Red Rover... we call Gate 141 over

I made friends with a robot while we waited on the tarmac until 2:30 a.m. The robot was outside my window de-icing the plane with the same warm liquid goo that brought Austin Powers out of his cryogenic freezing.

There's a beer garden at Pearson airport that is de facto entertaining when your flight has been canceled. Beer Gardens = a place you can find drunks since 1807

This is not, however, where my problems began.

I was about to buy a candy apple covered in pecans and reached into the pacific ocean that is my purse, flipping through the usual detritus: newspaper,notebook, collated receipts, and unused napkins. Nothing. The purse-within-a-purse was gone like magic. Ok, fine, I thought. Bring back my purse! I commanded to my bag and rummaged through it again, as though flipping through a book to find a hidden bill.

I tried this experiment several times with the same result. This is why I hated scientific method in high school.

I immediately concluded it had been stolen, a conclusion I'm happy about, since it shows I have some self-esteem. No one as young and thoughtful as myself would be daft enough to leave my purse in a busy place!

Somewhere, in some dark room full of blinking screens, a security tape was proving me wrong.

Airport security officials would have a lot to laugh about if they compared notes. Remember Calgary? My driver's license ran off with a spoon. Not to mention the army of mannequins that could be dressed in sets of mitts, hats, scarves and sunglasses once in my possession.

It's ok, though. I'm very zen about it. See the glass as broken right? (by glass, I'm referring here to my mind, not lost stuff)

I was standing in an irritatingly human customer service line: it went straight out, single file, blocking the entire hall in an apathetic - yet surprisingly effective - Red Rover. Two calm airport officials, one woman, one man sat at the extreme ends of a bureau built for six. The folks at the front of the line had the camped-out look of movie ticket squatters - their bags heaped on the ground while they lifted each foot in turn, arms crossed.

I joined the melee. A pregnant teen and her boyfriend joined the line behind me, bizarrely bubbly for being at the end.

"Not until I have the BA-by!" she said, alerting me to how annoying a woman - especially a too-young woman - is while pregnant. Probably she has no inkling of her future.

"Did you mean to get pregnant?" I wanted to ask. "How old are you?"

Yes, I, the 23-year-old matron, who can't keep her purse in sight.

I was in the middle of the line that was creeping like a vine through a sidewalk. Everyone trying to break through our Red Rover was targeting me. I thought maybe the Grim Reaper bags under my eyes might deter them. It apparently had the opposite effect.

Suddenly the intercom clicked on. There was a pause, then a woman's voice announced my name very clearly, asking me to come to Gate 141 to collect my "article."

Here I was faced with the embarrassing need to leave the line without making it clear to everyone around me that I was the crazy lady. Such a thing can be done by looking angry or bored or pretending to answer your phone. I went for the angry/bored technique, furiously picking my bag off the floor and then staring hard at the departures board for 10 seconds.

Oh, I tricked them.

By the time I'd walked down the neverending hallway glutted like the sugar in my veins they'd paged me again, this time specifying I was from Saskatoon.

When I got to the gate, the lady at the counter shoved the purse at me with a pitying stare, as though to say, "I'm sorry for your early dementia."

Dyb is sorry he won't be able to send me a purse in addition to the named-engraved binder he sent me on my birthday to replace the one I lost on the Montreal subway. The purse, he said, would be "bedazzled" with my name so that not only would finders know whose it was, but would also be deterred from keeping it.

I skirted around to my gate and eyed the rows to see whether I knew anyone on my flight who would have heard the announcement. I saw no one... until a little later when I saw a guy from high school who lives on my street. Fuck.

Fun Fact: as I left my previous flight, a young bearded man with a potbelly was coaxing a suitcase out of the overhead bin as his 2-year-old daughter regaled the carpet with tales of the outside world.
"Jesus!" the man said, as he gripped the overhead bin and leaned forward to let us by.
"Jesus' birthday!" I wanted to correct him.

Fast forward to me entering, then exiting my plane as everyone was evacuated due to a maintenance issue. Our flight was delayed until 12:05, as they called a new plane and moved us to a new gate.

I found the only bar that was open, moved a dirty glass to a dirtier table, and sat down to be entertained by a table of drunks.

It was then that I realized I was in a veritable beer garden, or as I like to call it, a drunk pen. Metal bars. But jovial. People happy to be imprisoned in glee, their mouths forced open in giddy laughter. It was a much different scene from the stuffy cabin and the pool of uptight passengers with their sarcastic remarks. I couldn't understand why everyone was so grim. I, for one, was relieved to get off that rustbucket plane.

