Round Two!!!

Leave your predictions, reactions, trash talk and general playoff fever here!

Series: I say Canucks in six.

Tonight's game: I say 3-2 Canucks, with goals from Alex Burrows, Henrik Sedin and Sami Salo.

(Edited after game one to add this photo of Kyle "not very" Wellwood. This is going to be a tough series!)

GO CANUCKS GO!!!

Celebrity Apprentice

Is anyone else watching it?

How crazy was last night's episode??!!

I was howling with laughter at the end, to the extent that Mr E Man (trying to sleep in the next room) had to ask me to be quiet. I taped it for him and just had to watch the last 10 minutes again as soon as I got up this morning.

Annie is pretty devious*, but the Rivers women... WOW.

ETA: I found video! Enjoy!



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*I like her though, I hope she wins. Her or Jesse.

Oncoming trains

I was excited this week to read an article on the BBC website about a possible renaissance of the US rail system, including talk of a high-speed link from Vancouver down to Seattle, Portland and Eugene.

Yup, I'm a train spotter lover. Love, love, love, travelling by train. Not quite as much as by boat, but close. It's just such a civilised, human way to travel. You can leave your seat, stretch your legs, wander through to the catering car for a cuppa tea or a beer, even jump out at stations for some fresh air. Compared to trains, planes are just awful - full of that nasty recycled air and the risk of DVT due to hours of inactivity. And cars... I do not like travelling by car at all. Strapped into your seat, stuck in traffic, and all that carbon guilt. The scenery also tends to be better from a train. I like the aerial views from the plane, but you don't get the detail. Obviously some roads have good sight lines to take advantage of nice views, but more often than not you just see a bunch of other cars, and maybe some stunted trees if you're lucky.

I took the train all the time in the UK: to get from my parents' to University and back, to go to weddings, football and rugby games, concerts, you name it. I've also been lucky enough to do some fabulous overnight and multi-day train trips, the stand out being Toronto - Vancouver through the Rockies. Toronto-Montreal was nice too, as were Paris-Marseilles, Paris-Madrid and Madrid-Lisbon. The latter journey was on our honeymoon and also Mr E Man's birthday, so we treated ourselves to a first class sleeping cabin, featuring fold-down bunks, our own bathroom and shower, and a delicious three course dinner with a more or less open bar (we did not test the limits of the openness, but the guys at the next table were getting close). I've also done shorter hops around France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and Belgium. Man, I miss Europe sometimes.

So... regular high speed rail down to Seattle and Portland? Sign me up!* I've got friends there I'd like to see, and I'll be more likely to go if I can take the train (and once I get the coveted Canadian passport and no longer have to be fingerprinted, photographed and generally interrogated at the border). The US is going to lag behind Europe for a good long while in this regard, but if some of the stimulus money can be used to stimulate the railways, I'll be one happy traveller.

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*Barriers to going right now: there are like 4 trains a week, and they're sloooooow. And expensive, because the only people who use them are wealthy European tourists. When I did the Vancouver-Seattle-San Francisco-LA section of my North America trip when I was 20, I had to take the Greyhound the whole way, because the trains were laughably far beyond my budget.

Tunnel lights

• After almost three months, we are getting our place back to ourselves in one more week! Awesome Tenant is moving out of the basement suite for the summer (at the very least), and Mr E Man's divorcing friend is moving down there on May 1st. This is great timing and has the potential to work extremely well for all concerned. (Although Divorcing Friend is going to have to work hard to be as awesome a tenant as Awesome Tenant, who brings us home-made cookies along with the rent money). DF has done his utmost to be a helpful and non-intrusive house guest - he's washed lots of dishes, fixed our old PC, and even made us pancakes one morning - and has generally succeeded. However, the weekends when he's had his seven-year old son with him have been a little too noisy and chaotic for my liking. And I really don't like sharing our one and only bathroom. I'd also like to be able to talk stupidly to my cats again when I come home from work, without worrying about who's listening from the other room... yeah, he laughed a LOT at my "Boogie Woogie Schmoogie! Who'sh a good kitty? You can has treats!" routine one day...
• I have finally figured out how to describe my job. My actual title is essentially meaningless to most people. I've tended to use “Grant Writer”, although it only describes about 10% of what I do. I’ve now settled on “Grant Wrangler”, which gets me up to about 80% and better captures the exertion required to get the damn things into the right places at the right times, and in the best possible condition. Blog post tags are now being modified to reflect this change.
• As of this morning, the shower room is back in business! I no longer have to endure the attractive helmet hair-frizz ball combo look, but can wash my hair upon arrival and look somewhat like a normal human being again (although my forehead dent is becoming gradually more visible, at least to me. Hmmmm).
• While I am still coughing, today has not (yet) featured one of the gag reflex-triggering coughing fits that have marked the last week.

