a few things i keep forgetting to mention:

i) mpub is the antiphysics. out of 18 students, 14 are female.

ii) i met three other edmontonians in the program yesterday. eerie. but cool. they all seem like solid people.

iii) sfu, like ubc, is a corporate whore of an institution. but sfu doesn't even try to be subtle about it. forget subway-sponsored orientation sessions; at the harbour centre campus, there's a labatt lecture theatre and a royal bank computer lab, just to name a couple.

iv) because it's so heavily sponsored, though, the building is emaculate, and i feel hideously underdressed. i also feel like i'm going to gain 30 kg by the end of the term 'cause everything moves for me. there are escalators and elevators -- nobody even knows where the stairs are, and i'm pretty sure they only open out to the ground floor.

v) sweet, sweet schematic diagrams. the key to turning a dry flimsy 16-page piece of poo into an MSc thesis. i'm about 3/4 of the way there...

mpub!

i had a first extraordinary class today. in text and context, we listened to a clip from a lecture given by lawrence lessig -- i still can't decide if he's a raging hippie or a crazy libertarian -- who thinks that everything should be free and in the public domain. he's on a mission to wrestle control of intellectual property, particularly that found on the internet, away from large corporations. his argument is that the concept of copyright is stifling culture.

it's a bit extreme, and completely neglects the incentive that copyright offers authors to create new material, but it sparked some compelling discussion.

the class was unlike anything i'd been to -- a complete departure from the prototypical university lecture; it looks like the course'll be more like a CUP conference, with discussion groups and guest speakers from the industry.

however, it looks like i'm going to have to do a buttload (yes, a buttload) of reading for this one course alone, and i'll have to rediscover how to write essays and term papers, something i haven't done in eons.

but i'm so excited!

and: i am a rockstar.

i never fancied myself much of a graphic designer; i knew the basic news design rules, but i never thought i had much of an artistic eye.

turns out i can design the pants off of most people in my class, with the exception of a few. i have to revel in it now, 'cause i know the learning curve for the other folks'll catch up with me frighteningly soon.

the mountain of reading and my thesis are conspiring to crush my soul, though, so i'm going to put a bit more of a dent in the old MSc.

i start school at my mpub tomorrow, and i'm quite, quite excited. so much that i have that nagging worry that i'll set my alarm clock wrong -- the whole am/pm thing -- and i'll be embarassingly late for my first day of school. i should really get to bed and try to get some rest (if i can -- my body still isn't allowing me to get a decent sleep despite my being utterly exhausted); i'm already a half an hour late for my desired bedtime. ah well. at least i'll get to bed earlier than the kids at the paper will... they have a sixteen pager, new unfamilar software (quark 6) and when i left at 10, the fonts weren't working properly and barely any of the photos were done.

today, i was supposed to head out for a picnic at the last MOMpop of the summer with HT, but i ended up flaking out and staying for lunch at home (which my sweetie didn't end up cooking until 2:30). technically, it was my breakfast, as i hadn't eaten anything beforehand, anticipating always that, oh, lunch should come soon enough.

ugh.

HT just ended up dropping off some baguettes and running off to the park alone. i met up with him and HP (!) later on and we hung out for a bit and ate gelato. a much-needed respite from my hours in front of the computer trying to get LaTeX to compile properly.

i picked up a few zines, and dmac's story was in it, but mine was not. they'd forgotten about my submission, apparently, so here is the little vignette for the zine, themed 'work less/play':

Cliff has not taken a single day off in ten years.

His dedication has earned him the proud distinction of 'employee of the
month' eight months running, a streak that started when he took on those
extra shifts on the weekend. He did come perilously close to losing the
title a couple months back when his eight-year-old daughter had a piano
recital at school and really ramped up the pressure on him to attend.

He held firm, though. "Daddy's got to work," he told her. He was being a
good provider, he justified it to himself. After all, those piano lessons
don't pay for themselves, and besides, he's diligently saving up his RRSPs
for his retirement in twenty years. When he finally retires, there'll be
plenty of time to spend with the family, which, at the moment, rarely ever
sees him. They realize, surely, that some sacrifices have to be made.

No matter - he's made his office into a home away from home, complete with
a kitchenette, with an endless supply of coffee and cereal bars, as well
as a small medicine cabinet with the latest in over-the-counter antacids
to temper his nagging ulcer.

It's all worth it, though. He doesn't have anything else to brag about,
really - he never really got into the arts all that much and he isn't
about to take time off to work on his golf game. His spotless work record
is his badge of honour.

"Ten years, eh?" his coworkers marvel at the company Christmas party.
"Wow...I could never do that."

Cliff beams with pride and rubs his wrists. The Carpal-tunnel that comes
and goes is back again.

You are a modern-day hero, Cliff. We salute you.

***

tonight, JW picked me up and set me down in a cardboard box. then he tried to haul me around in said cardboard box. i was unplussed.

on my way home, a woman saw a wounded pigeon and began to talk to it in a soothing voice. 'hey there, sweetheart. are you okay? you're not flying away... are you okay?'

if i were that pigeon, i'd be all 'no i'm not, but there's nothing you can do about it, so why don't you just leave me the hell alone?'

***

anyway, to the batcave!

or, to bed.

mathematica licks my balls.

wow.

i'm thesising to supertramp.

i never would have predicted this.

...

ugh...

i was intending on sleeping in this morning -- i really was.

got to bed at 2 am, not because of some wild s&m party with php-laced mdma, but because i'd been working on my thesis all day. my wrists are even beginning to get sore, something that happens when i've been at the keyboard and track pad a little too long.

problem is, i didn't really add any actual content yesterday; i was mostly just fighting with LaTeX to get the formatting right and spending hours trying to learn what the fuck i'm supposed to do to get adobe illustrator to give me an equivalent of i can get in ms-paint in a matter of seconds. i love LaTeX nerds who insist that it's the best typesetting software EVER and anyone who uses anything else is beneath them. truth is, LaTeX is a pain in the ass, as i expected it would be. yesterday was a continuous cycle of debugging and compiling, re-debugging and re-compiling. i honestly think that although i'd have to format my list of figures, table of contents and bibliography manually, i'd be mostly done all of this formatting garbage if i were working with quark.

like anything that the physics computer 'purists' insist is the superior alternative (e.g. UNIX) LaTeX has all of these unintuitive obscure commands that take special packages i have to find on convoluted download sites that are among the most poorly organized website i've ever visited.

anyway, seems my body will not let me sleep until i get the lion's share of this monstrosity done. doesn't really bode well...

i think i might write my acknowledgements today: i would like to thank the administrators of the corporate whore of an institution, ubc, my cranky supervisor and my lab's stifling social environment for jointly conspiring to make these past two years of my life both unenlightening and painfully disillusioning.

mh.

back to work. at least i have the lovin' spoonful to keep me company: did you ever have to make up your mind? pick up on one and leave the other behind. it's not often easy, and not often kind. did you ever have to make up your mind?

i sure have. sweet lady physics will no longer be getting my love...in fact, i've been cheating on her for some time now.

toilet seats.

the topic came up when i noticed that dmac, who is still squatting at our apartment -- and, incidentally, is one of the most considerate house guests we've ever had -- appeared to be quite, well, what north american society would prescribe to be 'well trained' in the art of putting the toilet seat down. apparently, though he lived in a household of three males and one female, the habit of putting the seat down is now so engrained, it's automatic.

my sweetie, on the other hand, has no such inclination, though also having grown up in a household of three males and a single female. it's a coin toss whether i'll find the seat up or down when i walk into our bathroom.

courtesy or etiquette, it seems, dictates that a man should always put the seat down after he's done taking a leak. i've never been a huge believer in this, just because i think it's just as fair for a woman to have to put the seat down if she needs it down as it is for a man to put it up if he needs it up.

so why has this seat issue been made into the stuff of crappy sitcoms? why is the down position considered the default, anyway? is it because women always need it down, and men sometimes need it down; therefore, it should be down most of the time?

yeah, there had been times of grogginess early on when i'd wandered into the bathroom and sat down, expecting there to be a seat and instead finding my ass treated to an ice-cold ceramic bowl...which is why now, i always check if there's a seat before i sit. i figured it much easier to train myself to check rather than train someone else (i guess it'd be my dad at that point) to put the seat down.

point is, i have absolutely no idea why people make such a big deal out of this. men never ask for directions. men don't replenish the toilet paper. men never put the toilet seat down.

well, women never put the seat back up.

