Van Horne

How gross is the phrase "necking"? I think any time you add "ing" to a body part is sound gross. "We were clavicling all night."


Sometimes the stats section of blogger lets me know if the blog was randomly found using google. Friday it was found by a guy from Tokyo, Japan. Apparently he wasn't affected by the current situation because he had the time to look up the following keywords:

"xvideos glorp poo shit".

In case you don't know xvideos is a porn site. Talk about living up to your stereotype. I bet his next search was "tube8 eels anal". Oh fuck now if someone types that into google it will point back to here. If that's the case then "Greetings from Hamilton".

Montrealqua-man II: revenge of the Côte-des-Neiges.

Outremont is by far the coolest neighborhood in Montreal. NDG is better to live in if you're poor but eventually getting into Outremont is ideal. The pool company had quite a few clients in Outremont but I was only ever assigned to one. It was a monster of a house that require a security gate and the steepest driveway I've ever seen. It was a bitch to clean because it had trees all around it. The kind that have those tiny orange pine-cone looking things that were more of a cross between a worm and baby-corn.

This house had a really great view looking East. This meant I could see the erect phallus that was the Olympic Stadium. The pool was actually above the house too because of how it was situated on the hillside. I remember one day late in September, I had to go with another new guy to clean this beast. He was one of those guys who most likely had a criminal record, a kid with an ex-girlfriend and every Tupac album. As we cleaned I remember stopping every few minutes to take in the amazing view. I would mention how incredible it was and how I would never have been able to see stuff like this if I hadn't lucked into this shitty job.

The guy, whose name I believe was Alex didn't give a shit. At all. The only thing he was even remotely enthusiastic about was the cars in the driveway. Lexus or BMWs or whatever. Cars you see a million times a day anyway. I had worked with a lot of people who were like this guy, people void of any passion. All he wanted out of life was occasional sex and a regular intake of weed. As I finished vacuuming the bottom of the pool, still gazing out at the amazing city below I thought about what life would be like if these kinds of experiences had no emotional or intellectual effect on me. It's the same way I feel when I see people who just shrug when they hear "Needle in the Hay." As sad as that song is, not feeling anything from it is much, much sadder.

I fucking hated St. Laurent (the town). It was ugly and crotchety and the houses were all owned by greasy people. People who, on a consistent basis, looked to be coated in buttery turkey grease.

There was one in particular that really stuck with me. It was an above ground pool at a middle class house very similar to anything you'd find in Grimsby or Oakville. The way the pump worked on this was that when you ran the backwash the ground all around it, which was already soft and muddy, would get even worse. You'd walk away with wet feet every time. They took absolutely zero care of either the pool or the lot on which it sat. It sucked when I had to clean it in the morning because it meant working the rest of the day with soaked shoes.

Close by is Nouveau Saint-Laurent which I did not hate. It was full of newer million dollar homes and best of all required a lot of driving time which made the day go by faster. The pools were all newer and generally speak the people who owned them used them a lot so they stayed clean. My only real work out there involved checking the PH levels. The really neat thing about the area was that all of the houses were built in this kind of updated Victorian-style. Although it was a suburban "survey" setting, the developers went out of their way to make sure all of the homes looked distinctly different. It wasn't like a sea of identical houses.



There is actually an old aboriginal word for an ocean of Identical housing, it's spelled "Mississauga".

There was one day however that really fucking sucked. It was pouring rain and I was stuck working with Greg, the guy who hired me. It was mid October at this point and the day had started out dry so I only had a sweatshirt and no real water proofing. The first few places were alright. One was at a townhouse in this amazing enclosed community that had it's own little lake and only had one road in and out.

Then it began to rain. Greg felt that because we were all the way out there that we should just continue on and do the next pools. We did three before it was raining so hard that I could no longer see the bottom of the pool to clean it. Remember, I wasn't wearing a jacket or waterproof shoes and it was mid October. Greg didn't seem to think anything was odd despite the fact that I looked like a shivering cat in a bath.

