I'm pretty sure that my dad got Lil' Dude Hot Wheels tracks just so that he'd have an excuse to play with Hot Wheels tracks.

My sweetie just finished his final PhD defence. Hooray! This next week will prove to be a painful scramble to make thesis corrections, but he's almost done.

HT told me he was moving, so I made this into a poster and sent it to him as a housewarming gift. Turns out he's not quite moving yet, but I wanted him to get it before Christmas:

I made this a while back and sent it to SD. She's received it, so now I can post it:

I tried a variant with the dots coloured, but I think I prefer this one.

SD writes, "I tested it out on my family when they were here for Alexander's birthday and most of us saw it pretty quickly, except my mom, but she doesn't count because she is perpetually in a rush and not really noticing what she is doing."

So maybe it's not entirely squint free. I'll have to practise some more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So have we all signed up to oppose SOPA yet?

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

Well, fuck.

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

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

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

Stegosaurus!

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

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

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

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

Go!

"Grignotines"

What a perfect word for what it describes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The $1 serrated pumpkin knife my sweetie picked up works shockingly well for making jack o' lanterns. I have to admit I was pretty skeptical.

I think back to our pumpkin-carving contests in junior high and the dull straight-edged chef's knives we were expected to use—think five prepubescent and awkward teenagers wildly stabbing a slippery pumpkin from different directions under a 30-minute time constraint—and am fairly shocked nobody lost a finger.

I took part yesterday in the very cool Beginner Cheese Workshop at UBC, presented by David Rotsztain. I didn't have the foresight to take a writing utensil, though, so I just have to get all of what I remember down in writing before it completely leaves my brain.
• Good cheesecloths? Not supermarket cheesecloths. Try muslin at fabric stores or discount clothing stores like Value Village. David uses a do-rag and says it's the cat's ass. Deodorize and disinfect with baking soda and boiling water before using.
• I had always wondered how ricotta works—how do you get more cheese from whey, which has already been cheesed? Turns out rennet cheeses, made at lower temperature, coagulate only the casein. The albumen stays in the whey, and it precipitates out when heated to a high temperature and exposed to acid. (Now I understand why you add vinegar to water before poaching eggs, too.) It's because of the albumen that heated cheeses like paneer will not melt.
• To think I've just been throwing my valuable yogurt whey down the drain. Add a quarter cup of the stuff to a gallon of warmed milk to start the souring process for rennet cheese.
• For (hung) yogurt cheese, to one 650g tub of yogurt, hung for 24 hours, adding about 1 tsp salt, then hanging for another few hours will help preserve it for up to 2 weeks. Add any flavourings to the cheese after it's been dried; otherwise it will just come out in the whey.
• Using a higher-fat-content milk will make a creamier product and improve your yield. Also, for yogurt cheeses, lower-fat yogurts are more likely to have thickeners like corn or tapioca starch, which will prevent the whey from separating.
• For rennet cheeses that need to age, don't use iodized salt, which will kill the culture. Salting pulls out moisture, helping to preserve the cheese, and adds flavour. Alternatively, brine: dissolve 1 cup salt to 1 L whey, then add an additional 1 cup salt as a reservoir. A camembert-like wheel will need 1 hour's worth of brining, whereas larger cheese will need longer.
• Paneer will absorb the flavour of the acid that you use to precipitate out the proteins, so keep that in mind. For sweet applications, use lemon juice. A balsamic vinegar will produce a great paneer with amazing purple streaks.
• Using whey as the weight to press cheese not only is convenient, but it also helps more whey come out of the cheese because of its warmth.
• Only non-homogenized milk works for rennet cheeses. Pasteurized is okay, but raw makes better curds.

That's all I remember that isn't in the handout provided. Excited to take the advanced class sometime in the new year!

If I were a three-year-old again, one of my main reasons for wanting to grow bigger would be so that my head would no longer be right at most grown-ups' fart level.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." —Thomas Palmer

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results." —Albert Einstein
***
So I guess Palmer's quote should be amended to say, "If at first you don't succeed, examine your axioms and initial conditions, make a reasonable adjustment, then try, try again." Or maybe he was just insane.

This little creature will be part of my brother-in-law's Christmas present:

(The odds of his reading this blog before then are infinitesimal.) The aardvark sits atop a Chicago Manual of Style because I did most of my work on it during an editorial retreat.

Nomnomnom...

SD got her birthday amigurumi. Here we see Alexander dutifully chewing on the turtle; the elephant is in the foreground. Both animals are a bit different from the similar ones I made before. Rather than clamp the turtle feet between the top and bottom shell, I sewed them onto the bottom shell, and I tried to give the elephant a natural curve to the trunk, but my sweetie says it looks a bit like Cyril Sneer. (Photo courtesy SD)

Kits farmers' market done for the year. Pout.

I initially found it enormously amusing that Lil' Dude appeared to have named his toy dolphin "Beauregard" but later realized that he was just horribly mispronouncing (and misidentifying) "beluga."

Um, awesome?

I never thought my Gromit would turn out this well, but the pattern was great. The stitches are loose, so the stuffing shows through, so if I try to make it again, I'll have to use a smaller hook.

