I guess the gremlins are out and about tonight and wreaking havoc in our house. Not only does my Mac G5 stubbornly refuse to boot, but the kitchen sink has backed up. It happened after I had just finished cooking a large pot of beef stew (and subsequently had a lot of dirty dishes).
A plumber is coming tomorrow for the sink, and I guess I’ll have to wheel this hunk of metal up the street to the shop in the rain to get a repair. Just when we didn’t need to spend money. *sigh*
Picture014.jpg
Originally uploaded by janelle gunther.
A nerdy jack-o-lantern. Reminds me of when I helped create the PumpkinCam(tm), a webcam pumpkin where the camera looked out of the eyes. That was back when I worked at Ziff-Davis Interactive. Many (harvest) moons ago…
Couldn’t stop laughing when a link to a news article on the Libby indictment on myWay.com produced the following juxtaposition of Google ads via their contextual search algorithm:
I have to admit that before we moved here, we had been warned about the weather. No — warned is not strong enough. It was kind of like that sign in The Wizard of Oz, the one that Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion reads out loud: “I’d turn back if I were you!” We were led to believe that 9 to 10 months of the year, this place is under water, or it’s like Ray Bradbury’s Venus, in a short story I remember reading as a kid. That’s the one where it rains for 10 years and then the sun comes out for only one afternoon (and a poor little girl is locked in a closet by her nasty classmates and misses the entire event).
When we visited in January, it did in fact drizzle for the entire time, but it was unusually rainy that month, even for here. On the other hand, after we moved here, we were lucky to have several weeks of absolutely spectacular weather: dry, warm, and sunny every day. We went for a walk nearly every evening, and the sun set around 9 PM.
Fast forward to this weekend: Despite what the forecast is, today was a beautiful afternoon. The sun was low in the sky, and the temperature was a little chilly, but not uncomfortable. We took another stroll along False Creek south, and Pam took some pictures with her new camera (I’ll try and post some of them on Flickr later). The widgets on my Mac desktop (click the thumbnail to see a full-size version) bear this out. The web cams show what it looked like on the Burrard Bridge and Jericho Beach. The widget to the left has the temperature (Celsius) and the forecast:
I know that there will be some rough weeks ahead when the sun shines very little, but that’s what books, movies, TV, the library, cafés (like the Wicked Café nearby), concerts, friends over for games, simulated sunlight lamps and roasted chicken/beef/pork/vegetables are for. For today, at least, the deluge is just on the horizon, however bad it gets.
How I’ve longed to see a split-screen just like this one, of a Prosecutor on one side with Bush and Cheney on the other side. The chickens are coming home to roost. Major League indeed.
Heather
Other news of a more personal nature: My niece Heather, who was serving in Iraq, returned this week, finishing her tour of duty at Fort Drum, in New York state. We got a call from her yesterday while she was on leave from her last few weeks with the Army. We breathed a sigh of relief that she made it back in good health and ready to go on with her life. Contrary to what we had heard earlier this year, she won’t be going back. Now I say that she should get every penny of compensation she can get in health benefits, the GI Bill for school, first time home buyer’s etc.. The US Government owes her big-time.
Not much to report on our end (and certainly nothing as dramatic as those two items). I’ve been attending meetings of the Vancouver User Experience Group and the Vancouver Weblogger’s meetups, as well as some talks regarding Ruby on Rails, CSS and AJAX at ActiveState, a software tools company downtown. I’m starting to recognize some of the same faces (and perhaps am being recognized as well). Pam is deep into the STC Vancouver Chapter’s Documentation Competition (that’s her page describing the competition), with the training of judges taking place this weekend.
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