Stuff and Moonshine

Installed the zipper, and now the bodice looks... slightly puckered and twisted; even though I sewed the zipper in by hand. I don't recall the front seams looking that bad before the zipper, so I think it must be the cause. Calling a break for tonight. Will unpick it and try again tomorrow.

Today is the day I'm officially sick of "wouldn't it be great if we could just let natural selection take out the stupid people, hardy har."

No one ever thinks they're one of "the stupid people," but that assumption is never 100% right. We all have absent-minded moments. Frex, I had to take this image down the first time I uploaded it to Flickr because I'd forgotten to blur out the names.

I know plenty of intelligent people with blind spots, or gaps in their knowledge.*

Furthermore, if I have my doubts that society is really improved by a death penalty for criminal behaviour, why would I favour a death penalty for stupidity?


* a note on the bottle of "Lakota Muscle Pain Topical Rub" indicating how to neutralize the stuff if it starts to burn you would have saved me several painful minutes a few years back -- for the record, the counter-agent is milk.

OK, so green_trilobite had a doctor's appointment on Saturday (booked while I was still working) and he's being sent for a slate of blood tests as usual - normally he doesn't make it to these because getting somewhere under his own power before pills and breakfast - not going to happen. This time, we figured, we'd take advantage of me being ad lib; so this morning we set out early to the pharmacy to pick up the new prescription and get his tests done at the lab upstairs; only it turned out there *is* no lab upstairs from the pharmacy anymore. The pharmacists told us the nearest labs were at Royal York, and at Kipling, but that the one at Kipling was usually crowded. One of them called us a cab to go to the Royal York lab. Cab arrives and the driver says "You know it's ten dollars extra for a van, right?"
"No one's ever told us that before, and anyway we didn't ask for a van."
"The call specified a van."
"OK, I don't want to argue, I'll cover it." (To self - I will not let someone else order cabs for us again.)

So we reach the address at Royal York, climb a flight of those skeletal staircases you get in small 1950s-era office buildings (no fun for green_trilobite), then through a door and *down* a couple of stairs to the smallest waiting room I've ever seen, which contains four adult-size chairs, one kid's chair, and eight adults waiting.

It seems the lab has recently been taken over by a different company, who've either changed the database software, cut the number of employees, or both; at any rate there is one single technician there, who can blow through taking blood samples in a couple of minutes, but only after she takes about half an hour to type the client's information into the computer very slowly.

We wait. I add an additional seven or eight inches to the scarf I'm working on. Several people give up and leave. Finally she starts entering green_trilobite's info. Forty minutes go by. She mutters imprecations at the computer, complains about how many tests he needs, and phones - twice - to ask someone how to enter the amount of time since he last had his pills. We hold our tongues and focus on the thought that after this we're going straight to the Canadiana Restaurant for HUGE BREAKFAST RAWR.

Then, on her second phone call she suddenly says "Oh no. What just? - I hit a button and it wiped the whole entry!"

THAT'S IT, sez green_t, WE'RE LEAVING.

We leave.

Tomorrow we try again with a different location (Jane and Bloor); we'll be sure to bring books this time.

In other news, screw you, France. Making burquas illegal is just as misogynist as making them mandatory. (Also I suspect there's a sop to the anti-immigration vote at the back of this).