I'm thinking I might take a post-christmas sabatical from this whole blog thing. Just getting a little tired of it, and I want to direct some of that energy to other things. We'll see. I'm still going to keep up the house updates -- things like adding photos of our new basement walls here and in the gallery -- and maybe post some sporadic updates about the other projects I'm working on. But for now... well, I'm just putting myself out there and the reaction has been mixed. I need to think on that a while.

December 30, 2004 after 2PM | house , meta , stress | maybe more»

'Twas the morn before Christmas and all through the nets
Not a mousie was stirring, not even the pets.
The floppies were stacked by the modem with care
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
The files were nestled all snug in a folder
The screen saver turned on, the weather was colder.

And leaving the keyboard along with my mouse
I turned from the screen to the rest of the house.
When up from the drive there arose such a clatter
I turned to the screen to see what was the matter.
Away to the mouse I flew like a flash,
Zoomed open a window in fear of a crash...

The glow from the screen on the keyboard below
Gave an electronic luster to all my macros.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a little Google icon, Gmail. With nine (count'em) NINE! invites to anyone who wants one. Just leave me a comment by Christmas morning. If you've taken the time to read this grabage this morning, you deserve one. HA!

December 24, 2004 after 7AM | meta , weather | maybe more»

But only because we spent so much money last night.

One might wonder why there is the sudden upsurge of entries on these chilly December mornings. This being the shortest day of the year, I thought perhaps it might need to be the shortest entry, as well. No such luck. So why the sudden verbosity? Three reasons:

1) It's pre-holiday. The office is dead. On any given day I'd spend a few minutes wandering and venting to my coworkers. They are few and far between. This is almost as good.

2) This is a primer. I'm due to spend the whole day writing articles for our newsletter. It's what I've been doing for about two weeks now, as odd as that may seem... but with interuptions, and other tasks sewn inbetwixt, well... As a result, it helps to loosen up the typing fingers, grease the ol' brain, and get that sass out of my system somewhere mildy constructive before I settle down and get serious for the day.

3) I've been writing too much about our house lately. And while that may amuse some of you, I'm sure it's killing my ratings elsewhere. And believe me -- they're on thin ice already.

December 21, 2004 after 9AM | house , life , work | maybe more»

I think my news years resolution should be to work on my enunciation. Heck, I'm a writer not a speaker -- but things being as they are, you know, self-improvement and the drive to better and brighter futures, I think it's something I should work on.

For example, this morning...

This morning I wandered over to Tim Hortons for a cup of coffee, a semi-regular morning ritual. Sometimes I drink the office brew. Sometimes I brew my own. Occasionally, and mostly rarely, I stop at Starbucks and try one of their blends. But about once or maybe twice a week I cross the road to Timmy's and get an extra-caffienated cup. This morning was such a morning.... and being as the Tim's across the way is one of the busiest in Edmonton, regularly lined up out the door, a progressive, no-nonsense ordering system is understood by those who frequent. The line-up moves quickly as one is to step to the next available grumpy old woman working the register, state one's order, pay, and step to the right to receive the purchased goods. Somewhere in that procedure the order is translated from me to the cashier and the cashier to the pourer, ultimately resulting in a cup of coffee less than thirty seconds after ordering.

I usually take my coffee black with one sugar.

I stepped to the counter this morning, said in (perhaps) a not-so-clear mumble: "Large coffee, one sugar."

"One forty." The cashier grumbled and I paid.

But then, as I was dutifully stepping to the right, she turned and said to the pourer (and I heard her clearly and distinctly, though it took a few moments to register) : "Large, four sugars."

I hestiated. Blinked. Laughed a little private laugh, thinking who the heck would order a coffee with four sugars? And I took the cup and walked away.

Sitting at my desk this morning, one very cold walk later, I sipped the brew. It was a little on the sweet side.

Maybe I need to make the new years resolution to be a little more reactive to my environment. That would help, too.

December 20, 2004 after 3PM | fish , weird | maybe more»

I took the chilly-weathered lunch break opportunity to change Blue's water. The poor little guy has been pretty quiet lately, and (even though fish don't really care about the holidays) gets to spend Christmas alone in his tank with Snail-bob.

I neglected to mention that a couple weeks ago Karin and I picked up a pair of Bettas for our apartment. While out on tour with Brett and Lenore one evening we all got it in our heads to buy out the local pet store. Three mini-tanks and about ninety dollars (total) later.... I'll let you figure out the rest.