***

you, reading this. yeah, you. weigh in on this, would ya? i haven't gotten comments in a long time, even with what i considered quasi-compelling content (and requests for help, you fuckers). hence, i offer drivel in the hopes of evoking some responses.

oh! two more days until freedom!

well, it will be more than that, since i've got at least 1/3 of my thesis to write yet. but friday is the last day that i believe i'm expected to be in the lab. i'll probably have to go in to gussy up diagrams and what not, and there are a few simulations that i'm still expected to run...seems my work will become my hobby and my hobby my work.

uh.

i'm never going to finish my thesis, am i?

the supervisor gave me some of the most useless feedback regarding what i've written so far. 'well, it's well-written. and nothing is sounding off any alarm bells. but you've got some blanks to fill in, of course.'

hm. of course.

no specifics about one section not being thorough enough or another section missing relevant information. no comments on how my diagrams should look. no feedback on the structure of the thesis and which sections should be rearranged. yeesh. i'm glad i don't care about this thing; otherwise, i might just be concerned at how profoundly in the dark i am.

the one thing that worries me just a bit is my tuition situation. since i'm not officially finished, i'll have to pay tuition this term. no job. two tuitions. better start cutting back on those high-priced escorts.

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.

should i be more patient with chinese immigrants who can't speak english?

probably, seeing as i was born to two of them.

there's this chinese grad student in my lab whose english is pretty shit-poor. to his credit, he's trying to learn the language, but the problem is that he doesn't understand some basic instructions, which, in a laser lab, can be rather hazardous. it's also hard to ascertain sometimes whether he does something because he doesn't understand the language, or because he's just plain socially inept. he is, after all, a physicist. he seems incredibly reliant on one of our lab's postdocs, who appears to have infinite patience. i both admire the postdoc's unflinching and unwavering commitment to help this putz out and am so, so grateful that i'm not in his position.

this chinese grad student -- known around the lab as 'sky' -- appears not to have learned my name, despite having worked in the same lab for a good six months. it takes about 10 times as long to get a concept across to him, and i'm not talking complicated physics-type concepts. concepts like, 'uh, you're not supposed to go into the laser lab without safety goggles. these. gog-gles. you must wear. wear goggles. no wear, then burn eyes out. gog-gles.'

anyway, i had a phone conversation with sky that went as follows:

'hello, nanolab. nori speaking.'

'enh... hello.'

'hi.'

'enh... is murray...enh...there?'

'nope.'

'enh... not there?'

'no. he's gone.'

'enh... gone?'

'yes. gone. he isn't here.'

'enh...who is this?'

'it's nori.'

'enh...are you murray's...enh...friend?'

(???) 'um...i guess so.'

'enh...is he...enh...will he come back?'

'i don't know. but i don't think so. his bike isn't here.'

'enh...bike? oh. enh...murray not come back.'

'no, i don't think so. i think he's gone home.'

'enh...home? okay. bye-bye.'

i hang up. twenty minutes later, he barges into the lab sans goggles and asks if murray's here. does he think that repeatedly asking will make it so?

apparently, as my sweetie's told me he's witnessed sky trying to fax a document to a number which was evidently wrong, and sky's strategy was just to keep faxing it to that number multiple times.

...

then he sends this e-mail out to the entire department. the whole department (this is totally unedited):

Sorry for bothering all of you,
      Now I am a graduate student working on nanostructure fabrication in AMPEL.This project will use a combination of a AFM and a borescope. But I don't know much about borescopes. It would be useful to make me get some information such as working distance, magnification, resolution etc., in advance, because I need to see a very tiny pattern on SOI surface, around a order of 7~8 microns, to be imaged with this sort of thing.
      Please tell me if you konw Who has such tiny device and where I can take a look? Thanks
Tian Si
Physics & Astronomy Department

my buddy SW writes an e-mail to a small group of us as follows:

To everyone@everydepartment.ubc.ca:
Sorry for bothering all of you,
Now I am a graduate student working on my thesis.  I don't know much about what I am doing.  It would be useful to make me get some information on what I'm doing such as doing some work, looking things up in books, on the internet, this sort of thing.
Please tell me if you know who will do all my work for me.
Thanks
Scott Webster

genius.

...

in other news, it's 0428h and i'm in my lab. it'd be a bit better if i were getting results, but after a frustrating day of one delay after another, i'm getting jack shit. it'll make the supervisor happy, i'm sure. i'm not entirely sure why the system's not behaving itself -- all i know is that i'm really really tired. after our spectrometer computer got devastated by a virus, the supervisor's all paranoid about connecting it to the network. i am without internet during scans, when i need it most. it was most likely some dumbass downloading a corrupt attachment to begin with. just having it hooked up to the internet isn't all that big a risk.

that computer has to work on windows NT 4.0 (shittiest...operating...system...ever.) because the software used to operate the spectrometer is hopelessly antiquated and won't work on anything more contemporary. as a result, the system is full of security holes and susceptible to viruses of all types.

it never ceases to astound me how backward this lab is. really. cutting-edge photonic crystal research, right here.

"uh...you don't have a toaster?"

about a year ago, i took a telephone survey which ended up being about the brands of my kitchen appliances. i'm pretty sure the survey administrator wasn't supposed to sound so incredulous, but suffice it to say that i don't have that many appliances. several of them were gifts, but i honestly don't have any that i don't use at least once or twice a month, which is pretty good, judging from the multiple pressure cookers and other wacky kitchen gadgets in my grandmother-in-law's basement. still, though, i don't have a toaster. i don't eat toast that often, although i might eat more of it if i had a toaster. for now, i get by with singeing the bread on my george foreman grill.

i indulged today by buying myself a couple of housewarming appliances -- neither of which is a toaster -- but i'm now a proud owner of an ice cream maker. and a blender.

ooh, i can almost taste the blackberry sorbet!

my consolation for the hassle of moving and cleaning. yep. that's my justification.

get out of my dreams...

