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Once I switched from slip-on boots to my walking shoes, the tops of my feet got sore again with the occasional shooting pains in the night. I finally looked up my problem on the Internet and found, duh!, that my shoes were probably laced too tight. I was directed to Shoe Lacing Methods and today I tried a variation of bow tie lacing. So far so good though it does take a couple of days for the pain to go away.

Now I know why the safety toe shoes at work don’t bother me: the two side flaps meet over the tongue when the shoes lace up making a “roof” over my foot; whereas, with my walking shoes the side flaps don’t cover the tongue so that the laces go over the tongue and press down on the top of my feet. With the “bow tie” lacing, hopefully, I can move that pressure away.

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My immediate boss said a $500k contract is on the verge of being signed and the major resource (person) to work on it is me.

His boss, our manager, says I’m currently not meeting my(?) billability target. So, do I a) beat the bushes for some billable work and say I’m not available for the big contract b) send him that quote from Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind c) roll my eyes and say “whatever” d) ask him if that was a rhetorical email e) retire and say enough of this nonsense or f) none of the above?

(?) - I was handed a sheet of paper with my billability percentage target. That is a decree from on high.

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It must have been a good vacation— I have been back at work for three days and I want another one.

Though I did take a picture or two of the leaning tower of Pisa. How about one from the top of that bell tower?

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Once again MS Word gets me very discouraged. Why can’t it handle section, page, and appendix numbering properly? Why can’t it arrange figures or other “floats” nicely? Why do I have to go to websites to find, not solutions, but work arounds?

Memo to self: if a client wants a report in future s/he will get a PDF file. I’ll choose how that PDF is generated. LaTeX is my preference. I look up how to do a particular task, appendix numbering for example, write a macro and, forever after “it just works”. If the client wants MS Word then I charge many $$ extra for the wasted time it takes to do the formatting. WYSIWYG indeed: what I see is what I don’t want MS Word!

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Based on my 2 years of experience owning a male dog I think this is a credo. When he comes a across an unfamiliar object: say a garbage bag of rolled rug ends like today. He sniffed it and then peed on it.

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I went to the open house and met the realtor/owner’s wife. I disclosed my interest in the place and, as there were no other customers at the time, she showed me around and we chatted. They had taken out a couple of walls and put in an addition so its made the place roomier. Very nice. I guess the only thing I contributed to the house was upgrading the attic insulation when there was a government program back in the 1980’s. I should do the same thing at my present house.

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Occasionally, I walk the dog past our old house we sold in 1988 about 2 or 3 km away. It is now for sale and the asking price is 250% more than we sold it for. IMHO, the price is way above the street: a combination of single car-single family homes and semi-detached dwellings. They probably used a summer picture of the back of the house to hide these details. (So, I hid the realtor details ).

I see my variagated euonymous is still growing there and I know the red maple sapling I planted is now a sizeable tree just behind from where the photo was taken. I think I’ll dress up a bit tomorrow and go to the open house.

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Got my picture taken, got 3 colleagues to be guarantor and friends, lined up at the Passport Office on Wednesday. “Did you know your current passport doesn’t expire until 2008?”

Even though I had mentioned getting a passport several times and I looked for it and couldn’t find it — assuming it was expired and shredded. Turns out my wife had “hidden” it for safekeeping. Sure enough, there’s another year and half to go.

Sigh…

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We renovated by: buying a new couch for the living room. (I bought myself a tripod just after Christmas.)

Buying a new TV stand with drawers from IKEA and moving the TV and old couch downstairs.

Getting rid of the old wall unit (bought back in the days of turntables and LPs) and having the piano moved upstairs to my wife’s “studio”, the former family room. (It was about 18 years ago when me and 3 or 4 friends moved the piano down to the basement when we moved in. I think I’m just as strong now; however, I’d like to think I’m much wiser, too, so we hired pros to move it this time.)

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Thank goodness for my brother-in-law: unknowlingly, he gives us some comic relief at Christmas with his choice of gifts. This year a “friend” has started a craft. In my image it actually looks OK. However, we are talking about a glass brick, here. Where are you going to store it for the next year? And where do you put it at Christmas time? Apparently this friend also does a Valentine’s Day version. “Here Honey, have a decorated glass brick.”

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I was appointed Chief Returning Officer for our union in September. On Nov. 30 I supervised my first ballot counting. By the numbers: about 2,800 envelopes verified, 4 ballots, 10 candidates, over 11,000 pieces of paper to sort and count. The group of about 12 to 15 volunteers took about five hours to do sort and count. Many of the volunteers recalled factory and assembly line jobs they had years ago.

I was pleased that the winning candidates' count margins were greater than the margin of error arising from missing ballots (i.e. sometimes not all 4 ballots were returned in an envelope).

During the last week of the election, the candidate emails to me took on a soap opera-like quality with accusations that a newly joined local was being bribed or told how to vote by a union staffer. That union staffer and an incumbent were an item, etc. “Fun” reading and, at least as far as I can tell, all specious information. Again the winning margins were great enough that the losing candidates would have trouble coming up with any justification for recounts or nullifying certain blocks of votes. I had to forward one set of emails to the staffer named and the staff manager. These were personnel problems now not something that the CRO could deal with.

It certainly has been a learning experience for me: I have learned to just provide rulings to election process questions. Trying to be helpful with examples or other types of advice seems to confuse people and then replies get garbled with stuff about the advice rather than the rulings.

I’m looking forward to having many less emails to deal with now.

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I have volunteered to be Chief Returning Officer of our professional employees union. I’m supposed to make impartial rulings on “corner” cases on elections, nominations, etc. not directly covered by the constitution and bylaws. And, of course, I oversee elections to ensure they are free and fair. I could be in for some interesting and busy times in the next few weeks as the principal officer positions of the union are up for election in a month or two.

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I noticed this spider on its web in the bathroom the other day. It must have been busy during the day while I was at work. Or it could have been busy at night but I didn’t notice it that morning. It’s a good thing this spider was in the main bathroom. My wife would have had a fit if it was in the ensuite. Naturally I got rid of it once this picture was taken.

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I put plastic lattice around the deck to keep the dog and other critters out and to give the deck a “finishing” touch. I also affixed a sheet of lattice to the inside of the fence between our yard and the park: to keep the dog from hurting himself on the chain link fence. I also lengthened his dog run by transplanting some “wild” daylillies from the yard side to the park side in order to “soften” the effect of the lattice and removing the little fence that protected the daylillies and some hostas. Eventually I intend for the wisteria to grow along that fence as well.

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Just starting to blow my nose and the eyes are getting itchy. My body says it’s that time of year again for the anti-celebration of the start of the ragweed season: now until frost. Ah-choo!

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Apparently when a dog lightly pants he is “happy breathing” — something like a cat purring I guess. Finnegan “happy breathes” when I scratch him on the side of his head, when he’s begging at my wife’s place at the supper table or when we go for a walk.

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A terse email from the VP of Personnel announced that the IT Manager no longer worked for the company.

He’ll be remembered by most, not fondly though: we all have stories about this strange character.

Someone asked me if I was interested in that job. After some thought while running home tonight I think not. It’s an admin position with 3 or 4 subordinates, budgetting for several hundred leased PCs, a PBX, ISP, software licences, etc. There’s no hint of technical software development in that.

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People ask me why I’m thinking of leaving the regular payroll when I’m eligible next year: I was thinking the other day that my last summer job in 1976 was at the place where I work now. That’s 30 years by my calculation — longer than I have lived anywhere else and over half my lifetime. I think it’s time to move on. Naturally I would consider contract work there; however, the 37.5+ hours, 5 days a week schtick would not be the norm anymore.

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Or so I told my younger son, learning to be a print journalist at Humber. His summer job is at a nursery doing gardening type things which he was never interested in before.

You prune out the dead wood or edit the superfluous sentences. You prune the strangely branches and tighten up those run-on sentences.

In other words (pun intended) you maintain the natural shape of the tree or shrub and the end result doesn’t look like you did anything. Similarly a good editor will maintain the ideas and the gist of the article and the reader will be grateful for tighter, better reading prose.

Me, I’ll stick to pruning.

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The ticket guy at the Kipling GO station handed me a plastic sleeve along with the 10-ride ticket I bought. A nice gesture since it poured rain for my entire walk home from the GO station at the other end. I had to empty the knapsack and let it dry out.

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I was working in the driveway area when I saw two robins chase a red squirrel who ran down the pine tree in our front yard, ran across the driveway, climbed the tree next to my neighbour’s garage. I lost sight of the trio as they went over the roof.

What did the squirrel do? Steal an egg/hatchling? Bother the nesting mother?

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I couldn’t ping one of our remote devices today. As I happened to be the “least busy” I rented a car and drove out to Oshawa to see if I could fix the problem. The DSL modem wasn’t connecting. I called one of the Oshawa PUC staff and he brought a phone. We plugged that into the line and managed to call his cell phone. After plugging the phone line back into the DSL modem it began work again. I don’t know the it{root cause} of the problem but at least it’s fixed and we know to bring a regular phone with us next time (or ask the local staff to try it).

And then I had to drive back through Toronto’s Friday rush hour traffic.

Wildlife of the day: Finnegan and I saw a fox tonight.

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Peel Region has started “single stream recycling”. I guess there were too many people who didn’t sort = can’t sell recycled stuff because it wasn’t “pure” enough.

I’m going to save some time on the night before garbage day because I did sort. Now I don’t have to.

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Finnegan spotted a possum on one of our evening walks this past week. I have never seen one in the wild before especially this close to home. I didn’t have my camera so I had to borrow an image from the Internet. The warmer weather must be bringing out the critters.

We spent a splendid evening with friends last night. Their twin daughters are about 3 and very cute. Their car has a big dent in the hood which, we thought, might have been from a basketball—the kids next door were playing when we arrived. It turned the snow and ice on their steep roof all slid off last week and and a good-size chunk of ice did the damage.

I’m taking tomorrow off so I can get a few things done aroung the house. Today I fertilized the lawns and mended the “temporary” fence around the backyard gardens to keep out the dog. If I have the time and the weather co-operates I’ll make a gate for the back deck. The backyard is too wet and muddy for Finnegan, not that he minds.

I also bought some “all sport” shoes. The top of my left foot above the arch has been sore off and on for the past few months so I’m hoping these shoes might improve it.

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• Symposium yesterday.
• Mozart/Vivaldi (MV) rehearsal this afternoon.
• BAS choir manager paperwork to complete this evening.
• Lunch time Blood Donour clinic tomorrow.
• Dentist appt Tues. morning.
• Regular OCS rehearsal Tues.
• MV dress rehearsal on Wed. evening
• Two MV concerts on Fri. and Sat. evenings.
• Regular BAS rehearsal on Sat. morning.
• Several work deadlines are in there, too.
• !

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We saw CATS at the Mississauga Living Arts Centre this past Thursday. Those tunes are as familiar to me now as they were 25 years ago. However, I’ve learned a lot about singing and listening to singers in the last 25 years. Some of the soloists in the cast sang flat on occasion, one painfully (to me) so. The dancing, however, was great. We sat 2 rows back of the stage so we had a great view of the goings on.

The only problem was that I had booked this night out last fall. My wife didn’t have a full-time teaching job, nor did she need every evening to make lesson plans back then. She survived though we’ve been kind of tired this weekend.

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Today I’m triple the age I was in 1972.

Today’s song “infection”: “Blow, blow thou winter wind” by John Rutter.

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I just put in an order for over 60 prints from Blacks. Half of them were pictures my wife took at school last month. The other half are pictures from last summer!

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I spent a couple of hours last night “crafting” an email to the chair of the board. I had mentioned to the board on a couple of occasions that filling in grant proposals has never been my idea of fun—even if I were to get paid for it. It is hard to believe that in 2006 one proposal mails you hard copies of the application to fill in by hand. You don’t really want to try and read my hand writing. Though my printing is somewhat more readable it takes me much, much longer. I finally had to partly resign in writing to get this message across. I’ll continue, on a volunteer basis, with the choir record keeping and in making arrangements for concerts and rehearsal venues.

I’m a computer-type guy. If I can’t write, find or buy the programs to do most of the paperwork-generation then I probably won’t ever get around to it. I’ll choose to walk the dog in the pouring rain (like today) instead.

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I took today off [1] and took Finnegan for a walk. He found and tried to grab the back half of a dead red squirrel. Later on he sniffed out a mound of something in the bushes which appeared to me to be a dead raccoon. It was a great day for a dog! I’m not complaining, though, as the temperature is 8°C—very mild for mid-winter [2]. Finnegan turns one year old tomorrow.

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The other day, while walking my dog, a guy had stopped his car across the clearly marked pedestrian crossing waiting for the light to change. This is a “push button” light so he would have to wait awhile. I made a motion with my mitt to back up. (Most people, including myself, would do so anyway though we would try to stop before the crossing lines in the first place.) He didn’t move, so my dog and I had to walk around. As we were doing so he yelled obscenities like what’s your problem a**hole and don’t be a chickensh*t and walk away, c’m'ere. Yeah right: I have to look after my dog and you are inside a one tonne weapon. My only regret is not getting is license plate number and reporting him since he was obviously over the limit on something. I uttered my usual curse towards drivers who are morons about hoping they crash themselves (alone of course) into a concrete wall.

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Well, it seems I have either a) lost interest, b) lost time, c) found other things to do or d) all of the above with respect to this blog. My first post was way back on Feb. 25, 2002. Our dog, now almost one year old, accounts for b) and c) as well as becoming choir manager, and a) arises because, after walking the dog in the evening, I don’t feel much like spending another half an hour posting something.

Perhaps I should try posting just a sentence or fragment instead of paragraphs.

Anyway, my software find this week is Audacity. I decided to start digitizing choir concert tapes from years ago. I can record one side of a tape and then slice out the selections, creating mp3 files out of them. So far I have done one Bell’Arte Singers set of two tapes from Nov. 1998 and one Toronto Chamber Society concert from Nov. 1981. The TCS turned out all right. The BAS tapes have either been played too much or they weren’t recorded at a high enough level. Their sound is kind of rumbly and muddy. I tried the FFT filter from the Audacity library to cut out the low frequencies: less rumbly now but the vocal sounds still aren’t very clear.

As for the 1981 tape, I don’t have the program just the titles I wrote on the cover. Through the “miracle” of the Internet though, I can search for midis based on the titles and, from listening to those, I can determine the correct title and composer.

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Is walking the dog good or bad procrastination? At least I’m getting some exercise and Finnegan seems to enjoy sniffing around and walking with me. And how about updating this blog once in a while?

Yesterday, I realized that dogs lean on things just like people. I never noticed this behaviour in cats; however, they sleep so much anyway.

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• My wife turned the half-century yesterday. She got a beautiful ring (pink sapphire amidst some smaller diamonds) “sort of” from me. She actually bought it several weeks ago for half price from a jewellery store going out of business. I’m going to return the favour by having her give me a replacement “CD/tape/FM playing” system that I’ll be looking for Christmas and my birthday.
• Last night we had the last “regular” rehearsal for our concert next Saturday, Dec. 10, 2005 at Grace Church on the Hill.
• As that rehearsal was moved to late afternoon I took my wife and her girlfriend out the pub for supper and libation. Singing is such thirsty work!
• Today was relaxing: walking the dog a few times, putting up some Christmas lights, reading the paper, etc. This evening I took my wife, my two sons and my older son’s gf out for supper at Canyon Creek. Four of us chose, quite independently, the chipotle and roast garlic steak. It was delicious. I had a pint with my meal. Wine is too expensive. One bottle of a “brew at the store” variety is cheaper than one glass at the restaurant and better tasting IMHO unless I go for something really expensive.

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Well it seems if you are a Mail Plus user you get to choose an alias with a '.' in it. Wow! I wonder how many database table schema had to be modified to do this?

I still prefer my gmail accounts for keeping track of email threads and far better search capabilities. Perhaps Yahoo! will catch up one of these days.

jim dot service at yahoo dot com

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• I configured the final (?) version of the rain barrel with a length of flexible pipe and restored the original elbows of the drain from the eaves trough. Now I can easily take said pipe out of the top of the barrel and clean the debris strainer.
• I have re-used a lot of the old deck railing 2×2 to make another compost bin for this year’s leaves. I found plastic “hardware cloth” to line it with and used the bags from topsoil to cover the bottom rails. While I was making it, my neighbour commented that a compost bin cost less than $20 at the store. Yes, I know, but IMHO this one looks nicer than those plastic bins and I re-cycled all those left over 2×2’s.
• Not in the yard but round and about: we saw Hello Dolly with my in-laws in Scarberia last night. It was quite a good production—a friend of ours was in the ensemble. Though Dolly’s voice wasn’t the greatest, I enjoyed watching her lungs.

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• According to the assessment, as of January 1, 2005 my house is worth 47% more than what I paid for it 18 years ago. The disclaimer on the notice says my realty taxes may not go up. Sure and Santa Claus is real, too.
• Today’s software “find” is a square image. It isn’t your general image editing program but it looks to be handy for creating icons from your favourite photos.
• I walked the dog around some richer “no exit” streets tonight. It seems that those with 3 car garages don’t park their cars on the driveway.
• Now that one son has moved away and the other will likely do so in a couple of years I don’t feel the need for a larger house anymore.

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A person drove by in a smallish car today exuding very loud music and pounding bass. Do they know that everyone else outside of, perhaps, a couple of friends think they are jerks?

I predict it will only get worse: These young guys will gradually go deaf so they’ll have to get increasingly more powerful amplifiers to experience the same volume.

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We looked after my son’s golden retriever this weekend. No real problems just twice as much work doing some routine tasks. Like wiping 8 dewy paws this morning—several times until I put a gate across the deck. My wife and I had to sleep apart last night; otherwise, despite the extra hour, we were afraid the dogs (probably our dog would start) would get up and wrassle again in the middle of the night. My wife is also allergic to the shedding golden.

Our dog is jealous of the golden. Every time we patted her, he would wrassle with her. It was only about a day after she arrived that Finnegan would finally stop trying to nip Cricket’s ears and want to wrestle. He’s very despondent right now as Cricket has gone home with my son.

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First it was three days of vacuuming each floor and spraying for fleas. Last night we saw Oscar Peterson at his namesake public school in Mississauga. At $20, it was a bargain to hear the jazz pianist legend.

I relaxed this evening by going to the grocery store for a few things and stopping at the drop-in clinic (because there was no-one waiting in the waiting room) for a flu shot.

Of course, I walked Finnegan for a about an hour each of those nights, too.

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This cold is a bad’un. I felt somewhat guilty when I had to go out and walk the dog. It wasn’t particularly pleasant though: walking in the rain and blowing my nose every few minutes. However at work, I couldn’t have slept all afternoon like I did today. I think I may be well enough to return to work tomorrow. Don’t bother me at lunchtime though: I’d like to have a nap!

Dogs are great company when you are ill. Finnegan likes to sleep a lot during the day just as I have been doing.

Having gone through a couple of sombre days I have had to turn the thermostat to heat once again. I’m hoping this 25 year-old machine lasts another winter.

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Friday evening

We were taught some early 19^th century dances at Fort York in Toronto. Though we had never done this before we found that if you can count, visualize simple patterns and know you right from your “other right” it was fairly easy. Quite fun actually.

Saturday

Up early at 7 am to give the dog a long walk before going to choir rehearsal in the east end of Toronto. After a quick lunch and longish drive back as the direct highway route, the Gardiner Expressway, was closed for repairs, we did a quick change for a wedding of a school friend of my wife’s at 3 pm.

Saturday Evening

We experienced our first Taiwanese-type of wedding reception. It was supposed to start a 6 pm (no bar) and we finally started being served our first of twelve courses at 7:30 pm (no bar, no wine). Four hours later we finished the last course and left the hotel. There were 330 guests in the room. Part of those four hours was taken up by two(!) false alarms. We didn’t leave but neither did the serving staff serve for those periods of time. Did I mention it was dry and there wasn’t even a cash bar?

Saturday Night

One of my wife’s teacher colleagues had invited to a party. My wife phoned and they were still partying. Those three beers I had there tasted so good!

Sunday, Very Early in the Morning

Walk the dog. Get to bed about 3 am.

Sunday

Very tired today. We did pick a couple of bushels of Cortlands and Empires though.

Monday evening

Put out the garbage and did some grocery shopping as well as walked the dog.

Tuesday evening

Attend a Masonic reception for my father-in-law on the occasion of him becoming a very worshipful brother. Walked the dog after I got back and went to bed about an hour later than I usually do

Wednesday

One of those late afternoons when I hoped no-one would drop by my desk because I might have fallen asleep. I could blame the high pollution count, too.

Wednesday evening

Go to bed as soon as I have posted this.

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Hmmm, this blog isn’t so regular anymore. Could it be the hour or so I walk the dog each evening? Probably. Then there’s choir manager things to do. Oh yes, and the washing machine drive belt broke on Friday evening when after it had been filled with clothes and water. My son wasn’t amused.

On Sunday I syphoned and sponged out the water and took a look underneath. I puzzled out the route of the belt, taped it together even in order to experiment on how I would put in a new one. It sure looked to me like I would need to lower the pump and agitator drive assembly and disconnect the agitator shaft. Unfortunately this suspicion was confirmed when I looked it up on the Internet. This “routine” repair would probably take several hours. My wife decided for me: the machine is at least 23 years old and not worth fixing. So, now I have started looking at new washing machines and we’ll be visiting the local laundromat in the mean time.

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1. Leave before 8 a.m. to pick up coffee, drop off wife and dog on the way to parking lot where Peel Region was having a HHW and recycling day. Parking lot was only a short walk from the leash-free park.
2. Got rid of half a dozen almost-full, rusty cans of paint my son “inherited” from the previous owner when he moved in. Also recycled an old 16 MHz computer, a keyboard, 2 computer power supplies and an A/C motor/compressor control.
3. Dropped dog off at house and then went to choir practise in the east end of Toronto.
4. Drive back to Mississauga to pick up my tux. Met son picking up the dog. Dog didn’t miss us at all since my son’s dog was already in the car.
5. Drive to London to rehearse with the FOICS choir. Arrive about 1.5 hours late but the conductor already new that. He was glad I came. Now there were six basses to balance about a dozen tenors and perhaps 50 altos and sopranos!
6. We sang an all Mozart program including the Requiem and Ave Verum.
7. Drive back to Guelph to pick up dog. Drive son and friend to party on the way home.
8. Get home about midnight. Very tired.
9. Very hoarse voice on Sunday and part of this morning.

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I was quite sleepy this morning. I walked to the post office at lunchtime and, just as I was crossing the parking lot, a woman walked by with a Tim Hortons cup of coffee. Well, since it was kind of muggy today, I thought I would take a little detour on the way back to work and pick up and Iced Cappucino. Thanks Lady, for the great idea!

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• On Monday after the Bell’Arte Singers board meeting, I watched a self-erasing video preview of a sitcom called Dads for this market research survey. The show wasn’t very good. Of course I haven’t watched American-style sitcoms since I was a teenager. I prefer the British comedies where I would put Fawlty Towers at the top of the list. Anyway the followup phone call asked me about the commercials I saw during this preview. The emphasis was on the commercial for “ground beef assistant,” an ad I don’t even remember watching. Basically, I panned the show and didn’t remember the “most important” commercial.
• The Oakville Choral Society started its rehearsals last night. I’ll have to talk to the director as I can’t attend and sing at either Christmas concert this year as it conflicts with the Bell’Arte Singers gig.
• I had made a couple of changes to the Postgresql database functions and was surprised that the scripts took so long to execute. One optimization was to move a couple of sub-selects out of the loop. This made the select loop about 10 times faster. Today I found the other slow part was a Perl sub being called in my script but, because the –debug switch wasn’t set, nothing was being printed. However, a large hash of hashes was being built and consuming memory and several minutes(!) of CPU time. I rewrote the sub call so it definitely wouldn’t be used unless I turned on debugging.

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Perhaps it’s the adjustment from vacation to work or that I’m taking antihistamines for ragweed causing less restful sleep or the dog barking at 4 a.m last night. Though it has been a four day week I feel like it has been six.

I was pretty sleepy yesterday afternoon at work. One of the guys on the canoe trip says it is embarrassing enough to fall asleep at work. It is especially so when you wake up and find there’s a polaroid picture of you snoozing sitting in front of you!

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A dog ran across the street dragging his “cord-reel” leash behind him to meet my dog. At first he started sniffing Finnegan but then “it” started barking and growling. By this time the owner had grabbed the reel but didn’t stop the leash unreeling as the dog chased Finnegan around my legs. Before I had a chance to grab that dog’s leash I was burned.

Rather than banning pit bulls I think Ontario should ban irresponsible pit bull owners, reel leashes and owners of dogs who can’t control their pets.

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I really stubbed my toe last night. It was so sore this morning that I was noticeably limping. I basically “hobbled” with the dog. I couldn’t run or jog: more sniffing time for him! Tonight I was able to jog a bit with the dog and even not think of my right, baby toe for a short while. Now there’s a bruise on my toe extending to my foot. Was it broken? I suppose I could tape it to the toe next to it tomorrow and see if that helps.

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My wife, Finnegan and I had a relaxing vacation at Summer House Park on Miller Lake about a half hour drive from Tobermory. We swam, hiked on the Bruce Trail, read books and magazines. No email, no phones: What bliss for a week. My favourite sign at the “Park:”

No outside radios allowed.

We liked it so much we’ve booked a week for next year.

In other news I have found out that my father, who lives in Vancouver, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately the prognosis for this type of cancer is not good though we will all hope and pray for the best of all possible outcomes.

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We paddled some and portaged about 8.4 km altogether in 5 days. I recall only one night where I slept “in” my sleeping bag. Thank goodness the lakes are so close by—we needed to swim a lot to keep cool.

Then my niece, the youngest daughter of my brother in Victoria, came to visit. Though she is 14 years old we felt like we had a kid again. Finnegan liked her because she ran and played a lot with the dog.

This morning I got up at 6 to take her to the airport. Then I spent today’s vacation day at work fixing a couple of problems with my “automatic” system.

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Should my automatic software systems at work run OK then I should be away from work for all of August. Next week it’s canoeing in Algonquin Park. In two weeks it will be to a rental cabin on the Bruce Peninsula. The rest of the time it will be doing this and that around the house and garden.

The third window vendor came a couple of days ago, a small reno company representing a BIG (we’re a Fortune 500 company didn’t you know) company, the former marketing division of a natural gas utility. Though his estimate was nearly the same as company B but without the inside finishing included. He was a poor salesman IMHO.

