Les Bonnes Choses

This morning we changed things up a little bit. Normally on Sunday mornings, we drive to Rebecca's parents for a chaotic brunch with her parents, sister and brother-in-law and Jude's cousins. This weekend, we are having lunch at my parents'. There's still chaos, but it's of a different quality.

The route we took to get here had us following an idiot wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap driving a white Dodge Ram pickup truck. For a couple blocks, and a couple of stops at controlled intersections, I wondered why the hell this guy had such slow reflexes when the light turned green and kept drifting in the lane, frequently having to swerve to avoid crossing the lane markers. It wasn't too long before I figured out his impairment: Hormones. It seemed he was physically unable to ignore anything on two legs wearing a dress. I watched several instances where his head would rotate like an owl's as he passed women on the sidewalk. I think it was to the credit of the other drivers on the road with him that no traffic accidents occurred. My only regret is that I didn't think to memorize his license plate so I could post it on the internet. Unfortunately, there isn't any breathalyzer device that could be attached to his car's ignition to prevent someone like that from driving while under the influence of hormones. My best suggestion is that someone should kick the guy in the crotch with a steel-toed boot before he gets behind the wheel.

I've never broken any bones, other than one time playing football, where I may have cracked a rib on Ian Norman's knee as I tackled him. But I never got confirmation on that, so I'm not going to write about broken bones today. I just couldn't think of another title for this blog entry. If you feel mislead, well, that's because I have mislead you. But you still haven't given me that $5 you owe me, so let's call it even.

The crew has just left our house, following an evening of games for me to lose. I'm not too sad about it though because one of the Trivial Pursuit questions taught us about a line of IKEA furniture with a name that corresponded to a German word meaning "satisfying intercourse".

I also went through my blog entries for the past several months and assigned tags to them. I think that means I have a problem. In so doing, I noticed that several of my more brilliant posts have not been commented on. I strongly recommend that you stop what you are doing right now and go back to my first entry and make sure you haven't missed any.

Finally, as of today, I am no longer a big wuss when it comes to riding my motorcycle, as I rode it across town, taking some of London's busier roads along the way. Speed perception is strange. I found myself feeling comfortable doing almost 80 on Wonderland because there were cars that were slowly overtaking me (the speed limit is 60). When I ride around my neighbourhood, on the other hand, 40 feels ridiculously fast as I whizz by houses and parked cars.

Jeez, I'm tired. I'm going to bed now.

New day, new graphical elements. I'm the type who can never leave well enough alone, so when I stumbled across a website with free blogger templates, I couldn't resist trying one out. Unfortunately, it bunged stuff up, causing my wish lists to be discarded, and also took out the important links at the top of the page, so I ended up just finding another blogger layout that I liked. I'm not sure why I did it, other than I have been in a gitterdun frame of mind since this morning, when I rode in on my hog*. I had to change my action plan somewhat because someone from the university maintenance crew was in to fix a water valve that had leaked in the ceiling right above our fancy computer. Nothing was damaged, thankfully, but it's hard to work at a computer in a closet-sized room with plumber-butt just inches away from your face. Instead, I stayed in my office all day (when I wasn't helping Kaz rearrange office furniture) and resumed editing my manuscript for resubmission. When I got home, I set about making meatloaf and cleaning out the dryer vent, which had accumulated enough dryer lint to make a small felt coat. This should not be taken as an indication that we don't know how to properly use a dryer; rather as an indication that the fencing company that built our deck doesn't know how to properly follow a building plan, and instead of building a step-down sitting area as I had asked, instead built the deck so that it blocks off the dryer vent.

*Note: I use the word 'hog' ironically. My motorcycle would never, under any circumstances, be referred to as a hog by a knowledgeable person. I use the term ironically because I don't identify in any way with the motorcycle culture.

Post number two for the day also concerns The Ceeb. This week they have been airing a repeat of the 2008 Massey Lectures by Margaret Atwood speaking on the economy. I would ask why they hell they would get a literary figure to give a talk about the North American economic engine, but that would make me a hypocrite because I'm always spouting off on topics about which I really know little more than the average lay-person. But that just reinforces my thesis that, once you get an advanced degree, you can take it as a license to render your opinion on pretty much any topic that you want and people give you a fair amount of leeway. Anyways, it's not her credentials that are the reason for me shutting off the radio this evening; rather, it's her speaking voice. You know how they have a saying about ugly people: "a face for radio?" Well, she has a voice for newspaper, which I suppose suits her choice of vocation. Ironically, the only other person I can think of that I would find more difficult to listen give that same lecture is former head of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, who would arguably be one of the most qualified people to talk on the subject. I would sooner have nails driven through my ear drums than listen to that man speak for more than a minute.

Update:
This didn't seem to warrant an entirely new post, but I just learned that I am SO screwed.

