Flotturgaur

MODify it

2009-05-21T00:44:00.000-07:00

norah jones - love me tender

woke up late but had tons of fun at the staffer workshop. mod makes awesome magnets, so crafty! after, i wasted 3+ hours at pat&oscars eating/talking to jee & modestine. dang those two are so freaking funny my stomach hurt the whole time. plus, tomorrow is already wednesday! i LEAVE on friday! i have to wake up at 4am! and i only did my siddhartha journals, but i haven't read ANY books. (i read sidd last year but i have to reread it for the test). thank god i did my french homework or going to new york and doing all my work would totally blow. plus it doesn't help that i spend like 9 hours a day watching the olympics. doesn't matter what sport, i will watch it! i hate school. everyone else gets to start september 7th. we don't even get out earlier! BLAHHHHHHHHH! i hope women's gymnastics is on today. china is REALLY good, yellow teeth and all. at least they smile, unlike romania--too hardcore to look remotely emotional.

Simple Solutions Are Always The Best

2009-05-21T00:34:00.001-07:00

Another slap on the forehead this morning. I'm starting to get a headache.

The Windows Server was erroring out during setup. It turns out that if you are going to run setup from floppy disks (the PC I'm using doesn't boot from DVD ROM), you have to copy the new txtsetup.sif file from the slipstreamed \I386 directory to Setup Floppy Disk #1. Hey, you live and you learn. I trashed quite a few DVDs because I thought there was a problem writing to them. So, the OS now installs with the SP3 files intact.

What The?

I'm having no end to problems with slipstreaming Windows Server. Errors are popping up all over the place, and I've created quite a few coasters in the process. I will figure this thing out, though. Oh, nothing for the job hunt, yet.

Train Your Brain With Super Saimon Deluxe

2009-05-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

Super Saimon Deluxe is a classic brain game that will test your sonic recollection abilities. To play, just mash the big pretty buttons, or press the corresponding arrow keys in the correct sequence before the timer runs out! Exercise your brain and improve your mental response-time!

Play more sequence memory games

Jokes to make you smile!

2009-05-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

1) I saw a fat woman wearing a sweatshirt with 'Guess' on it. I said 'Thyroid problem?'

2) When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realised that The Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me.

3) I've often wanted to drown my troubles, but I can't get my wife to go swimming.

4) I was doing some decorating, so I got out my step-ladder. I don't get on with my real ladder.

5) I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

6) A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Bypass.
Motorists are asked to be on the lookout for 16 hardened criminals.

7) Well I was bullied at school, called all kinds of different names.
But one day I turned to my bullies and said 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me', and it worked!From there on it was sticks and stones all the way.

8) My Dad used to say 'always fight fire with fire', which is probably why he got thrown out of the fire brigade.

9) S*x is like playing bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand.

10) I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said 'Are you going to help?' I said 'No, six should be enough.'

11) If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?

12) I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.

13) You know that look women get when they want s*x? No, me neither
14) Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

15) I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.

16) Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before

Let them eat cake

2009-03-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a rare Saturday night off (I've worked 11 out of the last 13 days--so much for working only part-time!) so I decided to go see Marie Antoinette. Even though the movie hasn't been getting a lot of positive reviews, I think it's still worth seeing on the big screen just to see all the food and cakes, as well as the lavish costumes and shoes.

Afterwards my husband and I went for dinner at Hermitage on Robson Street. Although I don't have any pictures, the meal was excellent. I started with the duck confit with white beans and salad and then followed it with the veal chop, a perfect medium rare. My husband had the seared foie gras with armagnac and grape sauce on toasted brioche followed by a main course of sweetbreads and kidneys in a bone marrow bordelaise sauce. We enjoyed the meal with a bottle of Mercurey 1er Cru 2001 pinot noir from Burgundy.

2009-03-21T01:33:00.000-07:00

O BY:
1. Marisa
2. Reeces
3. Natasha

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Nell Fenwick
2. Susie
3. M.

