Ottawa city councillor turned mayoral candidate Clive Doucet has one very small problem. He doesn’t quite get how mailing lists–particularly those advertising his position leading up to a municipal election–are actually supposed to work. Instead of allowing folks to choose to sign up for his advertisements, he chose instead to assume anyone who’s emailed him for any reason must be interested in his platform and has therefore given instead the option of simply being removed. Why is this a problem? Much to Clive’s dismay, not all of us are really all that interested.

I sent one, maybe two emails to councillor Doucet in early 2009, as a direct response to the fact OC Transpo had been dragging the bus strike out and making it nearly as political as some of the crap that came out of the house of commons. The response I got to that email was, pretty much, a politically correct version of “Go screw yourself”, and a reminder that the wicked evil cruel union wouldn’t be pushing the city around if he could help it. I pretty much wrote him off as an ass–even if he was one of the two people who actually did get back to me (the other was a form letter that pretty much said they’d look into it).

That was pretty much the end of my exchange with Ottawa city councillors in general and Doucet in particular. Flash forward to the start of the municipal campaign runs. I get up, go through my morning routine, and the very first email that shows up in my inbox? a newsletter from “Clive Doucet for mayor”. Flash forward again to tonight. I wrote that off as a simple mistake–he doesn’t strike me as very tech savvy, honestly–none of them do, really, but him in particular. Tonight when I got in, I was treated to another newsletter from “Clive Doucet for mayor”. This one, at least, came with an unsubscribe link–the last one didn’t exactly have one.

Hey, Clive? I emailed you a year and a half ago. At most twice. How does that translate to I want to receive advertisements or what have you from you? Most particularly after I no longer live in the city you fully intend to handle I’m sure with the same positively charming touch you demonstrated during our brief conversation. Tell you what. Nobody likes opt-out mailing lists. Particularly from charismatic individuals such as yourself. On the up side, at least you’ve given me a solid reason to avoid emailing you from anything other than a throw-away address from this point. Thanks for that, at least. Now, please, set your spam on fire. I’d appreciate that very much.

Just when you thought it was safe to jump across the border, someone up there’s pointing and laughing. Apparently, Ottawa’s local transit service isn’t the only one who sees a shutdown as the surest path to a contract dispute resolution. Greyhound Canada, also known as those people who will be meeting me in Toronto in order to get me the rest of the way home, is threatening to lock out its drivers on thursday. Assuming I can beat an answer out of people, and that answer is one I like, I’m due to return to the right side of the border on sunday. Houston, we have a problem.

As it stands now, provided they do actually end up locking out, I might be able to get as far as Toronto on the ticket I just purchased. As for getting me past Toronto? Well, that may require some degree of creativity.

Greyhound, you and I have been getting along famously this trip–I didn’t even have to fight with you over the purchase of my ticket for a bloody change. You do not want to start in with this crap now. Really, you don’t. So by all means, don’t. That would be awesome.

Also: What is it with bus services out of Ontario? OC Transpo was talking not too long ago about a lockout at the next contract negotiation, too. Really? Did we learn nothing from the 08-09 bus strike? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Update: Yeah, I thought so. Greyhound, if this happens, please find yourself a nice big fire and die in it. Thanks.

Or I guess heatwave week would be more appropriate, what with this apparently going to be the norm for a while. Nothing says welcome to a Canadian summer quite like stepping outside and getting slapped in the face with it. At 10:30 in the morning. And yet, there’s a nasty rumour floating around they’re calling for thunder storms.

Saturday, it was tolerably hot. Yesterday was irritatingly hot. Today is just plain OMG hot. And we aren’t cooling off any time soon. Happy heatwave day, Ottawa. May your AC not suffer a catastrophic failure. And may all your beer–if you’re a beer person–stay cold. You’ll need it.

