Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My sister called me last night to tell me that something was wrong with my dad. She got him to go to the hospital – no small feat, as my dad is not a big fan of going to see doctors¹ – and we were worried he may have had a stroke, but after much waiting around at the ER, when he finally got admitted and had a CT scan done, we found out that he has a brain tumour. Today he was transferred to a bigger hospital and is waiting to get an MRI and see a neurosurgeon in the morning. We really don’t know anything more than that at this point and I’m trying to remain optimistic that it will be operable. I’m waiting to find out what the prognosis and plan is to decide when I should go there. If he goes into surgery right away, I’m getting on a plane immediately. If it’s not that simple, I’ll figure out when is best for me to go there. I really wish it was tomorrow morning already, because the waiting is killing me. It’s hard to be so far away, because I can’t be there with my family for this. It’s hard even writing this posting, because all I can think is that my Dad isn’t at home to say to my Mom, “Hey Ann, come see what Bethy wrote on her blog today.” So I’m doing the only thing I can think to do right now – I’m adding Toronto Maple Leafs players to my hockey pool team.

I just need my Dad to be OK. I love you, Dad.

1. Which is a huge understatement – I don’t think my dad has seen a doctor in more than 20 years. [↩]

Tags: family, love, sad

This past weekend’s pre-core course was about accounting, which means I spent Friday night and all day Saturday and all day Sunday journalizing, posting to ledgers, and making statements of income/owner’s equity and so forth. I can feel your jealousy. I’ve never done *any* accounting before, so this was a pretty steep learning curve. When I went to bed on Friday after class, my head was spinning with thoughts of “An increase to an asset account is a debit” and such stuff¹. Also, I’m not a very detail-oriented person – I much prefer big picture thinking – so I kept making little errors, like putting things in the wrong column (by accident, as opposed to thinking they actually belonged there) or putting too few zeros. Happily, the prof wanted us to understand the concepts, rather than just being good at the mechanics with no understanding. In the end we had a quiz to test ourselves to see how well we’d learned and I got 85% (even though I didn’t get to the last 3 questions), so that made me feel like I’m doing OK.

Here’s some random things I learned this weekend:

• Debits  go on the left side, and credits go on the right side, of a ledger. Whether an increase (or a decrease) is a debit or credit depends on what kind of account you are talking about.
• The double-entry bookkeeping system, which we still use today, was first described in 1494.
• Expense ≠ Cash Out. Expenses don’t happen when you give someone money – they happen when you benefit from the asset (e.g., product or service) associated with that expense.
• Revenue ≠ Cash In. Similarly, you don’t make revenue when the money comes in – you make the revenue when you deliver your product/perform your service.

Also, I got this swanky backpack as part of being in the program. Not bad for $41,000, eh?

1. I also spent the first half of the first period of Sunday night’s hockey game with my brain racing with thoughts of accounting. I couldn’t seem to get my head in the game for that first 10 minutes, but I could easily have told you that accrual-basis accounting follows the revenue recognition principle. [↩]

Tags: Nerdery, school, tired

Bething Day, as I’m sure you know, is the the Bethmas equivalent of Boxing Day! The traditional way to celebrating Bething Day¹ is do to something that makes Beth happy. Last year, it was buying a pair of sexy boots. This year, it’s a massage and then dinner with Kalev. I hope you all have wonderful Bething Day plans too!

1. Where “traditional” means, whatever tradition I feel like inventing. [↩]

Tags: Bething Day

So it appears that I did, in fact, turn 35 today. And the world did not, in fact, end. Surprising, I know. And I suppose you are all wondering how I celebrated the big day. Well, first off was Bethmas Eve dinner. Since I live in the boonies and I didn’t want to drive all the way to Vancouver (where all my favourite restaurants are) given how limited my time is these days and how much driving to Vancouver I’m doing this month¹, I had to decide on somewhere out this way. There’s a good Greek restaurant near my place, but we’ve been there a few time recently and I didn’t feel like going to the brew pub, and that’s pretty much all I know for restaurants out here. So I decided to try The Keg. Everyone keeps telling me that it’s really good and my sister assured me that it’s good “even though it’s a chain restaurant”², so it was off to the Keg for a peppercorn encrusted steak and garlic mashed potatoes. I have to admit – pretty delicious! And since it was my birthday³, I got a free dessert! Already, my birthday was starting off awesome and it wasn’t even my birthday yet!

