• Oh Income Tax Refund, where art thou?!? (It’s been a month already! I’ve never had to wait this long!)
• I was trying to submit an online form to one of the most high profile corporations in the country, and at the end of the process was informed that an error occurred because I didn’t use any of the three acceptable browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer (currently unsupported for Mac), AOL, and Netscape! What’s a Mac user to do! (Phooey, I downloaded Netscape… the lesser of the–well, you know.)
• The more I feed Hugh, the more offended he acts when I don’t share my food with him.
• I phoned in to my radio station of choice the other night to make a small donation to their quarterly fundraising drive, receive a free copy of a CD, and make a song request. I used my mobile phone to call in my particulars and the line was a bit static-y, but I was chuffed to hear them announce my contribution on the air within five minutes — “… and we’d like to thank all our listeners and fundraising supporters, the latest one with a song request for ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ by Nina Simone in memory of her husband. Thank you, Gail Edwin-Stelding…”
• I prefer using subway tickets to tokens because the TTC tokens are barely visible to the naked eye, but more often than not I’ve been stuck waiting in a queue at the collector’s booth for drunk people to count out their fare in DIMES or the collector’s gone off somewhere and I end up buying a token ANYWAY because it’s the only way I can get past the gate!
• Crazy Property Manager is a real title, or, at least should be.
• I’m really trying to get my sense of humour back, but it hasn’t given me an ETA. Working on it.

I put in an online order for Bell’s landline service so I could also order their DSL.

I had Roger’s cable service briefly in Vancouver, and it was horrible, so I switched to Telus ADSL and had that for years. Years of smooth sailing, until some colossal blunders in 2004. I had incredibly good fortune with their wireless service, though, so I am not anti-Telus everything. But I do still remember the shoddy cable internet service from Rogers, even though the technician hooked me up with free cable TV until customer service figured it out months later. By then, I decided I wasn’t watching enough of this free cable TV to keep putting up with the horrible internet service.

So I decided to get a stripped-down, very basic phone service with Bell ($15.95 for landline plus three features) and get their Sympatico DSL service. I’d never dealt with Bell before, because Telus had the landline monopoly and Bell had only broken into the Western telecom market in recent years with wireless service.

I submitted the online phone service order last night and was pleased to see a prompt e-mail this morning from Bell. more…

I missed yesterday’s election in Canada, but I’ve been trying to keep up with the happenings through people’s blogs (because I loath advertising that much that I avoid commercial sites for even something as important as political process). I listened to public radio in the car but heard nothing about it there, and if it were mentioned on public television I was too preoccupied with Helma’s cooking last night to think of tuning in. Oh well… if any Canadians (or interested Americans, for that matter) want to break it down for me here or offer an opinion — because I’m out of the loop down here — that’d be swell. (Er, did I just say swell?)

And if anyone privy to my immigration woes is wondering if U.S. Immigration is as arbitrary as I ascribe it to be, I give you the story of a Vancouver native, Darren Barefoot, who was summarily rejected at the border this morning for trying to attend a Microsoft program at the Redmond campus a couple of hours south of Vancouver because they said he needed a WORK PERMIT. And if you think that’s harsh, read to the end of his post, where there’s another example of a Canadian getting rejected at the U.S. border, though in no way summarily (he was detained for hours). When I say there are no guarantees to enter the States, even under benign circumstances, I’m not kidding. Sure, there are people every day who get past the gatekeepers without incident, but it’s still very much a crapshoot. You’d think the next-door neighbours — the U.S.’s largest trading partner — would get preferential treatment? Nope. Even Nexus cardholders have no guarantees.

Who keeps airline socks? Anyone? I found some in a drawer this morning and they were PERFECT for putting over David’s swollen ankles to go to clinic this morning. Who knew?

It’s been a long, tiring day. Both of us had a hard time getting through the prolonged time at the clinic, where the radiation machine needed maintenance and consequently delayed all the appointments. We were late getting over to the hematology and oncology clinic next door by nearly two hours!

We made good use of the wheelchairs at the clinics, too. There was a lot of back and forth between radiation, blood work, and the injection clinic today, and the cane was wholly inadequate. We requested a scrip for a wheelchair, but we didn’t have time to pick one up today.

There was also the rigamarole with the increased painkiller dosage that the insurance company is not allowing the pharmacy to fulfill. more…

Hip!
Hip!
Hooray!

The other night I successfully completed my first attempt at creating a photo book, and I used recycled materials:

• cardboard from Amazon.com shipments
• ribbon from gifts received
• an old tablecloth dug out of David’s junk storage containers

It’s amazing how much stuff can be recycled rather than buying things new. At the same time, I can’t believe the things that people throw away.

