This was my first day back after a week off work, and after being here for 12 hours, I’m about ready for the weekend.

My friend Tanya had a baby girl, so I drove down to Kamloops for a visit. I stupidly forgot my camera, but I took a shaky phone video that I’ll be able to show her when she’s 20 and the world communicates via digitally-enabled telepathy, when cellular phones are a thing of ancient history.

I bought some scuba equipment while I was in Kamloops from a good friend of mine. She gave me a great deal. I’m planning on taking lessons in the next few months and then heading to the Bahamas with her for a week on a live-aboard dive ship, so that should be a lot of fun.

I then drove to Vancouver to visit some more friends of mine. It was around 38 degrees Celsius (100.5 Fahrenheit) and my air conditioning was broken, so the trip was a little painful, but we made it alive. Once there, I had a fantastic time. The friends I was staying with had a Canada Day party with great food, drink, and Rock Band, so it was a fun night.

I hope to make it out to Vancouver more often this next year. Living on an island with oppressive ferry rates to get to the mainland can really make you feel trapped at times, but it’s worth the cost for the occasional weekend trip.

I look away for just a moment, and it’s suddenly been over a week since I last posted.

I guess I’ve been in a blogging rut for a while now. This happens every now and then. I stop writing about subjects that interest me, and I start writing about subjects that I think others will find interesting. And being clueless concerning what other people find interesting, I just stop writing.

My brain has been a bit scattered lately. I’ve been keeping up with my physical hobbies, but anything requiring quiet concentration, after work hours, hasn’t been happening. I’ve only finished one book in the last two months, for example. When I think of a topic I’d like to write about during the day, my enthusiasm has vanished by the time I get to the computer, and I’m left starting at a blinking cursor, wondering what I have the the cupboards for a snack.

I’ll get over it soon, or I’ll disappear for a nine month hiatus. Those are the two usual routes I take, but statistically I’ll get over it soon.

The tooth had to have a root canal, so I had the first half of the procedure done today after we finished with the first filling.

When it was decided to go ahead with the root canal, I had to move to another operating room within the office, one that had the necessary tools. In the time it took to make the move, the local anesthesia he had administered apparently wore off, and we didn’t realise this until he started drilling. I won’t be forgetting that moment for a while.

I have to return on Friday to finish the procedure and get another filling, and I’ll have a few more appointments over the next couple of months. I’m quite annoyed that I need to have so much work done. I thought I was fine when I was going in. I brush and floss twice a day, and didn’t have any pain at all, but I have been avoiding dentist appointments for years now. I’ll be making my regular cleaning appointments after this, though, as I’d rather not have to go through all of this again any time soon.

What’s even more fun is my work’s dental plan is terrible, so the root canal isn’t covered. Two surprises in one day - lucky me!

I finally dragged myself to a new dentist yesterday, something I should have done quite a while ago. I’ve been on my medical plan for over a year now, but I kept putting it off.

The new office seems fairly nice, and the staff are very friendly. The sort of friendly you usually only see when there’s some sick, dark secret lurking behind the scenes. Like Kathy Bates in Misery friendly.

It seems like everyone in town is sick lately, and my dentist had lost his voice. Not enough to stop him talking, but enough to make him sound like Michael Jackson, which would have been creepy even without the nitrous oxide in the room.

It turns out I have a few cavities, and one might need a root canal. Apparently, even though I floss once or twice a day, I suck at it and haven’t been hitting a few spots. He says when I come in for my cleaning, he’s going to have the dental hygienist give me a refresher course in flossing, which is nice and embarrassing. I have visions of sitting in a lineup with several eight year olds, being walked through the steps, in a Billy Madison situation.

Also, I still have all of my wisdom teeth, and the dentist wants to pull out two of them. Maybe I’ll have him pull them all and live off of tofu and ice cream for the rest of my life, avoiding future trips to the dentist altogether.

During the examination, the dentist said, “you have a high pain tolerance - that’s fantastic”. This worries me a little.

I go in for my first appointment next Tuesday. I’ll find out once I’m in the chair whether or not I’ll need the root canal. Hopefully it can be avoided.

I went to Vancouver this weekend to visit friends, and it was a lot of fun. I should make an effort to get over there a little more often, but the ferry ride from the island makes the trip, however short, very irritating.

We ate and drank at some great restaurants, did a little shopping, and generally had a good time. Chris even made a nice home-cooked meal for us to enjoy, which was excellent and very appreciated. This last month, I’ve gone off cooking a bit. Sometimes it just seems like more hassle than it’s worth when you live alone, but it’s unhealthy and expensive to eat out too often.

I happened to visit during a freak snow storm, which is just my luck. I was catching a ride with another friend from Victoria, and we had to make a quick trip down to Abbotsford to grab his bike before returning, and for the first 30 minutes of the trip we were averaging about 10km per hour on the highway. The last thing you want to do when you’re tired and hungover is drive through fresh snow surrounded by Vancouver drivers.

I think I’m going to return to Vancouver in a couple of weeks to watch Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, an avant-garde play from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, and Tom Waits, the coolest man on earth. It should be an interesting show, I think.

On an unrelated note, I made haggis tonight for a belated Robbie Burns Day. I now have enough left over to keep me frying for a week.

