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.  

Technology Week (and a half?)

Since I last posted (more than a week ago?!) I've had even more distractions than before.  (Well, and I've also been translating German advertisements that were directed at women, which are simultaneously funny and terrifying, but I'll have to blog about that later.) 

So, a few months ago, Chris got a text message from our cellphone company saying that we'd be eligible for upgrades soon, and that we could get free smartphones if we signed up for a data plan.  This text message conveniently arrived a few weeks after we finally canceled the data plan we'd gotten so that we didn't have to pay a few hundred dollars when Chris text messaged himself an mp3 of the Saskatchewan Roughrider cheer song.  My response was "Well, of course they want us to spend more money again."  Chris's response was "I can get a smartphone?" 

I was so insistent that I was going to hold on to my "old" (only two years old!) phone, and that when I did upgrade, I was just going to get a regular old phone.  But then it turned out that, because my account is the "parent account" for our family plan, the only way Chris could get a smartphone was for me to get a smartphone data plan (and a smartphone) and to share my plan with him.  Which meant I had to get a new phone, similar to whatever Chris got.  And then it turned out that smartphone data plans are a lot more expensive than regular old phone data plans (like the ones we had before). 

I was ready to walk away at that point, but Chris got puppy dog eyes (and his old phone, admittedly, wasn't really working anymore).  So I started to negotiate, and got the connection fees waived, and then it turned out that their student plans are really inexpensive, and I happen to be a student.  (Why didn't I get a student phone plan before?)

The moral of the story is that I'm now one of Those People, who is always checking the internet on her touch-screen phone.  I seriously haven't been parted from it since I got it last Wednesday.  (It runs Android!)

And then it got worse today: the phone company came to my house and hooked up our Nice! New! Cable! And Faster Internet! (The phone company finally offers cable here, which is cheaper than our old cable company, and because it runs through the internet the deal we got included faster internet.)  As a result of this, I spent a few hours today playing with the new toys that arrived with the cable: a PVR (I put the VCR into storage!) and a new wireless router.  (The router might actually be the most exciting part; apparently our old router was what was preventing me from printing over the network all these years!)

And then then I found out that my Kindle arrives on Friday. 

Being Brave

Today, I wore a brooch in public for the first time in my adult life.  I think I'm going to become That Person Who Wears A Brooch That Is Her First Initial.  Watch for it. 

Also, I'm sitting in the cafeteria of my alma mater right now, and am having some serious flashbacks to the person I was twelve years ago.  (That person: not someone who would wear a brooch of her first initial in public.)

Hilarious/Awesome Purchase of the Day

Right now, Chris is running a virtual mile using the new toy we bought today. 

We were at XS Cargo and sheer curiosity (plus the fact that it was only $30 and promised me yoga) led us to buy the "Poor Man's Wii Fit," the Xtreme Fit.  It's like a yoga mat crossed with a Dance Dance Revolution mat, with roughly the computing power (and robot voices, and occasional freezing) that one would expect from a $30 gaming system with built-in games.

We love it.

We spent far too much of the evening playing its knock-off version of Dance Dance Revolution, and our new favourite song is named "I am a shamed little goat."   

(Chris convinced me to get it based on the hope that maybe I won't lead quite so sedentary of a lifestyle if I have the incentive of robot-voiced yoga and knock-off Dance Dance Revolution. He was right.)

Whoops, it has been a while

Even Chris has updated his blog since the last time I posted here. (For the record: while he's all obsessed with the idea of going on vacation in a dirigible, I want to make sure that this doesn't turn into Hindenburg 2.0. This is like our constantly-ongoing argument about whether or not we want to live on the moon someday.) (This is what marriage between nerds is like.)

(For the record, again: I refuse to live on the moon ever. Meanwhile, Chris's idea of "compromise" is suggesting that we could live in orbit.)