The worst part about it wasn't the cold soaking clothing and shoes, it was that I had nothing dry to help wipe the water off of my glasses. Anyone who wears glasses all the time can relate to this shit. The water just converts from drops to lines. It's almost as bad as walking into a warm business in the dead of winter. You fog up and nothing seems to settle it down. The worst is into bars, as it becomes impossible to look cool.

We headed back to the shop and Greg's boss, the owner, got mad at him for making me work as soaked as I did. I said nothing the whole time of course. I was already full of anxiety as it was I didn't need conflict on top of that.

I skipped three days and this post sucks. Sorry about that. I need to get work done so I can get my super-job. In case you didn't know I'm planning on making a kind of employment blitz to grab an entry level job in Toronto. I'm way behind on my preparation and I already have some of the lowest confidence capable in a human being so progress is hard.

Essentially I want to work in Toronto so I can wear fancy suits and take a train to work. Seriously. The fact that it will pay better and there are far more opportunities is just an excuse to be able to wear three-piece suits and ride the rails.

In my head I envision the warm morning sun beaming through the window forcing me to squint while I read one of the many books Mary has. A nice hot coffee in one hand and and the novel in the the other while resting on the knee of my folded leg. Maybe I spill a few drops on my tweed vest and I say "ah fuck!" even though secretly I love that I'm fancy enough to be concerned when I spill drinks on myself. When I arrive downtown I'll probably need to take a subway the last stretch. I'll have my laptop and novel in a new leather saddle bag at my side as I stand just feet from the passing subway cars. This will of course create a subtle wind effect that will mess up my over hair-sprayed quaff. That's ok though because I know I can fix it as soon as I get to the office or alternatively I can throw on the cap also housed in the bag at my side. The subway car will be insanely packed and as it slows into the various stops makes me recalibrate my footing while I think about how greasy and dirty the stainless steel pole that I'm holding onto is. I also look forward to the panicky squeeze to get by people and get out at my stop. I have to think about the timing and how I need to work my way as close to the door as possible. The stairs out to the street level are always slightly too slippery and I really have to focus on not falling as I work my up to see the same morning light reflect off the tall buildings of downtown which will force me to squint eventually giving me wrinkled character.

So that means post will be on random days.

Song of the day:

Seafoam Gleen

I need more classical music in my life. Clearly!

I tried some more modern cello arrangements but all everyone seems to do now is atonal stuff and it just doesn't sound good. I don't want to just stick to the standards either. This may take some experimenting to find but eventually I'll figure out my preferred sub-genre.

Remember a few years back when Iran held an election and their evil fucking government just decided the votes didn't count and made up the results? Remember the massive protests and how it looked very much like the government was going to fall? Remember how the whole world was excited that Iran was going to topple their dictators and theocrats? Remember how a few weeks into the rebellion Michael Jackson died and nobody gave a shit about Iran anymore? The whole issue just faded, the dictator stayed and people continued to be tortured and killed.

Remember how just last week Libya, Oman, Bahrain ect were just about to topple their evil dictators? Then the earth quaked and the big wave came and now nobody gives a shit about the middle east. Talk about having the worst fucking luck.

How much would anyone like to bet that all of these countries, even Libya, will remain under the exact same governments as they did two months ago. Everyone moves on once there's something even more bloody and gruesome to look at.

Imagine if a celebrity dies this week. The CBC website won't be able to have any news up on their website, it will just be a blank off-white colored screen from the news agency's massive orgasm and the explosion of cum everywhere. Translucent, off-white, salty slime on the screen of every news network and website.

Hooray!

Montreal

When I was hired to clean pools I hadn't even applied. Somehow this guy named Greg managed to find my resume online and called me up. He was from Stoney Creek and thought it would be awesome to have a fellow creepy-creeker in the Town of Mont Royal, TMR.

In order to get to TMR I had to take the Orange Line to the Namur station. Namur was probably the most sculptural of the Metro stations. This was also the stop you got off at if you were in need of going to the giant orange. I never actually had anything from the giant orange when I lived there. I did however go the only Walmart in city limits that was beside it.




This area of Montreal was a small industrial section between the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Cote St. Luc and the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of TMR. It was always a culture shock to go to the Walmart and stand in line surrounded by Hasidic families.

