Whenever I let Linz flip channels she picks something either girly (usually found on W network) or real and dramatic involving midgets or hoarders (usually found on TLC). The other day she was happy to stop on Golden Girls. So, just for fun, try to remember this episode from 1985.

Blanche’s nephew is coming to stay for a week or two because Blanche’s sibling’s rocky marriage is in repair mode somewhere warm and sunny. Dorothy fears this will put her out because she is studying for exams of some sort but agrees because, as Sophia, with her old Sicilian values, put it, “We do for family!” The little punk comes to stay, actually arriving under police escort, and is completely disrespectful to the girls and their household. He parties with random friends (who all have awesome mullets) and is insolent until, in one heated moment, Sophia slaps him. He storms out onto the veranda in a pouty rage and Blanche becomes upset with Sophia and asks her, “Is that all you Italians know how to do is yell and hit people?”

To which, she replies, “No. We also know how to…

What does Sophia say?

I Wore Two Sunglasseses

What do you do if you’re a Sheik with a trillion-dollar float, an army of slave labour, a reputation to uphold, an ego to serve and coastal neighbours that try to one-up you all the time. You build Dubai!Between the reflection off the sea and the glass skyscrapers, Dubai is the shiniest place on Earth.

Instead of on the convergence of two rivers, or on the site of a historical settlement, Dubai is what a city would look like if it were founded on showmanship.














In Dubai, you don’t want to live where you can afford to live and you could never afford to live where you would want to.


It’s a giant playground for the rich. We had fun, are we aren't even rich, that's why we didn't go skiing, but we did enjoy a $15 cocktail at the base of the ski hill.

First Things First

One of the first things I did in Abu Dhabi was get a haircut. I even saved up some growth for the event. I was told it was something I’d want to experience. The barber pulled the red curtain closed and turned up what looked like Arabic CSI on the crappy little TV. Heroes with thick black moustaches pointed empty guns and mimicked recoil at the bad guys in thick black moustaches as they sped off in a getaway goat milk truck. Then the heroes had fits in the street with really frustrated looks on their faces. Sometimes the barbers would all yell at each other from behind their curtains about a certain scene – they were all on the same channel. After a standard head shave he reclined the chair for my shave. He drew his straight razor and began stroking it across the leather strap while still watching his TV. I really hoped he was going to be looking at me for this part of the procedure. This is the only time in my adult life that I have used, to a T, the advice my mother gave when I was a child and getting my hair cut: “be still like a statue”. But the service went well, but for a few nicks. I felt like De Niro as Capone in the opening scene to The Untouchables. This was followed by the barber slapping five separate layers of goop on my face for my (I guess customary) man-facial. It tingled, it was nice. So I sat there patiently with a giant goop beard watching all moustache TV before I was toweled off and sent on my way. The 30 degree breeze was actually cool across my face during the walk home.

How We Deal

So the entire 0.43% of the Earth’s land surface known as Saskatchewan suffered a 4-day, sideways blizzard which brought in a couple feet of snow. It blocked highways, cut power to communities, dehydrated cows and strained people’s relationships with their cars. But nothing brings otherwise indifferent humans together like being in the same boat. No car remains stuck on city road because people literally leap to push or shovel you out. It’s just standard procedure.

Speaking of which, here are the steps to successfully enter the roadway from your driveway after a snow storm.
1. Start car with remote start and let warm up for 15 minutes.
2. Get in car and back up just slightly past the neighbour’s house, snowman, tree, snow bank, etc, so that you can confirm no cars are coming from either direction.
3. Pull ahead again as far as you can.
4. Put vehicle in reverse and floor it so that you’re travelling at least 40 kmh by the time you reach the end of your driveway.
5. Plow back of car into snow shovelled onto road the night before.
6. At sidewalk, crank wheel in desired direction. This should launch the vehicle into a healthy sideways skid landing it in the middle of the road where other vehicles have bravely made tire ruts.
7. Put car in drive.
8. Get stuck.
9. Roll down window and thank neighbourhood kids for the push.
10. Continue driving.

