Oorgo

One inch more around the middle

Well it's happened.
I never thought it would happen.
I am still in a little disbelief that it has happened.
I still think it will go away. Probably.
My pants are too tight.

That's right ladies and gentlemen I have gained actual weight enough that when I sit down I have to undo the top button of my pants. It's astonishing, amazing and crazy. I mean sure, ok, I'm 40 but seriously, I haven't change pant sizes in around 15 years. 32/30 that's my size and yep, it's now about to go to 33. Insane.

Is the thickening commencing? I don't know... maybe it's just bloating but this has been going on for awhile now so perhaps I have to face facts: I've gained weight. I can almost bet that this summer with the boys will take the weight off but who knows... I don't tend to go backwards, only forwards :)

Let's See

Let's see if I remember how to do this thing.

Blog... yes... umm... blog....

Right! Er... I mean Write!!

It's amazing that this thing still exists and doubly amazing that it isn't completely filled with spam comments! I painstakingly deleted a bunch, but I've seen many more on other mu.nu blogs.
edit - ok so I spoke too soon... craploads of spam comments I have to delete.

What's new... what's new... well not a tremendous amount, we're about 80% done updating the look of our living room, leather sofa loveseat and chair, laminate flooring, paint and possibly a new wall unit coming up. It's been an interesting journey and it's going to get more interesting being that our house is a bi-level with vaulted ceiling. Once you start the living room you have to continue to the kitchen or it looks weird. As it is now our living room looks nice but I look at the cupboards, appliances etc. in the kitchen and they look drab and dated. Slippery slope, it seems.

Still playing the latin music, posted some videos on youtube ... check them out -
Oorgo on Youtube

The kids are growing like weeds, bad weeds. Xavier is in grade 2 now, Griffin is on his way to being on his way to someday being able to go to pre-school. The potty training battle wages on and right now he's winning.

My lovely wife bought a new laptop, she's very happy, she made enough money off 2 garage sales to purchase it. It's shiny, has 3 GB of ram, T4200 dualcore processor, 320 GB Hard drive and a pretty 16" screen. Facebook and Bejewelled never looked so good. :)

Merry Christmas or whatever you celebratemas!

Once again, wow... life lag... almost 5 months since I posted something, anything!

Every year at this time I look around and wonder how I got here. Not in a sort of "Whoa, dude... like ... how much did I DRINK last night" got here, more of a life path, choices made, etc. etc.. I've always taken to the path of chaos, let the road choose me instead of I choose the road. When opportunities come I pause to consider them, sometimes I pause too long and good things pass me by, but that pause is usually instinct kicking in, disbelief, or my built in skepticism. Anyways I am rapidly going down the old path of self diagnosis and I'll stop there.

Winter 2008 seemed to be going well, job is enjoyable as jobs go, people I work with are great, the family is doing well, kids are getting bigger, as they tend to do. But then my boss read a letter from the Alberta Medical Association about a proposal from Alberta Health and Wellness that screwed all that up. Apparently our government in all of it's wisdom and greed and power hunger has decided to try and lure our EMR clients away to their chosen EMR software providers by giving them a big fat $20K bonus (per doctor). That's right, bonus. Nothing to do with setup costs, that's already provided for, nothing to do with anything, just "Here's $20K for your troubles".

Over the past couple years POSP has been trying to thin the crop of EMR providers by forcing us to jump through their insane hoops. Last year they came up with an RFP that was attainable by us, and we were well on our way to being compatible. Suddenly they decide "You don't have this this this and this feature" ... which is a lie, and they pick 3 vendors, all 3 from outside Alberta, one of which is actually affiliated with Alberta Medical Association!! None of which have fared very well vs. clinic staff/doctor opinion polls.

Do you think this will make a difference to doctors though? They'll take the $20K, switch over, put up with the new software until it drives them and their staff around the bend, then they'll be back. But in that time the other vendors in the province will lose real money, all because our government is a bunch of power hungry idiots. The only reason the $20K is being offered is because they've had ZERO interest in the 3 vendors, so they being the stubborn egomaniacs they are, are pushing forward no matter what. No matter how much it costs Albertans, or Alberta companies, no matter if we are in a recession, they are throwing millions of dollars at doctors to get them to use software they don't even want.

In Ontario EMR vendors, if they want to sell EMR have to pay money every so often to go through testing to make sure they are up to the Ontario medical standards. It's going well, it's still competitive, and they have multiple vendors. Why is it that the Alberta government has gone the way of the fascists and are trying to control and/or damage local businesses?

Coincidence? I think not!

Isn't it funny how things seem to happen semi-randomly but then the odd time something will happen that seems to be a little too coincidental? Such as a song that just happens to be playing when some other type of event happens. This morning was one of those times.

On the last day of my last job I was getting into my car listening to my miniDisc player and an Incubus song came on, called 'Nice to know you'. It was so perfect, I mean I can't think of a better chorus than that, for the last day of working for a company you hated.

So today I started my new position at work, in QA, I've been in Tech Support for about 10 years or so, and it was time to change things up. I was feeling very unenthusiastic about things and I really needed something new. Plus I'm really tired of having to talk to people on the phone, and try to solve their problems, no matter how ignorant or semi-retarded they are.

This morning the same song came on, this time on the radio. Coincidence? I think not!

Here are the lyrics for the chorus of the song, if you're not familiar with it:

"I haven't felt the way I feel today
In so long it's hard for me to specify.
I'm beginning to notice
how much this feels like a waking limb...
pins and needles,
nice to know you,
goodbye!"

Happy new year!

Welcome to 2008!

Welcome, for me anyways, to the realization you spent WAY too much money at Christmas on presents. Welcome to the note from your insurance company that there was insufficient funds in your account on the day your payment was supposed to automatically come out (Dec. 24th no less), oh and by they way here is your f*#$ing nsf fee on top of that.

Welcome to a bank account dried up and caked with mud from the banker monkeys throwing feces at each other, and the insurance company who decided to schedule the re-dip into my account the f$#@ing day before I get paid next.

Happy New Year! Hope this isn't an indicator of the rest of the year!

Like water, that's been sitting for weeks in a pot in the sink

This blog is in general disrepair, embarrassingly outdated and horribly under-updated. Stale and sour smelling like a geek after a weekend of only playing WoW, not showering and just drinking beer and Cheeto's.

It's not that I don't care, it's that I'm in sort of a shame spiral right now... I don't post and then I feel bad so I post but I'm not happy about what I write so I feed bad then I don't post and ... etc. etc. That and the horrid Facebook virus has overtaken some of my free will and is abusing my constant craving of information, no matter how dullard.

Is this the defining point where this blog goes to sleep forever with a needle in the temple and a colostomy bag? Is this post itself some rebirth of the blog? Is it even worth it for me to continue?

Am I that effing uninterested with life that I can't form a paragraph to talk about things that bother me? That could be too.

Some of this relates to the fact that I'm one of those guys who likes to do everything, pulled in all sorts of directions but in the end seems to do nothing. Kind of like multi-tasking: a little bit of a whole bunch of things but really a whole lot of jack squat. I want to spend time with my kids, I want to spend time with my wife, I want to play music, I want to play video games but then I need to do things too : I need to fix some shit in the yard, I need to go to gigs, I need to go to work...

There's just not enough hours in the f#$@ing day are there?

Reonion

Last Saturday I took the 1.5 hour trip out to my sisters to visit, with the family + the dog. She looked after the boys that night while we went to my 20 year high school reunion. As I was driving into town through the back roads (my sis lives on a farm) I thought to myself 'This road is very familiar... maybe I took it once or twice bypassing a check stop' .. yeah... I know .. horrible, despicable, heinous, but it was the 80's and we were young and logically stunted.

We got into town in about 15 minutes, and I realized my driving habits were still of the city. Some dude in a 3/4 ton truck pulled in front of me and crawled along at about 20 km/h, I swerved and went on my merry way at 10 km above the speed limit. Nothing much has changed, other than the really big bingo parlor outside of town, some shifting of businesses, some closures, a new flea market where the SAAN store used to be. We pulled into the parking lot of the hall and it was full of trucks, big-ass trucks and a couple of cars. Yep, this is Alberta alright, here I am driving my Honda Fit, and I park by some Dodge Ram 2500... dwarfing my poor little car.

Nerves jangling, I sign in, get my little name sticker, wave at someone I don't know who says 'Hi Dave', (of course we're late, everyone is already starting to eat and I have no clue where to sit). So we hover a bit, talk to some people that come up to us, walk over and make up a plate of food, then navigate until we find a friendly voice that says "Dave come sit here!". It was Jeanine, a girl I've known since jr. high, but I thought forgot me, that was pretty cool. Anyways we sit and start eating, I see others I know, others I know but really didn't talk to in HS, and some that I really can't name but their face is familiar.

So we're sitting eating, after saying hi to everyone and getting the ultra minimal update on "what are you doing these days". Somebody said at one point "What's new?" I just said "lots" .. I mean.. 20 years ... if nothing was new I would be in the ground from a bullet to my own head. It was a great meal though... very hometown: lots of meat, perogies, cabbage rolls, I love the Ukrainian food, even though I had a hard time eating it with my old friends trying to yack my ear off.

Strangest thing happened, somehow I was remembered and appreciated after all these years, I expected to go to this thing and disappear just like I did in high school. I expected the shallow people to still be shallow and the weird stigma to still be on my head. Perhaps because I lead a bit of a different life than most of them I stood out now? I don't farm, I'm not in real estate or pharmacy or construction or... etc. I'm in IT and a musician on the side, it just amazed people that I'm still playing trumpet.

We started the night out like old times, sitting with the semi-nerd portion of the crowd, laughing at the stupid things we did, what was different though, was when we were about to leave. We walked over to another table with a bunch of guys I new way back from elementary school, although I didn't really talk to them anymore. I was greeted with a hug from one of them and they were sincerely happy to see me, it was surprising and refreshing. I guess people do mature after 20 years.

What was really interesting is there were people that still live there but didn't actually come to the reunion. I guess if I still lived in my hometown I probably would not have gone to my reunion either. All the grudges and problems and stupid things that happened in HS would still be fairly fresh because you still saw those people around town. Small towns are funny that way, you can't get away from the people you don't like or the people who don't like you. You either become a hermit or face up to the problem, neither being a 100% solution. The real solution from what I have seen is to move away and don't come back for 20 years.

I love coffee

I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee

I love coffee
When I'm dumb
I love coffee
It makes me hum

I love coffee
When I'm tired
I love coffee
It makes me wired

I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee

This post inspired by the poetic workings of Fergie via Alanis Morrisette
'My Humps'

Driving madness

So our band went to Kelowna, BC on the weekend for a benefit for the SPCA there. Yeah that's right... a friggin 10 hour drive (one way if you're speeding) through the rocky mountains and 2 or more national parks. Were we insane? Partially. Did we enjoy it? Even less than partially Will we do it again? Highly unlikely unless there is flying involved.

We left at 4 am Saturday morning and a good hour into the drive in the darkness of early morning we hit some nice blowing snow, and slush, and icy roads for about 45 minutes. I think I counted 4 cars in the ditch, one of them was a Jeep missing its front axle. In Calgary we waited in Dennys on our beloved leader and his slow bunch ... ate a friggin $10 breakfast (huge but wtf, $10?) and an hour after we had stopped we were back on the road into the mountains.

Highly uneventful... boring in fact other than the great scenery. The craziest thing was our guitar players driving... 130-140 on windy mountain highways... that's crazy. Oh and the van that we rented was the Chevrolet Uplander ... don't get it... it was uncomfortable and some really stupid design mistakes i.e. no armrests on the centre seats.. no 'oh shit' handles... and we couldn't find a way to fade the stereo from the back to the front. 18 hours of latin/pop music can really get to a person when the little crappy speaker is right by your ear, especially when you're trying to catch some Zzzzz's because you woke up at 3 am.

I really love the mountains though, I just do. There is almost nothing more impressive than driving through Jasper with a rock face on your right and a herd of bighorn sheep on the left grazing. We even saw a black bear (a pretty big one) on the way into the park. Wicked. I wanted to ditch the whole 'going back home' thing and stay in Jasper for the week. Screw work, screw everything, it's the friggin mountains! Yeah that didn't go over too well.

21 hours of driving in a 42 hour timespan is not a fun thing to do though, I wouldn't suggest it. Luckily we all get along pretty good none of us hate each other too badly, 'cause I can imagine some flaring tempers and flying fists.

error.... error... error... error...

Well it's been an eventful week (yes I realize the leaves out the last... oh... 3 weeks previous to the last week but you know what? That's my life nowadays, scattered and insane.) Last Sunday night I set up my computer to do a defrag on the C drive before I went to bed, common thing to do, very common in fact. Monday morning I went downstairs because my wife had called up to me saying "What's this and why is it at 25%, can I close it?" . I go down, knowing full well I was not approaching a happy or healthy hard drive. Sure enough I close down defrag, try to do other things and nothing responds. I hard shutdown the computer, boot it back up and then was greeted with ""Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: ntkrnl32.exe".

I was not amused.

My heart was pounding as I fumbled for my XP install disk..I popped it in, rebooted, booted off cd. I dropped myself into the oh-so-beautiful repair and recovery dos command world, typed in DIR and got slapped with this error: "error occurred during directory enumeration". My heart sank... that just is not a good thing, not even close to a good thing.

I ran CHKDSK /R hoping and praying my fears were not valid but it was all in vain, 50% of the way through the check it stopped, giving me a pleasant "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems". Oh No. Here's where I did something stupid, I ran it again and it got 57% of the way through before dropping the same error again.

The worst part of all of this was that I had backups but they were OLD backups, missing a shitload of pictures etc., all of them irreplaceable. This seemed an apt time for me to hang up my punching bag in the basement, it was suggested by my wife and after the first 10 or so as-hard-as-I-could-punch punches I actually did feel a little better.

The next day I talked to a hardware guy I know and he recommended (and leant me)Spinrite for a day or two, so I tried that and it restored a crapload of sectors on the surface scan. Unfortunately the drive was still seen as unformatted in Windows. I tried running a deeper data recover but it was going to take 6600 hrs so I stopped that business and left the drive for a few days while I reinstalled other things to Windows and killed some people in Eve.

Sat. night I decided to go back at it, I first tried a program called PC Inspector Recovery which sort of worked but it was forcing me to click Ignore 1000s of times on the ntfs read errors that were popping up. I knew there had to be a better solution so I talked to my buddy Dan and he suggested I image the drive then run the utility. I found a plethora of image programs, but only one of them would actually image the drive whole, ignoring the read errors, and that was free, was ADRC Recovery Tools. Great little program which also includes Undelete ... very handy. Anyways I tried running PCInspector after that on the image of the drive but it crashed and crashed. I was stuck.

I was stuck until I found another program called ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) which actually does both: images and recovers files from unmountable drives. So I tested it first, it allows 4 folders for the unregistered version, I ran it overnight and recovered a good amount of usable files the next morning. I immediately forked out the $24.08 CDN (after tax) for the registration key (apparently there was a weekend sale going on it's regularly something like $79.95 USD). I then proceeded to run it again and recover 30,000+ files from my previously thought DEAD drive. I'm very relieved and happy.

The lesson from all this? Well that's obvious, but repeat with me: backup backup backup backup backup (repeated until blue in the face)

the Christmas that sickness took

Well it's come and gone, that season of giving and recieving and drinking and eating and if you have spare time giving thanks.

Our Christmas season started with Xavier getting a fever which turned into a cold and still isn't completely gone. Christmas eve morning Griffin woke up with a 101.9 degree fever which went down and up all day, he went to bed and then woke up again at 1:30 with a 102.5 fever. About 4 am Christmas morning we got to sleep, I think Amber had a hard time sleeping because she woke up again at 7:30, I got up about 9:30 or so prompted by the incessant nagging of Xavier.

We had a peaceful morning of opening gifts with our wonderfully behaved kids, had a nice breakfast, etc. At 2 we went to Ambers mom's place for more gift opening and supper etc. Xavier and Griffin were engulfed with presents, alongside their cousins. I and the rest of the family got a bunch of great stuff that we liked, and Amber got a bunch of stuff looked like she had previously bought for herself and pulled out of the closet. Two example items: a variety package of incense.... she's allergic to smoke... a pair of pink furry winter boots... yeah, I've known her for 16 years and never ever seen her wear pink. It's like her parents went to great effort to get stuff for everyone that they liked and then she was an afterthought. She was not happy, and this was not just a one time thing, it seems to happen every Christmas. Sure the season isn't about presents, but when everyone else gets thoughtful gifts but you get a bunch of shit you don't even like ... how special do you feel...

I made it through Christmas without a hint of sickness, then the day of the 28th I started feeling it in my throat, that night we had a wedding gig and the next morning I had to get up to go to work and man... I was full blown sick. I sounded like some Barry White infested frog had stolen my vocal chords and sat in their place. Of course then Sat. night we had another gig, this time at the Sidetrack, and then a New Years one the next day. No rest for the sicky. I called in sick on Tuesday because I wasn't getting any better and I couldn't talk for very long, and of course my job is talking all day.

I was sickened in another way by the New Years Eve party I played at, it a tribute to the club that was burned down a couple months ago, and it lived up to the reputation. They had a Latin band, a DJ and some Reggaeton/Rappers scheduled. Our first set went fine, sound was OK, people were dancing, then we went on for the second set ... it was BRUTAL, the monitors were cranked, we were being deafened by everything and couldn't hear ourselves. We finished at midnight, the next crap came on and we left to go find alcohol. We came back at say... 1:20 to find a bunch of drunk losers yelling into mics and dancing like fools. 1:30 we started our last set, the sound was better, but apparently 3/4 of the way through a fight broke out, there were chairs thrown, and later we heard rumors of people going out to their cars to get weapons. The cops showed up, the party shut down, we got paid and left. The whole thing left a bad taste in our mouths, and made us REALLY not miss the old club. Lucky for us (sarcasm) they're building another club which will be open in a year or so, made entirely of cement and steel.

[edit] and now I feel terrible about my whining after reading about Shank's Mom. My thoughts go out to him and his family.

Santa is mad

Xavier is totally pumped about Christmas coming, he hounded us to put the tree up, the angel in the window, lights, pretty much everything. But one thing he seems to be averse to is seeing Santa! They've had a Santa at the local mall for quite a while but every time he would go past he would fight it. He kept saying 'I don't want to go past Santa, he's mad".

NO idea how he got this idea, we've never told him that if he does something Santa will be mad, but for the last 2 years he has an aversion to Santa.

This year at his preschool Santa showed up, Xavier apparently sat on his lap and asked him for this imaginary video game where people turn into ghosts and then turn back into people. Last night he was telling me all about it and he said 'Santa isn't mad anymore'. Well at least that's settled, I was starting to think we somehow gave him a mad Santa complex.

Uninspired

Unmotivated, unamused, these are all things that could describe my state of mind these days. That's probably a big part of the reason I haven't been blogging, I come with a thought, something to put down, but then a couple minutes later I either forget it or shoot it down with the old "yeah.... no". The reality of the world doesn't help much either, when Stephen Hawkins says that we have to find a new planet to live on or we face extinction.... that really brings some holiday cheer.

Christmas comes again, and even though I'm not quite as apprehensive of it this year the anxiety still lingers, raising it's ugly head at the thought of buying presents, and incurring debt, and a whole day with the in-laws. I suppose this weather doesn't help much either, I mean it hasn't gotten above -11 C for what... 2 months? Frig. The other day we had -28 weather in the morning with a -41 windchill! In f@(*$ing November! Oh and this morning I left my f$*@(ing blockheater plugged in then drove away, I haven't been able to look at it yet, I hope I didn't wreck the damn cable... on my NEW car. Gawdammit.

