Ka-Boom

No, that's not my financial infrastructure caving in, its the Canada Day weekend fireworks. And can I just say that city wide fireworks over a few nights are very beautiful from the 7th floor balcony.

Average

Strong Contender for Best Ever

So I got one of the best homemade birthday cards ever, from Gayle. It was this:

The Simple Life?

(side note - Wipeout was awesome last night!)

There are a lot of things that you can accuse my life of being - filled with drama, exciting, full, etc. But you cannot accuse my life of being simple. No, no you cannot. There are times when I thrive on this simplicity, but often I crave some calm waters.

Why would this summer be any different? I go for months with no work, relying on the God inspired kindness of others for survival. Then I finally get this theatre day camp job. Which I was grateful for, but not fantastically excited about (for reasons both communicated and not communicated in the resent post on that job). As I was preparing to start training for this day camp position the possibility another position in a very different sector was brought to my attention, but a lot of ifs ands and buts had to be taken care of before anything could even look official. Well, those slowly got eliminated and today I got a lovely gift via the phone - a different job.

I'll be working for a labour group for the rest of the summer, helping them finish a project. I couldn't be more excited. I get to work mostly from home, I don't have to work with children or theater people, and well, I'll get paid more! So I don't have to go in for camp training today or ever more! And I start training tomorrow morning. Oh and I will have the foxiest boss alive!

Surprise!

Sometimes you're at home on a Sunday night unpacking and thinking about bed and a friend calls and asks if she can drop something off for you. You say sure. So the friend shows up at your apartment door.

Sometimes the surprise is this:


(that would an Amanda VH, home from Honduras early)

And sometimes the surprise makes you do this:


(that would be smile and then cry)

Welcome Back To Employment Land

Alors, I have a job.

Starting in early July (after some training in late June) I will be a theatre day camp counselor.

I honestly didn't think I'd get the job....group interview....imagine 11 theatre people, all competing for the same jobs and all asked to talk about themselves. Yeah. Yeah. The nightmare you're imagining is what I sat through and was a part of for over 2 hours.

Related to that, its not the working everyday with the kids aged 6-13, its working with the other counselors that I fear. I was reading the India blog (see previous post) and there was a section about how the 6 of us were working with 190 kids from pre-K to grade 1. And they didn't even speak English. So I think I'll be ok. But its the level of pretense with the artsy adults. I'm hoping that the kids melt right through that and become the focus.

I'll keep you updated on how this is going.

Namaste

What I was doing 4 years ago.

CMO

Current Musical Obsession:

An album of Roger Miller's greatest hits

Sometimes

Sometimes your Uncles come in from Manitoba and this enables you to satisfy cravings for buffalo chicken fingers and coke. Sometimes you have a lot of fun. Sometimes you go and hang out in Ikea after and all involved drool all over themselves due to lustful desire of various Ikea items. Sometimes.

Photos and Lies

I said something a while back about getting the pictures of Whistler and Vancouver up here. Well, in theory you can call this "here". They're on facebook, but you can see my wittily labeled pics of Whistler here and Vancouver, here.

The Dormant Mother In Me

A couple weekends ago I was driving across Toronto and noticed a car ever swiftly moving, nay, dodging and weaving at break neck speeds through traffic. As it caught up to and passed me, I noticed it was an Echo. In my head I scolded the driver "well, obviously he doesn't know about the Echo's poor crash test rating!"

Sigh.

I'm Just Sayin' Is All

Matt Stairs is not an attractive man.

Lou Pinella doesn't look right in a Cubs uniform.

I'm Pretty Sure That's Right

When life hands you crap, you sit out on your balcony and apply for jobs. At least that what my ancestors did.

So Much Brooding

Every time I see the commercials for The Incredible Hulk I wonder why I don't own Fight Club.

An Unemployed Wonderland

So, I am still what might be termed "under employed" and by under I mean total lack thereof. Now, I can't be too much of a complainer face as I was offered a part part part time job - 5ish hours every two weeks involving teenagers, hot dogs and drunk football fans in east Hamilton - I turned it down in the hopes that well, in hope. I turned it down in hope. Sometimes I confuse hope with trust.

Anyway, I thought I might make a list of some of the things that I have been doing in all of my unemployed magnificence. As you can imagine, someone of my personality is rarely bored, just unmotivated or unstimulated. Grin. I've been a little frustrated that my total lack of income means that now that I have time, I have not the gas money to visit so many people.

