As promised here are some pictures from today's mini-trip. Don't ask me about the bear, I have no answer that would would fall into either the logical or rational categories of response. It would be at best a slightly irrational, but hopefully funny retort that would be nothing but a ploy to divert your thoughts from the horrible, horrible truth.
One of the crappy things about living in the downtown core of a city is that you have the oldest cable lines known to man. My cable modem has been offline 90% for the past six hours now. I'm connecting through a 56k link on my Mac… The only machine in the house with a modem. It's driving me bonkers. I'm a bandwidth addict for chrissake. I need it. I neeeeed it.
I called them and their diagnostics agreed that my line had an unusually high amount of interferance… They're sending someone here on Wednesday to do some sort of noise and hum tests. Not that it'll do any good. What can they say? “Oh, yeah, you're fucked. Move to the suburbs.”
Nice week to quit drinking!
Well, I'm logging off now, I don't think I can handle this speed… Anyone who really needs to contact me can just call I suppose.
 I love this t-shirt. “Best shirt ever” |
When I sleep, my CD player scrolls through a bit over 500 CDs. My day started as always with waking up to something abrasive and incondusive (I hope that's a word) to rest — this morning it was Jad Fair. I got up, and dealt with some of the essential emails. As I'd suspected, since I'd spent the entire weekend creating source materials, there wasn't much for me to do today since the other half of the development team are now very busy. I suspect it'll be that way for the next few days as the software is implemented and the final business and banking things are dealt with. Our fraud screener wanted a huge monthly minimum fee so we've had to go with an alternate solution there, and there's still a little more to deal with on the merch stuff… but as far as I can tell it's all good.
Anyway, the plan for today had been to grab MiL0 from Phil and Carrie and some other little fellow's1 house, go out for breakfast and zip her up to the airport. Now, I'm not particularly known for anything other than erratic impulsive behavior (and I suspect that she may have a penchant for it also)… So breakfast turned out to be in Niagara Falls instead (I'll post some pictures of that later). Hey, it's not that far away and if we timed it just right she'd still make her flight.
After all, you can't really come to this part of Canada without going to the Falls. We checked out the tunnels under the Falls, something I hadn't done since I was a child. But time passes quickly, and we knew that if we left right now we'd get her to the plane on time.
Well… Almost…
We got her to the airport minutes after her gate closed. If it wasn't for the crowded parking lot, it would have been timed perfectly. No big deal though, there was another flight a few hours later. It was a bit nervewracking, but I hope she enjoyed coming along on the other errand I needed to run today:
I dropped off my TT at Howard's place and we hopped into my beast… Seriously, there's not much scarier for me than driving a truck like that at about 110 (kph!) on a highway. It really isn't made for that kind of speed. And, to top it all off, I've somehow lost the car's registration paperwork, insurance paperwork, AND license sticker, which would have made for a huge headache if we'd been pulled over. Anyway, even though that drive put my stress level through the roof we got her to the airport and I hope a good time was had by all.
One of the wonderful things about having been active online for a long time is that if you type your name to a search engine, you come up with all sorts of stuff… I was “spying” (that's what it felt like) on other people earlier, and eventually typed in my own name. I found lots of BME stuff, a zillion little interviews and some long ones, name dropping all over, stuff on exotic cars, Deloreans, monster trucks, kit cars, and even old video games I wrote when I was a kid. But I found a really nice article I'd never seen before. I met with this writer a few months after I moved back to Toronto from Philadelphia. Anyway, if you could care less, click here.
Liz Langley was very nice — one of the things we talked about was tongue piercing. This was a time when I'd recently gotten some bad chips in my teeth and I was very anti-tongue piercing. I love this quote from her article:
"[Shannon's] advice... if you want to restyle your tongue, get it split instead of pierced. After awhile that metal clacking against your tooth will break it, leaving you looking like a hillbilly, which for some is worse than looking like a lizard."
It's true… I haven't really seen many people actively seeking a hillbilly transformation! Anyway, I just sent her a thank you note… It seriously is one of the nicest things anyone has ever published about me.
Pasta often has goofy names. All the classics like rigotoni and lasagna and spagetti and linguini sound really funny… But this one takes the cake:
Scoobi-Do? That can't be real? Either way, I'm eating it tonight. It's squiggly.
