yeah, i've taken quite the hiatus. unexcused absence, really. i know nobody is reading this anymore, but i feel i should get back to writing something on a regular basis so that i don't, you know, lose my perspicacity.

i had a cold about a week and a half ago--nothing serious--but my sweetie said, "oh, you've got a compromised immune system? i've got an idea! let's spend the long weekend camping in the oregon desert freezing our asses off in subzero temperatures!"

"that sounds like a superb idea!"

it was a thirteen-hour drive down there. we left the city at 4:30 pm, so you do the math. we were stuck at the border for two and half hours, part of that because we were detained. four of us in the car, and the border official asked my sweetie and only my sweetie if he's ever been arrested. then they made us leave our car because we confessed we had pepperoni amongst our groceries. although we were pretty sure the pepperoni was made in the u.s., they searched the vehicle while they questioned us inside. again, it was my beardo sweetie they questioned, not any of the rest of us.

"where are you going?"

"smith rock, in oregon."

"and what are you doing there?"

"climbing some rocks."

"aren't there rocks up in canada?"

"uh...yeah, but they're kinda wet."

eventually they found SW's pepperoni and let us go. "you can't take this," the border guard told us.

we ran out and made a clandestine escape. they found one of our pepperoni packages, but missed our 1 kg stash in the trunk.

my sweetie had promised me that i could recover from my cold by sleeping all the way down. of course, since i was folded into the volume and roughly the shape of the inside of a washing machine, that promise went unfulfilled.

we arrived at the campsite at five in the morning. in the dark we set up our tent, where i spent my first of several fitful nights trying to keep warm.

the next morning, i wasn't fully recovered, and i wasn't strong enough to go rock climbing, but i did feel sufficiently well to hike around smith rocks while my sweetie and SW climbed.

in the evening the three of us headed into town to grab supper. according to the climber's guide to smith rocks, chan's restaurant was the "best chinese restaurant in town (Redmond)." my sweetie suggested we head there, although i was highly dubious. i said we should look at the menu, and if they served chop suey, we should leave. the others agreed.

when we arrived, the menu actually looked decent, and we decided to stay. we each decided on an entree and ordered. our meals came with soup: my sweetie and SW got the hot and sour soup, and i ordered the egg drop. the bowls of soup came with saltines -- seriously. and apparently, in the states the crackers aren't "premium plus" -- they're just "premium."

the rest of our dishes came, and they were actually pretty good. but as we ate, people came in ordering take-out. i nearly choked on my food when some dude ordered "sour cream wontons." i frankly have no idea what those could possibly be.

another dude came in and said, "yeah... can i get two orders of the general... uh... the chicken dish."

"general tsao's chicken?"

"yeah."

"two orders?"

"yeah. but no vegetables. just the meat."

"no vegetables?"

"yeah. and, oh, not too spicy."

"two orders?"

"better make that three orders."

as this conversation was progressing, i began laughing harder and harder. my sweetie accused me of being "culturally insensitive."

when we finished our meal, we headed back to camp. that night, temperatures plunged, and i could barely sleep. the next morning i wasn't feeling so great, so my sweetie and SW went climbing, and i stayed in the tent for the entire day. during the afternoon, the wind got fierce, and i heard drops of precipitation on the fly.

apparently, it rained -- and snowed -- more in that one weekend than it usually does in the entire month of november down there.

by nightfall, my sweetie and SW came to fetch me, and we headed in to terrebonne, oregon, for supper at this mexican eatery called "la siesta café." i ordered the chicken taquitos. it was good when i ate it. little did i know i would be tasting those taquitos twice.

in the middle of the night, in the tent, i woke up feeling urgently naseous. i sat up, turned around to face the vestible that didn't contain our shoes, and shrivelled into a fetal ball.

"what are you doing flipped around?" my sweetie asked, groggy.

"i'm gonna vomit," i said. i unzipped the tent and retched out onto the grass. i retreated back into the tent because it was horribly cold. but in short order, i had to expel my stomach contents again. and again. then the other end of my digestive system lost it, and i found myself scrambling to pull on my rain gear to make the twenty-metre dash to the latrine.

incidentally, the latrine didn't have any toilet paper.

needless to say, it was a rough night.

the next day, we started on our way home. i managed to keep a couple of immodium pills down, to SW's relief. last thing he needed was me befouling his vehicle. we drove from place to place in redmond attempting to find some gravol. apparently, americans don't know what gravol is. i guess they just chug pepto after meals. anyway, we found some ostensibly gravol-like pills, i took them, and we were on our way.

it took us twelve hours to get home. i ran a fever for at least half of that time. thankfully, the canadian border official didn't give us any trouble. the contrast was really remarkable.

