38/365: Mrs. A

She believed girls should be girls, in the 1940s sort of sense. She approached fun like an army sergeant. With her it was nonstop choreographed marching and flag etiquette. She sang the national anthem at a pace so fast it was barely legal, and in a bizarre falsetto.

She used to tell us that we had it easy, that when she was in Girl Guides they had to embroider their own merit badges, camp in farmers' fields and that all girls were required to kill chickens with their bare hands and then roast them by themselves and then feed the Guide group. We used to tell her that it was the 90's.

Free lunch

I never pass up the chance at swiping some of the catered food at school, and I think I'd be hard pressed to find anyone else that doesn't. The way I justify it is that

a) the food has already been paid for, so it's not stealing
b) they're only going to throw the leftovers out anyways

Now, some people are pretty brazen about the way they do it. They'll just walk into the middle of a crowd and take stuff in the most inconspicuous way they can think of. Because I consider myself to be a fairly honest person, I wait for whoever is supposed to be eating the food to get first crack at it before I pick over the leftovers.

The caterers were uncharacteristically friendly to students today. Part of that had to do with the fact that the people who were supposed to be eating were no longer anywhere around and the fact that there was a shitload of food left over. Really good food. Really good food paid for by my tax dollars because it was for some sort of federal government event.

As a friend and I started picking over the leftovers, we were approached by a Japanese exchange student that asked if what we were doing was alright. How do you answer such a question? Well, technically it's not but we do it anyways, and I always make sure that any new students I know get a proper education.

But today without threat of being told to go away, and with such a large quantity of food, students collected like pigeons around the table. The exchange student was ecstatic that she didn't have to buy lunch and that she was meeting people because it can be super hard to do. She told me it was her lucky day.

Slides

There's a couple making out in a car just outside my window, but they're not in my parking spot so they don't warrant much attention from me. But I couldn't help but notice as I walked by, returning from the park, that they've got a rather large kleenex box sitting up on their dashboard and that reminds me of something.

Sometime before they demolished our old house Dad borrowed a projector screen from school and pulled out all the old family slides. There were a few photos of my grandparents' house on Clarke Road in Coquitlam, their garden, which was quite unique and my Dad scubadiving.

The bulk of them though were of family road trips across the US and Canada, mostly of my grandfather, dad and his sister, and the rare shot of grandma because she was usually the one behind the camera.

The real star of the show, though? Nearly all the landscape shots were taken from the passenger seat of the car, and on the dashboard in almost all of them was a turquoise plastic kleenex box. In fact, there were more pictures of the kleenex box than there were of any of my relatives.

By the end of the night it had become a bit of a joke.

Gerberas from the people in my office because I'm appreciated. :)

Letter to elevator number three

Dear elevator number three,

I know that sometimes I leave you for other elevators, but you know that I love you, don't you?

You are by far the best in the building. You're faster than elevator one, take less sick days than elevator two, go to more floors than elevator four. Elevator five is delinquent. It likes to get stuck between floors and trap people. Elevator six? Well, elevator six and I had a fight in August and we're not on speaking terms yet.

You're the only elevator without a mirror. No need to reflect me back at myself. No, you have a personality of your own. You have your quirks, like how I always have to punch the button for the tenth floor twice for you to go there.

Day after day I count out the floors with you, listening to the beeps and watching the numbers flash, but at number four you're always mute, and there's never a reason why. You're complex like that.

You got a facelift last month. Before you were a little outdated, but not completely unattractive with some sort of plasticy, dark coloured wood grain veneer on your walls. Midway through your transformation they had stripped this to leave your interior bare - black painted metal. Elevator rides were dark, not unlike being swallowed up in the maw of a giant beast.

Then they laid a new floor and new paneling on the walls. And for a day, or possibly two, it was the talk of the office. All nineteen floors of us shared a moment of unity when we recoiled in horror at what they did to you. I wish I could say I was happy with the result but I'm just not sure what they were thinking. The floor is now a pistachio pudding green speckled linoleum and the walls are now arborite in a taupey beigey almost silvery... something pattern. I'm sorry, but it's hideous, and if they added a pink or peach coloured curtain, you could almost be mistaken for a hospital room.

But you've still got the same personality. Keep being yourself, elevator number three, because I like you just the way you are.

Truly yours,

Erin

Lace

I very rarely get caught unawares at my apartment. I can always hear when people are coming up the stairs, or at least I thought so. Maybe I just wasn't expecting her but I got caught knitting the above yesterday. She walked in the door before I could hide it but luckily she was distracted by the one pound cone of yarn I was knitting it off of.

A while ago she lost one of her favourite scarves - a large, black silk shawl thing with a fish print that she used to drape it all over her shoulders and look glamorous in. She was pretty upset about it so I started making her this. I'm told it will look better when it's finished and stretched out. I certainly hope so.

I kill computer viruses with my bare hands.

I've been having nonstop problems with viruses for almost a month now. They're trojan horses that exploit some sort of weakness in Internet Explorer and do all manner of irritatingness like open up popups in Explorer and slow my computer to a crawl.

