Mambo Taxi

At the moment I'm:

feeling well-exercised. It turns out to be 13km round-trip from work, up to the local BBQ place, and home again. Dinner was a totally awesome shrimp poboy.

I"m slightly worried about roverthedog - she got an abscess next to her ear, and the vet gave us a fairly substantial set of drugs to deal with everything, including an ear infection. She's been wearing her Cone of Shame for a few days, though we trimmed it down so it's slightly less awkward. The cut is doing much better now than it was on the weekend, though, so I'm only feeling slightly anxious about how she's doing. She's a trooper, and she seems in good spirits (she even enjoys being pilled. What a cooperative dog!)

Really looking forward to the weekend- melted_snowball and I are off to Ithaca on Friday! Wegmans! And Viva Taqueria! And Quakers! Oh my!

A big regret is that we can't take Rover- we had been planning to, but it makes the most sense to kennel her at the vet's. It would be a tougher decision if 1) they didn't love her as much as they do, and 2) she didn't love staying there as much as SHE does.

I'm starting to feel nervous about the Quaker workshop I'm co-leading next weekend in Toronto. I will spend a bit of prep-time between now and then, and I am sure everything will go fine, and now having done this before, I can answer the question of "why the hell did I think this was a good idea?" - because during, and afterward, it is totally rewarding. It's just the before that's a bit anxiety-inducing. :)

I'm grateful for all of the people who spoke up at the Regional Council meetings these last two days, concerning light rail. If you read this, you know who you are- you rock. And I'm also grateful for the people who've been live-tweeting the council presentations. I am cautiously optimistic, though I think the next few weeks are going to feel more nerve-wracking to me than the federal elections were...

I'm frustrated that I got half-way through a book and it got auto-returned on me. I checked it out online, via the local library; it was good for 14 days and there was a hold on it. (Though really I don't know how many holds there are- so who knows when I can check it out again.) While I did take notes on the parts I had read, I'm not sure how easily I'll be able to reconnect with it whenever I can wrest it back again. ...Ironically given my inability to finish, it is Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, about focusing one's attention on the things that matter to you. More words to come, I hope.

And speaking of Rapt, I was reading it over the unRapt long Weekend, which included celebrating Queen Vicky's birthday, my birthday, very few raptures, amarylliss visiting us from Toronto, and a few people over to watch Left Behind and Left Below.

And on that note, I think I'm Left for Bed. Night!

melted_snowball and I just took a fairly long Sunday Constitutional. We passed by the regional children's museum, which just opened an exhibit on Andy Warhol. So, it's interesting that Warhol has now become acceptable to teach to kids, which I suppose means they've built up enough socially-acceptable history or pseudo-history to paper over any hint of dangerous unacceptability? Or maybe that's just the cynic in me. We'll probably go see this some time soon to give us a better idea. As d. pointed out, the exhibit we saw with metalana in '06 did have a bit of the scary, but was fairly tame and "family friendly" (for certain values of family).

It's also interesting that they've programmed quite the speaker-series for Sunday afternoons through April, (jumping out for me: "Feb 1st – Kathy Battista, Director of Sotheby’s Insistute of Art, New York with Marie Burns and Amanda Kesner on Warhol, Wigs and Women: Identity Politics in Warhol’s Practice"). No mention of when on Sunday these talks are, though.

But I think the most interesting part of this was, one evening last week, Dave FM had a very long (3 minute?) discussion of why you should go to this exhibit and what Warhol is most famous for (Campbell's soup can, product design, "many films", no mention of sex). On the pop radio station. Which feels surprisingly subversive to me, pop radio talking about pop art.

Does anybody have a moving dolly I can borrow so we can put our tomatoes on wheels?

Now that I've got your attention...

We've pressure-washed the deck in preparation for staining. Next step, waiting for a week of no rain, so it will be dry for staining. It's been a month, a very rainy month. The forecast is for rain on Monday.

Meanwhile, d. says the tomatoes need to be planted ASAP, if we're going to have tomatoes. We would like to put them on the deck, in the 3-foot by 3-foot homemade planter. That's a heavy amount of topsoil- maybe 650-800 lbs.

Interim smaller pots aren't as useful (says d.) because he'd have to water twice a day. Putting the planter elsewhere means it's annoying to water. So: I want to put it on wheels, so I can stain most of the deck, roll the planter onto the painted part, and stain the rest. I want to avoid cataclysmic planter failure, broken backs, or failing to stain the *(^%%^ deck this summer.


The tomatoes are busy growing under the_infamous_j's care, and dan told me today they really should be planted soon.

So is this a good plan? Can you think of better?

Additionally, does anybody have a spare pile of topsoil? d. says we need some. :)

I just visited Joel On Software in response to a friend's heads-up that his latest blog entry was on AJAX/web programming. Joel Spolski is often interesting, smart and funny, even if sometimes he's totally wrong- I read the blog when I have time, which is not frequently.

I saw he's touring to demo his software company's latest project, a bug-tracking system. Just for kicks, I checked their schedule, partly to see whether they were even making it to Toronto on their 22-city tour.

They're in my town, tomorrow morning. *boggle*

(Then in Toronto tomorrow afternoon.)

It's a super-short event, but it's free and at a reasonable hour, and relevent to the kinds of stuff I'm interested in, so I registered, and there's no waiting list. Quelle surprise.