January 2007 Archives

there's been a lot of chatter online about flickr in recent days. with their new 3,000 contact limit, 75 tag maximum and the mandatory merging of your yahoo! id with your flickr account. as with most change, i've yet to hear anything positive about these upcoming developments. just today, i read a blog post by Kara at Colors...Pretty which really summed up the whole flickr user experience for me. a quote:

i'd like to add a little something to that definition:

don't get me wrong, i love flickr. it's introduced me to so many things: new friends, new (old) cameras, new techniques, new talent. but, i'm neither a flickr fangirl nor a staunch anti-change protestor. i don't really care if i have to merge my yahoo! id or people could put santa hats on my photos over christmas. i appreciate the site and community around it for what it is: a place to pimp my photos and get my ego stroked by random strangers.

all i do have to complain about is the lack of an archive/download feature. if my hard drive crashes, at the very least, i want to be able to reinstate the photos i've uploaded over the past two years.

love it or loathe it, flickr is good. it's fun and it works 99% of the time. that's a more than you can say for a lot of online services. including this blog.

i'm feeling completely over-whelmed and over-extended and everything in me is screaming to run home, lock the door, turn off the phone and hide under my covers for a week.

i just ate the sweetest baby carrots i ever have. yum! sorry, just wanted to record that for posterity. they were that good.

weekend summary:

- ate yummy chinese food
- had my dad over for coffee
- saw a fantastic play
- played zelda
- went to the art gallery
- sat not five feet from fred herzog
- ate not-from-a-package ramen
- visited jen at work (twice!)

it was a good weekend, just not enough time to get stuff accomplished, which always bugs me. it's the work/home/life balance i struggle with these days. i want to have time to relax, but i can't relax when my house is a mess or i haven't done the laundry. and how can i play zelda, watch a dvd with christopher and go hang out with friends at the same time? oh, and sleep. can't forget the sleeping.

the next few weeks are chock-full of social obligations. i've had to decline almost as many as i've agreed to! it's going to be a very spendy february, it seems.

if i can get an extra key from my building manager, i'm going to sign up for spud.ca. i think that having groceries delivered will be a huge load off my mind and time. they have a 'harvest box' of produce which, for $40 every other week, looks like it will have far more food in it that i could manage to eat. they also sell meat, bread and dairy products. conceivably, if it all works out, i could only ever have to shop for beer and junk food (which i'm trying to avoid by having more healthful, organic food delivered). i'll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

i can't believe i've had this man in my life for an entire year. i don't think anyone would have guessed that a nervous coffee at the bread garden one year ago tonight would turn out to be the beginning of the best twelve months in memory.

all those years of being alone and dreaming of one day finding a boy who'd like me back. i had it all worked out: he'd be tall and smell good and be funny and a good kisser and be able to teach me things and think i'm beautiful and be kind to my tender heart. all those years... never finding that guy. only to discover him on a dreary saturday excursion. the universe is funny that way.

and i'm so fucking lucky.

okay, here it is. i don't know how long that other boxy layout was around, but it's got to be well over two years. the only things which changed were the header image and the backgrounds. this time, i think things look a little more grown up and easier to read. i hope you like it.

unfortunately, for some reason i can't figure out (and, honestly, can't be bothered) the <div>'s i used to center photos in posts doesn't work on random photos. there's no sense to it which i can see, but changing them to <p>'s fixes it. i've gone back to july 2005 and changed them, but i can't see myself going all the way back to august 2000. that's just crazy talk. the perfectionist in me is completely freaking out about the fact that there are some 400 photos which DON'T LINE UP PROPERLY, but with the kind of weeks i've been having lately, i'm just going to hope that y'all can forgive me for being such a horrible housekeeper.

if anything is really borked, please let me know and i'll try to fix it up for you. otherwise, i think i've had my fill of CSS for the next two years.

believe it or not, i'm actually in the middle of re-designing the site. i won't be posting much until that's finished.

if you see anything amiss in the meantime, please do not panic. i'm just busy making a mess of things. it's been a long time since i've had to fuck with the templates around here and i'm pretty sure i've forgotten a lot more than i ever knew in the first place.

so, the problem with writing on your website about how you wouldn't totally hate the idea of ditching plans with friends to stay home and play with your Wii comes when those same friends read your website and spend the first twenty minutes of your evening with them bugging you about how you almost ditched them to play with your Wii and why didn't you bring your Wii with you so *we* could play with it, anyway?

