21 posts tagged “weather”

More point forms:
- I downloaded Alpha Centauri. Basically wanted that game for ~ 6 years. And then I was like, "Hey. The internet is so good for that." I also learned that I do not know anything about computers, but now I have a vague idea of what an iso is.
- I also legitimately downloaded the Creature Creator demo for Spore, which is fiiiiiinally coming out sometime soon. I really enjoy it, and will likely soon get the full version less legitimately.
- Went to the cottage. 2 days, ~ 8 episodes of rain, once when I was in the kayak. Saw "Across the Universe". I kind of wanted to hate it, but couldn't. Really, it was quite good.
- Okay seriously it rains all the time. Allll the time.
- So things with Professor are going famously! I suppose I should have provided interim updates since the last thing I said was that it was questionable, but everything seems to have smoothed out. Yayyy. I really like him. And we're going to spend my favourite holiday, aka Canada Day, together. Erm, magical...?
- Work yadda yadda. I have this week off. Gotta get my fill of Toronto before I'm off to the hinterlands come this weekend.
- Saw 2046. Not so great. Bad one, Mr Wong. (Interlude: Watched it with Professor. Putting my arm around someone makes me feel manly!)
- (Please note that Professor is but a nickname.... dating a real professor would imply a creepy age difference.)
- Free Harbourfront shows! (Nothing I like, though...)
- Okay so apparently starting a sentence with "As well," meaning also, is something we only do in Canada. I have Canadian and American neighbours: confirm? thoughts?
- I was at Sonic Boom! today (bought Milk Man and Intercontinental Champion), and some woman asked me "Excuse me, do you work here?" WHAT A COMPLIMENT!
- I finished Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which was really good. And set in TO! This was my second excellent Cory Doctorow, so I certainly recommend him. Oh and you can get I think most of his books for free on his website sooo.
- This song:

Yesterday I wished it would rain, thereby forcing me into the library. But this morning it did rain... and I still wanted to be outside. I just loved walking through Queen's Park... I missed rain smell, and the sound. And, I don't know, it made me feel "connected". This is 100% hokey, but I was like "This has been monsoon rain, this has been Alps snowmelt, this has been Amazon river flow". All that crap, haha. But then I had to sit in philosophy for two hours, as if I didn't despise that class enough.

Oh wow it is totally over. Except for the exam. I am too tempted to just float on my mark through the exam..... It is only 35%... But I can't! But if I want to do otherwise, I'd better get to work... I did barely anything today. I did have a lot of class today. Oh god. Today's Soc was our second lecture on "Research Methods", and everyone was falling asleep. Sometimes I'm sure he's stretching it to spite us. He'll repeat all the simplest parts in excruciating detail. The only thing that saved us all was that an hour and twenty minutes in... we heard this howl throughout the hall (it's the school's biggest auditorium), and these 4 guys came running in, faces covered, underwear only. They screamed, jumped around.... yeah I think that woke everyone up.

But that lecture gave me a headache. It's gone right now, but it's been off and on all afternoon. Perhaps I've run into some nutrient deficiency that I haven't foreseen...

I got up early for class today, but now I have nothing until 7. Hours and hours to enjoy this beautiful day!! It is so nice. I went over to the library for lunch with a friend (did I mention that every building on campus seems to have an eatery), and then we just dawdled so much getting back to res... and we were enjoying it so much, we just got a bunch of people together and went for a lovely walk to the east. I was aiming for a park, but we kept drifting north and missed it. But I cared not - it's warm enough for a windbreaker over a short-sleeved shirt, even just a t-shirt without a jacket places where it isn't windy. Aaaahhhh....

And so now I'm sitting in my room trying to work.... but my window is wide open, and there's jus no way.... I can smell the hotdog stand across the street, and I'm thinking of barbecues on the back deck... And the cottage. Oh hot damn I need to get up there. Lazy buzzing days reading on the moss in the shade of the pines... Dinners outside in the late dusk light... Thunderstorms!... Kayaking, swimming.... Bonfires.... Friends and family. Oh god! I love the city, I do, but there is nothing like being up north by the water, surrounded by nature.

And it looks like I may get a vacation this summer after all. They said we wouldn't at the first job training session, but then I heard that the first week of August was off. So we may get out west to see the family, which would be awesome. I miss Gramma. And I have good memories of hiking in the coulees, down by the river in the dry prairie heat. Yikes! I am looking forward to summer. And enjoying now, too.

Too bad about exams!

Today was the Clear Brightness Festival, which is supposed to be for going outside and enjoying the spring greenery, which is exactly what I felt like doing today. Unfortunately.... the ancient Chinese didn't plan for the amount of coursework I would have, nor the wet weather we had today. Oh it's also for sweeping graves, and I didn't really feel like that.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the rain, because I always do. I mentioned this in our Common Room, and someone said "That's because you're a plant." Which is sort of true, in that I like rain because I know it means fertility and growth. "April showers bring May flowers", as they say.

Blah blah blah and I'll be inside for all tomorrow and Sunday thanks to job training.

I've been neglecting this.

I went home on the weekend which was fine. It snowed twice this week but goddamn itttt... it's basically warm now. It all melted really fast. Though there's still lots of old snow on the ground.

My philosophy paper was a huge piece of shit, and so is my Bioethics paper, but 133% as huge, since it is longer.

I haven't played majiang since the weekend, and I want to because I am getting quite sick of school. I am so so so far behind in everything.

Started playing Pokemon again. Nothing wrong with that.

I participated in a study today about this thing. Oh panopticon society.