Now, for my actual birthday, there were two things that I wanted to do. And, as I mentioned, both of these things were on my list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. And those things were:

17. visit a shooting range and shoot a gun!
92. make Dark & Stormy cupcakes

Shooting Guns

Just before Christmas, there was a Social Shopper⁴ deal for the shooting range in PoCo that I keep hearing about on the radio⁵. The deal was pretty good – $29 got you on the range and you got a 9mm gun and 50 rounds of ammo to do some shooting⁶ and knowing that this item was on my 101 list, I convinced Devon to get this deal with me. So after a glorious morning of sleeping in (something I won’t get to do on any other day in this entire month!) and lounging around drinking coffee, we were off to PoCo for some shooting! After signing a waiver saying that “hey, shooting ranges are dangerous!” and that my heirs can’t sue the shooting range if I get injured or die⁷, we got our ear muffs and safety glasses and headed into the range. The instructor told us all the rules⁸, showed up how to work the guns and then we got to do some shooting! The instructor had to watch us each shoot a round individually, to make sure we were doing it right, and then we could both shoot the rest of our bullets while the instructor watched. I made Devon go first, because I’m a big chicken, and I have to say it was kinda scary to watch. You always hear that it is surprising how much recoil there is on a gun when you shoot it but, holy crap, it’s a surprising how my recoil there is on a gun when you shoot it! Also, the bullet casing fly every which way – bouncing off the wall, off you, off the instructor – just everywhere! Once I tried it myself, though, it wasn’t so bad – you can feel that the recoil is big, but it somehow doesn’t look as big when you are shooting as when you are watching someone else shoot. And I didn’t see where any of my casings flew, because I was intently staring at my target. Why did I need to stare so intently at my target? Because, naturally, I chose a zombie target!

Me and the target I used for the first time I ever shot a gun! I feel much more prepared for the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

I practised aiming for the head because, as everyone knows, you’ve got to destroy the brain when it comes to zombies. Headshots. Double tap. It’s elementary stuff.

My target on the left, Devon’s on the right. Out of the 50 rounds, I got 30 hits and he got 27. Not bad for a first go!

Baking Cupcakes

After we finished at the shooting range, it was back to my place for some lunch and to bake some cupcakes. You see, I long ago discovered this recipe for Dark N’ Stormy cupcakes, based on the Caribbean drink of the same name. The drink is a delicious concoction of lime juice, ginger beer, and black rum. The cupcake has a bottom layer that is essentially a gingerbread-flavoured cupcake⁹, a top layer that is a rum and lemon rind flavoured white cupcake, and then the whole thing  is topped with a rum cream cheese icing and some candied ginger on top¹⁰

Cupcake verdict: Delicious!

In the evening, Devon went off to Irish Gaelic class, and my friend Kim came over for tea and cupcakes! She also graciously helped me take down my Christmas tree, which I hadn’t yet had time to do this month and figured that I wouldn’t have time to do it until sometime next week if I didn’t get it done tonight. And now, I’m finishing up this blog posting and then heading to bed! Because apparently shooting guns and baking cupcakes is tiring work!

Happy Bethmas, everyone!

1. For the record, it’s 14 trips to Vancouver in the 31 days of January [↩]
2. As she knows how much I dislike most chain restaurants. I mean, there are a few good ones – I like White Spot veggies burgers, for example, and recently tried Red Robin and found that their burgers don’t taste like chain restaurant at all. [↩]
3. Well, birthday eve, but who’s counting? [↩]
4. i.e., Groupon-type thingy [↩]
5. Yes, apparently I am a slave to advertising, apparently. [↩]
6. In comparison, the range fee – i.e., just stepping on the range – costs $30! [↩]
7. Which would be a very sucky way to spend one’s birthday [↩]
8. Very sensible things like “always point the gun towards the range” and “don’t put your finger on the trigger except when you are all set up and ready to shoot.” [↩]
9. Molasses, sugar, fresh ginger, cloves, etc. [↩]
10. It’s also supposed to have a rum sauce poured over the cupcake before you ice it, but being brilliant such as I am, Devon made the rum sauce while the cupcakes were baking, and then he had to go off to Irish Gaelic class, so we quickly iced a warm cupcake for him to take, sans rum sauce. And then I let the cupcakes cool and then iced them, completely forgetting to poke holes in the cupcakes and pour the rum sauce on! So I just drizzled rum sauce on before I ate it and that saved the day! [↩]

