teflon ghost

Hello and Happy New Year!  2024 is here, and if I can manage it, this will be the end of Teflon Ghost the blog.  Not that I intend to stop, I just want to make it what it should have been from the start: Six Beer Shakespeare.  (or Eight Beer Shaksespeare?) The catch is, I want to make it so all the stuff I’ve written over the last almost 8 years is still attached in some way so it can be found.  I hope I’m not talking to myself here, as I haven’t had any feedback for months and my statistics say nearly no one is going to my site.  It’s ok, I enjoy writing in here, whether or not there is an audience.  It’s my version of singing in the shower.

A funny thing about the recently departed 2023 is that I intended it to be a year full of writing.  I had won a prize late in 2022 in a writing contest, so I wanted to build on that, submit to some larger contests with bigger prizes, freelance for the local paper a little.  Maybe make a few bucks, maybe get long listed somewhere prestigious.  So what happened?  I got sucked into two major distractions.  One was I took courses and tests for work, and the other was I got pulled deeper into the local chess scene, becoming a National Arbiter along the way.  How did your plans for last year work out?  Did you find yourself accomplishing all your goals or did you also find yourself going down some side road?  Comments are welcome.

I found out today that we got tickets to see the Rolling Stones this May in Seattle!  Our early plan is to take the Amtrak train down and get an airbnb somewhere near the stadium.  I think the four fares on the train, plus room, plus a few meals and the tickets will cost about the same as one ticket in Vancouver on the secondary market.  I know the people who resell those tickets are “providing a service” in that they have a way for you to get in the concert.  But what makes them vultures and parasites is the fact they don’t create extra seats or extra opportunities for you to go, they just get between you and the promoters and jack the ticket prices way the fuck up so normal fans can’t even afford to go.  There won’t be too many more chances to see the Stones, as the clock is ticking when all the members are 80+.  Luckily the Seattle show didn’t sell out too quickly and didn’t get bought up by blood sucking low lifes.

Hopefully this will be the year that the wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East end.  People only get one fleeting chance at life – to feel purpose, to fall in love, to have dreams – and no one should die for an imaginary line on a map or because their neighbour reads a slightly different religious text.  At least the Russians won’t be invited to the Olympics in Paris this summer.  Their athletes may not be to blame, as the cheating is sanctioned by the people in charge, but you aren’t usually in a fair race with a Russian these days, and even their judges have been known to be corrupt.  This year’s special Olympic event will be peddling your bicycle with a baguette in the basket, ringing a little bell that goes “bring, bring!” France is favoured to sweep the medals in that competition.

I have written in the past about how I hope this and that for various years, hoping for peace or whatever.  But the fact is, you and I are the people alive in this moment, and we can all make the world a little warmer by being kind and creating happy little ripples in whatever pond we are treading water in.  It sounds corny and like some ridiculed dogma from hippy days gone by, but love is the answer.

We have been invited to dinner this first evening of the year, so I’m going to quit rambling nonsense and go.  I will try to set up some sort of alert when my blog changes names, if it does.  Hopefully, it won’t just be me echoing in the shower.

 

 

 

 

 

In my last entry, I mentioned I had written a story for NYC Midnight.  It was a 500 word story with a 24 hour deadline.  Even when I wrote it I was saying it was heading for the virtual dustbin as it was a little silly, and I was right.  It didn’t even get an honourable mention.  I’ll put it on here and you can read it if you want.

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A Squirt of Revenge

Ryan was amusing himself in the playground behind his house.  He was swinging on the swings and going in dizzying circles around the merry-go-round.  His mother was working from home and casting the occasional glance his way to verify he was safe.

Three boys came around the trail and into the playground. They were walking with menacing swaggers. “Hey look, it’s little Ryan from second grade,” said the biggest, most menacing of the group. “Looks like he’s lost his mommy,” and the other boys laughed.

“I didn’t lose my mom, Derek, she’s behind that fence keeping an eye on me.” Ryan knew Derek wanted to be a bully, but at school he was kept in check.

“Looks like your mommy sent you with a can of bug spray. We wouldn’t want baby Ry-Ry to get a bug bite at the park.” Derek grabbed the bottle of repellent and threw it into forest.  The other boys laughed again. “Well baby Ry-Ry, you better go find your spray before mommy finds out you lost it.”

