in which we meet the clarences

ok, so i've been reading this blog by this woman i don't know (and there's nothing lame about peeping into other people's lives this way, particularly if they're really funny, like she is) who got fired from her job for posting horrendous and inappropriate things on her blog about her co-workers and/or bosses. apparently, that happens. there are few things i can blog about these days besides work, since my last seventy-two hours have looked thusly: daycare-red robin-sleep-daycare-red robin-sleep-daycare. now, i just hope and pray and more or less assume that no one from reds will ever get a hold of this website, but if they do, odds are that they feel the same way about paul as i do (complete and utter re-avowel of paul's SMS, because yesterday i heard kevin make a perfectly reasonable request, which paul denied out of hand. kevin made the error of trying to explain his reasoning, which got paul's back up, and apparently i'm not the only one to force a battle of wills) and hopefully won't tell him.

anyway, the major struggle for me (since i really won't cry if reds fires me) is with daycare. there are all kinds of privacy issues surrounding child care, but i have stories, people. so i'm wondering, maybe, if i don't call them So-and-so P. Surname, but refer to them simply as Clarence, can i steer myself clear of dangerous waters? there's Angry Clarence, who regularly kicks me, and throws rocks and spits, and Fragile Clarence, who goes to pieces every time he's tagged playing Pirates and Sharks (even though it is equally as fun to be a pirate as it is to be a shark, and that, friends, is the reason we have played p&s EVERY DAY FOR THE LAST SIX DAYS), and then there's Thug Clarence and Dude Clarence (who is a dead ringer for one joshua rostek, aka 'dude') and May Be Slightly Retarded (MBSR) Clarence, and poor little Girl Clarence with no other girl clarences to play with. most of their appellations will be negative, i'm sorry, but all of their positive traits are universal (they're all heart-rendingly cute and prone to cuddles and they're total prodigies. they've perfected the exasperated teenaged eye-roll, and the indignant, self-righteous 'whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?' when you firstnamelastname them for having teenage-eye-rolled you. you tell me that's not advanced behavior!) and they can only be distinguished by their...let's call them character deficiencies. but even though most of my stories will be about the time Dude Clarence bit Sulky Clarence hard enough to draw blood, or about how Silly Clarence can turn any word into a 'bathroom' word, and i will sometimes admit that i hate them, know that i also love them, much in the same way that they both love and hate me. love me because i can name any bone that they can feel through their skin and because i'm really good at foosball (relatively speaking) and because i invented Pirates and Sharks; hate me because, for what seems to be the first time in their lives, someone is calling down fire and brimstone for such minor misdemeanors as Giving Sass and Unprovoked Smacking of Friends, and my threats are by no means idle. i will actually plan fun activities so that you have something to miss out on, kids.

let the love fest begin.

my God is bigger than your HIV

ok, i was just starting a post about how i had my first really good shift at red robin today, and how that balanced out the fact that one of my kids threw rocks at me and kicked me and spit at me today, but this just in:

apilak and supakit (you remember them, right? skinny baby, fat baby, thai, HIV positive?) have both just tested negative for HIV.

THAT'S RIGHT, THEY DON'T HAVE HIV!!! their blood came back clean!!!!!

they're getting re-tested in six weeks just to make sure, but they're clean!!! they're healed!

amen praise God glory halleluiah.

this is what we call 'science'

'miss rachel, do you want to see my eyeballs disappear?'

'nope, i'm afraid i don't.'

'but look! i can roll them all the way back so that they're gone!!!'

'sorry bud, that's not really something i want to see.'

'miss rachel, look! i can see my brains!!!'

consider the ant, you sluggard

i would like, with the pride of the extraordinary lazy, to brag a bit about how productive and useful i was yesterday. now, i know that there are people out there who get productive and useful things done every day, but i am not one of them. i am disorganized and sleepy. please understand, then, the hurculean effort it took me to clean my room. i cleaned and swiffered my room. inertia in action, i proceeded to swiffer the kitchen and family room, working around koala, who was taking her ease...



i thought she might relocate when i moved the ottoman, but she didn't even flinch. for posterity's sake, here she is earlier today...

and a few hours ago...

