Brought to you by the letter F

Alright, I'm not in the habit of doing memes at all, but this one looked fun. Kimanda gave me the letter F, so now I have to list 10 words starting with that letter with a description of what they mean to me.

Frick - is the name of one of my cats. She has been known to pose with Japanese tourists, bite the hand that feeds her and attack dogs as large as German shepherds. A recovering buolemic, she once rode all the way from Port Moody to Vancouver and halfway back (about 35 km) on the freeway in the car roof rack before someone pulled us over and told us she was there.

Florence - I was the only student to go with all my teachers to the Uffizi Gallery to see all that famous art up close. Then afterward, when I met up with my friends, we found a carousel in the middle of a plaza with a little old woman who charged us half an euro each to ride. I'm sure we'd never pay that much at home to do that.

Ford F150 - John had an old truck that was given to him and it was grey with a wide pink stripe all around it which I thought was ugly as shit. One night it was stolen and totaled and he was never quite the same after that. He loved that ugly truck. He eventually replaced it with a minivan and complained often that he was reduced to being a soccer mom.

Famous - There used to be a little greasy spoon on the main street of our town called the Famous Cafe, owned by an eccentric little Chinese man and his wife, who used to do all the cooking. I don't know if it was actually famous or not, but it was pretty popular among police and paramedics because it was the only restaurant open at 4am every morning and breakfast was really cheap. Many people were sad when they retired.

Football - (the soccer kind) When I was little, my parents thought that they should put me in sports as well as dance and Brownies but they didn't know what my attitude towards that was. One day they told me that they had signed me up for soccer and I started to cry and told them that if they wanted me to do it I would. Needless to say they never made me play. I think I appreciate it more today though.

Faroese - is a language I know almost nothing about, except that it's used on some islands in the middle of nowhere that are owned by Denmark and there are some other islands in the middle of nowhere that are owned by Canada that Denmark says it owns too but it doesn't.

I'm running out of F words, aren't I?

Fish and chips - is what I had for lunch with some friends today. I guess Americans would call them fish and fries. They're the best with canned mushy peas and lots of pepper to dip the fries in but they didn't have any where we went. They did however have cream puffs with real cream.

Flak and the Enforcers - In my first year of university they drilled us repeatedly with Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model, which was about how all the media we see has had to pass through five sets of filters first. The fourth one they mentioned was Flak and the Enforcers, or negative feedback given to media networks from lobby groups, advertising, complaints etc. I always thought that it would make a good name for a band, or at least I did at the time.

But how can I forget

Fridays - The best day of the week. Can you believe that in high school I used to wake up at 5:00, row for an hour and a half, go to school, then row another hour and a half and swim for three hours and go to bed at 11:30 without dinner to be up again at 5:00 the next morning?

Frappuccinos - Rain, sun or snow, it makes no difference. I am a Starbucks whore. They're good to have when I'm not studying and I don't feel like having an Americano or worse. I just wish they had less sugar in them.

Ack, terrible. Comment to play, if you wish.

I have no new photos so you get more car crashes. Joy.

Take your kids to work week is like so six years ago

1. And in the beginning there was breakfast of oatmeal and kiwi and Erin put milk on the oatmeal but sugar she did not eat because it is white death. 2. And it was good. As good as bland crap like oatmeal can be.

3. And Erin was made to stand and wait for the bathroom. And Erin danced up and down and crossed her legs and got pissed off until someone let her in.

4. And Erin's father said "Daughter, thou art lazy. Come to work with me that I might have lunch with thee." 5. And Erin had other plans for today but she said yes anyways.

6. Erin's father's office is constantly full of people. 7. And Erin met Leila and said hello. 8. And Erin met a girl that looked like Pink and said hello. 9. And Erin met a girl that dresses like a clown and calls herself Muffin and said hello. 10. And mostly Erin just sat around doing nothing.

11. And Erin watched a presentation at the school. And it was good.

12. And then they went for Chinese for lunch and it was good. 13. And Erin was unable to finish her lunch so she got it packed up in one of those styrofoam thingies. 14. And she felt bad because the styrofoam thingie will eventually end up in a landfill.

15. And the unplanned activities of the day took precidence over the planned. 16. And Erin did not go erging like she had planned. 17. And Erin knows that she has to get down to coxswain weight by September or she's cut from the rowing team. 18. Again.

