Caveat

WARNING: this course puts your health at risk.

This was how we were greeted at our documentary research methods class today. The warning was followed by an unnecessarily long powerpoint presentation about every possible reason why we should drop the course. They included but were not limited to:

having a full course load

any possible concerns about your gpa

being prone to procrastination

being on academic probation

taking cmns 260 at the same time, especially if you've never taken stats

having a social life

having a part time job

being lazy

planning any sort of vacation during the course

having nervous disorders

pregnancy and/or breastfeeding

chronic health problems

He then went into a long diatribe about how he only ever gives out C's and how the course work takes at least 15 hours per week.

The room was a sardine tin of incredulous students. While I can understand that he wants to cut down the number of people in the class with horror stories, the fact of the matter is that it is a required class. People aren't there out of interest. They're there because they won't graduate without it.

So he's scaring us why?

Have filing cabinet, will travel

We got into our new student union common room today only to find that someone had stolen all our houseplants. This launched Heather into a huge rant about how pissed off she was and we took a long time to convince her that she shouldn't complain because we had originally stolen them from someone else a couple of weeks ago. Maybe whoever it was just decided to take them back.

Even though we had left instructions for the movers, we arrived to find that the most important things that we had wanted (ie. the filing cabinet and the two bouncy, squishy rolley chairs) were not there. We borrowed a TV cart from the audio-visual department and went exploring.

Our filing cabinet was still in the old room, with the 'please move this' sticker missing, as if someone had decided that they should just keep it there. It took the four of us to manhandle the filing cabinet into a rather precarious position on top of the cart. Our efforts were punctuated by the painful squeal of metal on metal. One of the bouncy squishy rolley chairs was in the room and we took that with us too.

You have to be truly suicidal to use some of the wheelchair ramps at SFU.

Luckily none of us are in wheelchairs and it really wasn't all that hard to do, especially since there were four of us.

Elevators are different. Out of the three that were available, no ammount of swearing could make enough room for that damn filing cabinet in the first two we tried. The third would have been the same, but with a little more manhandling and plenty of four-letter words, we made it fit.

I'm so glad we saved the chair.

Trips to the Chan Centre never disappoint. Yesterday, Jon Kimura Parker played a concerto by Mozart, something that I'm sure I've heard many times before, but it was completely different from the recordings. It's interesting how even though the notes are written down the same, everyone's interperetations can be so different. I guess you can say the same thing about live theatre too.

After the intermission, his brother, James, accompanied him on stage to play a duet that was really amazing to watch. Then their cousin Ian came out on stage and all three of them played together. I have never seen three Steinway pianos on one stage before, and I'm not sure if I will ever see that again. It was a treat.

I took pictures at the Chan, but my computer tells me that I no longer have space on my hard drive. I'll fix it tomorrow.

She strikes again

I was rummaging through the fridge, looking for a kiwi. Mom wanted to do her ironing. Conversation ensued:

"Get out of my way or I'll smack you with this ironing board."

"Get out of my way or I'll throw this kiwi at you!"

"Well I'll use my ironing board as a shield!"

"I'll propel the kiwi through your shield."

"I'll defend myself with this knife!"

"I'll left-handed karatechop the knife from your hand!"

Then, being clearly beaten, my mother retreated to the shadows from whence she came. I sat down and began to eat. Halfway through the kiwi, I froze in fear, feeling the cold butt of a banana pressed into my back.

"So we meet again, Banana woman." I said, "I should have seen right through your disguise as ironing-board-and-breadknife woman. You got the better of me this time, but mark my words, I'll be back..."

Yet another reason why I have to move out. Soon.

Hosers

I was about to go to bed when suddenly I was lured into the livingroom by the sweet sound of the Bob and Doug MacKenzie theme song call.

I spent the next couple hours glued to the television, watching Strange Brew, which, though it isn't the best Canadian cult film, it's pretty good regardless, if you're not the least bit concerned about quality. Or meaningfulness. Or thinking.

I got up once during the whole ordeal to get myself some pea soup. Or at least, the soup had peas in it, the same kind as the Habitant pea soup. How Canadian.

The MacKenzie family dog saved the day and the end credits rolled over everyone's favourite hosers saying all sorts of inane things. Then suddenly the national anthem started playing and I stood up all respectful and with that, our national broadcaster signed off.

I went to bed feeling oddly enriched by the experience, and wondering why beer doesn't come in stubbies anymore.

Today is one of those days that you stumble across people like Peter saying nice things about your blog that are completely unexpected, but pretty nice to see. The internet is a pretty cool place.

Fire and brimstone

26 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

Thereby making Lot into a millionaire because salt was worth much more than gold at the time and proving once again that women are all stupid whores. Though it seems to me that Lot was being pretty stupid himself, because he could have gotten his daughters to look back too and make him into a multimillionaire. He didn't, and there's a word for that: righteous.

