::alio!::

end of term

I hate the end of term.

I don't understand why everything gets more and more panicky and your whole workload is dumped on you with only two weeks to go.

I have one assignment due in two weeks that I'm about three-quarters of the way through, and I've done my last homework assignment for next week.

But it's this damned gender paper that I'm struggling with. I can't find a good hook to start with, I don't know what to write about . . . I'm just poring through stacks and stacks of literature, taking notes without really knowing if they'll be useful to me. The dumbest thing about it is I'm not even being MARKED on it - it's just a paper for my supervisor. But because of that, it has to be really, REALLY good. Damnit.

In other news, things have been interesting around the house. We thought it was spring for a while, but then Sheila's Brush flew in and dumped two feet of snow on us and then gave us an enormous amount of freezing rain. So it's winter again. You can't even see where it used to be spring.

Also, my oven melted. For real. It was on, and started to hum really loudly, and the element caught fire, shot sparks, and melted. Gross, I know. We now have a new oven, which doesn't have a clock or even an internal light, but it's new and it works, so that's something. It's so new and shiny it doesn't really go with the ghetto decor of my kitchen.

opinion please

My wedding shoes . . .

These ones?

Or these ones?

I have to wear flats because my plantar fasciitis won't allow for anything else. And I'm wearing pink shoes because I refuse to wear white ones. I'll get them dirty and feel weird about wearing them again.

I think the first pair would be the most comfortable to wear all day, with that nice cork sole and a little bit of a heel, but the second ones are prettier.

Thoughts?

Happy Birthday to ME!

One can't help but be a little reflexive when birthdays come around. I feel like, physically, I've aged more in this past year than before. Or maybe 27 is just that magic number where you realize you're not young and elastic anymore.

Do you remember filmstrips? They were like a combination between films and slides and you watched them in class, accompanied by a cassette tape. One of the privileged few who had behaved that day was elected to run the film strip for the class' benefit. You would put the stiff and already cracking plastic coil onto the rod, feed it through to the other, and then spin it through one frame at a time, whenever the tape told you to (usually with an oddly dischordant bell sound).

Because my memory is eidetic, I've got it all in little snapshots, and I feel like that's what's playing on the filmstrip, except that the student in charge of turning the knob is doing so before the cassette tells him so.

One of those memories came to me this morning as I was watching a replay.

It was summer, and we were staying with my grandparents at their cottage near Arnprior. I was very small, so it had to have been the summer of 1985, when we were moving back from England. I would have been three and a half.

This of course was back in the days when trains were still a viable means of shipping goods from one end of the country to another, and so they were always very long when we saw them.

We were on an excursion of some kind - maybe coming back from one, and we got stopped at a crossing. As the train came towards us, moving slowly because it was near a road, my brothers and I got out of the car and started waving at it, because that's what you do with trains. This was an especially good train, because the conductor waved back.

To our surprise, the train did not continue on its way. In fact, it stopped, right across the road. We were the only people waiting, and we were not in a hurry, but we were worried that perhaps the train had broken down.

But no!

The conductor got off the train and went to speak to my parents and grandparents, and the next thing I know I'm in the conductor's arms and my brothers and I are standing in the locomotive's engine room - AND THE TRAIN IS MOVING! I got to pull the chain to make the whistle go, and my brothers quizzed the stoker on how exactly a train worked. He took us as far as the next station, where the grownups were waiting for us, smiling from ear to ear.

It was such a treat, and such a surprise. My mother wanted to write to Via Rail to commend the conductor for being such a nice man, but she knew that he probably would have lost his job if they had found out that he had brought children into the locomotive. And this of course was in the time before strangers were scary, so there were no worries (also, a train can only go on a track, so it's not like we could have been abducted).

That day was definitely a gem, though. When I think back on it, I see fields baked yellow in the sun, and that gold kind of tinges everything about the whole day.

I don't remember everything about the ride, just snapshots: waving at the train, the conductor waving back, the train stopping, and being perched in the crook of the conductor's elbow as I reached up to pull the blue wooden handle of the whistle. But it's enough, and it's one I want to keep as I get older.

In addition to taking stock of my physical being every year, I also like to go through my snapshot memories, running through them one by one in the hopes that they won't be forgotten.

yah boo sucks computers

I really hate technology sometimes.

For the second time in about four months, my gmail randomly decided to send off spam to all my contacts. How embarrassing.

I ran a scan the first time and there was nothing to be found. I tried to run one this time but was forced to pay for the software ($40) and then it looks like they didn't even give me a registration number, so I might have gotten scammed on that one.

Anyway, I think that someone has compromised my account, perhaps through my old teaching address I had when I was a TA. So I deleted that. Then I tried to change my password on my current gmail. There was some kind of glitch because it told me my changes weren't saved, but I could no longer log in with my old password. Or my new one. And of course I hadn't changed my alternate email address in a while, and it is no longer active.

I had to go through the security settings and reset my password, and now I'm waiting out the 24 hours that my account must remain inactive before I can recover the account through my security question (which hopefully I remember the answer to).

GAR.

In other news, there's a running joke between Andy and I that you can see Signal Hill from anywhere in the city, except from our house. Well, I have discovered that if you lean over the sink and it's winter and all the leaves are gone, you can make out Signal Hill behind some trees on the right. So there.

We're also experimenting with cupcakes for the wedding, and I'm testing them out on willing participants at work and school. Seems to be going well so far.