I just got back from the dentist.  Nearly two hours in the chair: in itself, that’s tiring.  But the part that is bugging me at the moment is that the freezing is still fully active.  My mouth feels like its stuffed with cotton or something.  And of course you have to answer a bunch of questions while you are standing at the dentist.  The best part was when my credit card was “declined”: Citibank likes to refuse approval on “unusual” charges periodically.   Trying to talk through that situation is great fun when half your mouth is frozen.

I suspect I’ll be in some pain once the freezing wears off- at the moment, I actually am sort of looking forward to that.  I doubt I’ll feel the same way in a few hours.  I’m a big baby when it comes to pain.

I remember reading about wonderful new dental technologies that were coming “any day now” to completely eliminate decay.  I’d be happy if they worked out a totally pain/discomfort free way to do their work.  Today’s treatment was amongst the best I’ve had in terms of “comfort”, but I still had a death grip on the chair arm every time that evil drill went into my mouth.  Then there are the challenges involved with … spit.  What do you do with the saliva in your mouth while the dentist is drilling away?  Answer: suffer with it, or drool, or struggle to swallow in between drilling sessions.

I go back for a permanent crown in a couple of weeks, then some more work (a full cleaning) a week or two after that.  It’s my own fault for not keeping up with the dental appointments the past few years.  There are no magical technologies to fix my teeth, unfortunately. 

Chris, Kalen and I went boating yesterday.  This is sort of a “traditional” thing, as in we’ve rented a boat and risked drowning three times in the last decade or so.  This time we rented our boat from Sewell’s marina in Horseshoe Bay and went up to Anvil Island.

This map sort of shows the area we boated around.  As per usual, we had a lot of fun.  I probably got a bit too much sun, but I was more careful this time about the sunscreen so the burning was negligible.

During our trip we saw more seals than I’ve every seen in the wild.  I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but did manage to capture one decent shot.

 My friend Chris and I had a great day at the Abbotsford Airshow today.  As per usual, I’m mildly sunburnt (despite sunscreen) and tired.  I also have several hundred photos to sort through.  I was thinking I might get to uploading them tonight, but I think that will wait for another day.

Here is one of my better shots to tide you over until I put up the whole gallery of pictures from the show.  This is a trio of Snowbirds: it only took me about a hundred pictures to get one that turned out this well

Note also that I haven’t done any editing on this picture yet- I haven’t even adjusted contrast or cropped it.  Purdy!

The last couple of days I’ve been visiting with family.  That is, when I’m not playing new games on my XBox 360. 

My brother Ron, his wife Jessie, and their daughter Rebecca were passing through while on a vacation.  We spent the afternoon with the whole local clan at my Sister’s place on Saturday: Judy fed us salmon, and supplied Irene with her special wine.  On Monday Ron, Jessie, and ‘Becca came to our house for a few hours.  Rebecca played with our braver cats, and Iris met her first child.  She was apprehensive at first, but once we reminded Rebecca that cats aren’t fond of hugs, it was perfect.

(thanks, Shane, for the pictures)

I enjoyed visiting with everyone.  I’m feeling pretty lucky today to have such good family.

Today was my last day at work for a couple of weeks.  I still have work to do, but I am no longer on any kind of clock other than one meeting I’m supposed to call in to tomorrow morning.

I don’t take traditional vacations very often.  You know…the kind where you get on a plane/train/boat and go somewhere a long distance from home.  There are lots of reasons why this is the case.  Firstly, we have a house full of cats that are more our children or our demanding house guests than something so crass as a “pet”.  We can’t very well take them with us: most hotels frown on guests with six cats.  And it takes a lot of arranging to find someone trustworthy enough to care for them who has time to do so that just happens to correspond to when we want to take our vacation. 

Secondly, I’m not really that fond of travel in the traditional sense.  If I could basically put my house on wheels, I suppose travel would be okay.  And if I had virtually unlimited time to bumble around, no rush to get home, and plenty of time to recover afterwards: in other words, my next vacation will be retirement.

