Up With Which I Shall Not Put

Grey Hairs, and the Things That Cause Them

2009-07-06T10:06:00.003-05:00

This morning D made us a nice breakfast of french toast and sausage. Okay, the sausage had been cooked the day before, but the french toast was fresh and excellent. We were sitting there happily masticating when suddenly I cocked my head at a sound the bunnies were making, turned back to look at D and saw a look of unabashed glee on her face. She grinned impishly at me, gestured, and announced happily "You're going grey!"

Gee, thanks.

The woman rushed to the washroom, grabbed her tweezers, and plucked out the offending hair to show me. And the one beside it. I think she was making room for more grey hairs, so that she wouldn't be alone in aging. I fully expect to wake up some day to find her plucking hairs on my head in order to promote the advance of grey onto my scalp.

At least now when people point out the male pattern baldness that's also creeping its way onto my head, I can justify it by pointing out the grey hair as well.

I have reasons for going grey, however. I think this blog itself stands as testiment to one of the main reason; a short, maniacal reason that plagues me daily, but to whom I am shackled. There are other reasons.

One of our big stresses at the moment is attempting to rid ourselves of our apartment. We had to close very quickly on our new home and were unfortunately still in lease for our apartment, a lease from which it is proving extremely difficult to extricate ourselves. We've resorted to posting ads on Kijiji, and we get lots of replies to these ads, but so far no one has actually taken the damnable thing off our hands.

Many of the replies cause me considerable anguish. I've taken care to state quite specifically several points. Firstly, the rent includes heat and water. No pets are allowed. The apartment is available immediately. The apartment is located close to Bayers and Connaught. These are the sorts of replies I mainly get:

"Is this apartment still available?"
"Pets allowed? Y/N?"
"Where is the apartment?"
"I have a cat. Is this okay?"
"When is the apartment available?"
"Can you tell me where the apartment is?"
"What's included in the rent?"
"Does the rent include power? Heat?"
"I was wondering about the apartment."

The last one's my goddamned favourite. I cleaned up the grammar a bit to make the responder not sound like such a complete and total moron, but I have to ask: WHAT were you wondering about the apartment? Did you want to know if it's green, or inhabited by magical fairy bugbears who will give you cookies if you learn how to dance? Can you host key parties and invite your drunken leprous biker friends? TELL ME!!! It's like human beings have lost the capacity to read whole sentences. They see I have an ad, that it's for a two bedroom apartment, and read no further. Is it that difficult to go over the whole text of the ad? In its entirety it is shorter than this paragraph has been!

I weep for these people. It must be difficult for them to get through life. It goes some way to explaining Haligonian drivers, though. They see the big red octagonal sign in front of them, try to read it, get tired after "STO" and figure whatever it says it can't possibly apply to them and so drive right on through. They even seem to have trouble reading the colours of street lights, as though they can't be bothered to investigate anything that's flashy and colourful that won't also help them increase their penis size (although, to be fair to these people, they probably read "increase their pen" and think "Yeah, mine's running outta ink; why not?")

I'm also concerned about the kids across the street. The ones who appear to have passed puberty but haven't quite hit the stage of not-being-assholes. There's quite a large cluster of them, and they gather right at the entrance to the public housing across from us on their bikes like an imitation biker gang, yelling loudly into the night and wrecking any street signs that come within reach. I wonder if they walk around all day swinging their arms, and the moment they touch something solid decide that it needs to be vandalized in some way. If I can give them any kudos, it would be that they seem to be racially inclusive, so as a gang of misfits they are very accepting. Fantastic. Now we can have hope that in the future, people of all colours and shapes can get together in harmony to smash beer bottles and set off firecrackers that detonate like car bombs in the early morning hours.

The young boy who lives in the house behind us just got his first bike and is learning to ride it with training wheels. I wonder if his parents have made a mistake. The jackals across the street probably see him as a future member. Their only requirement appears to be the ability to not fall off a bike, and it's not a particularly strict requirement anyway.

My lawn continues to grow. At this point it's claimed our patio set. I can still see the top of the table, but had to dig to find one of the chairs. Halifax weather is uncooperative when it comes to lawn mowing. We haven't seen the sun for a week and a half.

D just told me the other day there could be earwigs in our laundry, after having hung it up to "dry" in the rain.

I think a few grey hairs are just the beginning.

Her Ass is Grass

2009-06-30T17:39:00.005-05:00

I know it's been a LOOOONG time since I've posted. For those of you who care, or somehow don't know, I moved to Nova Scotia about a year and a half back. Because everyone told me facebook was the place to be, I started using it. Something facebook lacks, however, is the unadulterated capacity to RANT LIKE A MANIAC!!!

It's something I feel the need to do right now. I have a feeling, nearly a premonition, that I will feel the need to do it more and more often.

Why? Two words. Home ownership.

Let's get this straight: I love D to pieces. I trust her implicitly and would travel to Hades and back for her (although because I'm stupid, I'd probably look behind me and she'd turn into a pillar of salt or something, so it likely wouldn't be an effective rescue).

We recently purchased a home. That's right. I now own a home with my lovely common law spouse. Lovely. I have to keep saying that to myself. Not bugnuts crazy. Not strap her to a gurney and inject her with valium insane. Lovely. Yes.

If I don't remind myself of that at least every 47 seconds, I get a bit twitchy.

So a bit of background. We had a birthday party for me back in April. Ah, April, when I was young and innocent, carefree and unencumbered by looming financial cliffs. I made a nice meal for my friends, had them all over for drinks, went and sang some karaoke, then came home to my patiently waiting hangover. That's not a metaphor for D. I really did have a hangover. The next day, around noon, we both woke up fresh as daisies soaked in turpentine.

We had no plans for the day, but we decided we wanted to do something that wouldn't cost us any money. "Let's go look at open houses!" D declared. "It's free, and we can get an idea of what's in our price range." This wasn't completely out of the blue since we had been saving for our down payment, but hadn't the funds quite yet.

A tip for those of you with spouses of the female persuasion: If your spouse suggests doing something that will not cost money, get out your wallet and take her to the movies, dinner, or buy her a box of frigging chocolate for all I care, otherwise you'll end up spending a LOT more. Like a couple hundred thousand more.

Long story short we found the house we really wanted to buy, scraped together the funds for our downpayment primarily by prevailing upon the generosity of our parents, put an offer down, applied for the mortgage, and yadda yadda yadda, we were homeowners. We moved in June 1st.

Okay, that's about 47 seconds. Lovely. She's lovely.

My parents recently came to visit and ended up spending most of their trip helping us with various projects around the house. We finished the risers on the basement stairs, mounted a live wire into a junction box in the kitchen, put up a clothesline, painted the kitchen cupboards, and I even tried my hand at carpentry assembling a table on which to mount the microwave. It turned out nicely. We bid them farewell after about a week, a week in which my mom tried to pay for everything (luckily D is sneaky and managed to field the waitresses and clerks for most of the times my mom tried to pay). However, my mom threatened to transfer me money for a lawnmower.

To be clear, I needed a lawnmower. Desperately. My lawn was -Who am I kidding? Was? My lawn IS- a foot and a half tall. I could hide hobbits in my lawn. First home, remember? I was surprised I needed to purchase a fire extinguisher, let alone a lawnmower.

So my mom followed through on her threat and we went to buy a lawnmower.

D and I have apparently quite differing interpretations of what that word means.

When I think lawnmower, I think a gigantic gas hog with blades that rotate at eleven billion miles a second, belching smoke and reducing my lawn to mulch in 13 seconds flat.

When D thinks lawnmower, she thinks an itsy bitsy eco-friendly push mower that requires the strength of ten men each of whom is at least twice my size to get it to devour even a foot of grass.

Because I'm a gentleman and a scholar, guess which one we got?

I just spent the last hour "mowing" the front lawn. It still looks like most of the haircuts my dad gave me. The only muscles I can still use are in my fingers and my eyes. I'm glad my fingers still work because it allows me to gesture in very particular ways at the lawnmower (and the lawn, as it's not entirely blameless).

My only consolation is that D said I look very sexy mowing the lawn. Yes. Thank you. I'm sure I will make just as sexy a corpse when I'm felled by my pending heart attack.

At least in my eulogy they'll be able to say I was eco-friendly. Yay.

Have I said she's lovely lately? I feel a twitch coming on.

HG Wells Hit

2007-03-20T10:04:00.000-05:00

I have come to a decision.

I like what Stephen Spielberg did to War of the Worlds.

I realize that comment alone could get me lynched, but I plan to back it up with fact. My previous opinion, which was polar opposite, was formed having never in fact read the original novel. I simply listened to the opinion of my brother, my father, and I agreed wholeheartedly with them.

I should not have.

The primary point of contention around everyone's dislike of the adaptation is the fact that in the movie, the tripods were already deposited in the Earth, under its crust and only the aliens were delivered via some kind of energy tube.

