Author: eightbeer_shakespeare@outlook.com

Not long ago I got my next writing assignment from NYC Midnight.  I was horrified to see the genre was Fantasy, and the subject was Mutiny.  The kicker for me was I had to include a character that was an Imitator.  What the hell does that mean?  I had eight days to write a 2500 word story using those guidelines, and I spent the first two days pouting and complaining about the cruel twist of bad luck that put me in group 151 with those rules.  So I named a character Flamel the Imitator, but he did nothing to imitate anyone, in person or on stage.  I hope I don’t get disqualified for failing to make my Imitator do anything remotely like duplicating.  Maybe all I really needed was to include a photocopier in my story, but so few good fantasy stories occur in the modern office.  I also picked a pretty dumb name for my story, in my opinion.  I had been looking at it day and night for a week and I just wanted it to go away, and the lame title reflects that.  Since a reader might wonder if the people get away, calling it “Getting Away” is almost like calling it “Spoiler Alert.”  Anyway here it is (it is very long for this blog, so get yourself a drink.)

***************************************************

Getting Away

The tall, lanky knight, Guillaume, and his fellow knight, the stocky red-headed Renaud strode the misty waterfront of Narbonne, surveying the harbour.  They scanned all the ships, looking for the familiar white sail with the bold red cross.  A few white sails were furled on their masts, but a quick investigation proved none to be Templar vessels.  Without a ship from the Order, they would have to find another ride out of France.

The stronghold at Montsegur had been sacked and looted the day before.  The knights escaped with their two pages.  Flamel the Imitator, an alchemist and mystic, and Georges, the curator of artefacts from the castle, had joined them in their run to the coast.  The armies of the Pope and Louis IX would be looking for them as soon as they discovered the relic missing. The attack on the castle had not been an attack on the Templars, but the Order knew what was concealed there and dispatched these knights to Montegur to keep it from the attackers.

“Well Renaud, it looks as though we don’t have an easy way out of here.  Any thoughts?”

“Even if there was a ship from the Order, they would likely have been engaged in some shipping and had no time to waste on our troubles.  We will have to hire a boat and crew.”

Guillaume spotted a small boat, a single-masted  cog, rocking gently against the wharf with one occupant watching them intently.  “Hello captain!  I see you are not busily loading or unloading, would you be for hire? My fellow knight and our small entourage are in need of flight.”

“Never any good comes from dealing with you bullies.  My crew just sailed from Antioch and they have ten days off at home before we depart again.  It would need to be a substantial offer to lure my men away from their homes, and an extra bundle for the trouble you and those long swords are probably bringing along for the ride.”

“There would be no reason for us to invite trouble onto you or your crew.  We do have an urgent matter that we  must leave to attend to , but I assure you we can give you a fair price for passage to Valencia.”

“Valencia, eh?  That would be two days each way plus a day to rest and feed there.  That cuts my men’s time at home in half.  I have a crew of four, so I think 100 deniers is a fair amount to pry my devout crew from their beloved families.”

“100 deniers?” Renaud interjected. “We simply want to leave France, not buy your boat and deck it with silver.  50 would be generous and fair.”

“100 is my price. Feel free to keep looking at other crews, but I know there is no one else for hire.”

The knights lowered their voices.  “it’s too high, he clearly thinks because we wear the tunics of the Order our purses are bulging with coins,” Guillaume whispered.

“We have that and more, but I’m sure his mangy crew is laying with the local working girls or sleeping off wine in some gutter.  Pious family men?  Ha!  He should go ask this crew of his. If my guess is right, they would love the extra pay and return to the gutter for five more days after the trip.”

Renaud summoned the curator into the discussion.  “Georges, could you please walk the rest of the harbour and see if you can find anyone to hire for less.  Your lack of Templar insignia may be of some benefit.”

He raised his voice again, “Say Captain, why don’t you at least go to your crew and tell them the offer.  60 deniers to Valencia, and we’ll throw in another 5 deniers each.”

“I’ll go and ask, I am a fair man.  Come back before sunset and I will have their answer.”

The knights and their pages, Flamel, and two chests of luggage found a tavern nearby and ordered some fish soup and bread.  Renaud nudged Guillaume and pointed to the back of the inn where the captain was shaking two drunks at a table.  They laughed heartily.  Family men indeed!

They saw Georges wandering around outside.  Renaud’s page ran out and brought him into the tavern.  “Well, Georges, did you find anyone else for hire?”

“No, everyone is very busy around here, they seem to think we had good fortune finding one boat.”

Georges and Flamel sat quietly.  Georges vacantly stirred his soup, and the mystic leaned back with his eyes closed.  As relieved as they were to escape Montegur with their lives, they knew most of their friends and neighbours had not been as fortunate.

