![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cushioned my ditch with a couch of snow
Dec. 7th, 2010 06:25 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. High today: -3.
Some of the most excellent lake-effect snow ever lately--first they got around a metre out of the westerlies around Buffalo last week, and since a big low retrograded from the Martitimes into Quebec and stalled on the weekend, kicking north-northwesterlies off Huron and Georgian Bay, it has snowed and snowed and snowed in some parts of southern Ontario ... and snowed a bit, and not snowed, and snowed a bit more around here. Nothing like the metre or more they've got around London and other places, but the Georgian Bay squalls don't usually make it this far at all, and when they do they don't usually give us anything worth shovelling.
It's that time of year when I leave the house every day and wish I'd worn my heavier coat. I wonder how many days on average I wish I'd worn my heavier coat before I start wearing my heavier coat.
And so that's the end of the mergansers on the pond. I went to take pictures of them on a nasty blustery Novembery morning a couple of weeks ago:
(You'd think I took these on a phone or something, but of course phones now have much better cameras than my camera.)
... and then it snowed a bit the following weekend, and when I went back the next week they were gone, and I figured, well, that's it for the season, then ... and I marched around the pond as I do before my lectures in some sort of effort to become human, and turned the far corner and saw a heron staking a claim for the warm season on the rocks piled at the inlet to make the water go the long way around the pond, struggling with a fish that was bigger than its beak. It flipped the fish around, dropped it, picked it up, sucked it in, spat it out ... and finally threw it back, and stood there with its neck and head straight out at a 45-degree angle for ... some seconds, as I wondered whether I was imagining that I was seeing the fish slide down, up, down, up, down, gone.
But then: a couple of days later, I went back, and the heron was unsurprisingly gone, but four mergansers--two male, two female--were surprisingly back. But today: the pond is largely frozen over, and all that's left are the geese.
Hey, have you noticed all the PINSTRIPE SUITS that are on the television these days? I mean on the news anchors and whatnot. I keep saying to L., look, pinstripe suit! She thinks maybe there were always pinstripe suits and now it's just a thing I've got in my head, like The Hum.
So quaint to see Don Cherry bellowing about "pinkos" at Rob Ford's inauguration. I bet most of my students don't know what "pinko" means. I bet a lot of them would guess it means gay--gay like Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff. (That would actually be kind of ironic, because Cherry has been one of the most prominent supporters of gay hockey players.)
One of my students gives me a hard time for giving them a hard time for not knowing anything about anything. This student points out that many of them are immigrants, and so they can't be expected to know things that non-immigrant Canadians know. Fair enough--though I point out that the fact that if people don't know things non-immigrant Canadians know because they are immigrants, this is a worrisome fact about Canada and immigrants. But another of my students is from a former Soviet republic, and had never heard of Karl Marx. Not didn't know anything about Karl Marx--had never heard of Karl Marx. This person is actually an above-average student.
I can't see much reason to doubt that I'd be a better person if I got out of academia.
... and to that end, I have made my first whirligig! Have I mentioned that I am going to become a whirligig-maker? Well I am! And I have! Look!
It is also my first youtube video! Both leave some room for improvement. (Also my first embedded video in an eljay post, so I have no idea whether it will turn out to actually be there or not. EDIT: Hey presto! What a world we live in.)
Other things I have been meaning to tell you about include standing ovations and social constructionism.
Some of the most excellent lake-effect snow ever lately--first they got around a metre out of the westerlies around Buffalo last week, and since a big low retrograded from the Martitimes into Quebec and stalled on the weekend, kicking north-northwesterlies off Huron and Georgian Bay, it has snowed and snowed and snowed in some parts of southern Ontario ... and snowed a bit, and not snowed, and snowed a bit more around here. Nothing like the metre or more they've got around London and other places, but the Georgian Bay squalls don't usually make it this far at all, and when they do they don't usually give us anything worth shovelling.
It's that time of year when I leave the house every day and wish I'd worn my heavier coat. I wonder how many days on average I wish I'd worn my heavier coat before I start wearing my heavier coat.
And so that's the end of the mergansers on the pond. I went to take pictures of them on a nasty blustery Novembery morning a couple of weeks ago:
(You'd think I took these on a phone or something, but of course phones now have much better cameras than my camera.)
... and then it snowed a bit the following weekend, and when I went back the next week they were gone, and I figured, well, that's it for the season, then ... and I marched around the pond as I do before my lectures in some sort of effort to become human, and turned the far corner and saw a heron staking a claim for the warm season on the rocks piled at the inlet to make the water go the long way around the pond, struggling with a fish that was bigger than its beak. It flipped the fish around, dropped it, picked it up, sucked it in, spat it out ... and finally threw it back, and stood there with its neck and head straight out at a 45-degree angle for ... some seconds, as I wondered whether I was imagining that I was seeing the fish slide down, up, down, up, down, gone.
But then: a couple of days later, I went back, and the heron was unsurprisingly gone, but four mergansers--two male, two female--were surprisingly back. But today: the pond is largely frozen over, and all that's left are the geese.
Hey, have you noticed all the PINSTRIPE SUITS that are on the television these days? I mean on the news anchors and whatnot. I keep saying to L., look, pinstripe suit! She thinks maybe there were always pinstripe suits and now it's just a thing I've got in my head, like The Hum.
So quaint to see Don Cherry bellowing about "pinkos" at Rob Ford's inauguration. I bet most of my students don't know what "pinko" means. I bet a lot of them would guess it means gay--gay like Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff. (That would actually be kind of ironic, because Cherry has been one of the most prominent supporters of gay hockey players.)
One of my students gives me a hard time for giving them a hard time for not knowing anything about anything. This student points out that many of them are immigrants, and so they can't be expected to know things that non-immigrant Canadians know. Fair enough--though I point out that the fact that if people don't know things non-immigrant Canadians know because they are immigrants, this is a worrisome fact about Canada and immigrants. But another of my students is from a former Soviet republic, and had never heard of Karl Marx. Not didn't know anything about Karl Marx--had never heard of Karl Marx. This person is actually an above-average student.
I can't see much reason to doubt that I'd be a better person if I got out of academia.
... and to that end, I have made my first whirligig! Have I mentioned that I am going to become a whirligig-maker? Well I am! And I have! Look!
It is also my first youtube video! Both leave some room for improvement. (Also my first embedded video in an eljay post, so I have no idea whether it will turn out to actually be there or not. EDIT: Hey presto! What a world we live in.)
Other things I have been meaning to tell you about include standing ovations and social constructionism.