To tell the truth, I never really understood the Bible. Good thing I'm not Christian.

Our prof assigned us some readings for anthropology, so we could try and reconstruct a dead and gone culture from a dead and gone set of beliefs. I didn't just say that, did I? Damn.

She floats like a duck!

Nothing but sunshine and bunnies from now on. I promise.

Breakfast of champions

What to eat when you wake up in the morning feeling slightly queasy? Mushrooms of course. Mushrooms and noodles. But not exactly the kind of mushrooms that you'd find at the store. It's more like fungus. I'm eating fungus and noodles for breakfast. There's one that looks like a piece of crumpled up black paper and it's delicious.

A largeish chunk of tofu will make it into my bowl too. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but I think I can live without the fat.

A cup of coffee, tall, dark, handsome. Fair trade, no less. Hold the sugar because that's gross. I'll have four cups of green tea too, while I'm at it, not because I want four cups but because that's how big the pot is.

And with that, my breakfast is gone, hopefully to never be seen by me again. I should have taken a picture.

It's come to my attention recently that there are no good places to eat out here in the suburbs. While this is not a new thing, I only noticed it recently because it seems that everyone and their dog has redone their decor, menus and jacked up their prices to appeal specifically to the up-and-coming middle class. Has the food really changed? No.

What we do have out here are crappy burger, steak and pasta places that masquerade themselves as upscale with contemporary decor that looks like Starbucks and extensive drink menus to woo people into paying $18 for a plate of only half decent pasta and $5 for a strawberry margarita that has sugar instead of salt along the rim.

Vegetarian? Vegan? Special dietary restrictions? Ocean wise? Fair trade? Slow food? Screw you, you're not getting any of that out here.

Okay, I'm being bitchy, and admittedly, it is getting better out here. But you can't tell me that that steak you're eating is actually worth $24. And it irritates the hell out of me when I go for lunch with friends and they exclaim constantly about the food when you could go downtown and get something nicer for half the price. It's stupid, but people don't know any better.

I toyed with the idea a long time ago of starting a little restaurant with $6 or $7 plates of pasta that just does lunch. It would have a really limited menu, maybe five different sauces for your pasta, three that are always the same, two that you could switch up depending on what's in season and what you feel like cooking. The place would have salads too, and soup when it's cold out. Good coffee, of course.

The problem with this idea, of course is that I have no intention of ever wanting to own and manage a restaurant, and most importantly, I promised myself that I would never ever get into marketting. What the hell else do you do with a communications degree? I'll let you know when I get one.

It's almost time for lunch already.

Tootle

I woke up early this morning with a nasty migraine, which is strange because I don't usually get them in the morning. There's codeine somewhere in the back of the cupboard for this sort of thing, but I couldn't find it in the dark and I'm not massochistic or stupid enough to turn on the lights. I sat in the darkened livingroom with my hands over my eyes until I eventually started feeling better and then I shuffled back to bed. I'm still a little upset about how much time that wasted, not that I could really help it.

The specifics are vague, but from what I've gathered, someone (I won't name names) allowed the subscription to the antivirus program on the desktop computer to lapse. Now apparently there is a virus on the computer that is not only preventing a new, working version of the program to be installed, but also blocking all access from that computer to websites related to antivirus programs. Fun, eh? I spent several hours today exhausting every brilliant idea I could come up with to fix it to no avail. I don't think it will be fixed any time soon. At least my computer works.

I managed to lose an hour while riding the bus today, and turned up late to a meeting about the sprinkler and alarm system for my building. Where exactly the time goes while I'm on the bus will forever remain a mystery to me.

Tonight I got sucked once again into a game of Scrabble with the parents, which isn't really a problem, except that my father nearly always wins and I am most often dfl in the rankings. This is naturally not a good thing for my ego, though I guess it's good for my brain.

Often to my parents' chagrin, we play by the rules that everything in the official Scrabble Dictionary is legal. The beauty of this system is that when I'm lost for words, I just rearrange my tiles until I come up with a combination that looks like it might possibly be a real word. More often than not, when I look it up, I'm surprised to find that it's actually there. If it's not, I just say it is and the game continues like normal. More often than not, nobody notices, because that particular dictionary has some of the stupidest, most bizarre and archaic spellings of words you will ever see.

I guess some would wonder why I bend the rules like that, especially since I rarely ever win the game. The answer is simple. It's so much more fun to lose with interesting words that everyone fights over than it is with boring words that everyone knows.

I hate to be beaten at my own game, though, and that is exactly what happened tonight. After a breif and unusual sojurn into the depths of the dictionary, my father came up with what I thought at the time was a stupid word: tootle. They don't get much stupider than that.

To add insult to injury, my mother left for some reason near the end of the game and my father and I took the liberty of disposing of her last tile, an R. We tried a few different places on the board before I finally put it where it would get her the most points.

tootler (n) one who tootles

Stupidest fucking word ever. And with that, she managed to beat me by two points. Again. The things I do for my mother.

