I almost passed out today.
Apparently I was behind on my vaccinations. Combine that with all the extra goods required for going to rural areas in tropical countries, and I have lots of drugs to take. Something in today’s batch didn’t quite agree with me…
After my shots they told me to sit in the waiting room for 20 minutes before leaving. For about five minutes I’m fine, save for a warm arm. Then I start to feel a little light headed. Within seconds I’m sweating more than after a 2k erg test. I rest my head in my hands and take some deep breaths but I’m not feeling any better. Then I look up briefly, and across the room there’s a girl about my age staring at me looking more horrified and worried than anybody has ever been in the history of...
In
Travel,
Daily Life,
Happiness,
worry,
smile,
medicine,
vaccine,
faint,
immunization,
lollipop,
pass out,
that look on her face,
travel clinic
Today, I’m ignoring my usually immutable ban on all things Christmas before December 1st. Two reasons:
1) It was snowing this morning,
and
2) I’m going to be in India all December.
Clearly, I’m not going to get any real Christmas season feeling while south of the Tropic of Cancer, so I’ve decided to promote November to Christmas Month, if only with respect to my MP3 playlist. I will still judge department stores for playing Christmas carols too early because, as far as I know, The Eaton Centre is not going to be in India for Christmas.
* http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001342.html...
I admit, I’m mostly writing this because I would hate to have not blogged this entire month. (Sure, it’s technically been over a month since my last entry, but let’s not get technical.)
I realised what the problem is. I still have ideas of things I want to write about, but I don’t have the same opportunity to procrastinate that I once did. For various reasons, I decided that I would not blog while at school. Or at least, not using my office computer. Unfortunately, between rowing and school, I’m only actually at home with my own computer for a couple hours a day. And those hours are typically spent eating, watching TV, and generally zoning out—not the kind of activities I need to procrastinate from (i.e., not the kind of hours I’d rather spend...
I’ve had roommates who left food and dirty dishes everywhere. I had one in particular who wouldn’t do dishes for, literally, weeks and months at a time. (She’d often be seen eating out of pots and drinking out of anything that would hold liquid.) Yet again I’m having problems with roommates and doing dishes, but of an entirely different sort….
My roommates keep doing my dishes for me!
It’s not that I leave them there for days. Living alone I might have a 24 hour turnaround time between using a dish and cleaning it, but I’m with new people here so I’m trying to be better behaved and get them done more or less as I finish with them. But they’re too fast for me!
I get up bright and early in the morning—no, scratch that: I get up...
I just got off the phone with a guy at Telus who told me that I’ve only had a phone with them for two days while I know the real time to be closer to five years.
I admit I am in a bit of an odd position because I changed the name on my account a month ago. Strangely enough, the Telus man readily admitted that I’d been a client since August 8th but refused to believe that I had a cell phone during that time. I tried to ask why I have any reason to pay my invoice for August if he thinks I haven’t been using any services, but he didn’t seem to get my point.
After spending much time trying to convince him there was a mistake on his end, my old phone record “just popped up” on his screen. Lucky for him. Maybe my threat of not paying really did work.
At about...
It has been a wild two weeks for me. I’ve flown to faraway places, seen friends get married, walked for miles on unfamiliar streets, spent all my money, and had a terrible time and a wonderful time doing it.
Yes, there are pictures to prove it and stories I could tell, but as it stands my bags are all packed for yet another trip early in the morning. This one is considerably more permanent.
I’d like to say, of course, that all these adventures from the past few weeks will be immortalised in blog post form for everybody to enjoy—especially since I was recently accosted by a tipsy friend of mine for infrequent updates—but I think the internet has plenty of “I’ll write about it later” posts followed by obvious silence as it is.
So until next time,...
I recently took the subway in an unfamiliar city. When coming up from underground, though I could identify the intersection and knew roughly where in the city I was, I couldn’t spot anything to give me a sense of direction. No recognizable buildings in the distance, no mountains, no waterways. I had to walk west about ten blocks, but without knowing the names of any streets in between I didn’t want to risk a guess.
So, I did what any lost tourist eventually has to do, which is ask a local for help. My first local turned out to be British and new only how to get to her hotel, which didn’t help me. The second person was much more help and immediately pointed out east and west for me.
So off I go, trotting westward down the boulevard. This is about 6 pm. Almost immediately...
I had just finished my least favourite exercise at the gym tonight when a woman got my attention to say that the exercise wasn’t a good one to be done alone, and was worried I could hurt my back. The reason I dislike this particular exercise ran along those lines already, but I did it because that’s the workout we did when I was doing it as part of winter training with a workout buddy.
