life

As per my usual habit, when my life is in flux I pretty much forget about this thing and focus on what’s happening in my personal meatspace. I’ve now moved 3 times in the last year and a half, and I do hope I won’t be moving again for years since I am in a friends-with-benefits relationship with a mortgage.

I moved into my new condo on Tuesday, and I love it so much that I would bore you with telling you how much. It makes all the years of living in really crappy buildings and saving up my money seem worth it now. I’m sure it will bore me eventually, but right now I’m really enjoying my view:

Suddenly friends downtown are wanting to do stuff with me, and friends in the suburbs now want to do stuff with me too. It’s like I’m now cool enough or something, even more than when I got an iPhone. Luckily I’ve always had a dream that one day I would be cool, and I don’t mind if it’s for shallow reasons.

I’m only half moved in at the moment; there’s still a mountain of boxes in my living room. Yet again I hurt myself during the move (this time my hands, previously my shoulders) and under workmates’ orders I’ve been trying not to work my hands too hard lest I give myself more RSI pain. I’m also missing:

• a sofa
• a dining table
• shelves
• and where the hell do I put the towels?

This suite is 516 sq ft, which means I’m losing over 100 sq ft from the last place, and 200 from the one before, and 600 from the one before that. I’ve been getting rid of furniture and stuff at each move, and luckily my remaining stuff, plus the eventual couch and table, should fit in fine, at least once I know where the towels go.

The in-suite washer/dryer have made my life so much better. No more hoarding quarters and loonies, no more dragging bags to the laundromat, or waiting for people to get their stuff out of the washers and dryers so you can use them. Someone recently told me that you can actually use loonies and quarters at stores to buy things! I had no idea they were so versatile.

The cat survived the move, with much whining and hiding in bathtubs.

She thinks the front-loading washing machine is a blockbuster movie. She ignores the 42″ TV, but watching clothes swish around in soapy water is where it’s at.

Oh, Tron Legacy comes out on DVD/bluray tomorrow! And Future Shop is a 10 minute walk away! So are places where they filmed the city scenes in the movie! Downtown is so awesome.

Intermittent blogging will continue most likely after I’ve moved into my new condo at the end of the month.

It’s above a Tim Hortons, i.e., my dream has come true. All the timbits I want, all the time! Or whatever hours they’re open.

In the meantime I’ve been suffering from a cold that turned into a sinus infection. I’m now on antibiotics for it, even. So much for thinking my immune system was functional.

Oh, and for anyone I know through “the industry”, I’m not making it to mysqlconf this year, if only because I didn’t ask to go. Though it’s too bad, I already had an idea for the follow-up to my Ignite talk from last year.

A friend said to me a few months ago that after I get laser eye surgery, it’ll quickly feel normal and I’ll soon forget what it was like to not be able to see without glasses.

He was right, and it’s kind of unfortunate. I’ve already moved on from the whole ordeal, except for the strict eye drop schedule. And this is not even two weeks since I was stressing out because I was healing slower than expected. I don’t know, I was sort of expecting a long period of cheerfulness once I could see clearly, but it may have only lasted a few minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, it is awesome. Getting up no longer involves having to feel around on the bedroom floor for where my cat knocked my glasses off the bedside table sometime in the night. My lenses don’t fog up when I enter buildings from the cold outside. But it hasn’t directly produced any fun, and where are all those hot guys I was supposed to be attracting now?

As for my sight itself, I am not yet 20/20 (and may never get there), but my eye doctor said I could drive without glasses. And that’s what I’ll tell the officer when he pulls me over for driving a stolen vehicle without a license.

The only downside to the PRK so far is really more my insomnia’s fault, and it has to do with the fact that I can’t hide the under-eye circles (well, with makeup, sure, but I still have to acknowledge them). When I wake up in the morning I can see myself clearly, and that’s just cruel. Glasses mean never having to say you’re tired.

This blog post title was one of the questions in my mind while recovering from the PRK. Nobody talked to me about the inevitable scent of burning cornea, not my close friends who’d had it done, nor the laser eye centre itself. The smell is rather unpleasant, especially since you know it’s yours. It goes away pretty soon, but still, why the secrecy about it? It’s not like it’s a huge surprise, what with there being lasers pointed at you. I dunno, maybe a bit of warning would’ve been nice.

