Category: D’autres
Man i hate being alone
30 minutes and I’m already slightly stir crazy. I could never of been one of those people who travels alone. I just can’t relax enough. I checked out my room, read all the literature, visited the dining room, found the quickest way to the bar, scoped out the path from Sally Borden to Lloyd Hall, checked out the front pathways and tried reading the bulletin board and now sitting outside.
All in 30 minutes. Only 45 more to go.
Sigh.
Got what it takes?
…At the Teddy Bear tryouts!
Apparently not because of the wrong species thing…
My childhood lion at his tryouts for a magazine cover.
Once Upon a Bad Vaudeville Parody
Once upon a time there was an owl named Who. This caused quite a lot of confusion as Who constantly heard voices calling her in the night. As you can imagine this wasn’t conducive to getting anything done. Papers would pile up (as Who was very wise and learned) and household chores would remain undone. This led to skimping on daytime sleeping and the inevitable, subsequent daytime-catchup attempts that failed to produce much in the way of results.
One day Who addressed her problem with What, a friendly vole with a dirty mind (obviously as a result of his nocturnal digging habits and not anything his mother was responsible for!). What’s suggestion was to pay closer attention and perhaps try harder. If she did this, maybe she would be able to solve the mystery and remove the worry of just who was spying on Who (or is that whom?).
So that very evening Who sat in her nest, which by the way was on the ground, as she was a burrowing owl, and much resembled a rabbit hole, and alertly stared out into the night. Just around 2 hours after sunset, she heard a faint “who” come from the forest to her left. Who scrambled out of her nest and screeched “What!” and then listened… there was no response. A few minutes later she heard again “who…” and she yelled “WHAT!” and again there was nothing but silence. Now Who was nobody’s fool and she knew she couldn’t very well just sit there all night waiting. So she carefully and silently made her way towards the forest, listening very hard. Just as she approached the first of the trees she heard, a little bit stronger, “Who… Who…”
Determined to put an end to this once and for all, she sucked in a huge gulp of air and blasted out “WHAT!!!!!!”. Well, several things happened all at once. The first thing that happened was a very dirty vole exploded out of the earth right under where she was sitting. It was very hard to tell in the confusion who was more startled as What yelled “what? What? WHAT?” spitting out tail feathers and fearfully attempting to glance in every direction at once. At the same time Who was screeching and hooting “WHAT? What? what…” with diminishing volume as she attempted to catch her breath again. As if this wasn’t enough, a large grey owl fell from the branches above, obviously very disconcerted and blurting out “What? Who! Who? What!” It only got worse when this new owl landed unceremoniously on top of poor What just as he finally escaped from Who.
So there they all sat, out of breath and quite confused until What crawled out from under yet another owl bottom and began sputtering “Why…”
“What?” replied the strange owl.
“Who …” began What.
“What?” replied Who.
“I said why…” began What again.
“What?” replied the strange owl, who, if you haven’t guessed by this time (like What apparently hadn’t), was named Why.
“Now wait just a minute!” yelled When (a brown bat from a neighbouring wood), “You can’t do this sketch without clearing permissions with United Artists who are the current rights holder!” To which the current trio unanimously replied “PUBLIC DOMAIN!” because, as we all know, it has been over 50 years since the death of Abbot and Costello. At this, When was just a bit miffed, and quickly moved on to another storyline where she felt her talents would be more appreciated.
Meanwhile Who, What and Why had settled into a comfortable little isosceles triangle to contemplate the preceding events. “So why…” began Who.
She was immediately cut off by What, who couldn’t take an more of it. “It doesn’t matter!” he insisted. “Obviously Why had a good reason, who knows what it was…”
“I do not!” retorted Who, “Why would you say…”
“I would not!” exclaimed Why sharply, “I never would!”
“Wait, wait, wait,” tried What one more time. “Let’s just stop this nonsense now. When are we…”
“I’m not answering!” When yelled from the distance.
“O for gawd’s sake” sighed What.
Meanwhile Why and Who were eyeing each other up and starting to do that weird dance that owls do when their grammar gets challenged. In one last attempt to bring piece to the woods and fields, What said “Has anyone ever tried to sentence diagram Abbot and Costello?”
Well as we all can guess, this pretty much put an end to the discussion and the two owls began to parse. To this day, every night, a few hours after sunset, if you listen very hard, you can hear quiet murmurings across the land as Who and Why, watched fondly and tolerantly by What, whisper “hoo, what, why, I don’t know is on third…”, trying in vain to successful diagram what was truly the ultimate in nonsense.
Or was it?
On occasion of encountering a recalcitrant grump
Kitteh
Meet Artemis, newest member of the household. Small, bouncy and a source of much consternation to Samantha!
