- I alternate cutlery in the dishwasher tray compartments by ends – fork up, fork down, knife up, knife down, spoon up, spoon down in the hopes that it will wash them better.
- I often walk on the left-hand side of the sidewalk because it reflects my socialist leaning. Yes, foolish and stupid, I know.
- I prefer lying in the grass and looking at the sky to standing and looking at trees.
- Why are so many people in Oshawa obese?
- Family and friends I have made aside, I prefer my own company to other people. Most other people are uninteresting.
- I think about hard travel abroad every single day.
- Computers are starting to seriously bore me, despite that fact that I rely on them for a living.
- I wish I had a proper wood working shop.
- I remember stealing ice cream sandwiches from the vending machine in Junior High, right in front of the office, and getting away with it.
- My ideas very often outpace my abilities.
- I miss living near the Rockies more than I like living in Ontario. Given the chance, I would move back to Alberta in a heartbeat. I think back to all the climbing and skiing and hiking I did in the Alberta parks and wonder what the hell I was thinking to stay here in the east after leaving school.
- I have really come to despise China. This, over many years of their stupid and arrogant intransigence.
- I think about renouncing my American citizenship at least once a week. Sooner or later I will do so.
- I haven’t taken an image I am proud of in about a year.
- I miss my lost iPod Touch much more than I thought I would. Its just a device, no?
- I love slapstick humour.
- I used to think Jean Chretien was a great Canadian statesman, until he became Prime Minister (after which everything just slid downhill). This just proves that no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
- I miss my 35mm Contax cameras something fierce (stolen four years ago).
- I have 40 sheets of the last Type 55 Polaroid film Polaroid will ever make. Finito; no more being made, no more available. I am worried sick that either I or my Polaroid back will screw up more sheets than will yield at least one good shot.
- I haven’t used bookmarks in years, instead consoling myself with the thought that should I forget the page number I last stopped at, that the page is not lost but merely hidden.
- I still don’t understand how the oscillations of a record player’s needle can translate into music. I wonder this again after so many years of CDs (whose operation I understand much better), as I am playing with a USB turntable to convert LPs to digital sound.
- I like mint chapstick better than any other kind of lip balm.
- I secretly like it when work is crazy busy.
- I chew my cuticles too much (a little bit is ok, no?)
- To me, Ishtar and The Last Temptation of Christ are really the same movie.
- I worry that our children will have no memory of their own growing-up, which partly explains why I try to document theirs as well as I can.
- I dreamt last night that I murdered two people and was on the team to find out who did, and clues soon started pointing to me. Scariest dream I’ve had in years – mostly because I was capably of doing the crime. Woke in a sweat at 3am and lay there for 30 minutes before I was sleepy again.
- I often feel saddened that people don’t look for beauty in life, more than they look for entertainment and shock effects.
- I have a small stature of a First Nations man on my desk here at home, but feel secretly very guilty about it. He’s sort of proud looking, but in that resigned and OK-you-can-have-it kind of way. I bought him at Niagara Falls – worser!
- Epson is a fat pig company for charging so much for their ink.
- Although I support computers for a living, I mostly have no clue how they do what they do.
- The greatest joy I have ever, ever felt in my life is in raising my children. Who knew kids were such a hoot?
- My Western Digital external hard drive is craaaaaap (as is said in Scotland). Note to self: avoid Western Digital products in the future. UPDATE: My WD Stdio II was the ultimate replacement and has been working very well indeed since installation.
- I have a sinking feeling I’ll still be working when I’m seventy.
- I wish I was smarter.
- Started reading fiction again (see, Carrie!), and am loving “The Pacific, and other Stories” by Mark Helprin.
- Got Darryl Sittler to sign my hockey card of him (through a friend) from the 1973-74 season, woohoo!
- The first LP I ever bought was “Dreamboat Annie” by Heart. The most recent CD I bought was “The Flying Club Cup” by Beirut.
- I have a secret desire to travel the Levant and photograph from the same vantage point as David Roberts painted and then produce a book of side-by-side paintings then and photographs now.
- I once told a man in ‘Amman, while smoking sheesha, that I was with the CIA and my friend with Syrian Intelligence, which scared him so pale I immediately felt like the idiot I was. He was also almost certainly not the school teacher he said he was, however.
- I like baggy shirts.
- I don’t understand the usage difference between “critical” and “crucial.”
- Why do my tear ducts leak when I yawn?
- Why do I sometimes do things that are bad for me? Staying up too late, eating too many sweets, occasionally ignoring my celiac issue…
- There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 (*nix geeks will get this)
- When I was in the third grade I (with some friends) stole several matchbox cars from a 7 Eleven in Garneau, Edmonton. Grade three, for crying out loud. I immediately felt so badly about what I’d done, that I smashed them to smithereens on a rock behind some bushes on the south side of Garneau towers (where I would ten years later live while attending the University, and my sister first live with her then husband).
- Listened to a new (to me) band today called Hooverphonic. They’re from Belgium, and they’re great.
- I wish I was at home right now instead of at work.
- I almost never RTFM, preferring to bungle things as I go. Why is that?
- It took my new Blu_Ray data burner at work 3 hours to burn 93 GBs worth of data (across three disks) using Toast 8 on a Mac.
- I love the smell of gasoline, oil and diesel.
- A colleague at work has an envelope addressed to him (from some years ago), taped above his desk: ATTN: Tony Jenkins, The Globe and Mail, Department of Hanging around and Staring out the Window. Is this perfect or what?
