Whew! I have to admit, Blogger Support is pretty on the ball. I got a reponse from them in less than a day, and they restored everything within an hour from that. And I’m not even a paying customer.

Unfortunately, Haloscan is down, so the commenting feature is temporarily gone…

OK, so I’ve been scrounging around Blogger’s Support pages, checking scripts on my template, and sending e-mail to Support for nothing… the one time I don’t read the Status Report first is the one time when it actually applies to me!

Curiously, only the archive links to posts from July, August, and September are down, but everything before July ‘03 works… I have no idea why only the last three months have gone AWOL, but at least I know the individual posts are still actually there, it’s just the Blogger pages of the posts formatted on the template are missing.

Once Blogger gets the archive pages up again, I’m going to archive the entire blog… I would be absolutely choked if 14 months of my life just disappeared into the ether like that.

Thanks to my workaholic friend Berit in Hamburg who sent this to me this morning:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

I was amazed by this! I read this half-asleep at an only slightly slower pace than normal.

I’m taking a breather.

The last few days or so have been far too manic… this is one balcony that needs a hammock or something so that I can get away from it all…

We’ve been working on the monthly report, which is always chaotic, but I had the added pressure of working on a presentation for Verle in Chicago. I swore after getting tendonitis from working on his Mead presentation in 2001 that I wouldn’t put myself through that again, but the glutton for punishment that I am wouldn’t say no. The problem is, Verle himself doesn’t know what he wants this thing to look like until he sees part of it, then he keeps changing it, and the monster starts to grow… and grow… hours and hours later, I start to get pissed off, and curse him under my breath. But it’s also my fault for taking on a project from someone who is unorganized as Verle. I should know better! But part of me also refuses to put out something mediocre, even if mediocre takes less time. I’m sure he would’ve been happy with a presentation that had no animation, less formatting, less colour. The presentation doesn’t have my name on it, but I can’t take any pride in producing anything less than what I did. Hopefully after my conversation with Ross this afternoon, my bid for a free flight to Chicago is still — if not more — viable than before.

Today was the first time I have ever submitted a paper that wasn’t complete. My choice was either to have more time to complete the Sociology paper by 1) not working on Verle’s presentation, and 2) not going out yesterday with the kids. I devoted the rest of the weekend to catching up on the course material, and it was still a struggle to get this assignment to resemble anything remotely worth handing in.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that I could either be a stellar student with no life, or a less-than-stellar student with a life. It is my own personal choice whether to be one or the other, but it doesn’t appear possible for me to be a top student while holding a full-time job (with its own set of challenges), spend time with my family, organize this event in November, et cetera et cetera. What I have to do is to get through everything one deadline at a time and not look back. At the end of the day I will graduate, and then I can look back at the work in aggregate and say I managed to get a degree while still doing the rest.

The taxi driver on the way home from the print job was high-spirited and very talkative, and asked me what I do in my spare time. I had to laugh… maybe I’m still a bit delirious from pulling an all-nighter last night. But then he proceeded to give me his phone number and told me to give him a call. I thought he was pretty charming, but we’ll see if I will actually phone. Maybe if I need a test subject for Psychology — ha!

Alvin made a rare appearance in Vancouver over the weekend, so I pulled an all-nighter on Saturday night reading Sociology material so I could make some time for all of us to spend the day together. Allan couldn’t join us as he had a paid tech support gig for a Maddocks customer on Sunday. Too bad for Dad!

Cheryl drove Alvin and the kids out from Surrey, and we headed straight for Stanley Park. I wanted to take everyone on the miniature train and the petting zoo, but I found out later they’d closed the farmyard only the weekend before, and they were doing prep on the train to transform it into the Ghost Train for Halloween.

The kids were pretty disappointed — they love the train, and the petting zoo, although they get pretty wary around the baby goats, who love to nibble and eat children’s shoelaces. But we found a playground to amuse them and spent the whole afternoon in the park.

When we were in the parking lot to leave, I tried to flog our paid parking ticket, which we’d bought for $2 from someone else, and the guy I tried to sell it to happened to be none other than Jeremy Knowlton, a classmate of Alvin’s from high school, and who’ve I’ve known since he was 10 years old… but hadn’t seen for something like 13 years. Jeremy’s mum was there, too, so it was a bit of a quick catchup, and I introduced Mrs. Knowlton to the kids, none of whom I think she’s seen before.

Wacky. This is only the second time Alvin’s visited this year, and we bump into a guy from high school! — a tiny high school an hour east that had only 100 students. Jeremy lives in Seattle now, and he brought his girlfriend here on a sightseeing trip, so this is also a rare visit for him.

