11:1

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11:1

“That’s horrible!”

What was clinging to the outside of the poor woman’s window was a mass of flesh and fur. The dark brown bits of fur and skin were matted with semi-coagulated blood and unidentifiable bits of bone or skin or maybe insides turned out.

Despite the coolness of the season, the flies were out in force and the whole mass seemed to writhe and move. As soon as Ali’s eyes focused enough for him to catch the movement he had instinctively jerked back and only the tension on his tether prevented him from overbalancing and hurtling 3 stories down to the ground.

The noisome mess oddly enough did not smell but the visual was more than enough to give Ali’s stomach a lurch or two.

After the initial shock dissipated, Ali leaned back in. It definitely wasn’t a bird. The fur was short, soft and brown and definitely didn’t belong thirty feet off the ground. And that one bit of leathery looking skin, if Ali didn’t think it was impossible he would have sworn it was … no, it really couldn’t be.

He slid back into the apartment without touching the mess and leaned up against the window frame. “Miss, I…” Ali paused, rubbed his face vigorously and started again. “Miss. There seems to be some sort of animal smashed into your window.”

“I know,” her muffled reply was barely audible with her head down and her hands tangled in her hair.

“It seems to be, well… well if I had to guess Miss, it seems to be…”

“A beaver.”

Ali started. “Why yes, it looks an awful lot like the remains of a beaver. Did you already look?”

“No. No, but it had to be, didn’t it.”

The young woman looked up and she glanced at Ali before her eyes were drawn to the shadowed outline of the gruesome mess that clung to her window. “It had to be, didn’t it just,” she repeated.

Ah. Well then. Ali rubbed his face one more time and clasped his hands behind his neck to stretch his tense shoulders. “Um, well I guess I shall get rid of it for you then. A very odd thing that, but I shall have it gone easily enough.”

As Ali bundled up some rags and grabbed a plastic garbage bag, he thought he heard the sad looking woman mumble, but when he glanced up she was again staring down at her lap. He paused, thinking to offer some encouraging words, but then decided soonest begun, soonest done, and slid back out onto the ledge to clean.

Alone again in her apartment, Caroline dragged her red eyes up tot he revolting reminder on her living room window and and murmured, “No, it won’t be gone so easily. I will never be easy again.”

10:31

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10:31

Ali spun the lock on the carabiner and double checked the buckles on his harness. He followed the safety tether back to where it was attached to the door frame and made sure it hadn’t shifted and the safeties were engaged. “All good,” he said cheerfully to the woman on the ratty brown couch, “Wouldn’t want to go splat, eh!”

She looked like she was close to tears, but Ali suspected that it really wasn’t just the joy of his cheerful presence or his offer to scrape the mess from the outsides of her windows. She looked like she was having a hard day…a hard week perhaps. And since it was within his power to bring a little cheer into her life, well Ali was going to do just that.

Ali picked up his bucket and squeegee and walked back to the open window. These old apartments still had the traditional wood frames with the lousy slides. Charming, but they really hadn’t worn well over the decades and often made squeezing the windows out of the tracks a bit of balancing act. Often people just left them in like his charming host and tried to perform some sort of circus act when cleaning the outsides. It involved bending two opposite ways and having the arms of one of those big orange monkeys, but Ali supposed it could be done.

Really, though, it was all in the type of persuasion you chose to apply and Ali had just the tool.

As Ali approached the window he glanced at eh mess he was there to clean off. It certainly looked disgusting, but between the years of grime on the glass and the thick goop itself, Ali had a hard tim e identifying just what it was.

He put down his bucket and with one last unconscious twist on the carabiner lock, he slid out onto the window frame to get a closer look. No point dragging the mess into the apartment if he could get the bulk of it off before he removed the window.

As he leaned back to give his old eyes a chance to focus, a sudden thought spiked into his mind. It was Hallowe’en.

Rough Draft

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Here is a rough draft of a new Theme I am working on. It was based on this excellent ThemeShaper tutorial.

I have grabbed the colour scheme off of Design Seeds posting of September 18, 2013. If you don’t subscribe to Design Seeds or visit their blog, you really should. It is full of awesome colour palettes that are just fun to look at.

colourswatch

The overall theme is pretty rudimentary right now but I will be screwing around with it a lot to try and a) figure out just what all the code actually does, and b) tweak it into submission.

10:28

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10:28

Ali had been a window washer for over 15 years. He mostly worked residential with some smaller commercial clients but he had always had an urge to try out one of the big sky scrapers. It wasn’t exactly a dream, but if the opportunity ever presented itself, Ali fully intended to jump at the chance.

Ali like to think that was the kind of person he was: the kind that always took advantage of what life through at him. Many of his friends had spent the last decade or so turning down opportunities; “not now,” “too dangerous,” I have kids to think of now”… Ali had kids; 4 of them. And Ali had a wife and a mortgage and bills to pay; Ali had family obligations and obligations to his church and a host of other reasons why he should live a placid and ‘ordinary’ life.

But Ali didn’t want to. He never had. God had put him on this earth to serve his greater glory and no glory was served by being like everyone else, by doing only what was expected and no more. He like to think that by embracing each and every opportunity that the world was somehow a better place, a happier place. Certainly his family had never suffered for it. They had experienced new and wondrous things and never felt the lack of anything vital to good health or a proper upbringing.

His youngest son had once fallen and broken his leg while climbing a rocky outjutting at the big park downtown. His neighbours had moaned and sympathized and urged him to keep a closer eye on the boy. But Ali, as soon as the boy was out of his cast, had taken him and his older brother to the University where they had this magnificently high wall designed for climbing and enrolled them in lessons. For if young Karem was to climb high things, it was only right and just that he learned the proper way.

Just last year, Ali’s eldest daughter had been invited to visit a schoolmate’s summer cottage. When she proudly announced this invitation at the family feast, Ali’s brothers and uncles loudly denounced the invitation and the women shook their heads in sympathy and sorrow for the young girl. But when Ali later told her she was to accept the invitation, the joy on her face was more than enough reason to believe that good things would come from this opportunity to learn and grow.

Today Ali was packing up his van after cleaning the window paintings off Garrepy’s Dry Cleaners, when he happened to glance up and see a women leaning out of a 3rd story window with a rag in her hand, trying to wipe down the glass. “Ah,” he thought to himself, ” Here is an opportunity I must not ignore. This poor woman is clearly not equipped for her task and I, with my truck full of equipment, clearly am.”