Saskatchewan Bound. Again.

Don't expect to hear from me until at least after the weekend, and possibly until after next Tuesday. We're all packed now, and right after I finish at school and Chris finishes at work we fly to Saskatoon, and the next afternoon we drive to North Battleford. And then this weekend, the crazy Irish part of the family will be doing our best to Put the "Fun" in "Funeral." (It's our official family motto. We've even talked about making up t-shirts.)

So, talk amongst yourselves until then. Can someone keep an eye on things while I'm gone? Make sure that procrastination still happens in the Queendom while I'm gone? (I'm plan on procrastinating from reading a book that Dr. Supervisor's lending me. And from preparing for next week's seminar, which will happen the morning after I fly back.)

Topic of discussion: how much of a wimp has your Queen become, in her sojourn to the Far Western Isle of Weather Wimpiness? Keep in mind that she just over-packed, with blankets, long johns, wool socks to wear over other socks, several scarves, and even a hot water bottle, because she heard that it'll be going below -30C this weekend. And, even though that used to be a normal winter temperature and at least it's not -40, and hopefully it's not windy, she's a-scared of the cold weather.

And it's all better now

I got through to the Rogers guy immediately after that, and he admitted that it was their mistake and they're sending us a cheque for $21 right away. Much better. And then we figured out that are finances are going to be fine. Which always makes me feel better.

And then, we got talking about the conference we're attending (Chris is coming along because we get such a good deal on the hotel room and it's going to be at a cool place up-Island), and I decided to look up the hotel where we'll be staying. Our usual venue closed down, and so we had to go to a new place. I'd been sad that we weren't staying at the old place, because it was all old-worldy charming, with gorgeous ocean views from the windows. I hadn't bothered to look up the new place, because I expected that it would be boring and generic.

Dude. Why didn't we use this place before? Okay, so this place won't have the suit of armor in the hallway and the legend that the top floor is haunted. But there's an indoor swimming pool and cardio room! And it's still beach-front. And the rooms are super-nice and huge, with ocean view from the windows. And we'll be closer to big mountains.

And so I started planning the fun stuff we can do that weekend, and re-evaluating my conference schedule to figure out which sessions I could skip to go swimming or hiking. Now I'm cheerful again. I'm a sillyhead.

"We apologize for the unusual delay..."

I am currently sitting on the phone, on hold with Rogers, listening to a continuous loop of Pachelbel's Canon in D. We switched back to Telus Long Distance in December, but Roger's still billing us for long distance. Um. No. And then I called them, and got transferred to two wrong departments first, before being transferred to what's allegedly the right department, except all I've heard so far is the Pachelbel and the annoying woman's voice who apologises for the delay. (And don't get me going on the voice-activated queuing system, where a robot figures out what department you need, and then they pick the wrong one, apparently!)

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Oh, and I got a really nice cheque from the university, but couldn't get to the bank until after it closed, and I don't know when I can next get to the bank when it is open. And that money would be so helpful, right about now.

And all of this happened within about half an hour of each other. Wow. I've been on hold for nearly half an hour now.

Seriously: is it Wednesday yet? Because I'm already whining.

Really Long Music Meme

Amanda tagged me for this one, and I may end up working on it off and on for a while.

Name your top 10 most played bands from your music library (I'm doing this with iTunes, and so this doesn't include the bands that I listen to on CD or vinyl, which accounts for the lack of Carole King, Cat Stevens, Don Maclean, and the Beatles):

1. The Cranberries
2. Simon and Garfunkel
3. James Taylor
4. Edith Piaf
5. Eva Cassidy
6. Amanda Marshall
7. (I'm skipping over a few artists where I only really listen to one song of theirs -- Merrilee Rush, Prelude, Bill Williams, a whole group from Lillith Fair that sang "The Water is Wide"...) Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
8. Dido
9. Jude
10. Gypsy Kings

What was the first song you ever heard by 6?
The first song of hers that I really noticed was "I'll Be Okay." And it's still, by far, my favourite.

What is your favorite album of 2?
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I could listen to Side B of that album forever. It's just so brilliant, beginning with "The Dangling Conversation" and ending with "Silent Night/7 O'Clock News." It's just perfect.

What is your favorite lyric that 5 has sung?
This is an odd one, because everything I've ever listened to of Eva Cassidy's are covers of other people.

How many times have you seen 4 live?
Once we get that time machine working...

What is your favourite song by 7?
"Carry On," by far. It was the B side to "Teach Your Children Well," and I can't stop listening to that song. I love the harmonies, and the part where the bass line suddenly gets funky. It's kind of like "Band on the Run," how it's like a bunch of songs in one.

What is a good memory you have involving the music of 10?
Working with Ky in my office here, while listening to my whole Study Music playlist. We kept freaking out about how good the music was. And that list was dominated by the Gypsy Kings, as well as Baka Beyond, Alabina and the Buena Vista Social Club.

Is there a song of 3 that makes you sad?
Ha! It's James Taylor. Seriously: I think he's constantly intending to make you sad. Such as "Fire and Rain." Chris couldn't listen to that song when I was going to be taking a plane trip around the world, because of the line about the plane crash.

What is your favorite lyric that 2 has sung?
Okay, that's better now. Favourite lyric by Simon and Garfunkel would probably be from "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her" (again, from Side 2 of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme). "And when you ran to me/Your cheeks flushed with the night/We walked on frosted fields/Of juniper and lamplight/I held your hand."

How did you get into 3?
Between the music I'd listen to with Ky on roadtrips and watching Remember the Titans, it was like I couldn't get enough of James Taylor for a while. I looked up a bunch of his music, and would get "Sweet Baby James" stuck in my head for days at a time.

What was the first song you heard by 1?
I'm really not sure. You know, it must have been on Empire Records, because I clearly knew the words to a few of the songs by the time I was listening to tapes of theirs with May-B, Ky and Lyn on road trips. In that place, it was probably something like "Look" (which I, sadly, thought was about someone named "Luke.")

What is your favorite song by 4?
Right now, it's "Mon Amant de Saint-Jean." Mostly because I'd feel cheesy if I said "La Vie en Rose."

How many times have you seen 9 live?
Jude? I wish.

What is a good memory you have involving 2?
Glad there are so many questions about #2. Maybe all the fun conversations I had with the guy at the used book and record shop about my collection of records, and why it wasn't enough that I only owned Sound of Silence on CD. Okay, and also the time I introduced Ariann to the "59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)." She'd seriously never heard the song before, and was so excited about it.

Is there a song of 8 that makes you sad?
Ha! Again: isn't that the point of Dido? Right now, "Mary's in India" makes me sad, for some reason. Oh, and "My Lover's Gone".

What is your favorite album of 5?
Probably Time After Time.

What is your favorite lyric that 3 has sung?
"Lord, the berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting/With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go" from "Sweet Baby James"

What is your favorite song of 1?
"No Need to Argue," by far. Wow, do I love that song.

What is your favorite song of 10?
"El Mariachi"

How many times have you seen 8 live?
Again: I wish. (I'll clarify that I've seen none of this list live. Seriously, I haven't seen that many live.) Well, I saw Jann Arden, unlike May-B. :)

What is your favorite album of 1?
You know, I think I'd have to say No Need To Argue.