Ryan held back hot tears. “Thanks, you jerk!” He ran into the forest after the bottle. He didn’t think his mom would care too much about it, but the stillness of the trees was a welcome diversion to being insulted by thugs.

The forest was dark after the bright sun, and he wouldn’t find anything until his eyes adjusted  to the gloom.  A squeaky voice nearby made him jump. “I saw the whole thing. Those boys are cowards, picking on someone small and alone.” A little elf stepped out from behind a shrub. “Sorry if I startled you. I am Tim. We elves are everywhere but we mostly stay out of sight. I could give you some magic to defend yourself with –  just a little bit, not enough to harm anyone seriously, and only enough to use once. Would you like that?”

“Yes! Please, that would be great,” Ryan said.

Tim touched Ryan on the forehead, and he could feel a tingling in his skin.

“Now hurry, your mom will look and not see you at the park and she’ll panic.”

Ryan knew the elf was right. He took a quick glance around and decided to go back to the playground.

“Thanks, Tim!”

Back in the daylight, Derek and his gang were at the far end of the park throwing rocks at a tree when they noticed their little subject had returned. “What’s the matter, didn’t find your bug spray, babykins?”

“No, but I found something even better, come and see,” he called back.

Derek approached Ryan, towering above him scowling as hard as he could. Ryan closed his eyes and called upon his one dose of magic. Suddenly Derek and his mates’ bowels let go, and they went running for home crying, as diarrhea ran down their legs.

“Wouldn’t it have just been easier to be nice?” he called after them.

A squeaky laugh emanated faintly from the forest.

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The judges said the dialogue and the method of revenge were age appropriate and well done.  They criticized me for not putting more detail into the elf, and even ignoring Ryan’s reaction to the elf which likely would have been surprise or maybe even fright at first.  They acknowledged the lack of words would have made me cut something else out, and they suggested I cut out his mother to buy more words.  Anyway, I agree with that, I guess.

I also talked in my last blog about a test I had to write.  I got 81% and passed, but I don’t get to be relief foreman because the superintendent says I need to take more courses.  It gets further away with each test.  It’s like putting a doughnut on fishing line and reeling it in, making some fat kid (me) run after it.

Speaking of doughnuts, you know what’s starting to bug me?  The combination of cute kids and menacing parents that greet me at the exit of the grocery store, trying to sell me stuff.  I dodged by the Krispee Kreme kids yesterday, but the Scouts guilted me into buying an apple today, as a couple of fathers were giving me menacing looks.  At work I have a full box of Girl Guide cookies in a drawer that I bought last week.  Girl Guide cookies used to have two flavours, chocolate and vanilla, and they were actually decent.  Now they have this thin chocolate mint thing, almost like an After Eight wafer, and it just isn’t that good.  But when a big-eyed 6 year old with a sad expression is selling them, I am doomed.  Pretty soon the Salvation Army will come and replace the Guides, Scouts, Air Cadets, Wheelchair Rugby, Girls’ Soccer, Boys’ Hockey, Cancer Researchers, Veterans with poppies, and whoever else is out there making eye contact with you and your groceries.  And the Sally Ann doesn’t take “I don’t have any cash” as an excuse – they have credit and debit tap options so you can’t say no without being a grinch of the highest order.

Speaking of polite ways to be embezzled from, what’s the deal with tip options?  I remember not too long ago 10% was the going rate for tipping wait staff at restaurants.  Then it crept up to 15, then 18, now 20%.  I now feel like a total jerk if I leave less than 18%, especially if the waitress, let’s say, has made an effort to interact with me. That’s ok, at least they served me.  The really awful tip options are the ones at regular businesses like the beer store.  Sometimes the staff at the beer store helps me out, but that is sort of their job.  When they offer me assistance, I will consider giving a couple bucks.  But when some goth girl has stood at the counter looking at her phone chewing gum while I search helplessly for the Moosehead Radlers, she can kiss my ass if she thinks I’m giving her anything.  Once I was handed a debit machine in a store and I couldn’t quickly find the solution to declining the tip, so I wound up tipping some lazy kid who spent my entire time in the store texting her buds. That set me off, and I quit going to that store for at least a year, even though it’s about 500 feet from my front door.  Take that!

