Jun
8
Two truncations that amused me lately:
While this person was probably looking for a professional cat sitter or cat groomer, I decided not to click on that link so I can pretend that they were looking for a professional cat.
This email notification was letting me know that my name in appeared in an academic publication:
But I think it’s probably also accurate to say that I was mentioned in a pub.
Jun
8
So nearly half the year is gone. WTF? I really feel like it was January about 5 minutes ago and now it’s June! And, as I tend to do when I haven’t blogged in a while, I’m going for a bulleted list!
So pretty much catches you up with what’s new with me. And now that I’m back from my various travels, I guess I should figure out what I’m doing with my summer!
Mar
28
The elevators in my office building are very, very slow. It’s only a 7 storey building, so I’m not sure why it takes eleventy hours to get from the ground floor to the floor on which my office is located but it does. You often have to wait several minutes for the elevator and it’s super annoying when you just want to get to work – or you just want to leave! The other day, as I walked up to the elevator and the doors were closing, I pressed the button to get the doors to re-open, knowing that if I didn’t it catch it, I would be stuck there waiting for several minutes. Someone from my office was in the elevator, saw me press the button and *pushed* the “close door” button. I mean, the doors were closing, I pushed the button and they started to open again, and she pushed the freaking “close door” button and the doors started to close again! So I pushed the button again, and the doors opened and I got in. And this person does this big exaggerated sigh at me. I was stunned. So I said, “I really didn’t want to have to wait 5 minutes for the elevator to come back.” And she’s like “Well, I just wanted to get going.” Seriously. She didn’t want to be delayed by 12 seconds, so I should have to be delayed for 5 minutes! I figured I won that round, because she actually ended up costing herself more time by not just letting me get in the elevator the first time I pressed the button.
One of the two elevators in my condo is broken, with just a sign telling us “We are waiting for parts to be shipped to us to fix the elevator and we have no idea when they will arrive.” So there’s also a bit of a wait for the elevator when I’m at home. But funnily enough, I’ve not had anyone try to close the door on me. What’s more, I’ve had some variation of this conversation several times since the one elevator broke down:
Me: Thanks for holding the elevator! I can’t believe what a big difference in wait time it makes having just one working elevator.
Other Person: Yeah, it really does. On the plus side, I’ve met so many more of neighbours because it seems like there’s alway someone else in the elevator with you!
“I get to meet more of my neighbours!” is *such* a New West thing to say.
So I wrote the above two parts a few days ago and hadn’t had a chance to post them… and then the elevator situation at work got weirder. Yesterday, the elevators would not come to the floor my office is on. They would go to all the other floors, but not mine. I may have been listening to too much of the SAYER podcast, but I’m pretty sure I have offended the elevators – probably by complaining about how slow they are – and now they are plotting against me! And then today the office admin person sent around an email saying that they were aware of the broken door handle on the first aid room and maintenance had been called to come and fix it. So basically the elevators are out to get me and they’ve sabotaged the first aid room so that when said elevators attack, there will be no way to save me.
Yes. I’ve definitely been listening to too much of the SAYER podcast
Feb
9
So now that I’m done making excuses for my prolonged absence from the blogosphere, here’s a brain dump of all the things I’ve thought “I should blog about that!” in the last month:
How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!
Leonato, Much Ado About Nothing
Anyhoo, I guess this has been enough of a break for today – time to get back to my marking!
Dec
2
This is not the lightning bolt that struck my building. But I’m sure it looked something like this.
I was at a conference on Friday in Vancouver and apparently while I was there, the apocalypse happened in New West. There was torrential rain, hail, rivers of blood, plagues of locusts, and lightning struck my building. Ok, maybe the rivers were just made of rain and there weren’t any actual locusts, but lightning did, in fact, strike my building. And apparently that killed our building’s transformer1, so they had to bring in a generator, which will power the building until they can bring in a portable transformer, which will get us through until they can fix the building’s transformer, which is expected to take 10 weeks. Ten weeks! Fingers crossed that the strata’s insurance will cover all of this!
The power ended up being out for about 12 hours on Friday, so when I got home from the post-conference dinner, I met up with Scott at Waves, as he had an assignment due at midnight and Waves has free wifi, lots of access to electrical outlets, and lets you sit there pretty much forever. When they closed at 10 pm, we went over to the pub2. By about 11 pm I was too tired to stay up anymore3 and it occurred to me that I didn’t actually need electricity to go to sleep. As I was brushing my teeth by the light of a flashlight, the power came on!
Just a few weeks ago, I had bought a stand up freezer, because I was sick of both having to be selective of what frozen foods I could have at any given time since the freezer at the top of my fridge isn’t very big and of having stuff fall out of my freezer at the top of my fridge every time I opened it. So I bought this lovely appliance, and filled it up with a whole bunch of frozen meats and vegetables, homemade veggie stock, homemade waffles, fish that Scott’s dad caught on his most recent fishing excursion, etc.
