Meh

Lately I've been trying to write something. It's kind of important and I'm totally blocked. I've been finding it very difficult to take what I can express verbally and what is in my head and put it out in words. It's quite vexing. At the root of everything I do is communication, be it visual, verbal or written. To not be able to write properly feels like cutting of part of my arm.

Christine figures two things are going on:

1. I don't write enough any more.
2. I write to much in chat rooms and in abbreviated geek-speak.

Stopping chatting with friends and arguing politics online is not a possibility, so I'm left with only one alternative. I need to write more and I need to write better, more organized, longer pieces.

To that end I'm going to bore the three of you left reading this blog. I'm going to try to write something a bit longer once a week. You lucky bastards have been warned.

Random Camera Phone Oddness

Here' s some stuff I've seen lately.

I dunno wtf this is about... but I do like random crap...

US Postal Service mail box. On McGill's Campus. I dunno. Odd.


This person will teach you how to communicate with your Guardian Angel... where to even start?
This was just cool, it's a vending machine that sells you power for your portable device. You plug in your iPod or Palm or mobile and feed the machine and then it charges it for you.

One less regret

When we had our door installed about a month ago we wound up in a kerfufle with the masons who were working on the bricks across the street. Our contractors had thrown rubble in their bin. This ended with the guy coming and trying to get into our locked backyard, yelling, people calling each other liars and one of my neighbors coming down the ally to back me up with a gardening tool in his hand. Fun times.

Mostly it was, like many things in life, an event tinged with regret. I'd watched these guys work on another wall down the street and they seemed decent. We need brick work done in the next year or so... it seemed a perfect match. So when this happened I felt poopy because we lost access to a contractor (I will not hire someone who calls me a liar... sorry).

So then they really got going on the work. By which I mean they put up the Tyvek and fucked off for a month.

Then they got the bricks here.. And stopped again for a week.

Now the bricks are going up. Unevenly, with no standard width to the mortar lines.

This morning they showed up and one of the guys went up the stairs to the second floor balcony to set up a board on the scaffolding. It was like watching a Rube Goldberg machine. Of course he almost got launched off the balcony. Of course the huge board fell down and went through the open first floor door...

Now they've spent the last 40 minutes cleaning up the mess they made yesterday and should have cleaned up then.... fun. *

OMFG!

Right at this very instant one of our neighbors, the one that wears an exclusive wardrobe of Harley and sports related clothing and appears to have his Terminator™ glasses welded to his head is singing along to some Arab disco in a perfectly acceptable falsetto.

Happy Father's Day

When Lucas was about a year and a half he and I went for a walk... we went along Pine and to St. Laurent... near the corner there is a bank and a biggish tree. That's where some of the local squeegee punk homeless kids gather. They pan handle, they wash car windows, that summer they slept there as well.

Normally my interaction with them is limited to giving them some food/changes or a polite no or smile (I'm not some great humanitarian, I just try and remember that they are someone's kid and a human).

Anyway on this walk one of the guys looked at Lucas and I and said "cute kid" and I replied with some sort of joking flip comment (as is my want) like "we like him" or "we love him" or "yes he is". He looked me in the eye and said "Do you love him?" I said "yes I do".

What he said next is what will stay with me forever. He said "You love him forever, and tell him, no matter what, or he'll wind up fucked up like me."

I was taken aback and, frankly, speechless (those of you who know me know what a rare deal this is) so I nodded and said yes.

What I later realized I should have said, what has become my private little mantra (well not so much anymore), is this "I'll love him as long as I draw breath."

What Father's Day is really about isn't the tools, isn't the Bar BQ, or the breakfast (though the French toast was fucking awesome), it isn't really about having a kid (ny moron can make someone pregnant). It's about the relationship, it's about being a Father, about being there, about caring and teaching and hugging and doing all that stuff that's hard but right.

A bad sign and best wishes

Here is how you know for sure that you are a stress case: When the man who's wife just went into contractions with their second child tells you that you have too much stress and that you need to calm down and take deep breaths.

This happened to me this afternoon.

I am not pleased with myself.

Also

GOOD LUCK JENNY AND MIKE! I'm sure everything is going to go great.

WOOOT!

(non-parents are excused from the following post)

LUCAS JUST HAD HIS FIRST REAL POOP IN THE TOILET!

Crap in water never looked so good.