1984-2008

RIP poly-cotton blend fitted sheet. I searched my closet for another fitted sheet to put on my bed and came up empty.

Well, I didn't come up empty. I found one but it was the wrong size completely, which begs the question as to why I had it in the first place.

Anyways, I guess this means I'm sleeping on the couch tonight.

I had errands to run today but I really didn't want to go outside.

21x365: Ms. Mac

She had white hair and a kindly expression, and her job was to keep us all from killing each other out on the field at lunch. When we were being especially good, she'd dig deep into the pockets of her Gore-Tex jacket and reward us with some of a seemingly endless supply of rubber and plastic dinosaurs. I loved those dinosaurs, especially the glow-in-the-dark ones, and I still have some of them today... somewhere.

20x365: Mr. Peckerell

He was the only janitor at my elementary school and he always did a really good job. I don't remember anything being a mess ever, though that may have had something to do with our age at the time. He always wore green coveralls and he spent a lot of time down in the boiler room. Once a month he'd bring in an old rotary phone or other electronic junk for the boys and I do pull apart during play time. We'd butcher them happily, talking about how much we loved him because he was so nice.

Lunch

I'm finally starting to go through and check out a whole lot of blogs I found through NaBlo but haven't been able to read yet because of school and life. One such blog is Berlin's Whimsy, where Berlin posts about kids, crafting, moving and much else with some really lovely photos. Her posts are thoughtful, contemplative and I think they're thoroughly enjoyable to read. But it was a couple of recent posts about packing bento box style lunches for her kids (here and here) that brought back a lot of memories that I'd forgotten I had.

I give my mom a lot of credit for her lunchmaking. I never went without a lunch at school and overall most of the time she did a decent job of it. In fact, she continued waking up early in the mornings to make me lunches until I was 17. The only problem was that at 6am my mom isn't all that awake, and thus isn't all that creative, so when she wasn't inspired, which was most days, I tended to get the exact same thing.

For most of public school I had a thermos that automatically gave me the status of having the coolest lunch around. Sometimes I got leftovers, especially if we had had some sort of stir fry or pasta, but often it was canned soup. That wasn't so bad, most of the time.

But in those moments of creative burnout mom would resort to the same thing three to five days per week. She would go through phases, and they would only end when either Abby or I would tell her that we had eaten the same thing so many times it now made us nauseous.

There was a Chinese pork bun phase. There was also a frozen meat pie phase. She used to heat them in the toaster in the morning and wrap them in tin foil to keep them warm, which didn't really work all that well. Then when she found out that that didn't work, she started wrapping them in paper towel and then in foil, which only meant that we then had to pick cold, soggy paper towel off of our pies before we could eat them.

At one point in time it was Kraft Dinner. Do you know what hot KD does when you leave it four or five hours in a thermos? The noodles suck up all the sauce, condensation and moisture and expand to form a solid mass of spongey orange crap that fills up the entire volume of the thermos. The result is something you have to cut through with a knife, which on coming into contact with the moisture in your mouth continues to expand until it blocks your throat and you start to choke. I'm not exaggerating much.

By that time the thermos phase was nearly over. I had more than one, and I had a bad habit of forgetting the empty ones in my bag for long periods of time so that they would be extremely gross by the time we found them again. From then on it was sandwiches, which were mostly decent.

Thinking about this makes me think that she didn't do a particularly bad job at all. But thinking about it also makes me so incredibly excited about the thought of bento box lunches that I'm really tempted to get one for myself. I'm not entirely sure if this is purely impulse or not so I think maybe I'll give myself a week before I go do something drastic, even if a lot of people pack a lot of really cool stuff in them.

Your questions answered, out of context, twenty-four seven.

A lot of people arrive here with questions, and I find the answers are far more interesting than the questions themselves. So here goes:

Yes, indeed, I know the words to the prune song, and posted them a couple years ago, here. (Believe it or not, I have gotten 2-5 searches for that song per day since I put that post up.)

I don't know what a newborn alligator's name is. Perhaps you should ask the parents.

Sorry, I don't know where you can find a fabric store in Narita, but if you happen to find one with a good selection of tweeds and suiting, I'd be interested in knowing, just in case I randomly find myself in Japan. I've become quite enamoured with them of late.

Seems to me that digging blackheads out with your fingernails sounds kind of dangerous. You might have better success with some sort of face scrub that has both salicylic acid and ground up pumice in it. Or, if it's horribly, intolerably bad, talk to a doctor about it.

In my experience broccoli doesn't get moldy so much as it just liquefies in the bag in the bottom of the fridge.

The Shakespeare play with the ear poison is Hamlet.

Yes, Roy Dupuis is awesome.

Mercedes Five and Dime was an album by the now most likely defunct band Moist. It's somewhat softer than their earlier stuff. No, you can't have my copy.

I guess the simple answer would be that a Scandinavian craft is a craft made by a Scandinavian. These days I think they make pretty much the same kinds of crafts as everyone else. If you're thinking of traditional stuff, maybe try googling something like "tvaandsstickning" or "twined knitting."

When a cat is headless, it's probably dead. Sorry.

The phrase "strep weeping sore" brings up a host of bad memories. I don't feel like talking about it.