Another fairly new thing to do is to stand on the median on a busy street and beg from people who stopped at the red light.  They always have a cardboard sign that explains their predicament, with most signs being too long winded to read at one light.  Those people probably need the money and would get the most use out of it, but the thinking is it will likely be spent on drugs or booze, so you’re doing them more harm than good.  I was told a story not long ago.  At the light at 1st Ave and the exit from Hwy 1 in Vancouver, there’s a guy claiming to be starving, needing anything you can give him.  So lots of kind people hand him bananas and apples, things to keep him alive, you know.  But there’s a big Welcome to Vancouver sign nearby, behind which is a mountain of bananas, apples, muffins and such that the guy chucks as soon as you drive off.  So I give these people change sometimes, but I’m always a little leery, too.

Hello person reading my blog!  Long time, no see.  I haven’t written here for a while, and I have been nutso busy.  After today I am going to be busy again for a couple weeks, too, so this is my tiny oasis of time to write something.

Prior to this weekend our chess club held its annual big tournament.  It’s online at SwissSys.com/events under Langley Open if you’re curious.  For the weeks leading up to the event, I go crazy with emails and calls; and the weekend it happens I basically work about 14 hours a day for several days.  We had 88 players this year, and it went off so well I am excited to run another one!  After this weekend I start studying for an exam I have to take for work.  I tried to study at work when I wasn’t on the clock, but the material is so monstrously boring that my eyes glaze over and my head starts bobbing within minutes.  The carrot at the end of this stick is that if I can pass this exam I will be qualified to be a foreman and fill in when my boss isn’t around.  It’s a big jump in pay and will help my pension.  One day, far in the future,  it will help keep me in diapers and nutritional supplement drinks.

Speaking of retirement, I was hoping to move away to some sunny locale when I quit working.  Somewhere with a lake, a junior hockey team to watch, and access to health care and grocery store options. Seems easy enough, half the towns you could name in BC would check all those boxes, it’s just that every summer one of those towns catches fire and gets evacuated now.  I’d be on the run with my cats, photo albums and denture glue, trying to get somewhere less flammable. So maybe I’ll have to stay near the fire retardant coast which hasn’t had any big fires or evacuations yet.  It could change I guess, but so far our rain forests and urban sprawl have managed to thwart any major fires, unlike the sun-soaked and crispy dry interior regions.

By the way, I’m so hungry right now my ass is trying to eat my chair.  There are cabbage rolls in the oven and the house is starting to smell like heaven.

About two weeks ago I wrote a short story for NYC Midnight’s 500 word challenge.  In the past, I usually put my story straight onto the blog, but I think I’m not supposed to, as they get first rights to publishing what you submit.  Of course, I could get away with it probably as I’m not a literary figure, but more like a literary figurine.  I don’t think my story is going anywhere and I don’t see it getting published, as I wrote into it some distasteful things.  In a month or so when it has hit the official wastebin in the contest, I’ll put it on here.

Next time I write in here it will be Autumn – another summer will have expired.  With all this talk about my retirement years, it gets me to wondering how many summers I might have left.  If I die at the average age, I have about 21 left, and if I think back over the last 21, they went by very fast.  Oh well, I’ve had a pretty good time and there’s reason to think that could continue for a while yet.

 

Well our big trip for the summer has come and gone.  We had been planning to go to Ireland for a while, but that dream circled down the drain when we got invited to a wedding in Saskatoon, the world’s least glamourous location.  We drove there in two days, mostly using GPS which took us a direct route across the prairies but one that, sometimes alarmingly, took us down empty dirt roads where we saw nary a soul or building for hours.  We found our way to the Yellowhead Highway almost by accident, and thus did we arrive in Saskatoon having finally found food and gas along the way.

