Saturday, May 01, 2004

G'Day all.

Its a sunny Saturday afternoon and I am at the physio clininc in Beaumont, waiting for Megan to get off of work. It seems lately that she has been running on female time, which means that I end up waiting around a lot. Maybe Al is a girl too, seeing as how Al-time is infamous for being so slow as to make one wonder if he lives in another time zone. Hmmm....

I worked this morning at the golf course, and it was kinda nice, cool and sunny and relatively quiet. Not so bad. This past week was a little more physically demanding than I've used to, I guess I'm getting soft in my old age. But it was all right, it'll pay the bills for now.

I do have one bitching point about the gold course and his name is Geoff. He's a lazy loser, one of those guys who works just hard enough to appear to not be standing still. Not at all like Jeff, my brother, who is reknowned for his kick ass work habits at the County. Basically, he strikes me as a total Momma's boy, a rich Sherwood Park kid who figures he ought to be hitting out of the sand trap instead of working in it. Never have I known anyone who seems so afraid of actually earning his money.

He's a lot younger than me, only about 19 or 20, so that may have something to do with it. I'm finding now that the 19-21 year old crowd appears to me as more of a potential student/immature youth group than a co-worker/peer group. He kind of reminds me of Carlton, Kyle Fougere's older bro. I dunno, if he slacks too much when I'm busting my ass, I may yell at him, just cause I'm older and crankier and figure I could probably intimidate him into motion. I'm a bastard, but I'm content with that.

Went out last night with as Cadrin rolled into town for the weekend before heading up to Ft. Mac for a work term. If you want to know why oil and gas prices are so high, ask this guy who purposefully picked a $600 one way flight from Montreal on Air Canada only because he knew he would get fed and watered. He could have taken a different flight, one that didn't feed him, but seeing as it is the company who is paying for it, he chose the bling-bling flight. What a hoser.

Lots of cool feedback on the story. Credit and Kudos go to Luie for picking that earlobe nibbling fetish word. He wins top prize for nearly stumping the unstumpable author. But now we all think he has weird desires, so I'm not sure this award is something to brag about.

Jeff's band is playing May 14 at Stars on Whyte. They took part in Devon-palooza the other weekend and the rumours say it was a good show and Jeff got lots of female undergraments thrown at him. Mind you the rumour mill is occasionally suspect. More likely it was men's underoos getting thrown at Jeff, but you'll have to ask him. But a good show nonetheless. So if you want on the bandwagon early, check em out on the 14th.

Not too much else to report. I'm still waiting for one mark, lazy professor. I start my last course on May 10, which will be a nice way of breaking up the work week. I've updated the links, so check them out. Hope your weekend is/was good. Until later, skater.

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 1:13 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

shout out out out out out

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Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Hmmm something is a little dodgy.

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 7:14 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

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Trying to work my computer....

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 7:14 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

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Struggling to understand technology......

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 7:13 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

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Storytime, ahead of schedule, just cause I'm a nice guy. Enjoy....

Morning in Australia

She woke up and was already sweating. She wallowed briefly in the gray area of early awakening, before reality seeped through to remind her where she was. She lay there, contemplating the situation for the hundredth, thousandth, time. She was under a cliff, the red rocks shadowed by the early western sunrise. She figured the rocks were orangey-red because the sun beat relentlessly down upon this backwater plot of land in western Australia, burning them red. She was here not against her will, but certainly not as a willing participant. Her husband, the world-renowned geologist Dr. Justin Marcus, was hot on the trail of some rock or something. Stromatolite, that sounded somewhat right in her head. It did not matter, really, not to her. He would look at her with his eyes wide, almost beside himself as he explained to her that stromatolite, or whatever the hell it was called, was formed over 3 billion years ago. She could care less.

'But honey', he would plead, trying to make this extended camping trip somewhat interesting for her, 'the sediment could tell us amazing things about what the earth was like 3 billion years ago.'

She looked at him with a withering stare. He withered all right, returning to his scribbler and GPS gadget. She did not care and could not understand why anyone would. Good god, it was 1998, almost 2000, who in their right mind would care about some dome shaped dirt from 3 billion years ago? If she had only known how out there geologists were, she may have reconsidered the whole marriage thing.

