Simian Farmer

Winter's reminder

I can't recall when Amy or I have had such a full weekend as this one was.  Socially speaking.  From Friday evening right through to early Sunday morning, with (thankfully) much of Sunday to recuperate, the boys delightfully absent.

When dawn arrived Sunday, however, it did so with the creaks, groans, and tell-tale fibrous pops that speak of a house forcibly adjusting to a rapid and drastic drop in temperature.  (It can be sort of unnerving because it often sounds like some guy randomly banging on your front door while making low, ominous howling noises.  Because, you know, it was windy too.)

We had gone to bed by about 2 AM Sunday morning with a clear sky and an unseasonably pleasant temperature right around the freezing point.  We woke up to heavy, blowing snow and about -22 Celsius (-8 F).

My brother came over in the early afternoon and took me, mostly on a whim, to pop some caps at the Wild West shooting range at West Edmonton Mall.  But, like any good ol' Alberta boys, we stopped for a burger and a couple of beers first.  Nothing quite like shooting a .45 calibre revolver with a very minor beer buzz.  I was feelin' lucky.  Punk.

When Buster drove me back home, he helped out with the worst of the snow clearing before taking off.  As you can see in the picture below, he likes to hover a couple inches off the ground while he shovels.  (Show off...)

Incorrigible

I took Tavish for a swim at the local huge mega Recreation Centre here in our home town this morning.  With both boys being sick the past few days, Tavish has had some extra energy to burn off.  He doesn't do nearly as well cooped up indoors as does his older brother.  Tends toward destructive energy release, and that's no fun for anyone except Tavish.

So we went swimming and went down the water slides about a hundred times.  He's napping now, quite thoroughly.

Amy went shopping with Declan while I was out with the younger lad and those two beat us home by a little bit.  Just as soon as we got in the door Dex showed me the new dollar store toy his mother bought him while they were out.  And then Amy, with that impish gleam in her eye, told me, "Look Si, I bought Dex a sticky dragon!"

If you're, uh, unfamiliar with the term, I suggest you look it up at the Urban Dictionary to receive the full blow of the humour potential my wife dished out this morning.

Also, as seen below, Tavish was unimpressed.

More of the same

The inexorable slog through the swampy morass of substandard health at the Fraser house continues into this week, not satisfied with last week's conquest.  Not even visitors are immune.

My brother visited earlier in the week.  He normally works two-week stints in the even more frozen hinterland of far northern Alberta (the mud from which I happily scraped off my own heels a few years ago), and then comes home to some semblance of society and fraternization in the big city.  And to see his nephews, who adore him.  He will regularly visit during the day, and I'll come home none the wiser about his presence unless informed by my wife or offspring.  (Which is sometimes sort of frustrating, because I like my brother a whole lot more now that I used to.  So seeing him would be a good thing.)

Uncle Buster was over Monday evening and I abused his presence to help me move the old, clunky, energy-pig of a deep freeze out of the basement, into the back of my truck, and to lug in the newer (but still used) upright freezer I bought for cheap off a co-worker.  By the end of the ordeal he was puffing and panting more severely than his nicotine habit could even account for.  (It's just about a law here in Alberta, you understand: if you work in any sort of trade, you have to smoke.  Buster is a welder.)

He spent the next several hours laid out on our couch downstairs, moaning pitiably and with a puke bucket beside his head.  (You know, just in case.  I mean the carpet's brand new fer krissake!)  He managed to heave himself back upstairs about the same time the boys went down for bed.  He mentioned, quietly, that he cleaned up after himself downstairs, and even screwed the door back into the frame that had to be removed to get the new freezer in.  What a trooper!

And now that Buster's all better, wee Declan left a lung in his bedroom when he woke up Wednesday morning.  Glued to his bedsheets with snot, no doubt.  We hope that reinsertion at bedtime tonight will be amply lubricated by the additional mucous he's been producing all day.  In the words of my wife when she called to update me on his condition (both of us grateful that he was kept home from preschool today), "He's just lying there looking pitiful, Si."

But good news is on the horizon!  The annual Burns Night supper I attend at the end of every January is only nine days away.  Kilts and bagpipes and haggis and scotch and comely nimble lasses prancing gaily over crossed claymores.  (Oh my!)  A more wonderful evening is hard to fathom, n'est-ce pas?

