Blessed by the Potato

April Fools is a tough holiday. It can be lots of fun to plan a funny, minor prank; but things can easily get out of hand. Practical jokes slide all too easily from funny to mean, and lesser puns are just as often annoying as they are funny. It’s also tough to take anything you read in the news seriously today, on the off chance that it’s just a hoax.

I think last year’s “Wikipedia sold” joke was pretty funny. Google has a history of launching services on April Fools’, and people always have trouble determining if what they’re pushing is real. Gmail turned out to be real (as did their huge and continually-growing storage increase). This year they’re launching Google Romance. I can’t quite tell if it’s real or not. On the one hand, a Google dating service just makes me say “what took you so long?”, but parts of the announcement scream prank, such as “…all-expenses-paid dates for couples who agree to experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their evening.” I’m going to go ahead and predict that the whole thing is a prank (but I was tempted to guess that there will be a matchmaking service from Google, sans advertising-supported dates).

Home Star Runner / Strong Bad is upside-down this year. It’s a cute prank, but if you genuinely want to watch a cartoon today, it’s annoying (I can’t find a way to turn it off, either). WordPress’ prank, an announced merger between WordPress and Textpattern was terrible, though at least non-intrusive.

Wayfare’s dad had a decent prank last year. He coaches a running group, and sends out a little email newsletter to them. So in one newsletter, he describes the history of the marathon. To tell it briefly, there was a battle between the Greeks and Persians way long ago, on the fields of Marathon. The Greeks won the battle on the fields, but the dastardly Persians after boarding their boats didn’t set sail for home, but instead continued sailing for Athens — they meant to tell the civilians that they had won the day on the fields of battle and that the city was theirs. So the Greeks sent a runner (Pheidippides) out to deliver the message that the Greeks had actually won, and were returning on foot to defend the city, and that the people of Athens should hold out until their return. Pheidippides managed to beat the Persian army and delivered his message, but died immediately afterwards. Thinking this was a great idea, athletes have subsequently run the 34.5 km distance as a Marathon (the distance from Marathon to Athens). This part of the history, if not exactly true, is well-accepted, and was sent out a few months before April. So on April 1st, Wayfare’s dad sends out his mail telling his runners that new archaeological evidence put the battle of Marathon a further 6 km from Athens than originally thought, and so the next day they’d be running 40.5 km.

Of course, it’s much easier to be cynical about other people’s pranks when you haven’t thought of any of your own. Every year I mean to do one, and like a really awesome one too, but I never get around to even trying to plan anything until like 11 pm on March 31st, and by then it’s a little too late.

I will say this though: my thesis defense date has been pushed back again.

London is fantastic for the number of parks and trails running through the city, especially those following the river. I’m pretty fortunate since my apartment building backs onto the river; well, it backs onto some forest, which in turn backs onto the river. Either way, it makes for some sweet walking/biking environs, and I’ve not been taking advantage of it nearly enough while I’ve lived here.

So now I’m making an effort to lose some weight and get in shape through the two basic, baby step approaches of:

1. eating less

2. exercising more

I’m taking it pretty slow (I just don’t have the willpower to go hungry at the moment, nor the energy to really work out), so with the nice weather I’ve made a point of going out for a walk almost daily. I took a slightly different route today, following the muddy path right along the edge of the water, instead of the nicely maintained paved one that’s set back a bit. On my walk, I ran into Christie, who settled herself into a neat little warren of fallen trees to curl up and read a book. She gave me permission to take a picture of her setup, but judging by the look on her face I think it was just because it was the fastest way she could think of to get me to stop bugging her and let her go back to her book. I won’t say exactly where along the path this keen little spot is, just in case I want to read a book there myself one day :)

There are a number of people I know who’ve gotten married recently, or who are planning on it in the near future. That, or they’re planning on moving out on their own. Either way, lots of people thinking about what to put in their new kitchens. One traditional thing (moreso for the people getting married than those moving out on their own) is to get some china with a pattern that they pick out together (read: that the bride and her mom pick out together). However, this isn’t a very useful tradition for most people: my own parents recently bought a new set of china because they realized that their wedding china was… hideous. Even with that, and with making a point of using their new china as often as they can — they still save it for special occassions, but use it for more of them, like thanksgiving, birthdays, tests, etc., instead of just christmas and easter — even with that, they still hardly ever use their china. Sometimes, they don’t realize until they’re halfway through a meal that they used the regular plates.

