dark! cold!

i'm finding it hard to adjust to daylight savings. i left my office at 5pm and it was pitch black. i know it's only getting darker and damper from now on.

thankfully life is going well. i'm still plugging away at phd applications (i hatehatehate writing proposals!) and teaching and marking. i'm giving a guest lecture next week, so i'm preparing for that too. more on that later - i'm very excited! teaching is going well. we played "anywhere but here" in the name round, which went down well. my supervising prof greeted me with "it must be that time of year. epponnee-rae's stopped spiking her hair and i'm lecturing in jeans." hah!

in tutorial we spent a long time going through john donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," which was fun. i drew diagrams on the board and explained the penis joke, and the students did some good interpreting and translating. i'm proud that i've mostly succeeded in creating the sort of noisy, friendly, creative classroom space i wanted. then i made them use the poem to do an exercise on thesis statements, which also got them talking. i hope this will improve the next batch of essays. . .

here are the pumpkin photos i wanted to post like sixteen million years ago. first, how the pumpkins looked all lit up. their round little bellies make me so happy!

second, some of the roasted pumpkin seeds miriam made from their insides. they were delicious.

we were going to make their outsides into pumpkin pie after halloween, but we left it a bit long, and now they have gone to be with the great pumpkin in the sky. ziggy assures me they're happy there.