some more news about my dad

He has lymph node cancer. But, he doesn't seem too concerned about it. He was more worried that I was going to get him a christmas present that's boring (an indoor bike trainer - he was like that would suck) or clothes (he said, in a nice way, to stop buying him outdoor clothes).

Hm. No idea what to get him. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Calgary is a zoo

I went to the airport and got my work permit today. Crazily, I was in the waiting room for 45 minutes. I started to get worried. Then the agent that was helping me came out and said they had just arrested a guy for manslaughter who was coming in to Calgary and that's why it took so long for him to retrieve my work permit. As he was stapling my work permit into my passport two agents led the manslaughter guy out in handcuffs.

That Calgary airport is a little insane.



Then I went to the zoo. I decided to walk not realizing the entrance off the Bow Riverwalk was closed for the winter. I went the wrong way trying to find the main gate. I ended up walking around the zoo and then walking down a busy "highway" (I don't know, in Canada it might be a highway, it was like 285 in Denver).



I saw some cool animals:

Grizzly bear making his way back into his man made cave. It doesn't look scary in this pic but it was a big bear.

Zebra: note to self, get invited to better christmas parties - these birds stink

"I'm NOT a republican"

(spider monkeys) - "It's FUCKING cold."

releasing your (hee) inner energy

Today I decided to get a massage since my neck still hurts a little. And the spa is on the same floor as the gym so it was convenient to go after my workout.

The woman who did my massage was a stocky but very short indian. She was dressed like a nurse in pink scrubs. I normally giggle my way through a massage (don't know why, as soon as that new age music comes on I feel like laughing). Then, to make matters worse, as I was laying on my back and she was rubbing my shoulders she farted. It was one of those "I thought I was going to get away with it" short high pitched farts. To make matters worse she whispered "oops!" under her breath, no doubt assuming I was asleep. It took every ounce of will power to not descend into hysterical laughter.

I tipped her well.

And, earlier this week, I was listening to this obnoxious guy who works for my company drone on and on in a very loud voice about cloud computing. At one point to show off he said "I'm sitting in my own private cloud right now!"

I had to leave the office for a few minutes until I could get myself under control. It still makes me laugh.

oh, and then the ceiling collapsed

I walked into the office today to discover that the water heater above the area where I work had burst a pipe. Running water all day while I was trying to work. Seriously. Who has an office with a water feature? More like water torture...

waiter...or weirdo?

The sales guys and I went out to dinner at this steak place called Caesar's that is supposedly some old money oil business steak place. I had salmon. They made fun of me.

Then the waiter, an older gent, you know, one of those guys who was probably a roadie for Bob Seger doing a lot of drugs and then ends up as a waiter in a cheap tux looking suit serving shit head consultants like me, took an interest in me. Why I don't know, except maybe I was probably the youngest woman in the joint or at least the only one who didn't look like my face was made of leather.

First he asked where I was from. I guess I haven't perfected my canadian accent (though my spelling is getting better - or they probably spell it "bettre"). There was an awkward moment when he asked me to hold the split in my baked potato open so he could put sour cream in it. No one, in any restaurant, has ever asked me to do that, I swear he was trying to put sour cream on my fingers.

Then, after I declined to have my leftovers wrapped, he asked which hotel I was staying in. I was totally caught off guard (it probably seems harmless when you read it here - it was more the way he said it, like he was going to come by when his shift was off and murder me). I fumbled for something to say trying to not look at the sales guy sitting in front of me because he had this totally shocked look on his face. I lied and said I was staying at some hotel I walk by and he said "yes, I know that place well". An embarrassing silence descended the table as the waiter leaned in towards me as if assessing which limb he would cut off first. Then he walked away.

The sales guys started making fun of me AGAIN. One was like "why would he ask where you're staying?" and the other guy was like "that just seemed so inappropriate". The waiter came by again and spent 15 minutes telling me about a hurricane that hit Calgary (actually, it wasn't a hurricane). The whole situation was weird and getting weirder by the second. He was giving me creepy attention.