On the brighter side there is a new Latin club to play at, I may even have a gig there next weekend. Interesting time eh? Old really popular club burns down, and within a month a new one pops up? Hmmmm..

Fuego Latino

Well it looks like there's going to be a severe drop in my gigs over the next while, not sure exactly how long, as the bar I usually play at burned to the ground on Saturday night.

Apparently someone used a jerry can, lit the DJ's car on fire and then figured they had some gas leftover so they lit the club on fire too. The fire department came because of a report of a burning car, but didn't see the club burning until it was obviously too late to contain.

The whole thing isn't really much of a surprise as someone tried to burn the club down in the spring, this attempt was just successful, that's all. In my mind that's what you get when you bring different groups (sometimes gangs) of young people with differring tastes of music (iow different cultures), put them in a club where the music the DJ plays is so loud that your shirt vibrates against your skin. I used to wear earplugs during set breaks and the shit was STILL too loud, and that's after cutting out 35 db!

Anyways, perhaps this will mean I have more time for other things: Family, Jazz, my blog, who knows? It could also mean that the nights I would have been previously playing my trumpet I may now be drinking beer and playing ultra-addicting video games like Eve-online. Who knows, is this the opening I've been looking for? Is this my escape from the Latin music scene? We'll have to wait and see.

Good or bad?

Obviously none of my family members are reading this blog, or my Wish List would be completely purchased.

I guess that's partly good and bad...

Yo G! Go back to sleep!

I am totally confused and apathetic about what to post about these days, there are so many things I feel strongly about, and so little time to talk about them.

My family is not getting enough sleep these days, ruled by the iron fist of the Tyrant and his name starts with a G. Every night about an hour after he's put to bed he wakes up. You just get to sleep and bam! "Whaaaa"... and there is NO possible way he will go back to sleep by himself. Last night we tried leaving him... yeah, that ended up with baby vomit on his sheets and a change of clothing. This morning I tried getting him back to sleep and gave up quickly, he just wants to go into our bed and sleep with Mommy. Yes it makes me crabby, if you can't read between the lines.

Last night I was so tired and out of it that I went to take my inhaler and instead I grabbed my stick deodorant and almost took a bite out of it. And earlier that same day I was caught nodding off at my desk.... things have got to change.

Xavier went on his first field trip yesterday, he was just thrilled. He couldn't stop talking about it when I got home "We went on a school bus and we rode a tractor and we got to feed animals and..." . In fact this morning when he woke up he said "Are we going on another field trip today?" I'm really happy he is enjoying preschool, it's defintely good to hear he has friends there and that he can't wait to go. His eyes just light up when you say "You have school tomorrow!". I remember a time when mine did the same.

When I spoke of good things in the past post I was referring to the # of gigs I've had lately and other opportunities to play/record. We're also getting a 4×4 Honda quad from my father-in-law, which of course we can't use in the city but we could likely sell for a few thousand, it would help pay for my wife's teeth and some other stuff.

Hello past

It's odd, recently I started thinking about high school, as my 20 year reunion is coming up next year, so I got in contact with a friend of mine I've known since kindergarten (or before) by email. He's doing great, he is part owner (I think) and pharmacist for one of the drug stores in my home town, he keeps in contact with alot of the people we went to school with. We talked about old times a bit and I realized that once had I left my hometown and attended college/university I basically blocked out memory of it, high school especially, and any time preceding high school. I blocked out the good along with the bad.

The problem with that plan was I also blocked out parts of who I was. I hated 85% of high school: the crap they put you through, the cliques, the small mindedness of the people there, country music, fickle and mean people. I had a couple shit jobs there after highschool too, so I wasn't exactly prone to having good memories, of course part of the reason they were shit jobs was because I drank and partied too much but that was part of the crowd I was with. We drank to escape and to relieve the boredom; hardcore binge drinking. You can probably see my reasons for leaving it all behind.

I remember now that there were good times in amongst the shit. I remember the new friends that I did have after my junior high group of friends ejected me from the group in grade 10 and tortured me until I left them alone and more after that. I remember ... damn... I still have a hard time getting past that 20 years later, stupid memory.

It's funny how memory works, how the bad things can be so vivid and fresh, yet the good things are grey and washed out. Of the good things I remember my family the most, and my neighbors and the people in my church. I realized when I got older that my parents, especially compared to most, are wonderful, they may have been strict sometimes, but I was raised right. My neighbour Mrs Parkinson was my stand-in grandma, she was a great lady and I miss her still, and my neighbour friends The Leroux family, they were rough around the edges but great people nonetheless. Even though I later on didn't agree with all the teachings of the church, the people who attended were kind and genuinely good people

I think recalling these times has been good for me, I feel almost like there are some spaces filling in, some of my identity recovered. I've heard it said that you don't know who you are if you don't know where you're from, I wonder if that applies to blocking out where you're from.

Pause

You know sometimes I read so much news and stories, and email, and blogs in a day that I simply can't form a cherent thought by 4 pm. It's like all the stuff is competing for cpu usage, thus dragging down my whole system so the performance is peaked. I'm pausing now to let some of the things tumble out of my overcrowded brain, maybe it'll make room for other more important things.

I can't bilieve the nutjob who shotup that college in Montreal yesterday. It's really too bad he was killed in the takedown, too bad they couldn't have gotten him with some kind of localized knockout gas, so that some crazed students could rip him to shreds or just beat the living shit out him. Torture is only valid for people who have no soul, men/women without a conscience, so cold that they would kill completely innocent people trying to get an education. If I had the capacity and someone tried doing that to my kid they would soon not appreciate taking in breaths and hope and beg for a quick death.

The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube," said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.""

On the flipside I read that Les Paul used to set up a studio in his apartment building in a soundproof room in the basement, and then broadcast closed circuit radio Friday and Sundays for his neighbours. I love it! A time when people shared their talent and gifts with others for free. These guys were famous and without any pay, just for the joy of it, performed with other famous guests and announcers for their fellow apartment dwellers.

Oh for those days to come back again.

Don't Honk after 2

Ok so I learned a lesson on the weekend, even though I don't want to admit it... wait I guess I just did. ANYWAYS

I was coming home from a gig Saturday night at the usual 2:30ish am and I made a left at an intersection with 2 left turn lanes. The Fit is tonnes of fun so I whipped it around there pretty quick, and the guy beside me tried to do the same in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. Well he lost, and swirved into my lane in front of me.

Wait now for a second. What was your first instinct there, did you think "honk", "finger", "swear", or "shrug it off"? Truthfully, most people I know would do what I did. Honk. Not a long honk, but a honk nonetheless.

Turns out that wasn't the best thing to do. I drove up to the next intersection (an overpass light), it was red for a bit more and then quickly green, so I took off. The guy in the black Jeep GC pulls up beside me (obviously to glare at me or such things), I didn't even look at him, looked down and noticed that I was speediing a bit, stepped on the brake a little harder than usual and then pulled in behind him. RIght there the guy should have thought "He has a full view of my license plate, perhaps I should watch what I do." Well he didn't.

We both come up to the next intersection and of course Karma catches up to me or something because it just fucking HAS to change red. I'm in the left hand turn lane and the black GC is in the lane to the right of me. I made the mistake of looking over and this big black guy gives me a menacing look and gives me the finger. He obviously thought this was enough to freak me out, well it didn't. I shrugged and made a motion of swirving with an imaginary steering wheel, well that just made him snap. He starts yelling at me, saying stuff like "You think that's funny motherfucker? You bleepity bleep bleep bleepin' bleep etc. etc.". I just turned and looked at the light, luckily it switched to green because I think the guy was getting out of his car. As I was starting to go I heard a bonk on the window, I think the jackass threw something at it like a cigarette butt or something. Maybe it was part of his brain that he burnt out on cocaine that night.

It never ceases to amaze me how fucking moronic people can be. What went from a jerk reaction honking of the horn could have turned out into some half brain fuckhead kicking/beating on my car or smashing the window. The real lesson here is don't honk your horn at people after 2... possibly even earlier, and if you do don't make eye contact or react ... pretend you're a scared little girl.

Nuts

I think I'll be travelling to London this week... maybe I'll bring my bottle of Gin on in carry-on luggage.

Oh... wait... no

Over a week of silence and I come back with this? sheesh

In Memory of

Today is the 19th anniversary of the big F4 tornado that hit Edmonton in 1987. The beast killed 27 people, injured 300 or more, and caused $250 mil in damages.

I don't think that anyone living in Evergreen Trailer Park will ever feel entirely safe from the whirling beasts.

Postus Sporadicus

Apparently I only post when bad things are happening or I'm pissed off.

I haven't been p o'd much in the last while.

Perhaps I don't like to post about good things, because I fear a jinx on the goodness. My old "for every good thing that happens, more bad things will happen" concept that has spawned not from merely my own psychosis, but from life experience up to this point.

I will hazard the jinx this time because this friday appears to be so friggin' cool and the last time I posted about something cool it worked out to be even more awesome than I thought. (I will have to do a post about it soon).

Ok, so my birthday is friday (yay me) and for that reason I get the day off from my employer, making it a long weekend. It being the middle of the month it's also payday! WOot! I have a gig friday night at a mansion downtown which includes free drinks, food, and is always a good time (oh, and I get paid for it). Yeehaw! Plus my wife can come along and leave the kids at the grandparents!

So yeah, it looks like it will be a great time, I'm really excited.
touchwoodthrowsaltovermyshouldercrossmyfingersetcetcetc.

You know you have nothing much to say when...

All you post are quizzes.

You Are 40% Weird

Normal enough to know that you're weird... But too damn weird to do anything about it!

Found at Your Moosey Fate

Wait, what was I doing?

I've been remarkably un-verbose here the last while, and I'm sure visitors are underwhelmed at the posts that finally do emerge. Truthfully? I haven't had any time in my day to sit down and focus on writing anything.

There.. right there... I was interrupted for 25 minutes and now I've lost my train of thought.

OH right... posting...umm...

I'll have to find a couple minutes later today to finish this train of thought, whatever it may be.

Bumper this, buddy!

Your Bumper Sticker Should Be

If you can read this, I can stop suddenly and sue you

Found thru: CTG

Clusterf ... er... post

As you may have noticed I haven't been updating this place much, and if you're even a little upset about that I'd be all like "wow.. yeah.. whooo...sheeit... sorry...". The funny thing about this is that not really that much has been happening, but enough to prevent me from posting. Apparently my lack of content doesn't stop people from dropping by from Googlyland to the ol' blog looking for what their b1rthday means, and the je0pardy theme song... the hits seem to be ramping up on those intellectually fulfilling topics.

A couple of weeks ago we signed a heloc to catch up on some evil debt and give ourselves some room to improve other things (home, new car, etc.). I'm happy with it, but now it looks like we should have asked for a couple of K more, meh, we'll live. We're looking at maybe this fall buying the new car if interest rates are good. The heloc has freed up almost 500 bucks a month in bills we were paying to various evil credit cards etc. I really think if I would have waited even 2 weeks longer we would have been completely sunk, June would have obliterated us financially.

We were about to cancel one of our credit cards but along with it there were the travel rewards that would disappear, so we used them to get a couple nights in Calgary at a hotel, and visited Vulcan AB for their Galaxyfest on Saturday. The kids and the dog stayed at my mother-in-laws, making it our first trip alone in about 4 years or more. It was pretty damn nice: sleeping in, travelling places by simply getting in the car not congregating the brood, no statements such as "Stop that!", "Put that down!" spoken, and freedom to watch whatever we want on tv. Vulcan was ok, but we didn't really spend that much time or go to the gala or supper, just passed through

Last night I found out I can almost carry my own weight in dumbells... I helped my supervisor move and carried his dumbells out to the moving van. I got out there and he goes "Whoa! Dave!" .. and then proceeds to count out how much I was carrying. 125 lbs (ok, it's about 15 lbs less than my own weight, but still pretty damn good for someone who doesn't work out).

Sucking a hole in my pocket

IN the ongoing saga that is my moneypit of a car, now that the weather is warming up the car is starting to overheat, mostly when you drive at slow speeds or turn the AC on. I phoned up my mechanic brother-in-law (not mechanical brother-in-law, although that would be cool), and he thinks there's some blockage in the coolant system.

I think that when I took the thing in to Crappy Tire 6 months ago they either put in a defective waterpump, didn't hook it up correctly, or screwed something else up. My reasoning for this? As soon as I started driving the car after they worked on it the temperature gauge was up a notch or so. I didn't make a fuss at the time because it was winter and it didn't seem to be causing any problems unfortunately now it's summer and the fuckin' thing is overheating.

I'm taking it to another shop tomorrow morning and get them to fix it, if it IS CT's fault I'm taking the bill back and shoving it in their stupid insufficienly educated faces.

[update] It's in the shop... the guy says it looks like a blockage of some sort, but he can't tell... but if the thing wasn't drained properly when they replaced the water pump it apparently can damage your head gasket. I would say most likely from the back pressure or air in the system? I don't know, I'm not a mechanic. Fuckin car.

Clunk - Kaching!

I finally took the Grand Am into the shop yesterday to get the clunks in the front end checked out. It turned out worse than I thought, but not really much more money (still too much IMO). Turns out that the ball joints and outer tie rod ends were fux0red, in fact one of the ball joints had 1 inch of play, the mechanic said they would fall out soon if not fixed.

Well that shop didn't bother looking at my car until 3:00 even though I was the first one on the schedule for yesterday AND I brought my car in at 8:30 as asked. Of course they couldn't fix it that day and would hold it overnight, and they wanted to charge me $885 plus the inspection cost of $47. Well I paid the inspection cost, took the car home, took today off and went to my regular repair shop.

The guy I usually use charges $14 less an hour, plus he agreed to put a mix of quality of parts. The ball joints took 4 hours so we put on the ones that were $122 each, but the tie rod ends were only 1 hour of labor so we put on the $35 ones instead of $120. Hey, I expect to sell this car within the year so any money I can save I will. Parts totalled $335 after tax, labour was 2.8 hours approx (this is why I go to this guy) and $80 for an alignment. $640 later I go home with a sound car, and saving about 250 dollars.

Funny and oddly enough, the amount I've spent on my car exactly totals the amount I was planning on saving for a downpayment on a new car. The thing has it in for me, I swear. On the bright side I was able to spend the morning with my family, got to see Xavier at his preschool and the car has a completely new front end. That's a major selling point when I go to sell it, that and the 4 new tires. Still... $640 was not budgeted and was geared towards other more important things like paying down a loan and paying off some debt.

If you drive a car it's a losing game. You never gain, it just keeps wearing away at your bank account until you've had enough and you buy another one, thus continuing the vicious cycle. Give me a bus pass and a decent transit system and I'd never drive the friggin things.

Some slight pulling and tugging

I'm officially neutered, sterilized, whatever you want to call it. It really felt like a spay clinic in the dayward of the hospital, you walk in and there are a bunch of guys sitting around trying to not make eye contact or laughing nervously, and then watching with big eyes the victims..er ... patients try to hobble all nonchalant. If you've ever dropped your pet off at a spay clinic you'll know what I mean.

I have a couple of tips for those planning about going under the knife:

1. Don't believe them when they say it doesn't hurt, or all you will feel are some tugs and pulls. Not if you apparently need more anesthetic than most, and they miss an area. One word: Cauterization. It felt like somebody plugged a 9 volt battery onto one of my boys: electric shooting pain.
2. Have someone drive you there and back, and make sure that someone knows on the way back NOT to drive like he's in a rally car race.
3. Follow the instruction for pre-op. If they say shave the area, shave the friggin area. You really don't want some grumpy bitch in scrubs taking a hoe to your private parts, the one who did mine apparently thought she was working in the friggin garden or scraping of her windshield.
4. Be on time, or the above nurse will be even grumpier.
5. Continually remind yourself the following: "My wife pushed a friggin canteloupe sized head out of her crotch, this is the least I can do" for me I thought "C-section". Of course this won't help with the pain, but it will distract you temporarily.
6. Afterward, peas and (surprisingly) frozen bagged cooked pasta are your best friend. Put them on, keep them on, just do it, the next day you'll thank me.
7. Don't sit on your ass all day afterwards it will just make it worse. Get up and walk around, not too too much, but the boys need their adjustments and exercise.

I swear to everything that's unholy, if I have a shaver handy and I see that nurse... she's gettin' it right back. Apparently once you're 50ish you can completely forget caring for the patient and just treat them like they have no pain receptors. I'm pretty sure the shaving will bug me longer than the incision.

The weight of things

I haven't been posting much this week, I seem to be otherwise distracted with every day issues: in my house, bank account, car, at work. At some time in the last 3 months I got severely behind in my bills and every time I turn around some is demanding I pay them an exhorbitant amount to continue service of some sort.

I'm working on streamlining my bills, I just signed up for Vonage Voip, which will save me $30+ a month in phone bills. I was paying $50 a month to the big T for almost nothing: about $7 worth of long distance and call display. Besides, the high speed connection is sitting there doing nothing for 80% of the day, so I might as well put it to work.

I have this car, it runs but not great, it needs work and I can't afford fixing it, and I can't afford a new car yet, probably not until Dec/Jan. The strut mounts make a racket when I'm hitting cracks in the road, and I think it needs new shocks, oh and the transmission thing is still there lurking waiting to happen again even though right now it seems to be ok. I had to plug the TCC back in because it was turning my 30 mpg car into a 22 mpg car. The next tank after plugging it back in I got an extra 80 kms on the tank!!

The house is fine, but I have to get around to mopping, crack filling, and painting the cement floor so we can move more of X-man's toys down there, HOPEfully this will happen this weekend.

That's the shit, and oh yeah one of these days I am going to create a gallery of pictures of the youngest and quickly growing oldest in my family for all to see. One of these days.

Job Distorted Personality

I swear, I've been changed permanently by this line of work. I used to be honest, straightforward, friendly, compassionate, and had empathy for people. I used to go out of my way, introduce myself, get to know people in my neighbourhood.

Now I avoid peoples gazes, I feel uncomfortable in rooms where I know a small proportion of the occupants. I don't go out of my way if someone needs a hand, I usually find an excuse to not be bothered. I'm "too busy" to do things that I could find the time to do. I've de-humanized myself when it comes to human interaction, and I blame tech support.

In tech support you are trained to act all sweet as pie on the phone and when you do it for long enough you come off as sincere. The instant the phone hits the cradle the muttering and ranting usually starts. In my mind I think it all leads to a distaste for people in general and a low opinion of humankind, because you talk to people everyday. I find most times by the time I get home I just want to hide out in my computer room away from people.

You can't escape in the city. You can't walk out into the field and sit and stare and de-stress. The noise follows you home, things are constantly interacting with you, things that need your attention, things that annoy the shit out of you. Then you get home and the kids are in there, and the wife, and the dog, and the dishes and the garbage and the fuckin shit you need to do in the yard.

I don't know if this is the same as every other job, I suppose you get jaded and impersonalized and untrusting too, I just know from my own experience with 6+ years in tech support. Maybe it's time to look for something else to do?

20 days

20 days, my friends

20 days until I'm officially out of the breeding pool.

I told my wife it was a little depressing:

Her: "Why?"

Me: "Oh, it's just so final"

Her: "Well there's always adoption"

Me: "Adoption is so expensive, It's a hell of a lot cheaper to release a few hundred sperm"

I know in the end it will be better, at least after a couple months when the swimmers have all expired.

Came and went with a whimper

So the digs hit 10,000 visitors last night, I'm on towards a new era just like the last era!

Appropriately it was someone searching for "Jenny turpish slapped me" that moved me into the 5 digits. There also has been a lot of traffic lately of people looking for blogpatrol information, it seems they disappeared again there for a bit, as they seem apt to do.