I’m exaggerating a bit.  Irene and I do occasionally go somewhere for a day or two.  And I expect that we’ll take a couple of longer trips, maybe a cruise or something, in the next decade.  But most of my vacations take place in my own home or the back yard.  I get to sleep in my own bed each night, and I like it that way.

For this vacation, my friend Chris is supposed to be coming out to visit with us.  He and I will definitely go to the airshow (the tickets are already bought).  I expect we’ll probably go out in a boat of some kind (although if it has a sail on it, I’ll be watching from shore), and possibly visit a museum or the like.  Undoubtedly we will go somewhere and walk some vast distance, I will probably get too much sun exposure, and there will almost certainly be some time with me drinking beer and Chris drinking Pepsi talking about the old days.  Those days back when we did adventurous things like roll 20 sided dice and draw maps of dungeons that only existed in each other’s imaginations.  And quite likely there will be some computer games somewhere in there, probably more than Chris wants to play and not enough for me.

To someone who travels the world, parasailing, mountain climbing, and bungee jumping their way to whatever nirvana awaits them, my idea of a great vacation probably sounds pretty dull.  But I am very much looking forward to it.

It was 38 degrees Celsius here on Wednesday.  It was about 32 today, and about the same on Monday and Tuesday.  I like warm weather, but “warm” to me is 25 degrees. 

We’d probably have central air conditioning in our house if this kind of weather was common.  Instead, we make do.  Our house has ”top opening” windows, so in-window air conditioning isn’t an option for us either.  I bought a portable AC unit a couple of years ago, the type with the big hoses you are supposed to route through the window…but guess what?  There isn’t any real way to mount the hoses / vents in top opening windows either.  I can jury rig something with tin foil and cardboard (I’m serious), but it is generally more hassle than it’s worth.

What this all means is we have a bunch of fans running, and don’t sleep terribly well.  The cats sprawl out as flat as possible in the lowest part of the house most of the time.  Amazingly, though, they actually come up and sleep with us: I suppose being near their pet humans is more important than finding a spot that is a few degrees cooler. 

What do you want to bet that, a few weeks from now, I’ll be complaining about the rain?

I captured this photo of an elusive wild mammal in our backyard about three weeks ago

Is it a Sasquatch?  An alien?  Elvis??!!

No, it’s a raccoon…and here is a more recent (and slightly clearer) photo:

Irene and I have been seeing the mama and her three (rapidly growing) babies quite regularly for months now.  But getting pictures has been a bit of a challenge.  Then suddenly I’ve been able to take quite a number of photos during the past 24 hours of the four of them.   All of the pictures are a little imperfect- I was shooting them through our windows, which means there are some reflections and focusing problems.  But I think we finally have a bit of documentary evidence of the critters that have moved in.

I know raccoons are wild animals, and have no desire to interact with them directly.  But I love watching them: they spend a surprising amount of time playing in the daylight hours for nocturnal creatures.  And the Mama bounces around and wrestles with her babies almost continuously.  I don’t know if this is normal behavior, or what.  But it is great fun to watch.  Especially the way they work by sense of touch.  Quite often, they’ll stand there running their fingers through the grass or dirt for a minute or so, not looking at what they are doing at all.  It puts me in mind of how I concentrate on handling something fine when I can’t directly see it: I intentionally close my eyes or look away. 

According to the websites I’ve read that talk about raccoon behavior, this family will probably be with us until about next January.  Apparently, Mama gives birth in one den, then relocates the family at about the eight week mark and, barring catastrophe, stays in the second den until the kits are about a year old. 

[tags]raccoon, kits, babies, wildlife, backyard[/tags]

I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work.  Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring).  Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.

At about 2:45 AM this morning I was finishing up for the day.  I had been making progress for about 14 hours straight, and hadn’t recently checked my work into our version control system (CVS) at the office.  Our cat Iris came strutting into my work area, announced her presence, and when I didn’t completely focus on her, started to bump against me.  When that didn’t work, she started climbing over the obstacles on my desk and bumped against my hand- this netted her a couple of pets, but I still was busy trying to wrap things up for the day.  So she decided to take a walk across my keyboard.

