What I Did on my Summer Vacation (2012 edition)

Things were a little different for us this summer, mostly because there are a lot of strange people in our basement. Don’t get me wrong: I want them to be there. After all, they’re working to develop our basement (I’m not exactly handy with a hammer; I don’t know which end is which). To get ready for this, we had to move everything out of our basement into the garage. If that doesn’t sound too hard, well, see, the garage is smaller than the basement...

Anyway, all of this activity affected our vacationing, so we didn’t do all of the usual. Yeah, we still went to Sylvan Lake, but only for one day. The beach is now almost totally covered by the lake, making it a lot less fun for the kids. (Note to the mayor: If you don’t do something about that, we may skip the beach entirely next year; the kids like the fake beach a lot better anyhow.) And we had to see the new Penguin Plunge at the Calgary Zoo. And, of course, Capital Ex and Calaway Park.

But we skipped the local festivals this year--too many mosquitos. My girls don’t get little mosquito bites, they get huge toonie-sized welts. And Canada Day was rained out.

So, with apologies to Harper’s Index, this time I present some data from the past four months. (Yes, I did teach in the summer. And even if I wasn’t teaching, I was working...)

• Department of Psychology admin staff who were laid off, reassigned, or quit: 5
• Remaining admin staff: 4
• New admin staff: 3 and counting...
• Secret projects I’m involved in: 1
• Number of times I’ve been named to the Department of Psychology’s Teaching Honour Roll with Distinction (modestly): 101
• McDonald’s iced coffees consumed: only 3
• Homemade iced coffees consumer: way too many to count
• Plates of food I ate at Big T’s BBQ and Smokehouse: 3 (see, it was too spicy/too different/too much for my daughters, so I had to eat their meals, too, OK?)
  


• Number of times my youngest daughter slept through the night, uninterrupted: 16
• Number of times I did: 16
• Win-loss-tie record of my oldest daughter’s soccer team: 16-2-1
• Field trips I went on with my youngest daughter’s daycare: 1, to the TWoS (got my tickets to Star Wars: Identities already, woot!)
• Kilometres travelled to the cottage of our friends (approx.): 209
• Kilometres travelled back home from the cottage of our friends (approx.): 210 (due to emergency pee-pee break)
  


• Total number of anniversaries my parents have had so far: 50
• Uncles who visited from Germany: 1
• Colds I had: 2
• Litres of homemade cherry juice I made: 10
• Litres of homemade cherry juice I had to throw out because somebody put a Pyrex dish on the stovetop, which exploded, sending shards of glass all over the kitchen, including into the cherry juice: 10 (sob)
• Litres of homemade cherry juice I made in my second batch, far away from glass-exploding spouses: 10 (our tree grows a lot of cherries; I still had enough cherries to make tarts and a pie)
  


• Updates, additions, deletions, tweaks, fixes, corrections, and changes to my courses/lecture notes/websites: 834
• Percentage of statistics that are made up: 47.3%

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