Not To Be Trusted With Knives

So it feels weird to be writing a regular old blog posting after the last few weeks, but I feel like I need to get back on the blogging horse and sooner is better than later, because I feel like the longer I wait, the weirder it is going to feel. My dad loved reading my blog because it let him keep up with what I’m doing, so it only seems right to get back to writing about the minutiae of my day that my legions of fans have come to expect here at NTBTWK. Of course, it’s late (as I had a study group meeting after work today) and I’m tired and my thoughts are all over the place, so I think that means it’s time for a bulleted list.

• I got some marks back on some of the assignments I handed in and I did surprisingly well, especially given that I submitted them from the hospital when I was in a state where I said, “I have no idea if I’ve even finished these assignments, but I should at least hand in whatever I’ve finished, as there’s no point not getting marks for whatever I’ve done up to this point. I’m just going to submit whatever is in these Word documents and hope for the best.”¹
• When I got to the office today, there was a card from my officemates including a note that they had taken up a collection and made a donation to the Brain Tumour Foundation in my Dad’s honour. I thought that was a lovely gesture. I also got a card and flowers from the management team I work with, which was really sweet. They are on my kitchen table next to the one’s Devon gave me when he picked me up at the airport. I’m spoiled.
• Also waiting in my office were a certificate announcing the two shiny new letters I have after my name² and the peacock feather earrings I’d ordered from the “Feather Fashionista” through one of the Groupon-type sites³:

• Whenever I see peacock feathers, it reminds me that my Dad taught me when I was really little that these are not actually peacock tail feathers, but rather “tail covert feathers.” The peacock’s actual tail is quite short.
• I have an unholy amount of reading to do in the next 10 days (i.e., when my next weekend of classes starts). I need to get caught up on what I missed in classes⁴, do the readings I should have done for those classes but just couldn’t do⁵, and the readings due for my next weekend of classes (March 2-4). Classes that weekend go until 5 pm on March 4 and then I have to be in Ottawa for a meeting starting at 9 am the next day. I am so not looking forward to that! As a reward for making it through that though, I’m taking three vacation days and spending the rest of the week visiting my family⁶.
• I’ve started to get various tax forms in the mail – T4s from employment, charitable donation receipts, pension adjustments and the like. And I’m ridiculously excited about doing my taxes⁷. I think there is something wrong with me.
• I have a massage appointment booked for tomorrow. And thank goodness – I really need a massage!

1. I guess I had finished them, but just not proofread them. I beat the class average on all four assignments for which we’ve received marks so far, so I’m relieved at that. [↩]
2. I’ll post a photo once I get a frame for it and hang it in my office! [↩]
3. I can’t even remember which one [↩]
4. Thankfully, I have wonderful classmates who are willing to get me up to speed. [↩]
5. My brain wasn’t able to retain anything! [↩]
6. I just can’t pass up taking advantage of a free trip to Ontario. Dr. Dan is going to visit me in T.O. and we are going to look for doors that say “Do not enter. Authorized personel only” which we will then enter, in honour of my Dad and his love of disobeying any such sign. [↩]
7. By which I mean taking all these documents to my accountant and having her do my taxes [↩]

Tags: peacock feather earrings, rampant consumerism, random

Ever so tired, brain too fried to put together coherent paragraphs, so instead you get bulleted lists. Because really, who doesn’t love a good bulleted list? Also, incoherence.

My Dad

• My dad’s operation, which will be at least 10 hours long (!), is scheduled for Feb 8. I will be flying out to Ontario to be with my family at that time.
• I’m so thankful that I have a very understanding boss and that my school is understanding as well.
• My friends and colleagues have also been so supportive and it’s meant the world to me. Kind words, offers of drives to and from airports, stories of similar surgeries that have been wonderfully successful and all the other support offered are all helping me and my family a lot.

School

• When I said that I’d likely be posting a lot fewer blog postings once school started, I wasn’t kidding – it feels like forever since I last blogged! In preparation for the first weekend of real classes¹, I’ve spent the last three nights reading pretty much from the time I’ve gotten home from work until the time I’ve fallen into bed exhausted. This is in addition to the fact that I’d started reading prior to this week AND I had to do a bunch of administrative-y things – like buying textbooks, downloading a course binder of materials, signing up for various websites, etc. etc., that I’ve been chipping away at over this month.
• One of our profs told us we aren’t allowed to whine about our workloads because if we have time and energy to whine, we should use that time and energy to get our work done instead of whining. So, for the record, I am not whining – I am merely stating facts
• Because I am a nerd, I’m tracking the hours I’m spending on homework using a program called Time Edition ((For the record, I have no affiliation with the Time Edition people. It just seemed like a handy time tracking program and I’m going to test it out. I’ll probably blog a review, should I ever have time to blog ever again)). I’m not sure if seeing this  will make me feel validated that I’m working hard enough or make me want to throw up when I see how much time I’ve spent on homework. Either way, I’m sure there will be graphs of this data in future blog postings.
• Tomorrow night is the welcome dinner for the program and we have to wear business attire. I’m very excited to have an excuse to wear my designer suit!

