Water, water, every where...

My holiday has not got off to the best of starts.

I woke up this morning to find that I don't have any water. As I have mentioned before, trucks deliver all the water to the houses here and then take away all the sewage - in a different truck, thankfully - so if the trucks don't run or for some reason miss you out then you have a problem. The service in Kangiqsujuaq is actually pretty good - my warning lights have only come on twice in the whole year, whereas in Inukjuak it was a far more regular occurrence - but I'm now in a totally dry house.

It's at times like these that you fully appreciate just how much water you use in a day and what you use it for, and whilst I'm in no way likening my plight to that of the Ethiopians, the whole situation is most inconvenient. I fully appreciate the irony of being surrounded by snow and ice but not having a drop of potable water in the house, and I know I most certainly would not have made a good Inuk in the times when they still lived off the land.

I have been playing phone tag for most of the day trying to get a water delivery, but so far my efforts have been in vain. I walked up to the residence and filled up a couple of water jugs there so at least I have some modest rations to see me by in the short term, but with this being the Easter long weekend I'm not entirely sure when I'm next going to see the 'truck of life.' So be thinking of me as you unwrap your Easter eggs, and raise a glass to me at your dinner table; if it's full of water though, would you mind just keeping it to one side...

iNeed help

Another weekend has come and gone and, to paraphrase John Lennon, "So this is Sunday, and what have you done?" Well, not a lot, to tell you the truth. I did have a nice breakfast at the new student residence this morning, but I've spent most of my weekend organizing my iTunes folder and have come to the conclusion that I am developing some sort of OCD disorder.

Now, I know that the use of the word 'disorder' just then was redundant as the 'D' in OCD actually stands for 'disorder', but the sentence didn't sound right without it. And did you know that this is an example of RAS syndrome, that is the "redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviation itself," like PIN number or ATM machine or HIV virus? RAS stands for 'Redundant Acronym Syndrome', so note the self-referential irony in that the term 'RAS syndrome' is actually itself an example of RAS syndrome.

Oh my, now I've gone cross-eyed.

Where were we before we got lost in that linguistic hall of mirrors? Oh yes - iTunes. I got a new iPod Touch for Christmas, and whilst uploading all my music I made sure that every track had the correct album art, which I think is a reasonable endeavour. I've now gone too far though because I'm now checking the year and genre attached to each song, cross-referencing with Wikipedia as I go, as well as correcting any spelling errors and mis-capitalizations. I have over 7000 songs on my iPod and my plan was to go through one, maybe two letters of the alphabet each day so that I'd have the project finished in a fortnight, but over the last 48 hours I've not been able to stop. I started on Friday evening and I'm now up to the S's already.

Last night in bed I actually got round to listening to the damn thing and noticed that one of my Dave Matthews Band albums was incorrectly listed as a compilation. Did this affect the quality of the music coming through my headphones? No. Could I ignore the error? No again. I had to get up, come downstairs, switch on the laptop and sort it out there and then. At 2 in the morning. I really need help, don't I? There are no psychiatrists this far north though, so in the meantime back to work...The Best Of Sad Cafe - Rock? Don't think so - Soft Rock maybe - and no year; what does Wikipedia say...?

P.S.
Before anyone points it out, I'm fully aware that the fact that I have The Best of Sad Cafe on my iPod is probably more worrying than any form of OCD that I may be developing. I am truly a lost cause.