broken glass

I can't seem to win these days when it comes to updating my blog. Every time in the last few days that I've had the opportunity to, I've either crashed the browser/computer, or the power has gone out (as it did for almost two hours tonight). Prior to that, my parents' computer's hard drive went to the great Future Shop in the sky, taking the first draft of my thesis along with it. (Thank heaven and Neil Finn for back ups.)

So I rescued Cortana from Guelph this past weekend; all the better to begin a second thesis draft, right? Right? What do you mean, I have no desire to work on it? Temperatures here have been incredibly hot these past few weeks. While the heat has not bothered me as much this year (perhaps because I am not under the weight of ten pounds of wool clothing), I fully accept that at my heart, I am a winter person.

I have had many discussions on the nature of patriotism lately; this excites me to no end. I think my thesis has the potential to be something I'm quite proud of, but likely will not end up quite there. For someone as concerned with discourses of nationalism as I am (particularly in terms of cultural and postcolonialism discourses), I am very much an unabashed and unashamed patriot; I find myself buying into the propaganda of Heritage Canada, often in ways that I can recognize as ridiculous. For example, a new brewery (Robert Simpson Brewing Company) has opened in Barrie, and one of its initial offerings is a Confederation Ale. This makes me happy to no end, for no real reason, other than that it celebrates the initial union of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into the Dominion of Canada. Granted, it would be an even better product if it were Confederation Scotch, but that's really neither here nor there.

Finally, on a Canadian note, here are two celebrity blogs to look at: Rick Mercer (one of the best written and spoken Canadians I know of), and the BareNaked Ladies' blog.