I want a Hawaiian chair!

These Hawaiian chairs look cool! Exercise while finding it impossible to work!

Fred and Sharon's movies

This Gem comes to us courtesy of Bryce (where oh where does he find these things?)

Like Bryan Wilson contemplated after hearing The Beatles's Sgt Pepper Album. I'm probably going to quit making films because I'm obviously outclassed by these here folk.



Don't forget to visit http://www.fredandsharonsmovies.com/ !!!! And bring a dollar!!!

"My sister's the Devil!!"

My eldest kid told me straight out the other day that her sister's the Devil. I told her she was mistaken, and just because her little sister breaks her stuff sometimes, it doesn't mean she's the devil or anything.

"She is the Devil, I know it!" She said, unconvinced.

I tried logic.

"I don't see any horns on her head, and she doesn't have a little red pointy tail or goatskin pants.." I told her.

"SHE IS!!!!!!!" And she stomped off to draw stuff and cut up paper

A little while later I caught her trying to glue something onto her little sister's butt. Here is a photo of the first attempt. Apparently one of the wings looked more like a foot so she started over.

Her little sister didn't seem to mind having horns, red wings and a pointy tail glued onto her.

I'm going to teach the youngest to say:

"I'm the Devil!!!"

Playing guitar on the snowy front lawn

The weather's been really good lately. It was sunny on Saturday and I took my blue strat outside and practiced scales on it while the kids played on the front lawn in the Quinzhee. This one was built on the remains of the first one from a few months back (that didn't survive 4 days of freezing rain) and when digging it out we found a fissure in the floor and a 2 foot deep air pocket. It was the floor from the old one and it had 3 trapped plastic sand toys half-embedded in the ground.
The kids were excited, it was kind of an archaeological dig and kept them busy for two hours!

Woohoo!

Never cheat on your spouse

It's just not a good idea, as these photos will attest(grin). That's an amazing number of pick-axes embedded in this guy's car.







A dirty laundry billboard! What a great idea!









Notice it's all the guys doing the cheating in these photos?








Someone tossed a coke at my car once. It kinda looked like that on the outside (my windows were up though!)

The new Acoustic's almost ready!

About a week to go. Just the bridge to do. You can see the arm-rest in this shot, as well as the upper sound hole, a bit of the multiscale neck. Tony Karol's done a bang up job!

In the back pic, you see the rib rest cut-away. It's gonna be a beauty!

Now I just gotta name it! I think I'm gonna call it "Seven"

Oops! When Nikon 18-200mm's get dropped

And not even by me! My wife took it into the Nikon licensed facility and it got sent away to have the barrels re-calibrated. The cracked lens you see on the front is the safety lens, the actual optics are intact (hurray safety lens, I'm so glad I bought one!). This is like the best lens in the Nikon line. When I first got my hands on one two years ago (thanks to my friend Jim, who placed orders everywhere and ended up giving me his name when two stores called him saying they had a lens for him) I strapped it on the camera and never took it off. Except for low-light concert type settings where you need a fast lens, this is a great zoom and a wide angle with Anti-vibration all in the same package. Read all about it on Ken Rockwell's website. He gushes over them!

Along the same lines of my photo up there, he has a drop test report on the lenses. Apparently they fare quite well. The main competitor's lenses, Cannon are all made of plastic and the Nikon's are metal. The Nikon's hit the ground and leave a crater, the Cannon's hit the ground and bounce.
Take your pick(grin). It's best not to drop them at all!

Mine should be back from the shop soon!

Geocache! Zartimus snippet

Geocache! A documentary by David Liban. Came out last year. It's been on PBS a few times and it's a well done glimpse at the hobby itself. He went out to film Geowoodstock and a Canadian geocacher I know named Binrat was out there and mentioned what a weirdo I was, so David (great name) contacted me and asked if he could stick something about me on there, and use a few stills from my Flickr site. I had a great time talking film with him as I've done a few just for fun Internet flicks and he promised that he wouldn't make me out to be too weird (which was ok, I have his business card and I know where he lives now).

I like how he did it, the purple-blue sideways camera slant. Kirok slid it out of the main film and stuck it up somewhere so I copied it here.

Embedded copy



He's also got an interesting piece entitled CAR-HENGE on his site. Man there are some motivated people with heavy farm machinery out there!

The Blood incident

No, I haven't been attacked by a pooch again. My wife and I were catching the Season premiere of LOST (the best damned show on television!) as our kids were ransacking the upstairs. Lost started at 9:00, we put them down at 8:00 but they weren't getting with the program. We threatened and stomped upstairs and put them to bed a few times but it just wasn't taking.. Screw that Super Nanny crap! I'd like to see her come to my house and work her mojo, the darn kids just aren't sleepy. I guess we didn't run them long enough on the treadmill (ah well, next time!).

