Wednesday, June 9th, 2004
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11:10 pm - Boston
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I'm in Boston now for a few days. It's hot and muggy here too, as it was in Toronto. The rain this evening doesn't seem to have helped much.
![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20040610075101im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) flos_campi cooked a lovely meal for hedgies and me, complete with fried chive flowers. As a garnish, they're lovely and elegant, but chive flowers certainly do taste extra-intensely of chives! I really like their apartment. It's spacious, with a beautiful garden outside, irises blooming in the sunlight, a porch, and separate spaces for computers and the living room. Also, I've met a hedgehog for the first time in my life. Pashmina is a cute creature with a nose that's constantly snuffling.
I'm starting to catch up on the Sailor Stars episodes I never saw, and I saw my first Invader Zim episode, which was very amusing. I could see it being prone to culthood.
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| Tuesday, June 8th, 2004
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9:08 pm - Expedition
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I think I will have a lovely time next week at the SHOT Summer Writing Workshop. I've never been to Cape Cod, but the place where the workshop will be looks beautiful! (As the local chamber of commerce unfortunately describes it, "Woods Hole is a salty, sea spray village that brings the Nobel Laureate and the local fisherman together in harmony.") This should be a good chance to get a whole lot of writing done, in addition to meeting other young historians of technology under rather intensive circumstances.
I spent much of the day panicking, running errands, and writing several more pages. I'll write more tonight and pack. I did laundry yesterday, I've printed out lots of maps and bus schedules, and I have the Rough Guide to New England handy. Ultimately, as long as I make it to the workshop in time for the Saturday clambake (!), I'll have earned my trip. The average temperature on the cape looks like it'll be an average of five degrees Fahrenheit lower than Toronto for next week. It should be more pleasant than today's mugginess, the first real hint of summer Toronto has had so far this year.
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| Sunday, June 6th, 2004
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5:50 pm - Harry Potter
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I went to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with a large horde last night, almost repeating our annual tradition, except that it wasn't opening night this time. I was impressed. It's the best of the three movies, in large part because of the way secondary plots were effectively cut out. It hung together well. I only missed two brief scenes which would have added to its internal completeness, but which were by no means necessary: the signing of the permission form, and an ultimate explanation of the newspaper clipping. I loved the details, even when they were as stupid as the baby fox sitting by the pathside while the children come down the stairs. I especially liked the various uses of the whomping willow. And Buckbeak! He wasn't at all as I imagined him, but he was perfect.
( The downsides and spoilers... )
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| Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
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5:13 pm - Water
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In the summer of '93, the midwest was innundated with rain and floods. In Des Moines, the rivers burst their banks and, despite desperate sandbagging efforts, the water works were flooded, contaminating the entire city's water supply. The system had to be shut off and cleaned out. It was two weeks before the city had water again.
When this happened, my family was preparing to move abroad for the year, to Venice. My mother and sister had already left, a week or so before, while my father and I stayed behind to do the last bit of cleaning and preparing. I was on a different ticket than everyone else since I was going to Venice for a few months, then flying back to the US to start my undergraduate degree. The floods happened a few days before I left and a week before my father was due to leave. The streets in the low-lying parts of the city were flooded. We went down to watch in the bright sun of the following day as residents rowed boats in to see if they could salvage possessions from the six-foot-deep flooding drowing out their houses. We were travelling from one flooded city to another, but the one we were going to was built around it; Des Moines wasn't. Friends who lived in the one major suburb with its own water supply offered us showers, which we gratefully accepted. All sorts of generous societies and companies trucked in bottled water for the city to drink. We finished packing the house by candlelight.
These days, the water works back in Des Moines are very well fortified against any possible floods. By one major creek, there's a street-wide guillotine-like device over one intersection that will keep businesses from being flooded by the creek the next time it happens. Flooding isn't likely to do in the city's water supply again; it's going to be very cautious after those two interminably dry weeks in the middle of summer heat.