The stretch of Jean-Talon that required walking up to get to work was lined with car dealerships and specialty mechanic shops. There was one place called E.K. Auto that specialized in ugly early 1980's ferrarris. Montreal was maggoty with ferrarris, it was one of it's biggest flaws as a city. You gotta cap that shit! Anyway E.K. stood out to me because I always wanted to call it Eek the Car and then giggle in my head. True Story.

Working as a pool-cleaner requires two basic skills: driving in Montreal and the ability to stick your bare hand into some really gross shit. We had our own blue uniform/shirt and were encouraged to wear shitty jeans and shoes because of all the filth. On my first day I had to wear my regular clothes which meant that I looked like a prowler as I wandered into various back-yards.

I assisted the other pool-boys for the first week while I learned the process of vacuuming the pool, cleaning and back-washing the filter. The company had a bunch of old Corollas and Civic hatchbacks that we took to get to the various pools and hot-tubs. On my first day I remember the exact locations we went to. It was just a short shift of only 4 places and oddly enough I was never given those on my schedule after that initial day. I think the guy who taught me had exclusivity of those spots on his list.

The first place was an indoor pool and hot-tub at an older 1960's style high-rise at the edge of Westmount. I remember that it was a heated pool and the whole room was set to a temperature that was somewhere between Mercury and Arizona. Everything was seafoam green and you could just tell that the only users of this facility were all way above the 75 age-benchmark. I didn't actually learn much other than the correct order for cleaning the filter and how to get the hose in the water without capturing air inside. It was pretty uneventful and right away I could tell that the kid showing me how to do this didn't much care for me. I clearly didn't listen to The Roots and so I was basically a total write-off in his universe.

The next place was a long drive around the city then down into the center finally coming to a stop in Old Montreal deep inside the commercial loading zone of a medium sized office building. We grabbed all our gear and made our way into a service elevator. When we got out we were on the roof of the Kocisko Building. It was nicely paved with gravel landscaping and several potted trees. I tried to find images to show you but the best I got was a Google map view. I added the arrow to show you the that the Hot Tub is real and that my memory is a fucking steel trap!



From there we began driving back to Westmount and began the long, winding set of roads up the mountain... Mount Royal... Mont-reyal... Montreal. Get it? The houses at the top are obscene. Their like the homes in the Shaughnessy area of Vancouver but with amazing views of the city below. The house we cleaned first was on a small hidden street just off one of the winding roads. It would be next to impossible to find again without directions. When we walked up to the hot-tub to find an array of empty liquor bottles and bikini bottoms draped over the side. It was clear that someone had a good time. The view from the Hot-tub was very similar to this only better:



After that we went to this really beautiful mansion just off the "The Bvld". It's really "The Boulevard" but it's always spelled in abbreviations on maps. This is about half way up the mountain and is probably one of the nicest streets in all of Canada. It's no wonder that it gets a name like "The Boulevard". It's a pretty sweet area to bike ride around and there is a really beautiful park I remember going to once. If I recall correctly, and I almost always do, we sat on a steep hillside and watched dogs and little kids. It's one of those memories that either happened exactly as you remember it or never happened at all. Like 100% imagined.

The pool at this house was my first outdoor pool. The hot-tubs and indoor pool had covers and ceilings so cleaning them was easy. This was one of those long narrow pools that is only used for doing laps. I've never been able to understand why someone would spend tens of thousands of dollars for the convenience of swimming lanes at home to use maybe 4 months of the year. Not to mention the fact that a pool brings your property value down and your house insurance up. If it were my house I'd turn the pool into my secret bunker and grow grass over it. I have no idea what I would need a bunker for, perhaps in case I would like to upgrade my creepery one day. I wonder if I can find that house via the googily...

Sometimes, my memory scares me. This was a house I was at for 45 min once in my life like 7 years ago and I still knew exactly how to find it. Here's a google streetview. On the right hand side behind the fences and bushes is the pool. Is it creepy that I'm doing this? Do I need a bunker yet?



