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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.