I shot some more photos, you see.

As is now par for a Saturday, Karin and I took a drive down south to the build site to check out the house progress. Framing is schedualled for next week (according to our contractor) but it seems they had already been busy, and over the past week some crazy garage-work had been done. Piles, forms, electrical work -- it's starting to look like more than just a simple concrete box.

Additional to this, I uploaded a whole new stack of pictures to the gallery, of course. For those keeping track, that brings the running total up to thirty-seven snaps of the progress. Sweet!

January 22, 2005 after 11PM | house , photography | maybe more»

from the fishy business department

I was at the pet store at lunch, looking into the fish food situation. Blue, who has been eating voraciously lately, is not quite out of food -- but he may be some day. He has also been very busy building little bubble nests at the top of the water, blowing little globule of air that stick to the single branch of the plastic plant that sticks out of the surface. It was my original intention to see if there was any floating plastic foliage that would amuse him a little bit more.

There wasn't.

Instead, I found a sale on a little aquarium decoration that looks like a tiny stump of wood with an assortment of weird plants growing out of it. All plastic. All very minature so that it fits in the teenie-tank.

I dropped it in around lunchtime. Snail-Bob clearly loves it -- or is simply oblivious to anything new in his environment. He's traced nearly every bit of the surface and scoped it once over.

Blue, on the other hand, is not amused. He has been cautious all afternoon, tucking himself into the corner or as far away from the new contraption as fishily-possible. Then he hovers there, tilted upwards at a twenty-or-so degree angle, and stares at it. Then he turns and stares at me for a while, probably considering what he would do if I were just a little smaller. Occasionally, I've caught him circling the plastic-wood log, flaring at it, like it's some sort of evil intruder that can be scared off.

Alas, some day (possibly tomorrow) he'll be friends again. He'll figure out that it's not an enemy -- it's another hiding spot -- and then I'll never see him again.

Silly fish.

January 20, 2005 after 3PM | fish , work | maybe more»

We sounded out the meetings yesterday: fortunately none of them were three hours long.

The first meeting of the day had more to do with computers and databases and volunteering that I'm doing and less to do with the house. But, the developer and I had a conversation that went something like this (after I mentioned to Susan that I had a house meeting shortly thereafter):

"Oh, you're building a house. My wife and I just built a house last year."

"Really? We're just about neighbors. My kitchen window looks across at those showhomes."

And then we did some real work.

Part Two

The second meeting was oddly engaging. We are apparently the casual-customers. That is, we're not crazy and demanding -- and the showhome folks like it when we drop by. They made sure it was okay, of course, but they wanted to know if they could use our contractor meeting as a quasi-training session: rather than a salesman, contractor, and purchasers meeting, we had a salesman, sales assistant, contractor, contractor-in-training, and purchasers meeting. It made for a cozy fit around the little table.

The gist of it was:

(a) Wink wink -- don't go around the site when people are working. It's dangerous, and if you fall in the hole or get a load of shingles dropped on your head, well, we told you so...

(b) Who the heck scribbled all these weird notes all over your blueprints? The sales-dude? Oh, that explains it.

(c) Don't freak out at what the house looks like UNTIL you move in. It will look perfectly nice on that day, until which time we are still building and cleaning and honing -- and after which time your mess is your problem.

There are still some schedualling backups because of last week's bone-chilling weather. The framing is actually (factually) schedualled and booked. There are less-apparent things to be done on the site before that time: our contractor, Miles, mentioned something about piles and safety-stuff that are due sometime this week, I think.

It's a big ol'complicated process, but it seems we're in competent hands. So yeah... w00t!w00t!

January 18, 2005 after 9AM | code , house , volunteer , weather , weird | maybe more»

meetings of stuff

Today is the day of the many meetings. I have three specific locations to attend within the span of nine hours this afternoon. For some, this would seem trivial. For I, who is seeking the concept of less-meetings, it is not trivial.

eyes wide shut

I was practicing typing with my eyes shut last night. I was awake, but I was trying to enter a zen-like oneness with the computer and... well, actually I just thought it was pretty cool that I could type about fifty words a minute with eyes shut and only make an occasional mistake. Of course, all the source material needs to come out of your brain, so it wouldn't work for data entry or anything of the like, but....

breaking up is hard to do

Or easy if you are ABC. Have you noticed how many television stations are exclusively digital feeds all of a sudden. If you have a regular old co-ax coming into your set, but still see the picture go all boxy and pixelly once in a while, it means the station is on a digital feed. And if you start to see little artifacts and pixelation during quick movements or transitions, it means they're using digital source and they're probably being cheap with their compression. Karin was trying to watch Exteme Home Makeover last night, but the image was stubornly breaking up into wonky little colour mosaics. Suck.

calendar dudes

Now's the time. We picked up two calendars yesterday for 75% off the retail value. That meant we spent less than nine dollars.

fishing in the dark

I'm not sure I mentioned it before, but Karin and I have got two fish at home now. Including Blue at my office, we have a total of three Bettas in our lives. Karin named the two newbies Fire and Ice. (I think I've explained this...) They've been alive for a little over a month now, so I think they'll survive for the moment, especially now that I've learned how to feed them. The trick, since they are in a divided tank and can see each other, is to feed them separately. If you put food in both halves at the same time, they both ignore the food in their own tank and try to eat the food floating on the opposite side, splashing and thrashing, and ultimately knocking down most of the pellets to the bottom rocks where they sit and rot. I've discovered, however, that by feeding them separately no such problem exists: feed Ice, and Fire goes nuts while Ice casually eats his food. Wait three seconds, then feed Fire wherein Ice goes crazy while Fire casually eats his food. Repeat as necessary.