Tags: 35, Bethmas, birthday

Unlike a typical year, I haven’t been yelling from the rooftops about my upcoming birthday. OK, I’ve done some yelling from some rooftops, but from much fewer rooftops that usual. I guess I’ve been a little less excited because this year I’m turning the big 3-5. How is that even possible? I certainly don’t *feel* like I’m 34 years, 364 days old. But, as I’ve said before, turning 35 is much better than not turning 35, so I best get on with celebrating it!

And I do have celebration-y type plans. Often for my birthday – or sometimes my half birthday – I’ll invite a bunch of friends out for dinner at a restaurant. But seeing as I have no weekends free this entire month, that seemed like it wouldn’t work¹. Instead, I’m going out for Bethmas Eve dinner with Devon tonight and then tomorrow we’ve both taken the day off work so we can get up to some shenanigans. In fact, said shenanigning involves knocking not one, but *two* items off my 101 Things To Do List! I’ll also be seeing my friend Kim on Bethmas night and then going for a massage and dinner with Kalev for Bething Day. Which all sounds like a pretty fabulous Bethidays to me!

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to enjoying my last day as someone in her early thirties!

1. Though now that I think about it, I might do that for my half birthday, since I don’t have any classes in July! [↩]

Tags: birthday, celebration, rampant narcissism, things of a celebratory nature

So, I was in class for 20.5 hours on the weekend¹:

• Friday – 5:30 to 9 p.m.
• Saturday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Sunday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

It was a lot of hours and it was all math and – I’m sure this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me – I quite enjoyed it. I mean, it was rather exhausting, of course, and I really didn’t like having to get up at 6 a.m. on the weekend, but the content was interesting and the professor was excellent. And it was really nice to meet some of my classmates for the first time! Since the program I’m in uses a cohort model and involves predominantly group work, I’m going to be spending *a lot* of time with these people over the next 28 months, so it was great to meet so many friendly and interesting people!

One thing I found myself telling a lot of people is something that I learned when I played hockey for 10 days straight – don’t think too far into the future! Take things one shift class at a time. Anytime someone mentioned that we were going to be spending four weekends in a row in classes – 20.5 hrs for each of the first three weekends, followed by 32 hours on the last weekend of January (Friday to Monday) – I saw this look in their eye that I recognized as showing what I felt whenever I started to think too far ahead during that game. It’s a look of overwhelm, a look that says, “I can’t do this.” And so I would say, “Don’t think of it like that. Just think of this weekend. One day at a time! We can totally do this!” And it was a really good reminder for me too! And I just typed this out, I’ve realized something else – it’s hardest at the start. The first 3 of the 10 days of hockey were the worst, and I bet the first weekends of classes are the worst too. Just like in the game, it will get better once we get used to the new routine.

Anyway, I learned a whole bunch of stuff – and get a refresher on a bunch of stuff that I knew before but didn’t remember all that much – I’m looking at you, calculus! Here’s some random things I learned this weekend²:

• The symbol used for “profit” in business math equations is π . Dr. Dan‘s theory on why this is so is because π goes on forever, which is what you would want your profits to do. Also, π  is delicious!
• Bill Gates and Warren Buffet started a movement to get the mega rich to give away a lot of their money. And by “a lot,” I mean at least 50% of their wealth, within their lifetime or upon their death (in case they haven’t given out the 50% before they die). In the case of Buffet, he’s giving away 99% of his wealth. To give you a sense of how much money he has, he says that even after giving away 99% of his wealth, he won’t notice any change to his lifestyle or that of his family! You can check out a list of the mega rich people who have taken this pledge at givingpledge.org.
• Calculus is all about slope and reaching limits.