What is a great memory you have considering 9?
Ah, sitting around Ky's living room, over-listening to "I Do" and getting artistically depressed.

What was the first song you heard by 8?
Of course it was "Thank You," which everyone was playing for so long. I didn't really become a fan until I heard "Here With Me" on Love, Actually and Meg and I started looking up all her music and singing all the harmonies.

What is your favorite cover by 2?
A cover by Simon and Garfunkel? Maybe "Go Tell It On the Mountain," because off the top of my head it's the only song of theirs that I can think of that they didn't write? Actually, I answered too many questions about #2, and so I'm going to pretend that it asked for #7, in which case I'm torn between their fantastic rendition of "Blackbird," and "The Times They Are A'Changin'"

Okay, that wasn't so bad, and that got me listening to my iTunes. (Except that got me listening to things not on the list. Right now I'm listening to Phil Ochs singing "The Dance." I love that man. Also, I did not see him in concert. As he died when my parents were like in high school.)

I'm going to take the wimpy way out and say that you're tagged if you want to fill this one out. Actually, I'm going to insist that Derek do this one, because it's right down his alley.

What were you like in high school?

I've been thinking a lot about high school lately. I guess it started at my department's recent potluck, when I was entertaining the other grad students with stories about how excessively weird I was in high school. I think it started with the statement, "Well, of course, when I was in high school, I had pictures of the Beatles and the Monkees up in my locker." And Chris chimed in something about I also had hair down to my waist and wore polyester '70s clothes at a point when it wasn't really cool to do so.

And that's gotten me trying to describe what I was even like back then. (Not that I've changed so drastically. Just ask Ky.) I have never been able to find an adequate equivalent to me in movies and TV shows about high school students. (Okay, maybe if you took the anger and the goth hair from Janis Ian on Mean Girls, and combined that with some of Damien from that same movie, then you'd be pretty close...)

Some facts about what I was like:

• Of course, you've already had the physical description: super-long hair and thrift shop clothes. My grad dress was an early-'70s bridesmaid dress that I found at Value Village. The one day when I wore jeans (borrowed from my sister) to school, it caused such a stir that my English class had a discussion about their feelings about it.
• I was heavily, heavily involved in non-sports or drama extra-curricular activities. One concert choir that had several hundred members and where we did choreography. A chamber choir, and several vocal jazz groups. And I played flute in the band. And I was assistant editor of the yearbook. And I was in advanced classes.
• By the end of grade 12, I had my own school keys.
• University was a relief, because I wasn't so busy.
• Somehow, I became known as a "writer," to the point that I won a Creative Writing award, which is odd because my writing was frightening at the time. So very flowery. Of course, I also spent several years only reading books by L.M. Montgomery, and I thought that writing ought to be constantly describing sunsets and trees. (Okay, I'd recovered from the floweriness largely by grade 12, when I won the award, but I was really melodramatic in my writing still.)
• I co-wrote a play that my English class performed at our Advanced Class Medieval Feast.
• I was known to sing songs from musicals, and perhaps dance to them as well, in the band hallway. While I essentially wore leisure suits to school. Popular girls of the sort that dated the school quarterback hated me.
• I wasn't actually unpopular. I clearly wasn't a social misfit at my school, neither did I sit in back corners with people who took too many computer classes and roleplay in maniacal voices. I had a really diverse group of friends, some of whom were popular (but more in the "nice people that everyone likes" sense, and not in the "I'm going to enforce my reign of terror on this school through the powers of my plaid short skirts and hairspray" sense). Even though it was a really big school, I knew nearly everyone's names by grade 12. (Thanks to yearbook.)
• I was known for my abilities to get along with a lot of people, which is why I was assistant editor of the yearbook (I could be the liason to the other members of the club, and smooth over hurt feelings when the editor got too intense). I also ended up as the liason to our photographers, who were known to be high maintenance.
• Traditionally popular people disliked me, because I ignored their whole class system. But they avoided me, because they were afraid (in a respectful sense) of the ringleader of my group of friends, who told them all to leave me alone. I didn't know this until I was well into University. But it makes sense now why Barbie (head Mean Girl) and her quarterback boyfriend always seemed to be making out on my locker.
• Okay, so I would only refer to the Head Mean Girl as "Barbie," and openly discouraged my friends from running for SRC, "Because it's all a rigged popularity contest, and you don't want to even try to become like Them."
• In addition to all that, I saw myself as "outdoorsy." I was a Girl Guide until I turned 18, and asked for stuff like camp stoves for Christmas.
• Also, I got really high grades in maths and sciences. But also in English and Social Studies, of course.
• And, when I was grade 11, there were a few Grade 12 boys in my Geo-Trig class. The teacher put one of them, Giant Rugby Player, beside me because he kept talking to people in class. The teacher assumed that I was so shy and serious that I would be the person to sit next to Chatty Giant Rugby Player. Which is how I ended up being friends with him. We'd work together on assignments, and turn the diagrams for the assignments into crazy pictures involving spies.
• And my locker featured pictures of the Beatles, the Monkees, and the cast of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And a clothing tag that read "Je suis lavable."
• When we played a World War I simulation in grade 11 Social Studies (we were all assigned the roles of different countries involved in the Great War, and had to negotiate to try to avoid war), my Social Studies teacher was really, really excited to cast me as Kaiser Wilhelm II. (I lead the world in a war against Russia.) Also, when we did a mock inquiry into the fate of a National Park, they cast me as the head of a logging company. Somehow, my Social Studies teachers loved best to put me in the "evil" roles. "Because we like to watch you fight your way out of a corner," one of them said.

Who were you in high school? Would we have recognised you, back then?

Weird. Weird. Weird.

So, I'm done? Like, editing and all? And it's still early enough that I can go to bed at a decent time? And it's due tomorrow, and I'm not planning a mad rush to finish tomorrow before the end of the day? I can just print it off tomorrow morning and go to school?

I don't recognise myself. I'm more shocked than any of you are.

So...I guess I'll go to bed, then. Without any reason to feel stressed. I'm feeling light-headed right now.

With my freaky annotation powers

I don't understand how my brain works. I've been working on an annotated bibliography since the beginning of December. It was my major project for last semester's directed reading course, but it took way longer than we expected, especially because my supervisor expected so much of it (in this one bibliography I had to come up with one of my comps lists, and also figure out a novel way of "framing" European cultural history). I froze. I spent December stuck.

And then, I just started working. I started looking through bibliographies and collecting sources. Last Saturday, Chris sat with me at the library while I waded through a heap of books, weighing which ones deserved to be on my list. The next day I figured out how to organise them. But then the annotation process freaked me out: I have to have this done by tomorrow, and at one point there were more than sixty books on this list.

By the end of yesterday, I had ten annotations finished. Now, I only have six left, and I only started working today at 5:00pm. It was like something suddenly clicked on in my head, and I was able to figure things out just from book reviews, rather than trying to read through introductions and chapters of every single book. I started intuitively figuring out which books didn't belong on the list and were just filler. Honestly, at this point it's looking really good. And it's almost finished.

