Holiday

B and I are here in One Great City! this year, which is nice because we can hang out together and do our own thing instead of splitting up for family obligations and sticking to schedules. Those things are also nice, but it's good to have a change once in a while. It's also a bit more relaxing.

On Christmas Eve I was released from the clutches of work halfway through the day, so we ran errands then went skating with J+J at the duck pond in the huge park in town. The pond froze into a sort of bowl shape so for parts of it we were skating downhill. In spite of the excessive amounts of Kenny G's Christmas pumping out of the speakers, I felt genuine happiness skating there.

We went over for a late meal and stayed the night. The next morning, they kindly lent us one of their cars because they live at the edge of the city and they figured bus service would be non-existent. We'd be going back the next day anyway so we could return it then.

On Christmas Day, it was just the two of us, and we cooked up a huge meal for ourselves. We had:

1. duck
2. stuffing
3. mashed potato with yam and parsnip
4. Brussels sprouts (for B. I have that anti-sprout gene)
   
5. carrot salad
6. cranberry sauce
7. gravy
8. bread and butter pudding
9. wine from Sardinia

It was delicious! Getting going was full of false starts as we almost never cook meat and this was our first time cooking a duck - plus, our kitchen is cramped and we don't have the right utensils or crockery to undertake this sort of project with smoothness - but it worked out in the end and everything tasted great.

On Boxing Day, we returned to J+J's for a party. We had looked up the bus before coming and had written down the times so we knew when to catch it home, because service was scant. J+J again offered their car and I considered it for a minute but it seemed ridiculous. They were talking about coming out to our place to pick it up the next day in another car and then driving it back, which sounded silly considering the bus was going there anyway. So we opted for the bus, and man. What a kafuffle! We really had to fight for it. People became very concerned. They just couldn't stand it. We were offered rides down the street, to the stop, half way; eyebrows and voices were raised; there was gasping; one woman looked me in the eye with pity and told me that she hates taking the bus. But it was a beautiful night and, after two days of lounging, I was ready to walk to a bus stop. So, despite the fuss, we took the bus home.

"Give them a medal!"

This is exactly what my thesis is about.

Anyway, it was a fun party. There were tonnes of nibblies. I have never eaten so much cheese in my life. B and I didn't know very many people, but everyone was friendly and we had a really good time.

These four days off in a row - four and-a-half if you count Christmas Eve - are prime movie-watching time. We've rented something like seven movies. We also have a 3D puzzle to assemble, the bonus there being that we can then get rid of it and free up some closet space. I like to think of myself as non-materialistic, but for someone who doesn't care about stuff, we sure have a lot of stuff.

The thing I've noticed this year more than others is how much hugging goes on at Christmas - with everyone and anyone. Normally I don't think anything of it, I just hug whomever, but twice this week, a compulsion came over me that I then suppressed, but the hug happened anyway. I don't know why I suppressed the feeling except that maybe I thought my hug would be rejected, but each time it was too late, some subtle signal had been sent which they then harnessed to hug me. Both times were really funny. One of these people is Brazilian so he's used to way more physical contact than we well-buffered Canadians. I'm just going with it now, like the lady at B's curling club who hugged and kissed me after we'd exchanged a single sentence.

I like my job

It's about time I wrote here again, lest my bajillions of readers shift their attention elsewhere and are lost to me forever. I sense I may have passed that point. I don't know why I haven't been here much lately - not for lack of wanting, nor of things to say, more that I just didn't want to collect my thoughts, preferring instead to leave them jumbled in my mind to fester and morph into something coherent of their own accord. Much like ignoring the disaster that is my desk. If I put my mind to it, I really can ignore these things. The desk will clean itself.

Well, that never works. I had started this 'essay' about Stephane Dion and the writing of history (most interesting, trust me!) but then you know how on top of the news you have to be before it's irrelevant and, well, 'on top' is just not where I was at all. Maybe this thing will bob to the surface months from now, having taken a different shape. By itself.

Thesis approach follows suit: abandoned in the back of my mind, left to figure itself out - which, happily, it kind of has, as of an hour ago. I haven't finished my thesis yet because I honestly could not connect the dots - from purpose to lit review to the three phases of research to the link back to planning - I just could not find a common thread to tie it all together. Saying that I'd abandoned it is not entirely true, though. I have been picking away at it most days in an attempt to keep some contact with it before I lost it entirely, but always with uncertainty about where the whole thing would end up. I feel clearer now. Work, of all things, has helped.

First, we had a writing workshop last month, which totally inspired me to take a new approach to writing, focusing far more on planning than I normally would. That put a whole new perspective on how to tackle the mountain of the half-analysed, half-written, all-complicated thesis.

Then, for the past week I've been working closely with my co-worker Gavin on a 'project charter' - a new term to me. In case you are as unaware as I was, this is a document that outlines the parameters of a project (spoken with authority!) and has very specific components, like Scope, and Risks, and Milestones. The process of poring through each section and writing the whole thing together on one computer was truly fulfilling. Our boss' boss' boss was happy with the result and so were we. I have always thought of myself as actively NOT a team player (my resume lies) but after this, I'm happy to work closely with Gavin, especially because this approach is how we both finally came to understand what we're about to do.

I've heard lots of reasons not to start a full-time job before finishing a thesis, but so far it's only helped me. Nearly every day at work I come across something that applies, something that brings me closer to tying it all together. Work helps me to look at my thesis more broadly, which is what I need to do. It gives me more energy, not less.

So this morning, when I woke up at 2:00am thinking about my thesis, I got up. I came into this room. It smelled like Christmas because B and I had bought a tree and left it in here to thaw. I wrote my ideas down as a kind of map. I think I'll go back to bed now.

An excitement of US proportions

This is the most exciting thing to happen in Canadian politics since... Pierre Trudeau? I don't actually remember being excited about him at the time, but had I been a bit older then, I'm sure I would have been.