The wedding was in a beautiful Catholic church, and the ceremony was very nice and not too long.  I am a little grumpy with the Catholic church in general, you know, with school yards full of buried kids and all.  Anyway, I found the proceedings a little churchy, but the bride’s family is a pretty churchy bunch by the look of things.  Then we set aside the bible readings and got drunk and silly.  We went back to our Airbnb and I managed to tumble my drunken ass backwards into a small bathtub.  I thought at first I may have broken a bone in my back, but a couple days later it started feeling better – a sure sign it was only a darn good bruise.  Dorth woke up the next morning sick.  She didn’t drink at the reception, and although I drank enough for both of us, I felt fine.  She sprawled out on the couch and watched renovation shows on TV for about 14 hours, in what may have been the dullest day of my adult life.

We were going to go to Winnipeg the next day but El Sicko wasn’t up for the drive, so we settled for the much shorter drive to Regina.  It was quiet in town and our hotel was full of Hell’s Angels.  Our main piss off was the hotel in Winnipeg wasn’t answering our calls and we wound up paying for the room anyway.  We had dinner in a Chinese buffet and everybody was obese, waddling to and fro with heaping plates.  I felt like an Olympic athlete in there.

The next day we drove to see her cousins who live in a place so remote it doesn’t have an address.  He is a farmer and flies a crop duster plane in low passes over fields for money.  His wife has problems with her immune system, and because Dorth had been sick we kept outside mostly, and tried to stay apart as much as politely possible. We left there and drove to Estevan.  We got a tiny room in a hotel and went out to see the sights.  It was a nice town, and we went for a walk in a park on a hill with a nice view of the coal fired electrical plant. They tell me the plant produces virtually zero emissions and that we should be exporting that technology abroad for the good of the world, along with the coal to make it go.

Next morning we started the long road home by heading for Swift Current.  We hadn’t got too far when Dorth got the call to tell her a girl we sat with at the wedding had Covid.  Luckily we had taken precautions with the immune compromised wife of her cousin, so she never wound up getting sick. When we got to Swift Current I ran into City Hall and grabbed us a couple Covid test kits.  Dorth was positive and I was negative, despite being within an umbilical cord length of her for days.  Logically, that evening we went to the pub for dinner, and struck up conversations with lots of locals, and we won some money on the VLTs, rubbing elbows with every patron in the place.  Hopefully Dorth didn’t start some new epidemic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.

The next day was grueling.  We drove ten hours from Swift Current to Revelstoke. We got a motel room, and a room for my uncle who we were trying not to infect.  We drove him to Calgary on our way to Saskatoon, then we picked him back up as we went by going west.  The next morning we drove home.  We tested again and this time we were both negative, so we invited our co-workers over for desert.  We had a houseful of water meter people eating apple and blueberry fritters with strawberry pie. And as far as I know, no one got sick.

 

Well I’ve gone and thrown away another summer weekend on chess.  It will be the second one in the last three weekends.  The first one was the First Annual BC School Chess Championship that was being run by my friend Umang, and he recruited my help.  It was a big event with over 210 kids from 110 schools competing, and of that number, about 130 of them had never played in a chess tournament before.  So once each round began, the kids having trouble started putting up their hands for help from the Tournament Director (hereafter referred to as TD), in this case me, and I had to run over and solve the dispute.  Sometimes there were half a dozen arms in the air and I was running around like a crazy person. All the while outside it was sunny and warm, perfect weather to go paddling or have a cold beer on the patio.  Maybe there should be a chess ‘season’ that runs through the fall and winter so that no one suffers the angst of watching the days you’ve longed for go by outside without you.  Which brings me to today.  It is early morning, but later this afternoon I have to go TD another tournament that will run through the weekend.  It is the exact opposite of the last one as this one is the BC Seniors Championship, open to players 50 years or older, so there won’t be many people panicking about tiny rules being broken and very few wrinkly arms in the air. Fun fact: if you went back in time the age of all 36 competitors combined, Jesus would still be in kindergarten.

School tournament: poor substitute for an outdoor life.

Anyway, my biggest apprehension about this tournament is the fact that I have to do some public speaking, which if you read my blog much, you know is my paralyzing fear.  I only have to address the crowd for a minute or so before each round to make small announcements, and it’s pretty small as only 36 players are registered.  Of that 36 I am on friendly speaking terms with about 25 of them, so it isn’t even strangers I have to speak to.  Still I have been having dreams about it and spending my days worrying about it. At this point I imagine normal people would be rolling their eyes at my chicken behaviour, and I wouldn’t blame them.

