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.