...and into my car...

i had a dream last night: thomas was in it, but he was black.

it smells like someone really scared a skunk outside our building. maybe it was the fumes wafting through the window that triggered the dream.

what does it all mean?

well, thomas -- it seems that skunk spray = you are black.

word.

i still can't believe martha stewart compared prison to camping and herself to nelson mandela. she may as well have compared herself to jesus. the only way she would have offended more people...

ugh...
 
two short hours after showering and i already officially feel sweaty and gross again. curse this humid weather...

today, i ate:
 
a large piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk for breakfast...
 
three slices of canteloupe for "lunch"...
 
another slice of canteloupe, a freybe pepperoni, two fried eggs and five grape tomatoes for supper...
 
i am going to die.

despite my doubts, the MOMpop interdependence zine turned out much better than i'd anticipated.
 
i was on collating duty last night, where six of us accomplished more in less time than the twenty or so bodies at the collating party for the first issue. anyway, last saturday saw a few of us gather at AW's to try to come up with content for this thing. it seemed like we all had the same problem: the concept of interdependence was just a bit too nebulous and vague to conjure up anything that didn't seem either ridiculously obvious or incredibly contrived.
 
in the end, there was a collection of random mediocre art. the way it was put together, though, is pretty good. i mean, it is a zine, so we're not really demanding particularly high standards, but all in all, it's a lot better than i'd expected. there's a page on lichens, a page on symbiosis, and, yes, plenty of random art, but it's kinda funky. my favourite is the poem that cori wrote:
 

haiku needs poet

poet needs verse to exist

interdependent

 
today's MOMpop is supposed to be a picnic, so HT and we're going to pick up some groceries before heading over. it'll be fun: pedal-powered sound, dancing, picnic... i'll try to remember my sunscreen this time.

there's a new commercial out for tampax compak -- you know, the tampons that are so discreet, only you know it's a tampon? a dude is waiting for his date to finish getting ready. he gets peckish (oh, get your mind out of the gutter) and starts asking her if he can have a cookie, then a sandwich, and then a candy as he picks up the tampon in its wrapper.

see? it's so discreet, your date may mistake it for a sugary confection.

how the fuck is this a good thing!?

why is it that girls are made to believe that they even need to be discreet?

i certainly don't flaunt it when i get my period, but i don't pussyfoot around it, either. i'm not ashamed of pulling a pad or a tampon out of my bag when i need a change. on the other hand, i don't celebrate it like it's some sort of empowering goddess phenomenon that somehow makes women the superior sex -- i hate the wrenching pain of cramps and the mood swings and the grossness -- but it's a natural part of having the double-x chromosomes, not a monthly breakout of herpetic lesions...

gross.

about five weeks ago -- about when the laser broke and i stayed home to "work on my thesis" -- i started playing my guitar regularly: every day for about an hour a day. the first week was agony because the tension in my strings is entirely too high and i hadn't played that particular guitar in a while. after the week, though, i'd developed an impressive set of callouses. asbestos fingers. the strings didn't cut into my flesh anymore.

when smorg and gerry visted, though, i didn't play. for three days. just three days of not playing and a brief brining in the ocean by wreck beach, and my resilient finger pads just kind of fell off. now i have these rough patches of dead skin on my fingertips that are kind of peeling off and getting caught on stuff. it's irritating and frustrating. it feels like i've just squandered five weeks of dedicated callous-building.

interestingly enough, it looks like the area under my finger pads doesn't actually have fingerprint ridges. maybe now's the time to commit those homicides i've been planning.

i've been rather negligent in updating, opting instead to attempt to be something of a decent host for visiting smorg and gerry. their trip out to the coast was initially scheduled to be a house-hunting endeavour, but, being that they have officially signed to take over our current place, they were able take it easy and spend some time seeing the city.

sunday saw us hitting virtually every shoe store on robson -- and there are a lot of shoe stores on robson -- in search of casual but professional footwear for smorg (no luck) taking a brief stop in chinatown to procure some barbecue duck and chinese broccoli for dinner, and spending a couple of hours on wreck beach, where, among numerous boobs and penises, i saw the nude jockocracy try to pick up two chicks, one of whom clearly had implants, and some crazy dude wearing only a headdress and a belt came up to us and declared that men would one day be having babies. i love vancouver.

on monday, our guests went and signed the lease agreement for our suite and they took an excursion with my sweetie to the PNE's playland, an outdoor amusement park. i was too immersed in work and generally exhausted to go, but was treated to a story upon their return of my sweetie brutalising a twelve year-old in the bumper cars for jumping the rather extensive queue and generally being an indignant little fart. my sweetie seems rather proud of this, though any acknowledgement of this from me could only be interpreted as encouragement.

yesterday, smorg and gerry treated us to a thai dinner, before we dragged them both to what ended up being an incredibly lengthy city council public meeting, where, inspiringly enough, local kits residents proved themselves much more passionate and much less apathetic than their yuppie bo-bo images tend to imply, arguing fervently against a proposed home depot that may constructed three blocks from our apartment. the speakers' list ballooned to over 90 people, and at 11 pm last night, council only managed to get through a third of them. they resumed tonight, and are apparently still in session.

smorg and gerry left for edmonton this morning, leaving us with some of their possessions (including christmas gift wrap!?) that are really and finally driving home the fact that i am actually going to be moving, and in less than a month.

....

it rained last night and i could hear it both through my closed window as well as through the bedroom door and the open patio door. it made me wonder whether i'll be able to get used to the sound of rain directly pelting the roof and window directly above the bed in our new place.

...

the upcoming MOMpop (17 july) is putting together its zine this saturday. its theme is interdependence: living together and relying on one another. i'd like to make one or two contributions to this issue, but am currently devoid of any insights. ideas?

the more i see them, the more i resent how utterly imbecilic those women in the schick intuition commercials are portrayed to be. nobody has that much trouble shaving. the very existence of this supposedly revolutionary razor does nothing but infantilise women. dumb.

there's nothing grosser than, when eating, picking up a wayward crumb and putting it in your mouth just to realize that it is decidedly not food.

...

i was watching the next generation today instead of working on my thesis and the preposterousness of data (um, the character) really struck me.

as an aside, my sweetie's absurd first-year philosophy prof once used data as a demonstration of the fact that artificial intelligence exists -- no joke.

anyway, i was watching a mediocre TNG episode where a prisoner was talking to data and asked 'why do you have yellow eyes?' to which he replied 'i am an android.'

now, it seems to me that emulating the skin tone and eye colour of a normal human being is perhaps the easiest aspect of constructing an android. yeah, i know they made brent spiner wear all of that cake make-up to distinguish him from other characters and characterize him as a machine, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. what, they didn't have any flesh-coloured paint when they put him together?

you know what i'm sayin'?

...

two...more...months...

pigfuckers.

some pigfuckers ripped off my sweetie's bike tonight. they took his handlebars, his stem, his pedals, his cranks and his seat. on a fucking BMX!

who the fuck would want to pay for or use the ratty old seat and the worn and sticky handlebars anyway?

he's on his way home now, by bus, if it's even still running.

why do people have to be such giant smelly shit-encrusted assholes?

after voting in the canadian national election today, i discovered a renewed sense of incredulous befuddlement at how the american election of 2000, especially the florida recount, could have gone so, so incredibly wrong.

remember how it took, like, two weeks for the official results to be announced? two weeks for the recount in one state? in unprecedented, the revealing documentary about how florida disenfranchised thousands of people -- most of them blacks -- the filmmakers discussed the negative impact of the confusing butterfly ballot. confusing!? fucking retarded, was what it was. the voters had to punch holes for a candidate on a convoluted list of staggered and alternating names. most of the voters -- the ones who were allowed to vote -- didn't even know whom they were voting for, and sometimes the hole punch didn't go all the way through and was never registered.

today, as i cast my ballot, i took a moment to revel in its beautiful simplicity: a list of candidates; you use a pencil to mark an x by the name of the candidate for whom you would like to vote. x. that's it. no hole-punching, no lever-pulling...the ballots are handcounted, but that's a pretty self-explanatory process.

during the american election debacle, my buddy JH remarked that it took four hours to count all of the ballots in canada when chrétien scored his threepeat; with a population ten times canada's, wouldn't it just take at most 40 hours to recount all of the ballots in the country, let alone those from a single state of geriatrics?

in november, the ambitious americans are tryin' out those crazy new-fangled electronic voting machines. let's see how far up shit creek they get this time 'round. do they think that implementing a new and barely tested (not to mention utterly unnecessary) technology somehow makes their brand of democracy superior? give me a golf pencil and a simple list of names any day.

