Category: Random Stories

An Oddly Empty Employment History

I’m back.  I did a laminate floor in my office room, and the result was I threw out my back, so little things like walking upright and sleeping well trended downward, so to speak.  It’s Saturday night and I haven’t had any beer, which certainly puts this last day of the week in a select company.  Normally, unless I have been hospitalized or laid out with a severe illness, I am having a few pops.  It’s a cycle of work and self-abuse I got into as a millworker and have never seriously sought to change.  My intention was to write a short story for a contest coming up, but, as usual, I’m searching for an idea.  I decided to trade beer drinking for productivity, but sadly I don’t have either.  I found the contest I want, and I have met the guy who is going to judge it, so I thought I might have a teeny advantage as I (very slightly) know my audience.

The Canadian general election is coming up in 8 days, and it is an important one.  We have to decide as a nation who is going to stand up to the madman, the Child King of Washington.  I won’t go into great detail because anyone interested could find a better source of election info than me, and also I have family members who don’t vote the way I do, and who I’d rather not argue with, as it makes get-togethers awkward.  Anyway, the tidbit I want to share is about the two main combatants in the race: Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, and Liberal leader Mark Carney.  Either will make a competent Prime Minister.  I looked at their resumes – by which I mean I looked at Wikipedia – and found a rather striking contrast in their work histories.  Carney studied at Harvard on a scholarship, and later got a PhD in economics from Oxford.  He worked for Goldman Sachs before  he rose to be the governor of the Banks of Canada and England, guiding Canada through the economic downturn of 2008, and England through Brexit and the Covid years.  He was appointed as a special envoy for climate action and economics to the United Nations.  He was keeping busy, and along the way he avoided being partisan as he worked for Prime Ministers of both the main parties.  Poilievre started by selling memberships for the Reform party as a teen.  Then, bless his heart, he got a paper route and then a job with a phone company calling businesses.  Other than that, he has been a politician.  People can vote for whomever they like, but when it comes down to 20 years of managing national economies versus the local paper boy, their qualifications seem a little unbalanced.  The fact PP gives off angry Peewee Herman vibes is just a sad accident.  To be fair, his political career has been marked with a lot of shit disturbing, which many people find appealing.

My mom came by for a coffee this morning and told me a little story that relates to Trump and the dictator aura developing south of our border.  A couple she knows goes down to the US all the time to buy gas and groceries which are cheaper there.  On a recent trip, an American border guard asked them “What do you think of our president?” and the lady said something unflattering.  The guard turned them around and barred them from entering the US for five years!  Local merchants in those border towns are already struggling to stay afloat with Canadians staying away in droves, so having GI Joe forbid them entry is another blow to business.  And, by the way, how’s that whole free speech, ‘Freest Country in the World’ thing coming along?  Yikes.

As I write this, it is only minutes away from being tomorrow, which is Easter Sunday.  I had a Catholic education, but it really didn’t stick with me.  For me, Easter was more about chocolate bunnies than the son of God cheating the grave.  More practically, it is a time for the family to get together and have a big meal and hopefully not argue about politics.  If Easter has a deeper meaning for you, that’s great.  It’s like country music, in a way.  I don’t like country music, but it’s me who loses out.  If I enjoyed it, my life would contain a little more joy than it does.  And I’m all about maximizing my levels of joy.  Same with Easter and most of the religion stuff.

Anyway, whether it’s off to church, or hunting for chocolate eggs, or gorging yourself into a mashed potato coma, have a happy Easter!

 

 

 

New Manifest Destiny

It’s been a fairly long time since I wrote a blog entry.  I had an unusual job opportunity – to compete for my own job – that I had a test component for which I had to study, and an interview for which I both studied and panicked.  In the end, I won my position permanently.  Yay me!  Between that stuff, children moving, chess events, intermittent spells of intoxication, and various household duties, I had writing on the back burner.  Life really got in the way.

