Every so often I reach a state of tiredness where one of my eyelids start to twitch. I am at that point and it is only the beginning of the week. Thanks to the help of my wonderful Papa, Aryn and I are well into the renovations of our condomaximus. My father arrived to help on Wednesday evening and what was meant to be a quick site survey turned into an impromptu demo session. We tore up the majority of the floor and started to knock down some walls. By Thursday afternoon my father had dismantled the kitchen and removed the other walls that we decided to eliminate from the space. Friday involved additional demo, including a trip to the Clover Bar Landfill to get rid of all the items that we could not find another use for. Saturday was a little more constructive, my father finished wiring the kitchen and built the structure for the kitchen wall. The days were long and my young bones ached at the end of each day. Yesterday, after a disappointing brunch at the Blue Chair Cafe (good company, poor service), Aryn and I returned to our labour and spent the rest of the day prepping our floors (a labour intensive process of sweeping,mopping, scrubbing, and scraping up the leftover crud from years gone by). We were making reasonable progress until we reached the final stage of the gunk removal, when we applied Circa 1850 to the gluey bits on the floor (as instructed by our flooring fellows). Much to our dismay, the miracle remover refused to be removed. After some vigorous attempts to scrape and then chisel the offensive junk from the floor we angrily gave up, deciding it was best to leave this problem to the experts.

Waiting for breakfast... learning new things about myself.

You are The Empress

Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.

The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents,
beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home
decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.

The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I was just looking at photographer Bill Wadman's site 365 Portraits... and then suddently I started to miss my camera.

I took some photos for a friend of a friend's Doctoral Concert on Wednesday night but I haven't had the chance to process the photos yet. The conditions were less than optimal, it was a church with challenging lighting conditions. As the focus was the music I tried my best to be unobtrustive with my camera. The concert was being adjudicated for the conductor's degree, so I was quite restrained with my photography. It was fun, but because I was shooting without flash (the focus was the performance not the photography) the photos have a real grainy quality. I'm longing to shoot some photos that have a real nice crispness to them. This past winter has not been particularly productive photographically for me. Will the summer pick up?

The weather puzzles me. One moment there's snow and then overnight it disappears. I'm absolutely estatic about the change. It has been a long and dreary winter and I have been anxious to throw off the shackles of sock season.

Today is officially the day. My decision to go sockless was in part prompted by my inability to find any matching pair this morning, but also because yesterday it was warm enough that I could walk across the parkade to the Property Management Office in a pair of pants my mom brought me from Trinidad and a tank top. Unfortunately open-toe season at work has not started yet (there's a strict dress code, summer dress starts sometime in May I think), so all of my sandal type shoes have to wait a couple weeks. I hope this is the last major weather change I will have to endure for a while. I want it to start getting hotter and hotter, with perhaps some rainy days in between.

I really feel like my general mood is improving. Aryn and I will start to move in a couple weeks, just in time for the reopen of the downtown Farmer's Market (The City Market) on May 19th. Realizing how little time I get to spend in the fresh air during the week, I'm trying to spend as much time as I can out of doors this summer. So that will mean sitting outside in the park during my lunch break, going for evening walks and going to the market every weekend. I live downtown, I might as well take advantage of all the amenities I have close by.

Maybe it's spring, but green things have been popping up a lot recently. I am continually reading blog posts or magazine articles about the new 'green' fad. Yesterday I came across Colin Beavan's blog called No Impact Man chroniciling his family's year long experiment to have no net impact environmental impact while living in the New York City.

No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

The blog has been running since February 2007 and will eventually be made into a documentary (to be released in 2009 I think). I was looking through the blog yesterday and it was interesting to read some of the comments, especially the negative ones. There are lot of people out there who like to condemn others for attempting to do something different. This guy is trying to reduce his environmental impact, which I think is admirable. However, there are a number of people who feel the need to call this guy a hypocrite and try to prove that his experiment is only a publicity stunt or an effort to seek fame and fortune. It's really ridiculous how some individuals are able to find something negative in what should be viewed as an admirable effort by Beavan and his family. There are so many ways that we each can try to minimize our environmental impact - and I think it's inspiring that this fellow is trying some extreme measures in order to see what would be feasible for his lifestyle in the longterm.