...

in other news, go see napoleon dynamite. D&A treated us to it on their stop in town before embarking on their alaskan cruise and it's incredibly, dysfunctionally, hilarious.

also: i just fucked up my sweetie's rubik's cube. he took the news really well.

still squinting...

i picked up my laptop from compusmart yesterday. on thursday, the dude said on the phone that someone would likely call me before 11 am. i waited until 2 pm and finally called them. the technician says 'oh yeah. i had a hard time reaching you. the phone number here doesn't seem to work.'

FUH-UCK. did i not specifically call them up and tell them to change the errant phone number and verify on a subsequent call that the phone number was corrected?

anyway, as i suspected, the inverter needs replacing. $61 for the part, which actually isn't so bad. i'm just worried how much the labour costs will end up being...

they're supposed to call me when the part comes in -- they say monday or tuesday of next week. i suspect that i will have to call them on wednesday afternoon. *sigh*

...

i'm not as sore as i'd expected to be after yesterday's two-hour critical mass ride. it was pretty big -- i'm sure they got at least 600 people out -- but i don't have an official count and it felt a bit smaller than last year. i'm tellin' ya: there were lots of beautiful people at the ride.

the crowd was big enough to take over cambie bridge entirely. the police actually helped us out with a car on either end guiding the route and blocking traffic. i don't remember them being there last year.

as usual, though, there were the angry honking motorists and the supportive honking motorists. sometimes it's hard to tell which category they fall into if you can't see their faces. generally, the supporters give out a series of short meep-meep-meeeeeeps while the disgruntled drivers lean meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnh. we had a passenger in one of those fucking stretch-UVs (you know what i'm talkin' about), lean out the window, waving and smiling at us.

some just have no appreciation for irony.

friday, 18 june 2004: massive windstorms in the lower mainland knock out power from the fraser valley all the way up to downtown vancouver.

probably as a result, the backlighting on nori's laptop screen ceases to function properly.

nori calls toshiba's call centre. man who can't speak english tries to convince nori that the laptop was purchased in america and that she would have to have it repaired in the states. the man does not understand that alberta and british columbia are in canada. nori tries explaining the problem to the man. the man does not grasp the hardware failure and tries to get nori to adjust the screen settings on her computer to no avail. nori finally asks where she can take the computer to have it repaired, and the man lists off three addresses, compusmart in downtown vancouver being one such toshiba-affiliated service shops.

saturday, 19 june 2004: nori calls compusmart. punk on the other end of the line is patronizing and rude. tells nori to bring the machine in and that parts and repairs will take four working days. nori must wait for realtor to deliver documents and cannot leave the house. asks punk for the store's hours.

sunday, 20 june 2004: compusmart is closed. nori discovers that if she shines a bright lamp on the screen, she can still sort of work on the computer. she works, squinting.

monday, 21 june 2004: nori drops off laptop at compusmart and tells dude at the counter her contact information. she pays a $45 deposit. dude at the counter says 'when the problem is diagnosed, someone will call you. this will take two days.'

'if you need to order parts, can i reclaim the computer and work on my thesis while we wait for the parts to come in?'

'sure. sign this waiver that says if anything else goes wrong with your computer, we aren't responsible.'

...

tuesday, 22 june 2004: nori looks at the work order form and discovers that her phone number was mistyped. nori calls compusmart and has them fix the error. nori verifies that nobody had attempted to call the wrong number.

wednesday, 23 june 2004: compusmart does not call.

thursday, 24 june 2004: nori calls compusmart in the morning. dude says 'someone will look at it today and a technician will call you this afternoon with a diagnosis of the problem.'

'this afternoon?'

'yes. this afternoon.'

thursday afternoon arrives. nobody calls. 20 minutes prior to closing, nori calls compusmart. 'what's up with my computer? i was told i'd be called this afternoon.'

'let me check. oh. yeah. they haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but it's next on the list (nori rolls her eyes). they'll call you tomorrow with a diagnosis.'

'you have any idea when?'

'you could try calling at about 11.'

*YAAAAAAAAARRRGH!*

nori heads to campus, a 25-minute bus ride, for the sole purpose of checking her e-mail and venting on this blog.

...

if it's going to take 5 days to make a fucking diagnosis, tell me it's going to take 5 days. don't say 'someone'll call you in 2 days,' have nobody call me, then tell me someone'll call me in the afternoon when i finally have to call, then NOT CALL! i understand if something's taking longer than expected to fix, but they should have phoned me and said 'hey, it's gonna take another couple of days' instead of having me stay at home waiting for a call that ultimately never comes!

this tale of frustration continues tomorrow.

i'm on a food tv binge...

i promised my sweetie that we'd downgrade our cable when we move into our new place. it'll save us $20 a month, which may not seem that much, but the hope is that it'll get me off the couch. or maybe it'll just raise my tolerance for shitty-ass shows on basic. anyway, i'm taking in as much of the gourmet picture box as i can before i'm cut off forever. i'm not watching emeril or anything with bobby flay, though. god, i can't stand that asshole.

i'm gonna miss the food network. *single tear...*

did i just eat microwave popcorn for supper?

i sure did, and i was 13 kernels away from the perfect pop. my record is 6.

wtf!? how did this all happen in the last 48 hours!?

...

my sweetie and i just bought a condo!

...i can hardly believe it.

i haven't been writing about it because i didn't want to jinx it, but now: woohoo!

i saw the sign go up on tuesday, called, got an appointment to view the place thursday. we went to the bank earlier thursday to get prequalified for a mortgage and they gave us the go-ahead, pending documentation from our department that we were receiving an income. i was a bit anxious about that -- after all, i'm not going to have an income come september -- i essentially asked the grad secretary to commit fraud. anyway, we checked out the digs, and the place is really awesome. a bit smaller than our current place, but two levels, and everything is a lot newer and more updated. but it's in the same building, making the prospect of moving slightly less daunting.

it was listed for $209,900 and there was fierce competition for it, so we offered $227,500. yeesh. so. much. money. but our offer's been accepted! we're fucking homeowners. how bourgeois.

the sweet mother-in-law came through big time with a loan to top up our down payment, saving us thousands in insurance premiums and interest...

i'm still going to have to get a job in september, though, and the uncertainty has me a bit apprehensive. that and figuring out what needs to be done in the next month...

closing is 31 july, meaning we'd be vacating the first of august. hmm...i've already submitted august's rent to the property management company. i'll have to get them not to cash it.

it was a blessing in disguise that the first place i'd mentioned a few posts back fell through. the realtor claims that it was significantly shittier than the place we've got now. another blessing in disguise was us not having a realtor. the selling realtor just ended up calling her partner to represent us. i have no idea how that isn't a conflict of interest, but we pretty much got the inside scoop on competing offers and an idea of how much we had to fork over.

finally, since we're leaving in august, i offered our current place to gerry and smorg. if they take it, they can forward us all our straggling mail.

oh, and we'll have two good friends in the same building, but you know, whatever.

gerry is proposing a big-ass housewarming for all of us...pretty good excuse to use our new walk-out roof-top patio, if you ask me. but i want to wait until LB and dmac get back into town.