Since the last post, Donald Trump has taken office in the US.  He has said and done so many poorly thought out things it’s hard to believe that it has only been 58 days as of today.  I could have a laugh at some stupid things, but mostly they have been tinged with evil – greed and revenge primarily.  Nothing comedic.  But for me the number one ominous threat is that he thinks Canada should join the USA.  We would be better off he says!  I see lists all the time of happiest countries, best educated countries, best overall countries, most peaceful countries, etc etc.  Very rarely do I ever see a list where the USA is ahead of Canada in a good way.  I guess if there was a list of school shootings, gun ownership and electing functionally incompetent assholes, then we would clearly fall in behind our southern neighbours, and I will happily take a loss in those categories.  I have travelled around the states quite a bit and I quite like Americans for the most part.  We are friends and neighbours, and we have (or had?) a long partnership that has enriched us all.  So I’m not being anti-American for the most part, just against a few people.  Trump is a mindless bully who wants our lunch money, and who’s gonna stop me?!  There are people around him who could talk him down from taking Russia’s side in world politics, or tell him to be nice to their allies, but those people are so fucking scared of protecting their comfy little nests that they won’t stand up to the bully.  Those people are gutless wretches who should be unelected immediately for being exactly the opposite of the leaders they promised to be.

The trade war.  Ah yes, Canada has been ripping off the USA for ages.  We couldn’t survive without the “subsidy” money we receive from the American tax payers.  Our drugs are flooding the USA with fentanyl, and raping immigrants are free to unleash terror on them after they sneak out of Canada.  Except not one word of any of that is true.  Which again, would be amusing and might be in years to come, but millions of uninformed Americans hear that bullshit and believe it.  So he is going to force us to submit through economic pressure. A little school yard arm twisting, if you will.  Of course, I’m not sure he understands that the tariffs he puts on our goods are paid by Americans, not us; and I’m not sure he understands that anything that gets from Canada into the USA goes through his borders, not ours.  But as long as enough people to get him re-elected swallow this load of shit without doing any research, I doubt he cares.

All the lies are the pretext to Manifest Destiny which has suddenly come back to life after being dormant for a century or more.  To refresh your memory, that is the doctrine that says America has a God-given destiny to rule all of North America.  It was the undoing of the natives.  Just as the Vietnam war was escalated with the bullshit Gulf of Tonkin incident, and Iraq was invaded for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, so Canada is under threat because America needs to expand and find new resources to plunder, under the false pretense of Canada being an unfair trading partner.

I told myself I wasn’t going to rant about this, but it’s been weighing on people, me included, and I haven’t had a good cathartic tirade for a while.  One day, I half expect to be held up at the border while some deadly serious American Nazi Party official reads this back to me.

One day soon I plan to write something a little lighter, but it wouldn’t seem right to tack it on the end of this little rant of mine.

Wasting Time

Not long ago a friend of mine made me an offer.  He purchases books for the Surrey Library system and he told me if I wrote a book, even if it was a single copy and self published, he would purchase it and stock it on the shelf.  I thought that was a great offer, but I have nothing in the pipeline.  In fact, between work and chess I don’t have all that much free time to dedicate to writing a book.  On top of that, my first writing goals were writing for prestigious contests like the CBC Fiction contest and the Bronwen Wallace prize.  Ha!  Who has the time to do it all?

Today I was in the kitchen doing not much at all when I got a notification on my cell phone.  It was a weekly report on my usage and it said I had averaged 5 hours and 13 minutes per day on my phone.  There are 168 hours in a week: 40 hours working, 36 hours on my phone (evidently) and about 50 sleeping.  That’s still 42 hours left.  I spend about 5 hours a week commuting these days, with so much road construction underway, and another 5 disappear on chess night.  The Canucks play about three times per week for another 9 hours wasted.  That’s still 23 hours a week unaccounted for.

Where does the time go?

