Hey, noipeh, here's hoping you have a TERRIFIC b-day and that the kids do all your household chores and cooking and so on so that you can just sit back and relax! *hugs*

I finally uploaded photos that Chris and I took last weekend in Ottawa - be prepared for tulips!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29756126@N00/sets/72157629758233584/

So last post was about me stupidly deleting my Outlook Inbox, such that all the emails I'd saved and/or not yet replied to were gone and I was not able to either receive or send email, having no place for them to arrive and no "new" to be able to send.

That was just the beginning of my day.

I tried a gazillion things, everything I could think of in fact, but I'm not very computer-savvy and nothing worked to restore my lost Inbox. Skipping hours and hours ahead, Chris came home and fortunately was able to reconstruct the - or construct a new - Inbox, but my old emails are still lost in the wilderness (though he might be able to recover them, given more time which he won't have for the next couple of weeks....).

Back to the day, while I was trying to fix that problem, I get a call from - I don't know who, the woman had a very strong Indian accent and I didn't understand half of what she said, even with my ears in I had to ask her to repeat very frequently. 'Cause, apparently, my 'puter had been hacked and I needed to do this and that and the other thing to fix it....

Oh yes. I got scammed. In my defense, I'd really hurt my left arm on Sunday moving some furniture and as a result could barely use that arm on Monday, nor could I sleep on it or in any other position, meaning that I was very sleep-deprived today; AND I was trying to cope with this disaster in email accessibility with no clue as to what was going on; AND my machine *has* been running slow of late. So I fell for it.

At the moment, it looks to be not all that bad; essentially they (I talked to 3 people) got me to pay US$380 to install "protective" programs that are *real* programs from *real* sites - but that are free to download. I must go to my bank (which issues the credit card I used) tomorrow morning first thing, to check first that they haven't put a bunch of charges on my card (we're protected in that case, limited to $50 liability by Quebec law) and second to see if I can't cancel that charge. If I can and the people call me about it, I'm to try to get a phone number to call them back or failing that, to just hang up. Worst case scenario assuming the credit card hasn't been maxed out, I've learned an expensive lesson.

But a lesson I already knew, and I shouldn't have fallen for this thing at all. However fixable it may be, it's still stupid of me.

Oh, and we ran a McAfee scan to check for viruses, just in case; at the moment it's 99% done and no problems. Just sayin'....

And I still don't know if I'll ever get my old email back again.

I did a stupid thing this morning - in my version of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, I deleted a file called "lost and found1" without having noticed that underneath that folder heading was the folder containing all my email AND my incoming email box. Now I can't access the already-received email NOR can I receive new email as I have no inbox for it (apparently that's the reason, anyway). I tried doing an entire computer search for "lost and found1" and the file was not found; I tried doing a "restore previous version" of Outlook going back to March of this year, but although it said that version had been restored, my lost folders still aren't there. Do I need to reboot the machine before it will show up again?

I have an external back-up device that automatically backs up the whole computer once a week (I think, might be once a day), but I'm not sure how to access that device from the PC. Maybe that should be my next attempt?

Arrggghhh!!!!!

Well, Mom is due any time now, more or less. Her flight was delayed an hour at SFO - no idea why, the weather seems to have been fine there - which means the plane won't get here until about 9:30 PM our time, and by the time we've got her luggage and got into a cab, it'll be somewhere between 11 and midnight before we get home, sigh. Chris has to work tomorrow, getting up at the usual 6:15 AM alarm - me, I'm sleeping in for once (I could sleep in every morning, of course, at least every morning when I have no work, but I've always made a practice of getting up with the alarm clock, in fact a few minutes before he does, and I'm afraid of the "slippery slope" if I stop doing that {g}).

Airports make me anxious. Delays make me anxious. Not getting enough sleep makes me anxious. Hope I'll not be a bundle of nerves by the time she arrives!

A bit of good news from my brother, though - they've been approved for a refinancing of their mortgage, which apparently means they'll be paying some $500 less a month than at present. Sadly, the house that he and my sis-in-law bought in, um, 2006 I think it was, is still currently worth almost $200,000 less than they paid for it. But they didn't buy it as an "investment," they bought it as a "home," so to my mind, the depreciated value doesn't really matter, as long as they're happy with the house. Which they are.

