random stuff

Merry Christmas!

It could be better, it could be worse.

And holy tofu, I’ve only made one other post this month and it was about eating at McDonald’s.

I have failed as a blogger. I’m sorry, Internet, I promise to do better!

Oat fudge bar: the affair is over

When I changed my diet back in June 2008 I pretty much swore off sugar-filled snacks and since then have rarely indulged (the occasional strawberry cheesecake mini-Blizzard for example — mmm!) and when I do it’s usually with something unsexy like an apple or one of those Lindt 99% cocoa bars which, to the average person, tastes a lot like chalk with a vague notion of what they imagine to be chocolate added in somewhere.

My current workplace has a Starbucks on the ground floor of the tower. This is not surprising, as there will likely be a Starbucks in every building in every major city at some point. They have an oat fudge bar and from days of yore I remembered it as being quite yummy. When I espied several sitting on a plate in the glass display case, I felt a nostalgic yearning and ultimately caved in to the urge, buying one for the low price of $1.95 (HST not included).

I’m pretty sure the bar contained enough sugar to keep me on a sugar-filled bender for the rest of my shift, the evening and part of my shift the following day. To say the bar was sweet would be akin to noting that Jupiter is a big planet in comparison to Mercury. It was so sweet that it went from yummy straight over into gross. My nostalgic craving was cured, forever.

As I write this I am eating fat-free cottage cheese. Times — and taste buds — change.

Long time no see

Oof.

I have been negligent in my bloggy ways and for that I aplogize to the person who accidentally entered the URL that brought them to my site.

I shall make another post immediately following this one to discuss nothing in particular!

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:

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.

Our education system demonstrated in Price Smart Foods

Ahead of me in the “dammit, I’m having an actual cashier serve me instead of using one of those robot self-serve thingers” line at Price Smart Foods the other day was a guy who looked to be in his mid to late 30s. He was not in what one would call prime physical shape so it was perhaps no surprise that he was buying a package of cigarettes (“Du Maurier KING size!” he admonished the cashier who could not seem to find this particular brand and size). Another cashier came along and was able to find the cancer-causing source of addictive pleasure he sought. His total rang up to $19.39. “Just like when World War II ended!” he chortled.

Yes, just like it if you were writing an alternate history version of Earth, maybe, Mr. “Du Maurier KING size”! At least he knew the year had something to do with World War II, so there is that.

In other random news, it was reported that Vancouver received less than 1mm of rain in July. It normally gets around 40mm. It’s been a little dry.

Random little things that bug me

I like to think I am a pretty mellow guy and the feedback from others seems to support this. For example, I can’t recall the last time someone asked me to stop yelling.

But like anyone, there are random little things that bug me. Not in a frothing angry hate-the-world sort of way, just in that “oh yeah, this kind of bugs me” sort of way. Here’s an incomplete list:

  • the sidewalk drifter: this is someone who walks slowly in front of you on the sidewalk. As soon as you decide to pass by, the person will drift in the direction you are attempting to pass on. If you move left, they drift left. If you move right, they drift right. They also always walk straight down the middle of the sidewalk so as to maximize the space they occupy. I have seen several drifters whose actions lead me to believe they are calculated and therefore, evil.
  • people who think they are clever by referring to Canada as Canuckistan.
  • The Pet Shop Boys video for “Go West”. The song, originally performed by the Village People, is a blatant gay anthem. The video tries to repurpose it as an east vs. west thing (Russia vs. the U.S.) in order to make it suitable for mass consumption. It’s intellectually dishonest, especially considering Neil Tennant had officially come out around the same time.
  • the flaps on cargo shorts. They always curl up. I actually iron mine after washing them to keep them flat and I don’t iron anything.
  • full page ads on the front page of a newspaper. You typically only see this on the free dailies like 24 Hours or Metro but still, it’s as good as them admitting that the news therein is secondary to anything else, which doesn’t make a newspaper seem all that valuable a resource.
  • ATV strollers, especially on buses. There has been a trend in recent years toward strollers becoming the baby-toting equivalent of an SUV, with huge knobby tires and reinforced seats seemingly more suited to some 4×4 driving in the mountains than taking little Billy downtown to playschool. I have watched several people struggle to simply get these monstrosities onto a bus.
  • running a pedestrian-controlled red light. Hey jerk, the light is red because a person is crossing the intersection. Running the light to save you precious seconds on your oh-so-important tasks is not really a fair exchange for seriously injuring or killing someone.
  • employees who smoke at the entrance to the store they work in. Why do managers let them do this? Do they think walking through a cloud of smoke is the best way to welcome someone into their shop? Also, people who don’t butt out their cigarettes and instead just leave them burning on the sidewalk. Lazy would-be cancer victims!

And many, many more. Again, these are little things. I don’t gnash my teeth and write angry letters to editors over them, I just note them here because I like lists.