Last Post on Blogger!

Hey everyone, just so you know - I am moving to a new blog. I'm sorry if this is upsetting and understand if you never want to read my new blog. But please do! It can be found at:

http://michellejw.wordpress.com/

I've moved all of my previous blogger posts over to there too, so you can see it all from one place. You'll see that I've already got a few posts up there, and the welcome post is about the fourth down from the top. That's because it took me a long time to decide whether I really wanted to make the move.

** A special sorry to my two known RSS subscribers - you'll have to re-subscribe at the new site.

See you there!

Snow Day tomorrow?

It looks like the 5th storm of the season is going to hit us tomorrow - what is going on?? Last year the snow didn't even stick until January! What is Fredericton going to be like?!? I have an exam tomorrow morning too - seamanship. It will be fun getting into school tomorrow! woo hoo! Poor Trooper has become a bit less fond of the snow, it seems, now that every step he takes off a beaten path involves punching through a layer of frozen crust and sinking in up to his armpits. (legpits?)

Some kind of woodland creature...

We always suspected, but now we know the truth: Trooper is not a dog - he is a rabbit. Trooper-rabbit.

Latke-tastic!

I guess this is a bit of a delayed message, but last Sunday Janice and Yifty hosted a Chanukkah party and invited a bunch of their friends, including several of us CCOMers. It was super-fun, we learned how to play dreidel, and had lots of delicious fried food, yum... They made homemade latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganyot (jelly/chocolate/vanilla filled doughnuts - I probably spelled it wrong...) Even Gracie came - but she didn't eat any of the fried foods. The picture shows some cookies (with sprinkles on top) and also the doughnuts before they were cooked. That's Janice standing behind the table overseeing the food preparation. It was delicious and lots of fun!!

Early morning walk

While Trooper's paw was healing from his injury, John and I felt so bad for him that we let him do whatever he wanted, including sleeping on the bed, getting up on the couch, giving him lots of treats. This has, of course, backfired. Trooper is feeling better already, only two days later, and he now thinks that he is entitled to all of those things, all the time. He jumps on the bed, pulls on the leash, whines endlessly when he can't get what he wants - we've created a monster!

This photo is from our walk this morning in College Woods. It looks so different in there when there's snow on the ground. There were tracks from cross-country skiers - we need to get some skis! But we missed the ski-swap this year AGAIN :( I've been told it took place way back in October.

Operation

Two days ago Trooper broke a toenail on his right front paw. He ended up having to go into doggie surgery yesterday morning. They sedated him and amputated the whole nail - it seems harsh, but they had to do it because it was split all the way up to the base. We don't really know how he did it, but he was running around like a maniac in the snow, and it could have caught on something like the icy crust or a branch that was buried. Well, he's back to his old self again, except that he's extra hyper because we can't let him go outside much to burn off his energy, in case he irritates his paw. I'll try to post a picture of him with his cast on - it was hilarious - a little blue cast.

I'm tired

I think that grad school is slowly killing me. I need to get out! I need to know what it's like to be outside in the daytime, to sleep in past 7am, to stare at a computer screen for less than 14 hours every day. What is that life like? I don't even remember... That's why I need to get graduated and move on out of here.

Right, sorry for all the complaining. But I am sick of trying to wade through 27 gigabytes of acoustic data, only to realise that I didn't calibrate the sound levels for changes in the pre-amp gain settings. Now I have to go back and write it all down by hand, and apply it to the data after the fact... Oh well. Such is life, eh?

Well, I think I'll try posting a video. This on cheers me up, it's starring Trooper, mainly. It was after we'd just played scrabble, and I lost (235 - 240). I have a bad habit of gambling on words that I have never heard of but suspected they might make their way into the scrabble dictionary.