This is an important update

Ikea has moose pasta.

I repeat: Ikea has moose pasta.

Don't let them fool you into thinking they are actually pasta elks. I mean, look at an elk:



Now look at a moose:



That pasta is clearly moose, no? Silly Swedes.

I live for Antiques Roadshow

I only ever go for runs after dark. There are some really logical reasons for this, namely that there is less traffic and the wandering hoards of people training for the Sun Run are no longer out in full force after 8:00. I stick to residential roads so that I won't run into other runners in the park because I don't feel like being looked at.

I'm not sure how exactly running became a clandestine activity but it's not surprising that it would turn out that way. I mean, in my hands most things end up being that way, because face it, visiting the gym, swimming and returning library books are things that must be done under cover of darkness, not to mention stuff like writing, drawing and going outside.

Which is stupid, I guess, because pretty much everybody does these things. Which is also stupid, I guess, because when I used to row, I never bothered to tell my coach that I actually took the time to train outside of practice, which probably would have helped my chances of making the decent boats.

Meh.

I was out until the cold crawled its way through the spandex to bite me in the butt. Then I went inside only to find out that House wasn't on when it usually is. Dumbasses. Every Tuesday it's supposed to be news, go for a run, Antiques Roadshow, Rick Mercer, 22 Minutes and then House. Either that or three solid hours of Roadshow. I'd totally watch that.

That about explains it

My friend sent me this link and this was my result:

You feel worn out, physically and mentally. Recently the going has been tough and it looks as if there is still a considerable way for you to go before you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. If only you could put a protecting wall around yourself and cut yourself off from the rest of the world - be it even for only a little while - how wonderful it would be, but you can't - so you need to bear with it. Just when everything will seem at its lowest ebb you will find that there is a turnabout and your problems will seem to find a way of resolving themselves.

You are very orderly, methodical and self sufficient. You demand and need the respect, recognition and understanding of all those who enter into your sphere on influence.

It is hard for you to accept that your needs and desires are misunderstood by almost everyone within your sphere of influence and there is no one to rely on. Your pent-up emotions and inherent egocentricity make you quick to take offence, but as matters stand you realise that you'll have to make the best of things as they are.

Matters have not gone well for you. You are experiencing severe stress trying to guard yourself from further disappointments. It would seem that all of your hopes and dreams have not been realised and you are now beginning to doubt yourself. You no longer wish to be further advised by anyone and you insist on going it alone - to control your own destiny. Even though deep down you doubt whether things will get better in the future you have one consolation - and that is that they couldn't possibly get worse. Unwilling to give up anything that you possess, you are looking for some sort of security as a protection against any further setback or loss of position and prestige. You are so negative that you tend to exaggerate your problems and refuse to accept any advice from so called well-meaning friends.

Disappointment and the fear that there is no point in formulating fresh goals have led to anxiety and you are distressed by the lack of any close and understanding relationships. You feel you are not appreciated by those who matter to you. You are attempting to escape into a world on which you can relax and feel at ease.

Now pay up for some sort of special help that will fix all your psychological fuckups. But of course, you know that reposting things you find elsewhere is boring. I'm boring and you don't exist. You make me sad.

Red potatoes

A pretty uneventful day, really. I went shopping for groceries and ended up with some potatoes. Red potatoes. They had yellow ones for the same price but I like the red ones better. To the best of my knowledge they taste pretty much the same.

This is turning into a very boring post, isn't it?

Well, what if I were to tell you that my parents and I went out to go to the pub and ended up in Ikea instead, and we bought some venetian blinds, but not before our cart was stolen not once but twice.

Any better?

I guess not.

Yeah, I caved

People finally convinced me to get a facebook account earlier this week and so far, other than sucking the time out of my day, it has taught me that someone from the Duke University rowing team has heard of me because I might possibly have said hi on the dock at a regatta or let her drink out of my waterbottle. I'm not sure. It's through a friend of a friend.

I was looking through some of the older entries on this blog today and I was struck by how obsessed I was with rowing at the time, especially for not really being a part of a team or doing it at all. I'm over it now. Completely.

