Rotundus.com

As promised, I'm posting when I have the latest shots up. The (very few) photos from our trip to Calgary are posted at darrenboes.com for your viewing pleasure, along with the tale of the trip. Comments welcome!

Darren

I'm known to walk around with a set of headphones in my ears listening to something or other, but that's not the only place that I use headphones.

One of the somewhat unusual devices that I've got (and like) is the thing depicted in this photo. Available from The Source for a few bucks, it allows you to switch between headphone and speakers on a computer with a touch of a button.

In the Guardian today was an article entitled It may be boring but even the villains are polite - British bobbies head for Alberta. The opening excerpt:

Jeff Locke spent 14 years in the Metropolitan police; the ex-marine was in the riot squad, the surveillance team and the counter-terrorism branch. But on Wednesday, the 45-year-old veteran could be found drinking a carrot, apple and ginger smoothie in a shopping mall in Calgary, Alberta, western Canada.

He wasn't on holiday. He was at work, patrolling the shops and shiny skyscrapers alongside another British officer, Kevin Whitley. All morning there had been no crimes to foil - though one man did ask for directions - but the pair seemed blissfully happy, not to mention well-loved. "No joke, around 10-15 times a day, a member of the public comes up to me and tells me what a good job I'm doing," said Locke. "In 14 years working for the Met, I think that happened twice."

I'm not quite sure whether to count this as a long weekend or a short one, as I really haven't had any time to just sit and veg. My now former roommate, moved out Friday morning, and I decided to take advantage of that to do a little upsizing to obtain some more space. Thankfully this move didn't even involve leaving the house, but was still a decent amount of work. (Perhaps I'm a bit too pack-ratty as far as books are concerned). I also needed to fill in some furniture gaps. No more 27" TV in the main area - the only one here now is my little 20". (Hopefully the smaller the TV, the more productive I get. We'll see)

Darren and Shena (et al). were in town for the weekend, so, of course, we ended up hanging out for a while. I mentioned before my theory that the number of photos that I take is inversely proportional to distance from Darren, and the weekend seemed to bear that out. We made it out to Banff and beyond - to Field actually - but with few trains. Blame the broken coupler (?) around the Spiral Tunnels, and the locomotive that caught fire on the main line closer to Calgary. (Almost caught that fire on "film"... blame the poor road access to the tracks in the vicinity which meant that the fire department just beat us).

P.S. If you're looking to childproof your place, a good place to start might be to ensure that there are no axes (yes, plural!) lying on your floor. (One's really a hatchet, but close enough...)

P.P.S. I couldn't help but note that Darren couldn't help but cheer on a certain team Saturday night.