I can’t exactly tell you how she did it, but in two or three little dainty steps she somehow managed to:

• turn off EJB interface decorations in Rational Software Architect/Eclipse
• make my entire EJB project (one of five active in my workspace at the time) disappear

Anyone who knows Iris…

… would realize that I haven’t a hope of getting angry at her.  But there I was, thinking that 14 hours of difficult labour was instantly and irrevocably gone…with this little kitten (a bit bigger now than in the picture, but not much) kneading and purring and bumping against my arm as I tried to fix things. 

Fortunately, I soon discovered that the missing EJB project had just been removed from the workspace- it was still actually there.  Of course, I had to re-run my unit tests and stuff, but I had everything back in order about an hour later…at 3:45 AM.

Well, not completely back in order.  I still haven’t figured out what happened to my EJB interface decorations.  They are little iconic characters that appear next to methods to tell you whether they’ve been promoted to the EJB interface classes or not.  If you see them lying around on the floor*, send them back please- my kitten didn’t mean to lose them.

* I’m kidding, of course: this is a software feature you turn off and on- I just haven’t figured out how she turned them off or how to turn it back on yet…

My back problems flared up today big time.  I have some hinky stuff going on with my C4/C5 vertebrae- arthritic growths/bony spurs, microfractures, and stuff like that.  Once in a while something happens and the bones pinch the nerves that run through/near them, or at least that’s how it was explained to me. 

I’m not a doctor, but I can say this: it translates into a lot of pain.  And the really irritating thing is that it isn’t “heroic” pain: I can’t claim I hurt my back playing rugby or sky diving or something.  Instead, more often than not, I have no idea what I’ve done to make things bad. 

Today, the pain started when I put on my shirt: it was bad enough that I couldn’t breath (the pain sort of runs right through my back and into my chest).  I was contemplating working from home at the time, and the pain pretty much cinched my decision.  Of course, since I’m hurting, I’m not able to be particularly productive.

In fact, at the moment, I’m on enough drugs that its actually getting a bit hard to concentrate.  The pain is still there, but its wrapped in a nice layer of cotton batten, or perhaps more accurately my brain is, and so it seems less important.  I spent an hour with a heating pad on my back, and that seemed to help.  But I really don’t know how people with more severe problems handle it- I doff my hat to people living day to day with pain that probably makes what I feel right now seem trivial.  Thank the powers that be that my concerns are relatively trivial.

Earlier this week I was relaxing in the back yard reading a book.  It was about 6:00 PM, and was starting to cool down after reaching 25 degrees Celsius or thereabouts.  I heard a rustling sound in the vines and some odd “chuff” noises from the corner of our gazebo.  I looked in the direction of the sound, and saw Mama Raccoon hanging upside down and peering at me.

She uttered a few more odd sounds (I am not a raccoon person, but they do make funny noises) and sort of drew her self back up into the branches of the overhanging vines.  At this point, I was perhaps 15 feet away from her.  I heard some more rustling in the vines over the gazebo, and then the crows that hang out in our trees started scolding loudly.  I assumed they had just noticed the Mama raccoon…

As I sat there, watching in the direction I had last observed the Mama raccoon, I heard some more chirrups and chuffs coming from a slightly different part of the gazebo.  The vines rustled more vigorously, and then suddenly three baby raccoons, formed up single file, came waddling along the deck.

They chirruped several times each as they made their way around the deck, coming right past me: barely three feet away.  They didn’t run, or stare at me: they just waddled past and into a gap underneath our deck, one by one.  Each of the babies was an odd combination of adult and baby features: a big head, but a very small fluffy body, and a stubby tail. 

A few moments later, Mama raccoon re-appeared in the same spot as previously, hanging down and making odd noises again.  I decided to get out of her way in case she felt she needed to go to exactly the same place as the babies- I slowly gathered my things up and went back into the house.  As it turned out, Mama raccoon had a different entrance on the other side of the deck that she used.

I saw the Mama a couple more times that day.  I’m finding it odd how active the ‘coons are during the daytime.  I *thought* they were supposed to be more nocturnal, and maybe they are more active at night, but they are certainly making appearances during the day.  According to one useful website I found, nursing mother raccoons will go out more often during the day, and raccoons in general are not purely nocturnal.  No need for infrared cameras then, I guess!