January 17, 2005 after 9AM | fish , life , weird | maybe more»

I've been cleaning the comment spam from my blogs. The vulnerable lost.in.vancouver was apparently wider open than I thought, and over the course of Friday and Saturday recieved nearly 300 rogue messages advertising for hair loss treatments and debt relief. I ultimately wrote a little script that lets me seal the doors (previously just hidden) with an iron-lock. In fact the door is pretty much welded shut, and I'm going to start locking comments off after they are older than about a week. It's just too much work to bother with the whole thing. In other words, get your say while you can.

In wandering the ancient pages of old blogs, I rediscovered a few infamous memes I was working on. One of my old favs: words I see from where I sit...

More Coffee Flavour
Music by Alan Menken
ACTION CANCEL
Trinitron
Principles of Biochemistry
Sonic Mega Collection Plus
Risk
Before initial use, recharge handset for about 8 hours.
7 1/4-in . CIRCULAR SAW
Omnivision
Montigo

January 16, 2005 after 11AM | abstract , meta , stress | maybe more»

It was Saturday, so again Karin and I found ourselves out for a highly directed drive southwards. Of course, we stopped by the build site. The recent cold weather didn't disappoint my expectations that not much had been done. We lingered for a while, scared off some eager couples scouting out the neighborhood, and took more photos. As it is, our next drop-in session to the neighborhood will be the super-mega-very official visit: the first of the schedualled construction meetings with the contractor. Since we figured that we'd need to spend three hours stewing in uncomfortable chairs looking over blueprints on Monday again (and they hadn't done anything but drop off lumber at the site anyhow) we avoided the showhome like the plague and instead drove to the nearby neighborhood of Terwilligar Towne to look at the showhomes there. We lurked a little, then poked our nose in some houses that we hadn't bothered scoping before because they weren't the style we were looking at. They all start to blend together after a while, anyhow. In one, Karin fibbed and pretended we were green, letting the dude in that random house give us the sales-pitch and tell us about how great and economical his company would be for a classy young couple like us. I think he would have been more convincing if I had liked the house better. I think Karin would have been more convincing had she not kept shooting me sly, grinning glances over her shoulder -- and were I not thumbing my camera in my pocket, the same camera that had a whole stack of photos of our new home, an actual chunk of concrete not four blocks away and across the road. Slightly deceptive, yes. Am I worried? Not particularly.

January 15, 2005 after 11PM | house , photography , weird | maybe more»

I do more with this page than meets the eye. Case-in-point: this is the nine-hundredth article spread across about ten (give or take) blog and content sites to be found in the depths of this domain. It just goes to show that I've been moving far too fast for my own good. I even worked through lunch today; though I did sneak out early to peek at the progress of our new living space just a twenty-minute drive away.

Consequently, the RoundUp was in mid-broadcast, and I was surrounded by audio version of a sociology lesson:

Around three-thirty this afternoon, just when the audience who needed to hear it most was busy working, the CBC conducted an insightful reflection on the general speed of the world. I can give neither the broadcasters nor the host credit for originality as it been extracted, the bulk of the context, from a guest reviewer's opinion of a magazine article, the article itself republished from an alternative media source. Initially, I thought all that filtering would make it less valid; But no. The filtering and amplification, like so many published memes passed around some secret network (until it wound up in my ears from the speaker of my little red truck) really only makes it more potent.

My inner-most muse was very impressed. He's a sit-back-and-smell-the-roses type of character, and I've been ignoring him far too much lately.

It seems, or so the article would try and impress upon us, that the world is moving too fast. Cell phones connecting us to previously untapped social and professional networks wherever we are and whenever we want, syndicated television on two-hundred channels entertaining us with the dogma of Hollywood, and the bulk of human knowledge available twenty-four hours a day to anyone with the means to buy a moderately priced computer and a high-speed Internet connection. What the article and subsequent broadcast meant to tell us is (really) that we are moving too fast in the world.

I reflected momentarily, and went back to driving down a busy road. Later I found myself sitting in front of two screens, one a television playing reruns of Seinfeld, and the other a LCD monitor checking my email and catching up on the latest news from the under-belly of technology.

This time the muse, most definitely, was not impressed. My life, after all, moves far too fast. That would be fine if I could keep up. But much of the time I'm sitting on the edge watching it all slip through my fingers and wondering why I can't seem to find the motivation to tap out a few words on the keyboard or etch out a few lines on a clean sheet of paper, gritty charcoal in my hands.

