Things that make me homicidal: having a student arriving in my ofice to add a summer term course to her record. Telling her she is too late to do so, the deadline was Friday and she's effectively missed a quarter of the course. Having her become visibly grumpy and petulant when her sob story about being too busy doing other things to add it earlier ( Read more... )

When I left to do some shopping early on Saturday there was a small flock of hadeda ibises (ibi?) posed dramatically along the roof-tree of my house, against the morning sky. Rather like a boy-band album cover, in fact: studied poses, all carefully differentiated, positions and distances calculated to hint at relationships. A deliberate ( Read more... )

Scotland is beautiful. Cold, and bleak, and windswept, and beautiful. Apparently these are the sands from the race in Chariots of Fire. The local industries appear to consist of education, golf and Chariots of Fire jokes.


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The bird life in this garden is vaguely increasing, most notably in the case of the hadeda who has spent portions of the weekend sitting on the highest point of the house roof and whooping meditatively to himself in the approximate tones of someone being slightly distractedly murdered by inches. I blame global warming, myself ( Read more... )

As New York sort of quails beneath Hurricane Irene, I note for posterity that there were two hadeda ibisis on the lawn this morning. (Ibissis? Ibisisisis? Ibi? It's a word like banana, in that it's difficult to stop spelling it). Hurricanes and hadedas are not, in fact, completely unrelated, at least in the wayward meanderings of what pass for my ( Read more... )

Goshdarnit, it would have to be the morning I arrive at work late (owing to a detour to allow medical vampires to extract their weekly quotient of blood) that a helicopter crashes on middle campus. I saw all the police vehicles milling about and deploying flashing lights as I drove up the hill, and vaguely wondered what the hell was going on. (My ( Read more... )

It's not madly compatible with ownership of four1 cats, but I really enjoy birds. To this end I have a hanging bird table in the back courtyard, which I fill erratically with assorted seeds, and watch with great pleasure while a motley assortment of pigeons, doves, sparrers, white-eyes and the occasional thrush squabble for it messily, taking off ( Read more... )

There's a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge on the hospital across the road from our house: I hear them screaming a lot. (This is a sound hotwired into childhood memories, from exposure to my dad's falcons for approximately the first twenty years of my life). I don't often see the actual birds, but yesterday there were two suspiciously ( Read more... )

Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show ( Read more... )

One of my students has insisted on writing her vampire essay on Queen of the Dammed. This is clearly about repression on a scale I have hitherto failed to associate with Anne Rice ( Read more... )