What's in a name...

So I was talking with Carol last night about my name and what it means to me.

I'm a Michael from birth but generally in day-to-day I'm a Mike. Michael means "who is like God" if you follow the Wikipedia definition of Michael. To my knowledge this comes about in reference to the biblical Saint Michael (or Michael Archangelis, depending on what variant you follow). St Michael briefly was one of two head angels in traditional theology. He's noted for the betrayal of the angel Gabriel who of course eventually became Lucifer. Depending on the particular variant you read, he betrayed Gabriel to God and threw him from Heaven.

There's an old Isaac Asimov quote that I've always felt is somewhat relevant: "Never let your sense of morality prevent you from doing what is right"

It's always been my take, metaphors aside, that Michael would have felt a betrayer and justly so. There are many occasions in life where betrayal is the right thing to do, although it is rarely the moral thing to do.

I've always felt it personally relevant as my obsessive compulsive behavior has often forced me into taking actions on things I would have rather not. For example, I was walking through Superstore the other day and ran into a little girl walking through the store by herself. I knew, on some level, that the situation wasn't one that required my action... but once I was aware that the situation existed there was nothing I could do but get involved. And yes, it was all good, and yes we found her parents and got them reunited but the point is that I couldn't have not got involved.

One hundred miles into the bush, and no one within an hour of me, I will still use my signal lights in my car.

I'm not sure that it all relates to being named Michael but I've always felt it was a good fit. So there. :)


Toronto Cathedral 4 by *pachocanadian on deviantART

Contests...

Let me first tell you about why I'm busy this time of year...

Toastmasters runs contests twice yearly at club/area/division/district/region levels. To run a contest you need staff to administer it. This consists of a chairman, chief judge, tiebreaking judge, judges, counters, timers, runners, test speakers and contestants. Many of these roles aren't too difficult to fill... you can train a timer/counter/runner quickly and if you don't have contestants then you don't have contests... A chairman is ultimately doable if you can create a good script (and/or if the chairman has contest experience himself).

Where it gets tricky is the judging. Ideally you want to pick people who have judging experience, whether in the sense of participating in contests or who have taken the official district judging workshop. Even if you can fill you judges spots finding a chief judge is often tricky. There are a lot of finicky legal details to work out and given that the chief judge is the one on the line it often is hard to find someone to put their hand up!

This is where I come into things. As an area governor and club president both, generally speaking the onus is immediately on me. And because I'm an obsessive reader/fan of legality (i.e. watch CPAC in my spare time for fun) I tend to find myself drawn into assisting other contests beyond my own club/area ones.

To be honest, it's a lot of fun, and I wouldn't have it any other way although it does make for many late nights as all club contests are in same two week slot, all area contests, etc. all the way up to district (at which point my involvement is neither needed nor desired).

Why are delete buttons so easy to click...

It's funny. Even with multiple levels of safeguards, with bright red delete buttons, pops, popunders, "are you sure" questions, etc. I still can accidentally click through to a delete now and again. Mad props to the wonderful folks at SurveyMonkey who were graciously willing to fix my idiot problem after the fact.


Graveyard panoramic by *pachocanadian on deviantART

Tiny dancer...

So on a totally random note, my niece Zoë just won her solo dance recital doing "Tiny Dancer". She had picked the song because I had originally picked the song. To be more precise, when my niece was born at 2:13 AM during her home birth, I had got in my car and drove for hours and hours. I eventually arrived at my office and mixed a CD where the title track was "Tiny Dancer". I then in an unrelated note shaved my head bald for the first time in my life (note: don't try this from a full head of hair like I did). Anyways, in the end the song became associated with my niece so when she was gearing up for her first solo season, that was the song that she picked.

On Saturday March 6th we had taken both dogs (Erik and Bella) out to West Lake and I took the following picture of niece Zoë:


Puppy love by *pachocanadian on deviantART

Getting back onto that high horse...