• Disparaging remarks like: why aren’t you getting that lousy sliding glass door replaced. [Because that would be another grand and it still works OK after 25 years.]
• Insisting I make a decision by the morning of the next day because of a special offer that would expire “soon.” [We’re talking about my 8 grand I’m spending or at least borrowing against my line of credit.]
• When I turned down the offer, he asked why. [Because you have annoyed me.]
• He was too insistent about how good the windows are. Yes, they are CSA certified but, unlike vendor B there was no ER.
• He wrote lots of stuff on the quotation form and was at the house for almost three hours (no gardening or dog walking that evening). It makes me wonder whether his staff really know how to install windows if he has to write so much.
• I wrote “Cancelled” on the estimate, signed it and faxed it in this morning. The guy finally knew I meant NO.

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While threading between the cars to get to the station the other day I noticed that someone had inserted a flyer about the same size and colour as a traffic ticket on every car in the lot. Lots more were on the ground or blowin' in the wind. I think this “dead tree” spam is worse than the electronic variety.

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Just a bit cooler today so I dug a 30“ by 4' by 6” trench, threw in the leftover limestone screenings and put the concrete patio slabs back on top. Now there’s a level place to build a couple of steps to the deck. For now I’ll just leave the precast concrete step there until my vacation time next month. Once again I have a half cubic yard of clay lumps and rock to get rid of in the garbage: 3 small bags at a time.

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We are kind of sheepish at times because our dog has decided to stop and stare at you while you pull weeds or clean your golf clubs. Or the dog is busy sniffing, pooping or peeing so we say hi to passersby to cover our pooch’s activities. Or its the usual, “My dog doesn’t normally do this…”

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I haven’t given up! However, the evenings are full and I seem to work through lunch: who wants to go for a walk in industrial Etobicoke when it’s 35°C?

I sat in on my first Bell’Arte Singers board meeting on Monday, this being, also, my first in my role as “choir manager” and recording secretary. Like all meetings, it did go on a bit; however, there were some good ideas and excellent suggestions. Basically the choir is broke at the moment so the emphasis is on raising some funds by increasing choir member donations, expected ticket sales and beating the bushes for more grant money.

Yesterday evening, while walking the dog, I met a high-school buddy (we graduated some 32 years ago). Turns out he’s just moved into our area a month or so ago. Welcome to Olde Burnhamthorpe or the Folkway-Sawmill Valley area of Mississauga, Mike! It has kind of grown on us after living here for 17 years and, before that, another 6 years just a kilometer to the west.

And speaking of walking the dog, Finnegan still likes to run even though it was 32°C when we left at 8:30 pm. I’m using one T-shirt per dog-walk these past few evenings.

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When I’m walking our dog the women, especially the young pretty ones, smile at our cute puppy. Perhaps the young men do too, but I never seem to notice. I wonder if the opposite effect happens to my wife?

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I’ve been very busy at work fixing up a website to show 50 homes worth of hourly electricity meter readings. Last night I had to go and visit my brother-in-law to fix and “take a look at” more problems. He thought his washing machine wasn’t working. Because he’s deaf he can only go by what the timer dial says and by feeling the machine. I think he may have been opening the lid which triggers the “kill” switch. Question: why don’t they put an LED or two in the front panel which light up when the machine is “busy?” Obviously we hearing people can tell when the machine is busy; however, an operating light or two would let the deaf know at a glance, too.

My shadow, walking companion, and friend who gives me a real lickin', our Finnegan is back from being neutered. He was gone for a couple of days. Except for the shaved nether part and a bit of one leg for the IV you’d never know he’d had surgery. He’s just as lively as he ever was and glad to be home. I thought the vet would just cut off his nuts but I was told they remove the testicles and stitch up the scrotum. The latter gradually shrinks into is abdomen. But perhaps this is TMI.

We have to keep the dog “not too active” for a week! Maybe we can at least accomplish this over the weekend.

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According to this CBC news article, those old wives were wrong: You can swim after a typical meal. However, the article cautions, that intoxication seems to be involved in a quite a few drownings. Sober up before taking a dip.

Happy Canada Day!

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Did you ever get that sinking, very hungry feeling when you opened the door to the staff fridge and your lunch was gone? Happened to me today. It was easy enough to find the culprit: a colleague who also shops at the local grocery store sometimes and re-uses the same bags. He claimed he was being absent-minded.

This past Sunday we drove to London, rehearsed hymns, Mag and Nunc, responses and an anthem during the afternoon to sing at an Evensong service. A good friend and music director at the church sent out an email invitation and 53 singers showed up. It was hot inside the sanctuary. My wife had only come because I promised we would go somewhere air-conditioned for supper rather than staying for the pot luck.

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I sent an email about a ½ hour before quittin' time to a manager about my new site going “live” on my PC at work. He phoned to say that the link didn’t work. I went over to his office and, sure enough, it didn’t. He suggested I try another PC in his area and this time the http access worked fine. I suggested that perhaps there was a configuration problem on his laptop. Instead, he seemed to imply that it is was my problem. I wonder: he his covering up some form of technophobia? I should have sent the email in the morning—I missed my usual evening train.

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A group of us have finished up the first annual(?) Health and Safety Audit at work. Generally the people we interviewed know the company has a policy and that the documents are on the Intranet. It seems the only ones who actually what’s in the policy and related documents are those like me who had to look up the “real” answers to the interview questions and others who had recently been involved in “incident” investigations. The rest know just bits and pieces from emails, hearsay, colleague chatter, etc. The Safety Manager has his work cut out for him to bring the company into “compliance.”

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In the “I don’t why I didn’t do this years ago” department, I installed a ceiling fan in the kitchen. Cool! Unlike the second floor fans I didn’t have to remove the existing junction box or worry about a vapour barrier. And this time I had an electronic stud finder to locate the joist. I still haven’t had to use any of those weights to “balance” any of the fans (more than a half dozen now) I’ve installed. Since I installed the fans I have been able to turn up the thermostat 1 C°.

I can see my workbench and table saw tops again. All that clutter was driving me nuts.

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Though I slept OK and didn’t go to bed too late last night I was falling asleep at my desk this afternoon and also on the GO train home. I figure it was the smog alert today. It’s like being in a small room with too many people and a boring meeting/speaker. The body just has to fall asleep to compensate: that’s what I’ll tell my boss, anyway. It could be worse.

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My butt is sore today like I’ve ridden many kilometers on my bike. Now I know why some of the Dragon Boat race participants brought foam pads. At least I remembered my neoprene bicycle gloves: keeps my office keyboarding hands from getting blisters.

It was a fun day though we won none of the three races. Thanks to my wife whose sore shoulder prevents her from paddling, we have lots of pictures though I only show four here.

I take two sleeping pills each night. Each of them are about an inch long and somewhat conically shaped. I include a picture. )

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• After dark, don’t let your dog sniff and poke around under bushes—he might find a stinking, dead bird.
• The only thing our dog doesn’t try and eat is poo, his or others.
• You know you are a dog owner when you are relieved to hear the only thing the lab found in the stool sample was (I paraphrase) dog poo.
• People who don’t have dogs seem to comment on how well-behaved your dog is when, just at that moment, he happens to be sitting quietly.
• Our dog is quiet. Whether it is by nature or training, I don’t know. He only barks when he’s really frustrated or angry much like me. )
• Puppy walks have two phases: sniffing every object within lease distance for ¾ of the time and then running home again.
• A little cheese or liverwurst helps the kibble go down especially as it seems our dog tastes exclusively by smell so you only have to mix in a little of the “flavouring.”
• Dogs can learn by example: Finnegan learned has learned to bark at the back door to be let in because he’s seen the neighbour’s dog do it. I think that is also why he barks at dogs being walked on the park path on the other side of our fenced yard.

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The concert of all-Canadian, recent compositions and arrangements went well though I had a bit of cough going into it and my voice “disappeared” a couple of times. Apparently my solo southern Ontario 'r' in Feller from Fortune came through loud and clear:-).

Being choir manager and riser schlepper, I had to run out after the concert and move the van to one of the church doors to pick up the 5 risers. Methinks, after “donating” a half-days vacation, paying for some gas, spending extra time picking up the van from work and being deprived of my wife’s company while driving to/from rehearsals/concert, that the choir will have to look into hiring a riser schlepper for the next season.

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On our walk with the dog this morning we saw that “Company A,” the “business” who took our deposit, dug out and gravelled our driveway but never came back to pave it had visited some people in a cul-de-sac nearby. We had Burl-Oak Paving come and complete the job after three months of promises. Anyway the representative from “Company A” was talking to some people, so my wife gave him a piece of her mind. Said representative came over to our place and talked to me about trying to call us (we have Call Display: no calls). We called them several times. He said he drove by in the summer and it was already paved. Again not true as we didn’t have it repaved until the end of August, over 3 months later. He said the deposit barely covered his costs of the disposal bin. Again, not true, I know what disposal bins cost from excavating for my front walk. They can recycle the old asphalt. Besides, I had an estimate for excavating our driveway for pavers and it was about what we paid “Company A” in a deposit. He told me he’d let the matter drop and not sue me and that my wife should have a Happy Mother’s Day. Yes and I’m sure that “Company A” is squeaky clean and would just love to open their books in a counter-suit.

At least my wife has probably ensured that the people on that cul-de-sac will actually get their driveways paved so that “Company A” can show us they are honest. “Company A” doesn’t deserve any publicity whatsoever from me by naming it in this blog.

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Our puppy doesn’t seem to care for plain kibble all that much. So we mixed it with a bit of cream cheese and he thinks it’s yummy—most of the time. One day I tried grated parmesan, he likes that too and it’s much less messy than cream cheese to sprinkle a bit on the kibble and mix it in. He does seem to get tired of the same old, same old. I don’t think there’s any danger of him overeating. Even at puppy classes he got bored of the liver treats so we’ve bought cheese strings and curds for tomorrow’s class. Outside, however, he never seems to get tired of chomping on any old thing: dead leaves, sticks, cigarette butts, litter, snail shells, bird droppings, … Reminds me of the first time we put our youngest, maybe a year or so old, on the sandy beach. He grabbed a handful of sand and immediately tried to put it in his mouth.

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“By mistake” I left a bit later on Thursday night because I was off for a four-day Easter weekend and I needed to collect a few things and water my office vegetation. At 5 p.m. I got a call to do some Quality Inspection (QI) work. Well, they were “desperate” and it was time-and-a-half billable work. So my first QI work started at the very bottom: inspecting some spare parts for overhauling sump pumps at a nuclear station. Instead of helping my wife prepare vegetables for Good Friday’s family supper, I worked.

All day Friday was spent getting ready for my wife’s family and one friend: a total of 22 people and one puppy. Then, at the end of the evening I had to sort music into numbered stacks to hand out at choir practice on Saturday morning. I’m exhausted. To relax I include an image of our sleeping puppy.

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The hygienist at my dental appointment this morning asked if I wanted the topical flouride treatment. Why? I recall stating in my “particulars” form that flouride seems to give me a migraine headache. This happened both times I had tried it in two different forms. Besides, our dental plan doesn’t cover it if you are over 18. I said, “No thanks.”

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I haven’t been away; however, generally I’m either out (less likely) or looking after the puppy (more likely) most evenings.

Yesterday’s break in the office work routine was provided by a colleague who bumped into a concrete support column in our office area. The forehead cut required two stitches to close but otherwise he’s fine. I remember almost bumping into that post on occasion when I first started working in this area.

I opened (yet another) gmail account in order to archive emails relating to my upcoming choir manager position that I (foolishly?) accepted (before puppy). I have a password generator/saver utility but the new gmail user form didn’t seem to accepted the password(s) I pasted into the field. After several fruitless attempts I tried typing the password by hand and finally got accepted. I’m wondering what Javascript technology is behind that. Perhaps I can adapt it to try to reduce blog comment spam.

BTW, if there’s anyone left on the planet who doesn’t have and wants a gmail account there’s plenty of extra invitations to give out now.

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Finnegan, our SCWT puppy, has to be quarantined to our back yard until he’s had his next set of shots in about 3 weeks. Thus, my wife and I have spent lots of time in our backyard. That maple tree will probably have to come down. There are more splits in the trunk bark and it is “crying.” I thought the dog had peed on the deck but pee isn’t brown and sticky. I guess the sap is running and leaking out of an overhanging branch. I’m considering a star magnolia or serviceberry as a replacement.

And that living room bay window is deteriorating badly. I guess I’ll have to call for some estimates and the kitchen window…and a two instead of four section sliding glass door to the deck would also be nice. Anyone have any windfall profits or lottery winnings to share?

Good news, too, that most of Finnegan’s deposits are now being made in the backyard. We are all learning the appropriate signs I guess.

We bought ourselves a digital camera, NiMH battery charger and 512 Mbyte CF disk. Expect more images…

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A puppy is a lot of work. Feeding, playing, napping, inside, outside, inside, outside, clean up occasional messes, … I think a wireless network and a laptop would allow me to read a few emails perhaps in between during the commas.

Today’s new thing I tried out was calculating differences between “adjacent” rows in a database. That is, given a monotonic increase in reading values over time I want another column of differences between this row’s reading and the last. I think I figured out how to do it by attaching two sequence columns to a table self-join. Now I need to make it more efficient.

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Perhaps the people who say this haven’t raised children.

• Babies wear diapers. Nor are they particularly mobile for the first year.
• You don’t take babies outside each hour. They don’t run around and play for 10 minutes. Then, just after you’ve brought the puppy inside and turned your back, it pees on the floor.
• You can put a puppy in his crate for an hour or so with a water dish hanging on the door and a favourite chew toy, perhaps stuffed with food. Then you can go out, get some coffee and relax for a few minutes.
• It’s a “good thing” puppies are so adorable.

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No I wasn’t directly affected—no money to travel at the moment anyway. However one of the cars on last night’s commuter train was a huge mobile Jetsgo ad. I hope GO transit and the ad agency that installed the mobile billboard asked for payment up front. I wonder if the contract covers prompt removal on the demise of said advertised company.

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I’m tired so I’ll just gripe a bit:

• There’s a foot of snow in the park I cut across to get to the train station—too deep to run through in the morning. It was -10°C. Around about March I should be contemplating shorts and in-line skates again.
• Cold and deep snow mean wearing boots and too many layers of clothing—an extra few minutes to go outside so I just stay in at lunch time.
• On the next temporary music job I accept I will have to already know at least half the repertoire and the other half will have to be in a language I know how to sing (English, Italian, French, German, Latin) and with easy harmonies à la Bach, Haydn or Mozart.
• Non gripe: there be daylight at 6:30 am and the sun is still shining at 5:30 pm. Now if only the snow would melt away…

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I decided to run in the valleys today; however, the rain last week has made everything icy. You get kinda get slowed down gliding or taking steps across the sloping icy parts.

I finally used my router and new stand to make some small ½ in x 1¾ in parts out of PVC moulding for my wife’s Indian flute making club. I used the switchable two-outlet strip to also power the vaccum cleaner to suck up “some” of the chips. As is customary, the setup took longer than the actual fabrication. I figure with the cost of the stand and the two straight bits I bought each part only cost about $10 each to make!

I had a look at the music that I will be singing to help out the bass section of another choir. There are several Finnish songs to learn. With the help of the Internet, I have found an audio pronunciation guide. It turns out that Finnish is similar to Italian in that you learn a few rules and you can almost sing the language like a native. I’m glad English is my mother tongue. Otherwise, how would I know how to pronounce cough, rough, through or thorough? There’s also a Gaelic song. Instead of accents these folk add extra consonants and vowels to symbolize the sounds. Sometimes it seems a one syllable word has 10 letters!

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It was too cold (-3°C) to do some “work” in my garage workshop but I did do some tidying up. Today’s tossed items included:

• a box of foam trimmings (for packing?)
• a couple of computer power supplies
• a parallel port scanner (remember those?)
• lengths of coax ethernet cable (cat-2?)
• several speakers from the intercom system that used to be in our house (quaint 1970’s technology)
• wood structures I built to go on things I no longer have
• junk (of course!)

Then I rearranged the remaining stuff for somewhat easier access. Perhaps this spring I should see what I have stacked and stored along with the two or three 4' x 8' sheets of dry wall.

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I rehearsed the Messiah (parts 2 and 3) with a (new to me) choir on Saturday morning. Today the Oakville Choral Society sang at Oakville’s Town Hall in support of an Oakville Arts Centre. As usual our half hour slot was delayed by at least half an hour.

I would have said my script was done until I analyzed some binary files. I programmed strictly to the spec.; however, it seems there must be a work-around because I’m missing all of channel 3’s data since the Feb. 3 whereas the old program gives data for that (and all the other) channel. I shall see if the firmware guys are ignoring their own extra parity byte.

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Either my wife is into money laundering or she forgot to check her pants' pocket. Should I consider the $10 and $5 bills my tip for unloading the washer and hanging up the stuff?

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The union shared an arbitration settlement with management after 17 hours of mediation-arbitration bargaining(!). The details seem somewhat unusual: such as 1.5% every six months for the three years of the new contract.

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I put a greeting card addressed by my wife in the mailbox for someone in another city. A couple of days later it arrived in the mail. Canada Post has such intelligent mail sorting machines that it must of decided that the return address sticker pasted to the back of the envelope was a better address then the one my wife had hand-written on the front. She has very legible hand-writing by anyone’s standard. We know it was machine-sorted because of the flourescent bar codes on the front of the envelope beside the stamp. We have mailed it again. This time my wife put To: on the front and From: on the back. Perhaps those bar codes will trigger a manual override and have the card sent on. We’ll see.

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I got the training today. I can hardly until wait the trainer’s stories come to pass—I’m looking forward to a steak dinner at a posh “Gentlemens” Club; or the Call Girl that accompanies you on the elevator up to your hotel room. Neither ruse swayed him. His point was that integrity is really your only trump card in rejecting something because of a non-conformance.

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I was part of the chorus for Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance several years ago. It was fun; however, I didn’t enjoy driving the half hour or longer commute at the tail end of rush hour to get there. The performances take place at the end of January so there are rehearsals around Christmas and snowy weather to drive in. The stage director, a friend, asked me in an email if I would come out and see the show this year. As the title suggests I probably won’t. Upon reflection I can think of these reasons:

• I’m not partial to sitting for a couple of hours as an audience person.
• I don’t like being in the audience when I could have been part of the show. This also applied to being in the congregation and not the church choir.
• The older I get the less I can stay awake in the evenings—especially if I’m just sitting and watching.

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I guess the new South Common Walmart is popular. I counted at least half-a-dozen of their shopping carts abandoned in the park path I ran through this afternoon. Shopping carts look unsightly at the best of times but especially so against new fallen snow. I wonder why “they” don’t have coin locks or some other means of preventing their lossage?

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Monday, Tuesday and today I caught the last commuter train arriving at 7:31 pm at the local station. By the time I’ve eaten supper and done some chores it is after 9 pm. Tuesday I got home just after 7, ate a hurried meal and drove to choir in Oakville. Fortunately these fuse tests will be over tomorrow and the associated long work days.

Though this week has been like a field trip: I can’t charge all my meals, I haven’t rented a car, I don’t stay in a hotel and I still have to handle the odd “emergency” with other work projects.

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A client visited work to witness tests this week. Today was a setup day so I ended up talking a lot with him, showing the client around and expensing him to lunch. After he had left for the day the test setup was finally completed and I witnessed a couple of trial runs. Got to work at 8:00 am. Left work at about 6:30pm. From house to return was 12½ hours all told. Maybe I’m strange but I like to do something “different” i.e. not work, at lunch even if it’s eating a bagel and reading slashdot at my desk. Tomorrow I’ll have to go out for a walk despite the predicted -32°C windchill.

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I was able to renew both my driver’s and vehicle licences in less than ten minutes today. I remember the old days when everyone had to renew their vehicle licence at the same time yearly: there were always lineups. Today, walking to the mall and back to work took much more time than the renewals.

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10°C here and only 4 in Victoria where one of my brothers lives. All our snow cover is disappearing fast and the local creeks and rivers are swollen with floodwaters.

Today I chose to walk. As a bonus, more “happens” than when I run:

• I asked a women what was the breed of her three dogs: Cairn terriers a.k.a. “Toto” dogs.
• Another woman was walking her pure white full-size poddle which was wearing four black boots!
• A man asked me about finding a condo / apartment on a particular street. The problem is that this street is a “ring road” and there must be dozens of townhouse developments along it. I could only point out where he was on the map he was carrying. It looked to me like he should be on the other side of the ring about a ½ km away.
• I found a retaining wall next to the sidewalk covered in English Ivy. I should take some cuttings and root them for transplanting in the spring between the new walkway and the garage: a very shady place.

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I spent about 3 hours this morning drinking coffee and reading a book, The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams: a parallel Faerie world-type fantasy. The whole idea of have the time to sit and read for a while is just “awesome!”

In the afternoon I went shopping for some sort of tall, narrow shelves to house my wife’s sweater “collection” and for an “upper shelf” for her sewing where she can put boxes of her “stash” items. I discovered our little Aveo⁵ hatchback can hold a 16" x 8' board with the hatch closed. If I had taken our Buick Century I would have had to have that board sticking out of a back window in these -10°C temperatures.

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I was going to run on the treadmill this morning but saw a couple a couple of joggers go by on the park path behind our place. Perhaps the 20 cm or so of snow ice were clear enough on the local trails. Nope! It was a tough slog everywhere that little bit of slippage on the single-track slows you down and tires you out. Lots of calories were burned—the whole idea of this exercise. It was quite pretty though with the fluffy flakes of snow coming down and Vivaldi on the ear phones.

On Christmas Eve we supped at my aunt and uncle’s in Port Hope and attended two of his church services: the family carol service, wherein I reprised my role as a camel in the pageant. The last time I performed this role was when our older son was young enough to be the baby Jesus. At the later 10 p.m. communion service my wife and I sang O Holy Night. Originally it was going to be a duet but I didn’t know my lower part well enough and the young accompanist was having a bit of trouble, so, we sang it in unison. As the weather was clear after the service we drove home. Late Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day it took us about 1½ hours for the Port Hope to Mississauga trip, a journey I would usually allow 2 to 2½ hours these days.

Christmas was a time for family. My older son and girlfriend dropped by and the five of us had brunch and opened presents. My favourite, from my dear sweetie, is a small MP3 player and FM tuner iRiver device. I guess my only complaint is that the 2 point font on the LCD display is rather hard to see for these older eyes. It seems to me that the small i is to marketing what mega was a few years ago. Now I need to collect or generate some MP3s. The evening supper was at my in-laws, both in their 80s. This was probably the last Christmas gathering they will host. (They did get lots of help from the rest of the family.)

I hope everyone else had a Merry Christmas or, at the very least, enjoyed this holiday weekend.

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Everybody had the same idea: I went to the local grocery store early, the parking lot was crowded, and the store was very busy. I was looking over the pepper squash (I like to bake or roast it on the BBQ) and someone asked whether I knew anything about squash. I replied that I knew how to cook it so she asked my advice on which kind was best for soup. I told her butternut because that was listed in the ingredients of the last container of squash soup I had. She grabbed two large ones.

I wonder what the going rate for “produce advice” is?

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The web server and everything else in this domain went down with a power outage yesterday so the hubbo news has been queuing.

Just in time for my brother’s arrival from Thailand he would have been greeted with -25°C temperatures last night. My toes almost numbed out walking to the train station this morning. However, it is supposed to reach 1°C tomorrow: almost time for shorts again.

We have two hamsters for a while—courtesy of my younger son’s girlfriend who’s off to Mexico with her family and the rich grandpa that sponsored the trip.

Two parties on Saturday: an open house at my older son’s place in Guelph and an office Christmas party at our GM's house in the country. Half the guests parked at the bottom of the long hill because it was too slippery to climb without four wheel drive. In fact tow trucks had be called in to extract the caterers' van from the ditch. But it was a good party, even the company president appeared to be having a good time.

Today was my last work day until the New Year. Except I might have to go in on Christmas Eve to make sure a script is processing some new files that will be coming in by then.

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After two days of busing it to the QMS internal auditor training course I’ll be glad to get back to GO Transit:

• The trains are (usually) on time.
• I don’t have to transfer nor do I have to wait between 10 minutes to half an hour to catch the transfer bus at a cold bus terminal where smokers are puffing away.
• If I have to stand, it is only for 15 minutes.
• There’s only 3 controlled stops between my arrival and destination stations.

It seems worth that extra $1.25 somehow.

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It’s been an exciting day learning about internal auditing for ISO9001:2000 the standard for QMS. I have another day to go. On a scale of 0 to 10 of excitingness this rates at least 0.0031415926535. Compare this to SRED which I’d give a rating of 0.000000000141421356237. Oh well, it keeps me busy and adds something to the résumé.

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I met my boss in the washroom on my way out tonight. I couldn’t very well tell him my train was coming since he was describing some billable work I’d be doing in the New Year. Luckily, the train was just late enough that I could run and catch it.

I overhauled a part of my web site of power line carrier based meter reading data in preparation for a new trial at a different utility. In the process I broke the automatic script which updates two exisiting trials. Luckily I discovered the error (the new htpasswd was missing an entry) before I left tonight: I’ll be away from work for two days to get ISO9001:2000 auditor training.

There was an unlucky bit: a part in my office chair broke. I can no longer adjust the tilt of the seat back. Come Friday morning I think I’ll get a similar chair I discovered in our conference room and “turn in” the old one.

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Today’s Word-a-day email was a word that looks like something my son would have made up. I think the definition is rather boring, IMHO.

backwardation (BAK-wuhr-DAY-shuhn) noun

A premium paid by the seller to the buyer for deferring delivery of stock or some other product. Opposite of contango.

I took today off to rest up for tonight’s Mostly Messiah concert.

We had sold chocolates to cover the cost of moving riser’s in and out of the church. However, the rental contract person and the wedding booking person both booked the church. We took down the risers after the dress rehearsal Wed. for the wedding rehearsal Thurs. I helped set up the risers this morning. We’ll have to take them down again after tonight’s concert and set them up again tomorrow afternoon after the wedding. I don’t think I’ll be able to make that setup session as I have another dress rehearsal on Sat. morning for Sunday’s concert. I think the stage manager will either have lost all his hair or have it turn completely white after all this.

On a cheerier note the OCS are sold out! I heard the ticket person had just one ticket left out of 800 on Wed. for the two performances tonight and tomorrow.

