Grey Hairs, and the Things That Cause Them

This morning D made us a nice breakfast of french toast and sausage. Okay, the sausage had been cooked the day before, but the french toast was fresh and excellent. We were sitting there happily masticating when suddenly I cocked my head at a sound the bunnies were making, turned back to look at D and saw a look of unabashed glee on her face. She grinned impishly at me, gestured, and announced happily "You're going grey!"

Gee, thanks.

The woman rushed to the washroom, grabbed her tweezers, and plucked out the offending hair to show me. And the one beside it. I think she was making room for more grey hairs, so that she wouldn't be alone in aging. I fully expect to wake up some day to find her plucking hairs on my head in order to promote the advance of grey onto my scalp.

At least now when people point out the male pattern baldness that's also creeping its way onto my head, I can justify it by pointing out the grey hair as well.

I have reasons for going grey, however. I think this blog itself stands as testiment to one of the main reason; a short, maniacal reason that plagues me daily, but to whom I am shackled. There are other reasons.

One of our big stresses at the moment is attempting to rid ourselves of our apartment. We had to close very quickly on our new home and were unfortunately still in lease for our apartment, a lease from which it is proving extremely difficult to extricate ourselves. We've resorted to posting ads on Kijiji, and we get lots of replies to these ads, but so far no one has actually taken the damnable thing off our hands.

Many of the replies cause me considerable anguish. I've taken care to state quite specifically several points. Firstly, the rent includes heat and water. No pets are allowed. The apartment is available immediately. The apartment is located close to Bayers and Connaught. These are the sorts of replies I mainly get:

"Is this apartment still available?"
"Pets allowed? Y/N?"
"Where is the apartment?"
"I have a cat. Is this okay?"
"When is the apartment available?"
"Can you tell me where the apartment is?"
"What's included in the rent?"
"Does the rent include power? Heat?"
"I was wondering about the apartment."

The last one's my goddamned favourite. I cleaned up the grammar a bit to make the responder not sound like such a complete and total moron, but I have to ask: WHAT were you wondering about the apartment? Did you want to know if it's green, or inhabited by magical fairy bugbears who will give you cookies if you learn how to dance? Can you host key parties and invite your drunken leprous biker friends? TELL ME!!! It's like human beings have lost the capacity to read whole sentences. They see I have an ad, that it's for a two bedroom apartment, and read no further. Is it that difficult to go over the whole text of the ad? In its entirety it is shorter than this paragraph has been!

I weep for these people. It must be difficult for them to get through life. It goes some way to explaining Haligonian drivers, though. They see the big red octagonal sign in front of them, try to read it, get tired after "STO" and figure whatever it says it can't possibly apply to them and so drive right on through. They even seem to have trouble reading the colours of street lights, as though they can't be bothered to investigate anything that's flashy and colourful that won't also help them increase their penis size (although, to be fair to these people, they probably read "increase their pen" and think "Yeah, mine's running outta ink; why not?")

I'm also concerned about the kids across the street. The ones who appear to have passed puberty but haven't quite hit the stage of not-being-assholes. There's quite a large cluster of them, and they gather right at the entrance to the public housing across from us on their bikes like an imitation biker gang, yelling loudly into the night and wrecking any street signs that come within reach. I wonder if they walk around all day swinging their arms, and the moment they touch something solid decide that it needs to be vandalized in some way. If I can give them any kudos, it would be that they seem to be racially inclusive, so as a gang of misfits they are very accepting. Fantastic. Now we can have hope that in the future, people of all colours and shapes can get together in harmony to smash beer bottles and set off firecrackers that detonate like car bombs in the early morning hours.

The young boy who lives in the house behind us just got his first bike and is learning to ride it with training wheels. I wonder if his parents have made a mistake. The jackals across the street probably see him as a future member. Their only requirement appears to be the ability to not fall off a bike, and it's not a particularly strict requirement anyway.

My lawn continues to grow. At this point it's claimed our patio set. I can still see the top of the table, but had to dig to find one of the chairs. Halifax weather is uncooperative when it comes to lawn mowing. We haven't seen the sun for a week and a half.