Well, having now read that particular scene in the book, I can quite honestly say there is nothing in the book to contradict that interpretation. The cylinder that deposited the aliens in the original novel is described as having a diameter of approximately 30 yards, which calculates to 90 feet in diameter. Length is not described but if we assume that the cylinder is as long as it is wide we're looking at a total volume for the cylinder of approximately 500,000 cubic feet. That sounds like a massive number? It's about twice as big as big in terms of sheer volume as our space shuttle at 250,000 cubic feet.

I grant you that means these cylinders were very large, but were they large enough to carry enough equipment and materials to construct three TITANIC tripods, as well as the nine martian pilots, their life support equipment and supplies? These cylinders would also have to be extremely well armoured to withstand both atmospheric re-entry and impact with the earth's surface at extremely high velocities, so much of that cubic volume would be taken up purely by the shell of the cylinder itself. Remember as well that the tripods based on HG Wells description seem to have an organic component as well, which would probably require care and tending and special facilities inside the cylinder. Fuel would not have been an issue since Wells describes the cylinders as having been shot as though from a gun.

HG Wells never describes the actual construction of a tripod, never goes into distinct details about how it is assembled, what type of equipment is used to put it together, or where the parts come from. It is entirely likely that all the cylinders were for is transport of the pilots to very specific landing points, where equipment to build the tripods had been readied long in advance, and that upon arrival all that was necessary for the pilots to do was to dig out the materials and assemble them using what few tools it was necessary to carry onboard the cylinder.

So in my personal opinion Stephen Spielberg simply took this possibility and went one small step further with it, and I agree with his interpretation. I've been able to reassess the movie based on reading the book and I truly think Spielberg was as honest to the book as anyone could like while still putting in his own particular creative flare.

Disagree with me if you like, but read the book before you do.

Are We Crazy?

2007-03-19T10:09:00.000-05:00

Well, having overcome the emotional tragedy and heartbreak of losing our first pet, Bun Bun, D and I thought and thought and finally decided that yes, we would get another pet. Our reasoning was mainly that we missed Bun Bun, and I think to honour her memory having another pet will constantly remind us of her, in a good way.

We once again decided on rabbits. Yes, the plural of rabbit. We are now the owners of two dwarf rabbits we obtained from the humane society, only 2 1/2 months old. They are brothers, and they came with very silly names, so we changed them.
The names they came with were Coal and Sweetpea. What kind of names are those? We have redubbed them Thelonious and Polonius. We call them Theo and Polo for short.

At this point we have yet to get a real feel for their personalities but as far as I've been able to deduce, Polo appears to be the more affectionate one, whereas Theo is more playful. Apparently Theo also likes to engage in a bit of incestual sodomy every once in a while, but we'll fix that maybe later this week or possibly next. Theo is a very dark black, while Polo has a brownish tinge to his fur. They enjoy grooming each other, and seem especially bent on cleaning each other's eyes. Both of them absolutely adore being pet, although Polo gets a lot flatter to enjoy it than Theo does.

We haven't really had them out of the cage for run arounds yet because we're still letting them adapt to their new environment. Since they're smaller rabbits as well we're going to have to keep a closer eye on them around places like the back of the fridge or stove to make sure they don't squeeze in and get trapped or find some wire to chew on and get zapped. Once D has finished her dining room table (HINT) I plan to use the vapour barrier she's protecting the finish with and seal up all the little hidey holes where they could inadvertently (that may be spelled incorrectly) kill themselves.

They seem to have a very strange fascination with paper towels. I was cleaning up something in their cage and couldn't finish because both rabbits were attached by very strong jaws to the paper towel I was using.

We'll have to find out if paper towels are bad for their digestion and if not, give them a supply to play with.

So far both rabbits are healthy and happy and seem to enjoy their new digs. I have yet to be thumped at, but that may be only because I've yet to bother them enough to warrant a thump. Time will tell, however.

I'm really hoping we have these two for quite a while. I quite like the burgeoning personalities I see in both rabbits and look forward to getting to know them over a period of years. But, since they are rabbits, I suppose I do have to accept the reality that they are fragile, and not very well designed from an individual survivability standpoint, so I'm trying to steel myself against potential tragedy. Still, they're brothers, and they seem to be looking out for each other so far. Perhaps they'll keep each other out of trouble.

We'll put pictures up soon.

Oh, and even though we haven't tested it yet, we're pretty sure both will fit in the crock pot simultaneously.

Swing Low

2007-03-03T11:31:00.000-05:00

I'll be brief.
Bun Bun, for reasons yet unknown, is dead. She was a beautiful rabbit. I loved her, and D loved her. It's hard to find a pet as perfect as she was.
Cherish yours.

Retraction

2007-03-02T16:41:00.000-05:00

Okay, just in case everyone didn't read my response to the previous post, I would like to be very clear about a few things.

I will never criticise any of my friends on this blog, either in subtext or overtly, and if something in one of my comments makes you feel like I have, I apologize in advance and if necessary, I will DELETE the offending post.

I love all my friends openly and completely, every fibre of each and every one of you is important to me and all of you are JUST as important to me as every other. None of you are better to me than any other, all of you are equal in my heart and mind, merely different in many wonderful ways.

While I will play the devil's advocate I will never play it in order to deride someone, or put someone down. As you may have seen previously when I play the devil's advocate I make sure that all fire and venom I might incite gets aimed squarely at me, and I make no effort to spread that around to others.

Finally, my blog is about posing entertaining questions, provocative if possible, and telling funny stories. I'm not using this as a soapbox for harsh thoughts and feelings towards anyone except for perhaps nebulous public organizations and the occasional stranger who may have incited my wrath. It will never be a place I come to be negative about my friends or family.

If my previous post was offensive to anyone, that was unintentional, as I was engaging in idle speculation.

Ooh! Look! Something on the ground I can read! La...tex... con...dom. I'd sure like to live in one of those!

EDIT: The previous post was deleted.

No More TOdyssey and a Query on Netspeak

2007-02-21T15:31:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I've decided to leave the third day of the TOdyssey up to your imaginations. Okay, I'll tell you something. We went home. There were hugs and puppies. She cried, then I cried, then Melany laughed... she's such a little trooper!
I've recently been thinking about language, possibly because of Melany talking about *shudder* irregardless and how some fringe radical groups have decided to use powerful lobbying tactics to have it added to the English language, and it's possibly because I've been spending so much time on *Gasp!* WoW lately. REGARDLESS (Do you see what I did there?) I've been wondering when certain elements of our online vocabulary are going to make their way into common speech.
I've actually found myself debating whether to laugh at someone, or say LOL to them, depending on the actual hilarity of the situation or their statement. An actual laugh is an honest expession of amusement, whereas LOL is a sort of noncommittal, "Yeah, I kinda chuckled, at least internally, so I'll throw you a bone." word, or at least it is in my mind, but there are circumstances where I actually have to fight the urge to SAY LOL to someone. My friend and D's friend Tim uses LOL as a sarcastic way of making fun of someone's attempt at humour, but he uses it in actual speech!
What about other expressions. There are a number of online acronyms and words that might translate well into our consumer dialect. IMO, IMHO, IRL, BRB, WTF, WTH, ROFLMAO, GTG... these could all easily take the place of the phrases they are short for.
I shudder at the thought but I accept the possibility. Do you think Netspeak will take over English, or are we as English speakers going to fight to keep the language, if not pure, at least as acronym free as possible?

Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T17:54:00.000-05:00

Oh, and happy VD everyone!
Ew... that sounds like a celebration of pestilence.

Goodbye Mr. Churchill

2007-02-14T17:51:00.000-05:00

To mollify my mother I have removed the image of Winston Churchill from my blog. He will be missed. When available, I will replace it with an image of Bun Bun composed as to incite hilarity.
Until that time I may try to put in something in place of Mr. Churchill, a placeholder as it were. I will consider the options available to me.

