Dear Facebook,

Every time I open you up, a little blue box tells me that I should get a username. I don’t need a username. Usernames are for MySpace, and aren’t you the anti-MySpace? I remember when the point of Facebook was to be a “virtual yearbook.” You had to have a real e-mail address and a real name and you were meant to connect to real people, and far less creepy stalkers. So no, I will not be available at http://facebook.com/heather.c.montgomery or any other Facebook.com slash addresses. (By the way, it’s weird that you searched my profile for my email address to suggest that, since my middle initial isn’t listed anywhere else in my information.)

Next, I find it really creepy how you use our personal information to market things to us. I get it, you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation, and awesome - it’s free for us, but personal information is personal, right? Also, did you know that when I post photos on you (even though it’s super convenient and everyone can see them) I essentially lose my rights to them? Copyright fail.

Right now, I can’t figure out why the hell you insist on bringing me back to my home page every time I click on a post in one of my groups. Wtf, Facebook?

Lastly and definitely most importantly, I do not want to be friends with So-and-So McGee who I went to high school/middle school/soccer camp with. Just because they’re friends of friends doesn’t mean they’re interesting. Also, even if I do remember them from high school doesn’t mean I ever want to talk to them again. I also do not want to become a fan of Some Band, Chicken, Not Dying or Stepping On Spiders. I don’t want an app that tells me some random date in the future that I will a) die b) marry c) reproduce or d) finally get a Facebook username.

Thinking of leaving you forever,

Hez

Planning Committee undertakes location scout for Retreat

*For immediate release from the Department of Corporate Planning and Infrastructure*

On Friday July 10, the Planning Committee of the 2009 Corporate Retreat successfully undertook a preliminary strategic operation. The team effectively scouted the first location of the Retreat, and through such investigation was able to identify areas for further planning and research.

Although the Corporate Retreat was originally scheduled for this date, the shift to a later date was thought to be best for all parties involved, allowing for proper preparation and organization by all. Most importantly, this will provide an occasion to further pursue options for corporate attire and a more thorough planning of proper locations and the best possible routes.

The Planning Committee attended a serving of refreshments at a predetermined location in Kemptville, Ontario. The lovely locale of Frank’s Diner was able to cater to all of the Committee’s needs. Preliminary examinations of the area proved fruitful and it was chosen as one of the most important locations for the real Corporate Retreat, now re-scheduled for August 7, 2009.

First impressions of the chosen media for the Retreat were very positive. All parties involved were highly optimistic for the outcome of the August 7th event, and have now commenced planning with more zeal and determination than ever before. Events have been well documented and will be shared as part of the media kit for the Corporate Retreat.

Please direct all media enquiries to the Communications Assistant. Any and all comments will be directly responded to in order to encourage an attitude of openness and clarity involving the events of the upcoming Corporate Retreat and Friday’s location scouting.

-30-

Ah, the wonders of spin. I didn’t spend 4 years in journalism for nothing!

In short, Kaitlyn got food poisoning (not from Frank’s though!) and we had to cut it short and reschedule. But it gives us time to buy cowboy hats and find me some plaid, since I was the only one not wearing any on Friday.

The epic of my Xbox, continued

I haven’t played my Xbox since I got through Fable II, a couple of weeks ago. It’s just been sitting happily on my TV. I watched a DVD on it a couple of times.

Today I was talking to my wife, Alaina (not actually my wife… but we call each other that and Facebook says it’s true) about how she’d just started playing some games on her brother’s Xbox. I said that I’d bought one this summer, and described my various trials and tribulations. But, I said, “It’s okay. It freezes a lot still, but I just have to save a lot.”

We discussed playing together someday soon.

Tonight I had a date with Fae, and we decided that we would finally play Fable II together. The times we had tried before were when we discovered that I needed to send it back.

So I turn on my Xbox, register for another month of Xbox Live, stick in the CD and join Fae’s party. To my surprise, I can suddenly hear her talking to me! I start a new game.

I was singing the Fable song, delightfully off key.

“You’re starting new as a kid? Right?” Fae asks. I don’t respond. “Right? *silence* Heather…? *Hez has left your party*”

With a weird little pop, I was disconnected. Hmm. I restart.

As soon as Fae gets close to me in the game, I disconnect. Restart. Press the power button…

And the ring turns red and starts flashing. Red ring of death.

I panic. I’ve heard all about this. Not good! Turn off. Unplug. Replug. Try again.