19. But lo, Erin's books were due at the library. 20. And Erin thought, I am very lazy and broke so I have no bus fare. 21. And Erin renewed them for another four months on the internet. 22. She has had them for eight already. 23. And it was good.

Just like Emeril, only different

Out in the more rural part of town there is a road where you can go to buy stuff straight off of farms. Most of it is honour box stuff: honey, free-range eggs, sometimes vegetables and the like.

This is exactly where we went in search of manure for the garden, and where we found a shed by the side of the road filled with just that. I seem to remember my sister saying something about how the task of throwing bags of manure into the back of our vehicle was a load of crap, which was exceptionally witty because that was exactly what it was.

We made other jokes about it as well, which I won't repeat because you can probably guess what they were.

Making potato salad for dinner, I realized that one of the eggs that I had boiled somehow had not been completely submerged and was still pretty liquidy on the inside. No problem. I just put it in the microwave.

There was a point in time in my life when I found it really fun to carefully remove and then replace a small section of the top of an egg, place it in an egg cup and then microwave it in order to watch the top erupt like a volcano. I am over it.

I made sure that the membrane inside the egg was broken so that it wouldn't do the same thing. However, nothing could prepare me for what would happen.

We have a nifty little egg slicer thing that my sister loves to use so she had the honour of chopping them up. I turned my back for just a moment as she began to slice the last egg, the one that had been in the microwave and then all of a sudden I heard a small explosion. When I turned, the yolk of that egg was all over the kitchen and my father, who had been sitting across the kitchen table at the time.

Bam!

I really need to have my own cooking show.

Good luck to a certain Norwegian who has a particularly scarying exam to write about an hour's time. ;)

Bridge, tunnel, rainbow

It was Cinco de Mayo yesterday, the international celebration of my mother's birthday. As you can clearly see in the picture, my apartment exudes coolness, coolness that is accentuated by the fact that there is obviously a party going on there. A party with rubber ducky wrapping paper because that was the only kind that we could find at the last minute that wasn't either baby, wedding or christ you're an old bugger themed.

There are many people out there on the internet. Lonely people. Teeniebopper people. Geeky people. Stalker people.

Parents of autistic children obsessed with Dora the Explorer people.

Because of something my sister wrote about babysitting my cousin and watching that repetitive show that drives you nuts, she was contacted by a parent of an autistic child who can't quite understand why the kid keeps chanting the same thing over and over, and wants to be able to see the episode.

We've been searching for it all morning to no avail, and finally we decided to email the network where it aired.

Maybe we'll find it.

Crash

I didn't have much to do today so I took pictures.

















More tomorrow when I feel like talking.

It's all relative

Re: Grandma Eileen

She was in an unusually good mood the other day. She only swore a little, she smiled and she didn't bother complaining about any of our twitty relatives. She did however tell the man next door to her to shut up and drop on his head. Up until that point I had wondered what was wrong with her but it turns out that nothing was. Good to know.

Re: my father

It is a stupid idea to tell your mother-in-law about how you visited your own mother and had a nice time on the day when you should have been visiting your mother-in-law because it was her birthday. Everyone knows that. We were "busy" on her birthday, remember?

Re: my sister

She won her rugby game today and now they're in the finals. I was just leaving to see the game when I sat down and fell asleep for nearly an hour. So we went to Dairy Queen and walked home together. She's awesome, I tells ye, except for the fact that she didn't tape House last night and I don't want anyone to tell me what happened to Foreman. DON'T TELL ME! I want to watch it myself.

Re: my uncle Lloyd

Courtesy of him there's a large chunk of chocolate cake sitting on the kitchen table and it's calling out to me. It's terrible cake and it has too much icing but it has that fake custard stuff inside. It beckons...

Re: my mother

She interviewed people all day and now she's talking about every single one of them. One guy managed to say "sort of" 90+ times in the space of twenty minutes. They kept a tally. My mother feels obligated to phone him to tell him exactly why he didn't get the job and suggest that he get some help to fix his speech impediment.

Juxtaposition

I have spent the past two days in an office with neither air conditioning nor windows that open. To say it has been unpleasant would be an understatement.

My uncle Lloyd turned 66 today, so we all had a party of sorts, sitting around my grandmother's bed at the hospital.

My aunt Gay was there and she's looking worse than ever. It seems like every time I see her she's gained another twenty or thirty pounds and tonight she looked like she had been inflated like a balloon. What I wouldn't do for a needle.

