Forbidden Planet

Well, the ponds are completely ice free today. Last night, I discovered the car had a flat. Normally, I would have changed it, but it was raining – so I called for roadside assistance (might as well use something I’ve paid for). Waited an hour for the guy to arrive. Maybe I should have taken the 15 minutes and changed it myself. Got home at 21:00 and saw I had limited foodstuff in the house: 2 cabbages, 6 onions, some garlic, 1 tin of condensed tomato soup, 1 can of vegetable cocktail, 10lbs of grapes, 12 clementines and pretty much any spice you want to name. Now, I know what you are thinking: “Why only two cabbages?” Well … one was red, the other green. Since the red one was older, I shredded it, added some onion, garlic, salt, pepper (lots of pepper, cabbage needs pepper) and some powdered stock. Cooked it with some water until done then added the condensed tomato soup and vegetable cocktail. Not quite paradise, it was lacking meat . Something I intend to rectify this evening. The...

It appears we have gotten some unseasonably warm weather (and rain) so all the snow has melted. We’re expecting a high of 12C (54F) as well as heavy rain – so what little tufts of snow remain, will soon be gone. The ponds outside my window are still covered with unbroken ice. I wonder if it will last? Because I have no idea how thick the ice is. Have a fairly computer free extra long weekend. I took Friday off work because of an unscheduled pedagogical day (strike) at Tania’s school – since the daycare is part of the school, it was also affected. Then there are always the surprise expenses that come up. This time it was the fridge breaking down. When I arrived home in Montreal Thursday night, the fridge wasn’t working. A little bit of investigation did not reveal any obvious problem. So we went out and bought a new one. But, it won’t be delivered until tomorrow. Fortunately, Sofia will be home because Tania is having another unscheduled pedagogical day that day. We were able to prolong...

Well, we have our first snowstorm today. Lot's of traffic accidents (at least 35 they were saying on the radio). Took me 1-1/2 hours to drive 32Km (20 miles) to work. Normally it takes me 30-40 minutes. We are expecting 10cm (4 inches) of snow. It is currently -7C (19F), with a wind chill of -16C (3F). You can have a real-time look at Ottawa from various traffic cameras here . But hurry, the snowstorm won't last long and the morning rush hour traffic will eventually dissipate. Unfortunately, some cameras are down. You can jump directly to an intersection here I recommend picking Innes and Blair (near where I live) from Zone 3 or Terry Fox and Palladiium (near where I work) from Zone 1. But a more exciting one might be Terry Fox and Hazeldean in Zone 1 or St. Laurent and Innes from Zone 2. You can click on the arrows in the lower right corner to get a slightly larger image. The snow is a fine, wind driven, snow, not the more romantic big fluffy snowflakes, lazily falling to ...

When putting my daughter, Tania, age 6, to bed, she often asks me to tell her about the time she was born. She likes to hear about it and I’ve been telling her this for at least the past two or 3 years. I wouldn’t be a good dad if I didn’t gush enthusiastically about my kids (hey! they are great!), but Tania is very special. She has an amazing capacity for languages and understanding relationships is very important for her. How many 3 year olds do you know who could say, “Grandma, will you tell your son to please stop bothering me.” Jason, age 4, has just discovered that grandma is my mother – but he doesn’t really care. On the other hand, you could see Tania working this all out when she was 2 and being very precise about it. Tania was born on 19-April-1999. She was the only girl born that night (mirroring my own birth, where I was the only boy born among a gaggle of girls). I remember seeing the top of Tania’s head: tiny and covered in black hair. Then the head came out and I could s...

I was watching SpongeBob SquarePants this past Saturday morning with my kids (“How old are you again, husband?” asks Sofia. “Four” I sheepishly reply), when a commercial comes on for Chocolate Rice Crispy Squares Cereal. Apparently, this is not correct, see here , but what do you expect, I only saw the commercial once, half paying attention before my mind zipped off on a tangent. So, my tangential thought was, “How things have changed. Chocolate being marketed at kids. One hundred years ago giving chocolate to kids would be unheard of. Chocolate was a bitter drink reserved for adults.” Sort of correct. Edible chocolate has been around a little more than 150 years. But certainly 200 years ago, cacao was made into a beverage, spiced with chili and drunk. A bitter drink reserved for adults. Makes you wonder why human adults persist in consuming rather gross stuff. Not only that, but making it out to be a delicacy. Maybe I should go home put a few tablespoons of cocoa to a cup of hot wate...

Recently, I wrote about how negative experiences in life block us and hinder our growth in certain directions as we try to avoid pain and suffering (ok, I didn’t exactly express it that way, but I think it is the gist). kwakersaur asked how I thought positive experiences affect growth and development. I think we take positive experiences for granted – like good health. We don’t notice them because they are what we expect. Growing up (most people, I think) had positive experiences and consequently, believe that goodness is the norm rather than the exception. It is only after we have been pretty beat and downtrodden that we begin to notice them. Positive experiences nourish and nurture us to grow without bounds, like a tree which stretches upward towards the sky. Some discipline may be necessary to ‘prune’ us so our direction is not ragged and unbounded - diverting our energies into the production of useful fruit. I fundamentally believe in the goodness of people. Some have had hard li...

