It’s the February reading week, day 1. I am supposed to be marking now but I am taking a break.
What’s been going on? Well, we bought the house, and sold ours. We have used up all our good moving karma on this one, people are incredulous that things happened so quickly. We saw the house we wanted to buy, we had our house on the market 7 days later, had an accepted offer that night, and then all conditions taken off 5 day after that. So in under two weeks, everything happened.
We move April 18th. There are some bad pictures here.
In other news, my office is no longer a portal to Hell. Whereas every other winter, the ambient temperature has been at least 27C, this winter it’s coooooold. I think the window seal has finally given up the ghost. As I sit here at the computer, I feel a cold breeze blowing in from the wall of windows beside me. So it’s more like I have a portal to Cocytus (from the Inferno). If I lean forwards slightly I can wave to Lucifer from his neck-high entombment in the lake of ice.
There are always surprises here though. Last week I came in and there were wasps all over the floor. Did a small wormhole briefly connect me to a warmer place, and deposited wasps in the interim? Now I think they must be in the walls. If you don’t hear from me for a while, I might be insensible in my chair from the stings of a giant mass of wasps that has erupted from the ceiling or walls.
Catalogue of fauna to date in and around my office:
- a baby mouse which emerged from the wall by the radiator
- a handful of sleepy wasps, point of ingress unknown
- a small, confused brown bat in the hallway outside my door
- three millipedes
- several thousand fruit flies, which have thankfully gone on to plague someone else
So, anyhow, it’s reading week, so there are no students around, and very few professors. I am marking this week, and then I have to start preparing for the linguistics labs.
Over the weekend, my friend Carrie and I wrote a book chapter on postcolonial archaeology in Honduras and sent it out to the editor. That thing almost killed us, but it’s finished. Thank God.
I can’t think more than 30 seconds ahead at the moment, so until tomorrow, I remain, your faithful servant, &c.
Musique du jour: God Module, Artificial 2.0. Perfect hissy marking music.