When Chris joked that I'd need to write one annotation every five minutes, he didn't think I was actually capable of doing so. He's a little freaked out by me, at this point.

(However, the prospect of finishing this is also a little freaky. When I'm done this assignment, I'm officially done my coursework and have to start comps reading. Starting tomorrow. Eek!)

God takes care of me

I should have been asleep an hour ago, but I've been playing around with these Blogger labels and reading through old posts (you know, to figure out how to categorise them). And then I came across this post from the summer. It was a list of all the things that I felt like I needed, and yet didn't have the money to buy, making the point that I had to work on my discontentment issues.

The list looked like this:

1. I'd buy myself some really good walking shoes.
2. I'd replace that laptop of mine, which is getting cracks in the monitor.
3. I'd buy a good electric piano, with full keyboard and weighted, touch-sensitive keys.
4. I'd get a couch exactly the same as the one we're borrowing right now, and never have to return to futon-as-couch living.
5. I'd buy a whole bunch of new clothing.
6. At Christmas, I'd fly to Texas for my friend's wedding.

Well. Let's re-visit that list, shall we?

1. Very shortly after that, I went to Saskatchewan for that conference. While I was there, my Mom took me shopping for an early birthday present: walking shoes. Really nice hikers. She looked at that list and thought, "Well, at least I can take care of the first one."
2. Well, I've adapted. I don't travel with the laptop anymore, and I've mended the major cracks. We can wait until we can afford a new one. (An external hard drive is higher up on the list, because it's a small fraction of the price of a new laptop, and then I don't have to worry about what happens if the laptop dies.)
3. That summer, a family we know gave us a keyboard. I already had it at that point, but the difference was that I started playing it after that. And then I got up the courage to start playing the piano in church. And now I get to play the piano all the time, and our church is no longer lacking an accompanist. (Actually, someone offered us a nice electric organ, and we realised that we don't have space here for anything more than that keyboard we have.)
4. We still have that couch, and we're all happy with this trade situation for right now. As we're currently storing this wonderful leather couch for someone, I couldn't buy a couch even if I could afford it.
5. I have plenty of clothes now. It helps that I got those shoes, a good sweater for Christmas, and I bought a nice pair of dress pants.
6. That wedding ended up happening in Regina, and I went to it!

A few months later, and none of those are issues anymore. Wow.

Five Exciting Things Meme

Dr. T tagged me to list five exciting facts about me. I don't know that there's much that is exciting, but:

1. I now own the following clothing items with some kind of Batman or Batgirl logo or picture: one touque (aka knitted winter hat, or whatever Americans call them), three t-shirts, one cape. I also own a Batgirl Barbie. I think I have a superhero complex. No, wait: that's a dorky fact about me.

2. I can touch my nose with my tongue. (Creepy fact about me.)

3. I knew more about Canadian geography than my first fourth-grade teacher, before she got fired. (She claimed there were twelve provinces. This had nothing to do with her getting fired.) Then, I had to tell my second teacher that "Manitoba" didn't have an "e" in it. Both of them made me go to the school library to prove myself. (Depressing fact about my education.)

4. I've only had three bedrooms in my whole life. My bedroom at my parents' house, My bedroom in Meg and my apartment, and my bedroom here. (Boring fact about me.)

5. I was once interviewed for the news. For the CBC, in fact. And they took the one soundbite that actually contradicted everything else that I had said. I don't think I'll allow anyone else to interview me, after that. They also filmed me walking around and taking books out in the library, for filler footage for voice-overs. It was awkward.

*Ahem* Is this thing on? *Tap tap tap*

I am a sheep, and now I'm on Beta, or whatever they're calling it now. Actually, I've been trying to convert to Beta for months now, but it never would let me. I guess mine is a "large" blog, if you would believe that.

Can you tell me if you find any problems? I miss the smoothness of the old template, and I'm incompetent with html, and so if you have any suggestions, suggest away.

The best part is that I now have a new source of procrastination: labels! Because, if any of you know me, you know that nothing brings more joy to this obsessive-compulsive little heart than exercising absolute control over small things. Especially categorising such as this. (This is also why I love packing, and why I'm taking forever to finish this annotated bibligraphy.)

Unintentional New Year's Resolutions?

Is it just me, or have I been weirdly upbeat lately? It's suddenly like I've become an aerobics instructor or a motivational speaker or both.

This month, I've become super-fixated on, in essence, "accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative" (to use that hackneyed cliché). I don't know how to put it into words. I've started writing this post so many times, only to delete it and try again.

I know that all of the recent stresses -- that combination of Dad going into the hospital, losing Grandma, and being sick for a few weeks -- really forced me to pay attention to what I need. What makes me happy and what brings me down. It started just after I found out about Grandma. In the past, when I've experienced a loss such as this, I've tried to keep going and push aside my feelings. I've become all too aware that my previous strategy was terrible and only made things worse, and so this time I tried the opposite. I notified anyone who was expecting anything out of me, and told them not to expect anything soon. I took some time off. I talked about my feelings. I let myself cry. I drank a lot of tea. I surrounded myself with people. I talked with my Mom a lot. I watched silly things on TV. I wrote stories about my Grandma, so that I could dwell on all the good stuff. I laughed a surprising amount, for someone in mourning.

And, somehow, that super-determination to be emotionally healthy expanded outward. I started to pay attention to the positive and negative influences in my life. I started to pay attention to my allergies and how I felt when I ate certain foods. (Dilled carrot soup? Makes me feel good. An entire bag of chips? Makes me feel like blarg.) I started paying attention to those moments when I felt anxious and upset. Rather than despairing about those feelings, I would stop and articulate why I was feeling them. I started to "use my words": I'm feeling anxious because I don't know what I'm doing with this bibliography and I feel like I'm making no progress. I'm feeling inadequate because I'm comparing myself negatively to my academic friends. I'm feeling sad because it's cloudy outside and I forgot to use my SAD lamp. I'm missing my Grandma. I'm worrying about my Dad. I'm frustrated with myself, because I wasted so much time. This messy house is making me feel anxious.

And I started to work on those things that were making me feel bad. I started getting out of the house. We second-year PhD students started meeting and voicing our frustrations with our work. We took a couple of days and gave the house a good cleaning. I started working on being concerned with my own work and happy for my friends, instead of envying the important awards that they win or the money they get. I started to work on making real progress.

And I have no idea how long this will last, but I'm really happy right now. (My bubbliness is unnerving for friends who I'm now encountering for the first time since Grandma died. "What's happened recently?" "Oh, my Grandma died and my Dad was in intensive care for a few days, and I just got over a bad cold, but I'm doing great!")

Now I need to go to sleep. And make sure that I get things done tomorrow.

Quick updates of non-procrastination

Well, I guess I am currently procrastinating from getting ready to get out the door, but that's not the norm this week! I've been getting work done! (Caution: exclamation marks ahead.)