I mistyped Icecream's URL this afternoon and was taken to a different page. A little more experimenting and I've discovered that it has worked for every blogspot URL I've tried (mind you, I have not exhaustively tested this). For example typing in http://forbidden-planet.blogpot.com will reveal the mystery page. Amazing what a missing 's' can do. If you are a denizen of blogspot, you can try it with your own URL. Saw on MIO 's page that someone had stumbled across using a rather obscure search (it's her 18-Nov-2005 post). While not in the same league as MIO, someone did stumble across my blog via unexpected search terms last night as well (not sure he got what he wanted though): It seems that Paradise Lost is the culprit. [Note: Blogger's spell checker is simply amazing. It flagged Icecream's and suggested I replace it with isochronally .]

Found out from my friend last night that his wife gave birth to a baby boy Wednesday morning. It is their first child. The only sadness is that he is in Canada while his wife and son are still in Africa waiting for their papers to glacially crawl through immigration. (can’t remember where I grabbed the image from, but I can say, it is very, very hard to find images of happy healthy African children)

The kids like going to grandma’s house (they never call it grandpa’s house, maybe because in Little Red Riding Hood it is grandma’s house – I can’t think of another, popular, fairy tale where grandparents are prominent). I took them this morning for a two day stay because Tania’s school was having an unscheduled pedagogical day (strike) today and tomorrow was a scheduled ped day. Since there was a strike, there were also no daycare services at the school - so we had to scramble for backup. My parents live about 80kms (50 miles) from us in the “bush”. Of course, there was no way Jason was going to miss an opportunity for a sleep over either, and insisted that he go too. Normally, he goes to a Montessori / daycare program. Tania has spent nights and weekends at grandma’s house since she was a little over 2 years old. Jason spent his first night a few weeks ago. Our criteria were that the kids had to be able to effectively communicate before we let them go overnight. Tania is a language p...

We become who we are because of the experiences in our lives - some good, some bad. Nobody's life is perfect. I have never met anyone who had an idyllic life (maybe I just haven't met enough people), but I have certainly encountered many who have had very hard and difficult lives. As a general rule, I think my life has been pretty good, but there are certainly things in it that have shaped who I am. I wish I could frame my life in terms of positive experiences, but the shaping forces have been negative. I guess negative forces shape us because they define our boundaries - extend beyond it and you get hurt. I think the reason positive and pleasant experiences don't shape us in the same way as negative one is because we are amorphous - without clear bounded shape. We extend and expand ourselves in whichever direction we wish to go - stopping if we encounter pain. As we get older, we become so boxed in by the negative forces in our life that we feel hemmed and trapped. At this...

A while back I wrote that Sofia and I were taking a program called ‘The Marriage Course’ . We finished the last lesson on Sunday. We both found the course somewhat disappointing because it did not address exactly what we were looking for. This is not to say the course was bad, but it is fundamentally a course about learning how to communicate – which I suppose is useful for most couples, since communication seems to be a major problem. We were primarily hoping for a more interactive program with a qualified counsellor who would be able to help us with various issues. The program itself consisted of watching a video and time alone to do some exercises. For Sofia and me, there were few surprises in the exercises. We have good communication, so there was not much to be learned form the exercises (which stressed revealing and opening up of oneself). Others in the course said that they found the exercises useful and discovered new things about their partners. Sofia and I were also the only...

I came across this passage from Isaiah Berlin commenting on Zeno of Citium while posting a comment on another blog. It accurately sums up my personal beliefs regarding people. "Men are rational, they do not need control; rational beings have no need of a state, or of money, or of law-courts, or of any organised, institutional life." Of all the philosophical schools, I like Stoicism the best - since it tends to be quite in tune with my own beliefs and ideas. "Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be inju...

I hate shaving and I like beards. Not short anaemic, face hugging ones, not moustaches, but a goodness to honest full face of whiskers - with a massive mane of hair to complement it. Sadly, my wife does not share my enthusiasm. But, I did manage to grow a little bit of a beard during my sabbatical. Two months does not really translate into what I like, but ... Jason liked the beard. I remember him telling me as I started to grow it, 'Daddy, I like your whiskers!' I laughed. Where does a 3-1/2 year old come up with the word 'whiskers'? I think he misses it because he still asks me why I shaved it off. I was bearded through most of my early 20s, prompting my local bishop to nickname me 'The Viking'. I shaved it off and trimmed my mane two weeks after starting at Ottawa U ). The most oddest comments I got were from old women who would say, "I guess the girls must like it." I did not understand why because I do not care what other people think and I do not...