So I turned the sourround sound up louder and we decided to let them police themselves. After a little while, our eldest came downstairs to tell us the TV was too loud. I told her it was loud because we couldn't hear the show with all the running back and forth in the bedroom hallway and that we'd turn it down if they'd go to bed. My wife said something else (in her angry voice!) and our eldest scampered back upstairs, but not after wiping out on the tile floor. Add crying to the cacaphony of sound. Julie goes upstairs grumbling as our daughter is crying that she cut herself.
Well, that's Karma, I thought, you mess around and don't go to bed and whammo, something bad happens. Then Julie gave a yell of concern, "Holy Crap, there's blood all over the place!"

Uhh oh.. I quickly ran upstairs.

As it turns out, daughter number one didn't cut herself just then. She cut herself about 60 seconds earlier hiding in her closet trying to scare the crap out of her sister who was fooling around and running into her room in the dark. She came shooting out of the closet and clipped her toe on the metal door slider groove on the floor.

And bled all over the closet. Then she chased her sister over to her window...

And bled all over the carpet... Then she decided to come downstairs and tell us the tv was too loud...

And bled all over the stairs... Then she stood at the top of the stairs to the basement...

And bled all over the tile floor.. Then she turned to run up stairs...

And slipped in the droplets of blood everywhere...

We used 12 cans of soda water and an entire roll of paper towels(we ran out, it was the last one) to clean up the bloodfest. There were clumps and drops of it everywhere. My daughter didn't need a blood transfusion or anything, but she managed to bleed over a very wide area mostly on the WHITE carpeting. Man if the CSI team ever comes to my house with the spray can of luminol, you'd swear there'd been a murder!

Lost was pretty good though. Thank god for the ability to pause live TV, we got back to it after 30 minutes of clean up. The upside to all this is that the kids haven't been out of bed after lights out one night this week! Screw Super Nanny! All we needed was a bloodbath!

Hahahahahaha!!!

Lots and Lots of Snow!!!!

We've been getting a ton of snow in Ottawa this year. This is Frosty. He's about 5 feet tall and he's up to his neck in our back-yard. It's funny because he lights up at night and all you could see what his head. He's actually buried now, I'll have to send the kids out on a rescue mission.

The other day I drove into work and after an hour and a half I had gotten about 5 kilometers so I decided to call it quits and just turn around and go home. It took 45 minutes to get back to my house and I waited two hours, tried again and got into work around lunch. I snapped a photo of everyone else trying to go west as I was going east. There were cars in the ditch every 500 meters. It never fails. A few inches of snow and the city forgets how to drive. Traffic crawls and people end up in the ditch.

It cost the city 3.2 million to clear the snow that day. Amazing!

Tobogganing at Green's Creek

You can always tell when the toboggan hill at Green's Creek in Blackburn Hamlet is running good and fast by the number of emergency vehicles in the parking lot when you arrive. In this case, we got there before the ambulance and fire trucks, and just in time to see the 40-something guy go down the ice run with the insane dips and bumps on his flying saucer, take some air and land on his back. Ouch!

Maybe the guy had never been to the hill before, but man, I haven't gone down that pure ice run (it's there every year, kids must carve them out of the hill or something) since I was about 9, when the same thing happened to me, on my flying saucer (last time I ever used one of those too!).

I see a lot of people go down that hill who don't bother to try to steer too. What's up with that? You may as well get out on the road with your car and just cross your arms in front of your chest and hit the accelerator for 20 seconds and see where that gets you(grin). I find if you leave both arms at your sides you can use them like rudders/breaks and avoid killing yourself and others as you go from point A to point B.

I took the kids in our long sled and flew by this guy on either side of him for 15 minutes before the Fire truck got there. His buddies made him a little lean-too out of toboggans and crowded around him to protect him from the cold. And from the other sledders who couldn't steer. There were a few that ditched to keep from slamming into him.

A few times as we walked up to the top, people arrived, having seen the emergency vehicles in the parking lot, saw the rescue crew in action and turned around and left(grin). Tobogganing's fun as long as you're half-way careful about it.

Me and my Quinzhee!

I used to make these things as a kid. You pile a big mound of snow in the yard, about 5 feet high in a rough dome shape, then you jam it full of 6 inch sticks all over the outside, like a pin cusion except that you push them in all the way. Then you wait for a nice cold overnight freeze.