that dog is sedentary! anyway, not only did i hang up the clothes in the 'clean' pile, but i did another load of laundry, since i have a nasty habit of eating in bed and dropping loaded bagels, jam side down. and i went for a run, and i had a shower, which i know shouldn't be impressive, but sometimes i take my not-in-thailand freedom-from-showering-thrice-daily a bit too far, so it is. and i emptied and loaded the dishwasher, not because i am awesome, but because the cache of dishes i'd unearthed in my room looked way less incriminating on the rack than on the counter.

and then i went out to mission for beers with friends, which is not useful or productive, but since they comprise almost the entire audience of my blog, i had to throw that in. jer, mike, alan, sometimes ryan...what's up? robbie, we missed you.

i aim for balance in life, so today i slept in late, made brownies with marshmallow icing, and watched three movies and the same episode of 'so you think you can dance' twice. perhaps one of these days i'll usurp koala's spot on the floor between the couch and the ottoman.

filters

i've been thinking of starting a completely anonymous blog and not telling any of you.

i struggle, when i blog, with how much to reveal. i treasure other blogs, particularly those of people i don't know (i know, i'm lame! i read strangers' blogs), for their frankness, and the bald honesty with which they discuss their friends and family. then i shudder, because i'm pretty sure those friends and families probably read those blogs. apparently, there's a new blogger service called vox which allows you to 'control your community of readers -- like, say, if you want to share stuff with your parents, without them also running into entries about the guy you hooked up with on Thursday night, or the time you vomited into their washing machine and managed to clean it up without telling them' (quote source: the fug girls) but it's invitation only, and besides, i'm not keen enough to go jumping from blogger site to blogger site, looking for the best possible scenario.

instead, i'll sit here and wrestle with how much i should talk about joel, for example. i know he reads this (hey babe, how was your weekend?) sometimes, and i have no secrets from him, but there's a difference between that and actually posting my thoughts about how i think one of his friends is an emotional bully, and how you can feel the tension in the room and the strained desires to both impress and avoid judgement, and how i prefer all of his friends (and himself, and even myself) when this one friend isn't around. and now, if i had a filter, i would block all of joel's friends from ever reading this particular post (if they even knew what a blog was, which i'm pretty sure they don't).

even harmless things, like the fact that my siblings and i recently discovered that we've all been using the thing-that-goes-over-food-in-the-microwave-so-that-it-doesn't-splatter-and-soil-the-micro-walls as a plate to cook things might not go over so well with my mother (hi mom, i think you're cute and i totally don't begrudge the fact that i'm slowly turning into you, though i hope i never have occasion to cook up fifty boxes of KD for no readily apparent reason).

and then there are times where my thoughts are subversive and angry and (usually) temporary, and i don't want anyone reading them, which is why i have thought about purely anonymous blogging. but then, i suppose that is what my good old pen-and-paper journal is for.

so, jer, i guess this is the blog in which i have nothing else to blog about except the nature of blogging itself (someone oh someone please teach me how to create links in my blog to other sites so that one of the words in the sentence is underlined and then when you click on it, it takes you to the blog that i mean, because i would link you RIGHT NOW to the blog of jer's in which he blogs about the nature of blogging, and does such a spot-on rendition of the average-blogger's-first-blog that i nearly peed myself).

error

with the help of a random comment from alan on how to post videos on my blog (i was not aware that i wanted to know how to do this, but the more skills i have, the higher my dowry, so here goes), i will be making my blogvideoposting debut. i have no intentions of becoming the next jer vis (who, for the uninformed, posts funny videos blogly [that is to say, every blog]), but i do sometimes come across a video that tickles me on the inside. this is one...

ok, that didn't work. my 'copy' won't copy the entire 'embed' code, and so 'paste' only pastes the first fraction, and my 'html cannot be accepted: tag is broken' so now you will all be left wondering which video i thought was so hilarious.

in other news, the advantages of being a 'grown-up,' according to one of my boys, are as follows: you get to drink coffee, you get to fly on a plane by yourself, and you get to get married and have a cake. enjoy your perks, friends.

who loves their job...........s?

daycare went well (in that i neither cried nor thought seriously about throwing children out windows), but only because a full half of our kids either stayed home sick or went home early. bless them.