Comments and regular visitors has slowed to a trickle, as I think has happened on many blogs out there. I see that Jen Lars has packed up shop, she'll be missed by the lecherous old men that hung out hoping to one day see a picture of her. Perhaps people are experiencing the same thing I have in the past while: information overload. You can't read blogs and news all day and expect to have your sinapses fire properly after awhile. I used to go home in a constant state of Duhhhh.. Now I read in moderation and my "Duh" has turned in to "Uhmmm... oh yeah!"

This rambling post brought to you by the letters S, U, D, A, F, E and D.

Tuesday quip

Is my chest supposed to make that rattling sound as I breath out ?

Feh

Damn tasty flem coming out when I cough though.

Wail of a weekend

We've had what may be called a cascade effect in our household. About 2 weeks ago Xavier came home from his Grandmas with a cold, she blamed it on school, but this was like 5 days after he had been to preschool. SO of course Amber got the bug, and then Griffin got it and then I ingraciously recieved the present of sinus pain, coughing, headaches, runny nose, all of the wonders that go along with a super cold. I haven't been hit this hard or sick for a good year, so I think it's a nasty new strain that's out.

Wednesday I started feeling the effects, and Griffin and Amber were feeling bad so I took the day off and took them to doctors appts. Griffin was ok, they said it's a virus, but Amber was worse because it was enhanced by asthma so her wheezing and odd voice patterns concerned them, almost to the point of hospitalization. I went back to work on Thursday thinking I was dealing with the cold, but Friday it hit hard and plus the fact everyone else (except Xavier, of course he was clearing up by now) was hacking coughing and crying, I stayed home.

Between friday night and Saturday afternoon we received 22 cm (8 1/2 inches) of snow, completely clogging the streets and making the highways hazardous to drive on. Saturday I couldn't even focus enough to turn on my computer, so shovelling was out of the question. Sunday I shovelled at least the back out so I could get to my car, Xavier had a great time playing with his new shovel and throwing the ball for the dog. He fell down quite a few times, got snow in his face, he's getting better about not freaking about it, so it's getting more fun taking him out.

Last night Griffin couldn't be put in his bed because the congestion in his nose and his cough would wake him up and he would cry. Amber took him out in the living room and stayed there all night with him getting very little sleep, so this morning she kicked me out of bed early so she could attempt to get some sleep. The doctor said that Griffin's problems are compounded because he's teething, so the drool and the cold are combining into a not very happy baby. I feel terrible for him, and Amber but what can you do? You have to wait it out and keep his head elevated, and she has to double her asthma medication.

I'm at about 80%, just have some shit in my lungs that won't leave and my ears are plugged from my sinuses. Now I can only hope this goes away before my gig this friday in Calgary, there really is nothing worse than playing trumpet with a headcold.

My name is Dave and I have a high metabolism

I eat tonnes of food and never gain weight. I eat bad things and never gain weight. I sit around all day and never gain weight. I have a high metabolism and always have, I think I've been at the same weight since I was 21. You may hate me for this, but there are things you may not know.

If I don't eat at certain intervals I lose it, I mean really lose it. I get shaky, I have problems thinking and talking plus I get agitated. If this continues I get more than agitated, I will say things I don't mean, tiny little miniscule things will make me want to kill something. If it's pushed far enough the only thing that would satisfy me would be ripping my own skin off or the entire universe imploding into itself. Death everywhere, death. I'm not kidding. I have had crazy urges to drive sharp knives into my hand when I haven't eaten and something is pissing me off. I would never harm someone else, so usually the hate gets deflected inwards.

If I eat, then all of this will subside within say 10 or 15 minutes. The next 30 minutes or so are spent apologizing to my family for something I did or said. This happened to me the other night when we didn't eat until 8. Xavier brought me back to reality by saying "I don't like you". I was startled, "Why?" I said, he said "You're mad", then I had to explain that "No, I'm not mad, Daddy just gets grumpy when he hasn't eaten for awhile. He doesn't mean it, he just get's grumpy". I realized at that point maybe we should try eating earlier, to avoid the wrath. I keep it under wraps as best I can but apparently sometimes not good enough.

Now I have to go eat something so I can proofread this before posting it.

Whatchoo whatchoo whatchoo want

Ok, so apparently my new car has finally been put on the Toyota Canada website finally.

I have low goals this is what I want and this is what I will pay for it.

Now it's just the waiting game, I have to wait until the fall before we can afford it.

Tuesday quip #3

What would ever make someone want to specialize in Urology? Is it a deep seated need to manipulate/fondle others genitals?

Tuesday quip #2

Countdown to sterilization

And now at last I scream into the wind "No MORE! No MORE!"

Tuesday quip

My dad is 71 this year, I walk out the front door of my house this weekend and he's got an 8' slab of drywall on his back and he's hawling it into our house.

Red light!

Flash light!

Well at least that's what I saw back in December. As I was driving through a yellow light (which by my 20 years of driving told me should have stayed yellow) the instant I entered the intersection the light turned red, and FLASH and FLASH and my heart sunk. Red Light camera. About a month later I received the ticket in the mail, $287.

I remember the instant it turned red I had thought to myself "That was way too short, it should still be yellow". Unfortunately the intersection is quite a ways from where I live so just this week I did some research. As there was nowhere to park I parked in a Transit Parking Only spot and I managed to get a good timing of the light with my cellphone stopwatch after 4 or so tries: 2.5 - 2.8 seconds. I thought "Damn, that's pretty short", and after a timing a couple other intersections it turned out my suspicions were correct. 2 other intersections, same speed limit, pretty much the same traffic and each one was a good 1 second longer than the offending intersection.

I did some research online today and found 2 other sites citing suggested lengths of yellow lights, one even gave length vs size of intersection and the minimum just happens to be about 1 second longer than the offending intersection.

So anyways, I went today to the Law Courts building and pleaded not-guilty, got a trial date in June and I'm gonna fight this motha$#@!er.

Wish me luck

Val-eee Day

My 36th Valentines day is here, it's also the 15th I've spent with my Wife ... well make that 13 since I was away at school for 2 of them, of course I was with her in spirit.

Happy Valentines day everyone!

Happy Hallmark day to the rest of you cynics (I'm also on that side of the fence many days, the materialism that flares up on these holidays makes me sick). Of course growing up a pencil necked pimply geek didn't help with my perspective.

Ramblings

I don't have very much to say these days, and that's not because I don't have much to say, but I can't say it in this venue. Needless to say things in other places fill my time and crowd my concious, not always in good ways.

I would like to send a shout out to my old friend dark Rum who has made a comeback. Ahh... so warm and cosy and full of memories. Good ones that I try to hold in front of the not so good smelly cleaning carpet the next day memories.

One such memory I remember walking from a club downtown, after more than sufficient of amounts of my aforementioned friend, to my room in a house about 22 blocks (long blocks) away. Oh, and I didn't mention that I had also left my leather jacket, my glasses (I was wearing glass contacts ouch!) and my keys (in the jacket) in my friends car who neglected to come back to the club in time for me in my state. I remember an older guy tailing me in a big boat of a car wanting to know if I needed a ride home. Yeah, I was not into that, no sir, the sidewalk was my friend, the people were my enemy and the air was fresh and crisp. Plus I can bet the 18 or so dark rum and coke wouldn't have went well with the interior of his car, or whatever he had planned for me. Lucky for me my roommates were home and let me in after sufficient banging, and my friend came by in the afternoon to drop off my seeing devices, as I am nearly blind without them.

Welcome back old friend, welcome back.

make that a double

Alt Oorgo

Hey so I know I don't post much lately, but if you want to see some of the stuff that I'm finding and mini-posts go to oorgo.stumbleupon.com. I have little time for full posts about my life these days, maybe one of these days I'll catch up.

Unsecure

Low posting this week I've been damn swamped at work and home.

Anyways, you know, people tell you how unsecure cordless phones are, don't they? I heard lots about it when they first came out, and they credit card /banking / any company who deals with sensitive information tells you not to perform transactions over your cordless phone. Well after this week I want to invest extra money in the FS Digital cordless, (full spectrum, it means the signal jumps from frequency to frequency and it is damn difficult to intercept or block).

I bought a set of wireless headphones from XSCargo (cheap, like, $25-30 CDN) for my wife for Christmas, and I finally got around to setting them up this week. The first thing I heard when I was changing frequency was a kid probably 10 or 12 talking to another kid the same age about something, I didn't listen. I fiddled around and voila! another conversation from someone. I think I counted 5 different conversations, all coming through in beautifully clear. Well the next day I figured out what part of the problem was, the transmitter was turning off because I didn't have the tv turned up loud enough.

Now it makes me wonder if I'm transmitting over folks cordless phones (probably older 900 mhz ones). If I am maybe they'll wake up and get into the 21st century. Unless you want someone to know all about your biznezz (and these headsets were a hot item, they had stacks and they went like hotcakes) buy a decent FSDD phone, preferrably 2.4 - 5.8 gHz so you aren't broadcasting your sex life to the neighbourhood.

So apparently the great blonde joke

went really wild, there's a dude (who I only know of from a sitemeter referral) who did some off the cuff programming (apparently bored, if only I should be so talented) and came up with an insane diagram of the path of the joke. It really is doing the rounds... It seems I'm on the tail end of it. That thing pumped like 500 hits in a few days to my blog, something rarely seen. I mean... most people come here searching for such jewels asjeopardy theme song, what does your birthday mean and jenny turpish slapped me.

A thanks to Gir, Snooze Button Dreams and Hitch Magazine for continuing the fun.

Edit: Thought Torrent also has a wicked graph along with a number system and key... this dude did his work. I am 181, if you can pick me out I'm in the upper right-hand corner. 181.. so I am infinity squished inbetween 2 beginnings... how cosmic

Shift work

Ok I know, I know, I have not been posting, yes, all 3 of you readers, I know this to be true, and I apologize. There are a couple of reasons why it's been so damn light lately, and I will go through them. I'm putting in place some vague structure in this chaos and therefore I have to try and be strict with myself. BAD Dave! whoo-psh! ok, not that, that would be more like fun.

As part of my plan to stop procrastinating (Hey check it out, it's almost 2 weeks into the new year and I'm still working on this) I decide to work in shifts. By this I mean I work at work, and I'm home when I'm at home. This may sound simple but there are so many damn distractions at work (via the Intarweb) that I tend to get side-tracked very easily and then work less than enthusiastically throughout the day. Mornings and late in the day are especially bad, I've gotten myself in this routine of slackdom and I seem to enforce it during these times the most. Along with my morning coffee I tend to read my 8 bazillion blogs on bloglines instead of focusing on where I am, at work. Workaholics can never get their minds off work, we procrastinators can never keep our minds there.

Procrastination extends to my home life too, I tend to do what I'm doing right now, go downstairs and do things on the computer. Sometimes I would do almost nothing but surf. Some might say "Hey you deserve it, it's a relaxing end to a busy day", well that would be true if you had a busy fulfilling day, not a busy one full of continual sidestepping and dodging the bullet. For example today I stuck to my guns for probably 80% of the workday and I came home feeling fairly happy, not entirely wholly ready to throttle someone. I believe this is a sign that I'm on the right road.

To sum up, until I can get this down to some kind of science the shift work will continue, perhaps part of the night shift will be blogging? Perhaps. Well with that I must get back to practicing, I have a gig this weekend at a mansion downtown, yeah, pretty cool eh?

Chug chug chug die

Well it has been an interesting holiday season so far, we've gone from anticipation of gifts and all that's Christmas-ish, to happiness and joy at recieving cool or needed things, to swearing and yelling and wanting to blow things up.

The last day of work before Christmas I was driving around and around and around town doing various things, all the time hoping my car wouldn't act up, as it has wont to do when the tranny gets overworked. Sure enough about 10 blocks from home, car full of Wendys and Tim Hortons food and drink, and with Xavier in the back sleeping, the thing chugs to a halt in the left hand turning lane. Usually I can turn it back on, put it in neutral, rev it a bit, or toss it in 2nd and it will get going again. Not today. Today it says "Screw you f@$#er!" whenever I attempt to put it in gear, and thereafter dies.

I pull out the phone to call AMA, all the while being flabbergasted at the amount of people pulling in behind me (I'm in the beginning of the turning lane with my fourway flashers flashing). One effer even honked! Christmas brings out the best in people doesn't it? Anyways I get AMA on the line and after a bit they schedule someone to come pick me and the car up. After a few minutes of eating fries and drinking Coke and listening to Xavier be whiny and full of anxious questions about the car I decide to try it again. Turn key, cautiously put in 2nd and away we go. AMA lady calls me back I said no worries, thanks but don't bother. WHEW.

Later friday night I was talking to my brother-in-law and he suggested it's a commonplace problem in GM vehicles after they're 10 or so years old. It's called a TCC something or other, and it gets dirty, but what you can do is unplug it right at the transmission and it will work fine until I can get it fixed. I highly doubt I'll get it fixed, it apparently takes about 3 hours of work, and at $85 an hour... no. I unplugged it, and the car is running fine like this, on highway trips I'll plug it back in because it definitely will affect my gas mileage at higher speeds. I noticed an extra 500 rpm at 100 km/h, and since I usually travel at 120 km/h on trips that would eat into my pocketbook a little too much.

An early Christmas wish

I don't know how much time I'll have over this Christmas period so I'll wish you all a Merry Christmas now. The new baby has been adding to my time loss, and I've been trying to focus more on work while at work (yes, of course I'm posting from there but never you mind) so I've been posting much less lately, and less actual content.

Merry Christmas to all, and as The Kinks say in Father Christmas:

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin'
While you're drinkin' down your wine

When collection agencies and parking meters collide.

It's almost like a collection agency in a metal box, Smart Parking Meters: Technology that sucks.

On the cool side it will automatically bill your credit card or text message you if your time is up, but on the downside the thing takes a photo of your license plate and sends you a bill in the mail if you didn't pay. Who was the friggin evil genius behind this? If my city installed this there would a rapid increase in vandalism to street meters, I mean, these things had better be bash/bullet/water/fire proof man.

Griffin, things, etc.

Well Griffin came home on Thursday after a few days in the hospital. He was held partly because at first there was some difficulty continuing breathing, but that was resolved, and then because of a bit of jaundice. I personally think the NICU people are so used to dealing with critical and problem babies they over-analyze things, many of the problems he was having would have been solved by just letting him go home (regular feedings, nipple confusion, angry feedings, etc.). And then he failed the carseat test at the very end because he's stubborn and likes to hold up his head so he got tired at the end and lolled forward or something. He's doing splendid now though and really he's a piggy, he will eat as much as you can give him! So much different from Xavier, he took forever to feed and didn't eat as much.

Amber? She's doing great now that she's gotten used to the short sleep cycles, especially since she's had me here to cater to her, feed her, and take care of X-man. That may change on thursday when I go back to work, I hopefully won't come home to a crying wife, screaming child(ren) or one of them gone off to his grandmothers. You never know though, right?

Me? I'm doing ok I guess, freakin' stressed about the money situation, and upcoming doom Christmas. Buying gifts for all these people always freaks me out. If you look back to the December posts of the past years I'm probably even more messed up. At least this Christmas I get my wish: at home, and I've got a 3 year old who is very very excited about the whole thing. That makes it much more fun, really takes me back to when I was young, the excitement, anticipation, the wonderment of seeing Christmas lights, trees, reindeer, all of the stuff. NOW I just wish it would get back to winter here, we went from -20 C to +12 C within 2 or 3 days! Completely insane and in my books, depressing.

Well that's a short short summary of my past 10 (really? 10? Good lord!) days. Other things have floated through my brain, I will have to attempt to retrieve them, or fail miserably and toss them on the pile of neural refuse.

I know this man

I read every post this fellow writes, and many times I feel as if I read my own words, but coming from a more affluent setting and eloquent mouth. His picture obviously isn't real and there's no mention of who he is but I know this man. We even share similar ex-neighbours, perhaps this is some similarity all neighbourhoods have: the stooped man, the hugely obese demanding woman, the destined failure of their relationship and family.

You should also read him and get to know him. Always well written and thoughtful and even sometimes funny.

Sitting Spraying and Steaming

Last night was one I don't wish to re-live any time soon. After work I drove to the Safeway near my home, went in, got various comestibles, came out, as usual, to my car. What wasn't usual was that there was steam coming out from around the hood. I'm thinking "Ok, that's not cool", so I opened the hood, no steam, cloesd the hood, steam. I noticed that the inside of the hood was wet, and I know the car has been leaking a little antifreeze, so I looked underneath and sure enough, a puddle.

I drove to a nearby gas station to fill up, and noticed the steam was getting worse and upon closer observation the dripping was quite obvious. Then as I was leaving the station the "LOW COOLANT" light came on. "Oh fiddle" I said (yeah, ok, right), and headed off to the unfortunately only place open that time of night, Canadian Tire. After 1 1/2 hours of hanging around waiting they tell me my water pump needs replacing, to the tune of $356!! The f@#$ing pump itself only costs $70, but the work involved was over $200, thank you Pontiac for making such an easy to get to water pump.

The first thing that came into my mind was that I couldn't get home, and how was I going to get to work tomorrow, etc. Luckily the guy at the counter lives up by me and offered a ride home, saving me a $15 cab ride. The other positives to this is Amber had a migraine and really needed the extra sleep she got with me taking care of Xavier, and he enjoyed having me home. A negative (other than the $356) is that I still need to fork out money for 2 tires to replace the bald ones on the car. I'm not going for anything extravagant anymore, no sir, gimme used ones for $40 a piece installed and balanced, that'll be fine thank you.

The car was fixed relatively fast and I got to work at 12 just in time for the phones to stop ringing off the hook.

You are Scary

You Are Scary

You even scare scary people sometimes!

I think it was because I made someone cry in the last week. I found this through Your Moosey Fate

Forty mil an' sum whishkey

Tonight's Lotto 6/49 is a tidy 40 million, and of course with this grand sum comes the naysayers etc., telling you it would make more sense to invest the money you spend every week on the Lotto. They also insist to tell you the odds of winning, etc. so you don't get your hopes up just to have them dashed.

Say you’re standing on a football field. You’re blindfolded and holding a pin. A friend has released an ant on the field. Your chance of piercing that ant with your pin is about the same as winning a Lotto 6/49 jackpot. One in 14 million. Not exactly a sure bet.

Of course (this) goes out the window if you didn’t join the office lottery pool – and you’re the only one who shows up for work the day after the numbers are drawn.

I'm up for it, hell even if I don't win at least it will get some endorphins goin' with the excitement of the remote possibility. Like it's been said "You never know...".

Time Capsule

I was digging around on the Intarveb today and realized "Hey! I can export posts from LiveJournal! Kick freakin' Ass!" (ok, I wasn't entirely that excited).

So that's what I did, you may notice a new category (if'n you click on Posts by Category), it's called Family, and I put a bunch of the posts about X-man in there, most of them are from before he was born, or when he was in the hospital.

It's really neat (for lack of a better word) to look back at those old posts, and realize that I've been blogging since July 17th, 2002. That's wild, over 3 years of blathering. What really is cool though, is reading about my world at the time, and I can actually recall and feel how stressful and crazy and generally shitty it was. I've come a long ways, I mean now I actually use Titles/Subjects in my posts! I definitely don't want to go back.

If you want a time capsule of my beginnings as a blogger check it out here. I warn you though... it ain't pretty but it is thoughtful..

Karma's catchin' up to ya

I don't know exactly what I did, but ever since Friday morning my nickname should be changed to "F$#@up Dave" at work. I think about 3 or 4 things have come to light (not really that major by themselves but put together, not that great) and I'm in the shitter. Or at least in my own personal shitter, my boss hasn't performed a smackdown yet.