It was its relative newness, though, that was the problem, as our pilot so diligently and gratuitously explained. When the system is electric - I think those were his words - one part down means the whole thing's down. I'd watched from my window as they'd attached an umbilical cord to the side of the plane, a floppy black thing joined to a Ghost Busters' truck. The whole thing was very Ghost Busters and it made me worry that maybe we had a ghost and that was what they weren't telling us.

But Bill Murray did not wave to me from the tarmac as I'd hoped.

According to the pilot, they were attempting to stoke the fire as it were, by blowing air into the engine. I'm not sure what kind of plane these people thought they were dealing with, but I'm pretty sure reverse-vacuuming the inside when a whole system is on the fritz is not the same as blowing on kindling.

The pilot wasn't helping with his in-depth account, dumbed down to terms like "whole system" and "blow air into it" and "reboot - like a computer." Each of his trembly-voiced updates conjured images of the plane's fuselage tumbling mid-flight or the power cutting out (as it frequently did during their re-boot attempts), forcing us into a gliding then precipitous descent somewhere north of Windsor.

In the airport's waiting lounge, we were told it wouldn't be long that "the plane will be here shortly." Most passengers fell asleep on their nearest loved one. I stared in longing at the empty massage chairs half-heartedly covered with a tarp, and wondered how much trouble I would get in for crawling underneath to doze. I made a mental note for later.

Fun Fact: In 1969, Jimi Hendrix was arrested at Pearson airport not for crawling onto massage chairs but for having hashish and heroin. He was acquitted after he argued that a fan had slipped it into his bag without him knowing. I doubt that defense works anymore.

The drunks were still going strong at 1:00 when we finally boarded the plane. I wanted to try asking for free booze once we boarded based on the premise that it's worked before. To make a point though, I would wait until the flight attendant handed me my mini bottle of gin and if she demanded payment, click my pin and scribble IOU 1! on the back of a receipt. She'd hopefully get the joke, and I'd lay back knowing poetic justice, at least, had been done.

After an hour of idling, I was beginning to think that "shortly" was a code word for "never" or "maybe in 40 minutes we'll start thinking about it." The flight attendants had probably taken the advice of one of the passengers and fucked off. They were nowhere to be seen or heard for our entire stint on the tarmac.

All of a sudden, with no provocation, the plane started moving. No one clapped. All was quiet. We were like a herd of sheep that had been tasered too many times.

The lights suddenly flickered on, then shut off, then flickered on again.

"They're mashing the wrong buttons," I told the teenage guy next to me.

Fun Fact: How does a plane get enough traction to take 0ff in a foot of snow? (that's more of a fun question, than a fact.)

Arrival time? 5 a.m. - 16 hours after leaving my house and shortly before NORAD began tracking Santa's journey around the globe. We almost had a chance to pass him in the air (he is, technically, a Canadian citizen). He could have given us our presents early - a giant shovel for the tarmac and a bone to pick with Air Canada.

I got my gin and took a cue from my neighbours - passed out.

From then on, it was a happy flight.

Grandma got run over by a squirrel and what?

It may be apparent by now that I have a thing for advent calendars. I guess it's the German in me that loves miniature doors and daily rituals. Hey, Tin Drum? Hey, OCD?

From wine bottles dressed like Christmas trees with water-marks denoting the day, to giant advent calendars comprising whole buildings, there is nothing I won't try.

But when it comes down to the good old fashioned kind - the $1 cardboard calendars you buy at Sobey's or the Independant Grocer, I have a little chicane of my own.

These are "holiday" calendars, to be sure. They are non-denominational Christmas joys, and that's not my problem.

Here's my beef: On the 16th of December I opened up the little box to find...

You tell me. What the bloody hell is this?

................................................. Is it a Gremlin?

On the 17th I found a squirrel holding a dildo. On the 20th, I found a dead Santa crushed by his sleigh. Yesterday it was a giant spotted mushroom.

Merry Christmas! Five days left, and we're here to remind you that destruction and death have never been more unpredictable.

The squirrel holding the dildo reminded me of the time I applied to be a sex-toy writer. I found the ad on the university message board. The deal was they would send me sex toys and I would review them.

I never heard back.

But that is neither here nor there.

These little chocolate wafers that are driving me crazy with their cryptic, unintelligible pictures.

