Mmmm, vegetables. Made a thai vegie stir fry with all kinds of good stuff in it. I can feel my arteries unclogging.

Spring is in the air. It rained today, and it wasn't the freezing kind. And nature is blooming in glorious shades of... well, brown, actually. Apparently the green starts happening in about a month.

Work today was mostly meetings. Did some docco in the morning, then into the office, and had a loooooong meeting about the status of the next version. It was pretty good actually. One of my assigned tasks was essentially "ponder and brainstorm" and I had some useful suggestions to make, so that was good. Some of the docco I'm doing is stalled waiting for the developers to actually write the stuff, so in my stalled periods I'm working on a bunch of HOWTO documents and also some more theoretical/descriptive papers for the .org site. I drew a little map of what docco relies on what other docco being updated, and it turns out that I have to update just about *everything*.

I also had to figure out how to work my health insurance. I need to visit a doc for my shoulder. Since I'm on an interim insurance plan until I qualify for OHIP (that takes 3 months) it seems that all I do is go to the doctor, keep the receipts, and claim it afterwards. Easy. I'll go see the doc tomorrow. Any money s/he tells me to stop typing :-/

After the round of meetings there was a happy-maternity-leave thingy for one of the finance people who's going to have twins. I grabbed a slice of chocolate cake then dashed off, because I had an Irish dancing class to attend.

I've done some Irish set dancing before, but it's been run by people from a folk dance background, not from a competitive Irish dance background. This class is run by the latter type, so we spent most of the session learning how to do certain footwork, then just 15 minutes at the end putting it together into (part of) a dance. Coming from an SCA dance background, with a bit of random folk dancing thrown in, I'm used to dances being described like this:

Double up and back, set and turn left, repeat with S&T left, mirror hey, sidings etc in the same format as the doubles, hey holding hands, armings etc, crossover hey.

(that's an entire dance -- Grimstock, from Playford, which we used to dance lots in Stormhold). Everyone groks it, and you can dance it pretty much in its entirety with maybe 3 minutes preparation explaining the heys to those who haven't done that dance before.

On the contrary, this Irish dance class took FIFTEEN MINUTES to get everyone understanding the following:

Advance and retire, sevens and threes right, advance and retire, sevens and threes left.

And that's gotta be just the first figure of a dance that should be *at least* three times that length. *sigh*. I'm used to doing up to six full dances an hour, or maybe only two or three if there are newbies, so this was INCREDIBLY SLOW. On the other hand, I got plenty of opportunity to improve my footwork.

And in tonight's review of strange Canadian television: "Yvon of the Yukon". It's a half hour cartoon, ostensibly about a French explorer in the 17th century who discovers the north-west passage then accidentally gets frozen. Sometime later (like, now-ish), he's defrosted when a huskie pisses on him. And that's all explained in the opening credits. Then it gets *really* strange. It's kind of like Northern Exposure meets Les Visiteurs meets The Simpsons.

Coming up next: Are You Being Served. Wow, I haven't seen this since before I was old enough to understand most of the jokes. I saw that To The Manor Born was going to be on earlier tonight, so I watched it, and found that it was the first ep. I saw that just recently in .au when it was on the ABC, but I didn't see more than a couple of eps beyond that. I thought I was going to see something new, but oh well. Haven't seen TTMB since I was a kid, really. It's quite good. Unlike AYBS (she says as she watches the opening scenes) which, to be honest, is BLOODY AWFUL.