Also, as part of our course package, which costs one zillion dollars, we got a swanky business math calculator. It’s the calculator that we have to use on all of our exams so that no one has any unfair advantage of having a more advanced calculator than anyone else. The problem, of course, is that everyone in the class has the exact same calculator, so it will be quite easy to accidentally pick up someone else’s and if you lose yours, how would you ever be able to figure out which one of the 50 in the room was yours³? This is my solution to that problem:

1. Hence the blog radio silence for the past few days. [↩]
2. This isn’t *all* that I learned, but I figured that most of it would bore the hell out of you. [↩]
3. This reminds me of my undergrad, where all of the thousands of students had to use the Casio fx991 calculator, and one day the Calculus prof made an announcement at the start of class in front of the 200 or so students: “Someone left a calculator in the lecture hall after class last week. It’s a Casio fx991. You can come and claim it at the end of class.” [↩]

Tags: Nerdery, school, tired

So today is my first day of school. Well, it’s not technically the start of the MBA program per se, but rather it’s the first of three “pre-core” weekend courses¹ that will get us ready for the actual program, which starts on the last weekend of January. And it’s not technically my first “day” of school, since it happens at night. But it costs lots of money and we’ll be learning things, so I figure that counts as school.

I’ve had terrible insomnia all week², which I’m ascribing to anxiety about school starting³, so hopefully once it actually gets going I’ll see it’s not that bad and calm down a bit. Either that, or it will be that bad and I’ll use all that extra awake time to do homework.

Wish me luck!

1. The three courses are Accounting, Economics, and the vaguely-named “Quantitative Methods.” [↩]
2. Where my definition of “terrible insomnia” means that I’ve lain awake for an hour or two each night, rather than falling asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. People with actual insomnia, feel free to tell me to STFU. [↩]
3. But which may also be due to the abrupt shift from my holiday schedule of stay up late every night, sleep in every morning and/or bf-withdrawal, since I spent the entire Christmas/New’s Week with him and have gone cold turkey this week as we are now both back to work! [↩]

Tags: book learnin', Nerdery, school

So I was reading a Stats Can report the other day¹ and came across some interesting data on housework^2,3:

Time spent on domestic work varied among women according to their working arrangements. Among women who were working at the time of the survey, those who were part of a dual-earner couple and worked part-time spent the most time on domestic work—an average of 21.0 hours per week. Less time was spent on domestic work by full-time working women who were part of a dual-earner couple (13.9 hours per week), or women who were the sole wage earner in a single-earner couple (15.2 hours per week). The least amount of time was spent by single working women. On average, they spent 7.7 hours per week on domestic work. [emphasis mine]

To me, this seems like quite a drastic difference! Women who were part of a dual-income couple did quite a bit more housework (13.9 hrs per week if they worked full-time and 21 hrs per week if they worked part-time) than single women (7.7 hrs per week). Most surprisingly, women who were in a couple where their partner didn’t do any paid work did more housework (15.2 hrs per week) than women in couples where their partner did paid work (13.9 hrs per week)! Shouldn’t they be doing less housework?

To me, the most striking question from all of this is: how come single women need so much less housework done than coupled women? Remember, the data on coupled women is only the housework being done by the women – there is also housework being done by their partner! For example, in couples where both partners work full-time, the women do 13.9 hrs and the men do 8.6 hrs for a total of 22.5 hrs per week. Compared to the single women doing 7.7 hrs per week, that’s nearly three times as much housework being done in that household⁴! I realize there there is a bit more housework to be done when two people live in a house – twice as many dishes, twice as much laundry – but the total workload shouldn’t even be twice as much as there are some things that don’t take longer by having more people in the house (e.g., vaccuuming). I suppose some of the extra workload could be attributed to housework related to children that isn’t child care per se (e.g., I know from my friends with kids that they generate a heck of a lot of laundry, especially when they are very little), but would this make the workload three times as much? I suppose it’s possible that single women are more likely to hire, say, a housekeeper, since they don’t have anyone else in their house to share the housework with, but that data wasn’t provided. Another possibility is that more single people rent (as opposed to owning a place) compared to coupled people⁵ and owning comes along with more maintanance tasks that renters don’t need to worry about (e.g., fixing things, cleaning gutters). Any other thoughts on why single people do so much less housework than coupled people? Or am I just bringing down the average?

Another thing in the report is, not surprisingly, that women do more of the unpaid domestic chores than men (on average) and men do more paid work than women (again, on average). But apparently that’s changing:

During the past quarter century, the involvement of men and women in paid work and housework has changed. A study¹ comparing three generations of young people—the late baby boomers (born 1957 to 1966), Generation X (1969 to 1978) and Generation Y (1981 to 1990) found an increasing similarity in the involvement in paid work and housework between men and women from the late baby boomers to those in Generation Y.

