Of All Things...

My car now leaks gas... it also leaks oil, viciously squirts radiator fluid, shorts the electrical system, starts on the 3rd try, leaks air constantly out of the front two tires, I can't use anything but the defroster vents, all the paint is coming off at once because the primer is bad, the steering wheel has turned to a nasty goo, my windshield is cracked all the way across, the vanity mirror was turned into a fine powderous form of glass (by a previous owner-sibling), and sometimes it doesn't want to shift into 3rd gear. The nice thing is I finally got a little milk crate for my trunk to keep all the various fluids and car goos from sliding around.

In Case Of Fire

My apartment complex, in its infinite wisdom, put an exit sign in my hallway. Let me fill you in on some details. What you see in the picture are two storage rooms at the end of my hall. There are only two apartments in my hallway and we face eachother. We are both at the end of a 12 foot long hallway and there are a total of 4 apartments in my building (2 on the lower floor, 2 up - I'm upstairs). So when I leave my apartment, I turn immediately to the right - there is a wall and window to my immediate left (behind the camera in this show)- I walk 10 feet, round a waist-high bannister/wall thingy, and go down 10 stairs and take 3 steps forward to the outside world. Including locking my door the process often takes as long as 7 seconds. They located the exit sign at the top of the stairs. There is no exit there. Sure, its near some stairs, but it looks really stupid because it's positioned above my storage room, as if that were supposed to be the safe way out. Besides, there IS NO OTHER WAY OUT. You can only go one direction down my "hallway". If there's a fire bad enough that I can't see out in the hall and I need an exit sign to illuminate the way, I'm going to jump off my deck into the neighbor's grass (8 feet below) anyhow... then park my car up against the building... but that's another story altogether.

Original Sin

I am conVINCED that the ritual of cleansing laundry is a product of the fall of man...

Handicap Accessible

For all those wondering how you will navigate this egregious website in your old age, it is now handicap accessible. (I know you don't remember what the word means so look up the word yourself, ok? don't just keep reading along lying to yourself)

You will notice on the comments section that there is a little man in a wheelchair. His name is Handy Randy. Click on him to read some stuff about being handicapped I guess (I haven't read it yet). I have also updated the rest of my blog to account for the hard of hearing. Click the word click in this sentence to be able to read the text without the hard rock music. If you cannot hear any rock music, this may be a bad sign for your hearing. I have also developed an alternate website (looks very similar) for the blind. Click the word BLIND in this sentence for the braille version of the page. If you seem to still have trouble accessing the braille, contact Best Buy to purchase a new Braille-Enhanced Monitor.

Thanks to Amy B. for suggesting I make my website a little more reader friendly for those of us with impairments!

Rice and Ribs

Yeah, you heard it right. Eating in Canada has been an adventure. They think the restaraunts are wonderful, but if you've ever been to the places those foods originated, it's a really scary difference. Just think sushi in North Dakota. Yeah, that little tingling sensation means you're not supposed to eat it. *sigh...* I'm that guy.

One of my first nights in town I ate at a barbecue restaurant (I can't spell that word! I keep spelling it restaraunt!). It was near a fork overlooking two rivers. Nice place, really, and great night to be out on the patio. "Fall-off-the bone baby back ribs (and an emphasis on the fall-off-the-bone in the menu) with some sides and a Canadian iced tea..." I thought to myself. It sounded pretty good. 'Sides, I've been trying ribs all over the states in some of the best, smallest, weirdest places. This was standard.

This was Canada.

First thing that alarmed me was the waitress (The entire country of Canada has no waiters... all wait staff are gorgeous 22-30 year old women... I have no answers for you, and I don't really feel that I need to question it, really). Moving along... the waitress asked me if I wanted fries or rice with my ribs.... ..... ..... ..... Yeah, you just heard that. RICE. Serving rice with ribs will get you 5-10 and a $200,000 fine in the states. Evidently nobody told them otherwise. Just as I recover from the shock (I was shivering and twitching uncontrollably - everyone on the patio just politely stared) the waitress brings out my food. I dig in. Kind of. The ribs were tough enough I had to stand on one end of them and pull on the other to get the ribs apart. I noticed several guys on the patio actually had small chainsaws at their tables. The smell of two-cycle fuel should have tipped me. Evidently in Canada the "fall-off-the-bone" meant you literally fell off the bones, the meat doesn't. I get done with my meal and start in on the sides. One little taste-o-beans and they were some freakishly weird vinegar-tasting stuff and what looked like kidney beans. X. On to the next one. I couldn't even tell what it was. I smelled it and took a wee taste. X. The slaw was the only thing left. There's no way they could... yeah... X. Ever made slaw from sauerkraut? Canada does.

