Just to let folks know, I'm doing an update on icemem this week, ready for some new features, and to clear out some of the old less successful ones. It's entirely possible it will disappear, reappear, and be generally flaky through until next monday.

Bye for now!

Yesterday, fiction on 365tomorrows. Today, oddly, and with no real effort from myself at all...
One of my snaps in an online Montreal travel guide.

While all this has been going on, I've been investigating my tax returns. Rivetting stuff, I know, but this being the first year I've ever even paid taxes, I'm hoping to get it right. As an immigrant, I'm finding the whole process a little bit more complicated that I'm guessing it is for residents. The deadline is April, but there's theoretically nothing to stop you from filing as soon as 2007 has finished. Except that I'm going to have to wait a month or so for the University to process some paperwork, so I can get my declaration of status. Those of you who have been following my experiences with the wonders of university bureaucracy may see where this is going. A month from now is half way through February, and the provincial offices take about two weeks to process the paperwork once they recieve it.

The question becomes, is a month enough lee-way for academic inefficiency not to screw me over yet again?

You must fight within a lumbering behemoth of red-tape and half-arsery. Defeat the enemy under this condition.

So... now I've thrown myself down a mountain on a huge inner-tube a couple of times, been published, pimped, and petrified, realised I'm back to being poor (it's not so bad this time around), reclaimed my habit of taking random walks, got myself over to the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and wound up talking to a number of people in Canadian environmental governance. Also, I've discovered the best trashy pizza parlour just around the corner from my house.

Unfortunately, I've failed to get my sleep pattern sensible, and (at least so far) the henna won't take in my hair. There is clearly still important work to be done.

Three days in, and so far things are oooookay. I've not made any resolutions at all, but I have kind of made a vow to change the things I'm not happy with. These 'things' are nebulous, hard to get hold of, and impossible to explain, so I'm not going to. So far in 2008 I have:

+ danced like a twat to crystal castles.
+ made the most intense chocolate mousse ever.
+ played in the snow.
+ had a day of doing absolutely fuck all.
+ decided for definite to take two months off from french classes before going back in the spring
+ sketched, a lot.
+ said 'yes' to trying out yoga.

It's just gone half four in the morning here, and for the first time in a long time, I'm finding that I still can't sleep. I've just spent half an hour or so looking for a setlist Cam and I played almost 4 years ago. Before that I went searching for a few tracks I've lost through crash after crash, rejigging data over and again. I'm tired enough that I'm experiencing that lag between when you shift focus, and when your brain catches up to let you actually see. When you're roughly aware of your own pulse without laying fingers to a vein.

Merry!

More honestly, it's that I'm in rural Ontario, and an hour away from anything much at all except snow and trees. Accordingly,this christmas I have mostly been reading and napping (mostly). Wherever you are, be it urban or rural, I hope that you've had just the right amount of quiet, enough food to fell a yak, and that you're ready to open 2008 with 'splosions and glee.

Peace, y'all.

xxx

Ièm in ur French classes, blogging ur mots!
Ièll have to edit in apostrophes later.
Damn you, French keyboard layouts!

Just so you folks know, I won't we making it home for Christmas. Even though I have more holiday this year than I have had for the past three (I'm counting revising for a viva as work, there), I can't really afford it. I will be back next christmas, which will be epic (even more epic than this summer was). But this year you'll just have to manage without me. Weeping into your mince pies, longing for my special brand of coronary inducing festival food. Or more likely just getting drunk and falling over a lot.

I know I'll be missing most of you terribly. Even more so than I do already.

Being hung-over is not fun when everything is covered in 3-4ft of blinding white snow.

I'm a fairly happy-go-lucky sort, never one to hold a grudge, easy to please... but one of the things I hate most in this world is the lack of standards between Fortran compilers. I know, I know, that's such a tiny thing to be bothered by. It's just, every time I switch server, I have to relearn at least one or two fundamental building blocks of the language I use. It's like taking the time to learn French in France, and then coming to Quebec, and being told that you can't speak French. A situation that would be laughable, if it didn't happen on a regular basis.*