But there's more than one way for water supplies to go wrong, and as of a few hours ago, most of Des Moines is again without water. A major water main broke back home and there's no water in my neighborhood. It's major local news, but this time the outage shouldn't last very long. It's a localized problem, albeit one affecting most of the city. In one of those strange coincidences though, my mother left a week or two before this happened - to go back to Venice.
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4:19 pm - Update
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Give or take the mounds of articles and books heaped up around my computer, the sediment of all my recent work, and much of it still in use, the apartment is looking rather clean. Sometimes tidiness seems more urgent than writing.
I had a lovely social day yesterday, in addition to doing some writing. Enough critical errands built up that I needed to go into campus for the first time in a month, and so I wrapped the trip into socialness. I had a library book to return, a Proquest dissertation to bind, and a Metropass to acquire. I caught up with departmental friends. I saw my advisor briefly. I ran into a CRRS person who works on things related to what I do, at least, related to the study of eyeglasses. I went to the Centre and had a delightful little chat with Professor Akbari, which resulted in her lending me a copy of her latest book for the weekend - it's on optics and romances! I was delighted to discover it at Kalamazoo since I hadn't realized that her work dovetailed so nicely with mine. I'm looking forward to talking to her about it sometime soon.
Then I met up with double0hilly, briefly meeting two of the incoming first years, Alexandra and Victoria, on the front porch of the Centre. They were diligent and declined the offer of our company in favor of homework, so we went off to chat and loiter at Mullins for a while. Afterwards, I joined her and hereward for part of dinner at Salad King, but since that's a restaurant, you'll get a separate post on what I thought of the food. It was very relaxing to spend the later afternoon being social and not working for a change, and with good company. The evening was spent helping irvinl move; at least the move all took place within the building she was already living in, so it didn't take too long.
Tonight is the first Thursday pub night. This weekend, I'll write a great deal more. All in all, things are going well.
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10:57 am - Writing
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Last night, I counted: I've written an astonishing 45 pages of decent writing in the past week or so. That's more academic-style writing than I needed to produce in a month during the largest series of deadlines in other degrees. If only any of it were intended directly for a dissertation chapter, I could be done by July at this rate. Alas, this is the sort of writing I can only do when I already know my material well through having already written about it. I don't need to track down most of the footnotes and I already have copies of nearly all the material I need to reference. I've already hashed through my arguments by writing flailing chapter drafts which are still in dire need of correction and revision. At this rate, I'll have better chapters if I cannibalize my writing from what I've written in the last week and readapt it back into being a chapter.
I realize now that the reason those chapters flail so much is because I didn't have any sustained argument in them. They are collections of interesting and useful information on their respective subjects, they occasionally drift into brief arguments of a trivial sort, and collectively they provide the background material which will make the real argument in my last chapter possible. These article deadlines have given me a major incentive to work through all that material and find my arguments. It's all to the good.
I think I can have the current article in reasonable shape by this weekend. One way or another, I have to have it sent off by Wednesday, since I'm heading out of town then for a week and a half and won't be able to work on it; anyways, it's already technically overdue. When I come back, at the end of June, I hope to fend off the vortext of lassitude* and be productive despite the lack of these immediate deadlines which drive me to productivity.
* Credit to haggisthesecond for coining this phrase.
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| Sunday, May 30th, 2004
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8:12 pm - Nicknames
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1:54 pm - Foodful bracketing
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I frequently find when going out to eat that the best foods are either appetizers or desserts. When I know this in advance, I generally order around this: when we went to Rancho Relaxo last week, I ordered the lime soup (mmm), an unmemorable mini-main, and shared their amazing sopa pia with C. This is not to say I don't like main dishes, or that the restaurants where I order amazing appetizers don't cook respectable mains. In most of these cases, it's not even that I don't like the main dishes: it's just that the appetizers are even better.
( A review of the Studio Café (Toronto)... )
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| Saturday, May 29th, 2004
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10:21 am - Doors Open
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Every year, around this time, a hundred or so Toronto homes, businesses, and religious and other institutions are open for free for the weekend to all comers. The program, called Doors Open Toronto, is a good way to get a look at everything from the new BMW building to fire stations to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario to the Redpath Sugar refinery, with mosques, synagogues, and theaters available as well.