Work

• I really freaking love my work. I do such cool things and work with such great people. Things are ramping up for the AWESOME Project and I am SO EXCITED about that. Also, another work trip to Ottawa is coming up, which makes me squeee!
• In less awesome news, I got my first ever rejection from an academic journal for a paper that I submitted. Boo-urns! We are going to adapt it to submit to a different journal, so fingers crossed!

Health

• Given my January schedule of 8 hours of work or school 6 days a week, with the 7th day of the week being a 14.5 hour day of work plus driving plus school, I’ve done virtually no physical activity this month, save for a couple of hockey games that mercifully fell on Sunday nights after I finished school. I think I need to force myself to make some time for at least some short distance jogs and the occasional yoga class because I feel like crap when I don’t get exercise.
• These long hours are really not doing well for me nutrition-wise. I haven’t had time to go to a grocery store in ages and my game plan for this week turned out to be to order lots of pizza last night, so I’d have enough for not only last night’s dinner, but today’s lunch, today’s dinner, tomorrow’s lunch and probably Saturday’s lunch as well². Clearly, I need a better system!

I really thought I had something else to say, but now I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Anyhoo, headed to bed now. So. Freaking. Tired!

Update: OK, I remembered what I wanted to say, which was: If this week is any indication, I think I need to buy stocks in Pepsi. Because at the rate I’ve be downing diet Pepsis, they are going to be one hellava profitable company in the next 28 months of my schooling!

1. As opposed to the pre-core classes I’ve had the past three weekends [↩]
2. School is providing tomorrow’s dinner & Friday’s lunch [↩]

Tags: list, random, school, stuff, suchlike, things, tired

Christmas hand santizer:

Tags: Christmas

The one – and I do mean *one* – good thing about living where I do is that I’m close to my office. Like 5 minutes away¹. And it’s awfully nice to finish work at 4 pm and be home at 4:10 pm². The only problem with my commute happens on days when I have meetings in Vancouver, because living in the ‘burbs means that if I have to get to Vancouver for 9 am, I’m going to be stuck with the eleventy billion suburbanites commuting into Vancouver. And I *hate* sitting in traffic, wasting gas as we inch across the Alex Fraser Bridge at a snail’s pace. So, when I do have meetings in the big city, as I do today³, I leave my house at 6 am to avoid the lion’s share of the traffic and then find myself a nice little coffee shop to sit in and do some work⁴ until meeting time. I mean, if I’m going to have to just be sitting there, I’d rather be sitting in a comfy chair in a coffee shop than sitting in my car getting stressed out. This does require me to get up extra early in the morning – not my favourite thing to do – but the trade off of not having to sit in traffic makes it totally worth it.

Image Credit: Posted by Mark Woodbury on Flickr.

1. Although sometimes it can take upwards of 20 minutes when there are idiot drivers in the way. [↩]
2. It takes a few minutes to pack up and such. [↩]
3. And as I did last week [↩]
4. Or, in this case, write a blog posting! [↩]

Tags: driving, traffic, Vancouver

So, I’ve been listening to Rihanna’s song Man Down, which I quite like, but there’s one line that drives me absolutely crazy:

‘Cause I didn’t mean to hurt him
Could’ve been somebody’s son
And I took his heart when
I pulled out that gun

*Could* have been somebody’s son? *Could* have? Is it possible that he wasn’t somebody son? What, did he spring from the foam on the ocean? Erupt from a volcano? Materialize out of thin air? Why the hell would anyone write such a line? Did no one at any point in the production of this song point out “Um, yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.”?

Tags: lyrics, Man Down, music, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011, Rihanna

Someone¹ tweeted about this odd promotion by Aeroplan where you email them a picture of a chicken and they will give money to Veterinarians Without Borders:

“Aeroplan will donate $5 to [Veterinarians Without Borders] for each photo or drawing submission we receive of a chicken.  Money raised will help purchase 600 chickens to give to three villages in Laos including  Palai and Dounien.  ($5 purchases 1 chicken)  To enter, please send your drawing or photo to: csr.aeroplan (at) aeroplan.com between November 1st and 30th.”

Since I didn’t have any chickens handy to photograph, I decided to draw one. Also, I’m a terrible artist, but the rules did not say it had to be a *good* picture of a chicken. So I sent them this:

And now, dear readers, I’m challenging you too to send in a picture of a chicken to Aeroplan so that they’ll give more money to VWB. And then you should send me the picture too and I’ll add it to this blog posting. Because you know you can’t resist all the fame and glory that comes with having your chicken picture on my blog!

