I'm dreading going to work today, and I have no idea why. Maybe because it's snowing, and when it's snowing the nicest thing to do is stay home under the covers with a cup of tea and a good book. I could call in, but I was hoping to take Friday off anyway and my long weekend will feel so much nicer if I manage to hold out through the week.

Note to self: Yellowtail chardonnay is a touch too acidic for your tastes, although it might work better with cheese. Also it has one of those stupid fake corks. What's up with fake corks in Australian wines? Do they not have real corks in Australia?

(And for the bystanders who are reading this despite the fact that it's a note to self, no, I did not sample the wine just now at 11 am. I had it last night but it just occurred to me to record my observations now.)

In MASH, the walls of the Swamp are made of mosquito netting so you can see through them, but the walls of all the other tents are made of opaque canvas. I wonder why they chose to do that? The see-through walls are sometimes used for plot purposes, but they're hardly necessary. Nothing that couldn't be worked around with a window or the fact that canvas is easy to hear through.

A quick poll for anyone reading this: To what extent did you have to ask your parents, or other grownups in your life, for help with homework when you were in elementary or high school?

I ask because I've just encountered another of those omnipresent articles about how parents are so stressed out these days because they had to help their kids with homework.

I had my mother help me with math because she used to be a high school math teacher; if she hadn't been a math teacher I wouldn't have asked for her help (although in high school I might have instead asked for help from certain cute geeky boys). I got some help with logistics/buying materials for really big projects, although I conceived the projects myself; I did most of the work myself, but sometimes a grownup would help me by showing me how to do something for the first time. And once in grade 4 I had to draw a picture of my house for French class for a stupid project, so my mother helped by drawing a couple of pieces of furniture in each room. I could have used help with English, but none of the grownups in my life were good at English.

At any rate, I did get help sometimes and there might have been stress around math exams when I gave my mother the assignment of correcting all my practice tests, but I can't recall ever having a homework load that would have caused constant parental stress. And I'm pondering whether it's the difficulty/extent of today's homework, or a culture where parents feel more obligated to be involved in every aspect of their children's education, or a culture where kids are encouraged to be more dependent on their parents, or what?

Anyway, how was your homework in elementary and secondary school?

I don't want to become one of those people who blogs extensively about her get-in-shape efforts, but I'm very proud of myself because:

a) I exercised for the last SIX days in a row (Sun, Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri),
b) I ate breakfast EVERY day this month with the possible exception of one or two that I don't remember because I was sick (still doing spaghetti for breakfast, which is working out well), and
c)I only ate ONE serving of potato chips, and they were Lays Salt & Vinegar and I'm on my period so it's perfectly justified. And if you don't believe me on this, you try living through one of my periods, especially with messed-up post-antibiotic hormones, without Lays Salt & Vinegar chips. (But I can't promise that I won't have more tonight if I'm still hungry after having fruit and salad and a PMS sandwich).

I wonder what would happen if Google suddenly became a really bad search engine? Like Ask Jeeves used to be good about five or six years ago, but then it became shitty and totally ineffective. What if that happened to Google? I find that, both with personal and professional research, I take Google as a definitive indication of What's Out There. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google, I don't hesitate to say "I can find no evidence that it exists." If it suddenly became bad, how long would it take us to notice? Would everyone in the world be floating for days around thinking there's no existing information on the topic they're looking for until everyone compared notes and suddenly realized that Google sucked? Would it take a really long time to notice and all of humanity just wanders around being ignorant because they can't find the info they're looking for?

I was watching on TV where a lady was having a baby, and there was a point in the process where she felt like pushing but wasn't allowed to. And apparently this is normal.

What kind of a stupid instinct is that? And if pushing when you feel like it messes up the birth process, how did the human race ever survive this far?

I haven't read her CV so I can't tell you this authoritatively, but it does occur to me that leader of the Conservative party might be the first job that Belinda Stronach has ever had to go through an application process for.

I left work at the usual time today, and when I came out of the subway it was still what you could rightfully call light out! YAY!!!!!!!

Also, because this is the first day of the year of the monkey, we should get to call it Monkey Day. Happy Monkey Day everyone!

The problem with the Vandendool is that Harmony contains many rules, but this book doesn't prioritize them. So I know you're supposed to raise the leading note to the tonic, I know you're supposed to move the soprano voice in the opposite direction of the bass voice, and I know you're supposed to move each note to the nearest neighbour. But in some examples you can't do all three. So which is most important? Perhaps this is why they don't recommend doing the Conservatory exams without a teacher.

I had a bizarre dream. I can't remember much of it, and what I can remember is just too bizarre to explain, but this is normal for my dreams. The weird part was that in the dream we kept doing retakes of various scenes, as though we were shooting a movie. And I really can't tell if it was a lucid dream and I was making us do retakes because I thought I could do better, or if there was a director off somewhere making us do retakes.

