Funny every year

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You can pretend that you ran too!

Because being done classes usually = me getting fatter, I went for a run today. In the rain.

With an absolute dearth of anything else to talk about, let me take you on a guided tour of my running path!

The interminably-long, mostly straight bit: if this bit were at the end, I'd defs die of boredom. It's long, and straight, and goes on forEVER.

The fun, woodsy, many-bridged bit: this bit is all windy and darty and I have to dodge roots and branches, which is more exciting than it sounds. UnFORtunately, in the rain it's all run-run-run-walk-carefully-over-soggy-bridge-run-run-walk.

The shorter, straight, cobbley bit: this bit has cobbles. Cobbles terrify me because of that time I cankled, and the only non-cobbley bits are ankle-deep puddles. Rock and a hard place, etc. This bit is mercifully short, and is the place where my iPod batteries died today, leaving me alone with MY THOUGHTS for the next twenty-five minutes.

The perfectly straight, overrun-with-dogs bit: this bit is connected to roads on other sides, and is perfectly straight. Many people walk their dogs here. I only run on this road for about two seconds.

The long, winding, fool-me-twice second-to-last bit: this is my favorite bit, because in my mind it's the last bit (fool me once), and then about halfway down there's this bit that looks like the bit right before the end, and I'm all Wooooo! Almost done! And then five minutes later I realize that was the false-end bit (fool me twice) and that I still have a great deal of running to do.

The last bit: this is the bit I always forget about. I always make the turn a bit startled, like Oh yeah! I'm not done yet! But then, in my mind it's this uber-short bit, so I run pell-mell to get it done with quicker. By the time I realize that it's not as short as I remember, I've been running for so long that I figure the end must be just around the next bend. For a surprisingly long time, it isn't.

In a lot of ways, being more aware of my surroundings would make this run a lot more painful, because I'd have an accurate perception of how much longer I have to run at all times. Because I have total goldfish brain, I end up thinking I'm almost done half the time.

I write more things!

New Back of the Book column up. Check me out.

Bring on the Silent Nights

Now that American Thanksgiving is here, we can officially start thinking about Christmas, and you can all wish you had some of these bad boys. They would look much more awesome against a not-white background, but I'm not the photographer of the family. I'm the cookie-maker.


Candy canes do not go quietly.

UBC's finest

So...the engineering department, or whoever, is having a banana pancake fundraiser in the lounge. Which, awesome, do whatever you want to raise money for your program. But they're taking up the entire kitchen-area, AND using all the power outlets. I understand that at 10:30 in the morning, not a lot of people are going to be wanting to nuke their lunches, but I DO! And I don't have money for your damned pancakes either.

So I made my case, and they unplugged one of their griddles so I could plug in a microwave and faux-boil my oatmeal, except that a fuse blew halfway through and my oatmeal was barely softened and still swimming in oaty water, more of a tepid oat-soup than a hearty meal. But a blown fuse = a blown fuse, and also = me eating my starchy broth in silence while the engineering students scrambled around trying to figure out how to fix a blown fuse.

I think the irony is lost on them.

Plague-yoga

Sometimes when I'm sick, I am weak like the kitten, and sometimes I have superhuman strength. Either way, my balance is down the tubes.

In which I finally give my plague its due.

Friends, I am sick. The world is spinning, and I'M NOT EVEN ON ANYTHING!! I have 2 Buckley's (the pills, not the ass-syrup) waiting for me, but I don't want to take them until I have to go somewhere so for now I'm just staring loopily at the ceiling.

After last week's hellish run-around to get all my assignments done, and a rather satisfying Friday dropping shit off and handing shit in, I have had the awesome weekend of death (the good kind of death, except where that creeping cold caught up with me and sternum-punched me).

Friday night I went to Leah's to watch the America's Next Top Model finale and drink copious amounts of wine and eat a block of expensive cheese and try to reproduce some of the modelly gals' most famous poses (there will be pictures up on Facebook later) and then stumble to the bus and transit my way home feeling like a bag of sand. Being sick always dehydrates me so much, and wine is not what you call 'water.'