I went out "fishin'" as it were, and came home with one bright blue betta and one bright red betta, the new inhabitants of our dual split tank. The tank, being somewhat oblong and triangular is split with a clear plastic divider down the center so the fish can see each other, but can't actually reach each other. Fire and Ice (the monikers promptly bestowed by Karin upon the fish) spent the first few mintues in their new home, exploring the inner corners of their relatively large residence. Three minutes into their arrival Fire flared at Ice. Ice ignored him for about five minutes, and eventually flared back. I don't think either fish has spent more than ten minutes not fiercely defending their little angular tub of water since their arrival.

Some day I'll tell the story about why I slightly modified the defectively designed tank so that I won't need to come home after work and fish a mangled loser out of his roomates turf again.

I suppose, at least they have company for the holidays -- like they care.

Blue has no such luck. He's tired of the antics of his snail pal, and spends most of the day watching me from the safe haven of his plastic plant. A fresh tank of water was the least I could do.

December 20, 2004 after 2PM | fish , weather | maybe more»

We spent the weekend in Red Deer, pre-harmonizing for the holiday season, preparing mind, body, and soul for the inevitable crush of party days that are to come.

Ryan spent the weekend hung-over on the couch. He anticipated a little too much and surely waxed illusions of a simpler life. I tried to explain to him the consequences of dabbling in the triad of pleasures (wine, women, and song) and suggested that he might have better success with the outcomes of each were he to try them in the maximums of "duets" -- but his insistence to the contrary didn't instill much confidence that he'd take that advice.

Saturday, I pulled my alto from the dust of nine-months of silence, and wailed a few tunes sans musik at the family sing-along night. I could have blamed the alcohol for my lack of skill, but there was none in the coca-cola I was sipping earlier. Perhaps I am just out of practice. Even so, the ability to marginally carry a tune on the old sax even after such a long absence is one of those vague encouragements to try and pursue that practice with a little more regularity.

Plausably, everyone must go through the doubting phase of the holidays. I've reached that (for a day, week, year, or decade -- I can't tell yet) place when one wonders what might be the point of all the spending and the buying. I used the example of the el-cheapo brand DVD players that everyone got for the holidays last year. You know: the forty-dollar specials that no one could resist. It was the ultimate great super-selfish present for you and your loved ones. Never mind the local cost of buying a product that was so shoddy many -- if not most -- of them now live at the local landfill wasting money, space, and resources. Never mind the enviromental cost of manufacturing and shipping hundreds of thousands of useless toys across the oceans and countries, burning oil, polluting the air, and generally wasting energy. And, never mind the human cost of the (proven) third-world sweatshops used to manufacture said products, thus making them so cheap that, well, we should have bought two! Never mind all that. It's Christmas, and who cares what the price is for eight minutes of focussed joy. We are at the top of the resource pyramid after all, right???

Karin and I tried to buy most of our presents from the pool of local industry. We don't know if we completely succeeded, but we tried. Mostly. And it's sad, because if someone like stick-in-the mud me can't succeed at that, there's not much hope for the rest of the populous.

I tried iTunes for the first time last week. Yes. My money was where my mouth was gabbing just about a year ago. I said, if they ever sell it for a reasonable price, I'd kick in and buy some. Pay. Legal-like. And considering that the levy is no longer on blank media (as of last week) there is no more little plastic shield to protect folks and their illegal music collections from the local record industry's lawyers. I took a double whammy, and actually bought -- yes, paid for -- the Band Aid Do They Know it's Christmas singles "for a good cause" and all. It wasn't so painful. And the quality is stellar. (Well, the encryption quality. We're still not sure about the new version of the song.)

And yes, it snowed last night. Stormed and snowed. I've tried to avoid mentioning this, but they poured some cement in our basement last Friday. Footings, or something. They were pretty much dry (and thus safe) yesterday afternoon when we stopped by to look -- but I don't think the weather is going to cooperate for a pre-holiday wall raising.

So what now? Holidays? Soon.

I mean, for the last three years we've had the Lord of the Rings to distract us from our troubles. And even last year we got a heaping dose of Mad Cow nearly just in time for the holidays -- at least the media was hyping the impact of it all by then. This year? Well. We still have nearly a week, I suppose.

December 20, 2004 after 9AM | friends , house , life , opinions , weather | maybe more»

Apparently, if I don't explicitly write it out here, no one bothers to go hunting for it themselves. Mom gave me the (metaphorical) gears last night because while I had posted a couple updated pics in the gallery (including this one taken yesterday of someone digging a big hole on our lot) I really just ran out of time and didn't have an opportunity to wax poetic about it here. I'll try harder in the future, to avoid any possible confusion.

So yeah.

While building a house (and thoughts thereof) consume most of my free energy, this blog has become (at least for the moments while the initial construction begins) the house-blog. Of course, you could just bookmark the house category page and avoid all that distracting filler that may pop up between house entries over the next few months.

