In an attempt to temporarily fix our seating problem for the upcoming housewarming party we picked up these “mattress legs” to put on our spare boxspring/mattress set up. The plan was to push it against a wall and set up big comfy pillows on the back for a big comfy couchbed! It would’ve been brilliant!
Though the website doesn’t say it, the Ikea catalogue says “fits most boxsprings”. This is utter bollocks. First off, the bolts come with no nuts to fasten them tightly through any holds in the woodend part of the boxspring you’ll make. They expect the wood depth to be the same as the bolt and for the legs to just screw right in.
And then there’s the placement of the hole. Our boxspring — and all others I’ve seen — don’t have two inches of wood along the bottom that you can bolt things into. Usually the bottoms are just one by fours. Because of this, the hole doesn’t even line up with any wood.
So Mel made some “risers” to put into the angle bracket. Unfortunately it didn’t work all that well because they’re just sliding out now that the legs are on the floor. I wouldn’t trust them to hold any weight.
We’ll be making a trip to the hardware store tomorrow to get some more wood/parts to fix this.
Oh, and we’ve got a great loveseat/hide-a-bed that Fatrick dropped off. Don’t worry housewarming guests, you’ll have places to sit!
My sister Tonya is running in the Canadian Cancer Relay For Life to raise funds for cancer research again. Please join us in donating to a worthy cause by following the link and donating something, even a small amount.
Mel & I will be holding a housewarming party at our new place on Saturday, February 4th starting around 8pm. Bring your own beverages, we’ll have munchies and quite probably some Karaoke Revolution. This invitation is for people who actually know us and not to random blog-readers (it happens, apparently — my Google PageRank is 5!)
Those of you who have seen the new place might have noted the lack of seating arrangements. Ah, therein lies a story.
When we were moving out, my classmates in my Acting for the Camera course asked if they could move in for the rest of the semester. I pulled some strings with our landlord and got the ok. The main organizer of this, Patrick, asked if we were taking our couches with us. If said that of course we were and he said that if we left them for him, he could get us new couches at The Brick at employee discount.
We checked out the couches they had and loved this red one and decided on getting two rather than a couch+loveseat. Patrick said that he needed to get his manager’s ok on it, and that very weekend he had gone to the hospital and they didn’t know when he’d be back. So we went a few weeks without.
Today I finally got hold of Patrick and he checked with his manager and got the go-ahead. He then checked stock on the couch we wanted and sadly informed me that it had been back-ordered… until LATE APRIL.
I’m half tempted to drive a truck to the old house and load up my old couches and be done with it. Four months without couches? I’m having a fucking housewarming on Saturday — where are people going to sit?!
I’ll cool down as I sleep on it and figure out what I’ll do.
My new order of Medifast food/shakes arrived yesterday and I’ve jumped feet-first into it today. Since completing my three months of Medifast last year I gained back nine pounds right away, and then over the holidays I gained another nine (thanks Mom!) putting me at 220 lbs.
I’ve got two months of food for now and might do a third. I’m aiming hard for my target weight of 180 lbs. If I can get a bit under that (to make up for the inevitable 8 pound gain after I’m done) that’d be great, but I’m not going to hurt myself doing it.
I’ll be keeping a new weight/body fat percentage journal for this diet as well as before/after pictures. I’ll present them at the end, like I did before.
My word, it’s the SUN!
It has been cloudy and raining every single day since we’ve moved to Burnaby, so my opinion of the city has been brought down by the general feeling that “it’s grey”. Now there’s blue sky outside and things are brightly lit!
The forecast is for more rain and grey tomorrow, but today I’m actually going to go outside and enjoy it for a while.
Of course, this is the day that a bunch of work drops in my lap so I can’t do it for long…
So the Conservatives “won” a minority government. I voted Liberal, though to be honest I felt badly about it. I was uncomfortable about supporting a party that had become so corrupt, but I’m not a socialist so the NDP is out and the Conservatives and their neo-con ideology concern me.
I think the election results are about the best we could hope for. There aren’t enough Conservative seats to carry out their neo-con agenda, and the Liberals have to take a long hard look at themselves and clean up their act for the next election. I’m glad Paul Martin has stepped down — it’s something he should have done at the outset of the election to give his party a chance. If they’d some housecleaning of people connected with the scandals the election may have turned out quite differently for them all.
In my own (new) riding, Burnaby-New Westminster, the NDP candidate was re-elected with 29% of the vote. I find it very odd that more people can vote against someone and he can still get the position. Perhaps it’s time Canada adopt some form of “tiered voting” where you can enter (if you desire) your first choice, then second and so on. The first round votes are tallied and if nobody has a clear majority the losers are dropped off and all the entries that voted for them are then checked for the #2 vote and so on until someone actually has 50%+1 of the vote. Something like this (I’m being very general about it — I’m sure there are problems with my basic description) would eliminate the drawback of multiple party systems where two similar parties split a vote and a third one gets in that most people dislike. You know, like how Nader took votes from the Democrats in the 2000 Election, allowing Bush to win. In a tiered voting system, people could have voted for Nader and then voted Democrat as their #2 (if they desired).
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
- Carl Sagan, from a lecture delivered at Cornell University: 10/13/94
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Additional: There’s more to that quote.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Every version of Windows needs to get this security upgrade NOW. It’s vitally important that you do because the hole it patches is otherwise unstoppable and could do terrible things to your system simply by browsing a web page that someone has set up to take advantage of the hole.
If you have XP and you have Automatic Updates turned on you should’ve received this yesterday, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure.
Your results:
You are Green Lantern
| Green Lantern |
|
80% |
| Supergirl |
|
66% |
| Spider-Man |
|
65% |
| Catwoman |
|
60% |
| Wonder Woman |
|
56% |
| Superman |
|
45% |
| The Flash |
|
45% |
| Iron Man |
|
45% |
| Batman |
|
40% |
| Robin |
|
38% |
| Hulk |
|
35% |
|
Hot-headed. You have strong
will power and a good imagination.
 |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
We’re 98% done the move. Or at least, the moving-out part. Yes, its’ the 3rd and yes that means it’s taken us six days to get out of and clean up the old place.
The time of year really hurt us. Almost nobody was able to help us move because of Holidays or New Year celebrations they had to attend. We mostly carted stuff the 90 kilometres using our Kia Spectra 5. The hatchback and foldable back seats really helped with the cargo we could carry but it simply couldn’t compare with having a big truck and making less trips.
Star mover of this experience has been Tony Jones who was there for three of our five previous moving days. His huge vehicle helped cut down on several trips and he was there for us when we needed him.
Now that nearly everything is over in the new house the unpacking has pretty much begun. My office room has been my top priority, and the basis of that room is getting my computer desks put together. The big problem: We can’t find the damned screws used to put them together. Much was made of “you can’t lose these screws” when they were being dissassembled. We put them into a plastic bag which was placed into a box along with other stuff, but I’ve been through every box in this house twice now and can’t find them.
So here I sit on the one tiny table that was movable as-is. It barely fits my (huge) monitor and keyboard (er… the keyboard is regular sized) but at least I can sit down and use the computer now.
Daddy’s missed you, baby.
Update: I found the screws!
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