Saturday Joel and I ran all around town in the moderate sunshine, by which I mean to the aquarium and then to Joel's friend's wife's dad's place in Vancouver for appies and more wine and then down to Granville Island for dinner and theater sports and then back to Joel's friend's wife's dad's place and then home.

I am le drained. I would like to sleep for a month, and maybe I will. I think I'll go take that Buckley's now.

In which November is a bitch

So, yesterday I took all the files sent to me by the members of my group, spent an hour and a bit ship-shaping them up (read: almost entirely re-doing them) so that they'd match in format, and not overlap in content, and make some sort of sense. Then I Ctrl-S'ed them all into the ether, because where do files go when you save them off an email? I searched my whole computer, even the 'hidden documents' (what are those?) and no dice. So now I do again.

Also, as brilliantly cloudless as it was this morning when I took the time to blow out my hair and admire my sexy bangs, it is now pouring rain. I saw the forecast, and I ignored it.

I am entirely umotivated to succeed today.

My life is tedious.

Even though I have already biffed at NaBloPoMo, and even though school is eating my soul and I have three major assignments due in the next 2 days, I am here.

What do you want to hear about? About how we kept our nicest TA for an hour and a half past his regular office hours because NONE of us (TA included) could figure out what was going on with the assignment?

Or how I have a poster due tomorrow that's worth 25% of our final grade (meeps) and she keeps giving us time in class to work on it when, unless someone brings posterboard and markers to class, there's not much we can do?

Or how I have the sorest of throats?

Or how this weekend I'm going to have the longest of sleeps?

In which I fail at several things.

Ah me, I have lost at NaBloPoMo. Alas.

Regardless, let's talk about taking the bus and how hard it is. So today I catch the 480 which is, like, eight miles long (the bus, not the route), and I worm my way all the way to the back because that's where the single functioning light is, and I have a quiz to study for.

The new talking buses are awesome, and they mean that you can happily immerse yourself in a linguistics text and know exactly where you are without looking up. EXCEPT! So I'm in the back plowing through vowel acoustics when the bus stops, says 'Thunderbird Boulevard,' and EVERYONE gets off.

I sit there for a minute because vowel acoustics is hard, y'all! But then I realize that everyone has gotten off AND that we're not moving, and I'm all, Awwwwww, does this bus not go all the way to the loop? ALL buses go all the way to the loop.

So I look up and hey presto! We're at the loop, Talking Bus was wrong. BUT! Now both back doors (see? Long bus) are shut because the bus is off, and I have to walk the eight miles up to the front of the bus where the bus driver is laughing at me so I can get off.

How did they know?

Rachel krueger's Dewey Decimal Section:

429 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

Rachel krueger = 8138521815758 = 813+852+181+575+8 = 2429


Class:
400 Language


Contains:
Linguistics and language books.



What it says about you:
You value communication, even with people who are different from you. You like trying new things don't mind being exposed to unfamiliar territory. You get bored with routines that never change.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Open letter

Dear Yahoo Radio,

What part of 'never play again' don't you understand? Why even supply this option if you're going to keep barraging me with Bare Naked Ladies long after I've clicked the little circle-with-a-line?

I am confused. I hang out here instead of on the real radio because I can, allegedly, control what I listen to. While I love your 90's Rock Station, there is some dreck from that era I'd like to avoid.

If 'never play again' actually translates as 'play much less often,' kindly amend your labels. I won't be upset. All I want is clear communication, and more obscure bands from my Awkward Years.

Yours sincerely,

raych

Juuuuuuuuust missed the cut-off.

I know, technically a NaBloPoMo fail, but I haven't gone to sleep yet (except before supper when I accidentally had a nap) so it's still today. Besides, we went to see The Dark Knight and who knew it'd be almost 3 hours? Of creepy madness? I am disturbed.

