All Around The Mulberry Bush The Monkey Chased The Weasel

This week at work will be wonderfully serene since the whirlwind of spaz, known as our boss, is away on holidays. She’s diminutive but a tough old bat. I don’t think you could bring her down with a sock full o’ rocks. And she’s very good at one thing: half her job. The technical half, not the managerial half.

The door that separates her from our work group has a stiff latch and its loud opening snap is the harbinger of child-scolding, turkey-like gobbling. About four or five times a day we encounter this spring-loaded scenario:
- Door snaps open.
- We cringe at its percussive report.
- Boss flies out like a jack-in-the-box.
- Boss turns on the fire hose of shrill tones like we’re a rioting crowd.
- She does accompanying dance which includes spinning in place, flailing arms, pointing fingers, eye rolling and random warnings.
- Boss loses train of thought; spring recoils and pulls her back into her room mid-mumble.
- We continue working.

Just the absence of that periodic slap to the back of the head is making me more productive. I’ve already learned how to respond to emails using only my mouse by dragging in place letters from the previously typed, randomly fonted soup below. The problem is they look like this:

I just farted and my coworker dry heaved into her garbage.

Guest Post: Mom & Dad

[The parentals are in England rubbing elbows with the stinking rich at a posh society wedding and then touring the old stomping grounds in Belgium. The following is submitted by faithful commenter and mother of Net Dumplings, Pour The Wine and Kate and Mike Abroad: J Le.]

We're here and our livers are the worse for it. We ate last night in Jean and David's garden (back yard) and it was sooooo warm and calm. Then a storm hit like a wall at about 2:00 a.m. and their basement/garage flooded. It has rained all day. We went by our old house yesterday. A young man was mowing the lawn. His family bought the house in 2001 and completely renovated it and painted the outside and put in a pool where the pond used to be.

You wouldn't believe the wedding and the old money. All the men on Gina's side were in morning suits. I was in two fabulous heritage protected mansions. On the second day we had lunch in Boxted Hall which is Gina's uncle's house and it was on a heritage garden tour and people had to pay for a ticket to go and I was on the inside at a table set for twenty having lunch. I wasn't on the outside looking in......I was IN!!! Heard of The Barclay Bank in England? Gina's mother is a Barclay. Their house, built in the 1500's has it's own postal code...they have a postal code all to themselves!

Hopefully tomorrow it will be nice and we can go down to the Grande Place [in the center of Brussels]. The following day we go to Paris on the train and I can honestly say that walking the streets of Paris is one of my favorite things to do in the world as is sitting at their cafes and then eating in a cafe. Love love love. Haven't done it for two years and I miss it.

Send this on to your sisters as my skills are dodgy on a foreign computer. If you reply in, oh, say, 36 hours, I will read it.

Love
Mom

I Bet You Never Knew That A $13 Appliance From Wal-Mart Would Save The World

We print an insane amount of drawings for our contractors here at site. It’s unusual if the plotter isn’t smoking by the end of the day. The amount of paper we distribute in a month could wallpaper West Edmonton Mall, including the paint store. The company that pays us would be wise to have shares in the tree re-forestation industry.

But yesterday we ran out of toner and it has literally ground most of our operation to a halt. We tried to order some but the supplier said it wouldn’t come before an undisclosed amount of time. We tried to get some couriered from a sister office in another city, they were out too. We found a Montreal-based distributor but they had a mere 13 bottles left but were shipping them out to someone else. Then it was confirmed today – there is no where in North America that has toner. That’s right, the entire continent is out of toner. The well is dry. And the down time is nurturing visions of dystopia. Entire construction projects from coast to coast will be put on hold because no printing means no plans from which to construct. Cityscapes will remain unchanged, urbania will stop sprawling, the lack of new homes and businesses will no longer be able to accommodate the increase and moss-like spread of world population. A restriction will be put on the number of children a family can have. The fertility drug market will crash. John & Kate (Plus 8) and Octomom will become posthumously canonized by a woeful, spawnless society. Strange dogs and cats will have to live together.

Enter the humble coffee grinder, the one that’s in the lunch room. With it we can grind all the toner we need. All we need is a nice blend of dark matter that can be found around the site and we should be good to go. Let’s see, some coffee beans, some pencil leads, if he’s willing, some dandruff rubbings from that black safety guy, some floor dirt, a few of those black spiders that runs across the floor of the office, welding dust, butts from the ashtray, some pepper packets and some of that crap on the floor of the raw ore building. That should do it.

