Puntable dogs

The sale at Opus was fun. I stocked up on enough sketchbooks, cartridge paper, charcoal, picture frames and portfolios to keep me going for a while, so now I have absolutely no excuse to not do anything.

The crowning jewel in my new collection of art supplies is a Vincent van Gogh action figure, complete with an easel, sketchbook and paint set. I checked the box for a knife to cut off his ear but no such luck.

What better way to celebrate than to fall headfirst out of the side door of a vehicle?

That's exactly what I did. I lost my balance and after a very long moment of thinking

there-is-nothing-that-I-can-possibly-do-to-change-the- direction-I-am-now-moving,

I landed on my face on the asphalt. I have some slight abrasions on my cheek and largeish bruises on my wrist and my right ankle, as well as miscellaneous aches in other places.

It was weird.

We checked out the new Coquitlam Thrifty's because it's been so hyped and it's a grocery store and my friend went there on Wednesday and got a free pie. I went in looking for those Chinese chews that Meredith used to always forcefeed us with whenever we went to the Island for regattas, but instead came out with organic tomatillos and spiced gouda cheese. C'est la vie.

I was sorting the recycling to take to the depot and as I opened the garage door I heard a woman call out for her dog and then all of a sudden the thing ran right in. My cat jumped on it and scratched its nose. It yelped and ran back out.

What should it do then but run back into the garage, to where Frick scratched it in the eyes, it yelped and it ran away again, this time into the neighbour's yard where there is a large dog with one hell of an anger problem.

Then it ran back towards the garage and I stepped out between it and Frick so she wouldn't have to attack it again and the stupid thing kept trying to go around me.

The lady finally caught up with the dog and began to put him back on the leash saying "I have no sympathy for him. He deserves all the scratching he got," to which I should have replied "then you won't be upset if I give him a good hard kick."

I really wanted to kick that dog, especially when it was climbing up my leg to try and get at my cat. Does this make me a bad person?

Reoder: a redundant poet

Psst.

Opus garage sale today. 10:00-4:00, 3445 Cornett Rd, Burnaby, or so I've been told.

Yay for cheap art supplies.

We bought my grandmother a huge set of acrylic paint for Christmas but it was stolen a few weeks ago and she hasn't been able to paint anything since. Maybe we can pick something up for her today, and maybe since my aunt "manages" the entire hospital where Grandma is staying, her stuff won't be stolen again.

I'm hopeless with paint.

Cleaning up my room the other day I rediscovered some of my oil pastels. When I was little we used to go down to places where they framed art and get the discarded centres out of the card stuff that they use for borders and use that for pastels. I used to draw lots of flowers and parrots and I think I want to do that again.

The screensaver on the family computer is of my sister's photos and my mother is narrating

young man with redeye and 3d glasses
Abby in her choir outfit
out of focus Abby
pants off!
outside loud mariachi restaurant in Tijuana
track meet!
pants off!
young man in choir outfit that looks very stoned
bad picture of me
damn communist
Mercedes Benz
Erin decorating tree of seasonal festiveness
Frick looking bitchy
pants off!

Blackout

Today I

went downtown for job related reasons.
felt like taking pictures of the downtown east side but
took some uninspired pictures of architectural details instead.
marveled at the beauty that is Vancouver.

wore lots of sunscreen.
didn't eat as much as I should have.
became dehydrated and now have a headache because of it.

realized that I can't remember hearing my father whistle at any time during the past three years while standing across the street from the boarded up Millar and Coe China Gifts.

guest posted on Kracker's blog.

spent about five hours on the bus.
slept most of that time on the bus, maybe because I was hungry.
had a conversation with an old woman sitting beside me who was excited about how I was studying sociology and women's studies over the summer.
wish I had taken a picture of her.

watched The Corporation again.
recommend it to anyone who hasn't already seen it.

ate mushrooms for dinner.
feel like changing the world.
might possibly be delusional.

have nothing really to say for myself.

We were sitting in the livingroom about an hour ago when we heard a huge thump upstairs and later found out that the lady upstairs had passed out and what we had heard was her head hitting the floor. She says she thinks it's stress and that there's nothing to worry about. I think she should see a doctor. It's all well and good to not seek any sort of medical treatment for things in places that are uncivilized enough to make people pay for healthcare, but here it's free so that you can get that sort of stuff checked out before it decides to kill you.

But I guess I shouldn't talk until I take my own advice. I have at this moment two pieces of glass, one in each foot, that have been embedded in the bottoms of my feet for six and eight years respectively because I refused to go to the hospital to have them taken out. I had my reasons at the time, but mostly I'm just an idiot.

The human body is an amazing thing. It surrounded them with some sort of really tough fibrous somethingorother that stops them from moving around. Most of the time they don't even hurt.

I shouldn't have said that. Now everyone's going to think I'm weird.

Sangria

I bought a new pair of running shoes the other day because my old ones fell apart almost completely. Today I tried them on and went for a run. Well, something that in my mind qualifies as a run. My definition may not match yours.

Lacing up I found that my new shoes seem a little on the longish side, as well as much on the narrowish. Serves me right for thinking that being female gives me licence to buy women's shoes.

The problem with me and shoes is that my feet are somewhere between a six and a six-and-a-half and they're kind of on the wide side. That means that the only running shoes that actually fit them have those plastic Spiderman or Batman things on them or flashing Pokemon lights and those wheel things in the heels.

