Category: Miscellaneous babble

The car took a bit of an ouchie today. Taking the left turn off Lockwood to get onto the bridge into West Ashley, the car hit a slick patch on the wet road and the back end fishtailed one way, whipped back around the other way when I tried to correct and we ended up slamming into the curb and up onto the grass. Very nearly took out a palm tree too.
Fortunately no injuries other than a bit of shock and surprise and no other cars involved. I’m sure it must have been a sight for the other drivers who happened to be around.

It’s at the Toyota dealership now where they gave me a verbal estimate of about $2k to fix the broken brake lines, hub, mangled brake drum and rim.
I suppose that’s what I get for being complacent about driving in the rain. Pay attention to those wet roads!

When I was growing up, the neighbourhood kids I played with were easily entertained.

Springtime brings warmer temperatures, more daylight and melting snow.

Streams of snowmelt in the parking lot in front of my house would make tiny little rivers of water as it flowed toward the storm drain.

So we had toothpick races. Or stick races. Or whatever-would-float races.

We’d find a nice little stream that was deep enough to float a toothpick and had some decent flow. Then two or three of us would drop our toothpicks in, and see which one made it to the storm drain first.

It was good, fun entertainment for a bunch of 7-9 year olds. I suppose it was kind of our version of Pooh sticks.

It’s been a year since I’ve had this phone now.
Once the performance problem was fixed by removing my Facebook account, it became a lot more useful than it had been. Still not great, but a lot better than it was before.
Recently, the phone has started spontaneously rebooting itself at roughly 10 and 20 minute intervals. There it, just sitting on the desk apparently doing nothing, and then the screen will flash on and it reboots. Seems to happen in batches where it will reboot a bunch of times, and then nothing happens for a few hours.
The primary culprit at the moment is Google Voice, which is the only app that I’ve installed recently.

Travel issues aside, the past week in Edmonton was pretty awesome. Could have used a few more days but I was able to get around to most things that I wanted to do and see most of the people I wanted to see.

The weather started off pretty mild, but then turned cold. It felt good to be back in winter again.

Dim sum and dinner at real Chinese restaurants was a welcome change compared to the Chinese food in Charleston. Indulged myself with Boston Pizza a couple of times, which was yummy.

There were a few people I didn’t get a chance to meet up with, which was a little disappointing and a few things I didn’t get to do. Will just have to save those for next time.
I did get to see the new Centennial Science Center going up in place of the Physics building and V-wing on the U of A campus. On my last trip it was just a big hole in the ground. Looks like a nice building, although for something with as grand a name as “Centennial Center for Interdisciplinary Science”, it seemed like it might be a little on the small side. Maybe it’s bigger than it looks on the inside. Also saw a bunch of new buildings on campus. The Engineering sector of the campus is positively packed with buildings now. A great big long building popped up opposite the hospital too. Didn’t get a chance to find out what it was though.

My friends tell me I should move back to Edmonton. This past trip made me feel like a stranger in my own home town. So many changes, so many new things. I started wondering if I could go back. The city is very different from the one I grew up in, but it’s still home.
Well, it’ll be several more years before I think about thinking about making any kind of move. Based on what one of my friends was telling me about what was going on with his department, there might not be much for me to go back to anyway.

This is what I was wandering around today


The snow in most places was 30 cm or deeper. Not a whole lot for this time of year, but still a good bit.
I even saw a rabbit in my wanderings.