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I selected these reasons from the August 26, 2004 email of T H E . M O U T H P I E C E which, in turn, had excerpted them from the Washington Post. I’ve taken the liberty of “Canadianizing” some of the references.

• My stigmata’s acting up.
• When I got up this morning I took two Ex-Lax in addition to my Prozac. I can’t get off the toilet, but I feel good about it.
• Constipation has made me a walking time bomb.
• The dog ate my car keys. We’re going to hitchhike to the vet.
• I’m feeling a little disgruntled this morning. You sure I should come in?
• Yes, I seem to have contracted some attention-deficit disorder and, hey, how about them Blue Jays, eh? So, I won’t be able to, yes, could I help you? No, no, I’ll be sticking with Bell, but thank you for calling.
• I just found out that I was switched at birth. Legally, I shouldn’t come in to work knowing that my employee records may now contain false information.

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Well, it poured rain all day which made for a pretty stressful drive from Toronto to Guelph (pick up something from older son) to Cambridge (lunch with another Aunt and Uncle) to Chatham (party). This explains why I was (literally) cross-eyed last night since I didn’t have that much to drink at the party. By the time we got to Chatham, the rain had stopped though it continued to be damp, windy and chilly. We had the food and then the speeches from my four cousins. Brett also sang a couple of songs and joined in a duet with his wife. My aunt and uncle were obviously touched by their sons' devotion. Normally my youngest cousin of that Service family is quite aimable; however, he was the organizer: trying to get food and facilities ready for 50 or so guests. His brothers nicknamed him “Uncle Krusty” for his efforts.

My thoughts wandered during the speech to contemplating my own parents. They separated when I was 13 so I would never have been in my cousins' places. Nor would I ever considering calling on my own father for advice. As another aunt said, sometimes we use the role of one or another parent as a counter-example; i.e., we will definitely not raise our kids this way. This aunt’s father used to beat them with his belt. When her kids (other cousins) were growing up and they did something “bad,” my aunt would go into her bedroom and close the door until her intense anger and desire to beat the child had passed. Gradually over the years these anger episodes subsided. I guess I was lucky: my dad just wasn’t there for us.

Perhaps it was yesterday’s lousy weather, today it is clearing and this introspective mood passed. We stayed at an “inn” near London last night and had a “bacon and egg” breakfast before driving home today. And I don’t have to cook tonight as my wife’s “Orff” class is having a BBQ.

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Finally, after 3½ months, our driveway has asphalt. We hired another company as the first company, the one that removed the old asphalt and put down a layer of crushed rock, wasn’t returning our phone calls. They did have $500 from us, though, so I figure we have kept up our end of the contract.

I signed the contract with Burl-Oak Paving on Tuesday and 9 guys (“all from the same village in Newfoundland”) came out to do the work today (Saturday). It took them about 2 hours with about ½ hour spent waiting for the asphalt truck. Now, in 4 or 5 days, I’ll be able to drive straight into the garage with no “bumps in the road.”

My next youngest brother, living in Victoria, had his birthday today. I woke him up at 09:00 his time to wish him a “Happy.” Apparently they stayed up Friday night to finish watching a movie they’d rented. I wasn’t too sympathetic as I had been up since 07:00 this morning not knowing when exactly the paving guys would be coming.

Today’s run was a scorcher: it was so humid that my “sta-dri” shirt was soaked by the end of the hour. My time was a couple of minutes slower, too — probably because I had to wipe the sweat off my brow periodically and drink some water.

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I used “No More Nails,” basically a thick latex glue to attach the moulding to the walls. I did have to use a couple of finishing nails to put quarter round next to the tub as it wasn’t a straight surface or the quarter round may have been slightly warped. Today I masked the quarter round next to the tub and applied clear silicone caulk.

Speaking of caulk, I wasted more time this week trying to revive partly used tubes of silicone caulking. I finally ended up throwing out at least half a dozen used tubes.

In the close encounters of the thunderstorm kind department, I was putting a coat of latex paint on the quarter round I’d replaced around the sliding glass doors. Just as I finished, there was a lightning stroke so close by I could hear a spark gap type of sound immediately before the thunderclap. I high-tailed it inside. Fortunately the rain pounded the house from another direction (and we have a new roof!) so that coat of paint should be good.

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“Because an increasing number of people are having heart attacks while gambling, the big, high-class casinos are now equipped with sophisticated defibrillators. They are computer-controlled to deliver the exact electric shock needed to revive a heart attack victim. That is, if you’re at a big, high-class casino.

“At the cheaper casinos downtown, they just drag you across the carpet and touch your finger to the doorknob.”