reds, well...i know that i will probably like it there eventually, but i hated tonight. not with the fiery, keep-me-up-for-hours kind of hatred, the kind where i will say things like 'paul has a tiny dick' in front of my mom (which is usually beyond my level of crude anyways, let alone talking to my mama), but with the bland, reconciled sort of hatred that goes well with the phrase '...but i don't have to like it!' i can't decide if katie (the schedule guru, who is currently not putting me on schedule) hates me because of what paul told her, or if she's just mean. i heard her snap at more than a few people, but i also saw her smile genuinely at someone, so i know that the tight-lipped fake-smile she gives me isn't her real one (some people just have naturally insincere smiles, and that can lead to miscommunication. katie is not one of those people).

anyway, being the last to start, i should have been the closer, but another girl stepped in and decided she was closing. i know it won't kill me to let everyone push me around and treat me like a rookie, even though i've been serving longer than most of them, but it may give me apoplexy. humble pie is not delicious, and reds serves a particularly foul brand. and i don't have to like it.

in other news, upon seeing the bowl of fun-sized chocolate bars on the counter, i immediately thought to myself 'oh goody, it's small-candy time again!' and then proceeded to rack my brains for a good thirty seconds, trying to figure out which holiday was associated with miniature treats.

a mild retraction

paul phoned on saturday to see if i wanted to work that night. i was in chilliwack, so i had to say no, but at least he called. he called again today to offer me a shift for tomorrow, which he's hoping will be a permanent shift. he says he's trying to get me some shifts, to get me on schedule. i may have to retract some of the things i said about him. not the small-man-syndrome part, he really does have that. and even if he ends up being the nicest guy alive, he's still resoundingly irritating and a little socially inept. but maybe he's trying to make amends.

or maybe he's up to something...

about 60% of this rage is genuine. all the things i say about paul are true.

i had the day from blazing hell at my one job, and then proceeded to have the day from blazing hell at my other job. i'm still too discouraged and angry and defeated to want to relive this twelve-hour period in blog form...suffice it to say that my boys were all restless and smacky because of the rain, and this exponentially increased their usual restlessness and smackyness. everyone was in tears at some point in the day, and so i figured, who am i to kill a trend? tempted to sit right down in the middle of the room and throw a hairy tantrum with the rest, i rather had a a good old cry in front of my boss. more embarrassing than not, but she was uber-sweet about it, and expressed her displeasure that my co-teacher had made an unbreakable appointment for herself on this day, leaving me alone (did i mention that i was alone with the restless smackers?) in my first week. so i kind of hate that job a little bit.

also, i hate working at red robin metrotown. i know i keep saying that i love it, but the truth is that i loved working in abby, and i'd work every friday and saturday night, and even the dreaded sunday afternoon, if i could only bring my abby staff (even troy, that rat bastard) to this location. it's exceptionally difficult to go from a location where i am queen and have all kinds of weight to throw around to a location where i can't even get my small-man-syndrome assistant manager (paul, i hope you're reading this, because all of those reconcilatory remarks i made were only because having your boss, even a small-man-syndrome assistant manager, hate you, is a bad call. so you can go ahead and keep thinking that we're buddies now and stuff, but i freaking hate you, and i think you're lying when you say your getting married, because i can't fathom that any woman could stomach you, and i hope you're lying when you say you have kids, because i wont live in a world that contains your spawn) to do something he should legitemately do on his own. it's one thing to get your boss to promo stuff because the folks at the table are friends of yours. it's another thing entirely to ask him to take a drink off the bill because the drinks took 25 minutes to get to the table (i will insert here that it was a teeny tiny bit the bar's fault, a whopping bit paul's fault, and in no way my or the table's fault, and i say that in complete humble sincerity). and i may have accidentally gotten into a shouting match with him over the whole ordeal, which was a mistake on my part, because he promptly went around talking trash about me (small man syndrome) to other servers. and this happened early in the evening, so for the rest of the night i was full of righteous indignation, and no small amounts of ire and wrath.

