The Scientist: April 2008

How Pumpkin steals the bed

Locked out

The other day, Karl found the key which fit the lock on my desk drawers at school.

I didn't do anything with it for a few days, but yesterday morning I decided to try out the key.

I put it in the lock on the bottom drawer - it didn't turn.

I put it in the lock on the top drawer - bingo. I locked the drawer.

I turned the key back to unlock - wait - uh oh.

I tried harder to turn the key back - no luck. Lift, wiggle, twist, push, wiggle, shake. No luck.

I gave up for awhile, hoping that if I walked away and tried again in a few minutes, it would turn easily when I retried. No luck.

I got Karl to help me with my drawer. Using his super power skills, he...broke the key in two.

I called the workshop. The handyman came over with some tools. He pried open my drawer. Then he dismantled the lock completely, since it was now broken anyway.

Now there is just a hole where a lock used to be.

Tonight I swept up half a cat from my kitchen floor

I swept my kitchen floor. The amount of fur I swept up was pretty disgusting. I guess it is spring, after all, so Pumpkin is shedding, but I hadn't realized how bad it was until I collected it all in one place.

This is half of what I swept up.

EEEEEWWWwwwwwwww.

Pretty flowers

Winter Re-play

Yup, it's true. We received almost a foot of snow on the weekend. We took these pictures out at Garrett's parents house the other day. That's me and Heather, standing uncomfortably in the blizzard.

We took these on the drive from Garrett's parent's house to my house. This is on the snowy, icy Whitemud freeway.

Snow plow!

Snow plow number 2!

More dirty freeway. The black car on the left is the one that almost sideswiped us. Some people don't shoulder check, the dummies.

On the bridge.

Garrett took this one on his drive back to Calgary. Bad highways!

This is a huge icicle at his house. He sent me these pictures for the blog.

I took these ones on Monday morning as I left for school. There was about another 5 inches of snow on Monday morning, and another 3 inches on Tuesday morning.

This is looking down at my boot on my steps.

We were supposed to have our first ultimate practice at the park tonight, but I cancelled it. My other team was going to practice on Wednesday night - it was cancelled too. There is a hat tournament scheduled for Saturday. If the snow isn't melted by then, which it probably won't, it will be cancelled as well. Stupid spring!

Elvis has LEFT the curling rink

On Friday afternoon, my department had a curling funspiel. I made a team with Joelle, Nikki and Mike. We decided to dress up, called ourselves "The Flying Elvises" and showed up dressed as below:

From left to right: Kim Zim (Vegas Elvis no. 1), Mike (Vegas Elvis no. 2), Joelle (pajama drugged-out Elvis), Nikki (young rock 'n roll Elvis).

Here is Nikki up close - we bought Popeye candy cigarettes to carry around with us.

She's a hunk, a hunk of burning love.

We actually played extremely well in our three games that afternoon. In the first game, we played an inexperienced team and beat them 5-0. It was a good starting game for us, because it allowed Nikki and Joelle to get their feet in the game a bit before anything harder came along.

The second game was much closer. We played a team with an interesting strategy - with only 3 players, they had no skip and just tried to draw it in each time. Unfortunately, they weren't that great at it, but we didn't have our strongest game either, so we won 2-1.

Our last game was against four professors from our department. They named their team "Docs with Rocks". They had some skills, but we were on fire that game! We made some really great shots and won 6-1.

Nikki and I made our sideburns out of some black velvet. Joelle had an Elvis wig and Mike has real sideburns. Lucky guy.
My hair is done up in an Elvis curl, but that didn't show up very well in any of the pictures.

After the games, all the curlers retired to the lounge upstairs for some beer and burgers. I had a really good cheeseburger - yum! AND our team won best dressed team!

Our competition was some half-effort rock stars.

I made a few videos of the bonspiel, however I can't figure out how to rotate them so they are facing up on the blog. So, I apologize for the sideways view. Otherwise, enjoy "Sweeping Elvises" and Nikki's Elvis dance.

Every day life

Here is a peak into mine and Pumpkin's lives:

Pumpkin plays baseball with the toys. Sorry for the low angle - I couldn't rig anything better for the camera to sit on.

Care package

A week ago, my wonderful mother, sister and granny sent me a care package. It included:

1. Chocolate - a given when sending something my way!

2. A fashion magazine:

3. A sewing book, so I can make myself some clothes this summer!

4. A cute little magnet:

5. And a shirt! That's me in the shirt. Cute, no?

I also received a card full of sunshine, and the package as a whole really cheered me up. It was super sweet!

Photo box

I finally filled the photo box that I received for my birthday from Garrett's mom. I ordered some of my favorite pictures and fit them into the sides of the box. I absolutely really really love the photo box! It looks so fantastic! It's amazing-ness is difficult to tell in my pictures, but believe me, it's great.

Front side: southern Alberta in February, taken by Garrett on our way down to Fernie.

Left side: parrot in the Westin Maui, taken by Bindi.

Back side: sunset in Moab, Utah, taken by Garrett from our campsite at Sandflats Rec Area in June 2007.

Right side: Mount Robson glacier, taken by Garrett in July 2007.

Top: Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, taken by moi in Dec 2007.

An Engineer's Guide to cats.

Check this out. I laughed so hard. My favorite part is 'corporal cuddling' and the new art form of cat yodeling. Thanks to Kristina for passing this one to me!

Patched!

You may recall last summer when my backpack got a hole in it - from a critter! Here is the hole:

Another view:

I bought some patches from MEC the other day and used them to cover the hole in my pack. They were iron-on, so I heated up the iron and off I went. However, it was a little trickier than anticipated, since the corner of the bag isn't flat, it's difficult to iron on the patch carefully. I managed ok, but it wasn't completely flat.

I stuck one on the inside too - double layer:

Not bad in the end, but I guess time will tell whether it endures.

Computer camera fun

This evening, I played with the camera on my computer and took some fun pictures. My computer has a bunch of fun effects that I can use and I thought I'd show you some of them! For anyone else who has a Mac (Ray!), this is probably old hat to you, but I sure had some fun with it.
This one below is called "Glow". It makes me look like I have funny age spots on my face.

This next one is called "X-Ray" (duh!). It looks awesome and cool, both at the same time:

SCARY!

This next one is called "Thermal Camera". Here's one from the weekend when I was visiting Garrett:

Here's the same effect, me alone:

"Comic Book". We look tough, like super heroes.

"Pop Art". My computer is Andy Warhol! Yay!

"Colour Pencil". This one isn't my favorite, but I thought I'd show it anyway.

After taking a range of photos of myself, I decided to take some of Pumpkin. She's worse at being still for the camera than I am. At first, I tried to hold her up to the camera: