Indeed, I successfully defended my Masters Thesis yesterday, and came home to this beautiful bouquet sent by my family. Lucky I, and luckier still for this Saturday afternoon Stuart and I are going out to celebrate the end of school in the fashion I have chosen, and it is a very special fashion. I can't wait to tell you all about it.
Linkylink:
-Find
an update over at my hobby blog Now Doing! Posted are pictures of the blanket I knit this winter, and my current patchwork project.
-I was thrilled to find out that the marvelous
Saffrina Welch has started a blog. Saff is a friend of Stu's from uni, and when she and her boyfriend Ivan
came to stay with us in December, we had a brilliant time. So it will be fun to see what she gets up to online.
-Bookwise, I was happy to see that
Karen Connelly's The Lizard Cage has been nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers. As I expressed when
I read it last March,
The Lizard Cage is an extraordinary novel, and deserves so much recognition.
-I've never read
Barbara Pym, but I feel like I ought to after having read
this wonderful feature on the Barbara Pym Society Conference.
-And on an unrelated note: Kirsten Dunst is
credited with saying: "I was brought up on Guns 'N Roses, the Les Miserables soundtrack and anything my mother listened to. But it's much harder to find great music these days." Bless.
Still reading
Happenstance very happily, though copy errors make my eyes bleed. I also picked up the new
Hart House Review today and it's absolutely beautiful. The ever-accomplished
Rebecca Rosenblum took a top prize for fiction. Congratulations RR! Some poetry as well by other creative writing comrades. What a bunch.
It's been a wonderful weekend, as our houseguests turned out to be brilliant fun, and Christmas plans are well underway. Saffrina and Stu went to university together, and she rolled into town Thursday night with her fantastic boyfriend Ivan, en route to England after two and a half years in New Zealand. They are coming to Canada next, they've decided, and they're touring the country now to choose a city. I think we sold Toronto well, though the city sort of sold itself. We had a lovely time together, out for dinner in Little Italy, and cooking dinner at our place the other two nights. They kept themselves busy in the day while Stuart worked and I did my work at home. Yesterday I'd already scheduled a day off the toil, and so we all partook in fun (and Curtis came too). Sleeping late, and then out for lunch in Chinatown. Saff and Ivan set off for the afternoon, and we came home to buy our Christmas tree and start the Christmas baking. All of us decorated the tree together later, and I baked a pie for Stuart's potluck at work, made a tray of nanaimo bars, and a big batch of dough for Christmas cookies which all of us made together. Dinner was started at this point, and our house was completely chaos, but the carols were going on, and we were deep into glasses of wine and Baileys. Leaves stuck in the table and we all sat down for supper, and it was a splendid splendid night that went on well into morning. Our houseguests left this morning and we were so sad to see them go.
