Dispatches from a happy Hullian

Yesterday was beautiful with good food and good company, including a circuitous wander down from my place to Verdun, some garage sale goodies, ice cream, enjoying the city flora, fun conversation, deep conversation, good food, some Red Dwarf, and even a little housework and lining up work. The good day more or less continues unabated today.

The world is as it should be, more or less.

Moving day today, grammargirl in, my sister out...

Yesterday, went to the monthly Scrabble thing organized by feygele and vierge_en_trop, had fun, learned an anagram game with tiles and took down the mighty feygele in one-on-one in a very slow, gridlocked match (after getting destroyed by a 7-letter play on his last turn in a four-way game).

After that, scarfed some supper and headed over to Azin's flat for a belated birthday incident. Met some neat people, talked, wandered the roofs of most of the block and took some photos (to come, maybe). Good conversation, good cookies (courtesy of emjayne and Provigo) and an interesting bathroom guard duty moment.

I've been programming a lot lately... some Flash/SQL bridging over PHP for The Lies Project, some user-interface widget stuff for the research, some Lisp to get back in the groove for thinking about the Church-Rosser Theorem. Now I'm on to doing grammars on paper for a bit... I've got the dependencies down, this contextual grammar might go down OK after all. Describing how to reproduce the process might be a little hard, though: "scratch this out, stare at stuff, make it right, dammit!"

My apartment situation is a little iffier, apparently the concierge for the place I thought I was moving into has shown the place to another person while I was getting organized... and I thought it was a lease assignment. Boo. Still, anyone who is interested in the place I'm at now: I'd love to hear from you. July occupancy preferred, but flexible. Renewable by arrangement with the landlord.

Work, social life and everything is jam-packed but fun. Grumpy's tonight, after a few hours of work catch-up. Moving and cataloguing equipment at the office tomorrow during the day. Yoga will be very welcome come 5 PM. Frontier meeting with the new Concordia coordinator (well, with two people, one of whom will be named the campus person) and the student organizers for next year on Thursday, delayed housewarming on Friday for a high school friend and his girlfriend. Saturday: Pho Mitzvah block party out East.

Rinse, rearrange, repeat! Victoria Day will be very welcome too. Victoria Day with yoga not cancelled would be even nicer I think.

It's been six months less a day since a long chat in the park turned my world a little bit upside down in a good way.

No phone messages, no e-mails... usually there's something going on at the FC office, but now this scheduled time is just plain quiet. Even the ventilation's kind of relaxing... if I'm not careful I'm going to wind up snoozing. Typical week up ahead, if there is such a thing :)

Did a bunch of TA-related stuff that I was running late on over the weekend, as well as getting routed from the table relatively quickly playing poker with my friends from back home, and attending keyef's very relaxed and fun birthday incident. Got to see sbourge in colour for the first time, talked, took pics, lounged, and ate a lot (some pics to follow).

Had a morning full of photography, fun, snowballs, doodling, exploring, dancing and general fun with emjayne and don_teo... 180 photos in 5 hours, or one shot every 36 seconds... and we did have time to talk and wander and eat... did Westmount Park, Villa Maria High, and Piz's (and the incredible two-tablecloth doodlethon).

A fantastic time was had by all, and we killed the batteries on all our cameras.

Whee!

OK, this is kinda cool.

( I'm interested in love )

In other news, it’s been a busy Frontier weekend so far... we had the provincial get-together over supper last night and all day today. I’m a little bleary eyed but encouraged. My opposite numbers from UQO, UQAM, Sherbrooke, UdeM and McGill and our permanent staffers are all a pleasure to train, machinate and shoot the breeze with. We’ve got our work cut out for us, but this was a great reminder that our campus literacy organizations aren’t isolated unless we forget to pick up the phone or fire off an e-mail.

Went to part of moonlightjoy’s Cho night at the Hearth in between Frontier-ings, relaxed, ate, actually got within petting distance of one of their aloof felines, laughed and put more faces to user pictures.

I’m going to sleep well tonight.

The post-potluck assessment is that the people were great, the apartment is well-suited to potlucks and the food was fantastic. The roof, kitchen and living-room-soon-to-be-Sylvain’s-room all accomodated the fun, pulchirtudinous (thanks, emjayne and moonlightjoy, for putting that in my vocabulary) crowd. I always wind up racing around a lot at parties I throw, but getting to know new people, seeing off departing folks and catching up with the regulars was a nice way to kick off vacation.

A few people didn’t make it due to short notice or conflicts with their outside lives... this’ll be easier when everyone is pinned down for work or school in the fall, but that’s just a good reason to throw another one.

I’m officially on vacation now -- the bosses gave us a week extra off! Whee! (I smell a crunch coming in September-October, but I’ll deal with that when it comes).

Today: moving Sylvain in during the day... goodbye temporary living room, hello human presence!

pâté-eating-vegetarian-approved dry-fried string beans

( recipe in here )

Serve hot with rice or cold as some kind of bean salad, preferably at a great garden party chez moonlightjoy and emjayne.

Happy St. Jean Baptiste!

For those of you that have heard a little too much about the killer paper... it has been pushed out the door and across the pond, in pretty good shape. If the editors like it, it’ll be out in the fall, I believe. Now back to regularly scheduled programming (more literally than that sounds)...

Having scheduled various things for when I thought the paper would be done, I got in a fair amount of human contact while working on it... thanks everyone for several good breaths of fresh air and concentrated bits of unwinding (and a spiffy red t-shirt)!

emjayne, can I drop by sometime to pick up the casserole dish? Maybe Thursday?