I went to the dollar store yesterday near our house for the first time, and I’m feeling guilty as a result of it. Why?

I found large numbers of items which EASILY cost more than $1 to produce. Dollar stores are everywhere, and how they manage to make a profit is that everything comes from China, where the labour costs next to nothing. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the idea of supporting an economy with such an atrocious record of human rights violations, especially one where obviously people are not getting paid a working wage. If they were, we’d be paying more than a dollar for many of those goods on the shelves. I’m not saying most of the inventory is worth much more than that — the stuff barely holds together after it leaves the store — but there’s still the cost of human labour in addition to machinery, importing, distribution, etc.

It’s not that I wish to pay ridiculous sums of money for cheap goods at a big box store rather than a dollar store. Dollar stores have a limited selection of goods, anyway, they’re not direct competitors for any one type of store. There will always be a market for cheap goods. But what makes things worse is that because the items are so incredibly cheap, we don’t think twice about throwing them away. Then buying more of the same! It’s not really the act of buying that I’m railing against, it’s the consumption-quick disposal-consumption cycle that gets fed by the steady increase of a wider selection of disposable goods at prices which cannot support fair costs for labour. They may not label themselves as “The Disposable Goods Store”, but society views dollar stores that way. Either our desire for quality items (manufactured by people getting paid properly) is diminished, or our consideration for the energy that is required to make a product is superseded by what we’re willing to pay for it. In other words, we don’t care if Chinese people work for pennies as long as we don’t pay more than pennies.

How this relates to me fumbling around with making a photo book from recycled materials is that it took me so long to create the damn thing that I had time to ask myself the following questions:

“How much would I pay for someone to make this for me?”
“How much is the other person worth to me that I would make this for them?”
“How much easier it would be if I just BOUGHT one?!?”
“What can I do to make this easier next time?”
“Do Chinese people ask themselves, ‘Why would a Westerner pay for such crap?’”

OK, I confess: this is one of my grammar pet peeves, perhaps the biggest one of all — the usage of ‘and I’ versus ‘and me’.

It drives me bananas when people take the ‘and I’ combination too far. For example:

My boss gave him and I tickets to the show.

No! Take out ‘him’ and see what you get? My boss gave I tickets to the show.

If you don’t believe me, how about AskOxford.com? Here’s what they say about it:

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is correct: ‘my friend and me’ or ‘my friend and I’?

That depends on where you and your friend are in the sentence. In colloquial speech ‘me’ is often used where standard grammar requires ‘I’, especially when someone else is mentioned too. Sometimes people use ‘I’ instead of ‘me’, because they know ‘me’ is sometimes wrong, but have not understood the principle. (Others resort to ‘myself’, which can sound rather pompous.)

I am the subject of the sentence, but the object of the sentence is me.
If in doubt, take your friend out of the sentence.

Me and my friend went to a party last night. [Wrong]
I and my friend went to a party last night.

My friend and me went to a party last night. [Wrong]
My friend and I went to a party last night.

The mayor has invited me and my husband.
The mayor has invited I and my husband. [Wrong]

The mayor has invited my husband and me.
The mayor has invited my husband and I. [Wrong]

Incidentally, saying ‘my friend and I’ instead of ‘I and my friend’ is not better grammar, it’s just being polite.

Whew, it’s good to get that off my chest.

Since David has radiation on a daily basis, the waiting room is part of my routine. Sometimes I read, sometimes I watch the “news” (I use that term loosely), sometimes I people-watch out of the corner of my eye.

I’ve started to rank the various facility waiting rooms by three criteria:

1. magazine selection
2. television programs
3. refreshments

It wouldn’t really be fair to include people, would it?

Mercy Hospital is a sad state of affairs on all counts. Every day it’s soap operas, the mags all get nicked (leaving real estate listings, ugh), and the vending machine selection is awful — or broken. Mind you, that’s the ER waiting room, the MRI waiting room has more magazines but not much of interest. I would sooner read laundry care labels than flip through Field & Stream again. When David and I perused an issue at the immigration doctor’s office in Tannersville, there was an ad for how to build a doghouse out of an oil drum. Am I missing something? Does America have an oil drum oversupply? Our city lacks recycling facilities, but oh wait — the family dog could use a petroleum-based shelter!