In other news, I'm taking suggestions for Fun Easter Egg Hunts for Visiting Two Year Olds. The (not-so) wee Andrew -- along with Meg and Karl -- are coming to visit us for Easter. Andrew tends to be our excuse to do fun stuff that's supposed to be just for kids. Last summer we forced him to come with us to our neighbourhood's free water park; we'd always wanted to check it out, but didn't want to be Those Creepy Adults Who Didn't Bring Children.

Sick Day

Somewhere between Geoffy's cold (which he apparently brought with him from his previous trip to Mexico), and all the sick kids at Chris's school, I've come down with a weird cold. I managed not to catch Chris's gross Stomach Plague, and then caught a cold immediately, in true Maryanne fashion.

I've been so tired and achy that I took yesterday and half of today off. At least it's a good time to take a couple of days off (except for that late ILL book): we have no house guests anymore, and not being able to leave the couch means I'm allowed to watch all the Olympics I want.

And, boy howdy, have I been watching the Olympics. I think it's amusing my parents, having me (me!) calling them all excited about curling and hockey. On the other hand, no one is surprised that I'm obsessed with figure skating. Or that I insisting on watching all of ice dancing, right from the compulsory program onward.

I feel like I'm seven years old all over again: the Olympics are in Canada somewhere close to where I live, and Elizabeth Manley is on my TV again (albeit as a commentator now, rather than as The Most Magical Silver Medalist Ever).

In other news, after I started to get some energy again this afternoon, I started cooking, in the hopes that food would revive me more. Such a good idea. I tried this recipe for Earl Grey Tea Pudding, and wow! London Fog in pudding form. I also made Roasted Dill Carrot Soup, and that was magical for my sore throat.

In conclusion: sickness is bad, but Olympics and dairy-based soft food are good. And I'm thinking in fragments, because I'm getting tired again.

Now for something completely different...

(I'm pretty sure this is only exciting for myself, I warn you.)

My birthday/Christmas present from my in-laws arrived this week: a food processor, to replace the broken-down third-hand Cuisinart that's older than I am. (I now have an at-least-thirty-years-newer version of the processor that I already had, which is nice because the old blades and base fit the new stuff, and so if anything breaks after the warranty's up, I can just mix and match.)

So, we decided to give this new food processor a try on Monday night, to see how it works compared to our old one. (My hope: "Hooray! It works the same, except that we don't need to use popsicle sticks to hold the work bowl together.") We made my borscht, because I always use the food processor to chop up all the beets, carrots and onions before I start cooking them. I let the thing run until it was all chopped evenly, expecting that it would do the same as the old one, and give me a whole bunch of small pieces of vegetables.

The thing pureed it all. It pureed raw beets and carrots. Without any liquid added. Turned it all into a thick purple paste. What the what?! How is that even possible?

I feel mad with power now. I have the ability to puree raw carrots: the world had better watch out.

In which I am really eight years old

I'd decided to celebrate my birthday a little early this year, and planned it for last night. It was already fairly little-kiddish (as my birthdays usually are), in that I invited people to come to my house and play board games as we consumed cupcakes.

And then, part way through last week, I found out that the Lighted Truck Parade was again happening on the same night as my birthday party.

And so I shifted around all my plans so that I could have a late supper at Denny's (which I knew was along the parade route), watching the parade out the window and pretending it was for my birthday. I told everyone that they could just meet at our house an hour later than originally planned (although two of my friends came along with us, which was pleasant).

Birthday Parade huzzah! I think next year I'm going to study that parade route in advance, and then find a restaurant that can take reservations, and reserve a table beside a window. Meaning that my entire birthday party plan will be to watch the parade.

(But I'm not as much an eight-year-old as Christopher is. I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday, and the only answer he will give is "Build robots." He knows he's getting Lego Mindstorm for birthday/Christmas, and that he has to wait until his birthday to open the box, and so he doesn't care about what else happens after that. Other people can come here and eat cake or whatever; he's building robots.)

While he was supposed to be doing report cards

I think the Royal Consort of West Procrastination is starting to live up to his name.

Made of my nightmares

Chris showed me this video, of an invention called the Funktionide Blob, that he found on one of his favourite websites. Seriously: you need to watch this thing and tell me what you think of it. (It's a robot that's supposed to help depressed people by curing loneliness.)

