Skip to content

Our Wedding



Looking towards the future (March 5, 2003)

Posted 05 March 2006 § Main Page § Photo § Shea ‡ Comments (0) °

My Game Show Tidbit

TV game shows
always get their contestants to give a pithy piece of trivia about
themselves during the interview portion of the show.  Here's what
I would tell Alex Trebeck:

Alex: “It says here that you married the same woman three times.  How does that happen?”
Me: “Well, Alex.  My wife and I wanted to get married in Mexico
but there was a lot of red tape and expense involved in doing
that.  So we got married by a Justice of the Peace in our living
room with only a couple friends in attendance.  Then we had a
ceremony on the beach in Mexico a month later.  Then, when we
returned to Canada, we had a wedding reception for all our family and
friends who couldn't be in Mexico with us.”
Alex: “That sounds like a man's worst nightmare.  How do you keep track of your anniversary date?”
Me:  “It's actually pretty handy.  We officially count the
Mexico ceremony as our wedding date.  But if I forget that one, I
have two other chances to fix things!”

Happy Anniversary one day in advance, Shea!

NP: “You and the Candles” –
Hawksley Workman (easily my favourite song off his new album although
the pause for laughter at the start is still a bit weird to me.) 

Classmate of the Day: Paul
Slater for suggesting that everybody go for “Second Last Night of
Reading Week” drinks tonight.  I replied to suggest Under the Volcano,
a local Mexican restaurant, selfishly because Shea and I are already going there for our
anniversary supper but also because they have Ranchero music as
entertainment in their lounge tonight which sounds cool and
different. 

Posted 04 March 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page § Shea ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:

Five Random Songs

On MetaFilter
the other day, they had a post about a new feature on the Onion where
celebs would put their I-Pods on shuffle then talk about the first 5
songs that came up.  Most of them seem a bit tweaked (barely
anyone came up with a mainstream song – all celebrities apparently only
listen to cool, obscure Pitchfork-approved bands.) 

Here's my version (I won't cheat but I'll say that this is only based
on the MP3 directory in my laptop so mostly is music I've added since
coming to London.  Also, I'm not a celebrity so you may see a
mainstream song or two appear)

Five Random Songs
1. “Charles Bukowski Is Dead” – Boo Radleys
Cool so far.  I got into the Boos when I was in England during the
height of the Britpop thing in 1995 and for all the bands strutting
around saying they were like The Beatles (Oasis was the main one but
there were many others), a pretty strong argument can be made that the
Boos were actually the most like The Beatles – vocal harmonies,
experimentation, genre-crossing, creativity – all with a strong
pop-based sensibility (yes, even in their fairly radical songs – with
this one is a prime example.)  I also like that one of my
favourite bands happens to be a band that 99% of people don't know
about or only know for their cover of “There She Goes” on the “So I
Married An Ax Murderer” soundtrack.  Their song “Wake Up Boo!”
might be the second most perfect pop song of all-time, ironically,
after The La's original  “There She Goes”. 

2. “Hymn For Her” – The Magic Numbers
The Internet has made it so easy to download songs by bands you've just
heard about as was the case with this band.  I downloaded it a few
days ago and this is literally the first time I've heard this
song.  First impression, nothing special.  To be honest, I've
probably got dozens of songs on my HD like this one. I read about a new
band on somebody's blog or MetaFilter or whatever then download a few
songs and never even get around to listening to them.  (In defense
of downloading, this technique has also led me to many bands/artists I
now like quite a bit and has actually resulted in <gasp> cash
purchases!  Ed Harcourt.  Bright Eyes being a couple examples
that spring to mind of artits I bought after first downloading tracks
to sample.)

3. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” – Green Day.
David Cross didn't put this on his list.  But you know he has it.

4. “Nowhere Man” – Ron Sexsmith
Another cool thing about file sharing is the ability to find rare
covers and alternate versions of songs.  I've probably got more
covers of Beatles songs on my computer than I have, the actual
versions.  (Okay, not quite.) 

5. “Smoke Baby” – Hawksley Workman
God, this songs just makes me want to dance.  So funky. 
Hawksley Workman is another one of my favourites that I'm proud to say
I got into before most people did.  I first saw him about an hour
down the road in Waterloo when I was in Toronto for a conference in
2000 or so.  Saw him in a small room (the Jane Bond Cafe) with
maybe 50 other college-aged people.  They all knew every word to
every song and I realised this was something pretty special.  His
new album is growing on me with every listen. 

