Archive for July, 2005

I’m assuming that everyone likes a story. Whether they read it, or listen to it, be it fiction, reality, a song or whatever. So, why do we like them? Indulge me for a moment…

I was eating my lunch today and thinking about how everything is math—I know I’m generalizing, but you’ll get the idea. Physics is math. Chemistry is physics is math. Biology is chemistry is physics is math. Music is pattern is math (at least good music is.) Art is like music and geometry and is math, but probably subconsciously. Philosophy uses lots of math. Language—is it math? Well, it follows rules but is it math like? Maybe efficient communication is math-ish.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Do we like stories because they are puzzles with rules and clues and conventions that (might be math like) we can use to try to reach their conclusions on our own? Is the fun of a story just in being told a story, of does it engage us when we think we can figure out where the author is leading us before we get to the destination?

I like mysteries a lot, so maybe I’m predisposed to accepting this theory. Then again, maybe we’re all little detectives trying to solve everyone’s literary puzzles.

Isn’t it great when you get picked up from work on a beautiful Friday afternoon (at 4:30 p.m.) and you’re told that you’ve got just enough time to get changed and have a quick supper before your tee-off time?

Well, yesterday, I got out golfing for the first time this year. Nice for me my dad bought new clubs (second-hand) this year. This means that I get his old ones—when I asked if I should return them, he said “No, just keep them.” Doesn’t that sound like he gavethem to me? Hee hee.

Well, unfortunately, dad was out at camp, so he wasn’t able to join Winston (father-in-law) Dave (brother-in-law) and I. It was probably a good thing for him, I was awful—though I did find my lost ball on the second time through hole four (and picked up an extra two balls in the trees.)

But this morning—my back! It’s embarrassing how much pain I’m in. I’m walking like an old man. Not much I can really do, but wait for it to get better and then get back out on the links to build up those muscles.

Well, three days, seven hours later I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Normally, when I’m reading recreationaly, I just do a chapter or so before bed, but this time I filled up a lot of my spare time with it. Jenn of course is a much faster reader than me so she finished yesterday evening.

Without giving anything away, I’ll say that I figured out who the Half Blood Prince was a number of chapters before the identity was revealed (after making some false guesses along the way) and I correctly identified, fairly early on in the book, the character who died.

Now, I have to be careful here, not to ruin anything, but I’m convinced that the person who we think did the deed, didn’t. Jenn developed this theory, so I’m not taking credit for it, but if you want to know what I think, read it and beware of spoilers.

Just so you know, I’ve only got spoilers on my theories page. I hope that if you have comments that would be spoilers that you’d keep them to that page as well. If you want to leave a comment about “Harry Potter is a tool of the devil” go ahead and leave it in the comments here.

Well, we’re by no means settled in Thunder Bay yet, but the anxiety levels are dropping. I’ve got a full week of work under my belt and am feeling like I’m fitting in and am able to “get the job done.” It should be a good job. Our department (all four of us) went out for lunch at The Madhouse on Friday, so that was nice too.

Friday night was Harbron Hullabaloo time. In addition to burgers and snacks, there were a lot of people that I hadn’t seen for a long time. It was good to catch up with them all at once, but there were some obvious omissions to the crowd. It was a last minute thing, so even though not everyone could make it, there was a good turnout.

After the BBQ at Harbrons’ Jenn and I started to head home. It was around 10:45 p.m. and I suggested that we swing by Chapters to see what was going on. At midnight they were selling the first copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We pulled into the parking lot and it was full. Inside there were hundreds of people, young and old, dressed up (and some not) and participating in the fun and festivities. We saw Heather Martin Laakso at the Starbucks and the three of us decided to wait until midnight together. You already know that I managed to luck out and get to the front of the line and had my copy before 12:05 a.m. so I’ll tell you that Heather teaches a high school course that includes C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra. I just happened to be reading through the space trilogy now (well, it’s currently on the back shelf due to the new HP novel) and she promised to e-mail me all her notes.

Robin, Doug and I finished up some recording at Rich’s place and we caught up with a few friends at First Baptist on Sunday, but we spent a lot of the weekend house hunting. We got the crazy idea on Friday and will look into the financial possibilities of the whole thing becoming a reality this week. Never the less, we hit eight open houses and got the addresses of several more places that looked interesting. We’ll see how that works out.

Think of a submarine sounding a ping and getting an echo… from Thunder Bay. It’s me, I’m back and I’m beautiful (five points to the commenter who knows what I’m parodying.) Anyways, it’s been over a week since I’ve been away from blogging, but I’ve got my eMac plugged into my father-in-law’s not-quite-high-speed-but-speedy-enough-for-now internet. So, I should be back to something close to normal blogging now.

First off, not that I think any of the thee will be reading this, but a big thanks to Roy, Peter and Roy for helping Jenn and I pack things up last Monday afternoon. Getting a UHaul was a frustrating task (especially since we had a reservation,) so it was especially nice to come home to these three guys who did almost all the work. Who knew that preachers were such good movers?