I made this one as a Christmas gift for our nanny's little girl, whom our nanny hasn't seen in person in two years. I asked her what animal her daughter would like, and she said she wanted a dog, so I figured this was a good excuse to try the free pattern out. Just in case her daughter's never heard of Gromit, I bought her Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Collection to go along with the amigurumi. The set includes A Matter of Loaf and Death, which I haven't even seen.

I signed me and Lil' Dude up as subjects for a study about behaviour, emotion and aggression in young children. After a two-hour interview today, I got to take home $40, and Lil' Dude got some apple juice and a handful of toy cars. I'm not doing this for the money, of course, but it is nice to be compensated, and it does seem a better use of my cash-earning time than, say, completing online market research surveys for Ipsos, where, after over a year, all I managed to earn was a $20 Amazon.ca voucher.

Anyway, after I'd volunteered for the study, I decided to look on Craigslist for other similar research that I could serve as a human subject for. After spending a summer doing MRI research on human subjects, I know how hard it can be to recruit eligible Guinea pigs. Since I now have way more flexible work hours, I can finally participate in these kinds of studies, which I always find interesting. They make me feel as though I'm making some minimal contribution to progress.

NM: "Hello?"

Person on phone: "Hi! I am calling from the campaign of Suzanne Anton. Can she count on your support this upcoming municipal election?"

NM: "I'm afraid not, no."

PoP: "Oh. If an election were held today, who would you be voting for?"

NM: "I'd unequivocally be voting for Gregor Robertson."

PoP: *pause*. "Uh... Is he C-O-P-E or Vision Vancouver?"

NM: "I'm pretty sure he's Vision."

PoP: "Oh. Thanks! I didn't know, 'cause I'm calling from London..."

Nice work, NPA. Outsource your municipal election campaign responsibilities to some call centre in London. Because Vancouverites are too busy doing important things, I guess?

My sweetie defended his PhD today (the first of two presentations he has to give). I and three of his friends painted his name on our bellies and yelled "DE-fence! DE-fence!"

I wish we had pictures.

"Please stop painting soy sauce on your pants with that bean."

We picked 120 lbs. of grapes for the fruit tree project today.

is where God decided I had to have a pimple this week.

To Kraft Canada:

Hello,

The fact that Dad's Cookies are Bullfrog Powered was a large part of the reason I chose to purchase these cookies over competing products. I applaud you for taking steps to reduce your carbon footprint. However, if you are sincere about your environmental commitment, I would fervently encourage you to investigate alternative packaging methods that would allow your packaging to be more easily recycled. The polystyrene inner tray, for example, could easily be replaced with a polypropylene tray. My local recycling program in Vancouver will accept the latter but not the former, and I know that other municipalities in the rest of Canada have similar restrictions on polystyrene.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration,

Nori Maki.

Foods that I eat because they're good for me and not because I particularly enjoy them:

1. Oatmeal
2. Yogurt
3. Kale

I'm still not really getting kale. I'm admittedly a bit of a kale neophyte, but do the hippies actually like this vegetable because they think it's delicious? I keep reading shit like, "ZOMG kale is like the best evarrr!!!" I can't help but think I must be missing something. I mean, I'll eat it—I have it in at least two meals a week, actually—but it's not something I look forward to with the great anticipation that I have for, say, gai lan. I've also done the kale chip thing, and, no, despite what the Internet says, they don't taste "just like potato chips."

I used to wonder whether we're culturally conditioned to think that farts are funny or if they're inherently hilarious. Since I've had a child I can now state this with certainty: farts are inherently hilarious.

Is it odd that I feel a bit weirded out when I scratch a dog's leg-thumping spot? It just feels... inappropriate. Not just in an "Is the dog getting sexual gratification from this?" way but also in an "I would probably punch someone if he or she touched me in a way that made my limbs spasm uncontrollably" way. Especially if it was a stranger.

Cross-stitched Megan ambigram done:

A bit of a shit photo. Are we detecting a pattern here?

Anyway, I'm delivering it to C&M today. Hope they like it.

I made an elephant (or "effephant," as Lil' Dude calls it) based on this free Lion Brand Yarn pattern, with a couple of modifications.

My sweetie took one look at it and said, "Trunkus erectus"—which doesn't exactly inspire confidence. There are certainly some better elephant patterns out there, but this was only the second amigurumi I started, so I figured it would be an easy intro. Lil' Dude liked it and decided that Baby Joël had to have it, and that was adorable in itself.

One day at preschool and Lil' Dude's already gotten me sick.

The turtle is complete:

I used Basics Stop yarn by Lana Grossa, colour 21 the darker green and colour 11 the lighter stuff, and followed this free pattern on Lion Brand Yarn's website. The legs are way too close to each other and to the head, and I did a crap job of stitching on the head, but Lil' Dude still seems to like it.

"No, sweetie, that's a Shirley Temple, which is different from a dimple, which is also distinct from a nipple."

"Stop that, please. Why are you rubbing cheese on me?"

I had to get an affidavit notarized. The notary charged me $25 plus tax for checking my ID, signing the document, and sealing it—maybe a five-minute job. At first I thought, "What the fuck kind of racket is this?" And then I realized that there is no way you could ever pay me enough to do what a notary does, so I guess that counts for something.

"Sweetie, stop forking your dad."

"Look! Holes!"

"Yes, I see. It's not a good idea to put holes in your father."