A friend of mine has started bombarding me with Táng dynasty poetry to help me practise my wretched pīnyīn. This is my favourite, which I will render in pīnyīn because I don't have any software for hànzì. With tones because it's useless without it, damn it!

It's called Jìng Yè Sī (Quiet Night Thoughts) by Lǐ Bái.

Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng
Yí shì dì shàng shuāng.
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè,
Dī tóu sī gù xiāng.

I didn't study for my calc test, and it went okay, and I knew that because of that, I wouldn't study for this chem test. And I basically didn't, and it went fine, so that doesn't bode well for finals, since I know I'll totally slack. But yeah, it was easy. But as usual, no matter how hard or easy anyone individually found it, everyone acted like it was completely average in all respects, because that's being "polite", which very often involves lying, doesn't it?

Oh and the main reason I didn't really study was St. Patrick's Day. See, I completely didn't drink or do drugs in 2007, after an interesting 2006, and I still rarely drink. So I'm not sure exactly what my rationale was behind getting completely wasted on a Monday night before a Wednesday midterm. But it happened, and I had fun. Boy was I opinionated that night. Now, even sober, I'll take any opportunity to make some sort of angry feminist argument, so with some alcohol in me, well, there was a lot of slurred shouting about "71 cents on the dollar", and "the angel in the house". Other favoured drunk topics of mine, including most aspects of white guilt, were well covered that night.

Aaaand.

Winter is over, motherfuckers. The city is melting, birds are chirping, plants are coming up. Of course, everyone's going a little overboard.... it's not quite shorts weather no matter how people try.... But we're getting there, and I can feel the warm weather already.

The St Patrick's Day parade is going past my window. Except we're not on their route - they're on their way to the route. So they're just sort of... walking past. Not parading. But at least I'm getting to see it, because I'm not going to otherwise.

It seems weird that we have this Irish holiday. Do we even have that many Irish people? Okay yeah according to Wikipedia we really do. 15.6% of Ontario. Bizarre.

So my grandmother gave me a jade plant. That means that my room is home to the following macroorganisms:
- Homo sapiens sapiens
- Dionaea muscipula
- Crassula ovata
- Kalanchoe sp.
- and sometimes, Mus musculus

It is warm out lately.

Oh and Friday night I saw "Me and You and Everyone We Know", which was amazing. Well-scored. Themes include fantasy and reaching out to strangers.

Okay there is totally a word for this bizarre thunder+lightning+snowstorm business. It is not creative: "thundersnow"! But apparently it's very rare. So rare, in fact, that the time that it happened here was notable enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia. Rare, yet it's happened twice in a month.

So my across-the-hall neighbour A was showing a mutual friend some music.

A: Oh, Peach Plum Pear is such a good song!
Me: Oh no, you like Joanna Newsom? Figures...
A: Who's that? I've never heard of her.
K: But you just said Peach Plum Pear...
A: It's by Final Fantasy.
K: Ohhhh. That's a cover.
At which point I play her the Joanna Newsom version, and she makes a shocked/appalled face. Because Joanna Newsom is not pleasant to listen to. I'm sorry everyone, because it does seem like everyone I talk to likes her. Come on!

That being said, the Final Fantasy cover is quite good.

I also don't like CocoRosie. At all! There! I said it! Call me a philistine!

Hey last entry was bitter!

This year is going by wayyyy too fast. I was reading a friend's Livejournal, and she was reflecting on her progress on accomplishing her New Year's Resolutions. And I could so clearly remember talking to her on the phone on New Year's Eve and her telling them to me... it feels like last week! And it was 2.4 months ago! Where did my life go! I don't want this year to end. Summer = home + work = lame.

However summer also = warm. And this weather is ridiculous. We're getting 36 hours of snowfall! Someone claimed we're in for 50 cm... I don't know about that, but it's certainly coming down. The melt is going to be gross.

Song!

Not terribly upbeat, I admit, but good for evening-time. A friend of mine called Black Moth Super Rainbow "trance". Err.... I'm not sure exactly why. I think the vocoder's just gotten a bad reputation. But what does she know.

Notice how there's just silence at the end. Another untitled track follows it on the album... I guess it's supposed to be "secret"? That worked on casettes, but not so much on CDs.....

Matt & Kim? Seriously? :-(

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On a related note, we watched a movie in Sociology on "Coca-Colonization", the process by which Coca Cola is well on their way to becoming the most popular drink in the world. They sell the stuff to villagers in Africa who hardly even have access to clean drinking water! And they're trying to supplant tea as the most popular drink in China, and tea is damn integral to Chinese culture. I felt sick, and I'm glad I don't drink that crap.

The movie also showed a man protesting on the street about multinationals and McDonalds, and some guy comes up and heckles him, saying "Man why do you gotta bring us down, see what I'm eating? This is a good quality Big Mac! Maybe you should be eating this stuff - you look like you have AIDS! How can you talk like that about McDonalds?? This is the American Dream!" And if that wasn't bad enough, a good portion of the class clapped. Clapped! I just yelled out "Augh, fuck this culture," and it was a little too loud because I said it when they were clapping, but they had sort of quieted down by the time I'd said it. You know how it is. Yeah I sort of thought... jeez wasn't I supposed to be angsty in high school? Aren't I a little old for that?

But learning more about the world, globalisation, all that crap... doesn't help the feeling of anomie, really. I want to get out of here, but pretty soon, there isn't going to be anywhere left to go. I swear to god I'm just going to go off somewhere and become a subsistence farmer.

On a more positive note, and because where would I be without a comment on the weather... it's warm again! Sort of. Snow is melting. Slowly....