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Alison Hawke

Alison Hawke

Running on fumes

Last night was our first marital running-out-of-petrol drama. It happened under near textbook conditions: after dark (10:30 pm), in cold weather (-9C or 15F), without cell phones, and after a stressful day (building inspection day for the house). Happily we were on a downhill slope, less

Google madness

Google has deleted references to the leading Internet critic of the Church of Scientology, Operation Clambake. It's still there if you search for the words "Operation Clambake" but Google has voluntarily shredded a part of their supposedly impartial searching system to cut the site out of

Dreams

Last Friday, when we saw the last two houses, Janis (the real estate agent) asked if we'd started dreaming about houses yet. I had dreamed the night before about moving into a big old house and having an Emperor penguin delivered in a wooden barrel. Apparently the penguin

Checklist

The termite Gestapo visited the house today, and pronounced it free of wood chewing buglets. Which is good, because it's a wooden house. No termites now, no evidence of them being there before, or of them being "treated," aka exterminated, squished, poisoned, sued for criminal trespass,

Poetry

Sehlat said: "The desire of depressed people, especially depressed teenagers, to write bad poetry is so common that it should be listed as an official symptom in the DSM-IV." Haiku, sonnets, and flumes are poetry forms that require discipline. The first two specify number of syllables, which

Web content

How to write a better weblog by Dennis Mahoney is a good read. I've just found A List Apart. In Defense of web diaries is another article I want a link to, by Erika Meyer. I love this quote: Web writing is different at its very core. Words

The Friday Five

Everyone else is doing it. The Friday Five, for your reading pleasure, and my avoidance-of-doing-the-filing pleasure. <li><b>What's your favourite animal?</b> <br>Meerkat, Duckbilled Platypus, Russian Blue cat.</li> <li>

Housing. More housing. Basements!

Saw another two houses this lunch time. The basements are all starting to blur together into one big generic basement. One house was OK, needed a lot of redecorating work, some nasty wood stuff stripped off and redone in the back room, but there was almost no kitchen counter space.

Grr

Stupid health insurance. "Oh yes Mrs Hawke, that's our mistake, we'll refile the claim and pay it." Really? So why have I got another bill for it a month later? Why am I sat on hold again, listening to syrupy music again, reciting date

Blogs aplenty

We now have a CDP Admin blog, a four person deal. It only took three failed attempts at installing a PHP MySQL blog too. Quickblog just didn't look right, myPHPblog I couldn't get running, scratchblog logged me out every minute, making it really irritating to do

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