Saturday Night at the Movies

Saw Crazy, Stupid, Love last night. There is a funny scene where Steve Carrell is attempting to pick up a much younger woman in a bar. His character's name is Weaver. So he says "Like Dennis Weaver" and she stares at him blankly. That really made me laugh. Then he says "like McCloud". And she still looks blank. At that point, I was laughing really hard.

And then the punchline.

Smoothie leans over and says: "I don't get it. Who was McCloud?"

A Breakthrough?

Last weekend when my friend's car wouldn't start up in the mountains, we had to climb up a dirt path on a hill to get to my other friend's parents' house to seek help. Climbing that hill I felt that this was "a sign from God" to lose weight and get back to exercising, as I was gasping in a most unpleasant and unladylike fashion. (Not to mention the swearing.)

So this week I bought a diet book. It's that French diet that everyone seems to be on. I'm reading the book. This may be as far as my new diet plan goes because that Frenchie diet seems unreasonable, unsustainable and possibly damaging to one's kidneys, if nothing else.

So maybe no Frenchie diet for me. But I still have to do something. I'll keep reading the book.

FF Update

I emailed FF and he called me right away. He is in Calgary living with friends, and he has a free long-distance line that only works when he is on-line, so he was on-line and we talked for 20 minutes.

When I told him about the $722.00, he said (as expected) "Screw Bell". LOL. I knew that was coming.

He is broke, of course, but expects to start working at some computer thing within the week. He needs $100 in the meantime, but said that I was "literally the last person on earth" he will ask. He has a couple of other people to try and squeeze first, and I was grumbling that he knows how I feel about lending money.

Me: I really don't want you to call back and ask.
Him: Neither do I. I haven't even asked and you're already riding me!

He sounds really relaxed and happy. Which is good. And he's lost a lot of weight. Apparently, he's a real chick magnet now. I said: you always were. He laughed in an embarrassed, but pleased way.

Telephone line, give me some time

I tried to call FF on his cell, but the number is no longer in service. I guess his ex-company finally caught on that he is an ex-employee. Oh well.

I'll just have to wait to hear from him to tell him the great news that he owes the company $722.00.

My weekend

I have just returned from a weekend Up North. I was supposed to be back last night and at work today, but my friend's car battery died yesterday and we could not depart until she got boosted this morning. Then we drove to Ste Agathe on her boosted battery to a dealership where she got a new battery and we tootled on home. What an ordeal! If that car had stopped on the dirt roads of Up North, we were thinking it was Deliverance time! But we survived.

But Amy Winehouse didn't, I have just read. Too bad. I liked her.

And Jack Layton looks like he's on his way out too. I guess the campaign was just too strenous for his body. What a shame.

And now for a Fancy Feast update: there was some mail for him from his employer. As I have permission to open it, I did. And ha ha ha his last pay was a mistake. He should not have received it. So he now owes them $722.00. I can't wait to give him a call and hear what he says about that. Maybe he'll never be allowed to own a land line again until he pays up. I wonder if his company blackberry is still working. I'll soon find out.

Ontario: The Home Wrecker

First it was Kumar was went off to the greener pastures of Toronto; now it is my Tall Teacher who is heading off to Ottawa.

Ontario is my Other Woman, luring my men with her siren's call into her clutches!

What does Ontario have I don't have? I ask you. ..... oh yeah, jobs. Careers.

I shake my fist weakly at you, heartless Ontario.

No News from Fancy Feast

I have not heard from FF in five days. Does this mean:

a) he has learnt to manage his money?
b) he got a job?
c) he has run off with the medical marijuana delivery woman and will live happily stoned ever after?
d) his phone died and he can't reach me?

News News

I've been spending a lot of the morning going to various sites and live blogs reading the testimony of the police and the Murdochs (no, not those nice Murdochs) before the Parliamentary Committee.

It's been fascinating but it just got amazing with old Rupert being smacked in the face with a shaving foam pie.

Too bad the News of the World doesn't exist anymore. It could put that on its front page.

Reverse Ceausescu Fail

You may remember that back in the bad old days, Hall of Famer Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu would not allow temperatures to be reported when they were below minus 15. The logic being that people wouldn't suspect they were freezing to death if they didn't know it was minus 25.

Given the current heat wave, I decided over the weekend to launch the Reverse Ceausescu manoeuvre. Readers of this blog will know I am addicted to the Weather Network. So it was quite a challenge I undertook to not check the weather on t.v. or on the Internet, no matter how hot it was.

This worked perfectly yesterday. Yeah, it was hot. But I dunno how hot exactly, and I did okay. Had supper in an air-conditioned restaurant with Smoothie. No wine. No overheating.