Bunny Girl

2007-02-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

I'm going to pause in the recounting of the TOdyssey to make an announcement that most of you have already heard.
Last week, D and I got a new pet, a rabbit we promptly renamed from Bon Bon to Bun Bun. Our reasoning is that she happens to be a lop eared rabbit who may or may not talk and may or may not be psychotic, so we may as well be prepared with the appropriate name. If you don't know what I'm referring to, I will refer you to the Sluggy Freelance link in my links section.
In the week and a half that we have had her, Bun Bun has managed to train us very well.
The first thing she did was put on an act that she was small and terrified and only wanted to be left alone in her cage. This was superb acting on her part, and we totally fell for it. We got used to leaving the top of the cage off because she seemed to feel more comfortable that way, and seemed quite content to remain in the cage.
Today, D woke to find the rabbit roaming free, having deftly escaped the cage's confines. We're not quite sure how, although it is possible she jumped. The height of the cage is not beyond her capacity to vault.
D responded to the fact that our rabbit is an escape artist by doing what I would have done in her place, letting the rabbit out of the cage and erecting the baby gate we got from her original owners instead.
Well, apparently Bun Bun can climb, as well, because I woke groggy and unpleasant to the pitter patter of sneaky rabbit feet outside the bedroom door. I woke up and there was Bun Bun, standing on her hind legs with an expectant look on her face. She took my opening of the door to be an invitation to scoot inside the bedroom and get under the bed. I barely closed the door in time because I NEVER would have gotten her out of there again. It took me another fifteen minutes to herd her back into the kitchen, and eventually resorted to scooping her up bodily, much to her dismay, and depositing her in the cage. It is now locked.
For the rest of the morning I couldn't help but feel the smugness emanating from her cage.
The rabbit is such a sneak that I've actually promoted her to this rank and D has been demoted to miscreant. I realized that in terms of sneakiness, the capacity to escape all bonds placed upon you by higher intelligences far outweighs the ability to secretly plan ways to insert culture into my life. It was not an easy decision to make.
Bun Bun has also become very accustomed to D and I in her short time with us, and now has no problem making plain her discontentment if she is not getting her way. We periodically herd her from the living room to the kitchen so that she can hang out with us while we watch TV in the living room or eat and pee in the kitchen, and she takes the trip between rooms as an opportunity to hide under the kitchen table. Well, if we try to prod her out from under the table before she's ready she gives the ground a good strong thump of dissatisfaction just to let us know she's not happy with being rushed.
One night she also peed on us. We found out this was because she was marking her territory, but I have a suspicion that deep in her heart of hearts, she really just wanted to pee on us.
She's my kind of bunny.
We get along quite well. I'm thinking of consulting with her about ways we can conspire against D. Apparently she gives D the stink eye whenever I'm not in the room, so I think she's got a vested interest in working with me to this end.
If only I could get past this damned baby gate...

Don't Sin Near Me. Anywhere Else is Fine.

2007-02-06T18:02:00.000-05:00

On the second day of our trip to Toronto, which I am going to hereby dub the TOdyssey, the first thing I remember is the wake up call. No, I did not schedule a wake up call. No, I did not WANT a wake up call. No, it was not the hotel which was making the wake up call. It was D, having woken up about three hours earlier than expected and run out of things to do while tottering around the hotel room in her gitch, poking me with cold little hands until consciousness reared its ugly head.
I don't actual mind these ministrations. It's become something of an established routine that if D actually has the opportunity to sleep in, she takes advantage of that opportunity and doesn't. I, on the other hand, when given the opportunity to sleep in, nay even the suggestion that sleeping in may be a possibility, leap into it with true passion. We end up connecting somewhere in between sleeping in and getting up early, and the result is D getting several hours of suggestible, gullible tired Jeremy who she then hauls around like a walking purse to whatever morning activities her imagination can conjure.
On this particular morning I actually got a coffee with my wake up call. It was terrible coffee, as coffee goes, but it was the ichor of the black god and hence it left me feeling mildly refreshed. I don't actually feel awake until my third cup but D was not that patient. I was commanded to shower and dress and that we were going to go to Nathan Phillips square again. I assumed that D was feeling better.
I won't go into details about my shower. Suffice it to say I ended up clean.
We left the hotel room, D with a giddy bounce to her step and I with the promise of coffee to come dancing in my head. Yes, I wanted more coffee. See my point about needing three cups at least. At this point I'd had one.
We exited the hotel and the very first shop (I briefly thanked the Black God for this courtesy) up the street from the hotel was a Starbucks.
I had never had Starbucks before. I had avoided it in the same way that someone who drinks Colt 45 avoids even the scent of a Guiness, believing it to be some fouled decoction from the abyssal planes. There was something about the way people talked about Starbucks that had always set it up in my mind as a place a Tim Hortons' regular (heck, a Tim Hortons' thrall) should avoid. It turned out I was correct in my assumptions.
Ordering coffee at Starbucks made me feel like I was filthy, unworthy of the sophistication offered by the establishment. I looked at the menu and it looked as though a dozen italians had thrown up all their adjectives onto an advertisement for homosexual pornography featuring a 50's diner in france. "Grande Bold Cafe Latte Crapuccino." is one example. "Tall No Foam Espresso Malt-shake" is another. Perhaps I exaggerate. Okay, I do exagerrate, but a first time customer should not walk up to the counter and before opening his mouth feel like a complete and total idiot before even laying down his money. It's like being a virgin all over again.
I left Starbucks feeling spiritually belittled, and it seemed the perfect cue to be introduced to a raving madman. The best word for how he walked is loped. He was a loper. Huge strides that carried him rapidly down the street, spreading his word of... something far and wide. At first I thought him inarticulate but it became quite apparent that the gospel he preached involved quite a number of statements about how jesus flows over us and coats us and all sorts of other imagery that seemed quite inappropriate to attach to a divine symbol. His most interesting statement, D and I found, was "Take your sin away from here. Don't sin near me." As though he feels it perfectly acceptable to sin, just not in his vicinity. Now, D and I were walking along holding hands at this point so maybe he thought we were somehow copulating in public (I have no idea what a raving madman's grasp on reality actually is. He might have thought this.) Anyway, we didn't feel like aggravating him further so we took our sin into the mall, the perfect place for it.
The mall was amusing for me. There's a games workshop store there, tucked down in the bottom under the stairs, with bad lighting outside, making it look like a forgotten tobaccanist's shop or an ancient billiards parlour. The one thing I love about games workshop stores is that I can walk in with my girlfriend and start chatting up the employees and immediately realize that while I may be a nerd, these people have PERFECTED that state. They're like monks who have spent thousands of hours fasting in basements, memorizing tables and rules and army lists until they are incapable of discussing any other subject, and so become games workshop employees. I always feel better about myself after that.
Over an hour was spent in the mall, window shopping, browsing for outfits for D, although she actually showed little interest in buying anything, or even looking, but we were trying to waste time while waiting for events to start at Nathan Phillips Square. On several occasions she rued the fact -rued it I say- that she'd woken me up so early.
Eventually we decided to head back towards the hotel to pick up our skates and do some skating before Nathan Phillips Square opened. On our way saw the raving madman again, who appeared to be growing short of breath, but was still marching strong, this time on the opposite side of the street. I realized that his circuit must take him up and down Yonge street, allowing him the opportunity to harass thousands of people a day. Quite the ambitious madman.
We got to the hotel without incident, grabbed the skates (yes, we hauled them with us to Toronto) and went back to city hall.
It should be mentioned that I enjoy skating. I got D her skates for Christmas and mine as well, and we've put them to good use. I'm not very good at skating but then again, I'm not exactly that adept at walking either. There is one thing that I excel at, however, and that's spatial perception. It is easy for me to notice that I am close to another person and avoid impact with said person by the expedient of moving out of the way. This is a talent that 98% of children somehow lack, or neglect. D and I were consistently the targets of ballistic infants whose only goal, as far as I could determine, was to hamstring the adults on the skating rink and claim it as their own territory Lord of the Flies style. I even saw one of them playing with a conch. It became eventually perilous to stand still on the rink, let alone maneuver around the injured skaters littering the ice, so we decided to check out a cooking demonstration.
We were pretty cold when we went inside city hall, so we were ready to be entertained by anything that happened to be going on when we got there. D and I had a quick argument which I quickly won, about what event was about to start (this is the first argument I've actually won by dint of being correct, so it was a memorable accomplishment) and we sat down to watch some opera singers.
There were three women called the Duelling Divas, whose individual names I've forgotten, because what I primarily noticed about them was three things:
1: They were attractive
2: They sang very well
3: I knew none of the songs they were singing, but D knew them all
So I sat there and enjoyed three hot women singing while D spent her time actually listening to the music. It worked out for both of us.
The presentation that occurred next was for lack of a better word dull. The description in the pamphlet intrigued me, but it ended up being a very pleasant jamaican woman rhyming off her spice shopping list for half an hour. She was herself a charming lady, but unfortunately if I wanted to listen to someone talking about their shopping... well, I can't honestly say that's an entertainment I would choose.
Following that was an East Indian woman performing a traditional dance that I found quite intriguing not because of my fondness for East Indian women (she was too old for me) but because while I could not necessarily interpret it, the dance seemed to be telling a story about the woman's day, her activities, may in fact have been a microcosmic representation of a woman's entire life. I would love to have a better understanding of that type of traditional dance to better enjoy such a presentation but in my own limited capacity I found it quite fascinating.
From there we were off to lunch. A quick stop back at the hotel to drop off the skates (Raving madman was now crouched in a doorway, muttering to himself, apparently having run out of religious go-juice). We had lunch at a restaurant D had visited years before called Fred's Not Here. I, as usual, was worried we'd be late, but we ended up arriving early and had to sit at the bar in the basement (which was actually a sub restaurant called the Red Tomato). D mocked me for ordering a ceasar. I like ceasars, and I don't have to defend that fact.
Lunch was for me amazing. D was not so enthused. She had her tastebuds back so she was able to tell that the gnocci dish she had this time was dreadful compared with what she'd had at Romagna Mia the other day. It was venison over spinach gnocci and she found the gnocci starchy and lacking in flavour. She enjoyed the other aspects of the meal, her appetizer and her dessert. For dessert we had bread pudding... which was not the best bread pudding I've ever had.
My appetizer was escargot "purses" which were actually little pastry puffs with the escargot inside. They were delicious. For main course I had their "Holy Basil Stir Fry Chicken" which was.... well, holy. I devoured it the flavour was so robust and delightful. There was not a scrap of food left on any of my plates. D had leftover main course AND dessert, but claimed this is because she was getting over a cold.
I'm not sure what we did with our afternoon. Memory fails me. I do know that we found something to do to entertain ourselves until dinner, which was at the Drake Hotel.
The Drake Hotel was where we were going to drop the most cash out of any of the restaurants we visited on the weekend, so we got there anticipating a fine, classy establishment full of people in suits, sort of like somewhere Niles and Frasier would frequent. What we got was... something else.
I can best describe the Drake Hotel as a combination of Jane Bond, Del Dente's and The Starlight. The entrance to the hotel was a standard lobby, with a couple of funky chairs and statues and a hostess dressed in one of the most atrocious outfits I have ever seen, at least when visiting an establishment which charges $35 per person on a Price Fixe menu, let alone on a regular basis. She had a jean miniskirt. There was a run in her stocking. She looked like Uma Thurman after a bad drug trip and a hurricane of clothing set free by Courney Love. It was bad.
But what was worse came next. She was dealing with a couple who had never made a reservation. We were standing in line behind this couple. The hostess' co hostess came in.... and proceeded to ignore our existence. We waited there while the co hostess greeted a couple that came in after us, sat them, returned, greeted another couple and seated them, before the first hostess who was now finished with the reservationless pair decided that it might be important to attend to us. By this point both D and I were livid.
We were taken inside the restaurant but our table was not ready yet, as we were early for our reservation. Fine, I can understand that. We took a seat at the sushi bar. Yes, there was a sushi bar. I drooled while watching those two men make plate after plate of spicy salmon rolls.
Of course, my fascination with the food only held at bay my growing anger for so long, as our reservation time came, went, and then fifteen minutes passed. I finally got up and went up to the woman who would actually be seating us and she told me that our table was almost ready. At this point, I was ready to explode.
And then, like a miracle, things started to get better.
A very pleasant, very perky young woman, quite stylishly and professionally dressed and as courteous as you could ever want found us at the sushi bar, took our coats, took D's hat and escorted us to our table. She was blonde and almost diabetically sweet to us.
At our table we were almost immediately offered glasses of champaigne to apologize for the fact that we had been sat late. The server was professional, prompt, and knowledgeable. The food was spectacular. I had sushi, a lovely risotto, and some sort of lemony dessert. That's the only word my mind brings to bear on it. Lemony. I can't remember anything else about the dessert.
Suffice it to say we were not only mollified but left the restaurant feeling quite content, pleased with our choice and with the overall level of service the hotel had shown us, even given the ineptitude of certain individuals.
Our next and final activity of the night was to visit Second City, which we do almost every time we visit Toronto. Telling you about the sketches would ruin them if you ever see them. However, D and I were howling with laughter almost the entire evening. If you go to Toronto, go to Second City on a Saturday night for their 10:30 show. It's worth it. Stay for the improv after. It's almost better than the main attraction, sometimes.
Satisfied in our hearts and in our stomachs we walked home through the growing cold of the early morning. The TD tower was surrounded in mist and glowing green, and I wondered if the city is ruled by a supervillain called the Toronto Dominionator who strikes down with fury from his sickly emerald tower.
D laughed at me because I'm a nerd.
At the hotel, we watched TV, then slept. The next day we would be leaving.
And I will tell more later.

