this little universe between our backs
We skated again tonight. I kinda like the ease of it, since we're so close to the canal. We can hop on a bus with our skates in backpacks, get off after two quick stops, and walk from the University of Ottawa across the street to the canal. You can lace up near Somerset, skate the entire length of the currently open section to Bank Street, stop to take quick photos, eat Beaver Tails (fried dough with sugar), make the entire trip back, get back into street shoes, and still catch a bus home on the same fare (the transfer expires after ninety minutes, I think). It's super-easy and a good way to get some winter exercise.

Look at me, all embracing winter in Ottawa this year!  | ¶ 11:46 p.m.

  losing my memory, saving my face On Saturday an editorial was published in the Ottawa Citizen that I could relate to. It was about a topic that I've written about before and have begun to feel more and more frustrated about the longer I live in Ottawa unable to get a job.

It's SO French here that temp agencies won't even consider you unless you're bilingual. I've done all the same things here to find work as I would in Calgary: scan all the ads, register with a bunch of agencies, take all their competency tests, but when I tell them that my French isn't so good, it's good-bye Charlie!

In this piece he talks more about people having a hard time getting promoted within the government, but my job search has shown that to even get an entry-level position, most of the time bilingualism is expected. Here are some excerpts from "Bilingualism a very low glass ceiling in Public Works":

• In the national capital region, 75 percent of all Public Works jobs are designated bilingual. In the supervisory ranks, there are 1,331 positions and all but 76 are designated bilingual.
• The bilingual federal workplace is an idea that is 40 years old. It was originally intended to offer fairness to francophones and anglophones, but in the end, it is fair to neither. Only the bilingual are benefiting from the system that has evolved and the government's unwillingness to offer language training on the scale it did in the past ensures that the situation will continue.
• Only 17.7 percent of Canadians are bilingual and only 8.8 percent of anglophones can speak both official languages.
• Here is the cold reality. In the national capital region, our federal government is only interested in people with a high degree of bilingualism. Other Canadian aren't welcome, and if they do manage to get on the first rung of the employment ladder, they will be stuck there. That's grossly unfair to the majority of the Canadian population and it greatly narrows the talent pool for the federal government. That makes it bad public policy.
  

Next week I'm taking my oral assessment for French. I'm still in the running for a position at the Justice Department, but I need to get a B on this test. The reality is that I wouldn't want to speak French in my workplace anyway, so it seems like a pointless exercise.

Je veux travailler encore dans le monde des Anglais.  | ¶ 7:43 p.m.

  see the look on my face from staying too long in one place Chief: big day in Ottawa. The canal is finally frozen enough so they're opening it for skating. Woop!
Persuade: Yay. Carnival is in a week and a half here.
Chief: about the same as "Winterlude" here. Starts Feb 1.
Persuade: you are skating on frozen water and I am parading the streets in a thong!
Persuade: wow - like parallel universes



Chief: a thong, eh? I don't know if my butt is suitable for that kind of thing anymore...  | ¶ 12:58 p.m.

  I would give everything just for a taste Something of an update with substance:

Since I was such a half-assed student last semester and ended up dropping two classes, I need to complete said two classes now, so I'm enrolled. Also, as I learned when investigating student loan funding for another term (I'm their best customer, don't you know), you need to be in at least three classes to qualify as a "full-time" student, so I decided to add another elective to my course load. Look at me, the keener all of a sudden.

So I'm taking International Relations (one that I dropped last term), Ontario Politics and Government, because it's taught by a very cool prof that I had last term for Canadian Provincial Politics, where we covered all the provinces besides Ontario, and since Financial Accounting went reasonably well, I'm taking the follow-up course called "Managerial Accounting".

The other part I should mention is that these are all evening classes, and two of them are even TV classes, so I actually don't have to be physically in class except once a week, which will be nice when I get the job I'm intending to get (uh, yeah right - are there any jobs in Ottawa?).

But a funny thing happened when I tried to get to that ONE silly little class. I couldn't find it. The course outline said that the class would be in "University Commons 214". Only, if you look at a campus map, there isn't anything with that name. There is a "Learning Commons" in the library, where I originally thought the class was. And there is a "Residence Commons" in, duh, the residence complex. Turns out that the University Commons is the Residence Commons, but I only found this out by emailing the prof to say, "duh? where's this?".

