baby wants a bottle

Future people

2012-01-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Kitty,

Oh man, I just had a sneezing fit. It was terrible. Well, I suppose it wasn't terrible as far as things called 'fits' go. Here is the ranking, from best to worst:

1. Sneezing fit
2. Conniption fit
3. Epileptic fit

I have a tip for people having sneezing fits. Rinse your mouth out with water vigorously, including plenty of gargling. Repeat until you are better. There. I feel like I've contributed something useful to the world.

That's Small Talk!

Oh! I'm thinking of introducing a new segment to this blog called "That's small talk!" I would record small talk that I hear or am involved in and then people in the future would have good insight into our culture. For example, in Calgary we were having a week of -30 C weather and it was due to clear up the next day. I held open the door for a woman at Starbucks (that's a global coffee chain, to you future people), and she said something like "Only one more day!" I chuckled knowingly but also nervously, trying to be friendly but also trying to say "Please don't continue talking to me because I don't know the small talk protocol and am just here to buy coffee and banana bread." Anyway, that's some good knowledge for you future people because you probably don't have weather or social awkwardness. I reckon you've solved both those problems. Congrats!

Did anyone else notice that I needed to explain Starbucks to the future people but not what 'Calgary' is or what '-30 C' means? It's ok, they won't care! All they care about is laser guns and robots.

Silly goose

2011-05-19T21:33:00.006-06:00

I went walking along the river and saw a goose, so I took a picture of most of it:

It was very calm despite my being fairly close. It must see plenty of people. I wanted to edge closer and closer to see what its limit for closeness might be. Best case scenario, I would spend the rest of my day carrying a goose. Worst case scenario, I'd be the guy fighting a goose down by the river. And I don't ever want to be that guy. I left the goose alone.* You always regret the things you don't do.

This past weekend I took a trip to Unity, Saskatchewan (pop. 2759). That's my birthtown and is where my grandparents live. My mom, my brother, and his whole family were there. We played games, checked out the playground, went to the ice cream parlour**, and visited the outdoor history museum. To help prove it, here's a picture of my brother in an old fire truck:

The end.

* Not literally. He actually had a friend or relative nearby.

** It's just a normal looking ice cream shoppe***, but because it's in a small town I have to call it a parlour to make it seem quaint and olde****-fashioned.

*** Oh man, I did it again.

**** I can't stop!

Snow, sun, guitar, lesbians

2011-04-29T21:39:00.007-06:00

Snow

I stepped out of my girly apartment in mid-April and this is what I saw:

It always snows a few times in April/May here but it always seems like a fun surprise.

There is an unspoken rule that Calgarians follow: you must act as though this didn't happen last year, the year before that, and so on.

I think this behaviour, and a lot of human behaviour, can be explained by this fact: humans really love to complain. And if there's a shared complaint, people really bond over it.

Sun

After the snow melted I wandered around neighbourhoods I had never been in before. There were houses, houses, houses, and then there was this:

It looked really nice but it doesn't come through via the crap phone camera.

This city goes really quickly from neighbourhood to brush and back to neighbourhood. I like that.

I saw some fat geese on the frozen reservoir nearby.

Guitar

Here is a pic of my brand new guitar:

Sometimes when I'm playing it I give it a kiss because it's beautiful.

My friend Ian and I are playing 'draw and folder over' but musically. He sent a beat and I played some guitar on top and now he's adding something. It's hard.

Lesbians

I found a great blog written by a lesbian geared towards other lesbians and her posts are mostly good because she's a good story teller, but they're also good because she writes short paragraphs interspersed with images (of attractive girls, usually).

I'm trying to copy her style a bit to make this one more fun to read. Now I just need good stories.

Homemade standing desk

2011-01-23T22:03:00.003-07:00

I've been wanting to try working at a standing / stand-up desk for a couple of months now but didn't want to buy a nice expensive one before knowing if I'd even like it or not. So I made this one.