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I remember the first LED's I “owned” were in a calculator I bought in 1975. Now I can trim my eaves and eavestroughs with LEDs. I think they have a richer, red colour than coloured incandescent lights plus they are claimed to last 200,000 hours. A quick calculation based on 8 hours/night for a month each year means that I will enjoy 833 years of use from these puppies. I’ll be sure to include them in my will so that the next 30 generations of my descendents will be able to enjoy them, too.

It was the first run of the season where ice is forming on the puddles. Fortunately there wasn’t much wind so a fleece sweater over my long-sleeved running shirt sufficed. I was “slow” today about 1:08 instead of the 1:04 I’ve be able to do in the last couple of months. I’ll blame this on being out late last night.

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With two separate choir rehearsals these past two evenings, I’m not getting under the covers until well past my bedtime. 6:20 a.m. is far too early to get up these still-dark mornings. I think I’ll go to bed very, very soon.

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A friend of ours said he saw us on TV on Friday. We watched ourselves on the program today. About 3 hours of taping was turned into just 3 minutes of air time. Just as well, as neither my wife or I were particularly proud of our “performances.” Our younger son had a great laugh about it after hearing our description of the taping and seeing what actually aired.

I bought a toilet flapper today as the old one doesn’t seal anymore. The main floor toilet has a newer type of float valve which only operates when the level goes down unlike the ball float variety. Because of the leak the toilet would spontaneously fill every so often. Anyway, while I was at Rona I picked up some LED Christmas lights for both inside and out. Though they are more expensive, I want to avoid the several hours I might spend this year tracing the burnt out bulb(s) on 300 light strings. I also bought a rubber mat, the kind you put under small rugs on hardwood floors to keep them from sliding. I’ve put this in the new car to keep the bottle of wind shield washer fluid from sliding back and forth in the hatch area.

A tenor from our choir and I practiced our duet, “Suscepit Israel” from The Magnificat by G. B. Pergolesi this afternoon. We’ll be rehearsing it with orchestra tomorrow evening and we’ll be in concert next Saturday and a week later the following Sunday.

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We (older son, gf, wife and me) sat in the studio audience for Monday report last Friday. Now I know why Rick Mercer’s monologues sometimes don’t get the laughs they deserve: he’s a perfectionist, if he flubs a word or two he’ll repeat the whole thing. The plastic stacking chairs weren’t particularly comfortable and we watched the tape segments on TV monitors just like we would at home. So the fun was visiting with my son and gf. After the taping we ate at the Planet Hollywood restaurant next to the Skydome. This P.H. isn’t nearly as impressive as the Niagara Falls location.

My younger son turned 20 yesterday. We are no longer the parents of teenagers.

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My wife cringes when kids do foolish things or their parents don’t watch them carefully and there are “near misses.” I guess I do too. However, what gives me frissons are people who don’t work safely. Examples I’ve seen include someone sawing grooves in concrete curbs with a gas-powered diamond saw and not wearing safety glasses or hearing protection. Yesterday’s action was a guy on a metre-wide scaffold about 6 or 7 metres off the ground. There was no railing and the guy wasn’t wearing any safety harness or fall-arresting apparatus. He was removing bricks over a window with a drill-like machine and, again, he didn’t appear to be wearing safety (or any) glasses or goggles. It kind of saddens me when I see this.

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As it started out sunny this morning I spread the second bag of polymeric sand in the paver cracks of my new walkway. It did sprinkle a bit but never enough that I had to stop this activity. The tedious part was removing the little leaves and seeds that had fallen in the cracks before I spread the sand. I found a probe from a dissecting kit worked well for this task. So, now the walkway is essentially “done.” I need to “edge” my porch with 2“x6” boards and, if the weather forecast is for nice weather next weekend, I’ll order a couple of cubic yards of “quadruple” mix to spread along the edges.

I cleared the deck of leaves and patio furniture. Though it threatened rain again, I raked and shredded leaves in the backyard: making at least a half a dozen bagsful of mulch. Then I mowed the lawn for what should be the last cut of the season. Though the chipper-shredder works well, the vacuum-mulcher is still the best tool for vacuuming leaves out the of the gardens and evergreen shrubs.

I also went for a run. The change from EDT to EST, and the cloudiness meant it was getting rather dark by the time I got back home.

If I was playing, why am I so tired now?

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Quoting from this CBC news article:

“Nationally, consumers purchased an average of 85.6 litres of beer a person, 13.1 litres of wine, and 7.5 litres of spirits in 2002-03.”

85.6 litres of beer

This about 242 bottles of beer or just over 10 two-fours or between 5 and 6 bottles/week. Somebody is drinking a lot more beer than I am!

13.1 litres of wine

This is about 17.5 bottles/year or about 70 glasses of wine or a little more than one glass/week. I figure I consume about 1 bottle/week for about ¾ of the year to make a total of 39 bottles.

7.5 litres

! This works out to about 2½ 2oz. drinks/week. The dust on the bottles in my liquor cupboard certainly shows I’m not responsible for this statistic.

Conclusion

I’m drinking enough wine for two Canadians. Beer I’m not sure about but I would guess I’m probably half a Canadian here. As for spirits, I’m only consume a minute fraction of that total. And most of that was on this past summer’s canoe trip.

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The deliverymen said it was too big to move downstairs. Tonight I removed the doors (per the instructions on the fridge) and my older son and I moved it downstairs. A fridge is actually pretty light as compared to pavers or wheelbarrowsful of limestone screenings. We only had to finagle it around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t think we scratched the fridge or the walls. For the rest of the evening I removed the tape, packing materials and remounted the doors on the other (left) side. Now the fridge is cooling off getting ready for beer 'n' stuff.

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I cooked swiss chard on the weekend like I do spinach: boil in a pot with a bit of water until just limp. I like it sprinkled with lemon juice.

When I made a salad a couple of days later there has half a head of lettuce and one clump of swiss chard so I thought I could use it “raw,” again, like spinach in the salad. Now it wasn’t awful; however, I felt like a ruminant because those leaves are tougher than regular salad greens and not particularly tasty. I guess cooking releases some flavours.

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The Bell’Arte Singers had their retreat yesterday in a dance studio in Toronto’s Distillery District. Basically a singers' retreat is extra rehearsals, some sort of “master” class and plenty of breaks to “foster the choir community spirit” in our director’s words. Today’s master class was led by Larry Beckwith, he of Toronto Masque Theatre fame among his many other musical talents. We’ll be singing the Messe de Minuit by Charpentier in “French” Latin. Think Inspector Clouseau asking for a hotel room or ‘Allo ‘Allo and you’ll get the idea.

Afterwards I dropped my wife off to have supper with a colleague and then the an opera while I went to a reception for BAS members. My wife told me my old “friend”, Maestro Bennett, was on the podium. However he was 40 minutes late and the audience was very restive. Her colleague fell asleep during the first half and they both left during intermission—a bit of schadenfreude for me. My wife planned to go to another colleague’s party after the opera and I was to meet her. However, she phoned and asked me to pick her up at the GO train station. We were just too tired having been on the go since 7 a.m.

Today was drizzly. Despite this I generated 4 bags of mulch from the front lawn leaves with my chipper-shredder. Indoors I installed the 3 “boob” lights, hooked up the cable to a bedroom TV and tested a UDS-10 serial to TCP/IP converter box for work. This was in response to a manager asking me if this thing will work on somebody’s local area network. It did. The UDS-10 has a built-in DHCP client. At home I control the DHCP server so that I could see what IP address was being assigned to it. Then I could try out its web server configuration.

In today’s workout I told the treadmill I was 35. Finally, I think I have found a sufficiently strenuous workout: burning over 350 bogo-calories in the 30 minutes.

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My younger son drove to my work today, then I drove him to the Kipling subway station about 5 or 10 minutes walk away. He was heading to Kensington market to do a photo essay for one of his Humber College courses.

Yes my son is quite different than my older son and myself. We tend to be technical type of people and know where we are. My younger son came back on the subway and planned to walk back to my work: except we walked in the diagonally opposite direction. He called from his cell phone and I suggested he eat, find out where he was and I would come and pick him up. Later, he phoned and said he would be at the Esso station on the south side of Dundas at Shaver. At least the intersection was right: however, the Esso station was on the north side. Yes, we love our son but, always, always, always we make sure and write down very explicit directions and give him a map, too. Here’s a person where a cell phone is a necessity when he’s wandering about.

Today’s “new thing” was installing and using the Template Toolkit(TT2). The demo website I made to show off how we will display the daily readings of a new technology has now become four “sub sites.” No longer were Apache server side includes going to be adequate. The only wrinkle in the installation is that ActiveState's win32 Perl didn’t have a win32 package for TT2. I found one elsewhere.

Now, generating more “sub sites” will be a snap.

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Finally the Google Desktop search engine has arrived. Anytime I want to a look for an email in MS Outlook I find their search function justs crawls. After indexing with Google for about an hour at lunch time today, I now get a spiffy near-instantaneous display of my emails à la Google. The last time the virus checker ran it reported 140,000 files on my work computer. Now these are instantly searchable—no more “I know I saved that report/email here somewhere.”

I brought home three ceiling lamp fixtures (a.k.a “boob” lights, a term coined by my brother-in-law) in my canoe pack. The whole lot including my usual knapsack weighed 21.5 pounds or just under 10 kg. I once weighed this combined amount at one point during my University of Toronto undergrad student days. That must have been during the semester I had no midday break time to use the fitness facilities. Of course my run home was slower.

The ceiling lights are for the upstairs hall and bathroom. The existing fixtures have two narrow base bulbs each which, even though the hall lights are seldom used, burn out quite frequently.

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The first bag of polymeric sand I opened had obviously gotten wet at some point. It was clumpy just like cat litter. It even says on the bag, “Keep in a dry place.” Out back on a skid in open air isn’t a “dry place” my garden centre friends. I’ll ask for another when I return the pavers' skids next weekend.

The second bag was OK. After all the back aching work of digging clay, removing concrete slabs, spreading screenings, carting pavers and making a cutout in the driveway asphalt today, it was relaxing to just sweep the sand into the cracks.

We had a little Thanksgiving dinner, just the three of us tonight. My younger son doesn’t really care about the family stuff, especially since his cousin is in France for a year, but he would have missed the turkey. We had one of those pre-stuffed, cook from frozen birds. Mmmm!

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The Bell’Arte Singers had their first rehearsal of the 2004-5 season today. Most of agreed it was a good idea to have September off. Personally, I had lots of things I could do outside on September Saturday mornings. After section leading in the community choir for a few rehearsals now it is satisfying to be sight reading at “concert speed” and already “polishing” the pieces.

In the music library department I’m trying “assigned” numbers. I bought the smallest labels I could find and printed the numbers 1-50, 3 per label, 80 labels per page. This way I hope to mark every borrowed piece of music with a number which will be “belong” to a certain member this season. There have been years where we have handed out a dozen different pieces at several rehearsals. Different people arrived at different times so we sheets of names with at least half a dozen different numbers. It was very hard to keep track of who handed in what at the end of the concert. Hopefully, with one number/one member it might be an easier task. The easiest concerts from a music librarian’s point of view is where the choir performs just one major work, e.g. Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

This afternoon I put 1×4 forms along one edge of the walkway to keep the limestone screenings in place. I am building up the walkway level to more closely match the driveway and porch elevations. I would like to avoid that big step that we were having to take between the garage side door and the porch. I even had time to spread out some screenings. I used a bunch of 2 × 6 x 6' cedar and PT boards I had saved for a few years as a “boardwalk” over the uncompacted screenings.

I didn’t have time for a run today so I used the the treadmill and tried using the pulse-controlled aerobic program as a 40 year old rather than my true age. The average speed and distance travelled were greater plus I felt like I had a better workout in the 30 minutes.

Today’s image is brought to by the U.S. treasury.

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I rented a disposal bin and Saturday and Sunday I filled it with about 6 or 7 cu. yards of dirt and also piled up twenty-seven (27) 24 in. by 29 in. by 2 in. concrete slabs in the bin. I figure each of them must weigh about 50 kg—so there’s over a ton of them that I lifted and carted around with my appliance dolly. Yes my arms and my back are sore. Yesterday I got quite dirty hacking and pulling out roots which, of course, flung dirt all over my sweaty torso. Those last few square feet were a killer: every few inches there were roots sometimes up to 2 in. thick.

Last night we had to drive out to Tilbury near Windsor because our younger son had a flat and the battery wall almost out in his cell phone. He was quite upset, too. So at about 7:30 pm we set out. I changed the flat tire with the emergency spare but then had to drive the van home at 90 km/h all the way. It took me a while to find a station with music that I could keep time with body percussion. Beating myself awake as it were. Remember, I had spent all day being an earth mover and root puller. I finally hit the bed around 4 a.m. Monday morning!

I was going to take today off anyway and start spreading limestone screenings; however I slept in to almost noon. I did some of this work this afternoon.

My plans have changed a bit in that I have decided to raise the front walkway level to match the raised elevation of the new driveway. I didn’t have to remove as much dirt but there were still a lot of roots. I went to the local lumber store to buy some cheap spruce 1 by 4’s to edge the screenings on one side. I’ll just leave them in place and eventually they’ll rot away under the topsoil I’ll put beside the new walkway.

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A message on our blackboard had the notice “van has a flat tire.” So, in order that my younger son could get to school, I changed the “totally” mangled front passenger tire for the “emergency” spare between 7 and 8 am this morning. The latter tire was almost rusted in underneath the van. I have heard of some of the under van mounted tires falling off when their holding cable had rusted through. Then it was a quick rollerblade to catch the last rush hour GO train.

So, I was an hour later at work than usual. At lunch I had to go to the post office and send a package to Thailand. For about $20 it could go by air and get there in 10 days or, for $10, it could go by “surface” mail, i.e., ship and get there in 6 weeks! I chose the expensive option.

I worked an a hour later and got home around 6:30 p.m. My wife had gone out to Canadian Tire to meet my son—the tire needed replacing and his line of credit doesn’t go that high. Meanwhile I had supper, cleaned up the kitchen, gathered up the household and put it out on the street. Finally at 9 p.m. I poured myself a glass of the new batch of Pinot Noir I bottled in the beginning of July. Mmmm!

Today means it has been four months since the original driveway paving contractor removed the asphalt. They have yet to call us. Of course we have had the driveway paved by someone else in the meantime.

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Prior to visiting Costco I went to a couple of landscaping places to get estimates on how much it would cost to “paver” my walk. Including pavers, wall blocks, limestone screenings, edging, galvanized spikes, etc. I’ll be spending over a grand. Then I have to add on top of this the rent for the tamper machine and disposal bin for the clay subsoil and 2' x 2' concrete slabs. However, six cubic yards of screenings is less than $200 so I figure I could get started next weekend.

Back to Costco: we were looking to replace the second fridge we gave to my son. We found a nice model and, for a modest extra charge, it would be delivered. I duly filled in the form, we looked around their new Oakville-Mississauga warehouse a bit and then lined up at the cashier.

The cashier said the system wouldn’t accept the code. She called in “the supervisor.” He tried it and then went over to another desk and tried to look up the code. No go. He asked us where we got the code. I said there was a pad of one page brochures with the code stuck to the display model. Finally after maybe twenty minutes of standing around “the supervisor” said, sorry the company doesn’t deliver fridges anymore. We’d have to move it ourselves. Perhaps my son and I may come back with the van and do just that but it seemed a wasted visit.

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I took some pictures of the front and side walks. I intend “real soon now” to replace them and put down pavers.

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Today I felt like I worked straight through the day with no break: I finished a draft report and sent it out for review. I prepared some graphs for a manager’s presentation where he needed them within an hour. I sent out an estimate for my time to make up a computer to sit on the Internet and collect some data sent by a serial-to-ethernet box attached to a remote data collection device. And I was part of lunch time focus group session on “points to ponder” for our upcoming union bargaining agenda.

And tonight I found out I’ll be busy singing in the second week of December with three concerts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and two rehearsals.

Tomorrow I’ll “relax” and go to my Great Aunt Edna’s funeral…

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I found a pen on the sidewalk near work at lunchtime. It had a logo , “nt,” followed by “Northern Telecom.” Underneath was inscribed, “Perfect attendance 1 year.”

I wonder how long it has been since Northern Telecom morphed into Nortel Networks and how long it has been since pens were given out as attendance incentives. The pen works so I’ll put it in my fanny pack and use it to sign credit card receipts and cheques … or autographs.

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Today’s delightful find was that the awful smell wasn’t the garbage in the garage itself but the maggoty dead mouse underneath the bag at the bottom of the garbage can.

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On these hot afternoon runs I have been carrying a water bottle and wash cloth to wipe the sweat off my brow. Today’s experiment was to use Gatorade™ rather than just water. I really can’t say whether I was able to keep up the pace because of it or not. I find it too sweet. I am speculating whether I should be trying de-alcoholized beer as my fluid du jour. Though, by the end of the run, whatever I use has warmed up to air temperature. Real beer wouldn’t be good as alcohol is a diuretic and it makes you sweat even more.

This morning I sketched my concrete paver (interlocking brick) front and side walkway on 11×17 graph paper. I still haven’t found a good (read free or minimal cost) CAD program for Windows 2000/XP. The Google calculator was a great help in calculating areas and volumes. My 100' measuring tape has handy 6 ft 8 in type markings so I used those on my sketch. Google helped me calculate the paved areas (e.g. 20 feet 10 inches times 4 feet. The answer came up in square meters but the paver company quotes square feet per pallet. So Google helps me there too: 10 square meters in square feet. I could also calculate how much dirt I will have to remove and how much gravel and sand I’ll need.

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It’s almost dark when you get up at 6:20 a.m. these days. I had to drag myself out of bed to return to work after a few days' vacation. Lots to do at work: a couple of mid-September deadlines for a large report and a mock-up website. I’m looking forward to the long weekend already!

At home I’ve started “clearing the land” for the new walkway. Yesterday I removed the 4×4 pressure-treated lumber around the front garden and extracted the 10”and 16”spikes. The bottom 4×4’s next to the ground were several kg heavier with moisture. I’ll leave them to dry a few days before I use the chainsaw to cut them up for disposal. Next up will be to divide and transplant some of my choice perenials. The neighbour has expressed an interest in any leftovers.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Being on vacation at home this week I seem to have two extra hours each day since I don’t have my regular commute. I still get up early though to de-water and feed my son’s dog.

Next week I’ll be off canoeing and camping in the Restoule area on the annual so-called “Ironman” outing. More R&R than iron I’d say. But who couldn’t use lots of R&R these days?

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Now that I walk the dog around the neighbourhood several times a day I get a good look at people’s front yards. I’d like to make a comment to that person who re-sodded their front lawn: you wasted your money. It will only look good for a year or two since you didn’t take down the large maple tree shading the grass and get rid of its roots. Next time, try shade loving/tolerant plants like violets, periwinkle, hostas, ferns, daylilies, lily-of-the-valley or astilbe for starters.

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The lady in front of me at the library had that “jaw dropped” look this evening. Who would have thought that videos and DVDs carry a $2.00/day fine! She didn’t.

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Now that we’ve had my son’s dog, Cricket, for a couple days I can make some observations:

• She only barks at perceived trespassers or when she’s playing.
• Generally she only barks at men — not women, children nor other dogs.
• When she comes up to you and just looks at you that means she needs to go out and do her business. We learned this after she peed on the rug.
• She’s been trained to “do her business” on command. This is rarely immediate as she sniffs around the backyard for a few minutes before finding the optimal spot for peeing or pooping. Or, if we are walking, this can take up to several hundred metres before she’s ready.
• The expression “from pillar to post” is all about walking a dog. You can expand this expression “from large rock, to bushes, to garbage can, to tree trunk, etc.
• You don’t actually ”walk“ a dog at this age (year and a half). You jog briskly and then stop. See previous point.
• The only reason she dug holes in the back lawn is because she would find rocks under the deck. She would try to chew on a rock; however, when she dropped a flat one she couldn’t pick it up with her paws or mouth so she would dig at it.
• She’ll follow you everywhere if you are doing something. If my wife is in one room and I’m in another doing a stationary activity she’ll lie on the floor; midway between us.

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This week I’m driving to work and dropping my wife off at the subway. She’s taking a course downtown and picks up the car from my work in the early afternoon. Usually I’m pretty mild mannered; however, I had to honk several times at this bozo who appeared to be letting off his SO just so she could pick up a newspaper at one of the boxes in a “No Stopping Anytime” zone. After a couple of more honks he drove down the street, barely wide enough for two buses, and turned around in a driveway on the other side. To quote:

In a “No Stopping Anytime” zone, vehicles are not allowed to stop for any reason. This includes letting passengers out, picking a friend up from work, running to the bank machine, buying a cup of coffee or picking up dry cleaning.*

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This weekend was spent at my aunt and uncle’s place, mostly next to their pool. The Service family quartet sang a couple of hymns and a set of four spiritual variations, arranged by my wife, at my uncle’s outdoor church service on Sunday morning. Fortunately, the rain held off until about 15 minutes after post-service coffee time. And the rain didn’t last. By about 2:30 pm when I was running on the country roads north of Port Hope, the sun was shining and it was hot. I was ready for a swim at the end of that exercise.

I was talking to the “new guy” at work. He has bought a new house in Milton but, until it is built by 2006, he will be commuting from Shelburne. He was telling me his fiancé is a veterinarian. When she’s on emergency call and the assistant isn’t available he has go out with her. Of course, these calls usually involve a pet being struck by a car or swallowing something. Makes me glad my wife is a private school music teacher: I might get asked to help decorate, put up scenery for a concert or repair an instrument.

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I have been getting morning delivery of the Toronto Star for the last few weeks. I’m not sure why because there’s been no “compliments of” notice nor has the company pestered us with “didja like it, huh, huh!?” I usually only have time to read the front pages of a few sections and the comics on my morning train trip. During the weekdays I leave it in the mens' washroom for others. Better to leave it for the dumpers rather than in the dumpster I’d say.

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I took today off and did some shopping type errands. These included bottling a batch of Pinot Noir, purchasing a ceiling fan for the computer room and buying an umbrella type clothesline. Over the coffee this morning my wife and I discussed having a clothesline. My wife suggested we could have an umbrella type one on our deck rather than planting poles in our smallish yard. I bought some stuff so I can drill a hole in a deck board and mount the clothesline holder (normally buried in the ground) to a joist. I’m hoping a couple of galvanized “pole” brackets and perhaps a U-bolt or two will make the assembly rigid enough to support towels flapping in the breeze. The only wrinkle to this fine plan is having to work on the assembly while lying on my back underneath the deck. At least it will be shady.

Today’s blog entry is brought to you by the cow parsnip, a large relative of the carrot. I have seen several of these plants in the Credit River valley as I run by. Apparently, though the plant is edible, its sap is photo-toxic in that exposing the sap on your skin to sunlight will give you blisters.

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I donned the inline skates and went for a spin aroung the neighbourhood — much less traffic on a holiday. Part of my route included the U of T at Mississauga campus. Going past the North building I wondered if it was named after its location or someone named North. That got me thinking that if I gave a few millions (yeah, that’ll happen ) they would call it the the Service Building which might be confusing if you were looking for the service building. So maybe they should call it the Jim Building instead.

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I have seen some ads about a Canada Day Ribfest near where I work. I think of some scenes from Fried Green Tomatoes and wonder, “What kind of ribs?”

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Today’s image was taken earlier this May and shows off my pesticide-free front “lawn” of violets and some grass. I think the violets originally came with the daylillies I transplanted from my mother’s house. This house used to belong to my grandparents and I remember dividing up those daylillies as a teenager some (!) years ago.

I woke up around 9 a.m. with a headache and it didn’t improve after breakfast and a coffee. My body was telling me to go back to bed: so I did at 11:00 and woke up at 1 p.m. and felt much better. I had, perhaps, three beers at last night’s party and we were back at home by midnight so that wasn’t the source of my ill feelings. I think my tiredness came from fighting a cold all last week.

My wife and I sang “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley last night in honour of our neighbours' 25^th wedding anniversary.

I developed a theory about why parties of us over 40’s break up earlier. Being in a choir, I know I can’t stand for two hours like I could even 10 years ago. My theory is that many people my age and older have the same problem. Eventually we get too tired of standing and gratefully sit in our cars and drive home. As this party was at the neighbours', we had a short walk home and then we could get into bed. This party might not have proved this theory because I have another theory that throwing together a party with too many “unrelated” people (e.g. neighbours, friends, co-workers, relatives, etc) will also end early: there aren’t enough people who know each other well to get the party going.

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We’re off to a party tonight. Good thing my cold is almost gone. I took Tylenol Sinus yesterday and that left me feeling somewhat “wired.” Even though I took my last dose at about 1 p.m. I still think it affected my sleeping last night. Either that or the “rebound” effect made my head “stuffy.”

My wife and I have been asked to sing at the party — a 25th wedding anniversary. We chose the song last night but wonder how much people will care about it at a party. I don’t think the “happy couple” are really that much into music.

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A continously drippy nose cold sucks in summer time, well anytime really. Perhaps I should be getting plenty of rest — I already drink lots of fluids.

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The seagulls are back again. Fortunately they are not nesting on our building this year. I am not sure why seagulls nesting on the top of a four storey building feel it necessary to dive bomb the pedestrians below. A couple of people have already been shat upon. Perhaps we should get the landlord to paint the roofs red as cited in this article.

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Today a man pulled into Woodchuck Lane off Mississauga Road just north of Burnhamthorpe, got out and asked me (a passing pedestrian) how to get to Ontario Place. He admitted he was lost. I guess so! He had only 30 km to go! I told him to continue south on Mississauga Road to the QEW and then take the QEW eastbound to Toronto. There will be Ontario Place signs by and by.

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Today’s Excel quirk is that if you name a macro sub the same name as the module where it resides then you won’t be able to run it via a shortcut key. Excel justs beeps.

I have received a couple of comments on my maple tree diseases article asking about other tree problems. I would like to point out that I am not an arbourist or tree doctor. Unless you have an obvious bug or fungus infestation I think most problems are environmentally related. Unlike humans who eat bad food and get sick a few hours later, trees may take several months or years to react. I can think of such environmental factors such as:

• new construction nearby (e.g. house addition, pool, patio, etc)
• local climate change (e.g. really cold, really mild winter, sudden freeze-up)
• inappropriate plantings (e.g. walnut is poisonous to other plants, shade from bigger trees)
• “human” error (e.g. fertilizing/pruning at wrong time of year, applying herbicide on a windy day, salt runoff from the driveway)

My upper left wisdom tooth has a big cavity but hadn’t bothered me until just the last couple of days. I phoned this afternoon and was surprised to get an appointment to yank it tomorrow morning. I plan to work from home tomorrow if I feel OK after.

