More photos along the Lachine canal

Lighthouse in Lachine

Fall colours at waterfront at bird sanctuary in Lasalle

I was udderly delighted with this photo

It's always something.....

For the past week or so I've had my little finger and ring finger of the left hand all numb and it was getting worse. This time it's not related to my truck.  As best as I understand it, the ulnar nerve is pinched somewhere, more likely at the elbow. Oh and the ulnar nerve is what makes the elbow have a 'funny bone'. That electrical sensation is your ulnar nerve.

The sucky part is that I sleep on that arm, elbow bent, so I have to stop it to heal and I also drive my car with my left hand only, since I learned to drive stick shift originally. 

I'm trying to keep my arm from being bent as much as possible, I'm hoping it will help

Lachine Canal

Lasalle Drive-in

Yesterday when driving around the Lachine Canal we stopped at the Lasalle Drive-in, located on Lasalle blvd, corner Champlain, right in front of Police Station 13. 

I had a French fry and my friend I had a French fry, Gyro and soda. My fries were kick ass. They also offer sea salt on the tables. The restaurant staff was friendly, the service was quick and the place was clean. They are right on the water front and if we hadn't been so cold from hanging around the waterfront we might have sat outside to look at the view.

I'd go back any day. Only down side is that they are a cash only business.

Lighthouse in Lachine

Moulin Fleming in Ville Lasalle

Racing brain anyone?

Windows 8 - and PC desktops

Apparently I'm not the only one who sees that Wind8ws might be a nightmare for those who are going to use a desktop computer as opposed to a tablet or a smartphone. 

I've been using versions of Windows since 1992.  I hate the double desktop, makes it non-intuitive for someone who just needs to get email and work on documents. This article is from experts and what they have to say about Wind8ws

I had said that I doubted OEMs would be very keen. It seems HP and Lenovo are going full speed but Dell is not so much. Dell seems to want to stick to windows 7 as its shipping OS on most machines for a little while longer.

ADHD Awareness week Expo

Here is a link to ADHD awareness Expo

Help! help! I'm being repressed!!!!

4.5 Earthquake early this morning in Montreal area

The last couple of earthquakes in the Montreal region I either heard about later in the day or I was away from Montreal and felt nothing. 

It was not the case last night. I was sitting at my PC a bit past midnight and suddenly out of a dead quiet, I hear all my cats scatter like there had been a huge noise. That's when I felt the house vibrate like there was some Guido living next door with a massive sound system and the bass was vibrating. 

That's when I suspected there had just been an earthquake, but the news were not out yet. This morning I found article that said there had been an earthquake last night.

Now I can hear this song by Carole King "I feel the earth move under my feet"

Interesting photo of tree with blue lights.

One neighbour on the next street over has a house just like mine and a tree on the front lawn in which was put some blue lights. I love how this photo came out. Of course this might be because I have a new lens. I`m pretty sure I would not have been able to take this photo with my old lens.

Fall colours and sunset on Riviere des prairies

Photos taken tonight on my street and from Rive Boisée, for the sunset all in Pierrefonds.

I can't believe he called!!!!!

I wrote back February of last year about an incident with one of my exes.  I was horribly upset afterwards and I had someone tell him to not contact me anymore. 

I wrote the piece below in December of 2011, but never gave him the letter. Now I'm wishing I did. I wasn't at work on Friday but I called to see if I had any messages and sadly I had one message, from him. He called me at work because he knows I don't answer my phone at home.  Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't snail mail this letter to him..... 

I know I shouldn't let it bug me but I can't help it bugs me. I'm pissed about it too. I mean I was in a perfectly good mood, I was going to have a great long week-end and now I'm upset over this dumb ass again.