That's my regular desk beneath with the legs extended as high as possible. The white boards holding the monitor and laptop are Lack wall shelves from Ikea (about $20 each). And the stuff elevating them is floral foam ($12 for 12 bricks), which I had no idea existed until today. I think it's used to make flower arrangements -- you stick a bunch of flower stems into it so each flower can be positioned how you like.

I'll be trying this bad boy out for the first time tomorrow. I bought that stool so I wouldn't have to stand all day, which I believe is just as bad for your back as sitting all day. I've got some running shoes to wear and soon hope to have one of those soft pads that cashiers stand on.

The shelf that the laptop is sitting on is 42 inches off the ground which may be an inch low for me (I'm 5'10" or 5'11" tall). We'll see.

This was a pretty cheap and easy way to make a stand-up desk. It looks nicer and seems more stable than some of the other homemade ones I saw on the internet. The only weak part is that the floral foam crumbles if you touch it. If I had known I would have tried to find another type of foam.

To my two blog readers (hi Jay and Annette), this post was long and boring because I want to help generate ideas for anyone looking to build their own desk. It helped me a lot to read other people's blog posts about it. Go see the movie Pay it Forward and you might* understand what I'm getting at.

* I haven't seen that movie but the trailer made things pretty clear.

Snake

2010-12-27T19:43:00.004-07:00

For Christmas my brother and sister-in-law got me a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet. I went to a how-to-draw cartoons site and found this snake. So I drew it. I think I did okay considering I hardly know how to draw.

Expanding the ol' horizons

2010-12-22T20:44:00.005-07:00

I was in Chapters this evening, thinking about how great magazines are. There are so many! It seems like there's one per interest, no matter how obscure. I reckoned that reading them might give great insight into different types of humans. They might help me expand my horizons.

So my plan is to read one magazine in a new subject area each week or two. I'm starting with 'Horse & Rider' and moving on to 'Heritage Railway' afterwards.

Yes, soon I'll be able to shoot the bull with horse enthusiasts, but that's not all. This reading plan will hopefully lead to new hobbies and interests. One day I hope to find it hard to find time to blog. I'll be too busy being enthusiastic about steam trains or another fine topic.

Photograph of horses by Trevor Lowe (http://www.flickr.com/people/72659237@N00/).

Cupcake

2010-11-21T11:46:00.004-07:00

Yesterday I purchased an iPhone at the ol' mall. I went into the store with a status level of 20/100 and when I got out, I was up to 80/100. Girls started noticing me. Guys started walking around me instead of doing that thing where they slam you with their shoulder when passing. It felt great.

People aged 50+ kept treating me the same, however, so I went to Zellers and bought some long johns. I'm wearing them right now for the first time and once I step outside I think the 50+ contingent will treat me with respect.

That cupcake was the first picture I took with my phone. It was delicious.

segment

2007-12-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

There's a new segment in this blog called: That's technology!

That's technology!

A guy at work showed me his camera a couple of weeks ago. Here's how it works: you point it at someone, it detects where the person's face is and puts a square around it, you click the button to take the shot, and the camera waits for the person to smile before it takes the shot. That's technology!

Regular blog again

This guy really knows how to make it happen: this one

To the left there's a view from my apartment window. That can't be good for the ol' lungs. There have been worse days than that for smog, but there have been a lot of ones better than that too.

hot toddy

2007-12-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

H. Workman is playing the Jack Singer in March. Sign me up, but I'm kind of disappointed that the Mount Royal and UofC concerts are over. You could get up close and personal. Also, the new song on his website isn't doing it for me.

I'm trying to get rid of my cold by taxing my liver. It's worked before.

My brother was here in Beijing for the last week. It was action packed. We walked so much that our dogs were constantly barking, we saw a fantastic wall, we ate duck. He got me into paying more attention to Chinese characters, and it's helped a lot. I know three characters so far.

L-dopa

2007-11-25T04:42:00.000-07:00

Here comes the science

I'm increasing the level of dopamine (the gunk that gives you pleasure and motivates you) in my brain right now by having a bottle of fine Belgian beer called Duvel. It's kind of gross because it has 8.5% alcohol. After doing some research I've decided that my brain doesn't create or pick up enough dopamine, so I compensate by eating too much or by drinking DC, which is a source of phenylalanine (which either turns into dopamine or causes more to be released or something).