i think we blew all our karma points on the place, though. shortly after the realtor delivered the good news, the back-lighting on my computer died. it's going to cost at least $300 and four working days to get repaired. that and the dude at the store spoke to me like i was a fucking moron. yay?

no, seriously: yay! i'm kind of surreally euphoric about my new home even though i'm going to be poor for the next several years. i hope gerry and smorg can hook this place.

ew.

i just got hit on by a dude who looked about 34, in my neighbourhood. ugh.

i was walking home from the bus stop.

dude (faux blond, maybe 5'9", carrying a tennis racket): that's a beautiful green dress you're wearing.
me: uh...thanks.
dude: enjoying the weather?
me: yeah. it's gorgeous.
*pause*
dude: you're gorgeous. can i take you out for lunch sometime?
me: i'm married.
dude: oh. sorry to bother you. (runs off sheepishly)

*sigh of relief*

i'm so grateful i can say that. it stops the conversation, right there. married. bam. go away. no continued attempts at persuasion after 'i'm not interested,' and no need for me to lie and claim to be lesbian.

i was, however, tempted to say, 'uh, HOW old are you?'

'cause i don't really look my age. i'm still routinely asked for ID at pubs.

anyway, this never happens to me. i don't, as a rule, get hit on, much less asked out on a date. in public and in strange situations, i think i exude too much 'stay-the-fuck-away-from-me' intensity that most people who pick up on it don't bother with me. so even though the television says this kind of stuff happens all the time, i still find it really creepy when it does. should i feel flattered? i don't really think it's rational to be as sketched out as i seem to be, but i can't really help it.

call me naive, but i actually believed my old babysitter when she told me that banana chips were healthy. after all, they're just dehydrated fruit.

i was seven. i liked banana chips. i was willing to accept any justification to consume banana chips.

then we got a food dehydrator when i was ten or eleven. one of those ronco knock-offs. and i tried making my own dehydrated banana chips. what i got were sour, rubbery warped pieces of overly-sticky/overly-chewy morsels.

did you know that they first fried the banana slices in coconut oil before they dehydrate? coconut oil! the most unhealthy fat in the world. more cholesterol and saturated fat than LARD! i sure didn't.

i was a fool.

tomorrow, i have a lunch meeting with the supervisor.

i'm ascared...

i am never graduating.

the laser has been down for the last two weeks and is due to be down for the next week at least. and MM's protocol for making GaAs samples has spontaneously stopped working.

the visiting scientist from nottingham was using the picosecond laser, which spontaneously stopped working. they took that board and put it into the femtosecond (mine) to see if it was the problem. it was. well, the femtosecond wasn't going to be used for a while, seeing as i wasn't getting any new samples within the week, so why not switch the blown one with the good one and keep using the picosecond until replacement parts could be ordered in?

wouldn't you know it: the femtosecond's board, put into the picosecond laser, also blew.

no functional laser, two blown boards, and a picosecond system that obviously has something more seriously wrong with it.

time is running out, and i'm getting no research results for three weeks. fah!

otherwise, though, this past week has been pretty good. tuesday, i got a confirmation letter for my $6000 from SFU. thursday, i got an admittance letter from the MPub program which told me i didn't need to complete any outstanding prereqs and included some additional information about the program's dates and deadlines. it starts 8 september, and those two pieces of mail got me really excited about it again.

yesterday, i saw DA, who was in town for a wedding, and we watched Human Nature, a film released in 2001 written by charlie kaufman. DA was constantly badgering me to see it, and we finally did. quite entertaining, but mostly, it was awesome to catch up with D. wish AP had come too, but i'll take what i can git.

also, my sweetie told me that he spoke to the graduate chair of our department, who told him that apparently, i could still TA for UBC even while studying for the MPub at a different institution. huh. so if i really need income and can work it into my schedule, that might be something i'll end up doing. i don't really want to, but at least that option's available.

tonight, J&K came over for supper (salmon...mmm...) and we all went out to see super size me. it was far beyond some freak show of a dude gorging on disgusting food and was well worth the ticket price. makes me grateful i haven't eaten mcpoo's in about two years, except for the ice cream HT bought me that one time...HT: i cut you!

well, i guess i'm gonna work on my thesis outline some more this week. not much else i can do.

i don't understand.

isn't a five-door sedan just a hatchback?

went to a machining demo at thomas skinner's open house today with my sweetie all the way down in richmond. CNC mills and lathes...some pretty impressive machines they got. also got a free lunch out of it and *ahem* avoided reading for my thesis all day.

what most amused me, though, were the little warning labels they had on the sides of these machines. next time they have a big trade show, i'm going to bring in a digital camera (if i can) just to photograph those stickers. pictograms of little stick figures getting mangled by moving parts, dragged into manacing gears by loose clothing...those little diagrams were solid gold. it disturbs and entertains me that it's even necessary to warn people not to touch the cutting tool when it's spinning. on the one hand, yes, there must be protection from litigation. on the other hand, uh, duh.

my first attempt at tom yum kung ended in failure. i should have known better than to experiment when guests were over for dinner. the hot and sour soup had a bitter aftertaste. i'm not adverse to trying again, but i wish i knew what ingredient contributed to the bitterness. maybe i need to find actual kaffir lime leaves rather than use the lime zest.

however, i did make the best potstickers in my history of potsticker making. rolled the wrapping out on the pasta machine. i love that thing. best investment i ever made...

ah well...

someone else's made an offer on the suite in our building. kind of to be expected. at once a relief and maybe a bit (just a bit) of a disappointment.

we'll keep looking, though. *cough*.

jesus crap.

what gave me the bright idea that i could be a home-owner, anyway?

i'm getting old.

we'd been talking about it for some time. it'd be good to get some equity. get a home before the housing costs really go nuts thanks to the olympics. if we have to move to ottawa temporarily, we could rent out. we want to be back here, anyway.

right?

right!?

fuck.

neither of us has time for this. i'm not even going to have an income come september -- what makes me think i'd even be given a mortgage?

anyway, we figured that, since neither of us had time for this, it'd be easiest to start close to home. 'next time a for-sale sign goes up for a suite on our building, we should check it out,' i suggested. my sweetie agreed.

but we missed one opportunity, then another, and another...

now, there is a suite on the 3rd floor of our building: 2-level, 1 bedroom, south-facing. price tag: $199,900.

ugh. i think i'm going to be sick. owning a home, eh? so bourgeois.

i e-mailed the realtor, and assuming it hasn't been snapped up already, we should be taking a look at it. i have two and a half months to get research results, write up a thesis and somehow find some sort of sustaining income in september. why am i thinking about this now!?

somebody please give me some words of encouragement here. tell me i'm doing the right thing. oh god. i'm going to be so fucking poor.

how many more couches have to die for don cherry's wardrobe? how many!?

three...more...months...

who ever first encircled sea scallops with bacon is a culinary genius.

the thing about having to wear glasses is that they're very hard to find if you've misplaced them.

i just concocted a kind of dessert frittata: two eggs with a bit of milk, a sploosh of vanilla and just a teaspoon of sugar. also, a pinch of salt. beaten, fried with butter, then topped with brie, sliced strawberries and sliced avocado. just a sprinkling of cinnamon and a drizzle of maple syrup.

it was yummy, but i think i'll put the brie on the side next time. it's really good with the strawberries, but only so-so with the avocado. also, if i had fresh cracked pepper, that would have been better.

my meal was kind of backwards, so i'm off to dig in on some leftover garlic mashed potatoes.

i guess this is the big grad weekend.

