Dispatches from a happy Hullian

1) What are you doing this spring that you weren't doing 1 year ago?

Making a habit of running or cycling daily.

2) What pandemic precautions are you still taking?

Giving people space, masking up indoors, seeing less of people than I'd like and giving strangers more personal space including stepping off the sidewalk as we pass each other. Also, got vaccinated!

3) What's a safety rule that's very important to you?

Don't surprise drivers.

4) What plants are blooming where you live?

A lot of the spring flowers have come and gone... strawberry flowers are still open, bleeding hearts too, and honeysuckle has some flowers holding on and lots of golden fallen petals under the bushes.

5) What was your most memorable summer job?

Probably working on web development in the mid-to-late 90s as part of a bold little enrichment program which connected talented rural kids with community groups that wanted websites. I discovered ramen, both ends of a job interview, Photoshop and Illustrator, hand-coding HTML, and doing tech projects in teams. I liked how us kids taught each other a lot of what we needed to do and I liked biking to work and having my own money.

Questions: thefridayfive

Take the following list, and: Bold items you have, and use at least once a year. Italicize the ones you have, but don't use. Strike through the ones you had, but have gotten rid of.

The holidays went by pretty fast — it felt like we were doing something social nightly for about two weeks. It's a good thing Oscar generally seems to like parties!

Christmas eve, we went over to Elizabeth's parents' place for the traditional nut loaf, cookies, rum balls and gifts. Christmas day, we drove to Ormstown and joined 17 or so family at my parent's place, feasting extensively and helping the new people get names straight. I had been a little sniffly on Christmas eve, but by Christmas day, I was full-blown sick, so a bit subdued. Boxing Day was sort of quiet, but three generations of my parents' next-door neighbours walked over to admire Oscar and say hi. The 27th was the annual Christmas bash with white elephant gift exchange (aka "steal the present") — last year there was one kid there, this year there were three and we were all starting to feel a bit grown-up. We got together at my friend A's parents' place, about 20km past civilization — Enterprise was out of compact cars and gave us something with four-wheel drive, which got some use as we were whacking through snow drifts to get there. On the 28th, we celebrated dagibbs' birthday with food and drink and cheer at his place, and on the 29th we celebrated frenchzie's housewarming and birthday. On the 30th was our mostly-weekly D&D game at our place, and on the 31st we stayed in and rung in the new year with the upstairs people from House of Flail, Ticket to Ride: Europe and Dominion, and some mead from 1999.

The most memorable presents this year were Ticket to Ride: Europe from Elizabeth (a rather addictive little game), a huge jug of Beau's Nightmärzen from my cousin Erica, and a medieval-looking Garden Weasel from my parents.

the_arachne

Places I've slept in 2010:

• Eganville, ON.
• Gatineau (Hull), QC. A lot.
• Gatineau (Gatineau), QC.
• Montreal, QC.
• Mont-Tremblant, QC.
• Ormstown, QC.
• Ottawa, ON.
• Quebec, QC.

In a little bit of rantiness, I've been fuming slightly over Google's ranking of restaurant pages. When I search for a restaurant, I probably want the official page (with menu, hours and phone) somewhere in the first hits, and failing that (or to help me decide), a review written by a real human with as much of that information as possible. The last thing I want is a listing scraped from the yellow pages, with Bing's best guess at where it is located, in which I can be the first to write a review or add information.

fuzzyila

1. What is your favourite vegetable? To grow, kale. To eat, asparagus.
2. What do you believe will be the most rewarding part of fatherhood? I'm sure my understanding of fatherhood will change drastically once I'm there, but from where I am now, watching our kid get good at things I've taught them, and branch off in new directions, will be pretty incredible.
3. When you're sick, do you prefer to be left alone or do you want company and babying? I prefer to be stoic and cocoon for the most part.
4. If you were in a museum and it caught fire, and you have the choice to save either a Van Gogh painting or a small yipping poodle with an overbite, which do you choose? I think I can run faster from the flames carrying a small poodle.
5. Have you ever stolen an object larger than your hand? What was it? When I've stolen things, they've been small, intangible and/or debatable.

raccoonbonapart

formative chess breakdowns

Everyone I know with this interest got wrapped up in a game of chess one time as a youth, their game collapsed, they couldn't take it, and they cried when it was over.

go-betweens

Being a bit interdisciplinary, I'm kind of interested in translators, guides, interpreters and folks who have to read specs written by folks who may or may not have a clue.

honey glazed babies

The name of a zine with two issues (making it longer-running than 40% of all zines or something) by my wife rottenfruit and one of her high-school friends and accomplices, silverspar. Also a neat mental image.

vermicomposting

We have a bin with worms in our kitchen that turns vegetable waste, eggshells and shredded confidential documents into compost. I think that's really cool and take some interest in how my invertebrate minions are doing.

masculinity

I'm a man, sometimes the baggage of that sits well with me, sometimes it doesn't. I'm quite interested in what good bits of traditional masculinity are keepers and which ones should be fed to the worms.

the decline of civilization

In all of recorded history, some people have been convinced that civilization was falling apart (whatever that meant to them). I have a tag where I grouse once in a while about people in positions of power or esteem whose social leverage seems to me to be in use tipping us over the brink into spiralling stupidity and/or rewarding people for doing bad things.

standards

I'm interested in the negotiated or dictated standards of interoperability, whether they're Web standards, grammar, laws or jargon. I feel they're pretty central to any useful idea of civilization, and as such, good ones are very good and bad ones lead to the previous interest!