Snow falling softly on concrete.
March 1st 2005
Well, I didn’t intend on taking such an extended break there. I have some books to fill in, but as that is only probably really interesting to me, I figured I should move on and try to keep things a little more current again.
I am surfacing after a very busy month of working not only my day job, but also two large freelance projects. One, for friends was the creation and launch of their new online store. Their project, Devour Design, is Canadian-made adventurewear that is really well-fabricated, using Canadian materials and Canadian labour.
They had their grand opening at a Trade show in Toronto over the weekend, so the site had to be up and running by then. Check it out if you are so inclined. By all accounts, after a disastrous beginning, the trade show went wonderfully. Good luck guys!
I also have been doing some work for the School of Education here. It’s been really interesting, designing questionnaires and collating and tabulating the data. I don’t know as of yet if I will be involved in the analysis, but I am game for that too. I figure the more things I get experience in, the better that makes my skills and it might open some doors somewhere down the road, who knows?
Last week was reading week, and I took a couple of days off to visit Mum in Almonte. She’s in a bit of a walking wounded situation because she fell on the back step in January. Now Mum I think downplayed things a little, because she is extremely lucky she didn’t break her hip. She fell with her hip right on the edge of the step, basically right under the greater trochanter.
Mum has broken her other hip, back in her 20s. She used to be extremely thin, and she fell on ice and broke the neck off her femur. Now this is kind of hard to do, especially when you are young and healthy, so she’s always been nervous since then about ice and falling.
Anyhow, Mum isn’t as thin as she used to be, and I think that is what saved her this time. She fell right where there was a cushion of flesh and muscle, and that stopped the edge of the step from hitting the bone. I am sure if it had hit the bone directly, the transmission of force would have probably resulted in a fracture.
Poor Mum has a dent almost an inch deep in her hip now where the muscle has been crushed. I don’t think it will come back.
We had a good visit though. I brought marking home with me, and got quite a lot done. I will be happy when I am comfortable driving there on my own, because the bus is really tedious on the way back. The way down is great, it is about as fast as driving, but the bus back takes almost 2 hours longer!
I also met up with a friend I haven’t seen since high school! For whatever reason we somehow lost touch in the time period from graduation and when I left for Trent. Sara got married, and moved out, and I found out she now has a child. She’s exactly the same as she was in high school, which is wonderful. I enjoyed catching up with her a lot. Thanks to my mum for arranging the super-secret-spy-reccy-mission there.
We were supposed to get a huge snowstorm last night and extending into today, but it hasn’t been so bad so far. I guess we can say that March is in like a lion because it is snowing slightly. The roads were all snow-covered on the way in, so it was a bit slipperly in places too.
Tonight is my late night – I am here until 9pm. Linguistics is starting, the last 6 weeks of lectures. My labs start next week, so this week I need to decide what the assignments are going to be and design them. I also have the last bits of marking cultural labs to do.
In other, geekier matters, I finally got our guild up and running on World of Warcraft. We are called The Northern Grenadiers and so far we have a good group. We did a group mission last night that was a lot of fun. I am looking forward to adventuring in groups in the future.
The next step is designing what our tabard looks like. I have some ideas, so we’ll see how those go over.