This one's from Gwilliker.. A great link to some "Why the hell are Mom and Dad leaving me on the lap of this fat Albino in the red suit with the whiskey breath?" photos.
I was playing single parent for a day last week, my wife was out at an all-day scrapbooking thingie and I was bathing the two monkeys after supper. After about 15 minutes the 6 year old screams..
We were out shopping the other day and I happened to see this Dance Pad for the Xbox at Futureshop for $199 , and I thought.. "Wow, my kid would love that!, But there's no way in hell I'm payin' $199 and tax for that!". When these mats first came out, it was a spin off of the Gamercize craze, to get people off the couch playing videogames and on their feet and moving around (but still playing video games). Sure it's much simplier to go outside and run around, but Xbox is fun, so I'm all for giving it whirl.
Another year of sitting on the curb in the cold watching ten billion led lights gliding past. Boy the kids like it though. And they hand out candy! We got smart the last couple years. Now we park at the START of the parade, not the middle, or the end. That way, when it starts at 6:00pm, we don't have to wait 30 minutes till the first float reaches us! Our secret parking spot has been compromised though. The old Canadian Tire has been bought out and some other kinds store is going in and they hired some poor guy to basically wear a hard-hat near the entrance and bark at all of us who tried to park there that (and I quote):
We put the Christmas lights up this weekend. I like to use the word Christmas because lately, it's been deemed semi-offensive at my place of work and we are encouraged to say "holiday" lights lest we offend anyone who doesn't happen to be the same religion. It's real funny to me since it's tied with Halloween as my favorite holiday and I'm not religious in the least. As far as I'm concerned, you can tell yourself that most of the religion has been completely commercialized out of Christmas. On another note, no one scolds me for saying Happy Hanukkah or Happy Ramadan or any other holiday I happen to catch on to. Call it for what it is.. "Season Greetings" my butt....
I got hold of a podcast on Hitler and the history of the third Reich from Slava the other day. Man was it interesting! I thought I knew a bit of the story but man Hitler was a CRAZY bastard. Him and all his stupid frickin National socialist Nazi buddies. The next time I run into one of those moronic Aryan lovin skinheads (I ran into a Heritage Front demonstration downtown years ago when I was in the market - now there's a bunch of raging idiot hate mongers), I'll have some new stuff to talk to them about little Adolf Schicklgruber and explain to them in great detail why they are &*%$#@ morons for holding that guy up as some sort of great leader.
We headed out to the Quebec side to do Canada's first multi geocache, Beware the Pit. It was a blast! I've never seen so much junk out in the woods! We found some old abandoned snowmobiles, a huge Caterpillar construction tractor, huge flatbed trucks out in the middle of fields, full of frickin junk like you wouldn't believe!
We hiked in and saw evidence of some recent bush parties, and this is where we stumbled upon the snowmobile, Tripper hopped on it and tried to drive it outta there, but it just wouldn't turn over for him. In fact, his hopping up and down on it like a demented evil bunny caused something dead-smelling to waft up at us from under the engine. It was RANK! (see the video here)
I don't know what posses someone to leave perfectly good machinery out in the woods like that. At one point, we stumbled upon an entire car engine block, just sitting there in the path, like it fell out of the sky. It was fun to play on the CAT. We couldn't get it started and drive it to the cache, which was to be expected, it looked like it had been sitting there for a few years. The whole way up we were dodging huge horse turds. This area is obviously a huge riding trail.
When we found the cache, we sat down for a bite to eat, and Tripper pulled out his cigar soon after for a celebratory cache-find smoke. Trouble was, his lighter fizzed out on him, he had no way to light it. He asked me if I had a lighter and I got and idea and rummaged through my bag. He didn't think it was funny when I threw him my flint and steel fire starter. In fact, he called me a bad name of some sort! I went about starting a fire the semi-old fashioned way and after a few minutes, I walked over with a burning piece of paper but the *&%$%&%# had gotten his lighter to fire and was already puffing away! It didn't matter. Fire is like CPR. Once you start to do it, you can't stop.
I recorded some stuff with my M-audio Micro recorder. I was going on about Bigfoot and GrizzlyG started to dispute the entire chain of viable Bigfoot evidence, so I thought, "This will be good" and clicked on my recorder with plans to decimate his argument and the %$#@&* recanted everything while the tape rolled and made like he believed in Bigfoot all along! Then he went on to orate how it was weird that an hour before I was having a spirited argument with someone who wasn't there (my imaginary friend) and that maybe I should go get that checked out...
And, speaking of Halloween, check out one of our scary pumpkins!
They're back! After like, a year, the museum of Nature in downtown Ottawa is open again. Only half the exhibit space is available and the upgrades probably won't be completely finished until next year, but the dinosaurs are there and they are WAY COOL! 
Check out the huge prehistoric turtle!