- My father gave me a painting on cloth from his home in Norway. He recalls it hung on a wall inside out (its like a large gunny sack) to “protect the surface” or something. Its whispered that its really a Munch (Edvard), despite the fact that I turned it right side out again and its a pretty crummily-done oil on cotton and has the initials “P.A. 1924” on it.
- I once lost a yo-yo to a shy Sudanese boy who mistook my offer for him to look at it, for an offer of the thing itself. This was in a cafe in ‘Amman, Jordan.
- A young man in the hinterland of Guatemala once materialized out of the bush to sit next to me at a bus stop on a dirt track. He asked all sorts of questions about why I was there, and then, when the bus came and I got up for it, grabbed my hand hard and without letting go pulled me close and asked: You CIA?
- Light shone through translucent blue glass is possibly the most beautiful method of transmitting it.
- I have flat feet.
- I was baptized as an Anglican soon after birth, but wasn’t consulted on how I felt about this.
- George Bush is an idiot.
- Goodies are quite possibly my favourite food.
- I wanted to be an RCMP officer when I was a kid and had a poster of the service on my wall. Of course, I also had a poster that declared I wasn’t paranoid, I just thought that everyone was out to get me…
2436 hour headaches are vile.- Sipping ginger ale is the best way to enjoy it.
- Being celiac sucks.
- My first digital camera (2001) came with an 16Mb digital card in it. I currently use 2Gb cards and these are starting to seem small when 4Gb are more common these days.
- I broke my arm when I was five by falling between joists I was walking on down to a concrete floor (of an underground garage being built). My younger sister broke it again the next day by running in to where I was convalescing and jumping up on it. I fractured the radius in my left arm in 1998 when some guy darted out between traffic on a rainy day to catch a streetcar and I was obliged to grab my bicycle’s brake, reaching unfortunately the front lever first and causing me to go ass over tea kettle.
- Technology fails me most of the time.
- I actually have days when I miss living in the city, but these are far out-weighed by times like earlier this evening when, in the midst of 6 hours of rain, sun suddenly streams across our field for 40 seconds and the world holds its breath while the birds go berserk with song.
- I like milk poured over jello.
- I am often a lucky person.
- I am often an unlucky person.
- There is no such thing as luck.
- I work in a cubicle, which is depressing.
- I love the word ‘persimmon’, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried one.
- Tim Curry, as the devil in Legend, established the high-water mark for this role and has not yet been surpassed.
- Purple was my favourite colour when I was a child, but in the same arbitrary way that Polyanna bread was.
- Apricot jam, however, remains a true favourite to this day.
- If I work on a physical project (woodworking, motorcycle maintenance, computer repair), and I don’t leave some blood behind, I haven’t done the job right.
- I dreamt last night that I was floating several feet off the ground while flying in and around the Watchtower Basin in Jasper National Park.
- I used to read in bed a lot, but unconsciously accustomed myself to getting sleepy whenever I read. Now I get sleepy reading two paragraphs anywhere.
- I used to think a child’s tune went like this: ” Mairzy dotes and dozy dotes and little lamzie divey, a kiddelly divey too, wouldn’t you?”
- I wish my sister would blog more…
- I wish my other sister would blog at all!
- I worry about taking the same kind of photograph over and over in different contexts without growing through to a new level of visual understanding.
- I love the smell of ground coffee more than the taste of it when brewed.
- I remember flying into Kai Tak and making my way in Hong Kong solo when I was just 18 like it was yesterday. It was my first plunge into the East and I felt so like I was home, almost immediately.
- I love driving my tractor.
- There are fewer barn swallows in our barn this year than last, but a far greater number of song birds about.
- Adobe Flash is difficult because one must think unilaterally, in ‘n’ space.
- Sunburned my neck yesterday. Don’t sunburn your neck. Hurts.
- When I bicycled between Jasper and Banff along the Icefields Parkway in 1978, with two pals from Calgary, the front pannier from my bicycle was nicked out of the cookhouse by a bear sometime during the day. We found it and, shortly thereafter, the bear on an after dinner walk in the woods. We walked backwards and got away, but the bear returned and thrashed about in the Hostel yard in the wee hours. We didn’t get much sleep.
- In 1984, two pals and I skied into Mount Edith Cavell hostel in Jasper to spend Christmas Eve. It was minus 45 during the day. We slept with two sleeping bags (one inside the other), and never stopped skiing while outside over the next three days to avoid hypothermia.
- I’ve had three pairs of boots from John Fluevog on Queen street in Toronto, and all have failed in one way or another.
- I purchased a $750 2TB RAID drive from Western Digital that proved to be crap, hanging the Finder on my computer at home every time on wake-from-sleep. I used my VISA to RMA-ship a replacement drive that now does the same thing. Support is dismissive and unhelpful, only capable of pointing out the obvious (“Are you sure the drive is plugged in properly”). Lesson? Avoid Western Digital products like the plague. UPDATE: My WD Stdio II was the ultimate replacement and has been working very well indeed since installation.
- I have a scar on the ring finger of my right hand, the result of introducing a gerbil from school and a gerbil we had at home as friends who didn’t want to be friends. How was I to know gerbils are territorial? I was seven.
- Digital photography is not nearly as rewarding as traditional film-based photography.
- I have the first pen-knife I ever received. It has an RCMP on horseback on it on the front, with a pearl underside. I think I got it in 1972, when I was 8. I also have a hundred or so hockey cards from the 71-73 NHL seasons (including a dozen from the ’72 Canada-Russia series; this, despite never having played hockey or followed the sport.
- Anti-newton glass is etched by waving it over sulphuric acid fumes.
- How does a red maple (with red leaves) photosynthesize to create sugars to live on?
- Love evolves and grows greater.