the streets are overrun with stretch limos.

gross.

financial planners should really warn their clients that they should set aside at least two per cent of their income for weddings.

not their own. weddings of others.

not that i've ever been to a financial planner, but if i had, and i had not been adequately warned that i would see my savings depleted as a results of the planned nuptials of my friends and acquaintances, i would deem that planner very much in derelict of his or her duties.

so far, we've been invited to a wedding a year for the past four. i know it's only going to pick up. the first wedding we attended had us fly from ottawa to edmonton and back. i was glad to go (at first), but it ended up, in retrospect, being one of the lamest weddings i've ever been to. my sweetie and i knew nobody except for the bride and groom, and i was seriously the only non-white person there. my sweetie and i were the only people there who weren't christians -- which was, yes, very much emphasized -- and the bride and groom took off shortly after 10pm. um, weak?

the year after that saw me fly from vancouver to edmonton for SC & MN's wedding. i went alone, but it was a chance to catch up with some of my old friends.

last year was TD's 'wedding,' which got unceremoniously cancelled after we'd booked our non-refundable plane tickets with jetsgo. jetsgo! the discount carrier that doesn't actually fly anywhere useful! the cash we dropped on those tix would be transferred to a credit that had to be used within a year, but jetsgo doesn't fly vancouver to edmonton or vancouver to calgary. more on this later.

this past christmas, we were at JS & BM's wedding, which was a blast. it didn't really cost us anything 'cause we were heading home anyway, and they didn't want any gifts. it was a slumber party wedding, so the bride and groom actually stayed the whole night at the hall with their guests, and it was just a great party. except for the dog shit and stomach flu. but i won't get into that.

now, we have to fly to ontario for S&A's wedding. i love them and am glad to go, but shit, is travelling to weddings ever taking a financial toll. fortunately, jetsgo does fly vancouver to toronto, so it was an opportunity to use up the credits. the wedding itself isn't until november, well past the year we were allotted to make use of the jetsgo credits, but i could at least book it before the year was up. if S&A cancel their wedding (unlikely, yes) we'd be shafted out of over a thousand beans.

i'm also sort of worried that it'll be kind of like M&L's wedding in that we won't know anyone there and that it'll be overrun with sanctimony...

fortunately, we haven't yet been invited to a wedding by people we didn't really know or like. it pisses me off when people invite those who can only ostensibly be considered acquaintances to their lavish self-indulgent ceremonies just to milk gifts.

anyway, my ultimate point is: the two of us spent about $800 plus gifts ($75) to fly to M&L's wedding in 2001, i spent about $250 plus gifts ($75) for S&M's wedding, just $100 in a food bank donation for J&B's wedding (though my sweetie ended up paying a much higher price with two days of non-stop vomitting), the equivalent of $1025 for airline tix and likely about $100 in gifts for S&A's wedding...which means that so far, we have spent more money travelling to and from and getting gifts for weddings than we spent on our own wedding and honeymoon.

whether that's more a commentary on our friends or an indictment of us is for you to decide...

gettin' better at this all-nighter thing.

just came home from one and besides the fact that i tried to get into my apartment building with my lab building key, i'm feelin' just fine.

in fact, i'm virtually wide awake...

grilled sandwich with thin slices of barbecued chicken breast, avocado and cheddar (monterey jack would work well too) on rosemary and olive oil bread.

yum.

which country shall i flee to if (a) george w. bush gets re-elected and (b) stephen harper gets elected?

MOMpop!

wheeee!

just came home from hanging out in the sun all day making hemp jewellery.

can't complain about that!

stupidly, though, i wore somewhat of a high-rise shirt and now i have an odd-shaped back-patch tan/burn. yay for melanoma!

the first MOMpop was pretty decent. HT came and sat with us a while, which was cool. nobody else i knew showed up, though. fuckers. i showed a little girl how to make a macrame dragonfly. my sweetie said she reminded him of lilo, from lilo and stitch. her mom seemed pretty pleased with the whole scene and even offered to pay me. i couldn't always understand what the girl was saying, though. and i felt silly asking her to repeat things all the time. i can't understand a lot of what some kids say because they kind of yell out the words and don't really enunciate. their parents seem to be able to understand them just fine, but i can't help wondering what i'd do if i had a kid who spewed supposedly meaningful syllables that i couldn't comprehend.

i've discovered today, too, that i have essentially zero appreciation for the diversity of most electronic dance music. i mean, i don't mind it, but i just can't really tell different songs apart. i can tell they're supposed to be different, but i can't grasp or appreciate preferring one piece over another, you know. SP, an acquaintance of ours, came and chatted with us for a bit and then said, 'i love this song. i just have to go dance to it.'

fair enough. to me, though, i don't really understand how you could love that particular song and not the slew of others that had been previously played.

i guess i'm barbarically uncultured. *shrug*.

so we biked to the event and biked back. i'm out of shape. man, i'm gonna be sore tomorrow...

...

fire update: it looks like the fire in the apartment started in the laundry room. i assume the plumbers who were doing the water maintenance were soldering something and lit it on fire or something. anyway, a big chunk of the wall is missing, where the firefighters hacked away at it. the suite next to the laundry room was collateral damage and the whole area is charred. i feel really bad for the residents whose suite is currently open for people of all sorts to peer into. i hope they get their place fixed up shortly.

my sweetie is still bitter that the strata council wouldn't let him weld with oxy-acetylene on our porch. he maintains that he would never have started a fire...

anyway, looks like laundromat for us next week!

also: there is no water pressure in the building.

but the strawberry: dee-lish.

so much for my much-needed nap.

uh, there was a fire in the building about half an hour ago. i was roused from drowsiness by an alarm bell. assuming it was just a false alarm, i slipped out of the apartment with my wallet and keys and exploited the occasion to head over to the market and get some organic strawberries (incidentally, $5 for almost a kilogram -- what a steal!). when i left the building, there wasn't even anyone outside.

i came back to three fire trucks, a small crowd of confused residents and about a half-dozen firefighters putting fans in the doorways to draw out the smoke.

they let us back in about three minutes ago. it looks like maybe it started in the laundry room or one of the other suites in the far end of the building.

i'll find out more later. now, i eat a strawberry and get back to sleep.

if i had a twin sister, i would constantly refer to her as my 'womb-mate.'

constantly.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

ew!

source of the unidentified smell: discovered.

my sweetie had apparently 'forgotten about' this cup of garlic cloves with a bit of water that he'd placed between the blinds and the window he was trying to coax into sprouting a few weeks ago.

it had, as you might imagine, long since given up on becoming anything alive and was decaying. there was a thick crust of something covering the top, which had actually sealed off much of the smell, which explained why the stench wasn't getting any stronger.

i'd been trying to convince him for days that the smell was still there and that i could smell it from the couch and not from the kitchen.

he did not believe me.

now he does.

rest assured, then, smorg and gerry (and possibly thomas later on), that the smell has been identified and thoroughly, thoroughly erradicated and your visit will not be compromised by rotting garlic.

i must have walked by this jamaican eatery on fourth avenue a hundred times.

'i should try their roti and jerk chicken sometime,' i think, every single time.

yesterday, i walked by the place on my way to the bus stop to discover it's become a yuppie juice bar.

i highly doubt that some massive 'i should start being more impulsive and live for the moment' epiphany will come of this, but i am quite, quite sorry that i missed out on the opportunity.

let's try to temper that with some sour grapes, shall we? 'well, if they went under, their food couldn't have been that good...'

that all-nighter, not surprisingly, completely fucked up my internal clock.

