"Do you guys know about chocolate? You don't? Oh man, this is gonna be huge!"

Today in the bank a little old lady asked me if my father was home from the war yet. It's a little hard to respond to questions like that. Especially since the look in her eyes hinted strongly that she would rant against Herr Hitler and his band of wicked men on only slight prompting. So I just smiled and said he wasn't in the military any more. And she smiled and nodded without comprehension and hobbled away. 

Since the Old Age Pensions came out yesterday we've been very busy at the bank. I got to buy some American Cash, and open a safe deposit box, and cash many many cheques. Yesterday I cleared over one hundred thousand dollars worth ($100,000.00) of cheques. But no, there's no money in this economy at all. 

And today I had a monumentous realization! I figured out why I've been so tired lately! I haven't been eating. Somehow you'd think I'd have figured out by now how to avoid that, but not I! It only takes two days of eating badly for my appetite to go away, and then the brakes are off until I start seeing physical symptoms. And put two and two together to get four. *sighs* It's since I'm working over lunch hour all the time, I've just been skipping that meal. Then it was really hard to get up in the morning, I was so tired, so I wasn't really eating breakfast. Finally, realization dawns today. :D I wasn't loosing weight this time or anything, so it's all good. And I AM getting up for breakfast tomorrow. And I'm bringing a lunch to work. *is firm* That's what I'm doing. 

The Brownie Halloween party was on Tuesday, so we got dressed up for that. Fraulein went as a marvelous Mime, and I, in a brilliant show of bluffing, dressed myself up in a blue satin thing that someone had given the family and called myself the Queen of the Night. Really, if you act as though you know what you're doing, most people won't question you. :D

"Did I mention I know almost everything about almost everything?"

I'm been such a sporadic blogger of late. I think that is because I have no time sense. It's true. There is an event, and another event, and they float disconnected in a sea of rushed images and words. I navigate by landmarks of memory, phrases and scenes that stick in my memory. This is especially odd, since I have a good memory, but if you ask me how long a thing has taken or will take, the odds are pretty good I will have no clue. The only way I know is if I work the math and count back from a number I have, whether that is a time or a date. Of course, this may be how everyone works. :D 

Well, I went for a lovely long walk on Saturday. 11.7 km, in fact. My legs were about to seize up when I got home. But I did get some very nice pictures, which I will post sometime in the future. Oh, and PT may be bringing his Girl Friend home for Christmas, which should be fun! 

I see another reason I didn't post. A signal lack of things to talk about. :D 

But I did make pork barbecue in the slow cooker, which was a success. Also, we're going to have a working shower tomorrow evening at five pm. For the first time in three weeks. 

HURRAH! 

Oh My My

I was trying to figure out what Gid reminded me of at breakfast the other day, and then it hit me. He is starting to look like the pictures of famine victims you see in the news. Huge eyes, fragile hands, delicate bone structure, all the symptoms of tenuous life. 

This is particularly problematic given my tendency to hide from social contact, including my family. Anything where I have to make eye contact and/or listen to someone else's breathing, or even, *gasps*, actually make conversation, I avoid. 

Life is weird. 

"There'll be better days, willow."

I was scheduled to do a ten minute presentation this morning at 9:00am. I was a bit nervous about speaking, given my tendency to start panicking and stammering. As it turns out, I need not have worried about speaking. 

I should have worried about waking up with my alarm clock. When I was happily curled into a small ball in my warm bed and waiting for my alarm to go off, Fraulein came into my room and asked when I was working. I muttered something about nine. Whereupon she just gasped in horror. Suddenly, I was very awake. That was 9:53, when I exploded out of bed and glanced at the clock as I started quick-changing. I was at the bank at 10:02, feeling sick to my stomach. And the scariest thing? No one mentioned it. *cringes* I don't like being incompetent! *cries*

But I did balance perfectly, first go round, and then I made a cake at home.

I also bowed to the inevitable and made a folder for nerdy bookmarks. Because the python site really can not honestly be stored under "travel."

"Who are "They" and why are they putting stuff in my shoes?"

Yesterday seemed to go by really fast. In fact, any time that I'm not at work has been seeming to whoosh by me. I think my time sense is broken. Oh wait...

Our laundry machines have been taken out of commission, so after the mountain of used clothing threatened to fill the kitchen we decided that it was time to take desperate measures. Slonner and I were therefore yesterday dispatched to take possession of the laundromat. Our departure was delayed by the fact that the small ones had taken the laces out of my shoes. They had then tied themselves to the wall with them, as "they were in space and the lines were to make sure they didn't float away." But we got away eventually. 

