Summer Flowers!

I haven't been gardening much as I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing, but here is a sample of the various flowering things on our property. Most were present when we moved in.

For instance, at the east side of the house is a shallow, shaded garden plot with almost no sun and a mess of crazy plants growing that may or may not be weeds - I am still not sure. However, I know there was deliberate attempt at planting perennials and flowering plants in a meaningful pattern, as evidenced by this one, sad, pathetic rose ... stick. I can't even call it a bush because it was literally two sticks in the ground this spring. But it did give birth to something surprising:


At the front of the house is a disgusting walkway that was probably hastily put in by the previous owner because it didn't even last one winter and fell apart. There is no division between the walkway and the garden plot in the front so I think we might get it redone entirely soon. I can't see it lasting another winter. Anyway, we planted some cute annuals, some soon being chowed down by ants. :(







The east side of the house showed some other cute blooms that can stand the shaded mess:


Good thing I didn't mow it down with my lawnmower this spring...


Two mystery annuals were planted in the tomato planter, with the promise that they would attract hummingbirds. I haven't seen them yet, but the flowers are cute! :)


One of the hostas has actually bloomed something terrific.


These are right next to the hostas, which contrast the lavender colour nicely:


A funny thing happened last fall, when I was trying to clear away all the crazy weeds that had plagued our back yard forever. Along the retaining wall, as I pulled and cut and threw out a ton of shit, a little patch of those chick-and-hen thingies appeared before me. They wept out, "Pleeeaase! Put us out of this misery!" And I said no. So this summer it put forth its revenge upon me and sprouted this scary mofo:



Last but not least of the craziness of our misplaced east side garden, is this dandy that keeps trucking on, despite being grown without any sort of wall or stand that clematis are supposed to be holding on to. We didn't even catch its existence until about a week ago.

Wedding Planning - something else

I got them pierced on Friday. One down, a bazillion to go...

Goodbye Antec Aria, we hardly knew thee :(

Dear Antec Aria,

Although I was very happy that you came into my life back when I built you, I knew that it was too good to be true. You delighted me in your cute cube-ness, and your glaring, blue LEDs that lit up the night while I tried to sleep as I downloaded huge files; your highly convenient - in theory - but non-functional card reader was my largest pet peeve, among other things like becoming discontinued and "improved" upon as the new NSK1380 model without card reader, most likely due to it being non-functional to begin with.

Everyone marveled at your smallness. They oohed and ahhed you as I showed you to everyone who bothered to look, as I beamed proudly and told them that you were "adorable" and "gave me many a headache." I even enjoyed the relative dustiness of cleaning your innards every so often, swabbing the little corners with rubbing alcohol and making lots of dust bunnies in the corner of the room.

Alas, it was indeed too bright an existence with me. Last night, while I was busy listening to the marvelous Saturday night recordings of Colorfinger (SA), sailing away at a Cursed Isles adventure on Puzzle Pirates (as I often do now to kill time and to be adored by my SA crewmates), and contemplating on wedding planning... Everything suddenly turned black. Silence.

Except for one singular noise.

Squealing away while your power cord was still plugged in, I realized it was your time.

Your power supply had suddenly died. The saddest thing is that I cannot transplant a power supply, as your case is too cute and specialized to have just any old one (oh noooooo), and I can't get your plug out of the case anyway.

Thus, it must be that I bid thee farewell, my dear Antec Aria. You served me well through three different cities, and you have come to your final rest.

With deep regrets,
your momma ;_;

***
(Before you ask, the warranty is only for 3 years anyway.)

I am borrowing Jorghnassen's laptop in the meantime, while I wait for my new case to be delivered. The NSK1380 may fill in the same spot on my desk, but it certainly won't fill the same spot in my broken heart. :(

PRC finally arrives...

Alors, the complication of having a job that necessarily requires interaction with young "vulnerable" folks means to have to get a police record check. Unfortunately, these are only valid for about 6 months after they check the records for you, and then if you're still not hired during that time it isn't so valid no more and you'll have to get yet another one.

