Would you get rid of a Friday?

Samoa has decided to place itself on the other side of the international date line. To do this they had to skip a day. They picked December 30 - a Friday - to skip!

Who would skip a Friday? Friday is a good day - it's the run up to the weekend.

A Monday - most people who work a Monday to Friday workweek would gladly lose a Monday.

Tuesday - that's a good day. Monday is over, and you have time to get stuff done on a Tuesday.

Wednesday - that's the day I would get rid of. It's "hump" day. Once you get through Wednesday you are on your way to relaxing on the weekend. Getting it over with in the blink of an eye sounds like a marvelous idea to me!

Thursday - that's another good day. You can still get lots of stuff done, and the weekend is almost on you, so you have something to look forward to.

Friday - if you have mindless stuff to get done, Friday is your perfect time to do it. I've never been able to do anything solid after noon on a Friday. Anything I write is basically a write-off on a Friday. (What time is it now... oh, maybe I shouldn't be blogging right now... oh well, it's just for fun.)

Saturday - hands off. No one skips a Saturday.

Sunday - lazy sleep-ins and indulgent breakfasts at mid-day. No one in their right mind would get rid of a Sunday, and if they did, they would find themselves alone in taking on Monday before they have to.

Fire? What do you mean there's actually a fire?

I've been living in apartment buildings for a good 25 or so years now. I've lived through dozens of false alarms in these buildings. The alarms go off. Depending on your state of mind, and how high up you are, you either:

• curse the noise and wonder who set it off this time
• run to your kitchen to make sure you aren't the one on fire
• go out onto the balcony and look to see if there are any flames
• get out of the building, then find out if any of your neighbors who are outside know where the fire is

I find as we get older, the more cautious we are. We now choose to get out of the building, and then try to find out what, if anything, is on fire.

Of course, I use a wheelchair when I'm not in my home now. Getting out of the building takes on a whole new dimension now.

Luckily, my spouse is a runner of marathons and trail races. When we hear the fire alarm he runs downstairs and outside on an advanced scouting mission to see if there really is a fire, and reports back to me.

This morning he reported back yelling "Get up! There really is a fire!"

So much for the nice sleep-in I was having.

I can still walk short distances, slowly. Somehow my spouse had found 2 guys I may know in the building, they looked familiar - probably some maintenance guys doing work in the building. They did offer to carry me down, but that's just not appealing, and I can walk short distances, slowly. So I grabbed some clothes and threw them on, and they grabbed my manual wheelchair and one of them took it downstairs for me. OK, so when I make it downstairs, I'm good. Now it's just a matter of me making it downstairs.

So slowly, grabbing the railings, with one guy in front, and my husband behind me, I made it down a flight, then stepped aside to rest and let others get past on their way down. Then I started on another flight, and when I was almost down, half a dozen axe-carrying fire fighters came up, so I grabbed one railing with both arms and said "OK, go around me!" The fire was on the roof.

My goodness, firemen are large examples of the human form aren't they? One of the firemen offered to call in other firemen to carry me downstairs. I was doing OK, so I declined.

Thankfully, we are only on the fourth floor - or actually just three floors above the lobby, which has a ramp down to ground level. I made it down, and was very happy to see my wheelchair. Then outside we went.

Luckily it wasn't raining, but it was cold, and I didn't have shoes on - only socks - because I walk better when I can feel the ground with my feet. One of our neighbors manages the apartment building next to ours, so he let anyone who wanted to stay warm sit inside the lobby of that building.

Once the fire was out, we were told we could go back home. What started the fire? The elevators. The terms being used were "melted" and "you can't see much because of the smoke damage" in the room on the roof with the elevator controls. So none of the apartments were burned, which is good. But now we have no elevators. Probably won't have elevators for at least a week - and that's a hopeful evaluation. So we can all go home now... back up the stairs. 

Oy Vey.

I just looked up the term Oy Vey in Wikipedia. I'm using it in a very appropriate way. It means "oh pain".

Long story short, I made it back up to my home, but my arms are very tired, and the muscles of my best leg have complaints and grievances to discuss with me and the other leg.

So yes, we actually had a fire. And I have to report, after 25 years of false alarms, all the thinking "what will we do next time if it isn't a false alarm..." does make it easier to deal with when it really is a fire. So maybe the false alarms aren't just annoying. 

And man, are firemen huge, or what!

PS - my horoscope for today said: "If someone says you should not be concerned about what is going on in your immediate environment that means you should be very concerned indeed. Go out of your way to find out what it is – then act."

Did I really just alphabetize my roses?

Some people alphabetize their books on their bookshelves.

Some people wonder if it was the book titles or the authors that were alphabetized... because they're wondering which way to do it themselves. Others know that it's by author first and then book title. Yet others feel that it should be by author and then date of publication... 

... and that is one true sign of insanity.

But I just alphabetized the roses on my Flickr set. Does this put me a step closer to insanity than anyone with an organized bookshelf?

