Your google search questions answered.

Once again, internet, you have asked google random questions and ended up at this blog looking for the answers. Today I deliver:

No, I did not die in a car accident in Cranford.

I don't know if there is a surefire way to get rid of sweat stains, but try mixing baking soda with some water to make a bit of a paste to pre-treat your laundry with. That works on some stains.

No, I am not a brain in a jar, though I have often thought about how awesome that would be.

Now, when you ask "how to awake are INSTINCTS" I think that you should awake your ability to choose the correct homonyms.

To the best of my knowledge I have never had a dream about alligators. I used to have invisible alligators that lived with me sometime before I started kindergarten.

I don't know when the next craft fair in Burnaby will be. Check out the BC Craft Fairs Calendar.

Is there any specific reason why we should be buying alligator plastic? Is it better than real plastic? Do tell.

Girl Guide cookies are no longer made by Mr. Christie, and have not been for many years now. Christie kept jacking the price up and Guides was feeling squeezed, so they switched to Dare. The recipe that Dare uses is different and I don't think they taste as good, especially the vanilla ones, which is sad because I only ever ate the vanilla ones, especially when no one was around to make me eat the chocolate ones to balance out the half-empty box.

As far as I know, the easiest way to get a playhouse with a table inside is to put a table inside a playhouse. I might be wrong though.

When someone searches for "nothing on nude girls" do they want to find girls that have nothing on while simultaneously having nothing on? Or is it that they don't want to find naked girls?

If something's between your teeth you should try flossing.

Sorry, I have no surefire cure for halitosis. If it's really unbearably bad and the standard stuff isn't working then maybe you should talk to your doctor.

Cats!

And now we come to the real reason why I have an SLR camera - to take pictures of my cat.

Riki bought a condo and so today I helped her move. It is both awesome and crazy that she's 21 and owns her own home. I'm not entirely sure if it's sunk in for her yet.

It's small, but newly renovated with new appliances so it's fairly nice. More importantly, it's closer to where I'm going to be moving so we might do more stuff together.

As we were unpacking boxes, a random black cat walked in, started meowing all over the place and then refused to leave. We're not sure where it came from. It was pretty friendly so she's decided to keep it if no one comes to claim it.

We named it Riki Junior because it's small, skinny, talks and eats a lot.

At 2am I scare Norwegians with my psychic abilities

Tom Roger says:
Why dont men buy pink phones?

erin says:
if you want a pink phone then I'm happy to support your decision there

Tom Roger says:
I guess it doesnt suit the male image
I dont want one at all

erin says:
I wouldn't even be embarrassed

Tom Roger says:
imagine what people would say!

erin says:
oh, look he has a pink phone. did you see the match with rosenborg yesterday?
yeah, I totally thought the referees were assholes
that guy totally did not deserve that red card
:P

Tom Roger says:
what?
yeah, i watched that game. but..
how did you even know about the game?

erin says:
you told me to imagine what people would say if you had a pink phone
so I picked a football team and made it up
did someone get a red card when rosenborg played yesterday?

Tom Roger says:
what
yeah
there was a red card

erin says:
I'm psychic!

Tom Roger says:
well. this is scary

erin says:
haha

Tom Roger says:
you have messed with my head now

erin says:
aww
sorry

Things I learned today

There are still Asian restaurants out there that make me feel very self-consciously white. Chinese: no problem, eat it all the time. Sushi: I eat it at least once a week. Thai: awesome and delicious. Vietnamese: when in doubt, order pho. Korean: holy shit! How do I eat this stuff?

My cat really really likes drinking coffee flavoured liqueurs. She and I were having a piece of cheesecake together, but because the cheesecake has been in the fridge for two weeks, it's a little dry. I poured some capuccino liqueur on it to soften it up. Sal sniffed it and got very interested so I let her have some too and she inhaled it.

A guy named Mark tried to pick my mom up at the Rockhound Rendezvous. The women at these events tend to be a bit on the over-60 side and a bit on the overweight side as well, so what kind of men pick up women there? Men that try to pick up my mother, that's what. My dad's the sort of person who makes himself scarce when this is happening, so he can watch and laugh from a distance.

65/365: Uncle Ivor

Uncle Ivor isn't technically my uncle. He was married to my grandmother's sister, Haroldine, a chronically unpleasant woman who smoked like a chimney and complained all the time about her health problems. She's been dead for many years and he is now married to a former Olympic skier who is as sweet as he is.

Ivor never lost contact with us though. He used to visit my grandmother in the hospital fairly regularly, and because he doesn't live very far away, we tend to run into him at restaurants.

64/365: Crazy Linda

Linda rides the train every day and rarely pays her fare. She turns the act of getting off of the train into a lengthy ordeal, during which she will block her door with her baggage and not allow anyone to pass her. Perhaps because she takes so long to exit the train or perhaps due to the fact that she isn't particularly pleasant, she occasionally gets to the bus stop just as her bus is leaving.

