I need one of these. After hitting the snooze button, this alarm clock on wheelsl rolls itself into a random place in the room. Thus ensuring that the second time the alarm goes off, the waker is really awake before shutting it off.

Story courtesy of boing boing.

I signed up for Parks and Rec tennis lessons recently, and attended my first lesson on Saturday. It was sort of fun, although I didn’t get all that much practice in. My swings need a lot of help—I’ve lost a considerable amount of control. My serve is still pretty spicey however; I had to tone it down else make the game unfair and unfun for others. During one game, my doubles partner went for a ball that I didn’t (because I thought it was going to go out). She tripped or slipped and took a hard fall on her knee. Everyone took an awkward 5 minutes off while the instructors took care of her. I felt embarassed for her, and slightly guilty that I had not returned the volley myself.

When I got home I started watching Real Time with Bill Maher, and realized a few minutes in that I was having trouble seeing whatever I was looking at. Oh crap, am I going blind?! I experimented with some reading material and discovered that I could see nothing at my focal point, but could still read using my peripheral vision. The distortion was in both eyes uniformly—even with them both closed—so I deduced that this was not an light/optical issue (which left my brain at fault, and me unhappy that I had deduced this fact). Slowly, the bluriness moved out to the periphery, and I could distinguish that the bluriness was actually a pattern of diagonal and glittering stripes. It went away after about 40 minutes of disturbing my visual field. Needless to say, it made me quite nervous.

Hark, what yonder approacheth? Why, tis my unwelcome acquiantance, Mnsr. Headache. I got one wicked headache, which slowly snuck up on me after a brief relief from the visual weirdness. It was the second worst I’ve ever had, definitely a debilitating showstopper. I pulled the blinds and took a 4 hour nap, after which the severe pain had subsided. I felt out of sorts for the rest of the day, not to mention the effect the 4 hour nap had on my sleep schedule.

Compound that with the fact that I awoke on Sunday with a sore throat and, all in all, this was a pretty shitty weekend. I went to the doctor yesterday and found that 1: I did indeed experience a migraine (as I suspected) complete with an aura, and 2: I had a upper respiratory viral infection (which I also suspected). So basically, two decidedly unpleasant things that I can do nothing about. Lovely.

On Friday I went to see the Eagles play at the RBC Center. We had the nose-bleed seats, third floor, one row from the back wall—but it was still a good time. Kevin invited me, as he’s on a bent to see all of the old rockers before they get too old or dead to keep playing.

I’m not all that familiar with the Eagles’ repetoire. Of course, most everyone knows Hotel California (which they played as their encore). But what I was surprised to find out was how much of their music I knew but dind’t know was theirs. Of the four of us, I seemed to be the most green. But like I said it was a good time.

I’m a bit astounded and also dismayed to learn that my 10 year high school reunion is being held this year. It is hard for me to get my head around the concept, the math works out of course. I just got a list of my classmates’ email addresses and it is weird to see all the distantly familiar names. Will I actually attend though, is the question? I always say that I keep in touch with the people I care about, but am I fooling myself. My Goucher reunion last summer was pretty much a bust. How on earth could my high school be better? How many retorical questions can one ask in a single paragraph?

I’ve just recently passed the 300 count mark in my vinyl collection. It is a bit disgusting if you think about the money involved in this evil hobby, especially considering it has been just over a year since I started. Imagine if I had spent that money on, ohh say, a laptop! But how I enjoy it, and maybe someday doubtfully, I’ll be able to write them off as a business expense.

Here’s a cute picture of my wide-eyed boys: Todd on the left and Edmond on the right.


Well, this is pretty damn cool. I’m posting to my blog from within flickr. I don’t see a way to blog about a “Photo Set” yet, but I’ll keep looking.

I got a crown a few years ago, right after I started my current job. I got it because I cracked a tooth and it hurt to bite down (actually it hurt when I released from a hard bite). Unfortunately getting the crown didn’t remove the pain. My dentist at the time told me to wait a little bit to let the tooth calm down, “Sometimes these things go away on their own”. But it didn’t, and then I moved out here and took my own sweet time finding a new dentist.

When I was flying home for Christmas break I was sitting next to an endodontist. He seemed like a well-educated, even-tempered, and good-humoured fellow, so I asked him for dentist recommendations, which he was happy to give. So I finally went to see one of his recommendations in January and, of course, required a bunch of work—it had been like a year and a half And since I still had so much pain in my crowned tooth, he referred me to an endodontist. Guess who?

So I had a root canal on Monday. That was two hours of my life that could have been more enjoyable. The first memorably painful event was testing my tooth with various stimuli to see what and how it hurt. I nearly jumped out of the chair with the cold test, jesus! Anyway, I am apparently very hard to numb, so there were a lot of little outcries from me and then more injections. I can’t say that I’m not happy that I did it because the pain that I used to feel, very vividly, while crunching down on that tooth now seems to be gone. I’m a little reticent to declare an all out victory though, because there is still some unusual sensation—I don’t know if it is psychological or physiological. Here’s hoping, I go back for a followup in April.