Part of what's been helping is the Fabulous New Office Space we just got this semester. It's so exciting: not only do we have new PhD and MA offices (one of each, I mean), but they adjoin a nice big common room, which has more workspaces (since each office only really seats two at a time) and comfy armchairs and stuff. It's such a wonderful space, especially because both the common room and the PhD office have big outside windows. As I worked on the Annotated Bibliography That Won't Die yesterday, I was able to look out at blue sky.

A lot of us have started using the space, and it's quite nice. One other PhD student and I worked in our office, and I really had to keep working while I was in there, because he was trying to read, and I would have distracted him if I got procrastinating. When I took breaks, I could go out and talk with the MA students in the common room, and even that kept me work-focused, because I'd get talking with the other Germanist about his research, and I'd get recommending books for him.

I even had a meeting with all the 2nd year PhD students, to figure out strategies for comps reading!

I really don't recognise myself right now. Who is this woman who finished most of the Annotated Bibliography That Won't Die yesterday? Who made concrete plans for her comps reading and who could speak knowledgably about research? That office space is magical. (It's also magical because I bought a nice tea kettle for it. Next step: a good supply of teas, a teapot, mugs, and some sugar.) What a difference some office space makes.

In the past, it has been hard to work away from home, because there was always so much housework that I felt like I ought to be doing. But our house is clean! Chris and I put some serious work into organising the house, and now the evening's all we need for keeping up. (It helps that I'm not messying up the house all day.) Our house is so nice and clean that we volunteered to have prayer meeting at our house last night. (It's like I'm living in a clean and productive Maryanne Bizarro World.)

In other news: My Dad has been back to work this week! He's been feeling that good. He gets stronger and stronger by the day.

Better thought-out posts will come soon, but right now I have to go and conquer a bibliography.

When do you feel creative?

I've been pondering a lot about what makes me feel inspired and what gets me working. Recently, Trillwing asked the inverse question to her readers: "What are some things that damper your creativity and energy?" I was amazed by the lists that her commenters compiled. I was especially amazed when I came up with my own list:

- Too little exercise
- Eating too much crap
- Too many distractions
- Too little time having actual conversations
- Too little time to reflect
- Too much distance from play [referring to a comment that someone else made, meaning "I don't get to play nearly enough. Age has nothing to do with it."]
- Stress
- Repetitive routine and too much of the same scenery all the time
- Many menial tasks without any sense of a goal

Upon reflecting on this list, I realised that you could take the inverse of this list and that would be a pretty accurate portrait of when I'm at my most creative: when I'm exercising (wow, even running up the library stairs cleared my head a lot), eating properly, and not filling my life with distractions.

But now I'm starting more of a list of those things that get the creative juices flowing, beyond just "take the inverse of what saps my energy":

• The right kind of stress or pressure. Some of my best work has resulted from me fighting my way out of a tight spot. I have an easier time decorating difficult small spaces than I have when I have lots of large, blank walls. If I have a looming deadline near (but not so near that I get frozen by anxiety), I pick up the pace and start making real progress. I think it's because it forces a certain external structure on me, which compensates for a lot of my lack of internal structure. It could also be that I work best when I'm responding to specific challenges. That's why some of my best writing is the result of editing: I have an easier time coming up with a better way of saying something already written than I can fill an empty page.
• Spending time with enthusiastic, positive people. If you're excited about it, I'll feel excited as well. That's why I felt so much better after working with my students on Thursday.
• Working within my own research interests. This one only works right now, while I'm being spread so thin first by coursework and then by comps. Touching base with my own research is enough, right now. (It'll be a different story when I'm working on my dissertation and it's just me and my research. I'm sure that then I'm going to need contacts with the outside world to make my brain work properly.)
• Changing scenery. Sometimes it's as easy as moving from my desk to the kitchen table or the office at the university. Often, when I'm really needing a creative boost, I need to change perspective entirely. Hang upside down on the couch and pretend like the furniture's hanging from the ceiling. Sit on the other side of the bathtub and study the shape of the taps. Work on top of the deep freeze. Set up a lawn chair in the back yard and face a direction that I normally can't see from my windows. Take a walk, but take a route I've never taken before. Get myself lost on purpose, and then use my wits to find my way home. This is my favourite. (I first read about this method in a Reader's Digest when I was a small child, and it was suggested as a good way to problem-solve.)
• Baking or cooking something from scratch.
• Dressing up while I'm working. (I've mentioned this one before.)

How about you?

Confession (I do this every once in a while)

I have a serious soft spot for Motown music. I think I'm going to go through another Motown phase, now that I've seen Dreamgirls. Wow. That movie stunned me. (I have an even bigger soft spot for musicals, and especially for musicals where I can feel emotionally involved and the music can heighten that emotionalism. Therefore: West Side Story yes, Chicago no.)

Of course, as with all of my first impressions with movies (because I'm so much of one to respond emotionally to a movie and then like it less upon reflection), I'm going to have to see whether I like it so much a few days from now. I think I will. (By the way, it's the first time I've been in a theatre where the audience has broken out into applause when it wasn't opening night. But that was natural, because the movie's very deliberate in making you feel like you're right in the middle of a fantastic and high-energy concert.)

What it's like being married to a German historian

Chris and I made a deal today. He would come along with me to the library and just read a book while I worked, so that I would have someone to guard my stuff (and especially the laptop I borrowed from the library) while I went around looking for books and so that I wouldn't get lonely. (I'm not a fan of long hours of solitary work in the library. Especially in this library; I'm still not comfortable there.) In exchange, we first went to our favourite used book shop and got him a book to read.

He ended up (with my encouragement) picking Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as we found a used copy that was greatly discounted, due to a bit of a tattered cover. In the meanwhile, I ended up wandering over to their Germany history section, finding two books that really should be in my library: Otto Friedrich's Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s for $5, and Ian Kershaw's Hitler: vol. 1 Hubris 1889-1936 for $11. I was excited.

Chris looked over my books, and especially at the giant book with the name "HITLER" in giant block letters on its spine, and he sighed.

"Sometimes people look at us funny," is all he said.

I just had to share

I'm about to break Mighty Girl's cardinal rule of blogging.

I just made the best pork fried rice ever. For serious. And I didn't have any sort of recipe, just half-remembered instructions from the Landlady From Hong Kong. (Put some oil in a pan, and then fry up your leftover rice and some sort of leftover meat, cut up tiny. Add vegetables, preferably green onion. My variation was to throw in some celery, and then to add a bit of soy sauce when everything was done frying.) I was thinking about leaving some leftovers for Chris, but I don't think I'll have the restraint.

That is all.

What also excites me

Part of what was making me feel so disconnected with my work is the fact that I'm TAing a course that has absolutely nothing to do with my research. Seriously, today I was leading a seminar about Aztecs and explorers. Aztecs! I last learned about explorers when I was in grade 5. And so how am I qualified to teach this?

So, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and under-qualified. I felt like I hardly understood the readings, and I was dreading how big my seminar group was going to be. How on earth was I going to get these students out of their shells and discussing?

