that ring of confidence

Even Superman needs a break and I'm no Superman

Between school, work and freelancing I'm starting to feel a little bit tweekish [wp].  Being busy is of course good, since work and freelancing pays the bills, I'm starting to feel like I've been on the go for so long that I could just curl up right here and have a nice long nap.  I've had a fairly recent vacation [jks], but while Las Vegas was fun it certainly was not relaxing.

I just deleted two full paragraphs explaining why I felt so stressed out, including a large section on the ins and outs of my days off, but at the end of the day that doesn't matter.  What does is that I feel like I need to have a nap, or at least a nice comfortable spot in the store near the iPhone display where I can lay down and cry for awhile.

I need a staycation [wp]. 

What I really want to do is to get two days off in a row, and just disconnect.  I'd like to stick my iPhone in a drawer for two days, grab my iPod and just enjoy life without a telephone, email or anything else.  These days I try to go a day without using a phone and I inadvertently start a citywide manhunt for my lifeless bloated corpse.  I need to find a way to modularly unplug myself from life for awhile, without everything else falling apart.

Now excuse me, I need to go lay down and have a nice cry.

Locals

It's official, nobody who lives in Vancouver is actually from Vancouver. I'm currently in my technical editing course and half the class is from Ontario and more students are from South Africa than Vancouver.

Ask around, you'll see I'm right. Does everyone born in Vancouver move to the US or Ontario?

30

"Something is about to give
I can feel it coming
I think I know what it means
I'm not afraid to die
I'm not afraid to live
And when I'm flat on my back
I hope to feel like I did"

— "Kite", U2

i was going to quote the U2 song "40", but there was too much God mentioned in it and I've got to save something for my post ten years from today. I've got to keep something in the reserve tank, and while one should always be writing as what they were working on was the last thing they'd ever write, I feel like I've got to keep a little bit in reserve. Even now, hinting at what I might quote ten years from now, I'm playing a dangerous game. You could just Google the lyrics and then make a point of not dropping by my blog in a decade, just because you already know what I'm going to lead off with. I may have tipped my hand, but hopefully your poor memory and apathy will make the song choice seem like a spur of the moment flash of inspiration.

It's a big birthday, a big year. All of the other milestones that I've roared past in the inevitable process of aging have been mere hints of what was to come. If I figured I'd have found myself a career by twenty-two, only to find myself deeply committed to being a student journalist and never graduating at that age, it was okay because I'd not yet hit twenty-five. By twenty-five I figured that the detours my life had taken me had been worth waiting a bit longer to actually discover what it was that this life was for. Thirty though, well it's hard to consider this a simple extension of my teenage, or young adult years.

John Lennon is famous for saying, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Well truthfully he was famous for being a Beatle, which makes the wild and crazy turns his life took him on while he was "busy making plans" seem a little more awesome than working at the same job for nearly a decade while I scramble to get some more schooling stuffed into my head so that I can find this elusive "career" and start this adult life. My lifeclock has already turned red, and we are entering lastday [wp].

I would of course hope for Renewal at the fiery ritual of Carousel, but then again that's a reference that might be lost. All I can say is I'm on the look out for Sandmen.

The only "adult" thing that I've feel like I've done, probably in my entire life, is getting engaged earlier this year [jks]. Everything else about me just feels like a slightly dumber, fatter version of the Jeffery Simpson that graduated high school back in 1997. By this point I was meant to have at least one published novel, a screenplay being seriously considered by Steven Spielberg or at the very least my own small desert island for retreating to between standup comedy gigs. Instead I'll wake up thirty years old not as Prime Minister of this great nation, or even a smaller shittier nation with lower standards, without a record deal or even pet mogwai.

I'm tired and Shia LaBeouf is blackmailing someone

these last few days I've just been feeling really tired. Part of it is trying to squeeze in time to do my freelance writing and part of it is that I've just not had any chance to slow down since Las Vegas. Granted also staying up past one in the morning playing Rock Band with Nathan also contributed a bit to it [jks].