I've been working on an ambigram for HG, since I haven't seen her in a while, and her first and last names make a pretty natural ambigram—except for the whole i/n issue. Not sure my approach is a particularly good solution, but it's the best I could come up with that harmonized with the rest of the letterforms:

Holy bumper crop, Batman! JD and I picked for about thirty-five minutes and hauled in about 3 litres of blackberries. Sure makes up for last year's crap harvest.

This is about a third of them:

We made them into a delicious pie for dessert.

I don't ever remember shedding tears over the death of a politician, but this morning I blubbered like a baby. RIP, Jack.

CL: "What's he doing?"

NM: "He's trying to wink."

CL: "Oh. Good winking, buddy! Looking a bit constipated, but..."

Lil' Dude's "wink" currently consists of his squinting and scrunching up his nose. One eye is completely closed, whereas the other one is about 95 percent there.

And so it begins...

Actually, it began in January, when Lil' Dude was enrolled in an art class and brought home his art projects each week. I had the, "Shit, what am I going to do with all the stuff he brings home?" thought. Fortunately I could put off thinking about it for a while, because he made mostly paintings in his art class, which are pretty much two dimensional and not that hard to store.

In his one day of daycamp today, he brought home a bracelet he made. I shudder to think of all the crafts he'll fill the house with when he starts preschool in a couple weeks.

My strategy is to take photos of them and post them here so that he'll have a record of them and maybe won't be too heartbroken to part with them. This one, of his bracelet, is unfortunately a shitty take, what with the low light and out-of-focusness and all. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow in better light.

Both my sweetie and I had had the same idea a few weeks ago, when Lil' Dude went to a barbecue hosted by a local organic market and made this head out of a tomato. We'd both taken photos of it before it became encrusted with fruit flies. It's in the fridge right now, but it looks as though Lil' Dude's finally forgotten about it and we can throw it out soon. I'll dig up those photos in the next couple of days.

There. I've finished my first attempt at amigurumi, based on the pattern by June Gilbank:

The stuffing shows through the midsection, and there are a couple of looser loops. I hope I'll progress to the point where I can look back on this and say, "Geez, look at the crap I used to make."

Apparently the hardest thing about freelancing is to remember that, yes, even at home, I need to drink water to survive.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

My sweetie, Lil' Dude, and I went kayaking to the smaller of the Defence Islands. We camped there Saturday night, alone except for a mother seal and her pup, who would occasionally poke their heads out of the water to see who the fuck was on their rocks. I misplaced my new hat, but otherwise it was a lovely weekend.

FREE-lance!

I made a couple of tweaks to the g. Wonder if it's better now. Our non-native-English-speaking nanny can read it; I'm calling that good enough.

Tried another ambigram—for yet another baby:

 

I don't know if my goal of making squint-free ambigrams is going so well. LC saw what it was supposed to be, but when I showed it to my sweetie, he said, "Mesaw?"

Sigh. Don't know now whether to go ahead with making it into something more substantial.

I am frustrated by both evolution and physiology that I can be woken up in the middle of the night both urgently needing to pee and also desperately thirsty. Why the fuck can't my body be better at redistributing hydration where I need it?

I put Thai basil on my pizza, and it was fucking delicious.

Lil' Dude still hasn't figured out how to pedal. I tried to get him to ride his trike to the playground yesterday; he basically Fred Flintstoned his way there and Fred Flintstoned his way back.

So I designed an ambigram for S&A's baby:

That was what I was cross-stitching:

S&A seem pretty pleased with it, so that makes me happy.

My goal in ambigram design: to create typography you don't have to squint to decipher.

Cross-stitching notes to self:
•Use masking tape over the piece edges to prevent fraying. Otherwise you will constantly catch your thread on the edges and drive yourself mad.
•Cut off loose ends as soon as the thread is secured. Again, to prevent insanity.
•If you are not stitching over the centre square, mark it with white floss. Coloured floss will stain.
•Don't use a thread longer than a metre. It will get frayed and shredded as you stitch.
•Don't try to use regular embroidery floss with 22-count evenweave. It will bunch up the surrounding stitches.
•When using 18-count evenweave, don't assume there are actually 18 pixels per inch. Actual pattern turns out much larger, for some dumb reason.
•Don't start a cross-stitching project unless you have infinite time. Three-year-olds are not much interested in sitting patiently and watching you stitch.

When I was cleaning out my crap at my parents' place, I came across old flower looms: a round one and a square one. I did a bit of online research to see if I could use them to make something that wasn't gaudy and hideous, and the results are a resounding no.

Last night I spent an hour cleaning orange juice residue from twelve of my keys. Thank God for the keyboard condom I got after the last time Lil' Dude spilled a drink on my computer; otherwise it could have been way worse. I really should back up my data...

"No eat the pine cone?"

"That's right. We don't eat pine cones."

"I had an epic struggle trying to get Lil' Dude to sleep."

"Oh yeah? As epic as The Lord of the Rings?"

"I don't know. Did The Lord of the Rings feature a child forcibly opening another character's mouth and deliberately drooling a goober into it? 'Cause if it didn't, I think my experience was more epic."

What the fuck made me think that I could take up cross-stitching and raise a toddler at the same time?