Leaving on a GO Train

2007-01-30T15:50:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, D took me to Toronto, which is a dangerous thing to attempt as many of you know, since I do not travel well. But she braved my irrational fears and booked us a two night stay at the Suites on King West, and then proceeded to tell me we were going.
That's usually the best way to do it.
Anyway, we left again from Milton, and okay, we didn't leave on a train PER SE but we did take a GO bus... but bus doesn't really work with the song lyrics and makes for a crappy post title. Allow me my artistic license, damnit!
It was Friday morning, and this time, there were no creepy criminals at the terminal, although there was a possession bag from the police laying empty on the ground. The GO station must be a popular departure point for malefactors.
I'm going to reiterate that Milton is a suburban wasteland. It's a scary place. Imagine Mordor, and fill it with young urban professionals and acres of semi-detached homes. *shudder*
The bus trip was relatively uneventful, which suited me fine. Except for the guy who hopped on the bus without enough money to buy a ticket and argued with the driver until finally being kicked off, little happened of note.
I should mention here that D was sick. Practically all I heard from the seat beside me was the snort and slurp of nasal congestion, and its subsequent expulsion into a growing tumour of kleenexes stored up her sleeve. By the time we got off the bus I was travelling with Popeye. At one point I contemplated trying to find her forearms but immediately recoiled from the idea, not knowing what sort of mucus-spawned monster I would find hybernating within.
We got off the bus and immediately went in search of the hotel so that we could drop off our luggage with their valet service as we were about 2 hours early for our check in time. We did not know before booking the hotel that the valet service would hold our luggage like this, but apparently it's commonplace. We were ecstatic about that.
The hotel was literally a hop, skip, and a jump away from the train station (for Superman) and we got there a lot more quickly than I originally anticipated.
We were immediately impressed by the hotel. A very cleanly dressed valet opened the door for us, welcomed us cheerfully, and we walked into a small yet sophisticated main lobby area. It was clean, well appointed, with friendly looking staff and a professional air. The valets were only too happy to take our bags and wish us on our way.
Now the reason D wanted to travel to Toronto was to take advantage of Toronto's Wintercity festival, specifically the Winterlicious Price Fixe (that's how they spelled it) that many of the high end restaurants were offering. Essentially, at a participating restaurant for lunch you can obtain a 3 course meal for $15-$20 or for dinner you can get a 3 course for $25-$35. That's an appetizer, main course, and dessert for what most of these restaurants would charge just for an appetizer.
Our first stop was to a restaurant called Romagna Mia on Front Street. We experienced a small hiccup in trying to find the restaurant when we walked into 106 Front Street and found it was in fact an office complex. Luckily there were two girls smoking outside who apparently dealt with tourists like ourselves every day, just as I deal with people trying to find the passport office every day, and they directed us to walk ten feet further and turn the corner. Lo and behold we found the restaurant.
I'm going to give this restaurant the highest praise I will ever give a restaurant. The service was exemplary. The host, the server, all the staff were professional, well trained and polite. Our server in particular was attentive almost to a fault without actually ever hovering over the table. If he even thought that we needed him to come he would attempt to engage my eyes from across the room to confirm his suspicion, and if I wavered or became distracted he still kept and eye on me to make sure I didn't need anything. The moment I made a definite movement that I required his presence he was there, ready to serve. I was truly, thoroughly impressed.
At that restaurant I had an appetizer that I can only describe as an extremely tasty scrambled egg patty on a bed of roasted asparagus and sauteed mushrooms. It was divinely flavoured but a little too hot, temperaturewise. D, because she was sick, had chick pea soup, which she described as "Mushy". It was probably quite tasty but no match for the creature living in her nose. For a main course I had a beef brisquet on polenta (I immediately thought of a penny arcade cartoon where Gabe wishes for a placenta sandwich, but that's not my story to tell: go to the website www.penny-arcade.com and look in their archives for the comic titled "I don't think he knows what that is.") and D had a cheesy gnocci dish which was extremely tasty and delicately textured. For dessert we had a delightful panna cotta. I was thoroughly sated.
From the restaurant we proceeded back to the hotel to check in. As soon as we got to the room we dropped out luggage to the floor and had a nap. Ah, what a nap. 3 hours of blissful sleep. D needed it, and I wanted it.
Once we woke we were thoroughly energized for the evening.
We walked up to Nathan Phillips square, just a quick jog up the street. The first thing we did was head into the art exhibit they had going on called Paintings Below Zero by Gordon Halloran (I think that's his name: I'll check the website later and update if necessary). Basically what he did was dye some water and freeze it using the same cooling elements they use in skating rinks. He shattered the dyed ice and arranged it in some very beautiful patterns. Part of the exhibit appeared to me to be a cityscape, but D thought he just ran out of ice at that end. Ah, D, always the cynic. Overall the exhibit was quite lovely.
We wandered over to the stage that had been set up to see a performance by the Italian theatre group Kitonb. I may be a victim of modern consumer culture here, and maybe that's why I require instant gratification, but the performance really failed to catch my attention. I was not engaged, not engrossed, and in an open public space where I can just walk away at any time that is not a good thing. I should have been hooked within the first fifteen seconds and I can honestly say that I wasn't even hooked after ten minutes of watching. A theatre group may be able to get away with that in a closed stage because the audience has already paid their dollar and anticipated investing their time in a performance, but it's not something that works at a free show. Not to mention that the bass from the soundtrack they were playing was so pervasive that the vibrations actually caused D, perhaps because of her congestion, to feel queasy and nauseated. We were literally driven away from the performance.
We wandered around and did other things while Kitonb finished up, and came back to catch a free concert from the Philosopher Kings (or as they're known in the U.S., the Sorcerer Kings*). We caught three songs before D started to freeze to death (it was -15 out) and so we went back to the hotel.
We had a nice dinner at the hotel but I would not eat there again. They charged $7.50 for a bottle of evian water. My pint of beer cost less, and was approximately the same size. Other than that the prices were good. I had a smoked salmon and caper pizza, and D had more soup. Roasted Vegetable this time. She described its flavour as "eh."
Because we were frozen, tired, and full of food we went up to the room and fell almost immediately asleep.
I'll leave you with that for now. But there is more to come!
* The Philosopher Kings are not actually known as the Sorcerer Kings in the United States. This is a lie. They are actually known as "Johnny Righteous and the Flying Radioactive Plantains." `
`This is also a lie.

