tomleslie.ca

September’s been a very busy month, but it’s almost done. We’ve had lovely weather for the most part, and a lot of social and choral activities on the calendar.

Exultate fired up again with the wedding of one of our members, Brent Fifield, and with our participation in the Colours of Music Festival in Barrie. The Barrie Examiner had a full-page article with massive colour photo of the choir on the front page of their Entertainment section last Friday, which, though rife with errors, was still quite a coup. We had an excellent and very appreciative audience, and donated four $500 scholarships to students for their vocal studies.

Anne and I have just joined the Pax Christi Chorale, Stephanie Martin’s ongoing Mennonite community choir, who have two concerts a year. It’s a bit far to roam to get up to their rehearsals, and the choir’s bigger than either of us prefer, but it’s great to be singing with Anne and for Stephanie again. We’re started working on some very good music for the Christmas concert — Vaughan Williams, Finzi and Britten.

On Sunday we biked down to the docklands to cheer on our friend Molly McCarron as she completed her first full marathon. Molly’s been a serious runner for several years now, and it was great to see her accomplish this milestone. Anne took some pictures which I’ll try to get up on the site shortly.

My work has been pretty busy as well, with two part-time contracts under way at the moment. I’ve been getting quite a few calls and have been trying to develop a network to reach out to. Now that the company has some significant money in the bank, I’m going through the process of setting up payroll and actually paying myself for the first time in almost a year!

We had a long and gruelling weekend fighting trolls in Jintha’alor with Kelayr. Ok, no, we actually had a long and really fun and gruelling weekend playing World of Warcraft with Kelly, who was on probation from her sons and who set up her fancy new laptop (and BTW Dell, I’m still pissed off you guys released the new XPS less than a month after I bought the old one) next to our machines in our re-purposed basement area. We were up until 4am on Friday evening, and that was the first trip up the ziggurat. Trip 2 on Saturday took us almost to the end but we ran out of time (and live party members) on the brink of success. Anne & I (Argwit & Bonemaul, Scarlet Crusade server) joined up with an excellent trio (including one of those all-too-rare priests) and dominated the place the following day to bring our Jintha’alor timesink to a close.

While our friend Molly genuinely cringes when online gaming is discussed (although in an excessive way that almost begs us to carry on relentlessly) and the rest of our dinner group friends range from incomprehending to sympathetic to slightly scornful on the topic of MMORPG’s, this game in particular seems to have taken over a frightening about of our free time. (Let me spell this out in its impossible detail: something like 250 hours each for Anne and me — very likely exceeding my actual lifetime hours of AD&D play — over about six months.) Semi-serious pundits are predicting that — minus the “G” part of the term — MMORP’s will at some point replace significant parts of the economy. I wouldn’t go that far, but for sure World of Warcraft has already replaced almost all other computer games, and all real-time television in our house. The monthly charge is a significant savings from my old habit of picking up the best of the latest video games every couple of months, and the best part about it all is I get to play with my wife, who’s every bit as much of a fan as me.

Of course I’m hardly the only one. Even the Globe and Mail has noticed the blurring of the real life world with the online one, and with 3.5 million users globally there are an aweful lot of World of Warcraft fans pumping their hard-earned dollars into making more virtual gold online. There are even secondary communities forming around these games. When two of my favorite web comics (which happen to have computer games as common topics) Penny Arcade and PVP took their friendly rivalry to the next level, they did so by forming online guilds to take each others’ fans to virtual war on a daily basis. Life sure is fun…

Hoover Leslie, domestic short haired cat, ?/?/1991 – 7/28/2005. Rest in Peace.

Hoover’s last day was spectacularly beautiful — warm, but not too hot, not humid for what seems like the first time this summer, sunny with little shreds of clouds — but by today it was clear she had very little left in her. The Veterinary Emergency Clinic and her excellent doctor Doug Mason welcomed her back for the last time. After more than a year of bi-weekly chemotherapy visits, it was familiar ground for her and she did not seem alarmed. With a smooth needle injection she passed away peacefully and without pain, with a final tiny chirp.

Anne and I will miss her. Life with Hoover was not always easy — never one to suffer indignity lightly, often painfully paranoid and not a cuddly, friendly cat — but she had style, poise and a calm, competent demeanor which comforted me through the many ups and downs in the last 10 years. The biggest shock for her in that time was moving in with Anne and, particularly, Scottie, our other cat, a gentle eunuch two years her senior. After a successfully staged get-to-know-you period involving closed glass doors, she and Scottie became, well, not friends, but mutually respectful old folks with firmly established rules and roles. I’m sure Scottie will miss her, though he’s been living the high life at Grandma’s for the last couple of weeks so he’s missed all the excitement.

When Hoover was diagnosed with cancer last year we feared we would lose her immediately, but in fact for most of the year her chemotherapy appointments did in fact give her back a pretty normal life. We quickly got into a routine, every other Wednesday, of cab rides to the VEC in the morning, and home together in the evening. The doctors, assistants and technicians at the VEC were always friendly and welcomed her every time.

I miss my cat, and life without her won’t be the same. But the cat I miss the most was Hoover at a teen, full of energy, spirit and health. I will remember her like that.