Add to this some glitch in setting my VCR to tape my livingroom lectures, and you get the typical miss-the-first-two-weeks-of-class scenario. Okay, typical for me anyway. But it's alright, I'm all on track now, got my first accounting assignment done, found my Ontario politics class, have the books for everything. Now I just need a job to fill my days. I'll let you know if there turns out to be any in Ottawa, 'cause in the meantime, I'm getting a little too good at yoga...  | ¶ 8:43 p.m.

  so take me far away and hold me close Devin recently purchased a fancy Krups espresso maker for our kitchen. I haven't ventured into lattes yet, but I have to admit that I'm pretty hooked on homemade Americanos every day. They're perfect after a nice walk in the snow.

  | ¶ 11:35 a.m.

  and that's the deal my dear froo spent some time in Cancun recently and asked me to assemble a video from her media. I'm still learning the iMovie business, so this isn't as slick as I'd like - I was experimenting with using multiple songs for a change, and the transitions could definitely be smoother. On a side note, I've been reading up on the new iMovie as compared to the earlier version and the word is that although this one is slightly easier for newbies to figure out, it is seriously lacking in features, so it's less powerful. I might just have to teach myself the earlier version. Here is my latest production.


Dan's Cancun Adventure from Stacey Ryan on Vimeo.  | ¶ 4:55 p.m.

  make me a channel of your peace
I'm watching the CBC coverage of the funeral service for the seven young men in Bathurst last weekend, and I would like to request a suspension of teenage boy deaths in New Brunswick (or anywhere, for that matter). My home province has had too much sadness lately.

A man who knew the boys mentioned this video project that a couple of them worked on, and it's really quite cute.

  | ¶ 2:08 p.m.

  I'm hiding from the storm 'til the damage gets done Yesterday I stopped to get a coffee and it only cost me seventy-nine cents! I was heading to the Justice Department for an interview and knew from my previous visit to their building that there was no coffee shops inside, so I ducked into a building across the street. I followed the escalator down to the food court and if I'd been more familiar with the place I would have maybe passed right by Edo Japan and gone to a proper coffee shop, but I wasn't sure what there was to choose from and I was in a hurry, so when I saw a fresh pot brewing next to the Japanese food, I darted over. Seventy-nine cents!

Do you know what it's like getting interviewed by the government? How they tell you to get there early so you can review a printed page of the questions you will be asked, and even provide you with a notepad and writing instruments to take notes and prepare your answers..? It's an interesting process.

Even more interesting was the notice I was given about a "role-playing" segment to the interview. I thought I would be spoken to rudely by a pretend co-worker / superior / client to test my interpersonal skills or something, but it was more fun than that. More along the lines of "go down the hall and deliver this agenda to Miss X, then go down the other way to Finance and deliver this invoice for processing". I laughed as I performed my duties.

On an unrelated matter, why do you suppose our eyelids aren't thicker? If the point is to keep out light, why don't they do that? In the lingering days of my headache from hell, I've found myself to be super-sensitive to light (wearing the sleeping mask religiously), and have pondered the absence of effective light-blocking eyelids.  | ¶ 9:58 p.m.

  wherever, whenever

Sitting at the table in her suburban kitchen, with her four young children tumbling in and out, Ms. O’Brien, 36, seems an unlikely candidate to be food’s Erin Brockovich.

Her theory — that the food supply is being manipulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing increases in allergies, autism and other disorders in children — is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.

Ms. O’Brien encourages people to do what she did: throw out as much nonorganic processed food as you can afford to. Avoid anything genetically modified, artificially created or raised with hormones. Don’t eat food with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Once she cleaned out her cupboards, she said, her four children started behaving better. Their health problems, which her doctor attributed to allergies to milk and other foods, cleared up.

“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this has actually happened.”