The sole extent of my brain right now

I fold
crumpled up into a little crane

I fold
cut my losses

I fold

foldyfoldy fold

I foaled
but that doesn't make any real sense

I calved on the other hand, does. But then again, that means icebergs dropping off of glaciers and I'm not that cold.

Only nearly.

If I was a composer this variation on a dumb theme might be interesting, but I'm not, so it's not.

English majors are an interesting bunch

So, today on the bus a guy walked in and sat down beside me dressed solely in his gonch and a pair of suspenders. Considering the fact that it was snowing outside, I found it just a tad odd.

Actually, I do believe it was this exact pair of underwear, to the right.

If I was my mother I would have said that they were a little too small on him, because on the one hand, he was tugging on the waistband to keep them up, and on the other, he was tugging the bottoms down to keep his butt cheeks covered. But then again, if my mom had her way we'd all be wearing everything eighteen sizes too large because we're all still growing, and we just haven't noticed it yet.

Someone asked him if he was cold. Well, obviously he was. His legs were covered in goosebumps. He said it was something to do with English class.

I have a funny feeling that I will neither leave school nor ever get my own car. Working for a living is nowhere near as random.

I swim with the fishes 'cause the fish are alright

My sister and I were just reminiscing about when we used to walk home from school and make ourselves snacks:

macaroni and cheese with broccoli and tabasco sauce, hoisin sauce and alum and extra cheese

pitas with mustard, tortilla chips and broccoli coleslaw mix

We went through a pizza pop phase, which was interrupted by a brief period of time when we had single-serving freezer pizzas that our mom bought for us, but that didn't last very long because they tasted like crap.

We put our raku fish back up on the wall again. It's starting to look almost like home.

They're shinier up close, I promise.

My favourite is the little one closest to the poster on the right. It's not shiny at all. Actually, it's pretty ugly, really, but it's got a big eye and a smile, so obviously it doesn't care. That's why I like it.



Thanks for the pictures, Du.

Rejoyce! I'm finished amputating my toes!

I like to call this one nice web, mr. crack spider.

Sure, my blog may suck, but I'm rocking SA 250 right now:

Erin: This is an excellent paper! Your descriptive account of the theorists’ ideas strongly compliments your critical analysis. Your writing is clear, concise, and thoughtful. Well done!

In other school-related news, I just finished writing a paper that was about as much fun as amputating each of my toes one-by-one with a steak knife. It was supposed to be 1200 words, but before people start criticizing me for whining, it was really hard to write. The paper requirements were a set of questions to be answered about recent bestseller lists which I answered in just over 600 words. I then had to write an additional 600 words without making it sound too redundant, which resulted in a paper that was far more shit than substance.

But then again, the course itself is far more shit than substance. You have to read separate articles with the same information repeated over and over and then answer questions like:

Who was John Lovell and what was Lovell's Library? Where was it published and why?

And then for the next article:

How did John Lovell get around the legal danger of pirating British works in Canada?

And for the next:

Which legal loophole did Lovell exploit and why?

The answer to the first would be something like:

John Lovell was a 19th Century publisher, originally based in Montreal. American companies were legally allowed to sell pirated British works on the Canadian market without paying royalties to the authors, and therefore, American editions of books were substantially cheaper than Canadian ones, putting Canadian publishing houses at a disadvantage. As a form of protest, Lovell moved his presses to the United States where he could print Lovell's library, a series of pirated British works for sale in Canada, and avoid completely the penalties of British law.

The answer to the second question would be:

Lovell moved his presses to the United States, where pirating British works was not only legal, but encouraged. By printing books in the United States, he was under no obligation to observe British copyright law, as the law did not extend outside the British empire.

And the third:

By publishing books in the United States for export to Canada, Lovell was under no obligation to pay royalties to British authors, whereas if they had been published in Canada he would have been bound by British copyright law. Moving his operations to the United States was not only a form of protest, but guaranteed that he could stay in business by offering his books for lower prices.

