weekend stuff

Oops, started this Saturday and forgot to post:
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Wow, looks like a beautiful day, and I am feeling motivated. Going to make a cheesecake for the neighbour's birthday and work on some projects. I love Saturdays.

Projects = making lampshades for two AWESOME kitschy lamps I found at Value Village last week (although as they are clearly from the '60s, I am going to get dad to check that they are actually safe to use!) and making a coffee table out of a board covered in trashy romance novel pages with a fruit box base. You may ask why my house suddenly looks like someone lives in it (rather than as if the occupant were still in the throes of unpacking, as it did for the first six months) and the answer would be that Steph came to visit. Stuff happens when Stephanie is around. She bought me a bookshelf, for one thing. TECHNICALLY my arrangement of fruit boxes was working, more or less, but I have to say having an actual piece of furniture certainly adds something. And since we had a lot of time to play (as I skipped out on most work for her visit) there were crafts galore.
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And now it is Monday and the cheesecake was delicious (did NY style with a strawberry-mango topping that turned out AMAZING - the neighbour was very pleased) and I got lots done. Went to Costco (and spent too much, but it is all useful stuff), cleaned the house, and spent most of yesterday in the garden with Oliver and Katie. Everything is coming up and now that it is weeded it looks so good. Also went to two bonfire parties and stayed out till 5am again. Pretty awesome weekend, in fact, in a quiet kind of way. This week, like last week, will involve much hard work to get a few projects off the ground before my parents arrive. I'll still have to work during those two weeks, but with a bit of effort now I should be able to escape for a while here and there as well. And I fully plan to do nothing at all useful (well, very little) while I am in the UK in July!

And with that note, back to work. Am trying to learn how to program in Python... getting there, but we have skipped straight to Classes in three lessons, and I have had to get a book out of the library to try and catch up! My last official programming experience was intro Comp Sci in second year undergrad...

Garden!

Don't worry, my leg didn't fall off. Only the skin on my ankle did (after two weeks of two kinds of antibiotics). Now I have nice pink new skin there and all is good.

Had a pretty busy couple of weeks getting a studentship application in. They are a LOT of work and I don't feel it's very likely I'll get this one, so a crappy return on investment. However, when your supervisor says "apply for this", you can't really say "No, it's probably a bad ROI." I suppose it's good experience, blah blah blah, writing up research proposals and all that. No fun, though.

So I killed myself working on that all last week, handed it in*, and promptly got completely ill and stayed that way for the whole long weekend.

Unfortunately, we also put a good bit of our giant garden in that weekend, and I felt compelled to get out there and do some work despite being diseased. Don't think that helped me heal too quickly. Garden looks great, though. It is actually in two bits - our grand plan for MY garden fell by the wayside when the landlady's husband's daughter and her boyfriend moved into the bottom of my house. They seemed very nice, so the first thing I asked them was, "You guys don't like gardening, do you?" The answer, sadly, was an enthusiastic "YEAH! We can't wait to get out there and get a garden in! We can share the space, right?" Sigh.

So, it was time to rethink. We didn't want to halve our grand garden plans (considering there are five of us in on this, and a tiny garden = not much yield per person). So I cut a deal with the Boys Next Door, who have a massive yard and had just let it all go to weeds. Oliver and I dug a 1050sq ft garden on their side of the fence in return for cutting them in on the food produced. So then the garden looked great but the yard was a mess. This guilted the Boys N. D. into mowing the weeds, getting rid of the garbage, and making a gorgeous fire pit plus two benches. Now their yard looks amazing, we have our garden (half in their yard and half in mine), and the unemployed downstairs neighbour is spending all his time landscaping our yard, so now it looks great too. Moral of the story: always make nice with the neighbours.

So far we have planted potatoes, rocket (arugula), lettuce, cilantro, tomatoes, tomatillos (which Del thought would be a cross between a tomato and an armadillo), and huckleberries, which are mysterious to all of us but someone gave to Oliver. This weekend we will do the big plant, although I'm not sure when we will fit it in. I have a conference on fMRI all weekend (organised by my supervisor, so no skipping), a party tonight, and the Boys N. D. are hosting the Beer Olympics tomorrow afternoon at their place. Probably a bit difficult to plant a garden in the midst of people performing the Keg Put and the 100 Litre Dash.




*not without drama - my supervisor did not give me his letter of reference until 2.30 due to printer issues, and the post office closed at 3.00. Although I was only sending it across campus, the instructions declared that the envelope had to be postmarked by 5pm on the deadline. So I ended up sprinting across campus clutching an envelope in one hand and all my attachments in the other, bursting into the post office two minutes before it shut, and frantically scribbling the envelope while the post office lady (who was keen to get started on her long weekend) stood over me ranting about how the mail guy would be there AT 3PM and I better hurry. I only hope it was somewhat legible...

Neighbours

I pruned my vineyard today.

Okay, let's be honest, ERIK pruned my two lines of grapevines. But it was still pretty cool.

Met the neighbour on the other side. Her name is Frankie. Hers is the small yappy dog I keep hearing. Her husband is bedbound and when they tried to take him to the hospital for his lungs, his heart stopped. Now his leg is falling off and one toe is entirely black and they are trying to decide where to amputate. He lost 150 pounds and now he weighs 120, but he can shuffle around the house.

Frankie also told me about the old Italian guy who used to own the house, which explains a LOT. Apparently the downstairs windows are covered with home-made booby tracks to electrocute burglars. Have to keep an eye out for that one...

The other neighbours are having a bonfire tonight, though, so must be off.

stupid weather

Gah! SNOW?! I was supposed to be safe from this! The garden committee was going to plant yesterday - thank heavens we didn't (it was determined that the soil was too wet) (and now it's under two inches of snow). The garden committee, by the way, consists of four other people who are going to help me sort out my garden - "help" as in do most of it and tell me how to do the rest. We are going to split seeds and supplies five ways and share the harvest. I am so excited that we can grow tomatoes, peppers (!), and even things like okra and watermelon outside. Two of the committee are currently doing their masters in asparagus, so I'm pleased someone knowledgeable is in charge.

Today is Neuroscience Day at Guelph, and I have to present my poster. Blahhhhh. However, the keynote speaker is Bryan Kolb of undergraduate neuro textbook fame, so I am looking forward to that.