We ended up spending three and a half hours in the Laundromat. And for most of that time we had the place to ourselves. And we filled it. Just to show you a glimpse of the enormity of the task that is laundry in our house; at one point we had five washers and seven dryers running. At the same time. It took two car loads just to get all the laundry up to the Laundromat in the first place. So Slonner and I suspended our time senses and stuffed machines. It was fun. :D

In the evening, Fraulein and I watched Enemy Of The State. I like that movie. *grins* It has sufficient conspiracy to please me, and that is saying something. I need to go through it to collect quotes. 

Oh, and at 10:30 I found out that a paper I said I would write for fun was due tomorrow. That is, before I go to sleep. *stares blankly at the screen, and then swallows hard* I really wish I had actually thought about the subject I said I'd write on... Yeah, I jury-rigged a paper, of sorts. It's held together with finishing nails and hope, and has gaps in the logic you could drive trucks through. There is no continuity from paragraph to paragraph, and it ends with a half-page quote which has nothing to do with anything. So just like all my papers, right? :D No. This one is really REALLY bad. I'm not showing it to anyone. If I had planned to share it around, I would have done a preliminary sweep for logic. 

It was fun, in a hard, Oh-my-word-my-brain-has-atrophied-when-I-wasn't-looking, WHERE ARE MY QUOTES AND CAN I QUOTE A NOVEL, Why? Just why? Sleep is looking awfully good right now, sort of way. Maybe I'll do another one and actually spend some awake time on it. *laughs merrily*

Oh. I'd better get to work. Ciao!

What if you fight your way through to the good and it is also terrible?

Life is so much more cruel and more beautiful than we would like to pretend. It is our culture's tradition to avow that everything works out the way we want it to, with no deviations from the plan. No surprises, except for the ones we were hoping for at the back of our minds. And it's such a lie. Life has a way of driving you to the ground gasping for air. Fate likes to strip the comfortable woolly blinders off our eyes and make us actually look at the world. 

This is a circuitous way of saying, of course, that God has other plans.

My imagination is just not able to encompass the incredible vastness of the future. It is more tender then I can think of, and more bitter. There is more sorrow, and more love, more joy and more pain. The future is unfriendly and so welcoming, uninterested in little me and decked out in banners for my arrival. There are more surprises than I can comprehend, though surprises are not always hand in hand with happiness. 

I just can't get my head around it. 

How do you prepare yourself for a child under the age of three who is on a morphine drip for eight hours a day, and yet who still gives away her candy to her friends when they visit? How do you even look in the eyes of a person who is withdrawing the contents of their entire bank account to fly across the country and take care of their best friend's daughter after the death of the best friend? What do you about people who will get up four hours before the sun to cook a meal for guests, and then drive the meal out to the guest's house when they can't make it across town for the dinner? What will make you expect a little boy who has started to say that it hurts to be picked up- in imitation of his idolized older brother who is dying of cancer? 

It's like we can only see the previews in black and white, no audio, and then the full feature is in HD, surround sound. 

"I'm sorry. I- I, I react to a certain doom a certain way. It's a bad habit."

Working at the bank continues to be fun, though it also has its share of nerve-wracking moments, such as when I discovered my cash was out by almost ten thousand dollars earlier this week. You try to think out paying that back, and the numbers very suddenly cease to be abstract. It all turned out to be an accounting error and I was only actually out by $0.65, which is much better for my blood pressure.

You also overhear some inadvertently hilarious conversations. Case in point;

Two elderly men talking.
"How you doing, my son?"
"Not bad, not bad at'all." *inhales and sucks on his teeth* "Had a heart attack last Sunday."
"Yes, well, 'orrrible weather we're 'avin', eh?"

I just about laughed in my customer's face, but managed to swallow it in time.

What else has happened? Hmmm. Well, I had a rather surreal moment this morning when I glanced up at the weather channel and they were showing something about the orbits of Venus and Mercury while talking about solar storms. I've been thinking in Science Fiction of late in preparation for Nano, and I had one of those moments when you're not quite sure which reality you inhabit. Similar to when I was on a WWII kick and heard the air raid siren go off.

 *blinks* "What was that?" 

I never did find out why the Weather Channel was talking about extra-terrestrial weather, but I am reasonably certain that it wasn't because said weather promises to interfere with the heavy shipping three-planet route. 

And in other news; despite weighing about as much as a winter coat, Gid is now taking 25% more Codeine than an adult would per dose, (and he's talking every four hours,) as well as slow-dose Morphine. They don't stock narcotics in town, so Mommy and Daddy are going on a Date to the next town to pick it up. 