“Why did you say Valencia?” Renaud asked, picking a large crumb out of his red beard.

“I thought picking somewhere not too far away might help our chances.”

“I see.  Well the Catholic majesties of Spain will be more inclined to side with Louis on the Montegur business.  I don’t expect a warm welcome there either.”

“We need only to get that boat away from land.  We need to go a lot farther than Valencia to get the Grail safely hidden.”  He took a quick look around to see if anyone nearby had heard his careless mention of the Grail, but was glad to see everyone was focussed on their own affairs.

Late in the afternoon they made their way to the waterfront.  The captain was on his boat already, gathering sailing gear.  “Hey Templars.  My crew will take the offer of 60 plus 5 each.  We can be ready by daybreak.”

Guillaume tried not to look too relieved.  “Fine, my good man, we will see you then.”

They spent the night tucked in a cherry orchard between the trees.  When the knights awoke, they were alone.  They opened a chest and made sure the Grail was still there and intact.  The pages returned shortly with some bread and fruit, and everyone gathered to eat.  Light was spreading across the cloudless spring sky as they made their way to the docks,  gulls screeching overhead.  The Mediterranean was almost still.

“Good morning, travellers,” the captain said with more than a hint of sarcasm.  He and three sunburnt but muscular men were readying the ship for sail.  “We have enough food for you for the trip, but we’re not running a hotel here, so I hope you find sleeping in the hold to your satisfaction.  Oh, and we’d like our money up front so there’s no funny business later.  Luckily for you one of my men can’t make the trip, so you have just saved yourselves 5 deniers.”

Renaud’s page stepped forward and counted out 75 deniers on a barrel top.  The captain scooped the coins up and handed a 5 to each man.  The last of the provisions and cargo was hauled aboard and stored.  Heavy ropes were unwound from the bollards and the ship eased away from the dock.
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There was very little talking.  Flamel and Georges conversed quietly at the rear of the boat while the knights watched the water and the receding land to their right.  The pages found a spot on the rear upper deck and played dice. The crew skilfully tacked the sail to manoeuvre the boat forward, but it was calm and progress was slow.  Lulled by the gentle pitching of the ship and suddenly exhausted from the relief of being away from France, the knights gradually fell asleep on the deck benches.

In the early afternoon they awoke.  Guillaume saw one of the sailors watching him.  “Hey, how are we doing?  Can you judge what progress we’ve made?’

“We’re still off the coast of France.  There’s next to no wind.  At this speed it will be at least three days to Valencia.”

“Thank you.”  Guillaume stretched and decided to track down the mystic, finding it slightly unnerving to walk on the rolling deck.  Flamel was still above deck, drinking in the beauty of his surroundings.  “Say, mystic, is there anything you could do to speed this trip up a little?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”  He closed his eyes and lifted his arms to shoulder height, turning his palms to the sky.  At once a strong breeze blew and those men standing stumbled to regain balance.  The sail filled and the boat lurched ahead.   They could hear the crew shouting to each other over the wind, suddenly busy after a sleepy morning of sailing.  The captain came out from under his covered steering compartment and had a quick conference with his men.  The bow of the boat crashed through white waves and spray soaked the decks.  The boat bucked ahead, making it hard for the land dwellers to move around.

Guillaume smiled at Flamel.  He made his way forward, holding the mast for support.  The sailor he spoke to earlier was controlling the angle of the sail with ropes.  “How about this wind?  Are we making better time now?”

“Yes sir, this is much more work but a damn sight faster.  If this holds up, we will be back in the tavern in Narbonne tomorrow night,”  he said with a wink.

So the afternoon passed in commotion and haste.  They passed an outcrop of rocks far to their right and the captain tilled the rudder slightly, changing bearing to almost due south, passing the traditional border of Spain.  When the land fell away to the west, they cut toward it, hugging the coast at a safe distance.  As night was falling they saw the lights of Barcelona ahead.  The boat headed toward it but stopped in shallow water, furled the sails and dropped anchor for the night.  Strangely for the crew, the winds abated abruptly.  There were comfortable below deck cabins for the captain and crew, but the travellers retired to the hold.  The floor was uneven and wet, and the cargo area was draughty and completely dark.  They slept but not well, waking often to wonder if a noise was ship boards creaking against one another, or rats.

They awoke in a press of men.  Everyone was tired and sore.  It was before dawn on another clear day when they clamoured to the lower deck in their damp clothes, breath billowing around them.  Soon the crew and captain appeared above deck with bread and cheese and everyone ate.

“We got lucky with a good tail wind yesterday, but today looks calm,” the captain mused. “We might make Valencia by nightfall if we get going soon.  Barcelona is a nice town,” he said, waving a bun in its direction, “but we haven’t got time to be tourists today.”

