::alio!::

Finally Friday

I'm trying to get myself into my work. But I'm not listening to myself very well.

This is my fourth day at work this week, to make up for the snow days last week. I completed all my major projects by about eleven this morning, so there's nothing much to keep me occupied in the library department.

I had a week off from having to do homework for school. Well, that's not entirely true - I still had to complete a project for my supervisor. But I didn't have to do the reading and response for my one class because of Winter Break. I was still productive that week - I completed my ethics requirement for my degree, researched scholarships for Andy and myself, and rearranged the living room.

I DO have a reading and response due Tuesday, however, and I'm having a hard time getting myself into work mode. There are so many other things I could be reading that would be more fun and way more comprehensible. As a result, I've read and taken notes on 42 pages of this particular book. I have about 200 pages left to go. Yippee.

It's also a sad day, because this is the day where Taras, our inimitable downstairs neighbour, heads back to Toronto, where he will be quickly and quietly married, and from whence he and his new bride Kara will head off to Australia for a year.

Hanging out with Taras was always an adventure, even if we never left the house, and we will miss him.

We are also a little worried about who will be replacing him. According to Taras and Kara, the people who lived in our apartment before us were antisocial and no fun, so we keep praying that the new people below us will at least be friendly and good neighbours.

Cross your fingahz.

NST

For those of you who don't know, Newfoundland has its very own timezone, and it is the only timezone in the world that bases its schedule on being on the half hour, setting it at thirty minutes ahead of Atlantic Standard Time. This really doesn't make much sense, as there are certain states South of the border that correspond to the same longitudinal lines. But you know, China also has its own special timezone, which is uniform throughout the huge country, and nobody questions that.

I'm starting to get used to everything being on the half hour. I think it's really going to mess with me when I move back home.

What's harder to adjust to is the fact that all my favourite television shows are on a whole hour and a half later than they are in Ontario. I really miss Eastern Standard Time for that.

I stayed up to watch the Oscars last night, which, in Newfoundland, started at 9:30 PM NST (8:00 for most of you readers), and didn't end until 1:30 AM. We shooed out our guest and tidied up, so I didn't get to bed until around 2:00, and then had to get up at 7:30 to go to work. I'm hyped up on caffeine at the moment, but I'm sure I'll crash soon.

I can do early mornings after late nights occasionally, but they always catch up on me in the end. The trouble here is that I can't sleep in on Tuesday, which I normally do, because I have to go to work to catch up on the hours I missed last week due to the snow. Then I work again on Wednesday.

The really unfortunate thing about this is that it's Winter Break for Andy, and he has Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off. So while he gets to sleep in and spend the day in his pyjamas, I have to struggle into dress pants and pantyhose every day at dawn and trudge over hill and dale and ice and snow to work.

Boooooo . . .

second snow day in a week

If winter is going to continue like this I gotta see if I can get paid for working from home.

All Andy's and my hard work from yesterday (shoveling the shit out of our driveway and porch) has been reduced to nothing.

Here's hoping that we aren't snowed in like we were yesterday. We had to wake up (at 8:30) our downstairs neighbour, Taras, and get him to shovel us out so I could go to work. I felt bad so I gave him cookies.

So I've only worked two days this week, and one of them was a makeup day because I couldn't go in on Wednesday. Today the office is closed until at least 11:30, so it could be open in the afternoon, but do I really want to negotiate those steep icy hills with icy pellets being flung at me, all for a couple hours' work?

I think perhaps not. I'll just go in an extra day next week, probably Tuesday, to make up for it.

It kind of makes it feel like an extra holiday here. Mid-term break is coming up. They can't call it Reading Week at MUN because they only give students Monday Tuesday and Wednesday off. But it means I have a whole week where I don't have to accomplish a reading (because my class is Tuesday), nor do I have to do any marking. I still have to go to work and work on my second assignment from Eeyore (a non-annotated bibliography of all ethnographies written on sport), but that's easy in comparison.

Awww . . .

This reminded me a lot of a Valentine that Angus gave me last year. It was a picture of Darwin, surrounded by hearts, on a pink background. And the message was, "I select you. Naturally!"

Which I thought was really cute. I got my dad to frame it an it's on the wall in my office.

So today I bring you the work of one of my favourite webcomic artists, Randy at Something Positive.

three things

I made three very important realizations yesterday.

The first came on my slow recovery from being horribly sick all week. In essence, I've had a killer headache, together with various aches and pains, hot flashes, exhaustion but trouble sleeping, and I've produced more mucous than I have ever seen in my life.

Thinking it was just a horrible horrible cold, I didn't put it together until Andy told me yesterday of a conversation with his mother where she informed him that Health Canada had missed the boat on flu shots this year. Basically, every year they just guess at a strain the year before and hope it doesn't mutate too much before they can inoculate everyone. This year, apparently, they picked the wrong one. You can't really blame them for trying, though.

I sat for a moment, putting together my symptoms, and then I realized that I had the flu. I just didn't recognize it because it's been so long since I've had the flu. Weird.

Second came as my nose started bleeding for the millionth time in rejection of my latest attempt to blow it. On the way home from work I stopped and bought a box of Kleenex with lotion.

I will never go back. I've been through about four boxes of tissues in the past week and this is like heaven. Sure, they're wayyy more expensive, but totally worth it.

Third realization happened at work. I was talking to one of my favourite lawyers (I mean, they're all the nicest people on the planet, I just talk to this one a bit more than the others, and we're around the same age), and he was trying to puzzle through a bit of insurance law, which wasn't his specialty. Essentially, the plaintiff was making a claim and they were wholly in the right, as far as I could see (from the information he gave me). I said this, and he was like, "yeah, but that's the wrong answer for us. We represent the defendants, who will sue us if we mess this up." I puzzled this out a bit, and gave him an idea (some precedents on Google) that gave him more things to think about (basically he was trying to figure out a way to turn it around on the plaintiffs and make it all their fault, a tricky thing to do). He went away and I sat in the library doing my work.

But it was weird. Because when I started I knew I worked for big time lawyers. My firm represents people who represent big oil, big companies, and big people. This economic crisis hasn't really affected our firm's business at all - in fact, the bankruptcy lawyers are making a killing, I'm sure.

I knew all that. But it wasn't until I had to mentally put myself on the side of the big bad corporation and twist around a totally legitimate claim on some individual who didn't deserve it that it really hit home. Sure gives "playing devil's advocate" new emphasis.

It's also a total contrast from the last firm I worked in, where my boss was the hugest misogynistic racist homophobic asshole on the whole planet, but he worked for the good guys.

Hm.