Let’s say I cut my phone usage back to 3 hours a day, giving me another 15 hours a week.  Add to that the 23 hours that evaporate each week and I have 38 hours I could have spent writing my book.  In a year that would be 1900 hours.  A typical novel is about 50,000 words, so to complete a novel in a year, I would need to settle on around 26 words an hour.  That is crazy few words.  And that still leaves me chess, hockey, and 3 hours of empty-calorie gawking at my device per day.  And my god!  If I could complete 50 words per hour I could polish off two books a year.

How much time does the average person spend on a device these days?  I don’t see myself as excessive when it comes to looking at my phone.  I check sports scores, watch Keno draws once in a while, look at emails, and sometimes (the horror!) I actually speak to someone.  If my usage is typical, and the Outlier theory says you will be a master at something if you spend 10,000 hours at it, a person dedicating the amount of time on a skill that I have at my disposal, would be world class at it in five years. Low income teens in the USA average over nine hours a day on their phones!  They could be fabulously skilled at something in a few years if they cut back to three hours a day and invested the time wisely.  A quick Google search – not on my phone – says the average American spends over four hours every day on their cell, a whopping 1.4 billion hours a day collectively.  Although we can’t assume it is fully wasted time, I imagine the majority of it is.

Going back to the offer to have a book on the shelf of the library, the federal government does a survey every year of library books written by Canadian authors.  The author has to register a book on the database first.  Then there is a list of libraries they look at, but the gist of it is the government has a formula by which they calculate how many books the author didn’t sell because his or her book was available for free at the library.  It looks at how many books the author has, and in how many of the surveyed libraries, and they send the author a cheque.  If I did write a book or two, I would be mailing a copy of each book to all the libraries on the survey list, and maybe I would find some of my tax money in my mailbox once a year.  If this ever happens, I promise to rush back here and tell you how much it paid.

 

 

How to Ruin a Coronation

I don’t know what’s going on, but the statistics say some people have been reading my blog.  If you’re reading this, then the answer is at least partially you! Thanks, it’s reassuring.

In earlier posts I made mention of some 100 word stories I had written for a contest.  I sure did like the one I wrote for Round 2!  Oh boy, it was going to launch me into the final round where all the glittering prizes are.  So… it failed.  It didn’t even get an honourable mention.  The genre was Historical Fiction, the action I had to include was shoving someone, and the word I had to use was ‘establish.’  Unless your house is currently on fire, or your dog is barfing up a newspaper, you will have time to read it.

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

Coronation Day

Napoleon’s glorious moment had arrived!  The cream of European society packed Notre Dame, while at the altar, Napoleon radiated power in silk robes embroidered with golden bees. The Pope walked slowly toward him, holding the Charlemagne crown above his head.
The Pope lowered the crown to place it on his head, but Napoleon snatched it out of his hands and shoved the pontiff, to the gasps and shrieks of the crowd.  He put the crown on himself. “I hereby establish a  Monarchy based on my greatness, not your Church,”  he told the stunned Pope.
Napoleon rose, “France! Behold your Emperor!”
************************************************
The feedback from the judges was mostly positive.  Their main complaint was that the point of view seemed to be off.  One judge concluded his feedback with “please keep writing!,” as though I may be discouraged and ready to toss my laptop in the recycling bin.  I thought they might scold me for using three exclamation points in a tiny story.
As for the story itself, Napoleon really did grab the crown away from the pope at the ceremony, but there are two versions of it.  One group says Napoleon had arranged for the pope to hand the crown over, and it was agreed upon, so there was no tussle and everything was good.  The other version is that the coronation was like what went down in my story where he pulled the crown away from the very surprised pope and gave him a short lecture about his greatness vs the Church. Sadly, no one had thought far enough ahead that wintery day in 1804 to bring a camera, and eyewitnesses never fail to see different versions of the same event.
Meanwhile, back in camera-mad 2024, I have now completed my third of four norms toward getting my FIDE Arbiter title.  Someone suggested I should do a blog series about the journey to getting this title.  Can you imagine how un-riveting that would be?  I mean unless you’re captivated by chess lingo and long periods of observing people playing a board game, I think it would be sleepy time for anyone who tried to read it.  I could publish pamphlets about it and have them available for use at sleep clinics.
Falling asleep on the board is usually a forfeit loss, especially if you have inhaled any pieces