Speaking of summer, this is already among the worst fire seasons on record and it is technically still spring!  An area 1.5 times the size of Vancouver Island has already burnt up this year in Canada, and back east in the big cities you can hardly see the hand in front of your face in the thick smoke. The weird thing is the people who are denying this has any relation to climate change, or that the smoke is even harmful.  Some lawyer from the coal industry was on TV saying this smoke was natural and no one ever dies from polluted air, even in badly polluted cities in Asia. Actually 4.4 million premature deaths in India and China last year that were attributed to unhealthy air. No doubt there has, or will be, some premature deaths across the eastern seaboard due to this, but sadly, not enough of those deaths will be coal industry lawyers.

Perfectly normal day in New York, no health implications at all.

Greetings bloggy people.  Normally paragraph #1 is where I complain about the weather, but lately it’s been perfect, so I won’t rock the boat.  Well, perfect is my opinion, not necessarily one shared by people whose towns are on fire in Alberta and northern BC.  Those people could make a good case for liking rain right now, and I would understand.

We have taken up bowling lately.  We went five pin bowling twice now with our friends, and it is a nice way to spend some time.  Of course after a 15 year layoff, give or take a few years, the first time we went we overused some dormant muscles and spent a few days toddling along like stiff little penguins.  The second time seems to have been ok, and those whiny little muscles have left us alone. Note: a woman at my work who comes from England tells me back home they don’t call it “whining” but instead “whingeing,” with a soft G so it rhymes with “binging”, like drinking every day for a while.  This is new info to me and I kind of like it.  In the tick boxes of personal attributes, good and otherwise, one of my faults would be that when down in the dumps I can be whiny, so I may get some use out of whingeing.

I have decided on three story competitions I want to write for this year.  The first one has a submission deadline of June 30 – 44 days in the future as I write this – and so far I haven’t written a word or even thought of an idea.  Last year I left it until 48 hours before the deadline and I won (?) second place.  The difference is, last year I had a story I just needed to put into writing.  I’m thinking about entering another one of those 250 word contests so I’ll be forced to at least come up with a basic plot idea I could take to the pasta buffet afterward and plump up to 2000 words.  Later in the year I would like to submit to the CBC fiction contest and the Writer’s Trust one.  They have great prizes and great exposure for anyone who even makes the final 25, or whatever number they put on their long lists.  Being long listed in one of those would be the sort of thing you’d mention subtly on your resume. Of course, my chances of success go way up if I dream of a usable plot and quit wasting time watching dumb TV shows and playing Scrabble on Facebook.

I think I have come up with an idea for a book, but it’s very early on.  I want to think it through a whole bunch more before I start committing to writing it, but it seems like a possible idea. Anyway, I’ll elaborate another time if it seems like it wants to be written.  For now, it can slumber away somewhere in the back of my head.

Speaking of heads, my employer has just made it mandatory for all us workers to wear a hard hat at all times, regardless of how dangerous or benign a job we are doing.  I say why stop there?  I want to show up in a fucking scuba suit in case I encounter some deep puddles.  Yeah!  That’ll show them!  As for the hard hats, everyone is against it, and I feel like if they keep insisting on it, they may be flirting with revolution. We may need to organize a protest, or try to petition WorkSafe BC to rescind their rule, (which only appears to pertain to our place of work, btw.)  Water meter readers are wandering around quiet neighbourhoods wearing a helmet that is stifling hot and uncomfortable for no reason anyone can explain.  I could accept it if the Canada Post delivery people had to wear them, too, but they don’t.  I mean, at least it would be equal for a very similar job.  And all day I drive by people working outside, weedeating shoulders of roads, surveying, picking up trash, and none of those people are wearing a damn hard hat.  Office workers should have to wear them too, as they sit under acoustic tile that could potentially shake loose in an earthquake or if Weight Watcher’s has a dance party on the floor above.  As for meter readers meandering around cul de sacs, where is the danger?  Once I saw a dead crow fall out of the sky for no apparent reason, so maybe I was lucky it missed my hatless skull.  Other than that obviously isolated event, I can’t even come up with something a hard hat would prevent someone walking around from suffering.