I digress - a list of what has been occupying my days as of late:

• sleeping - sometimes a little more than I think I should, but I'm working on a pretty large deficit still
• thinking about walking - it gets romanticized while I look out from the balcony, but rarely happens
• watching Asians hurt themselves - no, not in that row of apartments on the 3rd floor but on youtube
• acquiring Dreamweaver C3 and teaching myself how to use it
• praying
• dancing in my apartment
• not doing the dishes
• not cleaning the bathroom or my bedroom
• painting picture frames
• drawing/text art
• harassing people via instant messaging services
• writing letters
• tiny tiny bits of pilates/work outs
• applying for jobs
• applying for more jobs
• interviewing for very few jobs
• sitting around being hopeful
• sitting around being pessimistic
• discouraging Bernice from laying on the 2 new eggs she laid - I'll get you Irwin!
• reading
• playing ball
• hanging out with people
• letting mosquitoes bite my left foot 6 times
• counting down the days until: Chelsea returns, Amanda returns, baby showers, weddings, teachers stop counting down the days they have left in their school years
• listening for the ice cream truck, hearing it, deciding if I can actually afford to spend the 2.50$ on a small dipped cone, and then evaluating the amount of time I spent thinking and figuring out if I still have enough time to make it down to the truck before it drives away
• watching Portuguese television so that I don't have to watch lame soap operas
• cleaning the pigeon crap off the balcony in slow covert ways
• thinking about my mom's cooking
• running off to donate blood
  
• writing blogs
  

Have You Ever?

Have you ever been looking for domain names and the ones you really want are taken by people, but they have like one picture up and are saying the page is under construction, but its been under construction for like a year and you just want to punch them in the face and take the domain name. Of course by punch them in the face I mean communicate the love of Christ and speak calmly to them about why you might want to acquire that domain name. Of course.

Explain

How is this (new vid 11/06/08):



Not like this:



I mean we've got:

• pithy announcers
• rotating surf board of death
• the big balls are like the log jammer
• so much rope swinging
• people hilariously hurting themselves
  

Thought

The world needs more clothes lines and hammocks.

Beeeep, The Call You Have Dialed...

If you're trying to get a hold of me via my cell phone, it won't work. And it won't start working again until I get enough employment to pay off Rogers and restore my service. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, you have my shame filled apology.

Tiny Bit

I'm a little sad that Hilary is out. I always liked her hair.

Extra, Extra

I promised that I'd tell/show you when the grad announcement was in the paper. You can find it here - just scroll down a bit.

"Baseball Has Been Very Very Good To Me"

So I'm back into another year of Reachforth Slo-pitch. I'm playing with essentially the same team as last year. This season we're called the DP's 'cause we all mostly have a connection to one Dan Postma and we're so good that we toss the double plays around as if they were the tiniest of babies. What? I think I'm trying to say that we are good. At the very least we have a lot of fun.

If you'd like to follow us you can go here and scroll down to Team DPs. Our schedule and game by game results are there. If you go there now you'll see that we won last week.

Let me tell you a couple of things about last week's game. We won 16-7. I went 4-4 with 4 singles and scored 3 of those times. I only made one error in the field. I had a spectacular slide at 3rd. But what I really want to tell you about is Tim. Tim is/was the 3rd baseman for the other team we were playing. The other team is the church plant from my church. Tim has been a pastor, a professor and a friend. Tim slid into 2nd base (my base) and lacerated his leg on the post that holds the bag in. He cut right through to muscle and cut the muscle (cringe) and somehow also managed to sprain the ankle of the other leg. Oy! So there was a lot of blood lost and a visit from Senor Ambulance. Craziness. I'm hoping tonight's game is a little more sedate.

Oh, can I just say that I have never been more out of shape in my life. Oh. my. goodness! I'm the heaviest I've ever been and the most asthmatic. This winter/spring took so many good things from me. I spent more than half the game trying to catch my breath and the next morning I was so congesty and mucusy and gross. It felt like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes (which I have never done). But I'm sure tonight's humid game starting at 9:30pm will be much better. Grin.

Play Ball!

It Has To Do With The Epidemic

Last night I had the hottest date that I've had in some time. The lovely Linda and I went out for a "hey you finally graduated" and a "hey you planned the whole graduation" celebration night of dinner, making fun of Burlington and a movie.

The movie we went to see was Baby Mama. It stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both of whom I love. Now I wasn't so sure about the movie though. I hadn't heard too much about it and sometimes these SNL flicks turn out to really suck. But I gave it a chance, and oh my, I laughed my stupid face off. Good gravy there were some good parts to it. I would totally watch it again when it comes out on DVD.

Besides all the good comedy stuff, you want to know why I liked the movie? You know how in those crazy, really only comedy movies they have to have a sort of crazy plot. Like something that sorta almost could happen in real life. And they surround it with lots of little things that do happen in real life, because real life is very funny if you step back. Anyway, always in this plot line the action has to fall, the shoe has to drop and something bad has to happen - the tension that the movie has been resting on has to break and ... bwah. I am kind of sensitive and for really real, and often when this tension breaks I have a hard time handling it - it makes my stomach hurt. So there are many times that I don't like watching a comedy more than once because it makes my stomach hurt too much. A lot of Leave It To Beaver episodes are like this more me - I used to sit on the stairs and wait for the tensiony part to be over and then watch the rest of the episode as a kid. But Baby Mama had the tension, broke it and kept moving forward enough that I didn't hurt. I liked that.

Alors, Linda = hot, Baby Mama = very funny.

CMO/RMO

Current musical obsession: "Love Song" (the stripped version) by Sara Bareilles

Recent musical obsessions: the entirety of the Juno Soundtrack; the first half of the Once Soundtrack; M.I.A's songs "Paper Planes" and "Come Around"