Fortunately, my pricey 60$ Montreal PRC and 25$ Quebec City PRC back in 2006 were eventually used to procure a job in Waterloo, so those paid themselves back. The new unfortunate circumstance is that I wanted to volunteer in the local Ottawa schools to tutor mathematics under a volunteer agency (so that I can meet school principals and make connections to get into the occasional teachers list, so that I can finally get HIRED by the school board), so I needed yet another PRC from whoever.

The good news is that Ottawa police will do it for free provided you give them a letter from the volunteer agency. Done. The bad news is that I asked for it back in March, and it arrived in JUNE. Woo! Let's go tutor those kids now! >:( (In fact, it was completed in May and somehow they managed to not deliver it for yet another month.)

I feel like every single step I'm trying to take to get into the education system here is thwarted by another bureaucratic blockade that is determined to squeeze out whoever isn't favoured by nepotism and/or the virtue of being Catholic. (Did you know that to work in the catholic school board as a full time, part time, or occasional teacher, you have to be catholic? Analogous to requiring someone who cooks French food has to be French.)

Alberta Allows Right to Ignorance

Seriously messed up.

I can understand that parents and guardians want to protect their kids from hate speech, abuse, crime, disease, and other kinds of horrible things... but surely you can't protect them from information? As much as our society values knowledge and critical thinking, for some reason when it comes to just informing them on things that they will not be able to avoid when they grow up (if they grow up), there is a huge uproar over the rights of the parents to shield their children from being possibly corrupted, because they found out that blow jobs aren't a form of abstinence or that creationism isn't a science.

I can't even imagine how the hell anyone can even want to be a biology or ethics teacher like this. I always thought that teaching and education were important to everyone - yet when this kind of thing happens, even when the government backs the right for people to stay ignorant, it leaves me flabbergasted.

Also, CBC is a cesspool of idiot comments.

Camera's not borked, but the batteries are.

Apparently behind the yews on our property, there are some sort of apple or crabapple trees. I stumbled upon them as I was pruning the old branches on the slope (and there were a lot of them). They were so pretty I clipped a small branch off to bring indoors. :)

P.S. To the National Post - I hate you >:(

Plumbing, House, and Another Wedding Update?

The plumber came and went. Actually, the full story is too long and stupid but suffice to say that the toilet will not leak anymore, which may have been the cause of a huge, long, pipe-shaped brown stain on the ceiling of the living room. Now to paint over it...

With all the whining, some of you might be thinking, "Is it a good time to buy a house?" It's a pain in the ass with all the self- (or paid) maintenance, but the Bank of Canada is making it pretty sweet to get in the mortgage deal. In our last bank (sorry, caisse) notice, our interest rate dipped to 1%, and with this latest update it might even fall to 0.75%. Jorghnassen reported that we've already paid for about a third of the house. (Of course, this also means we're getting squat from bank accounts for interest.)

I'm not worried about paying for the wedding though. I have a modest amount set aside for things like this event (and other stupid expenditures like yet another plumbing mishap), that is slowly... taking... shape... and... sucking... the money... out... of... me...

I'm still looking for entertainment because now the cost of just hosting it (and not hiring it) went up. I have the option of adding a dance floor, even though the first manager I talked to said no and the second one said maybe and now this third one said it could be included. I also have the option to rent a/v equipment, which then we could hook up an ipod (or actual DJing equipment) for cocktail hour.

I also have the privilege to pay a fee for SOCAN if people perform music at the event, and the distinction that the musicians must be from the "Montreal Guild of Musicians".

Which means you can't just hook up and ipod to the speakers and not pay a licensing fee.

All I can say is: AAARGGHH >:(

Wedding Planning - nobody's counting

Just to give you an idea what I have been doing so far. Expect something else even bigger later! (When I'm done vectorizing it, that is.)