Mind you, the marriage was not a total write off, despite the sand in her underwear. Justin was famous, as famous as a geologist could be, and thus they had traveled internationally on an almost bi-annual basis. Most places were rather boring, but France had been nice. Mind you, Justin had been in the Alps, digging in the dirt. She on the other hand had spent lots of time and money experiencing Paris.

That was where she had met Louis. Sitting at a cafe, she had been surprised to find her bill had been paid for. She asked the rather snobby waiter, who had gestured to a gentleman sitting at a table near the kitchen. She walked over to him, expecting only to thank him for his kindness. Instead she had spent the next 13 hours with him. It was a hollow, sexual relationship, the kind one might only consider if they are certain they will never see the other person again.

She thought of Louis often on this trip, the memory taking her away from the sun-baked land she had called home for the past two weeks. He was so funny, so inviting. He told her stories of his life, always dropping in small facetious stories of self-deprecating humour. She was smitten and soon they were in bed. He was like no other she had been with.

She shuddered, remembering the torrid few hours she had spent with him. Louis, his grizzled beard tickling her neck as he nibbled, seemingly insatiably, on her earlobes. It had surprised her so much, as Louis spent much of their time in bed nuzzling her earlobes, that she asked him what he found so appealing about her ears.

'Well my dear,' he spoke softly in his Welsh accent, 'I have what my psychologist calls gynotikolobomassophilia, which is a rather strong desire to nibble on female earlobes.' Coming from anyone other than Louis, she would have laughed out loud in their face. But not with Louis, he was too brief in her life to ruin with adolescent behaviour. Besides, she had rather enjoyed it, the nibbling. If Justin ever wondered why his wife suddenly demanded that he nibble on her earlobes, he made no mention of it. Nor did she ever make mention of her chance encounter in Paris. It became a comfortable non-topic between them.

She lay in her sleeping bag, wondering about the benefits of getting up. In her almost 32 years of life, never did she think she would end up here, so unhappy, so unwilling to even watch the sunrise on this southern continent. She dozed, semi-conscious and remembering her idyllic university days. She had attended the University of Toronto, more for the city than the schooling, although that was not the story she told her parents. Her father, a wealthy business, bankrolled her education, all along assuming that she would return to Brandon to work in the family business. Her father owned a chain of retail businesses, which sold a wide variety of items to churches. Bibles, candles, hymn books, along with a lot of cheap, made in Taiwan-type of trinkets. She was told to study Religious History, so that when she most assuredly returned, she would be well versed and able to speak knowledgably to priests and other holy types.

She had studied all right, she remembered with a smile. She studied how to shotgun a beer, how to tease drunken frat boys, and how to smile when the frat boys asked her to come home with them. She had attended class only enough to pass whatever course her father had told her to enroll in. She could tell you that Beelezbub was the Philistine god of Acaron, an area supposedly 25 miles west of Jerusalem, but beyond that and a few other useless tidbits of biblical information, she basically remembered little of the academic side of her university life. She called her dad during the last week of her university life to tell him that, despite the fact her bedroom had remained unchanged in her absence, she was moving to British Columbia to see the mountains and find herself. Her dad had flipped, yelling a lot of words that one would not expect to hear from a man who sold bibles to churches. She hung up the phone and left for BC later that week. It was there, working in a coffee bar, she had met Justin. They had married, her parents grudgingly approving, four short months later. She was 25 at the time and so sure she had finally found love. Now she often laughed bitterly in the morning mirror, as she stared at the wrinkles, amazed at how weak she had been.

She laid in her grimy sleeping bag, fully awake and already feeling sorry for herself in this early morning hour. Justin, of course, was already gone. She looked at her husband's empty sleeping bag, so neatly tucked away, and steeled herself for another day of fighting back sarcastic comments and ignoring geological babble-speak. She was getting teary-eyed as she contemplated her life when Justin's voice echoed throughout the rock walls. 'Honey! I found it! The stromatolite, it is here! Ha ha! I knew it, I knew it all along. Honey? Come see.'

