"we're not fraternizing. we're discussing cheese."
What I just finished reading:
the very secret society of irregular witches, which was sweet and low stakes which is what i wanted and had an interesting twist at the end that i didn't see coming but that wasn't totally out of left field (i liked it). but the romance was stupid. at the point where the main character and the love interest are catching feelings for each other but not recognizing that and not admitting it to themselves, the love interest is thinking about the main character and wondering why he's thinking about her, and i said (to myself) "you're thinking about her because the story needs you to". to be honest i don't know how much of this is me being impatient with tropey romances in novels, and how much of it is because the love story really is dumb.
also sunburn, written by andi watson and drawn by simon gane, which is about a british teenager who's invited to spend the summer in greece with her parents' friends. she meets a slightly older (like probably a couple-three years) british boy and is introduced to adult drama - meaning there's drama among the adults around her that she kind of gets drawn into by virtue of the fact that she's there and she and the boy are the only young people in the community - and the story kind of builds to its climax and then... skips to the end with very little idea of what the repercussions of the climax were. i felt like they had me until almost the very end. that said, i liked the main character and i liked the boy (altho some of his motivations were a little unclear) and overall i really liked the story, and i liked the art better than the art in paris which simon gane also drew. i think sunburn is set in the 60s and the dresses are all really cute.
What I am reading now:
for the good of the realm: stories of power and defiance, edited by oren litwin and kickstarted by me (ok, and a bunch of other people). i'm a story and a half in and enjoying it. stories about power differences and (so far) how the powerless manage to defy the powerful. and
apiphile has a story in it and his stuff's always good.
What I'm going to read next:
i should probably read the book tour before i buy anything else.
this past week at work i learned that the admin liaison is leaving as is one of the other admins. the admin liaison's goodbye lunch is in a couple weeks and the admin's goodbye party was today. she got cake. and ice cream. and giant rice krispie treats. and heart-shaped chocolate cookies. and massive chocolate truffles. i had a slice of carrot cake, because carrot cake, and half a rice krispie treat and one of the massive chocolate truffles which was one truffle too many. cake was good, tho. the other cake was coconut. one said "geronimo" on it and the other said something in latin that translated to something like "goodbye ten and thank you for everything", both of them being doctor who references because said admin is a big doctor who fan. i asked if she should be wearing ten's pinstripes or eleven's little fez, and she said "oh i'm a capaldi girl". my doctor who watching is kind of scattershot (i saw all of nine and ten and two seasons of thirteen, but only random reruns of eleven and twelve) but i appreciate whovians when i find them. and some admins came and it's always nice to hang out with my fellow admins.
afterwards the project manager for one of my groups showed me where the big copy machine is (in another building) and then vented at me for like forty minutes. she spends half her time in another department and she does. not. like. the admin over there, altho apparently no one else does either. well, the undergrads do. but no one else.
the other thing that happened today was that a student from another college came by to chat with one of my pi's and his group because she's a huge fan of what that group is doing and she wants to be involved. like, she gave a kind of ted talk a couple years ago about kids in stem and learning to code and teaching coding - she was in high school when she gave the talk and it was VERY IMPRESSIVE. she's from peru and i think she's very driven and very smart and completely, completely adorable and excitable and just SO HAPPY to be talking to us. (the u where i work has some kind of reciprocal agreement with at least one other local college, where their students can take classes here and our students can take classes there.) anyway she was super cute and i hope she gets to work with the group because i bet she has some good ideas and she is, as already mentioned, very excited about it.
also i wandered around the building putting up posters for a seminar and spent my lunch break going to cvs to get an umbrella because i left my work umbrella at home and i thought it was going to rain. it didn't. >.< but now i have two work umbrellas and let's be honest, you can never have too many.