I don't need bells and whistles, I just need shoes.

Up until a point it's been one of those days where someone says something that touches a nerve that you didn't want touched and probably doesn't even know that he did it and then you find yourself crying in your dishwater and wondering why the blob of shampoo you just squirted into the palm of your left hand makes you feel so sad.

Every bit of that is stupid. Every bit.

However, my mood has improved somewhat because tonight was chick flicks and girlie drinks at Lindsay's house. I knew absolutely no one there, but that didn't matter much because the funny thing about her friends is that they make me a hell of a lot less self-conscious than my own. Maybe I need to get new friends.

There is a simple equation that explains everything: fruit + alcohol = good for you.

We kicked all her roommates out by saying that we were going to watch Brokeback Mountain, which we did, and it was so sad that we had a chocolate fondue to cheer ourselves up. Chocolate makes most things better.

Lindsay gave me a ride home because the last bus of the night had come and gone already, though it would have only taken me maybe an hour to walk home. Alright, maybe an hour and a half at the most. She seemed a little weirded out that I don't really have any neighbours

So now I'm here, listening to the ambient noise of the refrigerator. There is a life-sized, blue glass head on my desk that I bought for $12 at Salamagundi West once. Once upon a time I had had the crazy idea that I would turn him into a lamp and hang him upside down from the ceiling somewhere, but that never happened. Now he's staring at me. He badly needs a name.

I badly need to go to bed.

May decided it would come early this year

The past few days have been so eventful that I'm not completely sure what to say about them. Perhaps it will come to me eventually.

On Sunday I applied for a job and within four hours of doing so I had an interview. Well, she called and left a message on my voicemail because I was in a concert at the time. Two concertos for orchestra and storyteller, narrated by Stuart McLean and Vancouver's own CBC Radio Orchestra. The first, an irreverent history of Canada and the second, the story about Eddie Kovac, the kid that lived nextdoor to the young Wayne Gretzky.

I am a terrible sucker for Canadiana.

I arrived at said interview yesterday after a pleasant walk through Chinatown. I should have taken my camera because it was absolutely goregeous. The interview seemed to go well, though that has never ever been an indication of whether or not I get the job.

Never.

I hate spring.

If someone switched off all the lights in heaven it would be years before we noticed

Seems to me that I was supposed to do some drawing for the magazine at some point and they told me to make something tv related. As we were rapidly approaching exams, my brain was fried and this was the best I could come up with.

Sad.

I overheard a conversation between two parents in a high school washroom the other day, and it ran like this:

"I wish I had more ham."

"Yeah, I took thirty brothers down there in '96."

"We should go bowling for Exxon fuel."

It must be fun to have completely asyndetic conversations.

I have so much more to say, but it will have to wait until the evening.

It was the 80's

You have to treat transit in Vancouer kind of like a mentally handicapped sibling. You can't hate it, because that won't change it, and since it's yours, you can't get rid of it either, nor would you want to. It can at times be irritating and gimpy, but that's just the way it is and it deserves more love, compassion and understanding than anger.

Regardless, due to the transit system's autism, Abby and I found ourselves sitting in a bus shelter a heavy stone's throw from East Hastings, watching the busses pass in all but the direction that we wanted to go.

You always meet interesting people in that neighbourhood. One man who didn't so much walk as flail himself about asked us for change, and when he didn't recieve any from anyone in the shelter he continued on his way. Halfway down the block his pants fell down, revealing the saggiest butt I've ever seen. People try to tell me that drugs are cool. I don't believe them.

Beside us two Playland employees began to fume about the lack of reliable bus service and how much they hated being assigned to the climbing wall at work, because it involves lifting lots of small children.

In spite of the transit delays, we managed to squeak into the doors of the Cultch before they closed to the public. We didn't have much luck finding seats, though and had to squish in with the people up in the balcony.

The Cultch is a small converted church, and the beauty of it is that there are very few places to sit in there without feeling close to the artist. It doesn't hold more than four hundred people or so, so it's nice and cozy and there was plenty of interaction between the audience and Matt Good, who we were there to see.

Melissa McLelland opened the show and we liked her almost immediately. It always bothers me that I listen to so few female artists but I console myself with the thought that the reason why is that not many women make music in styles that I like. But she's got a pretty voice and music with a nice folksy/blues/soul feel to it that I like so I made sure that her ep came home with me.

Because this was technically the last show of the tour and in his own hometown to boot, Matt played an extra long set and encore, interspersed with local humour that the rest of the country wouldn't get. We all had a big laugh at the song he wrote about Poco girls and had an even bigger laugh when one of the guys in the audience from Surrey just had to shout out that Matt was drinking Japanese beer, just after Matt himself had mentioned it. I'm never completely sure what to think about Surrey people. That's a lie.

An anecdote about how Van Halen used to pick up girls at concerts sparked the use of the catch phrase "it was the 80's" for the rest of the concert. As for a setlist, I honestly have no idea. He played for two hours. There were three things in there that I hadn't heard before and I don't know about the names of them. It was awesome, all of it.