Posting for the sake of posting!

Oh good, something I can blog. Ok, these are the 106 most unreadable books as compiled by...some library. Quite a few of these overlap with EW's list of New Classics, ergo, classics continue to be largely unreadable. For the list, you have to:

Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you started but couldn't finish, use red text on the ones you really sort of hated, put an asterisk* next to the ones you really sort of loved, and use blue text on the ones on your own personal To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife*
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex*
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist*
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime*
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake*
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas*
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Oh unreadable books, some of you are so fabulous. Cloud Atlas, you have no business on this list.

I am sucking at this blogging thing!!!

Remember this gal? The one in the middle? In the white burkah? My lovely Karen from that time I went to Thailand?

She came to visit! Well, ok, she and her family came back to Canada for some months, and she and her husband were in Van tonight, and Joel and I had dinner with them! And that's all I really have to say about that, because you aren't interested in my delicious gyro, and because it would take too long to tell you how all the boys are doing (short version: awesome), and I have to go write an online quiz now. But Karen? I totally love you, and hanging out was definitely worth missing male-models-and-potential-nude-shoot-awkwardness on America's Next Top Model.

Ah me, young love.

Sometimes, when the weather is dreary and various holidays keep us from being able to go outside, Joel and I like to drag out the DDR pads and dance up a storm. Soon the air is filled with endearments such as 'I'm going to murder you' and 'Watch me while I kick your ass.' It is a special time.

My other boyfriend is a bus driver.

Ok, whether I'm going to class which starts at 8, or to the pool which opens at 7:30, I have to catch the 7:07 bus or end up watching full buses drive by me without stopping for 45 minutes before someone takes pity on me and stops to let me wedge on. I'm somehow incapable of leaving the house before 7:00 and often the 7:07 bus will come at 7:04. Today I heard it coming up the road so I bus-sprinted and got to the stop just in time to tap the breaklight as it pulled away.

Enter the Not-In-Service bus. He starts his route at UBC at, like, 7:20, which means that at 7:10, while I'm standing forlornly by the side of the road, he dawdles past my stop on his way to work. And stops. To pick me up. And drive me to school. At least two days a week.

I seriously owe him a pony.

Finally! On several levels.

Hi! It's me! I know, it hardly counts as NoBloPoMo if all I'm doing is scrawling a quick 'nothing to say.' But today I bring things to say!!! With pictures!!

Ok, so. Who has ghey bangs? It's me! I have ghey bangs! Also boo does. See? See how awful our bangs are, and how sloppy and blah our hair colors are? I know. How do we even go out in public?



Here we are trying to take a serious picture, and looking terribly tired. Do you see? Seriousness = bag-face.




Ok, so! New hair colors!! And I know, we bought the same color. But different brands! We're trying.

Also, somebunny needs a shower!

Ok, so! New bangs! New hair-ends! Healthiness and bounce!!!!

Huzzah for sister-days!

Rain check?

Ok, I know, worst NaNoBloPo ever, but I do have stories for you. UnFORtunately, Joel and I just watched some spin-off of Get Smart that wasn't actually Get Smart like we thought it was, and now I'm going asleep. Toots.

Last-minute post!

Shhhh, it is late and I am the sleepy.

Schnuggles!

Dear live continuous stream of baby puppies,

Why are the puppies always sleeping? I would like to watch them romp. Please install a Facebookian 'poking' application, so that I can poke one of the puppies. Perhaps all of the puppies.

Sincerely,

Waster McTime

Time for some sleuthing!

I forgot to mention that my last post was my 500th. Woooo, 500 posts! 501!! Yeahh!

