This panel comes from Bigfoot: I not dead. I saw the author, Graham Roumieu, interviewed on Q a couple weeks ago. They're stories written from the perspective of a very self-conscious and depressed Big Foot who has been forgotten by the world. Makes me want to smoke a cigarette too, but also buy the books.

The New Empire

Some of you may be wondering why I'm on an acreage, babysitting tropical animals and pooping chickens (have you ever seen a chicken poop? It's AMAZING!). Well, my vet-med friend Moni has connections that I can only dream of. The couple needed someone while they were on vacation for 4 weeks, and during one of my woe-is-me-I'm-never-going-to-find-a-summer-job-this-summer moments, she suggested this house-sitting gig, since she did not want to be tied down with it herself. Voila. It didn't matter I had no experience feeding animals. My willingness was enough.

Back to the chickens. Their poop is seriously sterling silver. It sparkles in the sunlight like hunks of raw silver. What have they been eating? Wedding rings?

One of my farm-girl jobs is to collect the chickens' eggs. Some of the eggs are warped and so huge they don't fit in the carton. Cracking one of these is like cracking an ostrich egg - it fills up the entire pan. On the other side of the barn-yard are the cockatiels, parrot-like birds that lay eggs the size of a thumbnail. I collect these too so that they don't rot, and I plan to make a Liliputian omelette demonstration video soon.

As for work, the Inn has begun its summer schedule which includes comatose weekdays and acid-frantic weekends. In other words, I only work the weekends now because that's when all the weddings are. My other job, the book-writing job, is picking up speed and filling in the gap left by not enough running around with coffee silexes. By the end of the summer our team of writers will have completed a novel about duh.. duh.. duh.. good and evil and the martial arts. I perform enough mental aikido in my customer service jobs to keep me primed for writing about it in the other.

I am thirst quencher!

I think that if I had a super-hero personality in my serving job, I would be The Thirst-Quencher! Dry throat? Is evil villain Stuffy accosting you in the corner? HAVE SOME ICE-WATER! DRINK! DRINK IT UP! I HAVE PLENTY MORE! I AM THIRST-QUENCHER!

Some days, I really do believe that the guests believe I have super-human powers. They ask me to do super-human things in super-human amounts of time. I must live up to their expectations by rustling my cummerbund cape and saying YES! I shall do it for you!

Hello, Chickens.

Imagine a person's panic after arriving at an acreage under the terms of a house swap, possibly having signed it in a drunken flail in South Africa last summer, to find a menagerie of chickens, birds, and rabbits who are not only plentiful and time-consuming but also very picky in their grand cuisine. They, of course, would argue, that 'picky' is a judgment call, that they prefer the word 'discriminating' when it comes to foodstuffs. House-sitting isn't easy when I've got 35 companions, but the more acute realization of the past week is that birds are more irritable and impatient than any dinner guest I've served in my other serving job. The two jobs blur when I find myself weighing chopped boiled carrot on a tiny scale into 7 individual dishes, carrying them out on a cookie pan to the bird highnesses like some disenfranchised Maitre D'. 'I hope you like my cooking' I yell at the birds. As I distribute din-din, I whistle my way through the two dozen cages, not merrily, but to appease the birds that still think I'm the creature from the lost lagoon. Their chirps sound almost like human screams as they batter one another to escape to the outdoor flight as I enter the shed. My first day I was wearing a skirt and high heels, something, I now know, they do not particularly enjoy. There's enough racket as it is, I guess.

A couple of birds are nesting, and in one nest you can see the grey chicks and their ridiculous beaks moving constantly, as though longing to suckle something. But birds don't suckle, they regurgitate, and so Mama bird takes the lovingly-chopped apple and banana bits to them in her own way. And I never see this happen. If I try to look at the nest by standing on the stool, Mama jumps across the entire 5-foot cage to glare at me 6 inches from my face, and caw at me in her peculiar way while spreading her wings to reveal red inner feathers. It's a beautiful display, and I love when she does this, and so her ploy backfires.

On Tuesday, I found a touraco dead in its cage. The owners of this quasi-farm told me not to worry if a bird died. It happens, they said. This bird had been sick for a while, anyway, I knew. Still, I was not pleased to find this bird collapsed like a feather-duster. Its mate was nowhere to be seen; I guess it had said its goodbyes. Cawing Mama bird raced back and forth as I pried the dead bird out of the opposite cage with a plastic bag and a sieve. The bird was surprisingly light, like a handful of banana peels. Finding the basement fridge, I placed it between the frozen pie crusts and ice cream. Good bye, little bird, I said, slamming the fridge-freezer. It felt a little irreverent not to have said any final words. I could have at least crossed myself, even though I'm not Catholic. But I had never done a freezing funeral before. Does a person throw snow on the sarcophagus?