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Today was neighbourhood-junk-exchange a.k.a street sale day. I was looking for yard tools for my son’s soon-to-be-purchased house. Though I didn’t find anything for him, a neighbour down the street was selling his 5hp chipper/shredder because he was tired of storing it. I just had to try it out this afternoon: after I turned my compost piles, I had a pile of sticks and brush to chop. The machine is noisy but it works great. It even chops up pine cones into little bits if I feed a few at a time into the branch port rather than using the brush hopper. I had planned on buying an electric shredder but this is more powerful and I paid half the price for this apparently not used very much model.

Now I guess I’ll just throw out my electric vacuum-mulcher with the chipped plastic impeller blades. I had dissassebled it but found the impeller and motor shaft were one unit. I hadn’t gotten around to taking apart the motor. Even on the Internet I couldn’t locate parts for the unit. Besides it is those pine cones or the “cores” left by the red squirrels that break the impeller blades when I suck up a pile of leaves with those hidden inside.

Today’s weather was great for a 12 km run. The park and ravine paths are dry for the most part and the air was cool. Instead of wearing a hat, I now put sunscreen all over my head and wear a sleeveless top to avoid a “farmer’s tan.”

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We got shingled today: a light grey colour as is (sort of) shown on the right. This is quite a change from the brown we used to have. It was certainly evident the shingles needed replacing as there’s lots of old-shingle dust around. C.D. Roofing did the work based on a recommendation from a sister-in-law. Their bid was about the same as the first one. These two were almost $2k less than the company recommended by a former colleague. As he is now self-employed, I imagine he could write off some of the expense. I can’t.

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I have two project leaders looking for deliverables by the end of the week and a third has asked for a meeting. How’s a guy going to have time to read email or check up on Slashdot during the day? Seriously though, I would rather be billable than doing “make work” activities. Nevertheless, I did learn a lot refactoring the company website and its number of hits continues to rise. I have been able to slough off another, less interesting accounting-type, unbillable task—that’s the subject of a short meeting tomorrow. At least they’ve improved the “unbillableness” by creating separate charge numbers “accounts” for my unbillable time such as IT work and SRED.

I transplanted large irises, an early day lily and a peony from my in-laws' Bobcaygeon vacation home just before they sold it. Everything, except the peony, is blooming now and the peony has lots of buds. I didn’t know there were yellow irises included in those transplants. At least all the rain we’re getting hereabouts is producing some gorgeous results.

Our daughter-in-law’s status at the University of Guelph changed to “admitted” today. Congratulations to my Supreme Princess!

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Usually after the cleaning lady leaves, the house “smells nice.” Not this Tuesday: My wife called the chimney sweep company and he removed a dead squirrel, cleaned the chimney and replaced the broken top chimney tile and added a new screened cap. Now we just have to “foop” up the “carrion” flies with the central vac.

In other house maintenance news, my wife was home when the “we’re paving in your area” man came to call. We had discussed it as something to do so she decided we needed a new asphalt driveway. An interlocking brick driveway was another $4k and she felt that weeds and snow shoveling would be a problem. Our driveway will be compacted sand and gravel for about 4 weeks, whence they will come and lay asphalt.

Both ceiling fans are now up and installed. I decided ours, in the master bedroom, would be a remote control job since the fan is over the bed and be rather awkward to change the speed or turn off in the middle of the night using pull chains. I didn’t have quite as many problems installing this one as I did the one in my son’s, primarily because it was easier to attach the box to the ceiling joists.

Today’s trip was out to Guelph to show my wife our son’s and daughter-in-law’s future home. The SOLD sign was already up. We walked around to the park and found we could go back up behind the backyards and peer over a couple of backyards towards the back of his house. My wife agreed my son got a bargain because the current owners hadn’t bothered to spruce up the place by weeding, trimming the hedge, cutting the lawn and painting the two peeling window frames at the front. I don’t know real estate but I figure that doing those simple cosmetic things could have raised the asking and getting price by $10k. I predict that the last weekend in July will be the hottest of the summer: it always is on moving day.

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Memories of winter are still on some of the sidewalks and bicycle paths that I use to get to the GO station. It’s not a problem for walking/running but it’s annoying when I use the inline skates. Some of it has been swept up near the GO station just today. I hope they get around to the other dozen kilometres before winter begins.

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Actually it was a non-music night. I spent the rest of the daylight hours weeding and pruning until I answered a phone call from my aunt in Port Hope. She and her mom are travelling first class by train from Toronto to Moncton, N.B. From Moncton they will go by bus to my aunt’s uncle’s place in PEI.

I added a page to the company’s Intranet site from home partly via VPN and partly via SSL. I have to cut down on those “fun” IT, unbillable hours at work doncha know.

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I guess Toronto is cutting back its infrastructure repair program. Today I witnessed a pothole repair at the bottom of the Kipling Avenue overpass, southbound side, just north of Olivewood [map]. The repair process was:

• Fill the pothole with asphalt.
• Drive away.

No tamping, no rolling, nothing!

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The latest spam seems to be random character string groups in the body and spaces in the Subject. The only exception, of course, is the URL, the payload so to speak. It’s sad that this dreck gets sent around. The only reason we have to have 3 or 4 GHz machines is so that all those idle cycles can be used in spam prevention analysis.

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I have been a do-it-yourselfer for a long time but I have been convinced to call the roofers in to replace our “just on the verge of leaking” roof. I have done roofing before; however, it was a bungalow and we were adding a second layer of shingles. I would like to have the old shingles removed and disposed of. The codes have changed so there is additional work required in applying metal edging and roll roofing along the eaves. I would have to rent or buy a pneumatic nail gun and compressor or I would be up there several days. Plus, I live in a two storey house—a much longer distance to fall or worry about my boys doing the same if I hired them. All told, there’s a lot of logistics involved and maybe (just maybe) it’s worth it to hire someone else to do it, to get the roofing job done promptly and to clean up and dispose of the old shingles.

Now I am venturing into the uncharted territory of gathering recommendations and quotes.

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According to this article, the recent decline in the U.S. dollar against other currencies means that Mr. Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, is now US $6 billion richer than Bill Gates. I calculate that my last year’s before tax salary is about 0.00015% of Ingvar’s net worth. Put another way: my salary is just 1 hour and 18 minutes of Mr. Ikea’s year.

Oops! I converted the %. The comparison should be my salary to his net worth is 48 seconds to his year.

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Though I can sight read French, German, and “Church” Latin (and English ) “at speed”, I can’t say the same for Italian. We are learning some opera choruses for our upcoming concert with the SPO. To complicate matters, Italian librettists and composers can sometimes put three and four syllables on one note. My other “handicap” is that the first basses are also singing second tenor in some spots so that there’s a little mental “jump” required each time when switching from bass to treble clef and back.

Cricket, our golden retriever “grand-puppy,” came to visit while its owners were away at a party this weekend. I guess it would be more work if we were looking after a one-year old child but there still seems to a lot of time spent with “walkies,” playing and making sure she’s chewing her own toys.

Last night, my in-laws and ourselves watched a CBC Radio One taping of Madly Off in All Directions at the Mississauga Living Arts Centre. The comedy sketches ranged from OK to excellent, however, the musical parts have a “country” flavour—not usually something I go for. In fact when listening to the show, I switch the radio station at the country music point of the show. The only country act I enjoyed was Washboard Hank, more for his unusual self-designed instrument. I would have turned his radio performance off because I wouldn’t have seen the practiced moves the man makes to play his one-man percussion ensemble.

The performance started late because of the lineups at the box office of people collecting their (on-line purchased?) tickets. And, because it was three radio shows' worth, the performance lasted until about 11:20 p.m.: too late to drop my in-laws at the GO station. Naturally, I was planning to drive them home anyway. What with driving them home to Scarborough in the pouring rain, taking the dog for a walk when I got back, and the daylight save time change I didn’t hit the hay until after 3 a.m. Fortunately, I got bit over 6 hours sleep before the dog got restless in its crate near our bed.

Despite the short night’s sleep I only added a couple of minutes to my usual route running time. It was pretty cold today with the north winds chilling a body to -10°C. How windy? On a neighbouring street I saw a blue spruce about 4 or 5 metres tall was blow over. There wasn’t a very big root system for the size of the tree. Perhaps they should grow in the forest, not in the middle of a lawn.

Walking a year-old puppy consists of her tugging at the leash until she almost chokes herself. So we jog for a few seconds, until she stops and sniffs around a tree or post. Repeat for every tree, post, evergreen, garbage can and rock.

Did you know that a golden retriever, given half an hour or so, can reduce a frisbee to a scattered pile of small, slobbery plastic bits?

Even though it’s just after 8:30 in the old time zone, I’m almost ready for bed.

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Someone rang the door bell just as I was about to sit down for supper soliciting donations for some charity. I’m crabby on an empty stomach, though, being an adult I was reasonably polite and said “I’m not interested.” When she persisted I said the same thing rather what I thought, “F**k off.” Telemarketers and door-to-door solicitation people: when I say I haven’t had my supper just go. I don’t care about you or your cause when my stomach’s growling.

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There’s another *ssh*l* out there. Maybe it is a former smoker, you know, the kind who dump their buts in a public parking lot. Today it was a pile of half a dozen water bottles. What a jerk.

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I misplaced my favourite “waiter” corkscrew. It’s been to Italy (perhaps even in my hand luggage in those naïve pre 9-11 days) for our choir tour. It then went on to see more of Italy with two women in the choir. Apparently the corkscrew just went along for the ride because neither woman could figure out how to use it. Anyway, I had to open my last bottle of wine with the old corkscrew. Its “worm” is too long: usually a piece of cork ends up in the wine. This evening I hunted all over for it and then I remembered my wine bottle carry bag had a lever corkscrew, too. I opened tonight’s bottle, poured my glass and then got the pewter stopper… Oh, there was my corkscrew next to the stopper on that little shelf under the kitchen cupboards. Now I have two useful corkscrews at hand.

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I’m using Quicktax, more because I’m lazy: it imports last year’s information. As I haven’t moved or been reborn that data stays the same. I started with my T4, RSP, charity donation slips, etc and it looked like I’d get a $4k refund. Then I added my wife’s T4 information—the refund was halved. I know Ontario tax credits (or lack thereof) are based on family income. Still, there’s my wife’s small business to account for and there’s lots of receipts to log. I keep saying I should log the receipts in the spreadsheet as we receive them but I always seem to leave it until March or early April of the following year. Maybe I’ll give it a push to try and get it done by the end of March.

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What do you write about when you can’t think of anything significant to write about? Perhaps it’s been a long week and I need some sleep. Or maybe today was like that Monty Python sketch when … absolutely nothing happened!

“Notes to self” today include the following:

• The registries and IIS configurations of nodes in a Windows cluster are different. This means your careful settings in the “master” node are “lost” when the cluster fails over to the other node. Naturally there are complicated Microsoft programs, scripts and incantations to try and overcome this. On the Unix side of things I would have just used rsync to synchronize various etc files.
• My wife and I were both born on a Saturday.
• I found OPCW, a simple one page calendar written for Windows 3.1. Nothing fancy, just a black and white calendar that fills the page and has some space to write in some stuff.
• I should look into the Text::Template Perl module for composing emails to the individual project leaders at work. I’m proud of my greater than 80% response rate. When I followed my predecessor’s example and sent an “Everyone” email with a GBSA the response was about 3%.

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On Tuesday mornings, “garbage day,” I collect the odd wine bottle or two from the neighbours' recycling bins. Last Tuesday I collected seven of the especially coveted bordeaux-type bottles—the long narrow ones with the dimple on the bottom. 16 of these fit in a plastic “milk” case without jamming: especially important once you’ve filled and labelled the bottles. I’m collecting these discards so I can make the next batch of wine before I have consumed 30 bottles or so of the present vintages, nor do I want to raid my wine cellar as yet.

My complaint is against three wine companies who use some non-water-soluble gummy substance to affix their labels. Not nice. I have to use mineral spirits to remove the gum once the paper has been scraped off. What are they protecting? You don’t store red wine at temperatures where condensation would be a problem and the label might come off. The other bottles had labels that slid right off with less than an hour’s soak in water.

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I took the day off to compensate myself for the extended days with dress rehearsals last night and tomorrow night. As it was sunny and the temperature reached 4°C, I could remove the last of the glacier on the driveway and sidewalks. Now we just need a cm or two of snow to cover those dirty, icy chunks: dirty because of the sand I had spread on the ice.

I walked to Rona in 32 minutes to exchange an item and ran back a different route in 21 minutes. Yes, I use the “chronometer” on the watch I got for my birthday. One neat feature is the “pause.” I can stop the timing while I’m waiting for the light to change.

Our younger son is home for reading week. He tells us he has had several of his essays published in the school newspaper.

There was a worrisome email this morning that the tenor soloist for Saturday’s concert was ill. However, tonight we got an email that a recent graduate of the COC studio would be able to step in. Neither the Liszt Missa Solemnis nor the Mozart Mass in C are particularly difficult but I’m sure he’ll be spending the next two days intensively studying his parts.

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That TV cable is no longer lying across the second floor hallway. Today I fished it down the cold air return to the basement and thence to the video amplifier near the service entrance panel.

Today’s find at Rona was a spring loaded access cover usually used for access to valves or wiring. I sawed an 8 in. square hole in the wall in order to be able to drill holes through two studs and pass the cable through from the hall cold air return to the room with the TV. Then I just snapped the cover on. The hole patching can wait until I redecorate that room. For the time being, the access cover is hidden by some storage drawers.

The longest part of the job was in trying to fish the cable from the unfinished middle room of the basement over the finished hallway to the service entrance panel. After a couple of frustrating tries in the afternoon, I broke off and ran on the treadmill. Then it was time to make supper. After that fine repast I made one more attempt — this time successful. I guess being exercised and well fed had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the stronger flashlight I used in this attempt.

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Americans are all a titter over a bare breast. Well, it wasn’t even bare since there was some sort of “decoration” over the nipple. I don’t think it was an “accident.” Who is Janet Jackson? And did she need the publicity?

And in other news we’ll be getting six more weeks of winter. Whatever.

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I read that the guy who did the code PC DOS' original three finger salute retired recently. In those old days you knew your PC had really crashed when Control-Alt-Delete didn’t cause it to reboot.

Sometimes I wish there was that kind of key combination on people. Like that fellow who was blasting the ticket clerk at the GO station about a 15 minute delay. As if the clerk has anything whatsoever to do with the problem. The railway line is leased from CP rail. Their freight train went through. The GO train had to wait for the “all clear” on the track. Where was I? Oh yeah. That man needed to reboot or rewind or something and stop being a blathering idiot.

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I purchased a 1:10 000 scale map from the MNR store of the area surrounding chez moi. It was couriered to me the next day. Now I can figure out the distances of my running routes — none of this about 10km stuff.

My back is sore today from all that shovelling in the past couple of days. The local paper says we got a 40cm dump. That amounts to piles of a metre or more high at the sides of the driveway. I most notice the back pain when I’ve been sitting for awhile — I’ve got this kink which takes awhile to straighten. Bending was a hurtin' problem this morning. Suddenly I’m aware of bending to shave, to put my leg in my underwear and then my pants, to put on socks. Oww!

I went out for lunch, for beer and schnitzel at Wally’s, with some of the guys at work and a former colleague . We got caught up on the news of our and other former Ontario Hydroids.

I left work early for an appointment with the dental surgeon. The cost to my dental insurance was over a $100 for a description of the procedure, a look in my mouth and “any questions?” — probably less than 15 minutes altogether. Now I’ll be waiting for the “assessment” from said insurance company on what they’ll cover to remove that wisdom tooth with the big cavity. “Are you sure it doesn’t bother you?” the surgeon asked. Nope.

The Walmart near us (< 15 min. walk for me) now appears to be open for business.

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Racked up the Valpolicella I bottled on the weekend. I also added to my collection of “stashed away” bottles — 6 or so from each batch I’ve made for a total of about 30 so far. I found that I have four Shiraz left from May, 2002.

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After poking along several routes in rush hour for two days for four 23 km trips I wonder why people drive to work. I had to do this because of two dental appointments. Tonight it took me over an hour to get home from work. By walking, GO train and running I effectively travel the same distance in about 55 minutes. The train trip itself is about 15 minutes where I read or snooze. The rest of that time is waiting for the train and at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. I got none of that driving in the car. I can hardly wait until my next dental appointment so I can drive in traffic again!

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Instead of drying the towels in the dryer I hang them in a room in the basement and turned on the floor fan for awhile. In a couple of hours most of them were dry. I turned them in the the dryer for a few minutes to “fluff” them out and dry up the final bits. As a bonus the drying humidifies the house.

I did some walking to the library and the drug, variety, and grocery stores. After all that fresh cold air, I completed my aerobic exercise on the treadmill. Today’s treadmill stats were #3 / 311 ↓ / 97.3 ↓ / 1.5% ↓ / 4.44 ↑ / 10.5 ↑ / 80 ↑ / 48.

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Hmmm, a new year. An Olympics' year, too.

Though they have snow in Vancouver there’s been none here for a couple of weeks. Just because I can, I went in-line skating for my exercise. Not quite as an aerobic workout as a run but I cover more territory. For example, I found out there’s a new beer store opening within 3 km of chez nous. Can an LCBO be far behind — perhaps in the new set of stores being built just behind the beer store?

The unfiled music stack is now down to a 6 inch pile from about six or seven banker’s boxes. I have recycled about a 9 inch stack of unsortable photocopies. Now there’s room on the shelves for current in/out music piles.

A few days ago I saw a large dumpster on the other side of the street across from my driveway. I went to check out what’s going on. A neighbour a few doors north-west was having their entire lawn dug up with a backhoe and three “drain rooter” vehicles parked on the street. Uh-oh! I wonder if those two trees on his and his neighbour’s front lawns have anything to do with the problem? Or should I be worried that our domestic sewer systems are aging prematurely? Not a nice holiday for them. I bet you they wish for snow to hide the mess left after the emergency repairs.

An unexciting New Year’s Day for me: just as it should be. I’m sure the year will get busy soon enough.

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While our cleaning person cleaned the house, I spent the day in the basement sorting and filing music. I had about 40 new items to file and filled about 2.5 large bins full of our choir music. There’s still a bit more to do so, while we’re watching TV and DVD’s and sipping sparkling wine, I’ll finish off this sorting business on this New Year’s Eve.

I ran my usual route ~10km today and didn’t feel any untoward effects from having given blood yesterday. BTW, yesterday’s numbers were BP: 130/76 and BPM: 71. Maybe yesterday’s day off and being perched on a folding chair for most of today gave me extra energy. The question is: will I make it to midnight?

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Best Gift

My older son gave me a snow shovel with a diagonally attached handle and a snow plow shape. I should be more effective for cleaning the two car driveway and that mound of snow the snowplow leaves behind. It’s the twisting, lifting and shovelling which is hard on your back and your heart. When plowing you are just using your body weight to push the snow aside. Now, if it does snow anytime soon, I’ll let you know how it works out.

Human Nature

About an hour after I annouced the new company web site I had one guy come over saying, I notice Bob’s area of expertise wasn’t mentionned in our departmental write-up. Another person sent an email that didn’t I know that the our company has the biggest “xyz” lab around. Hello people! The woman writing the content for our site has been asking around for at least the last six months for things to write about for our web site. Now that the site’s been improved, they finally realize that their department’s input is missing.

Christmas Eve Solo

I sang O Holy Night “a cappela” this year. The, ah, “organist” had never seen this arrangement and initially started off in the wrong clef — sounded awful. Then, there’s not enough room on the organ console to play with two hands in the bass clef so we moved to the piano. She still could hardly play it. So I sang without accompaniment to the 20 or so persons who came to the 10 p.m. Christmas Eve communion service. My only real mistake was starting a third too low. Instead of the key of B I effectively sang it in G, a bit low for my voice, but only my wife would have aware of the problem.

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What can I say, I’m a guy and I left it late but there’s still a week to go until Christmas. Of course, last week I had 3 rehearsals and two concerts. Anyway, I bought “something nice” for my wife and, if she doesn’t like it, then, with the receipt, it’s kind of like a gift certificate for that store. I’m glad I wasn’t dragging along some kids, or shopping with my sisters, and my cousins, and my aunts.

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In the article Head injuries in nursery rhymes: evidence of a dangerous subtext in children’s literature there’s a poem:

A Medically Sound Nursery Rhyme

Little Johnny rode his bike,
No helmet on his head.
He took a fall and split his skull,
His mother feared him dead.

She rushed him to the ER,
Where they checked his neuro signs.
They noted a blown pupil
And inserted IV lines.

They called the neurosurgeon,
Who came in and drilled a burr.
Now Johnny’s fine; he rides his bike,
But he’s helmeted, for sure.

It’s good to know that doctors can be even more nerdy than engineers!

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While I’m having a post-concert beer, crackers and cashews I thought I’d jot down some notes.

• I stayed home to take a half day off and a half day of work. Turns out the work took more than half a day. At least I slept in and rested my voice for those solos I did tonight. An E above middle C at 8:30 p.m. sounds much better after waking up after 8:00 a.m. than waking up with the alarm at 6:20 a.m. as I normally do.
• There’s a new link on our corporate web page because they want the mobile workers and salesmen to read their email on the web rather than having to lug a laptop and use expensive hotel internet hook-ups and VPN connections. I put that link and the web page it points to on the web site today. Slowly, but surely, they are inching ahead to approve my new design for the site.
• Our borrowed copies of the Missa Solemnis by Franz Liszt came from Hungary last week. I’ll hand them to BAS members at the two rehearsals with the Scarborough Phil' this week.

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My wife brought home 4(!) pummelos today. Someone was giving out samples at the store and she thought we should try some.. To me, they resemble huge limes. As you can see from the latin name, citrus grandis, they’re big. About 15cm in diameter as shown in the image referenced by this thumbnail. The skin or rind is thick and spongy and the separations between the sections are too tough to eat. The taste resembles a sweet, non-bitter grapefruit. Indeed, I read on the internet that the pummelo was crossed with some others of the citrus family to create the grapefruit. This fruit is an “eat with the family or good friends food.” Other such examples include mango, ribs, chicken wings, i.e., all are kind of messy to eat. Pummelos are good but, for all the work involved in the preparation, I would prefer golden pineapples. They take as much work to prepare but the fruit is much sweeter. (My wife also bought a pineapple.)

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I remember saying to my kids when they were small:

Sleep tight.
Don’t let the bed bugs bite.

According to this CBC article the local bed bug population is increasing. International travel brings 'em in and spreads the critters around. We don’t nuke our dwellings anymore with those strong pesticides, either. I remember one summer job years ago at a building where part of it was an overnight hostel for homeless men. Each week we went around the dormitories spraying all the matresses with insecticide. I wonder if they still do that?

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Nothing extraordinary happened today. I cleaned a shelf in the “storage” room of our basement and threw out odd cans of paint dating as far back as 1997. I read the Saturday paper while listening to Choral Concert. Today’s feature were works by Benjamin Britten born on 22 November 1913. We’ll be singing a few of his choral pieces at our Christmas concert.

Later on my wife invited me to walk with her to the Tim Hortons on Eglinton near Glen Erin, about a 3 or 4 km round trip I’d say. The weather wasn’t as mild as they predicted — only 9°C. Warm enough, though, for an Iced Cappuccino.

Back chez nous, my wife made oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies from a recipe on the 2004 Milk Calendar. I adapted from the recipes on the Shake and Bake box and put the coated chicken on a bed of rice and diced tomatoes. I also baked a pepper sqash. All quite yummy.

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Today’s stats (as if you really care…) were #3 / 372 / 116 / 5.0% / 4.06 / 9.7 / 79 / 48. The ramp was increased from 3 to 5 so the calories increased by 58. The only part of exercise I really dislike is that sweaty, drippy feel — the faster I can rid of that, the better. I guess it may be obvious but once you’ve stopped the intense activity, especially in the dryer atmosphere of a heated house, a brisk rub with an old towel gets rid of the sweat.

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The cleaning person always dusts are clock radio in a clockwise direction, thereby turning down the volume. Usually I check but it was late and I was tired. With a mad scramble I caught the last morning GO train and my wife made it to school with 5 min. to spare.

Part of the reason I was tired and slept so long was the extremely brief power flicker which caused the wireless doorbell to chime continuously. It woke me up; so I had to go downstairs and unplug it. Why don’t they test embedded systems under those conditions? It has happened before. I think it needs a zener diode to prevent the power supply from feeding the circuit until full voltage has been attained. I remember adding this to circuit years ago to prevent such a problem.

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I am not going to reply to your spam. Here’s what my inbox looked like:

Sender		Subject
A n n e t t e   E s t e s		clearheaded Addd ssssize to your bnkkevn kzo pmmt

The only actual English words are “clearheaded”, “to”, and “your” which do not provide this literate individual enough information to decide to open your email. I recommend giving up spamming and junk that spam software. Of course I am assuming that you, A n n e t t e, can read English.

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Increased the speed limit, decreased the ramp. Hmmm, the calorie count went down but, of course, the distance increased: #3 / 314 / 98.1 / 3.0% / 4.09 / 9.7 / 79 / 48

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I spent about 7 hours vacuum-mulching leaves yesterday. Besides a coffee break and lunch I had to interrupt my activity to perform dental surgery on the machine’s impeller about half way through. One tooth or blade from the impeller broke off, probably from a pine cone “core.” To achieve balanced operation again I had to break off the tooth on the other side. Since there were originally 10 teeth I guess my leaf vacuum now has 20% less suction. It didn’t seem to matter — I was able to process all the maple and magnolia leaves in the backyard. My back sure is sore today. I think the leaf vacuum-mulcher is designed for someone about 6”shorter than I am so I had to stoop slightly. The sore back could also be due to the twenty plus times I filled the bag. The compost bins are full and most of the gardens are mulched. And, a real bonus, because I didn’t around to doing the job until this weekend, the leaves have all fallen off the trees!

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Though it has been rainy all day I got some errands done tonight including:

• A flu shot injected at the local walk-in clinic, provided free of charge by the Ontario government.
• Choir rehearsal is next Monday evening — civic election day in Ontario. So I voted at the advance poll tonight. It took me longer to find a parking spot than to vote.
• I used the old van as my wife needed the car. Of course my son has run it down to below 1/8^th. Fortunately the gas is cheaper as the moment at 63.5¢/litre.
• And I put out the garbage — the usual Monday night chore.

