Friends

I'm pretty deer-in-headlights about our upcoming trip. I've started being really productive at other things to avoid finishing Christmas things. And I planned a date for tomorrow which was probably really stupid because of everything I have to do.

At least I have awesome sugar cookies to make everything better.

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If I had a roommate like me, I'd evict her. Seriously. I couldn't live with me. Today I needed mozzarella cheese, old cheddar cheese, and a frozen lasagna.

I almost accidentally bought light cheese - in both varieties. The only reason I didn't was because I screwed it up last time. Then I did bring home completely the wrong lasagna. And not a single serving - an 8-serving lasagna. And I didn't notice until the noodles were different. After it was cooked.

I buy lasagna all the time! My package? Red. This one? Blue. What the hell? Does my brain turn off after work? I'm fairly clever at work.

I seem to become more and more clueless about daily things as I have to perform harder at work (this week, reverse-engineering html forms, javascript, and a slip of asp). Maybe I'm just using up brain power. That must be it.

Obviously this doesn't sound dire. But imagine if you trust someone to get you food which you need to cook tonight in order for it to be available over the next 4 tumultuous days, and they bring home the wrong thing when you know they know better. It just makes me want to shake them. If it were someone else, it would make me want to do it myself from now on since they're so useless.

It's just getting to the point where I can't stand me. That's not a good place to be, when you're in any kind of relationship, because you get confused/irritated when someone likes you. Cause, like, WHY do you like me? What the hell? How do you put up with all this crap?

But I have cookies. Maybe they'll make everything better.

Heading home after a last minute, awesome evening. Got to remember spontenaity can be awesome.

(I've got nothing to do at school.)

....I should go home.

I'm done!

upside: applied calculus markers are machines and thus finished marking really quite early at 2:30pm
downside: I had planned on the marking lasting until 6pm and I feel like it's too early to start drinking.

I flew into Toronto today. I would start making plans, especially regarding some invitations I've received, but they would be trumped by a trip to Windsor that in turn depends on the schedule of my sisters.

As the weather gets colder (colder, not cold), I seem to be walking down the memory lane quite a bit. At 1 am last night, I was going through some notes in the midst of the sleepy silence. I burst out laughing as I had suddenly remembered Lino showing up at my house on Columbia Street with Diana in a shopping cart.

*sigh*

Weekend in depth:

Saturday, we went to the mall for three things: pictures of Alena with Santa, a pretty ring for Jen, and a birthday present for Lily's 4th birthday.

There was a long line up to see Santa, but I kept Alena entertained by pushing her around in a shopping cart. I'm so good with her. The picture-taking actually went really well, though not quite as much fun as the Santa ride a few weeks ago. As part of the photo package we got, Alena got a stuffed animal. We also went by the Fido booth and they were giving away free plush dogs.

Then we went ring shopping. I've been wanting to get Jen an onion ring in silver, but the engraving store doesn't do custom designs. The jewelery store didn't have much in the way of silver. Finally, we went to Vivah, and they had a better selection of silver. The first ring I picked out was a pretty green heart with a little crown on it. Turns out they're called Claddagh rings and are a traditional Irish wedding ring. I had no idea. When Jen revealed that fact to me, I felt like some monks were going to show up and pronounce me the reincarnated Lama. Unfortunately, they didn't have one in her size (note for future reference, 8.5). I had a good look at the rest of their inventory and finally settled on a thin ring with an oval aquamarine in it (her birthstone). It matches her eyes and the shape of her head. And oh yeah... I guess that makes it official: We're getting engaged! *dodges*

For Lily's birthday, to get pictures taken of Alena with Santa. shop for a birthday present for Lily's 4th birthday. We got her a kit that lets you dress up dolls in the bath. Really neat. We also got a game for Alena called "What's in Ned's head?" where you get a giant foam head and have to reach in his orifices for a strange object. Alena likes gross stuff... I find it disturbing. Then we went to Zellers for wrapping paper. We had a moment where I was all mopey because Jen gets way more excited over Christmas than I do. My family even stopped putting up the tree. Such Grinches. :( Also, we overheard one woman who was terrified because she apparently lost her kids in the store.

