March 2004 Archives

cross your fingers, but there might be half a chance that i won't be miserable with an over-tight and sore neck and shoulders today. it's probably been a combination of poor form during my recent fitness attemtps and the worst futon ever which has been causing my physical hell the last few days. irene from accounting has been coming over and leaning on my sore muscles, pressing her elbow into my upper trapezius to relieve the tension. i can't begin to explain how good that feels. i wanted her to come home with me so she could do that on a regular basis, but she said her husband and kids would miss her. damn those husbands and kids always ruining things! thanks to everyone who came to the aid of my boredom yesterday. mkh was the quickest to come to my rescue, but my british bunny definitely won the prize for volume. i swear, i wrote more in emails to iain yesterday than i've written here in the last month. god, that boy can converse! the very best thing about emails with iain is that one email of one line somehow transmogrifies into five different email threads each with five to ten different topics on the go in each. it's delightful! i'm drinking coffee right now. i haven't had any of this delightful beverage in, well, about a month. i'm kind of afraid to see how my body reacts to the extra jolt of caffeine. hopefully, it'll be fun. i like fun. fun is good. whee! tonight's my evil C final exam. i didn't even attempt my final assignment which is due tonight. it's just a bunch of practice for linked lists. i don't mean to sound too cocky, but i feel pretty good about my understanding of how they work, so i blew it off. really, even if i got 100% on it, that turns into a mere 2.86% of my final grade and the way things are structured, you can do none of the assignments and still pass the course if you pass the exams. i hate that, but in this case it's worked to my lazy advantage. at this point i'm just really glad to see the end of this course. it's been a lot more enjoyable than the previous C class and the previous pascal course. i liked this teacher a lot and it was so awesome to have married shane in class with me again. i'm still giddy knowing we'll be in the same classes together until we finish our programs. insta-friend!

don't you people know that i'm lacking a jeremy this week? why aren't you making the internet more entertaining for me? i need something to occupy me, dammit. post more! comment more! email me! send me stupid instant messages. goddamn. i can't stand the silence!

sore neck. procrastinating. nothing on tv. doing dishes. sneaking around. stretching. new bed == new home. hater. indecision. nest egg building. boring.

other than a bright spot on saturday afternoon and the fact that i did good things for my body by exercising, this was one of the worst weekends i've had in a long time. nothing tragic occurred, but i felt totally abandoned and alone. i didn't see my friends for cards or dinner or anything, jeremy left for a week away, my father's dating a hungarian woman twenty years his junior. everything just seemed to conspire to make me feel utterly sorry for myself. so i did. i'm so glad i decided to go out on saturday to surprise col with a visit to her bookstore. it was her last day at what's become the job from hell, and i thought it would be a nice surprise especially since we haven't seen each other in, quite possibly, a year. then ritchie showed up and we spent several hours keeping col from doing any work, mocking her evil manager, joking with her cute coworker (oh, yes. very yummy coworker), drinking starbucks and randomly misplacing books just because we could. i didn't realize i'm so fucking short. i hadn't meant to, but i did let col abuse her employee discount on my behalf and bought three books: hey nostradamus! and all families are psychotic by douglas coupland and the trouble with islam by irshad manji. now, i think, i'm only missing one coupland for my collection. i love douglas coupland. really. i think i should marry him right after i marry kevin smith. i think i need to move to utah. here's to hoping no one wants to talk to me today. it would be a bad day to try to chit-chat. put out the word, okay?

the crippling pain has gone, only to be replaced with a strange twinge in my back with either indicates an attack of sciatica or the onset of my monthly visitor. i'm honestly not sure which i'd prefer it was. regardless, it's fucking amazing to be able to walk without the geriatric lurching. i felt positively septuagenarian yesterday. today should be a productive one. i work until two then i'm off to aircare the car, get my car insurance renewed (if the car passes aircare), might go get a haircut, go looking at film cameras, and i'm not sure what else. i need to speak with meg to see if we're playing tonight instead of tomorrow. if not, i think i'll get a couple more movies and be a big fat lump all night long. gosh knows i'm way behind on my movie list.