The anchors were winched up and the sail was unfurled.  It filled with cool air and the boat began to skim forward.  Guillaume motioned Renaud to join him in private conversation on the front upper deck.  “We have to make our move early so we can have some hours to run in case there’s trouble.”  Renaud didn’t react, but he knew exactly what his fellow Templar was suggesting.

“We will need to recruit the help of at least a couple of the crew, unless you are suddenly a sailor.”

Guillaume nodded.  “How many deniers do we have left?  There’s a chance they could be paid to stay with us for a while.”

“My page is clutching the purse, but I would estimate we have perhaps 450 left.  Enough for a fat bribe for a common sailor.”

“I have never dispossessed a man of his boat before, so you will have to help me.  As a feisty redhead, this is more your type of action.”

The wind picked up a little as the morning passed.  Flamel smiled to himself as he found the right gradual amount to increase the wind without almost knocking people over like the day before.  Georges sat with the pages and told stories about his former home, and the pages taught him how to play chess from an ivory set from one of the chests.  Meanwhile the two Templars waited uneasily.

Guillaume caught Renaud’s glance and nodded.  It was time.  He shouted to the sailors, “Come here now!  We must speak.”  The puzzled sailors gathered around them.

“We need to go a lot farther than Valencia, as I’m sure you have guessed.  But we cannot sail a ship. Who among you is willing to remain with us through Gibraltar, and for what price?”

He saw the captain storming toward them.  The knights drew their weapons.  “You sir, have a choice to make.  We are taking your ship, and you can steer ashore and survive, and we will pay you for your ship, or you can resist and we will feed the fish with your entrails.  How do you choose?”

The captain panted angrily. “I knew you bastard thugs were no good!  This boat is all I have in the world, but I would prefer to remain alive.  Just know that if we ever cross paths again and you aren’t hiding behind a sword, I’ll serve your testicles to the harbour rats.”

“And you men?” Renaud said, “Who will stay to sail us through Gibraltar for 50 deniers, and who will wade ashore with your captain?”  A young sailor stepped forward and spat in his face and was run through with Renaud’s sword and fell gasping on the deck.  The other two sailors backed away.

” I will stay.”  “I also.”

“Then get back at the sail and you the rudder.  Captain, put that man in the water and stay where I can see you.”  The dying man was rolled off the ship with help from the pages.

Guillaume instructed them to approach the shore.  When they were close enough, they gave the captain 50 more deniers and made him jump.  Swimming was difficult with pockets full of silver, but they watched him drag himself up the beach, miserable but alive for another day, and relatively wealthy.

Flamel raised his palms again and the ship skipped ahead at high speed.  They had many hours to get ahead of whatever trouble the captain might try to unleash on them.  They sailed south but moved slowly east as far from land as they could while remaining in sight.  In the afternoon they passed the island of Ibiza which was level with Valencia, but they continued.  The crew who remained cooperated with their new masters, and as poor sailors they were eager to work for owners with money.  Guiding the ship was hard for two men, but they instructed the pages who were soon passably competent.

A day past Gibraltar they took advantage of the more Templar-welcoming nature of Portugal and ventured ashore in Lisbon for supplies.  Flamel purchased a broken lead mold from a blacksmith shop which he would make chemically imitate gold for the journey. Hiding the Grail was still weeks away, but its safety was now almost assured.

************************************************

Well that was it.  You probably needed that nap (or maybe you need one now.)  My last two stories are both about violent French people from years gone by.  I must be in a rut.  I’m not crazy about the story at all, but I hope that I don’t get called upon to write anything like that again any time soon.  I find out what the judges think of it in April, which is a long time to feel apprehensive about it.

My birthday went by a few days ago.  I worked that day, so I had to pick my way through the icy parking lot to my truck.  A few metres short of reaching my vehicle, I slipped on a patch of ice and landed in a heap on the pavement.  After several hours in the hospital, I found out I have a separated shoulder and a chipped collar bone.  I have been coping with one arm in a sling – thank God it’s the left one! – but some things aren’t solved, like how to shave.  I look like the Uni-Bomber now with some straggly grey whiskers cropping up around the front part of my head.  If I stood up against a building, people would give me change, it’s that bad.  Anyway, it’s for two weeks and I’m sure the time will fly by.

I entered two more writing contests as my new year’s resolution is still front of mind.  I just submitted the first one.  It was a 53-word story that had to be about two of something, or a pair.  53 words is way too short, but it sure keeps you from rambling.  The prize in this contest is the publishers of this prime number magazine, “53”, send you a book and maybe a subscription to their magazine.  There’s no money, but it would still count as pay in my reckoning.

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A Cold Diversion

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Yves fell across a log.  Philippe hesitated, then stomped on his brother’s leg, breaking it.  “Adieu, mon frere!”   Now, time to escape!