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My delight in oddity
2. My stick thin figure
3. I like my sense of fun

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. crippling my own abilities
2. being unable to break through unforgiveness
3. self-absorbing tendencies

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Scottish
2. French
3. Danish

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. neediness
2. lonliness
3. lust

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. the nearness of God
2. a warm piece of wiggling dog to hug
3. a toothbrush

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. black sneakers
2. corduroy pants
3. bobby pins

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR ARTISTS AT THE MOMENT:
1. Keane
2. Math Minor
3. the Cranberries

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS AT PRESENT:
1. U2 - "City of Blinding Light"
2. Keane - "Bedshaped"
3. Yes - "Close to the Edge"

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS
1. Gain an essential friend that thinks the same about me
2. Grow so many vegetables that I have to give them away
3. Undo the cords that bind me

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
1. I like chocolate doughnuts, but only to look at.
2. Time is moving too fast.
3. I've never been in a mud fight.

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
1. A cartwheel.
2. be an unconformist
3. take pleasure in marshmellows

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. listening to lps
2. writing e-mails
3. being outside

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. gain inspiration
2. buy a new bike
3. get my fill

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
1. book peddler
2. permanent companion and child-minder
3. professional dependent

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Alaska
2. Italy
3. Yorkshire

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Own a black lab.
2. Have huge amounts of people milling about my house for time without end.
3. Be an important fixture in someone's life.

Show Me The Money

2009-03-04T22:18:00.000-08:00

Today, I'll lighten our bank account by $950 when I pay for the classes I've taken to obtain an Associates Degree in Computer Information Systems-Network Specialist. I'm sure the account will be happy when it doesn't have to carry around all that extra weight. The Veteran's Administration representative at the school asked that I call her today to check on the advanced educational benefits which I applied for. I'm not going to hold my breath, because checks from the government are rarely on time.

News You Can Lose

I called the school's VA rep and, surprise, no benefits advance check has been sent. Go figure.

A mini-Thanksgiving feast

2009-02-21T01:45:00.000-08:00

I had to work this past Thanksgiving long weekend. (Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving a month earlier than Americans--I don't know why, maybe it's because the cold weather arrives sooner here.) So instead of a big traditional turkey feast, I made a quicker, smaller version using a cornish hen.

This cornish hen was stuffed with an apricot, sage, and mushroom bread stuffing. I served it with a baked butternut squash seasoned with salt and pepper and rosemary.

To round out this hearty Fall meal, I opened a bottle of the Silver Sage 2003 Sage Grand Reserve.

This is a truly unique wine. It's a Gewurztraminer fermented with wild sage leaves, so it has a semi-sweet crisp taste with aromas of sage and spice. It paired very well with the cornish hen.

Yesterday I attended a screening of Our Daily Bread at the Vancouver International Film Festival. This is a documentary that reveals the process of high-tech, mass production agriculture. There is no dialogue, only the camera follows workers at huge greenhouses, fields, and slaughterhouses. Some of it was quite disturbing to watch, but as a cook I feel that it's important for me to know where our food comes from. We are so far removed from any direct knowledge of food production--this documentary brings us face-to-face with our relationship to food, the earth and the mechanization of agriculture.

Why vote?

2009-02-17T22:56:00.000-08:00

On the question of whether your vote counts-

Our city is pretty big. Each city council person represents about 50,000 residents. Several years ago our district was up for grabs. My wife was leaning one way, but as she approached the polling place changed her mind.

Turnout was low since it wasn't a major national election. I think around 8,000 votes were cast. The electronic results were "too close to call". Absentee and provisional ballots had to be manually counted. Still too close, a recount was required because of the very, very narrow margin. Finally one candidate called for a second recount.

Final result? The candidate Kitti voted for won by one vote. Her vote. She decided the election. You could also of course say that every person decided it, if any one who voted for the ultimate winner had voted the other way, the results would be different.

Yes, your vote counts. Always. It might not determine the winner or loser of that race, but it sends a message to the politicians. You care, you hold them accountable.

Think of this scenario:
If an elected official has some grant money to spend to beautify a single neighborhood. Do they spend it on a neighborhood with low voter turnout? Or high votor turnout? Bingo, whether the last election went their way in that neighborhood or not, having more people involved will make a difference.