have you ever done so many squats you couldn't walk without muttering "shitfuckcocksuckermotherfucker" under your breath with each step? well i have! dear god, the pain. i really shouldn't have done pilates yesterday, either. i think that just exacerbated the over-exertion from tuesday night. at this point, i don't think i'll ever be able to walk normally again. even sleeping last night was an exercise in torture. every time i rolled over (did you know that you use leg muscles to roll over? i didn't!), my sore ass would bump against a slat through my crappy futon and i'd flinch. the pain! someone please sedate me. otherwise, i think my teaching assistant got really tired of marking our big assignments because even though my program had some serious flaws in the search algorithm, which i reported, i still got 100%. it's like he got to mine saw the pretty colours, ran it, tested it once and then just slapped a 100 on it. hey, i'm not complaining. what with the final exam from hell coming up in six days i need all the percentage points i can get. i think i'm going to buy a film camera this weekend. i've got a couple hundred extra bucks in the bank and, before i spend $2000 on a digital slr, i think i should start learning more about apertures and f-stops. a long time ago, my second-favourite jim (sorry, daddy's got the number one spot) recommeded a minolta maxxum 5000 as a good place to start. i'm fairly confident i can pick up a good used one for under $200 and think it'll be a good exercise for me. of course, then i'll have to get a scanner to scan in the photos i take. if anyone reading has any recommendations about which camera to start with (or which lens!) please comment or email me. i really want to start working on my photography. that's the passion i rediscovered on the weekend. i was so at peace and blissful while i spent my morning in the gardens making pictures. i actually found myself giggling more than once because i was so pleased with what i was doing. that's what i've been missing in my life: something that makes me giddy. i have some ideas for what to do with my photos, but they need a little bit of foundation work done before i can really go forward. i hope the couple weeks off i'll have between classes will be enough to get the ball rolling.

i'm in a weird kind of happy place. i'm feeling pretty good about myself and i'm not terribly lonely or bored. i do, however, need to get laid in the worst way, but i'm chalking that up to spring hormones more than any real deficit in my life. there's a new upstairs neighbour. i think it's a guy, but that's just going from the voices i hear and the heavy steps on the squeaky floor. he/she was playing music last night, but at a lovely, reasonable, non-annoying volume. what a treat! i think i'll like this new ceiling-dweller if he/she keeps this up. i'm trying not to count sleeps yet, but i'm so very excited about going to minnesota this summer. the other half of the trip has been postponed (the wedding in ontario) so this will be an all-minnesota experience. yippee! i may feel content about life stuff, but work stuff is starting to freak me out a little. i need to make a mockup of a site/interface and i honestly have no idea where to even begin. i can't remember the last time i tried to do any creative web stuff. i think i burned out early with my fifty-million blog designs in the first six months. ugh. why can't they give me the mock up and have me implement it? i can do that! *sigh* this is going to be tough.

yeah, this was a good weekend. it had a little bit of everything. the best parts were bonding with absent family, laughing (and crying) with friends and rediscovering my passion. i ran out of steam by the middle of sunday, but that only meant i got to go to bed at nine, which was just right. how was your weekend?

i'm in a really great mood this morning. i've got my hippy cleavage shirt (that's hippie-style which shows cleavage, not shows hippy cleavage) and mascara on. i'm leaving early. i've got a double-date for dinner, kind of. i've plans to stop at la banque to get mom's belated xmas gift (yankee money for her first trip to vegas). tomorrow is looking like cards and fajitas with m&m&d. i've got some stuff organized in such a manner as to help me make some fiscal progress. it's a great day! come, let us do the dance of joy!