once that part of the evening was settled, we had a great night hanging out at nelson's sweet pad eating gross amounts of sushi and home-baked white chocolate & macadamia nut cookies, catching up on each others' lives and "big news" items. colene ended up wearing nelson's pants and we all got to meet his hetero life-mate, david (who may not be a blogger, but is a ballroom dancer which, i think, is just as geeky).

by the time i got home, settled and into bed it was well past my preferred work-night bedtime, but it was worth the lack of sleep. well worth. those are some pretty awesome friends, i've got. i'm so lucky. well, i say that until i'm sitting in an ambulance after breaking something on this skiing experience we're supposed to be embarking upon.

did you know that if you book a cruise on norwegian cruise lines you get your own email address? i didn't, either. if i need to get ahold of my father while he's sailing around the hawaiian islands this week, i can email him! how cool is that? hm... i could even email him from my Wii!

speaking of the Wii: WHEE!

lots and lots of fun! so much fun. even just using the controller (from here on out referred to as the wiimote) to navigate all the menus to initially set up it up was exciting and caused me to exclaim "this is the best thing *ever*!" which inspired my boyfriend to prove me wrong later that evening -- rawr.

i've only had it two nights and now it's all i want to do. i have dinner plans with col, ritchie & nelson tonight, but i'm sorely tempted to cancel them so i can go home and practice my wii tennis. yes, i'd pass up yummy sushi with them to play pretend sports. that's how much fun it is!

even though, by the end of a session of tennis or boxing, my arms are burning, i've yet to be beset by Wii-elbow the next day, which is kind of surprising considering how much aching there is after three rounds of boxing. i'm sure i'll injure myself eventually, though. it's inevitable with my superior level of clumsiness. christopher very nearly dislocated a couple of somethings with his spectacular follow-through during a bowling frame on tuesday evening. luckily the comfy chair was there to catch his fall or it might have been quite tragic.

i've rented three games to try out over the next couple of weeks: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Trauma Center: Second Opinion and Warioware: Smooth Moves. at $10 a week per game (actually, it's more like $5/week because you have a week's grace period after your initial rental is due to take it back without penalty - yay), i figure it's a smart thing to rent these games before i shell out $60 a pop and then find out i hate them (like i did with some Playstation games - grr). jamie and i played some of Smooth Moves last night and, although it was kind of confusing for me, it kept me interested. after he left, i went through and played some more. it turns out i really like the fast-paced mini-games. not knowing what you're supposed to do in each of them might be the best part.

don't worry, there is little chance this is going to turn out to be a Wii gaming blog any time soon, but for the interim (aka while i'm obsessed) there may be a lot of Wii-talk hereabouts. sorry.

in other news: i hate snow. the gunk the doctor told me to put in my eye might be helping. there's too much food in my fridge for me to eat before it goes bad. working for a living sucks. i could use a nap.

i'm losing days.

i know i'm awake and doing stuff, but i have to spend a lot of time concentrating to remember what i did when and with who. maybe that's good. maybe i'm so into the now i'm no longer obsessed with the past. that bears some thinking on.

i do know that i got a full twelve hours of sleep after going out for belated birthday drinks with christopher, jen, thomas & matt at The Irish Heather friday night after work. i wish both chris & i had been feeling better to more fully enjoy the evening, but as it were, i had a good time nursing my yummy shandy and laughing my ass off. i almost forgot that i'd spent the day convincing myself i had acute angle-closure glaucoma and i should have had someone take me to the hospital before i lost vision in my eye permanently.

sunday afternoon, after cooking us up a yummy breakfast, christopher & i went for a very cold photo walk around Deer Lake in Burnaby (where the photo above was taken). we watched the dumb, dumb, dumb people walking and skating on the frozen lake. people! this is VANCOUVER! three days of -4°Celsius don't freeze a lake anywhere near enough to go practice hockey drills on! *sigh* we did wander a good two feet out onto the frozen water, ourselves, but chris almost landed on his butt and i nearly dislocated my patella again, so we didn't stay out long.

yesterday, i was up at 4:30am to take my dad and his pal to the airport. as i type this, they're about four hours from docking in the first port of call on their 7-day hawaiian cruise. i love him very much, but man, do i hate him right about now.

