birthday weekend 2013 - part ii

[...continued]

sunday morning:

i spent my morning simultaneously preparing for snowboarding and tidying up the apartment. icarus arrived with... a gift! supremely awkward, because although i appreciate the thoughtfulness - and in this case it's actually amusing - it's a Thing that exists purely to be Owned. not my style at all :(

it's a model of a porsche, to remind me of the porsche story.

we arrived at saint sauveur, the conditions were pure magic! only everyone and their grandmothers seemed to agree and the central lift was out of order. after lunch they fixed the lift, and then later on another exquisite snowstorm would begin... it was a fantastic day, i had plenty of great runs that alternated between switch practice and high-speed survival :D

on the return drive we plugged in my ipod and some trance came on; icarus isn't into electronic music, but i explained to him what trance is all about (that all the music is in the beats and bassline, in the nuances and the spacing / timing) and he got it so quickly that soon he was happily nodding his head to some pretty hardcore stuff!

the difference between going alone and going with friends: the day cost me a total of $2.50, and that was for the coffee :)

when i got home and showered i called sagirl, who'd been telling me repeatedly to get to the d'iberville metro station which i couldn't find on my map. until i realized that the magnet holding up the map was sitting precisely on the station :$

i headed out there, and it was great seeing her! and meeting her friend. we had an excellent evening, the very cool place we went to for dinner had veggie options and we spent the evening discovering that we share more friend networks than we thought and giving her friend an amusing lesson in cape town nightlife history :)

...

the street was empty so i decided to do some funny footprints in the snow on my way home. as i walked backwards back to the pavement i registered a dark figure mere metres away and walking towards me.

i spun around and continued completely nonchalantly. but i was very relieved when they walked past my building entrance and didn't enter!

---monday:

i was distracted constantly by conversations while trying to drop items off my to-do list. my alarm woke me to the unfortunate reality that it was time for my root canal treatment... i just missed the first metro and the second was delayed, so i arrived about ten minutes late.

the two hours in the chair went by very slowly, the soothing classical music in the background and the complete disengagement of my mind made it very hard to stay awake. i was warned a few times that i was closing my mouth, but what the hell? why can't they just use a clamp or something?
SO... while he managed not to hurt me at all, he informed me after he was done that the procedure had taken much longer than anticipated because my nerves were longer than he'd thought and that there had been four canals that needed cleaning and not three. oh, and the calcification interfered too, apparently. so instead of finishing the job, he slapped on cotton wool and temporary filling and i had to make another appointment.

i'm not impressed. i'm even less impressed now that i've heard four separate stories that make this seem entirely normal.

...

i got home with a sore jaw and still a little upset, and spent the following hour or two translating middle english. i then watched sucker punch, which is a fun movie but not the the one icarus was telling me about.

i was planning on posting this all after dinner, but i procrastinated and eventually had to go to bed. not before discussing my grandfather's yahrzeit with my mum... each anniversary of the death of a parent we're supposed to remember them by joining ten male jews for prayers. in addition to not caring too much for prayers others have invented... or hunting the ten men... i also know that our parents live on through us and that our daily actions determine whether we're respecting their memories or not. and that's regardless of whether they're alive or dead.

---today:

well, i've posted, finally. that's something.

---a friend of yang's asked me for help programming, and at one point i couldn't decide if the kid was trolling me or not. he wants help with something but is unable to articulate where he's having trouble. i explained to him that a fundamental skill of programming is knowing how to break down problems into manageable pieces, and his response was "oh, they're only teaching that next semester."

i suggested that he re-evaluate his choice of studies, if he's not interested in using his brain to figure things out then software is definitely NOT for him.