Auntie Marilyn was also there. I'm not sure exactly how she puts up with Lloyd's pompousness but she does it and seems to enjoy it for some reason. This is something that I'll never understand. She's such a dear.

The whole thing seemed kind of strange to me though.

On one side of the curtain, people were laughing as Lloyd told stories about home internet use: "So, I email Marilyn and say do you want to make love tonight? and she emails me back, no. Must be a default in the damn computer program or something."

On the other side of the curtain behind me another woman lay in her bed, tended by a volunteer because she didn't have any family near. She is not expected to make the night.

There will be pictures again when I'm not so damn tired.

Chop chop

Alright, please disregard the previous post.

It was written while I was in shock and obviously I was not able to think clearly because I now think that my wrist has just been sprained. The idea came to me while I was in the shower and found that gradually I was able to move it more and more. It still hurts and it's still swollen but I can move it a lot more than I could.

That and I don't want to sit for several hours in a hospital waiting room.
That and I've never ever broken a bone before in my life, though there are times when I probably should have.

If anyone was wondering, I was running to answer my phone and turned a corner, slipping on the floor and smashing my right hand directly into the bathroom door frame. I seem to have some large and painful bruises all down my left side as well, on my elbow, hip, butt, knee and ankle that make me walk and sit all gimpy.

That's why the hallway should be shaped like a velodrome. You don't ever see those bikes fly off the track, do you?

What bothers me right now is that these things always seem to happen in threes. Now that I've fallen out of the car and tripped in the hall, I'm not completely sure what to expect. Hopefully something pleasant.

Maybe someone will send me a letter stuffed with unmarked bills or something. Fifties and hundreds would be nice, though I will accept twenties too.

I just checked my mailbox and there was nothing there.

Come on people. Chop chop.

Shock

I always laugh when cat slides across laminate floor.

I don't laugh when I slide across laminate floor.

think I broke my thumb

hurts to type; can't use mouse

when I stop being shocky I'll get x rayed

treat for shock = oxygen + warm blanket + reassurance

I'll be fine

there's always amputation

using cranberries for ice

need breakfast

can't type; hurts

Who do they think they are, and where did they get that car?

Upass or up ass, that is the question.

When I paid my tuition for the summer, the $98 Upass fee was included in there somewhere, which for those who don't know what I'm talking about is the government issue bus pass that I get for being a student. $98 for four months, which is a hell of a lot better than the 120something I would have to pay each month if I didn't have the upass.

Problem is that my spring upass expires today and no one bothered to mail me my summer upass that I should be getting because I paid for it. So I checked the website and found out that someone suddenly decided that they would be so kind as to exempt me from the upass program because I'm only taking correspondence courses this summer and don't need to go to school.

But what if I need to go to work?
And what if the only reason that I took summer courses was so that I could get a upass?

These things evidently don't matter because a refund cheque for $98 is in the mail. Stupid fucking Translink bastards.

Now that my grandmother lives in White Rock and a lot closer to us we apparently have to visit her a lot more often.

That means we also have to visit the white rock more often. It is a rock and it is white. Once in a while some crazy kids hellbent on fucking with the system graffiti all over the white rock rendering it some other colour than white. Then someone has to get out there and paint it white again because the white rock has to be white. It's in White Rock after all.

Out on the western side of the White Rock strip we decided to have some dinner. After surveying the options available we were stuck with a tough decision: fish and chips or fish and chips? I mean, if we didn't want fish and chips we could always have fish and chips instead. These were the options open to us at the time. We finally decided upon fish and chips.

The place that we were at unfortunately lacked canned mushy peas, which saddened me greatly. It did however have homemade tartar sauce, Germans and really retro looking Superman cartoons playing, thereby earning brownie points.

Outside, people drove their convertables up and down the strip there. Apparently the Trooper song about the boys in the bright white sports car is about people who drive along that very road by the beach in the summer. Betcha didn't know that.

Boundary Bay is an important area for environmentalists and birdwatchers because there is a huge number of species of birds that live there or stop by while they're migrating. That explains why I only saw two different types.

My father suggested that I lay down on the train tracks and rest my ear on the rails so I could listen for trains approaching and my sister suggested that I just leave my head there.

I said something that bothered my sister at some point or other today and she kneed me in the crotch, which both anatomically and otherwise was a pointless waste of time.