A Pigment of My Imagination

This is what should happen when I decide to paint (anything - picture, wall, chair, etc)

1. Envision everything that needs to happen from start to finish.
2. Repeat step 1.
3. Write down everything that needs to happen from start to finish.
4. Submit written steps to multiple peers for review.
5. Receive reviews.
6. Review reviews.
7. Make any adjustments to steps.
8. Re-submit written steps with adjustments.
9. Review the re-reviews.
10. Acquire everything needed.
11. Double check that everything is in place.
12. Begin painting process one step at a time, careful checking the peer reviewed list before moving on to the next step.

What actually happens when I decide to paint:

1. Thought - "Ooooh paint, I got this! So, so simple. I totally know how to do this!"
2. Ruin project.
3. Attempt to salvage project by using "creative" idea.
4. Further ruin project.
5. Attempt to salvage project with another creative brainstorm.
6. Further ruin project.
7. Stop before things could possibly get any worse.
8. Hate universe.
9. Promise to think things all the way through for next project.
10. Repeat steps 1-9.

Important Thing To Know

Created by Oatmeal

Critically Ill

My laptop is in critical condition at a talented friend's tech hospital. Posting may be limited while this crisis is sorted out.

Your sympathy, understanding, eggs benny, big macs, cokes and macbook pros are appreciated.

- Management

We're Living In A Slap Dash Episode

Next in a series of things that would make the universe better if I owned them is this:



Reasons it would be good for me to have the SLAAAAP CHOP:

• I really like to cook.
  
• I love to keep expanding my repertoire and taking mini adventures with traditional recipes or the dishes I grew up with.
  
• I live with 7 other people.
• Moving sharp blades that swing to look like a butterfly for dishwasher safe easy cleaning (we don't have a dishwasher).
  
• This would help cut prep time.
• The guy on the ad looks crazy.
  
• This would help cut dishes.
• More growth in cooking due to the ease of prep.
• It's named Slap Chop
  

Heads Up Players

I've moved back to the Hammer.

When You Work From Home...

... you don't fall asleep thinking of snow days.

Back

The phone is back. I feel normal again. And only 15 text message and 1 voice mail waiting for me.

Some Gaps In The Truth

There is a lovely jazz song called "All God's Children Got Rhythm" (Kaper/Jurman/Kahn). It contains the title line and also a line that says "all God's children got swing".

I just want to say that the authors of this catchy tune obviously never met the Dutch or white Baptists.

Loads Of Truth

I use iGoogle and one of my gadgets there is the quote of the day. There are three of them in a little box all together.

The other day these three were together and I loved them all:

I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
- Gilda Radner

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.
- Dick Werthimer

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
- Sir Barnett Cocks

I Know There Is A Connection

When I saw this...

toothpastefordinner.com

It made me think of a few men I know. But it also made me think of this.

One Car, Car For Sale...

No, its not mine. But it is my lovely cousin's. She is having another baby and this car is a 2 door, which is not so conducive to being easy with kids. Its a great car, I've driven in it many times. Actually if you must know, its kind of a sleek, sexy car. And my cousin, being more anal retentive than I, takes very good care of her stuff. So the car has my endorsement. It's currently located in the Belleville area.

2000 Honda Civic SE, 2 doors, 5-speed, black, air conditioning, cruise, keyless entry, comes with 4 winter tires on rims, dealer maintained, no rust, one owner, $6800.00 613-477-2722

Oh Yeah

I'm moving to London, ON on the weekend. There is a great housing set up there. I'm living with 3 other people I know. Two of them are older than me. The younger one is finishing up school. The house is in a nice area, its not near the downtown at all, but the neighbourhood and the neighbours are really nice. We might get one more roommate for part of the year, a mutual friend of the 3 of ours. I'm getting a killer deal on rent for a house that is already furnished and landscaped and has some beautiful features.

I don't have a job there yet. Though the city is almost blanketed with my resume. Blessedly for me I am able to keep doing work for the labour group for at least a few weeks. So I have some income and some flexibility while I try and secure other work.

One of the other exciting things about this move is that I just made Gerald Fagan's Chorus London. Its a choir of just over 100 members, it has its own orchestra (and a uniform!). Some of the highlights of what I know we'll be performing this year are: Orff's Carmina Burana, Ruth Watson Henderson's Voices of the Earth, Handel's Messiah, and Britten's War Requiem. I'm pretty stoked. There are also plans for some recording too.

In the meantime, I'm stressed out of my tree to get packing done. Most of my belongings have to go to Brighton before the much smaller amount of them goes to London. So there is lots of sorting and chucking and looking longingly at children playing outside. Having this whole leg thing isn't helping too much. It still looks gross and swollen. It still hurts and I still have to ice it and keep it up. Keeping your leg up is easy when packing you know. Cough.

I just thought you'd want to know. And the more you know, the more you grow!

Thankfully No Probing

If aliens landed today they would be able to tell that I was raised on a farm and that I am Canadian. This is because a) I have a magazine rack in my bathroom and b) in that rack are copies of Macleans magazine and a Margaret Atwood novel.

FYI

Goodbyes blow chunks.

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
  

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.

Blogging Into The Future

So Blogger finally gave us the ability to schedule posts to be published in the future. Which, ack, I did with this post. I'm sitting in church right now, but while I'm doing that, this post is being published! Wah! I've been waiting for this feature for a while - 'cause some days I get more ideas than are readable by you, my friendly bloggership. So then I have to keep the ideas and put them as drafts and remember to post them later, or just scrap them. Now I can write them and schedule them to be posted the next day, the next week, etc.

I was thinking about this and how it could be used as a tool. It brought to mind the first season of Alias. One of the main character's best friends is a reporter. He discovers all of this stuff about a pretty evil organization and they kinda sorta wanna kill him for it. In the interest of pursuing the truth he continues to chase after the story even though his life is threatened. But he does something sort of interesting - he knows that he's about to go somewhere crazy dangerous and that really really bad things could happen to him, so he writes up everything he has so far and gives it to another reporter friend. He tells her that if he doesn't come back, that something has happened to him and that she has to publish the story. Its kind of like a wacked out insurance policy.

Soooo, if I think I'm going somewhere dangerous or something, I'll write up some post to let you all know that I've been drugged and left near a pier in Hong Kong or something. But likely it'll be that I got lost on the East side looking for a better deal on fixing my car's air conditioning, and didn't get back in time to unschedule the post. Hong Kong is nice in the summer. :)

Tell Me On A Sunday Please

The truth comes out, and is broken to me in a beautiful way:

Fat contains lots of energy (calories). If we don't use this energy we store it as fat in our own bodies, saving the energy for future use. Sadly the fat often ends up where we don't want it, leading to podgy stomachs and big bums.
- from www.chewonthis.org.uk/fat_salt_sugar/fat_home.htm

I had always wondered what was causing my podgy stomach and big bum.

Future

People have been asking me what I'm going to be doing with myself when I finish up at Redeemer in April. Well, I'm ready to let the cat out of the bag.

I'm moving to Europe. I'm moving to Europe to compete in Scandinavia's Next Top Model.