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?