A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

Last year, I said it should become a tradition.



We are going out to Harrison Hot Springs Resort for the night. Staying at a resort is generally not the type of lodging we frequent. More often than not, we stay in a Super 8 or privately-owned little motels. When visiting an urban area, we initially check to see if there's a YMCA hotel!

Fortunately, we were given a gift certificate to this place from friends. We were only able to stay a single night last time, so we are still making use of the original gift. It is such a fun way to get away though, I am convinced it will become an annual event even when we have to foot the bill.

Labels: places

I'm nearly cross-eyed right now. I've been correcting assignments while my class is taking the final examination. I've also checked and marked the listening comprehension part of today's test. This means I've stared at a lot of paper this afternoon.

Now there's just 25 minutes of class left, so I finally have a chance to look around the room. I will probably not see many of these people again. That seems strange as they have been such a big part of my life for the past five weeks. These intensive courses really do cause a sort of instant bonding. Sixteen hours per week is a lot of time for a college-level course.



What I'm thinking of now has more to do with the combination of personalities in the room rather than the length of time we've had together. Each group takes on its own unique characteristics. The sum really is greater than the whole. As a student, one never really thinks about how much luck is involved in the selection of people who are classmates. I suppose it's basically the same phenomenon in the workplace or, for that matter, life in general.

Labels: BCIT, opinions, students

We all grow older but far fewer of us actually grow up.

I thought of Cyndi Lauper merely as a girl wanting to have fun in the 1980's. I've recently changed my mind. I PVR'ed a concert off HDNet and have watched much of it. I have to give the lady a great deal of credit. She has quite a set of lungs and included an enormous variety of musical styles in an hour and a half. She is really an accomplished entertainer and still quirky enough to be endearing.

Now, she ranks right up there on a very small, personal list. It contains the names of people with whom I'd like to have a half hour conversation. Being on that list is saying a lot ... as I generally feel my own thoughts are tremendously more valuable than nearly everyone else's.

Labels: music

This is the time of year when all the bulbs and buds are starting to wake up. Within a week or two cherry blossoms will be screaming in a chorus of pink. The sap-sucking trees will soon begin to cover their nakedness.

Yet it's not nature's show that demands my attention when coming into downtown New Westminster this spring. I am most aware of the plethora of high rise residential buildings reaching towards the sun.



We settled in New Westminster because of easy SkyTrain access. In 1996 downtown was in a bit of a shambles having given up its Golden Mile status forty or fifty years beforehand. When we moved here, drug dealers were more numerous than shoppers. We figured all the pieces were in place for renewal. A decade has now passed. There are easily, at least, four towers under construction with others on the drawing boards. During this year and next, I can easily assume the residential population of downtown New Westminster will double. That's excellent news for the vibrancy of my neighbourhood.

Labels: New Westminster, transit

I haven't worked in the Middle East for nearly eleven years. After this amount of time, there are surprisingly few colleagues that I've kept up with. This entry, however, does relate to a person with whom I occasionally contact. Sally is in Dubai and on MS Messenger. Years can go by with little messaging then, suddenly, we will strike up a conversation. One such 'give and take' occurred a few months ago. Wait, it was even longer ago than that! Maybe this topic came up when we were discussing our research into wide-screen TVs last autumn.

Sally asked if we'd seen any episodes of Long Way Round. I hadn't heard of it at the time. I did see that it was available from our mail-based DVD rental company though. I put Disc 1 on the bottom of our ziplist. Eventually, its position moved up thirty or forty slots. It arrived last week.

Although only four episodes were on the first disc, and two of them dealt only with the planning, we got hooked and I moved up Disc 2 on the list so it'd arrive quickly. Here's the info as found at www.zip.ca:

Documentary, Travel & Adventure Documentaries - 2004
Two friends. One extraordinary journey around the world.

The adventure of a lifetime begins when two longtime pals, Ewan McGregor (Star Wars, The Island, Moulin Rouge) and Charley Boorman (Deliverance), set off on their motorcycles taking the "long way round" from London to New York: west along the rough terrain of Eurasia, across the Bering Straight, and covering 20,000 miles before completing their journey in New York City.

Long Way Round: The Entire Series includes ten 1-hour episodes, including a new episode that has never been broadcast on television.

Labels: Dubai, movies, zip.ca

This is not so much an entry as a passing observation, today.

I live on the tenth floor in an apartment building. When getting into the elevator on my floor, I most always travel to either the lobby or P6 where my truck is parked. Inevitably, I get in the lift and select the wrong one. When I want to go to the lobby I often overshoot and end up having to press the button to return to the ground floor. Yet, when needing to get to the vehicle, I frequently press 'L' and must make an extra stop. The door take its own precious time to open completely and close for no one.

Pure chance alone should give me equal odds of getting it right but the statistics are against me. Rather than get myself straightened out, I have a question for the Otis people:

Why can't elevator buttons toggle on/off?

Labels: complaints

My computer desk has a pull-out shelf for the keyboard; therefore, the scanner sits next to my knees as I type. For months on end, nothing is placed on its glass plate. Then suddenly, like yesterday, I went to the photo suitcase and pulled out a few old photos to scan. If I can keep up this habit more religiously, then eventually I'll make a dent in the decades of pictures in the closet.

Naturally, in my mind, I can remember living in the various places of my past. However, when I see an image actually taken at the time, I get a more complete recollection.

I feel very happy watching the likeness on old paper take on a brand new life. Better yet, I love the idea that I'm freeing it by uploading to Flickr. Whereas, the image was just sitting in a box in my closet one day, the next it becomes available worldwide!

Fly baby, fly. Go. Show up on a screen far, far away . . .


This was the view from the outside corridor of our apartment
in Juffair, Bahrain in the early 1990's. There was a large area
of date trees to the right of the photo. If you looked over the
dwellings of poor Iranians, you could see the beach. Click the
photo to see a larger version on Flickr.

Labels: Bahrain, Flickr