The party was okay. It was nice seeing everyone, but nearly everyone was really sick (except me, because I eat all that pork you know?), so we didn't get to do much. Oh well.

Sunday was full of nervousness. Jen and Alena were going to meet my family for the first time. Some things could have gone better... but I think this deserves a post of its own so I can rant.

Anyway, happy anniversary, hon. 20 weeks and still strong as ever.

I enjoy dabbling in languages. 8 months of each of Spanish, German, and Italian, and I bought some books to review my 9 years of French immersion, although that has to wait in case we're going to Italy, in which case I have to shun French until after the trip because it crowds out everything else.

Recently, I keep seeing ASL on TV - Joey Lucas on The West Wing, the episode of House with the deaf patient, and an episode of Law and Order CI, wherein Joey's interpreter Kenny made an appearance as a interpreter.

I want to dabble! The linguist in me is facinated! And now Andrew is learning a few signs, so I want to teach him Christmas (it's pretty easy - a cross between 'tree' and 'c') and Auntie Kaitlyn (since Aunt is an 'a' twisted next to the cheek, I thought a twisted 'a' followed by a twisted 'k', which will probably just be a hand twisted twice by his head with the "baby accent")

The thing about ASL is that it's not easily separated from deaf culture, which I do not have an "in" into.

My best chance is the community college which offers introductory asl, starting from scratch, but the classes are quite pricey ($500 a term?) and aren't related to my career so won't be eligible for help from work like my computer classes were.

But that's a lot of money for dabbling. But I know that the worst thing I can do is try to learn out of a book. But that might happen if I don't find a class! Bah!

Now that I know about shares, I wanted to share out the external hard drive that's usually hooked up to the tower. Then, if the tower is busy, I could access it from any of the laptops via \\tower\externalshare. If it wasn't taken, i could just sit and use it as F:. Eventually, we would use that as our store from all the computers in the house. Like a network drive! And one drive to grab in a fire!

There seems to be a kink since the working accounts on all the computers don't have administrative rights. In theory, I just set the external drive's ntfs permissions to "everyone has full control" and set the share permissions the same. But it doesn't seem to work. :-(

Then Dad showed my DropBox which is like... well it's like duplication across all the computers you want, plus into a cloud accessible via web address. Well, I put the drop box folder on the external hdd. I can put it on all the other computers here. I could put it on my work computer too. It's way better than using google docs as a store, since there are local copies!

https://www.dropbox.com

On the one hand, awesome! On the other hand, damn simple solution! That means I'll never puzzle out the shares thing!

Oh and I have invites and it's mutually beneficial to give them out. You can post an email address and I'll send you one. I'll screen all comments and unscreen the one's without addys.

My latest amusing habit:

When presented with anything with letters on, I will read it blindly(?). The fixation to get my reading done has manifested in a strange form of trans.

Just now, I flipped two pages at once. Not realizing, I spent the next three minutes trying to figure out why my string alignment problem all of sudden talked about negative edge weights. Turns out, the next problem the textbook talks about is the shortest path problem with no positive weight restrictions. D'oh.

Started watching "White Collar", new show.

In the opening episode they (FBI) find that someone has forged the new security strips for the Canadian $100 bill. So they tell us. Which leads the the comments:

"How upset were the Canadians?"
"Ohhh, Very. *shrug* Well as upset as Canadians can get."


Ahh the classic ever polite Canadian stereotype.

1943: Casablanca

[Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia]

So, Casablanca. This film is known as an American classic, and long before I had ever seen this film I had heard some of the pop-culture quotes that it generated, such as "Here's looking at you, kid.", and possibly "Play it, Sam". It's also the first of these movies that I've seen before: a few years back the City of Waterloo played this movie for a surprisingly well-attended Movies in the Park. Due to the environment and noise, I was a little unclear about the ending when I saw it then.

