What the Hell is Going On!

I’ve asked this question a lot over the past two months and you may have been too, so here is the answer. Well, it is a bunch of things that have created a giant time vortex that’s sucked all of my minutes from me for the last couple of months. Some of it fun, some of it work and some of it just headache inducing, nauseating, not so fun and it doesn’t pay, type stuff. Too bad you can’t just go to the store and pick up one of those card for extra life minutes instead of cellphone minutes. So on with the list of excuses!

First, my planned “upgrade” of the site has turned into a nightmare. When I launched the new design I transferred to a new host because I need so more flexibility. That was a bad idea. This hosting company spent a lot of time blaming me for problems they were having. Now, I’m not a day to day computer guy, but I’ve been using computers since 1980 (Sinclair ZX80) with a whopping 8kb of memory.

10 print “Darcy”
20 goto 10
run

Then there was the Commodor 64, and the 386 with a 20 meg hard-drive and 1 meg of RAM. Plus I did database work for a major oil company, been using Linux since Slackware version 3 and so on and so forth. Anyway, according to these guys it was all my fault, until the had a revelation. Oops. They still didn’t apologize. Anyway, aside from the stream of little issues, the breaking point was the disappearance of the Art of Drink for three days.

Well, I’m back to my old reliable hosting service (eHosting.ca) with their pleasant, helpful customer service guys. Not quite as flexible, but they’ll help whatever way they can and that’s good enough for me. 

Second, I’ve been preparing for Tales of the Cocktail. It just seems that everything was due in March so I put a little effort into it. I’m working on my session entitled: Sensory Perception and Mixology: What Your Tastebuds are Telling You. This is going to be a great session, and it will help you understand how different people taste things. During the session you will learn, via a taste test, whether you are a non-taster, normal taster or super-taster. Then we’ll discuss a lot of things about how flavour are perceived. I’ll have a more detailed description in the next week or so.

Also, I’m doing the Spirited Dinner this year at La Cote Brasserie. I’m going solo this year, so the cocktail menu is my own creation. If you want to spend an evening chit-chatting with me and trying some of my cocktails, this is the night to do it. More on this soon. 

Third, I purchased a new toy. I managed to save my nickels and picked up an Olympus E-510 digital SLR. A very nice camera and the lenses are top notch. But, the kit lense wasn’t good enough for me, so I embarked on a search for a better lens, which resulted in me ending up with three lenses. So of course I had to spend some time trying them out and deciding which ones to keep. Plus I built a new lightbox and spent a lot of time learning how to take better photos. This of course cut into my limited time, so I don’t even have a lot of time to take decent photos! 

Fourth, life has been fairly busy working. I’m still working in the Molecular Pathology Lab. I’ve also been doing some website and presentation design for an environmental company called Vydexa. I also designed the site for the pathology lab. I suppose I need to work some regular hours to pull in a pay cheque, since bartending and writing don’t seem to be doing much for me lately.

As for bartending, that is just over the horizon, but I’ve been doing some top secret work on that too. Hopefully I can share more in a month or so, but it should be really good.

Then there is the one year old, Mr. Fionn (pronounced Fin). He’s been a busy little boy and has really taken to stealing my computer and smashing the crap out of the keyboard. It so cute, but I’m worried I’ve created a computer nerd!

Other than that, I’m still here. I’m hoping that the spring will bring me more time and more writing.