Counting the ways

2007-01-17T12:14:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's because it is winter, with the cold days reminding me of all the warmth and joy and happiness in my life that make those days bearable, but I've been thinking a lot about my relationship, the wherefore and the why.
That I love D is not in question. How could I not? But I have a habit of trying to qualify and quantify my feelings towards things, either as an intellectual exercise or because I'm a stubborn bastard who NEEDS to know the core reasons behind everything. So I've been trying to figure out why I love her. It's a futile exercise, as anyone knows, and D herself would probably claim that it's primarily pheremones and body chemistry (she's a cynic through and through).
While I could not come up with an answer to the question, I did remember a number of instances, anecdotes, and moments that really drove home for me just how endearing she is.
The other day D and I were walking to the arena to go skating. She was carrying both pairs of skates, so I called her a pack mule. Her response: "No, I'm a Sherpa. Neigh!" So I paused, grinned, and looked at her. "Let me get this straight." I said, "Are you under the misapprehension that a sherpa is a goat?" And she looked at me with chagrin and replied, "Yes?"
Another instance that occurred when I was still living with my brother makes me chuckle every time I remember it. It was either a day I was finished work or we'd just come through the door, but we were sitting on the couch and D decided to tell a story about her day. She explained that she'd been driving along the road and she saw the cutest animal. "It was brown and furry, and it had this tiny little tail and it looked a bit like a pig! It ran away and dropped into a hole in the ground!" Now my brother and I looked at each other, each knowing EXACTLY what animal she was describing, and we said in unison "Are you perhaps referring to a ground hog, by chance?" (yes, my brother and I both speak like this.) How D managed to live twenty five years without seeing a ground hog baffles the heck out of me.
My brother and I want to publish a book of D's made up words, too. Here's a couple of my favourites:

Debattical: To take a long break from an argument
Influtry: The fourth branch of the military
Broccolie: A false statement about being a vegetarian OR a fraudulent green vegetable

For some reason I can't remember the rest of the list right now (brain fart) but if I remember them I'll put them down.
I love that she's such a capable and together person, more mature and responsible than I will ever be, but who can drop her guard and be unabashedly silly and blissfully ignorant about the most random things. She's obviously brilliant or I wouldn't find her interesting, but one of the things that makes me adore her is those brief yet endearing lapses in understanding or knowledge, or the very infrequent wrong assumptions she makes about things that are understandably unimportant.
It really makes me accept the idea that it is our flaws that keep us together, and because of that they are no longer flaws, but qualities, and I wouldn't take her without them.
Hell, if she can laugh at my jokes, I guess she feels the same about my flaws. I mean, who in their right mind would laugh at one of my jokes? Besides me, I mean.

Mass Irritation

2006-12-19T17:01:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, I do not drive. My primary transportation methods are my feet, and the public transit system. In Kitchener, that means the bus.
The bus system is run by the Grand River Transit group. They service most of the local cities, from Guelph to Kitchener and Waterloo to St. Jacobs. They employ what I assume to be quite a large number of people, and own and maintain probably upwards of a couple of hundred buses.
With fares at $2.25, with transfers that last an hour and a half, this means that most people taking public transit will probably spend anywhere from $4.50 to $9.00 per day, if they're careless. The smart ones will buy bus tickets which might save them about 15 to 20% of those costs.
That's a lot of money made by the GRT. Sure, they have their expenditures, but I find it very difficult to believe that they're running at a deficit, which means they should have plenty of money to spend on improving the existing bus system AND expanding it. You need to spend money to make money, after all.
And yet the buses are consistently late. Not seldom or sometimes or every once in a while late, but consistently, all the time, every single damned day late. Usually they're late by no more than a couple of minutes, but I have in some instances -more often than I would like to recall- waited so long for a bus that when it's finally come, it may as well be the next bus coming a few minutes early, and probably is.
Those instances are most likely statistical anomalies, but more and more I wonder if this is the case. I've had several experiences on the bus over the last few years that point to laziness and ineptitude being the culprits behind buses being late for their scheduled arrival and departure times.
Once a few years back I was on my way to work at the mall, already almost late, when the bus driver decided to hop off the bus and talk to a friend of his who was working as a crossing guard. He took his little break at the inconvenience of everyone on the bus, and took about five minutes doing so. Now, five minutes may not seem like a lot, especially since this particular instance happened in summertime, but in cold weather it can mean the difference between getting frostbite and dying from hypothermia.
On another occasion a bus driver stopped the bus in front of Tim Hortons, exited, and ran inside for a coffee. I like my coffee. I also purchase it on my scheduled breaks. I don't just drop my customer whenever I feel a hankering for some caffeine. That's what this bus driver did. He left his paying customers, to most of whom time is undoubtedly a factor in their transportation arrangements, to get himself a coffee.
Just today I was taking the bus to work and another incident occurred. Understand that I usually try to be at work an hour before my scheduled shift, because I like to take the time to relax and catch up on emails and work on offline work before I start my shift, so I wasn't exactly going to be late if the bus happened to run into a delay, which is another reason I go to work so early. That doesn't mean what happened didn't irritate me.
We all know teenagers when grouped together seem to reach a critical mass of idiocy and start acting out to prove that they actually matter, which they don't, but it's a common misconception. The bus was full of them, having just gotten off school. I don't mind teenagers on the bus, because I simply ignore them, and in turn, they ignore me. This is an agreeable situation.
Apparently the bus driver did not have such tolerance.
One of these teenagers, as they tend to do, rang the bell with no intention of getting off. Fine. Jordan has a similar story to tell about a similar situation, but what happened was basically the same thing. The bus driver stopped the bus, and would not start it again until someone got off the bus. We waited for five minutes before these particular teenagers decided to get off.
While I don't applaud the behavior of the teenagers, I felt the bus driver should understand my feelings about the situation, so I put away my book and walked up to him. I said "I just wanted to mention to you that the tactic you just used was extremely disrespectful to those of us who are actually trying to get to work. Thank you." The way I write it seems calm but I was on the verge of lividity. Many passengers heard me and gave me grins of solidarity.
The bus driver's reply: "Well, if they'd just said "sorry, wrong stop" or something we would have gotten going."
At this point I was back in my seat but I wanted to reply. Pardon me? Since when did this have anything to do with a misunderstanding about whether they wanted to get off, or if they chose the wrong stop? They were obviously toying with you, you knew it, and you decided to teach them a lesson.
I may be crazy off the wall here but as a bus driver, is it this man's responsibility to be the parent to these children? Is he their teacher? Is he even a distant relative to whom they owe some explanation of their behavior or whose opinion should matter to them? No. They are not going to pay attention to any lesson that a bus driver attempts to teach them because to them, he is just that: The man who drives the freaking bus. So do your job, and drive the freaking bus. Inconveniencing all of your other paying customers for the sake of teaching a lesson to a few reprehensible youths is both idiotic and a waste of everyone's time.
So next time the bus is insanely late I am going to question the bus driver as to why. These are but a few examples of the irresponsibility of the employees of the GRT. I have others, but these ones truly come to mind. It's no longer just chance, or accident. I have a feeling now that every time the bus is late, it's either because some bus driver is trying to have some sort of pathetic power trip, or because he's abandoning his job in favour of some personal agenda.
He or she should be reprimanded for either.