We're up to three fucking squirrels now. How many squirrels are related to Christmas in a normal person's life?

I stress normal person's, because squirrels have been weirdly prominent in my life lately, but not in a festive way unless you count red and green food scraps as festive.

As for the blotch, maybe it's an iceberg. Hey kids! Guess what? Santa's gonna drown soon! Remember the North Pole's melting? You can thank all those oil-derived plastic toys of yours.

My reaction to this squirrel (a scary and delicious food item) is on par with Janet Leigh.

Motel Livin'

Today is me and my motel room's two-week anniversary. You may ask me if we're doing something special, to which I'll say, we're a stay-at-home couple into drinking strong beer and vegging out in front of the TV. I don't think either of us is planning anything. Probably go to bed early. My mini fridge lets out a bang and a wheeze every half hour - that'll be all the romancin.

I really want to talk about bikers. But I'm afraid they'll come and hurt me.

So instead, I'll wait until I'm out of swinging range (I like to kid myself) and then regale you with my tales of danger lust.

The post will be titled Laura Posts her own Wanted Sign on the Internet. Read it here first.

I can't wait to get out of this charming, charming town.

Radio-Canada - will you fit in my stocking?

Even if you don't understand French, I think this film will still make you laugh.

Ahhh, Sarkozy, mon amour. (Given my recent Charest post, I should qualify that. Sarkozy, mon amour fou et violent!).

The gist: A Quebecois news anchor interviews Sarkozy about his upcoming visit to Quebec for the Francophonie conference (which happened a month ago).

It begins:

Anchor: I now have the great honour of conversing with the President of France from Paris - Nicolas Sarkozy!

Sarkozy: Yes, ok, listen up, I demand the immediate release without condition of all the French hostages being retained in your country.

Anchor: Listen here, there are plenty of French people here that we'd love to send home to France. Ha ha.

Sarkozy: I beg your pardon?

Anchor: We don't have hostages, hein? I want to talk about your visit to Quebec next week.

Sarkozy: Visit? ah! of course! excuse me. It's fatigue... it's jet lag...

Anchor: It's because you're in Paris

Sarkozy: Ah, fair enough, I'm not in habit of finding myself in France. Voila!

... (Later, After the Anchor accuses Sarkozy of not caring about Quebec)

Sarkozy: I like it, I like it, I like it more than ANYTHING!

Anchor: What is it that you like about Quebec?

Sakozy: But, everything! The St. Laurence, the Rockies, Michaëlle Jean, the whales... I love it all! Everything, everything, everything!

Sarkozy, your joie de vivre makes us all long for senility.

High Caliber Shopping

Bet you wished you brought an extra bag.

According to an article printed in the Montreal Gazette Wednesday, a car dealership in Repentigny will throw in a $17,500 2009 Dodge Caliber for free if you buy a Dodge Ram, Dodge Durango, Chrysler Aspen or Jeep Commander.

The dealership's rationale? To get the gas guzzlers off the lot.

People supposedly consume less during crappy economic times, until they realize they can get twice the merchandise for the same price as before.

I can save $17,000!
But you're spending $17,000.
That's a 50% discount... or is 100%? Did you see that Cold War Bunker?
No.
They're selling it off for $500,000!

I hate to admit it, but I'm the same way. Last night I peered into a discount shop and saw a little 3-drawer wicker dresser for $4. I spent the rest of the walk home envisioning it in that giant plastic bag they gave me at the textile warehouse (where I bought multiple $1 toilet covers and a pillow) so I can lug it to Ottawa on Greyhound.

Right now I have a multicoloured plastic kid's dresser. I feel sheepish keeping any belongings in something that should contain crayons, paper, and Barbies.

The main problem is I have acquired a strangely huge assortment of meds, most of which I've thrown in there to keep them out of sight. Seriously. Name a symptom and I will cure you.

Despite being a mild hypochondriac, I am wary of taking pills. The result is that I have dozens of unopened bottles sent to me by my parents, and many more that rattle around in my purse and make me feel like a geriatric.

But all of this aside, getting a 2 for 1 vehicle is a pretty sweet deal. If you're buying a Durango anyway, why not wrap one under the Christmas tree for your bro or sis? You may need a lot more trees to offset emissions, but gas prices are at an environment-ignorable level, anyway.

When gas goes up to $1.30/L saving the coral reefs will come back into vogue.

But that probably won't happen until summer.

