The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
Been a very bleh day today.
Not sleeping well because I have weird dreams. My stressometer (i.e. my left shoulder) is telling me that I need to unwind or muscles and sinew will soon start to pop and hurt again. Hit the gym today, which helped a bit, but what will help more is when things start settling down.
Way things have been though, that won't be for a while, if ever. I guess that's called life.
We got it last week but I didn't have the time to put it up. You may now go “Awwwwwwwwwwwwww”.
This weekend, I mowed the grass.
Simple sentence, 6 little words, but I'm damned proud of them. For a few reasons, really. The major one is that I have a rather huge phobia of flying/stinging insects, so spending 2 hours behind a lawnmower is a big achievement for me. Second reason is that the “grass” we needed to mow could better be classified as “hay” at the very least and “a fucking wild mess” with little effort.
When clover is a foot tall, it doesn't really qualify as grass anymore.
It's a damned good thing we bought a petrol lawnmower because no electric one could have been able to deal with that lot. Even then, we abused the shit out of the poor thing. The engine kept cutting off because the grass was too dense, we had to empty the grass catcher every 20 feet (at the end, I just left it off and left the clippings where they fell) and at one point, the drive belt fell off because the axle was too clogged with tangled weeds. Even then, we didn't even attempt to clear out the last 30 feet of the garden because we didn't feel like fighting 2-foot tall stinging nettles. We'll need to hire a petrol strimmer (i.e. a gas-powered weed-wacker for you North Americans) to clear out that jungle, but that can wait for another weekend.
I think I'll have to put my trip to canada on hold. I had planned to travel from the 20th to the 27th. However, the Home Office has put a damper on those plans.
We sent in an application for a certificate of approval, which is required to start the wedding registration process. I need that because I'm an evil Canadian and I want to get married on British soil. The forms say that it takes between 3 weeks and 3 months to get it. However, the form says that I can ask for my passport back if I need to travel.
What the form doesn't say is that it takes 10 working days to get my documents back if I send a fax to ask for them (so it's not even guaranteed that I get the flippin' passport back if I send the fax in today). The request *can* be expedited, but there's still no guarantee that I'll have my passport back on the day I need to travel.
Also, asking for my passport invalidates my ongoing request, which means that I'll need to submit a new CoA form when I come back. This also means that I'll have to pay another as the application fee is not refundable.
What I'm thinking of doing is waiting until the last possible moment to see if I get my application through. In theory, they say that it should be resolved within 3 weeks (and it'll be 3 weeks this Friday). If I'm lucky, I'll get everything back in time. If I see that it's not going to arrive, I'll call Air Canada and have my travel dates pushed back. The tickets are not refundable but there is a slight fee to have the dates pushed back (we did this with katy when she came in otcober 2004).
All signs point that this is going to be one of them weeks…
Katy and I went to a BBQ last night at a coworker's place in North Cambridge. Surrounded by chickens and horses, we ate hogfat and Russian Cornish pasties. All in good fun. We ended up home rather late and it was hard getting out of bed this morning.
While dragging my feet to the cafeteria to grab a cup of coffee, I ran across my favourite fowl couple, Grace and Clarckson. In the cafeteria.
Apparently, it's quite common to see ducks wander in in the summertime, pick at the crumbs on the floor and waddle out.
Sa-weet!
I hate having to deal with people by email.
Sadly, it's a big part of my job and also the only way I have to deal with some people. It's too easy to avoid answering emails you don't want to deal with. I know I'm guilty of it myself, but I do make an effort to at least give a token reply.
This is a public service announcement broadcast: if you really want to piss me off, ignore my emails. Especially if it's important. Even more so if it'll only take a yes or a no answer to send me on my merry way.
</sarcasm>
I'm going to be adding a few more frequent flyer miles to my body. I'm going to 3 conferences this year:
– “HABATOS” consortium meeting in Lodz, Poland (June 25th). BTW, HABATOS means “Healthy Ageing by Adaptation to Oxidative Stress”. They want me to give a talk on PRIDE and how it can be used to store their data.
– PSI meeting in Washington DC (September 25-27)
– HUPO meeting in Long Beach, CA (October 28-November 1)
Going to be a busy little beaver for a while.
See this shiny new website:
http://www.hinxtonvillage.co.uk/
The couple that runs the dead-tree-format newsletter wanted to go high-tech and make a website for the village but didn't really know how to go about doing it. I've been in touch with them because I wanted to set up a board game night at our local pub and, well, basically. I offered my services and they jumped at the offer. I looked into content management systems for them. That way, they just need to write content and happily ignore having to mess with any HTML. They're thrilled. The whole thing took maybe 30 minutes to install, an hour to get my head wrapped around their configuration logic and a whole of 5 minutes to hack together the graphics. And you know what? It kicks ass, especially compared to other village websites out there :P
Feeling meh at the moment. Don't really know why. I think I need sleep. I've not been sleeping well these past few days: weird dreams† and I'm waking up at like 5am. Not cool. I blame the change in the weather I've also been having annoying low-grade headaches, which I've come to associate with sudden changes in air pressure. I used to laugh about the whole concept until it started happening to me. Gotta love Karma…
We were supposed to spend a quiet weekend this weekend, but those plans, in our usual idiom, went flying out the window when we decided to invite Katy's parents over at the last minute. Katy was in a redecorating mood. In the last two days, the living room has been touched up, all the woodwork and trim done, and that bloody alcove painted (which meant that I had to unplug and replug everything electrical – again. blergh). I wasn't in the mood at all to do it, but it's done and I have to say that it looks nice and also means that I don't have to bother with it for the next little while.
We spent way too much money at B&Q to get the stuff we needed for this weekend. A large chunk of that went into a lawnmower, which is not a frivolous expense and we need to start tackling the wild kingdom in our backyard. We spent just as much though for supplies to re-grout our bathroom and get a shower curtain and rod. Again, looks nice, but I think it could have waited until we were a bit more flush.
Still in the spending-money category, I bought a new phone. Not because I wanted to, but because my motorola V3 RAZR, the one I bought just a little more than a year ago, died. After I renewed my contract and passed up the phone upgrade. After the warranty expired. Orange were totally useless about it and I spent waaay too much time on the phone with peons until I asked to speak to a supervisor that answered my question in 5 minutes. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Anyway, I could either spend £90 in “insurance” (which is a more polite way to mean “protection racket”) and get a replacement handset or spend £60 and get a new pay-as-you-go phone, ditch the SIM card and voila, instant handset.
All in all, it hasn't been the bestest weekend ever. On the plus side though, I did make a really nice stuffed chicken yesterday and there has been booze and chocolate.
Still, I think I'd have preferred to visit the Fitzwilliam and just chill with a book…
Liek, woah, dude!!!
Good news item #1: I have confirmation from my tax attorney that my taxes are done and on their way to my parents', who will post them to the government.
Great news item #1: I do not owe the government anything.
Great news item #2: I'm actually getting a refund from both the provincial and feredal.
Now it's not much, and in fact I'm almost certain that I'm going to be signing both cheques directly over to the tax attorney to cover his fees, but I'm thrilled nonetheless because I was expecting to have to pay a cubic assload of money in capital gain taxes.
And tonight, there will be beer.