Well it’s coming up to mid-August and time for my annual rant about fall.  We’ve gone past mid-summer and the days are already noticeably shorter.  Pretty soon everyone will be bundled in sweaters drinking hot, overpriced, pumpkin flavoured coffees and the Christmas shit will be in all the stores.  The exits from those stores will be blocked by panhandling packs of snotty kids with fundraising crap of all manner. At least hockey will come along and provide us with a sane diversion to the declining atmospheric conditions and public begging.  Almost enough to make you want to shove the Pope, right?  I’m talking to you, Francis!

(Ok, just kidding, I’m not really that grumpy.)

 

St Patrick and Being Generous with the Whiskey

Happy St Patrick’s Day!  I was just reading about the man, the myth, the legend that is St Paddy.  I used to think I was mostly Irish, but my sister got into genealogy and found we are more Scottish than Irish, and we have a muttly blend of a variety of northern European nationalities.  Anyways, St Patrick.  I always just thought of him as the guy who was credited with driving the snakes off the Emerald Isle, but I found a story about him I like better.  It’s also one that explains a wee bit of the Irish identity.  He was moving about the country and came to an inn where the hostess was being rude and uncharitable to her guests.  He told her there was a devil in her cellar that got fatter every time she was cheap and nasty.  He came back to that inn some time later and the innkeeper was filling everyone’s glasses to the brim with whiskey.  He took her down to her cellar and the devil was wasting away from her kindness.  After that it became    tradition to drink whiskey on his feast day, March 17, the alleged anniversary of his death.  By the way, some early accounts of his life have him living to the age of 120, which would be amazing in modern times, but absolutely stunning in the 400’s AD when everyone was slogging around in shit and living until 35.  Must be the whiskey!  Bottoms up!

Not that I’m picking on the health obsessed among us, but it’s worth noting St Patrick rarely visited the gym, nor did he advocate a morning ritual of protein smoothies.

In fact, rarely do I read an obituary or any account of an abnormally long life that advocates going to the gym or eating macrobiotic super food.  The common threads among the super aged, if there are any, is that they stay mentally active, have a positive world view, have a social circle they interact regularly with, and a whole friggin bunch of them drink socially and even smoke sometimes.  I will adjust my world view accordingly when I come across a 100 year old guy who is pumping weights with his “bros” and has an alarming pair of gym tits.  There, I said it.  And gyms have been around long enough to become a longevity factor to someone – there was a gym on the Titanic.

This guy would soon put his rowing prowess to the test

Sadly, rowing was about to become a highly sought-after skill.

Another thing old St Pat did that makes a lot of sense is he used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the people.  Most stained glass renditions of him have him holding a clover leaf and also what looks like a lacrosse stick.  I’m not sure what the lacrosse stick thing is about, but hopefully it wasn’t around after the whiskey got flowing.  In the Surrey of my youth, that’s about the last thing you’d want to see some drunk carrying.

Another odd fact: St Patrick was never officially canonized, although he is recognized as a saint.  And judging from other drawings it looks like the thing in his hands might be what he chased the snakes away with, but that’s only a guess.

Huddling Indoors

I haven’t written anything in quite a while.  That’s an opening sentence I’ve used a few times, sort of my version of ‘once upon a time.’  When I started writing this blog, I thought of it as a way to get out of my comfort zone and be a little more interactive and expressive.  I think my desire to be expressive comes in waves, and the last six months or so has been the trough between waves – the low point in the cycle.  But I think the time has come to get back out of my comfort zone and interact a little bit.