Reno(vation) Pics!

End of Day One

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End of Day Two

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The stress seems to be having an effect at this point. Notice Slonner's charming nose decoration.

End of Day Three

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End of Day Four

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End of Day Five!

Read this.

This is why I love Chesterton. Stark raving awesomeness. :P

"I saved your life!" "No you didn't."

I got a birthday present today! I'm gleeful. Third World sent me a present for my birthday, but it got turned back at the border the first time. So, instead of saying "Hard Times, girlie." (as most people will do when an international parcel gets sent back), she sent it again! So now I have two new DVDs (X-men and Sahara) and a stuffed puppydog with an adorable, no other word for it, pleading expression. 

In other news, the mainfloor is covered in two inches of polybead, then radiant heating piping, then wire mesh. Tomorrow we pour cement. I am going to be at work when the actual pouring of cement starts, but given the size of the job it'll probably still be going on when I get back four hours later. Darn. :P 

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but the bathroom is gone. As in, two walls are now reduced to support beams and the counter, bathtub, toilet, sink and counter are at the dump. While this does free up a marvelous amount of floor space, it also makes things a bit touchy when it comes to showering. And you know; renovation days and associated grunge, having to go to work in a respectable environment, my natural tendency to attract any loose powders in the kitchen, so on and so forth; it seemed like a good idea to beg, borrow or steal a means to get clean. 

As it turns out only begging was required. I traipsed over to the neighbors house with all the little ones in tow. "Hi, can we use the shower?" "What?! Oh. It's the crazy people in the old church. Just head on upstairs." *smirk* (Actually, Mommy had called ahead of time. I'm not THAT lunatic.) The two teenage boys (13 and 18) tried to set up invisibility vibes when the horde of small children invaded their living room, but since they were both using laptops the attempt was futile. Shiny things... Since I am the soul of mercy I distracted the small ones with my own laptop, thereby proving that you should always bring your laptop with you, even to shower. Of course my laptop was liberally spiced with death threats, but it also had Photobooth- which means that it easily won out over a pair of motley Dell-ish things. 

It's Palin! *cough* *coughcough* Right. I'll be quiet now. 

And then we came home and vegged out.

"It's like my brain has a mind of its own!"

We're back in renovation mode. I'm enjoying it. There's just something about the smell of flux and propane in the air and mugs of tea containing unidentifiable house dust every three hours. Due to my job I haven't been able to be here much lately, but I did help to take down a wall today. 

Unfortunately, all the crowbars were claimed. 

This is where one sees if one can kick through a wall. Seemingly, one can. One cannot punch through a wall without repercussions, however, which is why one is typing slowly. 

The remedy is inexperience.

The sleepover was fun, in a "prepare for the worst" type of way. Seeing as I had no expectations of fitting in or being included, I was able to move right past the unbroken social ice and enjoy the chocolate fondue. But for the other girls, who are used to being more comfortable in social situations, it was really awkward. 

But we had fondue, and made jewelry, and went on a walk to see horses and peacocks. Regrettably, the girls, (age 15 - 17) weren't interested in a night walk, but it was lovely and crisp in the morning. 

The fondue was just amusing all around. The majority of the girls didn't know you could make any kind of fondue other than chocolate, and once the cheese and broth were presented several of them turned out to be anti-green pepper or just anti-vegetable. One of the girls even thought that chicken was poisonous. I kid you not, she thought it was dangerous to touch. You've got to wonder.. So that was pretty much what I expected. But I was pleasantly surprised about their willingness to participate in crafts and try mushrooms in cheese fondue and such.:D Of course, Fraulein was awesome, as she always is, so she mustn't think these comments apply to her. A WHOLE other maturity level there. :P Granted, she DID make us turn around and go back home to pick up her permission slip, but that doesn't even count. 

Looking back, I see that I've been unusually able this weekend to just sit back and laugh tolerantly at things which would usually raise my blood pressure. For instance, the fact that I was recruited as a "leader" but the lady running the show kept calling on her 15 year-old daughter instead and leaving me stuck at the table. I just grinned wider and made a set of earrings. 

Then tonight was my first time watching the new season of the Amazing Race, which was oodles of fun. (I was working last Sunday night, 'member?) One thing stuck in my mind, however. If they were speaking anything other than English, all the teams spoke in Spanish. Directing their taxi drivers in Spanish and such. The only issue was that, this was their second leg in Brazil. Anyone else see any discrepancy there? Anyone??

Your head would look good on the end of a pole!

