Simian Farmer

Angst and torment

Of all the characters on Foxtrot, I can relate best to Jason.  This is one of the reasons:

I have been informed by my wife that, even though the DVD comes out today, I had better wait on the off chance that 'someone' may have bought it for me.

My only hope is that it's going to be a birthday present instead of a Christmas present.  That'll mean I get it a week earlier.  There are over 50 minutes of additional footage that my eyeballs are craving like a heroine addict for his next hit.  It was an exercise in willpower not to go out and buy the regular version when it came out.  I only made that mistake for Fellowship; ended up owning two copies, one of which I'll never watch again.

Ah well.  They say anticipation is the best sauce.  In which case, consider me covered in gravy.  (Not like that...)

Strange and unexpected, and then strange again

It took me quite a while to get back into the dating scene after my first engagement fell through.  It was a relationship almost five years long and came crashing down just before Christmas one year.  For the longest time I was far too busy feeling sorry for myself to bother with putting any effort into kindling a new relationship; or at least putting myself out there for the possibility.  You don’t really realise how hard it is to wallow until you focus all your effort into nothing else for an extended period of time.  It’s draining!

So I had no idea what to expect when I came into work one morning and received a call at my desk from Marty, our CEO.  Why the hell would a young engineer receive a call from The Boss?  We regularly exchange pleasantries in the hallway, but he would have no reason to call me up personally.

“Good morning Simon, how are you doing today?”

“Uh, very well Marty.”  (It was a family owned and operated company, so there was a great deal of familiarity, even with the See-Ee-Oh.)  “How are you?”

“Just great thanks. Say, do you have five minutes?  I’d like to see you in my office for a sec.”

“Sure thing.  I’ll be down there shortly.”  --click-- 

I didn’t care what I was doing at the time, I wasn’t gonna hold up the boss.

So I walk into his office and the first thing he asks me is if I’m single.  Huh?!  I was a little taken aback.  Um, yeah; I am.  So he whips out this photo of a fairly attractive blonde chick and says, so, what do you think?  Um, she’s real pretty, Marty.  Yeah, she’s relatively new to the city and has been doing some work for my family; do you want me to set something up between the two of you; I can give you her phone number?  Um, OK…  Great!  Here’s her number, just wait a couple days and I’ll let her know that you’re going to call.  Thanks, Simon. 

--exit stage left--

As weird experiences go, that one was right up there.  So I called her the next evening and we set up a neutral meeting at a grocery café near to her place in the west end of Edmonton.  I arrived first and saw her come in the door.  I took the initiative to stand up and introduce myself since, you know, I had seen her photo and all and she wouldn’t have known me from Adam.

We sat on the patio outside, sipped on some iced tea, and I remember eating a bagel with cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers.  I hadn’t realised just how salty capers are.  They are very salty.  We talked about inanities, pleasantries, the weather; I was very impressed with how well I was handling this fledgling endeavour.  Plus, Steph seemed like a nice enough gal, so we ended up agreeing to go out to a movie together that same weekend.

It got a little weirder then.

I picked her up in my truck and we headed to the theatre.  Conversation wended its way towards slightly more personal conversation than was shared at the café, and it turned out that she was nannying for some of my boss’s relatives; just for the short term.  She also disclosed that she had spent some time in New York.  At one point, she had been in a situation to meet Donald Trump who, allegedly, propositioned her with an undisclosed amount of money to spend the evening as an escort to a friend of his in a social setting.  She declined.  Steph seemed rather pleased by the fact that she could claim to have turned down Donald Trump.  That was very interesting.  Weird, but interesting.

In the line up at the concession stand, I bought some popcorn and pop.  Since I had insisted on buying our movie tickets (I have no recollection of what show we went to see), she bought the food.  That was nice of her.  And then she attempted to tip the concession attendant.  He politely, and with a great deal of confusion on his face, declined.  I do not doubt that he had never before had to turn down a tip behind the counter at the Cineplex Odeon.  They're not allowed to accept.  (Cute aside: my niece, until recently, has always referred to the local theatre as the ‘cinnamon oneon’.)

