Life's like this
Snowboarding -
I started this in Jan04, and went boarding about six times. I'm signed
up for trips and tickets this year too:
Swoosh, swoosh,
blam!
Swoosh, swoosh,
uggghhh!
Swoosh, swoosh,
ooowwww!
I really should take
lessons, but really have too much fun and pain to want to take the
time to do so. And for those skiers whining about bodies strewn over
the slopes ... well, chill! (Dec04 Xmas letter)
Plastic
(groom) and Double-Fisteds' (bride)'" wedding Jun03 - we set a
trail (chalk, flour and yellow roses) that must have been 18 km long,
not too far from Valleyfield Quebec (in the same general area as
Hemingford, where there is a park safari zoo). Highlights included:
- everyone
was held up by an irate Canadian guard running back into Canada
(after crossing 10 feet onto the USA side). Two people blasted past
the Canadian officer on "re-entry". She didn't like that
at all, so she held up the whole group for 15 minutes or so.
- "Plastic"
(the groom) lost his wedding ring in the middle of a rocky stream
(this is the day after the wedding – Double Fisted was really
impressed!). We were trying to ambush/splash runners crossing the
creek. After 10 or twenty of us spent 10 or 15 minutes looking for
the ring, we gave up – can't wait too long to get back to the
beer, EH!
- "Scratch
& Sniff" took my fireworks (which I had forgotten to use
the night before at the wedding!), and set off one at the edge of a
nice green luscious farmer's field, which looked like the perfect,
safe place for fireworks. Minutes letters you should have seen
those runners run, stomping out the source of thick, billowing
clouds! That was a great lesson for me – even wet, green
grass can be very dangerous. The farmer was NOT impressed (stupid
city people). (Dec03 Xmas letter)
Boston
Marathon spectator – together with the Boston running friends,
we handed out beer to the marathoners at the bottom of the steep part
of the famous Heart-break Hill. This was much appreciated by the
marathoners who partook. I went to the nearby delicatessen, and
offered some of my spinach-stuffed pastry and pickled herring to the
marathoners as well, but they weren't too fussy about that. I
couldn't run "bandit" – my legs were too beat up from
four days of running, jumping, and hyper-dancing (Mr. Slime –
because I sweat so much...). (Dec03 Xmas letter)
"Sky
Die" run in Northampton west of Boston - Peniscillin (who is
a slum landlord, and a brilliant friend) and I drove down west of
Boston one Friday afternoon to do some running. We arrived around
one in the morning – just in time for the party. I kept going
until 05:00, when I went to sleep so that I could get up early in the
morning to go sky diving... <brilliant, eh?...>. I did wake up
shortly after 08:00, just after Peniscillin went to bed – oh
well, forget him. After viewing a short film (you're not going to
die..), and some instructions, we piled into a Cesna ?182?. With the
instructor strapped to my back (tandem jumped) we launched into the
air – what an absolute blast! It took three hours to wipe the
smile off my face, notwithstanding the landing (splat – I
should have been paying intention instead of enjoying myself so
much)! (Dec03 Xmas letter)
Sri
Chimnoy 24 hour runs - this year was a disappointment. Two weeks
after the Quebec City marathon, we ran the 24 hour Sri Chimnoy around
the Terry Fox 400 meter track in Ottawa. Every six hours every
changes direction – you can imagine the anticipation building.
The Sri Chimnoy vegetarian food is amazing, and the people are
admirable. I only ran 97 km this year (we're supposed to run 100
miles, but I am happy to break 100 km), and slept for six hours in
the middle of the race – this is really getting lazy! This is
a "Beauty and the Beast" run - it's amazing how beautiful
it can be 10 to 12 hours into the race. But eventually, it plain
hurts (with the beauty!). (Dec03 Xmas letter)
"Needle's",
my long distance running friend, didn't run it this year. Two years
ago, she passed out the morning after from dehydration, after
over-heating in the brutal heat (high 30's!!). I had run stuffing
ice cubes in the ball cap that I borrowed, and more ice cubes
continually in my mouth. Needles did well last year, though. (Dec03
Xmas letter)
Homeless Person (again)
Because
my kids no longer live with me, there has been no reason for me to
live close to the schools that they attended. I was getting sick and
tired of commuting to work (4 km, 5 minutes drive or roughly 40
minutes walk which I never did), so I needed to move closer to work.
However, a concrete high-rise, the absence of cockroaches, and a
limited tolerance for sky-high rents narrowed my options to a single
building that I had already lived in.