I was holding Lil' Dude at a bus shelter and asked him if he wanted to sit down on the bench. He said yes. Two women were talking on either end of the three-seater, and their bags were on the ends of the bench, so I said, "Excuse me" and inserted Lil' Dude in the vacant middle seat. The older woman muttered something under her breath and, through gritted teeth, said to the younger one, "Take her picture."

I turned to her. "Sorry—why are you taking my picture?"

"You like to take it up the rear, don't you?"

"Excuse me?"

"You take it up the rear. That's the only reason they let you stay on our land!" (Both women were First Nations.)

I was standing there, holding Lil' Dude's hands. The bizarre verbal assault continued. "You're a slut! When he grows up, he's going to want to have sex with you. You'll just spread it for anyone, won't you. You're not sorry for anything. We're taking your picture because we're sick of it. You're going to get deported! They're sick of it, too. Sending you back where you came from! Look at you! Cover yourself up! You slut!"

At that point I just picked up Lil' Dude and walked over to the bus stop a little ways away and waited for the bus to arrive.

When I recounted the story later that evening, my sweetie remarked, "Yeah, nothing says 'easy lay' like a knee brace."

"No, no—shoes don't belong in the fridge."

The most useless response from Clubhouse:
***
Dear nori:

Thank you for contacting us in regards to our Club House Extracts. Our customers are our first concern and we are always interested in assisting you with any questions or comments you may have on any of our products.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We have forwarded your comments to the marketing director for future consideration.

If you have questions regarding any of our products, please do not hesitate to contact me via email or call our toll free number, 1-800-265-2600.

Sincerely,

Valerie Mailloux

Consumer Affairs Specialist
McCormick Canada
www.clubhouse.ca
***
I didn't write back, but I regret that a little bit now. Marketing? How is that productive?

I guess if I'm going to start making this complaint letter schtick a thing, I should start following through, huh? Anyway, if in five years you start seeing vanilla and almond extract bottles that don't fucking leak (I'm pretty sure that technology will be available then), know that you have me—or possibly hundreds of other people who have come to the same simple realization—to thank.

So you know how when you inadvertently translate your hand a key over and start touch-typing gobbledygook? It seems Google is clever enough to know you've done that and what you actually meant. Huh.

All right—for lack of something better to post, here is my complaint letter to Clubhouse:
***
Category Type: Complaint
Subject: Packaging
Product Name: Vanilla extract, almond extract, etc.
Message: Is there any way you can redesign your vanilla extract and almond extract bottles to be more leak resistant? I can't imagine that I am the only consumer who accidentally and unknowingly knocks over those bottles in the pantry only to discover them lying in a messy puddle with half the extract wasted. It would be enormously helpful if you could add a soft plastic gasket to the lid or something, because the paper gasket that you use just gets saturated and then doesn't function well as a barrier against leaks.
***
Their response to follow.

I'm in Edmonton, where my parents have asked me to go through all of my childhood shit so that they can cull what they can and get the house ready to sell. I started the process yesterday, going through two bookshelves and three desk drawers. Dear Lord, I had a lot of useless crap. I've already stuffed one recycling bag and am well on my way to filling another.

I expected having to sort through my old belongings to be exhausting and emotional, but it hasn't been too bad so far, possibly because we went through a great purge of our apartment a few months back, when I learned that I needed to take a clinical approach. Still, twenty years' worth of accumulated possessions, memories, and unfulfilled ambitions are bound to be fraught.

What isn't hard at all is throwing out my old florid writing from my high school days. I'm almost embarrassed to read it—it's so awful. I now know that's a phase I had to go through. Experimenting and pushing the edges of my sensibilities so that I could feel out where my boundaries are. Not that I knew that's what I was doing at the time—I'm sure I thought my writing was fucking brilliant back then. I'll just have to keep this in mind when it's Lil' Dude's turn to write for school and not stifle his own discovery by trying to impose my standards of quality on him . Fortunately, since I rediscovered this blog eight years after starting it, as I read through the archives I was relieved to discover that only a few of my past entries really made me cringe. Of course I hope I'll never stop learning, developing, and evolving, but it's reassuring to know that my tendencies have been reasonably stable since I've matured a bit.

I also found (and discarded) stacks and stacks and stacks of my old study cards from high school and early university. The handwriting is mine, but I have no recollection of creating it. This exercise has made me realize how much I once learned and how incredibly much I've now forgotten. How knowledgeable I'd be if I could just retain a fraction more of what I read.

So now I'm left with about a shelf's worth of university-level physics and math textbooks that I have no idea what to do with. My cursory online research has turned up Books for Africa, an NGO based in the U.S., and Books 2 Prisoners, which has a Vancouver office. Not clear if the latter will accept physics texts, though; its focus seems to be the humanities, and law. More probing needed.

I tried to sneak a juice box for Lil' Dude past airport security, but they confiscated it. I was tempted to say, "You know Osama Bin Laden's dead, right?" but I didn't want them to take me to the little room.

"Please stop paddling your mother with the pie server."

Sunlight—the exclamation-filled response:
***
Hello nori,

Thanks so much for writing!

We are writing in response to your comments regarding our advertisement for our products.

As a manufacturer we feel it is a major responsibility to provide our friends and consumers with the most creative and informative means of advertising possible. Needless to say, we are most concerned with your comments as they suggest we may not be successfully promoting this message on behalf of our product.