Of course, I’m always willing to improve myself and my workout (otherwise I wouldn’t be at the gym in the first place), so I asked this woman what I should do to fix the problem. First she said, “You should try using this machine instead,” pointing to a second piece of the same equipment. Huh? I asked for clarification, and she mentioned some other ways of using the same...
When I’m not listening to CBC during the drive to and from work, it’s a mix CD my mom made. It is her car after all. There are a handful of songs I like, but most I just skip over.
There was one that I was sure was a Madonna song, which I wouldn’t have expected from my mom but she does have varied tastes. For weeks I just skipped it after the first three seconds or so, but then one day I was distracted by something (possibly keeping my eye on the road) and let the song play. After about 10 or 20 seconds, what I was sure was a Madonna song turned into what I know is an ABBA song. I don’t know which ABBA song, but I recognized part of the music from an ABBA mashup techno megamix thing I had once. A melody of glissandos. I’d sing it for you but you can’t...
In
Media,
Music,
ABBA,
techno,
Madonna,
driving music,
erging,
glissandos,
mistaken identity,
workout music,
Rowing,
Daily Life
Trying to blog after a bike ride is like trying to tell people about that awesome dream you just had.
It’s a side effect of letting your mind wander, I think. That’s all dreaming is—your brain finding something to entertain itself with while you sleep. There’s not much to do while biking around the neighbourhood for an hour, so thoughts and ideas pop up and fade away without the concentration to remember them.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Yesterday there was lots to do while biking around the neighbourhood.
And by that I mean there was one thing. A speed trap to play with.
The local police have this robo-cop gizmo that sits by the road telling you how fast you’re going, armed, presumably, with a camera to record speeders. This one was set up on a...
Shooting fish in a barrel actually is easy.
Milk is the best treatment for spicy-mouth.
A bull in a china shop doesn’t do very much damage.
Elephants really are afraid of mice.
Thanks, Mythbusters.
Also, the roads in Sydney are alive. Or at least, medians on the Harbour Bridge can crawl across the road to different lanes. The video of cars swerving around them as they moved was hilarious. Thanks, Daily Planet.
Overall, a fun evening with the Discovery Channel.
PS: If you google “harbour bridge”, the first hit is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the second is the Saint John Harbour Bridge. Hooray for my......
If you ask what I did on just about any day in the month of April, if I answered honestly chances are pretty good that I watched some Battlestar Galactica. The miniseries in 2003 and the opening episode of the television series were amazing. Then it got boring for a season or so, and then more interesting again.
The basic idea is that a race of robots (Cylons) built by some faraway colonies of humans rebelled and killed everybody, and are now hunting down the last survivors in a rag tag fleet of spaceships, while both sides try to find Earth. The Cylons now have 12 humanoid models that are indistinguishable from the real McCoy. Of these, seven have been known for a while, and the remaining “Final Five” have been something of a mystery that the first seven don’t talk...
I’m coming up to a big move, and as such I’m faced with the problem of cramming everything I own into the back of a van. A big part of the solution, as it has been every time before, is to reduce the amount of stuff that I actually own.
The first to go were the many binders of notes I have collected over my undergraduate career. When the course is freshly over it’s sometimes hard to part with these, especially since most of the courses I’ve taken had a Part Two hot on their heels. Now that there are no more Part Two’s, the hardest part was hauling the bag of paper down to the curb on recycling day.
Textbooks were a similar case. I went to Haven Books Haven Books about a week ago to drop off about 15 textbooks ranging from anthropology and ethics to...
Some time ago I got the idea into my head that I would like anchovies. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I’m sure adjusting to a Japanese diet (where fish are in everything) and a love of Caesar salad (which has anchovies) played a role. The problem tended to be that nobody actually sells anchovy pizza anymore. At least, not at the time I was looking for it.
Turns out that Double Pizza in Montreal does. So at pizza night this past Tuesday, we finally went for it. One medium pizza, with anchovies, tomato, and onion.
The anchovies themselves weren’t bad. They were just what you’d except from having fish on your pizza. What was not expected was the horrific layer of salt they come with. I couldn’t even pick off the tomatoes without getting about a thousand...
I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning how ridiculously snowy it is in Montreal this year. I wasn’t too convinced that it was really that much snow—we get big snowstorms now and again—but then I remembered that those big snowstorms used to be two or three times a year. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve had at least forty two landmark blizzards in the last two weeks. I was finally convinced that there really has been an inordinate amount of snow when I tried to leave my building this morning:
Not that I mind climbing over snowbanks to get out of my front door. Or anywhere else in this city. To be fair, the tips of snowbanks shouldn’t really count toward how deep the snow is, but it is still fair to say that anywhere with less than 2 or 3 feet could...