There was a time when she used to just walk the three blocks to work from the train station, but those days are no longer. Now that there is a bus route, she can't be bothered. When she misses the bus she will try to get a ride.

Hitchhiking in suburban areas during rushour is not all that easy because people can't be bothered to stop, especially on a bridge, which happens to both be illegal and just not a very good place to stop your car. When she gets frustrated and late for work, she resorts to jumping out into the traffic to stop them herself.

All this to save herself a three-block walk.

Big blob o' black revisited

The big blob 'o black, aka Cheryl Oberle's Kimono Shawl is done! It has been an ordeal, but I'm proud of it.

Now to find my mom and stick it on her and say "happy birthday!" What? You're thinking that her birthday was more than two weeks ago? Well, you see, my mom has a conditional birthday. It comes around whenever I have birthday gifts to give her. That's why she's my mom.

I rewrite fortune cookies

One day very soon you will pass a stranger at the side of the road who desperately needs your help. You will never meet this person, though he or she would have been the love of your life.

You will meet a blue eyed person and be repulsed by the way he snorts in conversation.

Consider the sponge. It sucks up everything you throw at it, but does that really make it a better sponge?

In the 16th Century an obscure Flemish artist painted a portrait that looked remarkably like you. He died unknown and unmourned.

Your best friend died before you were born. Your true love has yet to be born.

Even the simple act of breathing can kill you.

This Americanized Chinese food is loaded with MSG and has no nutritional value whatsoever. You should know better.

Take a deep breath. You're going to need it.

Genetically, humans of all ethnicities are 99.99% the same. Crazy, eh?

Your lucky animal is the naked mole rat.

Somewhere in the world right now lightning is hitting a tree. Nothing profound about that, honest.

A roofing nail on the road came dangerously close to puncturing your tire on the way here.

The next time you visit the dairy section at your local grocery store there will be an acute shortage of homo milk. There will be no fuss because no one drinks that stuff anyways.

There are no lucky numbers on the back of this slip. Pick your own.

Have you ever considered raising chickens? Reconsider.

The mother of all hair spiders is living inside your shower drain, just beyond your reach.

Why are you looking for enlightenment inside your baked goods anyways?

Lynn Peak

Our parents don't believe us when we say that we don't fight when they're not around, but we actually get along fairly well. They also seem to think we don't do anything together, ever, which is mostly true.

I'll suggest some sort of activity, concert or event and then she'll make a face at me and then it won't happen. I tend not to ask her to do anything because I know she'll say no. So imagine my surprise when I suggested that since the parental unit is away we should go hiking or something and she said yes.

What I have since learned is that all of a sudden we have separate yet compatible interests. I want to go outside and do something and she wants to take pictures of stuffed animals.

We set off to take lots of pictures of us being non-beligerent and non-lard-assed. Our intended destination: Lynn Headwaters Regional Park. It just so happens that it has its own bus route and is actually not all that hard to get to from where I live. I don't know why I didn't know that before.

We ended up getting there a bit later than I had planned, and once we arrived we found out that the bus stop is actually a 20-30 minute walk from the park. At the trailheads we decided that it was too late in the day to hike to Norvan Falls, which is supposed to take six hours plus lunch time.



Abby looked at the map and decided we should do the Lynn Peak trail instead, which ended up looking like this:



The average grade of the trail is somewhere around 16%, which isn't as steep as the Grouse Grind, but it's a longer trail, and unlike the Grouse Grind, there's no gondola back down so it's challenging. Considerably less crowded too. You can go quite a ways without seeing anyone else.

It takes you up into some old-growth forest and past a few nice, though not super spectacular viewpoints, all of which I somehow did not photograph. I'll have to bug Abby for pictures. The only thing I really didn't like was all of the loose rocks, which are sprained ankles waiting to happen.

The length and not-so-steepness of the trail meant that there was a lot more time to spend looking around at things. Things like this haystack boulder:



It's one of many random boulders that got left all over the place by glaciers in the Ice Age.

Or this:



See how the branch is kind of shaped like a club with tons of branches fanning out from it? It's disease called witches' broom. A guy named Ficus told me that when I visited the Seymour Demonstration Forest.

It also gives you time for snacks like rhubarb dipped in sugar.

We didn't quite make it to the top, though we were really close. It was a little too snowy for our liking, and neither of us were particularly prepared for that. It's like they say with activities in wilderness areas: know your limit and play within it. Oh wait, that's what they say about gambling. It's the same thing.

Just because all of this is a couple minutes from the city doesn't mean that people don't get lost and die up there. Search and Rescue gets called out all the time and I'm determined to have them not look for me. The view from the peak will have to wait.

And in case anyone is interested, here is info on the trail via ClubTread and trailpeak.

Preoccupied

I had all manner of fun and interesting things to say about my day but I just came home to find that the cat bleeding all over the kitchen floor. Now I'm dealing with that. It's a crappy ending to an otherwise good day.