Jenn and I spent our last two nights in Ottawa at her sister’s place. Shannon and Don took really good care of us and it was nice to spend some quality time with them before we left. Wednesday morning we hit the highway at 7:30am. In Petawawa I parked on the side of the road with all the other big trucks while we went to the Tim Hortons. We also filled up the 26-footer there with $180 worth of gasoline. Crazy!

We traveled along through Sudbury onto the Sault with little to comment on. We devised some hand signals to keep each other apprised of our condition—did I forget to mention that I drove the big truck (at around 60mph) while Jenn followed in the Bora? The hand signals consisted of &ldquo:thumbs up” for everything is okay and “thumbs down” for I want to stop. The rule was, if someone made a hand signal, you had to respond with your condition. There were only two thumbs down on the whole trip—a bathroom break was needed once and Jenn was confused in the Sault and thought we missed our gas station.

We spent the night at Adam’s Hotel, the same place I stayed when I moved down to Ottawa almost three years ago. We had dinner at a restaurant on the Great Northern Road and stopped at Northern Breweries to pick up some nostalgia for dad.

After putting another $170 in the tank, we hit the road early on Thursday morning and I listened to CBC radio’s coverage of the London bombings. We stopped in Wawa for a quick stretch a couple hours later and then pushed through to White River. I was feeling a little more confident in the truck the second day and the road was smoother, so I had it running close to 65mph. We stopped to fill up again in Terrace Bay ($70 and some A&W) and made for the home stretch. The hills outside of Schriber were worse than those in Montreal Harbour and I was crawling up them at about 40kph.

At around 3:30 pm I came around the KOA hill and caught sight of Thunder Bay. The strangest part of seeing town for me wasn’t that we had finally moved back, but that I was starting a new job. Mom and dad welcomed us with refreshments and food and a nice shower. We took it easy and spent Friday unloading (thanks to Heather, Dave and Caleb,) Saturday at Lake Shebandawon for my cousin Jill’s wedding, Sunday at church in the morning with Robin, the Kuchtas and Andersons, then back out to Shebandawon. Did I mention that it only took about $40 in diesel to drive the VW home and boot all around?

Anyway, I’m getting settled in to my new job and looking forward to seeing some friends at the Harbron Hullaballo this Friday at 5:00 pm.

I’m not leaving until Wednesday, but I’m shutting down the internet tomorrow. So, I’ll blog to you all later this week.

PS: No using the internet while I have it shut down.

Lots has been going on this weekend, so I’ve got lots of little stories to tell. Yesterday, being Canada Day, Jenn and I celebrated by packing up our worldly goods. But that didn’t last too long. After a short while we hopped on our bikes and headed down to the market to pick up some snack things for lunch and then rode over to Jenn’s sister’s place. We spent most of the afternoon there, hanging out on the patio enjoying the light breeze and relatively humidity free day.

When the thunder started rolling we jumped back on our bikes and rode home. We got home about ten minutes before the skies opened, so that was good. What was bad was that Dave Wolframe (who was in town and going to meet us for supper) called just as we got in and told us he and his girlfriend (Jen with one n) were going to walk to our place from the market to meet us. The arrived a half hour later quite soaked. After coming in for a bit and drying out we headed out for dinner at the Lone Star and out for a round of mini-putt. Here are the scores…

Darren: 48 (Woo-hoo! Broke the 50 mark—thanks to three holes-in-one!)
Dave: 61 (We were calling him “Steady Dave, Two-Stroke” until he fell apart on the back nine.)
Jen: 71 (Golf isn’t her game.)
Jenn: 52 (Close but no cigar, baby!)

We went out for ice-cream afterwards and then after cooling off in the old basement apartment wandered down the canal to watch the fireworks. Highlights of the show were the “exploding planet,” “happy face,” “heart” and the one that rocketed up to the plane that was flying around and exploded right on top of it. Of course, it only looked like that from our angle, the plane was much further away, but the effect was cool and got a good reaction from the crowd.

Today our friend Gining took us out for Dim Sum in Chinatown. Perhaps we went a little heavy on the shrimp dishes and too light on the pork ones. In my opinion, it’s always better to err on the side of pork. Regardless, it was a great meal and we finished off by wandering down to one of the Bubble Tea houses down the street.

Now, we’re back at home with some more boxes from the LCBO—empty, to pack with and that’s probably what the remainder of our weekend will be like. Oh, and I’m finding that neverending falling thing to be quite mesmerizing—and funny—and weird.

Keep in mind this first example is of a mannequin. Apparently, it obeys the laws of physics as it falls through an infinite sky of spheres. If it gets stuck, you can click and drag it—even if it’s not stuck, that’s kind of fun. Jenn thinks it’s too weird to watch, so your mileage may vary.

The second example isn’t quite as neat, but it’s still worth a quick look. It’s a “liquid-man” who just follows your mouse pointer around the window.