A couple of weeks ago, my daughter told me that the three goldfish in her fish bowl "were having a meeting!". Sure enough, two of them were clustered in the bottom entrance to the mermaid cave, deep in fish conversation. 
Hmm. I've only seen two fish for a few days now. Barring any successful escape attempts, maybe something was rotten in goldfish-land.
Two days later, the other two were dead (damn that Spezza). Off to Walmart for more fish soon.
MY GAWD BUT THEY SUCK!!!!
A few years back I was planting a geocache on my lunch hour and I came across a dead squirrel in the middle of a path I was taking to get there. It appeared to be pretty fresh(it must have gotten run over by someone on a bicycle or something). I did what any aspiring photographer would do. I took a picture of the dead thing. I've tried taking pictures of animals before ,and it can be pretty challenging. 
Taking pictures of dead things is a breeze though, they don't move or try to run away! So, satisfied with the picture, I go on my way and plant my geocache on nearby Victoria Island(note the cool totem pole). On the way back, I came across the dead squirrel again, but some birds or something had eaten it's eyeballs(first come first serve).
By the way, the geocache turned out to be a real hit with tourists. It was in my "try to look like a rusted hunk of metal" camo phase. It's stuffed in an old dock along with other bits of weird junk. It doesn't look like a geocache at all! It's made with Sintra, heated and bent to imitate metal fatigue, and painted with Humbrol paint.
We visited Proulx farm on the weekend . They have scary wagon rides (well, not that scary. The outfit in Munster Hamlet puts on a freakier show, with guys running after you with chainsaws and stuff) for the kiddies and corn mazes and slides and stuff. It was s nice little afternoon, the weather was great!
When we were in the corn maze I caught sight of some big bird in the sky, no idea what kind it was, so I snapped a picture.. Running around in the corn brought back memories of when I was a kid, running away from someone I had kind of scared the crap out of, and right into a corn field. Those were the good old days!
One neat thing they have is these faces on the trees, with some kind of rubbery paste. I'll have to do up a geocache like that some time.
I only managed to do one geocache on Saturday, but it was a great little hike. You had to cross this creek/small river. Good thing I brought the Fire fighter booties. Tripper and I found some abandoned mattresses on the way in. 
I wonder what they've been used for recently(they were comfortable though). I've been in this area before but not as far back as the geocache led us.
Very cool! I'll have to come back here again..
So this Friday and Saturday were GAG9 (stands for Go and Get Em 9, a big geocaching event in Ottawa). I usually do a lot of the caches the night of the Friday with Tripper and Grizz. Grizz was indisposed that night, not having any modern forms of communication, and we were unable to link up with him, but we had fun none the less. One of the funnest ones for me was one out in the west end called Bridlewood Brain Teaser 2 . We heard from another group of cachers that the cache was simply not findable and that piqued our interest. "We can find the dang thing!" We thought. So we got there at about 9:30 or so, it's dark as all heck and we search for 15 minutes.. Nada... Nothing.. Uhh Uhh... I break out the description in my PDA. It says something about going 15 paces North and finding a surprise.. Well, 15 paces North was a big bunch of nothing, but 15 paces WEST was a big storm sew
er. An UNLOCKED storm sewer (well, it had some fancy closing mechanism, but if you fiddled around with it, that sucker opened right up!!). I opened the grate up, looked at my GPS and by gum, that GPS arrow was pointing straight down that hole! So we all know what that means. Down the hole we go!!!
As I clung to the ladder peering out the sewer grate I heard people coming by.. They were talking about meters.. These had to be geocachers. Time to have some fun.. I yelled from the sewer.
As I tell people when I talk to them about geocaching... It leads to you spots you've never been before. I never would have gotten to see the inside of that cool sewer if it hadn't been for that geocache!
We saw tons of deer on this night. From far away they look like hyenas eating something dead on the ground when they look at you with their reflective night eyes(I wish I had reflective night eyes). I got this new headlamp spotlight for the event, a new LED one with a powerful spot that can go about 72 meters. It's bright as hell and I was mistakenly blinding people all night with it until I realized that when I look at them to talk to them, I'm actually burning out their retinas. My bad!
Near the end of the evening, when we were coming back from a relatively wet slog in the brush, we spied some backyard lights and we made a beeline to them for a dry walk back to the path to the road where I had parked the car. Now we do this all the time, but I know I prefer to hide in the tree line when I walk back and not freak out the people in their houses watching CSI in Hi-def on their big screen TV's. For some reason Tripper decides to walk right along their backyard fences in full view. Well, not full view, it's dark out, and I'm pretty confident that when the home-owner who spies him walking on the edge of his backyard property carrying a flashlight a big back-pack finishes phoning the police, we have a good chance of getting the hell out of there before the cruiser arrives.
