I just placed a collection of panoramic photos of my apartment on Picasa. I'm keeping my apartment fairly empty at the moment, though as of yesterday it is serving as storage for Emily's moving stuff. :)
Anyway, I'm off to bed. I was sneezing a lot so took a (sleep-inducing) antihistamine. I'm hoping it's allergies that I have and not a cold...
We finally got a reasonably warm (14c), dry, sunny Saturday in Vancouver. It was a perfect morning to get out on the bike, ride around the Stanley Park seawall, and finish up with a hotdog at English Bay. :)
Even better, there was a persistent north-west wind in the afternoon; enough for me to grab my kite, ride over to Vanier park, and fly for a good 2 hours. I caught up with a few old friends from last year (including a family that I "introduced" to stunt kites), and made a new friend (helloooo out there!) and had a great long lunch and chat.
But best of all, Emily arrived around 6.30pm with a van-load of her belongings. On Monday she and her family will fly to China for a month-and-a-half family holiday, but when they return she will be living here in Vancouver.
I haven't had this good a day in a long time. =:)
P.S. Emily has been instructed to keep her apartment as clean as mine is. Uh, mine is merely "empty", rarely "clean". :)
I peeked at my visitor logs recently and found that someone came to my blog via Google. It seems that, for some reason, one of my blog pages is rated number 1 when you Google for "irradict weather".
Elmer Fudd, Elmer Fudd...
What a pain. My taxes are fairly straightforward - I have one job, a couple of bank accounts, and some charitable donations. Still, I almost fell asleep while filling out the forms. Stella (Emily's mum) did my taxes for me last year, and I'm very grateful for that. I would have used a free program called Studio Tax this year and submitted my taxes online, but I apparently am a special case. I am a "deemed resident" and so cannot submit online.
As a deemed resident I also don't pay provincial income taxes (yes, Canada still has separate federal and provincial income taxes). I pay extra federal taxes instead, and unfortunately that means I pay $830 more than a regular Canadian resident. I have a tax bill this year instead of a refund. I also have lots of incentive to change my resident status this year...
I was having some issues with my old camera, and was having a consistent urge to get a new one. My parents also had some Aeroplan miles to use up, and they could only really be used in Canada. So, using their Aeroplan miles we ordered some "West Edmonton Mall" gift cards and then went shopping at the world's biggest mall, West Ed...
Apparently this is a very popular camera! We knew that other Sears stores in Edmonton had the camera in stock, so we came up with a great plan: use our West Ed gift cards to buy Sears gift cards and then go shopping elsewhere. We were all set to do this but...
Oh, you have West Edmonton gift cards? I'm sorry, we can't accept it at Sears. Yes they are MasterCards, but if we try to use them our computer systems will crash for an hour.
What the hell? At this point I wanted to swipe our gift cards through a Sears cash register just for the fun of it. Instead, we toddled off to West Ed Customer Service to ask about our cards and whether we could exchange for cash...
I'm sorry, we can't exchange them. However, they really are MasterCards, not ordinary gift cards. You can buy things anywhere in Canada, not just at West Ed...
It would've been nice to know this beforehand. Still, this was the point where our luck finally turned. We went straight to a FutureShop who had it in stock. Better, they could price-match with a different Sears store. Even better, it was a camera that had been recently returned, unused, and so we got an additional 10% off!
Canon S5 IS from FutureShop: $324.14. Being able to use your West Ed MasterCards anywhere but West Ed: priceless.
Last weekend I flew to Edmonton to attend Emily's computer science graduation dinner. Considering my thesis is about to be submitted I decided to treat it as my own graduation dinner too. :)
We took a bunch of photos of our preparation, including photos of me helping to do Emily's hair. I have to admit, doing Emily's hair was a lot of fun. She and I might be able to mess more with her hair once she gets to Vancouver. :).
There's a few more lower-resolution photos on Facebook, plus hundreds posted by others who attended (a Facebook account is required to see all the photos of me and Emily). The dinner was decent, but the trip to the bar/club and to Boston Pizza (a relatively high class pizza and pasta place) was the real highlight. We were congratulated so many times by strangers who thought we'd just gotten married! Little wonder why. :)
One thing I've learned over the years is that you have to be true to yourself, to your own nature, to your own concept of right and wrong. If you only live to match the desires and expectations of other people then you have lost part of yourself. Develop your own moral code - something that you can believe in and that is independent of your peers - and use it to weigh the expectations of other people.
Developing a moral code that is independent of your peers takes a fair bit of deep thinking. A useful exercise I use is the following:
A person has been locked into a room and, by sheer happenstance, you have been the power to make them happy or unhappy. No one except you will never know what happens in the room or that you were given such power over another person. You are the only person who will know about the choice you make. What choice should you make?
This exercise is specifically designed to remove any concept of "peer pressure". It focuses on your own nature and moral code, asking what you think you should do, independent of society.
Developing a moral code this way has helped me cope with the expectations and desires of other people - I am now more comfortable saying "no" to people, but am simultaneously more interested in saying "yes".
Finally, the following poem was a kind of inspiration for this thinking and is worth a read:
The Guy in the Glass by Dale Wimbrow, (c) 1934
When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.
For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgement upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.
He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he's with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.
You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,
And think you're a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.
You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you've cheated the guy in the glass.
P.S. "pelf" means "Money; riches; gain; generally conveying the idea of something ill-gotten."
I accidentally knocked a glass of water on to my keyboard yesterday afternoon. The keyboard survived, for a while....
Peter: have a prtoblem wirth my keyboard brtw
Peter: splirt watrert on irt eartliert
Peter: now rt and rt prtoduce borth rt and rt rtogerthert
Peter: grteatr fun
Emily: hahahhaa
Emily: rt rt :)
Emily: :D
Emily: what are you going to do?
Emily: wait don't answer :)
Peter: no idea
Peter: weirtd rthatr irt justr srtartrting being a prtoblem now
Peter: i was coding fort trhe lastr few hourts, no prtoblem
Emily: no kidding :)
Luckily, a night spent drying has fixed it. I have two spare keyboards, but I've taken them both at work so that people with laptops can use them. I don't know what I'd do if I had no keyboard for the weekend. Probably go to work to recover one of my spares. ;)
P.S. I pulled my keyboard apart a little. It's kinda scary just how much head hair gets caught in keyboards...
