Blessed by the Potato

I just got my university fee bill, and my tuition for the semester is $2150.02. Right below that is a line for “anticipated aid” indicating that my scholarship will pay $2150.00. I don’t know if there was some sort of rounding error or miscommunication between the various departments of the university, but there’s a two cent difference there. In past semesters, that difference was more like $30, which we were told was for “tax reasons”. Years before that even (man I’ve been in school a long time), and we have an era where the entire tuition fee was covered by scholarships.

This is pretty confusing, and I don’t know if I’m expected to pay the $0.02, or if my scholarship will cover that and a simple rounding or other error happened somewhere along the way. At the bottom it says that any late payments not made by Sept 5th will be subject to a late payment charge of $105. I’m afraid that the university is just daft enough to charge me $105 on a late payment of $0.02, so I’m going to just pay it anyway, out of fear. I suspect though that it will lead to a balance carry-forward, which may lead to the hilarious situation where the university cuts me a cheque for two cents (two years ago they didn’t give me my fee bill on time, and I had to guess at what I thought tuition was and pay that… I of course made a conservative guess and overpaid by about $50, and instead of just taking that off my next semester’s tuition, they promptly sent me a cheque).

So I’m going to give the university my two cents, with the expectation that they’ll likely throw it right back in my face.

Heartburn is a condition that seems to run in my family, particularly on my dad’s side. I don’t know if it’s an overabundance of acid, or a familial weak cardiac sphincter, or if our poor diet and stress-bunny tendencies are to blame, but a typical breakfast for my dad or I is a can of coke and an alka-seltzer. Most of the time I hardly even notice it when I’m awake, but then when I’m awake gravity is usually my very close and personal friend, keeping all that stomach acid mostly down. When bedtime comes though, heartburn can be pure agony, not really from the pain or discomfort, but because it is a condition that for some reason has an incredible ability to keep me awake. After all, I can sleep through almost anything else, including pain, daylight, (some) noise, headgear, and the cat walking on me.

What I find amazing is how some foods can affect heartburn, and how random it is sometimes. For the most part, I can drink as much coke and rootbeer as I want, but Jolt will usually give me heartburn (though admittedly I only drink Jolt during times of great stress, so I couldn’t say if that was the main culprit or not). Perversely, a single small glass of orange juice before bed will just kill me, which is just not fair since it’s actually healthy in other respects. Chips (not that I’m allowed to eat those any more) are fairly inconsistent. Often they’ll lead to terrible night-time heartburn, but sometimes I can polish off a whole large bag and suffer no ill effects. Garlic, particularly in the guise of garlic fingers (oh how I love garlic fingers) often has a very delayed heartburn effect, waking me up after I’ve been asleep for several hours. I find that strange, since after that much time I figure that anything with garlic should have cleared my stomach and be making its merry way through my intestines by then. Anyhow, once the middle of the night garlic heartburn sets in, it can be really stubborn, requiring separate repeated bouts of alka-seltzer to finally clear.

Two days ago, I found it very strange when I was scanning people and was suddenly hit with this garlic taste and attack of heartburn. Not just because I was awake and sitting upright, but also because I hadn’t had anything to eat within about 6 hours, and nothing with garlic all day long. Shortly after I first felt the sensation, the guys I was scanning started talking about going out for a beer and a bite to eat after the scanning was over. Since it was a friday night in London, I couldn’t think of a single place to go that wouldn’t be pounding obnoxiously with dance music… except for one: Symposium. And if we were going to go to Symposium, then I would probably order some bruscetta, and if I did that, I would get heartburn…

And the realization hit me: I was going to get some bruscetta so good, with such intense heartburn that it would rip a hole through the very fabric of time, and actually give me heartburn before I even thought of eating it! When we got there and I was looking through the menu, I was sorely tempted to order something else, like a waffle, just to see if that act would make my garlic-flavoured heartburn go away, but in the end I was helpless, and almost of its own volition, I heard my voice ordering bruscetta from our completely spaced-out waitress.

In the end, having delusions of time-ripping bruscetta goodness is not anywhere near the same thing as having a good plate of food in front of you in the real world. It was actually pretty terrible that night: they got the spice mix completely wrong, it was spicy to the point of making my lips tingle, with none of the garlic, oregano, or basil flavour that bruscetta should have. They also put icky feta on it (it’s not part of their usual recipe, and not mentioned in the menu — if it was, I would have ordered it sans feta), and there were hardly any bits of tomato on it (usually I have to fight to keep them all on the bread without making a giant mess; not a problem I faced then). Despite the fact that I was very hungry after a night of scanning without snacks, I just couldn’t finish it off. It also made my heartburn go away, making me realize that I probably had it in the first place because I was hungry and my stomach was churning in the lab.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday. That’s an exceptionally rare thing for me to do, in the literal sense. Metaphorically, I wake up on the wrong side of the bed fairly frequently: I often wake up grumpy, or too tired to function, or find little things annoying. But usually that happens when I still find myself on the side of the bed I went to sleep on, which is universally the side with my alarm clock. There have been a few times when, having trouble falling asleep, I’ve moved over to the other side (especially when I made my regular side all hot and sweaty). But then when I wake up on the “wrong side” it’s not really the same, because I consciously moved over there in the night. But yesterday, I woke up on the wrong side, and was actually pretty confused as to where I was and how I had gotten there, because that sort of nighttime wandering just doesn’t usually happen.

