Birthday!!

Happy Birthday, CC.



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

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)

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.

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.

It's spring!

CC and me went on a bike ride all over Toronto. First we fixed our bikes at Bike Pirates. Then we biked way out on this peninsula/island in Lake Ontario.


View Larger Map

We biked to the lighthouse (point B on map). It was kind of cold and far away from the city. I was tired. CC wants me to write: I was tickled pink.



On the peninsula were all these colored bricks and rusty metal scraps (CC: rusty scrap metal). The sun was setting.


(Photo by CC)

We took the subway home, which I was very glad about. (Subway ride between points C and A on map.) It was sort of spring. Spring: no snow, fix bike, bike ride! Sort of not spring: wearing 2 pairs of pants and mittens, freezing cold, riding on subway with bike.

CC sadly only had one pair of pants and was cold. Then I got home and realized I'd had a spare pair (a third pair, just in case) in my backpack the whole time. Woops.

Like Art

I stumbled on this picture a few months ago while looking for illustrations for various pro-OBAMA posts on this blog.

You can see why it didn't work as a simple pro-OBAMA picture, yes? But I can't bear to just delete it. It fascinates and scares me. What do you think?

Congrats to CBAM!

Congrats to CBAM for getting ahold of a baby.