I'm my own worst critic though, I really hate making mistakes, any mistakes. I'm also not very forgiving, I tend to beat myself up for things; weeks afterwards I'll remember something and go "Stupid! Stupid!". Yeah it's my own brand of derangement.

I am just hoping that this trend is over and I can get back to the normal weirdness. I sometimes get odd feelings, I deem them to be futuristic (mostly because I like to believe I'm a seer) and I'm having some this week. It's like somethings going to shift and thrust me into another change. I can feel a great amount of work coming, and a great amount of change, not bad I don't think, just different, possibly even good. Once again, my own lunacy kicking in.

Welcome Squiddy!

Hey all three of you, head on over to the soon-to-be blossoming Squidblog.

He's a buddy from a hellofalongtimeago who started to blog again and was just recently welcomed into the Munuvian gang. We are becoming quite the force, let me tell you.

Be kind, he's not at 100% yet

Standing strong at 396

lol... apparently the TTLB Community of Canadian Blogs has been up for a while, and I'm #396 out of 413, lowered 20 since my inception into the community. Kick ASS. YEEEAAaaa... whatever. It doesn't matter, what does matter are all those great folk coming to my site searching for t33ns in p*nties and "J3nny Turpish Slapped me" and the Je*pardy theme s*ng, ok yeah no, you won't really find that here.

Hey so damn am I busy lately, I have (I believe) every weekend booked up until New Years. It's freakin' nuts. The only problem is, the band I've been getting subs for is getting a little antsie about having lots of trumpet subs. I kind of agree, you need a regular lineup to sound good, and to rehearse. With that though, there are some problems with getting subs (or another trumpet player), but I won't go into that. bad charts I believe there will come a time soon when I will have to choose one or the other, because there are 2 full time latin clubs with live bands, so there are much more gigs available.

Oh, and another thing of interest, this weekend will mark the 3rd week in a row that I haven't given a thought to playing games on my computer. 3 weeks.

If you didn't notice

Not a hell of a lot is going on these days in my life. Here are a couple things of interest though:

Sunday I was allowed blessed sleep after Saturdays gig, my wife and kid went to IKEA with her cousin for a few hours. I got up at 12:30, drank a pot of coffee, listened to wacky Steve Lacy and Steve Turre jazz. Vespers (Steve Lacy) is such an odd cd, beautiful but creepy and unsettling, with lyrics from Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova. Stuff like "I do not believe" and "Multidimensional" I'm sure have changed me, as they keep coming into my mind now and then. Rhythm Within (Steve Turre) is great, groovy latin/african jazz mixed with insanely good musicians.

After the caffeine took effect (some 2 hours later) I had enough reminiscing and decided to go out and work in the yard. Of course it was at that time they came home and my work was delayed. That's ok though, I love playing with Xavier, although he's a bit of a whiny brat when he's been around his cousins very much, they are not a good influence. Once he went for his nap I was able to go work, and after he woke up he came and helped me shovel topsoil, which was pretty cute.

Any day now (hopefully) my TMCM t-shirt will be in the mail. I'm pretty excited, and glad to help out a talented comic guy such as Shannon.

Oh and hey, check it out Sitemeter is at a creepy evile number Why is it that Blogpatrol has already lagged behind by 36 visitors even after I evened them out a few days ago?

X-man is Excited

Xavier is excited, very excited, that we're having another baby. Every day he says "I love you baby" or "I want to kiss baby" to mommy, he's pretty sure it's a baby girl.

He also has been thinking a lot about baby and what he/she can or cannot do:

Xavier: Baby can play with trucks right mommy?
Mommy: Yes, baby can play with trucks. (these are the big dumptrucks etc. by Little People).


Xavier: (Pointing at mommy's stomach) That's not all Mommy's tummy.
Mommy: No, you're right, that's not all Mommy's tummy.

Xavier: Baby can't have emems right mommy?
Mommy: No, Baby can't have M&Ms, that's right. (of course, he wants all the M&Ms)

(Mommy just coming out of the shower)
Xavier: Baby in there? (squats down to look, hoping he can see baby)
Mommy: Yes, baby in there but you can't see baby. (trying hard not to die laughing)

Crack snap crunch

Yesterday was my chiro visit, and after much crunching popping cracking sounds and some pain he basically insinuated that I should have came to him a lot earlier as my neck is pretty f$#@ed up. These are the things that I like to hear: "when these things are inflamed for long periods of time, if not properly monitored can turn into arthritis", and "It looks like some of the segments haven't moved in quite a long time". F#$@, yippity doodle doo.

Oh the wonders of the mid-thirties.

So in other words it looks like I'm going to be visiting him regularly for quite a while. On the bright side the remainder billing (after AHC) is paid for by my companies insurance plan, so I don't have to go into debt yet.

Release

You know, after re-reading that last post you would think the world was ending. It's not, in fact my part of the world was bright and sunny all weekend. I took the opportunity to get some long awaited yardwork done and I had a couple gigs, friday and saturday on top of it.

My father-in-law (I guess you would call him stepfather-in-law) was gracious in loading up his half tonne with topsoil Saturday morning. Although groggy and with poorly veiled crabbiness I and he shovelled the dirt into a wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow that I then wheeled around to dump onto several locations of our yard. After more coffee and some lunch I put the kid to bed and went out to rake... yippee, and then later mow.. woohoo. Later was the much required rubdown with Celadin (I think that's what it's called), and today is my next Chiropractor appointment, thank God.

So even though I worked my ass off and I'm a hurtin' unit (wow, that's an 80's saying), my spirits seems to have lifted. Some of the stuff I have been putting off for a long time has become mostly accomplished, and there actually may be an end in sight to the final grade drama. We'll see though, as I though I had it finished years ago, but every year they find something else that isn't up to code. I'm noticeably more relaxed and happy, I even went to a mall on Sunday and wasn't ready to stab someone by the time we left.

Uninspired

I am less than uninspired these days, and not just about blogging, but about most things. Here's an example: I actually spent the last 2 nights watching sitcoms with my wife instead of practicing/playing games/ etc. SITCOMS I tells ya.

frig

Next thing you know I'll be watching sports matches and swearing at the players for stupid moves.

Oh and by the way

Happy Birthday Ted.

We sometimes rarely agree (figure that one out), but it's usually a fun exchange of words.

A Laboured post

Ok so that's probably the cheesiest title I've chosen so far for a post, but whatever, I never said I was a creative genius.

So my weekend was pretty uneventful, or at least half of it was. Saturday we had a nice break, the mother-in-law took X-man for the day, along with Ambers 3 nephews they went to Galaxyland and rode rides, etc. apparently a lot of fun, I'm just glad I wasn't there. 4 screaming kids and screaming rides, and blaring music, and the smells of indoor carnaval... yech. We took the opportunity to finish cleaning the carpets in the upstairs, it's amazing how much difference it can make when you do that every once in awhile, it smells so much fresher and relaxing.

Sunday night I washed a couple loads of laundry, the first had a little pillow from the couch plus some other stuff to wash in cold water, etc. The second load I threw in had all my darks for the week, all of them. I went into the computer room downstairs to do stuff... and things... and after awhile noticed that the washer sounded weird, it was speeding up to try and spin, but then clicking and restarting another attempt to get up to speed, "oh fuddle duddle" I said (yeah sure) and went to investigate. It seemed that it hadn't pumped out the water from the wash portion of the session, and it was failing at pumping out during the spin too. Great, just great. So I pull probably 75 lbs of laundry (of course soaking wet) out of the washer, and run it to the bathtub (luckily the floor isn't finished so there's no carpet to soak downstairs).

Monday my wife decides to call my parents, I talk to my Dad about it and he says it's probably not worth fixing if it's to do with the motor/agitator etc., BUT that they would buy us a new washer! Wicked! Great! Monday night we went over to the mother-in-laws to wash clothes etc., got home about midnight.

Tuesday I thought that I better open up the machine to make sure it's not something stupid like a plugged hose or that, I would hate to make my parents shovel out $500+ if there really's nothing wrong. My friend Dan (who I'd link to, but he doesn't have a blog anymore) found a great site Acme How To that gives you detailed instructions on how to take the cabinet apart and other things. I got the thing apart, pulled out the pump, looked at it and there was some polyester jamming up the motor, pulled off the shield and the jam, put it all back together, cabinet back on, hooked up the hoses, pushed it back into place. I'm all like "Yeah! Yeah! No cost, I fixed it, alright, I'm the man, I rock, kick ass!" and then I see the drain pump hose, I bend it to go into the drain, and SNAP the F@#$ing thing breaks! On the lighter side this new hose is only $17 whereas the pump was $150.

Less is more or more or less?

Ok as promised... here are a couple of pictures... with and without beard.

Here's me playing with beard

Click this

Here's me playing with no beard... just goatee and really short hair

Now click this

This may be a better one

Oh, and there's that pick on the right of me w/ X-man and my beard... dunno... I know I can't wait for my hair to grow out.

Good F#$*ing God, is this turning into a Hair Blog ... F#$(! I even have the f@$*ing ads to go along with it (Hair Nets, only 2 pills a day, etc.)

Oh by the way the popups seem to look like shit in IE so get on the bandwagon and switch to Firefox ..... bitch

Delayed response to the damage

I've been putting off posting anything about the New Orleans and Katrina hurricane disaster, but I decided to say a couple things.

It overwhelms me the madness, chaos, death and suffering that this act of nature has caused, and I cannot imagine how the folks down there feel or how they are coping with it. I can only offer my hopes and prayers that things will turn out better , much better, and very very soon.

On one side I feel humbled and small next to the power that created the destruction, we humans are mere gnats buzzing around a stagnant pond, one big gust comes up and we're blown away. Gnats are tough to wipe out though, although their lives are short every year they come back in force. Humanity is tough, we come back, and we stick around.

On the other side it seems from my perspective (albeit limited) that the disaster efforts for the big tsunami that recently hit were more well organized, funded and quicker in execution. The supposed richest country in the world hit once again unprepared and naive. Much like the villagers in the story "The Little Boy who cried Wolf", there were those who had heard the warnings so many times before about annihilation, and after living through it figured they could once again weather the storm. I often think the US gov'ts delayed response to action was also linked to them being taken completely by surprise by the magnitude of the disaster. It angers me somewhat that once again the US gov't is blindsided by disaster.

Anyways, I came across a great link to FEMA from The Accordion Guys blog, it suggests sending money, not items, and it gives a good list of US volunteer agencies for Disaster Relief. I can't decide where to send money, but the Canadian Red Cross seems like a good place to start. I have very little to give, as you all might know, but every little bit helps.

[update] Looks like the online donation must be mega busy for Canadian Red Cross, perhaps 2 am would be a good time to try.

Narcissism

In a fleeting blast of narcissistic glory I threw a "Best of Me" section to my sidebar. I also deposited a few of my favorite posts, ones I perceived stood out and perhaps showed gears working upstairs in this clatterhouse of a brain I have.

Maybe it was in celebration of my 4620th visitor! Naw, it was just to took my own horn gahdammit! TOOT friggin TOOT!

[resume your regular blogreading now]

ohandifyouthinkofsomeotherpoststhatdeserverecognitionletmeknowiwillthrowthemovertheretoo

Requesting anti-tank support!

So it's the first day of my 5 days off... I've probably killed enough people and died enough times in Battlefield 1942 to fill a medium sized cemetary, but I've also gotten other things accomplished. We're getting X-man's room ready for his toddler bed, cleaning up stuff that should have been done ages ago, and later I'm going to start working on the yard... yikes. Didn't win that lottery, stupid lottery gods...

Posting will be sparce (as it's been lately anyways).

Wheeeee!

Oh man oh man, it's the last 10 minutes of my Friday work day, and it's almost the start of my week off.

I'm excited, oh yeah I almost forgot, I'm scheduled to win the 14 mil lottery tomorrow too, so that will be cool.

The down side to the upcoming week is the foreseen backpain from digging dirt ... raking dirt... and lifting dirt.. that I forsee in the near future.

Hey so I was going to post a before and after picture (beard/goatee) but all the ones I took I hated. I think that may mean I really don't like the after, I saw some better pics of me before, maybe I'll put those up. Of course that would be entirely narcisitic of me though wouldn't it?

Have I mentioned I love fridays at work? We usually have a drink (rye/coke) at around 3, sometimes 2, and bullshit for awhile. Good times

Less hair but not hairless

Friday I finally had enough of this bad haircut I've had for the past month so I went back to the salon where I got it cut last and got someone else to do it. They did a fine enough job but because it was not too too long, it's now very short (we're talking army short). I've also been wanting to shave my beard down to the way it used to be, just a thin goatee so I decided what a perfect time to do it, one hour before my gig Friday. Yeah, great. So 15 seconds after finishing I regret it, terribly, I'm stomping around the house grumbling "F#$K! I F$#King hate this!" etc..

It seems my beard gave me some definition for my jaw so I might as well have taken an eraser to my jawline, it's almost gone. Oh, and apparently my face has filled out more with age but at the same time with less hair I look younger, maybe 18 maybe 20. Perhaps I need to worry more and get more wrinkles then I'll look my age. It may be possible but I highly doubt it.

On the plus side not many people have laughed and pointed fingers, I say not many because my boss still can't quite get over how difficult I look. One of my co-workers said I look 14, yeah, thanks. People on the street seem to react better to the beardless Dave, especially women. Maybe I don't look like some snotty artsy guy who is going to tell them everything they're doing wrong, maybe the look is softer, friendlier, or maybe some people just have an aversion to beards, or specifically the modified Abe Lincoln.

Thoughts? Beards? Beardless? Fu Manchu? Goatee? Fuzzy stubble? Hairless?

Cursed by the Goooooogle

I have been cursed by the google ad gods.
All I see now are ads about blogs
Tried all I can, screwed with some things
Now I'm writing a pathetic limerick that doesn't even work.

[voice of good] The village store is nearly out of food! [whisper] deaaath

Oh I'm excited, the sequel of one of my favorite games ever is coming out in Sept 27 or Oct 14th..

If you haven't seen them yet, here are some screenshots of Black and White 2. I want to have this monkey as a creature. He looks creepy but cool.

barely contained exuberance

Caca Fracas

Ok I don't know if you guys have heard about this, and yeah, ok I may be way behind in the world (what else is new). It's a story about an internet mob that created itself to destroy a young woman's reputation for simply not cleaning up after her dog in a subway in Korea.

Online discussion groups crackled with chatter about every shred of the woman's life that could be found, and with debate over whether the Internet mob had gone too far. The incident became national news in South Korea and even was discussed in Sunday sermons in Korean churches in the Washington area.

Pure madness, but entirely believable, especially when you look at the size of the blog mobs that are out there. What would happen if someone did something that mu.nu folks didn't agree with as a whole... would they rise up, gang up and smackdown that person? Probably. Would they go to the extent of finding out everything about that person, where they lived, history of their life, sexual practices, etc.? Who knows, people act strangely when in large groups, and when all their peers are egging them on and ranting and raving. Look at the madness around the mobs for/against the braindead lady whose husband wanted to end life support and starve her to death. (purposefully leaving out name) That was nuts!

Something to ponder when you are lashing out in a fit of crazed lunacy about someone spitting on the sidewalk, or forgetting to zip up their fly, or picking their nose in their car, or not flushing the toilet. All social norms yes, but to what extent should we enforce them or feel entitled to enforce them?

Loooong Weekend

Things that can make your long weekend seem extra long:

1. Weddings
2. Inlaws
3. Family pictures taken outdoors

Ok so we were dragged invited to a wedding which took place outdoors on a farm on Saturday about 45 minutes out of Grande Prairie. We were bribed enticed there by the fact Ambers mom booked us a room with a king size bed and a jacuzzi, but the drawbacks of course filled up a list of it's own:

1. We couldn't afford the gas, the dog kennel, the present, etc.
2. We couldn't actually get a dog kennel booked for Ajax, since it was last minute and it was the long weekend
3. It's on a damn farm in the middle of nowhere.. with inlaws

The drive was fine, nice weather, Xavier was very good, he's a good traveller because everything is exciting to him, clouds, hay bales, cows. The car ran perfectly fine, other than the leak we thought we had fixed in the AC is not fixed, so the condensation leaks into the passenger seat, Amber gets wet feet.

The bride was beautiful, the dress was ridiculous though, here they are on a farm where there's grass and mud and cow dung in some places and she's got a train(sp?).. YEah, that's what you want, something draggin around behind you..in the aforementioned places. Oh but they had Corona so that brought them up in my books, but then they made you pay for it so... neutrality it is.

Weather was nice, cloudy but no rain for the wedding day, sunny and hot the next day for the family pick chores (yeeehaw! We is city slickers but we is on tha fahm! Weehoo!). The unfortunate thing about Ambers family is they are all fair skinned, so ... yeah, sunburn city. Stupid people had a 9 month old out unprotected for 2 hours, poor baby.

The best thing about the whole trip was spending time with MY family. We don't have many days where we spend that much time together, so that was nice. OH yeah and making her cousin uncomfortable (the one that's feuding with her), that is always fun.

Loonie linky-loo

Hey, so , yeah, ok I have nothing to post today but I thought I'd throw up some webpages that peeked my interest.

Here's something for all you fans who really get more out of music. Make it real personal, make it really move you, get an Audi-Oh addon to your iPod. I... I'm speechless.

Along the same vein, iPod advertising has been banned from the University of Washington, who has signed an enslavement agreement to thrust Napster and Dell's crappy mp3 player down students throats. If I remember my university days right, it will backfire on Napster. University students are historically not as gullible to advertising plugs, they also research things and think a little more than your average Jill/Joe. As if Napster and Dell didn't have a bad enough rep already.

Oh, and this made me hungry just looking at it:
egg and muffin toaster

Oh yeah, and Pam from Beetroot just gave me this one: My Dream has Finally Come True. Ain't it so true.

92 souls in the roll

Well what the... according to Who Links to Me there are 92 people with me on their blogroll. 92? Hmmm that's gotta be wrong, unless my munuvian relatives have me added.. very odd though. Unfortunately when I try to search blogrolling it says 0, so... no help there.

Oh, hey, and on other non related subjects, how about that Blue Screen of Death.

Stumble.. trip ... stagger

Ok so my posts recently have been lame, and uninspired, that's not surprising, because that's kind of how I feel these days.

One neat thing I've found (ala Dan is Stumbleupon. It's an extension for Firefox, and it's basically a community of net surfers etc. who find sites they find interesting, rate them and then give reviews. It's definitely addicting and can be quite fun. You sign up, then specify the type of sites you want to stumble... upon.

Anyways, here's the link, check it

Masterpiece! I swear!

X-man went into on a painting rampage, it's the first time he's finger painted anything that resembles anything, and he was excited to do it. They are both apparently airplanes, although you can definitely see it in the second one. I so proud beam.

Wait 5 minutes

I'm pretty observant of things at most times, and I seem to have a knack for seeing trends, even if I'm a little behind. This week I've been coming to work about 5 or 10 minutes earlier than usual, and I've found the traffic and drivers are much different.

At my old time I swear to God that a high percentage of drivers drive exactly the speed limit, or lower. Whereas this week I clipped along at 10-20 kph over the speed limit, along with probably 40% of the people on the road, it was refreshing.

Maybe I'll start coming to work a little early from now on

Or at least for tomorrow, I have Thurs and Fri off: thursday is my birthday, friday is a day to make the weekend longer.

Landmark

I thought I'd get in on the action (cause I like free things and prizes...) Jen is having a 200,000 visitor landmark party (sheesh... look at my counter... lol) and I wanna win tha prize waaaaa.

-Evil Dave

Piss off

I ran across this great post ala RP, it's a letter from London to the kind folks who bombed them and killed/injured their people.

