you know, if the americans refuse to use the metric system, the very least they could do is not spell 'litre' and 'centimetre' like jackasses.

ohhhhhhh...

day of übermisery...

i am so beyond exhausted. the house is empty and desolate and the kitchen is a sty.

i had intended on spending the day at home writing my thesis; i was -- and am -- feeling a bit under the weather. really really really lethargic and a twinge of a sore throat. it's at the point where i know that if i don't get a decent night's sleep, i'll be bedridden for days.

maybe it's my body's roundabout defence mechanism. if i get sick, i won't be able to go into an environment that i loathe with seething fury.

but then i get a nasty e-mail from the supervisor demanding that i am URGENTLY (yes, he used all caps) needed in the lab to try looking at my sample with the white light set-up, an experiment that i pretty much consider futile anyway.

i run for, and miss, the bus to campus.

i finally get to the lab to find that the postdocs are still setting up the experiment. my presence really wasn't so 'urgently' needed after all.

i then spend all afternoon and most of the evening trying to align a 100-micron pinhole to an out-of-focus image of a photonic crystal defect microcavity. without success, mind you. the supervisor unhelpfully makes a battery of suggestions to try, some of which are difficult, if not impossible, to execute. i am exasperated.

my eyes hurt, i am dizzy and i generally feel like the piece of poo that a piece of poo would have pooed.

i haven't eaten yet. at all. i could only stomach a glass of juice this morning before i headed out. now i am waiting for food to thaw so that i can restore my blood sugar level to something that doesn't make me feel like a bag of ass.

today is one of those days i wish i had a hug and someone to tuck me into bed and bring me tea.

pressing the crosswalk button over and over and over and over will make the light turn faster, right?

right!?

god, why do people do that!?

and with elevator buttons, too. you've already pushed the fucking button! pushing it again and again and again isn't going to make the door close faster or the elevator move sooner or your penis any bigger. all it does is wear off the little braille nubbins, leaving the blind with no indication of which floor they're going to.

repeat button-pushers: the bane of western society.

another listed update? heck yes!

i've been altogether too busy/apprehensive about my thesis to post. i'd figured that avoiding blogging would give me one fewer excuse to procrastinate, but the olympics offered a quick replacement. anyway,

1) i saw no fewer than four people wearing 'rage against the machine' t-shirts on monday. what gives? makes me wish i hadn't washed my 'raj against the machine' shirt with the wrong load of laundry, dyeing it all sort of unsightly colours. nobody outside of alberta would get it, though, and it would be especially bizarre for me to wear it on campus, because at the newspaper here, there is an, um, older, much less educated and much less well-spoken raj who frequents the office, submits unstructured drivel to the culture editor and generally makes people uneasy. it's not that he's particularly creepy or anything, though he has been seen urinating into the bushes outside of the building. it's that nobody understands why an elderly man would spend so much time wandering drunk about campus and trying to submit entertainment stories to a student newspaper. it's at once sad and perplexing.

2) my sweetie's gone houseboating. i should be on that houseboat. but i'm not because i'm 'working on my thesis,' or i should be, in any case. i have a week and a half left, and i'm totally shitting my pants. my experiments have produced no useable results thus far and i'm way behind on my writing. i just have no real motivation because i see this degree as utterly inconsequential to me. i'd sent part of a draft to my supervisor, and he's given me zero feedback...yet i'm expected to press on. this next week and a half will probably be the most miserable i've had in a long time. the end is coming both much too slowly and entirely too quickly.

3) paid my $100 deposit so that i could register in my courses for my mpub. i would be more excited about it -- and i am excited -- if it weren't for this fucking thesis hanging over my head. i got my full registration package in the mail about a week ago and the courses look so promising. the program looks like exactly what i want. what i need, jesus. i've had it with hating my work and the institution i work for. it's a completely fresh start in an utterly new direction, and i cannot wait to begin:

-editorial theory and practice: covers acquisitions, fiction editing, stylistic edting, magazine editing, copy editing and editing biographies, memoirs and even children's books. there's also discussion of editorial responsibility and ethics.

-design and production control in publishing: design theory, typography, production techniques...

-text and context: operation and developing trends in the Canadian publishing industry including government policy and international trade. discussion of scholarly journals as well (right up my alley).

