Out of my hat

So I’m sure I’d planned to do something with my evening. It might have been productive — I’ve got a draft of a paper that wants finishing printed out and ready for my attentions — but probably not; after dinner, I walked down to the library to pick up a book on the history of coffee that they were holding for me.

Of course, shortly after I arrived at the library I was told that there was a tornado watch in effect, and that the library was closing for business until it was lifted. (They weren’t closing the doors — they’re apparently a designated shelter in such circumstances — but I’d be unable to check out my book for a while.) Since I didn’t feel like hanging out in a library bathroom for the next while, I decided to head home and try again tomorrow.

Of course, when I got home I found out that power was out in the neighbourhood. I’m still not unpacked enough that it was easy for me to find matches, though candles were quickly located; it took even longer before I found matches that worked, rather than cheap cardboard matchbooks from crappy hotel chains.

So by the time the power came back on, whatever it was that I’d planned to do had been totally driven out of my head. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

This round-the-world trip planner provides me with much amusement. Right now my current daydream involves a travel itinerary next summer along the lines of:

• Toronto
• Boston
• Prague
• Bratislava
• Prague (I guess Bratislava International doesn’t give very many options?)
• London
• Accra
• Istanbul (and that’s a direct flight, apparently; who knew?)
• Bangkok
• Brisbane
• Bangkok again
• Vancouver
• Toronto

…thus managing to attend two week-long math conferences and then visit nearly everyone I know outside of North America.

I’m wondering whether a trip to New Zealand after Brisbane might let me avoid doubling back through Bangkok, but the app crashed before telling me how much more money that was likely to cost. Or maybe while I’m at it I should try and squeeze in a visit to Buenos Aires, thereby hitting every (populated) continent in my first jaunt outside of NA.

All of which, of course, would be contingent upon finding some source of funding that would let me get away with this, or perhaps becoming independently wealthy by dint of my native charm and moxie. In other words, maybe I need a new plan.

I like this idea: a public pizza-topping database, which presumably lets you generate random lists of pizza toppings which will satisfy groups of folk.

Unfortunately, it’s organized very oddly: tomato sauce is listed as an “essential” with other sauces (all of which also contain tomato usually) listed as “sauces”; meanwhile Basil Pesto is a “vegetable” and choices like olive-oil and cream sauce are nowhere to be found. The only explanation I can think of is that they’ve been Gotten To by the Tomato Conspiracy.

So it’s the first day of classes for the fall at my Urban Commuter Campus, which means that I’m wasting time by playing around with new software. I’ve been trying out a couple of apps: ecto, a blogging tool, and Shrook, an RSS aggregator. Supposedly the two are capable of working in tandem, but that assumes that both of the tools work; ecto is apparently having trouble figuring out my settings for this space, and hence its not looking like it’s going to be terribly useful.

The main advantage to Shrook seems to be that it interfaces with a web server, which means that even if one is away from the computer one can still keep up on one’s feeds. (Presumably, this also means that one can run Shrook from two separate computers and have them automatically synchronize through the server.) The main disadvantage I’ve found so far is a stubborn resistance to being drag-and-drop like all good Mac apps should be. What would really be nice is an app or add-on that would run through my Safari bookmarks and find web pages with associated feeds. Anyone know of such a thing?

As of yesterday, I’m older. I’ve come not to expect much from birthdays, at least while mine coincides so perfectly with the beginning of classes & hence my need to be here while nearly all of my close friends are there, there, there, and in one case way over freakin’ there. Despite the distance, though, I did receive many calls, e-mail, and e-cards from people, and I’m grateful for them. (Yes, even the one with the annoying song on repeat.) I did have every intention of going to a local bakery and picking out a small cake for myself, but for some reason that didn’t happen. (Or, I should say hasn’t happened, since I guess it still might.)

It seems to me that one’s birthday is a good time for the making of resolutions, since it’s really marking a New Year in a relative sense. As such, I’d like to say that I’ll be blogging more often in the coming weeks/months, except that such resolutions tend to be hard to keep, for me (and others in my family) at least. Still, I’ll throw it out there as a good intention; I figure once a week shouldn’t be impossible to maintain.

OK, enough of that. To work! (And when I mean “To work!”, I’m not actually toasting the idea of work, although I always feel like I should be when I emply that particular turn of phrase.)

Nearly three weeks after the initial scheduled activation date, DSL has arrived at my new place.

Now I’m beginning to feel at home.

Although considering that I’ve hard this site up for almost three years, I suppose that it’s nothing particularly to celebrate. Presumably this means I post an average of something like once every five days, but that doesn’t mesh with my confirmation-biased memory of rarely updating if ever.