That said, I don’t really have anything pressing to say.  I’m as disgusted with Trump as I’ve always been, but I’m becoming numb to the constant bullshit and idiotic, often racist, rants.  He hasn’t accomplished anything.  The only thing he can brag about is the record high stock market, which he didn’t actually do.  If the weather is good this summer, he will probably take credit for that too, and his half wit yokel supporters will believe it.

Glutathione, the major antioxidant of the body, requires this mineral levitra no prescription for its normal functioning. Evidence for the clock: Researchers know that metabolism and the biological clock are cialis professional canada connected. There are two types of enzymes available female viagra buy cute-n-tiny.com in the market and choosing the right one is essential, which is possible by taking help from a medical advisor. It appears that these are likely involved in the generic cialis soft process. Men sure are in trouble these days.  Everywhere you look some man has been whipping it out or groping someone.  That was fine while the women were intimidated and keeping quiet, but now the jig is up.  It turns out, if a woman wants to see your sausage, she will probably ask.  According to the Amy Vanderbilt Book of Etiquette, if no one has asked, it is polite to keep the old boy zipped up.  Of course some of the recent offenders have done a lot worse things than expose themselves, but I’m surprised at how many of the cases were just that.  I’m a regular guy, but I don’t ever remember wanting to show off my junk.  Frankly, it would seem like a really good way to embarrass yourself.  Yet that urge has shattered careers near and far, and every day it seems another man gets dragged into the spotlight to be removed of his status by the masses.  Oh, except the president.  He brags about sexual assaults and his victims have come forward to confront him, but no mention of him getting in trouble or losing his job ever comes up. Movies may have to be cast with women in fake mustaches playing men because soon every male actor will be a convicted sex offender.  Once when I was in my late teens, I went to the mall with a friend of mine.  He was at the till buying something, and the girl at the till was asking him for ID for some reason.  I probably knew why then, but my god, that was 600 years ago now.  Anyways, he was dyslexic and very easily frustrated, so he wound up pulling out his peeper and twirling it around, saying “here’s my ID!”  Today, he would be on page one of the paper.

I’ve had my fill of winter.  It has hardly snowed or even gotten cold really, but the weather is grey and bleak and clammy.  The days are short and mostly gloomy, and I haven’t sat on my patio and had a beer in months.  We live indoors this time of year, dashing from the house to the car and back when necessary, but huddling in the warmth the vast majority of the time.  There is a little songbird that comes around in early spring.  It has a distinctive two note mating call that is the soundtrack of the season.  I have no idea what bird it is, maybe you know and could tell me?  The other day I heard the little song, so I know spring is not far off.  That first day I drive home from work with the window down and the radio on, and I get home and start the barbecue is probably only four or five weeks away now.  Hallelujah!

Ramblings of a Baby-Sitter With Too Much Time

Well here I am alone again.  Actually I’m not completely alone, I am sort of baby sitting my grand daughter but she’s asleep, so my child-minding duties are pretty much making sure the house doesn’t catch fire and keeping quiet.  So far, so good.  I thought this might be a good time to write something, even though there is nothing pressing to be written.  I guess I can just jump around and ramble and change topics at will.

Today’s big news is that Trump is going to take the USA out of the Paris climate agreement.  Now he and his fossil fuel cronies can get the country back to good ol’ American polluting.  Woe to you, land, when your king is a child!

I don’t see myself as any sort of a salesman, but if I had to sell something, I’d go for selling particle colliders.  At about $5 billion a pop, I’d work on a 1% commission which would net me $50 million.  It would be a hard sell, but I’d really only need to sell one.  The people who design and build them must need a field rep once in a while.

I’ve only gone kayaking a couple times, but it doesn’t seem like much fun.  Sure, it probably gets better when you can get somewhere efficiently without an uncoordinated splashing display of physical nerdiness, but I’m not in any position to know.  My wife and I had to kayak in Mexico, and the tour guide hinted that there may be alligators in the water.  We were so completely useless as a rowing team that the gators would never have eaten us, surely we were sick and unpalatable, although they no doubt stared in disbelief.

