Tomorrow I move to Toronto. This is how the move has gone so far.
9 AM: Take out piles of recycling that have built up while packing. I realize that my PhD certificate thing was in the pile of recycling. I rummage through recycling to retrieve it. Woman from a laundromat yells at me for going through her recycling. I give up and concede that I no longer have a PhD. What a waste of 6 years.
10:30 AM: Call moving company to confirm that they are coming tomorrow morning. They were supposed to come Monday but then kept changing the date. Tomorrow is the last day they can come before I’m evicted. They say they are probably coming tomorrow and hang up. I cry.
Noonish: I’ve been putting things that I’m not taking with me on the side of the street with a “Free” sign. I’ve been impressed with how quickly things go so I decide to see how far I can take it. I put out a set of dishes, four broken chairs, and a poem that I wrote with rose petals taped onto it.
12:15 PM: The plates are gone. The poem has been crumpled into a ball.
2 PM: A Tupperware lid that I put in my “free” box is gone. There was no container. Someone just took a lid.
3 PM: I try to carry a computer monitor home from my office. I drop it twice.
4 PM: I call the moving company again. They don’t answer.
5-7 PM: I have several beers.
8 PM: I try to disassemble my bed. I drop a piece of wood on my foot and am now missing a toenail. If I find the toenail I’ll put it in my “free” box.
EMUS 
SUBJECT: Hi from a very low-frequency stalker.
Before I go further, please know that I’m not, like, a weird stalker with any fetishistic or murderous intent. I’m like, the other kind (a cool stalker)?
I was walking my goldendoofus (one Rasalhague Asselstein) earlier this evening, heading east toward the dog-freedom zone at Riverdale Park. We passed 3 guys from a presumed running club, walking back from a presumed hill-repeat workout at the park, one of whom was complaining about a guy who is always trying to con friends into doing shit for him. Seconds later, I (possibly?) briefly made eye contact with you, and squinted with confused recognition. Which, if the eye-contact was real, might have induced confusion (or hostility) in you. After frolicking, Rasalhague convinced me that we both deserved a treat because I had a super long/hard day and so did he. My longterm-man-friend/his roommate (none of us are comfortable with this ‘dogmom’ business (his mom got super growly with me the one time we met her and I kidnapped her son)) left us (again) for intercontinental business dealings. Doggo told me to have a margarita and he’d settle for a marrow-filled bone thinger. This has probably boosted my desire to write this crazytalk message.
To explain the aforementioned, possibly-confusing eye-contact, we must go back ~10 years, to when I was a miserable little astrophysics undergradling at Queen’s. I liked to read/study/podcastlisten (there are podcasts I’ve been listening to for >10 years. I’m a new kind of hipster) in that dungeongym (ADHD+depression, what can I say?). I also fancied myself a private eye, and, at the time, would pick someone else in the gym and try to observe enough about them to figure out who they were within a day (at this time, wifi in the PEC was not a thing so I observed and then scoured the wee internet when I got home). I believe I found you easy peasy one day because you were riding one of the stationary bikes and reading an econ textbook while wearing a cross country shirt across from me, running on a treadmill. These observations made it easy to find your full name on The Infant Facebook using the union of cross country members and econ students (Are you as weirded out by then-me as I am? I’m so sorry…).
Anyway. I am not a private eye. I spent a long time on my over-education in astrophysics. From time to time, when scraping the bottom of my procrastinatory activity barrel, I’d look you up. At some point, I found your blog. And learned that you were a fellow Stuart McLean Aficionado. And that you had a lot of other thoughts that I was fully on board with, as a woman doing academic things and stuff. But I didn’t do anything crazy like, *follow* or *comment*, because I couldn’t have anyone knowing I was a crazy creeper.
So, basically, I’ve looked at your blog ~biannually, and remembered your existence whenever someone asks me what I mean by heteroskedasticity (high redshift galaxy stuff is all infuriatingly heteroskedastic datasets – generally with well-characterized uncertainties, but few know what ‘heteroskedastic’ means! Ignoramuses (Ignorami?) the lot of them. I am still curious to know how that became your chosen name.
After Rasalhague and I got back from out walk and consumed our treats, I found your blog for the $n^{th}$ time. Seeing that you’d moved to TO this summer (as did I), I realized I wasn’t completely crazy in thinking I’d seen you. (Though recognizing you might still be indicative of a certain madness)
So for now, I just want to say ‘HIYA!’, from a long-time, not-too-creepy acknowledger, newly relocated to the big city to GTFO of academia and poverty, who will spend the next few days re-reading Stuart McLeanisms.
I’m so excited to have a low-key stalker! What did you think of the shirt I was wearing yesterday? I was going for a look that said “give me cookies” but in like a cool kind of way.
Also apologies if I accidentally glared at you at the park. But I was in pain because this running club made me actually run for more than 5 minutes. It’s like whoa calm down everyone.