4) canada is sucking up the old suck-box at the summer olympics, as we always seem to do. this olympiad seems particularly trying, though. so many near-misses. it's a good thing toronto didn't get 2008, 'cause that would make our current performance mighty embarassing. do i have the right to judge the athletics program in this country considering that i spend the vast majority on my time on my ass in front of either a computer or a television screen? not really, especially since i do think there are perhaps more pressing causes that the government should consider funding. there's the argument that a good athletic performance could inspire one's countrymen to get off their couches and get active, but that's pretty much horseshit as we can clearly see that the fattest country in the world is also leading in the medals. evidently, the fat people just expect the fit people to exercise for them.

5) it's been pretty cool sharing a living space with dmac for the past week. reassures me that my experiences with cheryl and her overfed cat were largely soured by her and not because i'm somehow inherently incompatible with roommates. we made sweet potato gnocchi on saturday and both wrote something for the upcoming MOMpop zine. we'd been itching to go pick blackberries, but the weather has thus far been uncooperative.

6) oh yeah: homemade watermelon-raspberry sorbet kicks some serious ass.

i have more to say, but i should also get to work. stay tuned for updates featuring characters MT, flaglar, PK and ND.

i've always thought that the pale blush-pink watermelon flesh was pretty inert and generally innocuous, compared to, say, the tenacious deep purple of blackberry juice, but it turns out that watermelon stains like a son of a bitch. the previously white components of my blender pitcher and lid are now apparently permanently dyed with patches of stubborn pink. not that i really mind at all. i just never expected watermelon juice to be the persistent type.

tonight, we try watermelon-raspberry sorbet with the ice cream maker. fingers crossed...

the watermelon-raspberry mixture used to make the sorbet is a rather tasty concoction in and of itself. i figure worse comes to worst, we could probably just drink it straight.

blaaaaarrrp!

one of my sweetie's family dogs just threw up on our carpet.

twice.

synchronized diving.

um, why?

i should stop watching the olympics and go to bed.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that it became the 15th at midnight.

see, my u-pass goes into effect on the 15th. but the cranky driver of the 12:35 bus leaving UBC wouldn't let me use it. i slid it into the machine and heard the reassuring high-pitched 'beep!'

he shook his head. 'not for today,' he says.

'but it's the 15th.'

'not for today,' he repeats. 'tomorrow.'

'but...'

he continued shaking his head. i relented and paid the two bucks.

hail to the bus driver my ass.

**

i promised a work-related rant a few days ago, i know. i've been too busy to rant, and i think i may have descended from frothing rage to mild annoyance, so the rant wouldn't really capture the intensity of that particular day. oh well. i may tell about it yet.

i wish i could play beach volleyball. well.

previously frozen bananas quite possibly have the most disgusting texture these hands have ever felt. *shudder*

inaugural run of the ice cream maker, you see. i hope it works out 'cause i am having guests over, gerry being one of them.

it's really peculiar having him live in the same building yet having to dial all ten digits to call him at home. it feels like i should just be able to dial a four-digit extension or something.

i had the most annoying day yesterday. i'll rant about it a bit later.

i am eagerly anticipating the two-hour finale of what i consider one of the most brilliant and underappreciated shows currently on television: joe schmo.

now, i'll admit that when i first heard about the show's premise, having some dude participate in what he thinks is a reality show which is just an elaborate scripted plot with actors, i thought it was going to be dumb and mean. but season one turned out to be an incredibly entertaining tongue-in-cheek parody of crappy-ass reality shows like survivor, big brother and paradise hotel

what i think i liked most about it was that it was at nobody's real expense. although the 'schmo' wasn't necessarily portrayed as the brightest bulb on the tree, the show certainly never made fun of him, and the editing made him out to be a down-to-earth honest guy. it was good times.

tonight, we see the end of season two, a parody of those vomit-inducing bachelor-type shows. the season started off a bit sluggishly, but picked up momentum as one of the two schmos figured it out and the producers flipped her to the actors' camp. the dialogue is full of inflammatory double-entendres, and the cast of characters is a host of stereotypical reality-show caricatures in outrageous situations that push the bounds of credibility, only demonstrating how utterly contrived 'acutal' reality shows really are.