I had an idea this summer but didn't follow through. Maybe I'll do it for the next election, probably a small local election. I'm going to make a difference on my block. Not the whole neighborhood, just my block. I'll get a copy of the votor roll and start walking the street with a stack of registration forms. At each house I'll ask, "is your registration info complete?" "Would you like to register" (if eligible and not currently registered)? I'll keep bugging until everybody is registered or refuses to speak to me again. Then the election approaches. I'll do the rounds again. "Are you going to be able to vote on election day?" "If you're not sure why not apply for an absentee ballot?" Then a few days before election once again. "Remember Tuesday is the election." "Did you send in your completed absentee ballot?"

I'm sure our street already has a pretty high turnout, but just think if some one on every street in the neighborhood did the same. We would have a voter density double the average. The politicians and parties would look at us and say "We better take care of those folks, they don't let an election slip by".

There's another thing too- Statistics on whether you vote are maintained and used by politicians. If you send a letter to your elected official and ask them to do something, you can bet the first thing their staff does is check to see if you vote. Then they decide whether to read your letter.

2009-01-26T00:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just don't know what to tell you people. To blog or not to blog, if you'll let me transform a cliche. Well, I have a lot of fun at it. But then, quite often, there's no more to say. It's not that I'm bored, or sad, or depressed, quite the opposite. I have a sudden hope, a modicum of things to do, and a few happy events in the future. The beneficent God has ordered my days to be undergirted with quiet joy at present. And for that, I'm thankful.

Memory

2008-11-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

There's a place hallowed in my memory, a little church where the best times of my youth were spent.

The images of a hundred faces fill my mind when I think of this room. All the calm afternoons that I spent there, talking, reading, singing. It brings me a comfort that few other things do, to think about myself, as a child, growing here amid forgotten feelings. In these memories are held the beginning of my spiritual life, the most treasured of moments with friends, and the happiness that I carry with me, every day of my life. It's the place where I was baptized, where I formed my ideas about society and relationships, and had so much fun that I couldn't bear to go to bed.

The early morning walks beside the creek, through the woods to see if my friends were awake yet. The morning meals, washing dishes after a cup of hot tea. Watching videos in the afternoon as the sunlight drifted quietly through the windows. The loud clang of the bell, and the pull of the rope as it settled back into its resting place. The excitement of going down the driveway, wondering who has arrived. A seclusion long looked for, an unworldliness. Late night card games. Crochet on the lawn. A thousand things make up the patchwork of my memory, special days in the sacred time of my childhood.

Mostly I remember the sense of peace, and the laughter of my friends.

This is a QotW answer A friend of mine sought solace in the booze..

2008-10-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

following the death of his father. My mate at the time was in his late teens, and went a bit mental with the drink.

Anyway, the drinking got to the point that he was permanently in his local getting absolutely wasted.

Things got progressively worse until about 3/4 way through one particular all-day session. Picture the scene: my mate stood propping up the bar of a dark northern pub, talking inane bollocks to other harderned piss-heads.
Suddenly he feels the need to expel some gas from the trouser department - which he duly does.
However, this is accompanied by a breakfast, lunch and dinner's worth of follow-through that only alcohol can truly bring....and due to the state of him at the time he was completely unaware of it.

Several hours and many beers later he toddles off home and collapses blind drunk on the bed.
In the cold light of day he finds the tell-tale brown,luke-warm, stinking mess leaking from his undercrackers.
Thinking he did it during the night whilst he was asleep, he thought no more about it, cleaned himself up and merrily went back down the pub for more.

Unfortunately for him, the regulars *had* noticed the previous night.
He was greeted with a round of applause, much piss-taking from both the landlord and regulars.
Also a new decoration was erected in the pub in his honour. This just happened to be a nappy with my mate's name pinned to it hung up above his place of choice at the bar, which remained there for weeks afterwards.

After that little incident he decided it was about time to get help from the AA.