'Everything just feels right tonight. I'm content. At peace. And very tired.' blogs jane. i am the opposite of those things. all is wrong. i genuinely and wholeheartedly (however much those feelings may or may not be influenced by my raging pms) don't want to go back to reds, ever. and i certainly don't want to go back to daycare on monday. i feel nagging hope for daycare, because children can be molded and trained, like monkeys. right now i don't ever want to see the inside of red robin again. paul cannot be coaxed out of trying to rule the world because i outweigh him, and he thinks he has something to prove. nothing is right, and i am still churning with gall (and, i'm not going to lie, still crying). i am not at peace, and i am not tired, and i will stay awake for another angry hour or so, and then dream angry dreams from which i wake un-refreshed.

and also, i made whopping tips and walked away with piddling money, which is a usual red robin occurrance and means that someone made more than they should and isn't telling. whoever you are, anonymous theif, i add you to my wheel of hate.

hello lars

some wacko is giving out my phone number as his. i had four wrong numbers call today. the last was one of those awkward calls that go thusly:
'hello?' i answer my phone.
'good evening,' says the companiable but unfamiliar voice on the other end.
'hello,' i say, a little more stiffly.
'this is lars. how are you?' he continues, sounding amused, and a little chastising because i didn't know him at the outset.
'i'm sorry, you have the wrong number,' i say, genial and polite now that i know i'm not going to have to make polite conversation with someone i didn't feel like talking to.
'this is lars,' he repeats, as if to say, 'you've made a mistake, baby. it's me.'
i was sorely tempted to reply 'oh, lars! i thought you said it was alphonso' and then see how long i could string on the conversation for, but i'm trying not to do things the five-year-old equivalents of which i would give my kids time-outs for.

i have a hopeless flip flop addicition

i am COMPLETELY unable to dress myself for weather. fall baffles me. vancouver baffles me. this fickle season in this inconstant city leaves me hopelessly underdressed and shiverry, or over-swaddled and sweaty. i can't properly assess the conditions, nor can i functionally layer myself. it was simpler in thailand, where you knew it'd be way too hot for t-shirts and long shorts, but that's what you wore anyways, because anything less would be uncivilized.

back at the bird

red robin called me at daycare today to ask if i wanted to come in. there are better ways to spend your first shift than sweaty and smelling like dirty children, i'm sure.

i do solemnly swear not to fill my blog with serving stories, unless they're genuinely funny (like today, when chad got a table of blind people, and tanya says, 'but how are you going to talk to them?') or genuinely irksome (like today, when...a bunch of things happened). i know that most serving stories are appreciated only by other servers, who can then say, 'yeah, i hate that guy' (because 'that guy' is at every restaurant), and that most other people think that servers bitch too much. we do. servers spend exactly half their time getting paid way too much for the amount of work they're doing, and the other half getting paid way too little for the amount of shit they're putting up with.

so, this blog is just to say that i'm back at it, working at the ole dirty bird, and it's just like riding a bike (would all who appreciate the irony of that statement laugh here). it was a creepingly slow night, and they put me in the back section where they always forget to seat people. you might say i was eased in.

also, we got new shirts, and they're horrendous. check them out at your local reds starting monday.

thank heavens for technology

remember the days before caller id and abundant cell phones when you would screen calls through your answering machine, and then, when that call finally came that you didn't want, you would all be quiet as the persona non grata left their message, because some subconscious part of you was afraid that if you dropped a plate or the dog barked, they would hear it and know you were there?

may i announce that...

...i am gainfully employed. i am the proud new owner of a 'real' (aka 'not red robin') job. let me disclaimer by stating once and for all that i lurve working at reds. it is not, however, a viable career unless your name is carrie and you work the bar at the abby reds and all the other staff call you 'mamma bear.' then it's legit. i will not be the new carrie. i will also not (hopefully) spend my life working at daycares.

did i land my dreamily-located job up at metrotown? certainly not, i say to you. either their funding was cut, and they're really not hiring more teachers, or they decided after i left that i had something of the psychotic about me, and that they weren't sure they liked my shoes (i wore shoes to that thing. not flip flops, effing shoes!!! one of them scraped all the flesh off the back of my heel, leaving it oozing and tender, so that when, in one of my pre-sleep twitchings later that night, i donkey-kicked myself in the heel, i woke up cursing). shortly thereafter, however (i think it was the same day), my good old friend jody (who i haven't physically seen for over two years, even though we used to hang out daily) calls me up and says, i have a job i need to give to you.