Today is a day off, but it's also a day that I'm going to be up late at a drive-in movie. At least that's the plan. Drive-ins used to be a fairly regular thing for my family, well maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. They were still special occasions, but when we were young and lived in Edmonton I'd go to sleep early then get up and my parents would take us to the Drive-In. The only movie that I know I watched there was Gremlins, but since they're generally double features there must have been more than that one.

Lydia and I went last year to the Twilight Drive-In in Langley, the one we're going to again tonight, and saw The Departed and Beerfest. The Departed was first and it was great. If you've not had a chance to see it go out and rent it. That's right, stop reading this go and rent it and this will still be here to read once you've done watching the movie.

Beerfest was okay, though I think by that point we were both too tired to really enjoy it.

Tonight we're going to see Ghost Town and Eagle Eye. Ghost Town should be good, since anything with Ricky Gervais in it tends to be quite funny. This is his first staring role in a film, and the first major thing he's done that he hasn't had a role in writing so we'll see how he does as just being an actor.

Eagle Eye is the newest film with Shia LaBeouf in it. He's the kid from Transformers and he was in the latest Indiana Jones movie as Indy's son. He must have some dirty photos of Steven Spielberg because Spielberg produced Transformers and Eagle Eye and of course Indiana Jones is Spielberg and George Lucas' pet project with Lucas producing and Spielberg directing.

Without Steven LaBeouf might not be getting any work, so blackmail is the obvious answer.

Haircut

haircuts have never been one of my favorite things. I suppose there are people in the world who really enjoy them. I'd like to meet one of these people. In person, because I suppose if you want to throw it open to the whole wide internet you're going to find a few odd people who really get off on getting their haircut. Normal people, the sort that I see socially or in the line at Safeway, probably agree with me that getting hair cut is a chore. Oh it's not the world's worst chore by any means, it's better than having even the most minor of surgery, or needing to go door to door trying to convert people to your new cult on a Friday evening, but it's still annoying.

Before I moved to Vancouver I had it as good as I probably ever will haircut wise. One of my former co-workers at the Paramount Theatre had finished hairdressing school and was working at a salon on my way up to university so stopping in either before or after school was never a problem. Melanie had been hired at the theatre at the same time as I had, and had gone to our graduation prom as Ryan's date so we were social work friends. That bit helped deal with the first problem of getting your haircut, which is the need to make small talk.

With Melanie we knew the same people, I had met her long-term boyfriend Jay enough times to almost care what he was doing and we had enough common friends through Ryan or the theatre that we could pass an hour every month or so talking about what everyone was up to. When I didn't feel like talking we could also go about our business of cutting hair and having hair cut, without the need for awkward forced conversation since after having worked with me for nearly five years she knew that I really was not a particularly talkative person and if I was quiet it was not because I hated her. At least I hope she knew that, I guess I never really checked to make sure that was the case.

In Vancouver I've never really found a place that I've liked. I've tried the expensive salons, tried my friend Vanessa when she was cutting hair, tried not one but two places in Metrotown and tried a variety of cheap hole in the wall places around the Denman Street / West End area. I haven't enjoyed or liked any of them. So each time I would go longer and longer between haircuts until this last time I think it was four months. My hair went from really short to growing long enough so that I could stretch it down past my nose.

Lydia wanted me to go to her friend's roommate, which sounded awful since it's all the social awkwardness of a regular haircut with the added pressure that I might actually see this person socially at some point. I don't want to chitter chat when getting my haircut. If it was socially acceptable, and if I didn't need to listen to directions from the hairdresser during the process, I'd simply listen to my iPod through the whole thing. Sadly it isn't, so I don't.

I'm debating just shaving my head. I would have it not to hide a bald spot Mark Messier style, but rather just to eliminate the need for having to be a hairdresser's patient. The only thing holding me back is that my special doctor says that the only reason nobody knows what a deviant I am is because my hair hides my skull's true shape [wp].

