Posted on

How's that for a berry blast?

And by that I mean…a blast to your berries?

Strawberries are mean. Because you’ll spend five minutes going through all the baskets to find the best “package” and then you’ll spend your three or four bucks, and then you’ll get home and enjoy them until you get to the very last one, which is – despite all appearances – mouldy and makes you run gagging towards the sink or garbage and spoils the whole experience. Mean old strawberries.

Tonight we played D&D and I was thoroughly amused. I think it’s safe to say that it brought out the best character roleplaying I’ve seen from the group. There were a lot of tense moments, and a lot of comical moments. In the end, they finished their current quest – so now it’s on the to next one!

Posted on

Five garbage bags worth

In this crazy thing we call life, some days will go by where you don’t get 239 used video tapes from Karen.

Other days go by where you do get 239 used video tapes from Karen. Today was one of those days.

239 video tapes
186 t-120’s
16 T-14o’s & 160’s and other longer tapes
37 shorter tapes (22-60 minutes in SP)

Let the request for dubbing commence. http://cartoontrade.cjb.net

Posted on

Hello-o-o-o-o Nurse!

I’m doing some more writing for the ESL book/cd company that I’ve done writing and voice work before. This time, the assignment is to write a bunch of stories rather than dialogues. Each story is about nurses – I guess the book is for ESL students who want to become nurses – and each one has to be about a specific subject, to whit:

Pediatrics
General medicine
General surgery
Cardiology
Dental & orthodontic
Dermatology
Geriatrics
Ear-nose-throat
Urology
Orthopedics
Obstetrics
Gynecology
Ophthalmology
Allergy
Plastic surgery
Infectious Deceases
Metabolism
Health Check-up (Radiology & clinical laboratory)
Occupational diseases
Geriatrics

Some I’ll write from the perspective of the nurse, some I’ll write from the perspective of the patient. Some first person, some third, etc. So hey – if you want to help me, and I’d appreciate it, if you have any interesting anecdotes about an encounter in any of these subject, I would love to hear it. Maybe I’ll use it if you don’t mind. I would change the names to protect the indolent (unless you didn’t want me to!). And better yet – if you know any nurses, I’d love it if you passed along my email (or point them to this blog entry) so I could ask them some questions/get their input. I don’t want to break any doctor-patient confidentiality, I just want to write some interesting little true-to-life stories.

Posted on

Superchlorination

Tonight I went swimming at a pool near Marlo’s house – with Marlo. It was a new experience for both of us. It’s $4.40 between 7 and 9. Adult swim in Coquitlam was $2 but it cost me $2 to get out there so it’s only forty cents more. Trouble was it was pretty crowded – and at 8pm we got kicked out of our side pool to make room for the lousy aquafitters. The instructor’s voice was incredibly shrill and when Marlo and I were discussing the idea of signing up to audit the course (for shits and giggles) I thought that would be the biggest hurdle. It was fun to watch her dancing around like an idiot though. We kept bumping into and kicking other people, it was so crowded. Once my hand came up out of the water and hit the hand of a girl in the other lane coming from the opposite direction. I thought it was romantic, but Marlo compared it more to a high-five. There was a whirlpool room but it was closed off with a sign that read – DANGER – CLOSED FOR SUPERCHLORINATION.

Afterwards we went to get something to eat at a sushi place on main and for 4 bucks I had the yummiest sushi I’ve ever had. It was yam with a bit of cream cheese on top and the whole 8 pieces were covered in crispy potatoe shavings – like a bird’s nest. With the wasabi I could hardly taste the seaweed. Cheap and delicious. Then I biked home – and here I am! I have another story to tell you but it will have to wait until Chris takes a digital pic.

Posted on

Loosely Compiled

Like they say in Fahrenheit 9/11 – you can get your country to go along with almost anything as long as you keep them in constant fear. The US raised its terror alert level and said that Al Qaeda might be planning to attack financial institutions in New York, Washington, and Newark, New Jersey. The 9/11 commission runs out of funds next month and is seeking private donations so that it can continue its work. A government audit found that Halliburton lost about one third of the property it was given to manage in Iraq; 6,975 out of 20,531 items were missing. The lost government property was worth $18.6 million. Too bad there weren’t any other choices. Too bad there was no bidding process for the contracts. The Bush Administration issued a new rule that will permit the EPA to approve pesticides without finding out from wildlife agencies whether the chemicals will harm plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Posted on

Special Guest

Unless things have changed without me knowing, we’re having a super special guest to Knitting in the Buff tonight: Stewie’s mom! So take advantage of the opportunity to kick it up a notch. BAM!

Posted on

Opportunities Squandered.

What’s more annoying than getting a coupon for a free kids movie rental at Rogers and then forgetting to use it before it expires? Well, at least I didn’t leave a package of strawberries in the fridge for so long that they went MOULDY! CHRIS!!!!

I’m starting a habit of putting a batch of stuff on ebay every week. To supplement my income. This week I put a lot of old Arkham Advertisers (Official Magazine of the H.P. Lovecraft Fan Club of the Miskatonic University Press) up. Anghold’s shoes end in an hour or so, and the bid is only up to about ten bucks. That’s sad and alarming, as Ang was hoping to get 30-40 bucks for them. I set the reserve price at $36 so if it doesn’t go up, we don’t have to sell.

Posted on

Did you wreck the car? Did you raise the dead?

Today and yesterday will be forever known as The Two Days of Zombies. In a strange flash of synchronicity, I was invited to a new roleplaying game by Palle, the gm of that Call of Cthulhu campaign that I was in for oh…almost two years. The game is described as “Punk Rockers versus armies of Zombies. 1983. A punk rock dance club in a bad part of East LA, on a hot Friday night.” They system we’re using is FUDGE – which I’ve never played before but apparently used a lot of d6’s. Tonight we’re making up characters. Mine will be modelled after Igby from the movie Igby Goes Down.

The other part of the synchronicity is that last night we had a Zombie-themed TV marathon. We watched the zombie episode of Buffy, the zombie episode of Spaced, the zombie episode of Kolchack, Shaun of the Dead (which I liked a lot better when I saw the whole thing all the way through), Day of the Dead, and the zombie segment of Treehouse of Horror IV. And there were donut holes and watermelon slices, amongst other things.

Posted on

The Esquire Man's hated nemesis: woman hair.

I was going through my heap of magazines today, trying to reduce the clutter (for the nonce) in my work area and indeed, the entire living room. I came across this quote from an article in the July 2003 edition of Esquire.

What conclusions can I draw from a woman who steadfastly refuses to get a bikini wax?

I’ts unreasonable to expect any woman to maintain a trim caterpillar-sized patch at all times–the upkeep is tough, painful, and expensive, and most jobs don’t allow you to write it off. However, it is reasonable to expect her to keep her crotch from looking like Benji, and if she isn’t doing that much, then you’ve got a problem on your hands, and in the back of your throat. First, you need to rule out some things: Is she foreign? No? Is she Robin Williams? No? Then it’s possible that the woman in question is a hippie and you’ve chosen to ignore the warning signs: rock-crystal deodorant, hemp butter. Sound familiar? If this is the case, let me offer my deepest sympathy. The situation is hopeless, but I hope you have fun at Burning Man. Or she could be a rebel by nature, which can mean only one thing: trouble. Still, she might take issue with waxing specifically, in which case you may want to gently remind Grizzly Adams that there are many other ways to remove hair.

Now I have a question for Stacey Grenrock Woods, the author of the article: What conclusions can I draw from a woman who propagates–on her own gender no less–uptight, narrow-minded, masochistic esthetics towards something as natural as pubic hair?