I think it really shows the Briton spirit... they really have seen it all, damn, their bloody city was bombed to the ground in WWII by the Germans.

Mental

Hey look! I'm a little more screwed in the head than I thought! Woot!

I found this Personality Disorder Test via Ogre's View. Apparently I'm in danger of being someone who wants to be the centre of attention, but also wants to hide in a corner so everyone will leave them alone. Oh, and then avoid trying difficult things because I might fail.

A sad moment

Sadly just now I deleted Sanitys-edge.com from my blogroll.

Come back soon Paul.

Birthday present

This year instead of buying myself a present, I get the joy of picking out a new tv. Oh joy it is. The old one reminds me of the 20 year old Zenith we had on the farm, where everything was a neat variant of pink and the greens are blue, the blues are purple... etc. Luckily now a replacement is 1/2 the price of the original, but god, I really don't wanna shell out the $300 CDN +tax for something I rarely watch.

What I REALLY want to spend the money on is this Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT... but that's another story.

This time of the year always seems to suck, so many things I want to do and no effin cash.

*update*
Well I spent more money than I planned, the flatscreen model of the tv was available for a deal, and then of course there's an environment levy of $25 that you pay on top... and $15 extra for 3 year extended warranty, grand total $427... yikes. Now no toys for Dave for many months... feh.

the jcb song

I was over at Geekward Ho! and she pointed to this wonderful music video called the jcb song". You have to go watch it, it's so simplistic yet tastefully done, and reminds me so much of riding on my dad's tractor on the farm when I was little.

Especially the line about the engine vibrating so hard it made his bum numb.

Childhood Mememememe

Five Things I Miss From My Childhood

1. The Farm. I whined, complained, bitched etc. when I lived on the farm about how it was boring, nothing to do, and then when there was stuff to do there was TOO much stuff to do. Now I miss the solitude, the quiet, the nature, farm animals, and not having neighbors breathing down my neck because I have something they don't like the look of in my back yard. If ever I were to come into mega money I would move to an acreage, I need more room than these claustrophobia inducing city lots.

2. Our Piano. I used to spend hours on my parents upright piano ever week, begrudgingly practicing my scales and etudes, and then later in life composing songs. We don't have a piano yet, just a little keyboard and it isn't the same. There's something about the feel of the wood, the ivory (it was old so it was real elephant tusk) and the resonance of the strings of a real piano, it inspires all by itself even if not perfectly in tune.

3. Great Neighbors. There were two houses of French people who lived within walking distance, one a retired couple and the other one was Mrs. Parkinson who had long outlived her husband. When I was a kid I regularly visted both, they were very nice people who I tagged along with around their yard/house, and of course they usually gave me chocolate bars. At Christmas time our family would go carolling to their houses and most times we'd go in for hot tea or hot chocolate and treats, it was nice. There was also a Ukrainian family who lived about a mile off named the Popowich's, we would sometimes go over for coffee and not 5 minutes after sitting down the entire table would be covered with food, amazing food.

4. Innocence. I had unwaivering confidence in everything my church / parents thought, I believed everything strongly and unquestioning. Somewhere along the way I started questioning and now things aren't so clear, and I see things I never ever wanted to see. People also aren't as nice as I originally percieved.

5. Family get-togethers Every year many times a year we would take the trek down to southern Saskatchewan for family reunions/weddings/etc. We'd have sing-alongs, campfires, potlucks and tours driving through the country.

Wow, that was harder than I thought it would be.

The rules:

Remove the #1 item from the following list, bump everyone up one place and add your blog’s name in the #5 spot. You need to actually link to each of the blogs for the link-whorage aspect of this fiendish meme to kick in.

Note-It Posts

Eat The Lettuce

Prochein Amy

Rocket Jones

Oorgo Blog

Next, select four unsuspecting victims, list and link to them.

Pam

Id's Cage

Dan

Jaime

Wet weekend

My car is not quite so lucky though.

Last summer the inside of my car smelled mildly like a swamp or really dirty feet, water had gotten into the footwell in the back seat and had been sitting there for awhile (the mess and crap in the back seat hid it from view for quite awhile). Dad and I found a portion of the weather stripping that had become unstuck and affixed it back into place, all fixed right? No.

Over the weekend in the hard rain I noticed it once again had gotten wet in the back seat, no where but in the foot well. F$#@! THAT means that the car has rusted or been punctured underneath and is leaking water up into the car. I understand that the car is 12 years old, but it must last us at least another year or so until I can work up the means to dig myself into a car loan/lease.

We're off to my sisters on the second weekend of July, my parents will also be there visiting. My Dad is bringing some break parts for the car, hopefully we can get a piece of sheet metal and plug up the friggin hole in the flooring. This car and my bank account would be both be in the garbage if it wasn't for my Dad.

The past is now

Available! You can go back in time to the early years of my blog!
Bore yourself to tears with the drivel that is my inanity!
You know you want it!
It's a great substitute for sleeping pills, better than counting fleas or cat hair, it's even better than watching reruns of Martha Stewart!

Hey, but seriously, my posts are all restored, all the way back to Jan 2004, something like 213 posts in total. Thanks to Pixy at mu.nu.

Now get reading there are gems there underneath the dog poo.

Blogger burnout ?

I was reading todays wilwheatondotnet and he linked to Tony Pierce's "how to tell you are experiencing blogger burnout".

Lately I've been experiencing #6, concerning myself with hits, popularity and such. Yeah, it's dumb, and I admit it, why does one do it? I have no idea, maybe it's when you start typing as if you are speaking to other people instead of writing? I am a horrible public speaker, so I can see how that would translate badly. Does it really matter? Hell no, why am I posting about it? Cause it popped into my 'ead.

I've had some of the other ones too, but not to a great extent, although #7 is haunting me some too... but it kind of goes with #6. "when you believe the lie that what you think doesn't matter." Getting caught up in a popularity contest also tends to make you believe if people don't comment and visit that what you say doesn't matter. Hand in hand in my head.

Miscellaneous stuff

TTLB Ecosystem - I couldn't wait for the dang thing to change my URL (mostly because it didn't seem to be working no matter what I tried), so I added oorgo.mu.nu as a new blog. We'll see how that goes.

Traffic - I'm still getting mostly hits on a post I did about Gurmant Grewal, and it almost seems I've lost actual hits, people reading the blog. Is that because it's almost summer and blog traffic is lower? Is it because I said some shit that pissed a bunch of people off and they stopped reading? Or is it just because I don't post about interesting stuff anymore... not that I ever did. OR is it because I whine and complain about how bad my blogging is? Comments, feedback, tripe welcome.

38 d to 36 y

Not that I think anyone who frequents this place has money to throw around, and I'm not blegging (a new term I learned today from Jen) but my birthday is coming in mid July and I just thought I'd pass on some things I would be pleasantly surprised to receive if you're so inclined.

Oh and if you've noticed I've done some housecleaning and my sidebar looks more logical... and I added a plug I received from blog extraordinaire RP.

Family on the Foci

For the people not pouring over search engine results for Gurmant Grewal or Evangeline Lily:
I realize I'm lapsing in my proud father duties, as I have failed to notify people of the impending expansion of my immediate family.

Amber is due early Dec. so that puts the pregnancy at 11 wks. It's a little stressful to me, because of past complications, but I'm getting more excited the further we progress. Unfortunately she's not feeling all that hot, afternoon sickness, headaches, and some back pain if she over stresses herself. I'm just hoping it doesn't turn into a whole swack of bedrest and such like the last two times.

As for gender, I'm not sure, and it really doesn't matter one bit, but I have a feeling it's a girl. Her mom is already buying boys clothes, it's probably because everyone in the family has been having boys. Just to spite her I hope it's a girl.

Wake up, medicate again

So I grabbed the new Thornley album "Come Again" on the weekend... and I'm not sorry to say I can't stop listening to it. It's really good. Ian Thornley is originally from the band "Big Wreck" which I also wholeheartedly dug, and was sad when they broke up. Sure you say it's been on the radio for quite a while (here in Canada anyways), but the songs just don't seem to get old, the melodies, chord structures, and contrast between sections of the album make me want to play it over and over.

I don't usually write reviews for albums because hey I just don't find ones worth shouting about, but this one deserves all the cudos and a couple of jugs of beer. The only downside I find with the album, is when it's playing in my car I tend to speed, and that gets me into trouble.

*update* Damn, you have to check out the song "Keep a Good Man Down", they have a media player on their website that lets you scroll through all the songs on the album.. and high quality playback too!

Rocket ship!

X-man always amazes me, I know I've said this before but he does, he's about 30 months old now and his grasp of English is growing daily.

He was sitting at the kitchen table the other day and we had the following conversation:

*sound of airplane going by*
X: *ponders* What's that? Oh, airplane.
D: That's right, an airplane.
X: *pause* No, a rocket ship.
D: You think it's a rocket ship instead?
X: Yes
D: Where do you think it's going? To another planet?
X: Planet?
D: Right, like Mars or the Moon.
X: Rocket ship to the Moon!
D: *trying not to laugh* That's great! Would you like to go on a rocket ship to the moon some day?
X: (exuberantly) Yes!
D: I'm sure you will some day buddy.

Ain't that a kick in the teeth

Every once in awhile everyone needs a good kick in the teeth

That's the lesson learned at last night's Jazz jam at the Yardbird Suite, that and I am rusty, very rusty. I got up and played a couple of songs with some young guys and an older bass player, it was fun, but wow I used to fly over chord changes that I now stumble upon. A large portion of the problem lies with me not being relaxed, nerves taking over and brain getting in the way of playing. I'm sure it will be better next tuesday, as I'm gonna be a regular until the summer season is over. That's part of that previous post about mid-life crisis and the notice of non-compliance I gave myself a few days ago.

The oddest thing happened last night though, apparently without my knowledge I was a part of a convergence of have-beens (people that have been in the music seen here). Guys I went to school with 10 years ago and haven't seen since appeared out of nowhere, and locals that rarely come out slid out of the woodwork. It was overall a good time and fun experience.

A good friend was there that I haven't seen in 10 years. We went to St. FX together and drank together, plus he played in my recital. He has changed quite a bit for the better, it seems. He used to be dark, negative and jaded about so many things including music and the scene. Perhaps he has found an awakening while working on his Masters down in the US. It's good to see, I like to see people change for the better, and for the "happier".

*Oh, on the downside one of my new trees broke a branch in the wind this morning, so we have to prune it

Constructive weekend

It's interesting how when my parents show up things start happening. They have this unbelievable ability to get things done, and inspire you to get things done also. At 70ish my Dad is just starting to have just a little bit more energy than myself, a few years ago he had well over double the stamina and willpower.

Sat. he fixed my car, it needed new bearings and the brakes were sticking a bit too. Sun we tuned up the lawnmower, went shopping for trees for the front lawn, found a couple nice ones, a weeping birch, and an ornamental crabapple. Monday we talked my stepfather-in-law to take us back to Hole's Greenhouse to pick them up in his truck. We planted them in the cold rain, of course my Dad did most of the digging. We've been wanting trees for as long as we've been living in the house (about 9 years), in a few years they should shield our south facing windows from the summer sun.

Wow... this post just sort of fizzled, maybe I'll put something up later when I'm less friggin tired.

The lowdown on the auto

Took the car in yesterday morning to the GM Dealershipso they could check out the front end noises etc. Here's a summary of what's wrong:
Both front hub bearings are growling, and need replacing
Both front lower balljoints have lots of play and need replacing
Then of course, the obligatory wheel alignment
Total cost : $1500

Luckily my Dad, in all his great dadliness, can get the parts for less than 1/2 of what they quoted me, AND can replace them this weekend while he is in town! My really great new neighbour Rob is also letting us use his new garage on Saturday to perform the required mechanics. All is good or looks good so far, maybe my luck is turning around? Oh crap, I shouldn't have said that.

Rain rain go away

Why is it, everything bad that can happen will happen, and usually catch you when you least expect it and can do little to help? Just like a ringing phone when you're sitting on the crapper in the middle of your business: you're condemned to sit there listening to it ring, and forced listen to someone important leave a message saying they are doing something that needs your attention and since you didn't pick up the phone you just missed something super fantabulous. Ok, maybe this story isn't quite that extreme, but you get the idea.

This past weekend was supposed to be dedicated to 2 things: cleaning and cleaning. My parents are coming this weekend for a visit and our house is in it's usual unbelievable state of disarray. They will always say when they come that "we didn't come to see your house" etc. but you know it's irking them to no end that we live in squalor. Plus it irks me to no end that they get to see the mess, and effects the visit in my brain.

Anyways, so my cat Brutus had been sick all week, and as you may or may not have read, we had to have him put down on Friday. That basically ruined that night for doing anything constructive. We basically spent the night being extra nice to our other cat, and me comforting Amber, since he was primarily her cat. She is also sick with a cold/flu and infection, so it's not been a pleasant time for her all around. We sat and watched "Meet the Fockers", what a hilarious movie.

Saturday I went gung-ho cleaning, this that blam blam ... then we had to go pick some stuff up here and there and that blew the afternoon. I still got more stuff done but not much. Later that night our kitty Zeus was up and we were being nice to her ( I know, Zeus is a male name, it's a long story) and Xavier started sniffling. I'm like "oh no, maybe he's allergic to cats! Oh crap do I have to get rid of this one too?". Luckily it turned out to be just a cold.

Sunday I'm goin' gung ho again, cleanin this, picking up that, watched a bit of a kids cartoon with Xavier and Fzzt! the friggin TV went bonzo! So now everything is WAY too red, and even after adjusting it to hell it portrays grass in a delightful shade of purple. Whee... that's just what I need another expense after the vet bill for Brutus.

Oh, and did I mention the car sounds like shit? Yeah, I'm taking it in tomorrow to get them to look at the front end, it makes this nice CLUNK when you have the wheel turned and hit a dip. Life is wonderful.

Fat cat lays flat

My poor hog of a male cat is sick, for the last couple days he's been just laying around almost motionless. He won't eat, and he won't drink water, and it's all because a few days ago he gorged himself sick with cat food.

I apparently left the lid too loose on the rubbermaid container that holds their catfood and he figured even though it's the same food as in his dish, that somehow it tastes better. So now the bastard is gonna probably make me take him to the vet, who is gonna give me hassles about him not having his shots, or some other shit. I'll be all like "Hey mofo, he ain't got none of those other diseases do he? No sir, he just be plumb bunged up!" (ok, not exactly like that but, more you get the gist).

I'm afraid that if it turns into surgery and/or expensive treatments I'll be looking at a dead cat. I'm sorry I just can't justify spending a grand on a cat that I personally don't like that much. Call me hard hearted but I have other priorites like my kid and family to take care of, and extra income sucked away by a sick cat? I don't know, you guys will probably think I'm uncaring or hard-hearted but I have priorities.

*update* Looks like it's worse than I thought, he's neither peeing or pooping, some sort of blockage Feline lower urinary disease (crystals/stones). Also looks like it would cost us over $1000 to get him fixed up. It looks bad.

*update 2* Brutus was too sick, he couldn't last the day, and so we had to have him put down, we're sad to see him go, he was a good kitty and a good friend.

The trucks are en route

Really... they are... those big moving trucks you hired are somewhere on the Yellowhead and heading towards the wrong house.

Ok I'm being really obscure, but basically I haven't totally moved over to oorgo.mu.nu, and the reasoning is... I can't find Pixy Misa's email address to contact him. Of course, I have been doing my usual procrastination/half-assed attempts at finding it, so the process is going nowhere. I also haven't been able to test my export of Wordpress posts combined with archived MT posts, so that's also going nowhere.

I also requested to change my Truthlaidbear ecosystem account, to change the URL about 1 week ago, no such luck so far. I have no idea how some of these huge blogs move from their blogspot.com over to mu.nu, the amount of work involved must be huge.

Oh, and I have to ask Dan to throw up a page to forward people here, and let them know the new URL. Here now he's doing fine and his server is probably going to be up for a long time.... oh well.

Ok, I'm stopping the whine-fest now.

Fracas in the Caucus

Ok, not really, in fact all the Conservatives are standing around patting themselves on the backs, chanting something like "Go PC Go!" or "Die Libs Die!". They've put on their warpaint and claimed that "We cannot support a government that is mired in these kind of corruption scandals." Apparently these nincompoops have forgotten the Mulroney years.

In FACT, the current Liberal minority government has been patching old wounds and fixing social programs, environmental stuff, and road systems, unlike the PC party whose main goal is and always has been focused on reaming the little guy while padding the corporate pockets.

In my opinion, if they cast a non-confidence vote, and the bullies of the PC party force us into another election it will backfire on them. Canadians DON'T want an election, they don't want to go to the polls, and they also don't want to see millions of their money spent on ad campaigns, slogans, ballots etc. aimed at coercing them to vote for a bunch of parties they don't even respect.

Call me a socialist, but Jack Layton of the NDP party is the only one in the whole house that's coming out smelling less of manure, and more of roses.

If anything, I can bet that the Libs will come back with a majority government, effectively trouncing the PC party. That's my prediction. Screw you Stephen Harper and your party of opportunistic bullies.

Courtesy post

Damn... I've been drawing a blank lately, nothing specific to write about, no questions, problems, solutions to life, the universe and everything (btw, I went to see that movie on Friday and it's great).

SO right now I'm courtesy blogging, just out of courtesy for the few readers I get daily... There's a post! but it's not exciting in the least.

I've been waffling between the two blogs here and the old one here. I fixed up some semblance of a template in the new one, and there is... surprise surprise.... a courtesy post in the old one too!

New post... new home!

Hi all, glad to be here, I'm making my first post inane, as I have to still work on transferring over all my goods from my old blog.

Sad, and happy combined ... I've been there for about 3 years (I think).

Let go

Hour-eating fun

Coasting

This is me if I still was in grade 9

Ok, grade 10 more likely.

MÖTLEY CRÜE Reunites all original members after more than six years to announce “RED, WHITE & CRÜE TOUR 2005… BETTER LIVE THAN DEAD,”

Sad, sad state of affairs for the Crüe... for some it looks like they ARE dead. Vince Neil looks like a buddy I went to high school with (I can bet he still looks like that: overweight, tattoed, perma-drunk), Nikki Six looks like they pulled him away from tiptoeing through the forest eating red hooded children that travelled through. Tommy Lee ... well.. that guy always looked like crap, and Mick Mars looks like they pryed open his crypt and gave him the command "You Play Now".

What's even more sad is their album sounds like it was WRITTEN by a grade 9 student. Cliche after cliche after nauseating cliche, with all new guitar riffs.

How does it profit them

I don't get it, I just killed about 20 porn/gay/rape/lesbian comments on old old posts. How oh how do these "people" think that it will profit them? Who wants to see stuff like "forced to suck" or "lesbian rape" or ... the list goes on...

I don't get it, but I know that this is the reason some blogs have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Sentimental Fool

This fall I was at my mom and dad's and a song came on her stereo. It's old, from the 80's or earlier, I've heard it many times but it made me stop and listen to the lyrics again. Sad and haunting yet promising, sometimes kind of sappy sure, but it's very timely for the state of the current world. I wish more people had the tolerance and patience that this guy did.

Read the Extended entry for the lyrics of which I speak and don't pre-judge the composer by what you already know of him. Maybe I'm getting sentimental in my old age but I feel pretty much the same way he did when he wrote it, the year I was born (or at least the year it was published).