[Warning: graphic description of unpleasant bodily functions follow]

The day didn’t really get any better for me after that. I was violently ill with diarrhea, perhaps the worst I’ve ever had. I spent basically an hour and a half on the toilet, going a minute or two thinking that the worst was finally over, just to be hit by another round of cramping and liquid evil. I made it through the rest of the day okay after that, but had very bizarre stomach rumbles and painful cramps the rest of the day. Usually when my tummy makes noise it’s sort of a long, protracted grumble with many individual rumbles and gurgles within. Sort of a rum-ble-rum-b-b-b-g-g-g-le. These were like dinosaur calls. A single, loud, painful note that seemed to coordinate the actions of many different areas of my gut. More of a Wroooooooaaam. Very strange indeed.

I also found ants in the kitchen, after thinking we had finally gotten rid of them in the spring. This time they were where I had most feared they might show up: in the food cupboard. Before, they had been drawn to the sink area largely because of the drops of coke left in the cans I had piled up there — rinsing and disposing of the cans individually rather than stockpiling a half dozen to do at a time seemed to help the problem significantly, and chemical warfare seemed to drive the rest off. The sink invasion also seemed to be partly out of convenience: while we never quite pinpointed exactly where they were entering the kitchen, it appeared to be somewhere over on that side of the room. The food is kept in a cupboard on the other side, and had seemed safe… until yesterday. While we have been pretty good about keeping our dry goods in containers and not letting any cans leak, there was one thing we had overlooked: Christmas candy canes. There was a small stockpile of them in there, to serve as a source of emergency sugar if needed. Of course, they came to be in that stockpile because they were rejected from the decoration pile at the time they were in season, because each of them had in some way broken. A broken candy cane is, unfortunately, a candy cane that lacks a seal, because breaking the cane almost always involves breaking the plastic wrapped around it. And so it was that I saw a lone ant crawling out of the the food cupboard, opened the doors, and saw a dozen swarming around the broken ends of the candy canes.

Ugh.

Well, today that mess is all cleaned up and I haven’t seen any more ants. We were also treated to a nice thunderstorm last night (though the air is still pretty muggy today), and those storms for some reason can drive the insects crazy before they strike.

Well, Quebec has admitted that the three masked bandits making the news rounds lately were indeed cops. They also said that they weren’t there to incite violence or act as provocateurs, but after seeing the video, I think that’s a statement we’ll just have to file under “what else would you expect them to say?”

I find this topsy-turvy business of the police looking for a fight and using underhanded tactics like this to be very disturbing. What’s happened to our society? I mean, we can barely stomach it when this sort of thing happens in the States, but to happen in Quebec? And what the heck is going on at the SPP?

Unionville will block the roads for just about anything. A town festival, or a music show, a baseball game or for just a pedestrian-only weekend along the shopping strip, they’ll block that road at the drop of a hat. Any hat. It is, in fact, one of the most popular summer time sports in Unionville, edging out even swimming in a backyard pool.

I don’t really mind the fact that they do it, turning Main St. into a pedestrian mall is often a step in the right direction because there’s usually someone who steps into the road without looking anyway. But it really bugs me how they go about it — they block the road off just before the first usable turn-off. There’s a bit of a drive up Main St. from Hwy 7 before you get to where they block the road, and never has there been a sign saying “road closed ahead” or something like that. If there was some kind of warning, then it would be faster to turn around, go back out to Hwy 7, and take one of the other streets into the residential area of Unionville (and of course, not having a functional grid layout contributes to the hurt here). There have been many times when I’ve had pizza rapidly cooling in the car, just to find Main St. blocked, and being forced to go around the un-named alley just to the east of it. That alley is essentially a parking lot, and it can take quite a while to get through, and then turning left onto Carleton when you do get through it is always an adventure, since there’s no sight line thanks to the ubiquitous parked cars, the slope, and the curve in the road. What really makes me mad though is the stupidity of blocking the road right before an actual usable street. It’s literally 100 feet from being a serviceable blockade, and there’s just no reason to block the turn onto Fred Varley, especially since all the shops are to the North of it (and there’s also a strip mall on Fred Varley itself — potentially a good place for Main Street walkers to park, and also housing a bunch of business owners who probably get cheesed off when people can’t drive up to them).