Obese people have fewer dopamine receptors. That might be why they overeat -- to make up for it, since eating will give you some dopa-pleasure. Exercise can also increase the amount of dopamine released and/or the number of receptors.

I guess what this all amounts to is that a) you should exercise if you're fat and b) alcohol is a pleasurable thing to drink.

Here comes the ladybar

Last weekend a couple of coworkers and I decided to check out one of the bar districts of the 'jing, and I don't know where we went wrong but it was a bad scene. We wanted some action, but it was mainly quiet bars with people listening to bad singers playing guitar. So after a while we thought we'd cave in and head to a ladybar.

We didn't know what a ladybar is. The bars hire girls to follow guys around and lead them in, so we let them lead us down a dark street and into one.

I assumed it would be a strip club, and even though I find them kind of yucky and uncomfortable, I figured it would at least be something interesting to do. I was wrong. The first thing you do after sitting down is choose from a line of ladies. I kind of wanted to get out, but the two other guys chose their ladies and so I did too.

This story kind of gets boring from here on out -- you know me, it's not going to go anywhere naughty. The ladies sat up against us, we had reasonably-priced beer, we were forced to buy the ladies unreasonably-priced drinks (which smelled very unalcoholic), and there was a big communication gap. I treated my lady to all the Chinese that I know ("I like to read!" and other useful phrases) and she treated me to all the Chinese that she knows, which is a lot.

Hi.

Ginger beef

2007-11-04T03:03:00.001-07:00

I don't know how they block sites, but there's a way around it. I haven't tried it yet. And, if the gov't is reading: I WILL NEVER TRY IT.

This Chinese version of blogger won't let me upload pictures. I'll have to link to one:

bugs

I saw those bugs for sale at a food market on Saturday night. There were a hundred stalls of food. I'm pretty lucky I didn't become a Yes Man when I got to China, because the guy I was with suggested that he'd eat a scorpion if I ate a cricket. Then again... that's a good trade-off. What was I thinking? Poor little baby can't handle a little cricket in trade for watching a coworker eat a scorpion?

Anyway, I really like it here. Good place.

China!

2007-10-29T04:01:00.000-06:00

Ok. I made it. I'm here. I did it. And it appears that I can post to my blog, but can't read my blog or other people's blogs. But your comments get e-mailed to me, so that's good.

Here's the summary:

Beijing is like this: picture Vancouver but with so much smog that you can look at the sun. Picture more Chinese people and Chinese lettering, and make the city bigger, and have more buildings. And take away the ocean. And remove the 7-Elevens. So I guess it's not much like Vancouver at all, then.

My hotel is fun because the brochure is helpful. This one page tells me that "It is honorable and refined that makes you the best of the fields." So true. And there's a product in the bathroom to help me clean my genitals. "Use this product on and around the pudenda by massaging for 2-3 minutes." If I can figure out where my pudenda is, I'll gladly massage it for 2-3 minutes.

kung fu

2007-09-28T02:44:00.001-06:00

I don't know much about languages, and I don't know much about the Chinese language, but I'm taking lessons and so far it's a brazilian times simpler than English or French, except for the pronunciation.

Example: Instead of having special words for each month, they simply say 1-month, 2-month, 3-month, etc. And instead of having special words for high numbers, they say 'two-ten' for twenty, 'three-ten' for thirty, etc.

Those clever bastards.

flat white

2007-09-27T05:21:00.001-06:00

I'm seriously considering drinking a coffee tomorrow. I don't like coffee, but sometimes wish I did. Practice makes perfect. I'm going to order a flat white, shown on the left. It's the most popular coffee drink here in Australia.

In other news, somebody asked one of the Chinese guys I'm working with what some of the sites are that are censored in China. His response was "Wikipedia and Blogger". Besides making me a bit angry that a government would practice blatant censorship, it also made me realize that now is a bad time to start this eblo. I'll have to find a way to update from China.