Don't try to tell me that those three questions couldn't have been condensed into one.

Miss Kenny

I spent pretty much my entire day today with Miss Kenny because she has pneumonia and an eye infection and the people at the daycare don't want her spreading it there.

The pros? Compared to Miss Garrett, Ken's pretty laid back and well behaved. She doesn't demand your attention all the time and she'll pretty much occupy herself. She has an incredibly long attention span for a child her age.

The fact that she was sick meant that she didn't have a lot of energy for much, which meant that when she finally realized that her parents were not at home, she was too tired to throw a full scale tantrum. Just a couple of tears before she fell asleep on my lap.

It also threw her eating schedule on its head so she didn't ask for any food and didn't express any interest in eating when I asked her repeatedly if she was hungry. Figuring that I should feed her before her parents came home, I finally made myself a sandwich and poured myself a glass of milk and set about looking like I was really enjoying having lunch while she looked on. All of a sudden there was a look of sheer horror on her face as she realized that she hadn't eaten anything in nearly eight hours. It didn't take long to fix that.

Why do I mention this? Well, since she was fed so late in the day, it wasn't until literally seconds before I heard the front door unlocking that she fixed me with an evil grin and said "I pooped!" The fact that her father had just arrived absolved me of all responsibility there.

Cons? She spent all day coughing up phlegm and having all sorts of weird and wonderful crap coming out of her nose. In spite of following her around with a cloth and washing her face repeatedly it still got on her shirt, in her eyes and all through her hair, and by extension, in my lap when she fell asleep.

I also got no work whatsoever done for school, which sets me back a bit. Grargh!

I love you

Happy take the time to actually notice that you're sitting home alone just like you were the night before and the night before and the night before day. I hope you're all enjoying yourselves out there in internet land because I love you.

When was the last time I shared some music on this blog? Far too long, I think.

I'll move to rectify this as soon as possible.



Hammer away.

Big brains and little brains

You can count on cribbage to be comical most of the time anyways, by virtue of the fact that for all my amazing mental prowess, I can't add whole numbers together, at least not the numbers between one and thirty-one.

It started out with my dad's nearly innocent observation that the cherubs on the back of Bicycle playing cards have been sitting on those bicycles for a very long time - several years, in fact, and might possibly have sore crotches as a result.

Mom replied by suggesting that maybe the cherubs were actually female, and I suggested that perhaps the seats on the bicycles were those gynacologically correct ones with the hole in the middle that are supposed to be more comfortable for women.

And then someone else said that maybe that feels better on testicles as well, having a hole in the middle of the seat, which led me to wonder aloud what the hell a gynecologist would be caring about testicles anyways, unless they were his own.

Which, in turn, led to us all wondering what a penis specialist doctor would be called.

"Oh, it's probably just a urologist or something," Mom said.

"A neurologist?" my sister replied.

We prolonged the hysterics by taking repeated jabs at men, until dad, brought to tears with laughter, accused us all of stereotyping.

Best movie I've seen in quite some time

Everything is Illuminated, 2005, starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. I remember seeing the trailers for it around the same time as the Lord of the Rings, but sadly it only came out on one screen in all of Vancouver, for all of about six weeks.

A pity, though, because I enjoyed it very, very much.

Scenario: Jewish American with an odd collecting habit travels to the Ukraine in search of a woman who is believed to have helped his grandfather escape the Nazis during the Holocaust. He travels the countryside in a Trabant with a blind man (the driver of the car), his grandson who learned to speak English from a thesaurus and dresses like a rapper, and Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., a deranged dog dubbed the 'seeing eye bitch'.

The film itself alternated between being hilariously funny and quite somber.

I think one of its main strengths was that there was very little dialogue throughout, and that nothing was spelled out or explained. For the most part, the audience was barred from entering the characters' minds and background information isn't provided. Instead, the film forces you through the same thought process that the characters go through, seeing what they see, interpreting and coming up with your own conclusion as to what happened.