The next day, you pop a hole in the side and you excavate inside just up until you start hitting the ends of the 6 inch sticks you stuck all over the outside. This ensures a 6 to 8 inch snow wall. Then.. you move into it! Snow fort for adults! Woohoo!

Igloos are too hard to make, the snow's gotta be just so. A Quinzhee you can make pretty much anytime a few degrees below zero. The kids love 'em, although there's always the danger of collapse if they try and climb on the roof. We supervise closely just in case we gotta dig them out quick(hasn't happened so far), and we break them if a thaw melts the walls too thin. They sure don't last as long as an igloo!

"Just a man I met in the bathroom dear..." Gay Immigrant gaydar

A few times in my life I seem to have incorrectly set off people's gay immigrant gaydar. That is to say, I have sometimes been accosted by recently landed homosexual immigrants. Now, I don't know for sure that they're recent additions to the country , I'm going on the broken english for that one, but their sexual preference is pretty obvious. And I should state that I don't give a rat's ass if someone is homosexual, or not born here. We're all homo sapiens(well, most of us).

On a particularly memorable occasion my wife (girlfriend at the time) was there to help set the situation straight (straight, hehehehe). I was headed for the bathroom at the Rideau center McDonalds and this black guy leaning against the wall outside the can followed me in. I headed for the urinals and I noticed that he was in there with me by the door, back to the mirror and he's staring at me. Of course I couldn't go. I thought then that he was gonna try and mug me, cause we were all alone in there. I was way bigger than he was so I stared back at him and tried to look all quietly menacing with my fanny pack and all. Instead he starts talking to me in broken english and he wants me to come to his apartment and be friends. Still not convinced this is a not a prelude to a mugging I pretend to finish at the urinal and I ask him to get out of my way so I can get to the sink.

I still had to go to the bathroom dammitt! But the body has this way of shutting the mechanism down and say to your brain "Not now! Pee later! You might have to run! or fight!, or maybe you can do all three at the same time in a few seconds, we'll see what happens next!"

So I went to the sink closest to the door and he starts again "Just come to my place, it close, we be friends my freind, you not like, you go.." Ok.. I get it.. Relieved that there's to be no mugging I break into a smile which turns out to be a mistake because he's looking at me through the mirror and smiles too and he's got these yellow stained teeth and he think I'm considering the proposition. SO I try to get all serious "No no no, thank you, that's ok.." and I leave. But he follows. He's in step with me like we're buddies or something and he's saying "Very close and we will go ok, ok my freind??"

"No thanks" I say "I have someone waiting for me here, see you later (ack, why did I say that!)

"Later.. OK OK my freind!" He goes. "When I meet you here?" Crap! I see my girlfriend. She'll save me. I ignore the guy and meet up with her. My bathroom buddy is right beside me.

"Who's that?" she asks. Maybe she thinks it's a long lost childhood friend with bad teeth or something.

"Just a man I met in the bathroom.. He's kind of following me.." I explain. The bathroom buddy smiles again. ugg. I tell him "Bye" and we turn right. He sticks to my side and says:
"Live over there, close my freind." I stop.
"Then we're going this way, and I'm not your friend." and I take my girlfriend's hand and we walk to the left , in the opposite direction.

He says , "I Can go that way, my freind." and follows again.

So I try to spell it out. I point to my girlfreind and say, with plenty of hand actions "Me, her, together, boyfriend-girlfriend.. you GO! No friend!" and my girlfriend decides to be funny and say to me "I've never met you before in my life" and she unclasps my hand and she walks away towards the market by herself.

"Now is not the time to be funny!" I call out after her. To my bathroom friend I then said "Fuck off!" and hurried after her (in search for a different bathroom) with people beginning to stare at us.

I never saw him again. I was beginning to understand a little bit about what it was like to be a woman. Malfunctioning gay immigrant gaydar.

Nice Doggy!

Last Saturday night was UFC night, the Ultimate Fighting Championships with George St-Pierre taking on Matt Hughes for the interim title. My neighbor's brother was getting the fight on PPV and we headed over to his place at 9:30pm to watch it. It was my first time at his place, and he had the biggest dog I have ever seen. It was an Akita breed, and looked like it weighed over 130 pounds.

The owner asked me when I came in if I was afraid of dogs 'cause he could put him away if that was the case, but I said "No not at all, I love 'em.."(grin), and this is true. I get my dog fix at other people's houses because I don't have one. I'd like one but you know, I really don't miss the dog hair, the walks and picking up the poop and all that. More importantly, the family is allergic so I live without the dog thing.