And so I remain for another 2.5 weeks at my cottage in the country, with my harem of birds, chickens, and rabbits. As soon as I find my camera, I'll post some photos.

When you're sick you watch cartoons right?

While lying in bed last night after assuring myself it was okay to take nighttime cold medication two hours after taking daytime medication, I started picturing myself in some other dimension lamenting a problem in valiant yet stoic fashion, when someone else in the imagined room said, "I'll do it." I saw myself throw up my arms and yell, "We have a hero," galloping around the room to the racy part of the William Tell Overture on an invisible horse until I reared up at the he-ro. I was in love with my spontaneous energy, convinced that I would bank this scene and re-enact it someday soon. In my vision, I heard someone in the room say, What are you on? And my proclaiming, NOTHING! with a voice Noah might have used to hearken God's dove from the new land.

I was disappointed to realize a minute later that I was hopped up on xtra strength cold meds that were making me feel as happy as an olive branch.

That didn't stop the song from continuing to loop through my head as I fell into a slobbery coma, only to awaken on the brink of the soporific abyss to wonder whether I was going to die during the night. More importantly, would this ridiculous song be the last song I heard as my soul parted from my body? I'd always hoped it would be more along the lines of Beethoven's 5th symphony, or at the very least Michael Jackson's Beat It.

As for the cartoon, Mickey Mouse's evil face is prima. I feel bad for Donald Duck, and can't help feeling that he was my younger brother in our childhood games. Yes, that made me the conductor-dictator. Sorry bout that, Josh. I think we've come to terms since.

In earlier days.

Kitchen Rebuttal

Dave's response to my Beethoven video (see post "For Those Who Hate Cleaning the Bathroom")

Mwah! As the Italians do.

Männertag

Watch the old-timer in Khaki

I was perusing a 126-item list titled "You know you're German when..." slowly realizing that perhaps I don't have an ancestral umbilical cord to the heimland, when I read the following entry:

32. We are used to men getting drunk every Ascsenion Day (Himmelfahrt or rather "Männertag")

As it turns out, "Männertag" is the German equivalent of father's day, a celebration that occurs the same day that the church acknowledges Jesus' ascension into heaven - also known as Ascension Day.

The undated video didn't help much in explaining why fathers guzzle bier that day. To find out more, I called local German club and talked to a woman who said to call Sigrid, that she would know everything.

Old lady Sigrid picked up the phone. With a delightful German accent, this is what she told me:

"It's not a family day like here. But the men get together and use their walking sticks and they put some branches on and put some flowers on their head and go from pub to pub."

That could explain why they are in the middle of a forested road with backpacks: going from pub to pub could be difficult in a rural setting I guess if each pub is in a different town. Sigrid also told me that she hadn't heard of men getting drunk, even though it's possible some might.

"I don't know. In my family, my father and my grandfather, they never did that tradition. My mother cooked a special dinner, and we went for a walk. And because it's Himmelfahrt we might have went to church."

It does seem a bit irreverent for fathers to be playing the accordion and drinking beer on the one day a year reserved for Jesus ascending to heaven. Does that make it less awesome? No, indeed.

I'm still not sure what the song is that they play, but I'm determined that be the next song I learn on the accordion. Pah pah! Get your branches and flowers, and let's take a walk.

Gleaning the Glib

Ever wonder what kind of game show your job would be if your employers ran a game show? Would it be the kind of pageant from the 60s with string flags along the bottom of a portable stage and the host dressed in glitter? Or would it be the kind of game show that involves people getting hurt while others laugh? Is it the kind of show where your bosses get you to believe the stakes are high when they're really not? Does it seem like chance decides the daily double of praise? Are the cords visible and the cameras sometimes get in your line of vision? Is it a call-in show of just you, or a studio audience of 1000, and most important of all, do you have to answer every remark with a question, lest you be disqualified? (All people working in customer service fall into this category).

Speaking of studios, do you know what's the hardest part of finding an apartment in a new city? Trying to figure out where the hell its neighbourhood is. Also annoying: neighbourhoods called the Glebe. It just tempts a person to extend the e to be Gleeeebe. I live in the Gleeeebe. Or just Glib. I live in Glib. At which, if I said it, no one would blink an eye.