You may be interested to know that all of our commercials and advertisements are pre-tested and various techniques are used to evaluate consumer reactions. Based on the results of our pre-testing procedures, the presentations are chosen for their majority appeal. Please let us assure you that your comments are extremely important to us in evaluating the success of our commercials and advertisements.

We have a long history of presenting "tasteful" advertising to the public. Our ads must be informative and truthful. The agencies creating our advertising adhere strictly to these guidelines.

We certainly do not wish to offend anyone. In developing product messages, Sun Products and its agencies may not always anticipate all possible implications of an advertisement or television commercial.

We will certainly forward your comments to the Marketing staff. Consumer comments are very important and evaluated on a regular basis.

We do thank you for your interest!
Your friends at Sun Products
***
I especially like the quotes around "tasteful." And I yet again did not succeed in getting free samples, not that I was angling for them.

Apparently the latex within fig leaves can be a severe irritant to human skin. Perhaps not the best option for covering one's shame?

Got attacked by stinging nettles at Rebecca Spit today, but I think the haul of beautiful salmonberries was worth it.

Lil' Dude seems awfully fond of them.

The QR code for this blog is









This is what happens when I find myself on holiday with too much time on my hands.

Doesn't "I'm a Little Teapot" conflate teapots and tea kettles?

My sweetie thinks it's "cute" that I write complaint letters to faceless corporations and attempt to reason with them. *Shrug*. I don't really expect anything to come of them—I'm not even angling for free samples or anything—but if I'm going to complain about something, I figure I may as well complain to the companies themselves, which are they only ones that can do anything about the problem... right? I keep assuming the art must be in striking the right balance of constructive criticism, but maybe I need to take a squeaky-wheel approach.

My latest missive was to Sunlight®:

In your Sunlight Deep Clean commercial, your use of statistics about women implies that doing the laundry is entirely a woman's responsibility. I know that I'm not alone in feeling that this implication is outdated, if not a bit irresponsible. As a consumer of laundry detergent and other cleaning products, I can say that I would be much more responsive to an ad that took a more balanced approach and showed that cleaning is just as much the responsibility of male members of the household.

Thanks,

nori maki
***
I wrote a note to Clubhouse a few months ago. Maybe I'll post that later for its entertainment value.

Complaint letters—perhaps that can be my blogging schtick.

Am I really resurrecting this thing? After spending a couple of hours trying to remember what login I used for this account and wrestling with Blogger to get my access restored, I now feel sort of obligated to see it through.

What started it all was a conversation I had with SW, who'd signed up for a Twitter account so that he could tweet his random, inane (almost always hilarious) thoughts. Yet now he doesn't feel that he can fulfill that promise, because he's somehow ended up accumulating a bunch of what he calls "respectable" followers. I'd thought for a microsecond about joining Twitter for the same purpose—sharing my completely irrelevant "insights"—but his experience gave me pause. I concluded that it was best to vacuum the cobwebs out of this sad blog and bring it back to life.

I'm almost certain nobody will read my posts, but what finally convinced me to come back was reading through my own old entries. Recalling friends, experiences I'd forgotten about.

So now what?

I see my posts here as an opportunity to keep up my writing and to purge what's on my mind as I leave the secure (?) but exhausting (!) world of in-house editing to pursue a freelance business full time. I won't have lunchtimes with coworkers to shoot the shit, so Internet, you're the next best thing.

We'll see how long I can keep this up.

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

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

"that sounds like a superb idea!"

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

"where are you going?"

"smith rock, in oregon."

"and what are you doing there?"

"climbing some rocks."

"aren't there rocks up in canada?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"general tsao's chicken?"

"yeah."

"two orders?"

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

"no vegetables?"

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

"two orders?"

"better make that three orders."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

needless to say, it was a rough night.

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

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

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

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

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

helps to have money in this world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

as much as i hate to break out the "emotional rollercoaster" cliché, i'm afraid no other metaphor will describe my past two weeks, which have absolutely exhausted me.

on top of that, my confidence in my abilities as an editor have been shaken to the core. it'll take me a while to get back to the point where i'm not second-guessing absolutely everything i do.

last week was supposed to be totally awesome. my company had posted a permanent position for assistant editor, and--predictably--i applied for it. my sweetie was convinced it was a position the firm made just for me to keep me around, but i didn't want to be too optimistic and set myself up for disappointment.

i'd also gotten my master of publishing approved by two of my committee members. all i had to do was get the third--my industry supervisor--to read and approve it. it was nerve-wracking enough prodding her to do it when she already had her plate piled high; then she reads it and says she should run it by the publisher to make sure he's okay with what i say about him. this is what doomed last year's intern to academic purgatory: she'd finished her report, and the boss didn't like what she wrote about him and he refused to let her get her degree.

it was down to the wire, but my industry superviros finally agreed to sign my approval form, and i was all ready to collect my second master's degree.

i schlep all the way up the moutain to burnaby, drop off my thesis, then come back into town to find a message in my e-mail with the subject line "project report mistake" from my advisor.

fuck.

turns out i'd incorrectly identified one of my committee members as an assitant professor (which was what he was listed as on the fucking program website) when he was actually an instructor. for that i had to get new forms signed--this coming just a couple of hours before my industry supervisor was leaving for a week in london, to return five days after the deadline for thesis submission.

