Somehow, my nephew managed to be 10 months old without my knowing it. Which means if there’s something he could possibly get his hands on, he’s probably already done so. On tuesday, I went to give the mother a hand with minding him plus the two dogs. Fortunately for both of us, when I got there he was in bed and sleeping. Not fortunately for either one of us, by 7:00 the next morning he was up and ready to go, no questions asked. And go he did–all over the place whether we wanted to chase him there or not. We took him in to see the grandparents, and he was no less energetic when we got him there. This continued pretty much all day, with the exception of maybe an hour in the afternoon when we managed to actually convince him that it wasn’t, in fact, dangerous to his health to actually spend some time immobile for a few minutes. Right up until I think it might have been 9:00 or so, it was pretty nearly non-stop. We even took him for a short walk that afternoon–mostly because we could use the break, and then he’d pretty much just go where we pushed him. By the time we finally got him down for the night, we were more than ready to fall into bed shortly behind him. And, well, we did. And got just enough sleep that the 6:30 wake-up call he’d had in mind for thursday wasn’t quite as painful as I expected. As you could probably guess, most of thursday was spent–yep, doing the exact same thing. And taking turns trying to convince him to go down for a nap so we could get things done around the house that needed to get done–that to do list tends to get pretty long when the majority of your attention’s focused on one very adoreable, but very exhausting, kid. Of course, that didn’t actually end up happening; although between the two of us I think we might have managed to scratch one or two things off that list. Kevin dropped in to kidnap him back at about noonish or so, which gave us just enough time to try clearing off the rest of that list before we hit the floor from simple lack of energy. I don’t even remember most of what happened the rest of thursday beyond the usual routine, which is almost a safe bet for any day that isn’t overly filled with chaos. Of course, the couple days I just managed to survive meant I was pretty much a zombie for most of friday. I slept like the dead thursday night, and was the walking dead pretty well up until friday night.

While I was in recovery, and probably while I was less than conscious, Meka was doing her thing for the karaoke world championships. She’d made it to the state finals as of friday, and was competing there saturday night. My origional intent was to watch the event online, but technical difficulties–for once, not on my end–quickly put the breaks on that notion. I would learn later on that night that I ended up missing an awesome performance, giving her second place and a spot at the regional competition in August.

Yesterday was more time of the familial variety, with a meetup for breakfast then another run into the grandparents’ to kill a couple hours. Then it was back to taking it relatively easy for the evening.

This morning, I got my hands on the audio portion of Meka’s performances. And, with her permission, once she makes them available in video form on Youtube, they’ll make their way here. Now, I go chase after a couple dogs while the mother unit makes her way to work. She had a job interview this morning–glad one of us still gets those, so I’ve been over here since about 10:30. And will probably still be here at about 9:30 tonight. It’s gonna be a long ass day.

Busy or not, this week’s been surprisingly educational. A small sampling of things I learned, in list format. Because, really, who doesn’t like lists?

• Just because the kid’s not walking yet does not, in fact, mean he’s easy to catch.
• Or slow down.
• Or stop.
• Or keep track of if you’re not right behind him.
• When they decide they are not going down for a nap, you are not putting them there.
• Nor are you going to trick them into going for one. Don’t even try it.
• This includes playing with him even while he’s within an inch of falling asleep. He knows.
• This also includes his grandma sneaking off to the kitchen while his uncle plays with him even though he’s an inch from falling asleep. Again, he knows.
• This also includes his grandma sneaking off to the kitchen after he’s already asleep. I still can’t wrap my head around how, but he knows.
• I am apparently not the only one with a periodically screwed up sleep schedule. By the way, kid? This whole 6:30 thing is not healthy.
• The face kids that age make when you let them sample your coke? Awesome. Sorry, no video–I didn’t have my cell phone handy right then.
• Discovered by the nephew at breakfast: your food is good, but someone else’s food is always better.
• Yes, a 10-month-old can, in fact, get on top of your end table if he wants to bad enough.
• Or pull something off it.
• Or pull out the end table’s drawer if you aren’t presently leaning against it.
• Rules are meant to be broken. And gates that block off stairs to prevent infant head trauma are meant to be opened.
• Related: The fact you’ve just wedged the afore mentioned gate against the wall so you’d practically need a sledgehammer to remove it? That’s not discouragement. That’s a challenge.
• The second worst possible thing you could ever do is say no. The worst possible thing is mean it.
• Of course, he’ll probably do it anyway.
• Twice, just because you said no.
• And once more just for spite, I swear.
• 10 months old is not too young to start messing with people’s heads. Either that or this kid’s wickedly gifted.
• If and when I ever get around to having one, I’m investing in a goddamn leash. At least.

