Back in Beantown
Well, the bad news was that this December 25 was only the second green Christmas in my 28 years of Haliburton Christmases. Last year I shoveled three feet of snow (plus a half inch crust) off my parents' roof - suffice it to say that at the end of the day, no ladder was required to get up on the roof (just walk up the snowbank, no worries). This year... not a flake. Of course, it was 21C here in Boston yesterday, so I guess in relative terms I can still talk about my Christmas in "arctic" Canada. On the other hand, one of my friends from my small group rang in the New Year ice fishing in Flin Flon (????), so perhaps I should be careful about claiming such northern hardships.
Other than that though, Christmas was excellent. I returned over two days (didn't even get out of Boston until 6PM) via Kingston to visit an old professor who gave me my first lab job (made and broke 1628 cooled beams of asphalt for a summer... yes, a glamorous beginning to my scientific career). I also made it back for the annual Christmas service in an old church just down the road from us - it's been decommissioned for years but has been maintained by the local community and makes for an absolutely fantastic venue for a Christmas Eve service (I actually maintain a website for the church here if you're interested... not updated for '07 yet, but forgive me). The service is always the last Sunday in December, which means I am often not home yet to attend, so it was good to be there. Christmas Day was much quieter than usual since my sister had to work (you'd think the sick people would take the day off to let health care professionals have a holiday too, but noooo...) As a result, our official "Christmas Day" didn't happen until just before new year's when we were all able to be there, which is the way it should be regardless of the calendar. I did manage to open one gift on the 25th though - my 1580 piece 3D puzzle of Venice. It had to be done to carry on a Christmas Day tradition in which I have assembled something (Lego or a puzzle) every year for as long as I can remember. I think it is a solid effort, as you can see:
(By the way, I actually brought the puzzle to Boston so I could enjoy it, which meant that a mini-skyline of Venice was sitting, highly visibly, in my back seat while crossing the border. Potential border agent conversation:
Border Agent: "Anything to declare?"
Me: "Two islands of Venice"
Border Agent: "Huh?"
Fortunately, my border guy was totally uninterested in life, so I didn't have to explain).
So, what this means now is that I will actually have to go to Venice to get my now traditional real-foam comparison picture - rough assignment I am sure, but somebody's got to do it. Italy is at the top of my "must-visit" list, so hopefully that "real" shot won't take too much longer to acquire. My other two most interesting gifts were a DVD recorder (excited to try that out - it's actually way cheaper than VCR tapes to do recording, I was quite surprised) and the "power drill that ate all other power drills" from my sister....18V of pure battery-powered drilling action (I feel like grunting like Tim Allen in Home Improvement but have no idea how to communicate that sound via text). Now if only I had any home improvement skills, I could really use that baby! To be fair though, I did do a highly successful install of a new paper towel rack in my parents' kitchen, and not just any power tool idiot can do that (right? RIGHT????). The other highlight of the holiday was cleaning my sister's clock in our traditional new year's Monopoly game. I think this is about our eighth year of playing Monopoly (not all consecutive, but still) and I think this is the seventh year I have won. We actually played 3 games this year since the first two were done so early - all glorious victories, the most glorious of which was Game 1 when I had roughly half the properties she had but still won by building hotels on Mediterranean and Baltic (talk about losing by a thousand cuts).
I swung back via Hamilton to say hello once again (motto: how can you miss me if I never actually am away for more than one month at a time?) before heading back to Boston on Thursday, arriving one half hour before... a three hour worship team practice. Oh well, suffice it to say that Friday was not my most alert and productive day in the lab, but the important thing is that no rats were harmed by my general dopiness. I'm actually kind of looking forward to getting back to work - I kind of had a lot of wind in my sails before the break in terms of research progress, so I hope that keeps going.
Hope you all had a great Christmas - all the best for your 2007!
PS - This is the type of news story I think we need to see way more often - a nice little reminder to view the glass as half full a bit more often in this new year.
PS2 - Sad but true fact - TSN streaming of the World Junior Hockey Championship is available only to Canadian computers... I am sure the American rights holder was sighing in relief that the three people in this country who actually cared weren't getting any renegade footage.