Five applications that have returned to active usage

s

ince the great hard drive crash of 2008 [jks] I've been slowly rebuilding my computer from the ground up. No, wait that makes it sound like I'm doing something complex and technical. Rather what I'm doing is slowly re-installing applications onto my hard drive as I have a need for them. The first things on there was the software that I had on discs, like Microsoft Office and the Apple iWorks suite. From there I've been adding the programs that I've acquired from the internet, though I've been far more relaxed about getting those back on.

What applications have worked their way onto my hard drive and back into usage? Well how about a list of five just so that we can give an uneven number to go along with my uneven track record of regular blogging.

5) NetNewsWire [ng]:

NetNewsWire is one of my most used applications on my iPhone and the fact that both the mobile and desktop version of the world's most popular RSS reader is free is pretty damn cool. It's the best way to follow blogs, news websites and pretty much anything with a RSS feed. I don't use it to feed podcasts through to itunes, though it can do that as well. It's probably the best way to add new feeds, manage them into folders and also read them. The fact that it allows me to create blog posts from incoming content could be useful if i used it more.

4) iTunes [ap]:

Okay, this one is obvious. I figured it was so obvious that it might not be worth mentioning, but iTunes is my most used application by far. Whether it's loading music onto my Apple TV, my iPod or my iPhone or just giving my tunes to type by it's almost constantly running on my computer. I'm really enjoying the new iTunes 8 which seems to have solved a problem I had where, since I am using an external hard drive accessed through Wi-Fi to store my music library, iTunes would lose the library forcing me to spend about forty minutes re-acquainting iTunes with my music once a week or so.

3) Ecto [is]:

I have to admit I don't use desktop blogging software as much as I should. It really makes writing, editing and maintaining a blog so much easier, but because I use multiple computers plus my iPhone to blog I tend never to use it. However through Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I got a free copy of Ecto and I always give using it a go. It helps avoid having to struggle with HTML, which I often have to use when posting with Safari. Ecto's the first piece of software so far that's not free, but the fact that it's less than $20 should help make it a consideration.

2) Adium [ad]:

Apart from iTunes Adium is the only program that's almost always constantly running on my computer. This free application combines the capabilities of pretty much every instant messaging service known to man into one single app. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and others are all there and with the addition of Facebook chatting it's got everything that I've ever used to talk to people online with. In fact between this and the very slick Facebook iPhone application I don't actually ever log in to Facebook anymore.

The one thing it's missing, and I'm pretty sure it's currently technically impossible anyway, is the ability to combine conversations with people using multiple platforms, so that you could merge a conversation you're having with someone on MSN into one you're having with someone else on Yahoo.

1) Handbrake [hb]:

Though it's kind of visually boring, hence the reason for no pictures, Handbrake is so incredibly useful. Basically it's the best, and as far as I know only, way to copy DVD movies onto a Mac. Loading television shows and movies from my DVD collection onto my Apple TV and my iPhone would be impossible without this little piece of software. Having recently loaded the complete series of Yes Minster into my iTunes library I've come to appreciate it even more. Again like everything else I've recommended, other than Ecto, it is free.

Another apology

i t feels like every post I make these days is a post asking for forgiveness after another long period of this blog laying fallow. Each and every entry seems like it's asking for forgiveness for the length of time since I've last blogged and promising to be more attentive to you, my dear readers.  Does it feel that way to you?

Again I've been writing for The Georgia Straight [tgs] and though I haven't been working as much this past week I've been travelling with Lydia.  We took a long weekend and went to Vancouver Island to visit Tofino and Victoria.  Lydia blogged about eating on the island [iatl] and I guess I don't have a whole lot to say beyond that, so I'll leave you with the link. 

One of the things we did do in Victoria was look at venues for the wedding.  We checked a few places, mostly heritage homes and none of them seemed to work for us.  They were either not the right type of place, required us to use their expensive in-house caterers or had the overall feel of a bingo hall.  After already mostly eliminating Kelowna from our list of cities to get married in, it seemed like we were crossing Victoria off the list as well.