This easter I thought I’d be a bit ambitious and expand my confectionery skill set to something from my younger years — home made cream eggs. Not quite Cadbury style, but more like Laura Secord. Big honking things you eat by the slice.
The first step was lots and lots of sugar.
Which are combined with all manner of equally unhealthy things into a nice sweet dough. One third is turned into yolks…
… to be wrapped up in the remaining two thirds. This is one time where you really can put the fried egg back in the shell. Suck it, entropy!
Then the delicious dipping step.
Sure, you could use a fondue fork, but chopsticks work just as well. I also bought a candy thermometer for this step. Slightly needless, true, but a necessary step in getting a kitchen as well...
The weather has been pretty weird around Montreal the last day or so. At least I’m told that it’s weird. The grocery store stopped delivering because of the cold, my morning workout was canceled due to snow, and I keep hearing about weather warnings. The particular strange type of precipitation that’s going on outside right now reminded me about a conversation I had with someone the other day about all the different types of snow. I may not have as many words for it as the Inuit (assuming the rumours are true) but it’s more than one.
Fluffy: This is the typical, nice, romantic type snow that comes down in snowflakes the size of your fist. It looks very good on television, and from indoors sitting in front of a fireplace.
Sticky: The stuff snowballs are made from....
I was tagged by this guy.
The rules:
Link to the person that tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
And here’s what I came up with:
I walk on my tiptoes through puddles and slush because my shoes have holes in the soles.
I’ve had the same hotmail account since about 1998, before it was owned by Microsoft, when it was called HoTMaiL, and when frames were a trendy design choice.
I’m addicted to bookdarts. Any book I read usually has about a dozen in them by the time I’m done with it, and non-fiction many times more. I buy them in bulk.
My...
Every December for the last few years, there’s been a big snowstorm in Montreal. And each time it snows here there’s a jump in my site stats as everybody searches for “montreal snowstorm” and find this photo album I published after the one in 2005. Every time I feel a little guilty that they’re getting old photos of the wrong storm. They aren’t even very good photos.
This year’s storm was particularly good, though, so I’ve taken some new ones. My favourite part has been that the city is being really slow about removing all the snow. It may not be convenient for cars to have to dig parking spaces for themselves, or to have two lanes reduced to one because of some dominating snow banks, but it sure is nice to look at! And fun to climb through!...
Theoretically I’m in the midst of writing my philosophy take home exam. In actuality I’m looking to procrastinate. At least I’m in the computer lab. And I’ve even printed off about a dozen astrophysics articles for that other paper I’m writing. I may not have read them yet, but it just looking them up in the first place counts as research. After a few nice diagrams, a respectable list of references, and fiddling with the margins a bit, I’ll have at least 15 pages in no time, right? At least that’s what the professor told us.
In the interests of making sure this post is actually about something somebody might want to read, I give you this tidbit: If you buy twelve cookies at Subway restaurants, it counts as groceries and you don’t have to pay...
I’ve been told that I’m hard to read, that maybe I carry my emotions too deep. But at the same time I remember once, back in grade 11, a friend of mine saying that she had driven past me while I was dancing my way to school. Apparently, put some headphones on me and play a peppy tune and I’ll let loose no matter who’s driving by.
Well, maybe that isn’t a guarantee, but it’s not unheard of. I’m quite sure anybody who happened to see me walking down Broadway to the tune of Turkey Lurkey would have seen a similar sight.
I’ve actually taken up the habit of singing along to my tunes, too. My favourite songs always tend to be those with good melodies, good lyrics, and good to perform. It’s no wonder that my notPod is filled with songs whose...
I wrote last spring that people are better looking in spring. I believed it at the time, but now I’m leaning the other way. People are better looking in the winter.
Maybe it’s just the change of scenery I like. Things are fresh and new, whether it’s because the world is warm, green, and alive again again, or it’s that cold kind of fresh that tickles the inside of your nose on that first breath out the door. People adjusting to that new sense of world is attractive.
Of course I have a soft spot for winter to begin with. I like the snow, I like the cold. I like seeing people bundled up in layer upon layer. A kind of style completely different from the warm weather wear of spring begins to take shape further from the skin. I like this kind of tuque that’s...
His superpower is subtlety.
Word on the street is (i.e., he told me that) he found my Amazon wish list through google. I had done it myself last week, but it was a good reminder that other people can do it too. There’s a tricky balance to play between what I ask my mom for and what I ask anybody for and what I don’t ask anybody for and what I just buy for myself. I looked up my super-expensive wish list from about a year and a half ago, and surprisingly enough less than half are still outstanding, and half of those remaining were just filler anyway.
