Simian Farmer

Two years of bliss

Dear Amy,

Tradition would have me give you a gift of cotton on our second wedding anniversary.  Well, my jeans are made of denim, whose source material is 100% cotton.  You are welcome to take them as often as you wish.  Preferably while I'm wearing them.  Rip them off, I don't care.  And, should you eschew your hands for your teeth in the removal of that garment, in no way will I hinder you.  Indeed, I will shout encouragement from the rooftops to spur on your effort.  (What we're doing on the rooftop with my jeans in your teeth is a matter I'd like to discuss in some detail.  In private.)

A more modern tradition, or so says the internet after a brief search, is to bequeath a gift of china on the second anniversary.  I've been to China.  A very neat place to visit.  Hard to find a fork.  Lots of people.  Big wall.  You and I have a toddler boy-child, two dogs and a domestic penchant for borderline cleanliness.  China would get boxed up and packed along with those of our wedding gifts that won't get used until the kids move out. 

Plus, we're broke.

So you get a letter.  Lucky you!

Kung Fu Kanada

From the same source as the geek post below, I stumbled upon this wonderfully worded diatribe wherein an ex-pat American cum Canadian cum Post-Nationalist espouses the homemade soup-like hearty goodness that is the nation I call home.

Canada does not convert. Canada heals. Canada leads. First among the nations, creating the Peacekeepers. Pushing the Land Mine ban. Still not perfect, but doing their best at reconciling issues with the aboriginal peoples even as other nations such as Australia choke on their responsibility. Allowing Quebec its poetic, myopic thrashings. I'm always a little dismayed at native Canadians who whinny about Canada's missing identity. I, as an adopted son, know damn well what Canada is. "Come, have a pint, I don't mind your odd accent -- mine's a bit dodgy too. Your business is your business, we can all be friends as long as you buy the next round."

There's a bunch more to it, and I recommend reading the whole thing.  Besides which, his website is called Kung Fu Monkey, and that just makes me smile reading it.

Hierarchy...

...or: What Noah would do the second time around if God decided to have it piss down rain for two score days.

I am copying the chart below to this site because I find it funny and because:

I am an avid Fantasy Lit fan;
I own an expensive Anakin Skywalker Force FX Lightsabre;
I play video games;
I play role-playing games;
I've read Robert Heinlein;
I've read Piers Anthony (his were the first books ever to get me into Fantasy);
And of course I'm a big fan of Star Trek.

THE GEEK HIERARCHY
(CLICK THE PIC TO EMBIGGEN IT)

Via: Kung Fu Monkey
 

Natural allies

I was sitting on the outdoor patio set (a gift from Mum and Stepdad) with a forkful of potato salad (oops, sorry Dan, potatoe salad) en route to my son's mouth. 

Ensconced between my son in his highchair and his grandfather, I was completely ignored - along with the potato salad - as the 15 month old boy and the 55 year old man were each trying to outdo the other: one with a gaping maw of partially masticated hamburger, the other with mouth similarly agape, upper and lower dentures extended to the point of caricature beneath his handlebar moustache.

All I could do was gaze forlornly across the table at my wife, fork still raised unseen between the duelists, mourning the divestment of what few manners we had thus far inculcated in our son.

Sometimes you think you're gonna get it...

One does not, if one is a true man's man, start a post with:

"So, I was flippin' through Cosmo the other day..."

Who the fcuk is Xenu?

I sat in front of my keyboard for five minutes, thinking of the diatribe I was going to write about the fcuked up shit that is Scientology. 

And then after reading an alleged Reader's Digest sort of version of the basis of this pseudo-religion, I realised that it really seems to speak for itself.  Any organisation which purports that human bodies are inhabited by the souls of extra terrestrials brought to Earth, chained to volcanoes and blown apart by hydrogen bombs in order to cull an overpopulated section of the galaxy is more than welcome to the followers it attracts.

My general disparagement for religious indoctrination notwithstanding, Scientology is some fcuked up shit, people.

Gotta get out more...

My wife and I have lived where we do for a little more than two years now.  Given that it's a relatively small community of just over 50,000 souls, one would think that we would have some inkling of most of the avenues of social diversion available to us.  Especially the free ones.

So I was pleasantly surprised, and somewhat chagrined when, for the first time this past holiday Monday, we took our son to the outdoor water park not five minutes from our home.

   

Just a few more pics ahead...

Last bit of bragging, promise

The final Death Race results are now in, via their website.

My team, Fourth Time Lucky, finished 27th out of a total of 150 teams and;

finished 12th out of 97 mixed teams.  (Mixed, as in boys and girls together, racing for glory in spite of the dichotomy of the sexes.)

I will now return to posting about my son and introspective maunderings.

GO LIKE HELL!!

UPDATE: (to what I posted just below this)

My legs have never hurt so bloody much as they do today.  Walking down the ten stairs to the basement so I could post this fact is a little ironic.  Each step down felt like my thigh was getting smacked by a canoe paddle...

This post is proof positive that I survived, even thrived, on the 2005 edition of the Canadian Death Race.

I was expecting a hard, long race.  It was harder and longer than I expected.  Our team finished in just over 15 hours.  My leg of the race took me five hours, 45 minutes.

As usual with these sorts of things, pictures tell the story so much better than my words would be able to.  So here are a few of the shots I took before and during the race.

I'm already intending to go back and do a different section next year.  That was WAY fun.

Picture Time!