We felt this while out investing in things of a grocery related nature. Apparently, the center of the earthquake was about 50 KM northeast of Ottawa–in other words, right in between Ottawa and Pembroke. We didn’t feel a whole lot–kind of like the mall we were in just sort of twitched a little. Windows were rattling, but nothing went flying or anything. We very nearly considered just getting the hell out of the mall. We were surrounded by glass, with concrete cielings, so if it was anything more major than that, the parking lot would have been a hundred times safer.

There’s a rumor floating around that it was felt as far down as Detroit, and into New England. Toronto’s supposedly had several evacuations as a result–as has Ottawa, according to the linked article. Twitter’s alive with speculation of at least one aftershock, but if there are any, they didn’t reach us up here.

We survived the earthquake intact and relatively as sane as we were before. The most exciting part was convincing some of the folks around us that yes, you did, in fact, just witness an earthquake. Spending three years on Vancouver Island has its advantages. Who says you never find anything exciting while running a simple arrand?

If you’re used to picking up your residential phone book on an anual basis and are an Ottawa resident, you’ll now have to ask for it. Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City and probably others are no longer getting copies of the books, effective… well, immediately. Their reason? Most people go online for their info anyway. And if you don’t, they’re now suggesting you do. Or, you can call the Yellow Pages Group to request they continue delivering it to your address. Me, personally? I’ll stick with online–I can read that, at least.

What happens in Quebec doesn’t very often stay in Quebec. Take this, for instance. Forest fires in Quebec have prompted smog/smoke alerts in Ottawa, Pembroke and area. Apparently, from what I hear, looking across the Ottawa river you can actually see it coming. Well, that settles it. The US has the big easy (Hello, New Orleans), and now, Canada has the big hazy (Hello, Ottawa). And it’s all Quebec’s fault.

It’s official. Sometime during the next 24 hours, new phone numbers in Ottawa, Pembroke and area will show up with a new area code. The new code, 343, is to address an apparently expected shortage in available phone numbers in the area. They blame the increase in mobile phones for the shortage of numbers; I blame a lack of recycling the old ones. I guess now we know why we’ve had 10-digit dialing for the last 4 years.

City council has approved a $155.7-million deal that will replace 226 articulated buses on OC Transpo’s fleet.

Does this mean the 118 will stop suffering from a rather depressing lack of air conditioning during the hottest days of summer? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. Ah well, can’t really shake your head at progress, can ya?

By this time next month, new phone service will be asigned to numbers in a new, much talked about area code–that being 343. It’s supposed to go into effect as of the 17th of next month. In slightly unrelated news, my old 613 number still has up a recording telling folks I’ve moved, and my number has accordingly been changed. Keep in mind I moved in October of 2009. Does this mean phone companies aren’t reusing old numbers, but are rather kind of letting them hang out in limbo for the sake of it? I wonder if this means I can request my old number when I move back to Ottawa, assuming I’m not too poor to aford a telephone by then. That’d make my life about a hundred times easier, what with most of the services I’ve long since stopped using on account of having moved still having that old number. Which, more than likely, is precisely why it probably wouldn’t happen that way. Ah well. People call enough of my formerly current phone numbers they’ll eventually get the new current one. Maybe. You’d think that’d cost the phone company more, though. No wonder my bill seems to have gone up a bit…

every couple days, I’ll accidentally unearth a potentially decent job worthy of at least considering applying. And, every couple weeks, I’ll find one I actually apply to. Apparently, since the advent of this newfangled recession thinggy, that’s the exception rather than the rule. Nowadays, a typical Ottawa job prospect goes something like this.

• Must have at least 1 year call center experience. Gotcha.
• Must have at least 1 year technical support and/or customer service experience. Gotcha.
• Must be able to multitask. It’s a requirement for being a geek, so gotcha.
• Must have experience with Windows XP/Vista/2000/any and all past, present and future implementations of windows. Again, required for geek status. Gotcha.
• Must have experience with CRM applications (remedy, etc). Gotcha.
• Must be a virtual expert in MS Office. Not that it’s hard to learn, but done it.
• Must be able to work well under pressure/in a team environment. Easy.
• Must be fluently bilingual in both english and French. Well, crap.

