Category: Daily life

Je suis fatigue.

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My wife just told me I haven’t been posting much lately. I guess it’s ’cause I’m busy. And tired. I can tell the tired bit ’cause this morning, when she got up to go to the gym, I didn’t wake up at all. Normally I’m a very light sleeper and wake up at the slightest bit of noise, but this morning I was dead to the world — slept through her alarm, through her getting ready, through the cats being pains in the ass…everything. That tells me that I must be exhausted, and no wonder; usually after a course I take the weekend (if not the entire next week) to recuperate, but this time I had the laptop on from morning to night working on the paper that’s due Thursday. That’s almost done, but I’ve already started reading the next textbook because of how heavy the workload looks, so I haven’t had any break.
That’s to say nothing of trying to catch up on work after a week away.

I don’t mean to whine. Part of me kind of relishes tough situations like this, but I know that I’m no longer able to propel myself along on caffeine with no sleep for weeks on end like I could when I was at Delano. I just need a little rest. Friday evening can’t get here fast enough.

Steeeeeeee-rike!

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The sudden TTC strike this morning is really throwing the city into traffic chaos. My office is half empty, partially because regular TTC riders can’t get to work, and partially because the resulting car traffic has overloaded Toronto’s streets and highways — which are stretched paper thin on a good day — causing substantial delays in getting anywhere by car. It’s going to be a weird day.

[tags]ttc, strike, toronto transit commission[/tags]

Out of the frying pan, into the movie theatre

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Another week down. And very productive work-wise, I might add. I got so much stuff done that I didn’t feel bad leaving at 3:45 to go see a movie. X-Men 3 (imdb | rotten tomatoes) wasn’t bad; nothing special, and worse dialog than the first two, but good end-of-the-week entertainment.

The weekend’s shaping up to be an entertaining one; movie tonight, bbq and poker w/ T-Bone et al tomorrow and dinner with CBGB Sunday. Somewhere in there I have to shoehorn in a bunch of marketing.

Giddyup.

[tags]x-men 3, poker, bbq, weekend shenanigans[/tags]

Breakin' shit down

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From Cinematical: Mara Leveritt’s book Devil’s Knot about the West Memphis Three has been optioned, and could be made into a feature film. Regardless of how well (or how poorly) the film is made, it can only help draw attention to their cause. Here’s hoping it gets made and more people become interested in finding the person who really killed those three kids.

.:.

The head of Homeland Security in the US has declared that the media will henceforth be embedded with government agencies during natural disasters. Presumably this will be to keep the public from seeing and hearing the, you know, facts about what’s actually going on. [from Antonia Zerbisias]

.:.

It’s been a nervous couple of days for us pet-owners. One of our cats — Michael, the smaller/stupider one — ate some string on Sunday night. About eight or ten inches worth, which can be fatal to cats (as it gets bunched up in their intestines). A couple of phone calls and a visit to the vet later, he seems to be ok, but they told us to keep a very close eye on him as things can turn very quickly. As such, we’ve been practically in the litter box with him for the last couple of days, and have found ourselves doing unpleasant things like breaking up his shit to see if there’s string inside (there is). This, I have decided, is a sad state of affairs. The things we do for our kids…even the furry ones.

Anyway, he seems to be ok for now. Fingers crossed.

[picture from QuestionableContent]

.:.

[tags]west memphis three, wm3, devil’s knot, homeland security, chertoff, cats[/tags]

Alone time

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Nellie’s out tonight with some friends, doing girly things. This leaves me some time to myself in which to do manly things. Gonna hammer up some drywall.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ho ho ha no, but seriously. It gave me a chance to catch up on a few things, listen to some music, blare some hockey (Buffalo just tied the game against Ottawa with 10 seconds left…3 goals in the final two minutes!) and be by myself. Not that I don’t love spending time with her, but introverts have an alone-time-to-social-time ratio; when it’s not met, we get cranky. And since tomorrow looks to be very social, and work was a little stressed today, tonight was a good recharging.

.:.

Downloaded music in my “preview” queue right now:

  • Gomez . How We Operate
  • Snow Patrol . Eyes Open
  • Sebadoh . III
  • Calexico . Garden Ruin
  • Tool . 10,000 Days
  • Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris . All The Roadrunning
  • Bruce Springsteen . We Shall Overcome
  • The Concretes . The Concretes
  • Pilate . Sell Control For Life’s Speed

I’ve given up on the Fiery Furnaces disc, despite what Cokemachineglow says.

.:.