I don't know how it came up, but talk turned to the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver [hh], and since I had been to Curtis's wedding there I sent him an email asking for a rough estimate on how much he paid.  His reply was surprisingly inexpensive and so we booked a viewing for Wednesday and after looking at it and talking to the woman in charge of rentals we've booked the hall for August 9th 2009.

Which is a huge relief, since now that we've got a date and location everything else can slot into that.  I guess the last really big thing is the caterers, and once that's sorted we're just having to deal with a few minor details like the flower arrangements for the tables and whether or not we're going to ask people to sit through speeches or a slide-show or possibly both.  Lydia's for neither and I'm for both.  I figure if we're feeding people the least they could do is pretend to care about us for half an hour, even if they'd rather be watching a rerun of The Office.

You can keep this suit of lights, I'll be up with the sun

i will admit it's been awhile. I got busy writing [tgs], and then my computer crashed and I've spent the last three days fighting to get it working. Thanks to the Genius at the Pacific Centre Mall's Apple Store I figured out my plan of attack, but it's likely that I won't be able to save most of the files that I had been transfering from one computer to another for slightly over a decade.  Though most of it was no big loss, I don't really need a saved game for each of the last three Sim City games, some of it was worth keeping.

Thankfully I'd actually backed up all my photos a few weeks ago onto DVDs.  The last six months or so of photos that I hadn't backed up are mostly on my Flickr account [fkr] so that is not a major problem.  Sadly I've lost a great deal of writing, and while most of it was just scraps and fragments it's still gone.  Most of it I have backups in the real world, with the eVent! articles and a lot of the Phoenix stuff in boxes in storage.  Some of it though is just gone.  All of which makes me wish I'd have been more diligent keeping my writing archive site up-to-date [teotw].

It is though a clean slate, a chance to start again.  My Macbook is running considerably faster with it's freshly erased and near empty hard drive than it was with a nearly full drive with programs and files migrated through three other Apple laptops (an iBook and two Powerbooks). 

My only worry is whether I'll be able to reinstall Adobe CS2.  I've got the actual purchased discs, but for some reason the registration code didn't work last time I tried to install it.

Now though I should be back to blogging on a more regular basis.  Well, hopefully.

The best merch ever

Radiohead Merch
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson

i am a sucker for a good bit of concert merchandise.  Give me a t-shirt with a cool logo on it and I'll gladly hand over $30 for something that costs ten times less than that to make.  Hand me a poster for $15 and I'll roll it up and stick it in my closet with big plans to use it to decorate the wall in the home office that I don't yet have and may never get.  Hoodies, love them.  I've got Matthew Good soccer jerseys.  I've got backpacks, pins and baseball caps.

My new all-time favorite piece of tour merchandise ever however is now the Radiohead Sigg bottle that I picked up last night at their concert at Thunderbird Stadium [mbv].  I'm a huge fan of Sigg bottles, and I use my two current ones almost constantly.  I took one around as my main source of water in Europe, and I try to avoid using plastic bottles or buy bottle water in stores because of the toxic chemicals that are meant to leak into the water from plastics.  Not only that but cutting back on plastic bottles is good for the enviroment, even if they're recycled.

$25 for a Radiohead Sigg bottle is a no brainer then.  It's metallic so the chemical issue isn't a factor, and its washable so it's not going to end up in a garbage dump anytime soon.

The Completely Useless Guide to Being Poor While Living Rich

Over the last week or so I've been writing a guide to how to like a life of great wealth without spending much money. This guide would have taught you how to do things like go to see touring Broadway musicals without spending a dime. That sounds useful, but sadly the entire 200 page work can be boiled down to "get engaged to a woman whose roommate works at a radio station."

I was going to try selling the guide at local flea markets, but after the dismal sales of my first book [blrb] I decided that a 500 page book whose basic message didn't even take up half of the back of the jacket on the hard cover version was a bit cheeky.  I mean I'm not Deepak Chopra, I don't have the name recognition to pull that shit off.