While PT is on the mainland, he left his car at the Citadel1. And while it is here and he isn't Fraulein and I have the use of it. MWHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!! *rubs hands together* We have a car! A car of our own! To go places in! Places like Tims! *maniacal giggling*

The only issue is, it's a standard. Now, I'm used to an automatic. The only standard I've driven is the Suburban full of screaming children2. And that was last summer. Moreover, I haven't driven at all for over a year. And Fraulein doesn't have her license yet. But we are not the sort to let little things like those stop us! Instead, we both drove. At the same time. Oh yes, we're awesome. 

Fraulein worked the stick, and I handled the clutch, brake, accelerator, lights, steering wheel, and funky things of that sort. This was decided the first night, where after we were on the road I realized that I couldn't see the dials, didn't know where the gears were, and was still in first gear in the middle of the road. It was an exciting drive. Then on Thursday Fraulein had to go into Gander for dance class. Gander is 45 minutes away on the TCH, when driving the speed limit3. And we drove in. 

It was fun! I got to go to a bookstore for the first time in two months, and spent time in a coffee shop. Coffee shops are very conducive to the imagination. I have decided this. There were also a few teenagers with stunningly profane vocabularies, which was illuminating. I didn't know you could use those words in quite those ways, but apparently it works. Fraulein and I also drove home without incident. This included two treacherous trips through drive-thrus, where nothing was hit and no one was injured. I'd call the day a signal success. 

Last night was my last shift at McWork. I think, as much as I did enjoy working with some of the people, I won't miss it. I transition easily, to the point that I don't generally miss anything, and McWork was not something I looked forward to the day before, let's just say. Usually tricks are played on people who are leaving, so I spent much of the night treading carefully. But apparently I am "too nice to soak." I escaped unscathed. 

Fraulein and I are going to go on a Rangers sleepover tonight. I have to leave Yinsen at home. *is sad* But there is the chance of a midnight hike, and possible falling in the ocean, which is always marvelous. :D

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1.That's the name of our house, in case I haven't mentioned that before. 

2. Yes, literally full of children, (every seat full,) and they were less than enthusiastic about my driving. It was- memorable.

3. Most people do it in 20 minutes. We're a law abiding bunch around here!

This was always the plan.

My computer has a name. 

Yinsen. 

*is happy*

"If you spray me and I'm not on fire I've giving you to the community college."

We had the police in at work today. In an unofficial capacity. You see, we had a techie come in to upgrade one of our systems. (I'm not important enough to know the details. :D) And in the process of doing so, he set off our tamper alarm. We continued as per normal, ignoring the high-pitched siren that was emanating from the secure room where he was locked in with the senior cashier. After about twenty minutes of this, a very confused off-duty RCMP Officer poked his head in the door. "Do you, uh, hear that alarm?" So the other cashiers laughed at him and sent him away. :D Just a normal day in your local friendly financial institution! (Interestingly, my reaction to alarms has gone down significantly since spending time at McWork. I just blink at them.)

Ah, and yesterday I had my first ever conference call! It was magical! Actually, it wasn't quite magical, but it was quite fun. The lady facilitating the training call was from Winnipeg, and everyone else was from Ontario. After about twenty minutes of general conversation we were told to preface our statements with our names, since we all had similar voices. Then she retracted that order, saying that Ali, (who moved to Toronto from Iran five years ago), and I (who apparently has a strong Newfoundland accent), wouldn't need to state our names. Mainlanders. :D 

Yesterday PT stopped by on his way to visit grandparents on the mainland. He and the Walrus are going out to help out for two weeks. Regrettably, I was at work all day. But I consoled myself with watching Ironman. Which is a good movie. A very good movie. My oh my. Everyone and their uncle, it seems, had been watching it and raving about it, so I had to preorder it on itunes so that I could watch it at the first available legal day. That was not even an option, really. (I sense disapproval oozing from those among us who do not have access to a theatre and are not fond of that fact, so I will qualify my previous assertion and say that everyone and their uncle who live in or near a city watched it and told me to watch it.) And it was awesome. Did I say that already? 

And I want Mr. Stark's computer. Actually, I want his whole house, but that computer is amazing to the nth power. *stares at it* For those who are gearheads- you know who you are- it is worth it to watch the movie just for the computer. And if you're a gearhead and don't know it, this movie will show you. Also the dialogue is marvelous, as are the characters, the cinematography is lovely, the effects are beond cool, and the plot makes me happy, but the computer rocks my socks. *writes fanfiction about the computer* :P

Now I need to go fold some laundry so I can jury-rig some more sudo-professional outfits. Valeo!