It’s a vacation since I’m not working, but not a vacation since it’s home. Hell, I would probably take a few days in Seattle in there but I have run out of money, having shoved it into RRSPs and paying down debt since I wasn’t expecting to get any time off.

There’s a brunch for me that week which may or may not contain duck poutine. I am very nervous about that, but in a good way.

This time off was decided upon yesterday about 4 pm, so I haven’t made many plans yet and the week is pretty open (though the weekend is filled up with Kimli‘s birthday shenanigans and the hypothetical duck poutine). Anyone on for brunch on Saturday? Or doing stuff during the week? If only I had more friends who were unemployed, damn you all.

I also plan to give myself mercury poisoning via the consumption of immense quantities of tuna sashimi.

I’ve been surprisingly saddened by the recent decision by my parents to give away their Manchester Terrier Seven. Surprisingly because I don’t really like the dog, he barks at every noise and is all nose and elbows, plus he’s a dog. I like my dogs like I like my men, fluffy and quiet and only around for brief visits.

I think my parents got Seven in 2003 or 2004, I don’t remember exactly. He was the runt of the litter (of 9, hence the geeky Star Trek Voyager “Seven of Nine” name) from a breeder in Terrace, BC, and I was visiting when they got him (though I didn’t name him, I was so over Voyager by then). He was cute, but he wasn’t cuddly, though he eventually became so in spite of being all pointy bits and unfluffy, when curled up into a ball beside you in a chair.

Our dog Dom, a Maltese Poodle (very cuddly), had died a few months or maybe a year previous, and he’d lived to be 15 or 16 or so and I’d grown up with him around. Dom’s best friend/worst enemy Samantha (my cat) had died maybe 2 years before that, at 14. I sort of felt when they were both gone that it was the end of an era, as we’d got them when I was in Grade 5. Here they are, old farts at this point, too weak to fight over the sunbeam:

I guess I see pets as family, and I would because I’m an only child so it’s either that, imaginary friends or hardcore drugs. I feel like I’m losing a family member here, and I did something I never do, which is question a parent’s personal decision. I argued with my mom a couple times in the last few days about how I think this is a mistake, but ultimately we agreed that it’s the best thing because she and my stepdad obviously have no soul.

Bah, it still sucks. The reason, really, is that given their move to a small condo from a very large house, plus other life changes, taking care of the dog is harder than it used to be. And the dog is a purebred and while stupid is still quite cute, so there have been a bunch of people wanting to take him. He’s not gone yet but he could be this week, and I’m sorry I was too tired to visit this weekend and say goodbye.

The other household pet is Mom’s Maine Coon cat Spooky, whom they got maybe a decade ago from the SPCA, who guessed the cat’s age at that point to be around 10. That cat is old and crotchety and its fur is all clumped up and matted, and I figure it’s still alive only out of spite for us. Spooks’ kidneys are starting to fail, though, so we probably will be saying goodbye to her sometime in the next year. Oh well, it’s hard to be that upset about the death of a pet that’s had a good life and is frankly on borrowed time at this point.

I think the real reason I’m more upset than I expected is because I’m imagining what it would be like to have to give up my cat Shebang, and that’s a really, really sad prospect. As far as I’m concerned, my home is not home without my pet, and neither are my parents’.

I saw what I think was my first ever Kelowna rainbow last night when coming home from dinner. This is a picture I took from my balcony; some dude who was hanging out in the parking lot below me said they’re pretty common in Spring/Summer when it rains, but hell, I didn’t know it actually rained here, ever. My first month I think it rained maybe half an hour in total. But I like rain, so bring it. It reminds me of home. Also the humidity does wonders for my hair.

My big news this weekend was that I finally bought a dishwasher, my first ever dishwasher that’s mine and not attached to a parent’s kitchen. A neighbour is moving out and sold it to me for $50, so score! Between that and throwing away the cat fur-infused duvet cover, my mother is proud and thinks I may join polite society someday if I keep this up.

My next trip to Vancouver is the week of June 18-20, so please mark your calendars and stock up on the lube.

Supposedly it’s her lack of external gonads that means that unlike her teammates, she did not catch the man cold that was going around the office:

However she may have whined enough to be allowed to have an honourary, if unofficial man cold, and at that she is satisfied.

I am not a lesbian. Just so you know.