i just might be getting this whole programming thing. then again, it's probably just that i was so horribly scarred by linked lists in pascal that it was burned very deeply into my brain. regardless, i was the first one finished the lab last night and i did it both the easy and the hard way. go me. meghan has gotten me addicted to watching starting over, a daytime reality tv show which has women living together in a house while trying to rebuild their lives through life coaching and personal empowerment exercises. it's like any other stupid reality tv show, but with a more noble intent. honestly, it's gotten me thinking a lot more about how i live and react to things. there are a couple of women in the house who are struggling with many of the same issues i am in their lives. the only difference being, i haven't reached out for help to resolve them. this leads to my talking about the best thing which has happened in my life in a long time: jeremy. while watching the show and reading an exerpt of a book one of the life coaches on the show had written, i realized that jeremy is like my own personal life coach. he's the most supportive, caring, generous person i have ever known. he calls me on my bullshit and will not tolerate my patented self-deprication. he cheers me on when i succeed and supports me when i'm struggling. he inspires me to be a better, more open and communicative person. when i think about him i just get this overwhelming feeling of appreciation and gratitude that he's part of my life. i've known jeremy for somewhere near the vicinity of eight years now, but we've never met. i don't think we've even talked on the phone more than half a dozen times, but we talk almost every day. i'm generally not fond of the human race as a whole, so finding someone with whom i actually want to talk to every day is la little bit like a miracle. back when we were both younger and stupider and we'd only known each other a short while, we had a big fight and stopped talking to each other for several years. i don't even remember what the fight was about or even how we reconnected. it feels like i've known him forever though. i can't seem to imagine not having him as part of my life. the thing about my relationship with jeremy is that, in the past, because of the strength of my respect, regard and affection for him, i'd start to convince myself that i was falling in love with him. that if i felt this much for someone who very obviously felt just as much for me, that it must mean that we should be together romantically, ignoring completely the fact that he's very happily married and he'd never even consider jeopardizing that relationship. what i'm realizing is that i can love the stuffing out of him without it being heartbreaking-longing-yearning-romance-novel love. that i don't have to dampen the strength of my feelings for him just because he'll never be my boyfriend. it's just another thing he's helped me learn.

i stayed up until midnight working on my assignment then got up at six this morning and worked on it some more. i've just now finished the final commenting, bug reporting and printing. i will not even think about it again until i hand it in tonight. the other morning while getting ready for work, i heard on the radio that a woman who worked in a care facility was terminated for putting an elderly resident, secured into a geriatric chair, into a closet overnight. she has recently had that termination overturned and is now serving a several month suspension without pay instead. i very nearly became physically ill at the thought. it took a lot of self control for me not to completely rage and lose it at the mere thought of someone doing that to another person. i just kept going back to what that poor resident must have been thinking and feeling as they were shut up in a closet for the night. even now, i can feel the fury rising inside me. i just don't understand what it is about people that makes them think it's okay to abuse or mis-treat seniors in this manner. why aren't we more compassionate with the people who can do the least for themselves? i need to find out if there are any seniors advocacy groups in the area i can get involved in or, at the very least, financially support. maybe i'll try to find time to go volunteer at a care facility again. i did a little bit of that in highschool and i did enjoy myself quite a bit. lately, i've been experiencing quite a bit of road rage. i'm swearing and yelling at other drivers a lot more than i normally do. i caught myself doing it yesterday on the way home. i don't know if this is a continuing trend, but i hope not. i don't particularily like being an asshole driver. i've prided myself on being pretty level-headed behind the wheel. maybe when i'm not stressing about other things i'll calm down in my car.

after sleeping on it, i think the answer to my binary search problem is a small recursive function instead of relying solely on strcmp() since it needs to accept partial matches. seeing as "Wyn" will never equal "Wynnwood" i think it needs to be a character-by-character comparison. then again, i could have no idea what the fuck i'm talking about.

so, let's see... friday, i came home from work early with a splitting migraine-in-progress, took a handful of tylenol, turned off all the whirring things and went slept for twelve hours. i woke up once about one a.m. but knew that if i really woke up, i'd be up for the duration, so i rolled over and right back to sleep. even without the migraine, i really needed that rest. saturday was mostly spent being a bum. i watched far too much crap tv, did an itsy bit of useless shopping (even though i really had the urge to spend spend spend) and then it was off to the hockey game with carolyn. i love hockey. anyone who knows or reads me knows this, but that game was sad. besides the fact that it was just a really tight defensive game by ottawa, the canucks just couldn't seem to make a pass to save their lives. i was disappointed for them. regardless, there's nothing like being at a game. sunday was much more productive. i got the laundry done, the dishes done, the cooking done, the shopping done. oh, my oven started sparking and burning when i tried to pre-heat it to bake some chicken i'd been defrosting. i emailed the landlord (who's coming today to look at it) and then took my chicken to my dad's house where i used his confusingly fancy oven. while there, i replaced his faulty floppy drive. yeah, i'm a good kid. i came home and procrastinated a while longer until i finally sat down and started working on my assignment. shane came to my rescue with a lead on how to do the first bit i was struggling with. then, i was on the phone for an hour and a half trying to talk my dad through ridding his girlfriend's computer of a virus. i almost wished i still smoked after that experience. i could really have used a cigarette. now it's monday and i'm completely obsessed with my homework and, well, that's all i have to say about that.

