World, Mostly Turning

::crash landing::

The last few days have been a wee bit busier than I normally like my life to be. On Friday, I had a meeting in Toronto during the day, followed by a three-hour drive to Ottawa that evening. All told, that represented ::counts on fingers:: about seven hours in various cars with a four-hour meeting in the middle of it all. Yargh. Jim, Bella, and I arrived at Mom's house in Ottawa around 10 pm, which gave me enough time to say hello and suck back a glass of wine before I went into a state of collapse.

I got my hair cut on Saturday morning and then took Bella to Bruce Pit, a huge off-leash dog park with fields and forests and about a hundred other dogs of all shapes and sizes. Bella was intimidated by the newness of it all for about five minutes, then leapt into the fray and ran around like a happy, crazed thing for an hour and a half until her feet iced up. She was walking around with snowballs the size of walnuts between her toes by the end of it--I must get her a pair of Muttluks.

After that, we repaired back to Mom's house for Christmas, The Sequel. My sister and her hubby spent their Christmas in Indiana with hubby's parents, and I stayed in Peterborough for mine, so this was our somewhat belated family Christmas together. Bella got to hang out with Xavier, my sister's border collie/basenji cross, and Jilly, my mom's sheltie/corgi cross, and a good time was had by all.

Sunday was a late-getting-up day, followed by an Atlantic Voices concert in the afternoon. They have a Newfoundland dog as their official mascot, so I phoned one of the board members to ask if Bella could come as honorary assistant mascot seeing as she's a member of Nova Scotia's official breed. The answer was yes, so Bella got to meet lots of people and listen to a concert in an echo-y church, so it was a great socialization experience for her. She was very well behaved, and no accidents were had in the church (phew). Then it was time to drive back to Peterborough. I was so tired by this point that I spent most of the trip dozing, which I don't normally do because it's nicer for Jim if he has someone to talk to.

Yesterday I felt like I'd been run over by a truck and couldn't really do anything. Fortunately, I'd anticpated this and had booked the day off, so home I stayed and did very little other than nap and occasionally eat. My various past afflictions have left me with less stamina than I once had: a weekend of mild exertion to most people is a marathon for me. I've been doing better in this regard in the past couple of years, but last weekend saw me pushing--and exceeding--my limits. Hence yesterday's collapse. It's annoying, but I'm used to it, and fortunately I have a job with floating days off that I can rearrange into "collapse days" when I need them.

Bella's training kind of fell off the itinerary too, which is unfortunate. She had her first group session with PADOC last Thursday and wasn't really at her best. Being in a room with ten other dogs was VERY distracting for her, and she had a complete brain dump of previously learned manners. ::sigh:: I get kind of upset about that if I spend enough time thinking about it, so I have to keep reminding myself that there are other things she needs work on--like her timidity--that did get worked on this weekend. The concert was a great experience for her, and so was Bruce Pit--every dog deserves some fun now and then. And so I'll take it for what it was and put our noses back to the grindstone this week.

Also, the Canadian Figure Skating Championships were on this weekend and I saw NONE OF THEM. ::weeps:: AND I forgot to set my VCR before I left Peterborough. ::wails:: I can't even remember the last time I didn't watch Canadians. I am welding myself to the TV set for Worlds in March.

Also also, we discovered last week that the VCR in my bedroom doesn't record, and I missed my chance to tape Victor, the film about Victor Davis starring Mark Lutz. WAH! If anyone has it on tape and wouldn't mind making me a copy, please do let me know.

Time to go home and practice heeling.

Filched from ponders_life who got it from mochi_tsuki:

Two high school students who are made of awesome.

Yesterday was not a good day. This kind of thing restores my faith in humanity a little bit.

I did my MSc at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in the early 1990s. My supervisor was Jon Lien, "the whale man" of Newfoundland. Collisions between humpback whales and codtraps were a big problem in the 1980s, so he set up a provincial whale entrapment network: fishermen who found whales stuck in their nets or stranded on beaches could call, and a team would be sent out to release them/roll them back into the water. It was a very win-win arrangement. Most inshore fishermen only owned one or two codtraps, and they had only a couple of months in which to use them and make the bulk of their income for the year, so the loss of one of their traps to a whale was a serious financial blow. It didn't do much for the whales, either--often, they'd become completely ensnarled and would drag the entire mess around with them until they died from starvation or infection from the lacerations caused by the ropes.

Jon figured out a way to get whales out of nets quickly and with the least amount of damage caused to both whale and net. He also developed alarms that could be mounted on the nets to alert whales to their presence and prevent entrapments in the first place. The alarms proved so successful that they were sent to Australia to keep sharks out of sharks nets that protect the beaches there.

Jon is a really neat guy and one of my favourite people in the entire world. He's orginally from St. Olaf, the same town that Rose Nylund told stories about in The Golden Girls. As a grad student, he helped train the chimpanzees that NASA sent into space in their earliest flights. "Jon stories" are legendary. He once hit a grouse while driving home from an entrapment; not wanting to waste it, he hopped out of the truck, threw it into the back, and took it home and cooked it for his wife for their anniversary dinner. Anniversary dinner = roadkill. That's our Jon.

Another time, he lost his Visa card *in* a dead humpback from which he'd been taking samples, which made for an interesting phone call when he reported the loss. During a trip to test the whale alarms on sharks nets in Australia, he somehow managed to jam a large fishing hook through his hand and then fell out of the boat, bleeding like a stuck pig, into waters where a great white shark had taken a swimmer just a couple of days earlier.

Someone really needs to write this man's biography--it would be such a fantastically entertaining read.

Jon's retired now and has had some serious health problems in recent years. Every time I see a reference to him, I fear that it will be his obituary. My father sent me an email yesterday titled "Jon Lien" and I dreaded opening it. But it was good news: the Governor-General is appointing him as a Member of the Order of Canada for his contributions to science.

Which is just awesome beyond the telling of it.

You rock, Jon.