On Wednesday night I dropped my geocache for the upcoming Ottawa geocaching event GAG9. I had a feeling it was going to be a bit tricky to plant it since it was basically a huge duct tape dummy based on my own body proportions, and it was made up to look like a dead body stashed in the woods... So I did what the real wackos and murderers probably do. Waited until midnight to drag this thing in the forest and dispose of it so to speak.
I had the spot all picked out, some little used woods off of the Innes road Eastbound Blackburn bypass.. I loaded the thing in my truck at 11:55pm Wednesday night and off I went! Of course it didn't start off smoothly. I have a new neighbor moving in right across the street and he pulled in late with some U-Haul trailer as I was stuffing the body in my front seat (I waved hello and went right on stuffin' - he pretended not to see me, we'll just keep it that way).
Then on the drive over I did a U-turn to get on the other side of the one-way street and ended up overshooting my entry point! Crap! I continued driving and thought I'd just pull another U-turn up ahead and do it all over again when suddenly the van in front of me jammed on it's brakes - and hit a deer. I stopped. The dead deer really did a job on the van and it's occupants were ok and already dragging bambi to the side of the road, so I went on my way. During that little incident I was reminded that my stupid dome light stays on inside the truck for 30 seconds after I open the door to get out, showing the body in full view to anyone driving by (grrrr)..
A police car with it's cherries on was parked in back of my truck. Now I figured there was NO WAY he could have seen me run into the woods with my body.. He had to be just checking out a truck stopped for no reason by the side of the road.. I was about 20 feet into the treeline and I threw the body to the ground (it was wearing a dark blue coverall, so it was ok, but I was pretty sure my MEC jacket had all kinds of reflective shit on it, so I turned mty light off, got down behind a tree and peeked around. The cop was out of his car, walking over to my truck and playing his flashlight around in the woods where I had just gone in. CRAP! I was thinking that if he came in the woods, I'd give a quick "Hi!" and come out from where I was holding the geocache container and try and leave the fake dead body out of it completely. Just explain to him that I was all alone, planting a plain old geocache, that's all, not trying to hide a body or anything, nope..
I'm a fan of the show. Heck, someone went and made a PC game of it.. It's kinda like the Sims (and we all know how I like to play that particular game!). It got a bad rating on the one site I found that reviewed it, but the story was written by one of the scriptwriters and it has the voice-over suicide lady that does all the V.O.'s for the show.
So there I was, 18 feet up the tree in my front yard, pulling up a saw I'd attached to a rope around my torso so I wouldn't have to climb the tree with it in my teeth - and that's when I got busted... My daughter was in her room (which I was kind of looking down on, being up in the tree and all) and she exclaimed loudly
This thanksgiving dinner I overheard my brother and my cousin talking about swapping cars. When this happens it's because something is broken or about to break on my brother's car and he gets my cousin in Winchester Springs to fix it because he's a car whiz. I asked him what was wrong with his car.. he said..
If you've ever seen the original one with Capt. Kirk. It's a classic. I hated the Gremlin though. It looked like a frickin little green leprechaun bigfoot. The one in the 1980's John Lithgow movie remake is better. And the Simpsons.. When it tried to scratch Ned's eyes out and he thought it was cute.. Classic!
This is a hillarious short about some french D&D players. I found it while looking for something to do for my french class. I'm going to air an "edited" version of it (minus the Deliverance scene - Ohh, I betcha you're all gonna watch it now eh?) next project I have to do. Pointing out the new french words I learned from it.. etc.. hehehehe
Man, long time no post! Been so busy with work, French, home, school, kids and pre-production for the Trailerpark Geocachers meet Bigfoot 2 movie I haven't had the time!!!
So I'm trying to learn funk bass these days. Mostly because I've always thought it looked pretty cool, and it sounded pretty cool, and heck, it IS COOL! As a guitar player, I always wondered how easy it would be to pick it up, and it's not so bad. The Heavy Wood fingerstyle guitar sure helps with the thumb slaps et al. I have weak girly hands on the bass though, and I have to strengthen them up a tab before I can move into the happy slappy thumpy choppin snapping.
Just in case anyone didn't know, I'm on full-time french language training for the next 9 months. I go to work, but instead of doing work stuff, I go to a classroom and learn to speak, write and understand francais! Luckily I have a great teacher and the class has some pretty cool people in it so it should go well.
A guy in my french class told me about this interesting book he read titled "1632". It's about a small town in West Virginia that for some reason was displaced in space and time to Europe in the year 1631. You can imagine all the weird stuff that takes place. These semi midieval peasants coming into contact with SUV's etc.. It's a 6 mile chunk of land that gets plopped down there and the town's got a coal plant, so they have electricity, but like, when they run out of lightbulbs, they're screwed because they have no way to make them. It's the good old US of A so everybody and their mother has a gun, but most are exotic with no proper ammunition.