And it boots fine. Phew.

I enter the game again. This time I’m greeted by lovely grey bars instead of graphics. Awesome.

Restart.

And every time I’ve turned it on since then, it’s red ringed. I know it’s hot in here, our AC isn’t on. But come on.

I have attempted the Towel Trick, it didn’t work the first time, but I’ll try it again. Pray for me. I have the worst Xbox luck of all time.

The nature of failure…

Some of you may have noticed that my blog stopped working for a large chunk of this afternoon. Let me tell you a story about my day and the nature of failure.

Monday is my day off. Today just happens to be Victoria Day, to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria. Who is dead. But all the same, we Commonwealthers like to harken back to our British roots and celebrate an already dead Queen. Most of us, however, call this weekend May Two-Four, as it usually falls around the 24th of May and a “Two-four” is what we call a 24 pack of beer. It is, essentially, the first long weekend of the summer and we usually like to enjoy all of those quintessential summer activities like skipping work and drinking in the sun.

What this means for me is that all of the things that I needed to do today, such as go to the bank or the post office, were impossible because nearly everything is closed. All the same, I had accepted my fate and planned some fun activities for the day.

The first was sleeping in. I was lying peacefully in bed, the sun pouring through the curtains, the cat snoring at my feet. I woke up, for once completely awake, and rolled over to check the time on my phone. 8:27am. What…? Why was I awake that early? But there was no going back now, I was awake and no manner of burying my head in the blankets was going to prevent it. Sad.

Now this alone would not have been a tragedy. After all, it was my day off and I could always nap later. The next thing on my agenda was to go give blood at the blood clinic. I haven’t donated blood in a while, because it’s just been 6 months since my last tattoo. But when I haven’t recently gotten a tattoo or a mysterious tropical disease, I try to give blood as regularly as my iron level will let me (I don’t eat red meat, therefore generally have low iron. My body can make enough for me, but if I give blood too often it gets too low.)

So I went to pick up Kaitlyn, who I was dragging with me, and went off to the clinic. I had an appointment for 11:20. Surprisingly, I was only two minutes late. And I passed the iron test with flying colours! All that remained was to wait for the questionaire and the poking-with-a-needle bit, which usually doesn’t take long…. But by 12:00 I hadn’t even done the questionaire and there were still quite a few people ahead of me in the line. I had to be somewhere (next part of the story..) by 1pm. I had no choice but to throw in the towel and leave with all of my original blood supply. I was a little annoyed - after all, I’d made an appointment and should get in before the countless drop-ins - but how can you really fault an important organization like that? I mean, they’re just trying to get as much blood to as many people as possible.

After a brief foray to Wendy’s for lunch (probably the only non-fail of the day), Kaitlyn and I headed downtown to the Museum of Civilization to see my sister’s new stilt show, The Girl Who Was Eaten by the Dark. I was supposed to take photos for their press kit, as I’ve done in the past. We drive into downtown Ottawa and suddenly notice that there are an awful lot of people about. And cars, too. As we get stuck in traffic, already running late, I snarl, “Why is there so much traffic in the middle of the day on a Monday..?!” And then it dawns on me. Everyone else in the city is off work today too.  The city is crawling with people.

I should mention that before this I had called my sister to ask her where, exactly, we going and where to park that she could get us free parking. I didn’t hear back from her. When we finally crossed the bridge into Québec, I drove around the Museum of Civilization looking for someplace to park. No such luck. After several uturns and failed attempts, we finally end up at a park across the street. That’s when I realized that I had forgotten to bring my camera.

It’s already 1:15, the show started at one. It took us another ten minutes of walking around the outside of the museum to find them, and we only caught the last ten minutes of the show.

Annoyed, I head home to attempt to do something productive with my day off. I turn on my computer to check my email and find out that the links on my blog aren’t working. And so I sign in and start fiddling with things to get it to work.

Well, needless to say I only made things worse. I ended up changing the main url that the blog was directed to and as a result, I couldn’t even sign in to change it back. I tried to go through a few php and css files to see if I could figure it out,  but I was so lost. And suddenly my blog no longer really existed, it was just words on an ugly white page.

I didn’t ever solve the problem. Obviously I don’t understand these things enough. Luckily for me, it took Seb like five minutes to not only fix what I had broken but the links as well. So, as you see, all is now well on the blog front, no thanks whatsoever to me.