- Inner-city
camping - There was a gap between the time that I vacated my old
apartment, and the time at which I finally could move into the
selected building. Twice I was too busy to finish a contract, and
lost available apartments. So I stayed at a very nice motel in the
Gatineau "mountains" at Wakefield for three weeks, crashed
at friends places on and off, and rented the apartment of a friend
who was shipped off to the Ivory Coast for two years. But a couple
of times "gaps" developed in my domicile arrangements –
so I experimented with the challenges of "inner city camping"
for a couple of nights. Not that conventional campgrounds aren't
abundant in this area – which is where I stayed for a few
weeks several years back. And there are motels galore. Its just
that I couldn't resist it. This was just like when I purchased my
van five or so years ago – I absolutely had to buy it at an
auction, ... and got a good car at a good price in spite of having
bid against myself.
- Back with the Dogs – My current apartment is close to Dow's Lake in
Ottawa (tulip festival, canoeing etc), right across the road from
the Humane Society. Neither the dogs not the cats have complained
yet. Lucky for them that I live across the street and not in one of
the kennels.
-
If I buy-You sell - I am now
almost in the position to buy a house – but want to wait for
the market to cool down from its overheated state (which may take
two or three years – watch the interest rates and shifts in
global competition). However, as soon as I buy I'll let you know -
historically my market timing has been perfect (stock markets,
houses, you name it) and always portents a collapse <buy high,
sell low - grin>. (Dec03 Xmas letter)
Snow
in the summertime, deep underground
(Dec04 Xmas letter)
M.V. Bodnarescu - I've seen Bodnarescu fairly
regularly at the annual IJCNN conferences (see my stories below),
starting with IJCNN'2000 in Como, Italy, 24-27Jul00. He also has the
good sense to spend his "vacation time" (actually, he's
been retired for something like 20 years) at the conference. Having
a long career in engineering in Germany, including the "Atoms
for peace" commercial nuclear power program post WWII,
Bodnarescu has a very broad interest in science and engineering.
As I
like to tell the story:
"...My friend
came from Germany in May, and I took him to Sudbury to see the SNOW
(...this was a little hard for my friends to believe given the balmy
weather at that time...). But in order to get to the SNOW, we
descended straight down 6,800 feet into solid bedrock, then walked
out a kilometer or so. And in getting to the SNOW, we could better
see the sun..."
The story actually refers to the "Sudbury Neutrino Observatory"
(spelled "SNO" – http://laurentian.ca/physics –
look for Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and
www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/sno/), which is currently he deepest neutrino
observatory in the world. Neutrinos are by far the most numerous
particles in the universe. Given that their mass is extremely small,
and that they have no charge, they pass right through most materials.
Actually, most neutrinos from the sun pass right through the Earth
sithout colliding! Muons (other particles – I get them all
mixed up too) also tend to penetrate, but not as easily – they
tend to be screened out by several thousand feet of solid rock.
Therefore, by burying a lab deep underground, you can better monitor
neutrinos without interference from other particles, getting a
clearer picture of solar physics.
Bodnarescu
had already visited the "Super-Kamiokande" neutrino
detector in Japan. (On 11Nov01, about half of the really special,
sensitive photomultiplier tubes in the Super-Kamiokande were
destroyed in a "chain-reaction" of "exploding bulbs".)
He really wanted to see the Canadian observatory before the
conclusion of the program (31Dec06 or thereabouts), especially given
the Canadian success in resolving the "solar neutrino problem",
whereby only two-thirds of the neutrinos that hould have come from
the sun according to the standard solar model, in fact could be
measured by other neutrino observatories.
Well,the long and the short of it is that we sat in on the two-day
workshop involving planning for future experimental programs at
SNOLab, then we went deep, deep underground for a fascinating tour,
and we had an amazing dinner with Josef and Barbara Stachulak. Joe
is the chief ventilation engineer for INCO, and dinner conversation
got deeply into European history and events. Fascinating... and very
revealing of my ignorance of recent modern history!
Thanks to Dr. Doug Hallman of
LaurentianU, Dr. David Sinclair of OttawaU, Dr. Tony Noble of SNOLab,
and Dr. Art McDonald of QueensU, and of course the company INCO for
letting us participate in the SNOLab workshop 12-14May04, and to tour
the underground observatory. Note that Art McDonald was awarded the
2003 Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, Canada's top
science prize (Nov. 24, 2003).