I have to agree with Technovelgy's editor who commented, "I really have to disagree with Funktionide creator Stefan Ulrich; a blob that crawls into bed with you is really not going to make me relax."

A Public Birthday Card for Ky

After Classy Night at the Opera, Chris and I were laying awake too late, talking about our days. The conversation veered toward the subject of my threat to give Ky a wedgie on her birthday, which led to a conversation about how Amanda had sent us "two atomic wedgies" for our wedding presents. It was late, and we found ourselves to be funnier than we actually are, and apparently I had said the words "it's too bad that we come up with these things when we don't have any pens or paper nearby to write these things down."

Apparently Chris got up and wrote down what we were saying, because I woke up the next morning to find this sitting on my kitchen table:



You know, I love that little picture of a stick figure with a wedgie so much that I think I have to give you a close-up:



And so, because 29 is such a grown-up-sounding age,* we're sending Ky wedgies for her birthday. She'd better look out when we see her in church tomorrow. Happy birthday, my dear. Thanks for putting up with us around here.



* And it's that awful year where you have a high likelihood that someone will ask you "And holding?" when you tell them your age, which is why my mother-in-law spent her entire 29th year telling people she was thirty, just so they wouldn't think she was lying about her age.

I should be asleep right now...

...but I just got back from the Classiest Birthday Ever. To celebrate Ky's birthday, a group of over-educated girls went out for dessert at a restaurant that's on the 18th floor of a tower downtown (with beautiful views all around) and had Fancy Deconstructed Desserts, and then went to the opera. While dressed up in our nicest dresses.

Much, much fancier and more grown-up than any birthday I've ever had. (Most of my birthday parties, many of which have been shared with Ky's sister Lyn, have featured ice cream cake and board games. Because we're permanently 11 years old!) I think, to counteract all this classiness and grown-upiness, I'm going to have to make Ky wear a birthday hat on the weekend (nearer to her actual birthday), and maybe give her a wedgie or something.

Garage Sale Finds

We spent an entire Saturday garage sale-ing, and nearly all of our favourite finds came from one house, where we only actually spent $8. (We also bought a laptop bag for when Chris takes my old notebook computer to school, and a bunch of beautiful old maps.)

The sorts of things that we found at that One Magical Garage Sale were like the garage sales you find back home. (Seriously: no one else in this region knows how to put on a garage sale; they're all "we annually take a couple of unwanted items out of our basement, throw them on the lawn, overcharge you for them, and only keep the sale open for an hour and a half on a Saturday morning.") But here? At a sale on top of the magical-sounding Triangle Mountain? We found things like this:

Now we have a kitchen window that looks like my mother-in-law's

And this:

(I've always wanted to have a couple of old milk bottles of my own, because one Grandpa was a dairy farmer and the other was a milk man. Also, they make terrific vases.)

Plus piles and piles of board games, all for $1!

From 1956! And the game's name is in quotation marks!

I guess this is only one pile of board games. Note: we bought a second Clue board because the awesome 1956 one was missing the lead pipe and a couple of other things. And because it's pretty much my favourite game, right after Trivial Pursuit. I now have five different versions of Trivial Pursuit.

I've already played Clue twice, using the old-timey board, and won both times. Best day ever.

Bits of Thoughts and News

• I ran a fundraiser auction this week (the same one as last year, and yes I did dress as Vanna again) and it went really well! We broke last year's record-breaking fundraising, which means that it'll be even cheaper for the students from my department to attend our conference. It makes me happy to feel like I've done something well.
• Canadian politics are suuuuper-interesting right now. I'm even letting Chris listen to all of the CBC program The House right now. (By the way, it's driving me nuts to hear the Conservatives saying that the forming of a coalition would be going against democracy, and would going against Canada's wishes based on how they voted. If you're a minority government, it means that the majority of the country voted against you, which theoretically means that the majority of the members of Parliament could form a majority against you.) Maybe it's the German historian in me that just loves the political potential of coalitions so much.
  