Step one step backwards.

It's not my objective to preach. Nor is it my objective to state abundantly obvious clichés of the nature of society in general. It's my objective to create yet another node in this, the meme-engine. The world is moving too fast. And thus this one idea re-propogates. I state it, and it enters your brain (albeit temporarily) and perhaps one day you'll share that notion somewhere else. Barring that, you'll become a end-node in the network and you may not even matter to the grand scheme of things anyhow.

It's about choice, information, and how we use it to our advantage.

I've been trying to recalculate something about this webspace. Doing so has made me notably absent, one may have also realized, until those unremarkable though vast bursts of creative energy are sporadically dumped into these pages. It is symtomatic of something else, and even if I tried to explain it, it would be the metaphorical tip of the iceberg to the grand scope of it all. Even Jess was reflecting on a lack of general motivation lately. I won't try to steal her thunder, nor try to arrogantly presume that I had anything directly to do with it -- but it does beg the question: in a universe created by the bursting interaction of ideas by like-minded individuals, how many nodes can collapse on that network before the engine folds in upon itself?

I am just a node after all. And not a particularly vital one at that. That's not pitiful self-doubt writing. It's just a quantitative fact of how many people load this page on a regular basis.

So, do we stop the world? No. The momentum would fling us all into outer space. Whatever. Then, without dropping dead of virtual exhaustion, how do I as a person sitting here with a computer on my lap make my little node vital?

I realize it isn't the question of stopping the world. It's a question of grokking the nature of the information, learning what is important and what is not, and filtering the filters: meta, as it were. I see you, I understand you, and I fall back to quietly leach off that energy. You presume that this is a parasitic relationship, and that by reading you've done your part. I understand it to be symbiotic. I guess it starts there: I write another nine-hundred pages of rambling giberish, contribute to the digital swath of information, and narrow those filters just a little more.

You? Well, that's really not my decision.

January 12, 2005 after 10PM | meta , opinions , reading , thinking | maybe more»

It's been cold here for the last few days. Today, with a minus forty-one celcius wind-chill at one low-point in the day, I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for all those blokes out on the south-end building houses. Outside. In the cold, cold air.

Yesterday, Autumn called to set up our "pre-constuction" meeting. Apparently it's called a "pre" construction meeting because construction doesn't really begin until all that messy, basic-foundation work is done. Or something. Really, it's just the builder's way of making you feel involved while at the same time making it blisteringly clear that the implied pre-constuction phase is more of a pre-come-see-but-don't-touch phase, and for crying-out-loud we know what we're doing so just-leave-us-alone, we'll work-on-our-own schedual-phase. And that foundation thing, it seems to be wrapping up.

Again, despite the cold weather and the haunting notion that I know I wouldn't want to be outside today, I checked the build site after work and discovered that not only had the concrete been inspected, but someone had backfilled around the house and did some basic grading out front. For example, you can wander over to the gallery and check out the sweet little level patch where my future garage is going to be. You might also notice the little slope up to the front step where the sidewalk will wrap around the side of the garage, take a single step up about half-way in, and eventually lead to one of those prefab concrete staircases into the front door. Ah! Just think. next year around this time I'll be writing to complain about shovelling that exact spot. In other words, I'll shovel it about half-way then have a pre-snow removal meeting to discuss the progress.

It was so cold... (How cold was it?) It was so cold that I hopped out of the truck to snap some pictures and only managed to click the shutter off six times before my fingers started to seize-up. If you know me, you also know that six pictures is like saying I took twelve steps out of the truck. It was cold. Did I mention that? And for one brief, ice-crystallizing second I felt some compassion for the dudes who would need to be wandering around that exact spot hammering floor-joists -- or whatever might be the next step. Then, I started worrying about my camera and its potential reaction to the weather... so I got back in the truck and drove away.

You may also notice in the gallery a photo of some building bits laying out at the front of the lot. I seem to recall from looking at other semi-built houses int he area that when building a house with a garage (Brett and Lenore's chronicle is absolutely useless for speculation here) they need to put some pilings under the garage, and then eventually build a little concrete frame for that, too. It doesn't go deep -- as last time I checked, my garage won't have a basement -- but concrete seems to be the basic fusion element between soil and wood, so I suspect the big-ol'truck will be bback to visit some day soon. I did see some wood and rebar again. I imagine the little strips of white foam have something to do with that too. Who can say?

My last observation, driving away from the build site (all the while slowly beginning to warm up a wee little bit) was that in front of the next-door empty-lot there was some window bucks, rebar, and wood bits. Based on my idle calculations (and those photos of our progress I took about thirty days ago) it would seem that construction next door is proceeding as well, only about a month behind us. Ha ha! We win. I don't imagine that big pile of frozen clay is helping things either. Not a good way to impress the neighbors:

"Hey dude, get your clay off my lawn!"

"What lawn? You don't even have a house!"

January 12, 2005 after 5PM | house , photography , weather | maybe more»

For those who go looking for greater things, there is gold to be found.

:: end transmission

January 10, 2005 after 3PM | abstract | maybe more»