There were two people sitting directly in front of me when I arrived, in the middle of four seats. They stayed like that throughout the opener and then at the beginning of Matt's set, they decided to move over and give up the two seats to a couple that was sitting on the floor. Ten minutes into Matt's set, the woman that they had been saving a seat for returned, already quite drunk and began to harass everyone nearby because she had lost her seat. Once in a while she left to get another beer and then she would come back and continue to try her damndest to make life as miserable as possible for everyone by singing along and talking loudly on her phone.

I wish people like that were able to see how incredibly asinine they look. I also sometimes wish that the Cultch had large men with anger problems instead of small soft-spoken women for ushers. Luckily she left for the encore.

Outside, Commercial Drive smelled of gyros as we made our way to the busstop, followed by a woman in a crushed velvet vest who was quite enthusiastic about how Matt played a lot of old songs in his new style, yet was upset because he hadn't played House of Smoke and Mirrors. I was distracted by the view of two people practicing acrobatics behind muslin curtains in an apartment above the shop across the street.

I love the Drive.

Picture courtesy of my sister.

Amazing disappearing grandmother

Sometime early this morning my mother got a phone call from my uncle in Ontario, asking where my grandmother was. Unaware that she was anywhere other than Chilliwack General Hospital, we were a little surprised.

Apparently my aunt had had Grandma moved to another care facility and hadn't bothered to tell us. A little rude, methinks, especially when we know that if Uncle Lloyd hadn't have called, we would have driven out to Chilliwack to see her and not find her there, just like the last time she was moved.

My aunt just moved as well and has changed her phone number, so we had no idea what it was. We began by looking up the websites and phone numbers of hospitals that we figured she might be at right now, and eventually we found her.

That being said, I'm happy that she has been moved. The place she is in now is much closer to where both us and my aunt live and it's in a place where she might be able to go outside in her wheelchair to go shopping or sit in the garden.

The room where she was before had three other women in it. Margaret had suffered a massive stroke and though you could tell that her mind was fine, she wasn't able to move or speak. The other two had at one point in time been energetic, pleasant ladies but since December, both have fallen ill and silent. Because they are sick, the staff keep the lights off and the door closed. When we were last there, the room was dark and quiet, and you could tell that it definitely bothered my grandmother.

I hope that it is a good change for Grandma. I just wish that some of my other relatives weren't such arrogant twits.

Who writes this stuff?

There is this show on tv right now and I'm not sure what to make of it. It contains:

• people in period dress


• Catholic archbishop cardinal type looking guys


• a woman dressed up like a soldier and the other soldiers seem to know that she is a woman


• a pretty-boy gay-sounding guy who is the king of England, or France, or wherever


• a plot to take over France and the rest of Europe


• one of Leonardo da Vinci's long lost notebooks


• extensive use of colloquial language


• general lack of anything that can be classified as humour

While I make no claim at being an expert on matters historical, or even requiring that everything needs to always be accurate, I believe that the plots of things you see on tv should at least be somewhat believable within the context of the show.

Some people have actually been able to mutilate historical fact and make it funny. Blackadder would be an excellent example. Very clever.

This show is anything but clever. I just don't get it.

With an unnecessary number of links

After the nuclear holocaust, Abby and I are going to steal some flamingoes from the zoo and keep them as pets. If we can't find shrimp to feed to them, we'll just have to spraypaint them twice a month to keep them pink.

In the meantime, we're going to go see Matt Good at the East Van Cultural Centre tomorrow night. Right now we are making some sort of arrangements to be nowhere near East Hastings that time of night. I would be the first person to say that a lot of people are overly paranoid and these places are safer than some would like to think. But still, I'm not stupid.

Yay for Commercial, not that it's drastically better. I like it by day, though. It's not like I can say the same for the poverty of East Hastings.

Sunday's all about Stuart McLean live at the Chan because yes indeed, I'm secretly middle-aged and I love that kind of stuff, especially when it involves a full orchestra playing variations on the Hockey Night in Canada theme. The man's awesome.

Today we met Lesra Martin at the local school district's pro d day, who if you don't remember was that black kid in The Hurricane, only not an actor but a real guy. He tours and talks about the value of literacy and having a positive attitude. Pretty inspirational. Roy Henry Vickers, the artist, was also there with a heartfelt speech that brought everyone in the gym to their feet.

I guess what I want to say is that by the time the weekend is over I'll be all cultured out and ready to crawl back into the hole from whence I came.

I think I'm more likely to be out on my ear.

Jimmy's lunch

There used to be this little Chinese restaurant in New West that my parents used to go to often. The food was terrible, but the entertainment couldn't be beat. Once you sat down, a little old man with a heavy accent would shuffle up to you with a small pad of paper to take your order.

You'd list whatever dishes you wanted one by one and he would repeat each after you said it.

"You waaaaant wonton soup. You waaaaant sweet and sour pork. You waaaaant chicken chow mein."

Then if you asked for a coffee, he would run through his standard script.

"You waaaaant decaf your coffee?"
"You waaaaant cream your coffee?"
"You waaaaant sugar your coffee?"

Then he'd shuffle back to the kitchen and shout something in Chinese, and there would be banging and crashing and all sorts of stuff happening there. Shortly after, he'd shuffle back out with the coffees.

If you wanted a refil for your coffee, he'd ask the exact same questions.

"You waaaaant decaf your coffee?"
"You waaaaant cream your coffee?"
"You waaaaant sugar your coffee?"