retarded, no? also, my advisor told me it was a good thing i was submitting this year and not last year, 'cause last year they would have insisted that all of the signatures be in black ink. WTF? doesn't blue ink make it easier to identify an original?

anyway, friday was supposed to be awesome, and it completely fizzled.

i had my interview for the position at the firm on thursday, and it did not go so well. in fact, they had to pull me into a follow up on friday asking me if i really wanted the job, 'cause apparently i didn't give them the impression that i did. one of the editors is still sort of being weird about it. they said i had to work on little knit-picky things like serial commas. and that's one of the things i thought i was actually good at.

and the managing editor said she wasn't going to get back to me about the job until maybe the 22nd.

it got worse when the production manager came over and pointed out that i'd fucked up the price of a book in cover copy that i wrote--that it had gone to the printer that way. fortunately, one of the other editors caught it before it went to press, but everything i do's pretty tentative right now, and that's when a person makes the most mistakes...

upside is, i got the job. i start january, but i have a three-month probationary period during which time i can get fired at any point without notice. i'm totally on eggshells at work right now, and it looks like i'll be until the end of march.

sigh. i only have three days of work next week, luckily, then i have a break. which i so need.

fortunately, there are some in the firm who are just so incredible and supportive. it buoys me that there are those who value my contributions, but it's the people who doubt me that get to me the most, especially when they're people i respect.

anyway, i should stop whining. i'm just ridiculously tired and facing an insurmountable mountain of work. i've got a job and i think i've got my master's degree, so it's all good, right?

i've lost my credit-card-fraud virginity.

someone stole my two credit cards and made obscene purchases at future shop. fortunately, the credit card companies reported suspicious activity and are sending me new cards. i guess it's lucky i didn't have anything else taken from my wallet, though now i have to put a flag on my credit file in case my identity's been stolen.

also, i'd still very much like to punch whoever took my cards in the teeth.

still in recovery...

instead of eating turkey and stuffing like normal people, my sweetie decided that the thing to do thanksgiving weekend was to take a kayak trip out by the discovery islands and harvest shellfish. see, oysters aren't any good in the summer because they spawn and get all gross -- october's allegedly when they start building a glycogen supply to live through the winter and actually get sweet. he'd made me promise a couple of months ago that i'd keep thanksgiving weekend free to go get oysters.

i had misgivings from the get-go, but i assumed we'd be camping at quadra island, head down to rebecca spit and pick up oysters from the beach at low tide. i thought we'd be out there for two of the three days, come home and get rested up and cleaned up for work on the monday. then i found out we'd be kayaking. and that we'd stay out all three days. and that low tide was at about 4am plus or minus an hour each of those nights. and that we weren't going on some romantic getaway -- a girl from his lab and s&a would be joining us.

i told him i didn't think i could go. the timing was shit. the weather had already turned rainy, i was supposed to write my thesis, and i was likely to be hitting the peak of PMS on the trip. i was going to freeze my ass off, i told him.

then he got all sad and whined about me promising to go. he tried to tell me i'd enjoy the trip and that it'd be good for me.

i relented, telling him that to make up for lost time on my thesis, he'd have to take care of stuff at home before and after the trip so that i could work. after two ferry rides interrupted by a two-hour drive from nanaimo to campbell river, we arrived at herriot bay, where we set up camp, had the last civilized meal we'd be having for several days, then headed out at about midnight to harvest shellfish. we filled our quota of oysters and dug for clams, then headed back to the campsite where a crazy and presumably drunk man was having a fit about a chess game or something. the noise, the cold, and my thermarest, which is not made with a lady's curvatures in mind, made for a rough night's sleep.

we set off on our kayaks the next morning, after numerous hours of dillydallying. the first ninety minutes were fine; we arrived on a tiny wooded island; the largest of an ostensible archipelago of rocks, several of which featured fattened seals in poses that might be considered sultry if they were human. their blubber rippled as they launched themselves with their bellies into the water, where they seemed considerably more elegant and cute. we ate a lunch of oysters at our wooded island; my first mistake (after agreeing to go on this trip) may have been that oysters were pretty much all i ate. most of us cut ourselves shucking the damn things; the wound i made with my oyster knife is still festering away on my ring finger now. although the oysters were quite fresh and delicious on their way down, let me tell you that i wasn't terribly fond of them on their way back up...

after lunch, we launched into a bleakly cold paddle against the wind toward an island but without a specific destination in mind. all we knew from my sweetie was that there were "some bays" on the other side of read island that probably have lots of oysters. after two hours of being tossed around on three-foot waves and having the wind chill me to the bone, i began feeling unwell. "we'll just go past that point there and there should be a place to beach."

past the point was an aquaculture operation, which meant that we couldn't harvest within several hundred metres of it. we paddled past the next point. more aquaculture.

this seemingly endless meandering made me feel even more ill, and with about an hour and a half or so before sunset, i lost it and vomitted off the side of the kayak. my sweetie picked up speed to drop me off in a bay where i was supposed to find a decent camping spot while he turned back to find the others and let them know where we'd ended up.