Alright, we're getting back into that time of year where I start taking this blog thing seriously again. Hey, how are you, anyways? Long time no speaky speaky.

There has been much insanity in my personal and professional lives lately. On the personal end, going outwards in terms of time: I have an alexisonfire concert tonight; I'm trying to get myself a Giant Schnauzer for summer and I'm coming up on the evil 3-0.

On a professional end: I'm gearing up for club and area contests (see http://a41.pachogrande.com/ for details); I'm celebrating the fact that I have one of the strongest areas in the province; I'm looking forward to becoming a "keener" rather than an "officer" next Toastmasters year (i.e. July).

On the photographic end: Carol and I finished up the 2010 calendar; I sourced a new 8 GB card instead of the new camera I wanted; I took many hundreds of pictures out in Toronto which I'm looking forward to featuring!


A year exploring beautiful BC by *pachocanadian on deviantART

All work and no play...

Garble farkle nargen.

I've been trying to avoid posting things to my blog when I don't have corresponding pictures but unfortunately am finding very little time to go shoot anything. :(

Work is fairly insane. Home Depot has a tendency to concentrate our work into a very small slot of time. That is, when customers know that Home Depot offers a 10% sale on a regular basis, people tend to want to purchase their $80,000 cabin during this sale. This means that customer inevitably plan to build 6-8 weeks from purchase date. Because on our end of things we don't see the order until we have the contract and the money, there is no chance to prepare for the onslaught. Our custom packages are spread out over the year - some small blips of activity but overall 1-2 per week sort of thing. With Home Depot I had something like 30 drop in a one week period. This makes for a lot of stress in my world and long days.

Fortunately there are lots of good things going on. Carol's dog Erik is moved in and happy. (I LOVE THE PUPPY!) We've been having lots of fun doing bonding puppy things like throwing balls around and going to random walks. Jonny took Erik out for a walk yesterday and was remarking at how mellow he is. College Heights is a busy place - everyone has a dog and there are lots of kids, adults and elderly walking around in general. Erik has so far been fantastic. Also, for some reason he thinks he's a cat so will try to sit in laps when a person does the computering.

Carol has been pretty super too. It's hard to gauge how someone is going to be (read: whether they are a crazy person) until you are with them day in and day out. So far we'll give her a tentative pass! Bonus points for girlfriends who make lunches for their boyfriends, I always say.

We had a good weekend with Mike and Christine. I think I got a bit wrecked - I'm not entirely clear on the sequences of events beyond trying to reach PS3 controllers from a sitting position that were not underfoot as expected. It was good - we were up early the next morning and back out in the garden doing work. We need to do more BBQ's - eating burgers is awesome. Ditto having people up. Oh, and the consensus from everyone in the house is that the term milf is accurate, so there :p

Well, pretend that there is a picture attached to this post, and I plan on writing after I return from the Area Governor's training this Saturday. Looking forward to seeing Kev and company! :)

Kitty likes to climb door jambs...

Word to your mothers. Life has returned to some semblance of normalcy at work. I'm still buried a bit but there's light at the end of the tunnel. I've never been through a Home Depot promo before. There are time limits on getting 10% off so people get frantic as they get to the end of the promo. Madness and insanity. I'll always remember talking to someone on the phone, hanging it up and looking down to see 4 new voice mails while I was on the phone. It was like that for weeks.

It was awesome going down to Quesnel to do the home show. Mike's got a pretty good setup for hosting guests. Lots of space, good A/V gear and you're guaranteed eggs in the morning. I seriously hate eating eggs normally but Mike makes a mean cheese omelete. The home show was a lot of fun. I've got sales in my genes so it makes me happy to be talking with people.

We had a great post-show meeting up with Mike's milf. I think Mike gets a bonus modifier for being a big fish in a small bowl (Quesnel). Also she has CHR 20, like srsly. Our verdict: good job malby!