D just told me the other day there could be earwigs in our laundry, after having hung it up to "dry" in the rain.

I think a few grey hairs are just the beginning.

Her Ass is Grass

I know it's been a LOOOONG time since I've posted. For those of you who care, or somehow don't know, I moved to Nova Scotia about a year and a half back. Because everyone told me facebook was the place to be, I started using it. Something facebook lacks, however, is the unadulterated capacity to RANT LIKE A MANIAC!!!

It's something I feel the need to do right now. I have a feeling, nearly a premonition, that I will feel the need to do it more and more often.

Why? Two words. Home ownership.

Let's get this straight: I love D to pieces. I trust her implicitly and would travel to Hades and back for her (although because I'm stupid, I'd probably look behind me and she'd turn into a pillar of salt or something, so it likely wouldn't be an effective rescue).

We recently purchased a home. That's right. I now own a home with my lovely common law spouse. Lovely. I have to keep saying that to myself. Not bugnuts crazy. Not strap her to a gurney and inject her with valium insane. Lovely. Yes.

If I don't remind myself of that at least every 47 seconds, I get a bit twitchy.

So a bit of background. We had a birthday party for me back in April. Ah, April, when I was young and innocent, carefree and unencumbered by looming financial cliffs. I made a nice meal for my friends, had them all over for drinks, went and sang some karaoke, then came home to my patiently waiting hangover. That's not a metaphor for D. I really did have a hangover. The next day, around noon, we both woke up fresh as daisies soaked in turpentine.

We had no plans for the day, but we decided we wanted to do something that wouldn't cost us any money. "Let's go look at open houses!" D declared. "It's free, and we can get an idea of what's in our price range." This wasn't completely out of the blue since we had been saving for our down payment, but hadn't the funds quite yet.

A tip for those of you with spouses of the female persuasion: If your spouse suggests doing something that will not cost money, get out your wallet and take her to the movies, dinner, or buy her a box of frigging chocolate for all I care, otherwise you'll end up spending a LOT more. Like a couple hundred thousand more.

Long story short we found the house we really wanted to buy, scraped together the funds for our downpayment primarily by prevailing upon the generosity of our parents, put an offer down, applied for the mortgage, and yadda yadda yadda, we were homeowners. We moved in June 1st.

Okay, that's about 47 seconds. Lovely. She's lovely.

My parents recently came to visit and ended up spending most of their trip helping us with various projects around the house. We finished the risers on the basement stairs, mounted a live wire into a junction box in the kitchen, put up a clothesline, painted the kitchen cupboards, and I even tried my hand at carpentry assembling a table on which to mount the microwave. It turned out nicely. We bid them farewell after about a week, a week in which my mom tried to pay for everything (luckily D is sneaky and managed to field the waitresses and clerks for most of the times my mom tried to pay). However, my mom threatened to transfer me money for a lawnmower.

To be clear, I needed a lawnmower. Desperately. My lawn was -Who am I kidding? Was? My lawn IS- a foot and a half tall. I could hide hobbits in my lawn. First home, remember? I was surprised I needed to purchase a fire extinguisher, let alone a lawnmower.

So my mom followed through on her threat and we went to buy a lawnmower.

D and I have apparently quite differing interpretations of what that word means.

When I think lawnmower, I think a gigantic gas hog with blades that rotate at eleven billion miles a second, belching smoke and reducing my lawn to mulch in 13 seconds flat.

When D thinks lawnmower, she thinks an itsy bitsy eco-friendly push mower that requires the strength of ten men each of whom is at least twice my size to get it to devour even a foot of grass.

Because I'm a gentleman and a scholar, guess which one we got?

I just spent the last hour "mowing" the front lawn. It still looks like most of the haircuts my dad gave me. The only muscles I can still use are in my fingers and my eyes. I'm glad my fingers still work because it allows me to gesture in very particular ways at the lawnmower (and the lawn, as it's not entirely blameless).