Seems to me the coffee was no screaming hell.

Unparty

Dancing at festival today turned into one big group hug. Sure, we were all competing against each other but at one point in time we all went to the same school. Either that or we've just gotten used to seeing each other so many times over the past several years.

I didn't place, if that's what you're wondering. That doesn't bother me in the least.

Kathy called me up once again today to tell me how frustrated she is with how immature our friends are. Her birthday is on the 21st so she is trying to get some people together to go out and do something on Saturday to celebrate. This is easier said than done.

The biggest thing bothering her right now, and me as well, is that you ask people if they're coming with you and all you get are maybes, because everyone wants to hold out to see what everyone else is doing first. It's not like they have other commitments. They all just like to wait until 3-4 hours before you're planning to leave to decide whether they're coming or not, so you figure you'll just have to stay home and do nothing.

And then there's the drama. Curtis and Jess just broke up so they don't really want to be anywhere near each other. Do you invite the one who you've known for 14 years, or do you invite the one you see nearly every day and are probably better friends with right now anyways? If you don't invite Jess, there's not much point in inviting Gina because they go together to most things. Angus wouldn't be caught dead near Dani and Craigger right now for some reason or other and the other Craig probably won't come unless Dani is there. Other people you can't invite because though you like them, they'll bring creepy weird friends that grope you when you're drunk. Lauren definitely can't come because she'll relate every minute detail of every stupid thing you did to her parents, who will tell your parents and your parents don't need to know.

It's stupid, all of it.

I think I'll have a party next week. The invitation will read:

Invite yourselves. Show up whenever. Bring booze. Anyone who messes up the carpet will have their left pinkie amputated.

Either that or I'll invite Kathy over so we can be pissed off at our friends and watch the CBC because it's the only channel I get. We had this crazy idea once that we were going to write a novel together for some reason or other. I wonder where that went.

I have gone an entire month without picking at my fingernails once, which is three weeks more than I've ever managed to go. Yay me. Maybe one day I will have reasonably nice looking nails.

Lampshade head

On my way to my grandmother's we saw a huge pile of gravel by the Fraser River and we all know that when there are huge piles of gravel to be found, I will be there. I love looking for agates.

The only problem being that there were other people there with the same idea and they were very noisy. They had irritating noisy kids with them and a little fuzzy assed puntable lampshade headed thing that they called a dog. It was a rotten little thing. First they had the audacity to call it a dog and then they named it Sparky to boot. I was so offended.

Normally when looking for agates by the river I require a certain degree of quiet.

One must know the rockpile. Experience the rockpile. Be the rockpile.

Something like that.

Needless to say, I didn't find anything particularly exciting. We went to see my grandmother who had a new story to tell for a change, one about her wearing steel-toed stilleto heels and karate kicking "some miserable creature" until he ran away with his pants around his ankles. No one remembers ever having heard that one.

My grandmother is entirely certain that Queen Elizabeth became queen at the age of eight years old because her father died in a war. Some war.

The winner of yesterday's least practical shoe award was my sister.

I threw out my old resume and made this one instead

I got mad skillz, yo.


Picking up rocks skillz.


Balancing on logs skillz.


Impersonating Salvador Dali skillz.

Hire me?

Holly, what the smeg is going on?

The question is this:

I have not had classes on Mondays all semester.
Red Dwarf is on at midnight on Sundays. Back to back episodes, no less.

Why have I not been watching it?

Obviously I'm a smeghead and only just learned about it now. It has to be my favourite sitcom ever.

Whoever would have thought that the adventures of the last man alive in the universe, a hologram, a highly evolved cat and an android with a head the shape of a novelty condom through space would amuse me so much. It must be that it is British. What is it about British people that they always do comedy better than the rest of us?

Okay, yeah, I'm a geek.

Sometimes I have to wonder what goes through my own head

Things I know from experience

When you have your fingers inside the electric beater, it is a bad time to try out all the buttons to see what they do.

It is never a good time to tell your mother that she has a big nose, even if it is kind of true.

Kitchen utensils make good soldering prods, but not if your mother finds out.

Hydrochloric acid has absolutely no place in the kitchen, especially if you're not wearing gloves or goggles.

Well-aimed propane torches are a good substitute for herbicides in the garden.

Computers work in mysterious ways.

It seems that whatever happened to the computer before has happened again. It's got a trojan horse that comes in and disables all antivirus/anti-spyware/anti-popup/firewall programs on the computer and then prevents you from accessing any website remotely related to keeping your computer safe. It will gladly let you uninstall your antivirus programs, but you can't possibly reinstall them. Other than that, it does nothing.

We had the same thing a few months ago, and we figured that it was because my sister let the antivirus subscription lapse without telling anyone for a month. This time the program had been installed properly with a two year subscription and was working just fine.

Until yesterday, that is. Suddenly my sister got a message that said that a) the trial subscription had expired and b) that we had to activate the program. Of course, she clicked the button that was supposed to activate the program and that froze the computer.

All this happened last time too. I thought it was over because we got my mom's favourite computer guru to check it and fix everything and everything was working fine. Apparently not.

Meh.

Are you bored of flower photos? So am I. I'm going to see if I can go a week without posting any. Here goes.