The world is flat

I opened up my textbooks this morning with the intention of doing some prereading before school starts next week. No such luck. Today my brain is fried.

I went instead to the pub with Kathy but it was closed for repairs. No such luck there either. We went in search of textbooks and cheap food and alcohol, but mostly we just wasted our time. I'm glad that we get to ride the busses for "free".

We searched the entire bookstore for Andy so we could harass him with a huge list of books that we could probably easily find ourselves. No such luck. He was nowhere to be found, that is, until we arrived at the checkout. We picked him out of the line and bugged away. I was thrown off momentarily by the fact that his name tag said "Sam", but it was him alright.

Usually we would take Lauren with us on these forays, but she's still on vacation somewhere and to be honest, I was kind of glad that she wasn't there today. Sometimes I get tired of listening to her complain about how irritating her brother is, household chores, homework for her (oh my god) three courses and not having the right shoes for a particular outfit, especially since her problems all seem to transcend the incredible limits of mortal suffering.

I can only hear about so much pain and anguish before my head explodes.

Somehow or other, every minute detail of everything we talk about manages to make it back to Lauren's mother, who then tells Kathy's father. If he were to heaven forbid hear about all the lewd and uncatholic things we get up to at parties, I'm sure she would never hear the end of it.

Since Lauren wasn't there, it was the perfect time for Kathy to admit that she was really shocked at how I wasn't the least bit hungover when I woke up at her house on January 1st, considering how drunk I was the night before. Not that that is really a surprise, considering the fact that I'm descended from a long line of charlatans, horse theives and raving alcoholics. But I guess that people wouldn't know that.

The end is near

I was pretty whiney a year ago tomorrow:

I hope you all had a great holiday. Mine, well, ranked somewhere near the one that I spent all Christmas in the hospital with an infection that was at first misdiagnosed as sexual abuse, and then they overdosed me on penicillan. Ask me about that Christmas and this one later.

I am, currently, at what is to be my house in about five days. Moving from a four bedroom house with an attic into a basement suite with a garage has been difficult to say the least, especially since nothing inside is finished. What is supposed to be my room has nothing on the walls, no boards, no gyproc, and is also about a third of the size of the room that I am moving out of. In addition, I will be sharing it with my sister, which means that our beds will be about a foot apart, and I won't have any room to put a dresser in the room for my clothes. Oh well, it's not like I would use it anyway. At least I have a closet.

Until there are boards and paint on the walls in my room, and also my parent's room, we all get to sleep in the livingroom together. Fun.

At the moment, my wishlist includes a washroom where I could have a shower (there is a bathtub, but due to caulking problems, hair must be washed in the laundry sink). I would really love to have a kitchen sink, a dishwasher and some cabinets, but I suppose I could settle with kitchen counters. We don't appear to have any of those yet. Maybe we will get a stove soon. (My sister says no.)

That is currently the situation I am in. What can I say? My house as it is is reminicent of the third world, though admittedly it hasn't been struck by a tsunami. I do however have my computer, and a faster internet connection than I did before, so I guess it isn't all bad.

My commute to and from school will be an hour longer each way. That adds up to a whole four wasted hours per day. I'm going to buy a laptop so that maybe I could get some work done on the bus. Otherwise, ask me about the commute in a week.

From the middle of nowhere, I am Erin. Signing off.

I don't whine that much anymore. But though I am now able to shower normally and have kitchen counters, the stove is still out in the garage and it would be really nice if there were cupboards in the kitchen. In spite of the fact that our house is beginning to actually look like something that people live in, I move out on the 15th. Joy. I'm not taking my cat. Sadness.

Hello 2006

New Years didn't fully begin until a guy named Andrew the geologist showed up and introduced himself with a large cooler of assorted alcohol to share. I'm still not completely certain why he was there or who he knew, but he was cool so it was okay. As always, there was plenty of truly terrible karaeoke and spin the bottle, this time with substantially more guys playing than girls.

I have come to the realization that falling asleep on people is much nicer than just sleeping on the couch or the floor. Though when you fall asleep, that means that other people use your camera. When I check my camera, there seems to be an unusually high number of nipple shots there. I did not take them, and I don't know who did. There are plenty of other, nicer photos there and they can be found here at the moment.

My apologies to Adam for giving him a black eye. People keep wanting the story behind that and to be honest, it's not really worth telling.

At this time last year, I was filled with all sorts of optimism and aspirations, some outrageous, others completely realistic and unfortunately, none fully realized. Faced with the possibility of another year of commuting 3-4 hours per day in and out of an isolated shithole suburb again, I just can't bring myself to feel the same way this year. Who knows? Maybe by December I will be pleasantly surprised. If nothing else, I won't be disappointed.