So why even bother? Aside from my parents, no one notices when we use the regular plates. It also saves a lot of attic space not having to store a bunch of barely-used plates alongside a dress that was only worn once. Perhaps most importantly, you just can’t beat the timeless solid white of Corelle plates. There are no patterns to form weird Rorsach patterns when food covers part of it, and no paint to slowly chip off with each use.

Yeah, I really like my Corelle plates. The best part about them is that I don’t need to constantly worry that I’m going to break them — I can actually use them. They are nearly indestructable, and that’s their big selling point. They’re not completely indestructable, as I have broken one since moving out here to the L-dot (and people are still amazed that I’ve managed to do that). Given how clumsy I am and how many other dishes I’ve broken over the years (particularly beakers in the lab… ugh), only having one broken bowl is a pretty big testament to their durability (and to give more credit to them, I dropped it from shoulder height with spin).

For those picking items for your wedding registry, it’s important to put some things on that people will want to buy for you, as well as what you want. Having a china pattern on record is nice, but most people I’ve talked to don’t want to be giving china, knowing that it will be used less than the 9th fondue set on the pile (a problem made worse if your pattern doesn’t have universal appeal so people wonder if a mistake was made). A good idea I saw recently was to put a bunch of board games on the registry (everyone needs a scrabble and monopoly, and not everyone has them yet). They’re reasonably priced for your poorer, younger friends, and fun to buy (rather than “hey, how’re you liking that toaster I got you?” … acutally, toasters can be sort of fun, but you get the idea.)

Full disclosure: this post was in no way supported by Corningware/Corelle or Parker Bros. games. However, it could be.

It’s amazing sometimes how much the river can flood in the springtime. Fortunately, this year I remembered to take some pictures of the difference. I didn’t manage to catch it quite at the peak (when they were paging people over the public address system at the hospital because the parking lot was flooding out), but I did get within about 2 days, so the water level is pretty high!

Here’s a pair of shots of the bike path running under the bridge onto campus:

And here’s a pair of the creek running behind my building (that during hot periods in the summer dries up completely):

I don’t know how fast the water rises once the snow melts and those ice dams are removed, but you can see why they always warn parents not to let their small children play near the creeks and rivers in the early spring. Not only does it flood out some of those paths, but the water moving down the river moves a lot faster, too.

Well, the curling season finished with a bang, as we came in 3rd place for the hospital bonspiel (of 10 teams in our division). The prize was a keen gym bag with this neat side pocket that allows you to expand the space inside. I’m not quite sure what to use it for though, since it doesn’t create enough room for something like a curling broom or hockey stick, but is more than you’d need for a pair of shoes. Despite the fact that it didn’t go so well this year (lots of absenteeism), I’m really excited for next year. It’s one sport that not only am I vaguely good at, but I’ve also managed to keep it up fairly regularly for a while now (unlike touch football or basketball, where I haven’t managed to get a game going for several years now).

I’ve been at a point lately where I’m really afraid I’ve run out of interesting things to say here; perhaps 3 entries a week was a pace too ambitious to maintain. It’s not that I’ve run out of things to say, it’s pretty obvious that I can just ramble on about any old thing to fill out at least three paragraphs. The problem is that I’m getting close to the point at which this no longer becomes interesting for anyone else to read. I couldn’t even come up with a good curling pun. While the blog format is great for being relatively unstructured and easy to fill in and publish content (easier than using notepad and HTML tags like I used to), it’s a little too easy at times. There’s no point in having it turn into a sort of private journal that just happens to be connected to the internet. Who — except the voyeurs who just want any old random peek into someone else’s daily life — would want to read that?

Anyhow, the last leg of thesis corrections is going pretty slowly, but I’ve still got a week (exactly!) to get it finished, print them all off, bind them nicely for the examiners, etc. I’m thinking of it like the bonspiel: we started off getting completely smoked in our first game. Then came on fairly strong in our second, and dominated the third as well, leading to a very respectable finish. Plus there were 3 games, and my stupid master’s has taken 3 years! Ok, I have to end this before Rez gets in my face about facile metaphors again.