The victory music was weird

I was sitting in Jean Charest's hotel conference room, a media pass around my neck, staring at a 12-foot screen broadcasting various female reporters (I saw no male TV reporters the entire evening). I was plotting the moment I'd join the jostling scrum around Charest and brush against that dark silky suit - a moment that began 12 years ago.

As the night wore on, the 120 minutes of sleep I had carved out for myself the night before began to seem like not enough. My body temperature was dropping, and putting on my coat was like crawling into a sleeping bag. The scaffolding of lights above became a comforting mobile - the world spun and I cooed.

My comprehension was shot. I heard my savant colleague say "I hate winter! The gold. The giant goats. It's awful! I HATE it."

Election day was the coldest day of winter so far in Sherbrooke: -28 with wind chill. It was a humid cold that made leaving the building feel like walking through a cloud of caustic lye. That may have been why voting turnout was 20 per cent lower than last time.

I was sliding down my media chair, focussing on avoiding drool, when I roused myself. As much as I was a basket-case, I couldn't miss my big moment with Charest. No, this was the pinnacle of a long courting. When I was in grade six, his campaign office sent me a package of campaign materials for a school assignment.

I'm not sure who thought an 11-year-old girl Backstreet Boys fan would want a 5-foot poster headshot of Charest. Are those his pores? Eww. This was 1997, when Charest was the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and thus getting used to people scrutinizing him in detail. But still.

Anyway, I thought the poster was funny and put it up on my wall. This may be one of the reasons I had few friends that year. Out of the four girls in my class, at least two of them saw my poster of Charest, which I would introduce to house guests as a good friend. Here is my good friend, Charest. He's a poster boy. Look at his grey curly locks... you want to know which lock of hair is my favourite?

It was the beginning of my fascination with Charest's dual-sided nature - the egotistical leader vs. the shy and uncomfortable man.

He finally arrived at the hotel, elected for the 3rd consecutive time. I watched the TV cameras beam his entrance onto the screens - he was surrounded by a crowd that filled only half of the ballroom. I felt bad for him. A third of the attendees were media. I stood up on the media platform with one foot on a chair, but still could see nothing. The crowd morphed and ebbed like a cat stuck in a burlap sack. The cat was Charest. Let me out, he surely screamed to deaf ears. Let me in! I yelled on the fringes.

I thought about This Hour Has 22 Minutes comedian Geri Hall and her press conference hijinks with Stephen Harper that landed her a one-on-one interview. "I love you!" she screamed, as she was escorted out. "I want to love you!"

Yes, little did Charest's campaign office know that 12 years later, that girl would be at his campaign HQ with a media pass and veiled intentions.

Unfortunately for me, I didn't have any huge pieces of TV equipment to bully my way through the scrum. I watched in admiration as those with cameras shoved their way in like hogs at a watering hole.

Laissez-faire, I said, giving up for the moment. Laissez-faire. (What I should have said what laisse-faire, not the economic plan that Charest has been using to gain popularity. But I thought his ears might perk up).

I sat down and folded my hands. Charest will come to me, I decided.

After his speech, he walked over and stood next to the media pen for a live beaming to Montreal. The cameras were practically on the ground so he had to look down, exacerbating his double chin, and causing me grief. My savant colleague grabbed my camera and commanded I stand in line with Charest. Move back! she said.

Could this photo be any more beautiful? Charest's hands are blurred because he was signing "I love you" to me peripherally.

If only I still had that poster. What part of his face would he have signed?

Saturday Night

This evening I am spending in the bathroom deciding what to do with $40 worth of monk cheese.

I spent the afternoon with a newspaper colleague and her friend on nauseatingly curvaceous roads only Mordecai Richler would find attractive. We drove through Austin, a four-way-stop town, and my colleague pointed out the restaurant where Mordecai Richler used to drink before his death. It wasn’t the kind of place I would have expected for him, though it is the kind of place I’d expect in these New England hills – a gingerbread style house with a steep shingled roof flopped over like bangs, and multicoloured lights in the windows.

Richler was a python to the press. My colleague once interviewed his neighbour who said he used to hear Richler clacking away on his typewriter in the middle of the night. The area may be sparsely rural, but it is also quiet.

Three kilometers down the road from the restaurant was another unexpected sight: a castle built in 1994.