I've yet to go, but I love the idea and it's happening this weekend. C.'s gone off to spend his day building-hopping, and hopefully taking lots of pictures in the process. If you're interested in dabbling in a few buildings not usually open to the public, there's a full list of sites and maps available here from the Toronto Star.
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| Friday, May 28th, 2004
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3:42 pm - Update
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I've sent off my article draft on sandglasses for the SHOT writing workshop, and can now spend the evening relaxing in the company of my lovely friend jennybeast. She's here for a two day visit, en route from east coast to west. It's been two years since I last saw her and it's been very good to catch up. It was also useful to have someone in the house willing to proofread the article draft.
The murky weather of the past few weeks has cleared up, and there's finally sun again. We're going out to try more of JS Bonbons' hot chocolate, and this time my taste buds should be working again. Visits to the outdoors should tide me through a weekend of productive writing, as well as will visits to a neighborhood cat who needs catsitting this weekend. I'm very glad I have so many friends with cats, so that way I can visit them, play with them, and other people can take care of them.
Happy Memorial Day weekend, to those of you who have one!
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| Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
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11:10 am - Violent fairy tales and overly long sermons
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You don't even have to read old fairy tales in order to know how violent they were, as this edict's title shows:
"Limitation on preaching with the admonition to refrain from all vicious attacks, fairy tales, and controversies that delight in the abuse of others, and to present instead a short and apt oration. (Prince-bishop of Mainz to the heads of the orders, in particular the Capuchins, Nov. 1789)" (1)
This was mentioned as part of a series of edicts designed to keep sermons from becoming entirely too long, so that "listeners are not inundated, pregant women not discomfited, the poorly dressed do not freeze, and the poor can prepare their meals". (2) One certain sign of a preacher going on too long is if they "speak at length in unknown languages, Greek, Hebrew, and the like". While you're at it, avoid "unnecessary repetitions and so-called tautologies." (4) This is as good advice now for teaching a class or conducting a meeting as it was then for preaching.
(1) Quote quoted from Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). p. 265.
(2) (Thorn, 1560-1570) Dohrn-van Rossum, 264.
(3) (Electorate of Saxony 1671) Dohrn-van Rossum, 265.
(4) (Brandenburg-Prussia 1714) Dohrn-van Rossum, 265.
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9:47 am - Reunioning
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| Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
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5:10 pm - Anime North
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Anime North grew substantially last year, and although it looked improbable that it could keep up that growth rate, it certainly did: as of the end of Saturday, 6500 people had registered, and that doesn't include dealers, artists, guests, or con com. It's probably just as well that it moved to the Toronto Congress Centre this year, albeit not voluntarily - the hotel it was held in last year closed a few months afterwards.
( All about my time at the con... )
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| Friday, May 21st, 2004
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9:04 am - Yesterday, in nouns
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Pearson airport. flos_campi and Tina! Clafouti. Strawberry-rhubarb tart. Js Bonbon. Lavender bittersweet hot chocolate. Peach Berserk. Lush. Little India. Carrot halvah and other tasty Indian treats! TTC. Bhajis and potato balls. Pork chops and fried potatoes with rosemary. Rainbow Market Square Cinemas! Van Helsing.
I would have gotten much more out of my day if my tastebuds had been fully functional. I had to take another's word for the fact that the lavender in my hot chocolate was tastable, if delicate.
A question about Van Helsing: In the closing credits, a department of Entomology was credited. Why?
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| Wednesday, May 19th, 2004
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11:45 pm - Tidy
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The study is tidy for the first time in a very long time. It's clean as well. There's room for me to work, there's room for me to spread out my articles, and most importantly, at least for now, there's room for flos_campi and Tina to come stay with me!
My extended abstract is mostly done, I've done lots of laundry, and we are now well stocked with groceries again. Now if only my cold would finish going away.
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