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It’s been a busy weekend but I still haven’t had the time to mulch those leaves — today it rained all day. You’d think it was a Vancouver winter for heaven’s sake.

Again our accompanist cancelled at the last minute for Saturday morning’s choir practice. We managed without him. Even those of us who have performed Handel’s Messiah many times, still find things to learn. Especially when another part is still learning it and not singing their entries so that we can hear our cues. Also, each conductor has his or her own way of approaching the work.

This weekend’s main activity was looking after Cricket, my son and daughter’s dog. It’s like having a two year old around again. Our younger son is also home for the weekend and his nocturnal wanderings and Cricket’s wanting to protect us(?) woke us up in the wee hours of the morning both Friday and Saturday nights. Yawn! That dog just likes to go. He was walked at 4:00 am Saturday morning then again at 6:00 am for a couple of hours. We took her apple picking with us in the afternoon, threw the frisbee around later and I took her for a walk in the woods in the evening. Still she woke us up barking at around two. So she was banished to the spare bedroom. Despite this the dog’s a lot of fun. Who else can be so excited when you walk in the door?

Since it has been raining all day, I pulled out the tread mill. My dedication to running does not include getting muddy and soaked both inside and out. Besides, I had already walked the dog this morning in the pouring rain. I tried a modest treadmill program, #3 / 344 / 107 / 5% / 3.74 / 8.9 / 79 / 48, which seemed easy enough to do. I’ll have to either increase the % or the 8.9 next time.

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for my aunt’s father. According to his grandkids' eulogies he was a great guy. Too bad he mistreated his wife and daughters at times. I guess we’re all “complex” like that. But, now that he’s dead, that’s history. My aunt arranged the funeral service, told my uncle, the minister, you just read the scripture selections. The grandkids gave their sometimes tearful rememberies of Grandpa. Together, my wife and I sang the “dearly departed’s” favourite hymn, “He Touched Me.” After that my aunt and uncle joined us and the Service quartet sang Psalm 23 to the Crimond tune. As the funeral was not far from where my in-laws live they came, too. At their age, they’ve been to lots of funerals and they said this was one of the nicest ones they’ve seen. No matter what my aunt’s father was like, you couldn’t meet a kinder, gentler soul than his oldest daughter, my aunt and good friend.

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Explosion Metric

Now car alarms have become a metric for the power of explosions: “The car bomb explosion in Baghdad was so powerful it set off car alarms 10 km away.”

New running shoes

My legs and feet are just on the point of giving me “little” pains after a run. This tells me that the shoes' soles are “down at the heels” so that my stride is starting go off. It is time for new runners. This time I went for a completely covered upper — mesh just doesn’t cut it for running in slushy snow. The sales person asked if I wanted to try “runner’s” insoles. I did and felt a bit of pain in my right heel. I subscribe to the maxim espoused by a podiatrist my wife once visited: if it isn’t “love at first fit” then don’t buy it. Obviously my heel isn’t the right shape for that insert.

Shredder

I played an Enron executive with our new paper shredder last night. 1998 and 1999’s deposit slips, credit card statements, pay stubs, dental statements, cancelled cheques – useless bits of paper, all – are now history in five (!) plastic grocery bags. Observations:

1. At one point in time, the company’s pay stub notices came with a carbon, i.e. a completely black back. The sensor to turn on the shredder must be a photocell – LED combination which triggers on the reflection from the incoming paper. I thought the shredder had jammed, but no, I just needed to feed the paper in the other way around. It is also a “point” sensor. When you feed in a bunch of small papers, say cheques, the shredder may stop before all of the paper has gone through just because there is no paper covering the sensor.
2. Don’t fill the bin too full; otherwise, it is hard to empty it into a bag without getting shredded bits all over the place. That square confetti doesn’t pick up off a carpet very easily.
3. Tell retailers that you do not want your credit card chit stapled to your receipt. Fortunately, I only had half a dozen staples to get rid of.

Now I have freed up a couple of inches of filing space for 2003’s useless bits of paper.

Published on Tue Sep 29 15:57:32 2009.

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My wife teaches music to young children from PK to Grade 2. Today, one class asked her age. She replied, “I am probably older than your mom and dad.”

One kid said, “My dad is 52.”

My wife commented, “Well I’m younger than that.”

Another student said, “My dad is 65.”

Again she said that she was younger than that. Another one said that her mom is 41. My wife said she is a older than that. She told them she has a son who will be turning 19 next month and another who will turn 23 in January.

A child exclaimed, “You must be in your seventies!”

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I took the day off today so I could rest up for tonight’s dress rehearsal. And rest up I did as I slept for two hours longer than I usually do on a Friday work day. It wasn’t all rest as I ran 10km. I altered my route to avoid the park next to the public school — too many kids.

I did check my work email and answered one question about a motor starter circuit and another about writing a script to process 6,000 program generated files for just a couple of numbers in each. This is an ideal job for a Perl script.

I also sent out an email to our choir regarding what the men were wearing at the concert. It ain’t the usual tuxedos this time but black shirts. A couple of years ago someone forgot. In fact I think that someone was so embarrassed they resigned their membership in the choir.

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Why is it the bean counters seem to get the expensive, fancy software? The better to track cash flows generated by the workers and sales staff who bring in the business, I guess. What if, suddenly, a major client decides to switch to a competitor because there’s no expensive, fancy e-store where they can conveniently shop for the products and services they need. Well certainly that bean counter software will accurately project the downward trend of revenues and profits! Meanwhile, there’s just a bunch of brochures (very nice ones mind you) available on the web site.

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Now that the days are shorter, I walk to the train station “by the dawn’s early light.”In the Credit River valley this morning a male deer crossed the river as I was walking across the bridge above. Despite the traffic, the deer appeared to have noticed my presence and looked up at me. It is hard to explain; but, seeing animals in the wild that you don’t normally see, seems to elevate your spirits for awhile.

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• I found a better dictionary and thesaurus website (IMHO) today:

  Dictionary Search

  Search for: Search by Hyperdictionary.com

• There’s a weed called Dog Strangling Vine that’s apparently spreading to Ontario. Inquiring minds want to know what kind of dog gets strangled by this plant?

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Bulbs

Planted some spring bulbs with the bulb planter. It works OK except when I encountered the occasional tree root or rock. And my hand is sore from reefing down on the planter trying to get it through our clay soil. If it hadn’t rained a lot recently this task would have been impossible.

Apples

We picked Cortlands this afternoon at the Williams Orchard north of Milton. Police were directing traffic at Chudleigh’s on the way there but that “farm”is too expensive and we just wanted apples. Mr. Williams said the Cortland crop is the best he’s seen since the trees were small. We picked a bushel, ate several and had apple crisp for dessert tonight. We drove the country roads and dropped off some apples at my son’s place in rural Oakville. Of course we had to say hello to Cricket their young Golden Retriever. Now that they found out the dog has a food allergy she’s poopin’ solid again. She also seems to have even more energy and bounce. Today’s trick was fetching, most of the time, a frisbee.

Run

I haven’t been running during my (having a) cold spell. I ran a shorter distance, maybe 7km instead of 10. Seemed to take me the 10km time, though.

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According to the this article smooth “food”like gummy bears will pick up contamination from smooth floors almost instantly. You can’t assume the old “five second rule”that if its been there for less than five seconds it will be safe enough to eat. On the other hand, the researcher found most floors in the university where she did the study were “too clean”to do the experiments — there wasn’t enough E. Coli lying around. Me, I’ll continue to pick up the odd chip or popcorn kernel where I’ve dropped it at home but I’ll throw it out anywhere else. Home sweet germs!

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Are we the better for it? Well, at least we “broke the back”on some of the works we’ll be peforming at our Oct. 18 concert. I tried something new this year: usually I take antihistamines (AH) until the first frost to combat the family ragweed allergy. However, it usually gives me a dry mouth and singing, especially the higher pitches, are problematic. As our retreat was at the north end Lake Couchiching north of the typical “ragweed line”, I stopped taking the drug on Friday and today my voice was fine. I’ll probably take an AH tomorrow since I plan to be out cutting the lawn and doing some gardening. The weather was great today, sunny and not too hot. None of the music is really difficult but the choir won’t just be singing this time. There will be percussion, non-singing sounds, atonal melodies and irregular rhythms — bound to keep us “on our toes”throughout the concert.

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Today it was choir practice and visiting my youngest brother to see their family including my roughly one week old nephew. Tomorrow it’s off to a horse show where my daughter-in-law takes her friend’s horse through its paces. The horse stables are just next door to where my son and daughter-in-law rent the upper floor of a former farm house. I hope he has some cold ones in the fridge.

Back to work on Monday, Oakville Choral Society practice on Tuesday, progress review meeting Wednesday, Bell’Arte Singers' retreat at Lake Couchiching on Friday and Saturday. Ack! Those lazy days of summer are over!

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Every so often Capital One sends me a credit card application for MasterCard. Conveniently they include a postage-paid return envelope. I cut out my particulars and the bar codes, stuff all the papers back in the envelope and then mail it back to them. I wish could do this with spam. If the spammers had to pay even a few cents each time they would eventually stop.

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No UK and France trip images today—my wife needs the computer with the scanner and printer attached. I dislike wasps because they sting for no reason that I can see. I was walking home tonight and brushed something off my shoulder. Not only did it sting my shoulder but it also stung my finger. Perhaps the only reason the sting wasn’t so painful today is because I’m taken an antihistamine for my ragweed allergy. The antihistamine didn’t help tonight though when I emptied and cleaned the central vacuum canister. I’m also allergic to high concentrations of house dust, too. Oh well, at least the electrical energy shortage is over in Ontario so I could turn on the A/C tonight. I adjusted the thermostat so that it will only cool to 26°C during the day rather than the former 23°C setting. At least all this energy conservation will mean a lower bill at the end of the month.

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It seemed I was on the road all day yesterday: First to Port Dover for a funeral of a former colleague and friend, Paul Dandeno and then to Guelph to a 30^th birthday party.

The service was a Catholic Funeral Mass. I felt like a rebel since the priest invited all people to partake but only Catholics would get the “bread of Christ;”others would receive a blessing. I went for the “bread.”My feeling is that communion should be open to all believers and followers of Jesus Christ—not just those who belong to a particular sect.

I don’t feel as sad anymore at funerals where people have died in their sleep of old age. It is a natural stage in the continuum of life from birth to death. The service itself is quite similar to the Anglican communion service I just did with the choir at Canterbury Cathedral. The tunes of the responses are different but the words and meanings are basically the same.

One thing, if you want lots of people at your funeral when you are old: either have a large family and may relatives or don’t move from where you lived most of your working life. Only three former colleagues represented the probable hundreds of former Ontario Hydro employees who knew Paul: myself, my former boss and Paul’s former secretary. I guess there were about thirty mourners at the service. Personal memories of Paul include him being my master’s thesis advisor and the two of us presenting a paper in Graz, Austria in 1990. This was the first time my wife and I had been to Europe since we were in high school. We have wonderful memories of that trip including visits to Munich, Graz, Vienna and Salzburg while we were there.

I also learned a couple of things from the priest’s homily: 1) the New Testament verses (Luke 10, 38-41) in the bible where Rudyard Kipling got his idea for the “Sons of Martha''. Engineers are oftened referred to as the sons (or daughters) of Martha. And 2) where the words for Healey Willan’s motet Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One come from: the Old Testament Song of Solomon 2:10.

The man celebrating his 30^th birthday is the youngest of 11(?) siblings. He is very concerned about being thirty years {old}. Pah! He’s just a young’un. When I was thirty there many more interesting things to think about: my sons turned 1 and 4, I finished my Masters thesis, I left the first choir I joined when I moved to Mississauga, and so on. I don’t remember anything about the day I turned 30.

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The Simple Simon’s pub, about a five minute walk away from Lanfrank house, a residence of the Canterbury Christ Church University College, became the “official”pub of the choir during our week long stay there. I guess it all started with Mr. Smith’s 64^th birthday party. How did I remember his age? His wife handed out copies of the lyrics to the Beatles song ``When I’m sixty four.”We celebrated Olive’s birthday there a couple of days later. The lager was cold, the “extra-cold”Guinness was, too. We could also sample a large selection of local Kentish brews, too. My wife and I played hooky from one of those extra, post-evensong rehearsals and had an excellent pub meal there one evening. It was a fine Canterbury drinking establishment located in a 14^th or 15^th century house called St. Radigund’s Hall.

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Apparently my body couldn’t survive the pace:

• We got up about 6:30 a.m Paris, France time on Friday.
• Travelled by Métro with luggage in order to catch the Air France airport shuttle near the Arc de Triomphe.
• Toronto flight delayed getting to Paris because of blackout. Flight out delayed because of difficulty getting clearance OK from Pearson Airport.
• Got to bed around 9:30 p.m. EDT or 3:30 a.m. the next day Paris (and my body) time.
• Awoke about 8:00 a.m. and felt OK.
• Went for a 10km run in the morning. Cut the lawn, unpacked, did chores, etc.
• Went to bed around 10:30 p.m. last night.
• Woke up about 8:00 a.m. this morning with a headache. Had breakfast, took pain reliever.
• At about 9:00 a.m. I crashed. I couldn’t stay awake and my head was still pounding, so I curled up on the couch.
• Slept 'til almost noon.
• Now I’m feeling fine; though, I’m not looking forward to getting up at 6:20 a.m. for work tomorrow.

If I had only been able to have a couple of hours of sound sleep on the plane I might have been better off. Oh well. At least my wife and I missed the worst of the blackout of '03.

And our house wasn’t burnt down from the candle my son had left burning on the kitchen counter underneath cupboards while he visited a friend. Those charred marks will be our “souvenir”of this blackout.

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Well, I’m back from a week in Canterbury with the Catherdral Singers of Ontario where we sang at evensong services and Sunday communion. I had the opportunity to sing a short solo from the steps of the Canterbury Cathedral quire where the choir sat for the communion service on Sunday in the Nave.

Weather

It was hot. For the first time that I can remember not all the lawns were green in England. Daytime highs were in the 30’s and our accomodation (a Canterbury Christ Church University College residence) had no air conditioning. Fortunately my wife and I did bring ear plugs so we could leave the windows open at least.

The “coolest”concert was at the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge because it was slightly overcast and the warmest was at Notre Dame in Paris. The temperature in the morning was 32°C at 8:30 a.m. Probably the temperature went up to almost 40°C around concert time in the cathedral. Plus we had floodlights directed on us.

Despite the heat I think the choir performed well at all the locations.

I remember being cool once on the trip: while we waited for our spot on the Eurotunnel train to take our bus from Folkestone, England to Calais, France there was a cool breeze off the English Channel.

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I pruned part of the maple tree in the backyard because there are a lot of dead branches. There are several trunk and branch cracks in the bark so I went to the Internet to find out what’s up. Apparently these cracks in more mature trees can be caused either by frost or rapid growth in a mild wet fall after a hot dry summer. Either of these scenarios could apply to our tree. Therefore, not as much nutrients are getting up to the leaves because of these cracks, hence the dead branches. Anyway I found out what to do about the splits. Maples are susceptible to them.

While I was googling I also looked up maple tar spot disease — a kind of fungus. It seems to be common among the maples in our area. Apparently it’s not harmful, just makes the fall leaves look rather unsightly. I guess I should compost all those leaves and be sure and spread that compost only after the leaves have come out in the spring.

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Garage Cleaning

With the deck building I did last fall and this spring I’ve just been shoving things around in the garage storage area. With cooler weather and showers off and on, it was an ideal day to start cleaning the garage. I had a pile of 87 cedar 2×2’s from the old deck railing taking up valuable floor space. I bundled them and put them upright. I think I will make a compost bin or two out of them—should look more attractive than the “holey”plastic barrels I’m using at the moment. I assembled a Tool Tower I bought at Costco last week. No more shovels and rakes falling off nails and bonking me anymore. Seeing as one kid has left home and the other is off to university this fall, I cleaned up some shelves of kids' toys, broken ones to the garbage and OK ones to Goodwill or the Sally Ann. That’s it for the garden tools area now I need to clean up my shop, though, if the weather is better tomorrow I will trim dead tree branches from the back yard maple.

Local Mall Expands

Our local mall, about a 10 minute run, from my place has been undergoing extensive renovations. The new model for malls seems to be satellite stores sprinkled throughout the parking lot. Anyway, the rumour has proved to be true, half the mall has been torn down and rebuilt to become a Walmart: I just saw the sign today as I ran past. I wonder how this smallish mall pulled off this coup?

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Too bad. Last month I couldn’t declare, “Look Mom, no cavities.”I had the last of three “small”ones filled today. Usually, I take the first or second appointment of the day but this time it was at 10:20 a.m. The freezing didn’t wear off enough so that I could eat without chewing a lip, tongue or cheek until about 3:30 p.m. I was pretty hungry by then.

Anyway, while I was busy with my mouth open, the dentist and his assistant were discussing the Canadian Idol show. Then the dentist came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea for a reality TV show: How about getting somebody off the street and training them to do a solo performance with a rock band. The cameras would follow him or her through the training, the concert in front of thousands and the post-concert party. Then the two of them discussed possible candidate bands. Of course I had my mouth open with dental dam and stuff on my teeth. The dentist asked me to think about what rock band would be suitable. At the end of the filling process he asked me what I thought. My reply was along the lines of one, I don’t know the current rock bands, and two, I’ve already sung solos in front of hundreds and, in a choir or chorus, I’ve sung in front of thousands. No big deal really.

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The new (at least to me) Canadian passport office is about a 20 minute bike ride from my house. My old passport expired last year and I had been delaying getting a new one. The first line-up out in the hall to get into the office and waiting room took about half an hour. Once inside we were pre-screened, that is, they checked we had the forms filled out, pictures included and ID documents ready. Then I waited another ninety minutes or so until my number showed up on the display. The passport clerk checked my forms and documents and collected the fee (about 80 CAD I recall). The passport will be ready in a couple of weeks. The woman behind me in the “pre-screening”line had a tale to tell. She was heading out to London, England tomorrow! and, because she was in the middle of a move, she couldn’t find her passport. Apparently for twice the price (about 160 CAD) and a plausible explanation you can get one day turn around for a passport. You have to make sure your guarantor and your two references are available to take the “Do you know so-and-so?”calls that day. Unfortunately she discovered she’d omitted to have her guarantor fill in the lost passport declaration once we were inside the office itself. Too bad — she was pretty and the conversation was interesting. However, I had a good SF library book, The Centurion’s Empire by Sean McMullen and that passed the time.

It was hot (> 30°C) riding home. I hadn’t finished the book and as the library books were due today, I stayed in the cool AC and read all afternoon.

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Oh Canada, our home and native land… Now we are 136 years young.

We just enjoyed the holiday by relaxing and puttering around the house and garden. I ran my usual 10km in the morning, though I felt a bit worse for wear after hauling pavers all day yesterday. We spent some time together just drinking coffee and chatting, enjoying each other’s company. Next week I’m back at work and she’s taking an intensive two week Orff course. We’ll be busy!

Now that I’ve have hauled and cut pavers for a day, I’m thinking maybe I should get around to doing our front and side walks. The existing 2’ x 2’ patio slabs have been sinking, tilting and sliding apart. Great for weeds but not for footing. This will be a project for later this summer or next spring sometime. In the mean time I’ll look up resource material on the Internet.

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Yesterday I was “locked out” of my account for allegedly “logging in too many times” to my free Yahoo! Mail account. My settings say to log-in once a day. So when asked, I logged in and got this message. Cruising through the menus I managed to get the password reset and e-mailed to me. Eventually I could log in again. Of course Yahoo! “care” sends these useless auto-replies. I could tell them what the problem is/was: somebody is “upgrading” the authentication scheme and it is ignoring valid logins. Anyway, I exported my address book and bookmarks to protect that asset.

Today the same thing happened — I was locked out! Very annoyed. Tonight I paid some money to “upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus. Now I can complain as a paying customer. The Plus gives me the option of having POP access. I just wonder whether this locking out, getting new password is just a ploy to get people to pay for their mailbox. Well, I guess after using their free mail service for, perhaps, 6 years it is time I paid something. At least the ads have disappeared from my sent messages and there’s an option to allow you to change the From and Reply lines. Now I can send something to work and it will look like it came from work.

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My dearest significant other of twenty-five years suggested going out for supper so we headed over to the Outback. I had the steak “special”and she had a chicken meal whose name escapes me. Could be the large draft of Rickard’s Red I imbibed. At the end of what seemed to be a long week for both of us, it was a pleasure to chat and have someone else make the meal.

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A couple of years ago Bell Canada had a caller ID promotion. I decided to try it and have kept it ever since. Very handy to screen calls. So, now here’s the choices for telemarketers:

1. Show your company name in the caller ID, say A&W WINDOWS and I won’t answer.
2. Block your name so that PRIVATE NAME shows in the caller ID. Then I’ll harass you when you call for not being proud of your company name or for not being honest enough to show the company name. I won’t even consider your product.

It’s a Catch 22 situation for your typical telemarketer. We need to have a delete key just like we do for email spammers.

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Those creative writing thangs just aren’t happening today — so there’s just a bluebird instead. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the VP of Sales and Marketing regarding our external web presence. It will be interesting to see what he wants. I’ve looked at the log files and I don’t think we’re winning any customers with triple-W method.

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A certain close relative who has been away from these parts for several years is coming to town for a couple of weeks. No-one here really wants to have anything more than a brief chat, if that, with this person. This person has remarried for the umpteenth time to a much younger person whom none of us know. I’m sure this “young”person is just fine; however, the relative has hurt and trampled on the feelings of many us off and on for over thirty-five years. Now, we feel like we’re being shown off as trophies: his siblings, his in-laws, his children from former marriages which failed, for the most part, because of this person. I presume this person has never been able to understand these wrongs as he has never apologized nor sought forgiveness. I treat this person as “just a friend”— only a relative in the biological sense but not in an emotional or spiritual one. That is, there’s no love and little respect in me for that person anymore. We’ll have that “friend”and his new spouse over for supper and a brief visit out of a sense of duty. Other than that, a bunch of the relatives will get together for a party to which this person and spouse will be invited. Will this person realize how close we’ve become over the few years, nay decades, without that person’s presence? Likely not.

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Today was a day much like any other except for the excess rain we have been having lately. The grassy channels beside the path were actually little creeks this morning. And I wore a rain coat poncho over me and my knapsack. Its warm enough (for me anyway) to wear shorts — my legs shed water much better than pants.

It was one lady’s lucky day this evening at the train station, she huffed and puffed up from the subway just at the time the train is usually leaving the platform. Today that train was a few minutes late.

It was my lucky day, too. I bottled up a batch of Castellina, a dark, full-bodied Tuscan-style red wine I had “started”eight weeks ago. Rosa at the Mosto Vinho store gave me a better quality cork as this wine has the potential for aging to five years or more. I’ll try and lay away six bottles, though whether they’ll last five years is a story for another year.

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While I was running my usual 10km in the late afternoon I was thinking of one thing this 48 year old body has trouble with. Scrunching. That is, I was hunched over mounting 24 spindles in an 8 foot railing section on the garage floor earlier in the day and now my back is sore and stiff. Fortunately the achy, breaky feeling goes away but I don’t remember being like this when I was younger. Oh well, at least my deck is now 1÷2 railed. I would have assembled another section this evening but it darkened considerably, thunderstormed and poured rain so that it was too dark and damp to work in the garage. I finished reading the Saturday paper instead.

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Happy Birthday

To my Dad out in Vancouver.

Deck Railing

I installed my first deck railing section today on account of it was a Saturday with a) no rain and b) no other activities scheduled. It took me three to four hours to assemble and install it. After working out a system I assembled my second railing set of the same width in just two hours. I’ll install it tomorrow morning. The main slow down is in finding stuff — I put something down (say my tape measure) and then spend a few minutes looking for it again the next time I need it. Perhaps I should have an assistant to keep track of my stuff.

Didn’t meet someone I recognized…

I went to Rona to get a couple of things for installing the other deck railings and recognized a person. An “associate”was nearby and asked this person if he needed help. Well, I continued on, looking for the things I needed. I remembered his first name later. As I was running home I remembered his last name. So, I avoided the embarassing, “I know you but I can’t remember your name.”However, I’m ahead in this game as this person didn’t even recognize me. Perhaps it is because I had more hair and no goatee the last time he would have seen me.

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I was out all day Sunday…

1. Picked up my youngest brother, his wife and my “cute as a button”niece in North Toronto.
2. Attended a church service in Canton (north of Port Hope) wherein we celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the ordination of my uncle, the United Church minister.
3. Attended a dedication service for a chapel next door to the church that has been at that location since the mid 1850’s. I also sang an anthem (River in Judea) with the choir from the United Church in Welcome. A friend always thought it was just a friendly sign on the 401:

   Welcome
   Port Hope

   until I told him there’s actual a village north of Port Hope called Welcome.
4. Ate lunch (pretty hungry by then after two church services) in the chapel hall provided by the three churches in my uncle’s pastoral charge. I especially liked the maple sugar icing on one cake.
5. Visited at my uncle’s place in Port Hope chatting with my aunt and uncle, my cousins, their cousins, their aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. It was cool enough to wear a suit in the morning but I brought shorts and T-shirt for the afternoon much to the envy of some of my cousins who’d forgotten.
6. Enjoyed beer in the afternoon and pizza with ceasar salad for supper.
7. Drove home in the evening dropping off my brother and his family on the way back to Mississauga.
8. Woke up after midnight when my wife got in from her brief holiday in Texas. She had a great time and we discussed our weekend activities for a while.
9. Very tired on Monday.

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Though I took the day off, I kept myself rather busy. The lawn needed cutting again, after less than a week, with all the rain we’ve been getting lately. I replaced the brake on my rollerblades and went for a spin as a “low impact”alternative to running. In the afternoon I went in to work as the project team which I had been a member of early last year received an award from our parent company. Each of us received a framed, personalized notice and a envelope detailing a monetary award which will be included in our next pay cheque. I appreciate the gesture.

After cake and beverages and a chat with our new “acting”president, I went downtown by TTC to look for bamboo poles in “China”town. The theme for the concert my wife’s music classes are presenting is water. She requires some “fishing rods.”Once I found the poles (6 × 4’ long for $3 plus tax) I walked over to Dundas and Yonge Street to see what was going on at the Dundas Square launch: lots of people and Toronto’s finest to keep things orderly. They closed off part of Yonge Street which reminded me of the so-called “Yonge Street Mall”of more than 25 years ago. This incarnation isn’t nearly the same — just a closed off street. And Dundas Square is neither New York’s Times Square nor London’s Piccadilly Circus, just a wannabe for now.

