E., to me, as I balanced precariously on the living room couch, reaching to get yet another Farscape DVD out of his computer:
“You got something you want to do with that disk, or are you just gonna wave it around?”
Good Monday morning.
Goodness, but time flies.
I’ll come back to the blog someday. Hopefully someday soon. For the moment, life is full of life!
I leave you with this poem. Safe for work, natch. I wish I knew who wrote it.
Edit: Fixed URL. It works now.
Snowy photos
Roundly chided for my laziness in learning how to upload pix from the camera we do have, I went and did it. Some blizzard photos are here.
unbearable whiteness and caloric intake
Snow! Oh my, the snow. I would like a small, lightweight digital camera that makes it trivial to transfer images from its card to my laptop, so that I might share the vistas with you. (This is a wish E. and I have had for a while, but other expenditures have taken priority. It’ll happen, though.) Meanwhile, our street looks something like this. (Image of Providence courtesy wunderground.com.) Not terrible, but considering this is how much snow we’ve gotten in the past twenty hours, pretty impressive. They don’t seem to be plowing the residential streets much: there’s no point until later today, when the snow and the wind stops. The wind is sending whirling clouds of minute dancing snowflakes flying all around, such that it’s hard to tell whether any new snow is coming down at all. Total accumulation, as per Wunderground, is 18 to 28 inches in Providence. Damn, do I ever wish I had cross-country skis!
Went clothes-shopping yesterday. We don’t do this often, and it was all kinds of fun – even though we did go all the way to Boston despite the blizzard warning. We managed to get back home before the worst of it hit, mission accomplished and even some food shopping done. The Garment District is an impossibly good second-hand store; next time either of us is jonesing for a change of wardrobe we know exactly where to go.
In other news, I have successfully bicycled several times already, thanks to the bike trainer we took off Molly’s hands. It makes me feel so good. I’ve finally found a gym-like contraption that I enjoy using, and can use without regard for the weather outside. I’ve long been complaining about feeling weak and blah, and have been gaining weight I shouldn’t be gaining – nothing tragic, just enough to make me feel sluggish and want to hibernate. Since today’s pace of life hardly permits one to hole up for the winter and suck on a paw, I’ve decided to set a specific weight-loss and exercise-gain goal for the next two months. Really, the wedding is just an excuse, a convenient chronological target in that it isn’t negotiable.
To this end, as of this morning I’m monitoring caloric intake, and also limiting it a bit. I’ve never done this systematically, and am curious as to what will happen. Hopefully in a week or two I’ll have enough data to be able to predict about how many calories I’ll need in a given day depending on the projected activities for that day. There’s some possibility that I won’t stick with it, but since I am loving this stationary-bicycling-and-iPod-listening thing, and also have a love who can nudge me when needed without making me feel bad about myself, optimism runs high. Plus, it’s two months. I’ve been wanting to change my health habits for a while now. If I stick with it for this long, perhaps maintaining in the longer term will be easier!
Doing things that make my body feel active and alive makes such a huge difference in how I feel on all levels. It’s time to live in the moment, I think.
Edit: Uni is closed tomorrow! W00t, I feel like… like… like I’m nine years old! SNOW DAY!
(Okay, I still get to work. But it’s at home, in PJs, with tea and hot chocolate and biking breaks.)
Surface, breathe, sync
My cousin from Australia is visiting the Boston area and staying with us. She’s a fun chyk, just graduated from Melbourne U’s law school (!), will be starting a job in March, and in the meantime is seeing the world. It’s good to meet her.
Last night I didn’t sleep much. When I did sleep, the dreams were mostly nightmares about: (a) wedding planning and food not quite going as planned; (b) stories of the Japanese ambassador and the entire associated wedding party being poisoned; and (c) the church grounds suddenly being as large as a large high school, and myself being lost and pursued.
Hm, time to chill out. Unfortunately, it’s also time to do wedding planning more quickly.
In two days, I participate in the Teaching in the Digital Age Faculty Showcase. Should be awesome.
The first draft of my very first semi-annual interim report to the NEH is complete. Seeing as it’s not due until the 31st, I’m rather proud of myself. Of course, we’ll see what my boss says; but it’s always much easier for me to revise than to write from scratch.