the producers had a stroke of brilliance, though, when they cast jonathan 'street-cents' torrens (i know, everyone knows him from jonovision, but i remember him as the host of the children's consumer awareness program that i watched religiously until it got really, i mean, really, lame) as an ambiguously gay suitor. i'm sure they must have boosted their canadian viewership ten-fold with that move. not that that really means all that much.

anyway, i'm extremely bored right now in the lab and i'm cursing the fact that i still have over three hours to wait before i can indulge in what i initially thought would just be a secret guilty pleasure, but is actually, i've come to realize, completely guilt-free.

my sweetie may be on vacation without me, but i just ate 4 (four!) homemade bacon-wrapped sea scallops, an awesome squid salad with fresh mixed greens, cucumber, red radish and dressed with olive oil and lime juice and yummy rosemary bread.

try getting that for $16 anywhere else...

so, so full.

yum.

s/he <-- i hate that.

it's peppered throughout an article that the physics journal's new english editor wrote. i want to be able to tell him 'that's not the way things are done' so that i can avoid putting it into this issue of the journal, which, incidentally, is turning out to be quite the piece of crap already, but i can't find guidelines on it either in the canadian press stylebook or the chicago manual of style, possibly because i simply don't really know where to look.

can someone help me out here?

no time to post for the past several days. hence, read as i spew forth random garbage i'd wanted to say over the last week:

1) i have exactly one more month in the lab. that scares the shit out of me, especially since my past three marathon sessions with the lasers have yielded zero results. which is why i can't go on...

2) vacation. my sweetie is currently kayaking to quadra island (more on this later), the first of his two vacations he's taking this month. the second is the houseboating trip on the shuswaps at the end of the month that we have been planning since february. it turns out, however, that i won't be going, thanks to thesis work. ah well, at least dmac will be here. i'll *ahem* write my thesis in between olympic events.

3) my sweetie, as mentioned, is kayaking to quadra island. great time for it to rain, after an absolutely parched summer to date. i am reasonably concerned about his safety, but i know there was nothing i could do to convince him not to go. he's promised me he'll wear his PFD and not to take any unnecessary risks, so i'm not apoplectically worried. Still, i find it slightly unsettling that i have to wait three or four days to make sure he's okay.

i know he'll be fine -- he's probably right that driving or biking to work every day is perhaps a greater risk. i made the mistake, though, of letting his kayak plan slip to his mother, and then: pandemonium. the news sent her into a frantic fretful tizzy, and there was very little i could do to calm her. she and the father-in-law freaked and looked up all sort of 'kayak death' articles and sent them, not to my sweetie, but to me, in the hopes that i would convince him to wait to kayak until he can get people to accompany him. they sent him a kayak safety and rescue book (which arrived the day he left, conveniently leaving him no time to read it even if he wanted to). for the past week, my sweetie has been trying to find various ways to reassure his inconsolable parents and has been getting quite, quite frustrated in the process. anyway, i've learned from my mistake: never tell the in-laws anything.

4) who buys comedy CDs? really, who? i'm not judging here -- i just don't know anyone who watches a stand-up routine and says, hey, that dude's pretty funny. i think i'll buy his CD. and, how many times can you actually listen to a comedy CD before it's no longer amusing?

5) ah, the dishwasher. the kitchen appliance in our new pad that my sweetie was so looking forward to. see, i never had a dishwasher, so i never really longed for it. but oh, it's going to be so nice, he says. he's never had dishes come out of the dishwasher dirty, he says. it's so much better than handwashing, he says. he was awaiting the dishwasher with so much anticipation that he made himself an advent calendar of sorts: a month-long countdown scrawled on his olsen twins calendar.

so, our first attempt to use this piece of machinery came wednesday. it's just a dishwasher, right? it can't be that hard. besides, my sweetie's known to be more than competent in such technical matters.

