oh my flist the ugly building where i work is SO COLD. SO SO COLD. holyshit. i am not a bag of frozen peas! i mean seriously. what the hell.

anyway. hi. it's been *counts* weeks. classes have started at the u and students are back and suddenly it's busy. surprise. on tuesday i walked into work the same time as admin d, and when she got on the elevator i said i'd wait because she was going down and i was going up. she works on the third floor, i work on the fifth, she pointed out we were both on the first floor. so that's how my week's been. >.<

other shit i did:

discovered a very large box of plastic spoons in the kitchenette at work
finished unpacking the kitchen and the living room
did not finish the dining room or my bedroom but made some progress anyway
went to work writing group three times
went to og writing group twice
went to the yearly greek festival by myself because tamalinn and friend a both had weather headaches :( and stuffed my face with sausage and rice pudding and kataifi
had dim sum with tamalinn and friend a's hubs (aka friend d)
had disappointing chinese food and saw my mother's wedding with my sister (it drops you in the middle of the story and never really catches you up but at least the actors had good family chemistry and it's very pretty, very cozy british cottage countryside)
had much better mexican food and saw the roses with my sister (apparently i will watch olivia colman in anything. i didn't like the ending or the main characters' friends but i laughed in some very odd places and there's a gorgeous house with absolutely stunning views)
had chinese takeout and watched mission: impossibles at my sister's house (twice! the chinese place has really good eggplant and the fluffiest egg foo yung)
watched all of girls5eva (fun, silly, spoofy, occasionally really touching, and i liked the songs)
watched the end of resident alien ("such a ridiculous show" + "ow, right in the feels" all the way through)
finished s2 of poker face (didn't love the ending, think i liked s1 better, enjoyed the guest stars)
watched s2 of twisted metal (deeply weird and hysterically violent but anthony mackie and stephanie beatriz have nice chemisty and overall i liked it)
watched all of black swans (in which keira knightley is a spy investigating the murder of her sidepiece and ben whishaw is her sad gay assassin colleague and now i'm interested in british spy shows)
probably other things i don't remember right now

also i went to iceland and greenland and canada. :D where i saw puffins (from a distance) and an active volcano (also at a distance) and lava fields and cute little icelandic horses and nosy icelandic chickens and mineral baths (twice) and geysers and so many waterfalls and soothing moss and lakes and icebergs and cute little houses and cute little churches and cute little greenlandic children (mom and i waved at them and one waved back) and the world's largest fiddle and a house museum and the occasional other ship and the occasional dog and some old buildings and lots and lots of open water. i walked a lot and got rained on and sat in the aforementioned mineral baths (twice) and spent like two minutes in a sauna because it seemed appropriate and got a salt scrub on the boat and walked around the outer decks through some terrifying wind and discovered the simple joy of a bailey's irish cream on the rocks and listened to karaoke and played hangman (badly) and assorted games of trivia and went to some lectures about explorers and saw really good shows and ate delicious brazilian barbecue and bought a lot of chocolate and also stamps. also apparently we crossed the arctic circle. we got certificates. :D

i'm still not a cruise person and i still wish we'd done the original itinerary but i had a good time and got to see really cool places and kind of want to go back to iceland because we didn't really get to see reykjavik and only got to eat local once. (one of the stops on the golden circle tour, which we did the day before we set sail. i had a lamb sandwich. yum. but other than that pretty much all the local food we had was snacks, mostly black licorice for everyone who isn't me and did i mention the chocolate?)

i have one more episode of andor s2 and i'm totally expecting someone to die altho i don't know who. tell me nothing.

today was CORN FEST at work and while i didn't think i ate that much i definitely was not hungry for dinner. i brought home leftovers which include an ear of corn (it was SO GOOD OMG) and a giant piece of cake with extra frosting. and it started at noon which means no one had had lunch yet and there were consequently not a lot of leftovers.

nakagin capsule tower, my beloved.

do you want to watch a short documentary about my local comic shop? of course you do. :D

if you drive into boston from the south you pass a giant gas storage tank with a rainbow painted on it. i was always told the original artist was vietnamese and hid ho chi minh's profile in one of the stripes. the artist was actually a white nun named corita kent and she sounds like a really neat person. she also did not hide anyone's profile in this particular art.

have some photos of ordinary folks in new orleans before hurricane katrina.

watch a swedish church move 5km down the street.

so you know how the nazis stole a lot of art that was never returned to its original owners because a non trivial amount of it hasn't been found? a missing painting was discovered in argentina hanging over a couch in a real estate listing. surprise!

manchester united fan takes up the challenge to not to cut his hair until the team wins five in a row. they're not doing well this year and now the guy has an impressive mop.

the new century standard letter-writer - published in 1900 and full of templates for a very wide range of correspondence needs.

who wants to go to france and take a cheese tour with me?

what's on the other side of the earth from you? for me, it's ocean.

this is definitely old news but if you haven't see it you might be amused to know that noah wyle's emmys tux was made by a company that normally makes scrubs. but they made him a (very nice!) tux to honor all the medical professionals out there.