Elizabeth came home from work yesterday and urged me to pull up the I.O.U.S.A website.
“I saw this guy speak today,” she said. “They made a movie, and posted a big section of it on the website. We should watch it.”
Innocently, I complied.
Now, when a movie advertises itself as being about the zombie apocalypse, or a witch hanging out in the woods, or a guy with an overdeveloped interest in chain saws, I expect to associate a certain level of fear with the film. I can brace myself accordingly or (more likely) just avoid it altogether.
I had not expected a movie about economics to be pants-crappingly horrifying. The image of the swelling US national debt, along with projections of where it’s heading, is frightening enough. But when you couple that with the realization that debt payments have partially been funded by drawing on surplus Social Security, and that the aforementioned surplus is going to disappear pretty quickly as a whole lotta people get set to retire…
I spent much of last night trapped in fitful nightmares of a post-meltdown world that was curiously reminiscent of Fallout 3.
photo credit: i eated a cookie
Elizabeth, Diggory, and I have been going to the gym much more regularly recently.
There’s an advantage to this; with all three of us participating, it creates a circle of shame. If one of us so much as mentions going to the gym, the other two assume that person actually intends to go, and are thus guilted into tagging along. So now, rather than individually going when the mood strikes us, we end up going when the thought even crosses the mind of anyone else in the house.
Given that exercise leaves me in considerable discomfort afterwards, the gym tends to be on my mind quite a bit these days — usually preceded by an unflattering adjective or two — and so we end up talking about said gym and, by extension, returning more and more frequently. I expect us to hit critical mass soon, where we will simply drag sleeping bags and the microwave down to this gaping maw of fitness and spend our every waking and sleeping moment there.
At the very least, our foray into exercise has proven to be more enduring than our detox attempt.
photo credit: adria.richards
This past Sunday morning, as we were shaking off the dusty cobwebs of sleep and scavenging our kitchen for breakfast, Elizabeth suddenly asked, “Do you want to go rent a canoe today?”
My mind folded in on itself trying to draw the chain of connections that had led us to this point and, failing to do so, crawled into a corner and whimpered quietly whilst trying to untangle its pretzeled self. This was pretty much out of the blue, as far as I can tell, and was also a pretty great idea.
We packed a picnic lunch, complete with a really great couscous salad Elizabeth made, and headed down to New Brunswick (the one in Jersey, not in Canada) in search of canoes to rent and paddle. The one we ended up renting, contrary to the title, was not birch and was not little. It was a big aluminum behemoth, the sort that people use when they’re traversing the wilderness with three month’s worth of food, or perhaps a yearling calf, aboard.
We ran into three distinct challenges on this adventure.
First, I have not paddled a canoe in close to a decade. Perhaps canoeing is like riding a bike, but if it is then my bike had two flat tires and a missing gear, and the steering column was about 30 degrees off center. As we struggled our way down the canal, leaving a tortured, erratic “s”-shaped wake behind us, we kept asking each other, “How do you go straight?” I’m not sure why we kept asking, because I think it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that neither of us really had the answer to that question. Fortunately, apart from a few near collisions and the fact that our zig-zagging caused us to travel twice the distance we would have had to cover if we’d gone in a straight line, our navigational challenges never led us to bodily harm.
The second challenge was the picnic. We had a 50-pound pack of food in the bottom of the canoe, and had just assumed that, somewhere along the canal, we would find a gently sloping grassy bank where we could drag the canoe up and have our lunch. I’m not sure if this is an issue with canals generally, or just this one in particular, but all the banks were perfectly vertical and about a foot above water level, and lined right to the edge with trees. It made for serene and beautiful canoeing, but did not really lend itself to coming ashore for picnic-type events.
We tried eating in the canoe, which started awkwardly and nearly ended very, very badly.
The third challenge was that canoeing is really a form of exercise. You may recall that Exercise and I have agreed to disagree. We respect each other’s place on this planet, but that doesn’t mean we get along. After an hour and a half in the canoe, I began to realize that I was getting quite tired, and a little sore — both in my shoulders, and where my ass was trying vainly to find a comfortable spot on a flat aluminum seat. In case you were wondering, my ass never did find that spot.
We ultimately ended up driving to a nearby park after we had docked the canoe, and had our picnic lunch-cum-supper on a blanket there. It was less precarious and a good deal more comfortable than in the canoe, and I got to shovel food into my non-canoeing face, so that counts as a win in my books.
photo credit: aussiegall
June 9th, 2009 in
Happenings | tags:
Elizabeth |
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Today, I am grateful for these things:
1. The Escapist. If you’re not interested in video games or video game culture, or if you are interested in it but struggle with the overwhelming geekiness of it all, this site is probably not for you. If, however, you can happily wallow in your own nerddom, there’s a lot to enjoy on this site. Zero Punctuation and Unskippable are definite highlights.