[tags]personal time, introvert, gomez, snow patrol, sebadoh, calexico, tool, mark knopfler, emmylou harris, bruce springsteen, concretes, pilate, fiery furnaces, cokemachineglow[/tags]

ScaryStupidScary

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I think that when my guy at Harry Rosen teases me for spending way less than usual, I have a bit of a clothes spending problem. And here I was proud of myself for walking out with only a pair of shoes (these ones, in fact).

.:.

I watched a pile of movies this weekend, most of which we’ve had stored on the PVR for a while and I just hadn’t gotten to (along with the fifteen or so still on there):

  • Warrendale (Allan King Films) was a CBC documentary made in the late 60s that the CBC refused to air. It was about emotionally troubled kids living together in a house with some (remarkably patient, by the look of it) caretakers, and seemed shocking in a few ways: the language the kids used (you’re used to any TV made during the 60s being scrubbed so clean that to hear a little boy screaming “fuck you!” over and over is startling), and the methods they used to control the kids (calming them during tantrums by wrapping up their arms and legs). It was also a little weird to see a teenage girl being bottle fed by the same woman whose face she was screaming in earlier that day. Interesting, certainly, but hard to watch.
  • The Rules Of Attraction (imdb | rotten tomatoes) wasn’t so serious, but it was depressing in its own way. I’ve come to learn that I don’t really like movies based on Bret Easton Ellis novels, and I’m also more certain than ever now that I despise the 80s; Ellis, if his books even remotely resemble an accurate picture of what things were like for rich college kids, has just given me more reason to despise them. I’ll say this for the movie: it managed to keep me from thinking about Dawson’s Creek every time James Van Der Beek was on the screen, which is no small feat.
  • I got back to the serious stuff with Ghosts Of Attica (imdb). I knew little about the Attica riots, since they happened four years before I was born, but if you’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon and you watch enough Oz you pick up a few things. It ended up being a similar story to a topic I’d discussed recently with friends: the Kent State massacre, which happened just 16 months before the Attica riots. The problem — social unrest and mass uprising — and the response — a violent overreaction by police — were eerily similar in both cases. Whatever horrible things the Attica prisoners did to get themselves thrown in prison (ignoring any bearing racism or poverty might have had on their incarceration), they didn’t deserve to be shot in the back, and the guards surely didn’t deserve to be shot in the same cowardly way by their would-be rescuers.

.:.

We also downloaded the first season of Deadwood this weekend; I watched the first couple of episodes, but I’m just not as into it as Nellie is. She’s always had a bit more of a western fascination than I.

.:.

Now that basketball’s over with (for me, not the Raptors…although I think even I played later into the year than they did…) I’ve gone back to running. I only did two miles tonight, just enough to get back into it. My legs felt a bit tight, probably since I haven’t run on a treadmill in a while. It should be warm (and dry, more to the point) enough soon to run outside, but that doesn’t last long; by June Toronto’s too choked with smog and humidity to run outside. For me, anyway.

CBGBBQ

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The Star has once again started dumping free newspapers outside my door. They do this a couple of times a year, unprompted. Normally a free newspaper is a good thing, except that I feel compelled to read a newspaper if it’s put in front of me (well…unless it’s a complete shitrag like The Sun) so I end up getting to work late every day. My own fault, I suppose, but dammit, they’re enabling me.

.:.

Carl Bernstein, a guy who knows a thing or two about impeaching presidents, asks in the HuffPo if the president should be impeached. I have a recommendation, but I don’t think I get to vote on this.

.:.

I’ve won tickets from Now Magazine for the second time in as many weeks. This time it’s for The Sentinel, which probably won’t be quite as good as Brick, but hey…it’s free and I was gonna see it anyway, so 3 shy little hipster hoorays for Now.

.:.

This month’s Toronto Life, in addition to humorous letters, contains an article about the Don Valley Parkway. They make the point that further north — near Eglinton or Lawrence — it feels like a big, dead, cold highway, but the further it gets into the downtown core, it paradoxically becomes more and more green…more trees, more grass, better conformity to the landscape. Near the Bayview extension you can see the Don River, trees, fields, and the downtown towers pulling up over the trees. The first time I rode down the DVP with a friend, shortly after moving here, I was blown away as we neared the bottom of the valley at sunset, shocked by how green space I could see (I lived at Yonge & Sheppard, so I wasn’t used to seeing any), and then suddenly we were on the Gardiner and I was looking at the incredible cityscape. I remember it was the first time that I liked looking at Toronto.

.:.

CBGB had us over last night for a barbeque, which was pretty sweet. It’s never a bad thing to have friends who own meat grilling equipment and live within the city limits in quick transit distance. And, of course, are nice enough to invite us over on a whim on a sunny Sunday afternoon for some red wine & red meat. It made us [sigh] look forward to the day when we have our own barbeque.