And I was doing so well, too. Sadly, unless an employer feels generous enough to train me in it, or pay me to take said training, I’ll just be looking elsewhere. If it didn’t cost so damn much to get there from here for interviews I’d contemplate working in toronto. But, since it does and I’m poor/broke, anyone looking to hire a unilingual geek?

It probably doesn’t help matters much that most of the positions being shopped around now are with companies that have pretty heavy duty government contracts, and so the bilingual requirement is pretty much non-negotiable. A lot of the small, local businesses, or businesses that aren’t almost exclusively government sourced, seem to be slowing and/or stopping hiring for the time being–examples include local companies Protus and Momentus, both of which have a pretty heavy reach in their particular industries–some of which, rather, tend to overlap just a little bit. The same could be said for national businesses like Rogers, who saw an advertisement position pulled virtually the same day it was originally posted–I dunno why either.

This dance has been going on since at least the middle of 2008, when first I started actually looking for work after Dell closed up shop. Probably longer than that, although at least then I was landing interviews with some degree of consistency. It seems only to be more noticeable now that we’re pretty much still trying to fish the economy out of the Ottawa river. Now, this has become the more typical job search routine and not just in the tech industry either. businesses are still shutting their doors, people are still being shuffled around to fill vacancies left over from cost-cutting measures, and companies who haven’t closed up shop have pretty well put the breaks on new hires. It’s a good thing the job search doesn’t piss me off. Otherwise, I’d of probably quit that full-time job a long time ago. Now, if we could just negotiate a pay rate for those of us who’s full-time job consists of looking for a full-time job. Yeah, I didn’t think that’d be likely either.

Drivers of Ottawa’s bus system say punishments for not calling stops, which have so far been restricted to suspensions of between 1 and 5 days, are unfair. They blame all the usual excuses–people not taking into account driver distractions, such as other customers talking to them, or needing to keep an eye on trafic, for the lack of stop callage. Because, you know, it’s just not possible to have the customer shut up for 30 seconds while he announces the next stop. Meanwhile, OC Transpo’s been fined already, after multiple warnings to call out stops–at least the major ones. You’d think after the first few, they’d start to learn. My money’s on folks getting fired before this fixes itself. At least, I hope to God someone does. Preferably, the next moron to decide it’d be easier/better/faster to just, well, forget to call the stop. Speaking as someone who’s missed a fair few stops because the driver “forgot”, I kind of suspect it’s gonna take at least that much.

Reports are coming out now that say there’s some kind of an economic recovery up on this side of the border. GDP’s up, consumer spending’s up, housing prices are up. Employment rate? Well, they still scratch their heads about that.

House prices, sales and starts have all rebounded, consumer spending remains strong, stock markets have partly come back from last year’s low, and the job picture appears to be improving with each new report.

On this, I call bullshit–at least in the Ottawa/Pembroke area, where so far I’ve seen a grand total of maybe 15 jobs posted in the last 3 weeks, and was inclined and not embarrassed to apply for all of 4. Granted, mostly that would be because those 4 were jobs you didn’t need half a dozen highly priced degrees in order to pretend you can actually do what’s needed. Folks are still getting laid off, or in some cases looking for work and not getting hired. And yet economists are saying we’re on our way back. Hey, if they’re saying it, that’s perfectly fine–just as long as they feel like backing it up with solid employment data. In the meantime, anyone looking for an IT geek? Resume available upon request.

For about two or three months before I moved to Pembroke, I scouted the apartment listings for a halfway decent place that doesn’t knee me in the wallet. The very few places I found that didn’t were, well, closets. My room during my time at Algonquin College was considerably bigger–they pretended to call it a bachelor. And, of course, now that I’ve found this apartment to fake my way through calling home for a price that almost doesn’t knee me in the wallet, halfway decent places for almost halfway decent prices started becoming available. Now, just when I can’t actually move into a place like that. Somebody clearly has a very cruel sense of humour. Nice to know such creatures exist, though. Now, if they just could have showed up while I was still looking.