If I got sentenced to house arrest, does the prison still feed me?  If they didn’t, I think I would have to complain about the unfair treatment.  I’d take my case to the Supreme Court and cost the country so much money they’d be begging to feed me!  Thanks goodness not too many people read this or someone might get the idea to try it.

In politics closer to home, the NDP and the Green party are going to put their numbers together and form an alliance to run British Columbia.  First thing on the agenda: cancel the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion and the new Site C dam project.  While that might be ecologically better for us, that will be the end of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment.  I like the NDP on principle, but they cost too much.  They are like that car you can’t afford.  Fun fact: last time the NDP was in power in BC, our province’s economy ranked #59 in North America out of 60 jurisdictions – 10 provinces and 50 states.  Only one backwater slough in the deep south (Mississippi?) had a more sluggish economy.  It was the only time that BC’s population was decreasing, due to people leaving to find work.  But here comes a new golden age in puffing pot, watching marbled murrelets and ending sentences with the word “man.”  Think positively, we could have Trump as a leader.
They’ve got established cialis tab scary motion pictures, fringe movement terror movies, scariest horror flicks along with like that. Do not hesitate to get all generic cialis the details regarding it clearly talked about and educated it becomes completely easy for you to have confidence in your penis size. These fallouts imply that Dorn Therapy should be a fundamental element of any tinnitus therapy. viagra purchase online It should be taken only as and when needed.People who are on drugs that contain nitrates (e.g. ‘poppers’) Are using alpha-blocker medication *Research if generika levitra check out this link is for you, based on your health status; and what your individual dosage should be.
The marbled murrelet is a little sea bird that nests in tall trees, incidentally.  The Sierra Club and local conservationalists in Oregon practically shut down their forest industry to protect the bird, even though, according to a forest rep I spoke with “there is a murrelet in every f’-ing tree.”

marbled murrelet

 

 

 

Subverting the Truth and Those Who Deliver It

Hello again.  I haven’t written anything in quite a while.  The reason is, I got Civilization VI for my birthday, and all my spare time since then has been used (wasted?) playing it.  It’s an interesting game, but it’s no substitute for an actual life.  So now that I have surfaced for air, I am going to put my two cents in on some things.

The most eye catching goings on of the last two months are, as usual, south of the border, where dictatorship seems to be taking hold.  First, Trump has appointed all manner of racists and over the top Christian zealots to key positions in government.  Second, King Cheeto has denounced journalists as lying and picking on him, and is now starting to ban the press from his briefings.  Third, political commentary and satire has been branded “mean spirited,” and denounced.  Whoo!  I sure wish I lived in a free country like America!  The latest shot out of left field is Trump’s assertion that Obama bugged his cell phone before he left office so he could eavesdrop on the new administration – without a shred of proof, of course.  I am sort of hoping Obama sues him for defamation of character, as he should have done when The Donald said he created ISIS.

I think in all this ongoing circus, the thing that gets me the angriest is Trump’s treatment of journalists.  I took journalism in college and despite never having done it for a living, I still think of myself as a part of the profession.  Journalists are taught to adhere to strict codes of conduct when reporting.  The story, as reported, is supposed to be honest, fair and in the public interest.  The USA theoretically protects the freedom of the press in the first amendment, along with freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, but when the president is of such delicate composition that every critical word hurts his little feelings, these freedoms are being threatened.  It isn’t quite Nazi Germany and the Ministry of Propaganda, but it is nudging that direction.