Source: Clean Laffs

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More and more people are “decorating” their front yards and boulevards with plantings, gardens, walls, benches, etc. I was walking yesterday and, on the street that intersects our crescent, a neighbour is building a waterfall and brook. When I went by the waterfall was operational. Later when I brought my wife to have look the brook was streaming. Obviously a work in progress.

A neighbour farther down the street is into heavy masonery and wall building. I guess he (or his s.o.?) didn’t like the sloping front yard so they are adding a couple of retaining walls.

Meanwhile back at chez nous we’ve signed a contract to have our driveway paved by another company recommended by a neighbour—hopefully this Saturday. It has now been three months (!) since the other company removed the old asphalt and put down a layer of crushed rock. I have had to spray the driveway for weeds it has been so long.

We have called the first company repeatedly, every couple of weeks, but I guess they just aren’t interested or they have too many orders. Really, I don’t mind waiting as long as I am kept informed; however, the communication has only been one-way from our end.

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I replaced the rusty, old screws on the siding around two of the second storey windows with stainless steel screws. Those “chrome plated” screws only last a few years before rusting.

My knees were sore during my run today. I wonder if that had anything to do with standing on the ladder for a couple of hours?

Today’s image is brought to you from the “fire tower” cliff at Restoule Provincial Park.

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Today I helped my wife set up the recital hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music for the Orff to Jazz course given by Doug Goodkin. Basically we moved all sorts or percussion instruments (drums, glockenspiels, xylophones, etc) into the room. In exchange for this “work” I audited the first afternoon of the course wherein Doug introduced several different songs via body percussion, singing, dancing and gestures. It is too bad I wasn’t “raised” on this stuff. I have to analyze the steps, count the beats, etc and then assemble them at speed as well as sing. It made me feel maladroit at the end of it. But no one cared and I didn’t either.

In between the fun stuff, Doug gave some background about what he was teaching. The part I remember was that teaching music (to kids) should be like a musical work. There’s an opening to grab your attention, a middle section where “things happen” and a final section, climax, release, whatever. Your teaching should just flow. He compared this to a symphony concert. The conductor doesn’t stand at the podium and say, “This second section is played andante which means 'at a walking pace.' The strings will be playing a fugue with the brass section. Blah, blah, blah…” She and the orchestra just get on with it. So should the teacher.

A tutor who tooted the flute,
Tried to teach two tutors to toot,
Said the tutor to the two tutors,
It is easier to toot,
Than to teach two tutors to toot.

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On Thursday, it was the dress rehearsal and concert for Carmina Burana. The performance went quite well though the orchestra and choir were right next to each other. At my spot I had to hold my music over the second trombonist’s head. The audience was kind: they gave us a standing ovation at the end of the performance. We hear from Maestro Brott that Beethoven’s Ninth is on next year’s program.

In between the rehearsal and performance we spent some time relaxing on the grass on the grounds of the Royal Botannical Gardens.

On Friday we drove out to St. Jacob’s and Waterloo. At the former for lunch at the Stone Crock and to the latter to visit Waterloo Music (I’d give the URL except the domain expired August 12. I had to use the Google cache to get a phone number to tell them about it.) I was feeling sleepy so I left my wife to browse the “teacher’s” music room while I went back to the car to snooze and read.

Rather than going back down to the 401 we took 7 over to Guelph and dropped in on our son, daughter-“in-law,” dog, two cats and bird at their new (to them) house. We had to restrain ourselves and not try and pick up things or unpack some boxes. If they want our help they’ll ask for it. To assauge our consciences we bought beer and pizza. I’m sure they feel very mortgage-poor at the moment. My son and I discussed his “building in the dishwasher” idea. After reconnoitering the kitchen I found that it would be a “trivial” exercise: All the plumbing and wiring is in place already.

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This was a tough one to diagnose because every time I used Outlook to send a message or expanded it from the taskbar I would get the new email messages. I finally tried reducing the Outlook polling interval to 5 minutes; but that still didn’t seem to pull in the new messages until I used Outlook. Finally I read an NTBuqtraq mail list message that pointed to XP SP2 as the cause of the problem. Somehow the so-called “Windows Firewall” prevented my office computer from getting notifications from the Exchange server about new email.

I applied the registry changes described in the article, OL2002: You Cannot Receive New E-mail Notifications in Environments That Use the Network Address Translation. These changes force the Outlook client to poll for new email messages.

Now I get those “Please fill out your timesheet” reminders as soon as they are sent instead of some indeterminate time in the future—A mixed blessing I’d say.

BTW, aside from this problem and having to open up the “Windows Firewall” to a few applications, these have been the only issues I have had with XP SP2.