annoyingly, the week i was trying to recover from this horrible bout of food poisoning, vancouver issued its boil-water advisory because of turbidity that made the water look like weak tim hortons coffee, even after filtration. ironically, too, the weekend after my horrible episode, i was scheduled to take a foodsafe course to learn how not to food-poison people.

i'm fully recovered now, and i can sort of laugh about the experience, but my sweetie will never again convince me to go on a trip when i'm not feeling my best.

you know, i'm glad graham mcmynn was rescued from his kidnappers and everything, but this whole episode makes me incredibly curious to know how much money the vancouver police department spent on the mcmynn investigation compared to how much they spent investigating all of the cases of the missing women from the downtown eastside combined. i mean, they had a hundred officers on the mcmynn case, for fuck's sake. not counting the rcmp's investigation of william pickton, the total budgets are probably pretty comparable.

helps to have money in this world.

i finally started volunteering this week: i’ve signed up to help this society that fights for the legal rights of marginalized persons archive media about them. i can probably best describe them as an activist advocacy think tank. they collect affadavits for their projects on sex work, addiction, low-income housing, and police corruption, then publish their findings in order to push for changes to laws--changes that would help the disenfranchised. this organization, let’s call it PLS, has a team of media archivists, including volunteers who scour the media looking for articles about the society and other volunteers (designers who know how to use photoshop) who scan in those articles, clean them up for reproduction, then lay them all out in an indesign document at the end of the year as a report to send to funders.

as you’d expect, i’m one of the latter. yesterday was my first “training” day; i went into the office and another volunteer took me through the process and gave me a bunch of files to work on at home. now, i’m a newbie, so i don’t want to rock the boat too much, but their archiving system is hideously inefficient: there’s lots of redundant work, the files are unnecessarily huge, and there isn’t a good sense of roles and end results. when i asked the other volunteer why they scanned articles in at a ridiculous 600 dpi, he answered, “i don’t know. we’ve never really talked about it.” when i asked why he wasn’t saving the images as TIFFs right off the bat, since that was the format they would probably eventually use anyway, he said, “i don’t know. we’ve never really talked about it.”

the whole process is, in theory, quite similar to our review collection process at d&m, only they don’t log their articles, they don’t have an efficient filing system for their scanned articles, and their electronic file management system is a bit of a mess. seems to be a consequence of the project getting stagnant at some point in the past, being revived, then being handed over hastily... it currently falls under the portfolio of someone who doesn’t actually handle publications.

i will keep my mouth shut for the next couple of weeks; at least until i finish processing the files that i have right now. that task should keep me quite well occupied. it looks like the senior volunteer on the project (who has only been on the team since january), is leaving at the end of april, so there is considerable turn-around. at that point, i’ll have to figure out how i fit in: do i make suggestions and try to streamline the process, or sit back and accept that the inefficiencies will continue given the nature of the organization and its volunteer base?

this is all, of course, assuming that they’ll even listen to me. we shall see. in any case, it appears the media archiving project is really a way for them to recruit designers; apparently, not long after the last person joined, she was thrust into this “emergency” design project of typesetting the society’s annual report. it may be a good way to get to work on fairly substantial design projects in short order, but for now, i’m just content to be applying my skill set to a cause that doesn’t expect me to do what i already do for eight hours every day.

i really dig this new snowboard cross event at the olympics. totally telegenic.

it seems all i ever do on this blog is whine, but when things are going well, it usually means i'm too preoccupied to post.

today, i am feeling listless. i really have no legitimate reason to feel this way, but it's been creeping up on my for the last several weeks. i've never had so much free time before, and i don't really know what to do with it. perhaps this is why housewives have babies.

honestly, i miss being a student. i miss having everything i do count toward some ultimately affirming goal. i miss the bonding between commiserating classmates. i didn't realize it could happen, but it has: somehow, my life has gotten even more pedestrian than it used to be. when i talk to people now, i have nothing exciting to report. "well, i'm working on a hockey book." "yeah?" "uh-huh." and that's it.

the tiresome winds are making the tree outside my window brush incessantly across the glass. it's almost enough to make me seasick just looking at it.

ugh. do i ever need to do something with my life. i mean, something beyond my 8:30-to-4:30 job. i need to start volunteering or something. now that i've cut down on freelancing and quit the physics journal, i need some other bandwagon to jump on. something i can feel genuinely good about. i am on a selfish quest for a cause; my soul is ravenous.

"The right way to use TAMPAX tampons and other helpful hints about absorbency

...

•Always remove your used tampon before inserting a new one
•Be sure to remove the last tampon you use at the end of your period"

***
i love this. the fact that TAMPAX had to include these rather ridiculously obvious instructions tells me that somewhere, at some point, some poor doctor had to pull, like, 5 three-week-old fetid rotting tampons out of an ailing woman, whose family ended up suing the tampon manufacturer.

i say this all the time, but honestly: what kind of retard...?