The truth isn’t always an absolute, sometimes different points of view are valid.  Most times, however, the truth is an absolute.  Take the crowd size of Trump’s swearing in ceremony: he says it was the largest ever, when clearly it wasn’t.  Same with his claims on unemployment, climate change and crime – they are proven wrong by available data.  His idea of “alternate facts” is basically twisting the truth to satisfy his followers and in so doing, picking a fight with a noble profession.  I have seen his fans on line claiming that people who listen to mainstream news are sheeple.  Do his alt-right people who write these things think Trump is a credible news source?  That he is in a position to oppose glaring truths like Kim Jong-Il?  Do they believe Mr Silver Spoon has seen through the veil of lies that is the news media?  Is he leading them to the Truth?  The real sheeple are the poorly educated masses who don’t have the critical thinking skills necessary to assess specious arguments and half truths; those people who feel undervalued and possess skill sets that they don’t see as being useful in the future.  Those are the people who have nothing to lose by throwing out immigrants and embracing ideas with potentially disastrous consequences like believing climate change is a hoax.  The trailer park has assumed power!  And since it likely won’t ever happen again, they’re going to make it count.  First order of business: do away with the critics.
http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/octopus/ cialis for cheap Understanding the irritation caused by difficulty in gaining or sustaining an erection for sexual intercourse. It is a rather big tree which can develop to great heights ranging from 66 feet http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/pig-wearing-rubber-boots/ viagra tablets price to 164 feet. We should take proper dose of viagra wholesale . Men can treat their penis right by keeping it clean, and maybe rolling on the protection sildenafil super active during intimate encounters.
I wouldn’t spend as much time worrying about all of this, but the world is pretty small now.  Madness in a world power concerns everyone, and unhappy, suspicious masses everywhere might embrace it.  People’s immune systems are not designed at birth to repel bad ideas, especially ones with lots of catchy phrases and wild promises.

Trump

 

A Less Than Stellar Christmas

I don’t want to be bitter, but this was a pretty sub-par holiday season.  I was booked off of work from the 23rd of December until the 3rd of January, but to get the disappointment started, I was given a bunch of work on the 23rd right before quitting time that was due on the 3rd.  I started getting sick around this time, too.  My last couple days of work I was so tired I barely made it home.  We decided not to exchange gifts this year, so there was a weird giftless vacuum Christmas morning.  Our dinner plans for Christmas fell through at the last minute, so we wound up staying home which upset a certain member of my family who was a little pissed we didn’t come to his place.  In reality, we were doing serious basement renos and I spent Christmas pulling down drywall.  I even came to my turkey dinner in work clothes covered in drywall dust, possibly asbestos-laced.

The next day I was sick as hell but we had people coming over, so I had to stay upright as much as possible.  The angry family member stood us up to get even, and it snowed really hard which sent the people who did show up home early to avoid getting in snow mayhem on the way home.  On the 27th I went out to do some of the work I had to get done, but I was so weak and miserable not much got done.  I had to read some water meters, but the side streets were icy and the meter lids were frozen shut and buried in snow.  The next day I tried again, but this time I bailed out after a few hours and went to the doctor who said I have bronchitis and assigned me some holiday mood killing antibiotics.  Our computer guy informed us about this time that our hard drive was dead and several years of family pictures and 1,000 or so songs had been erased.

The next couple days were a blur of sleeping, waking, taking medicine, and feeling like crap.  On New Year’s Eve we drove 50 km or so into South Surrey to a party, but it was snowing heavily and the road crews were off getting pissed or something because no plowing or sanding was going on.  For the three hours we spent eating fancy pickles and playing parlour games, we spent about four hours or more driving.  Today I’m feeling much better, but it’s a holiday and a Sunday, and other members of the household are now sick so it became another sitting around staying quiet, bored out of my tree sort of day.  Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday, so a bunch of us are gathering to wish him well.  This will likely be the highlight of my eleven day winter oasis.
Benefits of taking cialis without prescriptions uk Kamagra soft tablets: These soft tablets have been widely famous to return men their lost sensual stamina and energy during the bedtime performance. There was even a cartoon order cialis online view these guys strip gay I directed called by Jerry Mills, which featured the adventures of Billy. Obviously your penis will not grow in a home or society where sexual desires are seen as an issue somehow that is caused by the medication. viagra rx online Additionally, fatigue felt by patients with problems of erection loss during sexual activities, thus making them achieve satisfying erections and enjoy sex better!Whatever the causes maybe, one must never hesitate in discussing problems of sexual dysfunction among women of all ages. viagra canadian pharmacy
I referenced our basement renovation earlier.  We have the walls vapour barriered and framed, and some of the laminate flooring is in.  What we lacked at the start of Christmas was electrical work and drywall.  Our foolproof plan was to have the electrician come over a couple times to get his work done, then have my brother in law come over to help us insulate, then the drywaller guy was scheduled for the 29th.  Ha!  Our electrician cancelled a few times, then came over briefly, then finally came back for a full day, but this was already after the 29th and I think the drywaller has given up on us and moved on.  My brother in law could have come over to help insulate today, but he was called in to work because of the snow, so that is off.  I doubt much is going to happen tomorrow, so the whole project has fallen at least a couple weeks behind in just a week and a half.  Let me say, I’m not angry about it with anyone, but the destruction we are living with is disheartening, especially when everyone is sick.  As I write this, I can hear my daughter’s boyfriend coughing up a lung downstairs.  He has the family plague, and if anything gets done tomorrow it will be with us tippy toeing around his sleeping carcass.