...

i procured a bunch of painted wooden beads and some hemp twine, both natural and black on friday. over the next week, i'm gonna try a few knotting techniques that i learned years and years ago. the hemp twine is really quite uneven, though. the bracelet i made myself on friday is incredibly lumpy. also, i had to roll it quite a bit before it became maleable, so it looks really worn and fuzzy.

it's hemp jewellery, though, i guess. it's supposed to be rustic?

i just wanna make sure i figure out exactly what i'll need to bring to the MOMpop next sunday. scissors, obviously. masking tape? maybe. little pieces of cardboard to serve as shitty impromptu cork boards? thumbtacks.

the event's supposed to be really casual and spontaneous, but i'm getting inexplicably excited and nervous about it. i haven't made hemp jewellery in years, and i get the brilliant idea that i'm gonna teach kids how to do it, now? hmm...

...

we (HT, MM, HP, S&A and my sweetie) went to see carolyn mark on friday. the show was great, but way too short. i was kinda expecting her to play more than one set... i got her new album, which came with an 'ask me about carolyn mark!' button and a bag of 'beaver-flavoured chips.'

the album is absolutely amazing. i wish i had her voice -- my god, it's so rich and gorgeous.

we were debating whether the best thing to do is eat the beaver-flavoured chips and just keep the bag, or not eat the chips at all and keep the whole thing intact.

...

the more S&A talk about their wedding plans -- taking ballroom dancing lessons so they can have a decent first dance, hiring DJs, getting dresses, finding photographers...ugh -- the more i am so, so glad that we never went through all of that shit. i mean, i understand that all of this is important to them, but i can't help but feel that there must be a better use of their time.

1:39 am: still in lab. listening to the ramones' mondo bizarro. all of the lyrics speak to me right now. in particular:

"this is the job that ate my brain..."

"i've got the strength to endure..."

"it's gonna be alright. it's gonna be okay..."

getting a bit hungry. i have ginger cookies and pecan butter tarts in the lab, but don't particularly feel like eating either. want something savoury. wish i'd brought some mini-babybels. they have cheddar mini-babybels now. eww.

finding different ways to avoid figuring out spectral normalization ranges.

stuck here for the long haul, 'cause there's no bus that runs home anymore.

i wonder how long i can keep this up.

it really isn't all that late for me -- i usually don't go to bed until about 2, but i'm so fuckin' tired right now.

uh, hmm. want to know where i can get some decent hemp string. could make hemp jewellery for the first MOMpop. macrame dragonflies are cool and kid-friendly...

1:52 am: got a lozenge for my throat.

2:21 am: just finished looking at normalization ranges for my spectra. realized that i wasted a shitload of time following the boss's orders when i could have taken fewer scans. batteries in my flashlight dying. saying 'screw it' to laser goggles. only putting them on when aligning.

so fucking tired.

(incidentally, this isn't updated in real-time because i only have
netscape on this computer and the new blogger interface is still kind of fucked up.)

been using the mouse so much my index finger actually smarts. using middle finger as crutch.

missed supersize me tonight. will try to catch it in the coming weeks.

3:58 am: still taking scans. paul simon is saving my sanity. i have the doors here, too, but i think they might lull me to sleep. i'm doing okay, actually. we'll see what happens when i hit the inevitable wall. my spectra look strange, though. *shrug*. first bus out of here leaves at 5:47. i don't even know if i'll be done by then.

if you'll be my bodyguard, i can be your long-lost pal...

4:11 am: ate two stale ginger cookies.

need water.

4:24 am: wishing i'd brought a blanket or something.

4:37 am: eating a bag of vending machine hickory sticks. probably not the best for my throat. glad it's not raining. would i ever be in a shitty mood if i had to go home cold and wet in the morning.

5:05 am: outlasted DA. wow.

heeheeheeheehee...at the giddy stage of exhaustion.

5:37 am: just missed the first bus leaving campus with 6 scans to go. briefly left the lab to discover that it's completely light out.

6:07 am: one scan left...!

6:20 am: done. everything's turned off. files are uploading. just have to get sample back into the cleanroom.

6:43 am: wrote e-mail to supervisor. trying to publish this entry but blogger page is unhappy. try again later. ready to go home.

today's crossword on yahoo games was disappointingly straightforward. i'd expected it to occupy my time while i was imaging my arrays, but now i find myself idle.

...

while staring at the massive grease spot that a dropped left-over shanghai noodle has imprinted upon my napkin, it occurred to me that it was kind of remarkable that the fortunes in fortune cookies didn't come out greased up and transclucent. i speculated that maybe the cookies didn't really have all that much grease in them -- that they were made entirely of, like, cornstarch and water -- which would explain why they're always flavourless and bone dry.

i consulted the great oracle of google to find this recipe for fortune cookies (which, like chop suey, was an american creation -- from some dude in LA, for crap's sake):

1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 to 2 Tbsp of water

Beat egg slightly. Add sugar and beat until very thick and smooth. Add oil to mixture. Add water and a little of the egg mixture to the cornstarch and stir until smooth; beat into egg mixture. Heat griddle to about 350 degrees. Drop a heaping teaspoonful of batter into the griddle. Then spread with a spoon into a cookie about 3 inches in diameter an d about 1/8 inch thick. Turn over to brown underside. Cook until cookies are light golden in color and lifts easily from the pan. Remove cookies one at a time from the griddle. Place a fortune paper in the center of the cookie and fold the cookie in half, pinching the edges together and folding down.

2 tablespoons of oil! i use that much to bake a batch of a dozen muffins which routinely leave grease spots on their muffin cups, and 1/4 cup cornstarch can't make that many fortune cookies.

anyway, when was it, exactly, when fortune cookies (more aptly called sweeping advice cookies or mangled proverb cookies) started including tacky lottery numbers? i'd venture to guess some time in the last ten years, 'cause i certainly don't remember them from my childhood.

i don't really understand the point, frankly. was there a marketing blitz that changed the landscape of fortune-cookie-dom forever? when one rogue manufacturer started offering new, improved cookies, 'now with lottery numbers!' to chinese and pseudochinese restauranteurs and all of its competitors had to follow suit? isn't not like regular folks regularly go out and buy fortune cookies to snack on.

cookie fortunes aren't meant to be taken seriously, of course -- although (digression) there was an awesome researcher at the national research council in ottawa, margaret, who was otherwise incredibly smart, witty and just plain cool, but had this bizarre superstitious hang-up over fortune cookies -- but it seems including random lottery numbers can only damage the fortune cookie's credibility. what is it saying, really? that you'll win the lottery if you play those numbers? that you'll win something? what about those other chumps you dined with that have different potential lottery picks? are you just supposed to be luckier than they are? it appears to me that the numbers are simply an admission that the whole thing's nothing but a crapshoot.

as you can probably gather, i've never been the biggest fan of fortune cookies or cookie fortunes, although appending 'in bed' to a fortune does do a remarkably impressive amount to boost the fortune's entertainment value and works well on a surprisingly regular basis.

case in point:
about a month ago, we dined at a vietnamese eatery and my sweetie got 'self-reliance is your path to success.'

i wonder who came up with that. you can't really arbitrarily add 'in bed' to anything else and have it both still make sense and be hilarious.

fortunes can, of course, be entertaining in and of themselves -- on occasion. i had a really good one in my wallet for a while, but unfortunately, i don't remember it and the lettering's since rubbed off.

i've gotten 'hell is paved with good intentions,' but my ultimate favourite is a fortune that DA told me about: 'you like chinese food.'

my sweetie still insists that it would be solid gold to start giving out cookies with fortunes reading 'you just ate cat.'

what are some of the better cookie fortunes (real ones!) y'all have encountered?

i locked myself out of my lab tonight.

