hm.

long time no update.

well, here i am now. what do i say...?

1) we got a sweet haul for our non-denominational gift exchange. i got an ipod mini from the in-laws, and my sweetie got some high-quality hockey skates. got some new clothes, and JH brought me a jupo -- a rain skirt -- which he is now stubbornly refusing to accept repayment for... (thanks, JH). my sweetie got me an oilers jersey, which i will wear either when the nhl comes back, or when it's clear that it will never come back. to wear it now is just sort of wanky. apparently, he also ordered a sweatshirt with the cheat on it for me, but it hasn't arrived in the mail. i wonder if it will before we go back to van.

the grandmother in-law gave each of us a $500 cheque, which was sort of excessive, to say the least. one of these is going straight to the red cross in light of the tsunami disaster in south-east asia. it's staggering how many people that disaster's taken.

2) saw (or will see) most of the people i'd wanted to see, with the notable exceptions of KL&TH and M&L. i'm not sure what's going on with the former -- been e-mailing both of them for a while and they haven't responded at all, which leads me to believe that maybe they just don't want to see me (which is okay; i just sort of want to know). i'm thinking M&L may have read my blog entry where i said their wedding wasn't much fun and don't want to talk to me. *shrug*...?

3) i sent an invoice for my editing work done over december. i edited 411 pages. yeesh. also, the value of a euro has gone up, now i'm getting $4.95 CDN per page. wahoo!

4) been trying to lay out the january issue of the physics journal, and it's a total disaster. acquisitions have been poor, and my continual emphasis that the editors need to get me good photos and graphics just doesn't seem to be sinking in. also, the english editor has been retardedly slow to respond; i haven't even gotten his feedback for the proofs i've put out yet. fortunately, it seems that most schools are starting late this term (i don't go back until the 10th). we may have a couple of buffer days that i'm growing more and more confident we'll have to take.

5) still need to fix my CV and write my cover letters for my internship. blargh!

6) am sick. it was only a matter of time. DA was sick...DI was sick...the lack of sleep and dry air aren't helping.

7) looked up program requirements for a PhD in communications. 12 full-time terms or 6 years, it says. am i ready to make such a commitment?

i know edmonton sort of sucks, but it still bugs me sometimes to hear people talk smack about it. some don't understand why i would possibly miss this suburban dystopia, where south edmonton common has really gotten retardedly out of control. in addition to it being a large ungainly cluster of big-box stores where you're forced to drive to get from one store to the next, the traffic congestion around the area is unreal. way to concentrate all that's wrong with north america in one disgusting cold-sore of a place, kids.

yet, i like my hometown. today was the second day in a row of big ultra-blue sky. sunshine reflecting off the snow on the ground makes up for the early nights. vancouver may be 5 degrees above freezing, but being under nothing but clouds gets to you after a while.

unfortunately, all of the mucous membranes in my sinuses have shrivelled in retreat at the dry air. i've been drinking tonnes of water (edmonton tap water isn't full of cupric sediment like vancouver water is, incidentally), and it's all i can do to keep from getting a nosebleed.

also, my eyes hurt like hell, and i can't really tell if it's because it's dry, because i haven't been able to sleep like a normal person 'cause my dad likes to keep my room at meat-locker temperature, or because all i've been doing over the past four days is read undecipherable papers about fuzzy sets, weld pools and grinding by people who can't write in english and don't seem to mind. a new study says that people who stare at computer screens for long periods of time are more likely to get glaucoma. now that i've removed myself from a profession where i might blind myself with a laser, i seem to have chosen a different route to blindness. some might call it fate.

***

been reading publishing for profit for my management course next term....and it's a pretty crappy book. spelling idiosyncracies, clichés, and the layout is just horrible. i think it's what, 11.5/14 or something, and the margins on the book are about a quarter of an inch. it's a real travesty that a book on publishing can look and read that badly.

so! it appears that i will be speaking at nash! thomas *ahem* neglected to inform me of this when he'd scheduled it, leading me to assume that i was off the schedule and he was avoiding telling me. starting a magazine from scratch is supposedly my topic. i'm thinking about how to turn that into an hour-long session.

unfortunately, my speaking engagement coincides with my sweetie's birthday, as did last year's conference. oh well. i've got his gift all purchased (found it serendipitously while shopping for his christmas gift) so he shouldn't be too upset. three more sleeps till he arrives, and hopefully with my ibook.