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?

Now, I’m hardly the kind of blogger that’d attract massive amounts of visitors, so this is probably not a very accurate or telling sampling, but this is what happens when I’m randomly curious. If gaging spam rates was all it took to tell how much attention your blog was getting from people in general, this would be just way too easy.

But, because I started this thing on random curiosity, I’m going to extend my curiosity to others. If you maintain a blog that allows you to track trafic in some way, shape or form, I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a similar increase in spam comments relative to actual legitimate trafic that hasn’t yet tripped the spam trigger. Or, has the level of spam comments tended to differ from the increase in trafic? If you’re up for it, toss a general opinion on this–based on experience or not, your choice–in the comments. Inquiring minds want to know.

As I hinted at in this post, perhaps aspiring to be just like your 8-month-old grandson may not be the best thing you could possibly do. As promised, the explanation, and the visual evidence. Dad’s looking at taking a course for the operation of heavy equipment, so he can get out of his current–well, now former–job, and into construction or something similar that gives him a little more free time to get things done that he actually needs to do. Mom made some comment about him being able to possibly make foreman shortly after getting this course and such out of the way. The nephew had himself situated on the floor, playing with a few of mom’s dishes–hey, it kept him away from the stove; work with me here. In the process, he decided to adopt this look.

I think he’s on to something here. We snickered about that all evening. Mostly because I’m not entirely sure my dad completely caught onto it. Hell, it took me a few minutes to clue in–and I was standing right there when he did it. Wonder if dad’s rethinking his career choice yet. Sometimes, living here has its occasional good points. Or, at least, amusing ones.

In unrelated news, at least it’s only 16 degrees c out there right now. 16 humid degrees, but still. Now, about that dehumidifying.

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Would I be considered less of a geek for willfully ignoring at least one of those rights? Although… I do kind of like that last one.

Happy geek pride day, nerds. I call dibs on Washington.

Lady: I need to speak to Simon, please.
Me: I’m sorry, who?
Lady: Simon.
Me: I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong number.
Lady: I’m pretty sure Simon lives there.
Me: I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.
Lady: Oh. Well, bye.

Telling me you need to talk to a guy who doesn’t live here, and then telling me he lives here, does not mean he lives here. Just general FYI. And if you call me back again, I’m probably going to suggest you put down the crack pipe. Thank you for not listening. Twice.

• What’s the first thing you do if you’ve just been caught in an afair, and your significant other decides to up and leave you? If you’re this chick, you sue the cell company. Because, you know, there’s just no way he would have found out anyway.
• If in doubt, just nuke it. That’s a solution being tossed forward by an apparent expert for stopping the oil spill in the gulf. I’ll have my shrimp with a side order of radiation, please. I always thought “Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” was just a movie quote. Clearly, I don’t get out much.
• Ways not to impress the Afghanistan president, number 54761: call him a weirdo and predict he could trigger a civil war. Yes, even if he did say, supposedly jokingly, he might as well join the dark side. Yes, even if he’s not doing a whole lot better in charge of that country than the dark side. And yes, even if you are–as I think you would be–absolutely and completely 100% in the right. That’s just not cool–especially if you used to work in that country for the UN.
• When even actors are downloading their own movies because it’s more convenient and less annoying than paying for them, you know there’s a problem. Question is, what’s the industry planning to do about it? Answer: probably not much–that would actually require effort.
• And, in the political arena, because I can’t go on a mocking spree without it, we have this wonderful piece of I’m not sure what. Liberal party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff would just like you to know that, if you didn’t spend all that much time outside of Canada and living as varied a life as he has, you’re not as Canadian as he is. Might I ask, exactly from what planet was he exiled before landing in Ottawa? I didn’t know spending 30+ years in the US and/or the UK–he did both–made anyone more Canadian than the next. Boy have I been set straight.
• And in unrelated news, Montreal won tonight. I thought I told folks to fix the playoffs. They’re still broken.

