Category: Miscellaneous babble

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

That turkey yesterday was soooo good…

On the other hand, seems that our desire for big plump turkeys means we need to help them out a little to keep making big turkeys.

Picked up my new glasses yesterday. The new glasses are amazingly light compared to my old pair, which were even lighter than the ones before that. My new glasses are Easyclip titanium frames with these nifty little magnets designed to hold some clip-on sunglasses. The sunglasses just stick to the magnets, so no fumling around to slide them on, or prongs poking me in the nose. The lenses are high index glass with UV, anti-reflection (AR is a must-have) and anti-scratch coatings.

Over the years, my wife has been slowly migrating my glasses to smaller and smaller sizes, which runs counter to my preference for larger frames that preserve my peripheral vision (which now falls outside of my glasses). The smaller frames look more stylish, but now I’m limited to just detecting large blurry moving objects with my peripheral vision.

One of these days, I’ll have to talk to my optometrist about maybe getting some LASIK or some other laser surgery done on my eyes. My glasses are pretty pricy at $450 a pop. If laser surgery can improve my vision so I don’t need as strong a prescription, I’ll be happy.

In most of my dreams, I’m watching myself doing something. Last night I had a peculiar dream where I was making soup. There I am, standing at the stove stirring a pot of soup. I decided it needed some pepper, so I sprinkled some in. Then I looked over at our new pepper grinder, and decided the soup needed more pepper. So I grabbed it, and have it a few twists. Grind grind grind. Then grind grind grind some more. Eventually after some indeterminate grinding time, I looked in and saw the top of the soup pot covered in pepper. Then I woke up.

There really didn’t seem to be any point to the dream. Just pepper and soup.

I’m Canadian, my wife is American. I’m from the West, she’s from the East. So naturally, each of us has a different vocabulary set. There are a few items that I call one thing, and her by another.

Monday for example, we were at Office Depot to get a laser pointer for a presentation she was doing. At the last minute, she remembered she needed something called postal tape. She tells me to go get the postal tape. So I head off and then realize that I have no idea what postal tape is.

Me (staring blankly): Huh?

Her: Postal tape!

Me: Postal tape? What the heck is this postal tape you’re talking about?

Her: That clear tape you use for packages!

Me (understanding finally dawns on my face): Oh, packing tape!

The same thing happens when I try to tell her what the temperature is outside or give her anything in metric units. She just stares at me blankly until I break down and work out the conversion in my head.

She occasionally pokes fun at some of my Canadian pronunciation. I occasionally mock her accent, which she occasionally slips into when she gets excited or is talking to friends from back home.

Pop vs soda, postal vs packing tape, C vs F, zed vs zee. Yes, we’re different. And that’s probably the way it will stay.

I have a skeleton.

No, not the one inside my body holding me up and not the ones in my closet either. It’s one of those display skeletons you might find in your doctor’s office, or an anatomy lab. It’s not one of those cheesy plastic ones either. This is an actual skeleton, with real bones.

I was walking through our department mail area, and there it was propped up next to the photocopier with a sign saying “I’m headless and homeless. Find me a home”.

It’s not in the greatest shape, and it’s definitely seen better days. It’s been decapitated. The arms have been lopped off and the legs have been amputated below the knees. So I guess it’s just a torso with dangly bits. Some of the nuts, bolts and springs holding the joints together are missing or damaged, so some of the bones bend quite unnaturally. But aside from that, it’s largely intact.

I think it’ll make an interesting decoration for my office, once I find a place for it. Unless of course my wife decides to nab it so she can review her anatomy.