Bonus: Here's my idiot time wasting drawing:

A Wedding, a Newspaper, and a Plumber

Wedding planning part 2
I tentatively have a meeting room at the Holiday Inn Select, next to the metro station in Chinatown. Hence, the reception and the ceremony are merely stone throws away from each other. However, I still don't have any idea what to do for the officiant since everyone we asked said, "Uh... let me be plan B, ok?"

I just want to point out that not everyone can be plan B. ;)

Moral of the story: people are reluctant to do anything that sounds bureaucratic. :(

The National Post
Since my last post, my feelings for this paper have swelled and grown to the fanaticism that permeates the entire paper like the conservatism dripping from the editorials and letter writers. And Financial Post is the most illuminating thing ever.

Just kidding, I still hate the paper. In fact, I had the following conversation with Jorghnassen yesterday:

Ms C: God I hate this paper. I want my money back.
Jorghnassen: But this is a free subscription.
Ms C: I feel sorry for the trees that were sacrificed for this atrocity.
Jorghnassen: So wait, you want to cancel a free subscription?
Ms C: I'd call them just to do that if I didn't have something to do during the day. I'd imagine that they'd try to argue with me to keep accepting their free offer, but if they realized how crappy their paper was, they'd be paying me to take it.

Anyway, moral of the story: don't accept just any free shit.

Plumber
When you buy a house for the first time, you're a clueless homeowner. Nevermind what your background is (except maybe if you built your house with your own two hands and no help whatsoever, like your friend the invisible unicorn), you're obviously going to have things go wrong with your house in the first few years of owning it, and you're not going to have any idea how to fix some of them.

Which is why when the faucet in the kitchen suddenly stopped working last night, Jorgh called the plumber this morning. Super nice guy with lots of experience, I suppose. I watched him take apart the faucet and fiddle with a bunch of things; then he concluded that the spout was blocked and told me he'd go find a supplier with his workplace to replace the spout.

When he left, I proceeded to take apart the faucet and fiddle with a bunch of things; then I poked the blockage, and suddenly the spout worked again.

The plumber returned from his search for the part without luck. He told me that the faucet was only available at one supplier in Ottawa for $1000, while the part itself was $250 and would have to be on order. However, since I had unblocked the thing myself (which I had told him over the phone earlier) he didn't think we'd have to get a new part. Then I got the bill. $_____$

Moral of the story: hire a professional once for a very expensive lesson on how to fix your shit.

The National Post

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a freebie from Redflagdeals.com: a 90-day subscription to the National Post. Actually, the freebie seems to turn up often, and every time I attempted to sign up for it, they never seem to find my house.

Last week, there was an automated phone call that reminded me that I signed up for this thing (which by then I had totally forgotten due to not remembering what I do a few minutes after I do them). After chatting like a confused old lady with the service representative, I was told that it comes from Monday to Saturday until the 90 days are up.

Anyway, the whole point of the National Post being given away is because no one gets their news from "dead tree" media anymore, so they're hoping that you would get used to accepting their newspaper long enough that you'll want to pay for it over the longer term.

However, as soon as I received the paper for the first time last Tuesday, I immediately saw a problem:

It sucks. Itsucksitsucksitsucksitsucks it SUCKS.

A newspaper that has a decidedly conservative view is already unreadable to me. It's difficult to take any articles seriously when there's a definite slant to reporting (after a week, I can probably point out a dozen articles); as a critical thinker, it's enough to make my head asplode.

However, discussions on the editorial and letters pages are infuriating; besides editors driving a wedge between Canadians with "western" and "eastern" values, it's the delayed discussion between letter writers (by several weeks sometimes), that in the age of high speed internet, I'd rather read flame wars in real time between people who actually read the news in not the National Post.

It's not a very large paper; national papers need an extremely wide daily circulation and making a hundred pages an issue isn't really cost effective. So what could this paper publish daily that would ensure affluent people would buy it? Financial Post. Half of the paper is composed of a thick blah about numbers that are already outdated by the time they send the pages out to print. And I don't care.

