Karen

Over the course of the last year, I've been trying to keep track of books I read on LibraryThing (they have a groups/forum type section in addition to their awesome book cataloging capabilities). ( book list! )

Happy Thanksgiving, America!
Sadly, since Canada celebrated turkey day last month, I get to go to school and have meetings and install and test things at the museum today instead of being able to relax with friends and stuff myself with turkey and pumpkin pie. Josh isn't even here to share a makeshift turkey dinner at a restaurant or something. But I will be thinking of all of you, wishing you a happy day of cooking and eating and being with loved ones! Maybe I'll see if the grocery store has a mini-pumpkin pie or something on my way home.

People may have seen this already (I ran across is about a month ago and enjoyed it thoroughly), but it seems like the right time to feature it:

Been busy the last few weeks, traveling and stuff. But here's a few highlights:( Conferences, costumes, and cinema )

Simon Fraser University has this system where they hold Convocation in the middle of the semester after you earn your degree. ( Convocational )

ETA: Battlestar Galactica fans may recognize the backdrops in some of these photos as various portions of Caprica City. In particular, the area with the water was used in the scenes where Gaius and #6 are strolling around the marketplace, pre-Cylon attack. And portions of the stairs/Convocation mall where the procession and ceremony take place are used in the episodes where Starbuck returns to Earth to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo.

Finally managed to take some pictures of various new things in our lives.
( photos )
Okay, that's the end of the picture show for this evening.

Josh and I bought a box set of the Riddick movies recently (don't laugh...) and watched Pitch Black a couple days ago (wooo Claudia Black). ( Warning: Juvenile Humor )

I think I need a vacation from vacationing. Fortunately, school started today...does that count?
The last month has been crazy hectic. No more scheduling 3 trips in one month. By the end of it, Josh and I were (physically) sick, homesick, and tired. But, we had a good time on all of the excursions and overall it was worth it.
( Planes, trains & automobiles )

I present to you: Josh Tanenbaum, Master of Arts.
( Brace yourself )

Our guild cleared Karazhan in 3 hours!!!!

For those of you who have no idea what that means, let me see if I can break this down. It's also perfectly acceptable to skip this next paragraph and just assume that all it says is "NEEERRRRRRD".

( WOW blather )

From ellefromtheeast:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list in your own LJ

( boooooooks )

Last weekend Josh and I took a much needed vacation, and spent three days in the downtown Vancouver area. ( Pictures & lots of description )

So I'm having a great day.  I'm sure Josh being out of town has nothing to do with it. :) 

Halloween itself was a quiet night for us-we stayed in and no one came to trick or treat at our door. We got all our celebrating done last Saturday, at the Parade of Lost Souls.

Around 4 am this morning, I was slightly awoken by a low vibration in the apartment, which sounded like a truck idly loudly nearby. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep. Josh heard it too, and was having bad dreams, and ended up waking up more fully, although slightly disoriented. He got out of bed to see what the noise was and in the process knocked something off a bookshelf, waking me up more firmly. The noise tapered off and fell silent. I grumbled something about trying to sleep and rolled over. Just as Josh was about to go back to sleep, the noise came back again, louder. It started with a low, rumbling vibration, slowly ratcheting up to a full out rattling and shaking.

We are both awake now, out of bed and wandering around listening. The noise seems to be coming from the walls, and is loudest in the bathroom and kitchen. We surmise that it's the pipes, which are creaky even on good days, but this is well outside of the ordinary. The noise stops again, and we put on bathrobes and slippers. When it restarts (there's about 10 secs worth of silence), we go out in the hallway. The whole floor is vibrating. As we near the boiler room, which is just around the corner from us, the clanking noise crescendos. It's now clear to us that something is very very wrong. Either something has gone awry in the building plumbing, or some one has summoned an eldritch creature in the boiler room. We hope it's the former, since we're relatively certain the landlord knows who to call about that kind of problem.