2. Gord Downie on CBC Q. The May 11 episode features a lengthy interview with the frontman for The Tragically Hip, one of the best Canadian bands ever. The interview is a fascinating look into the mind of the poet and performer.
3. Uncle Jay Explains the News. More than Fox, CNN, or even BBC, I look to Uncle Jay to make sense of the events in the world around us. And then to mock them.
photo credit: Pipe ?
Yesterday, crews came around to our community to power wash all the houses.
I’ll leave you to process the nuances of that statement, but those are the facts and we must live with them. A notice was slipped in our door last Friday night, alerting us to the fact that, at some point this week, dudes with hoses would be blasting our houses with a high-pressure stream of water, and could we please take anything breakable off our patios so it didn’t end up lodged in our neighbour’s wall. For us, this meant hauling our potted plants and patio furniture into the living room, where they sat gazing out through the sliding doors and waiting for the crews to arrive and finish their work.
Around 10 o’clock yesterday morning, I sat at my desk in my office upstairs. I had the blinds half-drawn, as the sun was making it a little hard to see my monitor, and so I didn’t really have a good view of what was going on outside. The house was quiet, the street was quiet, and then an enormous jet of violently angry water suddenly pounded the window inches from my face. A window, when hit with a stream of liquid like that, behaves much like a drum, and my entire office was its acoustic chamber. I almost crapped my pants.
The crews quickly finished our house and moved on to the next, but by then the irrevocable damage to my psyche was done. I now sit fretfully at my desk, peering nervously out to the street and starting in alarm whenever someone in the house turns on a tap.
photo credit: Pembroke Dave
May 29th, 2009 in
Happenings |
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The other day, Diggory and I were enjoying a brief respite from our busy working lives, and were watching some Discovery channel.
Now, I love Discovery. They have some great shows on how things are made, how big things are made, how big things are used, and blowing stuff up. There are shows about sharks, and shows about penguins, and shows about ants. Between this, and the History channel, there are a lot of really, really interesting programs, and so we parked ourselves in front of the TV and prepared to be immersed in knowledge-building media.
In amongst these informative ones, though, there is an emerging trend of shows that talk — at great length — about one particular means of employment or another. Fishing. Truck driving. Logging. Actually, there are two shows about logging.
It goes on.
Now, these are interesting professions, and I could certainly be convinced to sit down for a half hour or so to learn more about what goes on in these industries. But a series? That goes on for years? And years? I struggle with that.
Diggory, however, raised a good point. In this content-starved environment, we can most likely launch our own show. We could call it “Extreme Consulting” or “Deadliest Working-at-Home” or “The Incredible Mid-Morning Coffee Making”. The show would follow all our adventures as we engage in the aforementioned tasks.
Honestly, would it be any worse than watching a guy drive a truck for an hour straight?
photo credit: didbygraham
Today, I am grateful for these things:
1. Exercise. It’s not so much that I like the exercise itself (at all), but I do like the general sense of well-being and smug self-satisfaction that one gets after one has returned from exercise.
At least, I get the aforementioned smugness and satisfaction.
Elizabeth and I were quite active this weekend, relatively speaking, though the relativity there should not be underestimated. We even went to the gym, which is somewhat remarkable given my previous forays into dedicated fitness facilities.
2. The Hip. I know, I know, I need to shut up about the Hip already. Bear with me. I’m still buzzing (and my ears are still ringing) from the concert, and I just recently picked up two of their albums which I didn’t have before. They are playing through my PC’s fair-to-middling speakers as I type, and are making me feel very soulful.
3. Good sp0rtsmanship. It allows me to remain friends with Diggory, even as he hands me the ass-whupping of a lifetime in our folding stats.
photo credit: kevindooley
Not that anyone besides me is particularly concerned, but I felt somewhat obligated to report that our PS3 has stopped being a whiny useless brick. It is once again able to stream media and do other things that we, you know, bought it to do.
May 18th, 2009 in
Happenings | tags:
PS3 |
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A while back, I stopped referring to “my wife” and “my roommate” and simply began referring to Elizabeth and Diggory.
In an effort to similarly simply things when talking about “my sister” and “my brother-in-law”, I will henceforth simply call them Lynnita and Brad.
“My brother-in-law” is what tore it. It takes me about ten minutes to type that out, what with the hyphens and all, and if I refer to him twice in one paragraph I pretty much need to book a vacation day when I’m done.
This weekend, we had some friends from Toronto travel down to visit us. On Friday, as you may recall, we went to see The Inimitable Hip. On Saturday, having pretty much had our fill of Manhattan for the weekend, we elected to stay in and play poker.
I do not play poker often, and I do not play it well, but it was tremendous fun getting a group of friends around the table and busting out the very dapper poker set that my brother-in-law got me as a wedding present.
It’s a good thing I don’t play poker often, because I got cleaned out.
photo credit: awshots