Soon we'll be off to catch the 747 - bus, a great choice of number given that it's a direct bus from 2 city stops to the airport - and then the wait really begins. I think I should bring my book - writerlibrarian, you might be interested in this, it's a reissue of a 1951 pulp novel called A Crime on Cote des Neiges, by David Montrose. A very strange take on anglo Montreal in the early 1950s, where the hero travels a lot on Dorchester Ave and the only francophone character (so far, anyway) is a detective sergeant named, I kid you not, Framboise. With atrociously bad, yet relatively accurate, renditions of his heavily accented English. You wouldn't know the city was French at all - and this is 61 years ago! Very odd; but aside from the virulent sexism and obviously racism (ethnicism?) of ignoring the majority of the population, it's actually quite a good example of its genre.... Anyway, to bring to the airport or not to bring? That is the question....

An interesting study (by Canadians, yay!) released last week in Science was discussed in a recent Time article:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/27/losing-your-religion-analytic-thinking-weakens-religious-belief/?xid=newsletter-weekly

Food for thought, eh?

I don't quite understand how April has already arrived - this year seems to be moving faster than ever! Good thing I have plenty of books to enjoy as Spring begins....

( Beyond Grimm, edited by Deborah J. Ross and Phyllis Irene Radford. )

( Carnival for the Dead, by David Hewson. )

( Beastly Things, by Donna Leon. )

( Vendetta, by Michael Dibdin. )

( The Memory of Blood, by Christopher Fowler. )

( London Under, by Peter Ackroyd. )

( The Floating Admiral, by Members of The Detection Club. )

( Cabal, by Michael Dibdin. )

( Mumbai Noir, edited by Altaf Tyrewala. )

And finishing up the month with that lovely standby, Rex Stout. I'm reading Gambit, the umpteenth gazillion in his Nero Wolfe series, this time set in, I think, the early to mid 1960s, somewhere in there. As always, good fun!

I've been pretty quiet on lj of late, mostly because I've been getting the house ready for my mother's upcoming visit from California - she arrives on Thursday for a three-week stay. Because she has difficulty walking and, especially, climbing stairs, it makes no sense to have our meals on the third floor, using our regular kitchen and dining room, so I've been reorganizing the first floor kitchen in order to start using that facility both for the duration of her visit and, probably, at least sometimes during the summer so that we can easily eat outside (we have a small table and chairs on the third floor balcony, but the "patio furniture" which is big enough to eat on will be on the first floor decking). We bought a new stove/oven at Sear's last month, have it installed now and I'm quite happy with it; I also had to either find other places for or give/throw away various things cramming the drawers and shelving space in that kitchen - since we don't use it much, we'd gradually ended up storing various objects that we very rarely use there. Also had to box up all the National Geographics and World Film Fest/FantAsia catalogues that we'd been storing in the first floor bathroom cupboards (yes, really!) so I could put extra towels in there, etc. And of course clearing out the summer clothes from the bedroom wardrobe and closet, to give Mom room for her clothes. All these things take time, but as of now I think I've got it mostly together. Oh, and I emptied some cupboards in the kitchen in order to have space to stock non-perishables like sugar, flour, salt and pepper; got some milk, butter, bread and orange juice for the first floor fridge so Mom will have the makings of breakfast on the Friday after she arrives, before we go grocery shopping to properly stock up. I plan to bring much stuff down from the third floor, of course, but it doesn't matter if some things are duplicated because we'll use them one way or another, on one floor or the other....

We've also been getting things to do set up for her visit: we know where, but I still have to make reservations for dinner next Saturday, which is closest to Chris's birthday so I'm paying. We had been talking about an overnight trip to Ottawa, but originally that seemed impossible because we could only do it on a weekend (as Chris is working all during Mom's visit) and the usual hotel we book there was completely full on all three weekends that Mom is here. But I was visiting our friend Marguerite last week (she broke her foot in a fall a month or so ago and is now in a cast and supposed to stay off the foot for something like four full weeks, so she's stuck at home and quite bored) and she mentioned a place where she and Jean and Eliane go when they visit Ottawa; you can see it here: http://www.minto.com/find-a-hotel-in-ottawa/projects.html This a place that has "suites" which include a living room, bedroom and kitchenette so you can cook for yourself if you like. Turns out they had places available, and I booked us a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom suite for the weekend of Mother's Day. This is largely so we can see the famous Ottawa Tulip Festival - millions of bulbs are sent from Holland every year to thank Canada for its role in WWII and they bloom magnificently right around now. But I also discovered that at least one of the companies providing tourist trips on the Rideau Canal will be in operation that weekend (it's quite early for such activities here in Canada, usually they don't start until after Victoria Day, toward the end of May), so hopefully we'll get to do that too, especially as Mom can't walk much.