Boulder shits

2008-10-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

I went to go see Kill Bill 2 the day after it opened and I think something in the popcorn disagreed with me. I was at the bookstore about a half hour later and a rock settled in my intestines. Putting the two Megatokyo books and I think an Edward Gorey aside, I left in search of a john. The theatre was at the otherside of a doozey of a parking lot and I knew I would not make it, so I searched for something in the area. Not wanting to traverse through Macy's for a toilet, I went to the nearest place I knew would have a ready toilet without my having to buy something: Burger King. Big mistake.

Oh, where to begin. First, the mall is ghetto, fortunately not very ghetto, but close enough. So the bathroom's already a wreck, the floor is slick, the doorknob is wet from something, the stall doors have spaces large enough above and beneath for someone to look through and see what's going on. To make matters worse, there is a queue, the first stall (out of two) that I went into had no toilet paper, and the second that did have toilet paper was the one which recieved a dookie the size of a tennis ball and long as a football. For those of you who have seen Trainspotting, this is the worst toilet in New York, except it's in white tile with better lighting.

I'm in New York, so water pressure is pretty good. I expect the crap to be flushed like rocket fuel. What happens? The handle barely moves an inch and everytime I jiggle the handle, I only get a little bit of water and the tennis ball moves an inch. It takes about ten tries of this before the thing is smashed up enough by the water to be properly flushed. I barely get my hands clean, I get them dirty again from the doorknob, any attempt to find a bathroom in Macy's is futile so I can't really clean my hands until I get home, and I have learned to avoid the Burger King bathroom.

I've also had similiar craps at home where I've had to go to work on the toilet with the plunger for a bit. Fortunately, it's not often, but when it happens, I'm in there for about a half an hour. And fortunately, only once have I jiggled the handle so much that the toilet overflows.

I really think I should have been born a boy. I'm too disgusting to be a girl and not ugly enough to get away with this. Oh, while I'm at it, when I was younger, I ate so many M&Ms the day after Halloween that when I blow my nose, my snot was blue, green, and red. Gross then, hilarious now.

Dos stories

2008-10-12T23:52:00.001-07:00

1. After eating lots of vietnamese greens and vegetables one night, I noticed particularly green poop the next day. Intrigued, I examined it a bit closer and found that it had no scent. At that point I was elated at the fact that my shit really did not stink. I made sure it wasn't a fluke the next time I got vietnamese food, and found that again, with consumption of certain green things my shit was indeed delightfully scentless.

2. I'm anal retentive in the literal sense of the phrase. I just won't go for days. I was spending a couple nights at a friend's house and hadn't gone for a few days and it was all compacted and boulder-esque, so I definitely had to go. After spending a fair amount of time in the bathroom, my friend was getting worried. I assured her that I was fine and would be out momentarily. I tried to flush the surpisingly round turd and it just would not. The bowl was starting to fill with water and I had no option but to remove it manually. Like the trooper that I am, I wrapped my hand in toilet paper and reached in and removed the half stuck turd from the drain (there was some digging involved-it was pretty stuck). I definitely buried it in said friend's trash can. My hand smelled like poo for days.
sorry for the length!

Bouillabaisse

2008-09-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

Before I get to my favourite dish from Provence, I was so thrilled to find some of that amazing Epoisses cheese that I mentioned in a previous post.

I was able to purchase this incredibly strong and salty creamy cheese at Les Amis Du Fromage in Vancouver. One bite (and smell!) of the cheese brought me back to the dinner I enjoyed at Hotel le Cep in Beaune, France, back in 2003. At the end of a long and decadent meal, the waiter wheeled out a huge cart full of cheeses, and that's where I sampled this unique cheese for the first time.

Keeping with the French theme, I recently made Bouillabaisse at home. Bouillabaisse is a Provencal fish stew--there are a dozen different variations of it--but the main ingredients are saffron, fennel, tomatoes, and fish and shellfish. Here I used salmon, snapper, mussels, clams, scallops, with diced potatoes and tomatoes, and sliced fennel. It's a healthy and comforting meal when you're in the mood for seafood.