Anyhow. Got back to my house after a longish weekend away at a workshop, and found that in my absence the A/C had been fixed. Huzzah! As a result, the house was quite blessedly cool… at least on the main floor. Upstairs, things were still on the warm side on account of because of the several windows I’d left open (to keep things coolish in the absence of A/C, natch).

I don’t know when the unit was fixed, but I’d imagine Friday; this means that the A/C was likely running continuously and somewhat wastefully all weekend. My gratitude to my landlords far outweighs the irritation at this latter development, but I’m unsure whether the very existence of the irritation makes me an ungrateful bastard.

Some highlights the Big Move Weekend:

• Got up far too early, at least by my usual standards. I’d been convinced that starting early in the day was a good call, since that way by the time the world’s gotten Too Darn Hot the heavy lifting’s pretty much done. I somehow missed breakfast; I’d bought some blackberries which were going to serve as the main component but they’d gone bad overnight, so I sort of just wrote the whole thing off as a loss.
• Of my three putative volunteers, I ended up with one. One of the others was waiting on getting his car back from the shop (apparently engine rebuilds take rather longer than you might expect); as for the other, I’d sort of forgotten that he’s not always one to check e-mail when he’s not in session, so it’s entirely possible that he never got the info. This made the work a lot harder, though not impossible.
• A certain amount of creativity was used to pack the moving van… the sort required when one realizes what one should have done an hour ago. We got almost everything big/bulky/heavy in one trip between the van and a pick-up truck, though.
• My box-spring fails to fit up the stairs to the bedroom. This makes me sad.
• Returning the van became a bit of an adventure because the U-Haul folks were sticklers about the gas level. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the gas gauge reading changed pretty randomly when the truck was actually in motion, so getting it to the required level wasn’t an easy thing.
• After I’ve treated him to lunch, I get my volunteer to drop me back off at my old apartment (which is where my car is); this is slightly complicated by a nearby traffic signal being out — someone crashed into a pole supporting electrical wires, I think? Anyhow, so I get back in to the old place and find my power’s not working. At first I get all indignant in my head about how I’ve got this place rented for another 2.5 weeks, how dare they cut off my power just because they saw me moving stuff out, etc. It took a minute or two before I connected “no power in the apartment” with “no power at the traffic signal”, and then I was much better.
• Some unwelcome discoveries about the new place: the air conditioning seems ineffective at best, malfunctioning at worst. (Turns out it’s malfunctioning, and steps are being taken to fix the problem.) Also, of the three apparent phone jacks in the house, only one of them seems to be connected to the phone line. (But at least it’s the right one, i.e. the one in the room where I’m planning on putting my computer/network/music stuff.) I’m thinking that a pair of cordless handsets might be the easiest solution.
• 
  Speaking of phone stuff, while my voice service got switched over just fine on Friday morning, the DSL did not. Initial investigations with computerized voices suggested a connection date of something like 12 days hence; talking with an actual person got this knocked down to a week, but no reasonable explanation was supplied regarding the reason for the delay. I hadn’t realized how lonely not having the internet could feel.
• On my way out that evening to pick up some rudimentary groceries, I’m accosted by my right-hand neighbour: “Welcome to the neighbourhood! I’m glad you took the dump.” Not exactly a flying start to neighbourly relations, in my opinion.

I’ve still got a bunch of stuff (mostly paper and assorted bric-a-brac) to take from the old place, which I’ll be doing on and off over the next two weeks. I’m also slowly putting together a list of things I’ll be wanting in the new place. I figure that by the end of August I’ll be more or less settled in.

So just how cold is a welldigger’s ass?

It’s not been one of my better weeks, since far too much of it has been spent either packing or avoiding packing. There’s been such a sufficiency of the latter, in fact, that I’m unlikely to be getting much sleep tonight to ensure that all is in order when the moving party assembles at my apt. tomorrow morning. The temptation is very strong to just throw pretty much everything out except for most of my furniture and a few books, but logistically that’s not really a lot easier than putting things into boxes anyway, and the latter course allows me to maybe not screw things up by tossing something important into the trash.

After tomorrow, I’m hoping things will be better. At the very least, I’ll be worrying about unpacking rather than packing, which I prefer in that there’s less time pressure involved.

21. A bottle of eco-friendly liquid detergent featuring a cap which seals tight.
22. An easy way to extract eco-friendly liquid detergent from the contents of one’s car trunk.

From the NOAA statement of hazardous weather outlook for today in my region:

IF ORGANIZED THUNDERSTORMS ARE ABLE TO DEVELOP
LATE THIS AFTERNOON AND EARLY TONIGHT...A FEW STORMS MAY BE SEVERE
WITH DAMAGING WINDS AND LARGE HAIL.

I find the use of organized here a little odd. If we thunderstorms can just get together, there’s no limit to what we can do! It’s like a union for storm systems, Cyclonics Local 538 or something.

Oh and happy Canada Day, everyone.