Could that office be in a worse place?
Possibly the best out-of-context professorial quotation of the year:
"I don't know; I can't really sex a turtle from over here."
On that lovely note, it looks like most of the skull-crushing Fall 2008 semester has come to an end. Most of my classes are done (having lived out their full natural lives, he says, with a sympathetic wince towards York), and the only remaining coursework is a few undergrad exams. The syntactics one tomorrow has me a bit spooked, but the others should be walks in Queen's Park.
Life has been hectic but predictable otherwise. Recession/depression/eschaton aside, it's been a booming holiday season at work, and the holiday season is somehow actually less stressful here than in Guelph. I suspect that a lot of it is the wonderfully drama-free staff; last Thursday, the entire night shift, even the manager (granted, one of the cooler, less ex cathedra managers) went out for post-shift pitchers and had a grand old time. I can't even fathom that happening at my old stores. I also seem to have a new gaming (or at least game-swapping) buddy in one of the new fiction girls; she's lending me Ico after having heard me rave about Shadow of the Colossus; I in turn am introducing her to Fallout.
Speaking of work-related awesomeness, my dearest colleague Vicky's birthday party was also this weekend, and that was absolutely awesome. Engineers, it seems, party like engineers wherever you go, and that pizza-, Wii-, and beer-fueled bash was no exception. My Toronto social network continues to expand, which is always heartening.
In music news, Steven Wilson is still friggin' awesome. I just got his solo album Insurgentes, and my mind is duly blown. Wilson is generally in about five wildly divergent bands at any given time, and it looks like he's taken this opportunity to say "Dude, I'm going to be Porcupine Tree and No-Man and Blackfield and Bass Communion and the Incredible Expanding Mindfuck all at once." Pretty chime-y guitars and random electronic noises and beautiful vocal harmony and horrifying industrial squelches and (hey, why not?) a friggin' koto all feature. He even gets people like Tony Levin and Jordan Rudess to guest-star, and somehow manages to get Rudess to play a reasonable amount of notes per bar (unlike, say, that live "Lazarus" debacle where everyone's favourite keyboard wizard decides to swamp the quietly pretty acoustic ballad with as many cascading arpeggios as he can manage).
Also: apparently I'm in a band again? Besides my honourary membership in the fictional Myspace-only lower-floor-of-Indigo band (every instrumentalist who works in the basement is automatically a member, and "we don't need music! We just are."), I'm now in the world's foremost twin-viola-wielding prog/electronic/alt duo with the encyclopedically-knowledgeable music savant from our store's CD/DVD section. We have between us two violas, four guitars, a banjolele, a pretty sweet synth, two soaring tenors, a small studio setup, and absolutely no idea what we're getting ourself into. We will rule the world. All we need now is a name. Current suggestions tend toward the animal kingdom; he likes Sacred Bovine, whereas I think Ungulate is an inherently funnier way of saying almost the same thing (and almost rhymes with undulate, which might be close to the desired effect of our music). Either way, it's going to be very hard to resist the temptation to give us some heavy metal diacritics. You know you'd listen to a band called Ừñģǔłäŧə.