Ok, so there's a mystery, and it's quite late and I've had a bit of wine so it's possible that it's no mystery at all, BUT! I made potatoes with tuna and cheese for supper, and as I'm leaving I'm all, Joel, can you clean this up (meaning 'put it in the fridge so we can eat it again tomorrow'). I just got home...the potatoes aren't on the counter where I left them, but they aren't in the fridge either (we have a small, emptyish fridge, so I'd see them). They aren't in our tiny freezer, nor accidentally in the cupboard.

WHERE ARE THE POTATOES?

Joel is sleeping, and I'm obvs not going to wake him up to ask him such a dumb question, but I've looked ALL over the kitchen, AND the living room, AND snuck a peek in the bedroom just in case he took them in there to finish them off and forgot to bring the pan back out.

Ghosts have eaten our potatoes. I was going to have them for lunch tomorrow. Ghosts have some answering to do.

Candy = brain rot

Whew! I almost forgot! Blogging everyday is hard, y'all! But you wouldn't blame me, right, if I told you I just got home from school? Just now? It was a long day. These group projects are killing me.

In other news, Obama is president! So sad that his grandma died yesterday, but at least we can all heave a sigh of relief that this'll never happen. Now we can all laugh freely, instead of laughing uneasily while we voodoo her behind closed doors.

I et halloween candy for supper. I need to start swimming MORE laps. Did I mention that I bought a swim cap, and that I look like a purple-headed tadpole? Also, that I left my bathing suit top at the pool today? Hawhoops.

Oh, nope. I found it. It schwas in the wash.

Dear Raych, you are not making any sense.

Well you weren't at school all day, doing word-math! So give a girl a break, no?

It is time to find some salty.

It is time for function to triumph over form

Dear Girls Wearing Tights Under Your Short-Shorts,

I know. Every time I talk about how tights aren't pants and how you can't wear them as such, I mention both 'under skirts' and 'under shorts IF YOU NEED TO' as ways you can wear them. However, you no longer need to. I don't know how to convey this to you. We are no longer in the 'Let's still pretend it's summer' segment of fall. We have entered into the rainy-ass almost-winter portion, and it is cold. It is damp.

I KNOW! This means that all other legs are covered up, and your legs are getting all the leg-ttention. Bully for you. But you could just, I don't know, wear a pair of really tight pants, couldn't you? Even leggings would be better than this.

Sincerely, The Girl in Gumboots. No, the other one. Not the designer expensive gumboots, the ones from Superstore. Little-boys section.

It's the days after Halloween that make me fatter

Fun-sized chocolate bars are the snooze-button of the candy world. Are you going to sleep for another hour? Hells no! But I will sleep for these tiny, bite-sized, individually-wrapped seven minutes. And then these. And then these.

I kind of appreciate all the individual environmentally-havocal wrapping, though, because that way there's no lying to yourself. When you wake up in the morning and there're 19 tiny OHenry wrappers next to your pillow, you know what you did.

NaBloPoMo

Hey kids! As per usual, it's the day after Halloween and I'm doing this thing again where you have to listen to me talk every day for all of November. I know, fun!

Be prepared, though, for a lot of nothing. Today, par example, we'll be talking about persimmons!

So, all of a sudden last fall I'm allergic to apples and can't eat them anymore, because they give me the death. Frown. Since then, I've been looking for a new grab-and-go fruit with little success.

Oranges: peeling them is work, and then your hands are sticky.

Grapefruits: ditts.

Bananas: WILL bruise in your bag, no matter how careful you are.

Seasonal berries: are seasonal. Also, easily mashed.

Melon: requires pre-thinking and cutting.

H'anyvays, today I grabbed a persimmon or two from my happy Asian food mart. Persimmons are tasty! Who knew! And if you get the ones that look like tiny squashed pumpkins (why does all fall produce look the same?) then you don't even have to peel them!

I know that, like berries, they also are seasonal, and that in a few weeks I'll be back to my bruised bananas and my sticky grapefruits, but for now (provided they aren't some secret apple-kin and I don't get sick in the next hour), I'll be chucking a persimmon in the old backpack for mid-class snackerings. Zoot zoot!