tuesday one of my pi's asked me to make a reservation for eleven people for friday night - he wants to take his students out for a welcome back to campus dinner, i think - he admitted it was kind of late notice but could i try to find a place anyway, and i did (i called to make the reservation and told the hostess "i have two questions and you're going to laugh at me" - because trying to book a table for eleven people at the kind of restaurant the pi wanted in the general area he wanted usually requires more than three days' notice), and then today he asked me to cancel it because apparently it was too fancy. i didn't think it was. this is what happens when you give me no budget and very little notice, dude. a student volunteered to find a place for next week. i rolled my eyes a lot.
i spent a lot of tuesday being completely discombobulated for no reason, and i used my lunch break to go to the gym. for the first time. all i did was walk on the treadmill for twenty minutes but it was twenty more minutes of walking than i would have done otherwise.
on saturday when it was so fucking cold out someone tried to drive his car off the roof of the parking structure of the t station near my house. he only succeeded in knocking loose some MASSIVE chunks of concrete, one of which crashed through the glass atrium of the station. a girl was hit by flying glass but otherwise no one was hurt. (probably because it was a. the weekend, and b. so cold no one was leaving their house, so no one was in the station.) the car stopped halfway over the edge of the roof of the parking structure and the driver is currently in the hospital and the t station is closed for an indeterminate length of time. so i have to take the bus to a different station and get to work that way. it hasn't been awful so far altho it is a bit of a pain in the butt. but i used to do this all the time - take the bus to the train to work - so at least it's familiar, and it doesn't take any longer to get to work than it did last week.
friend r is getting married in april and the dress code is "cocktail" which according to her wedding web site means more formal than semi-formal but not as formal as black tie. what this means for me is that i have to buy a dress and potentially new shoes. i'm not 100% thrilled about this. i like trying on pretty dresses but i don't love clothes shopping - altho shoe shopping is fun - and i wanted to spend some quality time on saturday sitting in a coffeeshop somewhere writing about space truckers but part of me thinks i should start looking for a dress RIGHT NOW. oy. my roommate volunteered to come with me and help me find something but i may have to do it myself. anyone have a cocktail dress i can borrow? us size 14, calf length (that's my favorite skirt length), not form-fitting, ideally not black? altho if it is black i already have shoes.
the very secret society of irregular witches, which was sweet and low stakes which is what i wanted and had an interesting twist at the end that i didn't see coming but that wasn't totally out of left field (i liked it). but the romance was stupid. at the point where the main character and the love interest are catching feelings for each other but not recognizing that and not admitting it to themselves, the love interest is thinking about the main character and wondering why he's thinking about her, and i said (to myself) "you're thinking about her because the story needs you to". to be honest i don't know how much of this is me being impatient with tropey romances in novels, and how much of it is because the love story really is dumb.
also sunburn, written by andi watson and drawn by simon gane, which is about a british teenager who's invited to spend the summer in greece with her parents' friends. she meets a slightly older (like probably a couple-three years) british boy and is introduced to adult drama - meaning there's drama among the adults around her that she kind of gets drawn into by virtue of the fact that she's there and she and the boy are the only young people in the community - and the story kind of builds to its climax and then... skips to the end with very little idea of what the repercussions of the climax were. i felt like they had me until almost the very end. that said, i liked the main character and i liked the boy (altho some of his motivations were a little unclear) and overall i really liked the story, and i liked the art better than the art in paris which simon gane also drew. i think sunburn is set in the 60s and the dresses are all really cute.
What I am reading now:
for the good of the realm: stories of power and defiance, edited by oren litwin and kickstarted by me (ok, and a bunch of other people). i'm a story and a half in and enjoying it. stories about power differences and (so far) how the powerless manage to defy the powerful. and
apiphile has a story in it and his stuff's always good.