We left without having dessert. The sales guys wanted to go to a micro brewery but I was too tired. And who knows what weirdos would be hanging out there.

moving down, moving up

I checked into my hotel on Sunday night and thought my room was a little warm but figured it was because the last occupant (likely middle eastern - there's a lot of them at the hotel - I'm not being racist) had the heat fully cranked. It was 86 degrees F when I got in there. After opening two windows and turning the thermostat to 50 I got the temp down to 79. I didn't get much sleep.

The next morning I figured out there was a problem because the temp hadn't changed at all. I called the front desk and they promised to fix it. I got home from the customer site super late (1 am) and realized my room was fucking hot, still. I was too tired to do anything and opened the windows again. I had the worst night's sleep ever.

So Tuesday morning I called the front desk again. They promised to fix the heat, again. Fucking liars. I got home at 7 Tuesday night and my room was scorching hot.

I called the front desk and they sent up a maintenance guy. He was like "this is not going to get fixed anytime soon". I called the front desk again and asked for a new room. The guy I talked to said the hotel was sold out. He offered to turn down the boiler and recommended I open the windows really wide. I was like look fucker, I need a NEW ROOM. He offered me a smoking room after I threatened to leave the hotel. They said they'd send up a bell hop with my new keys who would also help me move.

Then the front desk called back and said a guy was checking in who wanted to switch his room for smoking. Since I hate smoking rooms I was like "sure". Seconds later the bell hop showed up and didn't believe me when I told him he had to go back to the lobby to get different keys for me. He was french, and therefore dramatic and not entirely smart. He was arguing with me like I would make up this shit. Finally he said "I'm going down to check this out. I may or may not see you again."

The end of the story is that I moved from the 27th floor to the 10th floor. I'm used to staying on the top floors so it was a little weird having to go to the 10th floor. But I ended up with a suite that has a kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom (obviously) and 2 bedrooms. Oh, and a private balcony.

Just got home after work and dinner with two sales guys. My room is freezing. Just cranked up the heat.

Hee.

not edmunton

Ech. I got on my plane today to fly to Calgary and the pilot kept saying we were going to Edmonton. I figured he was just an idiot (and flying our plane - yipes). The stewardess finally stuck her head in the cockpit (I was in bulk head so heard the whole thing) and said "we're going to Calgary!" and he was like "but the cloud cover is low, they are directing us to Edmonton as a back up".

I was like fuck fuck fuck. I did not want to land in Edmonton and then have to drive to Calgary in a shit rental car in a snow storm.

Luckily the weather cleared and we were able to land in calgon. I was the first person off the plane and cruised through the first part of customs. Then I had to wait in line to get my new work visa. No problem. There was only like 6 people in front of me, none of whom spoke english or even seemed to understand the concept of approaching the counter to talk to an immigration officer.

Luckily (I guess) the woman who denied me a year long visa last time I came through calgon saw me in line and waved me over. She was like "you're back, I recognized your hat" and I said "I normally don't wash my hair for at least a week before I come here so I have to wear a hat". She smiled, demanded to see my diploma for my master's degree (I actually had it this time), updated the system so I never have to bring my degree again, decided that since my customer was bringing me back I must know what I'm doing, asked a few questions about my resume, and then gave me a year long work permit.

Good news.

Except. The fucking printer wasn't working. So I have to go back to the airport this weekend and get my permit because she couldn't print it for me. She swore I could wait until I flew out to pick it up but my current permit expires 15 December and I'm here until 17 December. I don't want to get in trouble. I'll probably go to the airport this weekend.

I have to admit she was really nice this time. And I waited in line longer to get my rental car (hey, I'm president's circle, I have to wait in line??????) than to get my work permit.