i left work early (not because i'd gotten there an hour early) to go see the ophthalmologist again. this time he was a bit more thorough and i got to say all the things i had concerns about. he even did the proper glaucoma pressure test this time. he gave me an ointment i need to stick in my eye at bedtime and said, again, to come back any time i had concerns. i still don't really feel like he heard me, though. i may ask my GP to refer me to another guy if things don't improve. at least i'm not as strung out about the whole situation as i was last week. boy, was i a wreck.

while i was running around pharmacies looking for the eye-gunk, i missed delivery of my Wii. i had even changed my voicemail message (which the door buzzer rings through to) to ask the Canada Post person to please leave any packages by my door, instead of leaving one of those evil parcel notices. alas, he in turn left me a message saying he couldn't do that because the parcel was marked "do not safe drop". bleh. well, we all know what i'll be doing on my way home tonight, right? and when i get home. and all night long. and for the rest of this week...

christopher speculated that my recent surge in popularity (i have three different social engagements this week!) was due solely to people's knowledge of my impending Wii-ness. he's probably right. damn leeches! first it's the couch, now it's the Wii. people only love me for my stuff! ;)

for some reason, i've got myself a killer headache today. maybe it was the 5am wake up to get on the bus in time this morning. it kills me that i have dad's car this week and there's this snow fall warning. of course, there's barely any snow out there, so now i'm crabby that i didn't drive anyway. mabye i should stop typing and go get myself some more coffee.

have a great day!

okay, so i had a little freak-out/break-down last night before i went to bed. while i'm not happy nor content about the vision situation, i am running at a much, much lower anxiety level about it all. i've made a couple of decisions about how i want to be dealt with by the medical community and have taken steps towards achieving them. these are my eyes and my life and i refuse to accept anything less than 100% of what the doctors can offer me.

note: my "diagnosis" was not based on the puff-test given during routine examinations. i've been experiencing visual distortions for the past few weeks which i went to see my GP about. she immediately sent me to the ophthalmologist, who was the one with the very relaxed attitude.

now, onto much happier things in my life...

sunday marked the one-year anniversary of christopher and i meeting. i wanted to go do the same things we did on that fateful day, but we got distracted and then had to go to a family birthday party for him and his father (where i BLEW HIS MIND with the gift i got him).

tuesday was his actual birthday, and i had super-secret plans to take him half-way up Cypress Mountain to have a fantastic dinner & drinks at the Salmon House on the Hill, but when i called for a reservation i found out they were closed for kitchen renovations until the nineteenth. i was at such a loss as to where else i could take him i put a call out to some local foodie-friends for suggestions. in the end, i decided upon the Moustache Cafe in North Vancouver.

the evening started out rough (what with 100kph wind gusts and lots of waiting in doctors' offices), but it all turned out in the end. we had a cozy corner table with a view out the window (where we got to see the hail, rain, sleet and snow falling), attentive service (there was only one other couple there when we arrived) and a fantastic three-course dinner complete with a half-litre of the most expensive wine which will ever touch these lips. christopher kept saying it was the fanciest meal he'd ever had and the best, outside of home. that's high praise coming from him. i think i done good.

alas, i think one of the hessmobile's belts snapped on the way home as i heard this fwap-fwap (shush, heather!) noise coming out from under the hood, but what with all the snow and transit-taking i haven't had time to get under the hood to check it out yet. at least i hope it's just a belt: that's an easy fix.

oh, and i finally got a Wii ordered! i can't believe it took so long, but it's on its way to me now and i can't wait to get to playing. yay!

what do you think of when you hear the word "glaucoma"?

i think of people going blind. no treatment, no questions, just losing their sight. forever.

yesterday, a doctor told me he thinks i have glaucoma. but, he's not sure. what i'm not sure of is whether that's a good thing, his uncertainty, or not.

christopher will tell you that the doctor's über-casual diagnosis and lackadaisical "come see me in six months" means there's nothing for me to worry about.

that's what i do, though. i worry.

i'm very worried.

i can't think of anything but that word. glaucoma.

things are going to change. they have to. i'm terrified, but i'm also determined. maybe this is what i needed. the universe must be very unhappy with me.

i'm so very scared.

this is not going to be a good day. no, not good at all.

i'm starting to think i've got a subconscious death wish. either that or i'm getting *really* clutzy as i age. in the past week i've:

- dropped a hatchback lid on my shoulder
- bit the inside of my cheek repeatedly
- hit my brow bone with a wooden hanger
- got a bump on my forehead from an un-remembered incident
- bit the tip of my tongue so hard it bled for ten minutes

seriously, i think i need to just stop moving entirely. it's causing far too much trouble and discomfort.