The group seemed a little reserved when I came in, but I seem to always forget that we're all a little reserved when we first meet. But they surprised me when I went around the group at the beginning: name, program, initial thoughts on the readings, and favourite superhero. That "first turn around the group" took up a significant portion of the class time, because they had prepared so heavily for this session that they had a whole bunch of first thoughts. This initial discussion led quite naturally into the discussion questions, and the whole seminar ran itself.

Seriously: I had to make them stop discussing so that we could put the desks away and give the room to the next class. My entire job was to act as traffic cop and make sure everyone had a chance to talk who wanted to talk. I have a tendency of making a check mark every time each student talks, which is how I discovered that nearly every one of my 26 students volunteered something.

I'd forgotten that nothing gets me more inspired than my students being excited about history.

Just what I needed

For me, the difficult thing about comps reading is that it's so broad. Seriously, I still haven't adjusted back from my thesis work, where I got to focus on my own particular research all the time. And then I took coursework, and felt disconnected. And then I started comps reading, and I felt even more disconnected, because now I'm hardly even around other grad students. Just me, my books, and my students in my seminars.

There are books in my comps lists that are related to my particular scholarly interests, but usually I'm working on filling in the gaps in my knowledge, studying everything but my specific scholarly interests.

I didn't realise how disconnected I was feeling until this week. You know, this past week has caused a lot of simmering feelings to rise to the surface. Everything's been magnified, as I've been trying to sort through and confront my own emotions. (Is it odd to discuss my scholarly work in terms of emotions? It's the only way I know how to do it. Have I mentioned that I'm extremely off-the-charts INFP?) The other day, I hit a point of frustration with my work. I complained to Chris that it felt like I didn't care about what I did anymore. I just kept working because I didn't want to get a real job and I didn't know anything else that I could do. And because I couldn't picture myself outside of academia. When I looked at things honestly, I knew that what I'd said wasn't entirely true. But it was true that I was having a lot of trouble caring.

And then, this afternoon I went to the website of the major scholarly association in my field, to look up next fall's conference. (One of the other grad students mention that their Call For Papers was up, and that it's on the West Coast this year. I'm not going to submit a paper this time, but I wanted to look up the previous conferences, to see who would be there and how much it would cost.) And I got giddy, just looking over all of it. Titles and names jumped out at me, and I got all excited about different people's research. On that website, I also found a fellowship for which I want to apply. That gives me two different funding possibilities for getting me to Germany.

And, just like that, I cared again.

Excuse the vague whininess of this whole post

One: My dad got out of the hospital today! He's still recovering, but he's well enough to be at home now. We're praying that his current treatment -- using a Bi-pap machine when he sleeps -- continues to help. Now, we can focus on mourning for Grandma and planning her funeral. The strange thing for most of us is her sudden absence: chocolates she won't be eating, conversations we won't be having with her, not needing to keep her walker in the car anymore.

Two: I'm very silly, and sometimes I don't make connections in my brain. Today I started the build-up for my allergy shots. I got my shot this morning and came home. I've had big plans for how I was going to spend my afternoon. I felt really well! I was going to get so much work done! And then I was suddenly hit by a wave of exhaustion. I couldn't figure out why, until I felt a slight twinge in my upper arm. Oh yeah: allergy build-up. For some reason, I always forget that the build-up period is always rough for me, as evidenced by this early blog post of mine. Essentially, until I get up to my full dosage, I'm reacting to all of my allergies at once. Weee!

Three: I nearly had to have a prayer meeting at my house this evening. Because the lady who normally hosted prayer meeting died at the beginning of the month, we've been having the meeting at different homes every week. When I got home today and the tiredness hit, I checked my phone messages to find one asking if we would host it tonight, because the family that was going to host it is having problems heating their house. There's nothing like feeling exhausted and looking over your "Can You Tell We've Both Had Bad Colds?" household, with the realisation that a bunch of seniors want to spend the evening in your living room. I was very relieved to get another call, telling me that they'd found someone else to host it.

Happy Second Blogaversary to Me!

Okay, it's really 10:20pm on the 14th right now, but the 15th is going to be a busy day for me and I wanted to have this post up for the full day of the 15th.

Minions of West Procrastination! Your Queen has now been blogging for two solid years!

It's so strange. When I started this blog, I was an unmarried MA student, attempting to begin writing a thesis and living in a giant apartment in Saskatchewan with a wee little roommate named Meg. I could name all of my readers: Meg, Ariann, Derek, Mikey, Janny, and Aardvark Al (the only stranger in the bunch). I had no idea that there were other academics who had blogs.* I had only heard the word "blog" for the first time that summer, when Ariann and Derek showed me the ones they had set up. Since then, not only have I finished that degree, gotten married, moved across the country, and completed a year and a half of another degree, but I've written 805 blog posts (plus a few unpublished drafts, including one about my adventures as a Girl Guide) and fallen into a merry band of academic bloggers, who have done a lot to shape how I understand myself as a scholar. If you would have told me, three years ago, that I would communicate on a daily basis with people that I only knew on the internet, I don't know what I would have thought. (On the other hand, how different is this from the number of pen pals I had, when I was a child?)

And so, to honour this glorious day, please stop by and say hello, and (since the "what's your favourite method of procrastination?" question was taken last year) name your favourite childhood toy. I'll go first: first place goes to the stuffed polar bear named Lizzie, because I seriously slept with that teddy bear until I got married and brought her back out when Chris went to Anaheim. However, honorary mention goes to the doll house that my great-uncle built, complete with little spool dolls of every member of my family. I was always super-jealous of the cool toys that my friends Ky and Kara had, and then when we got older it turned out that they'd always coveted my spool people, to the point of attempting to make their own.

* Did I ever mention that the first academic blog I ever came across was Blogenspiel? She commented on Go Fug Yourself and I was all "A medievalist? For serious?" And I clicked on her link. And then I started exploring the blogs on ADM's and Sharon Howard's blogrolls.

Story 7: Little Things

We would sometimes tease Grandma about the following:

1. Grandma treasured most some of her least valuable possessions. Valuable antiques would be sitting in the basement, hiding in a back corner, or holding tools and paint cans. A little ceramic cat which she found at some garage sale, on the other hand, got a place of honour on top of the piano and was very specifically willed to me. She told me solemnly that the ceramic cat would someday be mine, because I was the only one in the family who would not sell the cat for a quarter at a garage sale. She wrote my name on the bottom of the cat, and ended up giving it to me when she moved to Regina. You know, just to make sure I really got the cat. I also got all of her 1975 Eatons catalogues (the last year that Eatons put out a catalogue) as well, because I was a historian and therefore would not discard these items as junk.

2. As I mentioned in a previous story, dishes in Grandma's house were only used for their assigned purposes. Do not even think about setting a pie fork out for a regular meal. (I still can't use a pie fork for anything but dessert.) She had a lot of dishes.

3. Grandma, while babysitting us kids one time, once made us dress up to go visit the family of May-B, Ky and LynnieC. They were in t-shirts and jeans (because we were over all the time! We were extras in their household! I had chores at their home!), and we were in dresses and dress pants. Because we were "going visiting."