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I had a little trouble with the mozex extension in Firefox. Oh, it would install just fine but it wouldn’t be listed in the extensions. Therefore, you couldn’t double click on it and set the application to say, edit textareas. After some searching on the Internet where someone said you simply edit the userpref file, I found the answer. You have to install the Show Old Extensions extension. Now I can finally edit my blog entries in emacs using c:\usr\local\bin\gnuclientw.exe %t.

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I finished off the film on my old camera with a few pictures of the garden. I took that old (analog?) camera on the recent canoe trip and ended up using it since the “official” photographer’s camera got wet on the second last day. Anyway, the pictures on that old roll dated from Dec. 1999 to Jan 2000 including my son turning 19, my sister turning 40 and Christmas at my brother’s before he went to teach in Thailand.

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I finally got around to putting 3 coats of water-based urethane on the baseboards and quarter rounds I’ve cut for the ensuite bathroom. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll glue the moulding to wall with “liquid nail” glue or use nails. I guess it depends whether I can hold the moulding in place while the glue cures with clamps or heavy cans.

I bettered my counter-clockwise running time by a few minutes around my usual circuit. I have to run up all the steeper hill parts in the last third of my run when I go this way around. Running the route clockwise changes those steep hills into descents. The elevation change going up in the last clockwise third is more continuous and gradual.

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On Wednesday I had my first, and the choir’s second rehearsal under Maestro Brott of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. I discovered many of the assembled choir had done Carmina last year while it has been 3 years since I last sang it with the Bell’Arte Singers. Oh well, I have got a few days to brush up on the rapid-fire latin words to a couple of the movements.

Today I found out we get a modest honourarium payable to our choir. (You can get it personally if you supply your SIN but do I really want the hassle of declaring that small bit of income?).

The concert is part of the Brott Festival taking place at Hamilton Place, 7:30 p.m., Thursday, August 19, 2004.

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“Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.”

Ira Gassen

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Thanks to MT-Blacklist, 543 comments were rejected between 2004.08.10 20:30:31 and 2004.08.11 02:51:26 UTC(?). This selection of IPs from the rejections makes me thinks these are trojaned machines, especially the mil ones:

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Same old, same old is all I can say: emails to read, projects to be projected, deliverables to be delivered, deadlines to be deaded. At least my wife met me after doing some errands and we went out for supper tonight.

I have been quoted in the company newsletter. The editor interviewed a bunch of us about the reasons we exercise. Most said it relieved (their) stress. I said I did it so I don’t have to diet or count my beer calories.

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My cousins held a 60th birthday party for their dad, my uncle with a Hawaiian Luau theme. Lots of food and lots of fun, especially seeing some of my own siblings and my now, Guelph-native son. His dog had a great time vacuuming up food and drink. Unfortunately the weather was overcast and cool so that only the kids went swimming in the pool.

My sister is happy to have been laid-off off her job: the commute is long, most of the work isn’t very interesting and all her good work friends have already been laid off. She’ll be a very discerning job hunter this fall.

My son is discovering the joys of owning a house. Sometimes it’s the little things that bug you — like crappy faucets.

My commentary on the party is that pretty near all of my aunt’s side of the family showed up: even her seldom seen golf-pro son-in-law and her rural sister. My uncle’s side of the family was represented by myself, his oldest nephew, my sister and my youngest brother and our families. None of his brothers or their families deigned to show themselves. I should probably be checking with my cousins first before I sound off. Perhaps they weren’t sent an invitation. My Dad in Vancouver seemed to have known about the party, though. He could have called his brother on his actual birthday last Thursday rather than during the party-time.

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It was a great trip this year. Unfortunately this means there’s no real “it was so tough that…” memories. We did manage to eat most of the food and drink all the beer, wine (except for the 4 l box left at base camp) and liquor. Images and more commentary will follow once the “official” photographer sends me the CD. I think there are several screen wallpaper candidates of the gorge near the French River and one possible ugly shot of someone modelling their wet underwear.

Thanks to our host, Joel Barton, for setting up this trip starting at Barton Lake (the surrounding land has been in the Barton family since the mid-1800’s), Beaudry Creek, Commanda Lake, Restoule Lake, Restoule River, Stormy Lake, Lennon Lake, Restoule River once again over to the French River and back again.

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We spent yesterday afternoon and evening moving my son off to Guelph to their first house. No major problems just a hiccup when my U-Haul crapped out on my son’s truck reservation. He managed to find another larger truck but it took all morning to do it = less last minute packing time. It rained once but, fortunately, it was a short shower and we had mostly loaded the truck by then.

Once, in Guelph I went to Can. Tire bought new locks for the place. The only real problems in moving in is that the Queen size box spring, the large filing cabinet and a sofa all needed some persuading. Dings in the walls are easy to fix!

Well I’m off to canoe and camp for a few days…