1:49 a.m. - 2003-06-10
Bits and bites
I spent a little time with my Dad yesterday. Apparently one of my cousins IS getting married and soon - my uncle was a "Surprise baby" quite a while after my Mom was born. I knew it was in the works, but I thought it was planned for the fall. I guess the fact that she's been posted overseas for the next 3 years might have something to do with it. Her fiance is from South Africa so he'll be closer to home when they move. Sort of split the difference in distance I think. So that part of the dream was accurate, but the wedding takes place here in Calgary. I also know that dress I dreamt would not fit me now, the figure I had in the dream was the one I had when I competed in gymnastics - no babies back then and not an ounce of fat anywhere. It would take a month or two of hard work, all day every day, to get back to that.
I was telling my Dad about my friend who works at the university - he's met her a few times. We were talking about her trips this year and I was noting how I had always wanted to go to Egypt. He offered to loan me the money if I really wanted to go, but I don't like borrowing - not after having to struggle for so long since the boys and I were on our own. However, he really seemed to want me to think about it, so I started researching the costs. We'll see. The biggest problem would be having enough money to keep the bills paid in the meantime and until money was coming in again after getting back. That's not so easy.
Work was interesting today. No one was talking about the session on Friday, but everyone was wary and treading carefully. I'd gone back to some of my earliest entries about this assignment over the weekend, to check some details on another issue, and was surprised to find I had noted the tension was significant in the group even then. It was at the first meeting I had attended on my second day there and I couldn't figure out exactly why there should be the cross-currents. I expect there will be some fallout by Friday from the behaviours I noticed today. I think I'll just be as invisible as I can be for the next little while.
A, my supervisor called to see how I was doing about mid-morning. I'd e-mailed him on the weekend to let him know about the Friday event,in case anything came to a head at the beginning of the week. I couldn't really say too much - the students seem to be staying close to me all day - maybe I'm giving them a sense of safety. The student I share the phone with answered it and gave me a quizzical look. I think it's because I don't take calls at work and she was a little startled it wasn't for her. Doesn't matter.
Went out walking with my two partners today. Topics? Weight loss and mosquitoes. Ok so we have west nile virus and SARS warnings here and they were talking about conditions when they went to visit family back home. One from Guyana and one from the Philippines. One of the children had complained that the mosquitoes were much bigger in Canada. (You can ride them up north). What I wanted to know was about issues like malaria and such. I was also asking about the temperatures and coping techniques - thinking about the Egypt thing. Since Guyana is also very close to the equator and on the north end of the continent facing into a large sea just like Egypt - Mediterranean vs Caribbean - it seemed a logical point of query. The Philippines are quite tropical too, so I thought I'd ask the experts while I had the chance.
The weight thing - well all of us are battling different health issues, so lower weight is deemed one critical edge for coping better with the effects of genetic predispositions to various disorders as far as the current medical thinking goes right now. Can't hurt and besides, the better our clothes fit the better we're going to feel anyway.
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