My three visits to the lot (or as I should now call it, "site") over a twenty-four hour period include:

a) Alice discovers the Rabbit Hole wherein after a scrumptious dinner with our grandmother, we adventured down in the dark of late evening and spied not only a pile of dirt, but the significant startings of a house-shaped hole.

b) Neo stick his finger in the mirror goo wherein I drop Karin at work on my day off, and coffee in hand, check out the backhoe in operation shortly before nine in the morning. Photos are taken.

c) Curiosity leaves the boring old real world behind wherein Karin and I stop by the site after I pick her up from her office and discover an entire crew of folks and machinery pouring cement and starting the footings of our new house. No photos. Yet. It might have been rude.

So yeah.

It's coming along. The adventure has really begun. For us. Whatever. If you are really impatient, and looking for more house-fun you could check out bnlhouse.ca where Brett and Lenore chronicled their construction -- or you could visit it had Brett not switched his server off at the moment. That's too bad.

Whatever.

House! Hahahaha....

Okay. Now I'm just giddy. I'll stop now.

December 18, 2004 after 8AM | house , photography | maybe more»

I was a little ill yesterday. I won't go into the pathetic details, but it may have something to do with swallowing too much pool water at West Edmonton Mall, or eating all that KFC for lunch that same day. Long story short: my agony and inability to stand up yesterday morning -- that same agony that prevented me from going to work -- had pretty much faded to a dull rumbling and growing restlessness by mid-afternoon. As such, I decided to take myself out for some air, and drove down to visit our lot. Interestingly enough, someone had staked it, and dropped a small collection of building supplies -- things like rebar and bucks (and of course there are more in the gallery) -- at the edge of the road. In about four months, a pile of rebar and two-by-fours at the end of my driveway would be a bit of afternoon angst. However, since said driveway does not yet exist, and the supplies will in fact lead to its eventual creation, it was more of an exciting sight that anything. I predict by my next visit there may be even more progress -- perhaps even a big hole.

December 14, 2004 after 9AM | food , house , photography | maybe more»

I don't know how picky the spam scrubber on this blog can be, but sometimes it will reject those comments of yours out of sheer spite. At random. Who knows...

Lenore tried to write this:

Hehehe.... Heck, it's almost as good to have a surprise as I make my daily check of your blog.... April 5th, sounds like a good date to me!! It's only 1 day off Liz's birthday!! :)

And they originally told us July 22nd, and we got July 15th, so it could be even earlier! Then again, you're doing construction in the winter which has a little more weather influence...:)

...after reading this morning's entry. As astute readers will notice, and others will endure, occasionally some malicious bloghacker will fill blog comments with rude, crude, and unwelcome garbage. It's a ratings-thing, you see. If their link shows up in my comments then Google thinks I'm linking to their page. I'm not, but Google for all it's wonders and inventiveness can't really tell the difference yet. It looks at any link as good publicity and ranks it a little bit higher in their search results. Oddly enough, the spammers don't realize that Movabletype cleans all the HTML from their comments, and their links are spam-buffered-redirects of some sort. They're shooting blanks, in other words, but still making a lot of noise, and causing a lot of hassle for my readers (case-in-point Lenore) who has to struggle through the filters to post a legitimate comment.

Sigh. The scope of the problem is represented clearly in the system logs of this blog: my scrubber rejected no less than one hundred and twenty-two comments because of questionable content -- things like "casino", "poker", "online", "russia" are some of the top blocked URLwords -- and that's JUST in the last seven days. To put that in perspective: I've only written eighty five entries in this blog, and my readers have only posted thirty-two legitimate comments. And that is over the span of seven months!

Last week Slashdot had a poll about something like this... And sorry, folks, it's just going to get worse.

December 9, 2004 after 1PM | friends , meta , stress | maybe more»

I suppose I should have read over the papers a little more carefully. Lenore is going to be very disappointed that she had to read this here rather than, say, hearing it in person in the car as I may have read it last night. We could have been driving away from the showhome, as we happened to be, glancing through our copy of the consolidation agreement for our house, freshly retrieved. We could have noticed that in addition to the extra signatures there was an interesting date hand-scribbled, noted in the middle of some random paragraph.

Karin discovered it later, a tentative completion date. Not that there's even a hole yet. Not that there is anything but cold weather, snow, wind, and dirt. But the builder seems to think we'll have our house by April 5th.

December 9, 2004 after 8AM | house , weather | maybe more»

I'm really supposed to be working right now, but events being as they are one often needs to reflect simply -- a bit -- before one can settle back into the routine of life...

It works that way, sometimes. Memories are a funny thing.

