Archive for the 'Life' Category

I’m looking out the window into our back yard, where we have several big flower bushes with hundreds of flowers in bloom. It is spring… except for the little fact that it is pelting down snow at the moment.

Snow… in lower mainland B.C…. at the end of March. Did someone forget to send the memo out indicating that it is spring? Any time this sort of thing happens, I really wonder about the whole “global warming… the sky is falling! We are all dooooomed!” mantra. Sure, it is just one isolated incident, but as an individual it is really hard to accept that the world is markedly warmer when I’m looking at snow falling at the end of March.

Ah well… back to watching the flowers droop under the increasing weight of the snow. I’m exaggerating, of course: the snow is melting as soon as it hits the ground, but who knows? We could be entering another ice age as I speak.

I promised earlier that I would post some pictures and information regarding my home office “refresh”, and this post is my attempt to fulfill that commitment. I’m basically done, and I’m happy with the change- happier than last year.

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I just completed a completely unnecessary and unintentionally expensive upgrade to my main gaming computer. Of course, this means it is time for something to unexpectedly break and need replacing.

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I am in the midst of another office cleanup. Unlike last year, I don’t think I’ll bore / shock you with too many pictures. But as I shuffle things around, I have to occasionally shut down the network- including the server that provides this website. I expect the outages to be fairly brief: so far, there have been three outages of under thirty minutes each. But you have been warned.

One thing that is different this year is that I am attempting to dispose of a vast quantity of outdated/no longer used computer bits. I have four chassis, three of which have partial or nearly complete PCs ranging from a pentium III to a dual processor Athlon. There are also three CRT monitors, a stack of hard drives, another stack of network hubs and cards, and several boxes of “miscellaneous parts” (including RAM, sound cards, and other odds and ends). Most of the stuff is over five years old, and I can’t honestly tell you why I’ve held on to it other than it is hard to dispose of.

I plan on renting a truck later this week to cart it all to the Goodwill electronics recycling depot: they reuse what they can, and break down/dispose of what they can’t use. The scary thing is that I need a truck… I’ll probably post a picture or two of the loaded truck once it is all done. And probably a picture of the finished re-org: the “in progress” pictures would be truly frightening.

The final chapter… the nail in the coffin…. the slow, inexorable decline into oblivion: I’m there. I went to the optometrist today and, horror of horrors, I need bifocals.

Naturally, since I’m a geek, I can’t just get ordinary bifocals and be done with it. No, I’m getting progressive lenses, and even then that isn’t good enough. To satisfy my cravings for technical superiority, I’m getting wavefront technology progressive lenses by Hoya. What this basically means is that the distortions traditionally associated with progressive lenses are reduced by a much more complicated lens.

None of this diminishes the fact that my eyes have betrayed me yet again. I can expect continuing degradation in my vision for at least another decade before my vision “stabilizes”. There are no signs of glaucoma or other more severe issues so really this is just a bit of trivia directly related to my advancing middle age.

This isn’t any kind of real surprise to me: my eyes have been getting progressively worse since I turned about 30. But there is something rather depressing about hearing the word “bifocal” in conjunction with my own vision. Next on my list: a cane, so I can wave it at the kids as I shout at them to get off my lawn.

Irene and I went to see Bill Cosby on Friday night at the Red Robinson Theatre. I’ve always enjoyed Mr. Cosby’s stand up comedy, but I have never actually seen him “live” before. Despite the fact that Bill is over 70 now I can assure you that he still has “it”.

A few things I like about Bill Cosby were born out by his live show. He’s a “clean” comic, by which I mean he doesn’t resort to using an endless stream of profanities or toilet humour. I don’t mind risque content, but it seems to me that a lot of comedians have focused more on “shock” than comedy. I prefer Bill’s approach, and find it refreshing. Mr. Cosby is also very relaxed in his approach, which some folks may find less enjoyable. It is like you are chatting with a friend who is just naturally funny- meandering stories with comical “bites” now and then, rather than a staccato burst of rapid fire sequential set ups. There were times that I wondered if he had forgotten where he was going with his story, then all of a sudden the punch line came. Maybe he is forgetting his script, but if so his 50 years of being a comic means he can make something up that is still funny.

A couple of telling things about Bill Cosby’s style: the fact that he had a comfy chair and a side table on the stage…and that he picked both up and moved them closer to the audience right at the outset. I don’t think that was part of his show, either: after everything was over, Irene and I watched while the crowd thinned and the stage crew came out and relocated the whole set closer to the audience.

Bill, I think, likes that “I’m just that funny friend who you are visiting to have a BS session with” effect. Bill’s style is, to me at least, sort of the polar opposite of the frantic, almost spastic humour style of someone like Robin Williams (who is another comic I’d like to see live). Some of that may be the fact that Bill is getting on in years, but the result is a style I find very enjoyable and warm.

The show was, unfortunately, shorter than I would have liked: an hour wasn’t quite enough for me. But on the other hand, I imagine it is a long time for the comedian. And I don’t feel cheated at all- I just was having fun with Bill’s stories, and wanted more. Bill ended with a classic most Cosby fans would recognize: his “dentist” skit, complete with the acted-out results of dental freezing injection. Irene had never heard that skit… here it is from 1983:

I’m 44 years old today. I can’t complain about the day so far: my lovely wife gave me two (2!) XBox games for my annual “I’m older but still alive” celebration- Mass Effect and the Half Life 2 Orange Box collection, both of which were at the top of my list of “want” games. How cool is it to be married to someone who will give you games this good for your birthday? And my Mom gave me a very snazzy shirt as a gift- I’m feeling pretty spoiled.

