or not.

Whether I like it or not, I’m currently being treated to a very loud, free Rolling Stones concert. Yay! Well, maybe not…. No, I don’t have tickets. The Super Ex’s final concert has been on today from about 6pm to 11pm (2 hours to go). My apartment faces the stage so I could actually watch the entire concert on their Jumbotron screen. If I felt like it. And it’s loud enough that I have no problem following the music (trust me, I have no choice but to listen to it, it’s that loud — I can feel the vibrations through the soles of my feet). Glad I don’t live closer.

So, free concert for me. I sat out there for a few songs, figuring that I should take advantage of the view if I’m going to have to listen to the music anyway. My building keeps getting swept with the stage spot lights, though, so staying out there to watch means being blinded every few seconds. And something about the whole thing jacked up Mots and, when I went to bring us both in, he actually bit me and then went into attack mode. Now he’s sulking in the bedroom.

Who knew he was a Stones fan?

Saw an article in today‘s Dose called “How to unblock writer’s block”, about the winners of last year’s 3 Day Novel Contest. This year’s contest is set to run the Labour Day long weekend. I must be insane but I’m serously considering taking part. Mimi and I have been talking about collaborating on something and this seems like an interesting way to get started. The entry fee is $50 and, though you can create outlines and prepare in advance, all of the writing must be done between 00:01 Saturday, Sept. 3, and 23:59 Monday, Sept. 5.

I’m watching Family Plots tonight. Rick, the mortuary owner, just received some diamond jewelry created from the cremated remains of his son. Wow, what a nifty way to be remembered. Beats the heck out of being buried or having your ashes sprinkled all over (or worse, kept on display in an urn). I don’t know if there are other companies that do this but the one mentioned on the show is LifeGem. Takes about 24 weeks, they say, and it’s pretty expensive but how neat.

OMG, just realized that they can and will make diamonds from the cremated remains of your pet as well. Very cool. I was thinking I’d get a tattoo whenever it’s Mots’s time to go but a diamond, assuming you could afford it, would be much cooler.

So much for freeing up some time and energy. Thanks to my dad, that particular addiction has now been replaced by genealogy once again.

Since he reminded me on Tuesday that the 1911 census has been released, my spare time has been filled with hours of pouring over Mr SID and PDF copies of microfilms. Finally found the specific Toronto house we were looking for but, unfortunately, the people we were hoping to find weren’t living there yet. Dad found a promising entry in St. Gabriel (Montreal) in the 1901 census so he’s going to concentrate on that for the 1911 census. Still, the 1911 census isn’t indexed yet so it’s a matter of slogging through the “microfilms” manually, a long and generally boring process.

To add to the addiction, there’s a site called Automated Genealogy that aims to fully index the 1901 and 1911 censuses (among other things). 1901 is pretty much complete except for the odd correction (I submitted a couple of those myself last night) — the old censuses are really hard to read sometimes both because of the age and condition of the original micofilms and because some of the enumerators had lousy handwriting. 1911 is just in the early stages of indexing and I thought I’d help out with that since I was planning on indexing the Shelburne County pages for the Shelburne County GenWeb site anyway. So now I spend odd bits of spare time transcribing 1911 census pages.

And, oh look at that, my genealogy web sites could use some work. They’ve been badly neglected for the last few years…well, since other hobbies entered my life for the most part.

Anything to avoid what I really should be doing, eh? LOL

Got a call back today from Richard Ravenhawke. Yay! Mimi and I are going to be getting a reading from him on Sept. 7 here at my place. Could fight to try to see him at the psychic fair at the Nepean Sportsplex the weekend before but he’s very popular there and it’s tough to get on the list. He’ll be in town for that and his son’s birthday so Wednesday’s a good time for him and it’s a good time for Mimi (any day is good for me). I haven’t had a reading with him since 2000, I think. Saw him in 1995 or 1996 before that (think it’s only been twice — I “cheated” on him twice with other psychics but they weren’t the same LOL).

I offered to do a little work on his site. Feel very awkward having done that ‘cos it feels like I’m lecturing someone I really don’t know…but his web site should be more…well, just more and, anal retentive that I am, I have this urge to fix it for him that I’ve been fighting for years. It hasn’t really been updated in years so I’ll have to browbeat him to get that done. I’m not going to completely redesign it for him (not my place unless he asks) but I’d like to clean it up a little, make it easier to update in the future and make it load a little better. He seems to have lost control of richardravenhawke.com (unfortunately it’s now a hijacked search site) but richardravenhawke.ca is still available. Wonder if he’s thought about grabbing it up. .Ca domains are more expensive in general than other non-Canadian domains because there are fewer resellers to lower the prices (no Go Daddy or Register.com).

See, yet another obsession I have that is rearing it’s ugly face — web site design. Gonna have to work on that. Bought another domain for myself tonight as well — not sure what I’ll do with it yet.