So you speak to me of sadness
And the coming of the winter
Fear that is within you now
It seems to never end
And the dreams that have escaped you
And the hope that you’ve forgotten
You tell me that you need me now
You want to be my friend

And you wonder where we’re going
Where’s the rhyme and where’s the reason
And it’s you cannot accept
It is here we must begin
To seek the wisdom of the children
And the graceful way of flowers in the wind

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day

Like the music of the mountains
And the colours of the rainbow
They’re a promise of the future
And a blessing for today
Though the cities start to crumble
And the towers fall around us
The sun is slowly fading
And it’s colder than the sea

It is written from the desert
To the mountains they shall lead us
By the hand and by the heart
They will comfort you and me
In their innocence and trusting
They will teach us to be free

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day

And the song that I am singing
Is a prayer to non believers
Come and stand beside us
We can find a better way

"Rhymes and Reasons"
- John Denver

Google text ads

Does anybody make any money on these things? SO far since mid October I've made a huge $7.14. yay.

I don't think my readers are amongst the folks that are clickers, that's the problem. Funny thing is, when I did have a few clicks on the same day I made $3.40. If most people clicked once a day I could probably buy a new spanky video card or I could pay my AHC premiums owing... bleh.

Or you could continue to read my blog, making money wasn't why I started this blog. I originally did it to vent about my job, or to keep people up to date with Xavier's birth, and before that, Tristan. Now I'm not sure why I continue, who knows, I get about 5 - 9 hits a day, some leave comments, some were probably searching for something entirely different. It's a personal blog, I promise nothing, and many times that's what is delivered.

Ok, this was completely just a ramble and I'm going to stop myself. I had to edit the original post because it didn't come out as I planned. Thanks for stopping by, by the way. Hope your day is good.

BAM!

It's winter

-25 Celsius for the drive into work this morning, crazy truck drivers spewing diesel exhaust into my car's air intake. At least I skipped the mad traffic on the icebound city streets by driving the happy dry highway. I actually reached the speed limit for a good 5 minutes! And I got to work 5 minutes early, yesterday I took the city streets and was 20 minutes late.

Oh so pleasant, and some nice hoodie hair when I get to work.

Welcome winter wahoo dahoo.

I should know better

Ya know...

With a new computer all spanky and clean, 10 X faster than the old one and super cool, I should know better than to screw around with things.... but apparently I don't.

Last night I thought to myself "Hey! I like having a temperature/fan/etc. monitor running, let's find one for my motherboard" so I went to the Intel website (because my mobo is intel) and downloaded what looked like the correct one. When I installed it bad things happened.

The install started fine, then I hear a click, my screen goes blank, my computer shuts down to nothing, and the lights on everything are amber.... not good AT all. I shut down, start up, nothing but an amber light on my box.... shit.

Unplug ... leave for 30 secs... replug in... starts up... windows screen.. whew... a couple programs start and then CLICK off again. F#$@! I almost wept.

Unplugged, repeated above except held down F8 and selected "Restore previous good configuration". Windows starts up, everything is well, no problems anymore... thankyou MS for System Restore. I hear people say "shut it off" but I tell you now, if you're anything like me leave it ON people, leave it on.

Upcoming silence

Figured I should post quick before Dan takes down his server for the move tomorrow.

New computer is running great, plays some of the not-so-high-end games really well, as long as the details are not all cranked. Neverwinter Nights looks cool as long as the weeds... er.. grass is not turned on, and UT 2004 looks pretty too.

It took me 2 hours to transfer over all my files from my old slow hard drives (one is UDMA 33), then of course I had to test some stuff out ... and fairly soon it turned out to be 1:00 am... yikes... bad Dave... I'm not going to be able to do that too much, getting too old.

One odd thing: the main partition on my new HD is 70 gB, with a hidden 3.5 gB partition... but it's supposed to be an 80 gB HD. Did they just forget to partition 6.5 of it? Sheesh, that's like ... 1000 mp3s!

wait wait wait wait

Oh, so I checked online and the new computer is in Edmonton! It's apparently "On vehicle for delivery" SWEET!

NOW I just have to figure out the logistics of stringing cable to network the 2 together, and clean up a space for the old beast upstairs. That will be fun, really it will. I don't think that after spending all this money on a new computer, that my wife would want to spend the extra cash on going wireless.

*UPDATE*
It's here, and suddenly my tummy hurts I think I have to go home sick :)
hee hee

productivity ... down

Ok I've become addicted to this multiplayer turn based fighting game called Xeno Fighter! Online Combat in the Far Future!

It's very fun, you set up the moves (both defensive and offensive) you want to make in the upcoming fight, and then watch the fight take place with the opponent. I'm practicing mostly right now, but I can't afford a weapon. YOU also must join so we can spout silly things after fighting. My username is Oorgo.

Ok I know this is getting annoying but...

I'm so excited about my new computer I had to tell you all that it's currently in DELIVERY!! WOOT!

Estimated date of delivery between Nov 25 and 29th. YAY

I still hate waiting though

Evil

I posted a comment on Random's post: Random Pensées: A Ramble: Evil Times, it was so long I figured I should also post it on my blog as an entry, so here goes: (read his post first)

I've seen the movies about the concentration camps, and every time I had a hard time watching them, the sheer horror of every moment that was lived once they were arrested. I usually broke down if watching by myself, very similarly I broke down when watching the footage after the initial attacks on Baghdad watching Fahrenheit 911. "Lest we forget" is the motto for Canada's Rememberance Day on Nov. 11. Unfortunately a large portion of the world HAS forgotten, or chosen to ignore the lessons learned by the World wars. Evil is alive and thriving in our greedy societies and will continue as long as we view the worth of human life as less than the wealth we accumulate.

I used to write songs when I was in high school, mostly just lyrics. Here are some that seem apt:
"You've been given the gold, but can you keep it?
Will your bones never wither away?
All the things you acquire and the money you gain
will never be enough to open the gate."
Ok, so it was grade 11, I wasn't a wordsmith :)

Compy 686 update

So my computer has moved into the status of "InProduction". What exactly that means, not sure, maybe the little Dell gnomes are hurriedly assembling circuits, hard disk platters, etc. maybe not. All I know is it's approx still another 2 weeks until it gets here, and I hate waiting.

In the mean time, I was reading this review of a wicked vid card , the GeForce 6600 GT AGP . It even fixes your hair and brushes your teeth for you ... really it does! Ah to dream.

Grab those heels with both hands

I did a double reverse spiral flip today, and purchased a new computer from Dell. I really wouldn't have except for the payment plan (I know, don't remind me about the interest, I know) and the fact that I believe I got a pretty damn good deal. My old beast of a computer is 5 years or more old, and just doesn't hack it anymore.

Here's the stats: 3.0 Ghz P4, 1GB Dual channel DDR, 80 GB SATA drive (7200 rpm), and 17" monitor.

Vid and sound are onboard, but the upgrades from Dell were much too much money. $170 extra for an ATI X300 SE (entry level card, not great), I could buy a Radeon 9550 256MB With VIVO for $140 from www.a-computers.ca. Not a super card, but apparently very overclockable.

Now it's just the waiting game, estimated date of delivery : Dec 1, 3 damn weeks from today. Sheesh. Don't mind me while I sit here on my hands... la la la

Jay's Party

Came across this link over at geek@work, very funny young man named Jay Texas.

Jay's Party

Jay is working as a broker, he gives observations on his workplace, women etc. It's a very funny read, I would suggest starting right from the beginning. My favorites are the stories about Cliff, the sleezy pot smoking lazy guy, and apparently Texans are as bad drivers as Edmontonians and just as angry.

All new high

Apparently my stress level has hit an all new high, or something. I woke up Sunday morning and the muscles that control the corners of my mouth were stiff and sore. My facial muscles have been sore this week, not sure exactly why, I must be tensing something that I shouldn't. Anyways, so I don't exactly know why in particular the corners were so sore, the only thing I can think is that I was frowning in my sleep all night.

The great thing about playing trumpet is that usually the muscles you use don't get tired from other things such as lifting, holding, etc. Apparently as I found out, frowning all night will tire those muscles enough that it is difficult to play in tune and you will tire quickly. And it will piss you off.

Maybe I'll have to create a new category called Whining... this would go under that category.

Issues

Some people bite their fingernails, some obsessively clean their house, others comb their hair until it falls out. I arrive late. Doesn't matter what the occasional, I'm late. It's like some weird submliminal obsession with me, I don't mean to be late (most times) it just happens. I'm running perfectly on time and then something happens and wham.. 10 minutes... 5 minutes.. whatever. Doesn't matter if it's work, rehearsals, sometimes gigs, family occasions, weddings... church... Is this some kind of disease? Do I hate having my time controlled by other people so much that I subliminally go out of my way to be defiant?

All I know is somehow I have to push through this odd barrier, because I like my present job, and I would hate to lose it for something so inane as this. Not that it's been said, but the expectation is there to be on time, and somehow I have to smack myself out of this habit/syndrome that I've had all my life. It's not going to be fun, but it may be worth it in the end.

Halloween painfest 2004

Some days it's like I'm the comedic puppet of someone upstairs, Sunday was one of those days.

Every had days when you woke up a crab, and every single thing you did either went horribly out of control, or anything you touched you proceeded to drop or fumble? That was also Sunday. If there was a jar, or a glass, or something to knock off the shelf, I did it. And swore.

I also neglected to drink coffee until around 3 pm, which resulted in a raging caffeine headache, turned migraine. Everything I did hurt: picking up my kid, driving my car. and no tylenol to be found in my house.

Took Xavier to the mall, just to find around 100 kids or more walking around with empty bags. Nice of the stores to either not buy enough, or give it all out at the beginning. 2 stores actually had candy, Shoppers and Save-On, the rest had signs up saying either "no candy" or "Ran out of candy". This did not help my headache.

Finally by 7 pm the headache gave up under the pressures of codeine and acetaminophen, and an additional cup of coffee. I don't want to go through that again anytime soon.

So

Yes, the inevitable has happened, my poorness has made me put google ads on the site.

I don't expect riches or anything, but who knows maybe I'll get enough to pay back Dan back his $25. Or maybe enough for a coffee someday... oh to dream....

Anyways, click if you please... on said ads above ...

pr0n porn sex s3x0rz doggie love *blatant attempt at hits*

Playing keep away

Well it finally happened, I apparently threw the ball too low and the kid in the middle picked it up. Got a notice of disconnection from my telco company monday. Luckily it was resolved and I could pay it today, but sheesh... it just makes me want to shutdown and become a vagrant sometimes. Take the bankruptcy ticket, sell off all my goods, move us into a crappy basement appartment again and revert back 10 years to the days before we owned a house.

I have to remind myself that this TOO shall pass, until the next notice comes along (probably gas / power next). It's hard to see a positive financial future when every time you look away from something the next time you glance back it's on fire or threatening to pull out the rug from underneath you.

Sometimes responsibility can be such a downer.

Roaming the Sask

Well we got back at 5 on Sunday from our trip around Saskatchewan, 3 tanks of gas and about 1800 kms later.

The visit with my parents went really well, it was really nice to have an actual visit with them away from my other relatives. Xavier thought they were awesome, he took to my mom right away, and I'm pretty sure he misses her, they had such fun together. He got to see his great grandma for 3 visits too, and took to her right away, she sure thought that was great. He amazes us every day, she was in a wheelchair so we sat him on her lap and he sat real still, with a grin on his face, seeming to know she couldn't take much squirming etc.

Dad and I worked on my car for 3 days, we pulled off most of the dash to get to the AC grill. It was completely plugged, used some Fantastik and soaked it from the outside, then shot through compressed air from the inside. Some nice big black chunks of stuff came out... yech. The amount of air output is phenomenal now, there's more on low than there was on High. We also resolved an issue with taking off from a stop, it no longer bogs out when it's cold, and it seems to have better pickup all around. Now I just have to watch my speed, damn V6.

Regina and Saskatoon went pretty well, odd how Casino Regina is a major attraction, enough that they have blue signs with a distance countdown from every entrance to Regina.

Good morning back

Woke up this morning and damn.. apparently even though I look about 10 years younger than I am, my back knows my age, and has decided to jump ahead about 30 years where I'm old and I'm hobbling about.

The pain originates from a sprint I did in the mall a couple weeks ago. I was carrying X-man, who was struggling to get me to let him down, and I was unable to put him down for about 20 minutes. Lower back pain is the worst, it seems to creep into, and effect everything you do. Reach for that.. ow.. bend down to.. OW .. move my chair.. I said OW dammit. Pricing out spanky new mattresses etc... yeech... 500 for one that would definitely make life more pleasant.

I think my co-workers are beginning to believe I'm what I'd like to call a "Sicky" ... sick all the time, whining about pain, discomfort etc. I've had 2 colds/flus in the past 3 weeks, neither pleasant, and now this back pain shite. I don't like to be the Sicky one.

The back pain is timely, because I'm going on an 8 hr trip on Monday, all driving, and it's going to make it nice and unpleasant. I'll probably spend half my holiday at my parents laying on my back on the floor, or on painkillers.

Freak In

Random Pensées made me recall some of my younger years, especially around my college days.

When I was younger I used to try to scare myself into doing things because I knew I'd just procrastinate if left to my own will. I'd imagine the absolute worse thing happening if I didn't do , and picture in my head the day that it had to be done. Usually when the day came up I'd have this awful gnawing in my gut telling me I had to do something important. Sometimes I'd remember, sometimes not. (Oh, btw I did have a daytimer too, it does no good if you don't use it). If I didn't remember I'd beat myself up about it for awhile.

This wasn't a good plan. Unfortunately as I got older I'd immediately panic thinking I'd missed something significant, and many times I'd lay in bed at night imagining the worst scenarios possible.

Somewhere along the way I think something broke, so many things were freaking me out so many of the time that I stopped, dead.

After Tristan was born, many things were also put in perspective. I realized that life was more important, and my family was more important than paying all my bills on time even if I couldn't afford them. Xavier reinforced these ideas, with his incredibly strong lust for life, and will to thrive despite all odds has amazed me thoroughly.

Manageable debt dodging, that's my current goal. If I get only one call from a utility company a month my goal is obtained. Sure I'm paying penalties, but we can still eat and drive to work every day, this is the core goal.

Microsoft logic

Heh... had some fun in the office today, someone (not pointing fingers) changed the date on the server computer to 2034 (you know who you are), and one of our apps syncs the date on your workstation to the server date. So you can imagine the fun when one of my coworkers can't access the network drives etc. because it tells her "Date and time are different than the server". She restarts the computer, then it tells her she can't log in to the domain AND she doesn't have a local username so she can't even log onto her local computer. She was pretty happy.

Apparently in MS world if you're workstation is 30 years off the server computer date it doesn't like you anymore. Isn't that special.

Ow

I had a bit of a scare on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday I was taking care of Xavier while my wife peddled her wares at the flea market. She reads tealeaves, sells handmade hemp bracelets, and handmade egg ornaments. So we were having a pretty good day (he's motoring around on his legs now, so it's a constant chase), until about 2:30. I was talking to my mom on the phone, I hear a thump, turn to look and he's sitting on the floor, hitting the window crank on the window sill and then he started to cry.

I went over and noticed that there was blood coming from the corner of his eye. Of course I kind of freaked a little, told my mom I'd call her back. I wiped the blood away and tried to get a look at it, of course he wouldn't let me, so I comforted him for the 15 or 20 minutes that he cried. He stopped crying at the mention of going out (or bye-bye), thank goodness, so I got to look at it a bit, it was pretty nasty looking and his eye was puffy.

Took him to emergency, the nurses seemed a little concerned, partially because he fell fast asleep in the car on the way there. I got bumped ahead in the line, but it was still almost 2 hours until I got to see anyone. Meanwhile X-man had a bout an hour of sleep in my arms on the waiting room chairs. Man sometimes I wish I was a kid again, being able to sleep anywhere.

The doctor saw him for about 3 minutes, looked at the eye, said that there was no redness in the white of his eye, so he should be fine, it will just weep a bit and be sore. Nice doctor, but he was a little condescending "This kind of thing will happen alot at this age" I'm like "Yeah, but it's his EYE, hello?" (ok, I didn't actually say that, but I wanted to).

So now he's walking around with a bit of a shiner, but it doesn't bother him, so that's good. He's back to his trouble-maker self.

*Shudder*

I don't like reading the news these days, and I don't like listening to the delusional ranting of folks who think the U.S. will somehow pull out of the mess they are in if they keep Bush in power.

Articles like this --> Who's Winning The "War on Terror"? do nothing to curb my fear that this world is going into an nosedive that it doesn't have the horsepower to pull out of. I remember reading a childrens version of the Book of Revelations, and certain current events trigger shivers up my spine because I feel we're not that far away from it.

Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness: You Guys Are Just Tryin' To Scare Me! gives a nice sum up of Bush's very thin grasp on reality, or maybe he has some alternate reality he'd like to share with the rest of us. I might like to go there, everything seems so happy and peaceful.

Groan

Here are some interesting poll statistics regarding the US Election. It's not surprising the states that Bush is leading in such as Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas.

Survey USA - Current Election Polls

I wonder if these same states are all hyped about the expiration of the ban on assault rifles, I can probably bet they are. "Now I can defend mah home from that mob of non-whites that I saw standin' by the unemployment office" (sorry, had to induce the stereotype).

late weekend update

So I had a gig Fri. and Sat., the usual place, it went fine, but as I was driving into my neighbourhood I noticed a higher number of youthes in the streets than normal. Parked the car behind the house, went inside, watched a little tv (this is around 2:30-3:00).

About 3:15, I hear noises outside, loud voices so I look and there are 2 kids hanging out by the cable box infront of our house, mixing drinks or something, there's a 26 of vodka there too, and looks like a can of something for mix. I wasn't too worried, until I noticed the one kid (probably 16-17) standing out in the middle of the street looking back and forth (it's a t intersection).

It looked like he was keeping watch while his buddy (who was older looking and much bigger) disappeared down the street, then came back in awhile looking really agitated. So I watched for a bit, and I said "forget it" and called the cops, because it looked pretty damn suspicious.

I get off the phone with the cops, and I was sort of keeping an eye on the kids, when a couple of others comes up, more drunken speech, they leave. I now notice the kid on lookout has what appears to be a long knife, I'm assuming kitchen knife, which is glinting in the streetlight. Needless to say I call the cops again, this time quite a bit more agitated. By this time it's about 3:30 or so, so I basically was waiting around for them to arrive.

Almost 1/2 hour later (15 minutes or more after the punks left) they show up, shining a spotlight on our house, and phoning us from a cell phone. "This is officer so and so ... we'll drive around the streets, back alleys, and call you if we find anyone". Needless to say about 10 minutes later I see them driving the opposite direction, away from our house. No call, thanks for coming. Next time I'll skip the first call and say something about drugs, and knives and asian gangs, maybe they'll come faster.

Sick

Bah... woke up this morning and my voice sounded like Barry White, but not in a good way.

Went to work, left halfway through, basically shoo'd out of the office so I don't infect everyone else with the sickness. Probably won't be back tomorrow, it's bad... real bad... feels like a vice on my frontal lobe. I guess this must be payback for that post a bit back about the banjo music.

Had an interesting weekend, but I will have to post about it tomorrow, the haze that is my current mental state is getting to me.... ow.

Lull

Seems there's a lull out there in blogland. Many of the sites I regularly read are silent, why is that? I have some concepts:

a) School has started, and everyone is too busy
b) Blogging isn't as hip as it was once claimed to be
c) Watching the Republican Convention has lulled their brains into a coma
d) American bloggers are hiding in their basement, huddled in a corner somewhere muttering "no choice for leadership.. we have no choice for leadership..."
e) People are mesmerized by the continuing adventures of our new super heroess Trailer Britney
f) It's all been said, and who cares anyways right? (see point d)
g) Pointless entries like this have bombarded the blogosphere with mindlessness.

Moooo!