We were in the theatre long enough before hand to step up the level of our conversation again.  I offered her my bag of popcorn and she politely declined any of the buttery goodness.  I made some very lame comment along the lines of, “Well, the only reason I got the popcorn was so that during the middle of the movie, when we’re both distracted by what’s on screen, we both reach for some at the same time and our hands touch.”  Her reply was a polite smile accompanied by an expression that can only be called vapid.

Our exchange sort of petered out until the movie started, through which we sat in silence. Which continued during the drive back to her place.  I had nothing of any interest to share with this woman.  I found her so far removed from the pragmatism of real life that I could not find any common ground upon which to establish even a hint of rapport.

I dropped her off with some pleasantries, not even a chaste kiss on the cheek, and a promise to call her.  I called her a couple days later and left a message.  She returned the call and left a message.  I never bothered returning it.

Thankfully, Marty never followed up with inquiries about our date.  That would have been yet another uncomfortable conversation.  I’ve gotten a little better at dating since then.  Hopefully, my wife would agree.

Perspective

It was such a busy weekend!  Poker night and a Christmas party and finally stringing up our Christmas lights and a graduation to attend for a co-worker and staying up until 11pm on Sunday night to get some work done for Monday morning...

I was starting to feel a little stretched.

I got an Email from my wife this morning proudly proclaiming the fact that our son had taken his first drink from a sippy-cup.  I felt prouder for him having done that than for any of the other achievements or activities this weekend.

That sorta puts everything else in perspective, you know?

All I want for Christmas...

...is my:

Where angels fear to tread

It is now 8.26am as I type this.  Saturday morning.  I have not slept since I got up just after 5am Friday morning.  I am in the computer room and my son is sitting contentedly on the floor beside me, munching on my foamy Star Wars keyboard wrist rest.  His new favourite toy.

Was out for a bit of a poker night with some friends last night.  My estimated arrival time back home was a wee bit off.  As I dropped off my buddy who got to do some of the drinking (I was the DD), I thought to myself, it's 5.30am, you might be able to slip into bed beside your sleeping wife and nobody will ever be the wiser.  (Men always think this in this sort of scenario.  It almost never works.)  As I was getting closer to home, my hopes began to rise.  Two minutes from home, THE CELL PHONE RANG.  shit...

"Good morning, honey!"  (very cheery voice)
"Good morning.  Where are you?"  (not quite as cheery)
"Oddly enough, just two minutes away!"  (still very cheery)
"Good; your son's crying, you can look after him when you get here."
"OK!  Bye!"  (cheer fading)

Mama still has to wake up.  Dad really wants to go to bed.  But knows he's not going to get a chance until much later this evening.  Tonight is also his company's Christmas party.  **sigh** 

Wish me luck.

But on the plus side, I bought in with fourty bucks of chips and, nine hours later, cashed out at a hundred and twenty five.  And twenty five cents.  That could, thinking just now, buy a really nice bouquet of flowers.

Useless mutt

If the family dog still had his jewels, I'd feel somewhat inclined to administer a good steel-toed kickin' this afternoon.

Much like his master, Jango the Jack Russell Terrier has a bit of penchant for chocolate.  A craving that has led him down the path of ill favour in the past.  Well, just this afternoon, as my wife and son were out on errands, the despicable little runt managed to get himself on top of the kitchen table and consumed the last 17 days worth of chocolate from my advent calendar!

It has been a tradition with my mother that she gives an advent calendar to her two sons just before the start of December.  (Never mind the fact that I'm almost 30.)  In this manner we may count down the days to Christmas.  There are 24 little tear-away paper doors on the calendar, and behind each is a delectable morsel of milk chocolate.  Each morning, with no less glee now than 25 years ago, I am able to wake up and be welcomed to the new December day by a tiny tidbit of chocolaty goodness.  And oh how my eyes grew when I awoke to realize I had forgotten to eat my chocolate on the day before, resulting in TWO that particular morning.  (Sometimes I'd skip a day just for that very purpose.)

And now, even though Amy had the chairs pushed tight to the table, our little white runt managed to clean the table top off.  On it also rested a tupperware container with close to a dozen sugar cookies and a note from our next door neighbour with a milk-bone for the dog.  He got them all.

He didn't even have the decency to look sick after gorging himself to that degree.