*this might be lapsing into an episode of whingeing, so please accept my apology.

 

 

I just finished watching 60 Minutes.  Tonight’s episode was on Artificial Intelligence and how it is about to be unleashed on the world.  Last night I had a conversation with my son about AI, and it was news to me that there were already programs available that will write you a story, or a procedure manual, or paint you a lovely picture.  That conversation and 60 Minutes both sort of frighten me.  I had no idea AI had come that far and was poised to take over.

Earlier in the week I heard a news story that said a large group of scientists, including Elon Musk, had signed an open letter asking AI developers to stop for six months, but that news item just seemed like background noise I could safely ignore.  The unsettling part of the 60 Minutes story, for me at least, was that AI can tell lies, and frequently does.  It showed an AI bot being asked a question, which it answered quickly.  The answer included references to a half dozen or so books a person could go to for more info, except not one of the books actually exists!  The AI just made up some legit-sounding shit like the human receiving the answer was to be trifled with.  The story went on to say that AI lies were very common.  So what happens to the truth?  What if AI starts making up conspiracy theories or expounding well known BS like election fraud?  It still won’t be true, but it will have more of an air of legitimacy because it will appear to be researched and cross referenced.  So instead of trickles of nonsense coming out of the keyboard warrior’s basement lair, it will be coming from the research source itself.  Take the volatile political environment in the US today.  It really only got out of hand when truth was questioned (fake news, alternate truths) and fringe ideas got a national pulpit to preach from.  What if a few million people who already believe the government should be overthrown get some fresh fertilizer from their AI bots, who suggest they amass and coordinate?  And the humans who created the AI are only on the sidelines already, by the look of it.  The AI is teaching itself to do stuff, then turning around and coding and programming the next computer in line, and no human is in between making sure they are virtuous and honest.  And if any company stops for six months like the scientists want, then the company down the road they are competing with will get a six month head start and surpass them.

What will become of writers?  NYC Midnight, the place that runs the short story competition I went in a few times, have a new rule in their contests that states if they detect your story was written by AI you will be disqualified.  On 60 Minutes, the AI they used wrote very convincingly and I think what it wrote would be hard to sniff out as fraud.  Worse of course, is the fact some poor bastard will write, edit, re-write, rinse, repeat for weeks to make a good story and years to write a decent book.  But his AI counterpart can crank out a compelling story in a few seconds, and could literally write thousands of books in the same time.  If AI would be a good sport and sign itself as the author of whatever it writes, then no harm done I suppose, but the technology has already show itself to be a serial bullshitter.  And some guy could get his bot to write him a million dollar idea for Hollywood just for the asking, so why get all sweaty trying to be honest?

Maybe the biggest irony will be that the programmers who created AI will be the first job category eliminated by their invention.  It will be the real life equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster coming to life and choking his creator.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is still relevant today.  It’s amazing to me that book was written by a girl of 18 and was published in 1818, without any help from her tech.

It’s been over two months since I last wrote anything.  Not just in my blog, but anything including anywhere.  The reason is, I got told no one wants to read about my boring life. Even if that’s true, you ought not to run around telling people that, as it tends to be hurtful.  But I got to thinking about some of my favourite blogs – Feeling Funny, Snoozing on the Couch – and realized they are just about someone else’s boring life.  How about John Steinbeck?  Can you think of a better writer, he and his Nobel Prize?  Most of what he got famous for writing about was the Selinas Valley in California where he lived, and his books were filled with characters derived from his friends and neighbours. Most of his early books and stories occurred in places he could see from his kitchen window, with the notable exception of the beginning of Grapes of Wrath which starts in Oklahoma but moves on to Selinas later. I always sort of thought of this blog as something of a diary, maybe something my kids would read later to know me better, since I’m such a crappy communicator normally.  Maybe they could read exerts of this at my funeral, that might be fun. Well, this is my boring life and I’m paying to maintain this domain on line, so I’ll keep writing about it.  Besides, what else do I know to write about?  You probably don’t want me writing about your life, boring or otherwise.