When I was twelve years old (and as I can also say of literally half my life) I was involved with Scouts. Being twelve I don't think I fully appreciated the innocence of it all. I don't think I truly soaked myself in the experience and let it wash over me. It was just something I did. As such, the details are often cloudy, misrepresented, or fragmented in such a way that I might not even be shaping them properly here and now. It was Tuesday nights, maybe, whenever. It was the occasional weekend camping trip. It was wearing my dorky uniform in public, selling chocolate almonds or collecting bottles door to door to raise money. It was a group of guys who I knew one night a week, and who went to different schools than I did. It was a step out of my routine of the day, whatever that is for a twelve-year-old.

And that year -- that year of being twelve years old -- was especially taxing. It was a CJ year. A Canadian Jamboree, where ten-thousand pubescent boys and girls converged on a field to camp and be dorky scouts in unanimous cohesion. I was twelve. I was getting on a airplane. And in a cloudy sort of memory, so much that I can't say I even recall the flight, I was in Prince Edward Island in a dirt brown canvas jacket carrying an oversized blue backpack across an unfamiliar coastal field. I remember arriving late at night, in the darkness, trudging to our plot of assigned land for a week of camping. I recall setting up tents in the way that twelve year old boys do, arguing, more goofing around than acting responsible. I seem to recollect that upon drawing the figurative short-straw I wound up sharing a tent with Paul, whom I don't know if I liked, or hated, or (edging away from a twelve-year-old's simple emotional states) pitied because everyone seemed to pick on him, steal his underwear and throw it into the trees, or try to tilt the port-a-potty while he was inside. I know I wasn't entirely impressed, but I don't know why. I remember throttling someone for stuffing dried grass down his pants. I remember wading into the water, in rocky sand on the beach, both of us up to our waists and collecting fresh crab for dinner. I have a vague memory of these things. Hiking, walking, chatting. Memories are a funny thing.

I also have this memory about lobsters. The troop had gone into Charlottetown for the day, to explore and buy tacky souvenirs. We went for lobster for dinner, and impressed as I was by the cuisine, convinced Paul (or perhaps it was the other way around) to buy our own to ship back to Alberta. We arranged the details with the gruff salesman in the store. I ordered five one-pounders, Paul one five-pounder, iced and delivered to the airport to be picked up in Edmonton a few days later. The moral of a much longer story is that twelve-year-olds should not try to ship expensive live food across the country. Many phone calls (by parents) later, refunds by airlines for mis-directed shipments, and some dead and rotten crustaceans I never did see for myself, it just so happened that neither my family (nor Paul's) ever did dine on fresh Atlantic lobster.

Or at least that's how I remember it. Memories are a funny thing.

We came back. Time passed. Paul and I hung out in grade seven, a little. Not too much. I was a follower. He was wild. I went academic. He shoplifted from 7-11. Needless to say, and not-regretably, we drifted.

He quit Scouts. Found new friends. Every once in a while I'd hear a story about some chunky thug who was beating people up for money. Or later I'd read a newspaper article about some distantly familiar person who'd been busted for an armed robbery or for hiding stolen goods. I speculated about how and why and where, and wondered how it related to past and present, drugs, alcohol, or organized crime, perhaps. He terrorized the little populous of my hometown, you might say. Or maybe that's all speculation and I don't know what I'm talking about. Who can say? Memories are a funny thing.

I escaped Red Deer. I went on. I moved on. I travelled. I learned. I got a job, and a life, and I did those things that one is apparently supposed to do. Things are ok.

Last week Red Deer escaped Paul. Accidentally, they say. A gunshot. An unthinkable sort of death. An unthinkable sort of end. The gap is too large to say anymore but once, a glimmer of time ago, he was a good guy. I'll give him that. Memories are a funny thing, after all.

December 6, 2004 after 9AM | abstract , life , search , weird | maybe more»

Those not living in this fair province will perhaps neither know nor care that early Saturday morning the wind pulled an icy blanket of air across the land and the white-stuff began to fall. It is December, though, and most people's response was a generous "about damn time" reply.

We drove to Red Deer. And decided to stop by the lot to:

(a) Get some pictures of ourselves in front of the "sold" sign. Karin snapped a blurry picture of me: probably my fault it was blurry because I had both turned off the flash and also been shivering in the blustering wind. Her pose was a little more illuminated, though her eyes are wincing at the snowfall.

(b) Unofficially time the race from our new home to Red Deer where the folks live. The clock told us ninety minutes in a snowstorm. Most impressive. I suppose it helps that we're on the south-ish end of the city now.

December 6, 2004 after 9AM | house , photography , travel , weather | maybe more»