The nature of failure is such that it is never just one thing that fails, but all things. It is never just one thing that goes wrong in my life at a time, no that would be too easy. It’s the same with big things as with little, like these. All of them have to pile up in what Kaitlyn rightly called an Epic Fail.

Cleveland rocks?

Fae and I decided it would be a nice idea to go to Cleveland, to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the zoo. Cleveland’s less than two hours away from where Fae lives, but I thought it would be nice for us to get a hotel and stay overnight. Especially since it was going to be free (or nearly) with my AirMiles. So we booked the hotel (which of course wasn’t actually free… that’s the way these things work, right?) and headed down yesterday.

We should’ve known things were going to go wrong, because my GPS suddenly stopped working on the way out of Pittsburgh and we ended up driving in circles in downtown Pittsburgh trying to get the stupid thing to “recalculate route.”

When we left Pittsburgh it was yet another gorgeous sunny, warm day. About 26 degrees (Celsius). So of course Fae and I only packed sundresses. We actually both almost packed jeans but changed our mind last minute and didn’t. By the time we go to Cleveland, it was raining and 11 degrees. What the hell? We were very poorly dressed, obviously. We parked and ran into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stepping in puddles with flip flops and covering our heads with our very small sweaters.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was pretty awesome - I hadn’t been there since I was about 8, and I definitely appreciated it a lot more this time. We stayed a few hours, then we decided to check into the hotel and just hang out a bit in the warmth before we went for dinner. This is when I discovered that while I had brought my laptop, as planned, I had forgotten the power cord. It was charged about 70%, but that’s only about 3 hours of usage. We had brought movies to watch in the hotel! Damn.

We watched How I Met Your Mother for a bit, and then headed out for dinner. We were staying pretty far from the city, out by the airport. But we had a GPS, so it’s okay, right? Unless, of course, you’re us. The stupid thing kept losing signal in the middle of Cleveland, leaving us to try to navigate our own way through what apparently was baseball game traffic. They had traffic cops directing things, but I have no idea what they were doing… they were making us go through red lights! Finally, we found a place to park. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe, ordered strawberry daquiris and hoped it would at least be a good dinner.

Apparently the Hard Rock Cafe is a huge rip off… Our drinks were $6.99 each and didn’t even taste like they had alcohol in them. Our sandwiches were about $12.99 and while they were HUGE they weren’t all that great.

Normally, upon visiting a new city, we would walk around and check it out. It was too bloody cold and still raining. So we decided we would try to go see and movie. We asked the waitress and found out there was a theatre in the same plaza, in the basement. We paid and left and took the elevator downstairs… to the sketchiest plaza basement I’ve ever been to. Only to find out that while they were playing about a dozen movies, they were all the movies we didn’t want to see and none of the ones we did want to see (we were thinking Adventureland or Sunshine Cleaning). So that failed too.

In the elevator on the way back up I turned to Fae.
“Why do we always fail?” I asked. We laughed and decided that we would just order payperview back at the hotel and stay warm in bed. We got back to the hotel and decided that the pool looked very enticing, so we got back in the car to go into the weird Cleveland suburb to find a cheap place to buy a bathing suit. The guy at the front desk had given us directions to a Walmart. The last part was “Go down and turn right down Brooksomething, there’s a Walmart at the end of that road.” He said the real name, but neither of us could remember so we decided that it wouldn’t be that hard to find the street that was Brooksomething. We turn and find… Brookhaven, Brookdale, Meadowbrook and Brookshire. All right next to each other. Hmm.

Needless to say, we didn’t find the Walmart, but we kept going down the street and eventually found another store and bought some bathing suits, which were quite expensive for suits neither of us planned to ever wear again.

We got back to the hotel, went swimming for about 30 minutes, until we suffocated from the heat of the hot tub, and then went back up to our room to order payperview. Fae took a shower, and I tried to figure out the payperview. After about 45 minutes of trying to work it, and then seeing if maybe there was something on real TV to watch, I called the front desk.

“Hi, I can’t seem to get the Payperview to work.”
“Yeah, the company we got Payperview from just recently shut down. So we don’t have Payperview right now.”
“Oh…. Okay then, bye.”

Again, we tried to find something on TV. Largely, we failed. Until we found Whose Line Is It Anyway, and excitedly tried to tune to that channel… only to find out that we didn’t get that channel.

We woke up this morning with plans to go to the Zoo, but they were very quickly dampened by the cold and the rain. We ate our continental breakfast and left Cleveland behind forever, after having failed at everything.