This morning there was a guy whose truck had become stuck randomly SIDEWAYS at the end of our street. When I rolled up I got out to help push but it was a lost cause. It was a rear wheel drive pick up with no weight in the back and bald tires. He simply couldn’t get over the small bump in the packed snow that sat in front of his front tire. And he wasn’t helping because he just kept spinning his tires, creating enough friction to melt the very top of the snow which promptly refroze into smooth ice. Someone had even joined me pushing but had to leave to catch the bus. Finally he got out, flustered and agitated and started telling me about how he had been clean for the last few days in preparation for a surgery and this was the last thing he needed, “Maybe this will help.” He said jokingly, then added, “So if you see this truck abandoned later, you know where I’ll be”. The tire store, I hoped. He then grabbed the only thing he had in the back of his truck that could be used for digging which was some flimsy piece of metal siding and started hacking at the ice around his back tires. At this point I had to tell him I had to leave or I was going to be late for work. And that double-double wasn’t going to ordering itself on the way. Luckily we had pushed him back far enough for me to get around him.

Somehow, in the process of pushing his truck, I kinked my neck and can’t turn my head one way so have made a chiropractic appointment. Except I don’t like how chiropractors have turned into pussies. I liked when they used to twist you up and crack the shit out of you. Now it’s all about little baby pushes and tapping you with little plastic toys.

So we opened gifts the other night since Linz and I won’t be together on Christmas (at some point I’ll have to leave my family tradition and we’ll start one of our own). And watching the boy reminded me of the spectacle that is a child unwrapping gifts. Children virtually douse themselves with impatient gasoline sitting next to the tree and when a gift is handed to them it may as well be a road flare, setting them on fire with anticipation as they're rip into the paper, the sum of their imaginative wishes filling the contents of the package. It’s truly a magical event. It does makes some gifts anticlimactic, though. You can see the tension loosen in the wires that hold their excited face when all the paper comes off and it’s not the magic item they failed to will into the box but, say, tube socks. But the hugging is still fun, even though it may just be an exercise to them after gifts like those.

I went to the rental property after work to do a few minor repairs for the new tenants moving in that day, mirror, towel rack, drywall holes, shower head, paint. Then I helped the dude tetris in his couch while gouging every wall and scraping every corner, stuff that we would normally charge damages for if the tenant had done themselves. I took the very last of my stuff home including my junk trunk which contains stuff I’ve accumulated over my entire life. You know, little flotsam & jetsam of memorabilia, including a zillion wallet-sized pictures of people that have come and gone (some now Facebook friends), a torch lighter someone got me from Australia, pieces of paper with passwords to websites probably now extinct, a 9mm casing from an outing at the gun range, the earring I used to wear, textbooks, hockey trophies from childhood, etc. And a dusty picture of me with the ex and her boys which was tossed but not before Lindsey had a look.

Me: Oh my god, look at this.
Linz: You guys had a “family” portrait done? Hee hee.
Me: Yeah. That once, I think.
Linz: This thing is terrible! You still have that ugly shirt!
Me: Oh, right.
Linz: How come she doesn’t smile?
Me: That’s just the way she smiled, never with an open mouth.
Linz: In fact, it doesn’t look like any of you are smiling.
Me (laughing): That’s cause we were all miserable!

I was kidding, or course.

When Linz and I finally made separate meals for ourselves it was 9:30. We ate while watching a couple episodes of our newly and collectively favourite show, Californication. Then she went to bed and I proceeded to get meleed by suburban teenage or pothead 20-something Americans. In other words, I brought a gun to a knife fight and lost.

Last night? I went and sat at my house for a final open house session. No one came so we awarded the suite to a young couple, one of only two parties that came to view it and fill out an application this past Sunday. Then I went home and ate. The new tenants showed up to pay some of their damage deposit. Vance had a bath. I did some event work on Crackbook for our upcoming hockey team pub crawl, took down the ads for the suite from Kijiji. The dishwasher shot water everywhere so I took it apart, right down to the core to see if I could find the source of the clog, among other problems (I felt quite handy) then put it all back together while Lindsey manually washed dishes and surfed her laptop for a new dishwasher. Then I watched the Flames tie Anaheim with 18 seconds left to force overtime. I screamed when they did and Linz sent me a text from upstairs in bed saying I scared the shit out of her and to shut up. They eventually lost in a shootout. Then I played some Modern Warfare 2 online and slowly started to improve from my usual routine of getting INSTANTLY SLAIN UPON DISCOVERY by other players. Then I had a smoke and went to bed. You?

