Last weekend I managed to lose my glasses somewhere in my house. I’ve been battling a nasty summer cold for about 10 days now and last Friday I must have been pretty drained and distracted when I took them off. All I knew was that I’d worn my glasses home from work and in the morning couldn’t find them in any of the usual hidey-holes.

Sure, I have multiple spares but the ones I “lost” are my favourites. Aside from being comfortable, they have the added bonus of transitions lenses to mitigate the effects of the bright yellow ball of nastiness in the sky.

After a brief search over a period of days (hey, I was sick, I wasn’t moving much), I gave in and pulled out a spare pair of glasses to wear at work and around the house.

Yay for spares!

Anywho, today I was futzing around in the spare room, working on my “decluttering the house” project, and I found my glasses on the bed. Under the brown paper wrap I use when sending packages to the hubs. Very odd place for them to be. Don’t know what I was thinking when I put them down.

We’ve been re-united and it feels so good!

Drew’s truck, while running fine, had seen better days. The last time he went to Kandahar, his truck sat untouched in the garage for months. Since I have my own baby truck, I didn’t need another one. We decided not to have a repeat of the “hurry up and wait” experience for the truck this time. And we also decide that there was no point in trading in his old truck to buy a new one before he left. Then we’d just be trading one vehicle stranded in a garage for another.

Enter the government’s “retire your ride” program.

Drew’s truck is old enough that it qualified for him to give the truck to the gov’t in exchange for money ($300) or a year of transit passes.

Parking costs a minor fortune in downtown Edmonton so I’ve been taking public transit to work since I started working for the province. Monthly bus passes cost $85 each month. Getting a year’s worth of bus passes for free saves us a good chunk of change that we can put towards our vacation in February 2011.

The gov’t is trying to get old clunkers off the road and this program was a great way for us to deal with our extra truck problem. It can take a while between registering your vehicle & having it picked up (about 4 weeks in our case) so you’ll need a place to park it while you wait. You’ll get a call for the car to be picked up by a towing contractor and it’s sent off to be crushed. Shortly after pick-up (less than 30 minutes for us) you’ll receive a call to confirm the “reward” option you’ve selected (cash or transit pass) and your mailing address. If you choose transit, a few days later you’ll get a letter in the mail that you take to the city transit office each month to redeem your free pass. The letter is good for one year but must be used consecutively.

If you’ve got a vehicle from 1995 or earlier and don’t know what to do with it, perhaps you should consider throwing a happy retirement party for your vehicle as well.

I’m in need of a new point and shoot camera. Hubs broke mine last year when he was on tour. We bought a replacement camera while on vacation last summer but hubs has taken it with him on his current tour.

While he did leave his fancy schmantzy DSLR camera behind, I don’t have the foggiest idea how to use it. More importantly, I don’t want to be dragging around a backpack filled with lenses, filters, and a bazillion other odds and ends that I don’t know the names of.

What I want is a digital camera that will be smart enough to take a decent picture no matter how poor the photographer’s “eye”. I need a camera that can compensate for my wobbly hands, poor sight, and fits in my pocket or purse.

I don’t want a large body camera with a fixed lense. If I’m going to get something that big then I might as well sign up for a photography course and lug around hubs giant bag o’ camera equipment.

Preferably my new camera will have some sort of facial or smile recognition, a sports feature that would allow me to take pics at football games, a decent zoom (6-10x would be nice) and the ability to film short movies.

So peanut gallery, time to chime in with recommendations (make & model please) so I can start comparing cameras and make a decision. What do you use? What are it’s good points? What’s it’s bad points? What are your favourite features & which features do you wish your camera had?

Thanks.

Looks like there’s a chance my mum & sister may be heading west to spend Christmas with me. Since I’m about to get crazy busy with school again soon I figure I better spend the next few weeks going through the spare room, kitchen, office & basement great room to cull things that we haven’t used in years. I figure I can spend a few hours each weekend until my birthday clearing out odds and ends and then find a way to dispose of them (likely Goodwill or Sally Ann). Won’t promise that the house will be spotless in time for their arrival but should hopefully be able to find the sparr bed, some empty dresser drawers, and (most importantly) be able to move around a bit in my office.

I normally adore reading. Sci-Fi, fantasy, crime, mystery, biography, classics. I don’t really have a favourite genre. I happily read hundreds of books a year. Of course my love for reading is predicated on the fact that the book I’m reading interests me. That the pages it contains call out to my imagination and paints vivid pictures in my mind.

Textbooks, at least the one’s for my classes to date, really don’t fill this requirement for me.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this but I suspect it’s true for most university students – I’ve never read a text from school from cover to cover. Sure, I read chapters here and there. I skim sections that pop out at me. I’ll hunt down research articles and explore topics of interest. I’ll reference ideas from one text in research assignments for a different class. All the while content with the fact that I have never read a complete text in any class.

This semester worries me. In one class I have the standard text and handful of assigned readings in the form of articles. Class number two is a completely different story. I don’t have all the text for that class yet. One still needs to be shipped to me. The giant pile of textbooks required for the class keeps growing. To date I have 8 of the 9 books. Yeah, that’s right. 9 texts. I have a horrible feeling I’ll need to read more than one of them to pass this class. *sigh*

There goes my perfect “non-reading” record. I have a feeling I’ll be diving into the least dull seeming book beginning this weekend in order to prep for my fall classes.