But today, around 4:00 p.m. I was sitting in the backyard with Blackie and I started to feel woozy and unwell. So I came inside and sat in front of the fan until I felt a bit recovered, and then being only human, I turned on the Weather Network.

Well, the dang Humidex is 39. Three-nine. No wonder I felt like crap. Thank you Weather Network. You are a pal.

We have a winner!

MsMushrooms fearlessly predicted that FF would be in touch for more money as of Friday morning B.C. time.

And she is right! Sadly, I have no prize to award to her.

He is down to $50. He bought a sleeping mat and a camp stove. Also, beer, pot and cigarettes. Why cigarettes when he is a non-tobacco smoker? They are a good appetite suppressant when on the road. Whatever!

Oh, and olive oil. He bought some olive oil. And soya sauce, onions, garlic and fresh dill.

A Tragedy of Shakespearean Proportions

Move over, Othello.
Scram, Hamlet.
O woe is me, Nanuk.

Provigo was out of Greek Feta-shist Chips. Nary a bag to behold on the shelf. I was wounded to the core.

I needed to apply a balm to my wound. So I picked up a bag of Thick Cut Sour Cream & Dill.

I'm starting to revive...

Crisis Averted for Today

FF now has $200 in his account. I called him from the bank.

Me: Hi. I just deposited the money.
FF: Thank you (happy voice)
Me: it's supposed to be instantaneous, so it should be there.
FF: Uh..I checked 30 seconds ago, and I saw it. It's there.
Me: Good.
FF: When can I expect the next installment?
Me: When you need it. But if it is within 48 hours, you are in big trouble.
FF: (Nervous laughter) Ok. I'll call you back later.

Any estimates on when that 2nd installment will be requested? I'm guessing Monday. It's been 20 minutes. He's probably already bought beer....and olive oil. He was upset at the high price of olive oil in B.C. Only he would be complaining about that.

Movin' On Up

Went to see Horrible Bosses last night. It's pretty funny, but the language, people, the language. At the risk of being seen as an Old Fart-ette, did it have to be so vulgar? And I say this as a big fan of The Big Lebowski. Sometimes swearing is funny, and sometimes it's just excessive and boring.

But my point is, I saw it at Cavendish with Smoothie. As we were leaving the theatre, walking through the parking lot, he points and says: Look, a two-door Bentley. Frankly, I could not tell one car from another, but he is an obsessed car guy. So apparently there was a Bentley. At the bus stop, this car pulls up and he says: check out that Lamborghini. Who knew? It was pretty nice, but I didn't know what it was. Not 30 seconds later, he points and says: Aston Martin.

I'm living in the wrong neighbourhood.

Don't Kill Me for This

Fancy Feast just called. I'm advancing him some money. Don't kill me, please. I know better, but I'm doing it anyway.

If you look back to last Friday's blog post, he is entitled to $400 from his employee's pension plan. He needs the money. It will take at least 6 weeks, according to the paperwork in my possession, for them to process the request for the cheque. He can't wait 6 weeks.


So I'm putting the money in his account, $200 for now, and when he is back in Montreal he will deposit the cheque and pay back his debt. He has always paid up in the past, so I am trusting him to pay up in the future. I won't lend him the whole $400 at once because I told him he will blow it all and I am protecting him from himself. He whined about that. Tough shit, buddy. Take the $200 or leave it.


He said he will be back in Montreal WAY before November because B.C. is incredibly expensive. Gee, now he knows what the rest of the country has known for years. He can't afford to buy beer, and a steak at the grocery store costs $10.00. I didn't ask him for the price of pot. It must be cheap, since they grow so much of it out there.

Bliss, thy name is Bus

I was waiting for the 103 yesterday afternoon in the infernal heat and deadly humidity. Being the delicate flower that I am, I was wilting.

The bus came, I got on, and Oh My Goodness Gracious, it was air-conditioned. An air-conditioned city bus.

I was transported, in more ways than one. Heavenly.

It is a pilot project only, so I dunno how many buses are likely to get A/C in the future, but yesterday was THE day for testing it out. One of the few times in my life I wished for a longer ride.

Kumar: Back to the Future

Had an unexpected visit from Kumar on the weekend. The man still has no sense of time.

When I met Kumar, almost 3 years ago, his goal was to land a good civil service job. Which he did, finally, as a Business Analyst/Project Manager in Toronto. A civil service career would show everybody back home that he was successful in Canada. So now after 2 years, he is bored, unchallenged and wants to get out and start up his own business again.

Apparently you can’t make serious money in the civil service, you have to work for yourself to be really successful. And apparently the next decade are the prime earning years.