Here’s ‘Clap Hands’ from Waits’ Rain Dogs:

What is it that keeps one up at night? What cruel trick is this, when the body and mind have to scream and fight all day to stay awake, only to lie there in defiance when night finally arrives?

My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and the room is so bright I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a second moon hiding in my closet. I can see the smudge on the far wall of my bedroom. Suddenly I have perfect vision, and my hearing has reached super-human strength. I can’t hear a bloody thing during the day, but now I can clearly make out someone shouting their dog’s name eight blocks away with my window closed. I try to clear my mind, but morose similes keep forming.

Life is like the mirror hanging on my wall. Keep examining it, and you’ll spend all your days watching yourself slowly get older.

I shouldn’t have eaten that sausage roll so late. Tomorrow, after I fall asleep at the wheel and the rescue crew drag my corpse out of my crumbled car, it will all be because of that sausage roll. Why do you have to take a nap when you eat too much in the afternoon, but you’re wide awake all night if you eat something too late? Why can’t we have a little consistency in the world?

Life is like my radio alarm clock, full of annoying personalities that speak out at the worst of times.

I really need to develop a proper sleeping schedule. I’m a zombie during the daylight hours, propelled forward only by the power of caffeine, and even that is starting to lose its effect. I actually tried to eat a small child’s brain earlier this week, but his mother arrived while I was still rubbing margarine through his hair.

Life is like a box of chocolates. Eat too many and you’ll develop type two diabetes and, if left untreated, you may lose a leg or die.

Friday night was my company’s postponed non-denominational winter party. It was great fun. They held it in a very nice hotel banquet room, and we were served a tasty meal: maple-glazed duck appetizer, sirloin steak Entrée, and a chocolate mango cream-puff concoction for dessert.

After the meal I took full advantage of the open bar. I’m not a lush, but I do like a bargain. Eventually the party shifted to a pub downtown, and I stumbled my way home about five hours past my bedtime. I wasn’t too badly hungover Saturday morning, but it felt like I must have tripped on my way home and scraped the inside of my throat on the asphalt. I think I may have been shouting a lot that night, but I’m not sure at what exactly. I guess I’ll find out how much of a fool I made of myself Monday morning. I do think the new girl at work was intrigued by my drunken high-pitched shrieking, though, like a siren call from an island of eunuchs.

Saturday I had two friends from Kamloops come to visit, and they brought their Xbox 360 and all of the equipment for Rock Band with them. After a quick Japanese dinner downtown, we went back to my place and rocked out all night long. They even forced me to sing. My neighbours must have thought a goat was being raped in my apartment that night.

This morning we had a quick brunch downtown, and then I saw them off. They were going to a bridal fair before leaving, but I decided to let them do that alone, as I would rather chew my own leg off and paint my naked self-portrait on the side of the parliament building with the bloody stub than enter a fair dedicated to weddings. But I do hope they enjoyed it…

All in all, a great weekend. Always nice to have friends come to visit.

The New Year. A time to look back on past accomplishments, or lack thereof, and begin forming new ambitions and lifestyle changes to promptly ignore.

2007 was a fairly quiet year for me. This was my first year after graduating university, so I really just worked. It’s easy to measure life’s progress in semesters and city moves and trips abroad, but it becomes a bit harder when you’re stationary.

I’ve become a much better programmer over the last year and feel like my career is on the right track, I’ve been living a lot healthier and continuing to slowly lose weight, excluding the last month, and I’m generally happier and more comfortable with myself than I’ve been in quite a while. So this year has been a good one, I’d say, in a quiet way.

I say I’m not really into resolutions, but I end up making them every year anyway, so I might just be in denial about that. I’d like to be someone who’s not into resolutions, but I enjoy setting goals, even if I don’t really plan to achieve them. So here are a few:

Get off the habit of snacking all the time. My boss bought me a huge box of cookies for Christmas, and I live alone, so I’ve pretty much been living off cookies for the last two weeks. I eat some when I get home, lose my appetite for dinner, and then end up snacking again later that night. It’s a delicious, vicious cycle. Sadly, when I went to visit my parents for Christmas and detox, they had bought the exact same box of cookies. It’s a global conspiracy.

Write more. Not just here in the weblog, but actual fiction. I have written a little over the last couple of months, which is a step in the right direction, but I need to take it more seriously. This has been my longest running failed resolution, going about 15 years strong now.

Travel. The only travel I did in 2007 was for work, so I’d like to go on a personal trip this year. I’m slowly getting my student loans paid off and my credit card debt under control, so I’ll have more freedom to do this soon.

Take my bike out at least once. I brought my bike to Victoria last summer, and it hasn’t left my apartment once. It is an interesting conversation piece, though.

Catch up on my reading list. I have a towering pile of books to read, and I’ve gone through a slight reading drought this last month, so I need to start getting through them. I’m going to try and stop buying new books until I’m done these, which should save me money, because I pretty much have enough unread books right now to last me the entire year.

Be open to new experiences. Maybe join a club or take a class in something I’m interested in. Just get out there and try new activities and meet new people.

I hope 2007 was a good year for everyone, and if it wasn’t, here’s to a clean slate!