in neoprene boots and carrying an ungainly kayak paddle, i had to amble my way across rocky crags then hack my way through the bush only to find that the grassy area i thought might be a promising campsite was actually an impossibly rocky region next to a stream. meanwhile, the sun was setting, and there was no sign of the others. all i had with me were the extremely wet clothes on my back and a paddle. i climbed over this valley of fallen trees that smelled like rotting garbage and made it to a mossy landing, paced around, and waited. clearly, someone had been there earlier. there were discarded nets and old crab shells. was this person still there? was he going to emerge out of the bushes with a shotgun ordering me off his property?

i was relieved to see kayaks coming around the bend and into the bay just as the sun was setting...but they were sans my sweetie. apparently, when he'd backtracked, he missed them somehow. the others set up their tents while i sat and worried some more. after what seemed like hours, my sweetie paddled back into the bay, exhausted. he charged me with the task of setting up the tent while he pulled the kayak to higher ground. as i put the tentpoles in, one of them snapped catastrophically. we eventually reinforced the break with a piece of aluminum tubing, but it was just yet another thing that went wrong on this trip to make it stressful rather than enjoyable.

we started making food -- stirfried vegetables on couscous -- but after throwing up, it's hard to convince yourself to eat again. i swallowed a few bites and retired to the tent, where i spent another night tossing, aching, and being fucking cold.

the next morning, we harvested oysters from the bay, which was teeming with the creatures because, as we later found out, the land had actually been a shellfish lease, though my sweetie seemed convinced that it had since been abandoned. on our paddle back to our little wood island, we encountered even bigger waves than the day before, and although i'd taken all the steps i could to try to stay dry and warm, believing that being windswept and cold contributed to my seasickness, one of the larger waves came down right over me, running down my neck and drenching my fleece. i didn't throw up that day, but i sure felt like it. i didn't do much paddling, but by the time we got back to the island to set up camp, my thumbs were blistered, and i was cold and broken.

that night was a bit better; at least we could set up the tent in daylight. the island was small enough that we knew there was nobody else and no bears around, and my sweetie built a fire, which i used repeatedly to dry my feet. i only had my neoprene boots, and they were waterlogged. if i took them off to dry my feet, i knew i'd be wet again the moment i had to step into them to go anywhere. with our vegetables going bad, we just dumped everything into a pot and boiled them up with our clams and the remaining couscous, which resulted in a watery soup that would only be acceptable as camping food.

the next morning, we had a fortunately uneventful paddle back to heriot bay. and, as soon as we lifted the kayaks out of the ocean, the sun came out, after hiding behind clouds for the entire weekend. we ate at heriot bay inn that afternoon; we all gorged oursevles, me especially, since i was starving but didn't want to eat too much for fear it'd all come back up.

anyway, we got the 9pm ferry home, which meant that we didn't get to bed until midnight. the next morning, as i attempted to get up for work, i found myself with a cough, a headcold, and achy shoulders and knees.

"next time we go kayaking," my sweetie said to me, "maybe you'll listen to me and get the expensive paddling jacket."

to which i replied -- only partly in jest -- "what the hell makes you think i'll go kayaking with you ever again?"

~sigh~

i'm a bit better now, but i still feel dazed and quite broken. my sweetie is off on an intrepid hike up blacktusk in a couple of weeks.

i'm not going.

holy fuck, i haven't written in a long time.

an update:

two weeks ago, i finally got keys to my workplace. roughly a week ago, i got a real e-mail address (for the summer, i was intern@douglas-mcintyre....). on monday, i got an official title.

now i can introduce myself as an editorial assistant at douglas & mcintyre.

and, i'm making real money. not a lot, but i'm out of the starvation zone.

things are looking up.

***

in other news, my sweetie flew to ottawa last week to reclaim our stuff that had been growing increasingly obsolete for three years in a heated storage facility that charged us about two grand a year. he drove a u-haul cube van all the way back in three days, and up until a few days ago, there was a seven-foot cube of crap sitting in the middle of living room.

one thing about my sweetie that's generally very endearing but incredibly frustrating when it comes to discarding possessions is that he attaches sentimental value to everything he owns. he brought back about eight hundred t-shirts, all of which say something hilarious or are otherwise "cool," and even though we have zero space, he's insisting on keeping them. he's got a back-story for virtually every one of them.

~sigh~

***

i have a little over twenty pages of my internship report written. i'm not supposed to call it a thesis, but calling it an internship report seems to trivialize it some. anyway, it looks like i might have to invoke some serious triple-space action to get it to the requisite sixty pages. my days of student journalism trained me to economize words and be succinct. i just can't ramble or make my prose any more literary. as a result, the report is incredibly short and shit boring to read.

oh well.

i guess the point is just to get enough done so that i can graduate and focus on my job.

i have a job. cool.

back from a week of houseboating, where i spent every day hiking, floating around in the lake, or doing crossword puzzles. a much-needed break following a few months of frenzied hell.

it was refreshing not to have internet access, though i feel a bit out of touch now, having missed the katrina ordeal. when i saw lewis lapham speak at nash in january, i asked him if there was a sense of outrage in the US that the mainstream media was simply ignoring or if there was just no anger whatsoever. there is no outrage, he told me. the american people had gone numb.

well, there's certainly outrage now. a year too late, maybe.

on the houseboat, SW brought along a copy of the walrus, in which i noticed that one of their illustrators, sam, shared the same name as a remarkably gifted artist and genuinely awesome person i knew in high school. at the risk of feeling like a bit of a stalker, i am tempted to get in touch with him. is that weird? just a couple of weeks ago, my sweetie and i were on the bus going home from a party, when a chick approached us and started talking to us. i'd recognized her as the queen bitch from my junior high years, while my sweetie had the misfortune of going to high school with her. she talked to us like we'd always been pals.

when we got off the bus, my sweetie said, "you know, that's the first time she's ever said a word to me."

i felt indignant at her nerve to come speak to me after how mean she was to the nerdy loser girl in junior high. at the same time, i couldn't help but feel that her high school years probably were her best and she was trying to find any excuse to relive them.

anyway, point is, i don't know how a random e-mail from me to sam would be received.