My Purview to Review

2006-12-18T15:45:00.000-05:00

D and I went to see "The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge" yesterday. Knowing that Linds and James and my parents have yet to see it, I'll try to give away as little as I can of the plot.
As much fun as I might poke at Theatre and Company, I think that they put on a spectacular show, and this play was no exception. Whomever is in charge of set design there does an absolutely marvellous job.
The play begins before the audience has even seated. The theatre is transformed into an eighteenth century courthouse, so that upon entering you feel as though you are in fact entering said courthouse, and the seat you take is your place in the gallery where you will bear witness to the proceedings. A faux parquet wooden floor and a wooden judge's podium and witness stand have been laid out before the audience, with two gas lantern chandeliers hanging from ropes close to the ground. It became immediately apparent that at the beginning of the play someone would come to light these lamps and raise them up to brighten the courthouse, which I thought lent a sense of authenticity to the play.
I'll say right now that I thoroughly enjoyed the play, and I think it would be difficult not to. I would call it a "comedic homage" to Charles Dickens' classic, not a satire since it had not the tongue in cheek criticism for Charles Dickens' story that a true satire would require. Rather, the play seemed to be intended as a reminder to those of us who have grown up with Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas and have become used to his story what in fact that story was trying to teach us. Namely, the play reminds us that Charles Dickens meant for all men and women to show good cheer and charity to their fellows all the year around, and not to restrict ourselves to being good to each other merely one day out of three hundred and sixty five.
At times the play was sad, but never became maudlin. At times it was funny, but never farcical. At times it was downright scary, though the joy with which it was written soon banished fear and turned it into delight. One can easily detect Mark Brown's own feelings towards Christmas, or more pointedly the Christmas Spirit in the passionate speeches given by the witnesses at the trial, in the criticisms levied by Scrooge towards those same witnesses, and in the warm hearted advocacy of the defense attourney working on behalf of the Ghosts of Christmas.
What really stood out was Mark Brown's command of language. I found myself enthralled by the speeches and engaged fully in the trial, truly feeling that I was part of it and that I should give every word my full concentration. I paid careful attention to every turn of phrase, every joke, and never felt a moment of my attention wasted or squandered. The writing was so good I think I would have enjoyed it as much had it been performed as a radio play, with only my mind upon which the images evoked by the actors' stirring words could dance and play.
I had but one criticism, and a small one at that. On several occasions Mark Brown takes quotations directly from the popularized film versions of Charles Dickens' "A Chrismas Carol". They are used to great effect and well, and seem intended once more to make clear that this is an homage, but at times I felt the play suffered from the use of these quotations. I think that these quotations were a crutch upon which the playwright leaned, though like Tiny Tim after Scrooge's interventions the crutch was unnecessary. The reason for their use was clear, but I think "A Christmas Carol" is popular enough and well known enough that most men, women, and children know it nearly by heart already, and it would have been better to focus on the story at hand than to worry about drawing our minds back time and time again to the original tale with anything other than allusion.
I highly recommend seeing this play, be it at Theatre and Company or some other playhouse. I would see it again myself, but I think I've finally given away all the tickets I had available. And I would like to congratulate Mark Brown on recreating a fantastic world in which I happily spent two hours of my life, and which left me and D warm for the rest of the night.
On a side note I would like to suggest perhaps writing this as a radio play, as I mentioned above, because I think it would translate quite well, and perhaps broaden the audience to whom it could be delivered. Just a thought.
Merry Christmas.

Secret Shame

2006-12-13T19:54:00.001-05:00

It's time for me to come clean about something. I've alluded to it in the past, and maybe it's been missed, but I think it's important to have a frank discussion about the topic.
I like figure skating.
I don't mean I personally enjoy flouncing around on the rink like a hyperactive background dancer on wheels. What I mean to say is that when I see figure skating, I get a giddy sense of joy and pleasure tingling all through my body, and find myself unwilling to tear my gaze away. I love watching it on TV, and while I've never had the opportunity, would love to see it in person as well.
To give people an idea about the severity of this problem, I have the same sort of reaction to finding figure skating on TV that most people reserve for a friend's new baby or getting a replica Darth Vader lightsaber signed by James Earl Jones for Christmas (which would rock).
For the longest time I refused to admit it. I would only ever watch figure skating in the depths of night, when all the house was asleep and it was just me and Christi Yamaguchi, or Michelle Kwan, or their compatriots, when I could revel in their skill, in their triumphs and tragedies in private.
I realized I had a problem when D caught me watching figure skating when she came home from work one day a little bit early, and I wasn't able to change the channel in time.
I know that figure skating doesn't really hurt anyone, except for perhaps when the skaters wipe out, but hiding my love of it is unhealthy for me, pyschologically. I shouldn't keep it bottled up inside, or one day I'll find myself in sequins and not really know why.
So I'm coming out. I like figure skating. I think Triple Salchows are awe inspiring.
I even like the music.
So ridicule me if you like, but I'm proud of my love of figure skating and I have no reason to be ashamed.
I am a skating afficionado. Hear me roar!

Theatrical Overcompensation

2006-12-13T12:38:00.000-05:00

I've come to the conclusion that at a certain point, a company correcting a mistake by giving away free services or products loses its impact.
A couple of years ago D had an evil plan. A couple of years ago? What am I saying? She has an evil plan every day. Well, this particular evil plan was to have the two of us experience some culture.
I'm a cultured guy. I love culture. I enjoy art galleries, museums, concerts, musicals. I enjoy ballet. And, my most secret of shames... I enjoy figure skating. So I asked D to tell me more. She mentions that she's been looking at the downtown theatre, at the play series they're running and that it looks really good. She decides to buy us a subscription to their season as a Christmas present.
The plays we see are good. Most of them very good. The actors are all believable, the plays themselves well written and impactful. It's a small theatre but it puts on a great show.
Fast forward to this year.
We decide to buy another subscription for this year's season, more based on how we enjoyed the previous year than because of the description of the new plays they'll be performing. When reading about the new season, we find out they're trying a new tactic. Split the season into two sub seasons, geared to different themes. Sounds great! What? We also get these electronic pass keys that will act as our tickets into the theatre? Fancy! That makes the gadget loving nerd inside me happy.
D orders the subscription.
And we wait.
And wait.
I sit hungrily anticipating my electronic access card, like a starved vulture waiting for a man lost in the desert to die.
We call the theatre, finally. No electronic pass keys. Something went wrong when they were being ordered, so we're going to be sent printed tickets. Oh, and because there's been such a delay, here's some free tickets to the Christmas show.
Great! D's sister is coming home from Britain at Christmas, her and her husband might like to come to the show! We're very happy about this compensation, even though it was unnecessary.
We see a couple of shows, have to reschedule one or two of them because the matinees are on days where one or the other of us is working, but we're enjoying the season. All of a sudden D gets an email from the theatre.
In essence, it says that they feel their performances so far have not been meeting their own requirements in terms of quality. So here's two free tickets to the Christmas show.
O-kay?
We see another couple of shows, and are rapidly approaching November when we both get a call on our respective phones. D actually answers hers, and finds out that due to low subscription and attendance rates, etc, we have to reschedule a play we were planning on seeing for a different day. We're fine with this, so we reschedule.
Oh, and by the way, due to the inconvenience this has caused, here's two free tickets to our Christmas show.
WE DON'T NEED ANY MORE FREAKING TICKETS! HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN WE BRING TO THIS DAMNED PLAY! I don't think I HAVE six friends who would want to go to see The Trial of Ebeneazer Scrooge. What am I supposed to do, scalp the things? (I'd like to put an edit in here since the writer of the play has apparently been reading my blog. I didn't intend for the above to imply my friends wouldn't LIKE the play. I just don't think I can round up enough friends with an interest in theatre and the spare time available to SEE the play.)
Please, god, stop with the tickets. You know what would be adequate compensation for a mistake? Promise NEVER TO OFFER ME ANOTHER FREE TICKET. Now that would make me a happy customer.

