Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

We got an awesome new toy today — Dave went to the gaming auction and picked up this 1985 Tag Team Pinball machine for a few hundred dollars (bringing back memories of when we all lived just a few blocks from here in the 90s and had two machines in the kitchen that got a ton of use). They forgot to give him the front panel key though, so we’re actually having to put real quarters into it for now… I wonder how much money will be in it by the time the key arrives? I’m guessing a lot, since everyone seems to be enjoying it. Nefarious got a phone call from one of her school friends and mentioned it to her, so her friend is now quite excited (“coooool!!”) to come and play after school in a couple days.

Yes, we were so excited to get playing that we didn’t even take the time to put the legs on before starting to pump quarters into it.

In our continuing quest to improve the games we play, we’ve also added a new play style to Gin Rummy, which we play while eating a surprising quantity of mandarins. When you play your cards, they can be laid in a grid, with the suits being the columns and the runs being the rows (or the other way around). For a run/set to count, it of course has to have three cards minimum, as in standard Rummy, but this way means that you can have cards be counted more than once for scoring (as in Quirkle, which is the game that gave me the idea). So for example, in the photo below, I have a 6-6-6 set, a 5-5-5 set, and a 5-6-7 of hearts run, and a 4-5-6 of diamonds run, as well as a set of Jacks and a 2-3-4 of clubs run, and thus for the purposes of scoring the five of diamonds, the five of hearts, the six of diamonds, and the six of hearts are all counted twice. Especially once you start taking into account adding onto your opponent’s played cards, it makes the strategy and gameplay a little more advanced.

Tomorrow Nefarious is going to a friend’s mini-golf birthday party — we got them a “make your own glow in the dark slime” kids chemistry set, which I hope will be a hit — and as the chauffeur I’m looking forward to the free time. Because the place is a little out of the way, my plan is to bring along my Kindle and find somewhere to read, as I’ve downloaded a couple of books that feel so far like they’re going to be great reads. I’m really happy I got a Kindle, and all things considered, I prefer reading on the Kindle to paper books, which is really quite a remarkable statement for a bibliophile like me.

Other than that, I stayed up too late last night watching almost all the episodes of Embarrassing Illnesses, which on one hand is the same can’t-look-away trainwreck as the bazillion abscess and zit-popping videos on Youtube, but on the other hand is really valuable, really helpful information documenting the awkward experiences that we all have but are all afraid to talk about. There were some very brave people in the videos and I hope they know what an important service they’re providing.

I started doing my “homework” today… the first homework I’ve had in a very, very long time! This was the first week of Maya, so it was just covering simple modeling in 2011, as well as getting comfortable with the interface and core commands… nonetheless, I couldn’t resist getting ahead of myself and covering the roof with otter fur. I am sure that when we get into animation next week that I will be unable to resist putting various particle emitters in every orifice. So much fun!

I also got myself a new toy, one of the new portable Fujitsu duplex scanners (duplex in that it scans both sides of the paper simultaneously). I got it because I have mountains of paperwork — bills, letters, legal documents, and so on — and I think that my life will be immensely improved if it all just gets shot into my computer (and then on to my accountant, my lawyer, my archives, or whatever) and then eaten by the shredder. A much better than the current “solution”, which is put it in a box in the corner thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow”, “tomorow” being in the sense of the day that is always after today, but never today.

Nefarious’s new “toy” of the day (in addition to the Night Fury dragon that Caitlin and I got on our morning walk — and a McDonalds coffee for her and an apple pie for me) was stealing my glasses, something that fascinates her way more than I can understand, and she spent a while admiring herself in the mirror and remarking on how much older they made her look, which is true.

