Sad news

Prof. Bruce Stovel, one of my mentors at the U of A, died yesterday morning. He had just retired last year, which would make him around 65 or 66 years old (much too young to die, in my estimation).

Bruce was initially my supervisor when I started at the U of A, when my project was still about Jane Austen and popular culture. He was also my assigned teaching mentor during first year, someone I could go to with any teaching questions. Our pairing was not coincidental; thinking it would be best for me to work with someone I already knew, he'd asked the GTA Supervisor for me since we'd already met a couple of times. Bruce was an active teaching mentor. He voluntarily went through my first set of essays to be sure that my marks were on par with the department's expectations, and was always accessible by e-mail to answer any odd, last-minute questions that came up. He was generous with his time and his experience.

Bruce was also instrumental in my getting published for the first time. He strongly encouraged me to submit my term paper for his Austen seminar to Persuasions for publication, and was thrilled that it got accepted. I know I would have eventually published something at some time, but getting the article in my second year was a big high.

Bruce was well liked and well respected by students and staff alike. He was always encouraging and lovely to chat with. Though he was no longer my supervisor (it was a very amicable and mutual split), he was my first academic mentor in the PhD (and, frankly, in grad school) and I looked forward to sharing news of milestones such as my first job and my first book with him. The last time I saw Bruce was at the Jane Austen conference in Tucson, where I went to his talk and he went to mine. We talked about my paper later and he seemed really taken with the ideas in it. It made me feel more like his colleague than his student.

It seems like I'm too young to have one of mentors die before I've even finished my PhD. As far as I know he wasn't sick. He'd talked about doing a few laps in the hotel pool at the Tucson conference. The news was very sudden and a lot of people were shocked.

I was very very fond of him.

I am going to miss him very much.

List: Babies and the Diss

List inspired by seeing the cute university daycare kids in their snowsuits today. Oh, my uterus.

Ways that my dissertation is like a baby:

1. Long gestation period followed by difficult delivery process
2. Will likely weigh more than 5 lbs at birth/completion
3. Labour-intensive
   
4. Can bring it into department, all shiny and new, to show off to office staff and friends, admiring special details like footnotes/feet and fingers/appendices
   
5. Writing process makes me crave weird foods like beef jerky, cherry Coke, scrambled eggs, and yes, pickles. Expect pregnancy to be equally odd. Hopefully cravings will not include ice cream, as am lactose intolerant
   
6. Will be up late at night trying to put it to bed
7. Can't work on either during Department Council
8. Both will somehow have something to do with Jane Austen
   

Ways that my dissertation is not like a baby:

1. One is organic; the other is inorganic
   
2. One will take up all my time; the other is supposed to take up all my time
3. One will require me to cut back on consumption of caffeine and alcohol; the other will be alleviated and even enabled by consumption of said substances
4. Can't edit baby if unhappy with first version
5. Dissertation won't fit into cute CBC one-sie
   

Blizzard!

Watching a lot of weather news tonight because a big blizzard is supposed to move through Edmonton overnight. Apparently, blizzards are a special kind of winter storm that must fulfill certain requirements (from wikipedia: winds of 40 km/h or more, snow or blowing snow, visibility less than 1 km, a wind chill of less than −25 °C, all of these conditions must last 3 hours or more) to be called a blizzard.

It's so special that Environment Canada even has a special graphic to denote "Blizzard" in its forecast:

Curly wind! Star snow!

And that will be the cutest thing about the weather in the next five days.

Holy Crap! I'm Googlable!

Tonight, while looking up info on some Victorian lit job candidates online (the department's currently hiring), I decided to Google myself (so narcissistic) and entered my full academic name into the search string.

This is what comes up:
The first entry is a link to my most recently published article. I use the middle initial to distinguish me from the other English professor named Mary Chan, whose research interests just brush up against mine. In terms of historical eras, she gets as far as the early eighteenth-century novel, while I focus on the late eighteenth-century novel. Even so, she's published enough that you can see why, academically, the middle initial is a necessity and not an affectation.

More importantly (scarily?), searching for my academic name plus the term "Literature" gave me a bit of a nervous thrill (see second entry):

I am officially on e-notes. I'm not sure why this scares me, but it does. Partly, it has to do with the ease with which anyone can find my writing—and possibly plagiarize it—online. Even though a paid subscription is required to view articles (will desperate students pay for an article?), I do feel a little exposed. Or maybe my unease with the association has to do with the fact that e-notes would never be considered an acceptable secondary source.

On the other hand, when my first article was published in 2005, I kept checking the online MLA bibliography (the main articles database for English literature) for months afterwards to see if it had been listed yet. I guess it's a question of who I want to be exposed to.

Missing and Not Missing

Things I miss about Calgary:

1. Calgary friends and family (and friends from out of town who always come home for Christmas)
2. Not having to cook most of my meals (Thanks, mom!)
3. Electric bill that's not mine
4. Proximity to specialty yarn store
5. Cable TV
6. Fantastic dim sum
7. Ming on 17th Ave (now smoke free!)
   

Things I missed about Edmonton:

1. Edmonton friends
2. High Speed Internet (wheeeeee!)
3. Thermostat control
4. Location close to Whyte Ave, shops, sushi, good coffee
5. Breakfast with friends every other Wednesday
6. My duvet
7. Always knowing where my keys are

Things I wish were missing from Edmonton:

1. The big pile of work I have to do, mainly writing Chapter One (as if I'm even close to starting)
2. The pile of bills that awaited me in my mailbox
   

Happy New Year, everyone!

Photographic Evidence: New Year's Eve

Anna has posted the best of the photos (from both our cameras) from New Year's at Tony's here.

The fine pieces of photographic artwork include:

Ben attacking Daorcey with his party hat (note the faux fire DVD playing in the background—thanks, Daorcey's mom!) and

um, random photo taking and posing.

Also of note is photographic evidence that in addition to bouncing when he walks, Jeff bounces when he juggles:



Ah, good times.

Happy 2007!

What does it say about my caffeine dependency and/or my alcohol tolerance when today I wasn't sure whether my splitting headache was due to coffee withdrawl or a hangover?*

Happy New Year, everyone. Hope you all rang in Y2K7 with as much fun as I did, at Tony's bucket party (where everyone had to bring something in a bucket, be it food or drink).

More photos to come, once Anna and I consolidate everything from both our cameras. In the meantime, here's a photo of Daorcey from the end of the night:
















* after making a coffee run, my headache cleared up. However, I'm sure my sleepiness is hangover related.