My room is nice, but not as nice as the last time I stayed at this hotel. I got a king sized bed but my chair doesn't have an ottoman. They are trying to find one for me. Given some of the hotels I've stayed in I don't even know why I'm complaining.

update on my dad

We were talking on Sunday morning and my dad said that his doctor found a swollen lymph node in his groin. It could be bad as my dad has had very aggressive cancer. I'm hoping it's okay because lymph node cancer usually doesn't hurt (he was having pain which is how they found the mass in his lymph node) and his blood work came back okay.

He has a biopsy and MRI on Friday. Stay tuned...

pain in the neck, part 2

And, my neck is better, a lot better, but still not great. My doctor said it's actually a lymph node causing the problem. It's probably related to allergies (too much time spent the past few weeks on the right coast) or quitting smoking, or both.

I was going to get a massage but have been super busy with work and in the one hour I had to potentially get a massage I decided to get my eyelashes dyed instead.

I hate make up. I can deal with a little pain as long as my eyes look good. When I get to Canada on Sunday I'll do a massage. Luckily my hotel has a spa.

big news

I quit smoking two weeks ago. I know, don't have heart failure.

I did it by buying a fake cigarette. I took a quiz on some website (it was like "you're going to die from lung cancer.org" or some name like that) that figured out what kind of smoker I am. It turns out I hate cigarettes (explaining why I always get pissed when someone smokes near me) but I like to smoke. Fake cigarettes make smoke and do all the things a normal cigarette does, but it doesn't cause you to get cancer. Stupidly, the FDA won't approve them as a smoking cessation tool because they think fake cigarettes will encourage kids to smoke.

?????

Anyway, I did a lot of research and bought fake cigarettes from V2. They are so cool. I love love love them. I have 4 different kinds and one that I can smoke in my car and one I can smoke from my laptop (it connects up through the USB port).

One downside is my voice is kind of screwed up right now and I lose my voice usually by mid-day. My doctor says it's a result of quitting smoking and that it should stop happening...soon. Yeah right. Like when my other doctor said my organs would take the place of my uterus and my abdominal cavity would stop filling with air every time I fly, causing me to fart for like 45 minutes straight after I get off of a plane. That was, what, 10 months ago. Still farting.

If you know anyone who needs to quit smoking check out V2. And do a search on reviews, there's all kinds of discount codes to save you money. Right now my "smoking" habit is costing about 25% of what my normal habit cost.

All savings are going toward paying for a new kitchen which I will hopefully start this summer. Which should be a disaster if it's like everything else I do...

pain in the neck

I woke up this morning at 4:30 after having a nightmare that someone had tried to saw my head off. Surprisingly, when I came fully to consciousness, I was still having severe pain in my neck.

I've never had a back or neck problem before. Sometimes they feel tweaky, but nothing worth writing a blog about. This morning was different. I couldn't find a single position to put my head in that didn't hurt. I kept getting spasms that were so painful I felt like throwing up.

I have no idea what happened. When I went to bed last night I felt fine. More than fine. I even did an extra set of pushups and rollups. Neither of those exercises has ever hurt my neck, even when I over do them.

Panicking because I had to teach today I hopped in the shower and sprayed hot water on my neck for over 30 minutes. No change. I could barely brush my teeth and had to keep my head bent to the right side (the pain is on the left). Also, I could not lift my head up straight so had to stare at the carpet while getting dressed; good thing I don't feel the need to look at my outfit before I go to the office.

I got to the customer site, walking with my heavy backpack on just my right shoulder and almost passing out on the sidewalk from the pain. My point of contact picked me up in the lobby and she was like "girl, what is WRONG with you?" The left side of my neck was spasming so badly that my students started joking that an alien was trying to pop out (it's that noticeable - the muscle along the left side of my neck is totally sticking out and swollen and when it spasms it sticks out even further). One concerned student even offered to bring me muscle relaxers tomorrow (yes, I've been counseled to not take other people's meds so I won't be taking them - but, for the record, I'm tempted).