I felt it was a little weak for being as revered as it is. It's certainly not a bad a movie, and I was entertained, amused, and even touched at parts.

The movie is set during World War II in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, where French refugees have fled from Occupied France, many in the hope of escaping to Lisbon, where they could then fly on to the United States. Rick, an expat American runs his "Rick's Café Americain", a fairly upscale establishment with entertainment and gambling and various shady goings-on. Ilsa, an old lover of his from Paris from before the occupation arrives at the café with her husband, Laszlo, a Czech resistance leader, not knowing Rick is even in Casablanca. They are looking for certain documents that will allow them to leave for Lisbon, which Rick has unwittingly come into. Tensions are tense, revelations are revealed, and antagonists antagonize.

While the tension and romance of Rick and Ilsa (and Laszlo) is charming, the corrupt official Captain Renault provides a clever and witty foil, and much of the film is better for his inclusion.

In sum, entertaining, but not fantastic, but worth seeing just to know what the fuss is (or isn't!) about.

After having avoided one for an entire term, I ended up staying at school for a night working on an algebra paper. Next day was 5 hours of TAing, the department Christmas potluck (which I crashed empty handed) followed by a drink in someone's office, and finally assignment grading (I had about 200 papers to mark left at this point). By the time I got home at around 1:10 and made it to bed around 1:45, I had been awake for 42 hours straight. And I hadn't exactly been getting much sleep beforehand either.

I woke up today just before noon but could not bring myself out of bed until about 1:30 pm, dozing off still here and there as I laid there deciding if I should really bother with consciousness until tomorrow morning. I felt mostly refreshed (and even sang as I got dressed), but since coming into the office just before 3 or so, I've sent off the assignment marking report email prematurely mid-sentence (ctrl+enter for the fail), had a heart attack thinking I CCed the instructor I mark for in a casual email to another TA, and generally out of it. I think it'll take at least two more nights' good sleep to bring me back. Still feeling a bit like I'm floating around half asleep. I'm sure this cold isn't helping either.

I just tried to 'fix' my computer's time because it was 'wrongly' December. Oh sigh.
#cell

But still very awww inspiring.

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20091207

The previous day's is also cute too.

He humours me. :)

$ClassmateA once bragged that there was nothing her father couldn't buy. $ClassmateB cooly wondered if perhaps he could buy a few aitches*.

British snap. Oh no she didn't!

* It's very unusual in North America to spell out the names of letters. Here I am using the plural of the noun better known as 'H'. **

** Oh crap, now I'm reading about letters on wikipedia. Aitch vs Haitch as a pronunciation is a shibboleth in Ireland. Fascinating.

it's from one of the Enid Blyton boarding school series I read.

We rushed home from the company christmas party so that I could be sick some more. Great. Like I didn't earn a nice christmas party. I guess I didn't work hard enough this year.

The worst part is going to be taking it easy enough that I don't get sick again so I can get back to work next week. How easy is easy enough? I have stuff to do!

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Coverage of tomorrow starts today. Lino had no knowledge of what tomorrow is. I didn't get it until I was older. It's still an interesting Rorschach test. Do you just hate Marc Lepine? Do you hate his father? His mother? Do you hate the men that let themselves be separated from the women?

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I have to find reasons to visit Rome. Italy has nuances to eating in cafes. When you need to take an Italian class just to be trained how to eat in a cafe, it's not a good sign for a hapless tourist. When you have to watch out for the taxi drivers so that they don't charge you triple the going rate, that doesn't sound like a vacation to me anymore.

Time to hit up 914.5632 on the Dewey decimal system. There's a ... for dummies book that looks promising.

I just need a reason and an itinerary. I can't show up and wing it. "The coliseum" is not reason enough to fly to Europe. I'm not sure I could justify going to any just-one-place. There are so many places I do want to visit that I want to do an n-for-one trip and get many places done and visited. And Rome isn't one of them.