high expectations

I thought about it this morning, and really, people who expect me to get up at 3:30am and spend the next 10 hours travelling should not expect me to be completely functional until the following day. I even tried caffeine, it’s not working.

Oh, if you try to convince me that a four-week work assignment in Oakland would be “fun”, it’s best to leave the word “Oakland” out.

amalah’s the real deal

Ok, I admit it, I have spent a fair bit of time perusing the queen of everything‘s blog, and I haven’t laughed as much in a long time. Amy’s got style, and despite her life being just a little unhinged right now, manages to share with everyone and still make people laugh. I really hope she’s laughing too, at the end of the day. Have a gander, and enjoy things like trips to IKEA, and how much it hurts:

Basically, IKEA is an abusive boyfriend who twists your arm too hard and then buys your forgiveness with an ingenious media storage solution that he will then not help assemble because he wants to go drinking with his friends and after you assemble it yourself you realize that it doesn’t actually fit your TV after all and it kind of wobbles but you use it anyway because you don’t want to make him mad because he hits you sometimes.

But still. I love IKEA. IKEA can change! IKEA is so good to me when he’s sober!

Although this past weekend, IKEA pretty much beat the living shit out of me.

Funny stuff, and here’s hoping life calms down for her and her hubby a wee bit over the next few weeks.

cheese, please

Urk. There’s a company cook book floating around out there, somewhere, that seems to be built on cheese. It has recipes for breafast through dinner, and a desert or two. The recipes aren’t posted, but someone’s scanned the the lurvley pictures and added brief summaries like this one, for “orange fluff”:

Ok, before you laugh, please know that the chef says, “This recipe was handed down from my grandmother and has been in the family for years.”

The recipe is basically two boxes of orange jello and a carton of Cool Whip.

Now you can laugh.

Qwality entertainment via memepool.

update: the rest of Amy’s blog is definitely worth the visit.

cut the mash up(!)

Rawesome mashup/cutup by DJ Food incorporating a tonne of samples, sound bytes, and beat matching. Apparently the original was put together almost two years ago. The expanded track puts together Queen, Elvis, Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, the Beastie Boys, the Beatles, soundclips, and some serious beat-matching – and that’s just the first four minutes! Check it out. (links for download and/or torrent at the bottom of the intro paragraph)

The original link was from the fine folks at boingboing.

the puck drops

So the “new” NHL started last night, and I tuned in to have a boo. I watched the last half of the Ottawa-Toronto game after getting back from dinner with the Wednesday night crew, and the first period of the Phoenix-Vancouver game.

The “Battle of Ontario” reminded me a lot of the last NHL game I saw live. It was boring as hell until the last 5 minutes of the game, where the two teams combined for 3 goals. Passing and puck movement was god-awful, with the majority of play seeming to be flipping the puck back-and-forth between the blue lines. It could have been that the teams were on edge, but it was disappointing.

The officiating was pretty decent during regular time, with very few non-calls (and I still don’t get why, when a dive is called, there are offsetting minors). Unfortunately, overtime was the same-old, same-old. Two very blatant non-calls (one for each team), and they have to start calling this shit.

The shootout was anti-climactic, with Toronto’s shooters mis-firing twice. For once I agree with Pat Quinn – I hate to see the games decided this way, but everyone else seemed to like it.

The Vancouver game was much more entertaining. Like all West-coast games seem to be, the skating was wide open with end-to-end action being the MO. Curtis Joseph stood on his head (Clouthier was no slouch, either), and it was a much more entertaining game (although the lighting was so bad, I’m kind of wondering if GM Place has replaced the halogen TV lights with compact flourescents).

It was refreshing to see a lot less of the clutching and grabbing, muggings in front of the net, and goaltenders breaking up offensive drives risk-free. Not a bad start, although I’m still not convinced the officiating will stay on par for the whole season. We’ll see, but if overtime was any indication, the slope is slippery, and it’ll be very easy to fall back into old habits.

West Coast hockey still rules, and the sole East Coast game I saw was listless up until the last couple minutes. We’ll see how it goes.

surprises

Every so often, my dad surprises me. Today he did so with a very short story, and it gave me some insight into what a wonderful person he can be. The specifics are personal, so I won’t go into them here, but it was a little family history that made me smile and also reinforced how much he cares about his family.

Over the past decade I freely admit my dad has driven me a little nuts from time to time, but I think parents and kids are supposed to do that. The last couple years has been a bit of a watershed, as we’ve been able to re-connect through regular visits and the odd home project I help on. It also helps that he almost never calls for technical support anymore, because he’s learned to RTFM.

So what is the point of this blathering? The last week has really sucked on a personal level, and it’s nice to have family hit me with a perspective stick once in a while. Five years ago that probably wouldn’t have been possible. I guess time passing is sometimes a good thing.

dinos with my oatmeal

I have oatmeal 4 or 5 times a week. It’s not exciting, it’s nutritional. I keep telling myself this as I choke it down. My old trainer told me to try mixing protein powder in with the oatmeal to “liven it up”. What I got was a congealed mass that reminded me of plaster of paris and made me want to puke. It’s not exciting, it’s healthy.

Right.

It seems the fine folks at Quaker recognize that people like me (ok, 6 year olds, but that’s not what’s important here) choke the pasty blob at the bottom of their bowls as fast as humanly possible to avoid the texture and/or taste (or lack thereof). They’ve come up with a new type of oatmeal with hatching candy dinosaurs. I am not sure whether I should be embarassed or not, but if these make their way North I’ll be giving them a whirl.

I’m not proud, but at least I’ll be entertained the first packet or two until I discover how wretched said dinos taste. Thanks for the link goes to gizmodo.