Canadian words

I've got a new word to add to my list of official words that everybody up here knows but I've never heard before. These don't include words on 'everyone else''s list of Canadianisms, and in fact I've looked all these up in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (edited by my very good friend--in the sense that we've eaten a social meal together and I have her e-mail and she actually responds to things I send her--Katherine Barber) and each is listed as 'Can & Br'. So technically these aren't Canadiansims so much as non-Amer.-isms. But here we go.

The new one: "scrutineer" Apparently some kind of officer overseeing elections. Just got a thing saying that X Y and Z were elected to whatever committees for terms ending, and by the way, the scrutineers for this election were A B and C. I'm told that in provincial elections, every party is entitled to place a 'scrutineer' at the ballot count. As ballots are pulled, they're displayed to the scrutineers who jointly decide whether the ballot is valid or defective, and who was voted for. I think in these commitee/union things the scrutineers also stand over the ballot boxes making sure no one tampers with the ballots as they go in, travel with the ballot boxes making sure no one tampers with them until they get to the place where they will be counted, and then, I suppose, they scrutinize the ballots as they come out of the box.

So that's my new word. Previous words on this list include 'personation' (which where I come from is "impersonation", although I've never heard of female 'personator', in the sense of a 'female impersonator'. Personation is, well, fraud by impersonation, I guess. Also 'invigilator', which is basically a scrutineer for examination rooms, what I would call a 'proctor'. As in 'I need a couple of proctors to watch the room during my final exam'. Which I guess in Canada would be 'I need a couple of invigilators to invigilate (for) my final exam, eh?'

I only have one such word from Wisconsin, which is 'employe'. Which is Wisconsin for "employee". Every official document I ever saw in Wisconsin talked about 'employes'. Apparently either a) someone thought the 'ee' suffix was sexist, or b) somebody realised the cents per year that could be saved by not typing or printing extraneous 'e's. Presumable offset by the cost of having to go through everything removing extraneous e's, which aren't really extraneous, but whatever.

Oh, Mental Health and Goal Setting Thursdays are now going to be Mental Health and Goal Setting Tuesdays. Which means that mid-week updates will occur on Fridays or Saturdays, which is when I seem to be getting around to doing them anyway.

I'm screwed, and not in a good way <rimshot>

I was sleepy. I was going to barrel through some work, and go to bed early. But I was also cold, so I decided to snuggle up under a comforter to do some reading. And I fell asleep. This was about 5:30. I guess I woke up around 7.

So now I'm wide awake, and unlikely to get to sleep tonight any normal sort of human going-to-bed-time. I have, in fact, barreled through some of the work I was going to do, but it's now about 9:30 and I was going to go to bed. But, well, there wouldn't be much point. I could go out and try to find some action, but, well, I live in Winnipeg. <rimshot> I'm also over 40 now, and my notion of action is changing. Or maybe my standards are getting lower. I don't know.

All I know is a) I did have something to say on Thursday, but I never got around to saying it and now I don't remember what it was, b) much as I turned out to have enjoyed my nap, I'd really have preferred not taking it and going to bed now and sleeping straight through until morning like an human, and c) if I'm going to accomplish anything 'outside' it better be tomorrow, cuz they say there's a blizzard blowing in on Monday and Tuesday. 15 cm of snow in the city. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but anything over about 4-5cm will completely screw up the city for most of a week. So we're screwed on all fronts. And not in a good way.

Another Thursday missed

Well, I didn't do an update on Thursday, mostly because I stayed home and did some tidying up. The upshot of which is in the afternoon, when I normally would have spent some time online catching up with stuff, I took a near life-changing three hour nap.

I love naps. I love naps more than sleeping at night. I tend to fall asleep faster, deeper, and wake up actually refreshed after a long daylight-hours nap than I do at night. Part of me wonders if I'm reverting to a pre-antidepressant, grad-school state of actually being afraid to go to sleep at night (for a number of neurotransmitter-related all-in-your-head kinds of reasons) but having no problem sleeping, say, between 7am and noon, and again between 3pm and 6pm. Which explains why all my best writing occured between 1 and 3am. Typical grad school kind of schedule, but not what you call mentally healthy.

I've always been a thrasher in my sleep, and my fancy new space-age mattress that is supposed to eliminate that hasn't. Which is not a problem, except that in the last few weeks instead of going to sleep on my back and waking up on my back, but in the meantime having traversed every possible angle and position--I used to go to sleep on my back, blankets nice straight and wake up that way, but with all my blankets turned upside-down. Anyway, lately I've been waking up with my upper body folded over onto my right, trapping my right arm under my body. Which would be fine--I guess my shoulders are unusually flexible in that direction--but it usually means my right elbow and wrist are flexed as well--so not only am I stressing the blood flow, I'm stressing my ulnar nerve, and setting off my intermittend ulnar palsy.