Michael and Maddy were so cranky we had to make sure they had a nap, so we drove to Deep Cove to hang out for a bit, then drove to Ambleside Beach in West Vancouver to burn off a bit more of their steam before dinner at the White Spot on Georgia. It was a gorgeous day, so I was glad to be out and about, but boy — did I ever pay for it last night… I went to bed at 7am this morning, feeling like utter shite. Christa, who had to be at school early, was just waking up as I was going to sleep!

Photos Around Vancouver with 3 Big Edwins and 3 Little Edwins

I’m an 80s kid.

I can usually identify an ’80s song within the first five bars (I’m not as good with the early ’80s… my religious parents didn’t approve of “secular” music, so there was very limited opportunity for me to hear it until I was old enough to be sneaky about it). There are a lot more ’80s stations in the U.S., and I listened to them all the way down the coast when I drove down to San Francisco and back in 2000, sharpening this underrated skill for ’80s music recognition. Here I am, listening to Netscape Radio (formerly Spinner.com) while I’m working, and they’re playing Taco’s 1982 hit (wasn’t it his only hit?) Puttin’ On the Ritz, a cover of Irving Berlin’s original song from the early part of the century…

To get some “where are they now?” info on Taco, I came across a fairly well-maintained 80’s site, which has stuff other than lyrics, eg. 80’s arcade games like Pacman, Frogger, Tetris, and Simon… you don’t even need to download anything to play:


Revisit the ’80s

A crew loads sandbags in Virginia Beach, Va., to protect the city against hurricane Isabel on Thursday.
Photo: Steve Helber/AP

From the Globe and Mail:

Canadian weather experts are predicting heavy rain to begin early Friday in southern Ontario and spread north to Sudbury by late afternoon and to James Bay by evening. The area west of Toronto is expected to be soaked with upwards of 50 millimetres of rain, while the eastern part of the province will likely receive no more than 10 millimetres. Residents from Toronto east and into Quebec face the harshest winds, though, with winds blowing at between 40 and 70 km/h.

Click here for full article.

U.S. National Hurricane Center

Look what happens when Alberta Premier Ralph Klein opens his gob… *oops!* — out comes an inflammatory remark:

Klein takes jab at rancher who owned cow with BSE

He must be attending classes at the Jean Chretien School of International Relations and Public Speaking.

One of the most divisive issues currently being debated in Canadian politics is same-sex marriage:

Text of an amendment to the Alliance motion which lost by a vote of 137-132 in the Commons on Tuesday:

That, in the opinion of this House, it is necessary, in light of public debate around recent court decisions, to reaffirm that marriage is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

Results of the House of Commons vote Tuesday on the following Canadian Alliance motion, which was defeated:

“That, in the opinion of this House, it is necessary, in light of public debate around recent court decisions, to reaffirm that marriage is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, and that Parliament take all necessary steps within the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada to preserve this definition of marriage in Canada.”

To give you an idea of how same-sex marriage is viewed by the Canadian Alliance leader, Stephen Harper, here’s a quote: “Regarding sexual orientation or, more accurately, what we are really talking about, sexual behaviour, the argument has been made… that this is analogous to race and ethnicity… (For) anyone in the Liberal party to equate the traditional definition of marriage with segregation and apartheid is vile and disgusting.”

In my view, if reference to sexual behaviour is all Stephen Harper can point to when he defines marriage, we should interview his wife, too… the moment we start legislating private matters is the day I no longer want to be part of this national identity. Conservatives like Harper think this ruling is a slippery slope, but I think it’s progress rather than declension. Our guiding principle as a nation should be to protect personal freedoms within the framework of national interests, but how the Canadian Alliance or others in opposition to the ruling can argue that marriage between same-sex partner infringes upon the freedom of others is, to me, inscrutable.

New Democrat MP Libby Davies: “Nobody is forcing the leader of the Canadian Alliance to marry a man if he doesn’t want to… I think this motion does display a very homophobic attitude.”

I now have enough Airmiles to book a trans-Atlantic flight! The only thing is, I can’t book it until I register for the Spring Term and find out when that last exam is, and registration for that won’t be until probably November… oh well, at least I know I can book it when I’m ready. And it should be far enough in advance that I won’t have any problem getting the flight that I want.

Tonight I dragged Christa out for a walk down the seawall and around the West End. She isn’t very familiar with Denman Street, so I pointed out some good places to eat and took her to the West End Community Centre to check out their facilities. I just felt like we should get out of the apartment more while the weather is still OK, otherwise we might get cabin fever. I have lots of reading to do, as always, but I have to make time for other things in the evening besides books. Or maybe it’s because I don’t feel like reading Marx. That was probably why I also managed to get down to the pool at 9:30 for half an hour of treading water, something I haven’t done since the first year I moved in here. It felt easier than I’d expected, but then I took the stairs to come back up, and that’s when my legs started to send messages of resistance to the nerve control room that is my brain.