***

my pants are too long, my mother has decided. "let me shorten them for you." every year, i come home with pants that might be a little frayed, and she takes it upon herself to shorten and rehem them, leaving me with a suitcase full of ridiculous garments that aren't quite long enough to be pants but much too long to be shorts.

i have forbidden her from altering any of my clothing this year. we'll see how well she does.

ah, dial-up.

at least it's something, and i'm not totally disconnected from the rest of the world. it's not quite as frustratingly slow as i'd braced myself for, either. i mean, what else am i going to do with my time?

arrived in edmonton yesterday evening, and am already feeling a bit under the weather. didn't help that i couldn't get to sleep until 3am mountain time and was woken up by a phone call (wrong number, apparently) at 8:30am. who the fuck calls people at 8:30 on a saturday, anyway?

my parents have this creepy photo-essay of my life framed in my bedroom like some sort of shrine. other than that, not much has changed. so far, i've just been diligently earning my pay, 3 euros at a time. i'd told the supervising editor that i would have only sporadic e-mail access, so before i left van, he'd uploaded about 50 articles for me to work on over my 'holidays,' at my request. don't mind working -- just eagerly anticipating actually being able to spend some time with my friends.

i'd wanted to bring my ibook to edmonton (where all of my CV stuff i need to finish for my internship applications, my paper on math typography and my physics journal shit are, not to mention indesign), but it hadn't been fixed yet by the time i left town. hopefully it'll be done by the time my sweetie flies out here.

this entry is turning into quite the muddled hodgepodge of crap. what else? oh, my mother is livid at my passive-aggressive, gossipy bitch of an aunt (by marriage). it seems she's been talking smack about me to my relatives in hong kong. i don't care, but my mother does. according to the aunt, i'm fickle, flighty and i'm never going to graduate or find a decent job. that, apparently, was enough to set off some sort of rabid mother bear syndrome in my mom. it's kind of funny to watch, but she really does just need to relax.

okay, it's become painfully apparent that i have nothing of any value to say here. i think it just feels good to be online, which may be a sign that i should sign off.

i leave for edmonton tomorrow. i'll be there almost a week before my sweetie arrives. i haven't spent that much concentrated time alone with my parents in a long, long time. i anticipate that i'll have a good time for about the first couple of days, and then it will get excrutiating.

also, all they have is a dial-up internet connection.

will i survive?

so, kids, if you're in edmonton, call me up. please.

please.

the great fridge purge.

i've had an inordinately large amount of soup this weekend. i found half a bag of floppy carrots and turned it into carrot ginger soup. not bad, but it's a lot of soup, especially with the butternut squash soup i had on friday and saturday. it looks like i'm in for more, too -- minestrone, perhaps -- as there's also a rather large bag of hot house tomatoes on the verge of spoilage...

beyond the soup, though, i seem to be running out of food, and i'm leaving in five days, so i'm not even sure i should buy more groceries.

***

text & context final exam tomorrow. eeeee...

i seem to be fated to have laptops break on me, then have the repair people mistype my phone number into the work order. the same thing happened to me when my pc laptop got sad in june. fortunately, mac repairpeople care a lot more, in my opinion, and generally seem way more competent.

i called today after not having heard from them at all, worried that they'd been trying to reach me through the errant phone number in their database. turns out the unit is still somehow under some miraculous warranty (despite the fact that thomas had had it for, what, over two years?) and they've already ordered the parts. they said nothing about having to wipe the hard drive, so i'm hoping that it doesn't have to happen. i actually haven't owned it long enough to have too much content on it; i just don't want to lose the software that i *cough* don't have the cds for. i hope to get it back sometime early next week.

i leave for edmonton on the 10th. my sweetie doesn't leave until the 16th. i'm going early so that my parents can no longer complain that i spend all of my time in town out with my friends and not with them. i really should spend some more time with them, though -- both have had elective surgery this past year.

anyway, there's a tentative plan to head to brooks on boxing day for a corb lund concert (sans geoff berner!).

***

had dmac and his girl over for dinner last night. we had a great winter meal: butternut squash soup, homemade yam gnocchi and punkin pie. also, balsamic-marinated chicken and watercress and red radish salad. yum.

i still have tonnes of punkin pie left, so gerry and smorg, if you're reading this, you should come up for pie and hot chocolate or some such.

right. i should really write this essay so i can get studying for my final on monday, hmm?

you know, protesters' "hey-hey, ho-ho" chants are lame enough. do they really need to put political lyrics to 'my bonnie lies over the ocean'?

***

pierre berton died. huh.