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It’s a violent little story, but I wanted something with some action.  The next contest starts tomorrow, and round one is a 2500 word story that I have eight days to write and submit.  After each round, the top five writers move on to the next round, while the remaining entrants are eliminated.  There are four rounds, and each round the stories and time limits get shorter.  In the final round, the assignment is to write a 1250 word story in 24 hours.  The final round is in June.  Doing this will be a pleasant diversion for a clumsy dumbass with a bad shoulder.  I hope to make it through to at least the second round, but you just never know.  When it’s written and submitted I will likely post it on here as a part of my blog’s motto to bring you bargain bin literature, like the adventures of those whacky, fun-loving French Revolutionaries.  By the way, I think Philippe gets away.  He will slow down his trackers quite a bit as they deal with Yves and his broken leg.  Yves’ troubles are just getting started as he gets dragged back to Paris to be guillotined, while his treacherous brother escapes to Spain where he lives a long life.  I made these people up, so their fates are whatever I imagine them to be.  Mwahaha!

Happy New Year, blog people!  It’s time to make a resolution or two, if you’re so inclined.  Every year I try to resolve to do something, but I rarely do it right on  January 1st.  Quite often I don’t land on the winning idea until February or so.  Anyway, over my Christmas holidays I finished a course I had to do for work, so I am (probably temporarily) unencumbered with outside obligations.  And the chess club has been shut down which frees up one more night a week, and my favourite hockey teams are being decimated by illness which frees up more nights.  So this leads me to the big resolution for this year: write more, and maybe in a biblical-level miracle, get paid for it.  Assignment #1 will be to submit a tiny little story to the Press 53 people who require a 53 word story about a “pair of something” and a 53 word biography in case I win.  I’ll let you know how that turns out.  My goal of being paid would be fulfilled, in my mind, if I win a dollar or a magazine subscription or really anything, so I’m not setting the bar too high.

Our youngest little bundle of joy has returned home to live with us for a few months while she finishes her schooling and then leaps from the nest again to find enriching work.  She has brought along her 4 year old son who has given our house a burst of fun, enthusiasm, and non-stop questions, often asked at decibel levels that are sure to share our joy with the neighbours or set off nearby car alarms.  Big upside, besides the elevated levels of joy: she cooked a vegetable dish tonight that did not make me wish to pull out my tongue and scrape off my taste buds in self preservation.  It was good, and I will be watching and taking notes next time she makes it.  Yesterday I made Greek food and nothing turned out quite as I was hoping.  I think a good cook should be able to visualize the meal in terms of taste, texture and display, and then replicate that vision over by the stove somewhere.  Sometimes I pull it off, but not usually.

I got a cheque in the mail while I was off during Christmas, so I treated myself to some new golf clubs.  I bought a set of irons that included eight clubs – six irons and two wedges.  So I put on my checkered pants and lame hat with a dingle ball on it (no I didn’t!) and headed for the driving range to try them out.  My first order of business was to hit ten or so balls with each club to get a good fix on how far they go, so the next time I know I’m 100 yards away, I won’t select a club that goes 50 or 150.  I ordered up a bucket of 130, which I think would be the number of strokes in a typical round at this point.  I hit the ball in every conceivable direction including a couple that went straight, but my crowning achievement was letting go of my driver and having it helicopter about 60 yards to my left.  I had to run out past other golfers and retrieve my club, babbling “sorry, sorry, don’t shoot, sorry…”  And today I am so stiff I can hardly function.  Even my goddamn thumb is stiff!  I don’t believe there is a case to collect worker’s compensation for self-inflicted muscle tightness, so I reluctantly toddled off to work and tried to minimize how much complaining I did.  As for the clubs: I will keep trying, for I know I’m too cheap to let all that money I spent go to waste.

 
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I got the results of the writing contest from the NYC Midnight people, and I didn’t move on.  I was prepared for scathing comments and disappointment, but it wasn’t what happened.  Only the top 10 in each group go on to the next round, and I was Honourable Mention #3, so essentially 13th out of 50.  I can live with that.  Three judges give their feedback, both positive and negative.  All three judges liked one sentence in the story – if you read it, it’s where I say “It’s just me grandma, no more renters to scare.”  They all said that told a lot of backstory.  They all also said they needed some closure on whether her ghost moves on or continues to skulk around in the old house.  To that I say: who has time in 250 words?  Besides, it’s written in first person, and my character sure as hell doesn’t know!

