Mon, 31 May 2004
A ray of sunshine
My less than perfect week was punctuated on an up note this weekend. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. I took advantage of the nice weather to get some time on my bike. With the Manulife Bike & Hike for Heart ride coming up this coming weekend, it was good to get a warmup in. One of my teammates and I did a quick ride up to Conestogo along Bloomingdale Rd, then back down on Woolwich to Lexington. (I'll get an image up when I get the map overlay tool on my GPS desktop software working properly.)
The rest of the weekend was pretty lazy for me. After the ride, I went over to said teammate's place and had a barbecue with the folks there and played a thoroughly enjoyable couple of games of Settlers of Cattan. Sunday I spent a good chunk of the afternoon sitting on the patio of the City Café Bakery enjoying the fine munchables and coffee and reading in the sun.
It was unfortunate that my week was less enjoyable though. Things are really slow at work these days and I'm struggling to feel useful. Although I'd rather not leave, I'm not sure if there will be enough work in the near future for them to be able to keep me on full time. So if any of you want to keep your ears to the grindstone and your eyes to the ground, I'm looking around for other avenues of employment. You can find my resumé here.
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Wed, 19 May 2004
Death in tiny steps
Life can be frustrating sometimes. Of late has been a good example. The tools that I depend on to do my job simply cannot do what I want dependably or efficiently.
So I gave up on the mac 1.0 build of OpenOffice. For every other reasonable platform out there, 1.1 has long been in use, with extra features, and greater stability. For some reason, the OSX community has been left behind. *sigh* So be it. I threw up my hands, and installed Microsoft's still superior Office suite.
At the same time, I took the opportunity to download MSN Messenger 4.0 for the Mac. It works in two modes: Logged in, and logged out. Albeit the second mode isn't terribly useful. Even the Logged in mode is a pale shade of its flashier Windows cousin. However, so far, it has crashed a grand total of zero times. Gaim on the other hand, has crashed on me a dozen times today. I may just wipe the fink directory clean, and reinstall everything and see if that takes care of the problems.
Work itself is appallingly slow these days. It's not helping my mood. Neither is the fact that a small group of people where talking and smoking outside my bedroom window last night in the wee hours of the morning. I moved to get away from that shit.
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Sun, 09 May 2004
Fucking good tea.
| 8 | cups | water |
| 1 | | lemon |
| 2 | sticks | cinnamon |
| | fresh ginger* |
| | honey, to taste |
In a medium to large pot, put the water on to boil. Slice the lemon crosswise**, into even slices about 1cm wide or slightly less, discarding the ends. I usually get four or five slices out of it.
Slice the ginger into thin slices. Enough to let the flavour out, but not so thin as to make things difficult for you.
Add the lemon, ginger and cinnamon to the pot. If your culinary skills are only moderately stellar, like mine, the water hasn't yet begun to boil. This is probably a good thing. Cover the pot and wait for a bit.
When the water reaches a rolling boil, turn the element down as low as it will possibly go, and leave it to simmer. Depending on how strong you want your tea, you may want to leave this to simmer for some time. Five minutes is probably a good medium.
Portion out the tea into mugs. Add honey to taste. At least one teaspoons worth. Maybe more.
Enjoy!
* Sorry, I don't really know how much ginger to use. I'm guessing that I use between one and two tablespoons of ginger, but I suggest you experiment.
** I assume here that crosswise is what you want. le Chapeau helped me find the right word here. You want the slices to be circular, with the lemon segments making a nice symmetric star pattern.
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Feeling mostly better.
I'm pretty much over my cold now. Still some lingering bits that cause me to cough up some nice icky phlegm on occasion.
Spent a bit of yesterday tuning and otherwise performing maintenance on my street bike. It's labour I enjoy, and I had a nice little feeling of accomplishment afterwards. I actaully bothered to take my bike out to test in the rather cold and wet weather.
Had some fun at a birthday party of a climbing friend yesterday evening. Depite the cold, we had the barbeques going full. Drinks were had. Meat was eaten. (I don't think there were any vegitarians there.) Other drinks were had.
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Fri, 07 May 2004
I probably think this blog entry is about me.
The most noticeable side effect of me being single for a prolonged period of time, is that I've become relatively vain. Not narcissistically so perhaps, but I've become much more concerned about my appearance of late.
Bruce, barber extrordinaire, no longer touches my hair. Granted, it's a bit longer than it used to be. For one, I actually need to brush it from time to time. That was a weird discovery for me. In the car, roaming Florida with the windows down, I got tangles. At any rate, I now have a perky girl do strange and mystical things to my head which I don't comprehend. The end result is that I have the vague impression that my hair looks reasonably nice. The privilege for which, I shell out a bit more for a haircut than I used to.
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Wed, 05 May 2004
Spring nature is the best nature.
I'm unfortunately struck ill these days, but that didn't stop me from getting out to enjoy some moderately warm and sunny Mother Nature. Let me tell you, as the heading says, Spring nature is the best nature.
There's lots of little bity baby things about. Itty bity baby ducklings. Itty bity baby bunnies. I even saw some itty bity baby daffodils. Very cute. The ducklings were especially tiny. I saw two broods of them. (Clutches? Flocks?) They were probably only about two or three inches long at most. Ridiculously adorable.
While I'm on the subject of itty bity adorable things, are other people like this? Sharing the bed with a person, I wouldn't think twice about rolling over or otherwise extracting myself from whatever embrace I may find myself in, if it is at that moment uncomfortable. But if I am sharing the bed with a cat, I will do whatever possible to avoid disrupting it's rest, no matter how inconveniently it may be entangled with my person.
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