Despite the narrowing of the differences, men continue to have an overall greater involvement in paid work than women, and a lesser involvement in housework.

For example, at ages 20 to 29, late baby boom men did on average 1.4 hours more paid work per day than women. In Generation Y, this difference had narrowed to 1.1 hours.

Late baby boom women, when they were aged 20 to 29, did 1.2 hours more housework per day than men. By the time Generation Y arrived at the same age group, the difference had narrowed to 0.4 hours. This was due entirely to a decrease in the time women spent on housework.

When looking only at dual-earner couples, the dominant family form since the 1980s, the study found that young adults are increasingly sharing economic and domestic responsibilities. As women have increased their hours of paid work, men have steadily increased their share of household work.

Women aged 20 to 29 in dual-earner couples in Generation Y did an average of 6.7 hours of paid work per day in 2010, up from 6.4 hours for their counterparts in Generation X.

On the other hand, dual-earner women in Generation Y did 53% of the total housework done by couples, down from 59% for their counterparts in Generation X.

Average daily time spent on paid work and housework by men and women in young dual-earner couples is more similar for those without children and particularly so for Generation Y.

However, for both Generation X and Y, with the presence of dependent children at home, the contribution of women to a couple’s total paid work time declined while their contribution to housework increased.

My question about all this is: only 6.7 hours per day of paid work? Pfft! I could do that in my sleep!

1. What, you don’t read Stats Canada reports?? [↩]
2. What, you don’t think data on housework is “interesting”? [↩]
3. Note that “housework” did not include child care, which was discussed in a separate part of the report. Housework included unpaid domestic work such as “housework, yard work and home maintenance.” [↩]
4. Single men do 6.1 hrs per week, meaning there is nearly four times as much housework being done in household of a dual earner full-time working couple [↩]
5. This may be my Vancouver-based assumption, given that it’s nearly impossible to own a place on a single income here. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to own a place on two incomes here! [↩]

Tags: gender, Nerdery, statistics, Statistics Canada

And speaking of photos that I’ve been meaning to blog about, remember that time I said I was going to spend the first half of my Christmas vacation organizing my apartment? I totally did that. And I took photos!

My desk place that I stored “papers that I’m going to file someday” – before photo:

My desk – after photo:

Notice my corkboard of inspiration to the left of my desk – it contains my running medals, LG4CF player ID (not seen in photo), Polar Bear Swim button, a poster of yoga poses, and some inspiration photos. My diplomas remind me that I can really do this school thing, and the giant whiteboard is ready for to do lists/brainstorming.

Bookshelves – before photo:

Bookshelves – after photo:

And here’s my closet organization system – places to set out my outfits for every day of the week – and I actually have two of these in my closet, so I can set out two weeks worth of outfits at one time!

Let the school year begin!

Tags: efficiency, Nerdery, organization

Without even noticing, I tweeted my 10,000th tweet today! Had I realized how close I was to this milestone, I might have made it something more significant than:

In my defence, I was having a Twitter conversation with Cath, wherein I suggested that the number of grant applications she’s working on was crazily insane, and then she pointed out that I’m in no position to tell anyone that their workload is insanely crazy. Hence the “touche.”

In celebration of my momentous 10,000th tweet, I give you all of my favourite tweets since the last time I shared my favourite tweets with y’all. This may have been facilitated by the fact that, a few weeks ago, I took some screenshots of the tweets I’ve favourited with the intention of blogging about them and then promptly forgot.

As usual with tweets, these go in reverse chronological order. And I’ve added in a few comments to clarify items that made sense when tweeted, but which might be out of context without some explanation. Enjoy!

A bunch of these ones are related to the Longest Game for CF. And the one by Cath is in reference to an email we got at work (we work for related health organizations that share an IT system) about the Pagenet pagers being unable to receive pages. In 2011.

The next two by Dave (touchyoulast) are in reference to game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. <sob!>

Renee’s and warmandpunchy’s in the next set were tweeted while they watched the televised leaders’ debate at election time:

My tweets in this next section need to be read from the bottom up. Because they don’t make sense in reverse chronological order.

Again, read mine from the bottom up:

Tags: Geekery, tweets, Twitter