Good lord, what the hell is it with some days and drivers. It's like no one has more than 5 hours of sleep Monday night, and then they drive like mindless cattle Tuesday morning.

This morning I'm taking my usual route, running on time for once, but I still drive the speed limit or 10 Km/h more. Everyone, and I'm saying EVERYONE is driving 10 below, what the f#$@! I started looking at people and going "MOOOO!!!"... of course who knows if they could see me through the morning fog that is their own mindlessness.

Then I'm following these 2 jackasses in a raised old 4x4, they're busy yacking away, looking around, checking out girls. They are in the left lane, there's a space of a good 10 cars or more in front of them, and the right lane everyone is driving slow because the $@#(wads up at the lights are creeping around their right-hand turns. These guys obviously don't care about going to work on time, but hey, grab a freakin' brain and get the hell out of the way. Either that or turn up your banjoe music so loud that your frontal lobe implodes. Both are decent suggestions.

The grunt flows north

How long 'til you hear the dreaded "Blame Canada after this article?:

U.S. call center jobs moving to Canada | CNET News.com

Geemail

Hey all, I have 6 gmail accounts to give out if anyone doesn't have one already.

Leave me a comment or email me at oorgo.b at gmail dot com.

You comin'?

Xavier (almost) 2, late this morning went down for his nap, so taking the chance my wife went to have a shower. Upon coming out of the shower she heard him yelling loudly "You comin'? I was crying!". She said "I'm coming", he says "Ok", pauses and then "I was crying!" again.

She almost busted a gut, and so did I upon hearing the story. In fact I'm laughing again about it now. Kids are hilarious, he was basically saying "Hey, I did all the right things, how come you aren't over here paying attention to me?". Too smart for his own age.

Updates

A couple of updates on things for those who give a rats ass:

The Car: Well, it's running fine, no running hot, not a single leak, and obviously the sensor for coolant is working fine. I was spraying smelly stuff to attempt to clean out my AC when I found out that my control is fubar'd for the air control; only 2 of the settings don't turn on the AC, you can actually hear it kick in ... on Defrost! Oh, but the smelly stuff didn't help improve the whisper of air coming out of the vents.

The Minidisc player: Found out that Realplayer will transfer files to my NetMD just fine, AND it will run in the background allowing me to do other things without using up all my computer resources. The only drawback is that it doesn't use the group feature, for grouping tunes, but whatever, I can deal with that.

What's that.... smoke?

Here's a little hint for all you automobile drivers, when there's a sound that vaguely resembles a tea-kettle coming from under your hood, pull over.

It was a pretty uneventful weekend, mostly uneventful. I had a gig friday, and another one saturday, yadda yadda, and then Sunday morning(ish) went to visit my sister, parents, nephew, brother-in-law, at my sisters place. Everything was fine, had a nice supper, visited my family, listened to my brother-in-law rant about things a bit, listened to my sister rant about my brother-in-law, the usual.

Dad comes to me saying "you may want to add some coolant to your car when you get home", apparently he had been looking under the hood, as mechanic fathers tend to do. I'm like "yeah, ok, no problem Dad", around 8:30-9 I got in the car to warm it up and I noticed the Low Coolant light was on. Ok, so I went into the house, my brother-in-law said "Oh yeah, I found that was disconnected, so I reconnected it, hmm... I wonder if it's faulty". Ok, yeah, with my car I'll definitely believe that.

We started the 1 1/2 hour trip home, got about 1/2 hour into it and on stopping at a stop sign my wife says "What's that? Is that smoke?" Oh great, I look down, the temperature gauge needle is on red, and there's a sound like a tea-kettle eminating from under the hood. I pull over, turn off the car, leave it so the engine fan is running, swear a blue streak, get ou in the rain, pull off the reservoir cap. Dig around in my car, all I can find is a 500 ml bottle of water, pour that in, it doesn't do shit.

Luckily when I got to my sisters I had plugged in my cell-phone to charge, so I pulled that out, called my Dad. He came by after about 40 minutes, he and my brother-in-law poured 4 litres or more of fluid in, she had been BONE DRY. Of course my bro-in-law swore a fair amount and I'm sure on the way home he ranted to my dad how I should take better care of my car.

Here are a couple things that don't make sense:
1) My car was running fine, not even running warm, before I got there, why did it suddenly overheat?
2) Where did the antifreeze go? There's no visible leak, and the exhaust doesn't smell bad.

While we had been sitting on the side of the road, lights off, blinkers on, dome light on (sporadically), hood up, I think 4 people that drove by stopped, re-enforcing my view of humanity. No one carries anti-freeze though, so I would have been stuck out there all night, in the middle of nowhere, or I would have been paying some towtruck, or signing up for AMA on the fly. Once again I owe my Dad big time for coming out to save my ass. Thanks again Dad.

Sorry Dad

Wil Wheaton surprises me all the time. His insight on everyday things and his humanistic writing ability are uncharacteristic of a geek. It's like he gets outside and talks to people or something

Todays post about his dad titled the joker describes mine, and many others relationships with their dads. My dad had a habit of saying cheesy jokes, then when you didn't laugh he repeated it.

Unfortunately at the time, me and my sisters didn't really appreciate him for all the great things that he did for us. I think we're just starting to catch up with the "thank you"s now, after 10 or so years. When we "growup" I think most people tend to look back and see what an ass they were, and regret. Hey, you're kids right? I think the cycle is unending, your kids will do the exact same thing to you, and their kids to them. What's funny is that if you would have talked to me about this very thing when I was a kid I would have ignored you.

Family vacations

Shank made a great post about family trips, it was like I was there... 5 in a car, crammed, sweaty, cranky, bored. No money to eat at places, no time to stop. One thing different is we knew not to push things too far, or Mom was the punisher. She was a quick draw on the belt, I tell you!

the reluctant werewolf: So I saw my parents the other day

Frustrating Families

I won't go into great detail, but I was at my brother-in-law's wedding on the weekend up in Grande Prairie. The wedding itself was ok, beautiful bride, lovely weather, drunken relatives, what else is new, but the drama around the entire event just blew my mind.

I came up with some questions, because I won't spout out the details of the insanity:

Why is it that families let things that happened decades ago interfere with the current times? How are you letting down your guard or damaging your precious image when you say that you're sorry, and/or that you made a mistake? Why is it so easy to forgive others, but so hard to forgive your own brothers/sisters/parents? Why do some parents treat their own daughters worse than they would treat a ditch digger that was employed with them? What kind of game are you playing when you think you have to compete with your own sister over your mothers attention? How the f#$@ can some people be so f#$@ing thoughtless?

On a happier note

Yesterday I posted about Katie.com, and amazingly enough today Penguin Group (USA) Inc. has retitled the book "A Girl's Life Online". Maybe the 75/159 bad customer reviews on Amazon.com regarding this story had some impact (looks like Amazon has deleted most of the comments).
(pulled from Slashdot)

Glad that it's finally resolved, and hopefully it won't effect the actual sale of the book, the topic is important and these types of stories need to be told.

My boss went to Comic-Con

He's very cool, he went to Comic-Con and bought everybody something, and knowing that I dig Too Much Coffee Man he bought me a sweet 20 oz. mug with TMCM on it. It holds about 1/4 a pot of coffee... it's PERFECT.

Have I mentioned I dig my job?

Finally a weekend off

No posts for 5 days, I had a long weekend, made extra long by graciously recieving friday off as well. As well I spent not one minute in a loud club playing trumpet all weekend, it was my weekend of solitude. It was sweet.

I spent Friday night getting nothing accomplished, and doing it extremely well. My buddy Dan came by at about 9 and picked me up with this sweet ride he was driving, a Cadillac CTS loaded. His friend rented it and paid him to drive them around Friday night. We went to Second Cup downtown for coffee, funny the looks you get from people when you are driving a $50K vehicle. I brought along a mixed salsa cd to class up his ride even more. Got home about 11:30 or so, drank Sleemans Cream Ale and played Neverwinter Nights until about 3:30 am.

Got up at 9:30 on Saturday, took the Grand Am to the shop to get an oil change and get them to look at the spark plugs, and tires. The thing bogs out when it's cold and you touch the gas, and there is (was) a vibration at about 100-110 km/h. No vibration now, he balanced the tires but he said the plugs were fine, I think it's the MAF sensor, apparently that's a well known issue with that year and model.

After picking up the GA we grudgingly took back the Cadillac and then headed down to XS Cargo to look at a cheap car stereo. Picked up a Koss cd deck for $50, which apparently is a good deal (sure it's refurbished, but whatever). Then on the way back stopped at a cool hobby store on Argyll and Gateway and looked at trains, rockets, remote controlled tanks.

Sunday I went kinda nuts, woke up at 11:30, drank some coffee, had a couple of waffles compiled a cd full of crazy jazz trumpet music which was background music while I cleaned until 4. I got through a stack of cooking sheets that had been sittin around for awhile, and cleaned the entire tub and surround (which was complete hell). At 4 I went to a poorly attended band rehearsal, but stuck around for Erin's famous cheeseburgers, and Mauricio's 7 year old Cuban rum... oh man... yum.

Oh, and did I mention that Amber and Xavier were up in Grande Prairie for the weekend? Yep, they came home Sunday about 8... pure solitude for almost 2 full days.

One step closer to the edge

So lately I've been very grumpy, to the point of snapping, and I don't know why. It really came to a head yesterday when I was at the Safeway pharmacy picking up some tylenol with codeine, the pharmacist was asking me the inane questions they always do, and I had a quick flash of myself winding up and smoking him in the face. The same thing happened at a gig a couple weeks ago, the sound guy was saying some shit about how the monitors couldn't be configured bla bla bla. He was at foot level and I felt the sudden urge to kick him in the teeth. Damn, and it was a strong urge, I could actually imagine my foot bustin off a couple of his chompers.

I'm truthfully not a violent person, I've been thinking that the cumulation of the past few years of loss, suffering and poverty have done something to my patience and tolerance. Maybe it's the reverse, maybe the fact that there's nothing wrong with my life right now: I've got a good job that I'm happy with, my son is amazing and thriving, my wife is great, she is coping with her depression and being very positive. Maybe I'm expecting another hammer to fall, another spike in the heart, or another exorbitant cost that breaks my finances.

I found a good site, maybe I'll follow their instructions and take them to heart: Tools for Handling Loss: Anger Workout

Oh yay

So I guess it was inevitable, I got my first flame comment.

It was on a post I did a month or so back about my a$$wipe neighbours and their habits of endangering the neighbourhood with their backyard fire pit, and the wonders of the clouds of smoke/chemicals coming off it.

I used my administrative ability to delete it, not because I can't take criticism, but because I wanted to. I don't take kindly to being called names by someone I don't know, and if you're not going to read the entire post (I think it was actually one of the a$$wipes themselves posting) then don't bother commenting. Plus, it's my blog, I can do what I f$#@ing want.

Maniac Weather from Sunday

I was forwarded some pictures from a guy at work of the big storm in Edmonton on Sunday. These are pictures of the Whitemud overpass around 111 st.

They seriously blew my mind when I saw them and I thought I'd share them

Two more steps to old age

Well my birthday came and went, with no big whoop.

My work gives employees the day off when it's their birthday, so I almost got to sleep in, until 9 anyways. Cleaned, vacuumed, changed the cat litter, then the dude came to connect cable internet. 3.8 Mb/s downloads (456 KB/s)! Screw you Telus!.

Xavier gave me a break and slept for 3 hours in the afternoon, while Amber was babysitting at her friends. On the way back from picking her up I realized my car license and registration had expired in June, oh so happy was I. $130 later I had a piece of paper and a sticker for my license plate, damn do I love Alberta.

Went looking for dress/gig shoes at the Bay, they had some nice ones on sale but unfortunately none fit very well so I ended up cementing my progress to old age. I bought Hushpuppies. My second step to old age was to buy some Heel inserts (that are supremely comfortable and I can use in my running shoes).

When you start focusing on comfort over coolness, you have officially affirmed your embrace of the march towards the grave. When I was 20 I would buy cool shoes, no matter how uncomfortabe they were. I would buy cool clothes even though they hurt my pocket book.

Happy Birthday to me

Well.. I'm well on my way to middle age, right in the middle of 30's... do I have much to show for it? A great family, wonderful son and wife....

I guess that's all you really need right? Sure..... I'll go with that today, trying to stay positive as I inch closer to death.

Can't... look ... away..

Dammit! I'm totally addicted to watching the RADAR images from Environment Canada. It's fun watching the colors, wondering when the next dump of sky pee will be dropped on Edmonton.

The latest radical weather is making some of my co-workers remember Black Friday in 1987 when the F4 tornado killed 27 people, injured hundreds and caused 330 million dollars in damages.

Luckily that weekend I was back in St. Paul most likely at some after grad party drinking until I could stand no more.

Family fun time

Well the reunion went well, I knew many more people than I expected, only a handful or two that I didn't know. Xavier had fun, but he didn't get much sleep so if you didn't do what he wanted he would scream... yay fun.

A cousin of my Dads came over from Norway with his family, very nice people. They were amazed at the size of everything in Alberta, "big houses, big fields, big cars". I guess there isn't too much real estate inbetween the Fjords :)

I have to say, I like my Herrick relatives, they're fairly calm, intelligent, very respectful and helpful. Most of them couldn't believe how Xavier had grown, and how much he looks like me. I took some half decent pictures, I'll have them available soon.

On the birthday side I got some early money for my birthday, just in time 'cause I need new running shoes and also dress shoes for gigs. OH for a day when I can spend birthday money on something I want not something I need.

Gonna be a wild one

Another nutzo weekend on the horizon.

I have a gig tonight at Azucar Latin Club. and tomorrow morning we go to Didsbury for a family reunion. Turns out we aren't camping (thank God because the weather is horrible), my wonderful father has reserved us a hotel room, so we should have a comfortable night sleep (hopefully).

Should be interesting... as I haven't seen most of these relatives in about 10-15 years. It'll be a lot of this "Hi, and who are you again?"

Ok, I'm sure you have all seen this

I ran across Wil Wheaton dot net today. It's good, quite good. I was never a Wesley fan in my younger years, and that's why it seems odd to read stuff from him now. His 4th of July story is great, and sad too.

Interesting that he's somewhere around my age now, and like many of the people I know, has similar interests. He's also one of the smart Americans (jab jab) and doesn't seem to fall into the "blind angry follower" rut that so many of our southern neighbours have.

I especially like his Warning

Gee mayil

Hey, I have an invite for gmail, if anyone wants it. Email me or leave a comment.

Sorry... too late... taken

Happy Belated birthday Canada

The card was lost in the mail..er... my dog chewed up your gift... uh... terrorists have taken over my mailbox... um...

I am horrible with birthdays. Just found out on Wed I missed another one, my nephew's this time.... bah stupid brain

My Canada day consisted of cleaning, moving furniture, a less than enthusiastic band rehearsal, more cleaning and moving furniture, and then reassembling surround sound speaker ratsnest. On the plus side it sounds probably 75% better, because the main speakers + sub have a full wall behind them instead of the half wall.

Change

I changed the color scheme, you may vomit, it will be as expected.
If not, that is also expected.

I noticed how many blogs are using this common scheme, so I went the lazy way and instead of changing the actual scheme, changed the colors...

Xavier update

So I am being negligent in my raving father duties....

Last Wednesday Xavier started walking on his own. He will only do it between Amber and I (because he's too chicken), but he can definitely do it when he puts his mind to it. He's also understanding an almost disturbing amount of phrases and words. He may not be able to speak the words (he's a little lazy speech-wise) but he understands many things. For example, if he gives the phone to mommy and says "Daddy", she will phone me up and put me on speakerphone so he can talk to me and kiss the phone.

He's also decided he will only go to sleep when he wants to. If you take him to bed before his time, he will cry and scream seemlingly endlessly (30min +), but if he initiates it by crawling to bed he will grin, take his bottle and zonk out within a few minutes. We're working on that though, last night Amber was a hardliner, and finally got him to sleep even though he didn't want to.

He had an appointment with the Neurologist on Tues. and the MRI shows odd things, and doesn't go along with his present state. According to the MRI the bloodclot on the left side of the brain seems to still be there, and after a point there isn't blood flow. BUT according to the specialist he seems to be just fine, and there doesn't seem to be any ill effects. He said it may be that there is bloodflow, the MRI just isn't showing it, or there is enough of a trickle for normal operations. Either way he said Xavier would grow out of it.

He's got an assessment today, I bet they'll be blown away with his improvement, especially since they said he may not walk for a long time, or possibly have cerebral palsy. TAKE THAT, DOCTORS!

All Hooped up on Golfballs

Dammit! I've been hooked on ebay searching for new trumpets I can't afford.

Like THIS one.

Of course I should be able to feed and clothe my family before purchasing $1000 items that aren't essential. But dammit, they are COOL

I almost laughed my ass off after perusing the Makers of the Zeus ZTR100 Olympus trumpet. It's the cheesiest site, but the more you read, the more impressive they seem, in a wacked out sort of way.

I wanna buy one out of spite now.

doppleganger

Weird... the more articles I read from Paul over at Sanity's Edge , the more I think he's my older doppleganger (of course I don't know if he's older than me, but I'm just making the assumption). He has wacked out neighbours that resemble mine, his wife thinks pretty much the same of him as mine does of me. ALTHOUGH, my musical "career" was never influenced hugely by sitcoms, although I used to really dig the Flinstones jazz music, and the funky backround tracks for animated Spiderman.

Yay

Saturday Amber and I bought a new computer desk for the basement, rather, Amber bought it for me for an early fathers day present and I chipped in some money. ANYways, it's nice you can see it HERE

I spent about 1/2 hour putting just the shelving part together, and I'm excited about getting back home and finishing it. My current desk looks like THIS, I've had it for ... almost 20 years... and it's kinda busted up... I guess I deserve a new desk.

It will be nice once we get the room done, with carpet on the walls to buffer my trumpet practising, and the stereo we are borrowing from / storing for Dan. A practice room... I will actually have a practice room... woot!

Worn out weekend

Well it's monday again isn't it? Sheesh, what a weekend.

Here was my schedule for the weekend :
(keep in mind I haven't had a weekend off in 2 or 3 months)

Friday: Work from 8:30 to 4:30
     Go to gig1 at 8:30, lasts until 10:30
     Go to gig2 at 10:30, lasts until 2:30
Saturday: Get up at 8:30
     Take care of Xavier
     Miss soundcheck that was supposed to be at 4 because I'm out looking at a new computer desk
     Go to gig 3 at 11:00, get grief for missing soundcheck
     Wait around for an hour before we start
     Go home at 3:30 am
Sunday: Get up at 11,
     Borrow the neighbours heavy-assed lawnmower
     mow the lawn
     Go to pick up new desk, doesn't fit in car
     Go spend more money on groceries than we thought... (boo)..

That's it...

I'm going to buy myself a diesel motorbike and start creating my own Bio-Diesel

Stick it to the man

Son - of a ...

My wife and I finally got rid of the hide-a-bed and chair on Saturday. They were nice enough, but unfortunately neither of us could sit in them, because of a weird rash/prickles we got. Something about either the material or age of the furniture. ANYWAYS... while we were dragging/lugging the beast of a hide-a-bed out to the front lawn, I hurt/pulled/strained my back..

It's not comfortable, and I hate taking drugs to numb the pain so I'm a little cranky.

Oh! And I put up some new pictures of Xavier on his site Here. March through May... some good some ok, but all cute.

Atrocities atrocities atrocities...

I just had to pass on this link to the International Red Cross Report regarding the abuse / atrocities committed by soldiers in Iraq, (not just the one prison).

Thanks to Norbizness over at Happy Furry Puppy Story Time for a great summary of the report.

Hmmm.. who would have thought?