Re: the key to your heart

I had considered leaving this overly-long comment about Kevin's overly-long post about how he can read people by looking at the number of keys they have on their keyring.

Alright, the contents of my keyring are as follows:

5 housekeys.

That sounds excessive, I know. To get into the basement suite in my parents' house you have to go through the garage. One key there. Then you have to go through the laundry room. One key there. Then there is a third lock in a third door that you have to go through, so another key there.

Can't you just use the same keys and locks for all the doors? No, of course not. That would be too easy. That and the people that live upstairs need to get into the garage and laundry room, but not into the basement suite, hence the three keys.

But I said five keys, didn't I? The remaining two are for my apartment. I used to only have one for my apartment. I mistakenly believed that it was a masterkey to all the locks in the building. Well, it was, but only to one of the two locks on the door to my apartment. I found that out the hard way, when someone else locked me out. I only ever use the one lock anyways, but now I have two keys, just in case.

4 bike lock keys.

This too, seems very excessive. It is. It's just that I keep misplacing my bike locks, and everytime that happens, I get a new one. Then I keep the old key on my keyring because I usually find the old one eventually. We do the same thing with scissors.

I don't have a car, so I figure I'm allowed.

2 boathouse keys.

These are the keys that I use to get into the local rowing club, one for the fence, one for the door. The security code I use to get in there happens to belong to someone else, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out exactly how they were assigned, or which one to use. I don't really row there anymore, but sometimes I visit. They don't seem to care that I have the keys so I keep them.

2 keys from work.

Which is odd, because I don't work there anymore. I tried to give them back but they said I could keep them. I guess that was because I lived nearby at the time so they figured that I could keep an eye out on the place or something. It struck me as odd at the time though. It's still odd.

So yeah. What does that say? As much as I rack my brain, it always seems to come out as obsessive compulsive paranoid hyperactive somethingorother. Lovely.

I'm not going to start on my shoes...

Conservation

At the moment my father is making fun of my mother for this strange thing that she does where she soaks egg shells in water and then peels the membrane out of the insides of them and then puts the egg shells in a separate compost bucket from the other stuff to be composted.

She says that peeling the membrane out makes them compost better, but I'm not completely sure about that. I'm also not sure why we have to keep eggshells separate from orange peels, when they eventually go to the same compost pile in the back yard anyways.

Anyways, she does this thing and it is weird. It's very obsessive compulsive.

She saves all our rubber bands and twist ties too, which is a good idea. There's no point in buying new ones if you can just recycle old ones that you got for free. However, I'm always struck by the sheer volume of used twist ties and rubber bands that I find in the cupboards and kitchen drawers. Surely we can't possibly use them all. Yet, on the other hand, I find it difficult to throw out useful things too.

My mother's father used to keep these things in plastic containers in the fridge. We only found that out after he died and we had to clean out his apartment. You can only imagine the ridicule she got when we found that out. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all.

I must confess that for all intents and purposes I neither understand nor celebrate Easter. However, it is a good time to take a few days off of what you would have normally been doing and eat some chocolate for which the price has been artificially inflated just for the occasion.

It is also the time of year that we make pudding eggs out of Jello pudding mix and melted chocolate, or as they're affectionately known as in our house, little balls of shit. As much as we try to make them look really nice like they do in the magazine that we originally tore the recipe out of, they never come out looking appetizing.

They sure disappear in a hurry though.

Sax and violins

There was a point in time when I wanted to call this blog "there's a monster under my blog" and then have a picture of a hideous scary monster at the bottom and maybe one of those uptight women from a 50's horror flick screaming a completely random tagline, to be changed weekly or daily or whenever there's a full moon in Pisces.

I started drawing monsters, but could never quite come up with something that I liked. Sasquatch? Sock? Reptile? That's alright though, because I really don't know enough css to make that work anyways. Pity.

My mother has left me a copy of Tuesday's National Post with an article hilighted in it. It begins:

Pius X, who became pope in 1903, was quick to see the moral danger posed by the saxophone. An audacious composer had written saxophones into a mass and he didn't like it. He prohibited instruments that could cause "disgust or scandal," and everybody knew which one he meant...

Needless to say, I'm intrigued. Ah, sweet saxophone, to be hated by Catholic popes and Nazis alike!

It also reminds me that I need to get new reeds for mine. I haven't played in far too long. I need a bigger mouthpiece too. Hembruff always told me that that would help me play louder. All I know is that the one I have right now just doesn't work for me.

My rowing buddy Eric used to have a sax called Julia. People used to make rude jokes about that. My saxophone was always named Blauhardt. Why? No reason.

Since no one bothered to answer my question yesterday, I found the answer myself. A fond (n) is apparently a collection of documents and things in an archive that came from one source. Good to know.

rock paper scissors
digital photorealism

What is a fond?

"All dressed up for exams?" Erin asked me as she got on the bus. She then began to relate the abridged history of psychology to me, through all the theories of the mind or lack of mind. Hilarity ensued.

People have come up with some pretty crazy ways to explain how the brain works over the past few hundred years. Though, I suppose they made perfect sense at the time. A lot of things did. Sometimes I wonder who will be laughing at us when we're dead and gone and why. Free trade? Boehr's atom? Invisible weapons of mass destruction? The re-emergence of terrible 80s fashion at school?