Classmate of the Day: Uhm, Emma
McNabney for being the only classmate I had an interaction with at all
today?  She e-mailed to see if Shea and I were going to Toronto
this weekend and I replied that we'd decided not to.  But I'm sure
her suggestions for things to do would've been great!

Posted 03 March 2006 § LibrarySchool § Meme ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

4x4x4 Meme

As I mentioned
in my last entry, there's a web meme going around in the
blogosphere.  As I am with blogs, I'm also sort of ambivalent
about these types of memes.  But since I'm in a “let's play this
game” mode right now, here we go…

Four Jobs I've Had
I've got some listed on my resume elsewhere on this site (not linked
from the blog at this moment but will be eventually – definitely by the
time I do my 505 Web Design assignment – hint, hint) so let's pick four
wacky jobs I've done instead…
–
garbage dump supervisor (such as it is – mainly just collecting a
loonie from people who wanted to dump their garbage at our town dump
one summer)
– removing church pews and pulling up carpet at a  Catholic church
– door-to-door cable TV salesman in rural Saskatchewan
– goal judge for a senior men's hockey team


Four movies I can watch over and over
Princess Bride
Trainspotting
Star Wars (at least I could when I was 10!)
Brassed Off

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
The Daily Show
Survivor (I know, guilty pleasure)

(Those are the only two I watch without fail every week)
Corner Gas
Hockey Night in Canada

Four Places I've Been on Vacation
Mazatlan Mexico
Mayan Riviera Mexico
Cancun Mexico
and…Hawaii

Four Favorite Dishes
Anything Shea makes (that sounds like a kiss-up but she's an awesome
wicked cook.  Specialties?  Jambalaya, kung-pow, chicken corn
chowder and more.  Her buffalo burger might be the best thing I've
ever had in my mouth in my life.)
Korean Beef
Orgasmic Potato (a baked potato with everything – I mean everything –
on it: cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, mushrooms, corn, hot sauce, salsa,
pepper, salt, bacon bits, onions, peppers)
Pizza (any kind but usually Canadian or spinach/feta)

Four Websites I Visit Daily
Google (this is a cop-out pick – who doesn't?)
Metafilter
CalgaryPuck Message Board
Canoe News (it's the default page for my e-mail program)

Four Places I'd Rather Be
Right now, it'd be nice to be back in Saskatchewan as it was my mom's birthday yesterday.
London, England instead of London, Ontario
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Perth Australia

Four Books I Recommend
Skipped Parts – Tim Sandlin (Fiction)
Down To This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shanty-Town – Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall (NF)
Behold The Man – Michael Moorcock (SF)
Space-Station Seventh Grade – Jerry Spinelli

(God, that was hard to pick just four.  I could list forty.)

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
Not sure if I will or not (probably not since I didn't get tagged to
this in the first place) but maybe Jillian Bell, Jason Bird, Jennifer
(aka Canuck Librarian) and Quinn?  Oh, and look what I found on
Jennifer's blog – some confused-looking guy at the Ontario Library
Association conference…


Posted 01 March 2006 § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Treeful of Starling

Until I figure out an automated way, let's do it like this…

N(ow) P(laying): “You and the Candles” – Hawksley Workman


…from his new CD “Treeful of Starling” which I picked up today
at Masonville Mall.  It's been a fairly commerce-enabled day – I
also finally broke down and ordered a digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A610
after years of wanting one (a camera, not specifically this one) but
never taking the leap as they price would always come down a bit more
or another new model would be released or whatever. 

This appears to be a good mid-to-upper range camera from what I've seen
and read.  It's not the Powershot Pro that I almost bought in
Calgary at a massive electronics sale (I even had the box in my hand
before putting it back) but it also didn't cost me $1000+ like that one
would have. I really like Canons for some reason and think I'll be
pretty happy with this one for the time being.  It cost just under
$500 and that includes an accessory kit with everything I could
possibly need – 1GB memory card, a wide-angle and a telephoto lens, a
couple other lenses (UV, PL and FLD and we'll just pretend I know what
all of those abbreviations mean), two tripods
(one full-sized, one travel one), a battery recharger kit, a USB card
adapter and a carrying case.  Pretty good deal for somebody who's
an amateur but has ambitions to become a more skilled photographer
eventually. 

