You know, you might imagine that since I'm not travelling I would have more time to update my web log on a regular basis. So far, nix. Work's been pretty busy, and there are a ton of projects backing up at home.

This weekend I went home to Guelph to see my parents and pick up my cat Hoover. Mom & Dad are both in good form. Dad is very happy that his new book Infinite Minds has been picked up by Oxford University Press for publication next fall, and he's just finished working a stressful couple of weeks to get it reformatted and split up into chapters per their requests. In typical form, he's now starting to plan for their trip to England for the summer, which ought to be premature in anyone's book since they're not going until June and they're there often enough to have made the bulk of the details routine by now. Mom is in the middle of preparations for a trip down to Guatemala to visit her friend Janie, who's there for a semester with her husband and some of his students on a study exchange. Mom's going through a Spanish book and reading up on the sights to see, and Dad frets about her getting mugged.

Hoover took one look at me coming in the door, and knew that the cat carrier (most hated instrument of cat torture) could not be far behind. She spent the next 36 hours under my parents' bed, and in the end we had to gently but firmly push her out with a broom. She quickly resigned herself to her fate, though, watching the trip back to Toronto silently with big frightened eyes. Once reintroduced to my apartment, she chilled out almost immediately and within a couple of hours was walking around as though she'd never left. She's already made a significant dent in the fur deficit of the apartment (she sheds like a fiend) and this morning was gracious enough to allow her belly to be scratched in a very familiar manner.

Robyn got back on Saturday from visiting her sister in Ireland, and has already got her pictures developed. There is a certain c-c-c-cold theme that comes through, but it's still a nice shock to see grass that rich, warm colour of green. They seem to have spent a minimum of time looking at towns, and a maximum amount of time frolicking up mountains and down cliffs, taking outdoorsey shots of rocks and ocean spray and ruined castles. I'll have to plan a trip to Ireland... some summer.

On the gaming front, Dave and I continued our Starcraft feuding yesterday. Dave's success last week tailed off quickly after I realized that I could produce units about twice as fast as I actually was. Since then he's had great difficulty in building and defending a second base, although he's getting quite good at building a layered defence of his first base that is extremely difficult to attack. Pity the game doesn't allow you to win with a defensive-only strategy: all I have to do is build up an overwhelming resource advantage on the rest of the board, and then assault his lines with a fleet of cloaked carriers, and it's all over.

In addition to Starcraft we started a networked game of Diablo II yesterday as well. So far, so good...

Back to work: big meeting this Wednesday which may involve a lot of fireworks. I'm not either the marksman or the target in this one, but more of a neutral observer... or maybe a UN peacekeeper in Kosovo would be the better metaphor.
posted by Tom at 9:52 AM | link |