I’m talking to the blog of course. I don’t write on here anymore because there’s Twitter and Facebook. So succinct, on top of it. Who has time to write entire paragraphs?

I’m getting laser eye surgery tomorrow!!! I’ve been busy preparing, and by preparing I mean freaking the hell out about it. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and if it wasn’t obvious the Sleep Cycle app would tell me in pretty little graphs. It’s a useful app, if you want empirical data showing how much you fail at zzz’s.

Last night not one but two people at the dinner table offered me Ativan to help me chill out. But I Said No To Drugs, because Mom brought me up right, plus I had some Zopiclone already. I try not to pump myself too full of pharmaceuticals; the laser eye surgery place already had me pick up some Flax Seed Oil and Omega 3 and Vitamin C “to promote healing”. Strangely they didn’t say anything about Timbits, which just shows what they know.

Though speaking of supplements, I’ve been taking Vitamin B12 and I think it’s the cure-all of pretty much everything I’ve been suffering from, except of course from nearsightedness or lack of sex. I usually get sick two or three times over the course of the winter, but this year I’ve only had the odd 24-hour thing where I feel normal again the next day. And the working from home schtick isn’t the reason, I got sick lots 2 years ago when I was contracting, and I’m taking transit and making out with people lots more now (just not sealing the deal, tragically). I took B12 pills on the odd chance they’d help with chronic canker sores (omg they so do), but there seems to be a bonus of my actually having a functioning immune system for once. Of course now that I’ve said this I’m totally gonna get sick in the next couple days, Dad’ll probably sneeze on me when handing me dinner (when I spend the first few days of recovery at his house).

I’ve managed to convince friends on Facebook to refer to this laser eye surgery as “Pew Pew!” (the sound of laser guns in scifi movies, it totally ruins the effect if I have to explain it but sometimes I’ve had to). I think a few people are going to be disappointed that I didn’t get lasers implanted in my eyes, which I admit would be cool but I already have other mutant powers you don’t know about.

I’m hoping the PRK I’m getting tomorrow will be more like this:

And not so much this. No, I want the sexy lasers.

In case I forget, just like I forgot where my passport was yesterday and missed my original flight to Mom’s house. Now I get to cross that one off my list of 50 Stupid Things To Do Before I Die.

I’m in Enderby, BC now, and there is Granville Island Lions Winter Ale in the fridge. Merry Christmas!

My birthday gift to myself this year is laser eye surgery (next month). Last year I gave myself a big TV, so obviously the next step is to be able to see it better.

I’m also going to see Tron: Legacy tonight at midnight. Some of you may remember I’ve been excited about this for a while now. I’ve been told that the new movie isn’t that great, but I wonder what people were expecting, Shakespeare? I just want it to look cool, and the trailers so far look really cool:

My evening plans also involve alcohol and a Christmas train. I expect to be very tired and sore tomorrow.

So I got over that cold/flu/horrible thing eventually. It was bad. I didn’t leave my apartment for 6 days (Dad brought me groceries or I’d have starved). It’s okay now.

I decided while sick that being sick without cable tv is really fucking boring. Fine, I could download stuff, but when you’re really miserable it takes energy to decide what to download and type it in and then wait a while and then remember what you just downloaded. Cable is already there so you can sit there motionless except for your thumb on the remote and your runny nose and have your mind blanked out by senseless crap. I never realized the importance of senseless televised crap in my life until now.

Shaw gave me some crazy deal and I got an HDTV PVR and a whole lot of channels, so now my boob tube is high-res. Don’t see any point to it for most shows, but at least it’s guaranteed widescreen. I’ve had arguments with friends over whether the Canadian tv channels should just show everything in 16:9 (that’s new, anyways) even though there are still people around with old CRT televisions. I say yes, but then it’s easy to say yes when your tv is 42″ diagonally.

Randomly, here’s a list of indie bands with the word “whale” in their name:

• Freelance Whales
• Black Whales
• Noah and the Whale
• Or, the Whale
• Said the Whale
• Sleep Whale

And those are just the ones from my music collection. If I were a decent musician I’d have a band and name it

• LIKE “%Whale%”

But nobody would come to our concerts except a few bored database administrators.