A productive and positive day
4:10AM, January 24, 2008 - [ Permalink]
Not necessarily the most work-done kind of day, but nonetheless; check it out - I woke up around 9:30 or so, greeted my wife, made my tea, puttered around for a bit, checked and answered most of the email that came in "overnight". Yay me!
Then I head off to the Times Square building in the Byward Market for my first blood donation since I moved to Ottawa. Last Friday at Pattys, I was chatting (in meatspace) with Raissa who had to leave early because she was going off to donate blood at Carleton U, which me being me, led me down the rat-hole of looking around the Canadian Blood Services website. A bit of poking around found me a list of times & places I could donate in my area.
In keeping with my internal memo that I should try to be a better person this year (not that I was particularly evil last year, but more of a quest for continuous personal improvement), I decided on the spot I would sign up for donating. The "Become a Donor form" takes a minute or two to fill out and was followed by a phone call on Monday to ask a few additional questions and set an appointment time at the blood clinic.
I showed up at the Bloodmobile, filed all my vampire jokes into >/dev/null, had my hemoglobin tested (it's good), filled out a form, had a nurse ask me all kinds of questions about my sordid past, had my temperature taken, blood pressure & heart rate taken and then I went to the donation bed. I was handed off to another nurse, who was awesome, - actually, everyone there was really nice and friendly - who hooked me up and took half a litre of my blood, quite painlessly, I might add. Before you can leave they were quite insistent that I have some juice (apple) and eat a cookie.
From there, I walked around the Market a bit, then headed over to Mediabox for a (relatively) short meeting, and then to lunch, where Gabriel showed me his latest eBay acquisition, a new lens for his Nikon DSLR.
After lunch, I decided to stay at Pattys, but change tables closer to the window, where I wrote a page and a half of content for my new website (coming soon to a URL near you), and I think I have a pretty good idea for another page of content too.
Around four, I left Pattys and headed to the Rideau Centre to meet up with my friend Lindsay to see Cloverfield, which was effectively summed by afterwards by the fellow sitting a couple of rows behind us; "Well.. holy fuck." I enjoyed it, as did Lindsay. DVD release, come on down!
I walked through the late rush hour pedestrian traffic home, changed and went to badminton for two hours, playing some great, tough games. Home for a quick shower, a brief chat with Tracey, who told me that the Introduction to Mac course Dave and I are teaching on Saturday is half full already (yay!), then out for drinks (tea for me, thank-you) with a few of the badminton crew where we discussed the US federal reserve, movies, alternatives to cable TV, co-op opportunities, and a few other things until it was time to come home.
Upon returning home, I check in on Tracey who was still awake, where we chatted for a while, and then I came out to the computers, answered some more email (it just keeps coming in), wrote some code (billable hours!), the organized some of my work, and made sure I was ready for my meeting in less than nine hours. On that note, I'm heading to bed.
But, as you can see, an all-round productive and positive day.
