everybody's favourite cripple

erg. have become badly-animated-robot-girl again. my knee hurts and the physio said i am constructed all wrong and will never run a marathon and will probably drop dead in a week from tendons-on-funny-angle-itis. or something along those lines. . . *wallows in self-pity*

i spent three hours in my office thus:
people kept dropping in and fetching me coffee and meds and things, which was quite fun, actually. but i walk so slowly by the time i got home a little snow drift had built up on my backpack. yes, and the snow! purty. but cold. but purty.

all the uni offers for this year are coming in. most of my friends will be scattering around north america in august, which means i'll be able to do some kickarse couch-hopping. they have exciting well-paid offers to exciting universities - very inspiring.

my own work, however

check out this wild manuscript! it was produced in the late 15th, early 16th century, maybe, and is "a collection of unidentified texts in an unidentified langauge in unbroken cipher." (_the medieval book_, shailor 105) apart from the fact that *nobody* has been able to work out what the hell it's about, there are these strange drawings of naked women playing in pipes all through one section of the manuscript.

it's fabulous. yay for the middle ages!

bah to marking

you know what i hate about marking? (apart from the fact that it's time-consuming and soul-destroying.) it kills all the fun stuff, like talking about poetry or thinking about ways to consolidate ideas or talking to humans or making brainstorms with pretty textas.

i choose to blame the system.

more snow

it's just a light cover, see:

but apparently it's all of two degrees up here, so cross fingers.

i'd like an excuse to wag my french class. the flashcards are mocking me.

snow!

so much snow! what a lovely surprise.

also reduces outfit complexity. the coat of fabulouness it is. what fun!

gah

i dreamt the city was being terrorised by a evil kangaroo/werewolf hybrid. it was okay though, cos buffy was there to save me.

my subconscious is so derivative.

i have found the holy land!

it was in vancouver all this time!

p showed me a new way to walk to res. it involves walking along rooftops. a bit nippy but the views are fantastic.

the world is a good place to be

i was wandering down commerical drive, going to do my grocery shopping, empty milk bottles in backpack, "the be good tanyas" on my ipod, when I bumped into n. she took me round for hot chocolate at her house, which is a lovely big hippie house with spices in jars and three kinds of milk, none cow-based. i met her housemates, including the one year old. it's been ages since i got to play with a baby. he was a friendly bubbly kid in furry mec.ca overalls.

then i was walking back through the gentle rain, thinking what a nice place the world is and how good it is to live in vancouver, and i went past a florists. i went in and look what i found!
i had a nice chat to the florists, explained about wattle and how to spell it (funny to hear yr own accent echoed), then went and bought up masses of fruit and some leeks and more milk in nice square glass bottles.

now i have to get going on this assignment. i have kangaroo paw! it all smells so good. i miss the smell of gumtrees.

squee!

it's snowing! it's snowing! or, it was snowing, and now it's thickly hail/snow/raining. very purty.

ubc

ubc is kinda pretty. it's out on a penisula on the other side of town with park around. there was lots of this sort of thing:

but why does the english department always have the ugliest building?

i spent sixteen million years in their libraries and found all sorts of wonderful things for this assignment, including a big colour book called "the ancient books of ireland" which has lots of pretty pictures. turns out the holes in that manuscript aren't from the cow but from over-zealous rubbing out by a later scribe. there ya go.

i have also been reading translations of the stories in the manuscript. pre-christian irish myths are kinda icky. vis:


[Cet says to Conall] "If Anluan were in the house he would offer you yet another contest. It is a pity for us that he is not in the house."

"He is though," said Conall, taking the head of Anluan from his belt, and hurling it at the breast of his opponent with such violence that a gush of blood burst through Cet's lips.


this is my cultural heritage? ew.

after the library going i went for a wander down the beach. i had a paddle - the water was tremendously cold - and found a patch of sand to practise my handstands. very speccy with the snowy mountains rising above the sea. there were a few little kids wearing padded jackets puddling in the rock pools.

i do not love google

i have finally succumbed to the evils of the grotesque googleblogger beast. i resent this very much.

and in other random news:

it snowed yesterday! just a teensy bit, but now the mountains are covered in a light dusting and the main run on grouse looks mighty fine.

i have become addicted to vegemite toast. displaced nostalgia or vitamin b deficiency? you decide.

also, i got a interlibrary loan card thingy, cos i'm going on a research trip to UBC tomorrow to rummage round their medieval section, and look what it says on the card!

i'm faculty! bugger this doctoral business! you may all call me dr. gtg from now on.

chinese new year

okay, so this happened on sunday, but it took me a while to get round to uploading the vid, blah blah. damn demanding public!

i headed down with FLQ and her boy, who is visiting this week, and we caught the last half of the parade down the main drag in china town. it was very cool. i especially loved the dragons. we had a good front view and could see the young people swapping in and out of the dragon costumes and holding their lower backs. some of them were doing some speccy acrobalance stuff.

i remember going to a chinese new year's parade when i was small, but the only bit i remember really is the dragons eating cabbages tied to the shop verandahs. we missed that this time, but i did see a cabbage hanging up.

there's a long chinese history in vancouver, from the gold rush to the people labouring on the canada pacific highway.

think that's all i had to say. it was sunny.



this is the dragons. about 30sec.

and i love being a grad student

this is what i'm reading at the moment. that and an enormous stack of photocopied derrida extracts i'm pretending don't exist. . .

i love elizabeth honey

in the same theme

here's a website on which you can hear phrases in irish gaelic:

http://www.irish-sayings.com/

medieval manuscript

how cool is this??? i suggest clicking on it to make it big so you can admire the detail. it is a page from Lebor na hUidre: the Book of the Dun Cow, from the 11th - 12th C. it's in old and middle irish, with some marginalia in early modern irish. eee! see those holes down the bottom there - i suspect they're from holes in the cow. ew. . .

swiped from http://www.isos.dias.ie/english/index.html.

hide the cockroach is too well hidden

the cockroach is now hiding waaaay off the main page of the blog. oh no! please help find the cockroach!

quickly - before it is lost forever in greek (?) mythology!

dept dinner

we had the english department dinner last night. rather good fun. we all dressed up and ate nice food and drank a lot of wine. it was supposed to be a faculty-grad student mingling thing, which didn't quite pan out, but we did get to play with the small children of the faculty.

then we went off to the railway club and saw some interesting folky/rocky musos, including carolyn mark, who was a bit cool. i think the railway club should be my new hangout. it is hip and funky and sort of deconstructed. and it has a little segregated verandah for the smokers, which is entertaining. (have it mentioned the no smoking indoors thing? oh how i love it.)

feeling a little the worse for wear now, and just got back from a session on how to get a job in colleges, which are kinda like TAFEs. cardboard box, blah blah. though i may have some marking work lined up for fall, which would be nice.

must do study. *must*

housekeeping

1. i have been getting quite a few spambots commenting so now when you want to comment you have to do a little puzzle first. sorry for the inconvenience.

2. blogger has become increasingly insistent that i switch over to the new google-owned blogger. now, excited as i am about google's long electronic profile on my ISP and now being able to add my blogged information to all my google searches and everything i email to ppl with google accounts. . .

yeah, i like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person, but this system does smell. haven't decided what to do yet. feedback welcome.

misrule rules!

big hi to judith ridge and her visitors!