She rolled over, unwilling to get up and look at the dirt her husband found so fascinating. She stared, eyes watery, at the red rock of the cliff face, watching the rising sunlight creep ever lower, ever closer. The rock waited, unable to move. This rock could have been something, a mountain or a majestic canyon wall. Instead it was stuck here, a nameless wall of rock in a distant land, unknown to almost all and unable to change its place on this spinning blue planet.

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 7:13 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

shout out out out out out

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Tuesday, April 27, 2004

"Freedom is not a reaction, freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretense that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward." ~~ Krishnamurti

Food for thought as Iraq continues on it's hell in a handbasket road.

Well, it has been a while since I had a labour job, or at least that is what my bones are telling me. These first two days at the gold course, tending to bunkers and sand, has already reaffirmed my desire to not lift heavy things for a living. I'm rather sore, but it has been pretty good overall. It's kind of nice to just work, to give my ole brain a rest. I thought to myself today that if we work on these bunkers, making them look pretty, most people won't notice. They will notice if the bunkers resemble a kittylitter box, but if the bunkers are perfect, we won't hear about it. Human nature to complain, I suppose. That human nature is what keeps this blog flowing.

My boss said the other day that if I get hit with a golf ball, which I almost did on Monday as it deflected off the mower, I need to be polite. I told him that, most likely, I wouldn't be very polite at all. Seriously, if some duffer drills a Top Flite into my spine, I'm not gonna turn around and say: "Thank you sir. May I have another?" No, I'm gonna dramatically throw myself forward into a bunker, writhe in pain, and scream obscenities about how he'd better hope my new wheelchair doesn't have rockets and gattling guns. Now that will be a scene. Seriously, be polite after I get hit with a golf ball? Not gonna happen. Cause god knows there is some idiot out there who used his putter to tee-off and if he hits me, there will be trouble a brewin'.

On the topic of complaining, I'm pretty sunburned. On Monday I didn't wear sunscreen, so I guess that's my punishment for, after 26 years of life, still failing to realize that I am a fair haired and fair skinned pasty white sunburn machine. How many years of education? Jeez. I think my face is heating our apartment complex.

Looks like the "words" have been handed in. As per my profession, I won't be accepting any late submission without a note from your mom/dad/legal guardian. And even then, forget it. So I should have a little short story up for Friday morning. Hopefully it will brighten your day.

US Marines are, as I type, launching attacks into Fallujah, which is the stronghold of the Sunni Muslim resistance. Not a good idea. It would kind of be like someone rounding up an army and attacking one of the main Catholic institutions, like an archdiosese in a major city. Not likely to make Roman Catholics all over the world start dancing with joy. Look Bush, I know you are an idiot, I know that brain power pretty much peaked for you with the advent of velcro shoes. But think hard: War doesn't bring peace. It's just that simple. And if I were a terrorist I would thank you for galvanizing the youth to action. It's just a cycle. The only problem is that the bicycle is rolling downhill and the pedals are spinning too fast to get back under control.

OK, thats enough political ranting for today. I have to go stick my face in the water. We are having tortellini for supper and its my job to boil the water with my sunburned, "Of course I'm from Alberta, why look at my red red neck," face. Sigh.
Hope this finds you well. Keep your stick on the ice.

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 6:02 PM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

shout out out out out out

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Monday, April 26, 2004

Jeez Lou, I had know idea you knew of such things....

Cadrin, dammit, pick ONE word. Just one! I can't wait to teach future mininig engineers. "Cadrin Jr! Stop eating your gluestick! And for godsake, get that crayon out of your nose! God your Dad is ugly."

Okay, I have to go to work now, "it's my first day." Wheee, I'm so excited. I can't wait to get hit with my first golf ball. What the headlines: "Golfer impaled with own 3 iron. Maintenance man seen fleeing the scene, laughing hysterically"

Later little dudes.

A sovereign thought, delivered to your door at 5:51 AM ~~ 0 bonsai trees

shout out out out out out

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