mushrooms don't send letters of acceptance either, though.

i'm worried about my mushrooms! they've stopped their growing spurt and are starting to look shrivelled! am adjusting their humidity. no more photos til they look healthier.

in other news - i finally got an acceptance letter! actually it was a letter and a bunch of forms and a shiny brochure, which says things like "choosing X university for graduate study is one of the most important and rewarding decisions you can make!"

it also says:

"If you don't live here, you probably already have a position impression of Canada - a beautiful country with a peaceful, progressive society that welcome all ethnicities, nationalities and creeds into its cultural fabric. Did you know that Canada is also a major world power in academic research and that Canadian-trained researchers and professionals are in top academic industry and public sector positions all over the world?"

and so on. brochure-wank aside, it's an exciting phd program. i'm running around getting a wide range of advice and information on the program, the institution and the people. will keep you up to date. still checking the mailbox obsessively. there's two letters yet to come.

also in the mail was this:


thankyou, itchy! it's very sweet.

i gave my picturebook lecture again today, which was good fun. i was much more confident this time, and gave a better performance. i also spent a lot of time clearly signposting what i was about to say and had just said, and i could see the student taking notes easily and following what was going on, so that's a good thing to remember for my next lecture, whenever that may be. the prof is going to let me mark some of the papers the students will write on picturebooks, using this lecture and a worksheet i put together, which will be very interesting. i want to see which bits they pick up on, and how they interpret my ideas.

oof, and i had a traumatic loss-of-nose-piercing yesterday. i didn't notice til it'd been out for good knows how many hours and the hole had partially closed up, so i had to spend the afternoon running round to different tattooists finding another stud (i met a very ordinary looking young woman with a large python concealed under her jumper) then about half an hour essentially re-piercing my nose, which was painful as hell. i was very tempted to just let it close up, but i've had the piercing for nine years, and am attached. now i have a dyke-a-tron spike in instead of that neat silver ball. i'll post a photo when my nostril is not so red.

that's about all my news. spring is coming, spring is coming! (shh about that snow a few weeks ago). the cherry blossoms said so:


(blossoms c/o miriam. ditto the radish card in the background there - it has radish seeds sewn in the front there, which i'm going to plant soon.)