An official mud turning ceremony
We all got up early to gather in the rain and watch Bill, Valerie and Jim turn some mucky clay to launch the official beginning of construction for Hole’s new project: The Enjoy Centre.
Afterwards everyone got a turn at the shovels as a reward for slogging through the muck!
Seems like a good idea…
Seriously, every time I look a this I just can’t help thinking that it seems like a good plan on the surface. It should work; all that effort, planning, skill… really…
Cat Plan
The yard
Done! At last!
Life Update…
A note on the state of the universe:
1 Europe 2009
Well it looks like we will be travelling to Europe again this summer. Same crew as before (apparently Carmen is a glutton and Zak hasn’t yet decided to cut the cord). The itinerary is as follows:
Fly to Paris and spend the day (Carmen wants crepes here) and I missed the d’Orsey. Catch the 8:00pm Trenhotel to Barcelona arriving at about 8:30 am Sunday morning.
A note to other Canadians (and North Americans) courtesy of The Man in Seat Sixty One. There can be some severe differences between the ticket prices you can get on the French train site (www.voyages-sncf.com) and the Canadian equivalent. For 4 tickets it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1200. That was more than enough to bump me up to first class with a shower and still be ahead of the game. Just remember not to choose “Canada” as your location. If you choose Great Britain you will be redirected to www.tgv-europe.com/en. That will allow you to read the booking in english. Then you can just go ahead and book in the french site and pick up you tickets at the station.
It is possible to have you tickets booked to pick up in France and remain in the english site, but I can’t duplicate the procedure every time. Sometimes it just kicks me back to the French site.
As another side note, Mark Smith (the Man in Seat 61) is awesomely helpful and his site is even more so. Check it out! A funny story: I had managed to break the internet… It seems by booking and not carrying through with paying for my tickets so many times trying to figure the system out and get the seats I wanted I managed to overload the sncf booking system. I fixed so I could not book the tickets from any of the sites. I was unsure if It was me, Canada or the site. After a week or two I emailed Mark for advice and he checked it out. They must have straightened it out because it worked for him and I was able to complete the booking, but for a while there I’m a afraid I inadvertently fixed it so you couldn’t book any foreign trains…
So Barcelona. The upside of all this is, we supposedly arrive in Barcelona rested, showered, fed and raring to go (first class includes dinner and breakfast as well as two 2-person cabins). I’ve read conflicting reviews about whether sleeping is actually possible on the trains so we’ll see. Luckily we’ll be exhausted from the flight so it should work out.
So far we figure Sunday and Monday in Barcelona and leave Tuesday a.m. for Figueres. The rest of the day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we explore Costa Brava out of Figueres. Then Thursday evening we head off to Narbonne (in France). This is because I can’t make the schedule work to get us to Montauban early enough on Friday if we leave from Figueres. Friday we get up, hop a train to Toulouse, and then transfer to Montaubon where we head on down to the boat base.
This year we’ve booked an Asteria for the trip and it is again 11 days.
We will travel from Montaubon to Le Mas d’Agenais, with (hopefully) a side trip to Nerac. The trip is labeled the The Delights of Aquitaine Cruise. Hopefully it will live up to its name.
Disembarking in Le Mas d’Agenais, we taxi to Marmande and hop a train to Bordeaux for two nights. Then it’s back on a train for a couple of days in Paris and Versaille (at last) before we come home.
2 Condos
Well L and I have been looking a property for years now and hemming and hawing about investing. When C started looking at condos we tagged along and Greisbach sort of struck a chord with us. So… we’ve decide to buy a townhome in the Terraces of Griesbach. At this point we fully intend to keep the St Albert house and are not 100% sure we will move into Greisbach when its completed (a year from now).
Celebrating the decision with a glass or two at Tzin
But what we have are options — which is good — and what I feel is a solid investment. Zak is up in the air about his future after High School, so this gives him some options too. Other than that, it is as scary as shit, but at least we’ve regained forward momentum.
3 Climbing
What with Zak working and the weather sucking, we’ve done no outside climbing this year and the prospects look dim. Hopefully I will have money left after Europe to go back to Squamish but it’s looking pretty iffy. On a positive note, the gym is going well. I’m flashing 5.10+’s and working 5.11s. Now if I could just get on some rock… Any new partners out there?
Well thats all for now…
Snow?
Spring seems very reluctant to be sprung. Maybe in June…
Shopping for Condos
The possibility of moving into the city has reared it’s head. We’ve been looking at condos in Greisbach lately.
In other news we’ve booked tickets to Paris for July and a boat in the Aquitaine for 11 days. We also plan to spend some time in Barcelona.
Checking out condos with the crew.