Taking a 17 lb pumpkin for a walk is not the easiest thing, let me tell you. I have no idea how parents with kids carry them around all the time. Perhaps I just have weak arms …

Because joining the pumpkin carving contest was pretty much my idea, and the design itself was pretty much my idea, the rest of my team nominated me to take the pumpkin home. The only problem was, I walked to work today. Not that I live that far away from work, but it’s still a distance when you are trying not to drop a rather large pumpkin all over the sidewalk. The pumpkin did manage to make it home in one piece and is now sitting on my balcony, alongside the pumpkin I carved at home and the pumpkin I haven’t had a chance to carve yet.

We had a “speed pumpkin carving contest” at work today and won a gift basket full of chocolate, which we ate in about five minutes.

It is making this afternoon really really fun 🙂

(I’ll post the picture of our pumpkin if I can get it)

Now, I know that in my younger days, I fell asleep in a class or two (or three … or four …) when I had been out about about a little too late the previous evening. And I know that since I have graduated, I have been caught doing the “head-nod” in at least one lengthy training, but in my defence, I was at least *trying* to stay awake during what were less than ideal circumstances (dark room, very cold, hard to read powerpoint and a dull subject).

But as a little cog in the big wheel of industry, my daily actions do not really have a resoundingly direct impact on the daily lives of people. Unlike, oh let’s say .. a judge: When judge snoozes, crown loses – Sleeping justice missed testimony.

I don’t know if it’s just the field I work in, but whenever I get sent for a medical test I generally don’t get worried. I actually get kind of …. excited.

Ultrasound? Cool! Can I look at the monitor? What do the colours mean? Is this a Sonos?

Nuc Med? Neat! Can I look at the images? Will I glow*?

Blood tests aren’t quite as exciting, mostly because I had to have them semi-regularly as a teenager, but also because you can’t really see the results anyway. Blood looks like blood, whether it is rolling around in a vial, or rolling down your leg from a scrape.

*Photo from Victoria Radiology.

I think it might just be a good thing that Oktoberfest comes but once a year.

Apparently, although my computer can only survive for five minutes without the power adaptor before going into a forced sleep, it can survive for over three days once it enters sleep mode.

I decided to try a little experiment and run the battery completely down before charging it back up, to see if somehow, somewhere, a memory setting got messed up, making the computer think it had less battery power than it really did. And I’m beginning to think that maybe I was right, although I don’t know if I have managed to fix it or not.

You see, I wasn’t quite able to run the battery completely down. I started my little test on Sunday, and the computer quickly dropped into a deep sleep. But after three days of seeing that little blinking light taunting me, with no end in sight, I succumbed to my internet withdrawal and took it out of it’s exile.

I think it might be playing games with me.

I don’t know how the topic would have come up in the first place, but somehow my brother discovered that the cruise ship we were traveling on had thirty coffins on hand, just in case a passenger croaked.

Thirty.

Somehow that seems like an awful lot of deaths for what amounts to just over six days of vacation. The average mortality rate for the UK (it was a UK-based travel company) is somwhere around 738 deaths per 100,000 people. That works out to a tidy 0.738% of the population.

With a full cruise ship, there are about 1600 passengers on board. Which means that the cruise company is prepared for 1.875 % of their “population” to start the cruise but not to finish it. That’s just over 2.5 times the UK national average! If we throw the crew into the mix, the “expected” rate drops to 1.402%, still 1.9 times the national average in the UK.

Makes you wonder about the ship. Is there something we don’t know? Is the food a little “suspicious”? Is that why both my brother and I got sick during the cruise?

Aparently turkey, while making people very sleepy, makes little kitties very psycho.

I don’t actually know if my cats have ever tried turkey before. Since both my brother and I fall just short of the vegetarian line, we don’t exactly have turkey served very often in my mother’s house since she’s the only one who would eat it. We traditonally carve the Thanksgiving fish (and Christmas fish, and Easter fish, …) but since my father was joining us for Thanksgiving this year, my mother took the liberty of indulging in a little turkey (it really was little) and I carved off a little slice for my cats before heading back home.

Now I have the benefit of two very hopped up little furballs tearing around like their tails are on fire. And by the time turkey is served again, I will probably have forgotten this incident and will be doomed to repeat it.

A few days ago I noticed what I thought was a dandelion puff stuck to the outside of my bedroom window. This morning I took a closer look and saw that it’s actually a tiny little puff of white fluffy feathers.

Which makes me wonder, were the feathers lost elsewhere and just borne by the wind and stuck to my window by hapenstance? Or did a tiny bird actually launch itself at my window? Did it spot one of my kittens and try to take a closer look, only to be foiled by the glass?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Brad visited yesterday and with a few simple words launched me into a four hour cleaning spree this morning that saw 3+ teeming garbage bags leave my apartment, 3 more things that didn’t fit into garbage bags follow and a box of goodwill/sally ann stuff that will leave the apartment shortly.

The funny thing is, all he said was that I should “unpack”, meaning put up some shelves and make the place look like I didn’t move into it three months ago.

So I started with the spare bedroom, which is where all the garbage bags full of things came from. After that was sorted out, I could finally move my bike out of the kitchen and put it away in the closet. This, of course, produced quite the mess, so the vacuum came out and visited all the rooms in the apartment. Tomorrow was vacuuming day anyway, so it was only a day early. The living room wasn’t in too bad shape, but since I’ve been sick the last week (damn cold that never ends!!) it had definitely suffered a little and was in need of the extra attention I gave it.

Tomorrow, I tackle painting the living room. This will of course create even more mess, but at least it will be mess in the right direction.