For once I have remembered to note that it's my blog's birthday. I first posted on 31st January 2005. That's nine years of blogging. 1 657 entries, counting this one. That's one every 1.98 days, if the weather hasn't robbed me of my tiny vestiges of mathematical ability. People have posted 10 732 comments. The longest hiatus in posting has been the ( Read more... )

It's happening again! Chez Evil Landlord is once more infested with an Army of Reconstruction, only four years after the last one, and with the traditional pinpoint accuracy the blitzkrieg has been unleashed just in time to coincide with my exhaustion-making orientation frenzy. This time the panzer divisions are rolling only over the front wall of ( Read more... )

The ceiling in the foyer outside my campus office randomly fell in the other day. This is both ironic and inevitable, as the building has been rendered hideous for most of this year by the merry crash of scaffolding being erected, the merry crash of scaffolding being dismantled, the thumps and joyous cries of builders chipping plaster off walls, ( Read more... )

Time seems to go awfully fast when you're tired. I mean, it's October already, and the end of the semester, with its associated expectation of my return to work, is looming ominously. I feel as though I've hardly been at home for any time at all, and I certainly haven't achieved a fraction of the things I thought I would ( Read more... )

I know I'm a total klutz. I have come to terms with my own embarrassing lack of motor control. But I think it vaults upwards into new, high and inscrutable realms of clumsy when I manage to stub my toe rather painfully while lying in bed at night, asleep. (Why, yes, sleepwalking. Some unspecified threat caused me to catapult myself to the end of my ( Read more... )

We have a house! almost. Still a bit gritty, but most of the furniture is in, and I actually cooked supper last night. Yesterday the EL and I sallied forth and bought furniture, including a set of six birch bustle-back chairs for the dining room, to replace the benches, which were starting to look rather more than rickety. I'm very enamoured of the ( Read more... )

Good lord, the combination of start of term at work and no home internet has been torrid for my posting habits. I am pleased to note, however, that as of Thursday I am back home, which is still fairly full of builders but is also largely habitable, being as how the builders are drifting around doing all the last-minute fiddling but the ADSL is ( Read more... )

I love blogging. Yesterday I post a deliriously happy-making video featuring Jane Austen movie parody and Darcy espousing the cause of free-style disco, and what happens? a flurry of comments based entirely on a throw-away footnote about tiles. The unpredictability of blog responses is curiously pleasing to me ( Read more... )

1991-1992 were years of desperate drought in Zimbabwe; I have very vivid memories of driving back from Cape Town through the Lowveld during university vacs, with red, scorched earth and leafless trees in all directions, and skeletal cattle and donkeys wandering dazed through the devastation. At the height of the drought there were animal bodies all ( Read more... )

Right, so have been in curriculum advice all morning and just found myself shouting at a particularly dense and recalcitrant student, so this is a designated 20-minute break while I drink Earl Grey, cruise the internet for random distraction which doesn't require a brain, and recover my equanimity and love for the gazelles. Therefore, linkage.

• The ( Read more... )