So now that I've killed several trees, I can save you all money by telling you that it's easier, saner, and less headache-inducing to read the news on the internet. However, I admit sometimes it is nice to be able to pick up a physical newspaper and read, but don't pick the National Post.

A Conversation with the Afterlife

It's been nearly six years since my dad passed away. I often have dreams where he appears as he was when I was younger - sometimes even in his twenties or thirties, when only photos could have showed me how he looked. Nevertheless, my belief when he died is that he exists in an afterlife, where neither God nor Devil nor Buddha exists. It would be where people's souls exist on a plane different from ours, and we could communicate with them somehow, in mystic or an indirect manner. He was not a believer of any sort of religion as far as I knew, and this belief in a non-denominational afterlife comforted me when I woke up in tears from seeing him in dreams after his death.

Once I fell asleep and dreamt I could talk to him. In life, we could not speak directly as his English comprehension was not complete and my Cantonese comprehension is laughable; but to my knowledge, we were able to speak freely with complete understanding. An exchange could happen:

Me: Dad!
Dad: How have you been?
Me: Pas pire. You?
Dad: It's good. Nothing to complain about.
Me: ...
[Awkward silence.]
Me: So... did you hear about that Hockey Night in Canada theme controversy?
Dad: I heard. >:(

Wedding Planning - Part 1 of a gazillion

Date:Saturday, 15 August 2009
Place:Montreal

Completed checklist

• Reception: Kam Fung, full 10 courses of awesome

That's it.

To do

• Everything else

Possible Venue Locations for the Ceremony

• Holiday Inn Select - downtown Montreal, has a lot of rooms for meetings and closest to Kam Fung


• McGill University - some bookable rooms like the swank Faculty Club and Thompson Hall, but I'm sure we're all looking forward to a meaningful ceremony in the deep dungeons of the Burnside Basement, eh? BONUS: Alumni rates?


• Parc Mont-Royal - the Smith House has a room that is rentable with up to 120 people


• Montreal Museum of Fine Arts - as far as I know from the web site, the only room that is available at possible times is the members' lounge at the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion


• Jardin Botanique de Montreal - expensive as #@$!

Who Gets to Marry Us?

• A judge


• Clerks and Deputy Clerks


• A mayor


• Certain councillors


• Certain notaries


• Absolutely anyone else you want (as long as they're old enough and not in jail)

MMOArrPG

My Portrait

On Health, Transit, and Sustenance

Since returning from Montreal for Chinese New Year at the end of January, I eventually had another day of supply teaching. Then the next day I developed the flu. And boy was that terrible. I suspect that one of the kids (or all of them, who knows where their grubby hands might have been) had been working on making their teacher sick, and seeing that their regular teacher was not present decided that this was the next best thing.

What made it worse was that in the next morning I had to shovel the nicely packed layers (more than 2) of snow that accumulated on our parking lot, way beyond the level that the contractor had said he'd remove, and the two feet of snow that the street plow generously piled just at the end of the driveway. This was the same morning I was supposed to get to the school again to supply teach that day, and I received an angry call that morning that confirmed my suspicion that I would probably never supply teach there again. And then I got sick.

I did contemplate just driving over the snow (as I have done with the Rav4 going to the Waterloo school), but after removing enough to inch the car through the passage I realized it would have resulted in yet another trip to the garage, and a separate trip to the hospital.

Anyway, I spent two weeks with a fever, then a cough and congestion, and now just a cough. On the positive side, I did have scheduled an interview at another school, when that school (the one with the interview) called the day before and asked me to work at the same time. (They suggested working around the interview so I agreed.) It turns out that the principal was sick, so I was briefed by the vp instead, during the one break in the day that I had. I also managed to expose six different groups of kids with the flu virus, so the cycle of revenge is complete.