I feel numb.
Meme! Because I can.
This is no LiveJournal, so I’ve no clue how many requests I’ll get from this, but why not. Courtesy of my friend Molly, who rocks my socks. (No, really. She and socks have a special relationship. She’s got the coolest socks of anyone I know, and wears them with the most unabashed grin. You should see it!)
Comment on this entry, and I’ll tell you:
1. What color you make me think of
2. The first word that comes into my head in association with you (sequitur not guaranteed)
3. A food that I like!
4. [edited] Two fun facts about a country I select, which may or may not have any bearing on you at all.
I really should install the threaded comments plugin. For the moment, you’ll have to check back or subscribe to the comments feed.
Memememememe
Cribbed from, like, everywhere. My web browsing habits, presented in alphabetical order for your delectation, some rather obvious, some perhaps not. Of course, this is the most recent browsing history, and is thus tainted by things like gift shopping and travel planning. Still more or less representative.
a: amazon
c: coastway (my credit union)
d: dartmouth dante project (which I in no way recommend! it’s broken in so. many. ways.)
g: an all-too-appropriate .gif!
h: paradiso del perverse (R-rated; hilarious)
i: ifMUD
j: jews against circumcision, a truly odd one
l: my livejournal friends page
n: netflix
p: nifty pic of transparent concrete (2, 3)
q: nada
r: rand mcnally
t: telecharge, for all your nyc ticketing needs
x: xchat site (it’s an irc client for mac os x)
y: yarnivore’s blog post on anatomically correct knitting
z: zipcode.com
And you?
Words, words, words.
There’s a meme going around on LiveJournal. Generally I do not participate, but I haven’t posted anything in a while, and this is too strangely fitting to pass up. The rules are:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
Removed from the flat space occupied by the formalism, we find ourselves in the sweating world of the aircrew.
How perfectly pomo-slipping-into-surreal. This is from a collection of essays called Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. The specific article from which the quotation comes is by John Law, “On Hidden Heterogeneities: Complexity, Formalism, and Aircraft Design.”
My laptop has been back for a week now, with a hard drive that works. I’ve been catching up on work (mostly done with that!), making further backups, digging myself out of bills and sundry paperwork, taking some badly-needed alone-time, rediscovering the depths of my soul and drinking more tea and coffee than usual. No wonder I haven’t posted much.
There are some personal projects that I would very much like to pursue. A possible freelance gig is still up in the air, and may not come through – but no matter, there is plenty to occupy myself in off-hours. I’ve got half a mind to print up this list and put it somewhere visible in the house. Here’s what I’d like to do over, say, the first half of the next year:
- an art project that will take months to complete
- plan a rather big party in March, and our intended travels over the summer
- find alone-time every day, and a stillness inside my head that can be hard to reach
- volunteer time and proofreading skills of sorts to a library I like
- further reduce the number of paper documents in our house by scanning and shredding them
- work on Roland on a set schedule, or I am seriously screwed come dissertation time
That’s quite enough, don’t you think?
The unthinkable!
My hard drive’s dead. Long live the hard drive!
Luckily, Ethan had the foresight to sit me down to make a bootable backup a couple of months ago. Most of the important information from this semester has been recovered; my browser bookmarks, though, have not. I’ll survive, for sure.
This comes on the heels of Thanksgiving, which was a challenging time in itself. We were three, my mom and Ethan and I, and although we love each other fiercely, mom and I don’t actually get along very well. We managed to get through it, and now there’s a clean and orderly apartment as a bonus.
It’s been a hectic week-and-a-half: conference, then immediately mom last week, then a weekend of recovery, clean-up and hard drive woes. I’ll be picking up again both here and at okno shortly.
when blood sees blood of its own
it sings to see itself again
it sings to hear the voice it’s known
it sings to recognize the face
Having posted about being harried, I have reduced the number of e-mails in my inbox to fewer than thirty, written a lengthy letter to a long-neglected friend, and successfully tackled some work I’d been procrastinating on. This morning’s first hour was devoted to exercise, and now Suzanne Vega is making me nostalgic. There’s dinner in the oven. Perhaps there’s hope yet?