And finally after wandering around the Eaton Centre I went over and sang with our choir at the second dress rehearsal for tonight’s concert. This session went much better than Wednesday’s.

While waiting for the subway, I discovered the “interesting”combination of thong underwear and hip hugger pants. A young woman was pointing out something to a TTC inspector over the edge of the subway platform. To my mind ‘twas a far better view than ``plumber’s crack!''

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• Dress Rehearsal The choir didn’t “peak too early”last night. The Church of the Holy Trinity reminded my of some smaller European churches I’ve either visited or sung in. Lack of air circulation and the higher humidity of late made it rather muggy inside. I’m not looking forward to sporting the tux on Saturday.
• Lunch on the Deck One pleasant aspect about taking the day off and spending the day at home was having my lunch out on the deck. During the week it is much less likely someone will fire up the lawn mower or other power tool and spoil the serenity.
• Last Post I installed the last post on the south east corner of the deck just after lunch. It went much faster then the first corner ’cuz I’d done it before. It also helped that the nails in the side of the joist were driven in straight so I managed to avoid drilling into them when I installed the carriage bolt holes. Just as I finished up it started to sprinkle and, about a quarter of an hour later, it turned into a thunderstorm.
• Nap I took an actual nap this afternoon. I can’t remember the last time I did that apart from the occasional resting my eyes incidents at work during mid-afternoon. Probably going to bed after 11:30 p.m., waking up at 5:30 a.m. to drive my wife to the airport and running 10 km had something to do with it.

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I installed two more “run of the joist” posts and a difficult corner post. In order for the corner post to line up properly with both sides I had to install a 2×4 to support half of the post. When I drilled the first carriage bolt hole I hit a nail. So I substituted a metal drill. It was only 3/8”rather than ½”so I had to file out the last bit of nail in order to get the carriage bolt in the hole. I didn’t hit a nail with the second hole. Once I had the 2×4 in place (nicely vertical by the way) I installed a 2×2 on the other side of the post. I was lucky this time. Since I am working in the corner the bolts could have intersected. Fortunately they didn’t, though I didn’t have that much room to turn the wrench. I used ½”by 3”lag screws to attach the post to the 2×2 and the 2×4. Now it’s a solid, vertical on two axes, corner post. The other corner should be easy.

I have decided, based on my experience with the corner post, I will use lag screws rather than long bolts, thus obviating the need to purchase a long ½”drill bit. Instead I will exchange those long 8”bolts for 3”lag screws. So item 4 will be to drill two holes parallel to the deck joist in each 2×2 for a total of 4 lag screws. The post in the middle of the header joist in now solid. The posts in the middle of side joists will require bridging as they flex a little bit. Perhaps this will improve once the railing is in place.

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I bought posts for my deck railings which have a notch in the base so you can bolt it to the side joists of your deck. However I have discovered the joists around the deck are not absolutely vertical but tilt inward slightly. What to do? The solution I have come up with will be roughly as follows:

1. Bolt two short vectical 2”x 2”pieces to the deck joist on either side of the railing post.
2. Wedge the crack between the post and joist until the post is vertical.
3. Temporarily attach the joist-bolted 2×2’s to the now vertical post with deck screws.
4. Drill bolt holes through the side of the 2×2’s and post, i.e., parallel to the deck joist.
5. Bolt the 2×2’s and post together.
6. Test for “solidity.''

Today, I did buy a ½”spade bit for drilling carriage bolt holes; however, it wasn’t long enough to drill through 6”of wood. Unfortunately, the local Rona may be closed for the Victoria Day holiday tomorrow. Apart from this problem, the first post is standing proudly vertical; though, not solidly enough for a railing just yet.

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Very tired and sleepy today. Five late nights in a row are catching up to me. So, perhaps I should turn in now while I can still make it up the stairs. Good night all.

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Since choir practice is out in the east end near Kingston Road and Queen Street and since neither my wife nor I had anything pressing this afternoon we walked along the boardwalk from Coxwell to just past this hut. It was pretty cool with a southeast wind from the lake. Some persons with large kites were being pulled by the winds and the blown sand lightly stung my bare legs. The only thing I really miss about growing up in “The Beaches”or “The Beach”was the boardwalk, the bike path, the beach and the lake — almost a seaside feeling without the salty air. Of course I disliked the crowds on warm, sunny weekends; but, during the week or when it was cool the boardwalk was a pleasant place to walk and think about things.

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A Mississauga News reporter called me in regards to Opera Mississauga. I guess this site pops up in Google when looking for information about Opera Mississauga. I couldn’t tell her much more than what than what I’ve already said on my web site. I wasn’t a part of the Opera, just part of the Oakville Choral Society who were “hired”to augment the chorus for Aïda. I told her the“hiring”was more likely in the form of a donation to the OCS. Choirs always need money to hire soloists and orchestras. Concerts would be rather dull with just piano accompaniment for something like, say, Handel’s Messiah, for example. Anyway the OCS director had already said I could pass along his number. (I forgot to mention that the reporter called earlier while I was out doing the deck edge trimming. I called the OCS director to find out if he had been talking to the News as I had sent him the recent articles and he had some strong feelings about the matter.)

There have been a couple of articles about OM in the News recently: a and b. Perhaps the paper is digging further. I wish them luck. How shall I put this diplomatically: I don’t believe the Maestro of OM is treating “everyone”with fairness and equality.

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At long last the buds on the trees have burst and all over the Credit River ravine there’s a green fuzz on the tree branches. Yesterday they just seemed bare. Perhaps it was the over night rain that persuaded the larger members of the vegetable kingdom to “break forth”and greet the season.

My 3km walk to the train station aside from the changing seasons and weather is rather routine. However a property was sold at the corner of Mississauga Road and Woodchuck Lane quite a while ago. The city put hoardings around some trees and a home builder advertised custom homes. Today between when I left this morning and when I returned in late afternoon the little old house on the property has been torn down. I wonder what kind of monster home or homes will go up there? The lot (or lots) back onto Mullet Creek so it could be quite picturesque. And a Mississauga Road address has a little bit more prestige (= more $). It will be interesting to once again watch another house or two grow day by day.

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My wife received the much circulated Neiman Marcus cookie e-mail the other day. Apparently a form of this “big company charges big bucks for recipe”story has been circulating in various forms for at least fifty years. Neiman Marcus doesn’t have the restaurant named in the e-mail nor does it even make that kind of cookie though they offer a similar recipe on their web site. Anyway, the recipe looked good to my wife as it is similar to a chocolate chip recipe she’s been making for years. She made a batch of 10 dozen (!) last night and only substituted more chocolate chips for the nuts. Yum! The only downside is that I’ll have to increase my caloric output in the next couple of weeks to compensate.

Excuse me. I have to refill my coffee cup and have a cookie.

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Last night’s rain seems to have greened up the grass overnight. The violets in the lawn are just starting to bloom now — the scillas have been doing so for the last week or so. Compared to the last couple of years, everything in my garden is starting about three weeks later this year.

It is sure is great to have four day weekend: you can actually get a couple of things done. For example, my wife’s business expenses receipts are tallied and her tax return is filled out. I just have to check hers and mine one more time and then netfile them for the refund we’re expecting this year. I could have done this tonight except I noticed my books were due. Normally, I could have renewed them online and saved a trip but unfortunately I had a couple of periodicals which aren’t renewable.

Yesterday afternoon I did a little visiting. My Dad phoned from Vancouver. I just love modern technology: I continued to prune the privet hedge while I talked to him on the portable phone. One side effect though is that my balding, close-shorn head got a touch of sunburn. Later we visited my son and his Golden Retriever pup, Cricket. She’s getting bigger and her hair, which once was soft and fuzzy is now taking on the coarser, wavy texture of an adult. Still very cute, though. After that brief visit we drove from Oakville to roughly Don Valley and the 401 to visit my youngest (half) brother, his dear wife and my adorable niece who’s about a year and a half. My wife helped her sister-in-law make curtains and us guys moved some boxes to their new rental townhouse. They have possession already even though they don’t officially rent it until May. It’s only a 10 minute drive from their apartment; however, since my brother doesn’t have a car, it’s takes a bit longer to walk it or bus it. They’ll be glad to get out of that apartment building: three cranky, cramped elevators and all.

I guess the only thing that didn’t get done was to review trigonometry with my son. We didn’t get home until after 10 last night and he worked all day today. So I just sent him a bunch of links I checked out on Google. Some of them I think I’ll print at work tomorrow just in case he (or I) might need them.

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Friends of ours came to visit: she and the year-old baby stayed for the afternoon, he went for a music director interview at a church nearby. He must be very fed up with his posting in Etobicoke because he was very excited after the interview. This church is not all that much closer to Guelph though it is closer to our house. I offered to be a bass in the choir at his potential new posting if they needed one: it’s a 10 minute drive from the house and 15 minutes by bicycle as you can use the bicycle path in the ravine.

As I went for my run this afternoon, (Note to self: a glass of wine before hand kind of saps the ambition to run at speed for a while.) I though about having company. I really enjoyed the visit but it does take time to prepare the lunch, etc. and have the visit: probably the whole morning and afternoon. When you know you have so many things (with deadlines) to do, you tend to resent spending that extra time. Perhaps that’s why being company and going for a visit is so much more enjoyable — you are not at home so you ignore of all those things you should be doing. Of course in the summer there’s less things of a pressing nature to do and more daylight in which to do them.

Tonight’s homework was finding asymptotes, local maxima and minima, points of inflections, etc for various equations in order to make approximate graphs. Equations included such gems as y = x/(x - 1) and y = x²/(x² + 3). My younger son found them much easier than last week’s word problems.

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I was hired into my first permanent position at Ontario Hydro about 25 years ago by Wilf Watson, a quiet, reserved person, not unlike myself actually. Ontario Hydro vanished by decree of the Ontario Legislature and, sadly, Wilf passed away peacefully on Sunday, April 6. To quote from the on-line death notice:

Watson – Wilfred B.Sc. (Hons Engineering), B.A. Captain in REME, WWII Chartered Electrical Engineer, 32 years with Ontario Hydro Peacefully in hospital on Sunday, April 06, 2003 age 83 years. Missed by his wife Winifred of 60 years, son Stephen, daughter-in-law Seanna, grandsons Trevyn and Nicholas.

He retired in 1985 about 8 years after I joined the System Studies Section. Wilf had expertise in various fields of electric power engineering but perhaps he’s best known for pioneering work on power system stabilizers. These electronic devices allowed transmission of electrical power from hydro generation on the rivers flowing into James Bay over 600 km to the main loads in the Golden Horseshoe area around the western end of Lake Ontario. For those interested, a somewhat techical paper on PSS by former colleagues of mine is available: all of us were mentored by Wilf and Dave Lee, his successor.

Though Wilf was a man of few words (just a grunt of acknowledgement when you said hello in the hall or, if he was very talkative, maybe two grunts ), he became quite animated about the his times in Britain during the war. Fresh food was scarce during war time so when he and Winnie hit a rabbit one time, they stopped the car, picked it up and had it for supper. Another time when he and Winnie were quartered in barracks(?) or some sort of temporary housing Wilf would decide “lights out” by shorting the plug in his room. Unlike the individual fused circuits we have here in North America, in the UK it’s not unusual for a whole floor to be on the same circuit.

Though Wilf has passed on, his legacy still survives. The System Studs still get together every once in awhile for a canoe trip, a party, and sometimes for funerals, too. I’m sure we’ll be raising a glass or two in his name. May he rest in peace.

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Since I’m off to my Mom’s for supper tonight and then I’ll return home to do more OAC calculus I thought I’d do a quick round-up of news chez moi.

• My first boss, Wilf Watson, who started my career at Ontario Hydro, passed away peacefully this Sunday at the age of 83.
• After almost a year of looking for a teaching job in Victoria, my brother has landed a job teaching people how to look for jobs.
• The Oakville Chorale Society’s “Showtune Spectacular”has sold out Saturday. Step right up and order tickets for Friday while they are still available.

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Despite the snow and ice I took out my hand pruners and cut off last year’s clematis vine growth — it grows and blooms much better on the current year’s vines. Being positioned on a south facing brick wall, the vine already had some new growth visible. I also bought a bag of lawn fertilizer and 60 kg (!) of sand to spread over the ice on the driveway and sidewalk. And, wouldn’t you know it, the snow plow finally came just before supper. So I enjoyed my first daylight-saving time evening shovelling the heavy, icy slush out of the end of my driveway. Then I relaxed with an Old Credit™ Ale, and my son and I did page 2 of his OAC calculus problem set. It’s a strange world where spheres expand, right conical piles of sand grow just so and rectangular tanks fill at certain rates.

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Cold

It was -5°C this morning. There was a brief snow flurry blizzard just before noon. By the time I went outside at 12:30 p.m. the sun was out again with snowy shadows here and there. I went to the store and post office to by a birthday card for my brother in Thailand. I don’t know whether he reads this but you can him a card is on it’s way. I wonder how long it will take to get there? Anyway, I heard on the radio that a cool spring is good: it keeps the fruit trees from blooming too soon. They’ll bloom later when killing frosts are less likely. It could mean a bumper fruit crop this summer perhaps.

Permanent Part Time

My wife got good news. She was offered a permanent part-time position at the private school where she teaches music from PK to Grade 2. The only real condition is that she had to do something extra-curricular like a choir or music club or something. She gladly accepted.

Not a Handyman tonight

My brother-in-law, he of the flooding apartment fame, had his dryer conk out. I suspect the spraying water from the burst hose problem got into the dryer stacked above it. Anyway my wife ordered a new washer/dryer stack from Sears and it was delivered today. Of course, they didn’t connect it so I thought I would have to do this tonight. Fortunately, my brother-in-law and his wife were going out. Good thing as I had library books to return and garbage to put out. The connections will probably be Wednesday’s evening job.

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Some people learn by reading, some by taking courses, some by “osmosis”and others by paying. A young person I know seems to want to learn using this last method. He was told he was following too closely and using his brakes too much. “I know what I’m doing”he said. Until the day he ran into the back of another car. No noticeable damage to the van he was driving but a $1,000 repair bill for the other car’s rear bumper. I presume he doesn’t follow too closely anymore. He was told he should stop at STOP signs rather than just slowing down. Well, you guessed it, on a quiet Sunday afternoon on a quiet side street he was caught. This time it’s a $110 fine and a couple of demerit points. The police officer’s comment: “Where does it mention ‘rolling stop’ in the Highway Traffic Act?''. I predict that this young man will be stopping more often at STOP signs. I do. In the neighbourhood where I grew up and got my driver’s licence the powers that be decided to put a STOP sign on pretty near every corner. And, of course, police it for awhile. It was easier to just stop.

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I haven’t weighed in with my thoughts on the U.S and British war on Iraq yet. Today I ran my usual (non-winter) route so I had some time for reflection though there were lots of slushy, puddly and muddy spots to avoid in the woods.

My question has always been: Why? That is, what has the Iraqi régime done to annoy Washington and London so much? None of the media reports I’ve seen have provided much background on the necessity of this war. There’s only been a lot of “hand waving”about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (the U.S. has these), his biological weapons (the U.S. has these, too). Libya seems to have (had) a similar type of government and dictator but the U.S. hasn’t sent in the troops. Does the U.S. government care about the Iraqi Kurds' oppression? I don’t think so. There are many examples of oppressed groups around the world where the U.S might have intervened. They didn’t. I was forwarded an email the other day describing another theory: the U.S. needs another oil supplier. Saudi Arabia is becoming a less-willing supplier and wields enormous influence in OPEC. Venezuelan oil supplies are proving unreliable with their domestic problems; so, the U.S. (and the U.K. I guess) require an alternate. The small country of Iraq has mega-barrels of proven reserves. Let’s try and install, once again, a “West-friendly,“ “democratic”government and let BO start a' pumpin'. Again I don’t have enough information to know where the truth lies; though both Bush presidents are persons of BO. I do know that war seldom solves problems: it kills, it maims — mostly innocent civilians. Is Saddam Hussein, your “typical”megalomaniac dictator, trying to achieve world domination like Adolf Hitler as some suggest? It isn’t apparent to me that he’s trying this. He has been obviously hiding a few Scud missiles, but his infrastructure is so poor he can’t seem to destroy more than a few bombs/day for the weapons inspectors.

Well, I’ve rambled on enough and can find no definite conclusion. Prime Minister Chrétien did the right thing by declining to assist the U's (U.S and U.K.) with out some enabling resolution from the third U, U.N. that is. If wars could be fought, without civilian injuries and death and the destruction of every-day infrastructure, on a government to government, military to military basis then, maybe, just maybe, I might approve. But this has never happened!

Perhaps this Non Sequitur cartoon best illustrates the position of those who want war:

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I was reading a flyer the other day issued by a local dentist seeking new patients. One paragraph described the “teeth whitening”process. The kicker was the recommendation to avoid smoking and the drinking of coffee, tea and red wine after the process. Hold on there! I don’t smoke so that isn’t a problem. But now you’re talking about three of my favourite beverages — especially red wine. I have a batch to fill 30 more bottles ready next month! Actually I never thought my slightly off-white teeth were a problem, especially since all those ugly amalgam fillings have been replaced with off-white ones. Not going give up red wine, coffee or tea so I’m not getting my teeth “whitened”either.

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Yesterday Robert Fisher interviewed Dr. Lee Willingham yesterday evening on Here and Now on the benefits of singing. Such interviews are short but at least our choir, the Bell'Arte Singers, got a little publicity. Robert mentionned he was associated with the choir, in fact he's a board member!

The Oakville Choral Society had their usual Tuesday night practice. Now that the BAS concert is over with I've had a chance to go over some of the show tunes, especially some of the ones we have to memorize (get's more and more onerous the older I get it seems). The major problem with show tune medleys and arrangements is that the melody bounces around between the voice parts and, without the music in front of you, it's not always obvious when you are or are not supposed be singing the melody. The director said he has been having a careful look at the music and basically said the same thing: if your neighbour (in the same part) is singing different notes it's likely you're wrong because you are singing the melody instead of harmony. It isn't easy to “lift the notes from the page” of show tune arrangements while concentrating on pitch, harmonies, dynamics, rhythms, etc.

In my ongoing Windows Me → 2000 upgrade I found QuickTax 2002 didn't work: it said I had to purchase another authorization key. There must be an OS version signature in there somewhere. I uninstalled it and then re-installed the download. Then I sat on hold for about 30 minutes, explained the problem and obtained a new “activation key”. Guess I'll have to do our taxes now; though, there's a big incentive do so and get that refund. And I do like that Windows 2000: every time I ask for a “Shutdown” it does. In the Windows Me incarnation it rarely did.

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Some evenings you just want to relax and, well, update your blog perhaps. Last night I first had to shovel out the driveway and move the tonnes of snow plow ridge across the front of of the driveway to the other side of the street. I was tired already having run home either on the road way or on the unplowed sidewalks. So, I finished the shovelling and I was pooped. Not pooped enough apparently — there was a clogged toilet to be unplugged and too much toilet paper wasn't the problem. I could swear all I want as I was plunging the plunger but saying shit just doesn't seem to have same impact when you are working over a pool of it. Eventually I was flushed with success. Usually these clogs aren't so stubborn. After that I just went to bed.

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Since we have the concert tonight I decided not to do the full workout today — I would survive the night but my mind might wander. A wandering mind keeps one from focussing on timing, dynamics, pitch, watching the conductor: all critical parts of a chorister's attention. Our second dress rehearsal went well but I'll reserve my comments for tomorrow, post-concert.

In other news I put the yeast in for a barolo style Italian wine at the local wine maker's store, Mosto Vinho yesterday afternoon. It will be ready in 6 weeks — just in time for tasting at the Easter dinner family gathering a week later.

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Our first dress rehearsal with orchestra took place Wednesday — over 30 instrumentalists vs 45 or so in the choir. If we all played / sang at once I'm sure the choir wouldn't be heard. However, Brahms skillfully orchestrated his works so as to not obscure the singing. Marcato singing on occasion and attention to consonants also help. The venue at St. Anne's, a domed church, has a lovely acoustic and a “whisper gallery” effect. The director complained about us basses being too loud; however, as we could hear his instructions from across the chancel and the orchestra as if he were standing next to us I believe he heard our singing as if we were standing next to him.

So I'm taking the day off to get a few things done before our second dress rehearsal tonight. Getting up at 6:20 am, working all day and then standing and singing for more than two hours is just a bit too much for body and voice. I'm going to where more comfortable shoes, too. All of the Brahms music program is a challenge but especially Gesang der Parzen, in six parts, with only 3 of us baritones (the fourth guy was ill on Wednesday) on one part. One has to be careful not to “blow the pipes” by singing too loudly especially on pitches that are high in your range.

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Lest you think your doctor doesn't care about your hours long wait (and no interesting magazines to be had): I heard an interview the other day where one doctor admitted one reason he doesn't like his patients to wait a long time. During that wait, he said, his patients will think of other things to ask about as well as the original problem such as a sore throat, etc. Often answering questions about these other things will take more time than the standard ten minute appointment.

Doc, I have a sore throat and bad cough and now I also have this pain in my butt from sitting on a waiting room chair for so long.

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…since I first set up this blog and created the first post. It's about 29 C° colder today — the temperature was -17°C when I left this morning. No thoughts of gardening or other outdoor activities yet; especially, since the weekend dumped another 15 to 20 cm of snow.

• Back My lower back is still a bit sore from my fall on Saturday morning but it seems to be more a staying in one position problem. I need to get up from my chair and move around more often than I usually do.

• Music Folder I left it behind at choir practice on Saturday. Fortunately my business card was in it so the church office secretary was expecting a call. Choir friends who live nearby will pick it up for me so I expect to get my folder back at tomorrow's dress rehearsal.

• Van I dropped it off yesterday morning. I rode in the Courtesy van driven by an older man, probably about my mom's age. We had a pleasent chat about this and that until we got to the GO station. It was a bum alternator that made for sluggish starting. Fortunately my wife and son picked it up in the afternoon so I didn't have to waste part of the evening doing it.

• Exercise I didn't run home yesterday: too tired to work through the snow. Also when I tried to jog, the pounding excerbated my lower back pain.

• Snow There comes a point, about this time near the end of February, when softly falling flakes of snow are no longer pretty anymore. I'm ready for robins and crocuses.

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Winter has returned. Thursday and Friday saw days with above 5°C temperatures and lots of snow melting. It started to rain Saturday, then snowed a bit and then rained again. Then late Saturday evening the temperature plummeted to -10°C and it snowed and blowed. I spent much of Sunday morning shovelling the packed drifts out of the driveway and walkways. Then the snowplow came by … twice! My poor neighbour with the healing ankle and me with my sore back from yesterday. At least living on the bottom of a crescent there's no neighbour on the other side so I just pushed the snow plow's leavings to the other side of the street —- a bit slower perhaps but my back thanked me. Why, this evening I can bend over without wincing and put my pants on standing up!

Today's exercise was running through the snow. I think I packed 10km of energy expenditure into 5km especially running through those drifts. It beats yesterday's run on the treadmill on account of the slushy rain outside.

Just bought the downloadable version of QuickTax and sketched out mine and my wife's returns. I need to find out what sort of RRSP contribution I should make before next Monday. Then I'll have to tally the receipts for my wife's music teaching business. Oh, and I'll have to take the van in to be looked at: the battery or charging system is barely working and the Check Engine light comes on intermittently. More $$ to spend I imagine.

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Being a "morning" person I can't understand the snooze button. If I wanted to sleep 10 minutes later I would set the alarm for, well, 10 minutes later. Since the usual shave, shower, breakfast, dressing routine takes about 40 minutes I subtract that from when I have to be out of the house and set the alarm for that time. None of this snoozing stuff except, perhaps, on the weekend. But then the alarm would have come on "by mistake" so I'd shut it off and go back to sleep. I guess there are those who like to imagine they are morning people. They set their alarms for two hours before they have to leave and keep pressing the snooze button until they finally regain consciousness.

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Mild It went up to 6°C today. After a month or more of sub-zero temperatures, it is finally mild enough that I can read my pocketbook until I get to my stop. Then I can zip up my jacket, don my toque and put on my gloves as I exit the platform. Kinda slushy and wet running home, though, but I'll get over it.

Sunny I no longer get up before the crack of dawn. I could see my way down the hall this morning with the faint daylight coming in at 6:20 a.m. Can spring be far away? Still, last year the snowdrops were already poking out of the ground — no sign of them this year.

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It was over 80¢/litre earlier this week but it was back "down" to 78.9¢ at the local station so my wife asked me to take the car, stand in the -12°C temperatures and fill it up. Oh well, since I was out I bought some groceries, some flowers and a card for my love, my Valentine tomorrow. One year I forgot. After that I don't ever want to forget — though I can't remember what happened there was probably a lot of angry and hurt silence for the next week or two.

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My younger son asked me if I would help him in calculus this semester. A major request but I acceded. Today's "review" involved factoring polynomials and rationalizing numerators and denominators. I now realize this is stuff I haven't done for perhaps 25 years though I have used algebra occasionally at work. Thank goodness for the internet: a quick google came up with several sites and links with math class lecture notes on how to solve these problems. My son might not have the patience to browse this stuff but at least Dad can relearn and teach him without so much fumbling about.

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Yesterday the Bell'Arte Singers (BAS) co-hosted the third annual Choral Symposium. The clinician this year was Dr. Richard Nace. Dr. Nace told stories about, demonstrated and expounded on his choral conducting techniques. His signature, so to speak, is "exploring the expressive nature of your choir through Tone-Shape-Spirit". He was very nice, warm individual; however, as I am not a teacher, nor have I ever conducted choirs of young persons I found his talks rather "non-revolutionary" — more common sense advice of the caring and sharing, politically-correct variety. One music teacher I talked to said a workshop with her choir with Dr. Nace really helped her students. So I'm really not qualified to judge his worth. What I look for in a conductor is an indication of the beat and dyamics or expression. Whether this is made with grand inclusive, "gathering in" gestures or a waving baton with some accompanying hand motions I don't really care as long as there are clear cutoffs and tempo indications when (and if) required. Even though the self-annoited Maestro of the local opera company had really no idea how to lead a productive rehearsal for amateur singers, he was a fine conductor. I could even follow him in my near-sighted state, sans lunettes, on the opera stage. But, I digress. I probably should have done something else on Saturday morning and just come for the choral conducting master classes and the reading session in the afternoon.