Whether there's scientific evidence of it yet or not, I'd tend to agree with this lady. There are too many children with food allergies these days, and there's too much crap being put into even "natural" food (i.e. meat, dairy).  | ¶ 11:15 p.m.

  and I am one of many Well, this is something kinda random and fun. I guess there are people out there searching other people's flickr photos to use for their miscellaneous purposes. I got an email recently from someone wanting to use a picture I took of the Supreme Court at an online tour guide-type website called Schmap.com. So here is what the page looks like with my photo. Nifty, huh?

  | ¶ 11:57 p.m.

  it's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance I have been having a decidedly unpleasant week. The headache has given way to loss of appetite and a general feeling of being seriously unwell, with relief being found only in high doses of medicine (that Percocet can be wild stuff) and desperate sleep. When I awake from my slumber, I take stock of my body ailments and note that the sleep seems blissfully unaffected by my waking pain. As I ease further into waking consciousness, I sense a gradual tightening of various facial, head and neck muscles, and the accompanying pain of a crippling headache. There is something wrong with this.

Today I forced myself to eat a bowl of oatmeal even though eating has been thoroughly unappealing for days, and somehow that seemed to make a world of difference. I suppose it doesn't take a genius to compute that eating is good for the body. So I've been feeling steadily better throughout the afternoon and hope to find a physiotherapist tomorrow who can attend to my neck and ensure this thing subsides completely.

I can at least say that I'm doing better than Britney Spears today. That poor lost little girl...  | ¶ 11:58 p.m.

  I'm lying in a hotel room miles away, voices next door in my ear Oof.

I'm starting 2008 in a strange fashion. I don't know why it started, but I have been suffering with a brutal headache since just after Christmas in Calgary, and it just doesn't seem to want to go away. Drugs of various sorts barely succeed in offering any relief, so you can imagine that I'm getting a little frustrated.

Yesterday, the fifth day of my headache, I finally decided I better do something about it, so Devin came home early from work and accompanied me to the local hospital. I presented myself to the emergency room and asked for a diagnosis and something more effective than the Advil, Motrin, Tylenol and aspirin that I've been taking for days. I'll admit that I felt kinda stupid walking in to the hospital for a "mere" headache - didn't know if I was being melodramatic, but something had to be done.

I was lucky - given my prolonged and obvious pain, they didn't make me wait too long to be seen. After being examined and questioned by a couple doctors, they took some blood for testing and then began to give me drugs through an IV. First, Benadryl, which was apparently to calm me down for the next drug, one that makes most people pretty antsy and restless. The Benadryl made me very chilly (cold fluid running through your blood vessels acts fast), but I didn't notice much other effect. So they started the Maxeran next, which is apparently a type of drug for migraines. Yup, it made me "squirrelly", just as nurse Beth had warned. It was annoying - mostly a feeling that I had to shake my left leg around. I tried using a mind-over-matter technique that I heard recently in one of my yoga podcasts, "you can do anything for a moment". Yes, tolerate that for a moment. It was tough. I kept watching the drip in the IV bag to see if it was almost finished, and it was never close enough for my liking. Luckily, the Benadryl seemed to kick in around then and made me drowsy, so I may have dozed for a while.

I really don't think this thing I have is a migraine, though, so migraine medication didn't really kill the pain completely. I felt fine lying still, but that's true of my condition generally, so once I started moving around again it was clear that it hadn't "fixed" me. So they sent me off for a CT scan, which was sort of a cool experience. They didn't find anything that looked like the source of my discomfort, however (yay, no tumour!). Nurse Beth gave me more drugs at this point - a shot of a powerful anti-inflammatory drug through my IV, and a Percocet pill. The doctor came in and announced that this was likely just a "big bad headache", and prescribed a powerful drug regimen consisting of Percocet, Tylenol and ibuprofen every four hours. We came home after just about five hours at the hospital. And then we partied. Just kidding - I heard the fireworks around midnight from the coziness of my bed.

So that's about all I'm doing now - loading myself up with drugs that make me feel pretty stoned. Earlier I went for a walk in the snow and it was pretty trippy. I think what I really need, however, is a chiropractor. Because it's really when I move my head around that the pain shoots up into the intolerable range. I feel pretty fortunate to live in a country where all of the above treatment was "free" with the presentation of my provincial healthcare card, but frustrated when I realize that it is the chiropractor that I cannot afford. I made Devin walk on my back already, but he's not certified and the improvised treatment didn't have much effect.

So yeah, Happy New Year..!  | ¶ 7:50 p.m.