On the g/f note, I'm looking through the paper for places for Carol to rent. I feel like I'm 20 all over again. :p Some reasonable places to rent in PG, surprisingly. I thought the market would be tighter somehow with inflation or whatever but I guess prices must be down because of the economy, etc. Anyways, lots of excitement on that front.

Photo-wise, I have a bunch queued to doctor and shoot but one in particular because I like the colors. See how many building products you can recognize based on color!?

And life rears its ugly (multiple) heads...

Oi oi! Boy things have been hectic like you wouldn't believe.

I'm the newly elected area 41 governor for Toastmasters which is wicked.

I'm learning lots of cool stuff at work.

My niece turned 8.

I officially got myself a g/f.

The Flames got eliminated. :(

Counting down the hours...

So it seems like these last couple months I'm always counting down the hours. I suppose that in and of itself isn't unusual... all too often in life we're looking forward to what's coming rather than what we have this moment. I think they call that hope.

In this case I'm counting the hours until Carol comes up to visit. I seriously dig that chick. This will be visit #2 IRL. To be perfectly honest, I'm not a fan of the LDR or the internet-based LDR in particular. I have had prior experience as at least one of my readers will attest to. However, I believed at the time (and still believe now) that a person needs to pursue their dreams however illogical and misguided. If we don't act on our dreams then what are we doing here? Contrary to public opinion, you are not a robot, nor an island... nor a pony.

Anyways, if this makes any sense, I hate the process of being involved with someone who lives so far away even as I love the person. And I do think that the second half of that more than offsets the first half. In spite of it not working out before, I would still gladly repeat my previous "mistakes" if for no other than being enriched by meeting someone who I never would have otherwise and being exposed to a lifestyle that has taught me so much about myself. I think commentary beyond that point reveals more than I want to share, but feel free to ask me privately if you want me to expand.

In the vein of composite panoramic I have a new one. Basically a shot of our yard at work. I think it's bootyful! :)

He's got a ticket to ride...

I'll pretend that blog posts aren't an opportunity for me to dissemble for thirty seconds before whoring off my latest favorite picture.

Yesterday was fun - drove out to Quesnel after work and spoke at the Exodus 4:10 (Toastmasters) speaking club. The speech was kind of bunk. Basically I'm working through an advanced manual on specialty speeches. Things like eulogies, toasts to the queen, oddball stuff like that. Random and wonderful. Anyways, there's a project in there called "impromptu speech" which is meant to mimic the real life situation where as an expert you're called on to speak on something you're not prepared for. i.e. talk show, speaking in from of city council or similar. So I picked out my five areas of expertise and gave them to my evaluator.

Usually the evaluator will pick an area at random and then ask a question as you walk up to the front. You speak 5-7 minutes and it needs to have the normal aspects of a speech - i.e. introduction that sets the stage and gets attention, generally three points that you make, and a conclusion that reinforces and wraps it up. Vocal variety, gestures, etc. are all as per advanced manual standards so generally is fairly challenging. In the past I've spoken on "Please explain how filtration works and why it's essential in a fish tank" for example, so I walked people through trying to mimic a natural environment, water hardness/alkalinity, water depth and pressure, the inverse relationship between oxygen retention and temperature, etc.

Last nights was weird in that they just gave me back my area of expertise and asked me to speak on "digital photography". So I did a persuasive speech on the need to purchase a digital camera. I'm not terribly impressed with it but I'll wait to see the video that Mike captured for me. In the end though, just for random perks, I had two people come up to me and tell me that they are going to go to staples tomorrow and buy a camera based on my presentation. Kind of amusing.

Anyways, I think I can introduce my new favorite. It's a composite panoramic made up of about 20 6.1 megapixel shots taken from two different site locations about 15' apart. Infinite focus on the camera so the parallax effect is minimalized. I did full exposure blending, HDR and then post-processing on the final copy to bring the temperature of the shot down into the cold range. I'd be lying if I said I'm not feeling like a cat with a canary in his mouth...