What I'm going to read next:
i should probably read the book tour before i buy anything else.
this past week at work i learned that the admin liaison is leaving as is one of the other admins. the admin liaison's goodbye lunch is in a couple weeks and the admin's goodbye party was today. she got cake. and ice cream. and giant rice krispie treats. and heart-shaped chocolate cookies. and massive chocolate truffles. i had a slice of carrot cake, because carrot cake, and half a rice krispie treat and one of the massive chocolate truffles which was one truffle too many. cake was good, tho. the other cake was coconut. one said "geronimo" on it and the other said something in latin that translated to something like "goodbye ten and thank you for everything", both of them being doctor who references because said admin is a big doctor who fan. i asked if she should be wearing ten's pinstripes or eleven's little fez, and she said "oh i'm a capaldi girl". my doctor who watching is kind of scattershot (i saw all of nine and ten and two seasons of thirteen, but only random reruns of eleven and twelve) but i appreciate whovians when i find them. and some admins came and it's always nice to hang out with my fellow admins.
afterwards the project manager for one of my groups showed me where the big copy machine is (in another building) and then vented at me for like forty minutes. she spends half her time in another department and she does. not. like. the admin over there, altho apparently no one else does either. well, the undergrads do. but no one else.
the other thing that happened today was that a student from another college came by to chat with one of my pi's and his group because she's a huge fan of what that group is doing and she wants to be involved. like, she gave a kind of ted talk a couple years ago about kids in stem and learning to code and teaching coding - she was in high school when she gave the talk and it was VERY IMPRESSIVE. she's from peru and i think she's very driven and very smart and completely, completely adorable and excitable and just SO HAPPY to be talking to us. (the u where i work has some kind of reciprocal agreement with at least one other local college, where their students can take classes here and our students can take classes there.) anyway she was super cute and i hope she gets to work with the group because i bet she has some good ideas and she is, as already mentioned, very excited about it.
also i wandered around the building putting up posters for a seminar and spent my lunch break going to cvs to get an umbrella because i left my work umbrella at home and i thought it was going to rain. it didn't. >.< but now i have two work umbrellas and let's be honest, you can never have too many.
tuesday one of my pi's asked me to make a reservation for eleven people for friday night - he wants to take his students out for a welcome back to campus dinner, i think - he admitted it was kind of late notice but could i try to find a place anyway, and i did (i called to make the reservation and told the hostess "i have two questions and you're going to laugh at me" - because trying to book a table for eleven people at the kind of restaurant the pi wanted in the general area he wanted usually requires more than three days' notice), and then today he asked me to cancel it because apparently it was too fancy. i didn't think it was. this is what happens when you give me no budget and very little notice, dude. a student volunteered to find a place for next week. i rolled my eyes a lot.
i spent a lot of tuesday being completely discombobulated for no reason, and i used my lunch break to go to the gym. for the first time. all i did was walk on the treadmill for twenty minutes but it was twenty more minutes of walking than i would have done otherwise.
on saturday when it was so fucking cold out someone tried to drive his car off the roof of the parking structure of the t station near my house. he only succeeded in knocking loose some MASSIVE chunks of concrete, one of which crashed through the glass atrium of the station. a girl was hit by flying glass but otherwise no one was hurt. (probably because it was a. the weekend, and b. so cold no one was leaving their house, so no one was in the station.) the car stopped halfway over the edge of the roof of the parking structure and the driver is currently in the hospital and the t station is closed for an indeterminate length of time. so i have to take the bus to a different station and get to work that way. it hasn't been awful so far altho it is a bit of a pain in the butt. but i used to do this all the time - take the bus to the train to work - so at least it's familiar, and it doesn't take any longer to get to work than it did last week.
friend r is getting married in april and the dress code is "cocktail" which according to her wedding web site means more formal than semi-formal but not as formal as black tie. what this means for me is that i have to buy a dress and potentially new shoes. i'm not 100% thrilled about this. i like trying on pretty dresses but i don't love clothes shopping - altho shoe shopping is fun - and i wanted to spend some quality time on saturday sitting in a coffeeshop somewhere writing about space truckers but part of me thinks i should start looking for a dress RIGHT NOW. oy. my roommate volunteered to come with me and help me find something but i may have to do it myself. anyone have a cocktail dress i can borrow? us size 14, calf length (that's my favorite skirt length), not form-fitting, ideally not black? altho if it is black i already have shoes.