'bril,' JJB would say if he were here.

then i would have to kill him.

...

a publisher sent the canadian undergraduate physics journal three books completely unsolicited. "In your review(s), please quote al ISBNs and list prices," says the enclosed slip.

one of the books they sent, Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists (*snore*) costs US$118.

what kind of undergrad would voluntarily blow $118 US on a book called Candid Science IV?

inexplicably, i have the my pet monster theme song in my head.

i'm not entirely sure what got me thinking today about the hideous days of junior high, but for some reason, google triggered some sort of repressed memory of 'les actualités,' these current-event worksheets we had to fill out about once a month for social studies class through grades 7 to 9.

i remember spending hours in the public library scouring through newspapers to find obscure facts like the name of the deputy health minister of nova scotia at the time who may have been mentioned in some hidden news brief.

'les actualités' drove me to rabid frothing of the mouth; it wasn't that i didn't keep up with relevant current events, but the information the worksheet asked for was routinely irrelevant, with a few rare exceptions. i guess i wasn't as immersed in the news as i am now, though that's hardly surprising given my age then. the worksheets even made me ask my parents for an extremely ill-conceived subscription to Maclean's, which helped rarely if ever. the magazines piled up essentially untouched, and i, having neither the parents in high places with all the answers to the questions on the worksheet nor friends with such parents, was forced to wallow in my sheltered mediocrity.

i wonder if the ol' junior high still attempts this exercise, which by now -- evidently -- involves no more than the rote and mindless task of typing key words into google. and if they do still make the kids do 'les actualités,' i wonder if the students are learning just as little as i did back then.

ugh...

i think i might be getting sick.

my throat hurts, but not like it normally does when i get sick. it feels like someone's punched me in the larynx.

also, i'm exhausted. i've been sleeping all day.

god, i hope it's not mono.

ugh...

...

also: i hate tampa bay. they don't deserve to have a hockey team, much less be in the third round of the playoffs.

the unidentified odor has -- at least temporarily -- been replaced by the warming aroma of baking ginger cookies.

breathe in...

ahh...

there's a lingering smell in the apartment and i can't track it down. it's been pervading the space for the past week or so and i've been growing increasingly disturbed. the garbage's been taken out, the dishes done, the sink thoroughly drano'd but the smell's still here.

i don't think it's is getting stronger, although i fear i might be getting acclimatized to it. i'm paranoid that someone walking by our door will get bowled over by what they perceive to be the most repulsive of stenches. next thing i know, police will bust in to check that there aren't five decaying bodies in the suite.

speaking of which, i should really go roll those into the ocean soon.

anyway, it's one of those unidentifiable smells -- it's not dirty laundry, dog poo, or rotting food -- i don't think. it will be my mission this weekend to track it down and eliminate it. problem is, the sense of smell is so fickle; i've been trying to trace the source for days now, and each time i think the smell might be getting stronger, i lose it.

...

the supervisor invited me and my sweetie to wine and dine this prospective faculty member into coming here -- mostly so that my sweetie could explain his research to this dude. we went to this upscale-ish fish restaurant and i ordered an octopus-bacon-wrapped scallop appetizer. on the fancy-schmancy plate was the easily identifiable scallop as well as this mystery cube.

from the outside, it looked like agedashi tofu. i cut into it under the assumption that it was agedashi tofu.

it exploded in this spurt of brownish grey; some sort of gravy/sauce -- part of it landed right on the perfect white tablecloth.

yeah, i'm rad.

i don't even know how they made that thing. maybe they freeze the gravy into little cubes then deep fry them. *shrug*

point is, i disgraced myself in front of my supervisor, this new dude and his fiancee, and another prof and his architecture wife.

also, because i went to this dinner, i missed bowling for JW's birthday. but i did get a really really expensive meal for nothing.

i met JW and his crew a little later, when JW spilled beer on my foot from a gourd he got for his birthday. he's not going to feel that good tomorrow.

...

my simulations take 5 hours to run on my computer. this degree totally sucks.

what i'm not doing tonight: watching friends.

MOMENTUM, it seems, isn't completely dead. however, my hope that it will return in the near future is no more than a pipe dream. they're still trying to find a publisher and a managing editor, apparently, though they don't seem to be trying all that hard. CM says that she believes in 'synchronicity' that will bring the right person into the position at the right time.

hmm...

ahh well.

we had our first MOMpops meeting yesterday -- the first festival is coming up in just two and a half weeks! i threw out a few ideas: rhythm jam, wild blackberry jam-making, plant swap...but i don't think i'm going to be terribly deeply involved with this project. i can't afford to take on any additional commitments. i'll go to the event, though, and encourage people i know to go. they're going to try to have pedal-powered sound systems, art jams, dancing, a free store, barter booth, a bunch of other hippie stuff...

they're also putting together a cheap little zine to hand out at the event. i offered to help out, but i don't think i'll do much for it after all. it doesn't do enough to quench my MOMENTUM withdrawl and i hesitate to put my name onto something that i know will be hastily and shoddily done, even if it is for a good cause. the others seem really excited and passionate about it, so we'll see how things turn out. i'll have a review of the event after the first MOMpop.

i made yummy red snapper tonight: panseared with salt and butter; pan deglazed with white wine; filets kept warm in a 150-degree oven in the wine and butter sauce. a splash of fresh parsley and it would have been perfect.

num.

i'm rich!

i reimbursed myself for all the cash i funnelled into my journal over the past two years: $2227.72.

!

american truck-driver thomas hamill escaped the captivity of iraqi kidnappers this weekend after three weeks of being held hostage. he ran toward a group of american soldiers shouting, apparently, and they took him out of the area and gave him medical care.

gosh, wasn't it so fortunate that hamill is white?

can you imagine what might have happened if, say, fadi fadel, rifat mohammad rifat or naji al kuwaiti came running toward a troop of american soldiers, shouting?

i don't know how the myth that banana peels are slippery got started and perpetuated.

it's those half-crushed grapes you gotta watch.

combatting lethargy...

went for a good bike ride for the first time in months. first invigourating exercise i've had in months. god, i'm out of shape.

i want to do critical mass again in june, though. i'm hoping it'll be huge like last year.

...

on tuesday night, i get to find out whether my beloved MOMENTUM magazine is dead for good. it went on 'hiatus' after the october/november issue (which featured my sustainable funerals article) and my fear was that it would never come back. CM and AW, who edited MOMENTUM, are starting up this new venture, MOMpops, which is a series of free one-day festivals to bring together people and families in the community. we're have a brainstorming session for it tuesday, when, presumably, it will be made a little less ambiguous whether this is the triumphant relaunch of the great publication or a celebratory funeral.

oh, MOMENTUM. i enjoyed writing for it because it wasn't overly demanding. i think that with school and everything else going on, a bi-monthly sets the perfect freelancing pace for me. also, i could write just about anything for MOM, and the people i met through it are just such an awesomely diverse and quirky group of hippies. i guess i should try to get off my ass and find someone else to freelance for, but on the other hand, this whole thesis thing should probably take precedence.

stupid thesis. i just hate you so much...

as of ten minutes ago, i am no longer the editor-in-chief of the canadian undergraduate physics journal.

freedom!

...

(thomas, you can't make me put in a comment function, complain that i don't update my blog often enough and then NOT comment. it's just not fair.)