***

one week before starting up again at d&m.

woot!

i wandered into my last week of my internship expecting to slip right into "what are they going to do -- fire me?" mode, but the vp operations called me into a meeting and offered me a 3-month contract to stay on, do editorial work and help set up their central database.

woohoo! i get to put off worrying about unemployment until at least the beginning of 2006. and they're paying me more than twice what i'm getting now as an intern, meaning i don't have to come home every night and do freelance work just to make ends meet. and i have the option of working just four days a week so that i can spend that extra day working on my internship report.

sweeeeeet.

wow, i haven't written in a long time.

this is perhaps because the month of july attempted to kill me.

in addition to working 8 to 4:30 at d&m, i did my ccsp indexing project for my department's anthology and edited an entire book on fluid dynamics. i sent out my invoices two days ago, and discovered that i'd done over $3000 in contract work this month.

and i almost died.

i guess i've discovered the cap on the amount of money i could make as a freelancer. i suppose $2400 a month is a comfortable enough living. also, i probably wouldn't have been in such rough shape if i didn't also have to do internship work.

my internship is coming to an end in about three weeks, which makes me sad. there's a rumour going around that d&m might be initiating a junior editor position. fingers crossed.

my sweetie's gone on a kayak trip with his lab. it's much less nerve-wracking that he's actually going with other people, as opposed to last year, when he made a solo trip to quadra island. still, though, the timing sort of sucks, because this is my first sort of free weekend in over a month.

in a couple of days, i start designing the september issue of the physics journal. i have no idea what the content is going to be like...but i've discovered that i don't really care, which i see as a healthy and overdue step away from student journalism. it'll be good to do design again, though. i've been doing so much editing, i'll need a bit of balance.

until then, though, i'm trying to cram my days with social plans so i can keep my mind off the fact that my sweetie is under constant threat of drowning.

finally.

i'd finished the newsletter redesign for the physics department over a month and a half ago and i just got paid. allegedly, the problem was that the finance department hadn't changed my address since i moved (which was almost a year ago now), and the physics department couldn't enter the data for my cheque to finance before they changed my address.

it's all bullshit, if you ask me. first of all, i moved up two floors. that's a three-digit change in my address. also, i'd filled in a change of address form last august.

i'm pretty sure that it was just a bunch of newbies in the physics department who didn't know what they were doing and lost my invoice. i had to remind them i hadn't gotten paid before they finally got off their fat asses.

why they had to go through payroll and not just pay me as a freelancer, i have no idea.

i fucking hate ubc. seriously.

so i'm home from work after three straight and solid days of indexing that have left me exhausted and broken with a brain functioning at, oh, maybe 0.4 capacity. and i'm officially scared shitless about what i'm going to do with my life in six weeks after this buffer internship's over.

sure, i feel more prepared than ever to take on the publishing industry -- i'm armed with all sorts of obscure knowledge you could only get in a classroom and a high tolerance for tedium you could only get in an internship. unfortunately, i think that having one and a half master's degrees has pretty much done nothing but boost my standards to unattainable heights. any job description i read, i say, 'oh, i don't want to do that kind of crappy entry-level work.'

i wonder how long it will take me to bite the bullet and realize that i've still got to pay my dues in the real world before i get the cred to move up in publishing. no editing for nori just yet -- no, first she has to be an assistant to some editor, filing manuscripts and fact-checking bibliographies.

sigh.

i'm so tired. i just need a real weekend off. really off, where i could sit on my ass and not do any housework or contract work. just to make ends meet and be able to make the $2000-a-term tuition i'm paying the school to work for someone, i've been working my ass off editing or indexing. in some senses, it's something i'm essentially used to, since it's kind of like doing school work. mostly, though, it's just really really exhausting.

summer hours at d&m means that i have to be at work at 8 every morning.

it's 10:47 and almost time for bed.

i am officially old.

*sob*

they've confirmed my ibook's hard drive is fucked and needs to be replaced. it'll cost $120 for the part and at least $90 for the labour. the old data might be recoverable depending on the state of the old hard drive. data recovery will be another $90 or more.

*whimper*

my poor ibook. my poor stolen computer programs...my poor stolen fonts...all of my files...

*sob*

i just won a hundred dollars!

it was for a writing competition among my classmates. i highly suspect that i won because nobody else submitted anything.

it's still a hundred bucks. i promised myself that the next hundred dollars i earned would go to unicef. that was about six months ago, so i guess this is perfect opportunity to make good on my word.

word.

the fruitfly in my room is making me crazy.