Canterbury Tales

I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to get used to long Canadian distances again, I really don't.  Because last week, I popped over to Canterbury for a couple of nights, and it's so absolutely wonderful to only have to deal with short flights and short distances and one hour of time-zone change rather than my usual trans-Atlantic week of jetlag.

I went to meet with a prof who, like me, works with inscriptions and the Roman family and other similar topics, and that was wonderful.  Classics is a fairly small field in general, and what I do is obscure even for a classicist, so it's always nice to talk to someone who faces the same problems and deals with the same sources and material and arguments.  Besides, there are very few people who are not only willing to let me ramble on about inscriptions and families and dead people for hours on end, but who are genuinely interested in my thoughts and opinions and the results that will eventually become the remaining chapters of the dissertation.

And, being me, I still managed to sight-see and to take photos, despite only being in the UK for 48 hours.  That's the cathedral above, with the cloudy spring sky showing you what kind of weather I had for my trip.  The rest of the photos are here.

Around here

The temperature's dropped a bit, but it's most definitely spring here: there are flowers everywhere.  The stall at the market where I buy flowers every Saturday has an increasingly wide selection, there are daffodils poking through the grass, the tulips are almost here, and the trees are starting to bloom.













These next few pictures are all cut flowers I've bought from the market over the last few weeks.  Cut flowers are so much cheaper here that people buy them a lot more than they do at home.  You see people wandering down the street carrying bouquets all the time, especially near an outdoor market, and it's not always guys who are in trouble ;)  I suspect the purple ones above are hyacinths, but I'm not 100% sure on that one.











Oh, and any assistance with flower names would be greatly appreciated, because we've got lots of flowers around here that I've never seen before, because they don't grow in Calgary.  I can manage "rose" and "tulip" on my own, though ;)







As for the neighbourhood itself, most of those plants are a mystery to me.  Both of the white trees shed petals like crazy... I'll try to get a picture in a few weeks when it looks like snowdrifts.

 


















And a few pictures from the long ride out of the city that we took while the weather was gorgeous and well above 20 C... can you believe Stefan didn't want to get off his bike every time I found a new and entertaining street sign?

Look, Mel, your address could be "Aragorn 15" or similar!

The whole neighbourhood can be viewed on Google Maps here, and yes, it is Lord of the Rings themed.  Stefan says we can't move just because I like the street names.







What else is going on, since I've been so negligent with my posting lately?  Not too much.  I'm still writing away, and another chapter's done (or at least, done for now, because it still needs some revision).  Current word count: 26,714 words.  That's 80 pages, double-spaced.  The writing process isn't really all that interesting, which means that it's hard to come up with things to say when people ask what you did recently.

I've been getting a bit of sewing done, too.  I finished this skirt, and then promptly made another one in white, which isn't quite finished yet... it needs some hand-sewing and a bit of embroidery to make it fancy.  Stefan's been calling it my "potato skirt," because his mind works in mysterious ways.  Not that mysterious, I guess: when I brought it out to show him, he said something about how he liked the bumps, and I explained that the fancy word was scallops, which he associates with potatoes.

I really should get Stefan to take pictures of me wearing my sewing projects, because you just don't get the same effect on the hanger.  I'll try to remember to do that when I'm wearing them.



And that's about it... like I said, it really hasn't been very interesting around here lately, but at least I'm getting lots of writing done!