Blessed by the Potato

I am so incredibly fed up with stupid thieves. What possesses people to steal things from other people?

Perhaps just as important, I’m fed up with incompetent thieves. It makes absolutely no sense to me for someone to put me to all the emotional anguish of being broken into or stolen from, as well as the cost of repairs and actually taking my crap, when the thief gets next to nothing out of it. With my car, I had to pay for thousands of dollars of damage to it, and all the thieves got was a ride for a few hours and maybe $12 from the change in the ashtray, and a used poker set. The benefit to them was way out of proportion to the cost to me, so it’s not just theft, it’s retarded and spiteful.

So Wayfare was congratulating us today since we made it through a Sunday without going to the hospital while we drove back to London, and we got here to find the house was broken into. And broken into by what must have been the world’s most retarded thief. The guy must have been high and looking for drugs, or just out to piss me off and not actually steal anything.

They broke in through the basement window (which I’m 95% sure was locked), and then had to get from the basement to the rest of the house. We have a door at the top of the stairwell, and while there’s a bit of a trick to opening it, it wasn’t locked. So the thief grabs a giant concrete cinder block/brick and bashes the hell out of the unlocked door to get to the rest of the house. Walks through the kitchen (tracking mud, I might add), past the $50 Home Hardware gift card sitting smack in the middle of the kitchen counter (thanks Jonathan!), and into my office, where a lot of things were rifled through, where I think my nice newish digital camera was taken, but where my 22″ flat screen and computer were left (thankfully — I could easily deal with the loss of the screen, but would hate to lose the computer, or at least the hard drive). Then, into my bedroom where a much more thorough search was performed, including looking in the boxes of board games and dominoes (probably for drugs). On my dresser is a box that is my life: I had my passport, an emergency credit card, a bunch of cash/coins, a gold coin my dad gave me after I graduated from middle school (I don’t know what the spot price of gold is, but it’s probably worth at least $200), and all kinds of other miscellany: ticket stubs from my first date, my PADI card, movie passes, etc. They took the box, and all the Canadian money, but (thankfully) left my passport and I think all of the cards, as well as the gold coin. What’s just dumb is that in another room, they threw out the ~$50 in Japanese Yen I had and a crisp $100 US bill (yes, the 3rd place poster award was in cash), and just left it here.

The chocolate bar from my desk was taken, and left, half-eaten, on the floor of Wayfare’s room. Gross, but it might give us the only clue in this case with some saliva/DNA evidence (the thief apparently wore gloves for the rest of the break-in).

The rest of my room and Wayfare’s were rifled through fairly thoroughly, but nothing else was taken. So our best guess was someone was looking for drugs rather than money (and boy, did they pick the wrong house to look for that!). Now I’ve got a long night of cleaning up ahead of me, as soon as the evidence guy from the London police leaves…

One thing I wasn’t impressed with was when I called the police to report that “I’d been broken into and robbed”, the operator got all pedantic on me, saying that it wasn’t robbery unless I was home at the time, so it was “just” a break-in. Then someone took my name and number and hung up, without even telling me when or if they would call back (we ended up waiting about an hour and a half)…

Wayfare and I woke up with a start this morning when there was what sounded like a loud, rapid knock at the door just before 5 am. It’s hard to judge the exact nature, number of beats, and source of a sound that wakes you (or at least me, since I tend to sleep pretty deeply) because the first part of the sound you don’t really listen to or process in the usual way, it just gets the attention of your brain to wake you up. Still, I think it sounded like 5 quick knocks on the door. I’m a little slow getting out of bed, but I went as fast as I could, yet when I got to the front door and peeked out the windows (I don’t care how safe I think my neighbourhood is, I’m not blindly opening the door at 5 am) there was nothing there. That’s a little freaky, and I don’t know if it was just one of the neighbourhood students being a nuisance, sort of like ringing the doorbell and running (though we don’t have a doorbell), or if it was just an animal, or what…

Well, I’m awake now!

Well, one of the busiest highways in the world has a new name (at least for a section of it). It’s a name befitting a hair metal band.

I don’t really care for the name change, after all, we already have several Veteran’s Highways (the former Airport Rd. in London, and the 416 near Ottawa). And it’s a pretty cheesy name, I don’t know how much it really honours our soldiers (and other domestic heroes). The quotes in the article make little sense to me:

Capt. Mark Bossi, who served in Afghanistan, fought back tears as he rode along the stretch with CTV Toronto.

“That’s amazing — it really is,” Bossi said when he saw one of the signs. “It’s on (Highway) 401 — people are going to see them everyday.”

The signs are in response to an online petition in support of renaming the highway that was overwhelmed with responses.

Bossi understands why the grassroots movement to dedicate the stretch grew so quickly.

“If you think about it, every soldier has a mom and dad,” he said, his voice trembling.

“A lot of guys have wives and children. I think that’s one of the reasons Canadians wanted the highway renamed.”

So seeing the highway renamed made this captain so emotional he had to fight back tears? That makes little sense to me, the highway would probably have to be named after me personally to get that involved in it, and even then… of course, I haven’t suffered unknown amounts of PTSD. The last part of his quote makes even less sense. Every grad student has a mom and dad, and many have wives and children, but that really doesn’t make any sense for a reason to rename a highway. In fact, he seems to imply that the highway was renamed to appease/coddle the survivors of soldiers killed rather than to actually honour the soldiers themselves.

At least it’s not something that’s really going to affect me. For brevity’s sake alone, I think most people will still call it the 401 in everyday usage, similar to how nearly everyone still calls that stadium beneath the CN Tower “Skydome”.