My only consolation is that D said I look very sexy mowing the lawn. Yes. Thank you. I'm sure I will make just as sexy a corpse when I'm felled by my pending heart attack.

At least in my eulogy they'll be able to say I was eco-friendly. Yay.

Have I said she's lovely lately? I feel a twitch coming on.

HG Wells Hit

I have come to a decision.

I like what Stephen Spielberg did to War of the Worlds.

I realize that comment alone could get me lynched, but I plan to back it up with fact. My previous opinion, which was polar opposite, was formed having never in fact read the original novel. I simply listened to the opinion of my brother, my father, and I agreed wholeheartedly with them.

I should not have.

The primary point of contention around everyone's dislike of the adaptation is the fact that in the movie, the tripods were already deposited in the Earth, under its crust and only the aliens were delivered via some kind of energy tube.

Well, having now read that particular scene in the book, I can quite honestly say there is nothing in the book to contradict that interpretation. The cylinder that deposited the aliens in the original novel is described as having a diameter of approximately 30 yards, which calculates to 90 feet in diameter. Length is not described but if we assume that the cylinder is as long as it is wide we're looking at a total volume for the cylinder of approximately 500,000 cubic feet. That sounds like a massive number? It's about twice as big as big in terms of sheer volume as our space shuttle at 250,000 cubic feet.

I grant you that means these cylinders were very large, but were they large enough to carry enough equipment and materials to construct three TITANIC tripods, as well as the nine martian pilots, their life support equipment and supplies? These cylinders would also have to be extremely well armoured to withstand both atmospheric re-entry and impact with the earth's surface at extremely high velocities, so much of that cubic volume would be taken up purely by the shell of the cylinder itself. Remember as well that the tripods based on HG Wells description seem to have an organic component as well, which would probably require care and tending and special facilities inside the cylinder. Fuel would not have been an issue since Wells describes the cylinders as having been shot as though from a gun.

HG Wells never describes the actual construction of a tripod, never goes into distinct details about how it is assembled, what type of equipment is used to put it together, or where the parts come from. It is entirely likely that all the cylinders were for is transport of the pilots to very specific landing points, where equipment to build the tripods had been readied long in advance, and that upon arrival all that was necessary for the pilots to do was to dig out the materials and assemble them using what few tools it was necessary to carry onboard the cylinder.

So in my personal opinion Stephen Spielberg simply took this possibility and went one small step further with it, and I agree with his interpretation. I've been able to reassess the movie based on reading the book and I truly think Spielberg was as honest to the book as anyone could like while still putting in his own particular creative flare.

Disagree with me if you like, but read the book before you do.

Are We Crazy?

Well, having overcome the emotional tragedy and heartbreak of losing our first pet, Bun Bun, D and I thought and thought and finally decided that yes, we would get another pet. Our reasoning was mainly that we missed Bun Bun, and I think to honour her memory having another pet will constantly remind us of her, in a good way.

We once again decided on rabbits. Yes, the plural of rabbit. We are now the owners of two dwarf rabbits we obtained from the humane society, only 2 1/2 months old. They are brothers, and they came with very silly names, so we changed them.
The names they came with were Coal and Sweetpea. What kind of names are those? We have redubbed them Thelonious and Polonius. We call them Theo and Polo for short.

At this point we have yet to get a real feel for their personalities but as far as I've been able to deduce, Polo appears to be the more affectionate one, whereas Theo is more playful. Apparently Theo also likes to engage in a bit of incestual sodomy every once in a while, but we'll fix that maybe later this week or possibly next. Theo is a very dark black, while Polo has a brownish tinge to his fur. They enjoy grooming each other, and seem especially bent on cleaning each other's eyes. Both of them absolutely adore being pet, although Polo gets a lot flatter to enjoy it than Theo does.

We haven't really had them out of the cage for run arounds yet because we're still letting them adapt to their new environment. Since they're smaller rabbits as well we're going to have to keep a closer eye on them around places like the back of the fridge or stove to make sure they don't squeeze in and get trapped or find some wire to chew on and get zapped. Once D has finished her dining room table (HINT) I plan to use the vapour barrier she's protecting the finish with and seal up all the little hidey holes where they could inadvertently (that may be spelled incorrectly) kill themselves.

