hair maketh the man

after a tough, restless night with sore legs and feet, i woke up early this morning to wake pg up and drag us both out of bed, but she wasn't having any of it. i wasn't really in the mood either - in spite of it being a beautiful, heavy snow day - so i closed my eyes and dreamed weird dreams. something about being alone in the house i grew up in, and then playing a game with yang and getting physical with some guy who wouldn't play ball - there was spitting, and i woke up feeling bad about my behaviour. then i thought about my work on shakespeare and realized that i needed to find something, so i jumped out of bed, grabbed some hot chocolate and located what i was looking for. and something else that proved helpful.

and then my mind started wandering again. now i'm all over the place, and feeling super-stressed because i've got too much i want and need to do and no idea where to begin. the sensation is so vague that i don't even know if i want to begin at all.

---friday:

i'm intrigued by the good hair days i've been having since friday - it seems to be at just the right length to work with my beard.

how is it possible that a night can be warmer than the day preceding it?

permit-wise, we're getting desperate to consider using an immigration lawyer. not sure they can help. i really hope we can sort things out.

i've decided that moonlighter is professionally irresponsible. that kinda drops him a peg in my book.

---microsoft doesn't do itself any favours with their wording, nor their package compatibility: i downloaded a copy of visual studio 2012 express, which is supposed to be free but informs the user that it's a 30-day evaluation. it doesn't say that registration is free. i found a forum post asking about the 2012 licensing, and instead of the microsoft employee explaining that the express user's code belongs to the user the poster was told to contact microsoft legal directly. certain that it wouldn't be, i uninstalled (after ages of the installation locking up all four processors) and installed 2010. but 2010 isn't compatible with the windows 8 sdk.

that prompted me to go through the whole sla on my second attempt at installing 2012, and there's only the usual garbage. dammit. i registered for my free key (really, they could just have said "free" on the alert) and everything was fine, but then discovered that while the sdk is compatible with 2012 it won't run on a machine that's not windows 8.

microsoft: you assholes. again. still.

---my mum convinced me that it was high time to complain about the caretaker to the landlord; pg later informed me that after two months, he finally fixed the front door and sorted out (kind of) the toilet. now it's just the balcony door that we need to convince him to handle [hah! handle as a verb in both senses].

the reason the toilet's only "kind of" fixed is because the tank cover was on the floor and the caretaker stepped into the bathroom without looking where he was putting his feet and smashed it. he brought in a temporary cover that's too big but a much prettier colour.

---yesterday:

i don't know what made me feel like singing, but... i think my singing voice is back. i thought i'd lost it ages ago.

it was a warm -8 in the sun and a cold -8 in the shade, but either way downtown montreal was really pretty. we hit the apple store for an ipad. the salesman was friendly but over-explained a lot of things; he did seem to *get* us, though, and we walked out with a non-retina ipad 2. we chased that with too much food at the good chinese restaurant, and then tried to go to poubelle du ski.

i hate google maps so much right now. i don't know of a better service, but the routes that it suggests are often the least convenient and we gave up when it told us that we needed to trek through high snow on a highway pass to get to a station that was further away from both our starting point and our destination than the one we'd arrived at.

we got there eventually, and it was packed and crazy. we waited a while, and then a guy came out and said something in french while looking somewhere else - only after a group of guys responded and he attended to them did we realize that he'd been asking who needs assistance. after pg got her awesome gear sorted out i got claustrophobic and had to go outside.

in addition to reading wired and gaming on the ipad, pg and i played carcassonne and watched great one piece episodes. then i did some more post edits (i'm on a mission) and we went to bed early to go snowboarding.

---i was very excited by the replicator article, and concerned about standing desks.

also: smeagol vs gollum. genius.