From there we headed back to the shop and I got to go home. It was a very short day, maybe 3.5 hours. I think having a short shift on your first day is a nice way to introduce you to the work situation. In all likely-hood they probably wanted to make sure I wasn't too dumb to net debris off the surface of water. Finding a job in Montreal is tough when you don't speak french. If you want to move there learn french first, I learned this the hard way.

The next few stories aren't in a specific chronological order. I figured I would just share some random experiences I had as a Montreal Pool-Boy. I'm going to just go hood by hood and choose one house for each. I could literally write a novel just on the pools I clean during the six weeks I worked there.

Ok let's start off near the shop in TMR. TMR is one of many wealthy areas in Montreal. From above the you can see that the roads were designed to resemble a giant Union Jack. My bosses there told me that this was a big "Fuck You!" to the french. We had a ton of pools in this area and I learned to drive that bitch blindfolded despite the fact that in the large Union Jack there were an insane amount of side streets with every style of home you can imagine. OHHHHH side track!!!...!!!>>>

So... In Vancouver toward the end of my heroic missionary work I began to walk "the really long way" home. This meant going all the way up to King Edward then over to Main. Along the way there is this house that looks like it's straight out of "The Shire". Every time I passed it I expected to see a unicorn grazing in the front yard while a talking badger in a tailored vest and wire-rimmed spectacles collected glass milk jugs from the porch before checking his fancy pocket watch for the time. T'was time for tea! I need to discuss it now while I remember. It get's two pictures!






Anyway, I mention the fact that TMR had a crazy amount of styles because the one that sticks out in my head is probably the most boring to look at and yet the best in terms of awesome. It's one of those really long bungalows with a lot of glass walls and really smooth sloping roofs. The kind you would picture a party being held at in Hollywood. Lots of turtlenecks, feathered hair and Elliott Gould doing blow off the ass of a passed out woman in a tight, white jumpsuit and vastly over-sized sunglasses. This one would be hard to get a photo of but if you understand the style I'm talking about you'd know.

Anyway the owner was the original from when it was built. The pool was concrete and rarely if ever used. The man who lived there was at least 85 and would come out and talk to me every time I was there. You could tell he was insanely wealthy and had nobody to spend time with. He was awesome. He was english (as in England) and we would talk about his visits to Ontario and TMR. Every time I was there he would talk about repainting the concrete in the pool. He seemed embarrassed that there were spots where the paint had flaked off and caused the deep-end to look like there was a dead dalmatian resting on the bottom.

One time a woman who I think was his daughter was there and seemed like a real cunt. I think she assumed we were taking advantage of her dad by continuing to maintain an unused pool. I always made sure that pool was as clean as humanly possible and spent extra time getting every speck. Oh... I also flooded his basement.

His pool filter ran directly into the basement of the swingers/Brady household and so I had to go into his abode to run the backwash. It was my first solo trip there and the filter was old and complicated. It had twice the amount of valves and required a specific order to get working. Anyway I fucked it up and it started gushing water everywhere. The elderly man handed me a bucket and a bunch of towels and together we were able to figure out how to do it. He never once made any kind of complaint about me soaking his floor. I clearly fucked up but he just kept saying the filter is leaky and does that all the time. It didn't. He was just nice.

Wow, this is going to be long. I'm going to go into a part 2 tomorrow.

Here's a song that should make you cry if you have a heart.

Tiny Animals

When my age was still in single digits I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house. The house itself was on Kelson Road which is technically in Grimsby but borders on the great state of Winona. It was built by my grandfather Ross who was a brick layer and had worked on building my high school, Orchard Park. The house was a small, red-bricked bungalow and had five bedrooms. There were four kids who grew up in it, one being my mom. For a poor family during that time, everyone having their own bedroom is quite impressive. When I was really small my grandparents still owned the huge lot behind the house. It seemed like it was never ending. After my grandfather died they sold half of the backyard where a large, menacing looking house was built and starred down at us with contempt.

I can recall just about ever square inch of that house and just about everything in it. After my grandmother needed to be hospitalized due to Alzheimer's my Aunt lived there for a short period and then we sold it. We never went down that street again. I haven't seen the house in at least fifteen years. I think it was too painful for my mom to see other people living in the house she grew up in. I don't have that problem, I'm never anywhere long enough.

