The Christmas vacation seems an awfully long time ago. I have more individual groups and have already had more group meetings than I'd had at the halfway point of last semester. I can barely keep track of everything I have to do, plus I went and signed up for a conversational French class, and I'm still working nearly every weekend in Toronto. I've already missed school due to being sick, and I feel like I'm letting my various groups down. From the amount of work I'm doing, I don't think this is the case, but I feel swamped one moment and lazy the next. Everything is going so quickly, I can hardly focus on the tasks at hand. Entering week four of semester two, I am certain of only three things:

1. there is not enough time in a week to get everything you want finished
2. there is enough time in a week to get what you NEED finished and,
3. there are three full weeks ahead of me before Reading Week.

I had this passed weekend off, which was a pleasure, and even more importantly, it wasn't all filled to the brim with group work. So, not one to miss an opportunity, I invited Nick out to visit. I knew that I would have to take long breaks from him - he's as intense as ever - and those breaks would allow for homework doing. Mostly, it worked.

Having Nick here was really fun. It was the first time that my mother really got to meet him. Their previous encounters were usually less than an hour and hardly worth mentioning. Mom and Nick spent a lot of time talking, which was handy as that also afforded me time to do work and to conduct a phone interview with someone (we'll get to that later) for a project. Nick was also given ample time to work on his knitting, some of which he forgot here, and no one demanded he get up early in the day, which is good for him, too. He was a very good houseguest, though he smelled quite bad by Sunday night.

So, getting back to that phone interview I conducted... I called someone I had worked with a long, long time ago - a decade, in fact - at the ROM, when I was a co-op student in Outreach. Kevin, was the ROM's taxidermist and I worked with him regularly during my time there. We did everything from play (er, I mean, work) with freeze-dried bats, to play MYST after hours in the then brand new distance learning computer lab. He was also the one responsible for repairing my finger when I sliced the tip nearly right off with a scalpel. Anyway, he's still a taxidermist, and happily, I was able to track him down thanks to the Internet and a vague knowledge of where he resides. We did a good bit of catching up and I spoke to him about using mounted specimens in museum settings, etc. I plan to stay in touch with him and hope to visit his studio sometime soon. What's particularly interesting is that we know a lot of the same people both thanks to our museum work and my work/experience with MNR and his work as a naturalist and nature artist.

Anyway, I must going. I'm sick and The Daily Show is coming on shortly. Somehow, I'm going to manage to get everything done this week so that my weekend is free in Toronto and I can finish painting Rick's living room. I'm hopefully going to be well enough for, if not all of my class, tomorrow, than most of it AND French. I'd also like to get to the Y at least twice before the weekend, and if I can swing it, maybe once in Toronto, as well. No Dungeons and Dragons this weekend, though, because certain players can't make it. Probably for the best as I won't have much time to spend on a campaign for them. And, finally, I found out about an art competition that I'd like to enter. I'll try to tell more about that in the days ahead.