What I really wish for is that whatever I write about is relatable. If I was Spiderman, and I was swinging from a web in a dense, urban setting catching criminals, I could write about it,  but it wouldn’t be relatable to anyone. It would be escapist fantasy, held together by a suspension of disbelief.  I mean, the premise would be far fetched, but as long as we all agree not to point out that the story contains a million glaring absurdities, we could just enjoy the ride.  I got over comic books early in life.  I used to read Superman, but one day I bought a Superman comic that was so stupid my brain snapped in half trying to suspend my disbelief.  What happened was Lois Lane’s house got blown up and Superman arrived just in time, caught every little fragment of debris and reassembled it so fast that Lois didn’t even notice her house had just exploded and Mr Spandex Alien had superglued it back together. Huh? You can’t even ask a 10 year old to agree to that bullshit. Like she didn’t even notice her vase had a new crack in it? Right away I started wondering if Lois had her arm blown off, let’s say, and how fast you’d have to do reattachment surgery for her not to even notice?!  Good God I hope the guy who wrote that quit his comic book job and found something more suitable to do, like rodeo clowning or cleaning public toilets.

If you’re still hanging in there, thanks for reading.  I think it helped to talk about all this, and hopefully I can get through this little snit and start writing normal stuff again.

 

Well here it is, another new year.  The last few have been busts, so let’s hope 2023 is better.  First big thing – at least for me – was I turned 60 a few days ago.  I had a lot of fun getting cool presents and going for dinner and to a hockey game, but I also did some reflecting.  I remember hearing that usually the 50’s are the best years of a man’s life.  By that time, the children have probably stopped being a burden, he is likely in a position of power at work and well paid, and he is typically still strong and healthy.  There are a million exceptions, but in an overview of trends, that’s what “they” say.  The term they used was something along the lines of “the apex of his villainy.”  So a few days ago I passed out of my 50’s into a decade everyone can agree is the beginning of the long decline.  I figure 60 is about the 2/3 mark of my life, barring any sudden accidents or the onset of any major diseases.  Oh well, I had a lot of fun in the first 60 years, so I can’t complain.

Ok, a subject I haven’t written about in quite a while: Burns Lake and the absurd amount of BC 50/50 lottery wins that take place there.  During the Covid years, the jackpots were generally lower than before and since, but Burns Lake kept on winning.  In 2022 the prizes were back to pre-Covid levels, so let’s add it up.  It may be that more money was won in Maple Ridge, as a store called JV Convenience won many times too, and it also won the largest prize of the year, $75,000 won on Super Bowl Sunday.  But Burns Lake still won way more than its share, winning 74 times for $171,881.50  That’s just over 5% of all the draws last year, split amongst 0.03% of the province, or about 166 times what it should have based solely on population.  There are some people spending big money up there!  I am still considering playing heavily for one month, understanding that my money and I might be waving goodbye to each other.

I do a lot of dumb stuff.  For some reason I have been getting invited to a weekly Zoom meeting of chess players.  I say for some reason because the group often contains several master level players, and I am a moderately strong club player, but certainly no master.  Anyway, they tolerate my feeble suggestions as we analyze positions and toss out move ideas.  Last night we were analyzing a position together when suddenly my cat started gagging.  I jumped up and tried to grab the cat to throw her outside where she would be free to barf at will, but the cat evaded capture. So I dashed back and forth, swearing like a sailor, trying to grab her while some of the province’s sharpest chess minds watched us on Zoom.  Finally the cat sprinted downstairs and threw up partially digested kibble on our newly steam-cleaned carpet, the wall, and the couch.  Tomorrow I am playing in a tournament with a couple of those players, so I may find myself explaining my odd behaviour, hoping they will invite me to future Thursday night chess chats.

I mentioned gifts earlier.  Well here is the grandaddy of great gifts: a refurbished chair from the Montreal Forum, built in 1924.  My son saved this chair from a house fire and spent a year and a half cleaning it up and turning the clock back many decades.  How many times did the person who sat here see the Stanley Cup won?  I have to bolt it to a base because it’s a tipping hazard, especially if I am enjoying some hockey juice.  At my advanced age, falling from this chair might cause bodily harm.