Down the street was a German family with two kids who were a few years older than me. Their names were Monica and Warner. Their house was amazing. Not in an elegant, classy way though. Their house was filled with early 1980's souvenirs from everywhere you could think of: Niagara Falls, Wonderland, Disney World, NASA, The Grand Canyon ect. It was that really cheap but bright crap you can usually find all stained and torn, rolled up into a ball and sold in the clear plastic bags at the back of a Value Village. The bundled bags was where the best finds usually were. Snow globes, and felt pennants, commemorative plates, spoons, mugs and those little plastic horse things where you press the bottom and the limbs all go wobbly. It was nuts.

This is where I first had Fruit Loops. I think I may have told this story before but it's important so I will share again. I was given the magical food and the flavor has stayed with me to this day and was other-worldly. It didn't taste like the fruit-loops I know now. I don't think it was my first time eating sugar either. For some reason though, the taste of this fucking thing has lasted with me to this day never to be repeated. The closest thing I can get that resembles it is if you place a loop under your tongue, one on both the left and right of the gross thing that connects your tongue to bottom of your mandible, lay your tongue back down and then suck to high-heaven.

I haven't had fruit loops since I was married. I don't believe I will ever have them again either. Not because of some horrid memory or anything, have you looked at how much fucking sugar is in there? The calories in one handful could power a flight from here to Oxfordshire. If I'm going to consume a sugary snack it will be a baked good. For goodness sake!

On regular occasions my sister grandma and I would walk a kind of loop that went up the street towards "Andre's Wines", then turn and head up a cul-de-sac, through an undeveloped field until finally you came to a set of wooden poles about three feet high and painted bright orange. We called them "the carrot sticks." They were there as a make-shift guard rail letting drivers along HWY #8 at night know that there was no road in the blackness beyond. This was apparently in a time before reflective signs or common sense.

"Grandma, can we walk to the carrot sticks?"
"Yes, yes we can."

At the corner of Kelson and HWY #8, where we would turn to get back to the red-bricked bungalow, there was Used Car dealership that is still there on one corner, a scary old mansion/farm house that looked like every old scary-looking mansion/farm house from one's childhood on the other, a vine field with rows of disgusting grapes all waiting to be smooshed into disgusting wine and another 1950's style brick bungalow. By this time in the walk I was usually tired and going that last few hundred meters was always agony. It's funny how I'd forget that part. Every time.

Wow, that story is even more pointless than my usual tales. If you got this far you are a sucker.

Song of the day:

Sweatered Goats

Tracey, not Kelly. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you have not been reading. Shame!!!!!

All of the young men in Stratford look the same. At least they all did on the day Mary and I were there. They're all ever-so-slightly stocky with short, spikey, blondish hair and black plastic glasses. They all sport a navy pea-coat and book bag.

I had forgotten that we kept seeing what we thought was the same dude everywhere we went. As we would turn a corner, the guy we just passed would be ahead. Of course it wasn't the same guy at all, rather Stratford is the village of the damned without the girls. That's all.

More Fanshawe?

At 2:00 am and at minus 200 degrees the only place to get coffee was to walk about half a kilometer down the street to the 24hr Tim Horton's. While the distance seemed rather short it felt as though each step was yet another light-year's distance from the warmth of the sun. The alternative was to drive but if we were going to go ahead and drive someplace, it was usually McDonald's. I remember driving with my friend Ail to the late-night drive through for winter ice-cream. We listened to AFI in her mom's minivan and I kept making fun of her for liking Good Charlotte. Thinking back I'm pretty sure she thought I had some kind of boner for her. I didn't. It seems that my friend-gender ratio is always about 3:1. Three female amigos for every 1 male amigo.

Once I was tricked into giving Ail a ride home. She lived almost an hour away on the other side of London. I have family over there that I did not see or speak with the entire time I lived in London.