'this is perplexing,' he says after playing with it for about ten minutes. 'most dishwashers i've ever used just have the setting and a button that you can switch to "on".'

our dishwasher has this set of four buttons with cryptic pictograms that, as far as i can tell, mean nothing, and a knob with no explicit 'on' or 'off' positions. the first time my sweetie tried to use the dishwasher, both the prewash and the main detergent dispenser opened right away, which, i guess, isn't supposed to happen. it took him until the next day to he figure out that, okay, the inner two pictogram buttons need to be pushed in, and the knob turned clockwise to initiate the fucking machine. why? who knows? and no, we weren't left the manual for this thing.

he ran the machine without detergent once and with thereafter, when he verified that the dishwasher was actually operational when that nonsensical algorithm was put into play. then he left to go kayaking. when i came home (at 2:30 am -- thanks a lot, fucking photonic crystal arrays) yesterday, i tried unloading the dishwasher, to find:

a) a glass literally full of water on the top shelf

b) a cake pan with cake still stuck to it

c) a bent and half-melted straw

d) wet cutlery with food now incredibly stuck on.

now i get to rewash several of the dishes by hand, and since they've had food baked on by the ol' dishwasher, it'll be extra-fun.

6) rick james died. huh.

7) how much you wanna bet that 'the exorcist: the beginning' will be a smelly fibrous piece of poo?

ow... my cleaning arm hurts...

i hope not to have to move again in an extremely long time.

this past all-too-short long weekend was spent scrubbing, packing, moving, unpacking... we have so much crap. it's amazing how moving up two floors takes virtually the same amount of work as moving across town. our cleaning was also doubled by virtue of the fact that the previous owners of our new place weren't forced to clean the suite whereas, as vacating renting tenants, we were obligated to clean the old place. not that the owners left us with a sty or anything, but all of the shelves had to be wiped down before we could unpack.

i also spent about four hours cleaning the oven in our old suite and eight hours cleaning everything else. i defrosted the fridge, an action which led to a disgusting puddle of rusty water inundating the kitchen. i've talked to the property managers about what a piece of garbage the fridge is and with any hope, gerry and smorg can get a new one out of it.

we figured that we may as well take the opportunity to get some more shelving and furniture so that our books wouldn't be a disheveled mess in the new place. my sweetie spent saturday acquiring a new bookshelf, filing cabinet and wardrobe with SW's car and help. we were still trying to put together the BRANÄS (<-- swedish for 'piece of crap') wicker baskets at about 1:30 in the morning, hammering in stubborn plastic bolts that refused to go anywhere. we didn't realize that we actually shared a wall with our neighbour in the corner apartment, and after an hour of hammering, we hear BAM! BAM! BAM! from the other side of the wall. uh... we desisted immediately, of course, but now it's become this game of strategic avoidance; i stand behind the door and listen to see if the neighbour is coming or going, in which case i wait until he or she is out of the hallway before venturing out. i figure i'll be doing this for at least the next couple of months until the incident is forgotten. am i being paranoid? absolutely. but i can't afford to make -- or confront -- enemies so early in my tenancy. sunday saw the amazing adventure of us trying to get our queen-sized boxspring upstairs to the bedroom. turns out the distance between the stairs and the ceiling above the stairs is substantially shorter than the width of the boxspring. we tried pretty much every orientation and in each case the boxspring would jam into the drywall. 'i can repair holes in drywall,' says my sweetie. 'let's just try to get this thing up.' we now have a boxspring-shaped dent in the drywall above the stairs, where we'd wedged the boxspring to the point where it became apparent that there was absolutely no way to get it all the way up the stairs. you'd think that queen-sized mattresses are common enough that buildings would be designed with that in mind. anyway, we ended up hauling the boxspring with a climbing rope up the side of the building and onto the roof, then through our door to the rooftop patio. i was on the ground pulling to make sure the boxspring didn't crash into the building's windows while my sweetie hand-over-handed the thing up. some dude on the roof did ask, 'uh, just out of curiosity, what are you doing?'

'hauling up a boxspring.'

'oh. um, carry on.'

i spent most of yesterday cleaning up the old suite in time for this morning's move-out inspection. there are so many places that you don't even think about cleaning regularly. the undersides of kitchen cabinets, for instance, which, after two years, end up being rather repulsive. i also used an entire mr. clean magic eraser scrubbing marks off of the walls. it actually works quite well, but i guess that's the unfortunate consequence of these 'new cleaning technologies': now that they're on the market, you're expected to use them. at least i'll be getting all of my security deposit back.

currently, our new suite is a mess of scattered random boxes. our kitchen is hopelessly disorganized, and it'll take me a few days to figure out where to put most of the items that had been stowed in our previously abundant closet space.

it's strange: i still feel like i'm sleeping in a bed & breakfast. without the breakfast.