Last week someone used the search feature on my sidebar for the word “lesbian” so I’m just going to assume this person was unsure as to the direction of my swinging. Fine, I’m a tomboy, fine, I don’t mention any boyfriends anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m all about the muffins now. Maybe I’m just not telling you about my sexual exploits lest you be jealous of my mad skillz in teh bedroom. No, really.

Well, okay, I am totally gay for Kimli but as she’s won some unofficial award for most-straight-girls-saying-they-want-to-lez-you-up, unfortunately that just supports the case for my heterosexuality.

It’s a shame, because being bi would be so much more interesting.

The issue with the show, though, is not directly about lack of cleanliness but that the people can’t throw anything away. They buy stuff and bring it into their home and never remove it. They may have grown up poor, or they developed a mindset somewhere along the way that throwing stuff away was wasteful and they can’t do it. Now, most of us don’t have the OCD-esque mental health issue that these poor people suffer, but somewhere between religious-vow-of-poverty and them are people like me, who were brought up to be pack rats.

When I was getting ready to move to Kelowna, I got rid of a lot of stuff. Probably a third of all my things, including the CRT TV, big couch, clothes, at least half my books. Yet when the movers were bringing my boxes up to this apartment they commented on how much stuff I had for one person. Shit, and I thought I’d been so thorough!

I read some article online a few months ago in some anti-clutter simplify-your-life sort of website where the person spoke about how when you see the insides of houses of rich people, and in magazines, there’s not a lot of stuff in the pictures. Now, I recognize that the pictures in magazines like dwell are staged (avec placement of unhappy hipsters) and in real life the owners’ stuff is all stuffed into other rooms or inside giant closets or something, but it got me agreeing with the writer:

Maybe rich people buy less stuff?

Clutter is bad. I certainly enjoy my place more when I’ve opened up some space by removing a piece of furniture or put some books away. Various books and articles about self-organization talk about how clutter in your home and desk creates mental clutter and I totally get that. I have not been ruthless enough in getting rid of things that I don’t want or need and they haunt me and make me feel guilty that I’m not using them. Enough, yo.

The other thing, and more practical perhaps is that the next time I move it will probably be on my own dime so will I want to pay to move crap I don’t want to keep anyways. Plus should I actually someday live in an apartment that’s not for low-income people* it’ll probably be smaller since it’ll be newer. Which is maybe why richer people don’t have as much stuff, since their fancy shoebox apartments don’t have the space.

Have any of you gone on mad decluttering sprees in your homes? I’m going to be doing another round soon, once I get over this flu. Of course, since October one set of my parents have been getting rid of the majority of their possessions since moving from a 4000+ sq.ft. giganta-house to a 2-bedroom condo that’s maybe 1000, and I’ve taken a few pieces of furniture from them, so I’m not doing that well, pound-for-pound. The TV stand is nice, though.

*Mom thinks I should be ashamed for living in such cheap quarters, given what I could afford. I agree, I am ashamed, but try finding another building in Kelowna that allows cats.

I did some coding this week at work, and it had been a while. This is actually my first DBA job that doesn’t require me to do any (besides the odd bash script, which doesn’t really count), and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

I had to collect data from a bunch of database servers, each with a bunch of databases and each of those with a bunch of tables, and since grabbing all that by hand would induce homicidal thoughts rather quickly, I wrote a perl script to do it for me. I suppose I could’ve used a different language, but I know enough perl to be dangerous. Plus whenever I do use it I suddenly get this chorus of guys I know, who are a tad fanatical about the language, cheering me on. I don’t know what it is about perl, but I don’t get that encouragement if I use Java (instead, God drowns a puppy).

I’m certainly glad I stopped being a Java developer, if only for the sake of my repetitive stress pains in my right hand (it’s a really wordy language). Scripting languages like PHP and perl have been far kinder on me, as has DBA work.

Way back when I decided to go into computer science there were two aspects of it that interested me:

1. solving problems, and
2. actually creating something (i.e., software).

It dawns on me now that what I like best in database work is when there’s something to fix. At least when it’s not something I broke myself, though that happens often enough. If I can speed up data retrieval, or improve a query, that’s golden. Everything else is pretty lame, though, if I think about it. Documentation, installing new database servers, arguing with developers, I could leave it.

