Hey everybody! It’s been a while.
With Jaybird away in Qatar, I volunteered to take the Weekend! post this week. In fact, today is Canada Day (or “Dominion Day”, if you’re unable to handle modernity), so my weekend actually started yesterday.
It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for me. At the end of last week, I had a draft due for a current project (yes, at my day job, I’m a writer, too). The project got extended, so I got to re-do my document, and had another deadline to get a draft in yesterday. It’s made for two straight weeks of some late nights and struggles to get the work done, but it’s also been a really worthwhile project, and the challenge has been enjoyable and rewarding.
And thankfully, I was able to get it done a bit early and then join in on the company foosball tournament.
So now it’s the weekend. I’ve just watched my Ottawa RedBlacks defeat the Montreal Alouettes in a bit of Canadian football, so that was a good start to things. Tomorrow will be Canada Day festivities. I don’t think I’ll make it down to Parliament Hill–I don’t think the kids are at a point where they’ll appreciate it. I’d like to head out on a bike ride with them, maybe make our way to the Arboretum or off to the beach, weather permitting. Those seem like worthwhile uses of our national day.
Jaybird always seems to talk about doing laundry, and that’ll probably happen this weekend. Last week, we’d fully caught up, but when you have two kids, laundry tends to pile up. So there will be some laundry, and, if all goes well, some minor home renovations in the girls’ room. They’re notoriously bad for keeping things clean, so we’ll see if those renos actually happen
Sunday will probably be church and then an outing to the park…or we’ll skip church and head to the park. If we’re feeling adventurous, it might be another time to head off to the beach.
In Ottawa, we have a thing called the National Capital Commission (if you follow me on Twitter, you may have heard of the NCC…no politics!). They control a lot of the land around the waterways in order to make a great capital. They do this by having urban freeways running along the waterways (no politics!), but on Sundays in the summer, they close off some of them for bikes, pedestrians, rollerbladers and skateboarders. One of these closed off freeways leads right to one of our beaches, so that’s pretty inviting.
I’m also working on another post for The League (I know..cray cray), so I’m hoping I’ll have some time to finish it up and get it posted before 2017…which is actually Canada’s 150th birthday, so maybe I’ll just make sure it’s done by this time next year.
I kid.
I think I might end with a video, is that cool? Since it’s Canada Day, how about some Neil Young. Back in the ’90s, Neil Young went on tour with a Pearl Jam. A friend referred to him as the godfather of grunge, and noted, “he’s got ripped jeans older than Pearl Jam”. I think this video proves it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQCspcY4QUQ
That was fun. Can I do another? (Really, how can you stop me?) This is a band from Halifax, Nova Scotia. I saw them about a year ago, and they’re pretty cool:
So…what’s on your docket?
(Photo is “Footrace finish line, 1925” from the Seattle Municipal Archives, used under a creative commons license)
Jaybird is in flight somewhere (I think) over the Atlantic Ocean, but asked me to post this for him in due course:
“My last full day at work was a 16 hour day complete with a last-minute crisis (which was, of course, averted as soon as our support back in the states got back from the lunch break they took in the middle of supporting us).
Which means that my last partial day at work involves just writing trip reports, discussing various problems we found and trying to sort them into the various serenity prayer categories.
And this being a partial day means that part of it will be spent getting on a plane and going *HOME*.
I miss Maribou SOOO MUCH. I miss the kitties somewhat less but still palpably. I can’t wait to get back to a place where I can just sit down and breathe them in.
And then, later this weekend, writing some sort of post about all this.”
As for me, I’m just looking forward to having Jaybird home. We have some social plans for the 4th, and other stuff similar, but it all pales in comparison.
It’s so weird to know you actually NEED someone around, even after nearly 20 years. Life is far less functional without him.Report
Happy Canadian Fourth Of July!
I’m currently in Germany. I have just finished a meal consisting of sausages and sauerkraut (Gran used to call it “victory cabbage”) and there were two things I noticed about the dining experience:
1. Oh my gosh, pork products are soooooo good.
2. I ordered sausages and sauerkraut and she brought me sausages and eggs and told me that she could make my meal the way I ordered it for another three Euros. The European Customer Service Ethic is significantly different from that found in Qatar.
In an hour or so, they’ll be calling my flight.
The third or fourth best part of this trip is handing my passport to the guy in customs and they glance at it and hand it back to me and say “Welcome Home.”Report
Happy Canada day!Report
I knew we were about due for a new kitchen faucet and so it wasn’t surprising when the wife turned the handle on Wednesday night and it broke off. So I crawled under the sink to get the lay of the land and with a disposal and dishwasher lines and deep sinks that create a hard-to reach spot for the faucet attachments it seemed like a recipe for me being mad for half the weekend. So I told her, “Maybe we should just call a plumber.” The fact that she so quickly agreed bothered me so I then decided to research things and decided I could manage it without having a nervous breakdown, so long as I was patient and planned carefully.