Happy 2017!  Last year ended badly for me, but I feel things are likely to improve soon.  I am worried about the new year, but often what you’re worried about never happens.  I hope this is true of 2017.  A rich biker gang has taken over the US presidency, what could go wrong?

Why Liberals are (Supposedly) Smarter than Conservatives

A little while ago I posted an article on Facebook that talked about the fact that liberal people tend to be more intelligent and higher educated than conservative people.  I remember hearing about this in high school and in Political Science lectures in college, so I knew it was the tendency and I posted it to get a rise out of some really conservative people I know.  (Key words here are “tend” and “tendency,” as anyone could think of some good exceptions, maybe even my FB friends.)  The question I had never asked was why?

This came up as a result of the Trump election, of course, in reminding my conservative Facebook friends that the destruction of education in the USA has led to an idiot being elected.  It was a little bit of a sour grapes move on my part, as I was pretty disappointed in mankind for a few days there, and will probably be again for long stretches of the next four years.  Data from the election shows this education tendency clearly: voters without higher education voted more than two to one for Trump.  People who earned over $100k, the business elite, billionaires?  They favoured Clinton 20 to one!

First I found a simple definition of what the difference was between liberal and conservative people: conservatives look after themselves and don’t want to give or receive any help from others or society.  Liberals want to help others and make social safety nets that don’t allow anyone – in theory – to starve.  The reason the liberal way of thinking is a product of intelligence is that it goes beyond the caveman mentality of hoarding your stuff.  Liberal thinking isn’t natural, it’s learned and reflects man’s progress in becoming a social creature.  We have advanced to the point now where we don’t have to leave the old and the sick on the trail to be eaten by predators.

You’ll get fast shipping at the speed of change else we are ought to be left out from the condition, which make you feeling humiliated in the cheap viagra in india bed. There are some nutritional products and herbal medicines that can help you to treat an browse around this viagra from canadian pharmacies ailment naturally. Those feelings can interfere with performance,’ says the American Psychological Association. sildenafil 50mg tablets It supplies adequate blood to all unica-web.com online cialis canada body parts and improves the blood flow into the male penile region which leads to penis enlargement. I don’t mean to insult anyone.  Fact is, I have some conservative tendencies myself.  I think there is a stratum of society that uses the safety net as a way of life, getting fed and housed without actually having to go earn it.  Maybe parasites are just a fact of nature?  But I do lean liberal for the most part, even though in the parlance of the conservative I am no doubt a cowardly, frail communist who whines a lot.  Not really, but I have been reading a lot of internet “discussions,” all of which immediately deteriorate into profanity and name calling.  Liberals are cry-babies and conservatives are Nazis – and internet trolls are ready to pounce.

This is a topic that has probably been elaborated on in full length books, so my little overly-simple explanation is practically a stick figure drawn in crayon by comparison.  It is, however, the answer to a question I should have asked a long time ago.