CMC’s ER waiting room is pretty standard as ER waiting rooms go — nerve-wrackingly empty, devoid of anything distracting. The surgery waiting rooms at least have televisions, but there’s an annoying central phone that rings endlessly. Everyone looks at each other, but no-one wants to answer it because then everyone stares expectantly at you while you shout out the name of whoever it’s for (because it’s never for you). It’s like a hospital mind game: take a room full of anxious people and put a telephone in the middle. It’s 2005 but the phone is a $5 Wal-Mart rotary-dial special — Bat Phone Red, of course — with a ring so demanding it jingles the handset. No volume control. Fun for the whole family! (Sometimes kids answer.)

The Hematology and Oncology Clinic, which is housed in the same building as the Radiation Clinic, has a similar waiting room but to a larger scale. Eerily, I have only ever seen “Oprah” and “Ellen” on their screens. We go there all different times of the day, too. How does this happen??? Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres — all day, all the time. Bizarre.

The clinic staff reserve nearly all the magazines for the chemotherapy patients who have to sit for hours as the drugs drip into their veins, so I don’t complain about the lack of reading material. Not at all. But I still went home the other day to fetch David’s book that he left on the counter because One Cannot Live By Magazine Alone.

Each of the chemotherapy stations has its own TV, but the average drug takes 45 minutes to enter the body, after half an hour of anti-nausea drug followed by a half-hour of saline. Nothing on television is that engaging. Before, when David was on combination chemotherapy, he’d fall asleep on the first bag and they’d wake him up hanging the second one. I didn’t hang around the waiting room those days, I’d just go home and wait for the call when the final bag was started. I don’t have enough patience for Oprah or Ellen.

The number one reason why I like the radiation clinic waiting room is because they have an espresso machine, conveniently located at the front entrance. I walk in, push three buttons, and voila! This was especially handy when radiation appointments were at the ghastly hour of 07:30. The magazines are rotated between the main reception area and the patients’ waiting area, so the selection varies wildly. I end up ferrying myself between the two places, depending on:

• how chatty the reception ladies are (“HEL-L-L-OOOO MISSUS FIELDING!!!”)
• what’s on TV (Oh please no! Not ‘The View’! *sob*)
• if I’m in the mood for trashy tabloid (the section “They’re Just Like Us!” in People magazine showing celebrities feeding parking meters or pushing a grocery cart is absurdly comical), or
• pseudo-journalism (CNN or Fox News).

Thankfully, David’s radiation treatments are very short, so no matter how trashy or trivial the entertainment, I’m never subjected to it for long. And I always have my compensatory hot drink. That bought my vote.

Today, though, I flipped through a Time magazine and found this week’s cartoons pretty funny. I tried looking for them online, but the online cartoons must be a different set from the published ones. Anyhow, Time’s online cartoons can be found here. This week’s can be accessed by clicking on the cartoon below.

Oh, one other thing I saw today. I couldn’t help but notice this older fellow in the patients’ waiting area, wearing a baseball cap that proclaimed loudly “Bass Pro Shop”. But the real neon light was his belt, partially obscured by a fold in his protruding belly. The top part said JESUS in big, bold letters. I kid you not. The rest of it… well, I didn’t want to go there, you know?

ADDITION: an ulterior motive for me to write is to prompt David to write, and write he did –

Dave’s Logbook: The Waiting Game

A cameraphone photo I took last Friday at the 42nd Street (Times Square) subway station.

A family of buskers, part of the MTA’s arts project Music Under New York.

I’ve been reading an interesting discussion in the New York Flickr group today about the harrassment photographers get while shooting around New York.

This shot is a threat to the security of the United States

It’s essentially about the security paranoia that the average (and above-average) photographer encounters around New York City. Although, I should add that many of the photogs who have participated in the discussion own conspicuous high-end equipment, not touristy point-and-clickers. It shouldn’t matter, but it seems to invite strong-arming by the Powers That Be, whether they’re security guards or transit police or regular NYPD. It’s getting to the point where you can’t take photos of anything without looking suspect. Somebody even mentioned that tripods require a permit in many places.

It’s been argued that New York City has every right to be paranoid. Others argue that this heavy-handed blanket of security that affects everyone has protected no-one and won’t deter terrorists from subversive activity. I tend to agree with both points, but the second point is actionable.

First of all, these longstanding structures like Grand Central Station and the Empire State Building have been around for DECADES. People have been taking photos of them and in them since they were built, and preventing people from doing so now isn’t going to protect them. The same goes for the New York metro — if a terrorist wanted photos of the underground, they wouldn’t even have to take photos, there are many thousands of these images already in existence. It’s probably not difficult to obtain blueprints, either.

I suppose it begs the other question — do New Yorkers feel safer if they see photographers get stopped from taking pictures?