no cards tonight, so if you're tall, warm and like to cuddle, feel free to come over. bring a video or you'll be subjected to episodes of starting over. i'm totally not kidding, either.

i don't really want to talk about the hockey situation in vancouver. instead, i'd like to talk about me being the cutest thing ever. just kidding. last night as i was getting ready for bed, my mind, running its last laps for the day, stumbled upon an epiphany of sorts. i've mentioned paul here before, not often and not in any great detail. he was my first really physical relationship. he was brilliant and funny and knew all sorts of things i'd never even thought of. he was tall and dark and his voice was like chocolate. i became completely besotted. i very probably loved him in whatever capacity i had at that time in my life. paul's got some issues, though. yeah, i know, don't we all? his biggest one, at the time i knew him, was that he couldn't ever love anyone. i surmised, even then, that it was a defense mechanism to keep him from being hurt emotionally as he had been by his ex-girlfriend. totally understandable, right? we all do that to some degree or another. but, paul being the guy he is, with the conviction of concrete and the ability to hold a grudge longer than polyester holds the smell of sweat, wouldn't let it go. one night, we were on his bed. he lying down, me sitting up and stroking his long fingers. i don't remember what we were talking about, or if we were talking at all, but at one point his eyes started to get very blue and it looked like he was about to cry. my heart melted. the man who shunned all emotion was thawing! i thought it was a moment of breakthrough for our relationship, that maybe it would bring us closer, that he might come to show me the emotion i so desperately wanted. i was wrong. that was the moment that things started to turn. sadly, i didn't realize it for almost a year, but that's another story. the moment that i thought might mean he was ready to let me in actually started the process of him shutting me out completely. i believe that that one instance of vulnerability completely terrified him. the thought of having someone sitting there, wanting nothing more than to love him utterly was something he was just not able to deal with. it scared the shit out of him, so he started to shut down. but that's just the background. my epiphany came when i realized that i had the exact same reaction when morgan first told me he loved me. i wasn't able to accept that he was standing there, willing and wanting to love me unconditionally. it was completely foreign to me. he might as well have been handing me a piece of uranium for how much i wanted to accept what he was offering. not because of him, but because i wasn't capable of accepting the idea that someone could want to love me. from the moment that he first said "i love you" i started to pull away. i may have told myself i wasn't, i may have told him i wasn't, but i can see now that i was. i did. if i had been a little more open with myself and him i might have been able to salvage at least a little good feeling out of the relationship, but i wasn't. i didn't. that's my mistake. there's no real point to my epiphany other than acheiving another level of awareness about myself and how i react to different situations in my life. obviously, i need to start working on opening myself up to the possibilty of being loved by someone. that being loved doesn't mean i have to love them back. it doesn't mean i owe them anything because they feel that way about me. i have to learn to let them feel how they do and not let that change how i relate to them. mostly, i have to learn to be more forthright with how i feel in situations where i am uncomfortable. to be more open and honest instead of taking the coward's way out and pulling back or shutting down. that's passive-aggressive bullshit no one needs in their life. yeah, i'm still a work in progress. don't forget your hard hat.

