Vernon Winter Carnival

Every year Vernon has a winter carnival. I know this because every year a bunch of hot air balloons fly into town and descend into one of our parking lots. This happened on Friday. Also every year, there is a parade through town. That happened sometime this weekend, Saturday I think. I didn't go because I have a library book due back today and I was trying to finish reading it first. It didn't help that the book reads like a text book. I was falling asleep quite regularly and ended up moving to the dining room table just to push through it.

Of course, this also means I missed the Superbowl. Well, in all honesty we did turn on the TV to keep tabs on it once in a while, but like most football games it progressed way to slowly to capture my interest. I was way more distracted from my book when The Family Guy came on afterwards.

Report from the doctor

My doctor's appointment was today. This was to follow up on the tests and lab work that was done earlier and enough time had passed that I was feeling pretty confident that he would have nothing but good news. (Remember, if it was bad news, they said I would have heard from them pretty quick.) As usual, the doctor was running behind and my appointment was about 20 minutes late. I say 'as usual' because my experience with doctors is that the good ones are always busy. I'm not suggesting that this doctor is always running late, since this was my first office visit with him. But I digress.

The results of my EKG and blood work are as follows: my good cholesterol levels are good, my bad cholesterol levels are good, my heart rate while exercising is healthy and it's also good while at rest. Physically, the symptoms I report are not consistent with heart disease, which means any chest pains I experience are probably a direct result of stress and not indicative of heart problems. To be on the safe side he is going to schedule another test - an ultrasound or x-ray of my chest just to be sure. But the doctor honestly does not expect to find anything wrong with my heart with this test and is doing it mostly just to be complete. (God bless negligence laws.)

We talked about what else it could be, including things like acid reflux and a few other related conditions. He doesn't think it's acid reflux per se, but wasn't going to say that definitively. Stress seems to be the biggest trigger, so that's the most probable direction for this to go in.

As it turns out, this doctor spent some time in Halifax, so he was interested to learn where I grew up and if I spent time at the Thirsty Duck pub. (I had - lots of time spent, actually.) Overall he asked me a lot of questions and answered all of mine. My only regret is not being diagnosed in Halifax - we could have gone out to the pub after the appointment!

New tool to use with Flickr - SPELL

So I stumbled across a handy little flickr tool, which gave me the above series of photos. You can enter in your own text and get associated flickr images for each letter. It's random, so if you don't like the first selection, feel free to do it again.

I'm sure some genius is going to figure out how to insert this into my banner so that it's different every time the page is loaded. Yes, I would be indebted to such a person, and yes, I'm too lazy to spend much time figuring it out on my own.

So thanks to the Jeep's unilateral decision to blow a piston, I'm now commuting to work by bus. Which I thought I would really hate, but as it turns out I don't really mind at all. Although I must remember to bring my headphones so I can at least listen to music during my travels. While the bus schedule around here is good for me going to work, the last run stops at about 6:00 PM, which is really early in my opinion. At least I can get a monthly pass instead of paying $2.00 per trip.

It's a work of ART, I tells ya

So yesterday I decided to get my butt off the sofa and get some work done on the condo. At one point we re-tiled the kitchen backsplash but because we didn't have the drill bit to mix the grout, that last step was never done. Since I now had all the parts, I no longer had an excuse.

As usual, my work was not without incident.

The first thing I had to do was clear off the counters, as we have been using the kitchen without problems since the tiling was done (well, even before, to be honest.) Next up, was to remove the wall plug face plates, cut the power to the kitchen, pull out the stove and to tape up the outlets. So far, so good. Next, I used my dremel with a polishing bit to clean up the tile surfaces. Yes, my wife did roll her eyes when I found another reason to use the dremel. But she returned to painting the bathroom and let me have my fun.

Next up was to mix the grout. I had purchased the smallest bag of grout I could get at Rona, so I decided to mix it all up at once. In hindsight, I could have probably quartered the amount but that's okay - there is no more grouting to do in the kitchen anyway. With extra grout mixed up, my thinking was that I wouldn't have to worry about making what I had stretch over the whole area - bad move on my part, as it turns out. While it was good that I put enough grout on to avoid having any gaps, I would have saved myself a LOT of scrubbing if I had been more diligent at removing the excess while it was still pretty soft. I was pretty tired after scrubbing it all down. So much so that my wife came out to help with the cleanup because she was worried I was going to have a heart attack. I tell ya, one visit to the cardiologist and then you can't do ANYTHING without them worrying over you. Oh well, I do appreciate your concern hon. Honest.

We decided to get something to eat before continuing with the cleanup, which turned out to be a tactical error on my part. There was still about 3/4 of the grout remaining in one bucket, and it was hardening fast. I currently have it soaking in some water in an effort to soften it up so I can get my bucket back. At this point though, the job is done. Once it cures properly I'll give it a final inspection and possibly use the dremel on any remaining rough bits, but that's about it.

PS - has anyone else noticed how slow Blogger.com is today?

Walking the dog around the office

Vacant lot behind the office

Well I thought I would check up on the homeless guys, since Louise and I were at the office today. I knew that at some point we would have to go for a walk, and the vacant lot behind our office building would be perfect for her and I to snoop around.

Well it was either that or I let her play in traffic. Personally, I think I made the responsible choice today.

Anyway, the tent owners were either sleeping or not at home when we were in the area because we saw no signs of them. Which is probably good. My journalism skills really aren't that good so I don't know if I could have pulled off a successful interview. Still, I'm kind of happy to see that they are surviving the winter and haven't had to be forcibly evicted or anything stupid like that. I wonder what the squatter laws are around here - if they last a year do they suddenly get ownership of their land? Probably not, but it would be cool.

UPDATE: After I got back to my desk I noticed a cat snooping around the tent, that looked a LOT like our cat Roscoe. Too bad I don't have an optical zoom on my camera, otherwise I would have grabbed a snapshot of their pet, assuming the cat is theirs.

Missed doctor appointment

And before anyone says anything, I am not the one who missed it. I arrived at the doctor's office at the scheduled time, and he was on vacation. Seems there was a scheduling mixup with his secretary, who was also not working today. At this point, the secretary can call me on Monday to sort it all out. Luckily, the doctor's office is close by my office, so the wasted time was kept to a minimum.

So no word yet on what my results mean. The did tell me that if they had bad news, I would hear from the doctor very quickly. It would be one of those 'no news is good news' kind of scenarios. So more no news. I guess at this rate, my condition must have improved so much that they had to reschedule the appointment to account for the amount of 'good news' I have in store.

Houseguests

We have visitors this week. Louise and the cats are all thrilled. No, really - they have all learned how to capitalize on the situation to it's fullest. Even Roscoe has decided to grace us with his presence. At one point, he was even sitting on the lap of one of our guests! Unheard of for a cat that normally runs into the bathroom to hide every time someone arrives. Anyway, I took a picture just to prove it.

Meanwhile, I'm on kitchen duty at work this week. (we all take turns, the secretary keeps a schedule) Some weeks this job has perks, other weeks it's just chores. Oh yeah, it gets better - the schedule always assigns two people per week. And this week I got scheduled with my boss, who was conveniently out sick today. I can already see the writing on the wall with this one...

More snow and another webcam

I woke up this morning and it was snowing like a sonofa.... let's just say it was really snowing hard. Oddly enough though, I didn't really mind. It was warm enough outside and there was no wind, so I decided to shovel the walkway for the rest of my neighbors. (condo living and all that)

The picture here is again from another webcam, this one courtesy of the Weather Network. I'm pretty sure the view is of Kalamalka Lake, which means we are looking at the other side of town and technically not Vernon at all, but a town called Coldstream.