Good day today. Did yoga this morning and I was more flexible than usual (which still doesn't meet the basic human standard of "flexible", but it was a bit better than normal). Lots of good stretching and my joints kept cracking and popping while I was stretching, which I'm sure sounds gross but feels SO GOOD!

Actually got out of the house at 8:35 instead of my usual 8:45, so I was actually on time for work. I would have been early if I hadn't had to wait seven minutes for a subway. Seven minutes! During morning rush hour! (For those who don't understand what I'm bitching about, trains are supposed to be every 1-2 minutes during rush hour, so it isn't a giant inconvenience but it is a 300% delay which makes for very crowded trains).

Work went by quickly and was very interesting, although it wasn't anything I can discuss here. I had a yummy lunch and found out that feta oregano dressing does in fact go with tzatziki. (Anyone know of any other dressings or sauces that go with tzatziki) Did some errands after work (Shopper's, dollar store, LCBO - didn't get carded YAY!) and still got home by 6.

Had a PMS sandwich for dinner and now I'm full, which is good. Did some Harmony while eating dinner. Yes, I've finally started studying Harmony instead of just talking about it. Unfortunately the RCM Theory Syllabus didn't specify exactly which books go with which levels, so I went to the RCM store and looked in the Harmony section. I couldn't tell which ones were for Intro, so I got the Vandendool "Basics of Harmony - a comprehensive introduction to harmony" because I'd heard of Vandendool and it had the words "basics" and "introduction" in the title. Turns out I should have read the preface more closely - it's for Grade 3. But that doesn't matter, various levels tend to reprise each other a bit and I've had no problem doing this so far with only a Grade 2 Rudiments background. I really enjoy Harmony - it uses the opposite part of my brain of what my job does, and it's like a puzzle: Make the notes fit together and still follow all these rules. When I get to Counterpoint (which should take a couple of years) maybe I'll buy a keyboard - just a small one, four octaves or so - so I can enjoy the fruits of my labour. Counterpoint is sexy! Don't know how my neighbours will feel about it though.

So it was a very nice productive day. Now I'm going to curl up with a book and a cup of tea and relaxinate.

Fun fact: When I was a small child, I knew there was a TV show called Golden Girls, but I had never seen it and didn't know what it was about. So in my head, a Golden Girl had to be a female action hero, like Wonder Woman or She-Ra. Then when I finally saw Golden Girls, I was sitting there wondering when it was going to get interesting.

I had some leftover shampagne, so I bought orange juice so I could make mimosas.

Then I had some leftover orange juice, so I bought peach schnapps so I could make fuzzy navels.

Then I had some leftover peach schnapps, so today I bought orange vodka so I could make fruity fuzzy martinis.

Anyone have ideas for good drinks involving orange vodka and not too many other ingredients?

What's up with the idea that if you don't worship a deity, then by default you either worship science or money/materialism? Or the broader concept that if a person isn't spiritual they must be materialistic? Are the concepts of:...

a) not worshipping anything at all,
b) being neither spiritual nor materialistic, or
c) being both spiritual and materialistic,

...really so difficult to wrap a brain around?

The PMS sandwich:

2 slices of bread
An appropriate amount of nice salty cheese
A sliced hard-boiled egg
Twice the appropriate amount of pickles
Mustard to taste

Instructions: Toast bread, put ingredients together in the normal sandwich way

What's up with the people who object to photo radar on the grounds that "They didn't mention it in their campaign platform"?

No, this issue was not mentioned in their campaign platform one way or the other. It wasn't brought up at all by any of the parties, probably because it wasn't in the public mind then. If it had been in the public mind at the time, voters and media would have asked candidates about it.

So why does this bother people so much? Don't they realize that you can't fit every issue in the world into a campaign platform? What do they expect the government to do when an issue comes up that wasn't an issue at the time of the campaign? Just ignore it until the next election, when they can put it in a campaign platform?

On TV there's a protest about the proposed French ban on headscarves. I didn't catch where the protest is, but it's very cold there, and everyone is all bundled up against the cold. Because they're all bundled up, it is very difficult to tell whether the protesters are wearing headscarves or not.

My personal learning plan:

1. Self-study music theory, starting with Introductory Harmony, until September. Continue after Sept. if desired
2. If I find a Polish class by Sept., study Polish. If not, start intermediate Spanish at U of T school of continuous learning.
3. After achieving enough fluency to make me happy in Polish or Spanish as the case may be, time to consider grad school again.

According to today's Social Studies: (third item down)

Recently, a 33-year-old man in Leeds, England, had heart-bypass surgery, during which part of a large leg vein had to be removed to replace a blocked artery in his chest. Before the operation, reports The Independent on Sunday, he had a tattoo on his leg which read "I love women." After his leg incision was sewed up, the tattoo read "I love men."