So I held my hand out for the dog to sniff but he ignored it and trotted off down the hallway. He got a toy and headed back my way. "My god that is a huge dog!" I thought. He looked like a small bear. I set my drinks and peanut M&M's down on the kitchen counter and started talking to the owner about his dog just as it trotted in with the toy. I kneeled down in front of it to play with him and before my knees touched the ground it had dropped the toy, his muzzle got these little wrinkles on it and with a little snort he shot forward and clamped his teeth on the front of my throat and started biting and shaking me.

I didn't expect that at all so he had a great wide open shot at me. I didn't even have time to put my hands up. His owner freaked and grabbed him and managed to pry his jaws open. I don't remember doing anything to get him off but later at the hospital I noticed my thumb was cut so I must have jammed it in his mouth at some point. I think he was on for about three seconds and then the owner popped him off and stuck him somewhere. The weird thing is that the attack was totally unprovoked. I'm not a loud person. I'm calm, I move slow. It just snapped. Maybe getting down on it's level set it off, maybe direct eye contact, I probably smiled and showed teeth, maybe it was just a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Who knows. It's the first time I've ever been attacked and I've been rolling around on the floor with big dogs all my life(may have to re-evaluate this policy).

I remember standing up and it didn't hurt just then, it was kinda hot was all, and I touched my throat and looked at my hand. Blood everywhere. Not good. My first thought was the jugular vein or the carotid arteries. I don't know how they work but I know spurting is not a good sign. It's basically your suddenly racing heart helping to pump all the blood out of your body. I was kinda worried just then and asked the guys, "Uhh, what's it look like? Should we be calling 911 or anything?" The faces I got back were concerning me a bit. I think the word is "agast"? It mustn't look good - but I felt ok.. I was in the kitchen and there was a wack of paper towels on a rack so I took a few and pressed them up against my neck and looked at it. Just 5 or 6 big red openings looked like, bleeding pretty good but not gushing or spraying or all that bad stuff. This was not a Clint Malarchuk moment (thank god). The owner was back and pressing a wad of the paper towels in my neck and I asked to see a mirror so he steered me into the bathroom. He wet a big clump of the paper towels and cleaned all the blood away and it looked Ok actually. Just a bunch of 2cm holes in my neck. The dog had missed all the important stuff! I clued in to the fact that I was able to talk ok, and there was no blood in my throat. This was gonna be ok!. Woohoo! I tried to reassure the owner, who probably thought I was gonna bleed out on his kitchen floor at first, grabbed a pile of the paper towels and out the door I went to get driven to the closest hospital, the Montford(cute nurses!), where they stitched me up. I don't think I had been in the guy's house for more than 5 minutes.

The doctor was impressed. He told me it was good that he got me on the front of the throat (I told him I just basically sat there and let him bite me on the neck like a dork) because all the important stuff is on the sides and if I'd have turned to get away and not been fast enough, he could have opened up something important, and then I'd be at the Civic or the (he mentioned another hospital). And then he snickered. I didn't get the joke but I guess it has something to do with vascular surgery or something like that. Or maybe those hospitals have the best morgues (you know how night shift doctors are).

The owner told me he was going to put the dog down and I feel bad about it, but it's the right thing to do I guess. It was one of those vicious attacks. Not a nip, or a bite and let go. It was a go for the throat and hang on kinda thing.

The next day I googled the breed, "Akita" and it seems that they aren't really very nice dogs. They seem to attack people and other pets a lot! So I must be in a club or something now. I dunno, maybe it's because they are prized for their ability to hunt bears, but I'd think twice about getting one as a family pet.

One website had a quote like:

"Excuse me, but what kind of dog is that? He looks just like a big bear!"

Chances are, the questioner has just met an Akita, a Natural Treasure of Japan.

hope the meeting went better than mine!

Feeding fairies to the T-rex

Mmmmm crunchy... Clap your hands if you believe in faries! The plastic t-rex is hungry!

Smoking butts suck

I went to work on Monday with one of my kids to do the office xmas thing and as we were leaving she asked me why the ground outside the doors to the Main building were covered in cigarette butts.

Gee, what was I supposed to tell her? "I dunno, smokers have bad aim? They're natural born litter bugs? They like to share their disgusting habit with anyone and everyone?"

Seriously, how hard is it to hit an ashtray with a cigarette butt? I manage to put all my garbage in a can. I don't chuck burning crap outta my window when I'm driving either, or empty my ashtray at a red light(mostly because I don't smoke).

It's good to see this particular habit becoming less popular. Truth is, I like most smokers because they're so god damned sociable! It's just that they're not gonna be around that long so we should be nice to them while they're still with us I guess.