who knew you people liked to talk about poop so much? that's great. no, really, i think that's awsome. people don't talk about poop enough. you know, i think i'll type poop one more time, just for andrea. poop! so, while i was successfully avoiding anything remotely resembling homework last night, i mistakenly thought it would be a good idea for me to read through old emails. i'm talking shit from 1996 and even earlier. some files made me cry. other files made me laugh. what really touched me though was how much nicer random online strangers used to be. a little history: my first homepage was born on february 2, 1996. it was just as you'd expect: ugly, bright and containing animated gifs. hell, it even had an audio file of me talking like a freak (which, i think, is still online somewhere). anyway, at the very bottom of the page, in an attempt to be clever, i had a "subliminal message" which said "email me. email me. email me." over and over. going through the mail last night, i was amazed at the number of people who actually read that and emailed me. they were all so nice and flattering and funny. they asked nicely if they could link my page or thanked me graciously for linking them. it really touched me to be reminded of the kinder, gentler days of the internet. yes, i am a geek. although, jeremy says my cred's in peril. then again, he's not the one taking C. the problem with having short(er) hair is having to get it cut more than once a year.

if you don't like talking about poop or are at all squeamish about bodily functions (or my bodily functions), just look at the pretty kitty and come back tomorrow. i mean it. this is your last warning. seriously now, regular bowel movements are really wonderful. one can't appreciate their lack until they're subjected to the Evil Constipation. i know i sound like that other, significatly more interesting heather, but ever since i started weight watchers my guts have just not been playing nice. i've been taking some extra fibre in pill form for the last week in hopes of getting everything moving again. i think it's finally kicking in. for most of my life i was constipated. compound that with an unhealthy amount of public washroom phobia (not of them, but of fellow patrons knowing i'm using them) and i spent many years full of shit. going to the bathroom was a serious effort that took a lot of time and very strong kegels. i was lucky if i dumped twice a week, and i really wish i was exaggerating about that. then, i don't know what happened. several years ago, in another bid to get healthy and thin, i started exercising and eating dramatically different. healthy food, veggies all over the place, less junk and more fibre. suddenly i was pooping like a normal person! i didn't have to look for a plunger (just in case) before i sat down to go. i was even pooping every day! it was like seeing god, and i really wish i was exaggerating about that. as time went by and my regular pooping became a regular part of my life, i started to take it for granted. as i got more comfortable with my regular pooping, i also became more comfortable with pooping in non-home environments. i recognized that my body liked to poop at ten a.m. and didn't like me making it wait until after work, so i stopped making it wait. i finally became a public pooper! considering i wouldn't pee in a public washroom unless i was alone or another person was peeing or flushing to mask the sound of my tinkle, this was quite the accomplishment. considering all the history i have with my poop, this last month has been quite uncomfortable and frustrating. i don't know exactly what it is about what i've been eating that has so dramatically changed my internal functions, but it has not been pleasant. the interesting thing is, it seems to be a common occurance for people on ww if the number of times the topic comes up on the message boards is any indication. that's where i got the idea to try a fibre supplement. i certainly hope this is just a temporary adjustment period and things find their proper balance sooner rather than later because i know that the last thing you people want is a daily report on my poop.

- i woke up with a headache. - my new favourite food is vanilla yogurt with kashi crunch. - my new sweater is so very soft. - the oven stopped working, so i had to clean the apartment before calling the landlords. - dear god my head hurts. - the children of dune was better than dune. - daddy made me dinner last night. - my head really hurts. - i'm trying not to get to excited about finally going to minnesota to spend face time with jeremy, andrea and jodi chromey since it is five months away. - someone here has way too much perfume on. - it's been almost two weeks over two years since i stopped smoking. - i haven't drank (drunk?) coffee in two weeks, either. - *twitch*

so, there was a story i was going to tell you. then there was this thing that happened that i was also going to tell you about. all last night, during the commercial breaks while watching survivor and the apprentice, i kept thinking "i should really write that down so i don't forget.". then i'd argue with myself by thinking "oh, don't worry, this shit is good. you can't possibly forget it.". guess what! yeah, i forgot it. instead you get a photo and peek into my sad little pea brain. while i'm here, on the radio the other day (have i mentioned i'm totally stuck on talk-radio lately? i'm all about cknw since xfm became the new sleep-aid station) they were talking about this couple who, after 63 years of marriage, at the ages of 90 and 95, are now in extended care. but, they are not in the same facility. they are on opposite sides of this city. this is the first time in those 63 years that they have been apart. he phones his wife five times a day, but his speach isn't what it used to be and it doesn't nearly make up for having his bride with him. the government is saying that they are classified as different care categories and the facility he is in doesn't take patients of her category and vice versa. they are unable to be together for the most frustrating and idiotic reason ever created by man: bureaucracy. while listening to this story on the radio, driving home in traffic, i actually started to cry. it absolutely broke my heart. anything to do with the abuse, neglect or disenfranchisement of our senior citizens angers and saddens me beyond description. these are the people who built the world we enjoy. they gave us all our freedoms and liberties. they worked day and night to ensure that we did not have to. that as they age they are slowly demoted to second- and third-class citizens is not right. that governments continually chip away at the services and infrastructure they need most is much more morally corrupt and unchristian than two men vowing to love each other before an officiant. i just hope that when the people who make these decisions reach their golden years they are treated with just as much respect and generosity as they are bestowing now.