Christmas is nearly here again, so we spent the afternoon trudging around the mall, losing each other, standing in lines.  It snowed last night so it looks like a Hallmark card outside, but the reality is it also rained, so the pretty snow is actually a four inch high pile of slush.  I’m already done with winter and it hasn’t officially started yet.  God, I’m such a baby about the cold!  I want afternoon temperatures to be at least 15 C every day, accompanied by a glimpse of sun at the bare minimum.  Slush and 3 C can kiss my ass.  I heard the average temperature on earth’s surface is 15 C, so it’s not like I’m asking for special treatment.  Where I live the average temperature for the year is just below 10 C, so it tends to be a little more chilly (and damp) than the global mean.  I guess I could always find a hotter place to move, but I don’t really want to.

Tonight, the latest flavour of Covid, Omicron, has postponed all the hockey games I was hoping to watch.  My Canucks have won six in a row, so I was looking forward to them playing.  The evolution of Covid seems to be that it’s finding ways to become more transmissible yet less lethal.  Omicron does only about 10% of the damage to the lungs that previous variants did, so less people are dying and fewer are even getting sick.  Maybe it will evolve into a seasonal cold that will stay with us from here on?  Who wasn’t hoping for more illnesses to enjoy?

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Merry Christmas!  Enjoy the season as much as possible.  Soon we begin the slow march back toward warmth and light.

I entered the NYC Midnight Microfiction contest again this year.  I skipped last year, but did surprisingly well the year before.  My assignment this time was in the genre of ghost story, using the activity of speaking into a microphone, and including the word save.  I wrote a story and got it submitted in time, but I don’t think it was very good, and the others who read it agreed.  Ghost stories aren’t really my thing, and this one-day writing assignment could not have fallen on a worse day.  My daughter and her husband have been staying with us for a couple weeks, as his mother was terminally ill.  She, of course, died the morning I had to write about the undead, which I found suddenly inappropriate, although I never had him read the story and he never offered to.  Then the dryer died, although I did nothing to shield its feelings from my story, and its ghost has not been a problem yet, it was a distraction as well.  So there are my alibis, excuses, complaints for another year.  I’ll find out what the judges think in a month or so.  Here it is, in all its mediocrity.

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Moving On

I crossed the unkempt lawn and squeezed my way through the plywood-covered doorway, into the boarded up house.  I fumbled for a button on my voice recorder and whispered into the microphone, “In grandma’s house, very dark.”

My heart was pounding as I felt my way to the hallway and turned left toward the room she had died in.  “Hey grandma, just you and me, no more renters to scare.”  I opened the bathroom door.  In the deep gloom I could see the room was destroyed, and it reeked of mold.

Suddenly, there was an icy breath on my neck and I panicked and jumped, hitting my back awkwardly on the wall.  The grey outline of an old woman stood before me, “They’re coming to take this away,” she said.   Her voice was soft, and I wasn’t sure if I was hearing her or the words were simply appearing in my mind.

It took a few seconds to compose myself before I stammered breathlessly “You weren’t afraid to die, why didn’t you move on?”

“This is my home.”

My knees trembled from the adrenaline. “Yes, but it’s over.  It’s time for you to accept that you’re dead. Even the house can’t be saved.  Go find family, be at peace.”

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There is a certain feeling of this being a nearly-true story, as I have considered going into my grandparents’ boarded up old house and having this conversation with my grandma’s ghost, who evidently is still hanging around.  One of the criticisms I got on my story is that it’s too personal.  Might be true.

Back in the summer we went to Kamloops to hang out with the kids for a weekend.  On the way up we stopped in Merritt for lunch with our daughter and her son.  The waitress brought the cute little three and a half year old a Darth Vader pencil case to play with, which I of course stole from him and squirreled away in the Death Star, aka my car.  Don’t worry, he had other toys to keep him amused and didn’t miss it.  He doesn’t read or write yet, so the joys of using Galactic Empire office supplies was going to waste on him for now.

I am doing another course for work now.  It is a course on water works (yawwwn…) that I have to answer questions and mail them back to Sacramento, California.  The fine people at California State University will never guess that the little pencil marks on the sheet are from Darth’s pencil!  Mwahaha!

Fall kind of sucks sometimes.  It is dark, it has been raining for days on end, and everyone is busy busy busy.  Oh, and I cooked chicken thighs tonight using a cajun spice I purchased at the dollar store, and it just tasted like salt.  Not really fall-related, but still it’s a cautionary tale for anyone buying bargain spices.

Until next time, stay safe, warm and dry.  Time is whizzing by, so in no time it will be spring again and we can go outside and enjoy the world.

Well that’s just about it for another summer.  It was long and hot, and now that we’ve moved to a townhouse and don’t have a yard, it was mostly an indoor summer.  Sure, I still work outside, but after I came home at night I was lucky to go out again.  At its peak it was 42 C or so, around 108 F, and it was too hot to do anything.  Then things got combustible and fires sprung up around the province, burning the town of Lytton down at its climax.  Today I am wearing long pants for the first time in at least two months, so clearly it is cooling off.  Another weird thing about this summer was how little socializing we did.  Mostly that was about Covid, but it was also to do with our new-found lack of entertaining space.