1. I totally don’t remember who it was, so my apologies for not giving credit where credit is due! [↩]

Tags: Aeroplan, charitable donation, chickens, doing good, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011, Veterinarians Without Borders

Computers hate me.

First, it was my work computer. It started out when I called I.T. to ask them to figure out why I suddenly couldn’t print to one of the three printers in my office, which are shared among all the staff. It’s my preferred printer to print on, as the other black & white printer¹ is at the front where the clerks sit and they often print on labels, so when I send a print job there, it sometimes ends up on a sheet of labels that one of the clerks has just stuck into the paper tray – so wasteful. I.T. told me that it would be simple to fix – the driver was corrupted, so they needed to remove it and replace it with a non-corrupt driver. But when they logged onto my computer remotely, they couldn’t remove it, no matter how hard they tried. A couple of different I.T. people tried, yet the driver would not budge from my computer! They could remove the drivers for the other two printers, but not this one. Clearly, my computer is haunted.

They also noticed that it takes eleventy billion years for my Windows profile to log onto my computer. I usually deal with this by logging on the moment I get into my office, and then taking off my coat, bringing my lunch to put in the fridge in the lunchroom, etc. etc. and by the time I’m done all that, I’m logged on. But the I.T. person said, “Oh, we can fix that.” And then they did a bunch of stuff and it didn’t help at all. In fact, one of the things they did was reset my Windows profile, and the next time I logged on, a whole bunch of files appeared on my desktop. Files that I had deleted A YEAR AGO. Clearly, these files are zombies, returned from the dead to eat my computer’s brains.

So the next step I.T. decided to take was to do a complete reinstall of Windows on my computer, which fixed my printer driver problem, but pooched my qualitative data analysis software, which reinstalled fine, but refused to be activated. Qualitative data analysis software, I might add, which I’m needing for a few of my high priority projects right now! Clearly, my computer is a vampire, sucking the activation-y goodness from my qual software.

Then, just to add insult to injury, the printer at the back – the one that started this all – went on the fritz and we can’t use it right now. I really wish I were making this all up, but alas a truer story has never been told.

So that’s just my work computer. But would you believe that two other computer systems, completely unrelated to each other, and both of which are for Big Important Things I’m working on, both screwed up royally on me? One had a major glitch whereby the work that I did appeared on my end to be submitted back at the end of September but was not received by the people who needed to receive it and I only found this out this week when I emailed them to follow up. The other system first wouldn’t let me enter any of the information I needed to enter at all and then, once I got that fixed, kets giving me error messages that my entry needs to be 1000 characters or fewer, even though my entry is only 995 characters. O. M. G.

How is it possible that this many computer issues could happen to one innocent young lady such as myself? Clearly, this must be some conspiracy of global proportions. I’m pretty sure the spiders are behind it. Or the zombies. Or, god forbid, the zombie spiders.

Image Credit: Comics are by xkcd.com – they are hilarious and shared with a Creative Commons license, because the creator is awesometastic. 

1. The third printer is a colour printer and I only print on it on the rare occasions that I need to print in colour. Obviously. [↩]

Tags: computers, computers hate me, I hate computers, my computer is possessed, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011

After two long days of workshopping, my brain is now in vacation mode and thus, incapable of any real coherent thoughts. Thus, I give you a list of random thoughts.

• I’m back at my hotel room, waiting for for my mom, sister, and nephew to arrive. My sister texted me with an update when they got to Kingston. And her text included those three special words we all love to hear: “We have wine!”
• I’m too cheap to pay for the hotel wifi (and, really, what hotel *charges* you for wifi in this day and age?) so I’ve been tethering my laptop to my iPhone when I want to use the ‘net. And tethering had been pig slow.
• “Pig” is a kind of slow, right?
• And that reminds me, I was in a discussion the other day about why the Angry Birds are so angry at the pigs. Given that I’ve played Angry Birds all of about four times, I mostly just felt bad for the pigs. I mean, what did they ever do to the birds? Turns out – and I’m sure everyone under the sun except me and the person I was having this discussion with already knew this – the pigs stole the birds eggs! I’m not sure how the birds figure that launching themselves into pig-built structures is a good plan – how are they supposed to raise those eggs if they’ve killed themselves in the process? – but then I realized I was thinking far too much about Angry Birds.
• Also, this sale is now over.

Tags: NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011, random

This is my 2,011th blog posting. And I’m posting it in the year 2011!

That is all.

Image Credit: Posted by Jackson Carson on Flickr.

Tags: 2011, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011

This was the Do Not Disturb door hanger at the hotel we stayed in for Linda & Casey’s wedding on the weekend:

Please do not disturb. This woman and her apple are having a special moment.

Strangely, the “please service this room” side of the door hanger had the exact same picture.

Please service this room. Much like this woman is about to service this apple.

Tags: do disturb, do not disturb, hotels, this is disturbing