On a more exciting front (literal front, eh Gatineau? You fought hard for the north side of the river), on this front we have Nuclear Inferno Town, Mechanicsville, and Lebreton Flats. Allow me to illustrate: (Click for better image)

Fig.1 My apologies to whoever's garish graphic this is, one for it being garish and two for my stealing it.

As you can see, Nuclear Inferno Town does not exist. It is innocuously known as Ottawa West. But as we can see from this clever map of clues, Ottawa West actually has nuclear mushroom clouds! It's like scabies for that neighbourhood, it just can't get rid of them no matter how many times it washes its linen.

Now you will understand why, between Ottawa West and Mechanicsville, we have Tunney's Pasture. Kids, this is your first lesson in euphemisms: Tunney's is clearly a wasteland, begotten by a tumultuous love between nuclear arms and robots. The robots have recently given up, hence why they are pointed towards Lebreton flats, where God has recently awarded them life by touching their metal pincers with his finger.

Either that, or the Hulk is grabbing the overhead-projector-bot by its neck. But I prefer the whole 'spark of life' dealie, even if it involves AI.

I'm actually looking forward to AI, and hope that I've gleaned a representational portrait of this neighbourhood. I'm frankly looking forward to my best friends being my fridge and my toilet. Who doesn't need motivation in every aspect of his or her life?

After all, not every job is a game show.

For those who hate cleaning the bathroom

This video was inspired by several things:
- The film "The Fall" which plays this soundtrack (Awesome film, by the way)
- Joblessness
- Beethoven and his ability to remain in my head for weeks on end

Joblessness is no longer an issue. Today, a banquet guest asked me what time I got off. Yes, people still think that's a funny line. It's so unfunny that I told him what time I got off. Beat... that...

I heard that the mayor of Windsor is encouraging his citizens to move to the prairies. I would like to add to his emphasis: The Saskatoon Inn is hiring. Now. Today. Please apply, so I don't have to work with people who think 24 hours of OT in a week is low.

Fortunately, I've gotten another job writing children's books based on martial arts. What's that you say? I have no experience in the martial arts? And?

The key component to the writing job is that it requires sitting. For several hours on end. Did I mention that my feet hurt?

Here's the trailer for The Fall, whose action scenes were filmed mainly in India and Namibia.

The workin gal

While perusing through *my brother's* contractual employment documents, I started daydreaming about other things, like how I would describe the interesting people I work with in future vignettes (my fancier, classier term for blog posts) when I came to section 3: confidentiality.

This post is NOT going to be what you think it's going to be. Unless you are psychic, in which case I'd like to hire you. Aside from the whole "is it ethical to break your contract by writing about it on your blog" I was more freaked out by the summary of the confidentiality chapter. It runs roughly so:

GENERAL
4.1 The agreement will continue to kick your ass even when you leave and are no longer working for this company.
4.2 The Employee realizes that the Employee is employed solely by the Employer and that this Agreement does not create a relationship of employment between the Employee and this company. (Sorry about the caps. Lawyer folk are all of wanna-be German heritage and capitalize their nouns. My theory on German capitalization = every word was defined at the beginning of each story, a preface which eventually became the dictionary!)
4.3 This Agreement will be governed by the laws of the province of British Columbia. (Recall I live in Saskatchewan).
4.4 Something something
4.5 BLAA
4.6 Don't friggin take this document unless someone gives it to you.
4.7 Time is of the essence
4.8 You are advised to seek legal advice before signing this Agreement.

Okay, I've paraphrased here, but 4.7 is exactly how it appeared between two two-line memos rife with capital letters. "Time is of the essence." What exactly is this trying to tell me? That I'm going to die someday and what the hell am I doing reading through most of the policy guide when I should be out seizing diems (is that a type of bird? Why do people always say that?) or making love or feeling more existential angst. 4.7 is making the point that time is always of the essence when it comes to shhhhhhhhh.

Also, why is my contract governed by the laws of British Columbia? According to the internet, that means I could get thrown in jail for killing a Saskwatch. That was invented before they had comprehensive laws for murder. Now it's illegal to kill anyone, including people from Saskatchewan.

I have no choice but to sign it, and try to vaguely conceal what I've done. I mean, what my brother did, what he totally did. I mean, I'm writing from his character, you see how I slipped into his character part way through? It's called skillful narration.

Pan-Cakes

Are pan-cakes merely globs of cake batter fried in a pan?

Dave and I conducted an experiment by making pancakes with vanilla cake batter.

The result: delicious pancakes that don't even need syrup because they're already slightly sweetened.