Seismic Twitch

All say thanks to my carrel mate, Bronwen.

…has shoulder. Click on them to make them bigger.

I love the way she gets her feet planted in the hood and uses that as her brace.

I didn’t get out of bed until Bran got me up to have porridge and coffee. I think that was about 11 or so. After that I read comics and then about 1 Bran drove me to the university.

I actually got work done. I’m mostly finished my literature review paper for Theory and I’ve got the Methods research proposal started. With the literature review completed I’ve got a fair bit of my Criminology paper complete. All I have to do is narrow down the topic to assault instead of all violent crimes and then crunch my data. Then I can hand in a draft paper for the prof to review and critique so I can get a good mark.

I’m going to be mostly vegetarian again. I’ve gone off meat for now. Bran’s ok with that. Which is good. Boy doesn’t have to be and he’s happy with that. Bran made curry chick peas with rice again today. Yum!!!

After supper we all headed over to the river for a walk and to take photos. I also took videos:

This last video has a fair bit of bouncing. At first it was because of me not being steady. The last bit of bouncing is because I was being bounced by the vibrations of the cantelevered path. Bran and Boy made the walkway bounce when they jockeyed for better photographic position. Photos of this little piece of ice follow the video, notice how there’s more ice under the water than there was above, just like an ice berg…only a whole lot smaller.

I also took a nice pile of photos of different sorts. Of course, being as we were by the river and weir I took lots of photos of that, but I got a few of other things as well.

Let’s start off, shall we? If you want to see a larger image, click on it and it’ll grow. It’s magic.

First is Boy and his sideburns. The child is not growing to be like his father. He’s getting his hirsuteness (rather, lack thereof) from his mother. My biological family is a rather hairless bunch. Bran was getting into bars at thirteen because his sideburns were so well grown in. Boy is going to be lucky to not be carded when he’s in his 30s.

Next we have Bran and Boy plodding along the trail walking away from the weir:

Here are the weir photos I took:

Weirs are very dangerous man made river objects. If swept over a weir a person can remain under water, caught in the circulating current, for a very long time. Not even a life preserver/vest will save your ass if you get caught in a weir. As you saw in the video, the water is very turbulent at the weir with currents and counter currents. The pelicans who come to fish at the bottom of the weir seem to have a lot of luck because they’re always there.

Just north of the weir is the Railway Bridge (aptly named since it is a train trestle). This bridge also has a pedestrian walk way for people to cross the river to the university campus at the north end. I took a few photos of the bridge and of its piers. I liked the way the ice looked at the river level. Notice how, in the first photo, the ice is higher than the water level. I don’t quite know how that works but it’s neat.

I love the way these next two photos appear to be icebreakers moving clearing the way for ships.

This shot I wanted because of the way the sheet of ice was separating from the main bit.

This photo is the last I took at the river area. It was while we were walking down Spadina Crescent. I saw this and thought it looked like a reversal of what the river. It’s not the way I want to describe it, but the right words escape me at the moment.

These last shots were taken just before we left to the riverbank. I loved the way the ice created on the concrete is being slid off the table and seats by the water melted underneath.

Today was the 40th annual Sorokin lecture. Click his name and read about him. All I can remember for certain is that the first head of Sociology at the university was a student of Sorokin and negotiated with Sorokin (and then his family after the dude died) to get much of his writing housed at the UofS. So that’s the case now. The archival people are working on putting the writings into electronic format. Anyway, we just got home from that.

We’re taking in a friend’s cat for a while, until she’s able to find a place to live. Her roommate got all pyscho on her and kicked her and her kitty out. She’s homeless and so is her kitty. We’ll see how things work out, but tonight they’re both staying here. After that, who knows? Hopefully she’ll find a stable place soon. Her luck with roommates has been less than stellar of late.

I got a good start on my papers today. I took my ergonomic keyboard to school to continue that process. I find that I’m able to work longer and faster with that keyboard. I also took the three Scary Movies and some of my buttons (you know, the ones that say things) that I had on my lamp that will do more good and amusing there than here.

That’s about it for news from our household. Life is moving on and I’m working on papers before the day before they’re due. That is news in and of itself.

Seriously!! My co-worker is putting mental images into my brain that should never be ideated, let alone passed on to another person. He’s so going to hell!

I’ve decided to take up the gauntlet thrown down (not really, but it’s more dramatic this way) and have joined Solo Photo Book Month. If you’re up to a visual challenge, create your own photo album. Mine is called “Bad Mood in Progress” (also known as my LJ blog title). It starts May 1, so it’s not going to cut into my school work at all. Yay! Something for enjoyment.

Today was a bit of a mixed bag. It snowed last night, and it rained. So the highways were rather nasty this morning with the highways department not recommending travel around the city because of ice. The city itself was messy, still is actually, with slush. I took a few photos on my way to school today (click to make larger).