Peppermint Tea led me to this.... (Dan, you should check her out, she's just your type :-))

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Wow

Just had a big project thrown on my lap. I've been with this new company for 1 month and I'm writing a user manual and a training manual for a new module. It's exciting and stressful all at the same time: exciting because they trust me with this and because it's a great opportunity, stressful because up to this point I've written mostly tech documents, not full manuals.

Oh, and I've realized that even though I'm making more money, I barely am. After considering the increased expenses of paying my own healthcare and gas for my car, it comes out just above what I was making at Slave*****. Luckily if I do well here, come September I should see a significant increase, this my friend, will be a good thing. Oh, and thank god for being booked up almost all summer for gigs.

Bachelor weekend

Well A and X-man are gone to her fathers for the weekend, and I'm home to "fend" for myself. Not like I'll have much time for anything with the gig tonight and tomorrow night, and rehearsal on Sunday. Maybe the monster that is my computer area will be tamed, or I'll find my randomly strewn forms for may taxes and start those....
Or maybe I'll stay glued to newsfilter.org all night.

Oh- and I got sick of the Jack Handy quotes, so I threw them at the bottom of the page, and replaced them with Albert Einstein. And if you will scroll down a bit you'll notice there are a couple of RSS newsfeeds.

Wheee...

Well I went through most of the javascript tutorial at W3schools and as a little project made up the new addition on the right ( I know it's overdone, Jack Handey is kind of passe' now). It automatically spouts out random quotes from JH when the page is loaded. (And no, it's not stolen, well, the script isn't anyways).

In X land, Xavier has been very difficult, willful, defiant and sometimes violent in the last few . He also has at least 2 molars coming in, that can't be too pleasant. Here's the general progression of his actions : Happy, friendly, huggy, nice kid, and gradually as the hour progresses he starts doing things he knows he shouldn't, whining, crying, tantrums, throwing stuff, and if you're in range, he may smack you.
Needless to say by the time I come home A is at her wits end, so she goes and hides while I take care of the little guy.

Car update?

Well I took the car into another mechanic on Sat., a guy I've had work on it before, nice guy, and lots busy (so he doesn't need to "make" work for himself).
ANYways, he took a look at it, test drove it, and said that all it may need is a wheel alignment. He suggested watch the tire wear, and if it starts wearing uneven bring it in for an alignment.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy, although I do think it will need an alignment, it seems the front tire is noisier than it used to be. Not so much a growl, but a mild howl.... well... noisier than usual anyways.

This whole thing gives me another reason to hate cars, and reconfirms the fact they are a money pit. I can't wait until we have tube transportation like on Futurama; just cross your legs and arms and hold tight to your belongings, wheeee!

Monday monday

I started this blog to vent frustration and anger about my past job. Fortunately now with the new job that same crap doesn't exist, but unfortunately now my postings are not interesting.

I guess I could go down the road of talking about politics... but no, I'm really not that "in-the-know" so ... I won't do that. I could talk about my kid all the time... or the cats or dog ... or the freak neighbors next door. But that's been done a bit too much too...

gonna have to re-think this thing.. maybe at the same time as I do that I'll redo the look'n feel.

Or maybe I'll do like Pommie and just do random postings about stuff ...

Well

I know now, why I don't regularly go drinking with the gang... asthma, and allergies. The next day after drinking I had a chest cough, and I still have it, and a bit of a runny nose. I've gotten bad chest infections before from being engulfed in a smoking environment, and this is threatening to be one also. I think my inhalers are keeping it at bay though, so that's hopeful.

No offence to my friends, but smoking sucks and I hope the legislation goes through soon where it is not allowed in bars also.

Excuse the drunkenness

wow... first time I've gone out with the gang on a friday night in probably a year.

Good times, and lots of booze... memories of ten years ago flooding into our brains, friends, good times, bad times, sad times.

I miss it, you know, I miss going out with the gang and bullshitting, drinking a bunch of beer, speaking in stupid accents, talking of old times. It's fun.

It amazes me that when I was 24ish I used to do this all the time, and no worries, no mortgage, nor kids, no huge debt load. Just drink and good times.
Maybe that's where I went wrong... maybe I shouldn't have stopped....

I don't know... I'm still more than half drunk, so I can't be held accountable for what I type. .. really I can't...

Catalyst

After the recent drama at my last employer, some of you may have perhaps wondered what was my inspiration or catalyst for shaking things up and for standing up to be heard. I'd say a big part of it was a couple of great songs by Incubus, one called "Warning" and the other "Megalomaniac".

I included the lyrics for Warning, mostly because they are so pertinent to myself and my life perspective these days. And also because I listened to the song on my NetMD this morning :)

Incubus - "Warning"

Lyrics:
Bat your eyes girl
Be otherworldly
Count your blessings
Seduce a stranger
What's so wrong
With being happy?
Kudos to those who
See through sickness
Yeah

Over and over
And over and over

She woke in the morning
She knew that her life
Had passed her by
She called out a warning
Don't ever let life pass you by

I suggest we
Learn to love ourselves
Before it's made illegal
When will we learn
When will we change
Just in time to see it
All come down

Those left standing
Will make millions
Writing books on ways
It should have been

She woke in the morning
She knew that her life
Had passed her by
She called out a warning
Don't ever let life pass you by

Floating in this cosmic Jacuzzi
We are like frogs oblivious
To the water starting to boil
Now I flinch and
We all float face down

She woke in the morning
She knew that her life
Had passed her by
She called out a warning
Don't ever let life pass you by
Pass you by

New job

Started the new job yesterday. It's, as a 90's rapper would say, "wicked awesome". This morning I actually couldn't sleep an hour before I had to get up, so I got up anyways and got there a few minutes early.

I'm not going in to all the details, but they gave me this wicked computer... p4 2.8g mHz 800 FSB w/ 512 MB 400 mHz RAM... wow. I don't even want to compare the p3 450 to this thing... don't even wanna.

3 words... Second Cup coffee.

that is all

That nasty dihydrogen monoxide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1176710,00.html

Yet another example of the US education system failing.

Looks like it's time for a style change

Just checked out a great blog called Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness, mostly political stuff, but interesting and funny. UNfortunately he is using the same style as I am... so now I have to get off my ass and create a new style.

I've been fux0ring around (isn't that special eh? use of 1337 words in a blog.. who woulda thought) with stylesheets and block formatting etc. lately, so maybe I'm smack my way through creating some templates for MT and make it so pretty you may lose control of some body functions.

oh yeah... and there are approx 12.5 hours 'til I'm finished here...

And the numbers are rising for people leaving... just heard someone else found a job, and is going to be escaping. The floodwaters are a risin' on the shores of the river, and the village is in danger, but the mayor is in his tower with painted sunshine on the windows and fields of butterflies and daisies on the walls.

one little comment

And suddenly the hits to my blog jump 500%... (sad when 25 or 22 hits is 500%)

Apparently many many people are suffering from the same homepage stealing as I was. And they're all searching Yahoo/MSN/Excite for "clrschp028" (there... just created more traffic for this page) ahahahaha.

Anyways, in band news we had a gig at Longriders on Friday, and then Saturday took a road trip up to Grande Prairie and played a gig at 5 mile hall. All in all the weekend was fun, even though I accumulated a total of 15 hours of sleep, and had to ride in the back seat of a 11 seat GMC Savana. I don't think my spine will ever be the same.

Oh, and for all you folks finding this blog, looking for ways to get rid of clrschp028, I had to go into Internet Options and change the homepage there (Start > Settings > Control Panel > Internet Options), and also remove some registry entries (using Regedit) in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\run\ and I also got rid of O.bat and O. Luckily I did a search for files by date, so they were pretty easy to find. I also quickly updated win2K on www.windowsupdate.com, as I think they are most likely using one of the many many security holes in IE.

OH ... an addition... just changed my security settings in IE to prompt running ActiveX... looks like that's what is being used to install the crap onto your machine. AMAZING how often I'm prompted, and when I say no there is no visible effect to the page viewed.

Here's ANOTHER reason to disable ActiveX on your browser

tick... tock.... tick ... tock

6 days and 5.5 hours before I'm done at this place. Apparently nothing matters, they are holding me to my 2 weeks, even though I've been less than enthusiastic working.

Damn cursed morals, if I didn't have them I'd be like... threatening to delete the company intranet, or .... start a loud shouting match with a co-worker... or spreading a virus around the office... then they'd let me go.

Sigh

la la la

Well I gave my notice today, and everyone here is happy for me. Some begrudgingly so... most likely envious.

I just found out if I would have made them fire me I could have gotten 6 weeks severance... blast! All it would have taken was 1 or 2 days of being late 5 or 10 minutes.
Oh well, I'll suffer out the 2 weeks 'cause I'm such a nice guy (bleh). They'll probably ask me to leave because I'm so annoyingly cheerful.

Yay for me!

Well I received an email this morning from the Company I applied to, and Whoohoo! they selected me! I'm going to give my 2 weeks on Monday, and if ******** decides they want me to leave earilier, all the better.

It's for a little less (about 100 a month) than I asked for, but that's fine, it's still around 3700 more a year than I'm presently getting, PLUS full benefits, etc.

Needless to say I'm ecstatic, and I'm chaffing at the bit to go.

gah

The state of consciousness has been upgraded to "Gah" ....

No call, no email, I sent an email query about it yesterday

no response

The most unfortunate thing is the longer it takes the more doubt I have I will get the position. Even though I seemed like a shoe-in at the time.

Bah

I was supposed to hear yea or nay yesterday about the job.

I have not heard yet

Stress encompasses me

Waiting is the worst game
 

 

 

 

 

(by the way Pam, thanks to you now I check the dictionary before I post...) :)

... uhhh..... ahhh...

Well the interview went pretty well... I think... It wasn't very standard... or normal... or formal... It was unusual, I think it still went well...

I think I've won over one of the bosses, but the head of TS, I'm not sure... he seems wary of me.

Who knows tho... they said they'd tell me tomorrow... boy that's a long time.

wheee

I had almost forgotten what a good mood was like.

Today I am in one, and it feels good.

I have another interview at 3:30.

I'm excited.

Think of me at 3:30.

Wish me luck.

Busy busy

"And now it's Wednesday again... "

I had an interview on Monday, it went really well (in my mind anyways). The interviewer mentioned he would have to get a hold of the head of Tech Support, to see about possibly another interview. Luckily I'm the only one being interviewed, the position is not being advertised, and I have a friend who works for the company.

Now I'm playing the waiting game again... hopefully they come along soon, because things are uncomfortable at work. I will post about that at a later time.

Loverna Revisited

Out of mild boredom I did a google search on Loverna, Saskatchewan and I came up with some pretty cool finds. Surprising, in fact, that there was anything, but there are many pictures and history behind what's now a ghost town. The more I see, the more fitting the song is, I think.
Check some of these out:

Here's where Loverna is

Here's Loverna's Story and some Images

Here's a great picture of Main street Loverna ala 1988

Some pictures of unknown women who lived in Loverna, in 1912.

A spooky picture of a garage in Loverna

Why do I seem kind of obsessed with this tiny little ghost town? I'm not sure, it peaked my interest many many years ago, it must be the innate archeologist in me that is fascinated with long-gone places, relics, and the sad story of Loverna.

He's Furry! He's Fun! He's got a Gun!

I just had to post this, I'm sure you've all seen it before... but if not... here you are...

"Dishonest Dubya" - Lying Action Figure Doll!

I am still amazed that he has actually said such completely ridiculous things, and that someone thought he should be voted into office.

{insert Jeopardy theme song here}

(1:30)
It's the waiting game
Job application silent
I sit, still waiting

{insert ta-da sound effect}
(5:30)
I emailed the company I applied at, and apparently they're very busy but they are going to phone me for an interview next week.

{insert silent movie diminished chord suspense music}

Loverna: No Facilities

Thought I'd throw up this picture we took a long time ago, it was the oddest road sign I'd seen, and stuck in my head for a long time. I even wrote a jazz tune about it just out of University (excuse the sound quality, low budget demo cd).

Loverna is a tiny place in midwest Saskatchewan, near the Albertan border. Never been there, maybe someday.

17 days since last post... bad Oorgo! Bad dog!

Wow... I think that's the longest lag so far posting to this blog. It's been kind of nuts and since I'm not SUPPOSED to be blogging at work (which I am right now), I've been delayed.

On the job front: I have a very very positive opportunity with a company that an ex-coworker and friend is currently working at. It's significantly more money, better benefits, better job environment, better perks, better management. I'm crossing my appendages.

On the X-man front: He's doing really well, other than the odd tantrum because we don't let him play his computer game when he wants. He now recognizes and understands how alot of words and actions go together. For example: he here's someone saying "Hello!" on tv, so he waves at them. Very cute.

last night on the way home I think I got a cold in my ear, within 20 minutes suddenly my hearing decreased 50% in my right ear. Stupid winter. I have a gig this weekend, and I really don't need any ear problems

More Post Lag

Ack... more post lag... sheesh

On the homefront, I added more pictures of the X-man (Xavier) to his ever increasing archive . I've also sworn off Neverwinter Nights until I get a new computer, because the lag in some areas has become intolerable. This has been good for my creativity and willpower, because I finally got around to work on some transcriptions I've been putting off, and I've been spending more time with X-man. Maybe I'll actually get around to finishing that original tune I was working on.

At work it's become a tad bit less stressful, because I've moved further into redesigning and organizing our Intranet (A long and grinding road), and farther from answering calls (thank god).

On the gig front, I've got gigs lined up every weekend for the next month, right through Valentines day (Amber is not totally pleased with that one). So that means more cushion in our economy (slightly).

Post Lag

Well... it's been a few days since my last post but really that's only because of new office "policy". I used to make my posts at work, but now the fascist rule has imposed yet another construct to obstruct job satisfaction. Zero non-work-related internet access... nadda... except at lunch time (like I'm going to sit at my desk at lunch time).

So horror of horrors, I'm taking time from my NWN playing to post at home!

Oh, I got one of those Sony Net MD's for Christmas, it rocks! It doesn't skip, you can fit 2.6 hours of decent sound quality music on it, it's small, and easy to use. Oh, and I can digitally record stuff... mucho coolio

Happy PHS (Post-holiday season)

Whee... -38 windchill yesterday... and -16 w/ -27 windchill today

The January deep-freeze has started... and all the holiday cheer is now just wrapping in my recycle bag and molding in my fridge.

All in all it was a good season, we went to my sisters for Christmas day, my Mom and Dad were also there. I fixed a problem my nephew was having with playing Halo on his new computer (ATI driver problems, big surprise). Xavier had alot of fun, and everyone enjoyed watching him be the silly kid he is.

New Years eve I had a gig at the Sutton Hotel (used to be Sheraton, or Weston, or something) so Xavier went to hang out at my sister-in-law's place with his Grandma D. New Years Day we spent there, listening to the noise, and incessant banter about Global Idol, sheesh people, it's just a tv show!

Happy New Year / Blog

Well with all new years things change. Sometimes expectedly... sometimes not...

Not so expectedly MovableType went Wacko on Pommie's server after moving to gentoo, and now I start again.

We start again....

Spatula

Damn... I am so freakin' tired. I know... it goes without saying... parenthood==loss of sleep but damn... today I was talking to someone on the phone and I was on the brink of sleeping several times. That has to say something for the interest I had in the call.

Oh, I've been listening to The Hives today ... pretty awesome stuff, you should check them out.

Nothing too interesting to report... other than the usual feh.

posting, finally

Well, I know it's been forever, but I'm finally updating my livejournal.

Damn has it been hectic, what with the tight money situation, work is busy, and our new baby boy!

That's right, we had a little boy named Xavier on Sunday Nov. 17 at 5:54, 5lbs 9 ozs. If you want to see some really cute pictures they're here: http://members.shaw.ca/oorgo/pics/Xavier

He had some difficulty breathing at first, so they put him on an intibator (sp?) and then on CPAP (controlled positive air pressure) to help him out. He also had what they think were seizures at first, so they did some tests later on in the week, brain ultrasound and MRI. The Ultrasound turned up nothing, everything looked fine, but the MRI turned up some oddity in the back of his brain, meaning possible brain damage or blood clots.

They still don't exactly know what the MRI means, we haven't had a definite answer one way or the other. They're basically saying that the only way they can tell if there are problems, is if he starts acting strange, or starts having problems. And now he's getting assigned to a pediatrician, instead of a neo-natal specialist, I guess that's good.

The thing I keep saying is he looks so great, and acts so normal and active, plus he's gaining weight, he must be doing fine.

The nurse thinks he'll be out of there sooner than we think, so we're gonna have to start cleaning the house like mad. I bet that he's gonna be home by the end of next week.

(no subject)

What Is Your True Aura Colour?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yeah... that's me baby.... OH yeah

Stress

I'd like to take this time to stress the fact that there is no stress.
You are under the influence of the Stress Inducer.
You are not actually under stress.
It is all in your head, the Inducer has put it there
Resist the Inducer
Desist the Reducer
Insist the Deducer
Floss the bimboozler

Whine

Guh... stupid... stressed... life

Amber had more pains last night, but after lying down they went away. She's definitely on bed rest.. strict bed rest for a couple (few) days.

She really hates it, but it's better than getting another scare like the other night.

F#@$... damn phone... go away... ring ring ... idiotic questions... ring ring

Still waiting on the company I was working for, hopefully they contact me soon and wisk me away from this shit.

It only makes sense

Greek gaming law defeated in court

(no subject)

A song for the times

XTC - Dear God

(no subject)

I absolutely cannot believe this

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956357.html

NWN

Whee

I've been playing my "real-life" stats in Neverwinter nights. I'm a cleric... and it's definitely slow starting...
Here they are (or at least after I added my extra points that were left over)

Str: 11
Int: 11
Wis: 15
Dex: 10
Con: 10
Chr: 14

btw.. curses to for finding that webpage :)

the worst part... strength... damn... I can't carry shit ! I've got armor on, a weapon, a few potions, and some various stuff... but that's it. A big 92 lbs. I can carry 256 lbs with my fighter/thief (of course the Belt of Frost Giant Strength doesn't help)
Damn... I bet if I hadn't missed a bunch of quests, and other stuff... I wouldn't be going back ... I was almost finished.

One of these days I'll get bored of this damn game and go back to the real world. Really i will

Oddness goodness

I don't know why, but I feel lately like some door has opened in my head, some block that was there before has been removed and I can think more clearly again. I think it has something to do with re-reading Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life & the Arts by Stephen Nachmanovitch for the 3rd or 4th time. I'm coming up with new songs and new things out of the blue, and it's quite cool. Plus I'm in a relatively good mood, which has been pretty rare lately.

I got the car back from the shop on Friday... it runs AWESOME! Better than ever I swear, it idles evenly and quiety and even has some renewed power (it seems). YAY!

A. is finished work on Wednesday, which I'm quite happy about, it will be good for her to be able to get more rest, and maybe the cats and house will get more attention :)

(no subject)

Well it's Friday afternoon and I'm at work... as usual, and I have a gig tonight at Mezza Luna with America Rosa (local latin club downtown). That should be fun, but man I hate Friday afternoons... it's like this: everyone else leaves by 3:30 or 4:30, I leave at 6:00 ... So I try to find things to do.
Today I've been learning the exciting world of the OSI Network Model, and let me tell you it's exciting. I can barely stay awake.
Things on my mind: money and pregnancy, boy, they just do not go together do they, and the lack of the former doesn't compliment my current mental state. August should be better , I get an extra paycheck, at least we'll briefly have our heads above water.
I almost preferred it better last year when I was unemployed and we were pregnant, because then I could keep an eye on A and watch out for her. I guess I'm becoming over-protective, oh well.
I guess that's it for Post 2. Have a good weekend all