The new-grey siding gave it the appearance of painted foam, like those 3D puzzles my family was obsessed with when we lived in a leaky bungalow in Richmond, B.C. ten years ago. My parents were clearly urging me to dream big. Just because we lived in that one-floor house with rusty white guardrails in front didn’t mean I shouldn’t dream of Styrofoam castles.

I hiccupped a small catharsis, then followed my companions inside St. Benoit du Lac Monastery.

Inside, the walls, floor and ceiling were a mosaic of red, blue, and yellow brick, as though someone had rolled up the path to Never Never Land and re-plastered it here for a nominal fee of eternal life instead of eternal youth.

The place was clearly a tourist site, punctuated with garbage cans, no smoking signs, and male-female bathrooms.

The end of the hallway was the real gem – the cathedral.

It's difficult to describe, but basically if you crossed Haida totem poles with mandolins, artisanal blacksmithery and glass blowing, and Leonardo Divinci was on the architectural team, you could have something resembling the real thing.

The most impressive detail was the baptismal sundial which refracts the dawn sunlight that enters the front of the cathedral, illuminating the back wall in a brilliant display of angels, Jesus, and cheese.

Sorry, that’s actually the basement I’m thinking of, where tourists can graze the religious-trinket store, bookstore, and delicacy shop.

All the consumables and metal handcrafts are made by the 24 monks upstairs or by the monks at their “brother” monastery a few hills away. All the cheese, chocolates, ice cream, and jams have little cartoons of oafish monks on them, which makes them a perfect holiday gift for saints and sinners alike.

Say Cheese

As a rule though, I don’t buy cylinders of cheese that weigh more than my laptop. My mini motel fridge is only so big. Like laptops, these blocks of cheese will give you carpal tunnel. Like laptops, you want to keep turning them over in your hands to feel the smooth edges. Unlike laptops, they won’t make you infertile if you keep them on your lap. They will just make you stinky.

A better use for the giant cheese cylinders relates to the German Easter Wheel tradition I have been trying to get to catch on here. The public nuisance violations are starting to pile up, and you know how great it would feel to push a burning wooden wheel stuffed with hay down a hill during Easter, right? Burning bush to monk cheese – we’re probably moving away from blasphemy.

I wish we could have been there for Vespers, since these are Benedictine monks ie) monks who do the chants. “Do the chants” sounds a bit Valley-Girl. As though they’re cheerleading God with tassles, or something, like, totally, You go girl, Mary.

Speaking of Mary, while the monastery is a little Lichtenstein, the nunnery is like the Lichtenstein’s barn – behind some trees, barn-shaped, with white wooden siding... think Road to Avonlea. It makes me regret not being a man, because both places offer low-rent stays in their “hotelleries” the kind of self-imposed exile I’ve been dreaming about since the house-sitting fiasco this summer (Don’t remember that as clearly as I do? Allow me to refresh your memory). I could use a nice quiet getaway in the same hills Richler once blessed with his own literary curses.

We said goodbye to the Freres Jacques my colleague had interviewed when they won Best Cheese in Canada. For some reason, each monk she interviewed was called Frere Jacques. She quipped that she knows the answer to the rhyme. Dormez-Vous? No. They never sleep.

“They wanted us to interview them at 7:30 in the morning! That’s madness. I’m never up that early.”

On the way back we ate squeeky cheese curds and my colleague let her friend drive.

“I can’t eat cheese curds and drive at the same time,” she announced splitting open the bag with a Swiss Army Knife and handing it to me in the back seat.

Seconds later I was prying open one of three jars of apple sauce I had bought, and almost sprained my hand. A lot of spiritual force went into closing those jars, and sadly I have little. Thus the lasting hand cramps. But the pain was worth it: sucking apple sauce straight out of a jar on Backgammon roads requires talent. Oh, sweet apple sauce. Never have I made-out so good in the backseat of a Neon. Mm.

We curved around Lac Memphré where the Memphré monster supposedly lives. Then we swerved behind an abandoned building, through a sliding chain-link gate, down a gravel yard modeled on a mogul ski run and joined half a dozen parked cars in front of an enormous brick warehouse. The windows were broken in the shape of arrowheads. We walked up the path beside a mammoth rusted garbage shoot. It felt like we were sneaking up on a 19th century prison.

Inside, the ceiling was no more than ten feet high. “Textiles” I soon learned meant rugs, sheets, duvets, pillows, toilet covers, and towels – all discounted to prices even an itinerant like me couldn’t ignore. The maniacal shopper emerged and soon I was texting friends messages like “Need duvet or toilet cover? In discount store amazing prices!!”