This is a new word for me, and I'm sort of enamo(u)red of it, in the way that when somebody gives you a new word for something that you thought only you ever experienced or thought about you feel validated. Ulnar Nerve Palsy is a condition where you get tingling/numbness, etc. in your ring and little fingers related to stressing the nerve, which runs along the outside of the elbow. Since I've been experiencing this in both arms, mostly from my habit of clutching my blankets up to my chin when I'm cold--which I almost always am in the morning--I've been trying to keep my elbows mostly extended in bed. Which works fine as long as I'm awake, and on my back, and warm, but whem rolled over on your side or belly it's hard to keep your arms straight. And apparently my body is trying to get me to sleep on my side. Or something.

One wonders if this is my (familial) history of snoring and/or apnea finally catching up with me. I'm really hoping it's just the 20 lbs I've put on in the last six months, and as I retake control of my diet and whatnot, I'll go back to normal. For some value of 'normal'.

Oops

It's Sunday, and I just realized that I didn't do my Thursday update.

The reason (that it wasn't a 'usual' Thursday) is no excuse, since I'm not sure I've had a usual Thursday in I don't know how long. And, it being the beginning of a) the year, b) the term, c) my acting headship, 'usual' hasn't been established yet.

But on Thursday I met with the Deanlet of Space (hi, Barry) regarding the land grab we're trying to orchestrate--there's a pair of offices one-off-adjacent to the lab that are otherwise derelict and there's money to renovate research space. So I drafted some stuff, met with Deanlet Space and drafted a memo to the Deanlet of Research (hi, Janice). Then I tidied up some stuff and did some planning for the coming weekend/week, and went home.

Friday wasn't so bad. Yesterday was my Day of Rest. Today I'm going to do some tidying up around the house and later this afternoon I'll take myself off to the coffee house to get some reading done. Maybe some writing. We'll see.

Tomorrow my Yoga class starts up again and I can't wait. I really want to work out the kink in my lower lumbar/saccral area that sidelined me for a week in December.

So that's all. I'll try to have something useful to say eventually.

Album cover task

This one came from my friend Clay.

Go to Wikipedia's random search and make a note of the article title. This is the name of your band.

Go to Quotations Page's random quotes and make a note of the last quote on the list. The last four words are the title of your album.

Third, go to Flickr's Last 7 Days 'interestingness' page, and the third image, whatever it is, is your album cover. I'm told that sometimes the picture can't be downloaded, so keep reloading until one is.

Combine the image with your band name and album title, and voilá, that's your album cover.

So here's mine.

I initially forgot to make a note of the source of my image, but after a lot of poking around, I finally found out the poster, who is called daniel.berlin. I don't know if that's a surname or a location. But he calls the photo "ICE Arriving", which once you know that ICE is some kind of German train is pretty descriptive. I did crop it to be square, but whatever. The band name comes from a Wikipedia article on, well, the paperless office, and the title comes from a Quentin Crisp quote, "Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster."

But as an album title, I like it. The subjunctive, or whatever that is, is sort of interesting standing alone like that. It sounds sort of northern English. Reminds me of "The Law is a (h)ass" from Oliver Twist. Or something. Not bad for 10 minutes of wasted time this morning. And another hour trying to figure out whose picture it really is, but at least that was this evening, instead of going to bed on time....

By the way, my favo(u)rite name for a hypothetical band that I would be in is "Wonky Swing Pattern". Long, boring story.

Oy! ... or The Money Suck

Well, it's been a while, and things have not been going well. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just cataloging some bad things which have happened.

Remember the $1700 car bill? It turned into a $2300 car bill, what with the discovery of something having to do with some strut or other. They explained it to me, I told them to fix it, and I just filed everything in the 'deny while you can' pile.

Remember the new computer I bought for just over $700, that was supposed to keep me from having to buy a new laptop for a few years? Well, it's great, I love it, I'm not complaining. But now my laptop, apparently feeling old and neglected, has decided to go belly-up. Well, maybe not belly-up, but it wouldn't boot, and it took my tech guy JC most of the day yesterday to figure out what was wrong. I quote: "It had corrupted sectors on the hard drive. This could be a sign of future failure.... It could go tomorrow or in two years. Don't know for sure." Well, I could get hit by a bus in the meantime, and at the moment the thing is working, but when it finally comes time to pull the plug, I don't know what I'm going to do. A new laptop would cost a lot more than the new computer.