To be followed, on her last weekend with us, by a friends' dinner on the 19th - often our "gang" gets together sometime in May to celebrate four birthdays (well, one's in early June, but we include it), and this year I decided to organize it and ask people about it early because I wanted them to be able to see my Mom too. We've got upwards of 20 people coming! I haven't called the restaurant for that reservation yet either, it being several weeks away still, but I sure hope they can handle it {g}.... And, on Sunday the 20th, I've just booked us tickets for the new Circe de Soleil show, Amaluna ("mother moon"), showing under the Big Yellow Tent in the Old Port until June, I think. Pricey tickets - even though as someone who's signed up to the Circe's newsletter, I get 25% off the ticket price, the seats we got in the second level of prices are still $77 apiece. Yikes! But it'll be worth it, the Circe is fab.

So I think we'll be able to keep her busy, at least for the weekends! Actually, a couple we know loves to play board and card games, and hopefully we'll get together with them at least once while Mom's here, as they know her a bit and want to see her too. And as the weather improves, the garden centers are starting to display their wares, and no doubt will be fully up and running in the next couple of weeks, so I'll have Mom help me choose plants for the containers and annuals to put in the garden this year - she's a Brit so of course she's a gardener {g}, even though she can't do the work herself anymore. In addition, at her request I've bought the last three Louise Penny novels for her (an early b-day present; I bought the first four as Christmas presents for her last year and, as I suspected, she fell completely in love with Inspector Gamache and Co.), so she's got plenty of reading waiting for her too. The only thing I worry a bit about is the telly, as most of the shows that we watch are, ahem, adult in nature shall we say? As in "Game of Thrones," or "The Borgias" (who isn't in love with Montrealer Francois Arnaud, by the way?), a bit racy for my mother I think. But heck, she doesn't have to watch, right?

Meantime during all of this, the student boycott is getting uglier and uglier by the minute - 11 weeks and counting, but these kids basically want tuition re-frozen (at extremely low levels) or, better yet, done away with altogether, and they think that rioting and breaking shop windows and throwing smoke bombs in the metro will get them what they want. Er, no, kids, sorry; all you're doing is making the public, never strongly on your side to begin with, become completely fed up with and against your "movement." It's ridiculous, particularly when you learn that it's by no means the whole college-student population of Quebec, but actually only a small percentage - none of the English CEGEPs and universities, for example, are involved except for the odd department here and there, and by no means are all the French schools on "strike" as they keep calling it (incorrectly, and it annoys me no end to hear news media and the Gazette using the same term). I hope they all lose their school year and have to repeat the whole thing, at the very least. Very very aggravating.

In happier events, we've been seeing friends a bit more lately - in fact, the May 19th dinner is really the first big bash of the spring season, and that particular celebration usually is the first big get-together every year. Had dinner with friends last night, going for dim sum with friends tomorrow midday, and today we spent a fair amount of time chatting with Lucy, our co-prop partner, who was next door doing some work. She's quite pregnant, due in June, which makes me think she'll be even less inclined to do anything drastic to that property in the next few years because she'll be busy with the kid. She's thought about taking out the back yard and putting in parking for tenants, and I'm really hoping she never gets around to doing that because it'll spoil our back yard views, but I think that's many years away now, if she does it at all. And that's good news.

Yes, today is the 16th anniversary of the day that I moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, permanently, to be with the man I love. As I remember it, we didn't get back "home," Chris's apartment on the 19th floor of a downtown highrise, until around 10 PM, partly because of the arrival time of the plane and partly because Air Canada lost some luggage (which, I was amazed to find, they hand-delivered to our door the very next morning). It was cold, there was snow on the ground and all the trees were bare, without even the hint of green that was to come in another couple of weeks....