4. When my grandparents had a garage sale before they sold the house, one customer made the unfortunate mistake of presuming that he could take two 25-cents-each items and inform her, "I'll pay a quarter for both of these." The presumption! Grandma, full of righteous indignation, responded, "You most certainly will not!" In my aunt's version of the story, the customer then drops the items, runs to his truck, and speeds away.

5. My Grandma's immediate response to the discovery that my (very young) brother had somehow locked himself into the bathroom was to shriek, "Call the fire department!" The door had one of those handles that you could unlock with a nail. (Which is what my mom's cousin, who was boarding with us at the time, did immediately after that.)

These stories were especially funny to us because, in situations where I would expect her to be somehow shocked, she could be very stable and accepting. (I loved how she shut down other old women who were scandalised about a young man showing up at church with his hair in a spiked mohawk by saying how glad she was to see him at church.)

Story 6: "Prayer Warrior"

When I was small, I would frequently spend hours reading a book in this little armchair that was tucked away in a corner of my Grandma's kitchen. It was the best place in the house, right between her washing machine and china cabinet. My favourite part about the kitchen was all of its comforting noises: the whirring of the clock on the wall, the hum of the dryer, and the sound of Grandma praying. When Grandma was alone (or practically alone) in her kitchen, she would talk out loud to God.

I'm always reminded of Grandma when I read the Biblical instruction to "pray without ceasing." It really seemed like Grandma was in a constant state of prayer. When we slept in the spare room in her basement, I'd wake up in the middle of night to the sound of someone walking around upstairs. If I was in anyone else's house, I would have been alarmed by the sound of someone walking around in the small hours of the morning. At Grandma's house, that sound was comforting, because I knew that Grandma was pacing around praying. She would regularly wake up in the middle of the night and think of someone who needed prayer. When that has happened to me, I've mumbled a prayer and fallen back asleep. Not my Grandma; she'd get out of bed and pace around so that she wouldn't fall asleep until after she'd really prayed.

A lot of people referred to my Grandma as a "prayer warrior." She took prayer seriously and prayed frequently. She loved dwelling in God's presence.

You know, it was always a comforting feeling to me, whenever I was sick or somehow distressed, to know that there were very good odds that my Grandma was praying for me. That made me feel so safe.

Story 5: Priorities

When I was young, my aunt told me about a trick that she would sometimes use when she was a child: if she knew that Grandma was going to want her to wash the dishes, she would start practising the piano. Grandma would never stop anyone from playing the piano and make them do housework. (I may have tried that trick a few times myself.)

Grandma took housework very seriously (never mind the tiny handprints on the mirror and the Depression-era mentality that dictated that she hoard such things as jars and jars full of buttons). She cooked huge meals and asserted that pie forks should only be used for pies (or pie-related desserts). She ran a pretty tight ship.

However, Grandma also believed that certain things were just more important than housework. Such as music.

Story 4: Grandma Saw the King and Queen

Even from a young age, I could tell that my Grandma was a bit of a sentimental royal-watcher. She tended to have books about the royal family kicking about. She particularly seemed to take pride in her resemblance to the Queen. The best compliment that each my grandfather and I (at a young age, because of a fur hat she was wearing) ever paid her was to tell her that she looked like the Queen. She lived off of those compliments for ages.

(In fact, my Grandma stopped dyeing her hair dark brown when the Queen let hers go grey. If white hair was good enough for the Queen...)

A few years ago, I discovered what I suspect were some of the roots of this particular feeling of closeness. We were all in a waiting room at my grandfather's nursing home, about a week before he died. We were all waiting to be able to see him, and to pass the time and to distract ourselves from our worry, I told my Grandma about the course I was taking on Canada in the Depression and the Second World War. She was really excited that I would take such a course, and started related to me many of her reminiscenses of living on the prairies during the Dirty Thirties (where Saskatchewan was hit not only with stock market collapse and unemployment, but severe drought and plagues of grasshoppers). I got telling Grandma about the paper I was writing for the course, about the 1939 Royal Visit when George VI and Elizabeth (whom I knew as the Queen Mother) travelled by train across Canada to huge crowds along the way. Their reception in the prairies was particularly enthusiastic, with thousands even showing up at train stations along the line where there were not planned stops. I had been sorting through newspaper reports about the visit at that time, and had been astounded by all the purple press, and especially by the number of times the Queen had been called "radiant."

Grandma got really excited when I started telling her about my project. She informed me that she had travelled to the town of Unity for that day, because it had a station along the line. There had not been a stop planned there, but a huge crowd gathered (a newspaper report I later read claimed that there were 5000 people at that stop). Grandma's memories of that day were even clearer and more detailed than most of her stories, even though I'd never heard her tell of this before. She got to the station early and managed to get pretty close. She wore something pretty. And, fortunately, the King and Queen ended up stopping there, unlike many towns where bands were playing "God Save the King" as the train sped through. In fact, they ended up spending nearly half an hour, which was quite a long stop for that trip. The royal couple were very kind and Grandma got a good look at them.

"The King looked tired, but of course he was not well. But the Queen!" Grandma's eyes lit up. "The Queen was radiant."

Story 3: Less of a Story, More of a List

And it's also my 800th post! (And Monday's my second blogaversary.)

We had a hugely attentive Grandma. After we would leave her house, she would avoid cleaning the bottom part of the living room mirror because she didn't want to wipe away our little handprints. She only had four grandchildren (and the fourth one -- our only cousin on that side of the family -- didn't come around until we were teenagers) and she liked it that way. She got a lot of time to play with each us. In fact, one of my last conversations with my grandma was about how she couldn't imagine having forty grandchildren, as Chris's grandma had. How would you ever find the time to spend with them all?

My Favourite Ways that Grandma Would Entertain Us Kids:

• Taking walks to the big rock that was in the yard of the nearby high school. That thing was huge when I was a kid, and we would climb all over it.
• Playing Junior Scrabble
• Playing the fishing game that she rigged up; she attached a magnet to a piece of string and we would use it to fish for paper fishes that had paper clips on their mouths. (She invented this game as an incentive for us to leave The Rock. If we went home, we could play a fishing game she invented!)
• Bowling in the basement with the plastic bowling pins she bought, using the secret baseball that she kept hidden in a toy babycarriage. (My grandfather was a very cautious man, and would not have liked the idea of us kids having such a hard baseball around.)
• Playing with the flannelgraph board that she would borrow from her friends every Christmas.
• Having slide shows (always the same ones: Dad and Auntie Darlene as kids; their trip to the United States to visit Grandpa's side of the family) and then making shadow puppets afterward.
• Treating me as a grown-up and letting me drink peppermint tea with honey in it when her sisters would come over for a visit.
• When we didn't eat our crusts, singing us a song about a child who hid his crusts under his plate and then the crusts grew all big and scolded him after he went to bed. We liked the song so much that my brother would purposely leave a bit of crust on his plate so that she'd sing the song. (She would alternately tell us how children in Korea would love to eat those crusts. In fact, they would pick them out of the garbage and eat them with relish! Somehow, that didn't help my appetite.)

Hm. This list seems like it could also be entitled "How Nerdy I Was, Even As A Tiny Child."