Felonious Attitude

2006-12-10T12:49:00.000-05:00

Something happened on Saturday on my trip with D to Toronto for her company Christmas party that really made me think about myself and my responses to certain situations, and made me wonder whether other people have the same sort of reaction.
I woke up around my regular time on Saturday (10 AM) to D prodding me awake, but doing so with offers of coffee, so I forgave her. I also knew that I had to be up so we could travel to Toronto, and that she'd been awake since early morning at some cookie faire doing work. I didn't really have a leg to stand on if I had chosen to whine about waking up, so I woke with as much grace and forebearance as I could manage (I rolled out of bed and whined at D for about a minute, incomprehensibly).
Luckily, she knows this is just a defense mechanism and continued to prod me until my brain actually engaged.
After coffee I became as lucid as I ever am, and realized that in my sleepy stupor I had already dressed myself. I checked for unwanted undergarments attached to my clothing, found none, and D and I were off to Milton.
I'd like to take a moment to make a comment about Milton. It's flat. It's VERY flat. And because it's flat, it's windy. It also has the world's highest concentration of townhouses. These features combine to make it the most inhospitable city I have ever visited. It's like finding one's self on the surface of the moon, without the moon's aesthetic appeal.
We had to visit Milton in order to take the GO bus into Toronto. It is a good, safe place to park until early in the morning, and most importantly a free place to park.
We got to Milton later than intended, however. We were about 10 minutes late for the bus we had wanted to take, and had to wait about 3 quarters of an hour for the next bus. When we arrived at the GO station we parked the car and headed over to the terminal, hoping to buy our tickets. As we approached, we spied three men standing at the doors to the terminal. Now, I'm suspicious by nature, so when we got close enough to be hailed and the first thing out of one of the men's mouths was, "Hey, you guys got a smoke I can buy?" I was instantly on guard.
The three men were in fact two boys, and one man. I'd say the boys were probably 15 and 17, and the man was mid 30's. The man was in the process of taking off his belt and throwing it in the garbage as we approached, which was odd to say the least. All three were also clutching identical clear plastic bags, each with a slip of legal sized paper inside and containing what I assumed at the time to be shopping.
We quickly departed when we found that the terminal was closed (I can understand why no one would want to work on a Saturday in Milton, so I wasn't too miffed.) and went to find coffee.
After returning with coffee for me and apple juice for D, we parked and chatted, and I noted that the three men had vanished from the terminal. We were chatting for several minutes when I suddenly spied them loping across the parking lot back towards the terminal again. They had probably been to a nearby convenience store or some such while D and I got drinks.
We decided to brave the wind, the cold, and the desolate parking lot and go wait for the bus, so we did. We quickly froze as we crossed the lot and entered the bus shelter. I say "shelter" in the loosest sense possible, because for all its solid construction it may as well have been a hastily assembled pile of screen doors. Wind resistance was certainly not its strong suit. In the shelter awaited the three men, who were minding their own business, just waiting for the bus. The oldest of them even commented to D on the cold, and she replied in kind, courteously. I don't think she had any suspicions yet as to the nature of the three men, but some had definitely been brewing in the back of my mind.
I noticed that on the ground inside the shelter lay one of the plastic bags the men had been clutching, now empty. The piece of paper was in fact a label. It stated:
"(indecipherable) Police Services." at the top. And further down, "Property Bag, .50 c"
These three people had just been released either from prison, or from a jail cell, having completed their sentence or been parolled or even having met bail. Whatever the case may be, my first assumption was that these men were criminals.
Why did I jump to this conclusion? These men may have been drunk and tossed in the drunk tank overnight. Maybe they had been caught sharing a joint or two, which I don't consider a crime. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. I had no idea. All I know was that I suddenly wished I had a police officer nearby to watch these men and make sure they attempted nothing illegal.
I question my reaction because it says a lot about my sense of tolerance that I leapt to immediate distrust of these strangers just because of circumstantial evidence. I was terrified for D, afraid that we would be mugged and beaten, robbed of our funds and left for dead. Why? I had no evidence to justify this reaction, since these men had essentially left us alone, not even giving us suspicious glances.
Should we be immediately suspicious of strangers? Is it the safest thing to do? Or should we fight those impulses and approach even the most intimidating stranger with a sort of cautious optimism?
I know the decision I came to. Keep them in front of me and don't let them see where I put my money.
And make sure D doesn't wave her wallet around like a tiny flag in front of potential criminals.

Rude Nudity

2006-12-06T12:08:00.001-05:00

As a lead in to this story, I'd like to announce that I don't have sinus cancer.
This became a concern of mine shortly after I quit smoking, last year in November. Over the following months I started to develop increasingly painful headaches around my nose, my eyes, etc. My ears began to tear up more often, to be more sensitive to cold winds, smoke, and the like. From time to time when I blew my nose there was even a little blood. For a long while I blew this off as simply a side effect of the smoking, that my nasal passages had been dried out by 5 years of smoking a pack a day, and now without the cigarettes my body was finally starting to react.
Well, it just kept getting worse, until feeling unhealthy became kind of my normal day to day mood. A day without a headache was a good day. I didn't complain very often because, well, I don't like to complain unless it's about something silly.
I finally decided to look up my symptoms using that wonderful tool for budding hypochondriacs, the ole interweb.
First possibility I get a response for is sinus cancer. I'm freaked, but I don't want to freak anyone else out, so I downplay it. I tell a few key people who may need to know. D, of course, and my manager at work. I think about going to the doctor, but, well, I'm terrified it's sinus cancer and that I'll go, get tests, and find out I've got six months to live. That would suck.
Finally I decide that since I'm going to be applying for my passport, and my doctor is the perfect guarantor because he literally pried my whiny, crying, annoying self from my mother's body (I don't think I wanted to leave; I've been cold ever since) I should set up an appointment to get my sinuses checked AND get my guarantor section of the passport application filled out. So I had the appointment last Friday.
It was a fairly pleasant trip to the doctor's office. A bit rainy, and my pants got wet, but otherwise I was okay. I got there, took my shoes off outside the office, and sat down to wait. My appintment time came and went, but that's to be expected because doctors are never on time, and I passed the time talking to a lovely older couple about my fears of sinus cancer, and about "kids these days" (see previous post about how old I am).
Eventually the doctor's executive assistant lets me in, and I sit in one of the doctor's exam rooms, and I realize something.
For my entire life, or at least the majority of it, my mother took me to the doctor. I went, got into the room, and she told me to strip to my undies and sit on the paper. That was process. Without fail, I had to get naked.
And all of a sudden I realize that as a 25 year old, I don't know the protocol. Do I need to get naked for the doctor to check my sinuses? Maybe he'll want to check my breathing, make sure that if it's an infection it hasn't spread to my lungs. Should I just take off my shirt? Will a sinus infection affect my reflexes, and thusly will he need me to take off my pants so he can tap my knee with that tiny hammer of his? I have absolutely no idea. None. I start to freak out about what clothes to divest myself of and totally forget why I'm there.
And before I can decide, the doctor comes in and asks me how I'm doing, and my first impulse is to shout "I don't know when to take off my pants!". But luckily I have a fairly good mental blocking mechanism (about 2 out of 3 times it keeps a comment like that from coming out) and I manage to blurt out that I'm worried I have sinus cancer.
He tells me to get on the paper. FANTASTIC! Impulses engage and I strip to my undies and hop on the paper, like a good little five year old.
The doctor takes his little flashlight doohicky and shines it in each nostril, for two seconds.
"Low key infection. Probably environmental."
I discuss treatment options with him, we come to a decision and he prescribes me some nasal spray.
I'm still, at this point, practically naked, so I pause to awkwardly get back into my pants.
"Yeah, you probably only need to take those off for a physical." He tells me, with a very gentle criticism in his voice. Thanks. Great. Good to know. Can you put up a sign next time, doctor?
Now, I'm really comfortable around my doctor, because, like I said, he BIRTHED me (he was quite mistaken when he said I'd be a football player, but that's a story for another time) but I leave his office with the greatest feeling of shame I've had in a long time. I, a relatively healthy 25 yr old male, was unable to grasp the etiquette behind a doctor's appointment.
I don't know now that when it is time for my physical that I am going to be able to muster the courage to drop trou.
I think that when that time arrives, I'll just tell my doctor to go in through the fly.

Offside

2006-11-29T15:32:00.000-05:00

Having just put up Winston Churchill's picture on this blog, I for the first time realized how horrendously sour looking he is. I think he manages to say with that disapproving face exactly how ashamed he is of everything anyone else ever conceives of doing. It's like he's looking at me from the past and waggling his finger in admonition.
Creepy.

Real Duds

2006-11-29T12:25:00.000-05:00

I recently realized that I am getting old. At the age of 25, I realize, one should not start to notice how old one is becoming, but I have. It's the onset of male pattern baldness that's done it. I am not yet far enough along to be called "balding" but there will come a day, maybe 2 or 3 years down the road, that someone will stick me with that label, and my life will officially be over.
This grim outlook caused me to become somewhat nostalgic, and something Mel said when we were at a LAN on Saturday with Nick made me remember the good old days. The good old days of yellow pants.
The picture above is not a picture of me, but those are almost the spitting image of my yellow pants. They were outlandish, bright, cheerful, and omnipresent. Once I started wearing them, I didn't stop for what must have seemed to some people to be several lifetimes.
When I really thought about it, though, I started to comprehend that my penchant for odd clothing did not start at the yellow pants. I thought at first that my silk shirt phase was the first time I started wearing strange clothing. Strangely, my mother was very supportive of the silk shirt phase. At the time I thought it perfectly normal for her to happily spend thirty to forty dollars at a time on silk shirts that later would rot in the armpits due to my teenage hormone driven perspiration (for those of you who didn't know that silk did this, you now have a fun fact!). When I think back on those days now, however, I have the nagging suspicion that my mom was making fun of me, and my father was in on the joke.
And it was that thought, the understanding that my mother has secretly watched me ridicule myself with a terrifying glee, that brought back the oldest memory I have of wearing odd clothing.
Home made camouflage pants.
It was her all along.
Since practically the day I was brewed (I refuse to believe I was conceived. My parents don't get along that well) my mother has been quietly mocking me. When I was too young to protest, she did my hair in wings -WINGS! I was a tiny blond jetfighter! Then she dresses me in camouflage pants, which admittedly I thought were truly spectacular at the time. Then she waits several years and when I see my first silk shirt, BAM, she buys it for me and a new phase of mockery begins. Yellow pants, black velcro pants that allow me to drop trou at a moment's notice, trenchcoats that are far too big, winter coats with a waist elastic that when cinched make me look like a busty body building russian mennonite.
So now I wonder if my fashion sense for the rest of my life will be tainted by those early, formative days. Will I be unable to select a nice button up shirt without wondering what it would look like in silk? Will I secretly long for my dress pants to have velcro straps so that in the middle of a meeting I can undo the velcro and reveal my pyjama bottoms? Will all my ties be yellow, in loving memory of their bifurcated sibling?
I anticipate with dread my altzheimer's days. God only knows what sort of things I'll try to wrap around my shrivelled frame. Hamburger meat. Shania Twain. Chain linked undies.
Mmmmmmm.... chain linked undies.