Secondly, would terrorists be so bold as to carry around expensive camera equipment, set up tripods, and make themselves very visible and vulnerable to a search? It seems to me that ordinary tourists with ordinary digicams don’t attract as much attention, which has been to my advantage, but wouldn’t bode well for me if I started hauling around a DSLR with a giant lens. The past few trips to New York I’ve been shooting with the Asahi Pentax K-1000, which only made a curious older gentleman stop me for a chat on the street about how much he loved his old Asahi that he picked up in Japan in the 60s. I took shots at JFK Airport, in the subway, in museums, but didn’t encounter any nastiness. (One museum guard very politely prohibited me from taking photos of a certain exhibit, but that was for artist’s proprietary rights, not security.) Perhaps being female makes me appear less of a threat.

Maybe I don’t assert myself as much as the others in that discussion. When I see “No Photography”, I generally don’t try and take any photos, surreptitiously or otherwise. When I see police or security guards around, I don’t take out the camera. The last thing I want to do is ruin my day by arguing about my rights. If I want to take a picture badly, I make sure the ‘coast is clear’ first. If it’s not, I move on. Is that the wrong thing to do? Should I be more assertive and try and stop this erosion of civil liberties?

Part of me thinks it’s not worth it, to argue. It depends on the situation, but if I lived in New York and made it a regular practice to shoot such places, I would make more of an effort. After all, it’s my stomping ground, it’s in my best interests to exercise those rights because I’m going to keep running into these same security guards/persons of some authority, in all likelihood, again and again. But while my time in NYC is measured and precious, I’m not going to waste any of it waving a PDF of Metro Photography Concerns]

1:30am Saturday

I sent this pic from my cameraphone on the way home from New York. I tried to send it while walking down to the metro, but the photo hadn’t finished uploading when I lost the signal, which resulted in an aborted upload to Flickr… which might’ve answered my question whether Cingular sends the data in one packet or in parts (or is that at Flickr’s end? I’ve seen partial uploads/corrupted data before). I was wondering, since Cingular botched my cameraphone upload of Hugh’s pumpkin inspection last weekend, sending it SIX TIMES, three days later.

Speaking of baffling the consumer, I went to JP Morgan Chase (or is it Chase Manhattan?) to change my pound sterling to U.S. greenbacks this afternoon. It’s been sitting in my wallet for five weeks now because I can’t find a single outlet, bank or otherwise, that will convert foreign currency around here. You’d think I was trying to change Lebanese or Egyptian pounds instead of pound sterling, but the banking officer I spoke to said nobody deals with foreign currency at all in Scranton. Call me a cynic, but I’d probably get laughed out of the bank if I showed up with Canadian dollars or Mexican pesos — even though they’re from next door.

I was supposed to be in New York today, anyway, so I figured it was high time I got the GBP done and converted. I went to Chase because the last time I was in New York to pick up Lucy from JFK, she was able to change it there without too much trouble. She had to show her passport, but at least they didn’t require her to have an account. I remembered to bring along my passport, and stood in the glacially slow Friday afternoon line of clientele impatient to get their weekend money.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Over in the business accounts queue, an irate customer pointed to her watch.

“But I was standing here right at four o’clock!” She looked around for validation.

“Right on the dot of four! How can you not take me?!? I’m the last person!” She did have a point, why single her out? Penalty for not rushing the counter?

Meanwhile, I carefully guarded my spot in the queue. This is New York, after all. Those ‘keep one car-length’ and ‘don’t tailgate’ rules don’t apply here, for vehicles or people. When I finally reached the counter, I put the money through the little security trough. I don’t do bank chit-chat, I’m an advocate of speedy, efficient transactions. Besides, this looks like a lynching mob.

The teller asked me three times what the currency was called. BRITISH POUND STERLING. STERLING. POUND STERLING. BRITISH POUNDS. GBP. She also picked up and rotated several notes like she’d never seen security holograms before, or different editions of the same denomination.

I could see the little thought balloons floating above her head: “Oooh, look at the colours! How pretty!”

Then she took out some forms and asked the next teller how to spell the currency on the forms.

Hello? Is this not Chase Manhattan in TIMES SQUARE, the busiest, most famous intersection in all of the United States? There are more tourists here than the population of Scranton, for crying out loud, does nobody change money anymore? I’m a card person, myself, but you’d think Queen Elizabeth II’s face has made enough rounds in the past sixty years or so that she might be recognised by a bank teller in Manhattan. And when all else fails, one might consult the print on the notes.