I have no idea. Perhaps we will have the last laugh by nuking, overconsuming or polluting ourselves off the face of the earth. What a pleasant thought.

Just as I found it hard to study for the exam last night, because I kind of already knew everything in the book (or pretended to), I couldn't study for the one today either.

Journalism. It was such a redundant course. In spite of having what seems like it should be interesting subject matter, I didn't learn anything in it that I hadn't heard somewhere else before. Makes it easy to study for, though.

The takehome that I had to hand in though, was different. I had a whole week to do it, so naturally I had to change my topic at approximately 2 am this morning. I wrote something half decent about NAFTA, GATT and magazines, a topic that tends to make me very angry, but more importantly, one that had a lot of readily available sources for me to use. Always helps.

On my way home, I ran into Kevin. Seems to me the last time I saw him was at Ryan's grad party, where I remember him asking me if he was drunk or not and then falling asleep on my lap. Strange the things we remember. I didn't realize how much he liked roadtrips. Something to keep in mind.

Stranded

I woke this morning to the news that my entire apartment building has been surrounded with freshly poured concrete, effectively barring all entry and exit from the building.

Was I given any sort of warning about this? No, not really. When asked, they said that they were going to do it "soon" and "next week". The date April 11 never really came up.

I'm a little pissed off right now, to say the least. I have an exam to go to.

The picture above is one of the ones my sister took last summer on the Island somewhere.

I have stuck my foot in my mouth on two separate ocasions already today and I haven't even left home yet. Today, at least, I am an idiot. Tomorrow will be better. I hope.

There be lots of chi in my apartment

I really, really like the way everything's arranged in my apartment now. It just feels right, you know? Kind of like I unconsciously feng shuied it, sensing that yes, indeed that was the correct place for a lamp, and of course the couch should be there.

I watched the sun set behind the mountains, over the ocean from my office this afternoon. I realize that that's nothing particularly exciting, but at the moment my life lacks major excitement. I have nothing but exams and studying to do.

Maybe tomorrow, just for kicks I'll throw myself off a bridge, rob a bank, and then I'll go to my stats exam. A stats exam at 7:00 pm until some ungodly hour of night. I wonder who makes these schedules up. They must have a sick sense of humour.

I hate stats. I've said it before, but I'll say it again.
I hate stats.
There.

All you lucky Europeans out there should wait until at least 18:00 before you bother clicking on this link. Watch it all night, if you feel so inclined. It's a live webcam of eagles in their nest on Hornby Island, but you've got to wait for the sun to come up before you can see anything. We're a little behind with the times in this here time zone.

It's pretty cool to watch though. There are two eggs in that nest, and they expect them to hatch sometime within the next two weeks. With my luck, I'll be in the bathroom at the time.

All this motivation is really procrastination

So, my sister and I decided a long time ago that we would improve the generally crappy state of the submissions at the local country fair by entering and winning practically everything there. Perhaps we are full of ourselves, but I think we might be able to do it. It's all about the ribbons.

That, and the $4 prizes for each category. Oh, yeah.

We do this every year. We talk and talk and talk about things that we could or should or would enter, and then we don't do anything, only to walk through all the displays, knowing we could have done better than a lot of other people.

This year will be different.

I have a takehome exam to finish right now, the question being:

In recent years "self-regulation" seems to be the dominant mode of cultural industry regulation in North America. Explain how and why it became dominant. Use at least two cultural industries as case studies to make your case.

The cultural industries being video games and something else to be determined at a later hour. Not sure yet.

The guy who's got the wrong number and keeps calling me called again today. As soon as I said hello, he said, "Bitch, I told you to call my cell phone," and hung up before I could tell him that he had the wrong number.

If there is one thing I don't put up with, it is people who are rude to me on the phone. Now that he's started swearing at me for no reason whatsoever, I am considerably more annoyed than before. If he does it two more times, I get a free fieldtrip down to the police station to charge him with harassment. Joy, joy.

All I have to do is document a couple calls first. 6:07 pm, so I don't forget.

The above would be a terrible photo of my apartment.

Mittens! Holgas! Kites!

Here are my new mittens. I love them.

Yesterday I confessed my secret love for Colorflash Holgas to my mother, who had to look them up to see exactly what I meant.

Yes, they are crappy, bulky, heavy and analog, but I absolutely love them. My father is always complaining that I have forsaken film for inferior digital but that's not true. I love lomos and I'm sure that that would piss him off too, if he knew. Just the whole idea that the whole point of the camera is to take pictures that are sort of blurry and oversaturated with light leaks that are otherwise bad is kind of crazy. But I've never pretended to be completely sane, have I?

My mother got sort of excited about that, because I'm a really hard person to shop for and usually when it comes to buying me presents, people have to resort to buying me weird shit that I wouldn't have otherwise needed or wanted.

I'll let you in on a secret. I'm getting one for my birthday. Too bad that that's months away.

We rearranged all the furnature in my apartment yesterday. The livingroom area is now the dining room area and the nook alcove thing that served no purpose whatsoever is now my office. It needs a largeish plant.

More importantly, because it has high ceilings, the corner behind my desk really badly needs a kite. A bird kite. Made out of stained glass. I'm drawing up some designs so that I can make one. Should be fun.

