somehow it doesn't feel like Halloween

[kareina]

When I was a child living in Alaska Halloween often meant trick-or-treating in the snow. Usually not much snow that early in the winter, but often at least a dusting. In my years living in the "lower 48" as Alaskans are wont to call the rest of the US, I came to think of Halloween as an autumn holiday, with leaves turning colour, and whilst I no longer went trick-or-treating, having outgrown my interest in candy (not to mention having grown tall enough that many folk would have called me too old), I still enjoyed Halloween parties.

However, Halloween isn't celebrated in Australia the way that it is in the US. Not only was today a lovely spring day, with morning showers and afternoon sunshine, flowers happily blooming, and most of the (imported) trees having achieved their leaves (the one out front isn't quite in full leaf yet, but as it is the last to lose its leaves at summer's end, I'll forgive it the delay), but if there were any Halloween parties on offer, I didn't hear of them. Nor did anyone knock on our door looking for treats (and, knowing they wouldn't, we didn't prepare for them).

In addition to not really feeling like a holiday, it was an odd day in other respects. Last night I stayed up working a bit later than I might have done, and then, once we'd done our yoga for the evening, I spend an hour or so editing clovis_t's Honours Thesis, which was due today. As a result I didn't get to sleep till nearly 03:00, and I was *not* ready to get up when his alarm went off at 07:30. So I slept in and he went back to work on the thesis, looking over my suggested edits, doing some final tweaking of his own. Alas, my sleep was not sound--I couldn't wake up, but I didn't sleep deeply--dreamt that I was up in Alaska for something and was about to leave, but then realized that I hadn't yet contacted any number of folk I'd like to see before leaving.

Once I finally got up at 10:30 clovis_t was discovering that our printer wasn't working properly--leaving a blank line across the middle of the text. He has never had occasion to print anything at Uni, and the day your thesis is due (he needed to had in three paper copies of the ~50 page document) is not the day to figure out how it is done. So instead I took him into the Geology department, we put some cash on my account to cover the cost ($0.11/page), and we printed it there, where it took no time at all to print, compared to what it would have on the home printer, had it been working properly, and he turned it in.

By the time we got home I was hungry again, not feeling terribly motivated, and somehow some hours slipped away before I actually started doing any uni work. So here it is, after midnight, and I'd done only 3 1/2 hours of uni work today (though I've managed more than five hours of "useful tasks". But another sample's worth of calculations is done, and the need to write up the results in the morning will, I hope, inspire me to start work nice and early!