Friday, April 16, 2004

Today's Piece of Wisdom

"Terrorism after all is a technique of conflict, not the conflict itself. And just as we can't uninvent nuclear weapons, we can't eliminate the idea of terrorism from the human psyche. It will always be there to tempt the disaffected, the extremist, the mentally disturbed and the power-mad. So from now on it will always be part of our lives. The idea of winning a war on terror is a political conceit of the unsophisticated mind." ~ Joan Bakewell, in The Guardian UK

Not only an unsophisticated conceit, but a complete distraction from tacking the real problems in the world.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

I am very edgy today. I've been very edgy in general recently. I need some good exercise to tire me out and kill the edgyness. I also need some important financial security matters to quit being all up-in-the-air and not-dealt-with-yet.

Things like changing the title of our condo to joint tenancy between me and Matt, rather than just in his name. Things like homeowner's insurance, earthquake coverage, making sure all that covers expensive items like my computer, the keyboard, my wedding dress and his kilt...things like mortgage insurance, or life insurance, or SOMETHING that makes sure neither of us is up shit creek financially if the other dies.

I could really do with that all being sorted out so I can stop thinking about what it would be like if one of us died.

Friday, April 09, 2004

I know it was only this Monday that I last posted, but I feel as though Monday was a lot more than four days ago.

For one thing, I had surgery on Tuesday to remove the margins from around where my mole had been. They took out a narrow oval slice of skin about 1-1/2 inches long and 1/2 an inch wide, all the way down to the subcutaneous fat. It was worse than when I had something similar done to my scalp, probably because it was so close under my eye and I got a lovely black eye with lots of swelling. Both of which are mostly gone now, the black eye has developed through to a nice rich yellow colour, but my glasses hide the discoloured part pretty well.

Wednesday was a fairly busy day at work, not horribly so, but by about 4pm I was beat. My face hurt just from talking, because of the swelling on my cheek and the dressing over the wound pulling on the surrounding skin every time I moved my cheek. I caved and asked Dianne to give me a ride to my car, because I didn't fancy trudging up the hill and then going grocery shopping. When I got home I made banana bread and hung out with the kitties. My giant comfy chair is a great cat snuggling chair, they'll both jump up and sit with me there while I watch tv. Of course, the fact I was stirring a bowl full of butter and brown sugar was probably pretty attractive to them too, Marble tried to ooze towards the bowl a couple of times, but I eventually convinced her she was better off just sitting next to me with her chin on my arm, watching the butter get beaten with a wooden spoon.

By yesterday morning the swelling had decreased greatly, and I made it through the day without getting cramp in my cheek or wanting to curl up and eat a bottle of tylenol.

Work has been pretty hectic, we're doing a lot of new things and we just had our cell culture hood decontaminated and serviced which meant on top of the four of us working in here, we had two technicians working on the hood, which is in the narrowest througfare of the room. A tad stressful, but it's good to know the hood is good as new.

For some reason the insertion of the new filter has led to the lab smelling of grilled-cheese sandwiches. The ones made in the specialized waffle-iron like appliance that adds the smell of hot metal to the greasy cheese aroma. It's not just me, Dianne said it smelled like her granny's house, and her granny apparantly fried everything.

Monday, April 05, 2004

Tah-daaaaaaah!

We are moved, completely and entirely. All of our possesions out of the old place and in the new place, though by no means organized in the new place. The only things left behind are a few errant hairballs that I couldn't chase down with the vacuum cleaner.

So, on the dawn of our second anniversary of meeting we woke up in the third apartment we've lived in together officially (as opposed to living together alternating between both our apartments), and our first home with a mortgage. Two years ago today, at this time of day, I didn't even know what he looked like. Today I woke up next to him, like I have been doing for the past year and a half, and curled up in a ball with him, trying to fend off the message of awakeness the alarm clock was bombarding us with. It seems things have moved very fast for us, but only because things are right. Everything that's happened for us has happened at the right time. Meeting, moving in together, deciding to get married, being forced out of our first place together into a teeny tiny little place with bucketloads of character, meeting our kitties, and finally getting into the housing market...it all worked out for the best possible result: us, at two years, planning our wedding, with a stable place to live, two lovely furballs to keep us entertained, and a a lot more adventure to look forward to.