CBC recently announced a number of programming changes in light of their recent budget shortfall. Highlights (for me):
Changes on Radio One include:

• Cancellations of The Inside Track, Outfront and The Point.


• Reduction of regional noon-hour programs to one hour.


• Reductions in drama.

This is the best thing to happen to CBC in awhile. No more Afghanada? No more Outfront (a.k.a. the pointless depressing story show). Ontario Today will be limited to just one hour of random people phoning in with incoherent observations or questions about how to keep pests off their rose bushes? I may just end up listening to CBC Radio One even more!

I just read a headline on the CBC website:

Hundreds to be hired to process EI claims, says HR minister ...

... and promptly find themselves out of work.

A month ago yesterday, I received a phone call from BMO: my abysmally low-interest RRSP GIC was up for renewal (the anniversary was easy to remember: Heather's birthday) and they wanted to know if I wanted to do something fun and exciting with it. I'm young(ish) so I opted to invest in some investment product linked to the [stock] market's performance. If you've been following the stock market (or even if you haven't) you probably know that things haven't been going very well for investors lately. But I figured, hey, it's got to bottom out some time, and by five year's time, things will probably have picked up quite a bit - I'm wagering significantly more than the pitiful return I was getting on my existing investment. The thing was, for some reason on which I am not entirely clear, I had to wait until March 11th before my funds could be invested in this new market-linked GIC. As it turned out, March 11th marked the first day of the current run of positive gain days on the stock market. Is this more than an uncanny coincidence? Absolutely not. But it's happy news for me nontheless. Of course, my fortunes are just as likely as not to go the opposite direction, so this could just be the same sort of experience a lottery player must feel when the powerball pops up 6 numbers that they picked followed by 3 numbers that they didn't.

Still, the Canadian dollar is going back up along with the price of oil. I hope that trend continues. I need to maximize the value of my savings in $US for the move. Once I'm down there, the loonie is free to tank. Unless I get NSERC, in which case, I'll be torn. And oil? I like expensive oil as a disincentive to driving and for innovation of more efficient and cleverly designed automobiles.

As my facebook status has just been changed to read, today we were doing a spring cleaning purge. Moving companies charge by weight, so dropping a couple of hundred pounds of outdated textbooks and photocopies that haven't seen the light of day in years seems prudent. The reorganization of our storage area has freed up loads of room too. We haven't contacted anyone regarding the impending move later this summer, but hopefully the slow and steady pace we've been taking will get things done on time.

Another option that we've been mulling over is that we could rent out our house. This would save the stress of trying to sell our house by a certain deadline (which in turn requires certain home improvements to be made by an earlier deadline). Two possible problems with that are that our house isn't in what I would call the prime swath of rental area running through the city, and that it's difficult to know what it is you're getting with a particular tenant.

If anyone has any other suggestions about what to do with our house, I'd be happy to hear them. Arson would seem to be an easy route if it weren't illegal. We also live pretty close to a fire hall too, so it would probably just end up leaving me with a house with soggy rugs, sooty walls and the smell of Schneiders Red Hots.

Edit: Just in case my house happens to legitimately burn down before we move out, I should note that the only reason I mention arson here is because this entry is otherwise completely sensible, and I find that if I don't include at least one ludicrous statement in each entry, my audience becomes turned off and I lose valuable ad revenue. But I have no reservation in saying that if I could manipulate the weather, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute in clearing this lot with a surgical tornado. I mean, would you call insurance fraud on some dude who can summon lightning? No, man, you would let that claim ride.

I got an email from one of the bunnies today, noting the time that has passed since my last blog entry. I can't bear the thought of a sad bunny, so here's what's been happening with me since Monday:

On Wednesday, I had a phone interview with Northwestern University. Not the whole school -- that would be bedlam -- just one person. Some questions were answered to the best of my ability. The end result of all of this was that an offer was made. I still had to find out from San Diego what was going on their end before I gave my reply. I don't want to spoil the fantastic surprise ending (I've been interviewing with M. Night Shyamalan), so I'll just say that I probably won't be getting as much use out of my motorcycle as I had originally planned.

Later on that day we drove up to the T-dot where we stayed overnight at John's. Unfortunately, my awesome sister Heather had a night class, and we had to work around Jude's nap schedule the next day, so we were unable to meet up with her and her dreamy husband, X. Oh, and my cell phone wasn't with me. For the vast majority of my readers who are wondering why the hell I'm mentioning these details, it's because I still haven't returned Heather's unanswered phone call to my cell phone, and I'm really, really sorry. Give me a call, I'll be home all night.

