in other news...

kylie just brought me some chips and told me to guess what they were made of. i eat the first chip... crunchy, slightly sticky texture, very salty but good. second chip is deep red, sweeter and the tiniest bit sour. a couple more chips and i still have no idea. finally after much gustatory rumination (is that a tautology?) i give up. kylie reads off the list of ingredients, "taro, ruby taro, sweet potatoe, yuca, batata and parsnip" wow, i was close.

today i had a rush of discipline and worked on my research project for like 2 hours with only a minority of the time spent staring out of our office window at the willow tree in our backyard. while i was working i was even pretty efficient. suddenly i looked at my computer screen and thought "wow, i love my mac". i can have my main working tools and documents all on the desktop at the same time, and if i need to find something that's buried, i just slide my mouse to the corner and all the open windows tile out into view so i can pick the document i need. do pc's have this feature yet? mac has used it for years now. anyways, i thought perhaps this desktop could be research art, and maybe i could hand it in as an art project and not have to finish the research, so i took a screenshot.



yesterday i was also working on my research project, although i wasnt being quite as efficient. niko was upstairs bugging me for a while but eventually he got the message and went downstairs to hang out by himself. i didnt hear from him for over an hour. when i went downstairs to say hi i found my (decimated) wallet and its contents spread out over the entire room. he got a tooth mark in almost every one of my cards, wrecked my bank card and my visa, chewed the corner off my birth certificate (i think its still valid) and tore the actual wallet to shreds. that brat. "fine, if you dont want to play with me, i'll show you... i'll have fun all by myself". oh well, i needed a new wallet anyways.


this morning in the obligatory procrastination process that initiates all of my attempts to do actual work on the computer i discovered a number of comments that people had posted on our blog that had been lost but now are found. too bad they are scattered all down our blog and no one will read them. thanks to shareen for pointing out the problem, thanks to fraser for carrying on my (his) helmet joke, thanks to chris for the useful advice, yes jenessa i agree that olive oil is healthy and sorry josh that the first blog comment of your life got rejected.

the other day i was privileged to hear the perfect doppler effect. a train blew its whistle just as i was about to pass it going the opposite direction on the highway. a textbook "wheeeeeoooooOOOOHHHH" when the sound waves beat on my tympanic membrane with steadily decreasing frequency as i travelled towards and then rapidly away from their source. it served as an excellent reminder of the relativity of our various observations of the world. every person in the vicinity of that train heard a slightly different sound made by the same whistle at the same point in time even though the sound waves produced scattered identically in all directions. remember, the world you see and hear around you is not actually there; what you are experiencing is merely a map of your environment produced by your brain and your limited senses and projected to your conciousness to enable you to survive. you have no way of knowing what is really out there or what anyone else is really experiencing.