i work at a daycare in surrey. i'll refrain from giving you the first impressions of any of my kids, because they'll all end up being wrong and i'll have to eat them later (my words, not the kids). i'm only working part-time so that i can keep my belurved job at reds, but right now, part time is plenty time. having been madly busy and insatiably productive for the past four years or so, my shiftless bummery was starting to get to me. that being said, i am one day into my job, and nostalgically sobbing overy my days as a shiftless bum. sort of.

koala!!!

in lieu of the absolutely nothing that is going on in my life just now, let me tell you about my dog (well, dogs, because the story of how we got koala begins with shadow), because i think she's downright hilarious, and everyone who meets her thinks she's pretty great, too. so, the story of koala begins with shadow, who we got when i was about three. this is a picture of shadow...


well, actually, it's a picture of a picture, because i got my digital camera the christmas we put shadow down (which i totally thought was the tragic-est thing that had ever happened, and capped off my rotten christmas in which i also worked two weeks at a job that i hated and then sort of got fired, and my purse was stolen. i got back to school, vengeful and self-pitying, to find that my friend chris' two-year-old neice had been diagnosed with cancer and then died in that two-week period. he took that prize). so we got shadow when i was three-ish, and i was deathly afraid of her for about a week, and then we became romping friends. shadow was a family dog, who loved us all equally, and she was also part border collie, so she couldn't rest until we were all in the same place. she got to be about twelve-ish years old, which is old for a dog, and we figured she wasn't long for this world, so we started to think about getting another dog. if you're dog people, and your dog dies, or runs away, or what have you, this creates a dog vaccuum, and that will suck in any old dog if you're not careful. if you want to have some choice in the matter, you need to pick your new dog before your old dog kicks it. shadow was slowing down, so we got koala to fill the gap. shadow, out of pure spite and obstinancy, lived five more years before she got (quite suddenly) so old that we had to put her down. that's all i really want to say about that matter.

shadow was small and quick, clever and thought she was people. koala knows she's a dog. this is her knowing she's a dog (actually, i think she's sneezing, but you get the point)...


'did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? i think that's how dogs spend their lives.' - sue murphy


that's koala the time she got stuck in the front seat of the car. boo says that trying to get her out was like birthing a calf. needless to say, she's dumb as a rock. i mean, she's smart dog-style (she was show-dog trained when we got her, but she was also thin...she is currently neither of those things), but she totally will go (read: has gone) through a screen door because she didn't notice it was there. she's terribly fat, unreasonably happy, and hopelessly devoted to my dad, loving the rest of us only by proxy. she spent the first few years of her time with us being murderously afraid of my brother. now she is pretty much only afraid of being left alone at the park (not that she ever has been, but she'll never go more than twenty feet from you, and panics when you're out of her sight). and of that sound bottles make when you blow over the top of them. and lawn mowers, and vaccuum cleaners, and...well...a lot of other things, really. but she's docile, and let's us dress her up...


which we do, in the absence of smaller siblings. my mum contends that koala knows she looks foolish, and feels ashamed, but answer me this...is THIS the face of a dog who knows how ridiculous she looks?
not at all!! that beast is LOVING life! the collar you see in that picture is a relic; she goes about in the buff now. her intense fear of abandonment usually keeps her from running too far away.

in conclusion, koala enjoys lying around...

skateboarding...

(i just accidentally deleted the picture of koala skateboarding, and you know how blogger is about adding photos once you've started typing, so just scroll down to the next post, and beHOLD!)

and a good laugh...


(although that may be another sneeze). thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your time.

BEhold

apilak

this is sierra sanchez... she's ten and she plays soccer and speaks thai and is really completely rad. also, she keeps me in the loop. she emailed me this morning to let me know that apilak really and truly has pneumonia (well, namoneea, but she's ten). and also that she's lost her email address somewhere (not the 'address,' the account).

here's a smirky face to put to your prayers. karen says that he looked terrible when they admitted him (5:00 this morning, our time), but as they prayed for him and played with him, and the meds took effect, he seemed to get better before their eyes. so pray for a miracle. we only need a little one 'cause, well, he's a little person.