See what happens when we let in these “brown” immigrants, with their “goals” and “ambitions”. They just want to make “money” and be “successful” and make the rest of us public servants look lazy. Harrumph.

I asked him if he got along with his colleagues in the Ontario Civil Service. He said “They think I’m a bitch”. Really, I said, a bitch? “Yeah, but I say you have your projects, I have my projects, we work on them, you don’t have to be my friend”. Warm and fuzzy, he ain’t.

How I want to go

I see that a large crowd is expected at the funeral of the guy in Texas who fell over the railing while reaching for a baseball. Unfortunately it wasn't G.W. Bush. Oh well.

This got me to thinking that it might be cool to die a really silly, pointless death. It would make me a posthumous "celebrity". And would be less painful and awful than slowly wasting away from an actual disease.

I think I'd like to be known as the woman who met her maker in the Giant New-Dill-Flavoured-Doritos-Free-Giveaway Stampede.

U2....live in my living room

The wind is blowing just the right way tonight. I can hear the U2 concert perfectly sitting in my living room.

Bono is talking to the crowd right now. He started in French but has now switched to English.

I couldn't hear anything last night, but it is very clear tonight.

Mysterious Way is one of my fave songs, and they've already played it. I guess I'm awake until the end of the show. Why go to bed? All I Want Is You is on now. This is really fun. And it's free!

Update: I just emailed Smoothie since he is in Cote St. Luc and therefore much closer to the site than I am, and he can't hear anything. The wind, she works in mysterious ways. It is SO loud here right now. They are playing Beautiful Day and it sounds great. :D Happy Icon.

Chip Review by Nanuk

Apologies to JAW Fan if he already covered this flavour. There have been so many I can't remember, and since I don't tag my posts like a serious, proper blogger would, I don't have any way to check.

I was in Provigo yesterday, scanning the chip aisle for something a little different. Let us be honest about it, President's Choice makes a huge number of "exotic" chip flavours, but in the vast majority of cases, the essential flavour comes down to "barbecue". They all are just variations on barbecue chips. NOT that there's really anything wrong with that, is there?

Anyway, I spied the various bags of delectables, and came across one that promised not to be another riff on barbecue. Under the rubric World of Flavours* I found Greek, which is feta, olive and oregano flavour.

I may never have mentioned this before but I am a serious feta-shist. I lurve me some of that feta. I am a fan of all things Greek, except getting in the butt.**

Thus, I purchased these Greek lovelies. The verdict? PDG, pretty darn good. Not barbecue at all, but still spicy, tangy and Greeky. Permit me to avail myself of the wang-o-meter and rate them a solid 7 inches.


*I appreciate that u in Flavours, but if I was in charge of this product line, I would call it World o' Chips.
**What would a chip review be without a JAW Fan-like comment.

Hanging out in the park

I received mail yesterday, which included a two-week old issue of Maclean's with Jack Layton on the cover. Turns out the park on Chester where I once drunkenly smoked one of JAW Fan's cigarettes (after lying in the street on Coronation) is named for Jack's grandfather. Who knew?

So I was googling the name of the park and found that it is included in a website called "Gay Cruising Sites in Montreal". I did not click on that particular link. I'm at the office. I doubt that it is very highly rated as a gay cruising park. It's full of old Italians playing bocce every night. They seem like gay old Italians, but they are definitely not old gay Italians.

It does seem to be a good pot-smoking park, however. I often notice a smell. Not that I ever did that myself. We did our pot smoking at home as it should be.

Speaking of the old pot-smoking days, in yesterday's mail I also received a letter for Fancy Feast from his ex-employer. I opened it by accident, I didn't look at who it was addressed to since, hey, I'm the only one living at this address. Seems his ex-employer has $400 in a pension plan with FF's name on it and they want to know what he wants to do with the money. I sent an email trying to track him down. God knows where he is, on the road like Kerouac. Surely a man who had only $15 to his name last week would be happy to learn there is $400 coming his way.

Shall we talk about Canada Post?

The posties have been back to work for a week now. Am I supposed to believe there's no backlog of mail to be delivered? On Monday I didn't get anything.

There's been plenty of junk. That always seems to come through. But what about bills that I know should have arrived by now? Where are they?

Smoothie's mother spoke to her letter carrier last week and was told that they are not allowed to work overtime to clean up the backlog. Great.

They want to make themselves obsolete. Be my guest.

Work news

A bit of positive work news, for a change.

I had a meeting this morning with a very enthusiastic person about a new project. We are going to write a proposal for our "thing" by the end of the month.

I'm now in a weird twilight zone because I'm not sure how to feel about being interested in work again. It's so foreign and unlike me.

This "thing" will however mean getting released from my current dept for a few months. Awww, what a SHAME that would be.