A goodly portion of my TV watching, at least that which doesn’t consist of hockey or baseball, is done on CTV. Usually, its Ottawa station–particularly since they were nice enough to kill news broadcasts from Ottawa’s local A Channel station.

Their Ottawa newsroom caught fire overnight last night, resulting in the temporary loss of use of that building and the possibly permanent loss of 30+ years of news and video archives. Definitely, it resulted in the permanent loss of at least 2.5 million dollars worth of computer and video technology. They get to provide their news updates during tonight’s football game–which starts in 4 minutes for anyone curious enough to watch-from the parking lot of their former headquarters. Tonight’s local update at 11:30, however, will ironically enough come from the A Channel building–the first newscast from that building since March of last year.

If you get any of your news from CTV in the Ottawa or Pembroke area, or even if you just want to help out, keep an eye pealed–there will probably be ways and means for you to do so. If you’re a Max Keeping fan and happen to have something from his time with CTV, you’re encouraged to help replace everything he’s lost in the fire this close to his retirement–info for doing so is in the article’s comments section. CTV, and the news I’ve gotten semi-used to watching from there, will probably never be the same. CTV Ottawa is dead, long live CTV Ottawa.

About 6 or 7 months ago, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Convergys, an outsourcing company who at the time was handling a contract for AT&T. I didn’t end up taking the opportunity, however, on account of they were very up front about having absolutely no plans for doing, pretty much, anything I’d need them to do in order for me to work there. Like, for instance, installing a screenreader so I can actually use their computers. About that long ago, I stopped thinking about them. And on Tuesday, the office where I would have been working tossed all but a hundred of its employees. Suddenly, I’m actually kind of glad we parted company after our initial conversation. Otherwise I might very well still be exactly where I am right now. Except maybe on employment insurance. Thanks but no thanks–did that dance already. Oh, and as for where those jobs ended up going? You guessed it–overseas. On the up side, at least we’re helping their recovery.

In 2008, OC Transpo drivers went on strike, effectively shutting much of the city down, during two of the most demanding months of the year–specificly, November and December. OC Transpo management doesn’t want a repeat of such a thing. So, as an attempt to counter any future strike activity, OC Transpo will risk locking out the unionized drivers and mechanics as a negotiation tactic. Thus, effectively, shutting down much of the city. Someone do explain? Please? The logic behind that just completely and totally escapes me. Either way, the bus system comes to a screaming hault. Either way, folks end up not being able to get to work, do their shopping, or otherwise do the things that need doing. And, drivers and mechanics who’re affected still get strike pay. So what’s this here supposed to prevent, again? Someone wanna maybe straighten that out for me? I think I skipped that class in highschool. And college.

There’s about a 6-hour drive between Ottawa and Rochester, where I’ve been spending the last few weeks, which one would think wouldn’t amount to a whole lot of difference weather-wise–when we’re freezing, they’re usually freezing. But there’s been a winter trend that, until just yesterday and today, has been trying to buck the usual tradition. Winter has been playing head games with us. It teased us near to the beginning of November. And just when I thought we might escape the month snow free, not quite. And now, well into the month of December, we finally get serious about winter.

Ottawa got hammered yesterday with its first major snow storm of the year, as did the Pembroke area. And, surprising the hell out of me, as did Rochester. We’re still catching it good out there right now, and I’d be laying money on roads not being very fun to drive on this morning. It played with Ottawa and Pembroke, teased us up there, then finally decided to have at it. It didn’t once touch Rochester all month, but when it finally did, I do believe it made up for the teasing. Ladies and gentlemen, fans of Christmas everywhere can now relax. Winter has screwed your travel plans.

Break out the calendar if you plan on taking the bus next week, and mark down this Saturday’s date under “Important to remember”. OC Transpo has released their winter service schedule, with a twist for a lot of popular routes, which will be effective from then on. To start, they removed my formerly regular stop at Bayshore during their morning runs of routes like the 118. The 101 also doesn’t stop down by the office I used to work anymore–considering, you know, almost no one actually works there anymore–so if you have work to do near where the old Dell building is, you might want to think about taking the 182–at least, I think it still drops you off about a block from there. How does the change affect you? check it out for yourself, and then either bitch, complain, or otherwise opinionate in the comments if you’re so inclined. Or not.