I remember once being dragged along with Cynthia who had to go home and used Kat's car to do so. We were baffled that Kat's record collection included an unusual amount of black-metal and industrial tunes. It seemed very much the opposite to her outward appearance on a day to day basis. Speaking of which I also remember once going with Kat on a drive to her house to get something. Probably a tripod. She had a small navy-blue car and worked in Kitchener at a Tim Horton's when she wasn't at school. Years later she moved out west to Burnaby with her boyfriend. He once had a golf-club break off and impale him through the lung. Unfortunately for me, my stories never get that good. Going on quick fun rides seemed to be a highlight of the early millenial years. 2003 was a fine time for driving!

It was during this era of fast cars and loose women that the computer lab was moved outside of the secure and isolated photography zone and down the hallway past the fine arts and music industry arts studios. I remember a lot of us "photogs" were initially skeptical and even contemptuous at the idea of moving the lab away from the darkrooms and studio. This all changed when we realized three things: 1 - it was like 20 feet from the bus stop. 2 - there was mounted television with dvd player. and 3 - you could line up the chairs and then sleep on them like a narrow bed. I took advantage of all three on a regular basis.

I have vivid recollections of watching About a Boy, Donnie Darko, the animated Transformers movie and of course the early seasons of Futurama on dvd. I'm pretty sure I also brought in my copy of Logan's Run, the only dvd I owned at that point. It was a gift from Danny. I no longer own it, I wish I did.

Eventually by the next autumn school year the lab's eMacs would be replaced with our Macbooks. But in the magical winter of second year we still had the warm turquoise glow of the cheap plastic mac-monsters. For some reason we would all chat on MSN despite the fact that everyone was within 10 feet of each other. This was a time before texting and before the iPod too. I would have to drag three large CD cases with me everywhere. I was never without my silver Sony discman. Never.

Because we didn't have to write papers and the fact that we needed to be in the lab in order to work with Photoshop, Our small class was pretty tightly-knit. I think I was lucky to finish up my schooling in a place where I was able to be comfortable with other people. Previous to that time I had only ever spoke if there was an emergency or grading was involved. This was a good time, here is a goat in a sweater.



song of the day:

Queen Pixelizabeth

A few days back Mary told me about this dream she had that for some reason I find really hilarious. I asked her if I could share it on here and she approved the request.

The scene begins in an alley way. Mary is setting up some kind of bake sale either for her mom or with her mom. Other people are joining in to help out and also provide their own delicious culinary creations. One of these people is her friend Graeme. Graeme has with him an aluminum pan, the flimsy kind you'd expect to see a huge pile of hot-dog wieners in at a large summer party. He sets down the tray and then proceeds to cut deeply into the tips of both thumbs letting the blood drain into the pan.

At the sight of this Mary begins to get concerned and tells Graeme "No, you can't do this here, you can do that." To which Graeme responds, "Wait watch, it's good."

Next Graeme begins to add the ingredients needed for a salsa, tomatoes, spices ect.

Mary again pleas for him to stop and appears to be getting very angry telling him, "No you can't serve that to people, you can't do that here. You can't feed people your own blood, it's not sanitary."

Apparently puzzled by this Graeme explains "It's a secret ingredient, just wait, I want people to guess what's in it."

After some more resistance on Mary's part Graeme eventually has a passerby take a chip and eat from the hemoglobin-salsa. His reaction is mixed and when asked by Graeme if he could guess at the secret ingredient he responds with "It tastes like tobacco."

This is of course answered in return by Graeme with, "Yeah... I smoke too much."

~

During the winter of 2003 I would regularly eat, sleep and socialize in the secured photography area of Fanshawe College. I shared my darkroom with two girls who would very rarely use it, especially not at 11:00 pm on a Friday night.

These were small light-tight rooms that contained individual color-enlargers. Color enlargers need absolute blackness so the process would involved setting the exposure, RGB values and the lenses and then doing the test strips in complete pitch black. After you had finished either your test strip or print exposure you would place the paper into a light resistant bag and the walk about 15 feet to where the processor was. Although we did have a black and white processor, you could still develop prints using the tray and tongs method if you so desired. Color, on the other hand, was a much more intensive process so we used the large processor for that. The prints were loaded into the front end in another light tight room. The smell of color photography, both the paper and the chemistry will stay with me forever.

