Went to a concert for The National yesterday at the Orpheum. So. Many. Hipsters. My observations:
1) I'm surprised that concert halls aren't equipped with a stand devoted to selling cough drops. Last evening was a rock concert, so I didn't exactly need them, but still.
2) I am too old to go to rock concerts. Well, at least I am too old to go to rock concerts while I have a sinus cold.
3) I find the whole encore procedure tedious. Come on, now—when the lights dim for the first time, you know you're not finished playing; we know you're not finished playing. Do we really have to go through the whole charade?
4) In an acoustically optimized venue like the Orpheum, it really isn't necessary to turn your amp up to eleven.

I am still glad I went. It was a great show, and I really enjoyed one of the openers. That is to say, I liked their sound—I couldn't hear what they were singing because of the whole overamplification thing. They could be a Christian rock band, for all I know. I got their CD, though, so now I can find out.

Does anyone use the green tops of leeks? Anyone? I've never seen a recipe that calls for them. Why do grocery stores cut off just the tips of them and sell you the rest? The leek doesn't fit in the crisper, and you end up throwing half of the leek away.

It's probably just that they want to make more money, of course, though I've seen their strategy backfire. Once my sweetie noticed that a leek spanned the edges of the scale while the bulk of it wasn't resting on the scale itself, cheating Safeway out of about two-thirds of the leek's weight.

Lil' Dude threw up and screamed and shivered a whole bunch upon returning home from the hospital to go visit his dad.

Jesus—when it rains, it pours, doesn't it? I just realized that I haven't showered in days...

So have we all signed up to oppose SOPA yet?

Sweetie broke his fibula yesterday playing hockey. Still awaiting surgery. Boo...

Well, fuck.

I just found out today that I've been doing cheat stitches where I was supposed to be doing double crochet stitches. No wonder my scarf has the wrong aspect ratio.

Now, the question is, do I just keep doing what I've been doing and finish the scarf, which will take me ridiculously long because the stitches are so short and will look a little funny in the end, or do I start over, and waste the, like, fifteen hours I've already sunk into the five centimetres of scarf that I've made?

Apparently I'm teaching an editing course for the SFU Writing and Publishing program next fall. Huh.

Stegosaurus!

Again, from the amazing June Gilbank. Pattern was one of several dinosaurs given to me by S&A as thanks for my editing SW's thesis. I asked him which he thought Baby Joël would most appreciate, and he said this one. Turned out pretty cute—I couldn't tell from the photos exactly how big they would end up, but this one was less than six inches long. Apparently it's already been thoroughly gummed by the teething baby. (Photos courtesy AW)

Should I be concerned that this blog gets way more traffic than my business site?

Well, that's what I'm led to believe from my site stats, anyway. Apparently someone in Russia and someone else in Brazil give a rat's ass about my mental diarrhea. (Thanks for reading, but who are you?)

Anyway, I should probably be directing more people to my business site, so that I can actually cash in on this whole Internet thing.

Go!

"Grignotines"

What a perfect word for what it describes.

... aaaand I've lost my poppy already.

Participated as a healthy volunteer for a schizophrenia study today and got my brain scanned by MEG and fMRI. In both, you're expected to lie very still so that images of magnetic activity and blood flow can be taken while you perform a simple cognitive task. The MEG is done in a magnetically shielded room, while the MRI is done in the tunnel in an electromagnet. I was commenting to the principal investigator that it must be challenging for the subjects with schizophrenia to deal with the potential claustrophobia, restrictions on movement, and the potential paranoia associated with having coils stuck to their heads. He concurred, saying that he has to get rid of maybe one in fifteen control scans for excessive movement, but with the schizophrenic subjects, the attrition proportion is more like one in five.

Wish I had pictures from today to show you, but the CD they gave me of my brain images is in some Unix executable file format that I can't read.

Where do you pin a Remembrance Day poppy on a rain jacket whose waterproofness you don't want to compromise?

I've been doing a piss-poor job of documenting Lil' Dude's preschool creations. So I'm implementing an arbitrary rule that I'll be better about it for the three-dimensional stuff he brings home. Here's a pumpkin he decorated last week:

He keeps sabotaging it—trying to tear the eyes and decorations off, stabbing it with a key, throwing it down the stairs, etc., so I figure I should probably get a photo of it before it gets completely demolished.