I watched a documentary the other day called The Social Dilemma, which showed how social media sites like Facebook keep feeding you stories and videos that are similar to ones you already watched.  Sounds innocent, but the premise of the show was that if you are consuming misinformation, you will get videos that reinforce those points of view.  After a while, a certain amount of the people will have been so bombarded with conspiracies and dangerous ideas that their world view will have been sucked down a vortex of bullshit from which they will never escape.  I see evidence of this every time I read a news article about politics – the comments reveal that people can’t even have civil conversations any more.  The comment threads devolve into name calling and worse.  Of course, nowadays the first order of business when beginning a political discussion is to call your opponents idiots.  In the debate between conservatives and liberals, one side tends to spell better than the other, but both are inflexibly rooted to their position.

The conspiracies are nearly all from a  conservative point of view.  Democrats in the US are “libtards” and satanic pedophiles, while in Canada Trudumb and the Liberals are trying to make Canada a communist dictatorship.  Vaccines are poison and a plot to enrich scheming pharmaceutical companies, and billionaire wimps like Bill Gates in his preppy little sweater vest.  Covid is a scare tactic to keep people locked away and controlled.  Wearing a mask is a sign you are a docile idiot who can be led around.  On and on it goes.  I must be of a sensitive nature, because the bickering bums me out.  I want to follow the news and read comments, but I might as well go open a sewer manhole and watch turds go by.  And if you can operate a keyboard, even a little, (and, sadly, most people can) your opinion is probably as valid as any “expert.”

Fall will be here soon, and after the September 20 election I can go back to distracting myself with beer and hockey, interspersed with golf, eating and petting the cat.  What Cletus and his chickens think about the state of freedom of speech or immigration can just fade away like the brownness of the lawn.  As for the election: I don’t really care who wins, as long as they do a good job.

In regards to masks and offensive stuff like that, remember: To be a decent member of society, sometimes you have to put the needs of society above your own.  It’s a big ask for some people who were raised to think compromising is giving in.
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The Olympic Games just recently ended, and I was looking at the medal standings when an idea struck me.  The USA wound up with 113 medals, about 4.7 times as many as Canada’s 24, but they have about 9 times as many people, which means a population of say a million people would produce about twice as many medals for Canada.  Of course, reality is never quite that simple – the USA could have sent thousands of athletes instead of the 613 they sent to Tokyo, and they might have won a lot more medals.  Same could definitely be said for China.  But I decided to take a look at the games as a whole, and to compare how many people there are in a country versus how many medals that country won.  The smaller the number, the more bang for the buck that country is getting.  And the best ratio of population to athletic success for Tokyo 2020?  San Marino!, which is now officially the smallest nation to ever medal at the Olympics.

Tiny San Marino has only 33,900 people, but it won three medals.  That’s one medal for every 11,300 people – far and away the best ratio in the world this year.  Second place goes to Bermuda, population 62,000, winning one medal, but this appears an asterisk-worthy fluke, as only one medal could have gone either way.  Same with a few others near the top like Grenada, but San Marino won three, too many to merely be discounted as a fluke.  Not bad for the country that ranks 218th in world population.  Most of the top performers are island nations and Europeans.  Here are the top countries in people per medal won:

1. San Marino                      11,300 (3 medals)
2. Bermuda                          62,000 (1)
3. Grenada                           110,00 (1)
4. Bahamas                         195,000 (2)
5. New Zealand                  240,000 (20)
6. Jamaica                           333,000 (9)

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7. Slovenia                          420,000 (5)
8. Fiji                                    450,000 (2)
9. Netherlands                   475,000 (36)
10. Hungary                         480,000 (20)

Canada wound up 29th in the world with one medal per 1.57 million people.  New Zealand won 4 medals less than us with about 1/8 the population.  The worst performer per population was Pakistan, the world’s fifth largest country, whose team, picked from 220.9 million people, failed to win any medals for a score of infinity.  It should be noted they probably have more pressing issues to address back home than tossing shot puts around in shorts, but like life itself, this list is not meant to be fair.  China put on a great show and wound up second in the medal total with 88, but that works out to one medal per 16.35 million people.  Again, they had to limit how many athletes they sent and for sure they left many deserving souls off the team, but in terms of numbers this looks quite bad.

San Marino is in an interesting place.  If I find myself with time on my hands in Italy, I may pay it a visit.  It claims to be the oldest existing nation, founded in 301 AD, and is the world’s oldest constitutional republic.  It is also one of the world’s richest countries per capita, and one that can clearly afford the luxury of a well trained trap shooting team.  Trap shooting accounted for two of their medals in Tokyo.