Jennifer Love Hewitt Turns Down Playboy

My wife was in line at the grocery store and she caught some headline in People that JLH was going to pose in Playboy. Knowing that I (cough, cough) had a thing for JLH in the old days, she told me this and I was kinda of thinking it was a good thing...

A co-worker of mine with the same appreciation told me many years ago that he couldn't wait for JLH's career to start to tank so this would happen. Now I don't want to wish THAT! She deserves an excellent career! She's worked hard! And here we are in 2007/2008 and she has a hit show. What does she need to show off her goodies for?

So it's been officially squashed. She's turned them down. I hope it wasn't for those Hawaii bikini photos that made the tabloids where everyone said she was fat.

Those tabloid people need to be beaten with a dead gopher. She looks great to me, she just isn't as skinny. That kinda happens to most of us as we get older.

Ah well.. I got some other stuff I wanted for Christmas(sigh).

Fun with Diablo back in the old days

I got a Christmas card from my old buddy Darryl yesterday(his wife even made him sign it!) and I was reminded of the time he was over at my place, circa 1995 or so to watch the hockey game and I made the mistake of showing him the new computer game of the year "Diablo". Diablo was a really cool psuedo mouse button mashing RPG where you picked a little guy and ran around this town and these dungeon tunnels underneath it killing monsters while in search of loot. It was one of the earliest multiplayer games that utilized a bunch of central servers whereby you could hook up and play the game with up to three other players from around the world. In most cases these were your buddies, but in some cases, they were total strangers. And that's where the fun began.

So I showed Darryl how to start, how to choose a character.
"I want to be the cute chick!" he said.

"The Amazon  Rogue? sure, she's a great character! What do you want to call her?"

"How about Betsy Buttmunch?" Darryl said (I've changed the actual name he used at the time because the real one is unprintable)

"Uhh, ok I guess..." I said, not sure if the name would be accepted. It was.

Darryl said "Ok Ok, what do I do!" and we went through the intro, got him a little javelin to poke into baddies and he got himself killed a few minutes later, reappearing in the village again and to our suprise, there was another player there! He had entered the game while we were in the load screen. It was then I realized that I had set up a Battle net game purely out of habit. That meant the game was open to anyone in the world, they could come in and play or just chat. Darryl was slightly confused and tried to kill the guy. Since he was a newbie it didn't work and the person typed at him to "STOP IT!".

"How do I talk to him?!?!" Darryl asked. I told him to hit the enter key, type what you want and press enter again. Darryl typed something mean but very very funny. The guy responded very politely. I felt I had to add..

"Oh yeah.. sometimes I've noticed that when other players see the Amazon Rogue character, they assume it's an actual real-live girl playing. He probably thinks you're a girl.."

"Interesting.." said Darryl..

I'm not sure why some male online players think that. In my experience(before Everquest and World of Warcraft), it was the opposite. In the old days girl players took men character personas so nerdy online men players would not hit on them. I went down to watch the 2nd period of the hockey game and left Darryl upstairs on my computer. What a mistake that turned out to be!

When the hockey game ended I went back upstairs to my computer room and Darryl called out to me from the top of the stairs:

"I got three guys fighting over me here.."
My god he did. There were three fighters standing around chatting with him, text filling the chat line.
"One of them's giving my girl swords and armor and stuff but I don't know what to do with it.. And.. " He turned around and smirked. "I have a date after!"

"What!?" Turns out one of the players lived in Ottawa and during the marathon chat and flirt session Darryl had used his fake computer feminine charms to set up a rendezvous between this guy and his computer game persona Betsy Buttmunch at the 24 hour waffle house in Vanier later that evening.

I reached over and shut the computer off on him at that point. It was funny but getting out of hand. Darryl wanted me to drive him over to the waffle house so he could try and pick the guy out of the crowd and laugh at him but I dropped him back at his place after that.

Ahh, the good old Diablo days..

Vive le Niveau "C"!

Finally! After 8 months of French to get to a "B" and another 8 months to finally get a "C" it's finally finished! I am now licensed to officially butcher the French language in any manner of my choosing!

Muhahahahahahahahaha!

I can now speak my second official language better than the head of the Parti Québécois can speak hers! Muhahahahahaha!

Pauline Marois Parle Tres Mal Anglais
Uploaded by mediawatchqc

CliffyBeer ads

I on my was Flickr page and noticed one of my contacts, the ever-entertaining Cliffy, had some sets I had not seen. Some old ad-work he did quite a few years back. Some of you might recognise him as an old GHS alumni or local geocacher.

Christ he's funny!

Rated R for "Really?, I don't belive he just posted that on the Internet, but he did!"

Not for kids but really really funny! My favorite has got to be Canadian Camper!