Okay, back to my week, and the title of this entry. I mentioned on Saturday that Jude had become obsessed with Steve Lupker. It turns out it wasn't a passing interest because Jude asked about "catching Steve" several times since last Friday, and so the opportunity to visit Steve and talk about toy cars was used as an incentive for Jude to leave his grandparents' house to pick me up from school. I had given Steve a heads-up about the visit, which was pretty amusing from my perspective. Steve had a good rapport with Jude, who was quite happy to demonstrate the multitude of ways in which one could crash a pickup truck. Arguably more amusing was Jude's attempt to persuade Steve that we live out of our car. Unfortunately, he didn't have the good sense to ask if he could spare some change.

Over the weekend, I began the process of changing the oil and filter on my motorcycle, in preparation of getting it back on the road. I removed the old filter, letting the old storage oil drain out, but strangely, not all of it drained out immediately. For some reason, I didn't fasten the oil filter mounting thingie tightly [sorry for the technical term, but I like to be precise with my writing]. Consequently, the remaining oil slowly drained out on to my garage floor over the next 36 hours.

The solution, of course, was to go to the local A & P to pick up some kitty litter, which is brilliant at absorbing industrial spills. In fact, we should dig up our coastline and replace the sand there with kitty litter, thereby inoculating us against future Exxon Valdez type oil spill catastrophes. As I was going to the grocery store anyways, I thought I'd pick up a few other things that we needed. Easier said than done. The entire produce section was completely picked over. Only about a third of the chilled produce cases were stocked. What's up with that? Is there some impending nuclear conflict, and I'm the only one who doesn't know about it? Ha ha! Joke's on me!

Some number of months ago, I applied for an assistant professor position at a Canadian university. Now, despite the fact that the department to which I applied isn't particularly renowned, it is in the Ottawa area. There are few positions in Ontario, and I have always liked Ottawa and Rebecca and I have friends and family in the area, so I applied for the position anyways. So you can imagine what I think of the department now that I have received the following rejection letter via email (or at least, I think I received this letter -- the source of the confusion will be apparent shortly. I changed or obscured some names because it seemed prudent):

Andrew M______

Dear M_______,

Thank you for your interest in our Assistant Professor level position at the Institute of Mediocrity at Inattentive University. The applicant pool was extremely strong and I am sorry to have to inform you that you were not selected for an interview. Because of the numbers involved, it is not possible to provide individual reasons but generally candidates failed to be selected because of one or more of the following:

* Candidate was too senior for a position advertised as at the assistant level. We were required to adhere to that limitation.

* Candidate's research and/or teaching record was more limited compared to the candidates selected for interviews.

* Candidate had fewer credentials compared to the candidates selected for interviews.

Wishing you the best in your future endeavours,

John ______
Director, Institute of Mediocrity
Inattentive University
Ottawa-area, Canada

First, who the hell addresses people by their last name? I mean, emails that begin "Dear [your last name]..." are usually from someone claiming to be a barrister interested in transferring a large sum of money out of an African country. But what am I supposed to make of a rejection letter addressed to another applicant? I spent a good deal of time preparing and sending an application package. Could they not at least get mail merge figured out? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, as this was the same department who lost reference letters from Marc and Paul, claiming never to have received them in the first place.

I'd be hesitant to apply there again, though clearly they need me more than they realize.

So I suppose I should elabourate on my facebook status from Friday. Most days of the week, Rebecca and Jude come by the school to pick me up. Because Jude likes running around the 7th floor of the social science building, they park the car and come up to get me. On Friday, we met Steve and Natalie at the elevator. Jude was a little bit shy about getting on the elevator with strangers and hid behind Rebecca's leg. I teased him about being shy.

When we got off the elevator, Steve and Natalie went out the door to the SSC parking lot, at which time Jude had a change of heart: he suddenly wanted to show Steve his Octane Gain matchbox car. And when Steve drove off in his car without Jude showing off his toy, Jude was greatly distraught. He insisted that we catch Steve. During the entire ride home, he kept asking whether we had caught Steve, whether we were going to Steve's house, whether Steve was going to our house, etc.

So yeah. Steve: He has an appointment with Jude and Octane Gain on Monday.

I'm suspending my blog posts for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, I seldom plan past the end of the week, which is when I'll be marking some assignments that will hopefully not cause me to cringe. Thus, the foreseeable future may be upon us sooner than you might think.

I also really hope that things go well for K and me. I had originally written 'K and I' and was about to explain that 'K' was an initial, whereas 'I' was being used as a pronoun to refer to myself, but then I realized that it would have been ungrammatical, thereby saving me the extra effort of having to issue a clarification. Except that I then went ahead and wrote about it.

Oh, I did want to announce that I am now up to 2 lost friends reclaimed via the internet. The first was Vivian. Sitting on our picture shelf at the top of the stairs is a photo of me, Bill Hodgetts and Nicole Anderson, on the day of our graduation. I knew that Nicole had gone off to grad school at Mac after that, but previous efforts to track her down via the email addresses on her publications were for naught. Fortunately, she saw a comment of mine on the facebook group dedicated to critiquing the abysmal state of research funding in Canada and contacted me. Fait accompli!