book stores (and a quick rant about donald miller)

book stores give me happy tinglies. used book stores even more so. today robyn and i went for coffee at the wee cafe where her hubby works (thanks for the stellar latte, ry) and where mike soon will (i expect no less than stellar, mr laroy), and then googled 'used book stores north van.' the first one on our list had been mysteriously transformed into a gymwear shop, but it stood two blocks down from an un-used book shop (i forget which one) and so we browsed the orderly, straight-backed titles there (i am a bindings-breaker; my friend dennis is not. i discovered this upon returning a book to him, its spine rendered limber and readable by my unconscious bending, only to find that all of his other books lay flat when placed on their sides). i found 'plan b: further thoughts on faith,' anne lamott's sequel, of sorts, to 'travelling mercies.' may i just say this quickly: it is currently en vogue to like donald miller. he is current, slightly edgy, clearly loves Jesus, and has written a stack of books in the past few years. i don't like donald miller. for those of you who do, go on ahead, but when you flip over your copy of 'blue like jazz' and read where, on the back, christianity today likens him to 'anne lamott with testosterone,' replace that, in your mind, with 'donald miller has a similar style to anne lamott, but she's semi-olderish and has been doing it longer, so she's better at it, and she may swear just a teeny bit more, but she doesn't insult your intelligence by explaining every cultural reference she makes, and figures that if you don't know who charlie mccarthy or what sarcoptic mange is, you can look it up your damn self. and also, she is white lady with afro hair, and that's kinda rad.' i say this having only read 'blue like jazz,' and perhaps miller has matured in the three books he's written since then, and i have to admit that lamott's fiction really isn't uber-awesome, but her non-fiction is to die for. 'travelling mercies' is a must, 'operating instructions: a journal of my son's first year' would top my gift list if i knew any pregnant ladies who had wicked senses of humor and didn't mind the occasional f-bomb, and would whoever borrowed my copy of 'bird by bird' (alan, was that you?) kindly remind me that you borrowed it and then return it to me? (i swear i didn't lose it, jane, it's just that i love to lend out books, but i haven't developed a sign-out system.) there. whew! this has all been on my mind since i read blj in the summer of 2004. i am a free gal once again. what was i talking about? oh yes, bookstores. so, we finally found an honest-to-goodness used bookstore, which i greatly prefer. the books are not only cheaper, but they have been loved (robyn pointed out that the very nature of used book stores indicates that the books have been rejected and abandoned. i prefer to see them as an inheritance, passed down from book lover to book lover for a nominal fee). i am ecstatic when someone hands me their own personal copy of a treasured book, particularly if the book appears well-read and bears the scars of backpack travel, subconscious reading twitches, and the dog. a man at the shelter where my sister volunteers gave her this copy of 'stranger in a strange land' (which i insist you all go read right now. you can't borrow it from me, because it isn't mine. ask boo). truth be told, i was looking for a copy of this today. it's one of those books you'd like to own, because it's rich and deep and requires several re-readings to fully 'grok' it (you'll have to read the book). ANYway, the reason i started this post was to tell you about this bookstore we happened upon that almost gave me epilepsy...what was the name of that store, robbie? no matter, they'd likely sue me for libel anyways. you know that bin in zellers with the $.98 panties? they're all in a jumble from having been rummaged through, and you can only tell that they started out orderlyish because there's a higher concentration of mediums in the southwest corner. this store was like that, but with books. boxes upon boxes of unsorted books nearly blocked the entry. half of the shelves stood behind waist-high stacks of boxes, sealing the lower books into a mausoleum, of sorts. the boxes being bad enough, the books that were shelved were double-stacked. double-stacked! like i do with my geek-o fantasy novels that i'm too proud to hide in storage, but too ashamed to make it immediately obvious how very many of them i have. behind every row of books was another row of books, praying for the light. i'd say that of all the thousands of books present, maybe a quarter of them were readily visible. even those were in a loosely-arranged order. 'whattaya got there?' 'ummmmmm, i have what appears to be the M's' 'M's, eh? well, that makes no sense, because i'm noting a profusion of T's just here, but there seems to be a cluster of G's in between us.' it made me hyperventilate, a little.

it makes me happy, then, to be sitting cozily on my bed (read: mattress on the floor), flanked by my orderly, beloved, well-behaved bookshelves (plural!!!), having exacted a promise from my own dear joel that i will always have more bookshelf-room than books. my treasures will never meet this buried-in-a-tomb-built-of-their-own-kind fate. i'd give them away, first.