Like Cooking?

2006-11-28T15:45:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, the apartment is hot. I used to complain, when winter started, that this was not the case. We were getting snow on the ground and there was still no heat.
Those days are sorely missed.
Apparently our apartment building has two heat settings: OFF and KILL. The OFF setting is actually misnamed, because in that state heat is actually siphoned away from the apartment, so that one can be warm upon entering the apartment and within several minutes become a popsicle. When the heat is in the OFF setting, I turn on the stove just to stay alive.
The KILL setting is more aptly named. On that setting, the walls glow with radiant energy, waves of heat throbbing out of every inch of carpet, every millimetre of wall space, every appliance. Even the air itself is ignited, like a bad dream from the days of nuclear testing. D has been unable to sleep and has taken to fleeing to the couch so that our combined body heat does not cause the apartment to reach critical mass and cause a detonation that would level city blocks. Ostensibly, that's the reason, but we have been eating a lot of garlicky foods, lately. I may not currently make the best bedmate.
Rather than cooking, I hold a frying pan in mid air for approximately 2.2 seconds until whatever is on it has turned into a sizzling meal fit for a king.
One benefit is that every remaining fly in the apartment is now quite thoroughly dead. Of course, this does not bode well for the remaining living beings in the household.
I'm trying to convince D not to have a Christmas party, not because I don't want the company, or can't deal with the cleaning afterwards, but because of the fact that for days before the police arrived to remove the dessicated corpses of ourselves and our guests, the other people in the building would wonder who was having a barbecue.

Oh, How the Fruit Flies?

2006-11-26T14:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, since I told an embarrassing story about me, I'm now going to tell one about D. Fair's fair.
During the summer D and I were in the habit of going to the market and picking up a variety of fresh fruits. We used them in everything, from my patent pending Jeremy's Juicy Rouladin Surprise, to lunches, to evening snacks. The fruit was cheap, and it was good.
There was also way too much of it.
One day, D noticed that we had some fruit flies. She looked at the bowl of fruit, and saw that it was a bit infested. So, she found a place to put it.
Now, I sleep in late, so I woke up some three hours later. I made myself some coffee, played on the computer, and started to consider lunch. I remembered that we had some chili or soup in a tupperware container in the fridge that I could warm up.
I go to the fridge, which is suspiciously empty, except for a big jug of juice from D's sister's wedding and the soup I'm seeking. I grab the soup, and run through emergency procedures for starting the microwave.
I run around the house and shut everything off, leaving only the alarm clocks. The reason for this is that the genious who installed the electricity in the apartment put every single outlet on the same fuse, so if ANYTHING is on when the microwave starts we blow that puny little 15 amp fuse. We've gone through nearly a gross since we moved in.
Anyway, emergency procedures complete, I go to the microwave, and open it.
I stagger backward under the assault of what I estimate to be approximately two hundred billion fruit flies. A veritable cloud of the tiny buggers comes flowing out of the microwave, so dense I have to blow my nose to clear it of the things. I spend the next few minutes finding something, anything to kill them with and eventually resort to a bottle of windex, which gets most of them, except for a randy few that proceed to propogate their miniature race so that we have permanent housemates for the next few months.
I look in the microwave. A few lonely, outcast loser fruitflies hang forlornely over, yes, what is in fact a bowl of now quite inedible fruit.
D's solution to the fruit fly problem was to place both they and their primary food source into a tiny, hot, enclosed space, where, with their infintesimal lifespans they could in the three hours between her leaving and my waking happily spend about a quatrillion generations "being fruitful".
Some other options I quickly came up with:
A: throw out the fruit
B: put the fruit in the fridge
C: hire a lawyer to negotiate the separation of the fruit flies from the fruit (believe me, this makes more sense than the actual solution taken)
I have since placed an injunction on D dealing with anything insect related in the household. If we get invaded by insects from space, I better hear about it before she decides that an appropriate measure in dealing with them would be to hand them over our house keys and invite them to stay over, while feeding us to their young.
I await the next incident with dread.

A Tale of Woe

2006-11-24T14:19:00.000-05:00

So, there's a story that D thinks I should tell. Because I love her, I'm willing to, but it means that very soon I'll have to find a quiet place to die from embarrassment.
Okay, so we ran out of toilet paper (not the crux of the story). Since I had the day off after this happened, it became my task and I accepted it freely to go to the store and pick up more. A simple enough assignment, but apparently fraught with unexpected risks.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I got up, played a bit of WOW, then showered, shaved, and quickly threw on some clothes and I was out the door. I strode leisurely down the street to Sobey's, stopped at the Tim Horton's to partake of the Ichor of the Black God, and then successfully managed to purchase not only toilet paper at Sobey's but also some brand spanking new razor blades, which apparently are made of gold given how much they cost.
I get home. I take off my coat, take off my keys, put my money on the baker's rack. I even strip off my shirt because my apartment against all laws of thermodynamics is boiling hot.
I turn around and see myself in the hall mirror.
Something's hanging off my butt.
To explain, the pants I was wearing that day have back pockets that do up with velcro. Velcro, as we all know, likes to grab and hold fabrics.
I walked to the store with a pair of D's baby blue lacey underwear hanging off my butt. I stopped at Tim Horton's with underwear on my ass. I bought toilet paper not knowing that I was walking around like a flag carrier in a game of CTF, only my flag was blue and practically see through.
I nearly had a heart attack right there, in the kitchen. D would have come home and found me dead in her kitchen, apparently trying to wear her underwear on the outside of my pants.
I'm seriously considering burning the pants.

Anniversary

2006-11-24T00:56:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's silly, but today is the 3 yr, 4 mth anniversary of the day that D and I met. I'm still amazed on a daily basis that such a wonderful woman has managed to tolerate me for so long. (really, I don't get it.) Regardless, babe, happy anniversary.
Since I haven't bought you flowers in the longest time, and probably still won't have the chance today, I thought I'd do the next best thing.
And Nyah Nyah, I remembered first.
Not that this is a competition.
*hides his first place anniversary remembering trophy*

Songs for A Day

2006-11-23T12:53:00.000-05:00

Can everybody list all the songs they can think of that deal with the subject of a day? Like "Everyday" by Buddy Holly or "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats? My babe's trying to compile a list, and don't worry if you duplicate some, just list song title and artist.
James, this one's really for you.

TV Series: Cable or DVD?

2006-11-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

Having made a decision in my own household to cancel the cable services in favour of purchasing television series on DVD, I was wondering what other people's stances were on that same subject? Remember that I work for a cable provider so I'm cancelling cable that's given me at a discount.
With the increasing availability of TV series on DVD, a patient person can watch one favourite show in DVD format while waiting for a season of another show to end so that it can then become available on disc as well. Heck, for the serious collector, one can watch and rewatch favourite episodes from select shows instead of waiting for those particular episodes to come out in reruns. I know that my girl has the entire series of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer on DVD, and there are about 6 episodes that we regularly pop in for a bit of fun (Once More With Feeling, anyone?). We've watched the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, though we rented that, and we're eagerly awaiting the third. Mel, because of how much she's moved around, who hasn't had the opportunity to really subscribe to cable, has pretty much all of her favourite shows (Stargate SG-1... and, ummmm.... Stargate SG-1?) on DVD, and I don't think that she now has any interest in obtaining cable.
So it seems to me that spending $40 to $90 on an entire SEASON of a show is such a better investment than spending the same amount of money in a month on the off chance that a particular channel is going to show the episode or the series in which you're interested. TV is full of so much chaff these days (some gold, as well, but rarely) that it seems insane not to take control and personally customize your entertainment experience. Yes, it means we have to wait for the season to be over to grab it on DVD, but how much of a hardship is that, really? It builds anticipation, and when we finally get our hands on that season we can devour it over a period of days rather than one episode a week.
I also wonder what the future holds for the market for tv shows on DVD. I mean, really, if the companies were smart, they'd release the series 1 DVD at a time, 4 episodes a disc at $15 a pop. I mean, I'd still probably buy it, it would make the company more money, and it might start to make cable television a thing of the past.

Everyone's doing it

2006-11-22T21:48:00.000-05:00

Well, everyone else got a blog, so what the heck. I now have one too. Not that I have many important things to say, but maybe if I start blogging often I'll start doing more writing, too.
I'll keep this first entry short.
I have a silly question for your consideration. Consider the conflict between pirates and ninjas, well documented in nerdology. Both groups are technically evil, but fully committed to the eradication of the other. Is this the case with all evil organizations? Is the true enemy of Goldfinger Dr. No? Will the Brotherhood of Mutants ultimately focus its energies on destroying Galactus?
I mean, George Bush Sr. and George W. have ultimately toppled Saddam, giving us a real world example of two evil organizations duking it out. Can we expect Putin to eradicate Kim Jong Il?
Is there a place for heroes when villains take care of each other?
Really, I think Lois Lane had the right idea. This world doesn't need a Superman.
James is gonna kill me for that one.