Finch's

Had some errands to run downtown today and then went for lunch with my mother.

"Where are you taking your mommy?" the receptionist asked, as we were leaving.

"To Finch's," I replied.

"Oh, they've got great salads," she said. Her dog appeared from under her desk to give me a big mungy kiss on my hand.

"I had a cheese plate there once," I said, "It had warm blue brie cheese, sliced pear, a fresh baguette and pepper."

"Pepper?" she asked.

"You know, pepper. A pot of it."

"What do you do with a pot of pepper?"

"I don't know. I dipped the cheese in it." I mean, what else would you do if someone gave you a largish pot of cracked pepper?

No pepper pots today though. I had a bococcini salad sandwich, which was really good, except if I had made it myself, I would have left the salt out and added more balsamic vinegar. Other than that, the basil was cut right off the plant and the baguette was fresh so I was happy. Their baguettes are always fresh.

Mom had my personal favourite, the walnut and blue brie salad. They load it up with tomatoes and cucumbers and pour vinegarette all over it all. Quite delicious, if I might say so myself.

On our way back to her office, we stopped in at Artopia to see if I could get a new pen, the kind that you dip in the pot of ink. That's the best kind. Sadly, they didn't have any in stock. "Hi girls," the guy said. He was at least half my mother's age. "What can I get for you?" A new fineliner, of course, because I needed one of those too. 70% off because I'm a student. Pretty cool.

There's a new store down on Cordova called Mintage and we decided to check it out. It's another one of those vintage consignment stores with some pretty cool looking stuff in it. I especially liked the hats, but I walked out with a new blazer instead. And two doors down is Deluxe Junk, so we had to pay that a visit too. I am now the proud owner of a new pair of mittens. They're awesome. Pictures to follow eventually.

Back at the office, the manager in the office next to my mother's asked what we had gotten for lunch, then declared he was hungry and left for his second lunch of the day. That guy's amazing. He can sit down and eat an entire chicken in one sitting and still be hungry. It's all that tae kwon do and long hours at the gym, I guess. I could never do that.

Self evident

Outside there is a group in the park, barbecuing and it's technically a construction site and fenced off, but what good are fences when you want to have a picnic on the grass?

No, there are no fences when there is post-picnic soccer to be played.

I'm looking at my reflection in my glasses, sitting on top of my printer. My room's in there too. I wonder how they made it fit. They're sitting on top of a small stack of back issues of the Peak. I need to get a recycle bin.

They are talking about a spelling bee on the news and I never figured out what the big deal about them was. We never had those things when I was a kid, though I'm certain that I would have won, if we were using Canadian spellings and not those vulgar American ones.

It's doUGHnut and neighboUr. CentRE and not centER. ColoUr, not color. Of course.

Completely unnecessary letters make language so much more fun and rewarding.

The light has taken on a rather golden tone, turning the clouds into white fluffs.

A freighter is sitting in port, full of sulphur and low in the water. Before long it'll be on its way to Japan.

I saw an odd little tree on my way home today. It was very, very tall with a ridiculously skinny trunk, and no branches at all, save for a little round puff right at the top. Nestled in those branches was a little round crow. I thought the whole thing looked rather like a lollipop at the time, and that was about the time when I fell asleep.

Time

From: Adam
To: Erin
Subject: Time

On Wednesday of next week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.That won't ever happen again.

You may now return to your normal stuff.

There you go. I wouldn't have noticed that if I didn't have this newfangled thing called email.

As a second thought, isn't it weird how we attach some sort of significance to a completely made up event like that one that really has no effect upon us whatsoever and means absolutely nothing?

Another question: When is Easter? I don't really celebrate it, but I should get my cousins something, especially since my aunt has never once forgotten a holiday or birthday.

I was about to ask when my exams were, but you wouldn't be able to help me with that.

The picture today is in your mind because I have papers to write. How profound.

In memoriam, One-eyed Riley

So, I was thinking that I would get a cougar for my apartment because they're so pretty.

I know that I would have to feed it really well, and be with it all the time from kittenhood on, and keep it away from small children and people's pets, and watch my back and walk and neuter it, but it would be fun. On second thought though, I don't really want a cougar. They do a really good job of taking care of themselves in the wild, and I already have a cat that's almost as big.

I wonder why people keep these sorts of things as pets, to be honest. Then again, I wonder why people keep spiders and snakes and rats as pets too. The way I see it, if you let it out of the house and it will probably come back, then it's a good pet. If it won't eat you, it's a good pet. If it notices and seems to like or at least be familiar with you, it's probably a good pet.

My dog, though he was dumb as hell, was a good pet. My cats are good too. I had a rabbit once named Mr. Bumpy who was litter trained and came when you called him and he was awesome.

Fish are different. Sure, they run away sometimes but they never go very far. I used to have a feeder goldfish named One-eyed Riley and he was pretty cool, even though he only lived a lousy seven years. Got pretty big though.

Weatherwise it's been a weird day. In the morning it was bright and kind of raining but not, and then in the evening it was dark and kind of raining, but raining more. I told my mother this using those exact words and all she had to say was that it was profound, very profound, to which I replied: "I'm proud of being so brilliant."

