Monday 27 February 2006

The adventure continues...

Where to begin...

Oh yeah! I went to my conference on Tuesday (the 21st). It was a bit of an adventure getting there. There was an accident on the 401 just east of Kingston, really big, several spots where vehicles were damaged, some just a little, but there were tons of people stuck. It was in the west-bound lanes and I was going east but people have to slow down and take a look, don't they? So that slowed us up a bit, but then, immediately after getting out of that we got stuck behind three snowplows, plowing the entire width of the highway. Really they weren't clearing the road (that was quite clear from what we could see past them) but rather getting the snow from beside the median! That took about a half an hour of creeping along. After that, I thought I was going to make it in time, flying along the rest of the way to Ottawa but then, when we got in the city, we got stuck behind a convoy of tractors! Honest to god, farmers on tractors! Protesting something. They had signs that read "farms feed cities" on the side of their tractors. (I thought to myself: "Obviously not right now, they don't... they seem to have an awful lot of time on their hands right now!"). We survived that ordeal and got to the Carleton University campus and they were doing constuction and so we got delayed a little bit more by some cement trucks! Ok. By this time is was funny. I had called ahead (I had to do my presentation right then at 11:00 am... Wanna check it out? You can download here.) and they had someone by the street waiting to guide me and tell me stuff. Of course the old man who asked my guide for directions from my guide had NO idea how much I wanted to sock him in the eye for being my fifth annoying delay of the morning... *laugh* I finally got there and unfortunately some of the people who had been waiting to see my presentation had left thinking it was cancelled (I was only 5 or 10 minutes late but it was only a 20 minute presentation!) But I delivered it to three people. Not bad. It was my first conference presentation so it was ok that there were not too many people. Still...

What else? Oh yeah, I finished the second Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan book and am now well over half way through number three: "The Dragon Reborn". I think I like number 2 a little better but this one's good too. The last thing I read, everybody was well on their way to Tear. Fortunately it's been a while since I read all of this before so I can't remember what happens there exactly. All sorts of talk about Callandor, Black Ajah, Aeil, Perrin meeting the "falcon", Mat's luck... yeah, it's all pretty cool.

We did some work at home over the weekend. Mostly cleaning up (we've still got boxes of stuff left over from moving) but we did some minor renovating lately: put a mirror up in my daughter's room (I hope it doesn't fall down!), put some hooks and pictures up, turned a useless curtain rod/pulley thing into a shelf over my son's window to put some toys solely for display purposes... I MADE a night table the other day. That's pretty cool. The older man who used to live in the house we just bought left all sorts of wood and hardware and stuff so I've been pretending to be a real man and have been tinkering around with it. Neato! *laugh*

Damn! It's cold out! I usually bring a hat with me but I put my hand into the pocket it's usually in and found nothing! I had to run from my car to work before my ears froze off! But hopefully it should warm up soon. I'm getting a little sick of winter. Not totally, mind you. I still like it but there's things I want to do and sometimes this weather just gets in the way.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice prsentation, but give IM a chance?? You were having too much fun with the texting tools. I like it but it got a little annoying waiting for the things to highlight and to come on the screen. I am sure that it went really good when you used it for the presentation though. :) I would show you ones I did at Jackson Heights are corrupted. :-(

Debbie

andiepoo said...

Tell me about delays. My dream national crisis just came true, only on the wrong day. If they showed it on the news, there's talk of yet another coup d'etat here. Classes got cancelled last Monday (and it's Finals Week!), which is my dream scenario: a coup cancelling the finals plus maybe a couple of tanks roaming the streets. Trouble is, I didn't have any exams on Monday. T_T

Matt said...

Debbie:
Yeah. You got me. You know my two best friends are Excel and PowerPoint. I love them. I love making spreadsheets but you rarely get to really show them off. But with a presentation, the whole point is to show it to people. So I love Excel when I'm introverted and PowerPoint when I'm extroverted.

Andie:
That sucks. How inconsiderate of the rebels? They should have planned their coup a day or two later! *laugh* I hadn't heard about this until you mentioned it but I found some articles about it quickly. Arroyo declared a "state of emergency", eh? What do you think about that? Other than missing exams that you don't have, how does that affect you?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I kind of knew that. So when am I get my emails answered and my cookies, and the smarties?