And I was gonna put this in another post, but I'll just put it here. I also had a "wonderful" meal at a steak place in town the other night. Famous steak place in town. I've never known a place so famous for their Ponderosa-dry Filet Mignon, Ponderosa being that super-high-dollar steak place we all know and love in the states. The salad I ate had the most amazing dijon vinigarette. I wolfed it down. It was probably the best house salad dressing I've ever eaten. Then came the steak I mentioned earlier, which was a disappointment. The baked potato was good, but then I cut a slice off of this big tomato chunk that was on my plate. It was 1/3 of a semi-ripe tomato with some melted parmesean on it. No sooner did I put it in my mouth than I thought I was going to puke. I held it for a second and realized it wasn't ME that was feeling the puke. The tomato actually TASTED like PUKE! I politely chewed what was in my mouth (thankfully VERY little). When I asked the waitress about it she was like "oh, that's just a garnish..." !!! It's a big hunk of tomato with melted cheese. Garnish? Whatever. I had a martini to wash down the pukemato. It couldn't remove the scar on my soul.

One more week of survival training remaining... I'll keep you posted!

Canada Is For Real

Today I made it to Canada. You can always tell you're in Canada, too. It has this kind of smell to it. Can't really describe it, but its like a mixture of the freshest of the fresh outdoor smells you can imagine... with a hint of the back of Grandma's closet. I navigated a serious pile of one-way streets today to get put up in a really sweet / retro hotel room. I'm on the 23rd floor! My car is parked somewhere in a parking garage nearby. I can't even remember what floor. It was so traumatic! It was like a Micro Machines garage - and I'm driving a Jeep Liberty. Concrete chunks were laying all around. (And every stall had an electric socket for engine block heaters - it gets to -40 here regularly) It really reminded me of all those pictures of Russia I've seen on tv with all the concrete buildings disintegrating. I got out of my car and found a staircase. I was trying to get to the elevators for the hotel lobby. I could see the elevator room for the floor above where I parked, but I would have had to run up an extremely narrow cars-only ramp the wrong direction around a blind corner... you see where this is going. I tried to take the stairs and I found out they were nearly vertical and only had a door about every 2 floors... in the same location! Grrr! I just came back up the stairs and ran up the ramp. I didn't hear anything coming. All the elevators in Canada open before they stop moving. No joke. It was like 6-8 inches off. In fact, all of them are. I'm currently working in an office building with no stairs access to the second floor. You HAVE to take the elevator... Well, I threw my stuff in my really nice hotel room (amazing view of the big city), then I walk out to go to work. On the way I weave through the MOST culturally diverse group of people I've ever been in. People of every race, shape, color, size, and clothing style. People were wearing anything and everything. I think I saw a guy running around with paper bags on. I don't even know where all these people are going or coming from. They're just everywhere and keep on walking by. In Canada you use the crosswalks. The police crack down on jaywalkers. Also in Canada, if you're blind, you're better off just taking your chances when crossing the street. They have those little beeper thingies, but since there are at least two on every corner, the one going one way sounds just as loud as the one going the other. There's no way to tell which one is beeping. Just swing your cane like a madman and cross, I guess. I'm about to go find some food around here. This should be an adventure. Last time I was outside there was a dude playing the snare drum (traditional style) on the street corner for money. He wasn't any good, either. Just think of some 7 year old kid banging on a drum right behind you as you're standing there to cross. On the next corner down a woman lit up, then the smell wafted toward me. It was weed. Downtown! Well... welcome to Canada... where people pick clothing items at random while blindfolded from second hand stores and weedsmokers and drumbangers stroll around carefree. I'm already picking up the accent...*sigh*

Please Read All Instructions Before Using This Product

Some journalists dive into the heart of military action. Some become sleuths tracking down corruption in the highest levels of government. Some even get their hands dirty in humanitarian efforts to help the less fortunate. Me? I'm not a journalist. But I am about to embark on a potentially insane phase of my life. I'll keep it short of course.I'm going to read all of the instructions on every product I purchase for as long as I can stand it. 3 Days? 2 Months? A year? We'll see.

I bought a vacuum cleaner the other day and it told me I wasn't supposed to run the machine (it's a bagless) without the dust collection basket on there. First of all, "bagless" vacuums really do have bags. They're just plastic and you can dump them out. But I just get this image in my mind of someone sweeping around the house without a collection tank and dust and hair and dirt are just flying all over the place. It also mentioned about 20 times that I was specifically not to cut off the polarized plug (one side is bigger than the other) and replace it with a non-polarized plug. Like people even know what a polarized plug is anyhow... Oh, and you're not suposed to submerse the vacuum cleaner in water. !!? You know there had to be some guy that tried to vacuum up the contents of his tub. And then blamed it on the company saying "The instructions didn't say you couldn't do that!".

I also bought one of those little personal hair trimmers. It's made by Wahl and it comes with a Double Panda Super Alkaline Battery. It probably cost me twice what the Single Panda did. It makes the kind of noise you. hear on Discovery Channel when surgeons are cutting bones. They even included detailed instructions on cutting hair for specific regions of the body. Nose... Ears... Eyebrows... Why do they always say "bikini area"? They don't call your eyebrows the "sunglasses area" or your hair the "baseball hat region". Everybody knows what they're talking about, anyhow. You're also not supposed to shave boogers or earwax. Interestingly enough the instructions give basically no help on what attachment is what. It tells you the names of them in the guide, but now I've got a bunch of cutter thingies that I don't know what they do. Guess I'll just have to be a little more careful. I probably should have just bought a Dremel.