As I’ve said enough times to bore you, Nefarious and I have been on a major games kick lately, and probably have spent two or three hours a day — at least — playing various games. There are a few games where she can consistently beat me (memory being the most obvious — she has a killer memory), a few where she can hold her own (Othello, Chess), and a few on which I am the consistent winner (Whack-A-Mole). As I mentioned before, every game we play we tweak the rules and I think improve upon the game quite a bit. For example, I don’t enjoy games that have a heavy “chance” element in them, and prefer for games to be skill, intellect, and strategy based, so a lot of the rules we’ve come up with are about taking games and giving the brain a bigger role. If I didn’t have too many aborted projects already, I’d start a site of game rule improvements — although for all I know there already is one.

We’ve been burning through lots more Harry Potter (Order of the Phoenix, a behemoth of a book), and we’ve hit the point where they’re just starting to talk about forming the DIY Defense Against The Dark Arts classes, so the tempo has picked up after the three hundred page introduction, so Nefarious is always quite eager to get to the day’s reading.

Anyway, I’ve really been trying to keep to a proper sleep schedule, but it’s all messed up, and I’ve been sooooo tired during the day. When I get up between 6 and 7 AM to make breakfast and get Nefarious off to school (she is supposed to be there at 8:15 AM) I’m full of energy, and that usually stays for Caitlin and my walk, but when I get back, I crash and there have been a few days where I’ve literally slept for the whole day — until I leave at 3 to go back to the school — and nothing would keep me awake.

Last night at about midnight (already a later bedtime than I’d planned upon — I was shooting for 10 PM), I was incredibly tired, and just as I was about to fall asleep I realized I had to queue a couple of actions on my computer, which meant literally nothing more than clicking on about a dozen links. That’s it. As I said, this process started at midnight, and should have taken at most a minute, but somehow I didn’t finish it until 2 AM!!! This means that I must have been passing out between clicks — I suspect with my eyes open — and just “going offline” for twenty minutes, and probably because I wasn’t asleep long enough to dream, I wasn’t even aware until I looked at the clock and put two and two together that it happened. To make sleep matters weirder, I was woken up at 6 AM by a horrible earthquake, and it was not until I was fully awake from the vibrations that I realized they hadn’t happened at all, but were the remnant of some dream, my dreams having been especially vibrant lately.

Other than that, I am eating some amazing white chocolate lemon truffles that Caitlin made.

I was pretty tired today and was having a nap when the doorbell rang, so Caitlin answered it. I started getting up because I was hoping it would be a package with something fun, but she returned with a nervous look on her face and told me it was the police at the door and they wanted to talk to me — she had done the right thing and closed the door on them and told them she’d go and see if I was home. When I got there, it was a couple of plainclothes RCMP officers (that had the vibe of people who spent most of their time doing office work) asking if they could come inside and talk to me about some things that had been written on my blog. I replied that I’d prefer if we talked outside, although did leave to door open so that Caitlin could listen in.

As was no surprise — since someone had written me bragging that they’d reported me to the authorities and demanded I be harassed — they wanted to talk to me about the slightly controversial “Knives on a Plane” entry. After a minute it seemed to me like more than anything they were pissed off that the whole thing wasted their time and was generally an irritation that they didn’t need. They had clearly done some reading of my blog, and they pointed out that if they wanted to they could put me on a no-fly list and make my life (and my family’s life) difficult in the context of what they had learned, but I — politely — suggested to them that since they were perfectly aware that I was not a threat to air traffic, for them to punish me out of spite would really illustrate some of what I’d blogged about, that all of this is just pointless “security theatre” whose actions do little to actually stop terrorism, to which they basically said, “you don’t know the half of it… we know more than you what a waste of time all this ‘security’ is.”

On one hand, I get that they’re just following orders and they’re trying to keep their job and not make the world worse as they go through motions they know are pointless — I don’t envy their jobs, and I can empathize with the frustration they were oozing as they balanced the annoyance that I was to them, and the annoyance that the bureaucracy that makes them talk to me is as well. I should say that I was happy with how they treated me — politely and respectfully — and that I don’t bear them personally any malice for doing their job and coming by. But on the other hand, I’m not happy that this is what tax dollars are being wasted on when we’ve got serious shortcomings in education and other more important arenas. I feel like on the whole Canada has a common-sense and pragmatic approach to the law, and that’s something I’m very proud of as a Canadian, but security theatre is an area where it’s really hard not to get sucked into the giant black hole of American lunacy.