Document control: preserving the advancement of the human race, one blend at a time.

Wait, I've Seen That Before

In grade two I had one awful bitch of a teacher. (I hope you google your own name and stumble across this post, Mme. Beaulieu from Madaleine d’Houet). At best she was terse, at worst she made you want to cower under your desk. And she didn’t like me; she was extra bitchy to me. Her disdain for me was specific and focused, so much so that it was palatable and disconcerting to the other students. She would never call on me when my hand was raised, even if it was the only one, and she would call on me when no one’s hand was raised, singling me out. One time students were being called up to the front of the class individually to collect papers that had been graded. When I got to the front to retrieve mine, her outstretched hand deliberately let fall my paper about a foot before I could reach it. Once I brought my notebook up to her desk to ask her a question. She noticed that I had boxed off some notes in pen and saw her chance. She scolded me for “boxing off notes”, put a big red X through it and sent me back to my desk before I could ask my question. She was a miserable scrunt and had no business being within 100 feet of children, especially ones in their developmental years. She would have been more in her element slithering in a pile hissing snakes.

On one memorable day I was eating lunch with the other students in the gymnasium and I had to urinate like I had never had to urinate before, it was big and it was now. One problem, Mme. Beaulieu was monitoring the door and I would have to ask her for permission to leave the gym. No matter how much I tried to convey urgency, pressure, direness and fear to her in seven-year-old’s English she wouldn’t budge. I fought like hell to quietly make it to the bell but when it rang at the end of meal time it signified more than just the release of the students. Terror ran through my body while warm relief ran through my jeans. The subsequent recess was spent sitting on a heating vent in hopes of drying my pants while the other students played outside. The icing on the cake was that that afternoon I was paired up with the girl I had a crush on for a class assignment. I tried to charmingly contribute to the activity while subtly pulling my sweatshirt down to my knees to hide the giant wet spot.

It might have cost fortune in further child psychologist fees but I bet you Scrunt would have rushed me through if I had whipped it out and started pissing on her. She could very well be dead now, having only ever taught children cursive writing and that sometimes you can’t do anything right, no matter how hard you try. Nice legacy.

So I thought of Mme. Beaulieu yesterday during lunch when, much to the amusement of my female coworkers, I accidentally knocked my bowl off my desk with my arm, covering my crotch in cream of broccoli soup. The stain, I noticed, was the same pattern as the pee stain in grade two.

If any of you were wondering, cream of broccoli soup dries slightly slower than pee and leaves denim feeling like a stiff pad.

The House Rent Boogie

Recently I joined the ranks of the unemployed. The axe came down, swift and unforeseen. I was looking left and it came from the right.

A combination of lyrics play over and over again in my head from George Thorogood's "1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch and 1 beer" and, it's predecessor, John Lee Hooker's "House Rent Boogie".

I come home last Friday, talk to the woman that I lost my job,
She says don't confront me as long as I have my rent next Friday

Except it was Tuesday. And of course the woman was sweet and supportive, albeit suffering from a required minimal amount of stress.

The first items on one's action list when they get fired are updating the resume, pounding the pavement and hitting up contacts. And yes, I did do some homework on day one, but I also went out for lunch and was playing xbox when the woman came home.

She said "I don't believe you're tryin' to find no job,
I seen you today you was standin' on a corner, Leaning up against a post."
I said "But I'm tired, I've been walkin' all day, I just can't find no job."

Of course what one knows they should do often differs from the first thing they actually do.

So I stop in the local bar you know people,
I go to the bar, I ring my coat, I call the bartender
Said "Look man, come down here!"
He got down there, "So what you want?"

And the rest is foggy lyrical history.

We went high in the air and were able to see a lot of the island. We didn't know there were mountains to the south. Then they slowed down and dipped us, then they reeled us in. Parasailing is awesome.

Yesterday I went all discovery channel in the giant lake. I swam with nurse sharks and mulit-coloured fish. There's a great photo taken of me holding a giant sting ray but it's probably in a Dominican landfill now because it would have cost me $13CAD to acquire it. Dominican landfills, by the way, exist as randomly dispersed piles of garbage by the side of the road.

Today we're going tandem parasailing on the beach. Our flight out is tomorrow but I don't think I'm ready to leave.