Then she asked ME how much money was in the pile. The natives behind me were getting restless, so I told her the total quickly, and offered that she might want to check it. I jumped through all their little hoops, showed my passport, filled out my address, signed it, blah blah blah, then went on my merry way downtown towards the financial district… where they had better know what GBP means!

Took the 7 train eastbound, then the express 4 southbound, but it still seemed to take forever. That’s Friday rush hour for you. Got out at Bowling Green, which should change its name to Construction Central. Yeesh. In the end, I had to be fetched from across the street at Duane Reade because the Ritz-Carlton sign was completely obscured by a tree. (Who’s idea was THAT? Trees grow, even in New York. Whoa Gail, sarcastic much?)

I was there to meet up with Mister M and Mister B* for some nosh in the 11th floor lounge before their flight to Vancouver. Mister B was on Bangalore time, so he was nodding off. I hadn’t seen Mister B for nigh on a year, so I was well out of the loop on his offshore activities, and it had almost been that long since I’d seen Mister M. There was much to catch up on, but as usual the clock ran down far too quickly. The car service to the airport was waiting downstairs after only half an hour. We continued the conversation in the car, which was quite full already — the trunk was chockers, and the front seat piled high with carry-on luggage. But we made do sharing the back seat and were quite glad we didn’t have to manoeuvre through the Friday gridlock through Midtown and along Van Wyck to JFK. It was zooish, to put it mildly. They checked in to Cathay, and I backtracked to Manhattan.

It’s been a bit of a wacky day, and transportation loomed large on the agenda:

• car to bus station
• bus to Port Authority
• subway to Financial District
• hired car to JFK
• AirTrain from JFK to subway
• subway to Port Authority
• bus to local station
• car to home

The day started off wacky, thanks to an overambitious Photoshop project and a very funny phone call from Hong Kong. Days like this should be framed and put behind glass, for posterity.

* It’s Mister B who’s privacy-conscious, but for consistency I cloaked them both in mystery. Ha! Mrs. M would laugh if she read this.

Two of my favourite writers recently lamented — as older-generation internet users tend to do — on the decrepit state of literacy on the world wide web.

If you’ve never read any of Socar’s journal, mouse-click over there right now, before you read anything else. If her post titled “The Other Side of the Internet” doesn’t win you over (although I wouldn’t recommend reading it at work), I’ll start lamenting about my own readership. The thought did occur to me to ask her to write my vows, but that would not only be in alarmingly poor taste (gauche, even), but just a bad idea all ’round. I’m a little stuck on the vow-writing, while David is starting to wonder if I really know why I’m marrying him.

I would certainly be remiss and a poor nearly-spouse if I didn’t send you over to AviatorDave’s Logbook, where he wrote “Critiquing the critics” the other day. A post that anyone with any internet-surfing experience might appreciate.

It’s not merely word snobbery (more on that in a moment) that prompts such posts, even though we all play Scrabble online. Though I should mention that you don’t necessarily require an extensive vocabulary to do well Scrabble, since professional players depend on memorisation rather than full word/definition comprehension.

At the risk of subjecting you to more of Amazon.com’s horrendous consumer reviews (though I doubt there’d be any at this particular item), the book Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis inspired a 2002 documentary called Word Wars. We watched it via Netflix last week, and I can assure you that high-ranking Scrabble players — or, at least those who try to do this for a living — are no strangers to, um, strangeness.

For example, one of the top seeded players is GI Joel Sherman, a New Yorker thin of hair and body who slugs Maalox throughout every Scrabble game and in Word Wars states with alacrity that he has no other marketable skills. The ‘GI’ stands for ‘gastro-intestinal’. (I recommend both the book and film, by the way.) It should come as no surprise that people obsessed with a board game get pinned with labels of ‘idiosyncratic’ or even ‘nutty’, but GI Joel is especially endearing (at least to me) because he plays the piano and sings The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” with a forlorn charm.

See, what I’m talking about when I say it’s not merely word snobbery is my contention that every time a reader encounters Netspeak or internet lingo, misspelled words, terrible grammar, butchered semantics, et cetera, the brain has to de-code it… which is… MORE WORK! Yes, more work than if it were spelled correctly/the right word/flowed better. I’ve read more than enough arguments about the so-called decline of language and not enough scientific explanation why it bothers people in the first place. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a visual person that I depend on matching the word housed in my brain with the word on the screen or in print. When it doesn’t match, my mind catches on it like a snagged sweater. A whole paragraph of Netspeak means a sweater full of snags that my mind spent far too long trying to unsnarl, and would prefer to throw away.