Blessed by the Potato

I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and praise small victories. Often we take our small victories for granted, and only celebrate the big ones… but when things go poorly for a while, it’s important to step back and look at what is working.

I placed a small bet on the recent federal election in the UBC election market (it wasn’t gambling — it was supporting important social science research!) and I won 53 cents! The cheque arrived today! I bet on a liberal minority (d’oh!) with an even larger hedge on a minority of some sort (woo-hoo!) and a small bet against the Greens (sorry Liz… but it’s not like betting against the Greens had any decent odds anyway). So, hey, 53 cents. That’s outperforming my stock portfolio! I could buy 62% of a donut…

…but I won’t because I’m losing weight! I haven’t met my weight-loss goal for any month except May and June, but at least it’s going down, and I’m getting in much better shape even if I’m not actually any smaller.

So it’s NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — also known as “November”. I am not attempting to write a novel this year, just like I haven’t any other year, because that is just crazy balls. I am working on a pair of short stories that I’ve had outlines on for a while now, but I’m still not what one might call “done”. In fact, I’ve run right back into a fierce wall of writer’s block. However, in my procrastinating I’ve written over 4000 words for the blog in the two days I took off to write, so I’m easily meeting my self-imposed word count quota for the day. At least my typing skills are intact. I’ve also been catching up on my correspondence, writing to all kinds of people I haven’t talked to in a far too long, and finished my ethics revision (which is long overdue now, but I’m still counting it in the win column, at least until/if it gets rejected).

I got my camera back from Black’s, and they only charged me $15 to fix it, thanks to the extended warranty that came free with it when my parents bought it (they never knowingly purchase extended warranties). It was full of pictures of the pretty cat (what else?):

One advantage to all the night scans is that the cat is very happy to see me awake at 5am every day. While it has been very difficult to find volunteers for the late nights, things are chugging along: I hit the halfway point today! Yes, I’m 3/4 of the way through my MRI time availability, so I should be 3/4 done… but let’s not focus on that. Small victories, and halfway is halfway!

“You made me smile!…you really made my day.”

Yes, mission accomplished: making the world a happier place one small smile at a time, one day at a time (which is generally how days come, unless you’re on the night shift when they come in two half days at a time — you have no idea how confusing it is to talk to people about what happened “last night” when that’s still “today” to me). Now some linkage to what made me laugh my ass off today:

The Onion Video on whether Halloween has become too commercialized, and what happens when a cat spends too much time watching a hen lay eggs from Cute Overload. Oh, and the trailer for the Star Trek movie is up. It doesn’t really fit with the other two links, but… Byah! It looks pretty good, except for the part where li’l Kirk is driving a car off a cliff. I hope they make that make sense in the movie, I really do. Of course, one day George Lucas will die, and Star Wars can be relaunched…