Fun things:
1) I got to run around all day with an Ugly Stick.
2) The Toronto Islands are absolutely deserted at this time of year so you can run around and do just about whatever you want including riding stationary bikes in the middle of a field – seriously.
3) Fillin’ up Fiji water bottles with tap water can trick you into thinking that you’re drinking glacier water even when it’s just plain old Toronto lake water.

Xwrap something purple shiny fun Lure

All we caught was this lovely milkbag, and I dutifully threw it in the trash, and what a fun day it was nonetheless!

Whether they’re working for a newspaper, a publishing house, a book company, or something as simple a grading a million student-written essays, editors just rock my world. Seeing what someone thought to be their final draft just ripped to shreds with red ink all over the page somehow gloriously makes my day a little brighter. Maybe it’s the fact that no one ever sees them. They hide deep in the caves and dungeons of offices, keeping to themselves, making all the CEOs and writers and public speakers seem smarter, brighter and sharper.

They may live in the armpits of offices, but they’re apparently not a group to go down without a fight. When The Toronto Star announced several cutbacks earlier this week,  one such editor went to work on the memo announcing said changes.

Click through for the larger image.

Written by John Cruickshank, glorified to high Heaven likely by an underpaid editor.

From The Torontoist

Maybe it’s just my radio, but all the audio around here sounds all FLAT. It doesn’t matter what I’m listening to, or how loud I crank it… but it just sounds FLAT.

I hope my stupid little stereo isn’t going on the fritz. That’s be great. I just sent the microwave down to the curb, and now the radio is just about ready to go on the edge and drop over the side… GREAT.

I don’t know how the pioneers lived without microwaves. I guess they didn’t know any better.

Who starts a letter with “Dear Sirs”? CLASSY OLD-SCHOOL DUDES, THAT’S WHO.

Years ago, a bunch of friends and I went to the Highland Games in Fergus Ontario. It was good to romp around and get sort of rowdy. I’d worked an entire night shift of twelve hours before the idea even popped into my head that I’d like to go with them, so I was pretty exhausted, and I think I agreed to go on the condition that I’d drive there and back so that I could theoretically decide to leave if I wanted to. Bagpipes and kilts a-plenty and miles and miles away from home, plopped in the middle of a field on their lawn chairs in their tilly hats… were my grandparents.

Ab and Joyce

Field of Kilts

Grant, Rhonda, Trevor

Movies that will quite possibly look better on the screen than in shitty cam-copies:

Where the Wild Things Are,

This Is It.

I’ve never seen an Imax movie. This year, I’m planning on going. I’ve already watched most of the Michael Jackson movie, and yes – it’s fantastic. We shall see. My mother’s already seen it. I never read the book of Where the Wild Things Are, though -of course- I’ve heard good things.

I’m also considering expanding the categories that I keep on this blog. I never really put too much thought in to them, and this post doesn’t quite fall into any of the ones that I’ve currently got.

I deleted my Myspace. No one uses Myspace anymore, and it emails me too much garbage: I’m not interested in following around a million bands I don’t listen to.

The fact that Rhonda has a toilet in her backyard, or the fact that I decided to sit on it while drinking a beer?

There's also a mattress behind me!

At the fish store yesterday, I bought 2 new Plecos.

The tank is now up to:

8 Blue Silvertip Tetras, 7 Black Phantom Tetras, 2 Longfin Albino Bushnose Plecos, 3 Flying Foxes, 1 Neon Tetra, and 4 Zebra Nerite snails. There are also a handful of invasive little… weird snails that came in on the plants. They aren’t quite eating the plants, and I’m almost planning on buying some sort of fish that might like to eat them, but I worry that whatever that fish is might bother my other fish. In all, we’re at twenty-one fish and 4 snails.

There is also a smattering of Java ferns (about 7) , 3 moss balls, and originally what was a single Marble Queen Sword sprouted babies at the end of long stalks, so I snipped them off, and now there are 3 of those plants around the tank.