December 2011

Dear asshole friend. [The original text uses his full name here], 

I’m profoundly disappointed in you. You’ve been acting like a spoiled little boy for years. You say you respect your mother, but this isn’t true. Sure you treat your mother with more respect than you treat most people but if you truly honoured your mother, in true Mohawk tradition, you would treat all women in your life with the same kind of respect.  I remember you telling me years ago when we lived together that I wasn’t worthy of that respect.  Why you believe that is beyond me and incredibly hurtful.   If anything I have been a woman who has loved you, believed in you and tried the most to help you, other than your mom and your sister.   

  

I had to face my mom’s cancer alone, with a drunken asshole around me all the time. I would get home from work by the time you were on your 12^th beer. I did not get the support I needed at any given point. You didn’t even allow me a day alone to grieve by myself. Like having a drunken idiot who tries to pick fights with you, around you, is helpful to help you grieve? 

Yet when you called me to tell me about your mom’s cancer, I came running. I put away my hurts and was there for you so that you could be there for your mom. The pain I had to carry alone when my mom was sick and died, I didn’t wish anyone to have to go through this alone. 

When you called that night in February 2011 I could see you were in pain and needed to talk. Instead of being a man and telling me what was really on your mind, you decided to attack me verbally to the point where I felt I didn’t have a place anymore in this world. You spent over 30 minutes saying mean and hurtful things that I hope you don’t actually believe.  It’s not the first time you tell me such things, but this time is the last. You had the audacity to say you had brought me flowers the week before and ask me what I did for you in return.  When I’ve been there for you, I never did it to ‘get’ something in return. I was there for you because you needed me.  

That night on the phone you acted like a frightened little boy beating on the person who was there for you.  I still to this day do not understand what I did to you to deserve this profound disrespect. I don’t give a damn that you were drunk.  If you didn’t feel this profound disrespect for me, you wouldn’t voice it so adamantly when you drink. You wouldn’t try to make me feel like I didn’t deserve to walk this earth. 

It is incredibly hurtful that instead of acknowledging that when you drink you act like a jerk, you pretend like it didn’t happened.   Just because you have no recollection of being a jerk, does not mean you were not a jerk.     You’ve spent at least the last 12 years telling me that since you don’t remember being a jerk, and I don’t have it on camera,  I have no right to be upset at the impossible situations you have put me in due to your drinking.  

I’ve repeatedly told you that I do not want to be around you after you drink alcohol. I’ve put up with two years of your perpetual drunkenness one of which was while my mom was dying. I don’t ever want to have to put up with a drunken YOU ever again.   You consistently ignore this wish and subject me to your appalling behaviour over and over again. I stopped drinking myself 30 years ago because I didn’t like who I became when I drank, but you expect me to put up with you?  

 That being said, I’m done with you.  I am a person who deserves more than this kind of treatment and if all you have for me is disrespect then I don’t want to be part of your world. You wonder why my daughters have no respect for you, and don’t ever want to see you again? Look no further, they can see how you disrespect me and by extension, them. 

I still love you, despite all, and always will. I wish you no harm and hope one day you will become a man and be able express your real feelings instead of attacking the women who choose to be there for you. A man, who accepts responsibility for his actions, acknowledges the stupid things he did, apologizes when he’s made mistakes and works towards making amends for those he’s wronged.  I hope one day you learn to lean into your paddle. 

Walk in Beauty

Freedom of religion is a right!

Last I checked the charter of rights and freedoms in Canada, there was a right called freedom of religion. Interestingly enough the federal government seems to have forgotten that.

Either chop ALL chaplains regardless of faith or keep multiple faiths. Why is it suddenly only Christian ones are allowed?

Is there a memo that says that you have to be Christian to be a Canadian? Here I thought we had freedom of religion under the Charter of rights and freedom.... 

And as a non-Christian I find it offensive that sanity forbid I ever land myself in jail, I'd like to get guidance by someone who is not strictly Christian.

Today's Gnome of the day

As drawn randomly from the desk - today's choice

The Wonderfulness of Me

The Wonderfulness of Me

If you took all of the things that were special about me, you could put them all together and call it ADHD.
No better, No worse, just different that's me.
I'm really not crazy, please try and see.

