Friday, December 14, 2007

Dan - another week passes

So, I haven't been posting here much, reading too many RSSes to remember to post. Did lots of work stuff this week, got a bunch of long-overdue stuff done. Took yesterday off, and am now 65% done with Xmas shopping (helped by the various No-Xmas-Present pacts I'm involved in). Busy weekend ahead, lots of work to do before Xmas.

Anna : 500

This is post 500! Well done all! Beach this morning, huge waves that made the first morning beach of the summer feel a bit EXTREME!! Got to try out the cars new stereophonic music magic-a-nator and listened to Triple J on the way home!

Sun gone

Really not one sentence but...

After most of the snow went away yesterday, I decided to actually wear shoes instead of snowboots today. Fortunately, I looked outside before I left -- everything was white! The sky, the cars, the trees, the ground, the falling flakes...

My bus got to uni early enough for me to go to Coffee Hour. I usually just drink tea, but because I had been up until around 4am grading papers, I decided to try the caffeinated hot chocolate that I'd bought for the office. Big mistake. I don't know how much caffeine you absorb from that compared to coffee, but it's way more than I normally get from tea. Unpleasantly so. I'd recovered enough to do some work by around 2pm.

Then at 2:30 we got an email saying that the head of department said we should go home because of the snow. I didn't think the snow looked too bad, but all of the staff -- the people who've lived here for years -- thought it was bad. That was worrying. And I'd just missed my bus (we now live around 15-20 minutes away from uni by bus, and our bus comes once an hour). So I waited there, the only person on the whole floor, for almost an hour. Spooky. I got to watch people with a cherry-picker and a huge (pool?) brush try to keep wiping the snow off the building across from my window though. It's having structural issues, and apparently if more than 3 inches of snow accumulate on the roof it might collapse.

The bus came late but made it home okay (a friend of mine reassured me by saying "the buses here are tough as fuck, as are the drivers. I don't think they've ever shut down due to weather"). Now we're sitting on our couch with a fire in the fireplace, and I'm trying to finish grading my students' papers.

It was a weird day.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Ouch

I just figured out that the reason the sun coming through the window is hurting my eyes so much is because there's sun.

Just 20 more papers to grade and one paper to write. Yesterday I made a numerical model of the Earth's interior!

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Shoshe -- getting there

Mineralogy is done (yay!), the seminar is done, and now there's just a term paper, a problem from a way overdue problem set (but I've handed the rest of it in), and grading 30 8-10-page papers.

Our snow is starting to melt. It's weird when the temperature goes above freezing.

Oh yeah -- the other day, first I realised that it wasn't snowing. Then I realised that there weren't any clouds. Then I realised that the sky was blue. It's funny how fast you can acclimatise.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Breaking glass

I broke the kitchen window trying to get a fly that was buzzing around indoors.

I chose a bad weekend to do so.

Yesterday, there were largish hailstones raining down in a summer storm. Pretty much every windscreen I saw afterwards was either cracked or missing.

I got the fly though!

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Another Year Older

Wiser, hmm? A work xmas party provided free alcohol for the day, good. No snow, bad. (although we did get a few flakes on Saturday night)