As much fun as developing color prints was the real action zone was in the computer lab. This was where the big, globular eMacs were. They were light grey and had this weird bluey-green plastic trim. On regular occasions I would spend 20+ hours in there leaving only to urinate and get more French Vanillas and Chocolate Chip muffins from the school Tim Horton's. I was also partial to buying the packets of rice that you just pop into the microwave and then eat. They were new at the time and convenient as fuck.

The microwave was a bit of a hike through the school over where the Harvey's cafeteria was. It was one of those 7/11 style beasts that required only half the time of a normal microwave. In the dead of night we were still permitted to be in the school and I can remember vividly taking strolling breaks over to the silent food court with various pals who were also in the lab at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning.

Usually it was to accompany a photo-lady as the desolate academic wasteland was pretty spooky during the witching hour. At the time I had a surprisingly large number of friends in the program: Ail, Aurora, Cynthia, Kat, ex-wife, Erin and that tiny girl whose apartment I sublet but cannot for the life of me remember her name. That was on the female side. I also had some good male pals too: Adam, Craig and Wes mostly. Adam is really the only person I keep in touch with. These were the people who spent the most time at the school which is how I ended up befriending them. I was there pretty much any hour I wasn't sleeping, showering or killing ants at the shit-hole apartment.

In late January they had to shut down the school due to a severe snow-storm that was happening. I was in the school at the time and the 300 year old security guard had to come in and tell me to leave. He was nice about it but it meant that I had to make the 45 minute trek back to Ant-city through a blizzard. As usual I was improperly dressed having only a pair of ratty black All-Stars on my feet. I did have a proper winter coat, scarf, hat and gloves though so that made up for the damage to my tootsies.

The roughest part of the walk was the first 20 minutes which was through the middle of a vast, empty college parking lot and then up a long entrance road that lead to Fanshawe, The catholic high-school that looked like a shopping mall, and the school for the deaf.

Walking across the fields of asphalt in a storm was like being stuck in arctic. I would time my pace by counting the steps to each lamp-post. The lamp posts were really the only navigational tools I had at my disposal. I remember the yellowish glow that they would cast on the untouched drifts and watch the flakes falling through the illuminated cone of light. It often felt like I was the only person who got to experience these scenes. I normally never passed anyone on the long walk to campus and the blizzard was no exception.

The last stage of the parking lot section was a along straight walk up a tree-line road that led out to Cheapside. I then followed Cheapside up to Highbury and was then greeted with yet another long empty parking lot. This was where the Price Chopper and Zellers was located. It may have been K-mart. Anyway it was different from the other nearby grocery-department combo of Food Basics and Zellers (plus). Eventually I was greeted with Huron Street, which meant it was all suburbia laneways from there on. Along this section was a Giant Tiger where Danny and Haley would buy Icy Squares and Zero Bars from, a crappy movie theater, and the very last Biway I ever saw around.

This led to the long sidewalk-less road back up to the basement trash heap I called "basement trash heap". The whole experience I did often but it was really at it's best during a 3:00 am blizzard. I enjoyed that lifestyle. Time was arbitrary and the patterned day with a morning, noon, evening and night didn't matter. While everyone else enjoyed college via the bars on Richmond I was having a great time staring at lamp-posts in the middle of school parking lot in three feet of snow.

Kelly. That was her name.

Song of the day:
Why did I ever stop listening to Solex?

Two Young People and Two Companions

I'm feeling lazy and I finally checked out the stats area of my blog so I've decided I don't need to write anything good today. Who is using Internet Explorer as a web browser still? It's literally the worst way to use your internet access. The stats area shows me what browsers are viewing the blog and while most of them are sane, firefox users there are still Explorer people.

Here's a little web browser learning for you. There are a lot of them first of all: Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, ect. They all vary a little but as a general rule they try to stay consistent with what developers and designers want to implement. The code you use to make something happen on a website should be the same for Firefox and Safari, and for the most part this is how it works. Except the assholes at Microsoft. Internet Explorer goes out of it's way to stay behind on development and design standards. They go out of their way to create situations where code that should work perfectly fine doesn't in Explorer. There is no financial gain from doing this that I can see. Explorer is a free browser after all.