As I daydream and drift, you think no one's there, but nothing could be farther from the truth, believe me I swear.
I see your impatience as my mind starts to wander, but you don't know the depth of the thoughts that I ponder.
For creative thinkers get lost in deep thought, which leads to the illusion that they cannot be taught.
I know trying to reach me can give you the blues,but I wish for just once you could walk in my shoes.
To see things through my eyes, you would be amazed, at the speed and sheer volume my thoughts seem to blaze.
I'm not lazy or stupid, if only you knew, how truly difficult it is to limit myself and think like you do.
So show me some patience, as I'm patient with you.
Just a little tolerance it's long overdue.
Please try and understand me, along with my ADHD.
It's a very big part of the wonderfulness of me.

[Someone posted it in my ADHD group on Facebook and I'm sharing it]

Happy to have a long week-end

I decided to stay put, it's going to be too cold and wet this week-end to go out in the middle of nowhere and attempt to canoe. I remember last year at this time of the year we had Indian summer, it was warm and it was awesome but not this year. 

I'm happy to have time off because the past couple of days I've had bad luck with hardware. Other then finding out my 250Gb drive with the Wind8ws installs got fried because someone accidentally pulled out the power cord just enough for my Z800 to turn off.  And then the hard disk wouldn't boot. I've spent the rest of the week trying to fix it by marking off the bad sectors with a manufacturer provided software since I am out of hard drives.  Getting new drives will take one to two weeks. 

Then yesterday afternoon, it was suggested that I might not have tried the latest BIOS on the ASUS F1A75-V Pro. They were right, the system didn't have the latest BIOS. So I downloaded the BIOS and the BIOS flash tool off the ASUS site, put it on my USB key, booted and started to flash. Sadly after  it got 1/8 of the way through it's progress bar it hung. And stayed like that for the next hour at which point I unplugged the system and knew it wouldn't boot. 

And the coup de grace, was trying to add a 2nd display adapter in the xw9300, I had named Final Fantasy VII, or FFVII for short. It has been months that the power button on that system is flaky. You turn it on, it turns off.  Except that in the past week it was you turn it on 10-20 times, it might post once.  But yesterday after 30 trials and no post, I gave up. Stripped the machine of all it's usable parts and putting it to pasture. I have 2 more xw9300 in my team, one named Castle, after tv show, the other named Opus, after Opus the penguin of bloom county.  These systems will inherit the memory, hard drives and possible the CPU if they were single CPU versions.

It does not beat that about two weeks ago I noticed that my two Lenovo's LT2452 lcds, that I'd only had for about 2 months at that point, were both displaying solid white though the analog input.  I tried 3 different graphics cards, several cables, and concluded something went funny on the LCD's.  Thankfully Lenovo crossed shipped me 2 new ones, and I sent back the 2 defective ones. But this is the weirdest break of an LCD I've ever seen. Maybe it's because these are LED's?  These are very nice monitors, they do 1920x1200, and have an analog, a DVI and a displayport port.  The mechanism to switch between them is friendly and they display crisp. 

Annoying cold and broken furnace

I noticed when I started the furnace up  in mid September that it wasn't working the way it should be. It also seems that the ventilation unit is no longer working. It's not a huge deal, I just had to call Gaz MetroPlus with whom I have a service contract to report the problem so they would send a tech.  They did yesterday, and the furnace is fixed, it now keeps the asked temperature, but the guy did not have a part for the ventilation unit. He will be back today to replace that. The guy saw it misbehave and decided to change it before it completely died on me.

Other then that I've had a cold for over a week. It comes and it goes. I took last Friday off to sleep and get rid of it. I was feeling so much better on Monday. Sadly Tuesday I started sneezing up a storm. Still sneezing and having a runny nose. I don't think it's allergies. It's really annoying because of course everytime I over blow my nose I end up with cold sores in my nostrils.