This doesn’t exactly make me warm up to the idea of having police officers in schools, for any reason. An Ottawa police officer, now suspended with pay, is being brought up on child abuse charges. Well, actually, more like 4 counts of assault–and 2 of them with a weapon, but they might as well amount to child abuse. Considering the children in question were in his own family and all. And he was dealing with the public on a regular basis? Sometimes, the city scares me.

Clinics in the city have enough to last a few days, apparently. So those who want to, go get your shot. And those that don’t, sorry in advance for any trafic jams as a result. As for me, I’ll just minimize my venturing into crowded rooms until this whole H1N1 thing blows over if it’s all the same to you. Besides, if UPS cooperates today’s the day I should have a new toy to play with. That should make that objective a little easier. here’s a realtime list of currently available H1N1 clinics in Ottawa. Not sure how accurate it is, but it’ll give anyone who’s curious a starting point.

I keep threatening to do that post about what the hell happened to me since the last time I was actively blogging (Um, LJ-ing, perhaps?). Well, consider this my attempt at doing so. I’ll warn you in advance there will probably be things that get missed–it *has* been about 4 months, after all.

For starters, there were more than a few trips across the Canada/US border between myself and Jessica, who’s rarely updated LJ is over here for anyone who doesn’t already read her. Things in that department I don’t think can get much better. Well, beyond the elimination of the border but eh, that’s coming. Beyond that, I’ve been doing a lot more experimentation with Gentoo, my for the moment linux distribution of choice. I’d messed around very briefly with Debian and Ubuntu, but couldn’t get quite what I wanted out of those distributions. That, plus I rather like a challenge and Gentoo definitely provides that. I kept an old HP laptop around for the purposes of experimentation–and, actually, it was the same laptop I did most of my blogging on in the old days–so I can break it 6 ways from Sunday and not really be set back more than a couple hours’ tinkering. Works perfectly fine for me. In addition to that, I’ve been continuing to pound pavement in hopes of landing me a job. Not an easy thing to do when every day the unemployment line gets longer, but we manage. This in between trips to catch up with family, because… well, you know, they don’t tend to like it when you avoid them for long stretches at a time.

Then there was the move. I’d spent the last year and a half or so on employment insurance while I looked for work, thus enabling to keep my rather nice–even if I do say so myself–apartment in Ottawa’s west end. Not having found anything though, it became necessary for me to find somewhere else to call home lest I end up going very broke very quickly. So, on October 23rd, everything I own and a few things I forgot I owned got stuffed into one box or another, and carted an hour and a half away to this, a basement apartment who’s upstairs neighbour has perhaps one of the creakiest floors I’ve heard in my life. Now, I’m still looking for work, still finding time to do a little geeking, and still–at least, as of about 2 weeks from yesterday–making trips across the border when I have the time, money and transportation. Not a whole lot has changed, save for my mailing address–which I’m still finding things that didn’t get the notification of that change–and the fact some things in life just plain aren’t as convenient as they were a month ago. But, win some, lose some. That be life.

Once I have the space in this apartment, and everything I’ll immediately need to do so out of boxes and set up, I plan to get back into tweeking the laptop and making things work just that much better. And, with a little luck and a small miracle, it might result in me accidentally coming up on a skill or three I can put in a resume. Never hurts to say you can do something, particularly when that something didn’t require you shell out money you don’t have for a college/university education. Of course, if I don’t get that out of it, then maybe I’ll just have a computer I can use should I ever decide to wipe windows off this one. Either way, I can’t find a down side here.

Well, that’s the summer and part of spring in a nutshell. Not very exciting, just… chaotic, really. Semi-organized chaos, but still. And if this is any indication, the next couple months don’t plan to be any different. Which, surprisingly, is how I like it. Can’t very well go researching new and somewhat impressive things to buy if you don’t have time to, after all.

