Posts Tagged ‘backups’

It’s been almost a week since I landed in South America, and it sim­ul­tan­eously feels as though it’s been forever, and no time at all. In some respects, I’m still sur­prised we made it down here at all: the 9000km to Buenos Aires was so anxiety-ridden, I’m thinking I’ve used up all my bad luck for the year in one week. And that excludes that whole “breaking my wrists twice” period of the year.

Buenos Aires is utterly gor­geous. It looks like Mexico crossed with Italy, and cul­tur­ally speaking, it draws equally from Western Europe and Latin America, which makes for an inter­esting mix.

I have no (Cana­dian) passport

I really meant to get one before leaving, if only to get into the U.S., and then back home, with less hassle. (I usu­ally just travel on my British pass­port, which is gen­er­ally more useful.) I’d been trying to find my Cana­dian cit­izen­ship card for a while, and was waiting until I moved into my friend Dan’s base­ment before I offi­cially gave up and applied for a new one. (For those of you who were born in Canada, a Cana­dian cit­izen­ship card is proof of cit­izen­ship for those of us who weren’t.) I had an exciting series of phone calls and chats with the people at Immig­ra­tion and the people at Pass­port Canada, who of course have no reasons to col­lab­orate what­so­ever. Their phone system actu­ally at one point (twice!) led me through all the options, care­fully informed me that it would not hang up on me, and to please stay on the line, then promptly hung up on me. You know, usu­ally those auto­mated sys­tems are ter­rible, but I’ve never had one that out­right lied to me. Anyway, the end result is that appar­ently there’s no “proof” that I’m Cana­dian without my cit­izen­ship card, because that card has a photo of me when I was nine (and an old sur­name) and thus qual­i­fies as legit­imate iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and the twelve mil­lion other doc­u­ments I have, plus the fact that I’ve been voting and paying taxes here for nearly ten years, is just my devious immig­rant way of get­ting a fake pass­port, I guess. So I gave up, applied for the replace­ment card, and figured worst come to worst, I could always just return on a British visa.

My last day in town, the replace­ment card arrived.

How about one last trip to the E.R., for old times’ sake?

I was utterly con­vinced I was going to be the one who ended up in the emer­gency room. I went for an I’m-finally-cast-free! scooter ride with a friend before I started packing, and at one point I was very con­vinced some­thing ter­rible would happen and I’d wind up breaking another of my bones, which are appar­ently made of glass and por­celain. As it turned out, it wasn’t me, but my trav­eling com­panion who broke him­self. We were packing and get­ting ready to head off to their air­port at 4am when he man­aged to slice his finger with a knife. Given that it was mid­night, I actu­ally vacil­lated for a bit (and called my dad’s wife, who very calmly talked me through the Steri-strip pro­cess) before hauling him down to the ER.

I’ve never been so impressed by a hos­pital visit: he was all stitched up and out of there within about two hours. (I was still making cup­cakes and packing.)

(more…)

I have a ter­rible tend­ency to throw what I refer to as “all night work parties”, which usu­ally end up com­prising about two and a half days straight of me staring into my laptop, clacking away and for­get­ting to sleep or come up for air. They’re admit­tedly not the most glar­ingly healthy way of get­ting things done, but I do tend to be the sort of person who works in spurts, and when the fever comes over me, I often like to run with it. (I actu­ally exper­i­mented with a “normal” schedule, wherein I slept at least a little bit every single night for a month straight. It was inter­esting, and I may try it again at some point…but not just now.)

So a few weeks ago, I was crashing at the tail end of a work party, and ended up falling asleep next to my laptop, gigantic glass of water in hand. Yes, you know where this is headed. A few hours later, I woke up spilling said gigantic glass of water all over myself and my poor laptop. (Lovely way to wake up, might I add.) Nat­ur­ally, I pan­icked. There was much cursing and wailing (me) and sparking and crack­ling (the machine) as I tried to figure out what on earth to do. It wouldn’t turn off, and it took my sleep-addled brain a good five minutes to figure out that removing the bat­tery would do the trick. The poor thing was soaked, and ruined. I was in a sim­ilar state. That machine was, in effect, the entirety of my busi­ness assets, and the tool by which I can earn my living, and it had just crackled out and died on me. (more…)