The BAS had a party after the day's work. I chatted with Dr. Richard Nace at the party and he recognized me as the one who was smiling "all the time" while I was singing, even sight signing. There are probably two reasons for that: a) I like to sing and b) my first voice teacher insisted you can't make a good sound with your voice without a smile in it somewhere. He probably saw me during the reading session, reading through a new arrangement of "Verleih' uns Freiden" by Felix Mendelssohn — a personal favourite with a grand bass entrance. I told him I was an engineer and he asked me why I hadn't taken to a career in music. I like engineering work, the technical challenges and, of course, it pays well enough to support home ownership, a family, etc. Unless you're really, good music can't provide those things; nevertheless, choral music makes for a great hobby you can probably carry on with all your life. And there's the love interest: I met my wife in a choir.

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Sun-dried tomatoes. On the weekend we found jars of sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil at Costco. Today I had a bagel, cream cheese and these sun-dried tomatoes. Yum! Now I'll have to see if I can get fresh basil at the local store.

Quiet please. I made a plywood stand about 19 in. high yesterday and brought it to work. I set it up under my "desk" (actually it's more a wide shelf around the cubicle) in several places until I found a place I wouldn't accidentally kick it (often). Then I moved the Compaq behemoth horizontal-type PC there. Finally, after a year or two, I don't have the annoying whine of the processor fan "in my face" anymore. Now I'll be able to eavesdrop on my fellow cubicle dwellers' phone conversations more easily.

Applied for an internal vacany I had mentionned I was going to apply for a job vacancy in IT. Today I did it as the opening closes tomorrow. I think I wrote a pretty good essay on the application form on why I might be suitable even though I don't have all the acronymic qualifications listed. We'll see. It's probably the first time I've applied for a job in 25 years except for a downsizing episode in 1993 when we all had to apply for our own jobs. Even if I don't get selected I've still "declared my intent."

And finally this evening my wife and I watched a documentary on the Nathaniel Dett Chorale and its music director Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, an "afro-centric" professional 20 voice choir based in Toronto. The documentary was aired on Vision TV: well done with lots of singing and less talk. We know the director and one of the choir members and I had even considered auditioning last September — another thing to try upon early retirement.

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• At choir practice we sight-read a new piece by an Emily Crocker. Of course there were the usual Betty Crocker (she of cake mix fame) jokes. Our director came up with the best one. "Emily" must be one of the many Crocker children since the mother's motto was "moist and easy."

• We took back the china cabinet contents to my wife's brother's condo now that the new carpets are laid and the furniture is back in place. We also gave them a hand by washing all that china and glassware — something that looks like it hasn't been done for many years. My brother-in-law showed us a picture of a friend who would be coming over next week and I'm pretty sure I see this guy every day, waiting for the same GO train home as I do. I knew he was hard of hearing when I had heard him speak to the ticket guy. Small world!
• Yesterday was mild, up to 4°C. In typically Canadian fashion we saw kids out in T-shirts. I went for a run with just my Nike running shirt and a fleece sweat shirt. Today (Ground Hog Day), it was a bit cooler so I added another layer. Today was also a tired day. You know the kind: you feel like you could have slept another hour or two, you're yawning all the time, and you lie down to do your crunch exercises and feel that you should take a nap right there on the floor.

• We had the neighbour over for supper yesterday evening. Her house is warm again with a brand-new $3,000 furnace as the repairman had condemned the old one because of a cracked heat exchanger. She sighed and said "I guess the new hardwood floors will have to wait a year". She just had her rugs cleaned because one of the cats had done its business everywhere. She had wondered why until she discovered the cat's bottle of twice daily anti-constipation medecine was almost gone. Apparently the friends looking after the place had mis-read the dosage: instead of 0.35 ml they gave 3.5 ml — ten times the dosage. Besides crapping and peeing everywhere, that poor cat must have had really bad cramps, too. One silver lining of the house being so cold when she came back from her trip is that the smell wasn't as bad as it became once the heat was on again.
• I have started the last semester of Grade 13 with my younger son. Last night it was reviewing logarithms and finding line equations given the slope or intersecting points. Later we'll start calculus. I can hardly wait. I'll have to give my rusty brain a shake or two.

• Lastly, according to my web server logs and the AWStats software, I had 1492 "unique" vistors and 18862 "hits" in Janary. Way to go Internet.

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Usually it is, "oh damn, I forgot to lock the door." Last night when I got into bed I commented to my wife that the low for the night was to be -21°C (-5.7°F). Just as I was falling asleep I thought "I haven't turned off the shutoff valves for the outside taps." So, I got up and did that so I could sleep easy — not that I have had a problem in this house. At our previous house the garage was "inside" the house "box" and the upstairs bathroom was over it. When the night was cold and the winds came from the west the pipes to the bathroom would freeze. They never burst but it would take a day or so to thaw and that bathroom had the only shower.

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We had my older son and his girlfriend over for garlic sauce pork ribs and cake to celebrate his 22nd birthday. I made the "Never Fail Sponge Cake" from Edna Staebler's More Food That Really Schmecks recipe. I have made it before but found it was hard to get out of the Bundt pan without using a knife around all the edges. This time I lined the pan with parchment paper. Though, it took a few minutes longer to cook, the cake slipped out easily and I just peeled the paper off. No Bundt pan paint chips this time! I iced the cake with Edna's marshmallow and chocolate chip icing. Among the five of us there's only a slice left. I'm sure my younger son will have finished that by the morning. Ribs make a great tasting meal but especially when you save the honey-garlic sauce to pour on the rice — only suitable for family gatherings. Too messy for our Hyacinth's "candlelight supper."

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Being of rational mind, what I take to be coincidences, others would class as omens. Earlier this week a colleague pointed out an internal job opening on our Intranet web site that might interest me. It did. As I know several people in that department I was wondering whom I could call to see who this job opening was replacing. Well, today that department's manager was in our cubicle neck of the woods and stopped to chat. So we met briefly to discuss the job requirements. It would be a lateral move and I don't have some certifications (though I would be willing to learn and acquire them). Omen one? In the afternoon, our section head or what they call "practice leader" called an "emergency" meeting with the half dozen of us in his "practice". The president has said that our department budget wasn't good enough for FY 2003 and he was "demanding action". So our manager was meeting with the practice leaders "demanding action". Our practice leader told us we had to bring in a lot more work this year. The other alternative is to have less bodies. In fact, I was told that one of our guys is investigating his early retirement options. This was omen two. Time to bring my résumé up-to-date and have a chat with my manager to declare my intent to apply.

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Got gas, got groceries. Pleased to find red peppers were on sale at the same price as the green — usually they are twice the price. I like the sharper flavour of the red variety. The gas station was busy as the price has come down a few cents in the last day or so. So busy, I couldn't linger to sqeegee the windshield. It's amazing how a brief snowfall of, maybe, a couple of cm can make the car so dirty. Even as a runner on the sidewalk I need to clean my glasses after.

Speaking of running, I was planning to walk home as it is still quite cold; however, that 2cm of snow provided a nice cushion on the pavement so I decided to run the 3km. My wife met me in the car on her way home at a side street so I unloaded my knapsack. I didn't accept a lift because the first thing I need to do after a run and get into a warm place is to strip off my coats and clothes. Couldn't do that in the car!

Another problem is that my sensitive nose kicks into overdrive in cold weather. Drip. Drip. Drip. I'm thinking I should carry paper towel with me as kleenex is too difficult to extract from a pocket while wearing thick mitts. The pictured contraption isn't too practical for the cold weather.

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Today's ramble is about the clods who stand at the doors of public transit vehicles or trains. Of course, I tend to be just as rude as they are as I say "excuse me" and jostle them as I leave the door. Maybe there will be a purgatory for those individuals: there's a great big waiting area in heaven with hundreds of doors where these clods will be forever looking in at paradise but their lifestyle has condemned them to stand by those doors. One can only wish.

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The quickest way for me to get from work to the Six Points Plaza is to walk up Kipling and try and cross Dundas Street just as it splits between two one-way sections over Kipling. However, the traffic lights are so far apart that there's an almost continuous stream of traffic going westbound. A further complication is that the oncoming westbound traffic is hidden until it comes over the rise of the overpass and it has four lanes. Now I could spend an extra 10 minutes maybe and walk over to an intersection with traffic lights. But instead I swear at the traffic, city planners and maybe save a few minutes when there's a sudden break in the traffic. Get a bit of a run in there, too.

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Rather than getting all bundled up for the -5°C temperature, I ran on the treadmill today. I usually run the 30 minute interval program. This time I set the maximum speed to a slower pace of 8.9 km/h (5.5mph) rather than the 9.7 km/h (6 mph) I had been using. Adjusting the incline upwards to 7% according to the calorie counter, burns as many calories at the lower max. as I did at the higher max. at about a 4% incline. Also, at the slower top speed, I discovered that, especially during the 4 minute long interval, I can still think about other things; whereas, at the higher top speed, all I can think about is: gee this four minutes is awfully long and I stare at display as the seconds tick down. It had made a boring workout just grueling. So, since the slope doesn't seem to bother me as much as the speed, I will probably increase the incline still more to burn away those calories (or I bump my head on the basement ceiling!). I gained about 6 or 7 pounds over the Christmas - New Year holidays (too many extra sweets, "sure I'll have another beer" and too much sitting, either driving or visiting). Now I have lost 4 of those poinds since I'm back to my regular 3 km walk in the morning and 3 km run in the evening, 5 days/week plus extra running on the weekend.

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With our cold, snowy weather I have to wear my ankle-covering winter hiking boots. Unfortunately I guess I had fat feet or very thick socks when I bought them because they ended up being a generous 10½ more like 11. Anyway they always chafed at the back of my ankles so I dislike wearing them. One morning though I put some hand cream on the backs of my ankles — chafing problem solved. I still would rather wear hiking shoes but they are not too slush resistant.

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Visiting Friends

Originally our friends, a couple and their two daughters, were going to come here over the Christmas holidays for supper and presents for the kids. We couldn't align our schedules as the older daughter is from a previous marriage and she had to go out to her biological father's place for part of the Christmas holidays. And she definitely didn't want to miss seeing us. Looking at our busy calendars: last night was the only time we could get together for the next month, so my wife and I drove there. Fortunately the weather was clear and the roads were in great shape. We had a good meal and a good visit. Their youngest daughter is now ten months and just starting to discover how to move around. And, as always, their seven-year old is an active little lady — I wonder how she was this morning at getting ready and going to school?

Cold Neighbour

Our neighbour has been in England for the last three weeks or so visiting her mother and other family members. Unfortunately about a week into her vacation she stepped on "thin air" and tore a couple of ligaments in her ankle on the edge. The swelling just went down enough for her in time to put on shoes and make the trip back home. This isn't the story though. Her house was 6°.C cold. She left a message and I went over upon returning from our visiting. I brought over an electric heater and lit the pilot light for the gas fireplace. But I couldn't get the pilot light to stay lit on the furnace. Perhaps the thermocouple has failed. As luck would have it she had cancelled the emergency furnace service contract with the gas company a while back. They wouldn't do a house call until this morning. I offered to let her spend the night at our place several times but she demurred. I suggested using the heater in a room with a door and having a hot shower before hand. I wonder how she made out in her cold house?

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Here comes another year in the 3rd millennium. My wife and I celebrate 25 years of marriage this year. I graduated from high school (Grade 13 it was called then) 30 years ago. I won't see 50 for (ahem) a few more years yet.

We went to Uncle Bill and Aunt Kathy's place for supper last (night) year. She served a great meal of Beef Wellington and my wife brought the lemon-meringue pie for dessert. We played some cards, watched TV and yawned. Made it to midnight and then went to be bed. Can't believe I slept 'til 8:45 a.m. 6:20a.m is going to come awful early tomorrow after three weeks of holidays.

On the way home we stopped in at my wife's youngest sister (niece by relation) and her husband and had a good visit for most of the afternoon. When a family gathering numbers 20 to 25 we don't often get to really visit and chat about "significant" things.

Early this evening I ran in one of my new running long-sleeved T's. It's supposed to wick away sweat. However, because of the -11°C wind chill I had wear a fleece sweat shirt and my running shell jacket, so not at all the sweat could disappear.

Cleared up the email and prepared for bed. Then I remembered I hadn't posted my first article of the new year.

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It's the last day of 2002. My aunt and uncle have invited us for supper and to "hang out" for the evening. I suspect they usually do what we do on New Year's Eve: watch TV and sometimes manage to stay up past midnight.

I think I'll resolve to write 2003 on my cheques from now on.

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Mom gave me some Gjetost¹ whey cheese from Norway for Christmas. It's funny how you associate colours with food: this brown cheese comes in a block looking for all the world like a great big carmel. I had some on a bagel for lunch and, once I told myself this was cheese, I was fine with it. Good cheese, terrible carmel.

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Christmas Baking

I searched for brownie recipes and found Christmas Cookies. I made Pecan Pie Bars and Linda Léone's Chocolate Chip Cookies. Both turned out well though I'd forgotten that with our smallish kitchen and one set of mixing bowls and measuring cups you keep having to clean up after yourself when you do baking.

Cut my nose

I was bending over the lip of the trunk to lift out a box from the car and hit my head (softly mind you) on the trunk lip. By reflex I ducked and cut my nose on the edge of one of those stiff plastic packages they put electronic stuff in. Finally resorted to a steri-strip to stop the cut from bleeding.

Younger son opened a couple of presents

Even at 18 years he wanted to continue the tradition of opening "just one" present on Christmas Eve. Later he went to bed early — he's been busy at the grocery store for the last few days. Usually he would get a bit of time during his shift to "relax" in the back room but not at Christmas.

Hubbo Stats

According to my automatic awstats site statistics there's been over 4600 visitors to the site this year and almost 8,000 visits, serving over 0.5 Gbyte. Way to go everybody! Some slow day I will have to report some of the bizarre search expressions that end up here.

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Well one of the drearier parts of being music librarian is sorting returned music. However, it took less than an hour to sort over 40 sets of 15 pieces. Kind choir members offer to sort it as they hand it in. I think I get a better return rate if I don't insist on pre-sorting as it takes a second or two for a choir member to hand in the bunch of music. After a concert, most are anxious to get out to the audience to greet friends and family — they don't want to be stuck sorting through their music, too. Now I have to sort each pile by number, at least the original copies, to find what, if anything, is missing. To a music librarian, bliss is discovering that everyone has handed in their music. At least this time our borrowed copies were obtained gratis with no overdue fines or strict deadlines.

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I do this hated activity at this time of year since my wife's birthday comes along shortly and Christmas soon after that. I do shop for fruits, vegetables, milk and bread at the local grocery store, a five minute walk from the house (longer if you drive :-). And I make regular trips to Canadian Tire and the local hardware/lumber store. But the latter isn't really shopping — it's a leisure activity! Anyway our local mall is about a 20 minute walk away with probably a hundred stores to choose from. I had some vague ideas but had to browse around in order to crystallize them. I was successful! You'll have to wait until after her birthday when I can reveal what they were (but only if she was pleased to get them :-).

Earlier this week she plunked a bag of new clothes beside the bed and said this is what I could give her for Christmas. What a great idea! So today I went into Coast Mountain Sports and Old Navy and bought some stuff for her to give to me. Now I'll have to wait for 26 days or so until I can wear/use them. Again all will be revealed in due course because I know I'll like those gifts.

A friend of mine, the tenor section leader in the Oakville Choral Society (OCS), owns the Second Cup franchise at the mall. I dropped in for a coffee and he called me a "quitter". You may recall I resigned my position temporarily because I couldn't sing at the two Christmas concerts due to a conflict with my "home" choir, the Bell'Arte Singers. I explained that the OCS director was aware of the situation. I had even made enquiries about a replacement. However, I couldn't get any takers for a community choir section leader opening. My friend said the OCS director was "distraught" about my departure. I guess it was a compliment of sorts. I hadn't thought I contributed all that much as there were 15 in the bass section when I left. Perhaps some of them lack the confidence now that there's not someone there to count and come in at the right point and on pitch. Now I'm not so sure I will make an effort to listen to their dress rehearsal — it might cause too much anxiety. Of course it may well be that my friend, a known nay-sayer, may have exaggerated for effect.

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Some people do anything to stay in the news. Michael Jackson may have had one nose job too many. Was it because his father was said to have called him "big nose"? I hope I haven't given my kids some complex psychological hang-up by some off-hand remark I made years ago. Anyway, I find it remarkable that a "man" just a few years younger than I is so weird and eccentric. 'Course when you have lots of money I guess you can hold babies over balconies, de-pigment your skin or de-nose your face. It makes the rest of us look so, well, "normal".

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The Toronto Star had an article on blogging in this Saturday's paper. Suddenly it's now mainstream.

In other news, I mulch-vacuumed the remaining leaves — somewhat mushed and flattened by the 15cm of snow we had last weekend. That snow has disappeared save for a few mini-glaciers on parking lots and beside driveways.

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I was sitting on the train reading a newspaper when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I observed liquid dropping slowly from the corner of a woman's briefcase she had on her lap. After a few more droplets fell I asked her if she had a water bottle in her briefcase. She looked at me kind of strangely at first then realized where I was pointing. She pulled out the bottle and screwed on the top then kind of paniced and dumped the liquid on the floor of the train. (Luckily my pants or shoes were out of the way!) She put her briefcase on the floor and didn't say a thing, just looked out the window. The liquid looked like juice which pretty well means the briefcase is ruined. I hope she didn't have library books or an important report to review in there.

If I hadn't said anything there could have been other scenarios: She did have her briefcase horizontally on her lap so there was the potential for her to be wearing whatever that liquid was once she got up when reached her stop. If not, when she eventually reached her destination there would have been a big surprise waiting for her in that briefcase.

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It snowed yesterday and there's been a few flakes today but nothing has stuck around yet. The smashing pumpkin set has been out doing their post Hallowe'en ritual. Somebody smashed a floodlight(?) on our driveway but the pieces are so small I can only suspect it's a floodlight because of the silvered bits. I'll need to vacuum up the bits in the morning. Since I don't have any of that type of fixture outside then I guess a neighbour is missing one of theirs. How your outlook changes as you age — I remember smashing one or two pop bottles in the ravine when I was kid. What I also remember doing was when we found an old tire someone had dumped in the ravine: we'd take it up to the top of the ravine and roll it down the hill watching it bounce over rocks, smashing through small bushes and samplings, generally being more destructive as it built up kinectic energy. Not something I'd do nowadays nor would I condone it. We're so thoughtless as kids sometimes.

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I wonder if non-musical persons get infected with banal tunes that stick in your head for days at a time? I wondered this the other day when the BAS called me up the other day and asked whether we had copies of "We Rise Again" to loan out. Turns out we didn't need to loan the copies but I was infected with that tune for a while. At the moment, though, a couple of fugue subjects from the Mozart Requiem are in my head — certainly a more worthy usage of the spare CPU cycles in my brain. Just to get you started, here are some tunes to stick in your head:

1. "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes"
2. "These are a few of my Favourite Things
3. "Three Blind Mice"
4. "Frère Jacques"

And, of course, there's always those TV commercial jingles you learned when you were a kid!

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Our dress rehearsal for the concert tomorrow took place this morning. All told it was almost three hours of standing on risers. As usual, in the choir, you can only hear the few voices around and some of the instruments when you are singing in the chorus. However, "producer" Ian Sadler said the sound was "lovely" in the pews of Christ's Church Hamilton. We'll probably take the 407 from Mississauga to Burlington tomorrow so that we don't have to allow an extra half to full hour just to account for possible delays on the QEW on the Oakville to Burlington stretch. It took us a half an hour longer to get home this afternoon than it did to drive there at 8:30 this morning.

While my wife was getting her hair colour lightened I went to the local lumber store to buy the additional 5/4"x6"x16' board I need to complete my deck surface. While I was there, I looked for a particular type of clamp to help straighten out the warped boards while I screwed them into the Deckmaster brackets. I finally decided to buy a pair of Powerpress pipe clamp/spreaders. I bought a 10 foot length of black pipe and had the store cut it in half to I could have two pieces. Later this afternoon I worked well into dark (which comes about 6:45 EDT now) and used the pipe spreaders against the end header of the deck to coerce the deck boards into place. Since these Powerpress clamps don't require pipe threading I can slide them along at any place along the pipe. This was far easier than clamping a piece of wood and driving wedges, the process I had been using hitherto. I also bought hard plastic knee pads so I could kneel directly on those warped deck boards as I screw them in. By the time I am finished this deck I will be ready to do the deck properly and much more quickly. (Insert smiley face here.)

Now to set the clocks back: for a while it will be light in the morning when I walk to the train station around 7 a.m. but it will be almost dark when I get back home around 6ish.

My son, he's so observant! I used the van to pick up the lumber and pipe this afternoon. I guess while I was gone he came home from work (just a block away at the grocery store) to have lunch and noticed the van wasn't in the driveway. Just now (this evening) he asked to borrow the car since the van wasn't around. I guess he must have been deep in thought when he passed the driveway earlier this evening after work. The van has been parked there since I returned in the afternoon. No use hiding Christmas presents from him this year — I could just put them casually in a corner of the living room perhaps. He'll never notice.

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My dad remarried (his fourth wife but who's counting?) recently to a woman a few years younger than me. Factlet One:I am older than my step-mother! She has a couple of kids from a previous relationship who are older than ours and I believe one of those kids has a child. Factlet Two:This makes me a step-grandfather. Seeing as how he lives with his new family in Vancouver and I am here in Mississauga, these are pretty insignificant familial factlets if you ask me. Just thought I would point them out though.

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I had some time today to screw down more deck boards. I seem to have more of a system going now so I am now 3/4 of the way. Unfortunately it seems the 16 foot boards weren't a uniform width at either end. Half way along I found I was out a almost 3/4" on one side. Now I have added a gap at the shorter side and reduced the difference to less than 1/2". I should have the difference down to effectively 0 with the remaining 5 boards. I am not all that worried as I need one more 5/4x6"x16' board to complete the deck so I will rip (or routerize :-) that one to fit. Speaking of routing I am thinking of using my trimmer bit to trim those bits of overhanging deck boards. As I am using pressure-treated wood I will have to be sure and use a dust mask. The trimmer bit has a wheel which will ride along the joist underneath. If I used a circular saw I would have to carefully follow a chalk line and I'm not sure that my hand would be steady enough.

Other events this weekend included the last Bell'Arte rehearsal before the concert dress rehearsal with the Bach-Elgarians (see right side), picking a bushel of Ida Reds at the Williams' orchard north of Milton, visiting friends in Guelph and even finishing up a bit of "work" work.

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It seems that, though the 407 toll highway here in Ontario has a modern licence photo and transponder system in place, it can't seem to handle mundane billing or call centre work. I have paid my last two bills electronically though my Credit Union and these credits have yet to show up three months later. Now they are threatening further action on my overdue account. So, I tried phoning. First one has to dial up several times before your call is not disconnected or busy. Second, there's an extremely long message before they give the touch tone keys to press. BTW, press 0, then 1. Finally yesterday I talked to a so-called customer service rep. who put me on hold while she got my bill. What! they just can't show it on their screen. Perhaps they have to print your bill on the one printer on the floor. Oh, you want to look at the one two months ago — please hold. Anyway the phone connection broke so I have to start all over again. Where's all that fancy technology for customer service?

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I love running on Sunday mornings as it is quieter on the streets and I can listen to Choral Concert as I run. Today's major work was Handel's Israel in Egypt. There is one chorus than mentions pestilence however it came out sounding like pencils. "He gave them pencils" was repeated several times just in case I had any doubt. That's nice, God gave the children of Israel, or perhaps the Egyptians, pencils. Did He give them paper, too? Was paper even invented yet let alone pencils?

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At about a quarter to nine in the morning a colleague got a call from his wife about a jumbo jet crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers. His natural reaction was "you've gotta be kidding". Sad to say it was true. A true-to-life movie special effect, more horrifying than any movie. Those weren't extras or stunt people — just people like you and I at work in those tall towers. It still seems incredible. Did the perpetrators, other than the so-called "martyrs" on the planes, know how "successful" their mission would be? The U.S.A. has moved on but, how, how can one fight against fanaticism especially without usurping everyone's personal freedoms?

Why did it happen? I am sure there will be as many reasons as persons who senselessly died in the tragedy. According to articles I have read, 9/11 was being planned for at least a couple of years, perhaps longer. Being of a non-violent nature myself I really can't conceive how these people could plan such destruction.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims' families today. I'm sure the extensive news coverage is poking into some deep emotional wounds that have barely started to heal. What can anyone say to assuage this deep sorrow? Extend a hand in friendship, provide a shoulder to cry on, one can't know their pain but one can try and understand and sympathize with their feelings.

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Not a particularly eventful week, this past one. I was off sick from work for a day with a sore throat. My throat still isn't 100%; but, that's probably due to my anti-histamine not keeping up with the ragweed pollen in the air at this time of year.

My wife bought us a (newer) car: a 2001 Buick Century Custom with all the bells and whistles including a radio volume control on the steering wheel! The ride is comfortable and it sure is nice to have air conditioning once again. We still have the old Grand Caravan (325 Mm on the odometer) for hauling stuff and for my younger son to use as "his" vehicle. And my older son's Buick Skylark is still around. Three cars and one principal driver under 25 has sent insurance up to over $4,000/year. Sheesh! Anyway, I went to the bank and arranged to sign for a secured line of credit this week so I can take over the newer car's financing. Unfortunately those 0% deals are only available for new cars.

At work I have mostly finished one project where my involvement was to enter several hundred instruments and their wiring connections into a completely GUI driven database. Rather mindless stuff really. I used my creativity though by using Perl to generate scripts to produce instrument and junction box lists and to generate the prescribed wire numbers (over 3000 in total). This GUI database can produce reports but not of the instruments and their wiring simultaneously so, again, I made scripts to merge the reports and check that those 3000 plus wires go from an instrument to a junction box and that no instruments share a wire. Of course, I complained at the beginning of the project that I would have liked to use scripting to generate the SQL to automatically load the database but that option wasn't available. So, there was a lot of copying and pasting to do. Essentially all of the data has been entered and now the odd correction may be required as the project design changes.

My colleague and I have just started the design and C++ programming for our improved version of a Ontario Energy Market simulation program for our client OPG. This simulation tries to predict the IMO generation dispatch schedule and compare with what OPG predicted. One improvement we are implementing is to codify the Market Rules so that the rules may be read and processed from a CSV file. That way a change in the market rules won't require editing "if" statements and recompiling. This week I have been learning about and using C++ stream inserters, i.e., overloading the operator<< and writing user-defined stream manipulators (e.g. setw()). I have applied these techniques to my C++ classes so that I can dump in XML and verify these values for debugging purposes. Certainly, this is a lot more fun for me to be coding rather than copying and pasting stuff into a database GUI.

