I've been too reliant on Twitter

I was just trying to type a tweet, which was getting to be too long and I thought "Oh wait, my blog has unlimited characters!"  Right.  But, because I've spent the day sorting through articles on the history of the German advertising industry, and I'm now mostly brain dead (but also because I'm more used to tweeting than to blogging these days), here are some small bits of ephemera for you:

• I put some green apples in a shiny colander, and set them on the dining room table near our big window, because it looked pretty.  Today was an actually sunny day and I discovered that my pretty fruit arrangement was not a good idea: Ky (who worked here today) noticed that there was smoking coming from one of the apples!  When we checked, it turned out that the bright sun reflected off of the shiny, curved colander, and was starting to burn a hole in one of the apples!  Science!
• So, we keep buying cheap office supplies at the BC Government Surplus place (and then repeating to ourselves "Maybe these monitors are just cheap because they're replacing them!  Maybe this isn't the result of mass lay-offs!").  Chris recently bought himself a second monitor there, so that he can be That Guy With Two Monitors.  While he's waiting for a connector that he ordered for the monitor, I stole it and hooked it up to my laptop.  Now, with the external monitor, external keyboard, and external mouse, maybe I should admit to myself that I'd rather own a desktop computer.  
• Also: I think I'm not giving Chris back this monitor.  He can buy another one for $40 at the We'll Continue To Pretend We're Not Taking Advantage of Mass Lay-Offs store.
• In six days, my sister flies out here for a one-week visit!  And then three days after she leaves, I go to Maui for a week!  And then it's May, and I have to have so much more writing done, and also I'll only be a month away from the three-week course that I'm teaching.  Oh crap.
• The above point may clarify why I suddenly feel like I urgently need to get a lot of work done.
• But Hawaii and Sister Visits! 
• My brain is having trouble forming long, analytical thoughts.  I feel like my current chapter is only slightly better organized and coherently-thought-out than this blog post.  Do you know what would be nice?  If my dissertation could just argue "Hey, look at all this neat stuff!  Isn't it cool?" and then I just told stories and showed pictures for 250 pages.  
• But but but! I met with my supervisor on Friday, and boy does it ever feel gratifying to find that your supervisor also thinks that the Treasure Trove of Cool Primary Source Material you found is cool, and also gets distracted coming up with a million different ways to analyse it.  I feel less like I've been wasting my time.  And I have more ideas about how to bring this all together, so that this chapter is less of a Massive Hodgepodge of Stuff.  

So, that's how my brain has been working lately.