One great example was the use of .png images which took until just a few years ago to work in Explorer. The .png is an image file that allows transparency instead always being constrained to a filled in box. It not only allows designers ti create much better visuals but also decreases the time it takes pictures to load on your screen. The .png has been around since the late 1980's and there was never a reason to not let Explorer display them. If you're using explorer, not only are you making the lives of developers worse, you're missing really good stuff in just about every site.

It's like having six parallel roads that all lead to the same place giving you a choice to get there. Imagine five of them are all pretty much the same speed limit and well organized and properly maintained. The only difference was the view along the side. Now imagine that the sixth has a speed limit half that of the others and is full of potholes and debris and smeared feces everywhere. Why would you take that road? If you still use Explorer because you are too lazy to spend 2 min to download Firefox or chrome than you are driving on a shitty, broken road.

Ohh here's another good example. Let's say you're watching tv and the same movie is on six different channels. Five of them have pretty much the same clarity and commercial breaks and one is fuzzy as shit and has ten minute breaks every four minutes. Guess which one represents Internet Explorer?

Now, if someone told you they just preferred to watch that channel because pressing a few buttons on the remote was a hassle and that they don't care about how shitty it actually is, you'd probably think that person was either lazy or stupid. If someone said they know taking roads one through five was not only a quicker, nicer drive but also better for your car but still liked taking the slower crappy one, you'd probably think that person was either lazy or stupid. Perhaps that person really didn't know?

Well now they do.

firefox
chrome
opera

I bet not a single IE user who reads this will bother.

Majolie? No Siree.

Sometimes I get strange emails and invites to events from people I don't know and whose only connection to me was from the old life... It's very disturbing and makes me wonder where my name still floats around.

The latest was from a clothing company in Montreal that the ex-wife bought from and knew the designer. I have zero connections to the ex except through two friends and neither of them are connected to Montreal. In addition I don't use the same email address that I did when I was married and have strict privacy settings on muh social networks. This isn't the first time and I can't quite figure out where the tie would be.

I doubt very much that people simply remember my name as I have no idea who the fuck they are and never met them in person. All of the image tags with my ugly face that are connected with "what's her name" have been gone for years. I don't understand where the connection could be floating around and it kind of bothers me, although not enough to do anything about it.

Most of the time I just hit "No" or ignore the invite but sometimes I feel bad when there are no people attending so I hit maybe. In facebook lingo "maybe" means "pity". I wish there was way to just have it all automatically trigger "maybe" when the profile receives an invite. If I was a better scripter I would figure that shit out.

I get emails for other people who share the same name as me. It's almost always correspondence from Australia or New Zealand. The latest of those was some kind Christiany-jesus club membership renewal. My name is very popular in Australia but I found that there is also an architect and a dentist with my name in the US. Nothing, and I mean nothing makes you feel less unique than sharing your name with a dentist.

New Zealand sounds better when you pronounce it as "newsy land". It the island where they sent the cast of the early 1990's movie Newsies. I think Swing Kids was sent there too except for the one dude who is on House.

I'm cutting my hair this week. It's not going to be the magic hair-cut I intend to get for career hunting but it should make me look less like a fancy-girl. I don't know how to find pictures of what I want even though I've seen it dozens of times on the streets. Essentially I want a gentleman's haircut. Like real men had in the 30's. Dapper? Here's a photoshopped image I just made in 45 second combining my facebook pic with a style I like. I'm handsome!




Mary and I got an apartment. We sign the lease on Friday. Mary hasn't seen the place but she knows what the criteria is and that I wouldn't suggest applying unless it was met. It's an older place with a lot of character just like we like. It does need some work to look good and by the time I'm done with it, will look like a feature in House and Home.

I'm a bit of kook when it comes to interiors. Pictures require matted frames goddammit! We'd like to have social gatherings at the new place too. No water fights or screaming will be permitted. Instead we will sit around in classy chairs sipping of the champagne and eating of the scones and fancy breads. But above all the main rule has to do with the invitations, they will not find their way to ex-wives... or Draculas.