I don’t ever feel I’m creating much, though, at least not these days. And I think I’m aching for that, badly. That half-day of perl coding was the most work-fun I’d had in months. I was able to (mostly) block out the banter going on around me and focus on the code, and that’s so wonderful. I find it harder to get into The Zone with my database work, though that’s probably more because of all the multitasking involved, and having to deal with people.

Maybe it’s time I signed up for an open source project or something.

In removing the posts from this blog I accidentally switched their publication dates to April 25, 2010 (WordPress Fail!), so now I have to fix them with a backup. It sure would be useful if there were a DBA around to help me do that…

So, yeah, stuff.

Did I ever mention that I bought a Kindle? I’ve heard that the ones they ship to Canada have the browsers removed, or only Wikipedia works, but I had mine shipped to a friend’s house in Seattle (to save on shipping and GST) and I picked it up from him at the MySQL conference, so it still has a browser. Score! Unfortunately it’s pretty slow, so I can’t see it being useful, but, it has a browser! It’s like I won something almost!

I am digging it. I got it so that I could read fiction when waiting for the bus, or for the plane, or whatever else I’m waiting for. Also so that I could carry around tech manuals, because you wouldn’t believe how often I’m at work and wanting to consult a book I have at home. And I can’t just carry them around, have you seen the size of the MySQL Administrator’s Bible? You could bench-press that thing! And it’s too thick for my cat to properly lie on it, a la:

(Everything I own is potential cat furniture. But I keep the Kindle in my purse for its protection.)

I am liking the Kindle, though. It doesn’t have the glitter and flair of Apple products but it does win out on being convenient. And I already have 3 iPods, so I can’t get any cooler without dishing out for an iPad. And I don’t like to buy first generation.

I’ve been thinking this past week about my blog and what it means, and what it’s worth to me, all in the context of a random person who might feel that it’s bad because I use profanity here and there and often refer to things grown-ups do for the sake of metaphor. The conclusion I came to was that this blog has at times been awesome and has improved the world with its existence (even if only a little) and I can’t just dismiss it as a minor hobby even if that’s what it’s been lately.

One of my proudest accomplishments since leaving school was the fundraising I did with this blog. $5000 to the BC Cancer Foundation over three events between 2006 and 2008, just from me nagging you lot on this here website. I mean, fine, maybe I cajoled with the promise of pictures of my friends and I parading around Vancouver in our underwear, but that was what the events were about, after all. This year the event is in five cities, and my old team is still running. Go Thunder Panties!

I’ve also managed the odd post that touched people, or made them think, or other sappy stuff. Posts about sexism, and homophobia, and the difficulty of finding a good pair of jeans. One person reads my blog to help his English (though perhaps all the swear words aren’t particularly helpful there). Several people have said they were inspired to start their own blogs after reading this one, and that’s a pretty awesome compliment as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve managed to make a couple people laugh hard enough that I owe someone a new keyboard. Of course, usually the laughs come when I’m not trying to be particularly funny. I like to pretend that people are laughing with me, and not at me; since we don’t see each other I could assume the former, but then again I’d probably laugh at me too.

My good works also include the multitude of cat photos. Because the world doesn’t have quite enough of those yet.

It wasn’t that anyone was saying that my blog was bad. I just had to convince myself otherwise in the midst of turning the blog off and then suddenly feeling like I’d lost my voice. To be perfectly honest, I am really lonely and miserable in Kelowna, but I still had this blog and Facebook and plane trips home to keep me sane. Losing any of that would mean a sadder me, and I’m morose enough at my cheeriest.

Anyways, I’m hoping this was much ado about nothing and I can keep the blog after all along with a disclaimer that of course the opinions stated here are not those of my employer, you ninny. Or maybe something more polite.

We’ll see.

Monday sucked, but I never really expect anything good to come out of Mondays so I got over it. Then Tuesday sucked, for a different reason, and I was starting to feel a bit worn down but it was still early days.

Then today came along and kicked me in my lady parts but it’s still too early in the week to properly give up on society and commence the moping. No, there are still two more days of work where the best I will manage will be my usual apathy with brief periods of sulk between tasks. It’s irritating that I have to wait until Friday afternoon before I can fully commit to the gloom.

I was hoping for a thunderstorm this evening so that the weather could be truly symbolic of my feelings, but all I got was a strong breeze. It did not meet the minimum catharsis quota.

I don’t know where I’m going with this post, other than to document my whining for future comparison.