Spending time

Apart from poorly managing my time, as usual, I don't know what I've been doing to result in this blogging famine of late. You must be starving, Dear Reader - ! It's not as though I'm working a whole lot on anything, I'm not running, I'm never on facebook anymore (are you? That was short-lived!), so what is going on? This is normally the place I go whether I've got other things to do or not. Maybe once I start writing, all these fascinating activities taking up my precious time will reveal themselves, but really, that's doubtful.

Work keeps changing. One project ends and another begins. Unpredictable, and still part-time, but interesting. Climate change has completely finished and livestock is just about wrapped up; these have been replaced with seniors' transportation and a sustainability plan for a small town waaay up north. The local transportation project continues. Sense of competence is okay, but maybe that's because I haven't had to chair any meetings. Or attend any, for that matter.

Thesis is stagnant, mainly because I'm moving to the next stage and I'm having a mental block. I don't feel like writing about this right now.

What I will write about is Fishy, J-Lo's aptly-, if somewhat unimaginatively-, named new pet. It's a Japanese fighting fish and it's in my care for a week while its owner gallivants around the country on business. His new girlfriend just 'gifted' him (as one of my profs likes to say) with this critter a few days ago so he brought it over in a tall, lonely-looking vase and instructed me to feed it 4 pellets a day. I put the vase-with-fish on a high shelf but that didn't stop the cat from noticing it immediately. Soon afterwards, I found him on the shelf below, meowing madly, trying to figure out a way to get up one more level. I threw the cat out of the room and closed the door for the night. The next day, I surrounded the vase with a book, a lunchbox and a plant and tested the cat's memory. Apparently, he has none, so Fishy swims in peace, cut off from the rest of the world by a copy of Madam Bovary. I check on it now and again and it seems content enough, but I just have a hard time understanding how anything can be happy stuck in a glass like that, alone, with nothing to do. Maybe I need to stop projecting human capacities onto fish.

I come across as sounding bitter there about having to look after J-Lo's fish, but I'm not at all. He always looks after our cats. He sounded so apologetic when he asked me to do this, as though he was sticking me with this god-awful responsibility at the last minute, that it made me wonder if I shouldn't recognise the burden on him when we go away with a little more grace. A six-pack will no longer cut it!

Also worth writing about is last night's lunar eclipse: The local astronomers had set up their telescopes at the two rivers here and, considering the bitter cold, there were a lot of people who showed up to have a peek at the moon, magnified. It was beautiful! Orange and brown! Craters! Shadows! Another, massive telescope was pointed at Saturn. I'd seen Saturn a few years earlier when I was working at that science-y place. It looked nothing like the clear, colourful pictures in magazines; it was more like a tiny, fuzzy, white dot with big ears. It was so much more fascinating, though, knowing I was looking at the real thing. I remember feeling awestruck by it. It felt the same last night.

B and I had some wine at the pub nearby afterwards. We are into red wine lately, mostly because it feels warmer than drinking beer, which is nice at this time of year. This is only the third time we've been to this particular pub, and we asked ourselves why we aren't there more often because it's nice. The first time was about two years ago, and the second was last Friday, after curling. There were about seven of us and we were all chatting away until the band got up to play. This tends to indicate the end of any conversation, which normally annoys me, but this time I didn't mind because the band was really good! They were three young guys who played the blues and they were fantastic.

I don't think this has shed any more light onto where I let the time go, but who knew writing about nothing could be so enjoyable?

Tagged

...by Lolabola.

Books
Half way through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Keep getting sidetracked by other books, like The Wal-Mart Effect and The End of Poverty, but that' s okay because it means I can drag Harry Potter out.

Just bought a graphic novel called "Pyongyang" by Guy Delisle. It's about ... North Korea! Looking forward to it.

TV
Watched an episode of "The Extras" tonight. Otherwise, just "Coronation Street", my favourite. Wherever there's a crisis, and there are many, someone is on hand with a mug of tea.

Music
B put this on last night:

We cannot seem to get enough of this tape! It keeps resurfacing.

Otherwise, I bought a Feist CD a while ago, which I love. She sounds different from her Night Gallery days! I also picked up the new Radiohead, which I haven't listened to enough to form an opinion, but I think it'll be good. And The Old Disc Jockey!