Last night? We had a delicious Thai rice & beef dish that Linz made for dinner. A neighbouring boy came over to play with Vance. He has ADHD and so it was fun to watch how he played. “WOW! Cool car tracks! Can we make some paper airplanes? I’m hungry!” When Vance went to bed Linz and I watched Land of the Lost with Will Ferrell. A few laughs but entertaining throughout (we’ve become impatient with unentertaining movies since we just download rent them for free by the dozen and often shut them off half way through). She went to bed and I made some toast. Downloaded an update for FlightPlan on her iTouch. Watched John Stewart and a bit of Colbert then went to bed. You?

Home Version Soon To Be Released

For a year I lived on the ranch with my good buddy Charlie. Okay, it wasn’t a ranch, it was a 3-acre acreage but we lovingly called it the ranch. We were thinking of calling it other things too, like “El Rancho de la Muerte” and “Live Fire Test Range”, but none of them stuck.

It was an adjustment. I’d been evicted from my apartment as the result of a drunk and destructive roommate – evicted from the rush and livelihood of downtown Calgary. The unpredictability of life had wrenched my unwilling fingers off the pulse of big city night life and the Red Mile. So I packed all my toys and did what any city boy would do and moved to the middle of armpit-fuck-nowhere, to the ranch with Charlie. There, in the rolling hills of rural Alberta, no dwelling was in sight – and, luckily, .22 caliber range – of another. I used to gently fall asleep serenaded by the hum of the streets, the hush of traffic, the honking, pedestrians shouting, the occasional glass breaking, now I was laying in bed wide-eyed to the deafening sound of… absolutely nothing.

But it wasn’t long after that my neck got a little redder. I started to see the appeal of country living. I resigned to my current destiny and embraced being a billy of the hills. It wasn’t uncommon for Charlie to drive up the gravel road to the house to see me sitting on the porch in my straw hat with the rifle in one hand and a beer in the other. We both spent that summer unemployed, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Most of our days started like this:

Charlie wakes up off his couch.
I wake up off my couch, put on my straw hat.
Charlie: What do ya figure we git done today?
Me: Let’s done git drunk and blast things.
Charlie: I’ll done git the gun.
Me: I’ll done git the beer.

Give two miscreants enough time and alcohol and they will find other dangerous and nonsensical ways to entertain (and injure) themselves. For example, I don’t think there exists a type of molecule chain, natural or artificial, that we didn’t attempt to burn in a gasoline-assisted fire. In fact, I don’t think we had any fires that weren’t gasoline-assisted.

Then there were the more creative, beer-fueled, limb-endangering activities. If you've ever seen Cowboy Poker you'd know it's a ballsy rodeo event that involves cowboys playing poker at a table in the middle of the arena in which there is a loose, angry and unpredictable bull. The last one to flee the table wins the hand. We played Hillbilly Cowboy Poker in which you fire up the ride-a-mower and rig it to run full speed on its own with the steering wheel turned and tied off to one direction. Then set up the poker table in the middle of its turning circumference. The mower will jerkily deviate from its orbit and dive inwards toward the table. The last one to dive-roll out of its way wins.

But the piece de resistance, my friends, was a game we called Mailbox Roulette. See if you can guess how it’s played with this list of materials:
- 6 large size mailboxes and 6 fence posts on which to nail them (representing the 6 barrels in a six shooter)
- First aid kit (read: bottle of whiskey)
- 5 friends
- 1 pickup truck
- 1 baseball bat
- One die cube
- And one cindercrete block

Can you say STINGER? Forget connecting with an inside fastball just above the hands, trying hitting a mailbox with a cindercrete in it block at 60 kph. "Woo hoo! Ha ha! Fuck, that hurt. Pass me the first aid."