After forcing myself to do head rolls during the lunch break (or, half rolls) I was able to at least lift my head to normal position. The spasms stopped. I'm still getting a shooting pain from my left shoulder blade to the top of my head.

I fucking better be okay tomorrow. It's sheer hell trying to teach and be on my feet all day when my neck hurts and I can't turn my head at all. Fuck knows what the students at my periphery are doing knowing I can't see them.

my brother and I solve some problems of the universe

I had a great evening with my brother Bob watching two shows, Super Massive Black Holes and Wormholes. My mom wanted to watch HGTV but we wouldn't let her.

During the show we came up with a theory based on those funnel shaped fountains that you drop a penny into and the penny rolls down the funnel gaining momentum until it drops into the hole (kind of like an object approaching an event horizon). My brother postulated that a person would not get spaghettified at the even horizon because we are too small of a mass. However, the Plumber Physicist Leonard Susskin said on the show that a person and space ship would be too small of a mass to ever quite reach the event horizon but they would eventually be spaghettified just the same. He uses and example of Alice as an astronaut in a space suit and Bob in the spacecraft. He famously got into a huge fight with Hawking and won. 

He's one of the fathers of string theory so possibly everything he says is bullshit. Go astrophysicists!

I thought we should launch some kind of space craft to launch things into a black hole and see what happened to them. My brother watched the Minotaur 1 launch and said it looked like "a shooting star but in reverse". I was emailing with him when the launch happened but wasn't there to drink beer and actually witness it.

Then I started thinking about how a black hole is either dormant (i.e. not sucking in everything around it) or omnivorous (eating the universe). I postulated that when the black hole is dormant it is passing material into the galaxy (could explain how certain elements showed up in the milky way that could not have resulted from the big bang) and that when it's consuming that's how we could do space travel via worm holes. 

My brother Bob, because he's a dick, was like "yeah, but the closest black hole is really far away".

If we are right...you read it here first...

if it were easy it wouldn't be called "gardening"

Today I'm digging holes with my dad. We planted bleeding hearts, amaryllis, and some other stuff that the deer supposedly won't eat. My dad made me dig a big hole so he could move the dirt across the yard. After I dug the hole (had to use a pick ax to break up the soil) and moved the dirt with the wheel barrow (it wasn't easy) he filled the hole I had dug with dirt from a bag. I was like "why didn't I just use this dirt instead of transplanting that dirt?"

He was like "hm".

my dad's office building exploded

Today my dad left work early to pick me up at the airport. Which is lucky since his office building exploded. No one was hurt. But now he's freaking out because we're supposed to go for a meeting tomorrow (we'll have to find somewhere else to meet) and he left his laptop in his building. They just sent him an email that he can't get into his building.

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20111121/NEWS01/311210043/Explosion-causes-fire-at-GE?odyssey=tab|mostpopular|text|FRONTPAGE

crooks and contracts

I sent my book contract to my uncle Joe last night since he is a lawyer and a CPA. He sent me his review this morning.

The contract is shit and the agent has pending litigation against him for defrauding other writers. Fucker. I wish he was here so I could kick him in the nuts.

Oh well. I have a few days next week to send out more queries.

I <3 rejection.

some news on my book

I submitted my manuscript to an agent back in August. I never heard from him so I finally emailed him again. He had never received my manuscript.

He told me he would reply back regarding my manuscript in two weeks. I heard back from him on Monday, one week. He is interested in publishing my book. So, now I have to get a lawyer to review the contract, etc. Stay tuned...

I haven't gotten to post my good news because I've been insanely busy with work and travel. San Fran on Monday, back to Calgary today. On the road until Christmas.

Yee haw.

erased

[at the suggestion of a friend I sent this story to I'm publishing it here - I'm in San Fran - apologies to my dad for breaking into his desk]

Smelling the ocean air here with my hotel room window open... I don't know why, but the smell of salt in the air always reminds me of when I was 4 and my dad had rented this little cabin on a beach in Massachusetts during the winter because it was cheap. The chairs were yellow vinyl and completely uncomfortable. We had to wear our winter coats all the time because there wasn't good heating, or maybe my parents didn't use it to save money. The door was painted red with a white x that covered the whole door and a white border. The cabin always smelled like the ocean.

