Did I say that fall had arrived here in Oz? I was lying. I doubt they call it "Indian Summer" here, but all this past week the humidity has shot through the roof, complemented by temperatures in the 20s,1 which seem much higher because it's so sticky.
For we two whose Circadian and seasonal rhythms are set to the academic year, though, fall has most definitely arrived, because we rae actually working on a semi-regular routine, pulling late nights and early mornings, even starting to become actual colleagues with our, well, colleagues. On Friday, D presented a paper to the Dept. of Performance Studies faculty and postgraduate students, the same one she will give at a conference of postgrads from English, Arts, Medievel Studies, Religion, and Performance Studies this Friday.2 It was generally well-received, and seemed to break the ice a little for those in the department with whom she had not had a chance to talk much. Between that and the fact that she's now seen them almost every week for five weeks, they're all getting downright friendly!
Which is just the kind of day-brightener that D needed after a couple of rough days last week. Some weeks ago, D discovered a grey, longhaired furball of a cat hanging outside a house on her walk from home to uni. His tag declared his name to be "Raja"3 and after that day he met her on the sidewalk almost every day that she walked by, sometimes coming out from his yard to nuzzle up against her leg. But last week Raja did not come out to greet her on her walk, and a few days later there appeared a sign on the gate saying that Raja had been hit by a car and killed. Evidently he had many human friends and his owner wanted to thank all of them who stopped to give him a pet or a scratch behind the ears. In the big picture, it's a little thing,4 but it's hard to lose even a little thing that brightens your days when you are so far away from home.
In good news, Chad was able to secure a software license for the program he so desperately needed to continue his research, and it seems to be running well enough on his restored laptop. He has been very hard at work all this week "banging his head against" the little kinks in his code, and despite the sometimes-overwhelming frustration, he is moving forward. And, the situation with our housemates seems to have resolved itself, at least for now. So we can breathe a heavy and well-slept sigh of relief for that.
Otherwise, a lot of this past week has been taken up by Fulbright stuff, which sometimes fades far into the background and sometimes takes up a whole week of time and energy. Last Thursday night D was invited to the annual meeting of Fulbright alumni from NSW, so she got to meet people who had gone to the US on a Fulbright decades ago, and some who had recently returned. Then, Saturday evening, D and Chad went back to Govinda's5 to meet up with some US Fulbrighters who are here this year: Mandie, who is based in Sydney, and Christen, who was visiting from Melbourne. Then again, today D got to go to a luncheon with the Acting Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, accompanied by some professors from the dept (at her invitation) and joined by two Australian Fulbrighters from Sydney Uni who were preparing to go to the US. It's sort of fun, being a VIP. (Maybe I should do this professionally...)6
;)
- D
PS: Oh yeah, do you like the new look of the GAA page?
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NOTES
1Upper 70s and 80s, for you Fahrenheit people. Isn't it funny how I pretend that I think in Celsius now and that I don't have my Yahoo!Weather page set to show temperatures in F?
2Curious? The abstract is here.
3One of D's own cats, for those of you who missed it, is named "Rai," a shortened affectionate version of "Raja."
4Not so little, I'm sure, for Raja's full-time family, though. And not really for me, either, although I only knew him a few weeks. It's a cat-person thing.
5Vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian buffet attached to an arthouse movie room with couches, remember? Are you tempted yet? The movie room has couches to lie down on... (You know you want to.)
6Can you be a professional VIP? Do you have to be the Queen of England or something?
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