The only one that I really want now is those wireless speakers. I just want some way to pipe music from my stereo or computer into the bathroom (and no, a radio isn’t good enough). Then maybe I’d go take a shower and...
So November is National Novel Writing Month. In theory, I have almost seven thousand words written in my novel. (The goal is fifty thousand by November 30th.) In actuality, I watched four hours of television and took a five hour nap today. The first three days of the month weren’t much different, although I was at least a bit more active. Homework, which was going to take a back seat to Nanowrimo anyway, has taken a back seat to lethargy. Or is it hedonism? Considering my excuse for not working on the novel today is that I’d like to sit on my couch to do it but my computer is locked to the desk, it’s probably the former.
At least I have more than zero words written. I have the title and the first two sentences:
Gemini Island
“I’m writing a book.”
He...
These huge temperature changes are really throwing me for a loop. This morning when I got up, it was 3 degrees out. I wore two sweaters and a jacket, wished I had remembered my toque, and was brushing frost off my legs. By this afternoon my single fall jacket was too much for walking around downtown. Granted, when I was outside this morning it was 5am and the sun hadn’t risen yet so you expect it to be a little chilly, but it often seems like a few months goes by every 12 hours. (NB: What am I doing up at this hour writing blog entires if I have to wake up at 5!?)
Being out on the water for a few hours every morning before sunrise has been a good swift kick in the pants kind of motivation to get some decent winter gear for once. Layers upon layers of spandex only get you so far. My...
Should I, I wonder, take these times between posts to compose some long, thoughtful, and fascinating piece of writing? Should I post more smaller posts of little oddities I come across, like a photo of my poor blistered hand or that funny thing my professor said? Maybe I should just talk about the things I’ve done (we came fourth at the regatta the other weekend, for those interested). Maybe I should be doing homework.
Today marks the end of a four day weekend for myself. Thank you Thanksgiving, thank you Thursday conferences in my only Monday/Wednesday/Friday class. The total body of work that I’ve done, however, pails in comparison to what might have been possible.
Possible.
I’ve learned in my logic classes that the word ‘possible’ should raise make some...
Oh my.
Rowing has taken over my life.
Practices at 6 in the morning six days a week leave little time for procrastinating. I try to get homework done in the mornings after practice as much as possible over my second breakfast of the day, and then by the time I get home from school in the late afternoon and wind down, it’s almost bedtime.
I learned a few months ago that rowing is all about bruises and open wounds. Aches and pains would be on the list too, but there’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from it. Today on the water, despite the dull pain in my hand as another blister formed and the exhaustion that began to set in somewhere around the eighth kilometre, I began to appreciate the boat gliding over the water. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be stroking and got...
Five years and one month ago, a good friend of mine gave me a small lucky charm to keep in my wallet during an upcomming trip. She said she knew going away gifts were always hard to deal with, but this was small and would hopefully help me along my way. Its style reminded me of her and her family, and by association it reminded me of home, so I was more than happy to keep it tucked away on my person.
It’s been in my wallet everyday for over five years. Over the years there had been a few times when I felt like I really was lucky, narrowly avoiding a clash with authority or pulling off a difficult challenge, and on each of these occasions the next time I opened my wallet the little charm fell out. Squirrelled away in a zippered pocket I never open, it was not in the habbit of...
So I walked past 3525 rue Aylmer today…
When you’re hungry as can be
Or when you’re starved for company
It’s nice to visit friends and see lights are on inside
If you’re sick or if you’re well
Or bursting with some news to tell
All you have to do is yell, the door is open wide
You know you are welcome in our home
I, you, we are sharing and not alone
When you’re tired of where you’re at
Or you’d love to have a chat
It’s nice to know the welcome mat will never be worn through
Sharing’s dandy and it’s grand
Besides it sure can come in handy
When you know that understanding’s waiting there for you
You know you are welcome in our home
I, you, we are sharing and not alone
You know you are welcome in our home
I, you,...
I don’t know how I did it, and anybody who knows me isn’t likely to believe it, but I’ve turned my sleep schedule on its head. Up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning the last few days and to sleep by about 21:00. Class doesn’t even start for another 45 minutes and already I feel like I’ve had a very productive day.
Yesterday I went exploring. Jumped on the first metro of the morning eastward bound and went to the Olympic Basin on Île Notre Dame. I was still underground when the sun rose, but it was a nice view nonetheless.
There were exactly three rowers on the water, arriving just at the same time I did. I sat in the stands and watched them go past until they were out of sight at the other end of this overblown swimming pool.
It somehow seemed much smaller...