Remember all that marking I had to do? Well, I did get it done, I don't know how many weeks late, by which I mean 'in reasonable time'--I actually did get grades in before the absolute last deadline, but since that was Friday last week (I did it on New Year's Eve), that's not saying much. Mostly because by the time I was ready to sit down and do them, I'd done something to my back and was laid up for almost a week. Not a full-blown spasm, but something weird. Felt saccral, so probably lumbar extensor/erector, and it wasn't so much the lingering pain, or the lingering immobility, but just the overwhelming thereness of the soreness that was distracting. That and on the day I was going to take everything home I literally could not lift the stack of papers.

But now I'm a) Acting Head, b) I've survived my first official Heads' Meeting, c) I have a course break, d) I'm within about 24 hours of having a review in only a month late, e) the papers I lost during an e-mail meltdown (did I mention my e-mail meltdown) are trickling in, so my students are becoming increasingly less likely to hunt me down and kill me. Which is a good thing, because as acting head my colleagues are likely to start any minute now.

So we'll see how this week goes. More Thursday.

Checking in

News 1: My new computer seems to have access to a wireless network (perhaps operated by someone in my building), which means I can do stuff from home. I don't mind paying for internet service, but if someone else is willing to do it for me, I'm fine with that too.

News 2: My favourite e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird, which I like to run off a portable memory stick so I always have my contacts and all my e-mail at once, won't run off my stick under Vista. So I may just switch to web-mail, or I might have to come up with a new solution. But whatever.

News 3: I've been keeping a low profile, both generally and webwise because I'm literally two weeks behind. To wit:

News 4: Today I finally 'finished' reading final papers. By 'finished', I mean I've read and assigned numbers to all the papers I ahve on hand. There's another two or three that never got printed, and probably another two or three which haven't reappeared since the infamous e-mail meltdown, and probably a few more that never came in in the first place. But at least they're all read.

News 5: The next step is to add up scores and add them to the spreadsheet, so that I can get grades in sometime before my students rise up and kill me. Hopefully that'll be tomorrow. Monday at the latest.

News 6: So the goals are, before the end of the year, which I take to be Monday Night:

Goal 1: Get grades calculated. At least most of them. To the degree that I can.
Goal 2: Set up next month's spectrogram, the December solution, etc. for upload on Tuesday sometime.
Goal 3: Finish writing a review that was due two weeks ago.

Anticipated goals for next week, i.e. before school starts:

Actually get grades in.
Start writing the review of the grant I need to write but at least that's not due for a couple of weeks yet.
Get set up for next term's class. Singular. Gotta love that part.
Update my Activity Report, which I have to submit to myself this year. Weird.
Go through the stack of work-related things I brought home with me, and prioritize activities therein.

But first I gotta make it to 2008. Oy.

Thursday goal setting

Goal 1. Pay for the car.

Well, it seems I've got a bad left-rear strut; three leaks in my power steering (the main gasket, the return line, and the pump itself), which I presume is the source of the screaming my car makes when I crank the wheels; a failing battery; and corroded battery terminals. All told, overnight at the garage and $1700 or so.

"Say what you want about credit cards leading people into debt, they're jolly handy when you haven't any money." (Sarah Caudwell in "The Sirens Sang of Murder")

Goal 2. Get most of my letters of recommendation written.

This is a huge goal. I should break it down. Today I plan to sort through all my current papers, prioritize my enthusiasm for student applications, and maybe, if I feel the need, set up my database where I can access they're grades and whatnot so I can draft letters. Tomorrow or Saturday I'll work on the first couple of letters and maybe the database of addresses so I can print labels. If I can get a solid draft of all the letters (or at least he ones due by Jan 1) by next week at this time, I will be very happy.

Goal 3. Get rid of the computer boxes and packaging.

I often keep stuff like this for no apparent reason, but now it's mostly taking up space in my bathroom, which for some reason is where I kicked it all the other night rather than take care of it. So it's either break it down and take it out to the garbage and recycling, as required, or at least put it all back together and stuff it in a closet.

Goal 3. Remember to sign up for Monday evening Yoga and Friday noon Yoga for next term.

Goal 4. Continue with my 10/10 strategy. Which is working for me, sort of.