So of course I was worried that 12 hours of no power was going to have ruined all that food. But lo and behold, this thing must be super well insulated, as after the power came on I opened it up to survey the damage and everything was still frozen solid!
Yesterday afternoon, the power went off again! I had just gotten home from having been out most of the day and was going to try to fix the wifi, which wasn’t working since the first power outage, and the power to the whole building went out again! We got a letter from the strata later telling everyone that the generator they have running cannot provide enough power for everyone to do all the same things they are able to do under normal circumstances, so we need to minimize our electricity use. So don’t, for example, do laundry while cooking dinner and, if possible, cook dinner outside of the peak hours of 4-7 pm. And maybe turn off the lights when you aren’t in a room. Most of this (other than the not eating dinner between 4-7 pm) is stuff we really should be doing anyway, when you think about it, so I’m going to use this as a way of getting myself into the habit of being more energy conscious!
Image Credit: I did a search for a Creative Commons-licensed photo of a lightning bolt on Flickr and one of the first ones to pop up was the above photo, which was taken by Derek Miller. You may recall Derek from his final blog posting. It’s really an incredibly cool photo!
Nov
3
So I was on the bus on the way home from work yesterday and two men got on the bus, sat down a few seats away from where I was sitting, and then one of them took a bottle of wine out of his bag, opened it up and took a swig right out of the bottle. But the thing is – it was my favourite wine1. So part of me is like “Oh my god, you can’t drink wine on the bus!” and the other part of me is like “Omg, that is such good wine!” And then after he and his buddy had each taken a drink, he offered it to the guy next to him, who was like “Uh, no.” And again I was torn – part of me was like “why aren’t they offering it to me? It’s my FAVOURITE WINE! Where are your manners??2” but also “Eww, I don’t want to drink wine from a bottle that random strangers have been drinking from.” I already think transit is germy enough!
Image Credit: Posted by Troy Kasper Photography on Flickr with a Creative Commons Licence.
Oct
11
So I was looking for images to use in slides for the class I’m teaching this semester – I’m a big fan of using striking images in my slides and I also make a point of only using ones that have copyright licenses to allow me to use them for free1. I have a few sites that I go to for such images: Freepik, Unsplash, Pixabay, Free Images, and Flickr (where you can search for Creative Commons licensed photos). I’ve found some pretty good ones and have some slides that I really like this semester, but in the process of searching for images is not always so smooth. Like yesterday when I was searching for an image to represent “causation”. Three sites2 gave me no images and one site gave me 484 images of carnations. #EvaluatorProblems.
I’ve also come across some weird stuff. Like this image3, which is currently haunting my dreams:
So, um, Happy early Halloween?
Image Credit: Posted by SarahRichterArt ((Be warned: I just went on the page of this photographer and she also has photos with spiders in them. And you know how I feel about spiders! Gah!)) on Pixaby with a Creative Commons license.
Sep
8
Recently, some colleagues at work and I were discussing how Vancouver is so expensive (and our salaries are, relatively speaking, so low), it’s not just that households need two incomes – you kind of need like 3 or 4 incomes to have the kind of standard of living that previous generations had with a 1-2 income household. Now, I realize that I’m not in nearly as hard a position as many, many other people, who actually need multiple incomes per adult in the family just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table and who have children and/or elderly parents to take care of. But even as someone in a relatively privileged position, I have relied on multiple incomes to pay off my massive student debt, buy myself a place to call home, save something for retirement so that I don’t have to eat cat food to survive, and do at least a little bit of traveling. This year, for example, in addition to my day job, I’ve taught one post-secondary course (Jan to Apr) and will be teaching another one this semester1, and I’ve put out a new edition of my textbook2 to help ensure that it continues to sell3.
And then in addition to the work-work-work balance, I try to have some semblance of a life – play some hockey, lift some weights, see my friends once in a while, read books for pleasure (as opposed to work-related reading), and maybe do some home improvement projects or some other hobby-like things4. I feel like I need at least 10 more hours in the day to do all the things that I want to do!
Aug
27
On the weekend, while falling down the rabbit hole that is the “Recommended” video section on YouTube, I came across this old SNL video that made me laugh harder than I have in a really long time. And I laugh all the time, so that’s saying something. At any rate, I’m posting it here to share the joy.
Jun
18
Summer is here! After a few rainy days last week, it was all sunshine and 28 degrees on Saturday and Sunday! Things I enjoyed this weekend, in no particular order:
Starting next week, I’ll be on holidays for a few weeks, but it will be mostly a stay-cation (though we might take a road trip for a few days somewhere, possibly the Sunshine Coast, since I haven’t been there before). If anyone else has time off in the next few weeks and is interested in going hiking during the week, hit me up!