Tag anyone reading this who is not Lolabola?

More weather because I live in Canada and that's what we talk about

I made a snow angel yesterday. It was a most beautiful day - the sun was shining and the sky was this incredible blue, it was cold but not stingingly so, and the snow was so fluffy and lovely, that light, dry kind, that I felt compelled to swim in it, or something close to that. I couldn't get enough of this day. It made me sad that I had spent all of it up to that point indoors "working".

(It feels silly to open a post as I did there because when I was a kid, it's not like I'd go home and write about a snow angel in my diary - if I had one, which I mostly didn't. Snow angels were just a part of normality, thus not really noteworthy. Not that anything noteworthy ever appears on this here blog.)

Yesterday was an anomaly. This is what the weather has generally been like lately:

Behold the bedroom window and all the icy action that can happen between "double glazing". It makes for some pretty patterns on the panes.

Give it up

At the library yesterday, a man walked past me with a black, smudgy X on his forehead and I remembered that I forgot to give something up. I stopped being a Catholic a long time ago but I've never really let go of Lent. I just looove the opportunity to prove to myself that I can Go Without. So, what would it be this year? I've given up chocolate, meat, drinking, smoking and coffee in the past but none of those really exists in any substantial way in my life anymore (especially not the smoking, thank god!) so to give them up would not be very sacrificial of me. I decided on caffeine, because I drink a lot of tea. I'd already had a cup that morning, so I had missed the starting gun, but I figured I could make up for it at the end of Lent; that cup was out of memory lapse and not weakness, so totally forgiveable.

So today was my first caffeine-free day in what I am guessing is a really long time. I can't even remember the last time I avoided it altogether. Normally, I just have a hot beverage every few hours, some caffeinated, some not, without thinking about it too much, and I'm normally relatively alert. Today though, I just felt dopey and I had a headache.

Now, B has come home with some caffeine-laden chocolate, but I will be stashing that away for Easter because I am Going Without!

M-hmm. Feels good.

I still have that headache.

Snow bright

This stack of snow is the new dirt pile. It's not drawing much of a crowd today but that must be due to the the cold temperatures we've been having because it displays a lot of fun potential.

Right next to this pile is an outdoor rink, which gets used quite a lot, especially for hockey, whether it's cold or not. Both rink and snow stack are right behind our apartment building, which is great because it means I can roll down a hill or go skating at a moment's notice if necessary - call me NOW and I'll meet you there in two minutes. (Usually, though, I go down to the river to skate because it's so much more fun to skate in a line than in a circle.)

The thing that's not so great is the lighting. Big, tall flood lights surround the rink, some of which shine directly into our apartment, which is fine, but after about 11pm, by which point all rink users are long gone, you'd think it might be time to turn them off. Not so. For some reason, these lights have been on all day and all night for the past 5 or 6 days, and for other sporadic days and nights over the past month or two. This is a bad case of excessive energy use and light pollution. When the lights are on, it's like daytime in our apartment.

I've already called the community centre twice about this, and once they actually pulled the safety card, to which I respond (in my mind only, as of yet) first, people deal drugs out there in broad daylight so extreme lighting isn't necessarily going to change that and if it does, the problem is being displaced not solved, and second, since the purpose of flood lights is to light a rink then we should use them for that; improved neighbourhood safety is a totally different issue and has lighting all its own. I get the economics behind doing two things with one lighting system, but it isn't really working here, and besides, that's a load. They are on because no one's bothered to turn them off, otherwise why would they be on in the daytime? I'll offer my light-turning-off services myself tomorrow. I wonder if they'll trust me?

More photo fun

Yesterday was great! Went skating with me


went out for Ethiopian food with B

and came home to lots of nice messages.

This morning, two packages came in the mail.
This from Em


A lunchbag which she 'felted' herself. She even made the button, out of fimo. Every time I look at it, I laugh. Isn't it excellent?

(What is 'felted'?)

And this from Best Friend

Yay! I can't wait to listen to this, but I'm trying to catch up with the transcribing first, which I let slide a little this week.

(So how do I have time for all this writing?)

When I unwrapped the CD, I realised that the 'Old' in Old Disc Jockey referred to the disc, not the jockey. And all along I had that the other way around...

(Recognise that mug, anyone?)