***

The Ottawa transit strike is over, so Donnah is now back in her rented room and not stewing in the flu germs in our house. However, it turns out that the city of Ottawa did not "save" $3 million a week that the buses ran on, but lost money from offering free rides to entice people to trust the bus company again. Many people predict that because the bus strike allowed many commuters to make rideshare opportunities (and people met their neighbours who work in the same buildings), the bus company may lose lots of permanent riderships and have to cut back on expenses like, say, the bus drivers. (Oh, but weren't they striking to get better working conditions? Not if there's no business and money for it, buttheads.)

As a follow-up to the previous post, the NCC is now proposing an even bigger waste of money for the interprovincial bridge. Besides the one proposal that their own contractor told them would be the best choice, they are spending an additional 5 million dollars and even longer to make assessments. Ultimately, they will still choose Kettle Island because it will still be the cheapest and least environmentally impacting choice, and then everyone living in the affected region will poop their pants in agony while everyone else will poop their pants from the stupidity.

***

Horse meat burritos, and an overly-buttery, flour-less chocolate cake. Happy Valentine's Day!

Welcome, Transit New Year

Admittedly, the new year has been so for nearly two weeks, but I digress.

Media has already discussed the turn of the new year to be one that is full of hope (Obamarama) but at the same time full of crap (bomb-ba-bomb-bombs). Jason Jones as Baby New Year puts it best: "The Gaza thing - it's like being born with herpes!" (Not that I think babies born with herpes is funny...)

So here's the Ottawa hopeful new year news, besides the ending of the month+ long bus strike: Kettle Island Bridge.

Here's the Ottawa crapful new year news: Kettle Island Bridge.

You're asking, "What's this non-existent bridge, and why would I care about it?" Well, if you never intend to visit Ottawa, then you wouldn't - so you can just turn off your computer and bask in your city's lack of any transit problems. You have no transit problems? Wow.

***

As far as I know, Ottawa's downtown has always been a complicated stew of pedestrians, cars, and 18-wheelers playing Who Wants to Be A Pancake? (Hint - pedestrians win that one more than 18-wheelers.) This insanity is probably due to a huge bureaucratic mess called Everybody's Fault But My Own.

In any sane city, one would want to make a highway system to have heavy trucks bypass busy pedestrian areas, allow express buses to speedily transport workers from the quiet suburbia to downtown cores, and promote public transit and carpooling by reserving lanes on the road.

But of course, Ottawa has no sane people in it (see: bus strike, prorogue, 2008). So Ottawa is left with a downtown full of trucks and buses wrestling for room in an already congested pancake-filled Rideau/Montreal/King Edward/Elgin/Laurier/Everywhere Else.

Unfortunately, none of these things could be fixed in Ottawa because everyone from the borough councillors to the federal government have to be involved in the decision processes.

The current addressable issue is that the highway to Ottawa ends slightly outside of the core, and the rest of the roads to cross over to Gatineau run through downtown. Quebec and Ontario once had an agreement to build a highway on their respective sides that would be joined by a bridge, so people could go straight across, bypassing the mess. Quebec built their side (Aut-50), and the bridge was built. Guess who didn't build their side?

There are only a few bridges between Gatineau and Ottawa, and they all lead downtown. So the Kettle Island Bridge was proposed (cheapest, most convenient, fricking closer to home), and a whole lot of people were happy (especially this blogger), and probably ready to set it up.

Of course, people would be inconvenienced from having a few acres of land repatriated, some increase of traffic and noise to affected areas, blah blah blah. "Build it in another area - not in my backyard!1!!one!" Then a different set of people would protest with the same complaints.

Fight fight fight!

Anyway, the point is that most levels of government decided on this site after many, many, many years of studies, but some people at the local level don't want it there. However, if all the levels of government can't agree, then the plan will be scrapped and everyone will probably have to start all over again with another site. By the time another plan can be developed, more pancakes would line the streets of downtown Ottawa.