Ultimately history is whatever you choose to believe happened, based upon the best evidence that's available to you at the time. In some cases there are more loose ends than others, and some things you'll never know. But regardless of what you know of history and whether or not you care, you will always be a product of the people and events that happened before you. That's pretty much what I got out of it.

It was also pretty refreshing for a Holocaust film. Seems to me it's the first one that I've seen that didn't take place during the actual Holocaust and so it didn't really deal with it in the same way that practically every other film has. It didn't come across as preachy at all.

Oh, and I liked the soundtrack.

In which I was assaulted with pasta

You know the phrase to be slapped in the face with a wet noodle?

I was today, and it wasn't pretty.

At last there is nothing left to say.

You know how you're always supposed to dance like no one's watching?

But is it possible to blog like there's no one watching? That's kind of what it feels like these days. I guess if I was any good I would have flashed my nipples by now. I can only conclude that I've become intolerably boring.

So here's a picture of my cat.



Now excuse me while I watch cheese get moldy.

To do:

Create a chair entirely out of hands in various positions. Human hands. Fibreglass human hands. But only hands cut off of fibreglass liars and thieves, because otherwise this would be a sick and disgusting endeavour.

Knit a domo-kun mitten. Knit a kitten mitten. Wear both and then see if anyone notices.

Stop writing such schlock.

Escape to Norway.

Find my copy of Maestro.

Overcome my fear of hammocks.

Drink heavily.

Get a typewriter.

Find the meaning of the earth in a single grain of sand, drop it and then find it again in a completely different grain of sand.

Molotov cocktail party at my place. You bring bottles and I'll provide the gas.

Eat brains.

Three stooges

So, here we are, holding this cabinet up against the wall while Dad's getting the electric drill ready with the right bit so he can screw the screws in.

And then we stand there, Mom and I, holding the damn thing up. I had to contort myself into an odd, unnatural position to get around the washer so I could hold it in just the right place. Mom was playing footsies with the laundry sink.

The funny thing about holding weights up sort of above your head but kind of out from you as well, is that your arms get tired. The same is to be said of holding a storage cabinet, especially when previously mentioned father is trying to manouveur the stepladder around the litterbox and making stupid jokes about it being shitty.

The fun only intensifies when said father climbs up there and finds that something is amiss. "What in the sam hell? Jesus Christ. Trust me to measure that ass backwards," he says, "I guess I should take a cabinetmaking course someday. You see that there? I measured from this side instead of that side, so these holes were supposed to line up with the studs but now they won't. Aww, piss..."

"Well, fix it!" Mom says, just as I do. She and I have green personalities, which is to say we build straight bridges at the shortest point across the river, while Dad's more of an orange person, building a levitating rollercoaster with flying butresses and helipad, bungee jumping and fine dining to get you across the river, but downstream a bit, because you really shouldn't miss the canyon over there. It's something to see.

"But I need to get a drill bit," he replies.

"Do it then," she says.

He re-manouvers the stepladder away from the litterbox so he can get the door open and then proceeds towards the shop. Mom and I wait until he's out of earshot before we burst into laughter.

Later, he took this picture of myself and Sally, but my camera wasn't set to autofocus at the time. Otherwise it'd be a good picture.

Greg finds love

An overdone theme, I know, but I really have nothing to say. I'm feeling a tad jaded at the moment because I've just received confirmation from the last internet provider in the city that no, they can't offer me anything better than dial up. I don't live in a remote area, just one that has a lot of working class people in it. Evidently these people are worthless.

If the government owned the internet companies, it would have to provide access to everyone. Indeed, in the past the only reason why BC Tel was allowed to have a monopoly over telephone service was because it was bound by law to provide access to everyone, not just the cities. The government was needed to step in and force this because private companies just wouldn't bother otherwise. Same went for electricity. But what about Telus, Rogers and Bell? I say nationalize the bastards. Enough of this private enterprise shit.

And about the hearts and stuff, I'll stop soon. Rest assured that I'll likely be nice and disillusioned about that too pretty soon.