See what happens when I stay away from news sources? People don’t get mocked. Clearly, we can’t have that.

Well gee. If I knew back then what I know now, there might have been a slightly different ending to a past relationship or two. Then again, considering the said past relationship or two, maybe not knowing’s a good thing. Either way, relationship complexities explained. Now, back to my simplistic life. Where’d I put the sports section?

lol, 50 Cent is so crazy! I love him.

Now, can someone tell me please what this entry has to do with 50 Cent? Really? Stick to general complements on my blog’s design/theme, guys. They were even making me feel good. Well, okay, so not really.

In barely related news, Ontario’s government has still yet to get back to me. I’m waiting, Dalton…

Still, with all my interest in Star Trek, it never occured to me to do anything beyond watch the shows, play a video game or two, and later–meaning in present day–take up roleplaying in the genre. So I didn’t do the trivia thing until recently.

Now, though, I’ve decided I might as well go about the doing of that. And, in just an hour of doing so, I discover Vulcan does actually exist. No, not the planet, per say. But rather a town in Alberta that was originally founded in 1910, 50 or so years before the concept of Star Trek was even a theory on a piece of scrap paper. And it’s now Canada’s Star Trek capital.

Holidaymakers are being urged to ‘boldy go’ where they’ve never gone before with a visit to the Star Trek Capital of Canada.

The town of Vulcan in Alberta was granted the official title earlier this month and is now being billed as a ‘logical year-round destination for science-fiction enthusiasts and Star Trek fans from across the galaxy’.

The trekky in me is having a very small heart attack. Excuse me for just a minute. Okay, that’s much better. Now, to go see if I can’t bribe someone into taking a vacation.

With businesses going global anyway, and just about everything happening across national and continental borders, it only makes sense to consider the elimination of timezones. Businesses in Canada and the US send their call center jobs to India. Britain sells things to businesses in Mexico. China has arangements to ship things back and forth between several countries–including Canada and the US. And all of those would run much faster, and be a whole lot more eficient, if 9:00 in New York equated to 9:00 in London. Sure, it means some places would be lacking in daylight, but well, we already have that already–see: Alaska.

If we’re gonna make everything global anyway, the world should at least try to keep itself on the same schedule. If it’s midnight in New York, folks won’t be calling their sister/cousin/friend/whatever in California because they might not be ready to call it a night yet. Conversely, I won’t get a call from the east coast at 5:00 in the morning from a family member who happens to be staring at a clock that says 9:00 AM instead, and thusly not be required to later plan to beat them to a fine paste for the unwelcome wake-up. And life would go on just as usual–except maybe not as brightly in some parts of the world. But folks are already dealing with that–see Alaska, as mentioned above. If they can handle it for as long as they do, so can we stronger folks.

There’s really no reason I can think of to keep timezones around, except to keep track of when the sun’s up and where. We move to one timezone, and anyone with any reason to keep contact with folks on a global basis is happy. Also, converting 3:00 PST to anything not remotely asociated with my timezone or GMT is a real pain in the ass. Let’s kill that, like, now.

In short, timezones are evil. If we didn’t have to worry about that, we could concentrate on things that could actually be made much better by removing them. Also: daylight savings? Gone. That can’t hurt anyone. Well, okay, so it maybe wouldn’t hurt me. Then again, it’s my blog–naturally all my ehtories will be me-centric. And sometimes, they even possess an almost normal sense of logic.