What prompted my writing of the book was when Lydia's roommate Sarah got us free tickets to the Vancouver opening night of Spamalot [mbv].  It had been a play that I'd been interested in going to, but by the time it was announced that the touring company was coming to Vancouver I'd already moved out of the phase of my life where I could afford to pay for things and into the phase of my life where I eat rice and bulk chicken breasts.  The fact that the United Nations isn't delivering the rice from the back of trucks to my house is a small victory, I mean it's actually store bought.  So that's me for the win.

The other advice I have is know someone who works in the tourism industry.  Through the hostel Lydia got this wicked pass that gets her and a guest, typically me, into all sorts of tourist type spots.  On our weekend, which last week just happened to be Canada Day and the day after, we used the pass to take the False Creek Ferries three times, ride the Vancouver Trolley, go see the newborn baby Beluga at the Vancouver Aquarium and then go to Science World all for about four dollars each.

All of which is handy since I've got about $150 that I'm stretching until the 15th when I'm next paid.  The fact that the part time job is coming out to about one shift a month (June had two shifts and July brings zero), means that stretching a dollar is important.  Even more important now that for the second time in about a year I've had my wages cut at work. 

The summer plans are still being made

So these past few days have even been extremely beautiful. Well at least the weather in Vancouver has been very beautiful. Warm, sunny and with not one drop of rain to be seen darkening the sky it's been very un-Vancouver.

Lydia and I have been trying to figure out what sort of vacation plans we can make. There was some light talk about a trip to Las Vegas with my parents in September, but that seems to have died down. I'm trying to get a camping trip arranged with Nathan and Krista for August but after making bold claims about wanting to camp Lydia is feeling a bit nervous about the bears and the potential lack of washrooms that come with camping.

At some point we will get to Kelowna, both to scout out wedding locations and caterers and to just enjoy the sheer heat. Last year it was a bit cooler while we were there, and I was wanting Lydia to really get the sweltering Kelowna experiance where you'd kill a small child for a cold glass of lemonade. There's also a trip to Tofino at some point, since we really enjoyed out brief time there last year so much that I even claimed to want to move there [jks].

Don't worry, I probably won't. Though that would keep me from worrying about the future of Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv].

Wake me when it's fall and we've all relaxed a little

I started work at Elfsar, the Yaletown comic book store, last month and was hoping that it would be a good source of additional income. I was also hoping that working there would break up work at the Rogers, the way that working at the theatre used to break up working at Rogers back in Kelowna. The trouble is because it's been slow, they just have no shifts for me. After two shifts this month, I'm not working there at all in July.

At least I've got my staff discount I guess.

Meanwhile the iPhone hasn't even arrived and I'm starting to get tired of it. Every day is a flood of people wanting to know things, which would be fine if Rogers told us anything. Today we weren't even allowed to tell people about the recently announced plans despite the fact that they were in the newspaper and on Rogers' site. I feel like we should just wear t-shirts that say, "We know even less than MonkeyJizz365 on Howard Forums, so don't bother asking."

Meanwhile the internet's turned into a festival of idiots over the Canadian iPhone plans. Why people expected them to be the same price as the AT&T plans in the US I'm not sure. Anyone who had spent about ten minutes looking at Canada's data rates could have guessed what the plans were going to be within about five dollars. The fact that they're better than any current data rates in the country isn't the issue, the issue is that they're not the best in the world. Or something. People just need to go back to high school and retake economics or business education, of course typing "iPhone FAIL" into their blog gets more hits.

And hey look, I'm not someone who defends Rogers blindly. They make mistakes, but for the most part they make fewer mistakes than Telus or Bell and the ones they make tend to be the classic big corporation mistakes that any company with several hundred employees make.

Telus for example sent Lydia a bill last week for over $1100, even though she hasn't had a phone with them since 2003. It seems that when she closed her home account to switch to Shaw they kept her account open, and kept charging her without sending her a bill until five years later they were about to send it to collections. Or something. They never actually told her why she owed this money, or even how much she owed since the amount kept changing every time she called them.