Now, wait a minute... Didn't I uninstall Internet Explorer from my computer over a year ago? Am I not a religious user of Firefox? Well, of course.

But the thing about viruses is that they're tricky little bastards. The ones in question added themselves to the registry underneath the startup menu, which meant two things: no antivirus program could touch them there, and that they'd automatically start downloading the moment I'd turn on the computer.

So day after day the antivirus program would repair infected files and I would uninstall Internet Explorer. This would in turn cause the virus to say "Oh shit! I'm missing crucial files with which to work my asshattery and drive Erin nuts! I must download them again, but only through Explorer because it's the only program sucky enough to let me through the back door."

To which my computer, the ditz it is, would say "Oh no! A program is trying to open Internet Explorer and it doesn't exist! I have to download and reinstall the program!" Intuition and intelligence are not my computer's strong points.

So first it would reinstall Explorer without my permission, and then through Explorer it would redownload itself and then pop up Explorer windows telling me I'd better slap that sumo wrestler quick or else I'll lose my chance at a free ipod.

This was getting time consuming so I finally took the plunge into the registry and removed the damn thing manually, all 112 entries. It was scary because I knew that I could cause irreperable damage to my computer but after three hours of staring at the gibberish that they name all those system files I was ready to reboot.

Maybe it's a little early to be claiming victory but I'm going to do it anyways. I haven't had a problem in 12 hours. Yay me!

Sometimes all they need is a little acknowledgement.

It was beautiful and gorgeous out again so of course I was indoors sans camera all day.

I ran up to the library to get some books on food security. Yay, food security. At one point in time a random guy began to follow me, narrating aloud what I was doing and it seemed kind of like he was mocking me.

After three blocks I turned, looked straight at him and asked very politely if I could give him a kleenex for his runny nose. "I was just talking," he stammered, "People here are so uptight!" He then turned and walked away, silent.

I'm convinced that this sort of stuff only happens to me.

37/365: Linda

Linda had run the preschool next door since the beginning of time and was kind of like a neighbour to us. Sometimes dad would stop and talk to her and anyone else in the neighbourhood while he was supposed to be taking me to school and then I'd be late and then I'd have to ask the receptionist to make up an excuse for me because "my dad's chatty" is the most pathetic excuse ever.

But Linda had a deep dark secret. She was afraid of animals in all their cute, fuzzy, loveable incarnations. One day we got a phone call with instructions that we were to come running with a box. Mom took a laundry basket over.

It was almost two months to the day past Easter, and someone had abandoned an unwanted bunny to starve to death in the park. A kind soul caught it and brought it to the preschool, which had poor Linda in a panic. She was quite hysterical, apparently.

Mom arrived back with the most pathetic, emaciated bunny I've ever seen, and that's how I got Mr. Bumpy. Within a month he was housetrained, a neighbourhood celebrity and he had almost doubled in size. We're big suckers when it comes to animals.

36/365: Baby Dave

Dave didn't drink but you wouldn't have known that. He looked like he was in a constant state of hangover: tired, hair unkempt, 5 o'clock shadow. He was kind of like a kid sometimes. He'd drive the coachboat away from us just so that he could race over someone elses' wake and then speed back to tell us how much air he got.

At one point in time he disappeared for a while. Rumour had it that he was training for speed orders, and the next time I saw him he was completely different. He had lost all the fat in his face. He was alert, clean shaven and in shape.

From then on the story gets a little less clear. He went to speed orders, missed being selected for the Olympic team by a fraction of a second and then promptly disappeared. The craziest of rumours had it that he joined a cult and moved to Afghanistan, but it's probably more likely that he left to do some missionary work somewhere.

Towels

Today it was gorgeous out and I thought that I would go outside but evidently not. I found lots to keep me busy inside, which is just as well because I was feeling kind of achey and bloaty and not at my best and I ate half a batch of cookie dough.

I scrubbed out my bathtub because it was fast approaching neon green, and I happen to know that it's supposed to be white. I also pulled a big lump of matted hair out of the drain because it was plugged. The person who designed the drain was an idiot because the drain plug is built in so there's no possible way you could stick a hair trap in there. I need a hair trap. Preferably an industrial sized one.

I plug drains really quickly. I also plug vacuum cleaner bags. I shed so much hair it rolls across the floor in balls like sage brush.

It's so long that no normal hair towel can contain it. See? I got these towels for Christmas and the hair towel just isn't cutting it. Rumour has it that Jysk has decent sized hair towels but I haven't been there yet, so until then the ends of my har will curl and drip all over my shoulders.

I'll let you in on a secret too. I can see into the future. Nothing will happen for three to four months but then after that this post will begin to get comments to the effect of "i wanna see u take that off" and "mm yr hott plz shew us yr tits." I will quietly delete them as they appear. I know this because that's what has happened every single time I have posted a picture of myself in the bathroom mirror. Either it's magic or the people on the internet are super predictable.

I planted lettuce too, but I have to keep it inside until it warms up. I find one large window box full of miscellaneous greens is enough for me to have salad every day in the summer.



Still too small.