 

One weekend it was raining really hard and all of our toys had gotten packed (we must have been moving somewhere), we had nothing to play with, and my parents couldn't send us outside, so my dad went down to the local market and brought back some erasers for us. The erasers were shaped like animals (flat, not a whole 3d body, with ink faces and body details like feathers or fur drawn on them) and they had eyes glued on them with the pupils that move (I used to call them googly eyes). There was a blue dog and a pink rabbit that my sister picked, she got to pick first because she was older, then my brother Bob picked a yellow lion (he was youngest so got to pick next) and a gray elephant. I ended up with a green owl and a red cat which was fine with me. I was playing with the owl and the cat and they were having a conversation about spaghetti. I guess I was irritating the shit out of my dad because he said "owls and cats would never talk to each other because the cat would want to eat the owl so stop pretending they're friends".

 

I thought about that for a while and then decided the cat should eat the owl. But since the cat was just an eraser and couldn't eat the owl I bit the owl's head off but then decided to keep the rest of him intact so the cat would still have someone to play with. At dinner that night I put my erasers on the table and when my dad saw that I had bitten the head off of the owl he started yelling at me about how I would never get a toy again because I ruined my owl. I tried to explain that I was just doing what he had said to do which was the wrong thing to say because it just pissed him off even more. He took the erasers away from me.

 

For years after that I would go through his desk when he wasn't home (it had a lock but I figured out how to open it with a screw driver - my brother Bob used to lock himself in the bathroom and not be able to open the door so I got pretty adept with opening locks) looking for my erasers. Never found them.

guess who's getting a new computer

The answer would be...me!!!!!!!!!!

I get 3 to choose from, and after a long discussion with the geeks at my client site, I know which one I want (even though it won't fit under a plane seat - they were like "dude, major RAM upgrade!" - I was like, "um, ok").

And demonstrating my company's complete illiteracy of technology, my manager, in response to his manger's manager's email asking why he didn't respond back to my email asking for help last week with my laptop, sent an email, repeat, SENT AN EMAIL, saying his email has been down and he hadn't got my email.

He can send, but not receive, email? What, he switched to a guy exchange server? Can send but not receive?

On a total random side note, check out this book the canterbury trail. I've only read excerpts, but it's really good. I've heard from a friend that the bone cage is great too.

looking for nemo? I found him...at my customer site

Today my customer received a shipment of toy helicopters from china. They are moving offices but since they are a tactical team they will move last. The building we are in is deserted, meaning, of course, a perfect place to fly remote control helicopters. The group of guys I'm training took great pleasure in buzzing the choppers over my head as I was trying to work.

Yes, everyone I work with is over 30.

To avoid the chaos and try to keep training on track I moved everyone to the board room (or, they call it the "bored room" when I'm in there with them).

A knock at the door. I opened it expecting to be kicked out by the chief guy because it's his room. Instead a rather large helium filled Nemo floated over my head and into the air space above the conference room table.
Needless to say order broke down. I retreated to an office to write sql statements. For the most part I could successfully ignore the crashes when a helicopter hit the window. I was not allowed to try to fly one of the helicopters or the remote controlled fish because I'm a woman and "women can't drive".

The nemo balloon is called an air swimmer. It's on youtube, funny video link here. I'm seriously considering buying the shark.

manuscript update

On Friday night I finally got off my ass and sent an email to the agent that asked to read my manuscript at the end of July. I haven't heard from him and it's been a few months...

I should have contacted him a long time ago. I received an almost immediate response from him saying he never received my manuscript. I emailed it to him again this morning. He promised to get back to me within 10 working days and said he was excited to read it.

Fingers crossed...