I'm also on the hunt for a guitar as the one I left at home never did
get shipped here (at the time, it seemed silly to pay $50 for shipping
when that's what I paid for the guitar itself!) I guess I could still
get it shipped but I'm jonesing pretty bad to play a guitar, sneaking
into music shops and quietly strumming a couple chords before hustling
away, not wanting anyone to hear me (did I ever mention that I'm not
very good?)  I figure if I buy one here, I can always sell it
again at the end of the year and get my money back out of it.  Or
keep it and retire the $50 one.  (Does a more expensive guitar
make you sound better?  I know that having an electric with an
effects pedal definitely does!)

N(ow) R(eading): I usually have 2-3 books on the go at once and right now is no exception:

The Book on the Bookshelf – Henry Petroski
– heard about it via Jessamyn's 4x4x4 meme post then went to the library and there it was.  I love when coincidences like that happen. 

Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy – John Buschmann
– how's that for an engaging title?  But it's cool that I'm coming
across many of the “names” of library science and am also now on
listservs where they're active participants.  This was a loaner
from my student mentor, Sabina, and the awesome 2-for-1 deal I got via
the student mentor program deserves its own entry some day.  (By
the way, I gave her Revolting Librarians Redux
in return so that's a fairly equal exchange in my opinion.  I've
also turned on a few other classmates to that book so if I can stop one
library student from saying “customer” instead of “patron”, I'll have
accomplished something here.)

Posted 01 March 2006 § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

The Writer's Ego

Another reason
I'm suspect about the majority of blogs out there, is that many of them
tend to be little more than exercises in ego.  Don't get me wrong
– I've got as healthy of an ego as anyone (maybe healthier ). 
But again, is it big enough to think that my random ramblings are
important enough to take the time of anyone who may be out there (let
alone, to take additional time out of my already busy days to post
them?) 

This got me thinking about the ego of the writer.  I worked for
the Writers Guild of Alberta for three years and encountered a lot of
writers at various stages of their careers, writing in all genres with
varying levels of success.  One thing I always found interesting
was the writer who would say “I don't think/care about awards.”  I
always thought to myself that if a writer doesn't have the creativity
to at least imagine their speech on the podium at the Awards Gala,
they're probably not a very good writer.  Not to mention that
awards usually are a recognition by a jury of your peers that your work
is some of the best produced in that year.  So unless you've only
writing for yourself and not trying to reach anyone else (a perfectly
valid reason to write), you probably should at least admit to caring
about awards.  I don't know – maybe it's a “modest Canadians”
thing?  Obviously we all have egos but perhaps it's embarrassing
to admit you want people to actually like and buy and recognize your
writing.  Or your blog. 


Which gets back to my original point.  That's why the best blogs are about something –
the writer's favourite TV show, a certain brand of electronics,
happening in a particular city or whatever.  Otherwise, a
completely random blog is only really about one thing – you. 
Which (again) is a perfectly valid reason to have a blog if you don't
want to reach anyone else (outside a narrow band of your family and
friends.)  But if you want your blog to add something to the world
in a larger sense, having some sort of theme is probably a good idea.

So far, this blog is much closer
to the first type than the second (Happy Birthday mom, by the
way!)  But it's early and we'll see
how it develops.  Even the current title (“Yet Another Library
Student's Blog”) hints at where I might go with this. Or I could try
and write a bit about the Canadian book industry in the larger sense as
I've been involved in so many aspects of it – book publishing, awards
programs, non-profit literary organizations and now libraries.

Oh, one more point on the writer's ego thing.  I don't have it in
front of me but there was a book published a few years ago by the Banff
Centre Press called First Chapter: The Canadian Writers Photography Project. 
The book featured portraits of various writers along with their
responses to one of two questions (something like “Why do you write?”
or “What would you tell your younger self now?”)  Someone pointed
out to me that there appeared to be an inverse relationship – the more
famous and successful a writer was, the shorter their answer to these
questions were.  I always thought that was revealing.

Classmate of the Day: Marni Harrington is hosting a “drinks & munchies” party tonight which will be fun. 

Posted 28 February 2006 § Blog § Jobs § LibrarySchool § PopCulture ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: ,

Fredettes…

Now that I've
figured out what time zone I'm in (I think my first entry was
timemarked as the default Pacific time zone and that last one, I
thought I was in “Central” (because I'm in Central Canada right?) 
when in fact, I'm in “Eastern”.  That's what I get from coming
from a province that doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time at all – I'm
as confused at those cows that won't know when to produce milk if
Saskabush adopted such a radical proposal. 