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I read the column Commuting by Bicycle: Good or Bad? and the comment Cycling without a Bicycle and wondered if this is something I could learn in my mid-40s. I walk, jog, run, and inline skate the same route each work day from home to the train station and I've been doing so for the last dozen years or so. Would a unicycle help put some variety into this routine? Obviously I would have to buy one and learn how to use it — probably the two greatest barriers. Though I do enjoy inline skating I can only do it in dry weather and there's the time involved in taking the boots off and putting on my shoes and vice versa. I usually carry them from the train station to work because the time taken to put on the inline skates, go to work, and take them off again is about the same as it is to just walk there. Perhaps I'll find a used unicycle somewhere that I can try before I lay out the money for a machine I could commute with. You may note that I didn't mention bicycling. I can't take it on the train in rush hour and the train station is completely unattended all day. I had biked for awhile until the bike was stolen. I could take a unicycle with me on the train. Of course, if I learn to ride the unicycle and, perhaps, juggling then I could always run away and join the circus when I retire.

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We "house sat" a "circa 1860" country home for friends who, for the sake of a name, I will call the Smiths. The Smiths own 100 acres on a property in Oxford County between Kitchener and Woodstock Ontario. The house itself is on 6 acres in a relatively narrow strip in the middle. The Smiths lease the south-east field to a beef cattle farmer for grazing and the west and north fields for crops. This year it's corn. It's a lovely quiet setting with cattle grazing in the distance and corn as high "as an elephant's eye" or at least 3 metres in some places.

Most mornings I would go for a run on the concession roads where I might encounter one or two vehicles and one person or dog during the hour of exercise. Save for a few days it was hot (+30°C) and even in the morning, the pesky deer flies were about in the wooded areas. I brought my bicyle the second week to outrun the flies but found a regular 10-speed rather troublesome on the gravel roads. In some places, fresh gravel had been laid and graded because the heavy rains during the first week had washed out parts of these roads. After my morning exercise, I would sit on the deck with my wife drinking coffee and chatting while gazing at the birds and cows. The cool shade from the maple tree would last for most of the morning.

In the afternoon I would "work". There were dead and fallen trees to cut, many trees to prune, cedar fence logs to pile and grass to cut. Speaking of grass, there was probably a couple of acres to do. I used a diesel-powered Kubota riding lawn mower and my wife used a smaller gas riding lawn mower. It took us both several hours to complete the task and it required cutting twice. Once just after we arrived and once before we left. A storm the first week dumped 7 or 8 cm of rain providing great grass growing conditions. My favourite job, though, was the pruning — cutting and shaping, nay sculpting, a tree so that grass may grow under it and that grass can be cut without bonking one's head.

As the Stratford Festival was only about a 40 min. drive from where we were staying, we took in the musical The Threepenny Opera at the Avon Theatre in "downtown" Stratford. Our project team at work had been awarded a prize for 1Q2002 performance which included $100 towards theatre or dinner tickets for two. So we were able to afford tickets close to the stage for this fine matinée performance. Wouldn't you know it, we met a retired secretary from work and a fellow Bell'Arte Singer while walking the town. The BAS person had sang with us last year when the Singers toured northern Italy.

Interesting events at the Smiths country home included a little brown bat. My wife heard it one night but just ducked under the covers and didn't wake me up. The second night it flew up the stairs just as my wife was turning out the hall light. (She screamed!) I made several attempts to isolate the bat and try and catch it in a sheet. However it managed to sneak under the door and escape. With so many rooms and a lot of furniture to hide behind or under I couldn't find it that night. On the third night the bat suddenly appeared in the "music room" around 9:30 p.m. (This time my wife just covered her head with a book.) This time I tried to isolate it in one room and we put bed sheets under the doors. Eventually I herded the poor bat into the kitchen, opened the door and, after several flights around the kitchen the bat flew the door. Ah! such is country life with wild creatures outside and in!

We entertained guests: my son and his girlfriend, who were actually coming to swap our van for his car so that they could move furniture from their old to their new apartment. And my aunt and uncle who have now moved from Cambridge to Port Hope. We invited them to take a break from packing and have some supper with us. After all, this county home is only a 20 minute drive away from Cambridge. (Except for Civic Holiday Monday when an accident on the 401 diverted traffic onto the two-lane country highway. It was going the other direction but you have to drive more slowly because you never know when some jerk might try and pass.)

What country holiday, just the two of us, would be complete without going up to the bedroom in mid-afternoon on occasion to, ah, enjoy each other's company. Sometimes life can't get any better than this!

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Yee haw! It will be vacation time at the Trapper Estate. We may go away but, then again, there's lots to do around the house, too. I figure there can be nothing more relaxing than sitting with a cup of coffee in the morning and reading a good book. I don't think I'll look at my email much nor update this blog either for a week or two unless something really important comes along or I see a "bust my gut from laughing so much" type of joke. TTFM

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Well we seemed to be the subject of a mis-understanding today. My wife invited friends for dinner(?) after church. We started making lunch at about 1 o'clock and still no friends by 2:30 p.m. Just as we were about to eat lunch without them, they arrived. They had had lunch and were expecting to stay for dinner! Oh well. The supper(!) was containerized and put in the fridge and then we enjoyed some Old Credit brewski's. The supper tasted just fine reheated, after 2 x 680 ml brews I don't think I could have managed to cook it properly just then anyway. We did have a good time chatting Our only regret is that we could have used that extra 3 or 4 hours we waited around to complete some of the many chores that need to be done here at the Trapper Estate.

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Julie and I spent some time in rural Ontario this weekend. This year, instead of going off to sing in Europe we'll be house-sitting for a couple while they go to the U.K.: she to sing, he to visit relatives. They have a lovely "century" home on 100 acres of farm land near Plattesville. On Saturday we went for supper for our instructions. I learned how to operate the new diesel riding lawn tractor, the kind you find operating on golf courses and the large lawns in front of suburban offices. He said it would only take three to four hours to process the property! For touching up there's a pushable gas mower and small riding lawn tractor and a gas operated weed whacker. Glory be, I must remember my hearing protectors. My host also has a full size tractor, he bought at some farm auction, for the heavy work like pulling down dead trees or carrying away brush to a distant spot on his property. If it isn't too hot I will probably spend some time pruning the shrubs and trees around the house. As Stratford is about 40 minutes away we'll probably catch a play or musical during our stay on the farm.

Today we went to see Brianne ride her horse Percy in a practice "show" at the stables just north of Milton. It was very hot, even in the shade of tree our skins pinkened. Unfortunately, the heat seemed to have put Percy in a mood because he balked at doing the required jumps. One such "balk" caused Brianne to slide off Percy. She was unhurt except for pride and dignity. She didn't quit: she picked up her crop, started the circuit with Percy and gave him a few swats to the rump. Well ladies and gents, he jumped that jump he had balked at and all the others, too. Just being ornery on a hot day. I also learned that I am no horse show judge. There were three "flat" events where the riders were asked to have their horses alternate between walking, trotting, cantoring and even galloping. I couldn't tell what differed betweem those three events. Perhaps I needed a program or maybe I'm just plain ignorant when it comes to the finer points of horse show(o)manship. I'll ask Brianne.

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I enjoy your emails, not that they have been funny or up-beat all the time, but you write about you and your surroundings in your own inimitable fashion. Having known you for over 40 years: each email, to me, seems like a little personal character snapshot. I like that. I have also noticed a general improvement in structure, grammar, spelling, word usage, etc. in your emails over the course of your teaching season. Are you editing and re-reading more or is the discipline and practice of writing a weekly newsletter and having the time to read "literature" improving your skills? I suspect it is probably a combination of both.

If your emails didn't do anything "for me" I wouldn't have posted them. Though they be pretty low, I do have some standards, you know. I encourage you to continue writing those emails -- it doesn't have to be weekly, though as you note in your email, there's a kind of discipline involved. Even and especially in the Arts discipline is required.

I believe you are trying too hard to be "the best" teacher. Julie and others could tell you that problem kids come in all shapes and sizes and income brackets. And teaching at a private schools you get much more parental involvement, a double-edged sword where the line between involvement and interference is very blurry indeed. I have talked to teachers in our choir who have suffered nervous breakdowns due to the (mostly) psychological harassment of a department head or principal. Instead of being the best just do your best, a subtle difference perhaps. However, it allows you to embrace and do your best at other activities in your life as well as the one that "pays the bills". This email is starting to ramble on, characteristic of an open loop system. When you are not talking directly to the person you are addressing, one tends to pile on the advice.

To summarize, keep in touch. It shrinks the distance between us. After all, we spent almost 20 years in spitting distance of each other sharing the room.

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I woke up early this morning and couldn't back to sleep — my brain decided to be active. I was thinking back to our wedding day and seeing what and who I could recall.

Julie and I met in a small choral group called the Melodante Singers. They were a "community-based" (i.e. rather than church or school affiliated) choir, a "collective" I would call it for want of a better term. It wasn't until about 20 years later, when Julie and I joined the Bell'Arte Singers, that we would find an equivalent "collective". Basically, a group of friends and colleagues committed to learning and presenting choral music with a music director who's been there since its formation. Admittedly, the Melodantes did not have the musicianship of the Bell'Arteans but we made up for it socially with the almost monthly parties. John Purdy was its director. He also was my mentor and singing teacher during my later teens as my father had divorced my Mom and left the home several years earlier. In fact, John was the one who gave me tickets to the ballet and said he couldn't go that night and why don't you ask that soprano Julie? The rest is history, as they say.

At our wedding the Melodantes were well represented: John played the organ, Garvin Farr sang during the "signing of the register", Ian Cox was an usher and several others were in the congregation and attended the reception. We were fortunate that my uncle Bill Service had just been recently ordained as a United Church minister — he married us that day at Kew Beach United Church. The wedding party on "my" side including my friend, Frank Lo, as best man, Ian Cox, and my brother Bob, who now calls himself Robert. Julie was accompanied by Maureen Barlow, her sister Kim and my sister Jane. Sadly, Maureen died during heart transplant surgery several years ago. I've lost track of Frank and Ian.

It was a muggy, sticky day as I recall. Good thing the suit was rented! I also recall the photographer. I believe the original person was a friend of my in-laws but he couldn't make it so a colleague of his was sent. His wise-cracks and demeanour were awful. My wife and her bridesmaids had to put with him all day. I barely could stand it the hour or two after the wedding. We became very good at pasting on smiles. In the end though, the pictures turned out great.

I remember having a good time at the reception. I belong to a rather large family so I "owed" dances to seven or eight aunts, two mothers, two grandmothers, cousins, friends and so on. With the open bar I wasn't allowed to have an empty glass in my hand - it's a good thing a) I ate Julie's as well as my meals and b) my best man didn't drink at the time. He had rented a limo to take us to our nuptial hotel, the Royal York in Toronto. (I registered as James Russell to prevent a couple of my wise-guy uncles from playing tricks.) That also reminds me that the reception venue (Town and Country?) included a hospitality room for the bride and groom. As we weren't going to use it my father-in-law (John Howard) offered it to out-of-town friends. They experienced the French-sheeted beds in our stead!

A lot has happened since that time: our grandparents' generation is gone. I've lost an uncle and Julie has lost a sister. But we carry on honouring their memories and remembering the good times of years gone by and those still to come.

And yes, Julie and I continue to sing together just as when we met.

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Friday evening through Saturday morning
June 14-15, 2002
Etobicoke Centennial Park, Toronto

Relay for Life 2002

Some members of the Bell'Arte Singers are entering a team in the Canadian Cancer Society Relay for Life 2002 event.

Susan made hats for us with TBA, Team Bell'Arte, on them. Unfortunately her brother died recently so she and her husband were missing from the team. Another couple showed up briefly in the middle of arranging a deal on their house. However, they took a cell phone call and were required to leave before midnight in order to sign back the "final" offer before it expired. I had to leave after midnight because June 15 was a "moving the furniture from my in-laws vacation home and re-distributing it amongst the relatives day". Despite this, our team captain, Tim, stayed 'til the morning and, I'm sure, represented TBA very well. Congratulations to the team and Tim, who, by the way, is also a cancer survivor.

I, personally, enjoyed this year's Relay for Life much better than last year's at Birchmount Park. I can't name a single factor but I note these points:

• The rain held off so we could do our paces on the track. Last year it rained and the activities were all held in the arena.
• Less crowds: I believe this is the first year for Centennial Park in Etobicoke at the western edge of Toronto. This meant more parking, food, more room on the track.
• Closer to my home: I didn't have to drive across Toronto this year.
• A fine team: Last year's team was also great, except for one person we were members of this year's team. As noted above, the team had our own hats.

Lest I forget, my personal "in memoriam" for this year, was in honouring the memory of my sister-in-law, Corinne who died of cancer last November. I purchased a memorial candle which was included with the 100's lining the Centennial Park track. Our team remembered Phil King, a tenor in our choir, who passed away from cancer a couple of years ago.

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This Washington Post article describes the problem of (North) Americans not reading the manuals that come with their expensive purchases, be it DVD players, digital cameras, cars, washing machines and so on. As an engineer, I usually find it a challenge to figure out how to operate an instrument without reading the manual first. (Though I do read it eventually; otherwise, I might miss out taking advantage of some of the features included in the cost.) But Mr and Mrs Average (North) American ignore the manual and phone the toll free number instead when they experience problems and miss out on many of the features of the product. Hence (And here's my chance to use the much maligned <blink> tag :-) the result is the now cliché flashing 12:00 on the VCR. Anyway this is all a lead in to a joke I saw today in the Clean Laffs email letter.

One of my daughter's wedding presents was a toaster oven. Soon after the honeymoon, she and her husband tried it out. Almost immediately, smoke billowed out of the toaster. "Get the owner's manual!" her husband shouted.

"I can't find it anywhere!" she cried, searching through the box.

"Oops!" came a voice from the kitchen. "Well, the toast is fine, but the owner's manual's burned to a crisp."

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Next week I run with 3 others from work in the YMCA corporate challenge relay. The relay race takes place at Toronto's Exhibition Place next Wednesday on June 5 at 7:00 p.m. Well, today we had a 5 km practice race. Geez, I walk 3km in the morning and jog 3km in the evening and do about an hour's worth of aerobic activity each day on the weekend. Still that didn't make me the fastest. Hmmph, maybe I will blame it on my tiredness. I drove out to Cambridge yesterday evening to pick up a desk for my son from my aunt and uncle's. So I didn't get to bed until almost midnight. And then there was a thunderstorm in the wee hours of this morning. Yeah, and today was pretty muggy. Of course, it didn't seem to slow my teammates. Sometimes you just need to be humbled, I guess.

I hear there will be 900 teams which I make out to be 3600 people competing. Sure will be a big crowd at the Ex. I am glad I will be running anchor, i.e. the fourth person, perhaps the crowds will have thinned. And it is only 5 km after all. Somehow I don't think I will be doing it in under 15 minutes like Olympic atheletes do. Stay tuned. Next week will be busy with two Bell'Arte Singers' rehearsals and a concert as well as this race.

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It was cool and windy today so I was looking for physical activity in the garden. Turning the compost came to mind. It really has been a mild winter as my three(!) compost bins kept on working (i.e. the pile subsides) over the winter months. I even found worms in the middle of the compost which is unusual. I dug out enough compost from the bottom of the "Soil-saver" compost bin I use for the "final" stage to sift and fill four 5-gallon pails. Other than sticks, pine cones, fruit "stones" and corn cobs, the only other recognisable items were fruit stickers, probably from banana and orange peels. The latter I throw out but the other chunks make great mulch under shrubs. I use to try and throw them back in the composter; however, this chunky stuff doesn't appear that it will break down in my lifetime. Next, I moved some of the "fresh" and partly rotted matter from the other two plastic barrel bins to the final stage bin. Some of this smelled, obviously needing a bit of air in the mixture to promote aerobic bacterial decomposition. Usually I do this chore once a year; however I predict that 2002 will be a rotten year so I will be able to harvest as much or more top soil later this summer.

Now I have 40 gallons of sifted compost in the garage waiting to be used for transplanting and top-dressing. The old clayey soil I dig out when I transplant goes into layers on the compost and gradually gets worked in with the humus turning it into rich topsoil. It has taken several years to achieve a more or less self sustaining cycle. Oh yes, last fall I bought a mulching leaf vacuum. The chopped leaves break down much faster in the composter and they also provided a nice winter mulch on the gardens around the Trapper Estate.

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Earlier this month I had thought about taking the Friday before the Canadian May long weekend. However, we took our project manager out for his big 5⋅0 birthday and the forecast wasn't very good (coolest Victoria Day weekend in 35 to 50 years depending on the newscast) until Tuesday. So I stayed home today. I had forgotten that our cleaning person comes every other Tuesday but that got away from the computer and out of the house earlier anyway. And a beautiful day it was: for cleaning the garage, heavy pruning, and mowing the lawn — slightly overcast and about 12°C.

I pruned some of those thorny shrubs (Russian olive) in the path behind our backyard using my new 1½ inch loppers. Damn those thorns are sharp and can be up to 4 inches long. As I have been maintaining those shrubs and pulling the weeds for the last few years I think send Rec. and Parks Mississauga a note to have them removed. Then I could plant something more "pruner-friendly", like perhaps some more double kerria which looks like a marigold bush. It's putting on a great show this year because the past winter was so mild.

I bought an electric chainsaw on Sunday. The best kind of Father's Day gift is the tool you buy for yourself. I have used both gas and electric chainsaws. Usually the gas ones need a tuneup, i.e., they're smoky or they cut out instead of idling and both kinds have usually been dull. "Oh, think I have a file here somewhere!" So, I bought my own so I can keep it sharp. I prefer electric for the pruning jobs I usually do. A 16 incher, "Pro" model should do it. The "Pro" model has the wrap around handle so I can use it sideways to cut off stumps and it also meant I had to put on the bar and chain myself. Got to know my tool, in other words. What I am leading up to is that I had told my neighbour I would prune her trees for her. Today I got to try out that chainsaw and the big loppers and remove a few lower branches from her locust tree. The other one will require a lot more work

mod_perl and Movable Type experiment — it didn't work. My 200 MHz FreeBSD box with 32Mbyes of RAM and 64 Mbytes ran out of swap space as it compiled the Movable Type modules. Oh well, I will have to look around for some extra RAM.

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As usual the chorus met for a "warm-up", this time in the staging room, a very large, high room the area of the stage. This night I guess the heating had been turned off and the A/C wasn't either. The room was stuffy and hot and I fight sleep especially given Maestro's offerings tonight. Gergely warmed us up vocally a bit and just as the Maestro entered, one of the Oakville second basses who shall remain nameless though his picture appears somewhere at the side, asked if the Oakville chorus could go over something. We all shushed him. Besides, I thought to myself, this is the fifth performance, if you don't know it by now and haven't been studying the score with the CD at home then you'll never get it. Anyway, we certainly didn't want to provoke the Maestro.

That night's lesson was about two doors. One for the artist and one for the cynic. He read some quotes and some poetry and asked us towards what door were these things headed. This took some time while I got sleepier. Next, he extolled the features of the program. Yes, I agree it is nicely organized, with a synopsis, cast names, etc. However, I thought we were to be there an hour and half early to warm up our voices. By the way, attendance was taken. Finally tonight's theme was fire, i.e., we were to sing as if we were on fire melting the metaphorical ice of the audience allowing them to experience the music of Verdi through the right door.

It was the fifth and final night. A few mistakes were made but fortunately we won't have to suffer another pre-performance warm-up talking to from the Maestro. Especially since we might try and blame those mistakes on somebody other than the chorus, which is true, but would he believe us.

After the show many of went to Alice Fazooli's to have some refreshments of an alcoholic nature and generally wind down from an exhausting couple of weeks of rehearsals and performances. Gergely showed up as you can see in the pictures and we gave him a round of applause. No sign of the Maestro which was probably just as well.

As I was running today I thought about our experiences with the Oakville Choral Society (OCS) and the Maestro. The director of the Bell'Arte Singers, Dr. Lee Willingham did his doctoral thesis on, roughly speaking, the choir as a community. Maestro made a grave mistake attacking our community; whereas, Gergely joined us, so to speak. The OCS community resisted and sloughed off his criticisms we went on with the show despite his seemingly mean-spirited ways. Because we accepted Gergely attacks on him were also seen as attacks on the OCS community. He once said something about it being "professional". The OCS isn't. We are there to have fun and to learn some music. If professional is being a member of the orchestra, playing for 3 hours — no more no less, then I guess I would rather be an amateur musician, thank you very much. Here's to the OCS community's triumph over what the Maestro tried to throw at us. In the end he tried to join with us, too: too little too late I'm afraid.

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It was the last "regular" Aida practice for the Oakville Choral Society and Opera Mississauga; i.e., next week we start staging instead of just sitting or standing around. My voice is a tad lower today (from its normal baritone range) from the almost 3 hours of singing last night.

At break, the chorus was asked if they had any "exotic" animals, e.g., parrots, monkeys, afghan dogs, ostrich(!) to display as the "spoils" of Egypt's war with Ethiopia [1]. Apparently there will even be a horse onstage for a while during the procession scene. No elephants though. Some of the men have gone for costume fittings and found that the male "people" are wearing not much more than a loincloth. Personally, I don't have a problem with that but do I have to shave my chest and legs? Unless I get a great tan in the next week, I will need a lot of makeup on my body to have me resemble a swarthy Egyptian. At least I'll be comfortable under the hot stage lights — when I played a policeman in the Pirates of Penzance, I sweltered in a thick uniform. I hear the priestesses' costumes are basically a thong and a bra designed for nubile, young women. Unfortunately, neither chorus has many members who fall in that category.

As section leader in this community choir, I never cease to be amazed at how unprepared some of these people are for a major musical production. Simple things include memorisation of both words and music, wearing costumes which may not flatter the physique, length of rehearsals, the sometimes microscopically detailled attention paid to certain musical passages and not being able to wear glasses. Anyway I better get back to my own memorisation — the music is basically there. Now if I can only manage to fit all the Italian with it I'll be laughing.

[1] Aida Story

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I listened to some of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's funeral service this morning on CBC Radio One at home and while I was walking to the GO Train. Though I really had no particular feelings towards her I was moved by the commentator's remarks that Prince Charles was trying hard to suppress his feelings by sitting ramrod straight. He, like I, was the oldest child and knew his grandmother for all his life and probably had a couple of extra-special moments with her, being the first grandchild. I was first grandchild to both my grandmothers and recall them both fondly. Their deaths seemed to end that generation and now we must carry on by ourselves. I can only imagine what Prince Charles must be feeling. There are special bonds forged between grandparents and grandchildren — they can spoil you, they seem so incredibly old when you are young, and we love them dearly.

In the summer of 2000 I was part of a choir (the Cathedral Singers of Ontario) that led daily Vesper Services at St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh for a week. At the end of the week my wife and I spent three days in London. During that time I walked from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey along part of the route taken by the Queen Mum's funeral cortège. My wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to sit in the choir of Westminster Abbey during an evening vesper service. It was literally an awesome experience knowing the number of kings and queens, prince and princesses that have been married, crowned and buried in this holy place.

May she rest in peace.

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It was time to change the clocks and "spring forward" for daylight saving time. I did this around 11:15 p.m. on Saturday which advanced the time to 12:15 p.m. However I had forgotten to advance the day/date on the bedroom clock radio and the programmable thermostat. So yesterday was Saturday once again and today started out to be Sunday. I first noticed because it was rather cold in the house as the thermostat turns up the heat later on weekends. This also explained why the clock radio came on yesterday and not this morning. Ain't technology wonderful!

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"Any new venture goes through the following stages: enthusiasm, complication, disillusionment, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent and decoration of those who did nothing."

Reminds of a few years ago when a small department was set up to give awards for productivity, safety, etc. Of course this department also received an award!

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Went to the funeral home tonight. Weirdest weather: a blinding snowstorm in Mississauga, perfectly clear once I got east of Dixie Rd. The Turner and Porter website appears to place their funeral home at Islington and Dundas. In fact it is west of where Burnhamthorpe intersects Dundas West more than a block away. I eventually found it. Without my wife, love her dearly, navigator, I have trouble driving and locating simultaneously.

I talked to both of Gerry's sons. Gerry's wife died when the oldest, Steve, was only 16. The youngest, Allan, is just finishing college and I think the oldest had just moved to Toronto (from Mississauga), closer to work at the U of T Athletic Department. Gerry had been hospitalized for about a week in intensive care with a bladder infection that had spread to his kidneys. He also had a bleeding ulcer, caught pneumonia and they couldn't stabilize his electrolytes. Poor fellow. He was only at the Credit Valley Hospital for about a week when he died. I only live a 10 minute walk away but his entire stay was in the ICU where only family members are allowed. Pity.

I feel a great sympathy toward Gerry's two young men. Gerry's sister lives in California and his brother lives in Australia. The rest of Gerry's family is in the Winnipeg area and there wouldn't be time for any of them to come down for the funeral tomorrow. There's just the two of them. The casket was open, more than likely because the funeral home suggested it. Perhaps the funeral was quick for the same reason. They are so young to have lost both their parents and to have no close relatives nearby to help them through the grieving process.

There were quite a few of my former work colleagues there tonight. Of course the retirees look not much different than when they had left — Must be the lack of stress lines. Our old work group was family in many ways, some of us get together for a canoe trip each summer, a Christmas lunch, old-timers hockey, etc. Yup, Gerry was a part of some that for many years.

Donna nobis pacem — Grant us Thy peace.

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In this New Yorker href="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/020325crbo_books">article
by Malcolm Gladwell he reviews the book "The Myth of the Paperless Office"
(M.I.T.), by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. In general you use
paper to help your creativity: shuffling it around, making notes, etc. and
leave the the filing to the computer. My colleague is fond of writing
project tasks on "stickies" and re-arranging their order into something he
believes he can accomplish. I like printing articles such as this so I can
read them on the GO train, while I am
waiting for something or, of course, during the daily href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wrader/slang/t.html">dump routines.
With Google around I don't need to keep
the article — just remember a phrase or two. Or I mail myself the url
to stash away, never to be recalled again.

Some random thoughts (random, as I didn't write them down and organise
them):

• There's one colleague who always has a paperless desk. Perhaps one report or a couple of text books are all there is. Perhaps he doesn't need paper. I find him rather anal though. Perhaps hi