Goal 5. Over and above my 10/10 strategy, and getting rid of the computer boxes, I really want to get my computer area a) cleaned and b) vaguely organized. Enough that I can take a picture of my pretty new computer and post it somewhere. Maybe here.

Goal 6. Have some serious fun somehow. Maybe see a movie (I want to see Beowulf in 3D, but I really want to see the IMAX version and for some reason it isn't scheduled here) or a new DVD. Buy a couple of books (I'm down at least one Tim Cockey, Paul Doherty, and Janet Evanovich, dunno about the old standbys like Martha Grimes and Anne Perry who are getting depressing. Really want to read the Dresden File novels by Jim Butcher, the first one of which I bought but now can't find. So

Goal 7. Not withstanding any plans to have fun, I need to find what I did with that book. There's only a couple places it can be, so if I devote a 10 or two to it, I should be able to find it. Which means I can start reading it, and take care of Goal 6 without spending any more money.

Which would be a good thing, considering Goal 1.

New computer report:

Well, it's up and running. It took me a while to turn it on, and even longer to figure out that Vista doesn't actually shut off the computer--it mostly just hibernates it. But there you go. The foibles.

It took about four minutes to load Office 2007, which is pretty blinding fast considering a) it used to take an hour and a couple of disk swaps to do it and b) it took about two hours for the computer to unpack itself, load Vista, start Vista, set Vista, and reboot itself several times until it was happy, and settle down.

On the other hand, I can't figure out how to get Logitech's disk to finish setting up my keyboard/mouse configuration, which is too bad because the whole point was to have a programmable keyboard.

And I don't have an internet connect for this machine yet so nothing has updated and I haven't actually done anything except play a really bad round of Hearts on it. So I have to keep my laptop and my modem going for a while anyway. But it means I have a pretty new computer that I can't download anything (like iTunes) to. On the other hand, I have one heckuva nice widescreen DVD player now. If I don't mind playing through Windows Media. Which I don't really. I have no strong objection to anything that works.

But oh well. I'd better get that corner of the apartment clean. And the corner where the cable connection is, cuz I'm pretty sure that's where the new internet stuff is supposed to go. Hmm. Maybe I need a wireless network at home. Hmm.

But tomorrow is Car Day, in which I take my car in for servicing, and they tell me how many thousands of dollars it will cost to fix the two truly alarming new noises my car is making. I'm hoping it's a loose belt and some low power steering fluid. But we'll see.

Blessings in the guise of complaints

I was thinking about what to write this mid-week and realized that everything I had to say was in the form of a complaint. But I'm really very grateful for most of my life, even the rough parts could be so much rougher. I really do understand in my heart of hearts that life is so much more difficult for other people and my problems are pretty minimal. I have a roof over my head, plenty of food, good health care people trying to help me, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. Underground parking. My life is good.

But here comes the complaining. It's just after 9pm, and I'm just getting home. I had a decent yoga practice, so I didn't get back to the office until about 6:15, and what with tidying up and shuffling papers around, I didn't get out of there until almost 7. There were a number of things I wanted to shop for on the way home.

1) A new shower curtain liner. Because my current shower curtain liner is getting gross. Did it.

2) A new humidifier. My current humidifier is sick. It thinks it's done its job when the humidistat reaches 80%. Except the humidistat across the room thinks it's still 20%. So someone is lying. And I think it's the humidifier, because I can wave my hand in front of the humidifier and it will drop from 80% to about 60%. So there's obviously some moisture or something built up in the humidifier. But it was like this all last year too, so it's time for a new humidifier.

Complaint: Didn't cuz Canadian Tire didn't have my brand (I want to keep the reservoir I have), and Home Outfitters didn't have any at all. There's an hour of my life I want back.

3) Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (a computer game from about 2 years ago that I've never had the computer power to play before). But I want the Game of the Year edition, and EBGames didn't have it. I may have to order it cuz....

... I bought a new computer on Sunday. Yes, I know. Bite me. Anyway, it's still in its box, awaiting me to finish cleaning up that corner of the house. It's a cute little Acer Aspire L100, with a tower about the size of a box of Hamburger Helper. Which is the only thing in visual range that is about the size. Comes with a 19" LCD monitor.

So 4) I bought a keyboard/mouse and speakers for the new computer.

At school I bought a license for the new Office suite, which I need to work.

So at some point I have to get this corner of the house clean, and play with my new computer. But I'm playing it cool. No rush. It's there. I'm happy.

If I manage to replace my shower curtain liner before bed tonight, I'll even be on the ball with my 10/10 commitment.

Life is good. It is. Really.