...and hopefully not a continuation of yesterday. I am sitting in the lobby of the Orrington hotel in lovely Evanston listening to some classic rock station over the musak. Let me run down how I came to be here.

Yesterday I made a detour to the school to pick up my book to read on the plane, and dump off some old electronics in the electronics recycling bin. I felt like I was in a bit of a hurry because we were on our way to Rebecca's parents' house for lunch, so I made a short cut across the muddy hill up the backside of the social science building because, for no good reason that I can tell, my 1D key does not work on the service entrance door, but does work on the main entrance door (despite the fact that, if you can get in the main entrance, you can easily get to the service entrance from inside the building). As it turned out, it was a poor choice of shortcut given the terrain, and I stepped out of my shoe and into the wet muddy ground when the turf refused to let it go.

Later on in the day I was dropped off at the airport to find that my flight from Detroit to Chicago had been canceled. I would be spending the dinner hour (and a few hours past that) in the airport, rather than enjoying a proper meal with Amy. It was in the airport that I learned the hard way that the currency exchangers there are the LASTpeople you want to do business (in addition to having a rate 5% lower than the bank rate, they also charged me a $2.50 commission). And once my later flight was finally boarded, we were about another half hour late taking off as the airline tried to fit on all the passengers whose flights had been canceled. The last standby passengers sat beside me. They had been flying all day from Mexico -- with two kids young enough to have pacifiers who were very, very overtired.

The plane landed properly on the runway, and Amy was there to pick me up and deliver me to the hotel, so that part went right. However once I got up to my room, I found that the promised internet connection was not working, and so I was unable to check my email to find my itinerary. On the upside, as I lay awake all night long with a case of the Mirandas, I had a chance to figure out what it might be that keeps me from sleeping.

So that brings me to here, the hotel lobby, the only place I can access the internet, and where I will hopefully be met by Jen and Fan before too long.

Another thin envelope arrived in the mail today, this time from a Quebec university. The one thing I would like to comment on was the following let-me-down-easy statement ("it's not you, it's me"):

I would like to let you know that the Search Committee was truly impressed with your academic profile and research accomplishments. [emphasis added]

The use of the word truly implies to me that this reflects a specific evaluation. Maybe I'm being cynical here, but that seems at odds with this being a form letter.

I really must find out what it is that these people getting interviewed have that I don't. I'm assuming that the rest of the envelopes that will arrive in the mail in the weeks to come will be similarly composed, which will make a total of about 20 applications sent out between this year and last, and exactly 0 interviews. I hope I can get my dissertation work published this year, and that it makes a difference for next year...

Rebecca bought Jude a new dragon toy. That makes two plastic dragon figures in addition to the stuffed dragon we bought from IKEA (I had the idea that I might modify it to look like Trogdor). Jude likes dragons, which I can appreciate. I just suggested to Rebecca that I could roll him up a character, which she didn't appreciate.

I will win in the end.

The Canadian Government is currently conducting a survey about household income and spending. Participation is voluntary, but households were randomly selected. Being a researcher, I feel compelled to participate in surveys, so I agreed. It took about 3 weeks for me to connect with the survey guy, Will, and the survey used an interview format, which meant I couldn't just fill out some papers on my own time. On the whole my thoughts on the exercise were mixed: on one hand, it seemed that much of the information I gave the government was pretty useless in that I had to guess at much of it. I mean, honestly, how much do you think you spent on toilet paper in 2008? I'm not being facetious - that question was in the survey. On the other hand, I did learn that I know much less about the money going in and out of our household than I thought I did.

This evening, Jude watched a youtube clip of James Blunt singing a song called My Triangle on Sesame Street:



Somewhere in the song, he used the word hypotenuse, which caused Jude and I to laugh, though presumably for different reasons. Tomorrow is a school day for Jude, and Rebecca said that she and Jude were talking about telling the class about the hypotenuse tomorrow. He's in bed now, and will in all likelihood forget about it overnight. Still, the prospect of a preschooler using the word hypotenuse is irresistable.

My dad tried to teach me a little bit about calculus in second grade. I remember telling Matt MacGregor about parabolas one summer evening when I saw him as I rode my bike. The kids in my grade pretty much all got along well. I can't imagine any other reason why that sort of talk didn't get me beat up.

Maybe I should have a chat with Jude again before he leaves for school in the morning.

As if my education hasn't continued long enough, I received an email from Fanshawe College on Friday from their continuing education program. That I am on their mailing list isn't really surprising, as I took the highly recommended motorcycle driver's ed course, which in this area is run through Fanshawe's continuing education program. A suggestion that I would make to the program's registrar, however, is that they not try to drum up business with an email from fees@fanshawec.ca. If that's the email they use for marketing, it makes me wonder what account is used to notify a person when his or her tuition is in arrears.