by the way, those fuzzy photos down the page are completely untouched and non-photoshopped. that's exactly how they downloaded off the camera (other than resizing, obviously). wade made the mistake of calling yesterday's photoshopped and i got right upset at him for it and decided i should publically state it. they were a happy consequence of a photo experiment gone awry. i'm exhausted and i'm wearing the wrong socks for this outfit. at least it's nice and sunny out and i discovered my new london fog umbrella opens AND closes with the touch of a button. how cool is that?

somehow i managed to get my lazy ass up off the futon and reclaim control over my apartment last night. it's not spotless yet, but it's much less gross and messy than it was this time yesterday. maybe it's the cancer in me (astrologically speaking, not the disease), but i have such a definite symbiotic relationship with my environment. when it's out of whack, i'm out of whack. when it's in order, i'm in order. you'd think that knowing this would keep me on top of it so as to maintain some sort of even keel. i'm getting better, but sometimes sloth life gets in the way. academically, i've registered for my next class (understanding objects), which will keep me in class until just after my birthday. thankfully, this next class is on thursday nights instead of the dreaded wednesdays. i think that will do much to improve my application level. then, i have the summer off again! i could take my next course in six weeks in the summer term, but that conflicts with my trip back east (yet another wedding and the tentative minnesota invasion) and, well, there's no way i could do an accelerated course in C++. it would just about kill me. things to do: - buy a power bar - set up my router - start assignment - find out how to or how much it is to clean my blinds - get a haircut - backup photos - make a cod cd for dean - take dishes to keb - wash, vacuum & windex car - clean oven & stove top thingies ugh, and thats just a partial list!

ohmygod, i'm so tired today. no idea why. i was in bed before ten and didn't get up until six-thirty. too much sleep, you say? lies! there is no such thing. nope. sleep is manna from heaven. (and that, my friends, is as close to anything passion-related as i'll get on here). i'm feeling very antsy lately, yet i'm also somewhat stagnant. i need to clean my house, but i'm overwhelmed by the number of tasks into doing nothing. i need to start my huge assignment, but i can't bring myself to even think about where to begin. it's frustrating, and it's driving me crazy. CRAZY! oh, i'm going to see vancouver vs. ottawa next weekend. yippee! my favourite team against my east team. this is going to rock! this is also going to be a record. three hockey games in one season. all of them free. how lucky am i? c'mon, just how lucky am i? well, since you asked. i'm so lucky that my bestest jeremy sent me a lovely bloo router to bolster my sagging geek cred; i received a somewhat tardy, but wholly appreciated valentine from fellow blogger erika; and, i'm one slip of paper away from filing for my biggest tax refund ever! of course, it's going to responsible things like bills, but i can still be excited about it, right? it's so fucking beautiful out today. bloo sky, warm enough to go without a jacket, light breeze. and i'm stuck in here looking out at it. it's actually kind of cruel. we really should get an exemption from work on these kinds of days. the company can consider it a morale incentive. freshly-aired employees make for more productive employees! maybe i'll submit a suggestion to that effect. while i'm at it, i might as well ask for that margerita bar and on-staff masseur.

yay peter jackson! yay lotion! yay long, hot showers to wake me up in the morning! yay finishing a good book! yay soup! yay photos that people love! yay sunshine! yay old acquaintences contacting me! boo forgetting my glasses. boo cleaning the george foreman grill. boo scary chicken burning neighbour lady messing up my laundry schedule. boo not winning the lottery. boo being sleepy.