Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Birthday!!

Happy Birthday, CC.



To celebrate, here's some "re-purposed material" (in the words of one of my favorite NPR shows) featuring CC.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Places I lived, April 2008-April 2009, in no particular order


(The yellow building, not the car. It's last summer in Ithaca.)

 

(CC's place, NJ)

 

(Berlin, photo from this morning.)

 

(Toronto)

 

(Princeton last April--This is from the goodbye house party)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Sugar shack

CC took me to do a Quebec cultural thing, which is to celebrate maple syrup by eating a bunch of breakfast-esque food for dinner smothered in maple syrup, in a historic-seeming building staffed by people in 18th century costumes. This is called "sugaring off."*

We went to famous Sucre de la Montagne, founded in the 1970s by Pierre Faucher, who is famous. Sucre de la Montagne is a maple sugar farm and a huge restaurant. (They served 1,500 peopled the day we were there.)

They make the maple syrup right there!


CC's dad explained to me how famous Pierre Faucher is. It seemed to me that part of Pierre Faucher's success was due to how he'd evoked an 18th century Quebec masculinity (all the dudes who work there had on these cute, like, fur trapper guy costumes) that appeals mightly to 21st century Quebecois. Faucher himself is, I guess, the star practitioner of this manly maple syrup farming thing.


His picture is all over the restaurant.

Then we got our picture taken with the real guy!



*This name seems vaguely obscene to me (verb+"off," you know?) so I often mis-call it "sugaring up" which seems more PG, but then CC gets annoyed.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Doing things I promised myself I wouldn't

I just this hour started signing emails to my students with my initials. I swore up and down I'd never do that. It's so pretentious.

You know, that happens a lot to me with this job. Ever since I started in grad school. Like, 'When *I'm* a TA, I won't make undergrads go to a boring discussion section...When *I'm* an instructor, I'll never skip out on class time with undergrads to go to a nice lunchie-lunch...' (Actually, that one happened yesterday.)

But I don't want to sign my first name to emails. And writing out first and last name takes forever. And is weird.

So here I am again.