On my way home, the suv beside us suddenly decided in the middle of an intersection during a red light that it would stop and back up. It nearly hit the Beamer behind it, and that had to back up also. Then, as we sat there, the white lights in the back of the suv didn't turn off, and we were hoping that maybe the suv would gun it when the lights changed but no such luck. Whoever it was suddenly realized that it was in reverse and fixed it.

What is it about miserable, rainy, black nights that makes all the jaywalkers come out? They only ever dress in black.

The above photo was printed out as big as your head so I can put it up on my wall, I'm thinking in the hall where the stairs are. Bright and springy, I know. The next batch will be in blues and blacks and whites, I think.

My father still does not believe in the value of digital cameras. "See, look in the corner, there. It's pixellated. It's all blurry." Though, seems to me that pixelated things look square, not blurry, and besides, that part of the photo was supposed to be blurry anyways.

Not that I'm against film or anything. I love the way darkrooms smell.

Ignore the grey stripe at the bottom there. It only exists because I was impatient and didn't let flickr do its job.

Fun fun fun

Every time Erin gets bored, she photoshops a politician.

She's off to a job interview. Wish her luck.

My cat's on standard time

The cats always begin to fuss around the same time of morning, reminding all us selfish bastards that there are indeed other organisms in the world that need to be fed, let out and given attention. I have always found it strange that they sleep for so long during the day, yet at the exact moment when I could use another hour, they have to come and wake me up.

This morning, though, they were an hour late. They haven't switched their clocks yet for daylight savings time.

A week or so ago, a mail slot suddenly appeared in my apartment door, and now I have been informed that I am the proud recipient of a brand new postal code. Now Canada Post will finally deliver mail. I am now in the process of writing a letter to myself to test it out.

The problem being that I don't know what to write. Mostly I'm just sitting here.

My mother poked me and started singing that song where they say "I'm gonna mail myself to you..." but I can't remember the words.

I sent some of my pictures off to be printed really big and I'll put them up at my apartment. They are sorely needed because the walls are so bare. I notice these things now.

When I moved with my parents about a year and a half ago, I suddenly realized just how much art we actually owned. I'm not talking about Picassos or Monets or anything exciting like that, but little things.

The kitchen had 22 handmade raku fish on the walls, different artists, different glazes. Every window in the house was filled with hand blown glass balls. We had paintings and prints, photos, ceramics, art glass, antiques and knicknacks that I never really noticed that we had.

Suddenly I realize that none of that stuff was really mine. My apartment is so bare looking. I'm looking through all the pictures on my computer to pick a couple to print and put up on my walls right now. It's kind of fun.

Scrunchee

"Oooh, scrunchies!" Chels exclaimed. I can't remember why. "Remember when we used to all have those little dresses and every one came with a matching scrunchie?"

"God, everything came with a matching scrunchie," Jessica said.

"Or a barette," I added, "or a ribbon... or a barette with ribbons!"

"Yeah," Chels continued, "and I kept all mine in a drawer in my dresser and long after the dresses were gone, the matching scrunchies remained." She raised her eyebrows as if it was some sort of coincidence. "And then there were those skort things. They're like skirts, but they're really shorts..."

"I was definitely a skort girl," I said.

"I wasn't," Jess replied, "I wore those legging things like in bright pink and stuff..."

"In every colour!" Chels said, "And all of them at the same time, like pink and yellow and red."

"And I used to wear them with those big shirts," said Jess, "and I used to have one of those little jumper dresses made out of that knit sweatshirt fabric. It had kittens on the front and lots of sparkles and I used to wear a headband with it..."

"Oh God," I said, "everyone used to wear headbands."

When I was little, my well meaning mother made me a red sweatshirt with a white fuzzy bunny on the front and it had a pink plastic eye. I was the only kid who had a plastic eye that stuck out from her shirt so the first time I wore it, other kids poked it continuously and I was traumatized for life and never wore the shirt again. I didn't didn't feel like sharing that.

"Haven't you noticed that everything that we used to wear as kids is coming back?" Jess asked.

Yes, indeed I have. I fear for the world.

Business

I have noticed that how much I feel like blogging is directly related to the amount of stats and research methods I do. The more I read through corporate reports and statistics, the more I become aware that there must be millions of people out there that waste their lives doing completely pointless bureaucratic bullshit, pushing paper, merging assets, majority interest, transactions between shareholders, stakeholders, limited liability companies, sole proprietorship crap.

Don't get me wrong. It all has its uses. For a while I owned my own company in high school, registered with the government and everything. It was limited liability so if it went bankrupt I wouldn't, not that that was ever really a concern and mostly I just used it to claim stuff like my computer as a business expense so I would get some of the taxes back. That much at least is useful.

But the rest is inane as hell. Remind me to have nothing to do with anything remotely like it when I'm older.

INITIAL Announced: Sep. 23, 2004 Status: complete
UPDATE: BCE Inc. sold its remaining 0.2% interest in Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. (MTS). PREVIOUS: MTS bought back 7.5 million of its common shares from BCE at $43 per share under its substantial issuer bid. In addition, BCE sold, through the facilities of the Toronto Stock Exchange, 6 million additional MTS common shares at $42.65 per share. Following these transactions, BCE holds approximately 150,000 MTS common shares, with its equity interest decreasing from 15.96% to approximately 0.2%. Total proceeds from these transactions amount to $578 million.

Yeah, baby. That's what I'm talking about.