I don't know why "we" go to university. All I can speak for is myself, and that reason is that it beats work. As much as the people I work with are really incredibly nice to me, and as much as I get paid reasonably well, my job has the habit of turning my brain into a sponge. It renders simple tasks at home like blogging, drawing or other such creative activities complete agony and I feel burnt out. I'm of the opinion that exposing oneself to new ideas and people and learning to think is good for you and improves your quality of life regardless of the amount you end up earning afterward. It's not about getting a "good" job. I think if that's the only reason you're in school you're missing the point. Elitist, I know.

Don't quote me on this, but I was watching a documentary once and the narrator said that the sexual habits of alligators and crocodiles are mysterious and very undocumented, so sorry, I can't help you there.

Dressew isn't selling chocolate right now, and may not in the future. In addition to their regular stock, they seem to buy up lots of all sorts of random things from businesses that are liquidating, and this is the sort of stuff that may only ever come in once. The $20 15lb cases of Belgian chocolate were that kind of stock.

19x365: Mr. Clarke with an e

Grade 4 in his class was the first year we had letter grades - a rude awakening. I hated him from the start for being a bit of a hardass, but my second year in the same class wasn't as bad. He earned my respect with his uncharacteristic choice to choose the side of a guy in my class who was caught picking his nose. I wouldn't have said it at the time, but the poor guy had already taken enough ridicule from the other students by that point.

At one point Mr. Clarke decided to start reading us a book. I can't remember the book, but it had something to do with a juvenile delinquent being taken in and taught to fish for shrimp by a black man from Florida. I don't think we finished it, but from my seat in the front row, I had a good view of his ear hair. He had some of the most fantastic ear hairs.

After grade 5 he suddenly retired, telling us he was going to golf for the rest of his days. I saw him a year later, in Costco. I hid behind a clothing rack and watched as he picked up one pair of slacks, and then another, and then one in each hand, weighing them. Two weeks later he died suddenly. I never learned the cause.

18x365: Rene

In grade three I met Rene. He was a year older than me and really big for his age, twice my size, not that that has ever been hard. He said he was from Honduras, and I vaguely remember looking it up on a map to see what he meant by that. He could always be found outside, playing basketball.

In grade four Rene became convinced that I had magical, telekinetic powers because I could stack and shelve things like no other. Somehow I was the only person who was able to do it without making them fall down.

In grade five Rene moved away.

Yaletown tour

I spent a lot of time downtown today learning an architectural tour for the Architectural Institute. The Institute has summer staff that do them, but sometimes in the winter they need extra people to do them.

I wandered around with the information from the tour to find that one of the buildings that used to be on the route just doesn't seem to exist anymore, and one seems to have the wrong address written down in the book. Not only that, but the RAV line construction has kind of screwed up the route anyways, and there are a few major buildings that are being renovated so the stuff you're actually supposed to look at is either being torn down or hidden behind canvas or plywood.

Good to know. It would have sucked to find that out the day of.

When I finish my work term I'm going to have to go down there to take some pictures, because Yaletown isn't an area I usually spend a lot of time in.

There's one dumb street down there where one side of the road has one name, and the other side of the street has another name, and the numbers on both sides are all even. I was looking for something down there and a guy stopped to ask if I needed help finding something.

People from out of town always tell me that Vancouverites are really aloof and unfriendly, and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that the majority of tourists tend to gather around the exact same area where there are multiple panhandlers on every corner, and that more often than not, a polite "Can I have a moment of your time?" or "Excuse me, but can you help me out?" is a plea for money.

17x365: E.S.

At first I thought she had a kindly Old World grandmother look to her - grey hair tied in a severe bun, a slight hump to her back, a large nose and creased face. In my mind's eye I could almost see her wearing an Orenburg shawl, baking bread and sweets in a hut in the woods, like all good fairytale grandmothers do. "It's alright if you make a mistake," she'd cackle good naturedly, "How would you know?" It was very reassuring on the first day of the job.

But the next day and the next it was the same thing: "How would you know?" cackled ad nauseum, until she started to look more like Baba Yaga. I was certain she thought I was stupid. After two weeks I was glad to be out.

Surveillance stories

New classes this week. Yesterday it was ecological sociology with the most laid back prof I've had in a long time. No due dates, no late penalties and early dismissals. He seems to do a reasonably decent job of engaging people and getting them all to talk too.

One class called "Leadership in Sustainable Community Development" which I was really, really psyched about but now I'm not so sure. It's exactly the opposite pedagogically, mostly lecture and lecture and deadlines every week and no dinner break and dismissal at 9:30. Hopefully we can suggest some improvements to the running of the course.

Then a class with two of the most awesome profs ever about surveillance in film. We watched Rear Window today and we're going to watch a lot more so it should be good. We were invited to tell our own stories about surveillance and I should have told this one:

At one point in time in their relationship grandma became convinced that old weird Harold was cheating on her. She contacted one of her friends, who was a phone operator at the time and together they organized a wire tap.

They learned that indeed, there was an affair happening, and the friend was able to learn, by the sound of the dialing, what the phone number of the girlfriend was, and through the reverse directory, she learned the girlfriend's address and paid her a visit.

Meanwhile, she also listed Harold as deceased in the obituaries.

They never once talked about it, but the affair was pretty much over after that. Pretty clever, though if you ask me, it would have been smarter in the long run if she had just divorced him then and there.