Squidly love

The 7 Deadly Sinner's blog has a selection of bizarre retro valentines cards up right now, my favourite of which is:



or possibly:



I'm not sure. But when I looked through them, I realized at once that perhaps the cutest and most cuddly animal of all was strangely underrepresented in all valentines I've ever seen, and since I'm all for equal opportunity, I bring you:



Squidly love. If you're lucky, I might just send one to you.

Conclusion?

Grandma doesn't really need us to visit her anymore. She's got the tv to keep her company.

The trip wasn't worth the cost of the parking ticket we got outside the hospital.

Flickr's down.

You'll never fear the checkout line again

So, when we first went to check out the new Thrifty's last April, we picked up a large chunk of Callibaut chocolate as well as some other fixings for a fondue, and up until last night, they sat in the back of the cupboard gathering dust.

I figured that the end of mom's audit was a good enough occasion to do something fun like a chocolate fondue. Unfortunately we had no strawberries, but we had bananas and a package of those vanilla wafer cookie things that we all hate, but are fondue necessities.

You know the kind - they come in rectangular sticks with a waffle pattern on the top, look kind of like plywood and taste kind of like drywall. They're crunchy and always leave crumbs on your lap when you eat them, no matter how hard you try to not make a mess. I hate them. I really do.

And yet, you can't have a fondue without them. They've got that sort of quintesscence that no other dippable food has, not even ladyfingers.

We had made it about halfway through the package when I noticed the warning on the back. Instead of just being a warning about peanuts and eggs, there was an additional note there, explaining that 'excessive consumption may have a laxative effect on sensitive persons'. I read that out kind of as a joke.

It wasn't a joke. I ate three, maybe four of them and within two hours I felt a lot of rumbling and movement in my abdomen. My parents had eaten more than I had so they were definitely affected too, but even my sister who only ate one said that she definitely felt something. Luckily, and this is rapidly approaching information you don't really need to know, luckily there were no stomach cramps or other forms of genuine unpleasantness associated with that affliction, other than spending half of one's evening on the toilet.

Which got me thinking, really. You know, certain products that deal with things of a... personal nature can kind of make one feel a tad self-conscious in the checkout line at the drugstore. I try not to, but I do tend to speculate in my mind about people who buy things like yeast infection cream, condoms or diarrhea medications in unusually large quantities before reminding myself that tampons are on sale and I have what could be considered an excessive amount of them in my shopping basket.

But there you go, there's hope for all you constipated people who don't want to broadcast it to the whole world. Eat vanilla wafers. Lots of them. People won't even look twice.

Rescue

It's something that happens every year and is absolutely necessary. Most years my mom is able to anticipate the sorts of questions the auditors will ask and make them a package of most of the info they'll want beforehand. That way they're in and out in about three days, after they've determined that everything's fine with the books and payroll. Usually it's pretty painless.

This year it seems that they've changed the auditing procedures completely, and on top of that, one of the two auditors does not seem to understand exactly how the office works, how decisions get made, and is in the habit of asking the same questions over and over. What should have taken three days is taking seven and mom's livid.

I caught the end of a conversation as I arrived at her office. The female auditor was on her way out with a stack of papers, as my mom was explaining to her she was apalled that as an auditor, this woman did not seem to understand how Canada Pension Plan payroll deductions worked. Apparently yesterday the same person didn't understand why not everyone in the office gets a merit-based pay raise, and the day before she didn't understand that the numbers for this year can't be the same as the ones from last year because some people got raises, as in more money, as in bigger paycheques, as in, they aren't making the same amount as they were last year so the numbers are different.

We rescued mom and took her out for lunch. Luckily this was the last day.

I've got worms on the brain

Maybe I'll save the world tomorrow

My bus was late today. If it had been on time, maybe I would have made it to the skytrain station in time to be the one doing CPR on the guy with the heart attack. Maybe then he would have lived.

As it was, I was on time for my meeting. Lucky me.

Maybe I'll save the world tomorrow.

I'm not so much feeling like blogging these days.