Story 2: Chocolates and Red

When I was young, my grandmother was on a quest against refined sugar. She feared developing diabetes in her old age, and so she used honey instead of sugar and raisins instead of chocolate chips.

She kept this up until somewhere around the time that Grandpa's Alzheimers got worse and he went into a home. Somehow, she decided that life was too short and she embraced her love of Oh Henry bars and all things chocolate. By the time she moved in with my parents, we had learned one simple rule about buying presents for Grandma: she didn't want any more possessions (especially while she was giving so many of her things away), but she would always welcome a box of chocolates. This Christmas, my brother and his girlfriend bought my Grandma a big box of chocolates. She kept forgetting who gave them to her, and so my Mom attached a big note on the lid that said, in big black letters, "Michael and Nicole." She wheeled that box around on her walker, offering people chocolate and telling them that her grandson gave her them: "Such a big box! So generous!"

As she aged, my grandmother started admitting many of her hidden loves beyond just chocolate. She also started letting everyone know that her favourite colour was red. I first learned the extent of it when I was in North Battleford for a girls' weekend (back when Ky lived there) and had dyed my hair bright red. I'd never done anything like that before and was nervous about what my grandma would say when she saw it at church.

I was surprised by her reaction: "I love it! I always wanted the courage to dye my hair red! I even bought red hair dye once but never went through with it." After that, it seemed like she was always talking about her love of the colour red, and her previous reservations about it. She'd always wanted to buy a red coat but hadn't had the courage. She loved Janice's car best because it was red.

I think that was my favourite part of my grandmother's aging process.

Story 1: Grandma didn't go to India

Grandma told me this story while we washed dishes together, at my parents' house during some holiday. I think it started off with us playing the "What were you doing in this year" game. She realised that I didn't know the whole story of how she ended up a teacher and then in Bible College, and then getting married. Here was her story (some of the details may be fuzzy, because this is as filtered through two storytellers who love effect more than precision):

When Grandma was a young woman, she went to Bible College. After she had attended for a while, she panicked. Everything in her life seemed to be aimed toward being some missionary in India, never getting married, and probably dying of some exotic illness. What she wanted out of life was a "normal" life: a husband, a house, some kids, and stability. And she wasn't going to find it where she was. (Don't ask me how she decided this, as the joke about "Bridal College" was going around as much then as it is now.) And so she decided for herself that she was going to go and find herself a husband and stability. The best way she knew how to do that was to become a teacher and be posted in some small Saskatchewan town.

And so my Grandma went off to Teacher's College. She had a student loan arranged, which had the provision that it would go into effect after she'd been in college for three months. After it went into effect, she was bound to stay in for the full two years. Shortly after she started, some people from the school board came and talked to her class. As the war was going on, there was a teacher shortage, and they needed volunteers who were willing to start teaching right away and to get a temporary teaching certificate.

And that's how my Grandma ended up not going to Teacher's College, but teaching right away. She was thrilled that she got to skip that whole process and get started immediately on her quest for stability.

She taught for a few years. It was both good and bad. She collected a lifetime worth of stories about teaching in a one-room school, and in that time she also made an impact on one young student who would grow up to be a significant scholar and writer, who would write over and over about his teacher. There were also bad times along with that, and she frequently felt troubled.

But, one day, as she was walking home from school, God spoke audibly to her. His message was simple: "Frances, weren't you happier when you were following me?" And her reply was simple: "Yes, Lord, I was." And so she quit her job and went back to the last point where she knew she was following God: she went back to Bible school.

At this point of the story, she told me, "That was the point where I gave up all my own plans for my life. I gave up hope of living a normal life. I gave up my plan of getting married, of having children. But none of that mattered, if it wasn't what God wanted for my life."

She finished Bible College and became a deaconess with the Pentecostal Church. One day, a friend of hers wrote to her from India; she had been teaching there, and they had an opening for another teacher. Would she like to teach in India? Everything seemed to be falling into place just as she had always sensed it would. Grandma accepted, and was instructed to go up to North Battleford, where there was a camp going on where they would raise funds for her to go.

After Grandma left for that camp, another letter arrived at her home: her friend had lost her job, and the people in India told her not to send her friend there, either. The letter missed Grandma at home, but the people at the camp in North Battleford did get the news. When Grandma got to NB, she found that no one mentioned any fundraising. She went home and found out why.

And so Grandma made a decision. Obviously God wanted her to go to India. And the only people she knew who could send her were those people at that camp in North Battleford. "And so I decided that I would go back to that camp, and I would wait there until they could help but send me to India." And so Grandma returned to North Battleford.

And that's where she met a man named Daniel. He was nice and he was balding, which Grandma took as a sign that he was actually older than her. (She was in her mid-thirties by that time.) She decided that he was the sort that she would like to marry. She only found out later that he was actually a year younger than her, but was just balding. (It wasn't until later that she also found out that the first time he saw her, she was scolding people in the kitchen and he remarked to someone, "I wouldn't want a wife like that!" He apparently changed his mind later.)

She and Daniel got married in North Battleford, bought a house and had two children, and lived there for the next half century. Interestingly, she also always had close contacts with people in India, and blessed many through her letters.

"It turned out that God had the same plan for my life that I had," Grandma told me. "But he wanted me to to give my plans to Him, so that He could give them back to me in His time."

Remembering Grandma

Kissing Grandma C
Originally uploaded by Maryanne, Queen of Procrastination.

Today, I'm easing up and taking care of myself. I've drunk a lot of tea. I've done that "hold your head over a bowl of steaming water, covering your head with a towel" trick for my sinuses. I'm using my SAD lamp, which is doing wonders for me. I've e-mailed my supervisor and told him not to expect any productive work out of me for the next few days.

And now I've been remembering Grandma. I went through my wedding photos and found the really cute one of Chris and me kissing her. I think that, for the next few days, I'm going to start collecting stories about her here. Both silly and serious. Because she would want it that way. Grandma told me as many stories as possible, both because she was Irish and loved telling a good story (and would sometimes confess that it was really difficult to keep to the exact facts), and because she was so proud that her granddaughter is a historian.

We even used to make a game of her good memory and her love of story-telling. We kids would take turns picking either a year or an age. Then she would tell us everything that happened that year. The year she got a red coat. The year she saw the King and Queen. The year she started teaching. The year she started Bible College. The year she had a nervous breakdown. The year she thought she was going to move to India, but met Grandpa instead.

And I'll try to relate a few of those stories.

Because this week couldn't get any crazier

And so, in the midst of all the craziness of my father being in the hospital, my grandmother died this morning. As in my Little Grandma, the one who was living with my parents in my old bedroom. I'm still in shock right now, but mostly I'm doing better than I expected, especially because when I got a phone call from my sister at 6:30 this morning, it was a relief to hear that the news was about my 90-year-old grandmother (we've been preparing ourselves for this for a long time) than about my father.