A few hours on hold later and she got them to delete that, thankfully.

Meanwhile my mother wanted me to delete a previous post mentioning the iPhone, scared that I'd be fired. It seems that some Rogers dealers are firing people for just that, and others are making their employees sign paper work saying that they can't say anything bad about the iPhone or they'll get the sack. The amount of money that people are imagining that Rogers is going to make off of this is turning everyone into fraking idiots. We weren't this concerned as a nation when we helped invade Afghanistan.

I loved my iPhone, that I now can't use or I'll be fired, and I'm sure I'll get a 3G one and love it even more but it's just a phone. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't make you good at playing Dr. Mario. It's super cool and the best phone I've ever used but it's just a phone.

I can't wait until summer is over and everyone relaxes a little.

At least Telus doesn't believe that I owe them money. Then I'd really need some Elfsar shifts.

Going to see Nathan

This morning I'm off to see Nathan early in the morning.  We've been talking around the notion of doing something, like a video show or a podcast for years and I'd like to finally record something.  I'm sure the fact that we've yet to come up with a subject, format or method of working together will in no way affect the quality of what we end up producing.  I mean let's face it, it's not like half the stuff in your average art gallery was made with any sort of planning.  Art isn't what you plan at, art is what happens when you just let yourself create.

Or at least that's what I'm sure my high school art teacher would have taught me if I hadn't of switched into band after the first week because I found the art kids too weird.  Now there's an alternate life to think about, how would I have settled into Okanagan Mission Secondary School if I'd have stayed in art. 

I'll tell you one thing for sure I would not have gotten lost in the bad part of Anaheim California with Karen Wilson while on a band trip.  Not that anything came of that adventure, we neither made out nor were we murdered for our Air Jordan's.

Another post about a puppy

Just a quick post to note that Lydia and I went up to Whistler on our day off yesterday, but I'm still working on getting the photos and video to Flickr so I'm holding off blogging about it until I've got all that stuff online. What I do have online is some more pictures of my parents' new puppy Charlie. This time I give you a video of him investigating the camera.

Right, okay so it's not the sort of hard hitting content that you've come to expect from my blog. I suppose I could get a meth addiction to provide myself with some blog worthy content. Until that pans out however I've got not much to go on. At least until I get some time.

I'm still alive and my parents got a new dog

I just wanted to say that I'm still alive, just in case you thought that I might have died at some point during the Emerald City Comic Convention.  Working two jobs seems to eat up quite a bit of my time, and I've not been able to post as much as I'd like.  I will be changing that in the near future, though how I'm not quite sure.

In the meanwhile my parents got a new dog, well my mother did.  It's a Havanese [wp] and it's name is Charlie, because it's the same colours of a dog that my mom had years ago.  Charlie, the first one, was a part of the family before I was and lived for around sixteen years.  Hopefully Charlie 2.0 will have as long of a life.  But damn, puppies sure are cute little things aren't they?

Soon, blogging.  Yes.  For now though enjoy the puppy picture.  I have more of them on my Flickr site if you're interested in looking.  The Flickr link is in the sidebar. 

The one where the show introduces the new comic book guy

After work yesterday I went to Elfsar for Free Comic Book Day [fcbd], the international day (well US and Canada) where retailers give away free comic books to help build a new readership.  By the time I got there, about twenty minutes before closing, most of the comics were picked over so if there was anything particularly good I'd already missed it.  The ones that I did get were mostly the ones that were based off of kids' cartoon shows and aimed squarely at the early readers.  Also I got an Archie book.

I start work there on Wednesday, so that I suppose was my last trip to the comic book store without officially being the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.  Though I'd generally like to think that I'm more the newer cooler comic book guy that they introduced last year named Milo [swp] (voiced by Jack Black). 

Back when I was still in contention for the job at the new Vancouver Apple Store as well as Elfsar, and debating a future where I had part-time jobs at both, Jeff Weston joked that between the two jobs I probably could not get more pretentious. 