Tra la la, it's Friday and it's sunny. Have a good weekend!

Wouldn't you think

that a drawer that looks like this




would contain at least one paper clip?

Sushi menu, safety goggles, golf balls & tees, two sets of allen keys, numerous screwdriver and drill bits, spackle, used and new batteries, camera film (I've had a digital camera for five years), elastic bands, crazy glue and a sanding block: all present and correct. Paper clips, nope.

Oh well, at least the taxes are done, even if I can't assemble and mail the filing package just yet.

Cough medicine FAIL

I called Mr E Man at work yesterday and asked if he could possibly pick me up some cough medicine on the way home. Being the best husband EVAH, he brought me "the most expensive stuff in the store - this must be good stuff", plus some juice and some chocolate. He then went out to a friend's house to watch the UFC.

After taking three doses, my cough wasn't getting any better at all. I finally read the label and realised that he'd inadvertently brought me the homeopathic stuff.

I called him again and asked him to make a second attempt. So he got the taxi driver to stop at the 7-11 on the way home, and triumphantly came into the house bearing:

Benylin for children.

So I took twice the recommended dose and went to bed. It was either that or put a capful of the homeopathic stuff in the bath, fill it up, and then drink a cup of the magically fortifed potion.

As soon as I'm better, I'm gonna kick his ass teach him how to read labels. And figure out the answer to his question about an anti-placebo effect.

Snakes...

...on a plane!

--ra--le*

(Regular readers may have noticed a recent increase in the number of short and/or image-based posts. This is all because of Resolution A ii. I definitely don't want to give up blogging, but I do need to reduce the amount of time I spend on it. It's also the NHL playoffs. Please bear with me; I'll try to drop the occasional more substantial post in!)

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Mr E Man consistently beats me at pretty much every game we play. He'd tell you that it's because of his vastly superior skill, but I'd like to point out that almost every single game has some element of luck, and that the luck usually goes his way.

You know your letters are bad when you feel compelled to take a photo of them. These letters were actually better than the 4 Is I had for the prior two hands. Surely they can't get any worse though.

Oh, look, wrong again. These will be fun to get rid of during the endgame.

Final score: Cath 168, Mr E Man 304. Although I would like to point out that he got the X, the Z, the Q and the J, and put them in places where I couldn't use them. He doubled my rummy score on the ferry home too.

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*"Scrabble" with all the good point-scoring letters removed

And they're (play)off!

Beer?

Check

Chips?

Check

Canucks shirt?

Check

Towel?

Check

Houseful of friends?

En route

Stanley Cup?

Hell yeah baby!

GO CANUCKS GO!

Please ignore this post

Testing the iPhone blogging thing

Fun, rabbit, fun!

I got to be the Easter Bunny this year, and if I do say so myself, I think I did a stellar job of making the eggs just hard enough to find.

My mother-in-law has an amazing property. She has a cozy house that her late husband built,


a beautiful formal garden,


a small patch of 2nd growth forest,

and my favourite, the sea lion rock.


I did briefly consider hucking an egg or two into the swamp to see exactly what a nine year old boy will do for chocolate, but you'll be glad to hear that I thought better of it.


We saw the usual deer come on through, which was great. My MIL hasn't seen a cougar in years, but the bear still visits from time to time. But the scariest wildlife was spotted at about 11 am on Easter Sunday:


The hunt over, the pack of wild nephews animals retires to its den to gorge on its prey.

Pop quiz

The person who patched this piece of road is:

a) a musician
b) a cell cycle biologist
c) a St Louis Blues fan
d) oblivious to the above connections that his/her handiwork forges in the brain of passing geeks cyclists

(Sorry about the dodgy angle of the photo, I had to take it upside down from the sidewalk to avoid being run over).

