26 Sep 2008
My birthday, I have to say, was pretty awesome. It was everything that I wanted it to be, which to some might sound boring; but to me was nearly perfect. The only way it would have been better is if Holly hadn’t been so sick.
As it stands, we traded horrible illnesses on eachother’s birthdays this year. I had a four day bout of stomach flu for her birthday, and I don’t know for sure what she has right now but it is really terrible. I fear for my life if I catch it, because she hardly ever gets sick.
The whole birthday experience has really been extended into more of a season this year. It started in August while we were in New Brunswick to visit my family and go to a wedding. And it will end on November 24th, when we go to see the Detroit Red Wings annihilate the Vancouver Canucks. I’m thinking 5-2.
I really can’t wait to go. I have never had a chance to see the Red Wings play live. Hank, Pavel, Nick, Ozzie; it’s going to be a great time. Even if I am the only one in the arena cheering for the Wings.
To top it all off, in all of 3D Realms’ infinite wisdom, Duke Nukem 3D came out on Xbox Live Arcade on my birthday as well. I downloaded it and jumped right in. Within a couple of minutes I was laughing and flat out loving it. I’ve missed Duke. Any time you take lines from old Sam Raimi and John Carpenter movies, and throw them into a world being invaded by aliens… it’s just magic. Why Sam or John haven’t made a Duke Nukem movie, I’ll never know.
Tonight there will be some Duke Nukem happening for Friendly Fire Friday. I always look forward to FFFs, but I’m really looking forward to this one. I expect the universe will step in and cause the internet to implode so that it can’t happen.
I think I’m going to start adding some tracks of the day to my posts.
Tracks of the Day
Kids by MGMT from Oracular Spectacular
Big Casino by Jimmy Eat World from Chasing the Light
19 Aug 2008
I was thinking today about trying to get back into writing. Other than my blog, I really haven’t been writing in quite a long time. In thinking about this I started wondering about the different categorizations of a piece of writing. From what I can piece together, the following table is how it works:
| Category |
Word Count |
| Short Shorts/Short Short Fiction |
1-1,000 |
| Short Story |
1,000-7,500 |
| Novelette |
7,500-17,500 |
| Novella |
17,500-40,000 |
| Novel |
40,000+ |
I would like to write something that falls into each of these categories. I know it won’t happen right away, but I think it’s a good goal to try and have completed by something like 2010.
15 Aug 2008
That title pretty much explains my foot, and my current state by extension. The surface bruising is going away little by little. I have gone from having a mostly purplish foot, to just a little bit of bruising left in my toes. Everything is still a little sore, and I’m not walking at anywhere near 100% yet, but it is getting better.
The brace makes a huge difference. Without the brace on I feel pretty hobbled, and with it on I can walk 80+% of normal.
As for work, I’m starting to feel pretty bruisy there too. I can’t clearly remember the last time that I was anywhere near to being this busy. It would have been back when I worked for HB and we were seriously understaffed. I have 60 days of work to do in the next 30 days. We’re trying to get the work load cut down, but we’ll see how that goes. I’ve been feeling pretty drained at the end of the day lately.
It won’t be much longer and Holly and I will be heading away on vacation. It will be nice to head home and visit the family. I’m hoping my ankle will be feeling a lot stronger by then. At the very least I hope to be able to walk normally with the brace on.
I can’t wait for the weekend to start.
06 Aug 2008
So this past weekend we went camping, which was pretty amazing. It felt great to get away from it all for a few days. Hang out by the campfire. Eat some simple food. Read while sitting out in the sunshine. Getting back to nature as they say.
There were of course some hiccups, as there always are when Holly and I do anything. To start it off we forgot our camping mattresses; so we ended up sleeping on the ground. These provincial parks out here provide a gravel patch for you to pitch your tent on. Gravel, of course is made up of rocks. Rocks, well, rocks aren’t that comfortable to sleep on. There was lots of tossing, turning and aching muscles to go around.
On the only full day we spent there, Sunday, we were going to go to the beach. We were ready to head down bright and early, but the friends we were there with weren’t ready to go until early afternoon. We drove down to the day use area, and found that there was nowhere left to park. So we headed back to the campground, and decided to do the 1km hike to the camping spot. It was quite a steep decline, but there were stairs. Unfortunately these stairs were wooden frames filled with gravel (lots, and lots of gravel at these parks). My right foot went down and slipped on a rock and shot in under me. I lost my balance and went tumbling down the steps. Thankfully I managed to stop myself after only three or four steps. However in the process I scraped up my left knee very badly, and sprained my right ankle really well.
Now, I can’t really complain to much about the whole thing. Other than feeling like a bump on a log for most of the weekend, and still now as it slowly heals, it hasn’t been that bad. That, and the fact that I’m 28 and this is the only sprain I can remember ever having. My foot still looks a little ghastly, what with all of the bruising, but I understand this is fairly normal. I can walk at about 75% efficiency when I have my ankle brace on.
Holly has been doing a superb job taking care of me these past couple of days as I am unlearning some of my default behaviours. Little things like I apparently always put my pants on starting with the left leg and then cram the right leg in. Well, I found out the hard way, that doing that really hurts my right ankle when it is sprained. So I’m learning to do that the other way. It is quite an educational experience to see the things that I normally take for granted. Like, oh, I don’t know; the ability to stand comfortably. Driving is a little more adventurous too with a sprained right ankle.
I look forward to having a fully healed ankle. Hopefully it will be stable by the weekend.
28 Jul 2008
I am not a handy person. Manual labor has never been my strong point. Thus, our recent and current renovation has been a comedy of errors.
Everything has taken an order of magnitude longer than I thought it would. What was meant to be a couple of weekends of work has snowballed into a couple of months of work.
Things still aren’t quite done, and the summer is well on it’s way to being over.
The latest adventure was shaving down the bathroom door. Let me set the stage…
You see, we had new flooring put in. We ripped up the old floor, which was a berber carpet. I am here to tell you that if you think that you like berber carpet, trust me, you don’t. One tiny little thread in the carpet gets snipped, or torn, or bitten through by a pet, and the whole carpet is lost.
Anyway, we had someone come in and put down a new laminate floor. I love it. Then we picked up the transition pieces that go from one type of floor to another. The problem there is that these pieces have a certain amount of height. In our case just under 1cm at the highest point. And, well, sadly, there were no transitions between the carpet and the other types of floor. They had just been glued right up against the other types of flooring.
This meant that we had a 1mm gap under the bathroom door, and we needed an 11mm gap to account for the new transition piece. So, I go out to the local Home Depot. I pick up a Jig Saw (because I know I can’t cut it straight with my little hand saw, and it would take forever anyway). While I’m there I decide I need some clamps. My plan was to draw the line on the door that I needed to cut along. Then I clamped down a spare piece of laminate as a guide that I could push the saw along. Unfortunately I picked up the cheap clamps. The vibrations from the saw caused the clamps and the guide board to shift ever so subtly. By the time I got to the other side of the door, I was out a full inch. There’s no way to go back and fix that kind of a problem.
So I grabbed the door from the spare bedroom (thankfully all of our interior doors are the same) and I cut down the bottom on that one (not relying on any guide board, just the line I had drawn, so it is the tiniest bit crooked near one end), and put it on the bathroom. So now, instead of spending an extra $10 on clamps, I’ll be spending an extra $35 dollars on a new door (or two…), or maybe we’ll decide that it doesn’t need a door anymore.
Of course a new door, means more painting as well… just when I thought we were almost done with it.