Month: February 2007

Printing out the Valentines

I am almost but not quite overcome by the excitement of my upcoming trip.

Still haven’t got hold of everybody.  This VOIP line is messed up, or nobody in Toronto has an answering machine, or I don’t have the correct numbers.  Or possibly there’s another explanation, but it’s odd, for sure.  Guess I’ll just have to sit in Tammy’s hot tub the whole time, woe is me!!! with a side of snickering.
I am almost, but not quite finished this year’s batch of Valentines.  I am hoping to curry them (courier them???) over to my cow-irkers at the sales & CS meeting, so they can take them to my US cow-irkers later.  The meeting which, once again, I was not invited to attend…. and every year it’s the same thing.  I get all pretend pouty ’cause I wasn’t invited, and then afterwards the participants describe their boredom, frustration and lack of pumped upness in Cecil B. DeMille scale terms. So really it’s good.  And I’m still thrashing my way through a nasty project at work, so it’ll be nice and peaceful while I finish up preparatory to my trip.

Oh dod

Three frrrriiiicking years til the Winter Olympics.  Ain’t it charmin’ to have something so great to look forward to?  And I can’t really complain because I didn’t actively try to do anything to stop it.  Worse, it’s helping prop up the value of the house….

Mac and cheese

I taught Keith how to make home made macaroni and cheese.  I asked him to boil up some noodles and he did – rather a lot of them – and he watched me assemble the dish, but now, strangely enough, it’s almost all gone.  This time I cooked it in the dutch oven, and man, what a difference the little crunchy bits at the edges made to the flavour.

Katie didn’t come home last night.  However, I know where she is.

Update

I have got “The Weekend’s Over” which is the scurrilous song I wrote for ScaryClown’s b-day, in the mail to mOm, and I am just finishing up Wish it was mine.  Blues is hard to write down, man  – it is meant to be SUNG not written down in musical notation.  Katie came home to collect her work duds and listen to me play it (I’ve been playing mando for hours today, my fingees are aflame) and she loved it.  Which was nice; she said that should be the next one I record.  It’s going to be a while before I have the money for that kind of thing, but I will definitely be doing it soon.  Every time I teach myself a new chord I end up writing another song.

Even nicer than Katie’s appreciation was her acknowledgment that Dax was being difficult.  The actual words she used were not exactly difficult, but you get the general idear.

I still have tons of Valentines to do – I may have to do some more tomorrow.

Yech I really did not need to see that pic

Okay, thanks to the Internet, I now understand the references to the Goatse man.  If you don’t already understand the reference, don’t bother looking it up, and this means YOU, mOm, and if you do get it, you can have a good laugh on me.

ScaryClown emailed me a link to an author about quality.  I burst out laughing when I read the email and replied (enjoying my advanced age for the first time in MONTHS) “Hey, I read that book in 1988.”  Yes, I am referring to the venerable Quality is Free by Philip Crosby, which I read, as I recollect, when I was working at either the law firm or at CDS.  Anyway, it was when God was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth.  It had a very powerful effect on my thinking about how to run a company, and of course I keep finding it in company libraries and in people’s personal collections, and I always laugh when I see it.

It’s like church.  It’s the same message, over and over again.  It’s no surprise that Philip Crosby is a committed Christian, and that his message hums along like a sermon.

Oh, for the purposes of clarity, and to scotch the notion that I’m being sarcastic when I refer to a committed Christian…..  There are committed Christians, and there’s everybody else.  Committed Christians are people who have accepted the yoke of the Lord and make their lives their witness.  They try to love, and they try not to judge.  Everybody else has decided that Christ wears jackboots, and is going to come and kick the shit outta everybody they don’t personally like.  I have yet to meet a Christian who didn’t fall into one of those two categories.  The first kind of Christian I have no issues with.  I’m looking forward to taunting the other kind of Christian in the lake of fire.

As for there being contradictions in the Bible, which really gets my goatse, something bizarre occurred to me recently, and I thought I’d share it.  There are contradictions in my own DNA…. Ain’t nothing whole and perfect, except maybe an idea.

New Song

Dance around a fire

and the fire is you

I cast a shadow

Nine feet tall

I could fly

Up into the sky

Never feel the pull

of gravity at all

Wish it was mine, wish it was mine, whoa baby x 2

He said

Wish it was mine? You crossed a line

You’ve got some misconceptions you must redefine

You cannot own me, you cannot buy me

Do not go there, do not try me

I’ll defend every inch of skin that I have got

Pack up your delusions woman I cannot be caught
She said

Such a violent answer for such a peaceful man

But I was put upon this earth to help you if I can

And only you must judge if the price is set too high

But I love a man who trusts himself and that is not a lie

Wish it was mine, wish it was mine, whoa baby x 2

Off for a walk

Briefly:

  • I went out to the Golf Course with the folks last night.  We were gargling a liquid goodbye to Darryl and Dave, who had been with the company 17 and 11 years respectively.  I like and respect them both, but it’s Dave I’ll miss the most, because he is a complete sweetie and I ate lunch with him damned near every work day for five years.
  • I gave a neckrub to the guy who hired him away from my employer however; I too can live in hope.
  • I worked the entire table and gave everybody who wanted a neck rub same; excepting only that greedy oinker RobofNine, who’d already had one that day.
  • At the beginning of the day I gave Burnt a package of Buffy Valentines; he indicated pleasure in a deadpan sort of way.
  • The Dalai Jarmo gave an extremely amusing and highly accurate description of what happens when a slender, intelligent and goodlooking female new hire gets dropped into an engineering department.  Punch line, “Every time I turned around, some guy had pulled out a bigger crimping tool.”
  • Paul and Keith came out!  Keith had a Crantini. Paul tried to pay, but I made sure I gave him my share.  Paul was especially happy because there were not one but TWO flying buddies there, being RobofNine and Jeff F., who now works with Susan N., who was ALSO at the Course, and… well, you get the idea that the high tech community in Vancouver is about a thousand strong, and you have to mind your p’s and q’s.
  • When I got home, Keith, who is a marvel among children, had provided Dun Tot from St Germain bakery in Metrotown.  My happiness may be imagined.  No sign of Katie; her door is closed though, and I don’t know where she is for sure.
  • Two cow-irkers gave me detailed and horrific descriptions of why they are now so miserable that quitting without another job to go to seems like a viable option. They are both solid contributors to the org so I am shaking my head.  I just started working with one of them so I only recently came to an understanding of his value.  The other one I only knew by his reputation from other people, but it was solid.  It was a poke in the eye, lemme tell you.
  • One of my other cherished cow-irkers called me an evil genius.  Happy sigh!
  • Brother Jerome was there, as was the Otto-man. However, Tom and Mike couldn’t make it so we only reunited one half of the original lunch bunch.
  • Dave also described his exit interview.  Man, I can only wish I’d been a fly on the wall.

Well, it’s 6:30 in the morning, and unless I actually put on a coat and go for a much needed walk, it ain’t gonna happen.  May you all have a lovely day!