So next time you see a hillbilly with, say, a missing a finger, go ahead and ask him how he lost it. I guarantee it’s nothing Hasbro ever thought of.

Want Something To Do Tonight?

Every day the paperboy rides his bike along his paper route. Each morning he comes to my country house to deliver my paper. To get to my house each morning he has to cross the gravel road. Dust is always kicked up from the gravel road from a truck that occasionally drives along it. When the paperboy crosses the gravel road dust always hits him in the face. He does this each morning at the same time.

Tonight, August 12th, the dust will hit him hard in the face and create one heavenly show, where a day is actually a year, and the paperboy’s face is actually

And my country house is actually

And the dusty gravel road is actually the trail of debris left behind by what the truck is actually

Swift-Tuttle Comet

And each speck of dust is actually

So tonight’s the night to remember to look up and catch a few. One to two a minute, they say.

Smell My Finger

You know those company-wide emails that remind you that you can’t wear anything scented because it irritates your coworkers? When I get them I always wonder, “who are these people and why do these complain-aholics have so much clout when it comes to lowering the common denominator?” Well I finally met one. My supervisor is one of these people that react violently to any kind of fragrance. One time she was in my cube and her eyes started tearing and she started coughing. She asked me what scent I was wearing, I said “uhh, pit stick”. This morning I went to ask her a question and after a couple seconds she started recoiling in her chair as I was standing next to her. It was a strange thing to watch, as if a ghostly hand had extended from my body to slap her about the ears and face. Then she actually asked me to find and start wearing unscented pit stick as a favour to her. My thought was, “Uhh, no. I’m not going shopping for you. This is deodorant, not odorant. Anyway, I don’t think you want the alternative.”

There has to be a principle involved here. Cologne, after shave, perfume, even Binaca, fine, I can consider them unnecessary but I’m not going to scale back this already basal level of personal hygiene to exclude the only basic defense I employ against smelling like four straight days in the desert. At some point, the level of freshness I have to maintain must outweigh your unusual aversion to anything with a scent. What are we talking here, 1, 2 parts per million? Is she a freakin’ shark? Chopping onions must knock her right out. One day I should hang out in her cubicle reeking of B. O.

Oh man, that reminds me of the worst case I’ve ever encountered of an odour coming from a human body not yet deceased. My buddy and I were on a flight from Kingston, Jamaica to Toronto and we got seated across the aisle from this giant black woman who, no word of a lie, smelled like she was smuggling fish into Canada under her arms. We sat there inhaling our ties, wondering if the pilot would let us crack a window at 35,000 feet, until her eyes met ours. “Lots of fish in Canada, dude. Don’t have to bring your own.” Luckily the flight was a relatively open so after takeoff, when the stewardess gave us an understanding nod, we leapt out of our seats and moved about 20 rows back.

So what shall it be, my over-sensitive coworkers, pit fish or “ocean surf” Right Guard?

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.

We walked along the pristeen beach to a row of shops because we needed some junk to take home, a t-shirt, a painting, a wood carving. It was a nice walk, the sand is as white and soft as icing sugar, the giant lake is brilliant torquoise and blue. Walking into the water while the surf is receding creates a strange effect. The ground races away from you under your feet faster than you can walk so it looks like you're moving backwards but you're walking forwards.

Lindsey's a ruthless haggler. She'll walk into the first shop start dropping the price of a wanted item faster than a loosed coconut from a rotted stem. But he's only the set up man. Once she gets to a decent price she'll leave and take that with her to the next shops where she'll tell them that they now have to beat that price. There's a lot of arguing, turning away, eyelash batting and eventually smiling. She's a killer.

Last night I flashed the old art and put these monkeys to shame. I shut down most of these other Canadians. People were dropping like flies around me. My sweetheart/trooper trucked on with me till about 4 or 5. Some of these pups have probably never yet been kicked around by a 40 I guess.

Wednesday we're going snorkling with sharks and sting rays. Right after I check myself for chum-leaking open wounds.