And apropos of nothing…isn’t it neat that an online encyclopedia (Wikipedia) has first-rate information on computer games that were released within the last couple of months? Both of those links above are from Wikipedia, if you didn’t notice. The world is a wonderful place!

My brother Dennis and his kids Dustin and Jhillion dropped by yesterday and we had a good visit for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon. I guess calling Jhillion and Dustin “kids” is becoming increasingly inaccurate: both of them are old enough to vote now. Bizarre: it is becoming increasingly obvious that I’m getting old when my younger nieces and nephews are in university and working for a living.

What will I do today? Well, most likely I’ll power on my work laptop sometime today and see what horrors await me there. Maybe I’ll have a celebratory beer later… or possibly something stronger

First, I should explain the above reference. Moe, the bartender in the Simpsons, once referred to Homer as being “fancy” for calling his garage a … garage. When asked what it should be called, Moe responded “A car hole”. My closet has been the place I throw clothes I’m not currently wearing for the last several years, so calling it a “clothes hole” seemed appropriate.

The basic organization of my side of the closet hasn’t changed since we moved from Alberta. To be honest, there really wasn’t much organization to begin with: one small section for “work” clothes, one section for sweaters and shirts, and one section for “other”. Unfortunately, much of the space in this closet had become cluttered, confused, and generally unhelpful for the purpose of actually locating anything to wear. Golf shirts that I wear at work were mixed in on the shelf with T-Shirts I wear at home and not hanging on hangers where they belonged, because the hangers were all occupied by pants that hadn’t been worn in years. It was like someone had taken all the clothes from a Salvation Army drop box and thrown them willy-nilly onto various hangers, and then pushed me into the room and said “get dressed- you’ll look marvelous”.

There was one other set of factors that led me to the conclusion something needed to be done: much of the clothing in my closet was no longer something I would wear. “Stuff I wouldn’t wear” fell into two basic categories:

• pants with waist sizes that mocked my now portly midsection
• other clothes that I was keeping more because of fond memories than out of any expectation I was going to wear the item again

It was time to take action.

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It is now 2008. In two more years the Winter Olympics will almost be open here in the Vancouver area. Irene and I will hopefully have a trip away from the area planned so we can avoid the traffic and endless “Olympic this” and “Olympic that” nonsense.

But what about now? Let me tell you about the incredibly fast-paced, party a minute life Irene and I live. Irene got off work early yesterday afternoon. She came home, complaining of a sore throat and feeling tired. We went to have a nap. I woke up at around 8:30 PM and watched TV, then went up stairs at midnight to wake her up and say “Happy New Year, honey”. She got up and had a snack, and we chatted for half an hour before she went back to sleep. I puttered on the computer until 3:00 am and went to sleep as well.

Yep, party a minute here at Casa del Adams

Happy New Year, everyone!

I remember spending a couple of summers on my Uncle George and Aunt Yvonne’s farm when I was about eight or ten years old. Two of my Uncles, George and Charlie Gillies, and my Grandma lived near Big Beaver, Saskatchewan. The family farm, split between the two brothers, had grown to several thousand acres from Grandpa’s original homestead. It sat on the American boarder…as I recall, the big “excitement” was going across the border to Scobey, Montana, to use their swimming pool or shop in the American stores.

For me, though, the best part of spending those weeks on the farm was seeing a different way of life from what I was used to in the city. I was too young to appreciate it properly, I suppose, but the time spent with my cousins Mark, Greg, and Karen formed all sorts of good memories. I recall breakfasts in the big kitchen, riding in George’s new four wheel drive tractor, and following Mark and Greg around as they did chores and generally did things young boys do like play with the old farm equipment or shoot gophers.

One memory sticks in my mind of a “round up”, where the local farmers were moving some cattle from their own pastures to the community or shared pasture. Greg and Mark had an old grey horse, and I recall they put me up on it and we did a bit of “cowboying”. I’m sure they thought I was a bit of a pain in the neck, sort of useless baggage that they got stuck with entertaining. But for me the memories have that hazy “wonderful summer” feel to them, like something from a movie.

The last time I recall seeing Mark and Greg was probably when my Grandfather passed away: I guess I would have been around 13 or 14 then. I barely recognized them at the time, and in all the years since I haven’t really thought much about them. I heard the news from Mom now and then: Mark and Greg leaving the farm, becoming welders or various things, Greg getting into body-building and then professional wrestling. But it was more or less all somewhat fantastical: I had a cousin who was a pro wrestler, with a stage name (Doby Gillis, or “Mr. Gillis” later) and everything- kind of neat, but hard to imagine being “real”.

I found out earlier this week, on December 23rd, that my cousin Greg had died of a sudden heart attack earlier that morning. He had been at home in Coquitlam from his work as a heavy welder, which often took him to places like Fort McMurray, Alberta. His girlfriend was holding him as he died. He was born three years before me, in 1961, and died only a few miles away, without me even knowing he was there.

Thank you, Greg, for being a temporary brother to me all those summers ago.

Update: The wrestling community is responding to Greg’s sudden death- this article by Dan Denton seems to be the most complete.