General

Pet peeve: Public washrooms

Ah, public washrooms, the places you go when you can’t avoid not going.

My pet peeves, from the male perspective:

  • People who do not wad up paper towels before throwing them in the waste bin. This means the bin fills to overflowing much sooner than it otherwise might. Wadding up a damp paper towel is not a difficult task. It is not something that is likely to result in a pulled muscle or other injury or to cause mental anguish. And yet people don’t do this and the waste bin fills to overflowing and there’s a bunch of unwadded paper towels being trampled on all over the floor. Wad your paper towels, people!
  • Speaking of the floor, people who pee all around the urinal. The urinal is a trough designed specifically to pee in. Strangely this is insufficient for many people who, instead of peeing into the urinal, water the floor all around it. We’re talking real puddles here. I am not sure how one’s aim can be so very not true.
  • And speaking of puddles, the sink counter is likely to resemble a flood plain, with every bit of its surface covered in water because people cannot wash their hands without getting copious amounts of water splashed all about the counter. Some of it may even manages to get into the sink itself.
  • People who leave toilet seats unclean. I will say no more.
  • People who hog the hand dryers. If your hands are cold, stick them in your pockets. Or your pants. I don’t care, just get away from the hand dryer before you short it out from over-usage.
  • People who talk on their cell phones while engaged in #1 or #2. These may be the same people featured in points #2 and #4.
  • The smell. A clean washroom is okay, any other has a smell that is just wrong.

As always, there is probably more but that seems like a good starter list. I wonder if public washrooms would be nicer if people treated them as they would their own.

Or maybe I don’t want to see what the average person’s washroom looks like.

Hello there!

I said I was going to post more this month and then the opposite happens. Ain’t that always the way?

Actually, no, it’s not. But in this case it is!

After the last post on the 7th I ended up getting a job, so my schedule has been a bit nuttier than it had been previously. I do plan on posting more for the last week of the month, though. Really!

The evil that is the can opener

A little over a week ago I went to open a can of beans to enjoy with my dinner. Beans are full of protein and yummy and strangely do not give me gas. Opening a can for dinner is about as mundane an event as you can get.

But not this time.

My can opener, which is a fairly good one, seems to have been getting a bit dull lately, talking about soap operas and going on about the weather. Worst, though, it was also not as sharp as it once was. This meant that sometimes after a full rotation around the lid it would not have pierced through the metal, requiring me to go ’round a second time. Not a big deal, it’s not like I’m going to blow a muscle doing it twice.

However, one of the side effects of the repeat at opening is the lid will sometimes have strands peel off. Since these are very thin and metal, they are most comparable to piano wire.

You may see where this is going.

After cutting the lid a second time, I lifted the can opener slightly while it was still gripping the lid. The lid pulled up, indicating all was well. I then released the opener and put it aside on the counter. I carefully pulled the lid off as always but this time I failed to notice the metal strand. This was a very generous strand, kind of like a King Strand or something, but still so thin as to be almost invisible. I rammed my thumb into it.

As the pain registered, I jerked the thumb back, momentarily puzzled because I still could not see what I had cut myself on. The thumb did not care, as it bled in copious amounts from a small but deep wound on the tip. I jammed it into my mouth to suck away the excess blood. Not wishing to sparkle and become otherwise vampiric, I took the thumb out of my mouth, at which point it continued to bleed with great vigor. I tried staunching it with a paper towel. My plan was to get the bleeding to settle down then apply a bandage. The paper towel quickly soaked and was generally not effective. The cut had formed a line that went around in a 3/4 circle. Had it completed the circle that fleshy little bit of my thumb would have been on the counter, in the can of beans or somewhere other than on my thumb where it belonged.

As I dabbed with the paper towel I noticed the would formed a kind of flap that could be opened (gushing blood) or closed (gushing blood, but less so). I felt a bit queasy. I decided to put a bandage over the thumb and then wrap another around that one, sealing off the top of the digit like one might cover up a cursed tomb. A cursed tomb that would not stop bleeding.

The thumb was tingling but after a few minutes there was no blood seeping through, so I vowed to leave it for 24 hours before having a peek.

When I did look it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I kept bandages on it for about a week and a half before finally removing them and I’m pretty sure there will be a small scar when the healing bit is done. I have my ‘wrestled a mako shark’ story ready to go.

And the can opener? The next time I used it it created another impossible-to-see strand that I jabbed my index finger on. This time it wasn’t enough to draw blood. I calmly walked the can opener over to the garbage can, its new and permanent home. I have a new one now. It’s called the Little Beaver. As long as it doesn’t bite me, I think we’ll get along.

The thumb, about a week after being can opener’d:

Goodbye summer!

September was a pretty lousy month, weather-wise, being one of the ten soggiest on record. More positively, the first day of October was sunny and summer-like. It’s partly cloudy today but I may yet get proper closure on summer before The Dark Times (ie. winter) arrive.

I also plan on writing more regularly this month as I gear up for National Novel Writing Month in November, so more inane blog posts shall be on their way. Hooray!

A taxing incident

Taxi drivers have a fairly bad reputation as drivers.

This post is going to add to that reputation.

This taxi is parked at the Esso station at the corner of Burrard and Davie, across the street from where I was waiting to catch the bus. A few minutes prior to taking this picture, I watched as the taxi driver attempted to defy physics by having his cab occupy the same space as an articulated bus (he was trying to cut ahead of the bus to get into the gas station). This led to the honking of horns and crunching of bumpers as the two vehicles verified the laws of physics still do in fact apply.

Seeing drivers do foolish things is pretty typical. You know the old joke that yellow means drive faster? Now it seems yellow is the new green and red is the new yellow. The mentality appears to be ‘if you don’t actually cause an accident, it’s okay!’

I’ve noticed more cyclists on the sidewalks lately. Given the typical Vancouver driver, I can’t entirely blame them for avoiding the roads. It’s unfortunate that many cyclists also kind of suck. Oh well. At least pedestrians can’t run each other over. Yet.

Chemist no longer needed

The new adult store down the way apparently no longer needs a ‘chemist’ as the CHEMIST NEEDED sign is now sitting upside down at the bottom of the window it’s in. Or maybe that’s part of the testing the potential chemist needs to go through, to be able to read upside down text.

On one of the store’s side windows, a new sign has appeared (click to see the full-size version):

Now, I have no problem with some people being size-enabled. As Morrissey once wrote, some girls are bigger than others, some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers but here the shop owner is not only offering large lingerie but extra large. It reminds me of that story about It’s a Small World at Disneyland being closed for months so they could make the canals deeper. This was needed because the weight of passengers over the years had increased enough that the boats would occasionally scrape bottom and get stuck. One can only imagine the madness that would ensue as the boatload of people was forced to endure that song for an extended period of time while waiting for help to arrive. (If you follow the link, you can see Disney denied the changes were made due to passengers getting bigger, to which I offer ‘fat chance’.)

The other sign in the window shows how out of touch I am with the latest in adult toys and things of that nature. The Stallion spray is labeled a ‘male genital desensitizer’. I am unsure why a guy would want to desensitize that particular area of his anatomy. ‘I can’t stand the pleasure anymore! Make it stop!’ As always, I fallback on my standard:

People are weird.