It took me a few minutes to realize what was wrong with this idea. First of all, I was spamming friends. Secondly, I had little intention of buying for others once I saw how much I was already carrying.

After a few minutes it dawned on me where I was. The concrete pillars with white stenciled numbers, the low ceiling and concrete floor... it was the former underground parking for the factory.

The store had unintentionally produced the most efficient way for parents with erring children to recover them.

“Wait, hunny! Where’s Julipe? Where did we lay her down to change her diaper before seeing that 50% off sign? The purple fabric? Purple fabric is D80. We’re in D40. Head North!”

By the time we left the store at 4 p.m. it was almost dark. It’s great to have an hour time difference between here and Saskatoon when I call my parents, but looking at a map of Canada will tell you why the difference makes little sense. Why are so many people in favour of the sun setting at 4 p.m.?

I got back to my motel and started a bath. Last night was my first bath in six years. I can’t remember the last one except that it was during high school, and well, that was over six years ago.

But last night I had an Einstein moment. Hot bath + tired bones = !!!

Three Memphre sea monsters.

I rummaged through my bag to find the bath bomb I bought today. Under the infra-red light of my bathroom, I almost threw the puck of monk cheese into the bath instead.

That would not have fizzled the way it was supposed to, unless God was telling me his thoughts about my destruction of his cheese.

The red light is confusing; I‘d never seen one before this motel room. I kept turning it on expecting a bathroom fan but a darkroom light appearing instead.

My savant colleague knew was I was talking about right away.

“You know, the little lights they have above fast food to keep it warm, or the lights they have in chicken coops to warm the eggs.”

I appreciated the news, despite my bathing body being compared to idling fast food or factory-farmed chicken eggs.

Which leaves me at the point where I began: how to gift-out all this cheese by Christmas. For now, though, I leave you for the red glow of my bath.

In Labour

Our new furnace has had a difficult birth. It woke us up this morning at 7:45. The sound of crows segued to the beeping of a reversing truck to the sound of chainsaws. I looked behind my blinds and saw my neighbour and three yellow-vested men staring at something on our front lawn, which I couldn't see from my window.

WTF I thought and said several times just to be sure I was awake.

Wait, was I drunk last night? Was I drunken-accordioning last night. Shit. SHIIIIT. What other disasters occurred?

I threw on clothes and marched down the stairs with a little military flair, thundering down, ready to evict whatever illicit construction gang-bang had pooled on my lawn.

I opened the door, stepped down, and almost toppled into a grave-sized hole.

Two meters from my head was a Caterpillar shovel balancing a wedge of our former entrance path like a piece of raw pork on a butcher's scale.

*Screams*

That was my beautiful patio. And by patio, I mean the concrete path that I never shovelled. Miraculously, in the centre of this metal-dirt-snow disaster my pot of shrivelled chrysanthemums was still intact.

I shut the door and my roommate brushed past me whistling.

Roommate: It's the gas company! They're finally here to install the gas line for the new furnace.
Me: What the hell are they doing here at such an ungodly hour?
*Roommate glowers.*

I gazed in longing at our current state of heating - dozens of space heaters and their cords curled ominously around every piece of furniture in the living room. Suddenly I was ok with the space-heaters.

It is now 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. I am sitting at my desk and my curling iron is inching off of my glass-topped desk from the vibrations.

I just had a conversation with my friend about the house.

me: the house is vibrating again
Dave: under normal circumstances that'd be exciting, but I've seen your house
it might dislodge some stucco from the side of the house
me: or the house might collapse. One or the other
Dave: no, I think it would take an act of god and satan working together to finally topple your house . It's the building that refuses to die so long as carleton students seek near-campus housing
me: by god and satan you mean a burning crucifix that happens to fall on the house?
Dave: er, you haven't had that happen, have you?I put nothing past your party-hosting skills
me: It wasn't a burning man themed party
Dave: I meant more like god and satan shaking hands and saying, "We've had our differences since the dawn of creation, but let's agree to disagree and bring this mother down."
also, satan is played by gary oldman
me: who would play God?
Dave: Barack Obama
or rather, god would play Barack Obama
if Barack Obama personally condemned your home, wouldn't that be super cool?

Even Barack Obama could not make this situation better. Just as the devil could not make it worse.

If God and the devil are willing to make a pact, I'm willing to collapse-proof my stuff and then get the hell out of here for December.

Lennoxville here I come.