This one struck close to home when I read about it. Danielle died Tuesday morning when she got “doored” by an illegally parked car on a busy street and fell into traffic. I’ve always been anxious about passing parked cars, since friends of mine have been doored in the past, and luckily they’ve gotten away with fairly minor bumps and bruises. I love my morning commute but I’ve had a few close calls of my own, and there’s that persistent whisper in the back of my mind that even if I do everything right, there’s always some element of risk when you’re mixing cars and bikes together on the road, and that things can happen so fast.

So sad. My thoughts go out to her family, and all of my cycling friends who dare to brave the downtown core in their morning ride in. Be careful out there.

Here are some of the fascinating things I learned from this highly informative show:

1) Anna Paquin loves Cadbury creme eggs, as evidenced by a paparazzi closeup on her shopping bag.

2) It’s possible to use ALL of the After Effects plugins on each and every transition. WOOSH!

3) When you don’t like your dress… it’s called a “Gown Frown”. (This is where I start to lose it.)

4) There is an entire generation of celebrities I don’t recognise. (Who are these people?)

5) There’s a new video on Youtube! Some Glee cast are in it flailing around and lip synching! Amazing!

5) Sarah Jessica Parker’s full name wastes valuable television seconds… She’s “SJP” now.

6) That Will and Kate shared an officially designated “Tender Moment” when he helped her with her stuck hoodie zipper. (My brain is melllltiiiiing)

7) Insiders have revealed the contents of Kate’s clutch: Blotting papers, lip balm, and a compact!

Like I get it – TV can’t all be Steve Paikin’s hard questions and informative topics. There’s room in everyone’s life for a little romance and glamour. I’m not bashing people who watch this stuff because sometimes you just need to put your brain in neutral and coast, and it’s probably mostly harmless to watch insipid drek on television. ET Canada  have made a science of reporting a half hour of exactly nothing.

The saddest thing is that Will and Kate are university educated ‘World Leaders’ doing interesting and culturally significant things on their tour, and ET are covering her wardrobe and purse contents – give me a break!

For the record, the Date Code on the burrito is D10211 21:09 – you might want to go over burritos from the same time period with a metal detector before you chow down.

I recently discovered in a pinch that I can jog across the Westgate parking lot and beat my bus home to the next stop – I’ve caught it twice now thanks to my quick feet and friendly traffic lights. Fresh from those bus-catching victories, as I watched my ride pull away along Baseline, it occurred to me to try to catch it.

I’m in good shape, but it would have been impossible if not for a bit of construction traffic that was holding everyone back. A break in traffic made it possible for me to sprint across all 4 lanes of Baseline, and then it was on. The first 300 meters I made solid gains – traffic was moving slowly and I was at nearly full stride. I got to the next stop only moments after it did, and rather than pull over and stop for me, the driver continued on past. (Either the driver didn’t see me, or the sight of me coming full bear alongside was unintentionally hilarious. *Grrr* )

At the 500m mark I was pulling ahead to a large lead, because traffic was slowing down for the light on Clyde, and I was running along unhindered and managed to catch a walk light at a cross street. Finally a bus stop was in sight – at 700m (baseline and Clyde) I slowed down to a jog and then pulled my tickets out, turned around to wave and make eye contact – the bus drove on past without stopping. I probably could have caught it at the next stop if I’d tried, but at that point I was furiously muttering between panting breaths, and I didn’t want to overdo it and risk ending up a sweaty mess in the office.

So I had to wait in the cold for half an hour for the next bus, which got me to the office in time for the meeting, but barely. I was super furious. I hate taking the bus.

I was quick to blame the ants, because I dug up a few nests when I was preparing the dirt, but my ant powder’s done nothing and the rate they’re stripping my plants (they ate 12 new Zuchinni plants overnight) seems too high. I must have beetles or caterpillars or something.

They’ve stayed away from the tomatoes and peppers, but they love radishes (stripped three rows down to the roots), onions, zucchinis, squash, cucumbers and eggplants. All gone.

Our beans have fallen victim to the other pest, lurking Mr. Rabbit. There used to be leaves and flowers at the ends of all those twigs.

I’m kindof at the point where I just want to say “Screw It” and give up – it’s already getting too late in the season to start my seedlings over, and I’m not sure how much more money I want to invest in feeding the bugs in my garden, when I could just be buying zucchini at the grocery store.

Hopefully we’ll at least get a few tomatoes, and I’ll start researching pest control options for next year. *sigh*

I’m glad to have all of these things up to date, but the updater processes seem oblivious to eachother, and to me, trying immediately after bootup to grab up as much of my puny laptop processor as they can, tripping all over eachother’s feet, and fragmenting the heck out of my hard drive.

300MB and two restarts later, I’m considering looking more seriously into a “Startup Delayer” app to force my updaters to wait their turn as the OS boots. Anyone had any experience with this?

It would almost be a clever way to hide the flusher, except that we -use- that counterspace, so now there’s 7 feet of countertop that we have to lift in order to poop, making it kindof useless as a storage area. Nice job on cleaning up the wall barrier from the previous toilet, too. Really loving Paramount Properties so far.

Oh! And the previously new toilets? The ones we’ve only had for a year? All being smashed into a giant dumpster. Give them to habitat for humanity? At least re-sell them? No? Whatever.

It seems like just a plain vanilla 6 volt DC power adapter – which begs the question – if the power cord is broken, where is the red light getting it’s electricity from? I suspect maybe the adapter is doing something fancy to the frequency of the electricity or something and that’s somehow stopped. (???)

Bell is sending me out a new wall wart, which should arrive today or tomorrow. (Or, given our past track record with Bell, it will show up six weeks from now in a fisherman’s net in Brisbane) Hopefully this will be the last of the posessed electronics in our house for a while. I think I ought to invest in a bunch of UPS devices and surge suppressors.

Every so often while we’d be drinking tea in the living room or reading in the office, the control panel would come to life and start typing random sequences of numbers and power levels. Luckily it never started the magnetron on it’s own, but I got in the habit of leaving it unplugged while I was at work so it wouldn’t go into meltdown while we were away. Saturday it’s damnation was complete – it began frantically beeping away at cycles of random numbers and ignoring our button pushes. We counted rosary beads and read passages of Leviticus to it, but unfortunately it’s soul was deeply corrupted, and it never quite recovered. Please join us in prayer for the soul of our lost kitchen appliance.

When we went out Sunday to pick up a new one, the guy at Sears told us that generally microwaves only have a life expectancy of 5 years. That’s a lot of microwaves in the trash – I’m surprised and a little dissappointed that they don’t build them a little more robustly. I remember my grandmother had one of those giant steel and wood grained beasts from the early 80’s that lasted a few decades. We spent a little extra to get a “good” one, so here’s hoping it exceeds the usual life expectancy by at least a few years. You can get microwaves for $30 now – practically disposable.

I suppose their philosophy is that the people who use the stats should pay more than the people who’d have no use for it, but then aren’t we fostering a system where we’re only gathering the stats people have a vested interest in? The idea of a government-run public statistics bureau is that they collect, analyze and distribute data that benefits our understanding of the nation. I think putting up a monetary wall, however cheap, actually hinders a lot of the constituents who’d otherwise find the data interesting or useful.

That being said, there’s a lot of general summary tables available for free, so I can’t complain much. If I really needed to have detailed numbers on Softwood Toothpick Production it’d probably be worth the $3 to me.

As an aside, I hate the brutally inappropriate government “Common Look & Feel” design they’re trying to force on the site. But that’s a rant for another day.