Category: my ramblings

Man, there’s a lot of stuff to talk about.

I took the 14th off to spend with Sandy. We had an amazing time together, and I think (and hope) I’ve figured out how to balance everything together, like one of those plate-spinners. We went mini-golfing to The Putting Edge, which features glow-in-the-dark indoor mini-golf courses. Sandy loves mini-golf, and since we were there at 12:30 in the afternoon on a Friday, we were also the only ones on the course, which of course meant much horsing around and cheating. According to the scorecard, she won by two strokes, but who cares? The Putting Edge has a few arcade games as well – Sandy played a game of Simpsons Bowling as Lisa. I’ve always wondered what that game was like, and the bowling seemed extremely easy and the humourous phrases were pretty, well, humourous (after a strike: “I feel just like Susan B. Anthony – if she bowled.”)

Afterwards, since we were already in Burlington, we went over to Ikea, because Ikea is always fun. Picked up a new bedside lamp, and other knicky-knacky things. One thing that I’ve been looking for forever was a tiny little artist’s easel, which I finally found at Ikea, for 95 cents. Schweet. More about that later.

In the evening, we went to our favourite restaruant, the Carden St. Cafe (who finally have a website – woooo!). I never tire of the food there – it’s just so damn good. And the staff are excellent, excellent. We ended up with the booth right next to the door because I made late reservations and the owner? was so accomodating for us, she put up some partitions to shield us from the wind and then she actually ended up locking the door and using the other one!

After dinner we went to the movies. Sandy decided that she wanted to see Final Destination 2 again. Hey, it was good fun the first time, right? And this time I’d know what was coming so I wouldn’t have my head buried in her shoulder as much 🙂 Well, not 10 minutes into the movie and there was a very annoying black scratch right down the centre of the first reel. It was pretty obvious that someone had fux0red this print up, and bad. It was extremely annoying, especially for Sandy, as she used to be the assistant manager at a movie theatre and so she knows that this isn’t supposed to happen. So we went out to get the manager and complain, and probably get some passes. While she was dealing with that I ran into my old friend Mark from university, so we chatted for a bit. The manager offered Sandy either passes (which suck, because you can never use them for the first week of a movie’s release, at least) or we could go see another movie tonight. The only thing that hadn’t already started was Daredevil, and I guess seeing the trailers in front of every other film for the past month had brainwashed us into thinking it would be OK, so we went. Summary: it was god-awful. No more needs to be said.

After that we snuggled into bed.

I spilled a glass of water all over one of the bookshelves this morning. You’d think that the aftermath of such a boneheaded maneuver would have woken me up, but I’m sitting here sipping my second coffee of the morning. I mopped up everything as fast as I could, and had to throw out half a ream of paper because it was soaked all the way through. Also, books don’t like to be wet, and what happened? The brunt was poured right onto the shelf where all of our recently purchased Sluggy books are. In a word, fuck.

After that, I had to run around to find my security pass (in my shirt pocket, hanging in the closet), cell phone (in the back pouch of my bag), grab a sweater to put on, and what did I forget? My headphones. For me, I may as well have left a third of my brain at home. Listening to music keeps me functioning at work. By 2pm, I’ve got my headphones on if I already haven’t been listening all day. Crap on a stick. We’ll see if I make it through the day…

I think ‘cull’ is my new favourite word. It just rolls off the tongue, and it can be applied in a variety of circumstances. I always thought it meant to select for purposes of destroying (eg. to cull a herd), but apparently it only means to select from a group.

Yeah.

News front pages from around the world – cool stuff. If only the images were then linked to the stories online…

Today’s caffeine intake: high.

Sandy’s got the flu. I’m not feeling too great either – I think I slowed down enough for this cold to catch up with me. And I’m out of tissues at work. Great.

one of my favourite pasttimes: communicating through Simpsons quotes.

Seems like NewtonTalk is down right now. This, of course, sucks ass. I’ve been informed that a trouble ticket has been opened with our new hosting service. Update: it should be back shortly.

Today’s Penny Arcade: it really is like that every time I go to EB.

Blargh. I am so tired this morning. I’m actually typing this while not looking at the keyboard at all, but staring up at the ceiling. Wow, my fingers really do know where the keys are.

I finished Stupid White Men last night. It was good. It really makes me glad to not live in the USA. I only hope that Canada doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket like that though. I can already see how the TV news (with the exception of the CBC) has changed to become sensationalist garbage.

I haven’t had lunch yet, only an extremely spicy instant Korean noodle cup. Yesterday I picked up some sushi – three salmon sashimi, one tuna sashimi, six california rolls (they were kinda small), a bowl of miso soup and all the fixings for $8 plus tax ($9.20). Kinda expensive for lunch, but it was good, and it wasn’t Subway, which I have been frequenting WAY too much. And my usual hot dog guy hasn’t been around the past few weeks – probably on vacation, and he’s the only one that I know is fresh, because he doesn’t stay open 24 hours. Hot dog carts that don’t move are sketchy as hell. There’s always lots of them around my building because we’re right in front of the SkyDome – sporting even crowds, you know.

Even though I hate commuting, it does give me time for one activity that I’m not usually able to do: reading. On the GO train, there’s not much else to do anyways. I just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this morning. There are some things that I like and some things that I dislike about all of the HP books to date (keeping in mind, of course, that they are primarially aimed at readers younger than me).

I’m enjoying the story across all the books immensely. The fourth book was a real turning point, which makes sense if there will be seven books in total. Three at the beginning, dealing mainly with character origins and building Harry’s character, one in the middle, the turning point, and three at the end, to sort out all the evil. There’s tons of good stuff that didn’t make it into the movies, and I have no freakin’ clue how they will ever make movies out of Prisoner of Azkaban or Goblef of Fire. They’re long.

What I don’t particularly enjoy about the books is how the story progresses within each book. Especially with Chamber of Secrets, when you finally get near the end of the book when all of the good stuff happens, you realize that you just read a whole lot of pages for nothing, because what the characters were thinking and doing was completely and utterly contrary to what was actually happening. I would expect them to get at least something right some of the time. Having a twist ending for every book does make for some great reading, but you have to go through a ton of stuff to get to it.

Rowling’s writing has improved a lot since the first book though, which is nice to see. Right after I finished Goblet of Fire, I started Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.

That’s the sound of me importing all of my old site postings since June 2000. Well, more like the sound of MT importing them all. I kinda messed them up still, but frankly I don’t really care too much – what kind of wacko’s actually going to look at them?

In other news, today my boss told me he was reading my site archives…

In other other news, the Zwan album comes out tomorrow. In case you don’t know, Zwan is a new band formed by Billy Corgan and the ex-guitarist from Smashing Pumpkins (I can’t remember his name). The video for the first single, Honestly, has been playing for a few weeks now on MuchMusic. Sandy is unsettled by it because Billy Corgan smiles too much. Not having been a huge Pumpkins fan like her, I don’t really get it, but compared to the Pumpkins videos I have seen, yeah, he looks scary smiling. It’s like you expect the smile to turn into an evil grin, and his clothes to suddenly change into black robes.