It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled my shit together and wrote anything.  A casual observer might imagine that I’ve been too busy, just can’t find the time, etc.  But they would be wrong.  I have had more idle time than anyone should ever have, and yet I look at social media, pet the cat, stare into the fridge, look out the window, anything but be busy.  We sold our house, so the next few months will be about packing up to move and also doing a course at BCIT which they tell me will take 1 – 1.5 hours every day.  Then I will be too busy to write anything, now I’m just being a lazy lump.

Not long ago I went for a massage with my 15 year old grandson.  It’s the third year in a row that this was his birthday present, so it’s becoming a tradition.  When we went into the locker room to change into our robes, I noticed the kid now has hairier legs than I do.  Mind you, it isn’t hard to have hairier legs than me, you almost just have to be a mammal.  I hear about negative body images, and it’s usually in relation to girls and the pressure they feel to live up to the beauty ideals of society, but let me tell you, I have some of that too.  I am hairless to the point of being almost alien.  I have even been accused of waxing myself.  I used to have a couple lonesome hairs on my chest but my abdominal wall popped out of my belly button one day, and the corrective measures taken to repair it involved mowing down my few sparse blades of grass.  The week after the massage I started physiotherapy, which of course meant I had to take off my shirt every visit and sit there embarrassed, looking like one of those bald Egyptian cats.  When I was younger my self defense was to call myself “highly evolved,” since in evolutionary terms, mankind is getting taller and less hairy all the time.  Maybe I could start a hair club for men-type business that caters to us people who look like they were treading water in a vat of Neet hair remover?  I could plant little hair plugs all over them, run an ad on TV showing hot girls going crazy for some newly hairy guys, and get rich.  It’s about time the beauty industry started picking on men.

I see people on the news almost every day who refuse to wear a mask when they are asked to.  I really don’t understand their objections, as wearing a mask is a very small inconvenience (I forget I have mine on), and has been shown to slow the spread of diseases, evidenced by the fact that this year the flu has been all but eradicated.  One study I saw said it brought the R number down 30%.  The R is the expected number of people you will infect if you get COVID.  When it’s over 1, the disease is spreading and below 1 it’s dying out.  30% doesn’t sound like much but if it would be 1.4 without it, it would be 0.98 with it – a huge difference.  In five generations of infecting people, 1.4 would be about 8 sick people, 0.98 would be 0.8.  Anyway, news stories about anti-mask people almost always end with the non mask wearer losing his mind in anger and assaulting someone.  Pretty convincing argument technique!  I hear people say they are reluctant to get the vaccine too.  I looked at the Canadian data so far, and there have been fewer than 200 serious reactions to the shot in around 1.8 million doses.  That’s one in every 9,000 or so – a success rate of 99.989%  If you are someone who knows they will react, I get it, other wise it seems pretty safe so far.  I will be getting my shot as soon as it is offered to me, and I hope most people do as well.  I’m sick of staying home and not seeing anyone, but not so sick of it that I will defy medical advice and go out before it’s safe.

Hang in there and stay well.  Let’s have ourselves a good summer.

I am officially bored of sitting in the house. Today is my dad’s birthday, and in any other year we would be getting together as a family for a dinner to celebrate.  I miss him and my uncle, which is my fault mostly as they only live about a half hour away.  There are other people I miss too, who I never see.  Me being a poor socializer is a sad reality, and this is a terrible time to be that way.

Today is a typical mid-winter BC coast day: rainy, windy and grey.  I have no where to go and I am sort of restlessly looking for food to eat and something to do.  Fact is, I got books for Christmas I could read, and there is always house work to do, but when you start doing nothing it gathers momentum.

Happy new year!  I see a lot of people are happy to see 2020 leave.  There were many reasons not to like it – the pandemic, street protests galore, rampant examples of public foolishness about masks and phantom election thefts.  I have seen where some people have said it was the “worst year ever,” but, while it might have been the worst in a while, it would need to have gone a long way to be worse than almost any year during the world wars or the black plague.  2021 should be a year of hope, and a year that brightens with time as the vaccinations start to rid us of the risk of COVID-19 and set us free again.  This hope and the lightening and warming of the world in spring may run in parallel, sort of the opposite trajectory of last year.  Maybe the family birthdays this summer will be back to normal?  I sure hope so.