And so now I'm weighing everything differently. I'm taking advantage of the shock (when I go into shock I become very businesslike and busy and matter-of-fact) and get this conference paper edited for publication, as it's due on Monday and so I can't leave it at all. Then, I'm going to start e-mailing professors, to notify them that things are going to be in upheaval for me for a while. I won't be flying back to Saskatchewan yet; we'll need to know when Dad's going to be out of the hospital before we can start planning when the funeral will be. It'll probably be a couple weeks (Dad's thinking three weeks). But I know that I won't be able to do anything for the next few days, and that I need to allow myself that space. (I've learned a lot about what I need when I'm mourning, thanks to the past several years. I especially know what to expect, after Grandpa died. I know that I'll try to keep working, and then get frustrated that I'm not getting enough done. I will then surprise myself by how hard I'm taking things, and finally start taking care of myself. I'm getting a head start this time by planning on taking care of myself.)

So, for those who are praying, please continue to pray for my father, as they figure out the best way to get his body to expel carbon dioxide. Please pray that they don't have to do anything too drastic. And that he recovers quickly. Other than that, please pray for the rest of my family, and especially my mother, who takes care of everyone and everything. I have a very good family, and they have been amazing me this week.

And I'm sorry to anyone who found out through my blog. We're trying to notify everyone quickly.

Please Pray

So, I'm posting this at a point when things are starting to look a little more positive (oh, what a day we've had), but for those of you who pray, please pray for my father. He's spending the night in Intensive Care, after a day in the Emergency Room, as they figure out why his body is retaining way too much carbon dioxide (which has the effect of pretty much suffocating him). At least now they've run a bunch of tests, and established that he does have too much CO2 in his system, and so far it looks like a Bi-Pap (sp?) machine is helping. But nothing's really for sure and we've had a really hectic time lately, as my Dad has suddenly gotten into really rough shape in a hurry.

Which also may explain why the posting's been light and superficial lately.

By the way, in case you ever have wondered, I really really don't like living so far away from home. That was pretty much the theme of my last trip to Saskatchewan.

My most recent seemingly-redundant obsession

Straightening my hair. With a straightening iron. I love doing it. And my hair looks fantastic when I do it. This new obsession is hilarious to me, because I have what some call "poker-straight hair." It takes an awful lot of effort to get this hair to bend at all, much less to curl. And yet I use a straightening iron on it. And it looks fantastic when I do. But, at the same time, I feel ridiculous when I do.

This has been another navel-gazing and content-free post from The Procrastinator Who Doesn't Yet Have To Take Antibiotics, But Just Apparently Has the Worst Cold Ever, And Who Is Also Currently Obsessing About The Nose Spray She Was Prescribed. (It's a steroid? Is this going to stunt my growth? Am I in danger of 'roid rage? Do I render it ineffective if I blow my nose afterwards? How long should I wait? Why did the pharmacist feel the need to talk to me about the nose spray, and then only say "Use it twice a day. Once before bed, and once when you wake up." Shouldn't he have been warning me that I'm going to be spraying steroids into my sinuses?)

This has also been brought to you by the Good Idea of the Day: pumpkin pie for lunch.

I promise to make more sense in the future. I have to make more sense immediately. I lead my first seminar tomorrow afternoon. I also have to edit a conference paper and submit it for publication this week. And put together a major bibliography. Maybe I should have done some work over the break.

Irritants and Comforts

I find that, when I'm sick, everything in my life starts being filed under two headings: irritants and comforts. And I start making lists in my head like this:

Irritants:

• Flying in an airplane at 7:00 in the morning while sick.
• Needing to be constantly hydrated while sick, but being on a flight where you're not allowed to take on liquids.
• Blowing my nose.
• Coughing.
• Ten-year-old children
• Ten-year old children who sniffle right behind me. No, not sniffle. More like snort. And it's not like they don't have Kleenex. Sometimes I can hear her blow her nose. But mostly she prefers to snort. Over and over and over.
• The most turbulent flight of my life.
• The smell of sickly-sweet gum, being chewed by a snorting ten-year-old girl, just as I'm starting to feel nauseous from the rocky flight.
• People who recline their airplane seats, when they sit in front of me.
• When someone sits in front of you and you can tell that they're just waiting to recline their seat.
• People in general.
• The lack of good broccoli soup in the world.
• Waking up from a nap and discovering that you're feeling worse.
• The realisation that maybe you should have a doctor look at that throat.
• Rain
• The state of not wearing slippers
• Unpacking. Which is for chumps.

Comforts:

• Bringing your own teabags onto the airplane. Hooray for sipping Dry Desert Lime while flying.
• The look of sheer joy on your husband's face when the airplane starts mimicking a rollercoaster.
• Being home
• Discovering that you have all the ingredients to make a good, hot bright green soup for supper
• Garlic
• Hot apple juice
• Deciding to ignore packing and watch a comfort movie
• The combination of a space heater and slippers
• Hugs
• Taking two showers in one day, and the second one being after a long flight
• Arriving home on payday, and discovering that you made your money last properly and there was always enough money for the automatic deductions and the cheques while you were gone. (Also known as: the discovery that you stayed on budget, even on vacation.)
• My own bed and pillow.
• Not needing to talk.

That's the sum of my life right now.

And miles to go after I sleep

And with that, our trip to Saskatchewan is nearly over. Tomorrow morning we wake up before 5am, get ready and catch a plane. (Yuck.) This trip has been a roller-coaster for my emotions and my health. It always seems to be that way, every time I come home. And, as always, there wasn't nearly enough time to spend with the people we love, and we have new resolve to call home more frequently. Again.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the process of switching back to Victoria mode. It took so long to switch back to Saskatchewan: to the weather, the people, the pace. And we're going to be hitting the ground running in Victoria. We land just in time to go and set up for church. And we start preparing for a funeral on Monday. (Note to people who know my Victoria life: Grace died this week. Which means that our tiny church group is down by one very fiesty and independent old woman. And we now don't have a place to have regular Wednesday prayer meetings.) We'll be landing right into the middle of our home life. I'm also going to have to make a list of the friends that I need to call when I get back into town, and the work that needs to get done right away. I'm going to have to get back into the habit of cooking and cleaning and doing laundry. I'll have to think about my schoolwork again.

It's a difficult thing living far away from home and having a completely separate life somewhere else. Especially when things change while you're away.

I'm still alive...but just barely

I'm posting from my in-laws' computer right now. This is the only way you could communicate with me right now, even if you were in the same city as me, because I can't talk above a whisper. Actually, I tried to talk on the phone a couple of times today, but it wore me out and, as Ky said, I sounded (when I was talking my loudest) like I was doing a Mike Tyson impression. And I had a nosebleed today. I haven't had one of those since just before my wedding (apparently, the humidity on the West Coast does make a difference).

And, between Chris and me, I'm the healthy one. He picked up a nasty stomach bug, which hit with full force the moment that we entered this house.

I'm glad that this was not my only week in the province. I had a good, and fairly slow-paced, time last week. I hung out with family. I went to a small wedding of a dear friend. I went to a retreat (where both Chris and I caught these illnesses). And, even though we're sick, it's good to be home. But, to all of you who are looking forward to seeing us this week, prepare yourselves for the fact that we won't be operating at full speed. (Okay, Chris probably will be. He gets sick quickly but violently, and recovers instantly. I, on the other hand, am no better or worse than I was three days ago.)