Posts by Amy Gale
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Actually, David in the long tradition of internet pedantry, there is more to it than just latitude. Ithaca stands at the south end of a glacial valley, and from downtown (Cornell is "on the hill") this can shorten the effective period of daylight, as the sky does not subtend a full hemisphere to many observers, reducing the amount of direct sunlight experienced around dawn and dusk.
La la la la la I can't heeeear you.
Some of us still live in this town, you know. And even though we're currently setting up gigantic support structures around our tiny tomato plants and admiring our peonies and wondering if it's entirely natural for a clematis to grow THAT fast and bracing for the start of the CSA vege-onslaught, we know in the back of our minds that the grey lid will come down all too soon.
At least we have electricity. What could the earlier waves of people have been thinking when they settled here?
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Imagine reading a book where the ending hasn't been written and when you get to the end the author may not really bother writing one - would you read it?
As in, the complete works of Neal Stephenson.
So the answer turns out to be: yes, if the journey is good enough.
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Wow, no love for Letter paper at PAS. I can't say it's really affected my life at all. File folders are generally big enough for both/either. I didn't pack ring binders (no space left after all the books and art and kitchenware). Even printing documents from home is not the problem it might once have been: modern COTS software generally does the necessary conversions painlessly and automatically. (And if you're using something more esoteric, you probably also know how to boss it around.)
On the other hand, if your note-taking/keeping habits rely on a steady supply of 1B4s, I recommend bringing them from home. Exercise books here seem to have much flimsier paper.
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4. Be prepared for SO. MUCH. MORE. bureaucracy than you had ever anticipated. Queues: accept them. Also accept that everything after you get to the front of the queue seems completely illogical. Because it is.
Oh and also? During the first couple of weeks? Every time you see a queue, join it and then ask what it's for.
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2. Do not judge the myriad male colleagues whose wardrobes consist entirely of pleated khaki pants. They know not what they do.
You should definitely judge them (loudly and often) on their white socks, though. Otherwise they'll never learn.
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cover the whole Northeast with crazy ideas about New Zealand
pshaw, you think you're prepared with your stories about how you have to row to Australia to buy jeans, and then you find out that they all think New Zealand is near Iceland. Takes the wind right out of your sails.
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(Incidentally, I am trying to decide whether to get a haircut of this nature before I move to the US in August. It seems like a good opportunity to screw with people.)
I found that short hair did not screw with people, but (innocently) referring to 'my partner' did.
YMMV, of course. Where are you moving to?
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Yup.
Oddly, I'll even be in Auckland before April 11. Twice. Maybe I should leave the airport and take in some art.
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I just read Ithaca Island Bay Leaves (at which time I also finally grasped the full cleverness of the title). It's very good. You should all read it.
Oh dear, I'm probably supposed to give some sort of meaningful review too. I'm not sure that I can, but let's see.
You know how sometimes you just don't want to read poetry? So you read a novel instead and the novelist sneaks a poem in and you just skip it because you don't want to read poetry and then you wonder whether there was any exposition in the poem and maybe you missed out but even then you don't want to go back and read it because you don't want to read poetry. It's just too much work, and you're tired today.
Ok, but then what do you do when your friend writes something highly poetic? You just read it anyway, is what. Then you find that it's captivating. Wellington is your Wellington except not through your eyes. Greece is hers and her mother's and her grandparents'. Here is a character. Here they are again. And again, skipping in and out like a Greek god skipping in and out of the Iliad. Sometimes the character is a Greek god, come to that. It's funny. It's sad. It's over too soon.
So, yeah. It's very good. You should all read it.
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1. Is this one of those liberal elite ivory tower questions about the sound of one blog clapping?
2. Glass. Bottle price may be over the audit threshold.
3. The subject of a previous, unsold statue.
4. "Eff off povo". Too easy.
5. You can't catch me out that easily.