Mostly, they do the US politics, which well, yeah, there’s plenty to mock there. But they’ve taken a few stabs at this side of the border too. Everyone’s favourite province to pick on gets a special mention a time or two–hello, Quebec. Especially around the time when they were holding their vote for separation. The awesomeness is surprising. Now, if I can just figure out who it was who did “Let’s Bomb Iraq”. Probably these guys–it’s their kind of thing. Now then. Back to seeing if Beyond Satire has been updated in a month or three.

Edit: I was right, it’s them. Oddly enough, when I heard this the first time I didn’t even know the group existed. I’m awesome. Or maybe not.

I’ve been hugely into role playing for a number of years. Since highschool, really. Most of my early creations, though, ended up lost between here and there when the first laptop I owned decided it would rather spectacularly break. Physically. Of course, it was a toshiba so that was kind of expected. But I kept, or tried to keep, logs of as much of the old days of RP as I could. Mostly as something to refer back to should a situation come up where I needed to.

One of my adventures in RP was a medieval style MUD, or multi-user-dimension/dungeon/whatever you want to call it, called Eternal Struggle. I played a variety of characters on that game–anything from the somewhat helpful healer to the cold blooded killer with absolutely no problem pinning you to the wall with your own knife. And he’d give you a pleasant little smile while he did it. Reading back through some of those logs, I reminded myself just how much of an asshole I can be. Sometimes, I surprise the hell out of me.

I play a couple of characters in a Star Trek game, too. Star Trek: A Call to Duty, to be accurate. One of those I’ve had going on since 2006. I forgot about some of the awesome RP I’ve been involved in with that one as well, including a sort of special event RP that went on for a couple months, where I got to hang out with and torment the hell out of a few people I didn’t used to talk to until then. One of these days I’ll get around to posting some of the stuff. But right now, I’ll just say, 4 years later looking back at some of these thinggies, I crack me up.

Sometimes, procrastination is a good thing. At least, it is when it comes to me. I’m kind of thankful I haven’t yet gone through and hit the delete key on about 90% of this stuff. Now, if I can just remember to put them somewhere where I can find half this stuff again. Eh, I’ll do it later.

• Sarah Palin joins up with Fox News? Who didn’t see that one coming from a mile away? Really.
• Simon Cowell to say goodbye after this season of Idol? I’m surprised he lasted this long. And considering there’s already tension between him and Paula’s new, non-musically inclined replacement, come on. You didn’t miss this did you?
• One child per family is going to end up being bad news for China, but who didn’t figure on that. By 2020, they’re projecting 24000000 single men. I wonder if Canada and the US would consider a woman shortage criteria for refugee status.
• And, the well duh award of 2010 goes to? Mark McGwire bulked up with the help of steroids during his record breaking year. And finally admits it. Not that the admission was required–he hasn’t come close to being that good since, and if he was naturally that good he’d of managed to pull it off. Nope, no surprises here.

If stuff gets any more obvious it’s probably going to put news reporters out of business. Which some would argue might not be a bad thing. Oh well, at least we’re not hearing about Stephen Harper and the non-parliament again. I’ll take it.

Flash forward to my post-highschool life, and people are starting to clue into that fact. Particularly, the people running Prince of Wales Public School in Barrie Ontario, which conveniently enough is about half an hour from where I was living when I did the highschool thing. Last year, after some arm twisting, they managed to ban the asigning of homework. And, surprise of surprises, they’re noticing grades are actually going up.

“As a whole we found marks have started to go up, our Education Quality and Accountability Office data has improved since we started,” Jan Olson, the school’s principal said in an interview with CTV’s Canada AM.

He says there are also fewer behavioural issues as a result of the ban, and academic improvement was observed across the entire spectrum of students: wealthy and poor, special needs and gifted.

See, mom? I told you homework was bad for me.

The song, called “Over You”, is also up on Youtube–although they were nice enough to turn off the embedding options, so you get a clicky clicky instead. Now, I just have two questions, one of which I’ll search out eventually. Which movie’s sound track does this song belong to? And, why did no one inform me of this? I feel cheated now.