Joke of the day

Overheard on the radio on my drive in to work this morning:

Hey, did you know that Buddhists refuse to have their mouths frozen when having dental work done?

Yeah, they want to transcend dental medication.

HA!

Fun with license plates

Just a little  more proof that I sport the 'Geek' brand blazoned boldly on my forehead.

I like to play games with license plates when I'm bored on the road.  The fact that I'm further distracting myself while already in a distracted state behind the wheel does not bode well, I know.  Don't worry, I haven't had an at fault claim against me since 1996.  And those get stricken from your record after six years, so I'm clean baby!

Alberta license plates, like most around the rest of the country, conform to a certain standard.  At least insofar as the alpha-numerics that are assigned to each.  Most are of the format:  ABC - 123.  Three letters followed by three numbers.  Again, most often the three letters consist of consonants so as to avoid the inadvertent spelling of a word by mistake.  Though I've noticed a trend away from this of late.

The game is played thus: take the three consonants that adorn a license plate and make a word.  Multiple words are even better.  The rules are, 1. - you can add as many vowels to the existing letters as you want, in whatever order.  2. - you cannot change the order of the existing consonants in any way.  3. - You cannot add any consonants anywhere.  ('Y' as in sky is permissible, 'Y' as in yes is not.)

To date, I've had my most resounding success with the license plate: PRT - ###.  I've been able to come up with:
PRAT
PORT
PART
APART
PRATE
PIRATE
PYRITE

So, as is quite evident, the fun never really ends.

Good luck.

What was I thinking...?

I recently received an Email from my mother enlightening me to the fact that a group of singers was on CBC radio, a sure sign of her age that she listens to nothing else (Love you Mom!), from my former Alma mater, St. Justin Elementary School.  This reminded me briefly of some of my time spent there.

One of the things I recall is the fact that, for most of my 7 years spent there, we had no playground.  The students, at recess, would stare longingly across the school yard at the public school across the way.  It was larger and had a massive playground that was absolutely infested with children three times a day, five days a week.  Brief forays across the way to participate in the obvious oodles of fun the public kids were having were frowned upon and met with stern admonishment.

When I was in either grade four or five, one summer saw the inclusion of a small playground at Saint J's for the next school year.  All the kids were agog with excitement.  To the chagrin of the student body, its size was such that each of the grades were allotted only a single day of the week to claim it for their own.  Kindergarten and grade one on Mondays, grades two and three on Tuesdays and so forth.  So when your day came every week, you made darned sure to take full advantage of it.

What comes to mind first is playing on the monkey bars.  (Oddly fitting, given the title of this website.)  What comes to mind second is the lesson that one ought never to play on the twirly slide unless it's the day after a good rain.  'Cause then, you know, you're pretty sure it's clean.

Playing on the monkey bars was great fun.  Me and some of the other boys would gather to watch some of the girls perform what seemed like an unimaginably athletic manoeuvre.  They called it a 'baby drop'.  It consisted of hanging from one's knees at the apex of the arching bars with your body dangling vertically below.  A little impetus resulted in a pendulum-like motion of the suspended torso.  Once the right rhythm had been attained by one of the girls, she would release her ankles at just the right moment, resulting in a graceful rotating descent to the ground, and landing on her feet underneath the bars.

Well, we fellas thought that was just the neatest thing, so took it upon ourselves to go one better.  It was all well and good to land gracefully on one's feet, but where's the challenge in that?  From where stems the bravado?  No, we made a slight alteration and renamed the move.  It was now called the 'suicide baby drop'.  The guys would hang suspended from the monkey bars in the same fashion as the girls and, without initiating any angular momentum, would drop face first into the sand six feet below.  This was followed by huge gales of laughter and a muddled stew of boys on the raised wooden platform to see who got to go next.

The move was improved by adding just enough of a swing so that a boy could do a belly flop on the sand instead of landing on his head.  This lasted just long enough until one boy landed flat on his back, winded himself, and scared all the other boys out of doing it anymore.  It's memories like this that sometimes amaze me when I realize I've never broken a bone in my body.

And make me a little afraid of what shenanigans my own son will get involved in when he's a little older.  Boys that age hardly have any fear at all!

Lord Stanley

And on a similar note to the post below, I'd be all about this particular notion.  The fans would come back out in droves.