I have a little bone to pick with the site that my blog appears on, Bloglovin.  I have written a few blogs that have not shown up there, and I see by the analytics that no one has read them.  That might be what they deserve, who knows?, but I wish they would at least post them.  I wrote Bloglovin twice and got no reply.  I think it may have been a problem with the ‘theme’ – the actual lay out of the site – which was out of date and not supported by their programming language.  That’s why the site looks different than before.  I kind of liked the old lay out better, but if this works, then it’s improved by default.  In a way, this post is a trial run to see if this gets out to the people who follow it.  We shall see…
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Happy 2021 to everyone!  Better times are on the way, and the first beer’s on me when things get back to normal.  Cheers.

Well the Christmas holidays are here again.  I am pretty excited to have ten days off for the price of using three holiday days.  I plan to rest, drink moderately, and spend a lot of time looking out the window, as non-essential travel is banned for our own good.  Most of our traditions are out the window this year, but it was reassuring to see that I have accidentally continued one tradition we seem to have: small household disasters.

It started several years ago when we lived in our townhouse in Cloverdale.  That year around December 22 our hot water tank died, so we had to scrape together several hundred dollars we didn’t have laying around for a new one.  It could have been worse, as sometimes hot water tanks don’t just quit working but die in the hot water tank equivalent of a supernova, where they split open and flood the house.  Ours just died peacefully in its sleep, but its timing made it Christmas disaster number one.

After we moved into our old house in Abbotsford we started having trouble with the water service line.  Honestly, we had a lot of trouble with a lot of things, but only a couple of them got busy and wrecked Christmas.  We had already dug up parts of the water line and made repairs to the old copper line, but it was Xmas day that it went with a flourish.  A big wet spot had showed itself on the lawn – surely another leak had started in the line – and this time our daughters ran for shovels and dug it up.  There they were in lovely dresses and makeup, digging up the muddy ground.  We didn’t finish the repair that day, we had presents to open and a dinner to ravage, but that time I replaced the whole 40 feet of old copper from the road to the house when the weather warmed up.

The next catastrophe occurred a year or two later, and it began with a phone call I got at work around the 20th from our daughter Lizz.  She told me water was coming out of the ceiling and running down the light fixture in her bedroom.  It turned out that about 60 years of kitchen sludge had completely plugged a drain pipe which had came apart above her ceiling.  For this adventure I had to remove about 20 feet of ceiling from the basement and cut out all the old drain pipe.  The pipe was clogged like a fat man’s artery.  There was a tiny little hole through which all of our dishwater had been seeping out, but it finally got too much.  Christmas afternoon as guests were arriving for dinner, they were greeted by my two legs poking out from under the sink, trying to patch together a working drain.

The next year my half-ass plumbing skills came back to bite me.  The drain I laid the year before wasn’t sloped properly, and the new pipe was already full of fatty surprises.  Of course it chose December 24th to totally stop draining.  Luckily Dorothy worked with a guy who was a plumber and who happened to live near by, so with one call I had expert help.  All day Christmas he helped me install a whole new drain and, most importantly, slope it so there weren’t any low spots where the crap could build up.  My helper even refused to be paid for his help!  It was awful, but there certainly was a silver lining.

Another year or so later we decided to renovate the basement.  (Of course, by “we” I mean Dorothy.)  It didn’t start out as a holiday-tainting event, but it wound up that way.  We scheduled in people to frame, drywall, do electrical and paint.  Everything was going along well, then a flu came around and everyone got sick and cancelled days.  The job got further and further behind.  My Christmas that year was spent pulling down old drywall, feeling sick but having to carry on.  I picked at my turkey dinner with drywall dust all over me and bits of plaster in my hair.

Fast forward to this year’s disaster.  On the 21st I was drying some dishes when I came to a canister we had stored rice in.  As I dried it, it started to slip.  It had a heavy glass lid that fit snugly on top with a wire hinge.  I fumbled the top for a second, then it fell.  I stuck my foot out to break its fall and hopefully stop it from shattering, but the actual result of what I did could best be described as me giving it a robust drop kick into the front of our glass stove which smashed into about fifty million little glass cubes.  The lid suffered no damage at all.  You might me surprised at how much glass there is on the front of a glass stove.  We swept up about five pounds of the carnage into a box for safe disposal.  Then we picked out more glass, swept some more, vacuumed, swept again, moved things and repeated.  Luckily the oven still works and the heavy inner glass door seems to insulate really well, so anyone with a poorly developed sense of danger who might touch the door with the oven on, probably wouldn’t get burned.  I say luckily because that is where the turkey is going to get cooked in a day or two.
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We are hoping that’s the only disaster in store for us this year, but we missed a few years, so maybe we’re due for two?  I am also hoping for a couple other things.  One is, of the last three posts I written, only one of them got published on Bloglovin’, so I’m hoping this bucks the trend and gets put where people can see it.  And most importantly, I hope anyone still reading this has a great Christmas, free of messes and chaos, and that everyone stays healthy and keeps enough sanity to get back to enjoying life when the opportunity comes.