And because everyone needs a little bit of kittiness in their lives, here’s Dutchess playing with the hood string on Bran’s bunnyhug (hoodie for you non-Saskatchewan dwellers). Afterall, if it’s in her house she must own it, right?

Dutchess and the String from dykewife dykewife on Vimeo.

The theory presentation on Gender Trouble is over with! Thank goodness for small miracles. Jin and I pulled it together fairly well and the Alison Bechdel comic was a beautiful fit with gender, sexual identification, sexual orientation, transgender and all that rolled into one comic. Tonight I shall continue on with my literature review and printout the research proposal proposal that I need to get done sometime soon.

Happy day after the vernal equinox!!! It’s officially spring (according to the calendar) and it actually is acting like spring outside. I love that. I mean, it’s not that I mind the cold weather, but I’m sick of snow and white. I’m needing some colour in my life. Granted with the melt, colour means brown to black of mud and blue from the swearing at the pot holes in the road, but it’s a change.

The following are photos that I took on Friday. The first shows a “sundog” which normally don’t show up unless it’s extremely cold. The sun creates it’s own little rainbows from the ice crystals in the air. Bran and I saw one like this a couple of weeks back when the weather was also warm but I didn’t have my camera with me. The angle of sunlight and the clouds was just right to create that colour in the sky.

This one is just to show the melted snow and some puddles on the road. Nothing more epic than that.

I made a video of some of our trip across town from getting the car washed. However, because my glasses are “progressive” lenses (they turn dark in daylight) I wasn’t able to tell that it was focusing on the dashboard and on the water spots on the window. the rest was out of focus. It would have been a really nice way to see how pretty Saskatoon is. Dang. I did discover that the touchless car washes leave me feeling somewhat claustrophobic. I’d never been in one. Maybe I’ll video that next time we get it washed.

I have to work in a little over an hour so I’m going to head off to shower…well I was until Boy went in to leave a dump. Dang!

Ta-Ra

I’ve been working reasonably hard and I’ve nearly completed Gender Trouble. Tonight I have to read more as well as do a review of a questionnaire that a classmate created and I agreed to help out on.

I got the assignment due tomorrow done this afternoon in a couple of hours. I’ve concluded that the Nvivo program for analyzing qualitative data completely sucks. Really, it does. I couldn’t open up saved analysis of my own work. The program collapsed and crashed after I’d done most of my analysis and that’s how I discovered it wouldn’t open my saved work. Then I couldn’t get the program to print up a couple of things. All I can think right now is that I hope the program is vastly improved or there is a different and better program if or when I ever do my PhD.

The car got a tune-up today (I wrote “update” – duh!). I paid with my credit card. It was then I realized that we could have gotten a few groceries to get us through the week and charged it then paid it off when I got paid (tomorrow). I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t think of using it though. It’s always better to not have that be the first thought…use the card. So now we have a bit of a balance to pay off. Then we’re going to get the bearings packed, have the intake stuff cleaned up, and the brakes done (not all at once, we’d go broke if we did that).

School was ok today. We had a bit of a ditz from Corrections Service of Canada come by for a talk, but it was very informative. I learnt a lot of about programming. Despite being a bit of a flake, he had enormous passion and enthusiasm for his work. I’m glad of that. I might try to work within the system for a short while, working at Okima Ochi Healing Lodge (the Aboriginal minimum security facility) would be a very educational.

That’s about it. Nothing to exciting is going on.

Ta-Ra

I’ve been reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler for my Theory class. I thought it would be a rocking good book to read. I was wrong on so many levels. The most significant level is that it’s full of sociology-ese, run on sentences, compound sentences and logic runs that make my brain cells turn upside down and cry. It’s been incredibly slow reading as I try to decipher what Ms Butler wants to say and what she means (sometimes those don’t seem to meet in the middle). Oddly enough, the Foucaultian part of the chapter “Subversive Bodily Acts” is actually the most easily understood.

I have only the section on Wittig (in the “Subversive Bodily Acts”) to read and then the shortish conclusion. Then I get to go through it and synthesize it for a PowerPoint presentation and get that to my group partner so that she can check it out and add her stuff to. This all has to be done for Monday.

It’s days like today when I miss Heidegger (and if you’ve heard of that philosopher you’ll understand my frustration level with Butler). I’d much rather read Butler as interpreted to through Dykes to Watch Out For.

In a productive effort to avoid reading the book I did dishes yesterday. Now Boy has a norm to look at and maintain. Of course I didn’t get around to sweeping and washing the floor (I had to start reading sometime), but that shouldn’t be to hard to get done…when I’m working on one of my papers.

Thanks to Bran I now have a lovely picture of Dutchess as my desktop. Yay!