it’s late

i’m taking a course in a nearby city on mondays.  the university doesn’t pay for my travel, so i’ve been going out to dinner with friends afterwards. tonight was really fun – got to visit with my twin cousins and congratulate one of them on getting engaged to a marvelous woman.  the problem is tuesday morning.

i’ve been taking a train home at 9:43   the trains come every hour after 6:43 pm and take just over an hour to get back to my car. then it’s a ~15 minute driveto my house. that puts me in here at 11 pm, an hour after bedtime at the casa m-p.  also, i’m very wired when i get in, so i can’t go directly to bed.

instead i’m here, trying to wind down to go to sleep. probably not the best place for it, but it’s better then lying in bed feeling the energy vibes vibration out of me.

the alarm still goes off at the same time tuesday and i have stuff to do, so tuesdays are pretty bad now too.

this is the last credit i need to finish my phd. hopefully it won’t kill me.

3 things I love, 3 things I hate

OK, I’m totally overcooked. I wrote this post, saved it and intended to come back and add pictures.  As you are about to see, there are no pictures.  It’s been busy, we’ve had a very stressful few weeks and now I’m making excuses.  Anyways, here’s blogstalking #4 3 days late without pictures.

This week’s blogstalking is more about me – I’m supposed to give you 3 things I love and 3 things I hate.

I’ve already shown you my husband and my cat so those are obvious loves. Same with the bike, the outdoors and knitting. Let’s try for something different.

Things I love hmmm. Books – I like reading biographies, science, science history, some novels and cookbooks. Crazy I know. I am quite a fast reader so I use the library a lot. Otherwise my book bills would be very large. D is convinced libraries are a scam – the publishing companies only get 1 payment for lots of people reading the same book. He thought you had a pay a borrowers fee to use the library. In our town, there’s no fee except when your books are overdue. I figure the odd $2 fine is better than paying for the 10 books that are 2 days overdue!

Red. I love red. And Blue. Green is also up there on the list of favourites. Yellow’s getting there, especially a nice warm butter colour for bedroom walls. I wear colour most of the time. I’m not a black or grey/neutrals girl. My mom never let us wear black growing up – too severe for a child, make me look sallow and colours look good. I used to have little red, but slowly I’m becoming red everywhere – purse, school bag, glasses, winter hat, shoes – I even wore red shoes to the wedding. My maternal grandma had a thing for red shoes that I never knew about. Apparently the line was “Only hussies and harots wear red shoes – do you like mine?”. Little did I know I was continuing a tradition and all of my female cousins have worn red shoes to their weddings.

Travelling – seeing new places and trying new things. Going to somewhere a little off the beaten track. Taking the old, slow road instead of the new superhighway. Making getting there and back part of the fun (when possible!). I like doing the research and finding possibilities for travel, even if I am wracked with indecision sometimes. Like right now. D and I know we need a vacation, but we can’t decide where to go (London, NYC, snow or warm?), when (November or February or both) or what type of trip we want (never done all-inclusive, but I don’t drink and am not the lie on the beach all day sort).

Three things I hate? The master’s thesis. I’ve finished my part. I’m waiting on comments from one of the former supervisors. He’s had it since mid July. At this point I think that if I defend it I’ll loose my major PhD scholarship which is alot of money, so I might just sit on it forever. What a waste of time and stress.

Damp/cool mornings – we don’t have a garage and our house shades our driveway, so on fall and spring mornings with a heavy dew I can’t see out my car windows to back out of the driveway. I’m so afraid of hitting someone. I have been known to squeegie my windows before starting out, but that seems to be extending the snow/frost scraping season too far for my liking

Clean dishes in the dishwasher. I HATE putting away clean dishes. I know that in a few days they’ll be dirty again and I’ll have to put them back in the dishwasher and back on the shelf again. Unfortunately, there’s enough variety in our diet that we donl’t use the same dishwasher load over and over, so I have to do it.

I’m behind – don’t shoot me!

I signed up for this blogstalking thing and I’m behind. It’s week 4 and I’m just writing the week 3 post. It’ll be quick and dirty.

The theme – how I get from here to there. I had this great idea – show my car’s engine, then show a page that shows how it works and then the gas pump. Did I get to any of that? NO! So here’s my car.

I played with the lisence plate so if any of you work at the MTO in Ontario you can’t track me down. Someone’s bound to tell me that they can un-mess it, but psaw – I’m just out to make it a little more difficult – like the Prof I’m TAing for this term. The Class title and description are a very applied class on a type of material and it’s mechanical behaviour. The course? Hard core science and math, little application. I’m having to remember math from my 1st year and that was over a decade ago. One student even asked me what the one question had to do with the course. I had to answer that it’s a mathematical proof, the fact he didn’t use anything from the course material wasn’t unexpected (and ED that’s what the red pen of doom is for – MARKING!!!)

Anyways, that was a major sidetrack that tells you a bit about my week. There’s not much in my car – the trunk has som garbage bags and rubber gloves for picking up garbage, the back seat looks like this.

We have 2 ice/snow crapers/brushes and a pair of big thick mittens for keeping my hands warm while using the brushes and driving. There’s oil (this car burns some) and windshield washer fluid. I have a basket to give back to my mom so she’ll bring me more yummy food and my favourite – the Emergency/Picnic Blanket, or the Emergency Picnic Blanket. It’s there in case you need it – caught in the snow, flat tire means eating dinner beside the road, drive by an outdoor concert and want to sit down and watch. It’s there year round for good and bad things.

This is D’s car, a Subaru Impreza 2.5 TS – base model of Subaru’s Impreza line. There’s no brochure about this one baby! but we LOVE it. I drive it whenever D’s away in a rental car with work.It’s our road tripping car. We decided we needed one good car for weekends, travel etc. and one that will get one of us to and from work. I came to the relationship with a Chevrolet Cavalier and he came with a Volkwagen Jetta Wolfsburg edition, so I have the get from point A to point B car and he has the powerful roadtrip one. When I’m done the PhD we’re going to get a more fun car for me. Right after we started dating my cavalier was totaled and we had to go car shopping. I test drove a few (scaring the bejeepers out of D and a sales lady in a Volkswagen beetle – aparently I was a rally car driver in a previous life) and ended up with the fraternal twin of the Cavalier, the Pontiac Sunfire. That Sunfire was Jinxed. So many things broke on it and weird things at that. I finally dealt it in for my current Hyundai Accent when I started getting frost on the INSIDE of the windsheild that I had to scrape.

My other way of getting around is my bike. You’ve seen me on it before (see my first blogstalking entry) so I’ll show you a different view – this time of our basement. There’s 5 of our 6 bikes in this picture – my oldest one is in the shed. It is getting to the point where my bikes are worth more than my car.

So that’s how I get around. There’s one more picture, but I’ve decided to use it in week 4′s theme – things I love and things I hate.

I’m working on christmas knitting here. Small needles are involved along with a callous on the left pointer finger.The other major bit of work is painting every window frame in our house. We got lovely new windows, but the dude brought the wrong sized trim, so we have to paint the trim AND the walls around the trim. That’s been every night this week. I should go join D on the couch now as it’s late.