Speaking of lose-lose situations where pragmatism has gone way off-kilter, my conversations with my doctor about appropriate medication have been annoying in a similar way. One of the primary side-effects for many people with MD is pain, and the most effective treatment for this pain is either narcotic/opiate painkillers (which is something that I’m currently prescribed) or marijuana. However, opiate painkillers are heavily policed (doctors are regularly investigated and sometimes prosecuted over legitimate prescriptions if they hand out more than average), and as a result many doctors are paranoid and can be unwilling to prescribe it in high doses — even in patients who are ideal candidates for those prescriptions. For example, in my case there is hard diagnostic evidence of the cause of pain (ie. they can “prove” that I have a painful condition, rather than just taking my word for it), as well the fact tat I have zero negative side-effects from the medication, and I am currently being prescribed a low dose and less than the average dose according to the manufacturer. My doctor’s advice so far when I’ve suggested that the dose is too low? If you feel like you need more, buy it on the street. I kid you not! This is actual advice from my doctor… As if I think that’s a good idea! I guess the bizarre reasoning is that doctors are also prescribing narcotics to patients who don’t need it, so they then channel their pills into the black market — at a huge mark-up of course, to say nothing of the many other problems that all this criminality causes — and everything just “works out” somehow without the doctors having to take any personal risk. How messed up is that???

My doctors have also been recommending marijuana to me, and it is true that it’s a very effective pain killer, one of the best. It really does work. However, it comes with a ton of side-effects, making me drowsy, unable to focus (or do anything), and completely intoxicated in a way that I don’t enjoy. I spent a long time self-medicating with pot (which caused all sorts of other problems for me and those around me, even though my pain was reduced greatly) and it took a lot of effort to get clean of it, and I love being clear-headed and I don’t want to go down that road again — I’d consider it an absolute last option. In addition, if my doctor were to prescribe it, and I did everything by the book, I’d be getting the government pot which is 10% of the strength of decent street pot, so weak in fact that it’s utterly useless as a painkiller and won’t do anything but give you a headache — which has resulted in a number of lawsuits from Canadians prescribed medical marijuana. There are compassion clubs who will give proper strength medical marijuana to patients, but clubs and patients are still getting busted — people with completely legit prescriptions are being arrested! So it’s all lose-lose, with good intentions all around, but because of the inept bureaucracy there’s no solution that works, and everyone lives in a state of constant frustration… and pain.

This is as good a time as any to mention to people that they should watch this two part series: Don’t Talk To Cops Part 1 and Don’t Talk To Cops Part 2, as well as this DVD: BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. That’s almost two hours of videos I think, but it’s really advice that’s worth the time should you ever find yourself in the position to need it… and many people who find themselves in those positions are completely surprised by it happening, so don’t think “it’ll never happen to me.” One good thing about evolved bureaucracies is that at least in North America there are enough checks and balances in place to go a long way toward protecting you, assuming you don’t get tricked into giving them away — which, unfortunately, most people do.

Other than that, I’m going to try and get a good night’s sleep today — I’ve fallen in a cycle of staying up too late, and since I have to get up at seven on school days it ends up being rather crippling, so I need to really work to break that cycle, especially now that I have school of my own to content with! Of course I have still been reserving the energy and wakefulness and joy ti play lots and lots of games with Nefarious — not just the authorities — as well as continuing to chug along on Harry Potter, of which we’ve recorded over fifteen hours of video so far on the project of making a “book on video” for Nefarious to enjoy as an adult. I’ve also been going for morning walks around the neighborhood with Caitlin which is a wonderful way to start the day.