Home again.

Got home Thursday night and glad to note no traveling for another six days or so (Victoria on the weekend, Ottawa again the 19-21) – after which there will be no trips east for a couple of months because collective bargaining has ground to a halt. The bargaining teams came to a decision this round that rather than continuing to spin our wheels with an unwilling employer, it’s time to go to mediation and get on with it. Since it takes time to schedule such things, I doubt we will be back there until some time late January.

My hard drive crapped out right before I got on the plane to come home Thursday, and while it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, I had most of my life backed up anyhow. I don’t trust machines anymore since this is the 5th catastrophic hardware failure I’ve experienced in my lifetime of owning computers. That’s three motherboards and two hard drives – all due to faulty product, not my handling of the machines. I also once lost all of my data in a bungled disk-encryption attempt (someone else’s doing, not mine). In any case, $200 later I’m adding another 100 gigs to my laptop because I might as well turn this tragedy into a little bonus for me. More disk space! (Oddly, as I was typing this I got a call from MacStation that my laptop is ready for pickup.)

The biggest headache really is having to re-set all my programs and preferences up. Otherwise I’m pretty laid back about the whole affair.

I haven’t been writing too much the last few days, Ottawa being hard on my internal schedule, though I did manage to bang away for several hours on the flight out – a story about a recent suicide in my family (condolences not necessary, I didn’t know him and this is a common end in my family), and the land that this same person once destroyed by contract logging it. Another piece of the writing path I’ve been following lately about my family, their homestead land, and the histories that we invent about ourselves. The piece I submitted to the Geist postcard fiction contest last week was from the same crazy free write I’ve been adding to for the last month or so. All the stories I ever heard as a kid, about this relative or that, with the twists of faulty memory thrown in for good measure. It’s a reinvention rather than a history.

So it’s Saturday and I am glad to be home, a little hungover from drinks at the WISE with union friends last night, but organized for the week. Got errands, exercise and kid-driving (to a birthday party) on the list for today. Tomorrow we are heading down to the Russian hall to see the Sarti play about Bruce Erickson’s life (Brian’s mom is coming over to see it with us). I am feeling all family and organization and work at the moment. Quite good actually, thinking about what comes next.