After watching Manufactured Landscapes over the Easter long weekend, I'm still in shock of some of the images I saw in the film. After seeing the piles of recycling shipped to some of these cities in China (where from I'm unsure), I am interested to find out more specific details about how the Edmonton Recycling (& Waste Management) Programs work. Lucky for me I'm dating a Civil Engineer who has not only visited some of these facilities but is also employed by the City (albeit in a totally different department).

I think Aryn and I need to think more closely about how much waste we are producing. If the Beavan family can try to live with a net environmental impact for a year, we can at least try to lessen ours.

The long weekend is over and the snow is back. It doesn't seem possible that July is only three months away. How does the weather change so much in such a short time?

The return on the snow left me in such a foul mood this morning. In an effort to prevent a bout of bad weather induced depression I decided to focus on my career and try an online personality test to see if I was pursuing my true calling.

The results:

You Are An INFP

The Idealist You are creative with a great imagination, living in your own inner world. Open minded and accepting, you strive for harmony in your important relationships. It takes a long time for people to get to know you. You are hesitant to let people get close. But once you care for someone, you do everything you can to help them grow and develop. You would make an excellent writer, psychologist, or artist.

I must admit that this test did not tell me anything new about myself. It didn't really improve my mood much either. I suppose that my half-hearted efforts in the photography world might count for something, but I feel like I haven't taken any pictures in ages. I brought almost all of my photography equipment with me over the weekend and nothing came of it. Blah... Oh well, there's some light on the horizon. Tomorrow I'll be taking photos at a concert with Wade and I may have another corporate photo shoot scheduled in the next couple weeks.

In other more exciting news, Aryn has started working on his LEED® Professional Accreditation today. I'm moderately jealous that he is able to do this as part of his job. Not only is this something that he is interested in, but it is also relevant to the type of work that he is planning to continue with. I would be hard-pressed to find a way to relate LEED® certification to the work that I am currently involved in. However my lack of professional development opportunities is not really the point here. I could always pony up the cash to take the exam, but that's not really an option for me at the moment. For the time being I'll just learn what I can on my own and use my darling beau as an additional resource.

It's Day Two of my visit to Fort St. John. Yesterday I was feeling a bit sick (*kaff, kaff) so I hung around the house and did a whole lot of nothing. I finished reading JPod by Douglas Coupland and watched a series of boring home movies from the family archives. My family likes to do this when our significant others are around, because our movies are really quite boring and it's our way of torturing others.

After dinner with the fam, I went with my two brothers, blonde sister-in-law and my blonde beau to the other end of town, where we proceeded to watch more television. Apparently it's what we do. It somehow became Simon Pegg night, and Aryn was introduced to the wonder that is Shaun of the Dead and we both finally got to see the brilliant Hott Fuzz. Both are not only hilarious but also very clever and I highly recommend them. My sister suggested that I watch the series Spaced, and I think I will have to follow up on her advice.

This is a short post, but potato peeling duties await. However, while we're on the subject of clever cinema,watch this short film that I found on Virb.com (the best alternative to MySpace that I have ever come across. If you're into social networking check this site out). Either watch the embedded video clip below or see the video on Virb.

Edit: The video seems to have disappeared from Virb, so here it is on YouTube instead.

I was meaning to post something tonight, but poor Aryn is sick and I've been busy tending to him with water and other such essential get-well remedies all the while entertaining him with my terrible Eastern European accent.

Florence Nightingale would be proud.

Eventually I will post my thoughts and feelings about the Alberta Ballet. Just not tonight. I must watch over my patient. It's a little odd to be the one who is healthy, that is not usually the case.