After some running around, we get in touch with the building manager, waking her up and coaxing her out of bed. She takes a little longer than we would have liked to get downstairs, and we spend the whole time sitting in the lobby, listening to the noise & vibration come and go. The silences seem to be getting shorter and the peak of the rattling louder, so we're a little concerned that the whole thing is going to blow. We're also very disturbed by the fact that we're the only ones in the building who appear to have been awakened by this. Granted, our apartment is the closest one to the boiler room which appears to be the epicenter, but there are other apartments near us that should definitely be feeling this. The vibration is noticeable even 2 flights up and on the other side the building. Deep sleepers, I guess.

The landlord comes down and after poking around in the boiler room for a bit, determines that a pipe under the building has burst and the rattling is the system attempting to repressurize and failing. So we don't have to worry about it exploding, although Josh reports that it sounds like a sizable amount of water is being let loose, which could cause other problems. She thanks us for reporting the problem and says help is on the way within the half hour. We return home, to our rather freaked out cats, and that's when I started writing this. The noise is still going on, but I have hopes that it will stop soon and we can get back to sleep. And I hope the water doesn't cause any real damage or flooding.

Fun!

Lots of stuff has been going on that I haven't been updating on, so here it comes all at once.

( traveling & learning )

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff, but that's what I've got for now.

We made it! My family probably thinks we're crazy, but we we drove from Chicago to Philadelphia in 13.5 hrs and still made it in time for the family BBQ on Friday evening.
The drive across Indiana & Ohio was very pleasant-a little boring to look at, but good straight roads, little traffic and nice rest areas. Then we hit Pennsylvania. Beautiful state, and much more interesting than the previous two, but crappy roads and construction everywhere! And of course we were more tired by then, and getting antsy about the car return. But we made it to the car place with exactly 3 minutes to spare (another 3 and the cost of the rental would have gone from $250 to $450). It was 6pm eastern time at this point, which is 1 hour before we would have been boarding the flight they wanted to move us to at O'Hare. So we were at the Philly airport about 4 hours earlier than we would have made it had we flown instead of driven. I call that a win.
We turned in our one-way rental and checked out a local rental, since my parents had convinced us it was better to just rent a car and take care of ourselves rather than wait around for rides. A quick and surprisingly painless stop at the airport to pick up our luggage, (clean clothing! at last) and then we were on the way to see the family, which was wonderful.
More details coming later, especially about the long drive, but for now I just wanted to let anyone who was concerned know that we made it and we had a good time.

Well, the flight from Vancouver to OHare was flawless. Smooth takeoff, clear skies, gentle touch down. We arrive on time, with 50 minutes to make our connection to Philadelphia. Only to find that our flight to Philadelphia has been cancelled. And there's no space on any flights to anywhere near Philadelphia until tomorrow evening. So now we're in O'Hare airport trying to find a rental car company that will do a one way Chicago to Philadelphia rental so we can just drive it, because it would take less time.
I said I didn't want to fly, but this is not really what I had in mind...

It's 11 o'clock on a Sunday night, and after 20 minutes of insanely bright lightning bolts and slowly building thunder, the sky has released a grudging trickle of rain. I guess this is what passes for a thunderstorm in Vancouver? ( summer ramblings )
Oh, the final bit of news I have to share: we booked our tickets for summer travel. We'll be in Pennsylvania for my grandma's birthday from July 19th-23rd, then we'll be coming straight from PA to San Diego, arriving in the evening of July 23rd. We're in San Diego for 3 weeks, until August 13th. We'll be housesitting for Josh's parents from the time we get in until August 5th, and then probably we'll bounce around to various different friends. From August 5-9th, Josh is busy at Siggraph at the Convention Center as a student volunteer. We're really excited to be coming back home and to have so much time to spend with friends and family in the area!
It's going to be a good summer!

( big ol' update )

Whew, okay, I think that's most of the stuff I have to tell y'all about. The short of it is: We're busy and happy and this summer will be awesome!