I don't think I'll be taking pictures this year, cumbersome as my new camera is.  (There are only so many places to store things when you're wearing a kilt, ya know!)  But to get a taste for what awaits me, you can see what I penned and posted from last year's, thither.  It has a neat little video snip I cobbled together.  I love the snare drum solo.

Guitar Hero makes you vomit

No, seriously, it does.  More about that in a moment.

I have been accused of adopting the new year's resolution to stop blogging.  That's not quite true.  Or I've fallen off the bandwagon after only two weeks.  Either way, I feel a little more inclined to type something here.

Perhaps it was the new year peeping its head around the corner that startled me from my navel-gazing.  It has been hella busy around the Fraser household the past couple weeks.  There's always so much to do after Christmas.  You'd think that after the holiday fervor had run its course we'd be rewarded with a little down time to regroup, take stock of our status, and plan a little for what the next eleven and a half months will bring.  But no, that's nowhere near what happens.  Life's unfair like that.  We still have our string of Christmas cards hanging in the kitchen and are all bothered about what to do about it.  Like, for example, we have to compare all those names to the names on the list of Christmas cards we sent out this year and make sure that the lists align for next year so as not to hurt any feelings and all that.  And do we keep the cards that were hand-made, and the cards that weren't really cards but those adorable Christmas photos of an idyllically posed family in a pristine Christmas setting with the ubiquitous caption that reads something like, "Merry Christmas 2007 from the Smiths!"?  What do we do??

It's having thoughts like this that put a crimp in our efficiency during the weeks as they sneak past.  And when you have to do seven loads of laundry on the weekend, you need to insert some efficiency in there somewhere.  We wouldn't have had to do so many loads, but Tavish came down with SOMETHING last week that had him ejecting whatever used to be in his stomach.  Made me very happy that I put laminate in the boys' rooms rather than the cruddy carpet that used to be in there.  Easier to clean.  Poor kid had me and Amy up four or five times one night last week.  I seem to have a stronger stomach for that sort of thing than my wife does, so I got to clean up more of the linens, but it was rather unpleasant for all involved.  And it was again a couple nights later when the wee lad came back on stage for a rockin' encore.

In spite of all the fun we were having, I decided to take Sunday afternoon off and go hang out at a friend's house.  A group of us was supposed to get together for a rousing game of ball hockey on an outdoor tennis court where we play infrequently, but the commitment couldn't be roused in time from enough guys, so I still went out to the erstwhile organiser's house, citing social withdrawal as the driving force.  (Seriously, I don't get out much.)

After hearing about his honeymoon trip to Europe from October, we got down to the nitty gritty: Guitar Hero III.  I've played a couple times before on older versions of the game, but never with the sense of commitment or single-mindedness that was evident on Sunday.  We started a brand new band and went from the beginning of the game right to the end in just under four hours, on medium difficulty.  We didn't play the songs that got unlocked by finishing the game; our fret fingers were getting pretty sore at that point.

My buddy's wife cooked us up some healthy, deep-fried, battered and cheesy snacks, and I also had a few beers.  Combined with whatever it was may have afflicted my younger son, and then catalyzed by the beer and greasy food... well, I shan't go into the gory details, but I haven't purged like that since the horrible Oktoberfest fiasco of 2001.  (Which was sort of the first date I had with the woman who is now my wife, and whom I blame for that turning into the fiasco it was but, again, this is not the place for those details.)

Some chicken noodle soup and a good long sleep later, I was feeling about 70% when I woke up Monday morning.  I think I've only taken four or five sick days in the eight-plus years I've been with this company, so 70% wasn't quite enough to keep me home.

I just hope now that we've seen the end of our insides at home for the next long while.  We still have more laundry to do before we're caught up.

Burgeoning dichotomy

The past week and a half has thrown several monkey wrenches into our sons' schedules.  Along with a couple of bad cogs and some wee doses of pure mischief and evil.  Imagine five straight days spent in the clutches of doting and spoil-prone grandparents, and then forced to come home with parents who firmly believe in the healthy rigours of a set schedule, with absolutely no transition period to soften the blow.

We're mean, unforgiving parents, Amy and I.

Here are a couple of pictures to show how very differently the two boys have coped with the change...