They seem to have a very strange fascination with paper towels. I was cleaning up something in their cage and couldn't finish because both rabbits were attached by very strong jaws to the paper towel I was using.

We'll have to find out if paper towels are bad for their digestion and if not, give them a supply to play with.

So far both rabbits are healthy and happy and seem to enjoy their new digs. I have yet to be thumped at, but that may be only because I've yet to bother them enough to warrant a thump. Time will tell, however.

I'm really hoping we have these two for quite a while. I quite like the burgeoning personalities I see in both rabbits and look forward to getting to know them over a period of years. But, since they are rabbits, I suppose I do have to accept the reality that they are fragile, and not very well designed from an individual survivability standpoint, so I'm trying to steel myself against potential tragedy. Still, they're brothers, and they seem to be looking out for each other so far. Perhaps they'll keep each other out of trouble.

We'll put pictures up soon.

Oh, and even though we haven't tested it yet, we're pretty sure both will fit in the crock pot simultaneously.

Swing Low

I'll be brief.
Bun Bun, for reasons yet unknown, is dead. She was a beautiful rabbit. I loved her, and D loved her. It's hard to find a pet as perfect as she was.
Cherish yours.

Retraction

Okay, just in case everyone didn't read my response to the previous post, I would like to be very clear about a few things.

I will never criticise any of my friends on this blog, either in subtext or overtly, and if something in one of my comments makes you feel like I have, I apologize in advance and if necessary, I will DELETE the offending post.

I love all my friends openly and completely, every fibre of each and every one of you is important to me and all of you are JUST as important to me as every other. None of you are better to me than any other, all of you are equal in my heart and mind, merely different in many wonderful ways.

While I will play the devil's advocate I will never play it in order to deride someone, or put someone down. As you may have seen previously when I play the devil's advocate I make sure that all fire and venom I might incite gets aimed squarely at me, and I make no effort to spread that around to others.

Finally, my blog is about posing entertaining questions, provocative if possible, and telling funny stories. I'm not using this as a soapbox for harsh thoughts and feelings towards anyone except for perhaps nebulous public organizations and the occasional stranger who may have incited my wrath. It will never be a place I come to be negative about my friends or family.

If my previous post was offensive to anyone, that was unintentional, as I was engaging in idle speculation.

Ooh! Look! Something on the ground I can read! La...tex... con...dom. I'd sure like to live in one of those!

EDIT: The previous post was deleted.

No More TOdyssey and a Query on Netspeak

Okay, so I've decided to leave the third day of the TOdyssey up to your imaginations. Okay, I'll tell you something. We went home. There were hugs and puppies. She cried, then I cried, then Melany laughed... she's such a little trooper!
I've recently been thinking about language, possibly because of Melany talking about *shudder* irregardless and how some fringe radical groups have decided to use powerful lobbying tactics to have it added to the English language, and it's possibly because I've been spending so much time on *Gasp!* WoW lately. REGARDLESS (Do you see what I did there?) I've been wondering when certain elements of our online vocabulary are going to make their way into common speech.
I've actually found myself debating whether to laugh at someone, or say LOL to them, depending on the actual hilarity of the situation or their statement. An actual laugh is an honest expession of amusement, whereas LOL is a sort of noncommittal, "Yeah, I kinda chuckled, at least internally, so I'll throw you a bone." word, or at least it is in my mind, but there are circumstances where I actually have to fight the urge to SAY LOL to someone. My friend and D's friend Tim uses LOL as a sarcastic way of making fun of someone's attempt at humour, but he uses it in actual speech!
What about other expressions. There are a number of online acronyms and words that might translate well into our consumer dialect. IMO, IMHO, IRL, BRB, WTF, WTH, ROFLMAO, GTG... these could all easily take the place of the phrases they are short for.
I shudder at the thought but I accept the possibility. Do you think Netspeak will take over English, or are we as English speakers going to fight to keep the language, if not pure, at least as acronym free as possible?