After Dell’s closure in June of last year, I’ve been devoting much of my time to trying to find something remotely resembling work that I can get into. I’ve had several interviews, but that’s usually about as far as they go. I have another this wednesday for the CAA–I’ve had conversations with them before, so this shouldn’t be entirely too difficult.

I attribute part of my amusement at an observation I made yesterday to boredom, and perhaps to being still a little overtired, but a random stat circulated around Ottawa news outlets yesterday morning put a somewhat ironic smirk on my face. In the month of October, 800 full-time jobs were created. But yet, in that same period, unemployment went up by almost half a percentage point. Guess I’m gonna have more competition for that position than I thought. And the search continues.

As anyone who follows my twitter feed will probably already know, last weekend went actually quite well with myself and Jessica (samari76). She arived safely on Friday, and we spent the majority of that day just hanging around the apartment, talking. she ended up being a little more tired than she thought she’d be, so she caught a couple hours’ sleep while I came out here to finish up with checking email and the like. We ended up just relaxing and enjoying ourselves for the rest of that evening. I threw together a little something for supper, and we just sort of talked and did a little listening to music. Saturday we slept in a little, and took our time getting to that point most people would call awake. Again, there was more just hanging out, and talking. We ended up ordering out for supper, after which we got into a bottle of lemmon rum I’d picked up a couple days before leaving Pembroke.

It was actually before we started drinking, though, when we got a call that my grandpa had been taken to the Ottawa hospital; he was having issues with his apendix and they weren’t sure if it would require surgery or not. We stayed up most of the night waiting for news, but after being told my parents were enroute to Ottawa just behind him to make sure he was being looked after, we hadn’t heard anything. Trish IMed me at that point to say she hadn’t heard anything new, really, either. We ended up aranging to get together for breakfast the next day, since we’d not hung out in a while anyway and Jess was looking forward to seeing her again. Well, that, plus since we were waiting for information it made more sense to all be in one place when it came in. We ended up going to bed about 4:00 that morning, getting up again at an impressive 9:00. Cabbing it over there, we hung out with Trish, her husband and both her brothers for much of the morning. She made an awesome breakfast, which kind of reminded me a little of something you’d be able to order from any decent restaurant on Jessica’s side of the border. Family started to trickle in shortly after, and we learned he wasn’t actually going to get the surgery right yet; they wanted to see if they couldn’t treat it with antibiotics first, which kind of makes sense to me. I mean, the guy *is* in his 80′s. No sense in putting him through a surgery that may or may not be required. We got to see a goodly portion of my family, though. And Jess got to meet a few people we couldn’t get around to visiting the last time we were both in that neighbourhood. We all sat around and talked, the older guys watching nascar on TV and everyone with something better to do just generally conversating/trying not to hear it. They ordered pizza and wings, some of which we both helped ourselves to (Hey, breakfast was good, but it’s pizza and wings. Come on.). We spent the rest of the day just sort of hanging out. After everyone left, Trish, her husband, both brothers, plus myself and Jessica decided to go and check out one of the local carnivals in town that weekend. We got there just in time for it to start packing up, of course, but at least Jess got to get a brief look at some of what goes on around here this time of year. We didn’t get home until about 9:00 or so, and stayed up for a bit longer just generally talking and the like.

Monday was a very low key day; we didn’t even get dressed until that evening. we just enjoyed our last day together for a while, and recovered sort of from the day before. I took Jess to the bus station that night, and she made it across the border all in one piece, luggage and all. As for me, I went back home and did that thing where I fall into bed until 6 or 7 the next morning. I spent the rest of the week going through my usual routine; looking for work, not finding much, talking to Jess, and occasionally cursing technology. I did eventually finally hear that my grandpa was back home and doing well, the antibiotics seeming to be working thus far, so that was one less thing on my list of things to be paying attention to.