A far cry from today's temperature of 20C, sunny and clear weather, with no snow (except the big mountains that take until June to melt) left at all and green plants and trees all around. And tonight we came back home (from a delicious dinner at Tuck Shop) to a house all our own, not an apartment on the 19th floor.

But I'm still happy to be here with the man I love, and that's what counts. Hard to believe it's 16 years, but it's true - in a few months I will have lived in Montreal for longer than I've ever lived in any city or town. I was in SF for 16 years and a couple of months, and that record is about to be broken. Amazing.

We PVR'd this HBO film, "Game Change," when it first appeared, but waited until now to watch it. I've got to say I have some mixed emotions about it, which I didn't really expect.

If you don't know about it, "Game Change" is a fictional "recreation" of John McCain's 2008 Presidential campaign, in which he famously chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate, that is, the Republican choice for Vice President. As we all know, Barack Obama and Joe Biden won the contest, not in a landslide but quite decisively (and I have a lot to say about folks these days on the left who bash Obama for not doing everything he promised - I said then and say now, the expectations of much of the liberal world were immediately put upon his shoulders and there's no way he could satisfy them all, not to mention the fact that, inspiring or not, he's still a politician. But that's a discussion for another day). This HBO movie focuses on why McCain picked Palin, how she was and was not vetted, and what happened after that.

There's an interesting mix in the film of real footage from the time (all the Obama appearances are video recordings of the man himself) and actors standing in for the real individuals; most notably in the latter category are Ed Harris as McCain (his impression in terms of body and words is spot on, his face not always so much), Woody Harrelson as McCain's campaign manager (don't know how much they look alike, but Harrelson is excellent) and, especially, Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin. She gets the look, the voice, the mannerisms, all of the public persona spot on; more uncanny than Tina Fey's parody, because she's playing her for real. And I'm sure that a lot of the "war room" talk and decision-making around how to run the campaign is pretty much correct - the film is taken from a book of the same name in which the authors extensively interviewed key players in the campaign, there's not a lot of made-up stuff here.

But there are some cringing "crucify Palin" moments in the film nevertheless. For example, not one but three or four scenes where the campaign experts are trying to brief her on serious subjects like foreign policy and she's literally not responding, acting catatonic pretty much in fact. I would guess that the book quotes some of the players saying, hyperbolically, that she was "practically catatonic" in those moments, but in reality she probably wasn't *as* out of it as is portrayed here. OTOH, all the really, obvious defects in her knowledge base that are on record (the Katie Couric interview, etc.) are included as they should be. I'm just not sure the dramatized "I can't/won't function" moments were really necessary to dramatize what was already pretty dramatic in real life.

I liked that the film actually explains why McCain picked Palin to begin with - it makes sense, and I had never understood it before. I liked the section toward the end where Palin is totally "going rogue" and not mincing words even though they have nothing to do with the McCain platform. I liked that McCain is portrayed as a (foul-mouthed) decent guy; he *was* a decent guy before this weird campaign where he ran far to the right of what he himself believed and chose a running mate who was such a loose cannon. I don't agree with McCain for the most part, but I always respected him as an honourable man, and this film upholds that image of him even though it also undermines it when he agrees to some (but not all) avenues of attack against Obama. And I liked that at the end, Palin is shown planning to make a speech on Election Day after it's clear that Obama has won, which is also something that really happened. In American politics, the VP candidate doesn't give a concession speech to the newly elected President, that's the job of the Presidential candidate, but she thought she could usurp that role because she, not McCain, was really the "superstar" of the campaign.

Sadly, since then McCain has become toothless pretty much; fortunately, Palin got her platforms in books and TV shows and punditry for a while, but she's pretty much a spent force these days (though she may come roaring back, I think there'll be a lot more skepticism even on the Republican side given her general ignorance of the world and how it works). And now Obama is facing Romney for the next contest. The question is, who will Romney pick as his running mate? Can't be Sarah, that's certain, but who else can make ordinary Americans think that ticket speaks to them, considering that Romney has no constituency except the very rich? These thoughts and more come up from watching this film. Sure, if you're a conservative republican, you'll find this film just full of lies (which it actually is not); otherwise, it's quite entertaining, if a bit too partisan in the (fictionalized only; the real ones are fine) Sarah bashing bits.