• The one thing that stumps Chris and me is who ought to be Prime Minister, if a coalition is successfully formed. This conversation has led to a lot of discussion of the hilarity of The Moustache as Prime Minister.
• I'm still figuring out what I thought of Baz Lurhmann's Australia. I definitely liked it as I watched it, three-hours-long notwithstanding. It was emotionally satisfying. But on reflection afterward...I'm not sure. I'm going to have to see it again. (I read Ebert's review and found myself agreeing a lot, even if Ebert did get some of the details of the movie wrong.)
• What should I do for my birthday? I'd like something special, but I don't want anything where I'm having to do a lot of work and planning, because those are the birthdays where I get stressed out and then cry.
  

Minutae

1. Some days you forget you live by the ocean, and then some days you spend your early morning drive debating "Cruise ship horn or fog horn?" with your husband. This morning it apparently was a fog horn (I was right!), as I can hardly see out my front window anymore. That's going to be cool when I take the bus today.

2. Do you know what song I hate? "The Way You Do the Things You Do." The problem is that I hate the song so much it gets stuck in my head all the time. Rhyming "schoolbook" with "culprit" (pronouncing it "cool-prit") indeed.

Roar!

Could someone please tell me why I'm continually feeling compelled to roar like a dinosaur? It doesn't entirely correspond with my moods, because I have both a happy and an angry "Roar!"

It might just be because I'm crazy.

Who knew Calvin Coolidge owned a hippo?

For your enjoyment: List of United States Presidential Pets, on Wikipedia. The best ones are Herbert Hoover's two alligators, Calvin Coolidge's entire zoo (seriously! He owned lion cubs!), and the fact that Teddy Roosevelt owned a badger named Josiah.

You Americans don't know how good you have it

I never get a legitimate reason to use the word "gubernatorial." Seriously: best word ever. Say it several times. It's almost as fun as saying "bees." But since we don't have governors, we don't have gubernatorial elections and I never get to use the word. (Well, we have a Governor-General. But she isn't elected.)

Gubernatorial: good times.

Also, it keeps me awake at night

Yesterday afternoon, I was standing in a line-up at Toys 'R Us, buying a water bottle. (Meg saw that they had a good deal on the exact size I've been looking for, and the store is in the mall where I pick up Chris from the bus.) The cashier threw me for a loop for a moment when she mentioned to me, and hadn't to anyone else in line, that they had baby socks on sale for 99 cents.

It threw me for a moment, "Uh, I wouldn't have any use for those," I told her.

Afterwards, I looked at myself in a mirror, and wondered: of everyone in that line, why did I seem the mostly likely to be a mother of a small child? I looked down at my clothes and realised that my "I've been writing all day and I'm bleary-eyed, am wearing slightly shabby clothes and am long over-due for a hair-cut. My clothes are a little tight because I put on weight during comps, but do you like my sensible hiking shoes?" look could also be mistaken for "mother of a small child who doesn't get any sleep or time for haircuts or new clothes."

It's funny, because I always joke (with those people who ask why we haven't had kids yet) that my dissertation is my first baby. Apparently I'm looking the part.

In retrospect, it could also be the fact that I was a nearly-28-year-old woman standing in a line at Toys 'R Us in the middle of a work day.

Drug addicts judge my taste in music

So, our car got kind of broken into on Tuesday night. I say "kind of" because nothing got smashed or anything; one of the doors was left unlocked overnight and someone opened that door, unlocked all the other doors, and took the change out of our ashtray.

The only other thing to be taken were the packets of this crazy chemical that makes your campfire change colours; it was stolen from the glove compartment, put there and then forgotten several camping trips ago. (When your husband's a chemistry teacher, this is the sort of stuff you transport in your car.) Chris thinks that the thief probably thought that s/he had found drugs, and speculates that they're in for a colourful surprise when they try to light up these chemicals.

So, they took our campfire chemicals but left our CDs untouched! They apparently took one look at our motely collection of Christian music, Classic Queen and Joanie Mitchell's Hits and decided that it wasn't worth it.