One thing I did finally get around to this week, that I’d been threatening to do before, is installing Gentoo linux on the formerly retired laptop. It actually didn’t take too long when you break it down to time spent actually working on the system; the longest part of it all was the waiting for things to compile. I had it installed and running by yesterday morning, and talking by yesterday afternoon after I learned I missed a step in building the kernel so had to do that all over again. Lovely. I got that fixed up though, and it behaves beautifully now. I ended up playing around with Speakup, one of the screenreading packages available for linux, a bit yesterday and again this morning. Now, I’m waiting for the various Gnome packages to install, including its screenreader, so I can have a little bit of a look at that. Judging by the sheer number of packages that are needing instalation, and the fact they all need to be compiled, this could take a while. In the meantime, I have free time on my hands that I’m sure I’ll put to good use ordering groceries. Or sleeping. Or something. I may or may not have missed something in my update. If I did, I’m sure Jess will remind me… she’s good like that. As for now, though, I’m so gone it’s not funny.

Ottawa’s city council is once again being approached by two major developers regarding the building of a new sports arena. One wants to bring a soccer team to Ottawa, the other wants yet a third crack at football. I do have to wonder, though, has anyone ever considered the possibility of a MLB arena in Ottawa? Yes, we had the lynx for a time. One problem, though. They were Montreal’s minor league team, and Montreal is now in Washington. So why not? We have the toronto versus Ottawa rivalry in hockey, and it’s awesome as hell. As much as I rag on Ottawa fans for being Ottawa fans (hey, what can I say? Your team’s falling apart at the seems), they do provide a wicked provincial battle. Why can’t we have the same thing going on in baseball? Who knows? I might even cheer for *that* team rather than toronto. Although you’ll never see me doing that where hockey’s concerned. Sorry, folks.

Still managed to update in less than a week; something funky must be going on. Last week was pretty uneventful, after my last update with actual substance. Jessica (samari76) has a pretty full schedule, that being primarily work and class, so not a whole hell of a lot was really done short of taking advantage of the time when she wasn’t attending either to catch each other up on what’s going on, and just generally enjoy ourselves. It was still a very wonderful way to spend a vacation. We decided to exclude the usual party crowd this past weekend (well, a third of the usual party crowd was out of town anyway), and on Friday, ordered food and just generally ate, drank and were happy. We had a nice long talk about a lot of things, listened to music, and just… well, for lack of a better way to put it, did the couple thing. Saturday was largely taken up with grocery shopping, picking up what she needed for this week plus a few things for the easter get together at the house of a coworker the next day. We had time left over, so Jess also got herself an MP3 player, which we spent much of that evening playing around with in an attempt to get it to work. Once we did, though, it very quickly became her newest addiction. The next day was, as said, the easter get together. We packed up a few things to cart over, and all manner of good times were had. There was a person or two there with an apparent talent for drama, but they managed to behave themselves rather admirably. At least that day. We managed to stuff ourselves silly, then both to avoid said talented people and attempt to walk some of it off, we decided to head it back home on foot. It was actually a whole lot nicer than the walk we took last Friday coming back from Selina’s, with it being neither cold nor rainy that night. We got back to the apartment, talked for a bit, then crashed like nobody’s business. Monday was back to the grind, so she went back to work and I puttered about with attempting to get things packed for my departure. Once work and class was over with, we stuck around the apartment and talked until it was time to call the cab. Then, at the bus station, we said our goodbyes, and I boarded the bus for my return trip across the border. It was fairly uneventful, with the only minor hick-up being about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa,when the driver (apparently he was new to the job?) was trying to figure out if we were supposed to change buses to go the rest of the way to Ottawa, or just change drivers. Turns out fortunately it was just changing drivers, but still, it was a tiny bit confusing even for the passengers. I got here at about 12:30 yesterday afternoon, and pretty much spent that day getting caught up on email and things. Today was a writeoff thus far, with me sleeping most of it away. And now, I’m posting this thing, finishing my coke, and… contemplating getting my hands on another. I love my visits to that side of the border, but let me tell ya, sometimies, it’s good to be home.