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.