Woe is me

The shower room is out of commision because of (ironically enough) a flood. They wouldn't even let me in to grab stuff out of my locker. It being a cold and rainy day, I'm sitting here with my frizzy unwashed hair and unmoisturised face, wearing all the warm clothes I can muster, and hugging a mug of hot mint tea.

Boooooooooooo.

Random career bullets

Look what I got!

And it only took a year and a half...

• The sign serves a very important purpose that has nothing little to do with massaging my ego. I sit at an open-plan desk right outside my supervisor's office, in the exact place where his former secretary (who has never been replaced) used to sit. Combined with the fact that my boss was away for my first week on the job and so was unable to introduce me properly, a lot of people assumed that I was his new secretary. This assumption has been very difficult to reverse. Even now, his many collaborators from other departments often drop by to ask me to schedule meetings and do other secretarial tasks. (And on the frequent occasions when there is no-one else around, I usually end up doing them, because otherwise they won't get done). Even when I am able to refer the person to a colleague, the constant interruptions really break into my day. I've mentioned the problem several times, and things have got gradually better as a result. But when it came up again during a recent performance review with the department's admin manager, she suggested that we order the sign. I spent ten minutes or so on Friday deciding on the best position for it, and it's now directly in the sight-line of anyone who makes it past the filing cabinets that we moved in front of my desk to give me more privacy.
• The environment in my industry job was quite rigid in some ways, one being an outright ban on wearing jeans (in our department at least, the lab people were allowed). I maintained this dress code in my new job for, oh, maybe a couple of weeks, before tentatively wearing jeans one Friday. No-one commented (I doubt that anyone even noticed), so I started to wear them more often. I now wear jeans two or three times a week. It's great. I love how academia recognises that what you wear bears no relation to how well you do your job. I've also noticed a relationship to the first bullet; when I wear nice trousers or a skirt, I get treated more like a secretary, and when I wear jeans, I get treated more like a scientist.
• Other things that academia recognises to be unrelated to job performance: turning up after 9 am, and listening to music while working. I no longer have to dash back early from the gym to avoid the disapproving 9:02 comments. And the first time my boss saw me listening to my iPod at work, as I yanked the buds out of my ears and apologised profusely, he said "why would I mind if you listen to your iPod?"
• My last job really did mess with my psyche. Prior to the aforementioned performance review, I had filled in my form in industry-sanctioned levels of detail, mentioning every single mistake I'd made and how I'd dealt with them, and ticking off the "I have met this standard most of the time" boxes rather than the "all of the time" options. The admin manager thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen, and suggested severe edits. The second version was almost unrecognisable, and much more flattering.
• The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hoooray! It's warm (20C, five days after it snowed - April is weird), people are smiling more, and a complete stranger even started a conversation with me in a coffee shop yesterday. This never happens in Vancouver and I think it's about time that changed (although this girl was actually a bit over-friendly, even by non-Vancouver standards, almost to the point of weirdness). Yes, this is work-related; what other reason could there possibly be for my boss to use a smiley face emoticon in an email yesterday?

ZOMG!

I am in heaven.



They're sweet, but not overly so, and with a definite tea taste. They are also very addictive, and surprisingly strong.

Woo hoo! TEA CANDY! YEAH! CAFFEINE AND SUGAR! YAY!

Confusing bilingual packaging

How can this be??!!

Cat food sans nom?

Google and Saba were confused too:


"We iz not noing Fwench, but smellz abit fishy. Erm, iz for nom?"

But eventually came around:


"Om nom nom nom nom nom"

All is well.

Mission: impossible?

Legendary Newcastle striker Alan Shearer will manage the club until the end of the season.

Presuming that the BBC isn't playing an April Fool's joke, that is.

The local hero, who has an almost God-like status on Tyneside, is the fourth manager this season (!!!) and has just eight games to keep us in the Premier League... with the first one being against Chelsea.

I'm excited and terrified in equal measures.

Good luck Alan - you'll need it. But don't worry, we'll still love you whatever happens!

p.s. I know no-one cares, but if I didn't "tell" someone, I'd explode! I'd usually call my Dad, but he's on holiday in Malta.