It's not as bad as it sounds, really. I was "pruning" my roses. My photographs have gotten better over the years, so I do occasionally remove some of the older, less appealing photos. Then I noticed an option to "alphabetize" the set of photos in one of the menus, so I chose it. Simple, really. Not that insane.

Of course, then I went and changed the titles on some of the roses so that they would sort properly. And "alphabetized" them again. That may have been the step over the line to insanity.

Then I had to fix the blog entry that was muddled from the reorganizing in Flickr.

No, I'm not trying to avoid doing other things that really need doing. Honest.

Am I addicted to photographing roses?

Roses, a set on Flickr.

Roses, a set on Flickr.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet... Shakespeare

But most of them don't actually have much scent any more. The hybrid tea roses in particular are less than forward in the scent arena these days.

So why do I have 81 photos of them on my Flickr site? Why do I have at least 2 more batches of them to process and add to my Flickr site (probably 4 or 5 new photos to add from that)?

I'm not actually that attracted to roses... but I feel a compulsion to take photos of them!

When I'm in Stanley Park's Rose Garden the flowers just sit there looking picture perfect and daring me to go by without taking a shot. I can't resist.

The only way I can resist taking photos of more roses is when they don't have name posts letting me know who they are. "Lovely flower, but I don't know the name, so I won't bother taking a shot." is the only thing that saves me!

Sounds like an addiction to me.

When did I get so picky about grammar?

Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Rose, a photo by Clara Johnson on Flickr.

This bloom is on a bush called Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Rose in the Stanley Park Rose Garden. It has a label on a post in the ground underneath it that says so, but it has a grammar problem. The label says Brother's Grimm Fairy Tale Rose.

This is wrong because there is an apostrophe in it. The way it reads on the sign is that a Brother owns a Grimm Fairy Tale Rose... or even funnier, Brother is a Grimm Fairy Tale Rose!

There were two brothers with the last name of Grimm. They wrote stories. The stories are by the Brothers Grimm. The people who bred this rose named it after their stories.

After being irked by the sign (I take photos of the signs to make sure I get the names of the flowers correct in Flickr) I googled the details and found I was correct about the inappropriateness of the apostrophe.

So how did I get from being a child who thought spelling a word only one way was a sign of a lack of creativity to an adult who is bothered by apostrophes?

Why do I unintentionally relax when I find the first typo in every book I read? I know they are there, and I seem to be so happy when I find this is yet another book proving my theory that there is no such thing as a book without a spelling or grammar error.

When did the speed bumps on the road to reading enjoyment start bothering me so much?

Maybe I've read too much? No such thing.

Maybe I've read too much drivel? That's a possibility. So many things to read, and not that many years left to do it in. I don't have any patience for drivel left. Thank goodness I don't have any of my writing from my youth around anymore!

Do we need to duck this time?

So was everyone expecting the world to end at the turn of the millennium?

Another satellite that was sent into orbit in the 1990s is about to land back on our planet. "Land" being a rather bland way of saying "hit very quickly while burning up and shattering into many pieces." And no one knows where it will land. 

Did no one in the 1990s think of what happens to objects in orbit after they've been up there for a while? They come back down. It's this gravity thing, you see... not really a new phenomenon, if people got the satellite up into orbit, they had a good understanding of the concept then, so they knew it would come back down eventually. Did they not care about the eventual crashing back on the planet?

Of course, this one is only the size of a car... the last one from the U.S. was the size of a bus. So much better. Really?

This latest satellite comes from Germany. The European Space Agency has a Space Debris Office. (That's a trashy job, ha, ha.) They say there is a 1 in 2,000 chance of hitting one of us monkeys with this satellite - the last satellite only had a 1 in 3,200 chance of hitting a monkey. 

A smaller, but better targeted piece of space debris.

This satellite has the added bonus of a mirror which the Space Debris Office says may not burn up before hitting the planet, meaning some serious shards may come flying off the debris when it hits.

Of course, the planet is mostly covered by water, so the satellite has a better chance of hitting fish than us monkeys. 

Any space aliens out there watching us must be wondering if we're just on a fishing trip with some really weird ways of catching fish.

Update: It landed in the Indian Ocean (probably) (hopefully). So it hit the body of water next to the largest population of humans possible. This could be the work of a super villain!

Is it Summer again?

The calendar says October 7. This weekend is Thanksgiving - the harvest festival time in Canada. So why is the Cox Bay Beach in Tofino covered in surfers? (There are more in the water.)

This is a screen shot from Tofino today. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.) (See the Long Beach Lodge Resort website for the live webcam.)

I'm not there myself, and I can't surf (but would love to), but it's 15 degrees Celsius on the beach! For Tofino, that's balmy! It's cold in that water... but it's cold all year round. Dry suits are the clothing of choice at all times of the year when surfing Tofino.

I've just spent a warm sunny afternoon cleaning up the plants on my balcony, and I had to come back inside because it was too hot!

We missed having a lot of hot sunny days this summer, so are we having it now? This weather does not make sense.