Imported from the old lesombre.ca…

I can’t believe it. This is the kind of thing you are told about as a child but never quite think it’s true until it finally happens.

Today was the day they replaced the duct tape on the carpets at work.

I’ll let this one sink in a bit.

To say we have old carpeting at work would be an understatement. The building is maybe 40 years old and the carpet is the original carpet. When the carpet rips, because let’s say someone drags a chair across it, of just turns on the lights, maintenance comes in and duct tapes the ripped part.

There’s a good reason for that. Ten years ago, the building was supposed to be demolished because of all the asbestos in it. Eight years ago when a new videoconferencing room was installed, they surface-mounted the wires because the buiding was to be demolished any minute now. When I got there two years ago, they told me not to get too confortable because the building was coming down in the next few months. Now our moving date has been set to mid 2009. Wait, I’ve just been told that it’s more likely to be late 2010.

So today, people from maintenance were working hard to peel 10 yers of duct tape to replace it with fresh duct tape. But they didn’t just rip and replace, they trimmed the excess carpet, so it wouldn’t make bumps in the carpet.

Did I mention the water is not drinkable in that building? The air quality sucks? There’s asbestos everywhere? Did I mention it used to be the Child Study Center?

As a funny aside, since this used to be a building with a lot of kids in, the sinks are unusual. They look a little like this, except way less stylish. This was done so the kids could gather around the sink (which is about 5′ in diameter and 3′ tall) and all wash their hands at the same time. When I interviewed for the job there, I got in, shook everybody’s hand and said: “Your urinals are really strange”. They still hired me.

To sum up: Carpets old, duct tape new.

On an unrelated note, I went to see 30 days of night. Read a very nice abstract of the movie on Wikipedia. Don’t go see that movie. It is really dumb and I can’t believe that it’s only 51% rotten on rottentomatoes.com.

12:30 AM.

I guess this is Tuesday now. I’m sitting here waiting for “Duh!” to turn to “Cool”. No exclamation mark after cool. We turned the clock back on Sunday morning, and while most people got one more hour of sleep out of the deal, for me it finally happened: I worked a 25-hour day. I’m now one hour behind on everything. I’m on one cool out of 3 Duhs! at this point.

Work is crazy (as usual). As an aside, I’ve been here almost two years now, and in the past 24 months things have changed drastically. We used to have one crazy time at the beginning of each semester – So 3 times per year, and a much smaller crazy time mid-semster (you know, mid-terms and all) and one last crazy time at the end of semesters. Now we have less crazy periods: We have one per year. The problem is that it lasts 12 months.    

School is crazy (as usual). I’m doing extra stuff worth absolutly no points to save on driving 7 hours to get to class and back. Saturday, I got up at 7:30 and started working on school stuff. Eventually, I was hungry so I went upstairs and it was 19:30. I swear (and I swore). I completely lost my Saturday! I got an e-mail that might require me to drive down once more before the final exam. It’s really hard to express your disagreement to someone who’ll grade your final exam before getting your masters. I’m such a whore.

My hair is crazy. This is what my hair looked like today. If it was just up to me, it would look like that tomorrow. I think I can get a suit like that. BTW, be really careful if you search for “shaven head” in Google Pictures.

Family life is cool. My daughter won (again) some sort of draw at her school. We’re seriously considering getting her to buy us one lotto ticket. Last year, she won something in most of the draws for prizes at her school. It started with the “reading week”. She told us that we needed to fill this form, because she was going to enter the draw and win the prize. We explained to her that the other 400 children in the school also had a chance to win, and that she had roughly a 0.25% chance of winning, and explained the random factor of any draw, etc. But she won. Then it was some sort of Halloween draw, and she won again. She kept winning the whole year. It gotten so boad that other parents with kids in other grades know my daughter as the girl who wins everything.

Crap, still one cool and two Duhs! I’m waiting for a computer to finish importing courses (big courses, 600 megs to 1.5 Gig in size) on the new server. While it’s importing, the result page gives me a Duh! besides the course code. When it’s done, the Duh! changes to a Cool. Pretty nifty, n’est-ce pas? I’m sure you want to see the page in action. Go ahead!

It’s my sister birthday today. Happy birthday S.

I have close to 200 pairs of socks. On Sunday morning, as I’m putting my fresly washed clothes away, I noticed that all my socks were in a pile inside mycontemporary man’s chest with two drawers. Mine is green, has an arched top, but you get the general idea. So I started taking them out and putting them on the bed. My plan was to have them (the socks) share a drawer with my underwear. Incidently, I just bought new underwear, so at the same time I went through my “old” underwear withthe firm intention to throw away anything that had holes in. Well the underwear must have heard about my plan, because it turns out I only had two pairs with unwanted holes in. I could swear I had close to 10 pairs with holes on Friday. Anyways, with 200 pairs of socks and close to 25 pair of underwear, there’s no way that all these things could share a drawer. Why do I have so many socks? LovelyWife thought it was going to be fun to blog about this, but I see she was wrong now. 

That’s it. I’m off.

1:10 AM.