Anyhew, a couple posts ago, I was cribbing Fred's monologue on the
Freddies.  Done in (mostly) good humour, it's also got a lot of
truth to it and the Freddies were out in full force Saturday night –
chattering loudly through the slow songs, calling out gibberish
requests during the breaks between songs, swaying beside the stage as
they take pictures nearly knocking over a lighting rig on those of us
in the front tables. 

To top it off, we saw the emergence of a new category of fan, the Fredette.  Closely aligned with the Freddie, this creature, her best years far behind her but wanting to recapture some of the Hot 100-fuelled
craziness of her youth, stumbles onto stage during Fred's first encore
and stands with her arm around him as he looks off into the distance,
like a man trying not to see the gigantic spider in the tree beside
him.  Needless to say, we didn't get a second encore. 

Posted 27 February 2006 § Blog § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Day Three – Already Nothing Exciting To Say – Let's Do A Blog Entry

Some random thoughts…

Things I Want To Set-up/Figure Out In This Blog:
– it
already appears to have most of the things I wanted my blog to have by
default – comments, tags, RSS feed, so I just have to play around with
each of these things a bit to make sure I like how they work or
configure them as needed.
– I want
to re-create my existing home page's most useful features (weather,
link to my bookmarks because I'm also not with it  enough to use
del.ico.us yet, post some photos, link to my Fred Eaglesmith/Hawksley
Workman (and not much else) guitar tab pages)
– get rid of all the default stuff that my otherwise great hosting company has put on the page for me that I don't want
– related to tagging, figure out how to do a “tag cloud” like on
librarian.net, metafilter,com and other advanced websites near
you. 
– figure out how to add the “Now Reading” and “Now Listening”
features.  “Now Reading” is easy because that's only going to
change about once a month with the amount of (pleasure) reading I'm
doing here.  And I refuse to list journal articles as my “Now
Reading” even if that's 90% of what it is.  But for “Now
Listening”, I'd love to have a constantly updated thing sent from
Winamp or whatever player I'm using so you can now how horrible my
music taste is.  (Isn't the web great?)
– lots of other niggly stuff I can't think of right now.

Fred was awesome last night
The webmaster of the world-famous (hey, I got an e-mail from Paris,
France a couple months ago!) Fred Eaglesmith guitar tabulature page
shouldn't admit this but I've been pretty out-of-the-loop as a Fredhead
for the last few years.  I unsubscribed from the Fred Digest
to try and cut down the volume of e-mails I was getting a few years
then never re-subscribed.  Fred rarely makes it to Western Canada
(at least the areas where I was) and I'll even admit that sometimes I
would choose to go to the concert of a different artist I hadn't seen
rather than the concert of an artist I've seen probably a dozen
times. 
Then, on top of all that, I didn't even think to go look at the Fred
Digest archives before going to the concert with 20 hardcore Fredheads
to at least get up to speed a bit on what's been going on.  For
instance, I didn't know Fred had a fire a week ago that burned down his
studio in Port Dover.  Since nobody was hurt and Fred's taking it
well (I didn't know this either but apparently he's a Buddhist now
too), I have to point out that he gave the funniest quote of all-time
in a newspaper story on the fire: “I thought the whole building would
go, so I got out onto the roof and started yelling.”  (I don't
think he was trapped on the roof, I think he was trying to get
attention so somebody would call the fire department.) 

Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation
I should just note that some people are real demons for proper punctation gramr speling. 
I usually am too but for the purposes of this blog-thing, I'll probably
have the occasional error because I have neither the time nor the
inclination to double-check everything I write.  I know it
reflects baldly on me (that one was intentional by the way) but
deal with it.  I do have a bad habit of being inconsistent so
forgiveness in advance for my switching between British/American
spellings, serial punctuation styles and so on.   I also
reserve the right to still harshly judge any other blog or piece of
writing that has any minor spelling or grammar errors.  (Can you imagine, he
wrote “their” instead of “there”.  What a maroon!)

Classmate of the Day
It's hard to do this when we're on break but I'd have to give
the nod to Linda Bussiere for being an absolute mind-reader – she sent
an e-mail saying that Fred was playing in TO next weekend without
knowing we'd arranged to go see Fred in Brantford.  Plus she also
gave some very generous guidance about accommodation possibilities in
the city.  Very cool! 

Attempt to Upload a Photo into the Body of a Post
Another new thing to try…if this works, you'll see a class photo we
took on Tuesday night before class.  Quinn's camera apparently got
one with nobody cut off at the edges.  But he hasn't touched it up yet so I'll put this one for now…

[2006-07-01 – I don't know if it's even worth ever going back to update old entries when I think of new things or whatever but in this case, we ended up with a better photo on our own camera so I decided to come back and add it to this entry.]



Posted 27 February 2006 § Blog § Main Page § Photo § PopCulture § Randomness ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

FREDDDIEEEE!

“I quit my job on
Monday, took my holiday pay and went to the liquor store where I cashed
my cheque and bought all the liquor I could.  I headed for
home in my pick-up truck with its 6-CD player listening to all Fred
Eaglesmith's albums (except the “50-Odd Dollars” one which was a bit
weird for me and the first three ones which I don't like.)  Later, that week, I go the concert, park beside
Fred's bus and go bang on the door – “Freeeddddiiiieeee!  Freeeddddiiiieeee!” 
No answer so I pass out, miss the show, wake up at the end and go up to Fred in the
autograph line.  “You changed my life, man.  Never mind that
woman in line man.  I wanna talk to you about your songs,
man.  Look man, just leave her alone.  You wanna friggin'
go?  You think you're so cool with your guitar, man.  Fred,
you changed my life, man.” 

Yep, I'm a white-trash wannabe, a middle-class person living an honest
working-person's life vicariously through the music of Fred
Eaglesmith.  Since I talk about him on the Internet sometimes,
Shea and I have managed to hook up with a group of 18 Fredheads who are
going to Brantford tonight to see the man.  Should be fun – my
first Ontario Fred experience.  Next time…

(PS – I had leftover porkchops, noodles and corn for lunch.  It was most excellent.)

Posted 25 February 2006 § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Welcome to Head Tale – The Blog

Well, I've finally gotten on the “blog-wagon”…

Because I'm from a small Saskatchewan town,
I have a theory that I get into anything trendy about 3-5 years after
everybody else does.  It was true when I got a Colecovision game
console in 1985, three years after the rest of the world did.  It
was true for grunge music which broke for the rest of the world in the
late 1980's and for Indian Head in about 1992.  And now its true
of blogs which have been growing in popularity since around 2000 and
which I'm finally getting around to trying out, right here in 2006. 

Although I'm a huge fan of a few blogs, part of my resistance was that
I didn't want to have just another blog where I talked about what I had
for lunch and whether my cat has a hairball today or not.  (I have my
personal journal for that and would prefer to keep it that way.)

Now that I'm in library-school, I don't necessarily have anything more
exciting to say than I did before.  But because blogs are playing
an increasing role in the library world,
because I'm far from home and as soon as I get with that other trend
(ie. when I finally buy a digital camera) I'll be able to keep in touch
with home better, and because someone told me my regular web site
looks a design from 1998 (guilty!), I decided to take advantage of the
30-day free trial my web hosting company offers for their blog
interface to give it a whirl. 

My old co-worker (er, former co-worker probably sounds better) has a blog
and I liked her policy of trying to write an entry everyday.  I'll
try to do that, at least for the next week when we're on Spring Break
and I'll have a bit more time for playing around.  If I get this
thing set-up the way I want, it may even become my official home
page.  Isn't that exciting? 

I've got a couple ideas for regular features I'd like to do to keep
things interesting as well – a revitalization of the Friday Fun Links I used to
send when I worked for the Writers Guild of Alberta
but with more of a Library Student focus.  (By the way, it's nice
to see I'm still listed as the Southern Alberta Program Coordinator on their site, a
year and a half after I left that organization. Web sites always seem
to fall to the bottom of the priority list in most of the non-profits
I've been connected with.)

I was joking the other day that I was going to start a “Favourite
Classmate of the Day” list after Quinn & Margie, two of our
Victoria students, both had me thoroughly entertained by under-dressing
when they day started as a balmy +5 then getting caught in a freak
snowstorm that hit by the end of the day.  “I'm going to be a
Quinn-sicle” is now a part of my vocabulary. 

That's about it for now.  Next time…

Posted 25 February 2006 § Blog § Jobs § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (3) °