Bed Head

bed head
Originally uploaded by theken.

I was most amused this morning while trying to focus on my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My hair is finally long enough to form "bed head", it would seem. So happy was I with this discovery that I left it protruding at a rather strange angle all day rather than flattening it down with some water.

 

Make Poverty History

I just went to the Make Poverty History website for the first time and wanted to write a bit about it here. You will notice there's now a white band at the top-right of my blog, linking to there. I think we, the blessed minority in the wealthiest nations in the world have a responsibility to the poor. The bible talks so much about caring for the poor and I think that we've not done a great deal to help people in the long term. There are so many people who are trapped in a hopeless situation, with no way of ever paying their way out. We need to communicate to our leaders that the impossible debts third world countries owe the west need to be reduced or even dropped all together.

We really are so blessed here with all that we have. Thank you, God, for my warm home, my hot running water and the abundance of food around me.

Canadian Tax Returns

Man, there's one thing that's definitely not fun about living in Canada and that is filling out your Tax Return. I've filled out so many forms in my time ranging from an application for a Visa to work in Pakistan to applications for a Canadian Work Permit and Canadian Permanent Residence.

The whole laborious process of filling out all these tax forms EVERY YEAR and sending it all away is so unbelievably annoying. It's another complicated set of forms to add to the pile. I liked it better in the UK where we didn't need to do any of that. OK, you might argue it's good this way because you get money back but I now feel like I've just earned that money all over again with all the work I did filling out the forms!

Clotheslined at Blue!

I had the most entertaining time at Blue Mountain on Friday evening. I went up with Shaun and Dave and we met up with Daniel, Chris and Chris' friend from his band whose name escapes me now. (Sorry, man!)

We were bombing it down the hill and Daniel introduced us to a pretty cool line you can take down Waterfall (one of the runs at the south end of the hill) which involves ducking under a red tape and then going through the bunny hill at the end.

After we did the run we thought it'd be fun to race it. Well, right away Dave had an advantage because he was on skis and there were some flat parts where he definitely benefitted from his poles for additional propulsion. The race went quite well although I was last or second last. I seem to remember beating Chris because I cut him off at a corner.

The second time we raced it was REALLY funny, though. We were all converging on a rather critical section of the race. The red tape was about 3 feet off the ground, between two rather solid, vertical poles which were quite close together. I noticed as we approached that we were all about to go through this small opening at the same time, heading in slightly different directions as well. I had a sudden, unexpected moment of sanity where I realized I was on a collision course with a number of people. I turned to brake and was skidding towards the (thankfully padded) pole at an alarming rate of knots. Somehow I missed the pole but didn't duck far enough under the tape and was "clotheslined" in true wrestling fashion. I somehow flipped over onto my front as well so I was left lying on my belly, facing back up the hill. I laughed so hard for a considerable time. Poor Daniel was asking me if I was ok and I couldn't stop laughing to answer him. My right hand was the only part of me that was slightly sore and I think that's because I held it up to protect myself from the tape which amazingly was not damaged by the collision.

I love snowboarding. It's so much fun!

Oh dear, technology can be a pain...

We had a bit of a disaster in the office this past weekend. There was a power outage which resulted in all kinds of disruption but by far the most significant was the loss of our Active Directory Server. I won't bore you with techy speak for why that's really bad news but to cut a long story short, we now need to re-create the user accounts (usernames & passwords) for all the people in our organization, re-create all the e-mail groups, network permissions for shared resources and the user profiles that people are using to store their settings.

It's amazing how much we depend on a computer system every day and when it fails nobody can do ANY WORK whatsoever!

Crazy.

New home

I just moved into a new place on Saturday. It's a bit different but I think things are going to be good. I'm now staying at the top of an apartment building which would allow me to see for miles around if it wasn't for the smog/fog obscuring the view.

We now have free electricity and heat which is a great deal. Also, my rent is $47 less per month than my previous place so I think I'm going to save a bit which is good.

I want to say more but I haven't forgotten that the Internet can be a bit of a freaky place at times and I don't especially want to tell the world where I live.

I find it interesting how I never feel really settled in a new place. Even with this one, I'm already thinking of how I don't know how long I'll stay there. I never feel it's time to really establish myself in a place for a long period of time. I don't know why that is.