We went Halloween shopping this weekend, getting ideas for costumes and decorations (it’s actually a bit of a late start for us, but don’t worry, we’re still going to throw a rocking Halloween party — if you read the blog and want an invite, just send me an email, and don’t be too weirdo internet-stalky. Also, come in costume). Then, we brought the 7 boxes of Halloween decorations out of the basement (see picture with the cat for scale) and started decorating.

Towards the end of the day, I went back to the kitchen to start on dinner while Wayfare continued to decorate. I hear “do you think the table is sturdy enough to stand on?” Without thinking, I say something along the lines of “it’s a pretty sturdy table.” A few minutes later, there’s a giant crash from the front of the house, and I walk back to find the table on its side and Wayfare holding her hand yelling “get me something to stop the bleeding!” Turns out it was a pretty sturdy table, just not a particularly well balanced one. She grabbed the chandelier going down, smashing a lightbulb with her hand.

She’s got this nasty gash up her hand that’s a good 3 cm long, and there’s all kinds of skin missing so you can see different layers of tissue, and that is just not going to heal pretty. In addition to that are two other cuts on her hand that would be noteworthy all on their own. So I got her patched up, finished dinner, cleaned up the glass, and then we took a little trip up to urgent care to have it checked out (we threw the gauze on pretty quickly without really checking for any leftover shards of glass). The doctor there was young (I’d guess just about my age or younger), and she missed the fact that Wayfare had a cut on the palm of her hand when she did the inspection of the big wound, so I wasn’t having a huge deal of confidence in her. She didn’t seem to do too rough a job on the sutures though, and I’m especially glad we went after I saw how many stitches she got: 15, including 3 in the smaller, but deeper, cut in her hand.

The chandelier has seen better days. I was afraid the one arm that she broke the bulb out of would never take another bulb, but apart from cracking the decorative plastic, it doesn’t look to be too bad. Of course, the screw-in base of the bulb was torn right out, so something had to have been warped for that to happen (perhaps the impact deformed the bulb to yank it out?). The top of the chandelier where it attaches to the chain has also been warped, and she thinks that’s where she grabbed it with her good hand. I’m glad the whole thing stayed attached to the ceiling: as bad as her hand is, things could have gone even worse if she landed with a hundred-pound chandelier on her chest.

Heartburn is a condition that seems to run in my family, particularly on my dad’s side. I don’t know if it’s an overabundance of acid, or a familial weak cardiac sphincter, or if our poor diet and stress-bunny tendencies are to blame, but a typical breakfast for my dad or I is a can of coke and an alka-seltzer. Most of the time I hardly even notice it when I’m awake, but then when I’m awake gravity is usually my very close and personal friend, keeping all that stomach acid mostly down. When bedtime comes though, heartburn can be pure agony, not really from the pain or discomfort, but because it is a condition that for some reason has an incredible ability to keep me awake. After all, I can sleep through almost anything else, including pain, daylight, (some) noise, headgear, and the cat walking on me.

What I find amazing is how some foods can affect heartburn, and how random it is sometimes. For the most part, I can drink as much coke and rootbeer as I want, but Jolt will usually give me heartburn (though admittedly I only drink Jolt during times of great stress, so I couldn’t say if that was the main culprit or not). Perversely, a single small glass of orange juice before bed will just kill me, which is just not fair since it’s actually healthy in other respects. Chips (not that I’m allowed to eat those any more) are fairly inconsistent. Often they’ll lead to terrible night-time heartburn, but sometimes I can polish off a whole large bag and suffer no ill effects. Garlic, particularly in the guise of garlic fingers (oh how I love garlic fingers) often has a very delayed heartburn effect, waking me up after I’ve been asleep for several hours. I find that strange, since after that much time I figure that anything with garlic should have cleared my stomach and be making its merry way through my intestines by then. Anyhow, once the middle of the night garlic heartburn sets in, it can be really stubborn, requiring separate repeated bouts of alka-seltzer to finally clear.

Two days ago, I found it very strange when I was scanning people and was suddenly hit with this garlic taste and attack of heartburn. Not just because I was awake and sitting upright, but also because I hadn’t had anything to eat within about 6 hours, and nothing with garlic all day long. Shortly after I first felt the sensation, the guys I was scanning started talking about going out for a beer and a bite to eat after the scanning was over. Since it was a friday night in London, I couldn’t think of a single place to go that wouldn’t be pounding obnoxiously with dance music… except for one: Symposium. And if we were going to go to Symposium, then I would probably order some bruscetta, and if I did that, I would get heartburn…

And the realization hit me: I was going to get some bruscetta so good, with such intense heartburn that it would rip a hole through the very fabric of time, and actually give me heartburn before I even thought of eating it! When we got there and I was looking through the menu, I was sorely tempted to order something else, like a waffle, just to see if that act would make my garlic-flavoured heartburn go away, but in the end I was helpless, and almost of its own volition, I heard my voice ordering bruscetta from our completely spaced-out waitress.

In the end, having delusions of time-ripping bruscetta goodness is not anywhere near the same thing as having a good plate of food in front of you in the real world. It was actually pretty terrible that night: they got the spice mix completely wrong, it was spicy to the point of making my lips tingle, with none of the garlic, oregano, or basil flavour that bruscetta should have. They also put icky feta on it (it’s not part of their usual recipe, and not mentioned in the menu — if it was, I would have ordered it sans feta), and there were hardly any bits of tomato on it (usually I have to fight to keep them all on the bread without making a giant mess; not a problem I faced then). Despite the fact that I was very hungry after a night of scanning without snacks, I just couldn’t finish it off. It also made my heartburn go away, making me realize that I probably had it in the first place because I was hungry and my stomach was churning in the lab.