I started a post really early this morning about mangoes, mainly because I was thinking about eating one with breakfast. I did, in fact, do just that, but promptly forgot to finish the blog post, got sucked into the last book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and shovelled the driveway.

So, here we are again. It’s now early Friday evening, and I’m still thinking about mangoes. I like mangoes. They are probably my favourite fruit. Peeling and all. Yum.

I really thought this post was going to be more substantial, but maybe not. My head is pretty fuzzed out at the moment. It’s been a long week in general, starting with a root canal and ending with a snow storm, and today was worse than normal, with a lot of things in crisis mode at work. I am looking forward to a weekend full of mostly nothing. I suppose there has to be something in it. Without those somethings, you’d probably not really appreciate the nothings between them.

I’ve been a folk-funk-female musician thing lately. Tonight’s recommend is a live track by Tori Amos called Take To the Sky (Russia). I saw her once, in Toronto, many years ago. Probably one of the best shows I’ve been to.

You can say it one more time
What you don’t like
Let me hear it one more time then
Have a seat while I
Take to the sky

Not that I am comparing myself to Steve Austin, but for the last few weeks I’ve been nursing a stack of little injuries that have made my lifestyle a little harder to maintain. Between the sprained wrist, the shoulder injury, the broken toe, and a off-putting tooth problem that needed a root canal to fix, I was slowed down a bit. It’s hard to walk everywhere when you’ve got a sore foot, and it’s hard to eat crunchy veggies when you can only really use one side of your mouth. The shoulder injury goes way back to Morocco, from carrying my pack for days on end. Anyway, the tooth was fixed yesterday, so that’s the last of it. The brace I was wearing on my wrist came off last week, and I’ve been able to start slowly adding plates to my weights in the morning, and adding reps to core work, again. I was probably due for the rest. I need to learn to listen to my body because I’m dumb and go until I physically break down, and then I have to take a break. Not so good.

I have a new recipe to put up. I may get to that today. I don’t usually do a lot of straight Japanese cooking, but I was craving soba noodles and mushrooms for some reason the other and put together something with that, and tofu.

Track of the post? Despite not having tickets to the Fredericton show (curse you, box office), I’m going to suggest “Half Assed“, by Ani DiFranco. The Youtube link is to a live version, with just Ani on an acoustic guitar.

I do this to myself, but I think it’ll stop now. I keep wanting to like the stuff, but tempeh and I just do not get along. Tofu and I love each other. it has a tart, tangy zip, sort of like yogurt, and it’s awesome. The texture is great. Smooth, and, in the case of silken tofu, well … silky. Tempeh, on the other hand, is malty, fermented, like a solid cake of beer. It’s gross. And no matter how I try to disguise it, it grabs a hold of my insides and kicks the bejebus out of me. I had some, on Tuesday night. The outcome? 20 freaking hours of the ‘Spins’ on Wednesday. Never again, foul substance. As I said, I do it to myself. I think the fact that I think that beer is one of the grossest, most vile things a person can swill probably stacks the cards against me.

Anyway, that was it for that stuff. Farewell, and good riddance. I should probably get rid of the pile of home made natto sitting in my freezer, but that’s another story.

I had some guy email me a link claiming that global warming was over, simply because it appears that things are getting colder out. I am prepared to admit that lately, it has been cold, and there seems to be quite a few parts of the world that are snowed under, or dealing with extreme temperatures. While statistical anomalies do not a trend make, I’d like to propose that we completely forget about global warming, or climate change, and focus instead on the fact that as a species, we collectively suck ass.

Let us deal with the fact that as a species, we are utterly without thought, completely short sighted, sloth-like, and reprehensible. We suck. All of us.

When plastic and garbage washes up by the ton on unihabited islands in the Pacific, we suck. When we catch apex predators like sharks and whales and tuna and leave thousands of other fish dead in the water as by-catch, we suck. When modern nations fish whales and consider it “scientific research” as a ruse, we suck. When we mow down millions of acres of rain forest to grow crops for bio fuels and deplete our world’s biodiversity, we suck. When our polar regions no longer freeze over and rather than fix it, we argue about who gets to drive their ships through the open ice, we suck. When millions of salmon fail to show up for the yearly spawn in British Columbia because we probably killed them all off years ago because of salmon farming, we suck. When countries dig huge underground facilities for creating fissile material for nuclear reactors and claim that it’s for power generation, we suck.

The absolute best part is that we are leaving all of these problems to our kids who will be saddled with a world of hurt and will lack the resources to fix it. It makes me sick. We talk about bacon, and driving around like it makes not one teat of difference. It does.

We suck. All of us. Fix these problems and we’ll probably have a shot at also remedying “the changes” we’re doing to push climate change along. The world is NOT going to get along fine, and nature is NOT going to recover if we keep this up. Scientists believe that the rate of extinction is now one thousand times faster than it was a hundred years ago. Nature’s way? Baloney. Explain to me how destroying pristine nature to build golf courses is nature’s way.

Want an example of short sightedness close to home? My neighbour drives this big yellow monstrosity, a big Ford 4×4. My other neighbour, who lives a few houses down, drives a black Hummer H2. These two guys are good friends. All weekend long, they drive from each other’s house, back and forth, because they are too damn lazy to walk. It creates no end of aggravation and frustration to me.

Oh — If some big obese dude puts down his double fisted cheeseburgers long enough to want a second seat on an airplane for free, I should get a discount because I can cram my skinny ass into just one, right?

I’m ranting, now, I realize. But hey, 2010 is the year of the Rant.

The first week back to work for 2010 has been a good one. Really started off slow, though. The holiday break is just far too long — the cobwebs that collect on both body and mind take serious effort to shed. In the end, a few big projects that have been well… plaguing me, I suppose, were finally put to rest. DSpace upgraded, Nagios monitoring software implemented, our theses project migrated, and RAW/CR2 file upload support for ResourceSpace added. For a week that started off with me drooling on my keyboard, I’m a happy camper.

The physical injuries that I routinely inflict on myself are healing, too. I sprained my wrist a few weeks ago and I hadn’t given it time to rest. A very smart person suggested a brace, I took the advice, and that’s working well. My shoulder is healing, and if I carefully choose the right socks to wear, my foot doesn’t bother me too much. Dreading the dentist on Tuesday, but it will be nice to be able to chew with that side of my mouth again. Rocks in salads suck. New house colour starting Monday, though! I like that it’s going to be Sage. Tao Te Ching once said that “when the sage governs, He clears peoples’ minds, Fills their bellies, Weakens their ambition and Strengthens their bones.” Cool. Maybe I’ll acquire the aspiration to live up to the colour of my house one day.

In celebration of how this week ended up, I’ve chosen Victorious March by Amon Amarth, a Swedish death metal band. Really catchy guitar. You’re the proud owner of mad props if you can handle his vocals the first time through. The video I link to is a live show. The energy is amazing.