Last night I laid out all of my tools carefully, read the directions several times and told my wife the gameplan. Since she would be assisting, I explained to her what all the tools were, and how I might need to try several wrenches or sockets before getting the right one. I also told her that there would probably be grunts, or curse words coming from under the sink and she should just ignore them.
I’m happy to say that the old faucet came off without incident and the new faucet went back on pretty easily. Getting the anchor nut on the new model was quite a chore, as it was too big for a socket and getting channel locks in there was not easy, but I managed. In the home stretch, with two more connections to make on the supply line I realized ours were too short. D’oh. It was 11pm and so the installation will have to wait until tonight to finish.
Worst part of the whole thing is that after I called it quits for the night I remembered I owned a basin wrench, which would have made the project much easier. If you watch the video above you will hear the guy say the basin wrench is a ‘necessity’ for kitchen faucets. All I could do was laugh.
Anyway…
We might try to see some movies at the drive-in across the river. I think they have a double-header with Independence Day and Tarzan, so that might be fun. Family fireworks Sunday night and a whole lot of nothing for the rest of the weekend. sunday night will be weird without Game of Thrones.Report
My Dad gifted me a basin wrench a few months ago. It proved to be of inestimable value when I installed the new bathroom sink after the remodel.Report
I’m sure there is some kind of lesson there about having too many tools if you can’t remember having them when you need them. All I can say is that the last faucet installation was 7 or 8 years ago and went so poorly that i have blocked it out of my mind completey.Report
I have one of those, but I didn’t know it was called a basin wrench.
Anyway, this is why software is better than hardware. When you need a tool, you can just search for it and download it, or build it yourself from stuff you have lying around (like a Python interpreter.)Report
Canada’s the big city in Michigan, right?Report
Happy Canada Day to all our Canadian correspondents and readers. We think it’s too bad that you don’t have the fourth of July up there. Odd how your calendar goes directly from the third of July to the fifth of July, but to each their own.
But hey, have some poutine and some of that whiskey of yours and a Nanaimo bar or two afterwards.Report
Happy Canada Day! My grandmother was born outside Edmonton, I think? Not exactly sure, she died before I was born.
I have been spending the last few days packing up my father in laws belongings that my wife thinks we should keep, and settling the estate. Much suck.Report
Home. ‘zausted. Momo is very glad to see me but is also doing what he can to communicate his displeasure with my having been gone in the first place.
I’m going to try to stay up until 9PM.Report
Welcome home Jay!Report
I slept in until 4:45!Report
Also, while over there, I discovered that my belt moved another notch in the good direction.Report
Bad food will do that.Report
I think it was more the drinking a gallon of water every day. (A literal gallon, not the “I had 3 bottles of water! That’s like a gallon!” but the “I had 128 ounces of water” version of the gallon.)Report
Geez, how hot was it? I mean, where you actually were, not out in the sun, where weather.com is showing highs above 110 and lows above 90.Report
Where I actually was? I was in air conditioning. Some rooms were better than others, of course, but I doubt I was ever in a room that was hotter than 85 degrees. Outside, however, was in the 110s pretty much every day (and I’m sure that it hit the 120s… and the car sat in the uncovered parking lot so we tended to have short bursts of temps in the… whatever it ended up being in the car).Report
Starting the car, running the AC, and calling you when it’s down to a livable temperature is what interns are for.Report
A while back my wife snitched my alarm clock (it’s okay, it was for a good purpose). This week I went through my “projects” drawer and pulled out odds and ends to build a crude prototype. Among other things this weekend, I will be contemplating that timeless question, “What is the exhaustive list of things a bedside clock should do?”
Re Mr. Schilling’s comment about software above, one of Cain’s Laws™ says, “To the greatest extent that the budget and design constraints allow, put all the tricky bits in software.”Report
A nap counter. Just hit a button for an alarm to go off in 15 minutes, hit it twice for 30, thrice for 45.Report
There’s a Raspberry Pi buried under the display, and there’s open-source voice recognition software around that’s supposed to run on a Pi. Wouldn’t it be better if you could hit the button and just say, “Nap. Fifteen minutes. Execute.”? (Since this is an exhaustive list.)Report
that timeless question
Heh.Report
I just got back from a giant family trip (30+ people). For a week.
So to end my vacation, I am…doing laundry. And cleaning out the few things that got left in the fridge. And generally feeling pretty okay about that.
And Tuesday, I return to a job where we were behind our deadlines even before I left, so that’s gonna be fun. (OTOH, my work was pretty complete).Report
Of all of the things that happen after every vacation, truly, laundry is the best part.Report
When we had a beagle, and she had been at the kennel while we were gone for a week, we made sure to dump all the dirty clothes in one giant pile in the family room. She would race to it when she got home and burrow in. I assume because it smelled like her people and she knew that she was home. Silly beagles — they can see it, and they can hear it, but until they’ve smelled it they’re not sure it’s real.Report
We left our beagle with our in-laws. Last time we boarded him, he came back hoarse for a month.
He’s coming back home on Tuesday. It’s weird not having him around.Report