These are the 2 newest Fish

A blue fish of some sort died the other day. For a very long time, I actually thought he was one of the Silvertip Tetras, but he was incredibly (really!) incredibly fat. I didn’t know why he’d died, considering I’d just bought those Tetras on May 19th and six months isn’t a long lifespan for a Tetra when the water quality of my tank is very good and they are eating good food. If he had died from the stress of moving into a quaratine tank and back into this display tank in August when I built it, I wouldn’t have been that surprised, but considering that was three months ago, I didn’t understand why my fish had died. A properly cared for Silvertip Tetra can live for 5 years. I got my answer at the fish store yesterday: looking at all their tanks, I realised that he wasn’t a Tetra at all – he was one of the last Blue Platys that Jon and I had at the old apartment. The fish had died because he was incredily old. A Platy typically lives for about 3 or 5 years maximum, and considering that I probably got this fish in 2007, and he has moved not only from the old apartment to this house, I’d say he had a pretty damn good life.

I’ve figured out this little fish’s life, and assuming he came straight from the farm to Big Al’s, here’s all the places he lived:

-whatever farm or hatchery or lake

-Big Al’s display tank (unknown period of time)

-into a bag in my car (max 1 hour)

-40 gallon tank (an unknown period of time, as I’m not 100% sure when I bought this fish – possibly 1.5 years)

-10 gallon bucket to move across the city (max 2 hours)

-10 gallon tank in new house while 40 gallon tank gets set up (10 days)

-40 gallon tank (13 months)

-10 gallon tank while 90 gallon tank is set up* (10 days)

-90 gallon tank (3 months)

This little fish has lived more places than I have! He’s been in nine different places in his life, all of which could have significantly increased his stress level, thus shortening his lifespan, so the fact that he made it upwards of two years is amazing – what’s pathetic is the fact that I had no idea I still had a Platy in my tank until I was at the fish store looking at all their other Blue Platys and recognized that I had -until very recently- one swimming around in my tank. Originally I think I had bought three of them, but only one made it as far as my moving to this house.

*I would have skipped this step, but the ninety gallon tank was going to go in the same place as the old forty gallon, so I had to transfer all the fish to a small quarantine tank while I drained their previous tank and set up the new one. It would have been easier on both me and the fish to just set up the new tank and then transfer the fish to it, but then we’d need a bigger house.

I am seriously beginning to wonder if there is something weird going on. Today I’ve noticed that the manual focus control on my camera won’t work in Macro mode, however, it’s perfectly fine for Super Macro, and all my other manual setting seem to be working normally. I have yet to figure out why anyone would like to shoot in auto-focus mode for Macro photography. It’s a decent little prosumer Canon. It’s great for what it is, but it’s no SLR.

My printer is no longer on the fritz. As expected, after hardly 20 hours of being fully powered off and unplugged, I turned it back on, and there she was – completely fine in every respect. Jail term over and bailed out, the printer is now printing normally.

Earlier today I went to Tim Horton’s and got another Boston Cream donut. I didn’t end up eating any of it. The local Tim Horton’s I go to has a terrible habit of putting hot donuts into  paper carry-out bags, thus sticking the icing to the side of the bag, and fusing the entire donut to the paper. By the time I got to where I was going and the donut had sat in the bag for fifteen minutes and mostly cooled off, my attempt to pull it out resulted in a mangled mess of ex-donut. Since they don’t -by default- give you any napkins and I was wearing dress pants, I just threw the whole thing back into the bag and put it on the floor of my car. What a mess.

I’m all for ladies in the ring. Women fighters, brawlers, whatever you want to call them, they can do just as good of a job as their male counterparts. (I say they and not we because you’re not going to catch me out there. I played rugby in highschool, and yes – maybe with a bit of training -one day- I could do it, but at this point in life? No. I’d get my ass handed to me.)  Women in wrestling, mma, boxing and and any type of contact sport deserve to be there if they’ve put in the time and training.

That said, age is a factor. 49. 49? This lady has the cards stacked against her. All the power though… DeEtta Petersen is determined to get in the ring and fight before she turns 50.

Here’s a video of her training from Kimatv.com

Anyone remember this mess?

I am watching an ad for the TOBI stupid iron-on-a-stick… Are you KIDDING me?

A long time ago I wrote about the Hawaii Chair. This crap makes me want a Hawaii Chair. This dumb vacuum pretending to be an iron doesn’t look like fun, but that silly old chair could at least pass for a ride or something. You could have a garage sale and charge parents a nickel for rides on it for their kids or something.

The Barack Chia Head grows grass at least… It serves a purpose too I guess. Who names an IRON a ‘TOBI’??

[Update: I apparently wrote 2 posts about that damn Hawaii chair... that damn thing was on tv for a long time... ]