It's been awhile since I've had a job that I'm actually looking forward to.  I'm sure after a few shifts it'll get just as boring as any other job that involves mostly filing things into alphabetical order (I assume) and manning a till but at least for now I'm optimistic about the new part-time job.  The bad news is that I've not really got a lot of free time this month to spend with Lydia or friends.  The good news is that hopefully I'll make some money to start saving for this wedding thing.

I'm nearly done these beer shots so it might be time to get back into school

Taking a look at any random month over the past year or so and you'll find entries like this one [jks] where I'm looking for work.  It has become the new looking for a girlfriend in the dramatic narrative that is my life, and like my pre-Lydia attempts at finding love my job hunt has resulted largely in disapointment and nights spent surfing the internet looking for porn... I mean jobs.

A bit over a month ago I felt like I'd finally gotten into a good position in the hunt.  I'd an interview with a local company looking for a technical writer, I had an interview lined up for a sales position with the new Apple Store and I had an interview lined up with the comic book store I shop at.  The Apple Store and the technical writing job were both oppertunities that I considered to be career stepping stones; positions that would lead to bigger and better things.  The comic book store seemed like it would be fun, and a way to help make some extra money to help pay for the wedding.

I got a part time job at the comic book store, which was not the full time position I'd hoped for but was a promising start.  The techincal writing job did not pan out, and the Apple Store turned me down after bringing me in for a group interview where they did not actually interview us but spent the entire time telling us why we should work for Apple.  By the end of the interview I'd gone from really wanting to work at the new store to really really wanting to work at the new store.  Sadly there was something in the way I watched the promotional video that informed them they did not want me.

The ring is the thing and other terrible titles

Lydia was away for the last two weeks at her parents.  They've recently sold their motel in Bracebridge Ontario which served as both their home and business for the last five years and so that meant moving homes.  With Lydia's mother going to Mexico to visit family for a week they needed Lydia's help to get everything packed up and ready for the move.

While she was away I lived the bachalor life, which mainly consisted of being less tidy and staying up all night to play Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart.  With her back today I dragged Nathan down to Bellingham to pick up the engagement ring [ial] that she had picked out a few weeks ago.  We had not been able to take it at the time, because it was off getting resized, and I wanted to have it for when she got back.

Having picked the ring (pictured above) yesterday, I picked her up from the airport today.  I had debated pretending to not have already proposed and doing a big showy thing where I got down on one knee in the arrivals area of Vancouver Airport, but decided instead to give it to her in private.

Less romantic perhaps, but also less chance of airport security deciding that we were acting suspicious and roughing us up.

Some days I just wish I were a sea otter

IMG_4207

It's been one of those weeks where being a sea otter would probably have been a lot cooler than being me.  I started off the week with an interview with a company that I've wanted to work for nearly my entire life and ended it not only not getting one of the 100+ jobs on offer, but also barely holding onto the job that I've got now.  Top that off with the fact that Lydia is gone for the next two weeks to Ontario, and things are certainly not coming up Me.

In a measured attempt not to get myself into any more trouble, or burn bridges or do anything silly, I'm keeping mum on things for a bit but I'll be offering some explanation soon.  Until then I can just wish that I were a sea otter, because let's face it that's gotta be a pretty sweet life.

Originally posted on jazzlawyer.vox.com

Nothing to report... except a Mario Party!

Sean Tamaki and I went to a group interview for the soon to be opened Apple Store at Pacific Centre [mbv]. It was mainly a meeting telling us why we should work for Apple, which I already knew I did. I've not heard from them since, though Takamki's gone back for a follow-up interview and looked certain to get a job. I'm starting to feel like I'm not about to get a call, which has left me a little despondent today.

How to cheer up? I suppose the only way to get happy is with a Mario Party, and that's what Lydia and I are doing right now. Later on we'll be heading to her house so that she can pack for her two weeks in Ontario visiting her parents.

That means I've got two weeks without my fiancee. Anyone want to be my friend? I've got Mario Party.