Erm ... no ... not really. Just three highly dubious, but ego inspiring, instant insight internet interrogations indulged in over the course of the week. How You Are In Love You take a while to fall in love with someone. Trust takes time. You tend to give more than take in relationships. You tend to get very attached when you're with someone. You want to see your love all the time. You love your partner unconditionally and don't try to make them change. You stay in love for a long time, even if you aren't loved back. When you fall, you fall hard. How Are You In Love? Your Brain's Pattern You have a tempered, reasonable way of thinking. You tend to take every new idea in, and meld it with your world view. For you, everything is always changing. Each moment is different. Your thinking process tends to be very natural - with no beginnings or endings. What Pattern Is Your Brain? Slow and Steady Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, ex...

Sometime over the past 2 or 3 years, I have shed any and all delusions of being immortal. Intellectually I have known for a long time that some day I shall die. But, it was a far and distant destination beyond my power to observe. Now I am mortal; a human whose existence inexorably grinds its way to his final breath and heartbeat. I raise my eyes and in the distance I see my journey’s end – a barren and desolate land, windswept and cold. A lonely cairn testifying that I am no more. Freed from the burdens of sadness and loneliness, denied the joys of loving and cherishing. Nevertheless, I expect there are at least another 30 or 40 years left in me, but … it is still sad to recognize ones mortality. I have passed from the Summer of my life into the Autumn. I expect it to be a long and glorious Autumn with bright and vibrant colours. A sunny Autumn with leaves burning with burnished brilliance. The next stop is Winter whence the days shall grow shorter and colder until nothing remains but...

(I should point out that I myself am an immigrant and the child of immigrant parents. I was born in Sutton-in-Ashfield in the County of Nottingham, Great Britain – my parents originally came from Poland. I emigrated, along with my parent’s and younger sister to Canada in 1971. That was a great year, we had the snowstorm of a century in Montreal. For a 5 year old kid, this was just fantastic - and I have been waiting every year since then for the same, but all we get a piddling amounts of snow. sigh). Being an immigrant is hard. You lose you language, your culture, your food, your music. Nothing is familiar anymore. So you seek comfort and join up with fellow immigrants of the same nationality. You form little conclaves – ghettos – where you live in isolation from the rest of society and your own culture. I’m not saying all immigrants do this, but my experience is that a lot do - at least the first generation. Many of my friends are children of first generation immigrants. The second g...

A fairly universal myth that spans cultures and generations is “Things were better in the good old days.” This is a myth. Typically people invoke images of peace and harmony, how you could leave your door unlocked, everybody knew everybody else and kept an eye out for one another. Many examples are always brought forth: (1) “Ancient / ancestral / traditional diets were healthier. In the old days nobody heard of cancer / heart disease / allergies / etc…” Poppycock! In the old days, you were probably dead by 30. Many of these “epidemic” diseases we have now only show up later in life. Further more, you can get some idea of how healthy the ancients were by looking at their size. Recently, the kids and I saw some Egyptian mummies, a lady who had died in her twenties was barely taller than Tania (who is 6) – the ancient diets were poor and lacking in nutrition. With high rates of infant mortality, it is likely that a child with severe allergies would die young – another casualty of a tough...

Well, not really. It is just that today the wind is blowing from the southeast, normally it blows from the northwest. It’s odd to see the trees and reeds bowing in the opposite direction. [Updated at 14:23] Ah! The sun has come out. That makes things much more cheerful!

For various reasons (most notably a cold, me ole noggin' ain' workin' so good t'day): So I'll just leave you with an inspirational quote: "Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is." - Jorge Luis Borges And a nice place to visit if you need to look at some pretty pictures and relax. Check out the Visual Meditations page.

As mentioned, I signed up for NaNoWriMo - 50,000 words in 30 days, a quick estimate makes that about 75-100 pages. So here is what I have, no idea yet where it will go: Hard soled footsteps echoed in the darkness. … LOUDER … … softer … … Approaching … … Receding … … In unison … … At random … … Solitary … That was his favorite, a single pair of footsteps echoing lonesomely in the darkness. It was the only sound he liked. The only sensation he lived for. Clip … Clap … Clip … Clap. Regular or irregular, fast or slow, soft or strong, it did not matter, to him it was a soothing metronome beating a comforting rhythm into his life. It receded and he was alone in the silent darkness. He was blind. He was numb. He was severely burned. Only his hearing remained and he chose to be selective, listening only to the footsteps, ignoring all other sounds. He knew the doctors and nurses spoke to him, but he chose not to hear. He only wanted the soft comforting darkness and silence of the womb with no...

A little while back, I blogged about the view from my cubicle. Security gave me permission to take some pictures so I present them below, they are from left to right (I probably could have done a better panorama, but ... still ... I think they convey pretty nicely what I see everyday - at least in the Fall). Here are some additional Fall photos from Ottawa taken in the morning at Strathcona Park : Naturally, all images are copyrighted by me.