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.