OH yeah

and as far as i know, golf and apilak are doing better. thanks for praying.

scandilacastle!

i had thought that things would kind of slow down for a bit once i got back to north america. i suppose the fact that i didn't get dressed today until 2:00 suggests that perhaps they have (although 'dressed' is a loose term. i replaced my sweatpants with fisherman pants, the rough thai equivalent. 'changed' might be a better word for the process). this past long weekend, however, was long indeed. i spent a significant chunk of friday transiting myself out to abbotsford (i know, i'm lame, and i still don't have my license. i KNOW!), where joel and i had dinner with his family and then hung out with his chilliwack entourage at the chilliwack earls (the only earls where, as far as i can see, my 'whores unlimited' theory falls short. if you are reading this and you work at earls, i'm sorry, kind of).

saturday, i went to some basketball game at mei which is supposedly a big deal *shrug* and then caught up with a series of friends from last year. ben and caleb have a new place (except that ben doesn't actually live there. in my mind he does) and, like, thirty new roommates. it's the mt waddington house all over again. since ben is the only person in whose company i smoke, we had a cigarette on the roof. ben started trek on sunday which, since drinking and smoking are verboten while on the trek program, cuts both of our fledgling smoking careers short. a shame, really.

sunday, joel and i headed off to my sweet little church in surrey and then went to the pne. it's the last weekend of the fair, so, needless to say, it was packed. the superdogs were splendid, as usual, with the border collie rocking the show (i'm partial to border collies, since our dear departed shadow was kind of part one. joel says they're prone to nipping at heels. if he and i ever do agree on something, i hope it is of more consequence than our preference of dog). there was a high-diving show that was actually pretty wicked (as in, awesome) and a street performer who drew the 15-second act of catching a catapulted cabbage on a helmet with a spike into a half-hour show. there were some sweet sand sculptures, like this one...


...where you can't actually tell, but saskwatch is sneaking up on an unsuspecting camper. there were some other really intricate ones, but this one caught our eye...

...as being a trifle crude. i mean, i know, art and all, the human form is lovely and whatnot, but this is a family park, and that woman is being ravished by the snake! the miscellaneous security guard informed us that she had begun her sand-life naked, and was sand-clothed at the request of the local powers-that-be. that's her leg up in the air. (there's a sand-dude behind her with a sand-apple in his mouth. probably all of you get the adam-and-eve reference. i totally missed that connection, which i'll chalk down to being shocked and appalled). ANYway, the real reason i go to the pne is to see the animals, cause i'm from the city...

most particularly THIS animal...

look at the SIZE of this cow!!! that little creature in black petting him is me, to give you some frame of reference. MAN!!!

monday saw still more friends i haven't seen in ages come out to hang out, and go to the earls on kingsway to visit more friends. it is good to be home.

as per my job situation...well, as soon as i said i preferred the part-time position, the jellybean daycare cooled off, and said they'd be in touch. i called them today, left a message on the machine, and haven't heard back. here's hoping i still get on there, but if not...them's the breaks. the reason i'd rather work part time is so that i can work at red robin in the evening (i know, working at reds gives me ulcers and makes me lose my hair and curse like a sailor, but i love it, i really do. plus it's good money). reds is more than eager to take me on staff, and the scheduly lady and i will be having an availability chat this evening. i guess this is the real world, and it's time to start making my own decisions, but i'd frankly rather have someone sort out my life just now. any takers?

too soon

so, i knew that this would happen, and that sooner or later, one of the boys would get sick and i would be over here, and not only unable to do anything about it, but at the mercy of everyone there to keep me updated and to shower love and affection on my behalf (which, i have to add, i have NO doubt of their ability to do. i just want to be the one doing the showering). so, i've been home for just over a week, and golf is sick. i got an email saturday night saying that he was quarantined, and that they were hoping that it wasn't TB, that it was just a really bad case of pneumonia, and today i get more mail saying that he's getting better (thank God) but that now apilak is sick, and he's way more frail. so now two of my boys are sick, and there's literally nothing i can do about it, except worry. it feels like worrying over there would be more productive than worrying over here. worrying there, i could cuddle and hold and joke and make laugh, i would be in the know, i would feel connected and useful. worrying here, i just worry. and pray. and ask others for prayer. so if you all could pray for my boys, they're sickly. i hope to have happier updates soon.