The Others

It's no secret that I'm an avid viewer of the much loved/hated show "LOST". For those of you who don't watch LOST, start watching it asap because if you're over at my house and I'm watching it, I will not tolerate your million-and-one questions during the episode I will force you to watch. Here's the basic premise:

A plane crashes on a mysterious island. Mysterious things happen. Time travel?

Now that you're up to speed on the plot, I'd like to bring your attention to a group of people on the island called "The Others".



The Others are people who were already on the island when the plane crashed on it. No one knows who they are or why they're there. They're portrayed as villians who want to steal your baby reeeeeealy bad. They have many tricks up their many sleeves, or so the castaways think. They infiltrate the camp of the crash victims to gather information about them. They wear neutral-coloured clothes. Some are nice, some are not, some are crazy. They love, laugh and grieve, just like everyone else...but they're bad. Or are they?



Above is another picture of The Others. Not so drab this time in their natural habitat. Taking a stroll to an awkward book club meeting, having a strange medical experiment forced upon them while the sun is shining, having a creepy, ultra-conservative leader who manipulates the minds of people and the time-space continuum alike. Sound familiar, Canada? In the end, The Others are a lot like the castaways who so rudely crashed their tranquil, Utopian party.

Classifying people that you don't make an immediate connection with as "Others" is a natural tendency of our human brains. We have to make some snap judgments and classify people (rightly or wrongly) upon meeting them, or else we wouldn't be able to get any errands done on a Sunday. We'd be too busy administering one of those "tell me about yourself" chain mail surveys that haunt the internet to every cashier, fellow transit-taker and passer-by we encounter. The snap judgments we make are rooted in our struggle to live long enough to reproduce. These judgments can be a matter of life and death and one poorly-timed lapse in coding someone or something as "Similar" or "Other" could mean the difference between being friends and getting stabbed in the neck. If we as proto-humans in our cavewomyn days classified saber-tooth tigers as "Similars", we would have promptly gotten eaten, so making wise judgments regarding people is coded into our jeans. Ok, maybe not these chicks (they're not wearing any jeans), but those are fantasy art characters (BTW...my physique is based off those characters and they should have to pay me royalties for using my likeness).



This chick definitely made a judgment error in placing Eaglehead Birdman in her "Similars" category. I love the "whatever" expression on her face. "Sure - I guess I could lay some eggs for you. I didn't have plans tonight".



According to my research, which is based on the Darwin Awards, the inability to distinguish between "Others" and "Similars" are what caused the extinction of the Neanderthals. Somehow this guy slipped through the cracks. Tiger hugs. I bet he has one hell of a brow ridge under that hat.



Believe it or not, this ramble has a point. I was out and about in T-Bay today and I certainly felt like an "Other". In each place I visited, I looked around and I saw very few people that I could call "a Similar". There were people my age, but many of them had kids or other characteristics that distinguished them from me like kids or buying drink'n boxes. There were people who dressed like me, but they were probably about 10 years younger (Note to self: start wearing age appropriate clothing before Stacey and Clinton knock on your door). There were lots of women, but they were more diverse than a Dove commercial.

What's the point of all this? Well, I, in all seriousness, am feeling out of place. The lack of "Similars" is a very visible impact of the Exodus that has taken place out of Thunder Bay over the past 20 years. It seems like the "Similars" tend to go elsewhere (Southern/Eastern Ontario or out West) and the "Others" tend to stay. Now, I have to qualify all of this by saying that I have met a number of "Similars". It's not that they're not out there...you just need to know where to look for them. They were under the couch cushions all this time!!

Speaking of "Others", Sean and I were forced to hang out with his cousin Kissangelo from Brussels and my half sister Feorra from Ibitha last weekend (I didn't even know someone could be from Ibitha). They got really drunk and Sean and I had to take care of them all night. It was horrifying.

K-OS Ain't Just a Rapper from Toronto

Hello, fans of sports!!!

I started this post in early January, but I didn't finish it. I'm finishing it because it had some sweet, sweet bloggold in it. More retro posts are on the way...stay tuned

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Our house is in K-OS. Khaotic Operating System v1.0 - that's what our furnace and Internet connections are running on. I always capitolize "Internet". I guess it's because I see it as an entity all unto its own.

Our stuff was delivered last Monday morning and it was a near death experience for me. I almost froze to death. I know, I know...I was not actually close to freezing to death, but what would this blog be without a bit of overzealous exaggeration? In the words of my mother when I used to throw a teeny-bopper tantrum and claim that I would die if I didn't get borrow her car on a really stormy night to go to Hamilton to visit my cousin Marcia, "People don't die that easily" (true story). She was, and still is, so logical. In all seriousness, I wasn't close to death due to freezing, but maybe I was close to taking my own life because I was slowly freezing to death and I was feeling like I'd rather get the whole death business overwith quickly.

The garage door and front door were open while the movers brought our posessions into the house. The thermostat stopped dropping at 40 degrees F - the point at which I had assumed the cold from the outside and the heat from the furnace came to impasse.

I was thinking, "stop being a wuss...it's not that bad. 40 isn't even below freezing", yet my limbs were starting to ache, I couldn't feel my feet or fingers. When the movers weren't around, I'd get up and jump around and make high-pitched squealing noises in an unsuccessful attempt to get blood pumping through my very purple arteries. Jennifer Beals and Sarah Wolf both would have been proud of the Flashdance I did in the spirit of warming up. Lots of running on the spot.

I started walking around the house to keep from turning into Jack Torrence.

*note, the picture above was taken from the Affordable Housing Institute blog. High-larious.

While I was walking, I saw one of the movers putting together one of our chairs.

The mover was sweating because he was actually doing something physical, rather than just sedentarily whining about how cold he was (he probably wouldn't keep his job if he was more the latter than the former). As he leaned over the chair to screw the legs onto it, I noticed that big drops of sweat were dripping from his face onto the seat of the chair. First of all, gross. Second of all, yuck. I turned the other way, like I usually did when I couldn't watch what the movers were doing to my stuff.
A few mins later, I walked past the chair he sweated on and I noticed that the sweat had beaded on the cushion and hadn't soaked in. Great, I thought. I'll just brush that sweat off of there and perhaps absorb any remaining heat left in it. Well, sure enough, the beads of sweat were frozen solid. Frozen before they could even begin to soak into the cushion. That's when I realized it wasn't 40 degrees in the house. It was probably -40! The forecast that morning called for -25 Celcius and that was before the wind chill. I'm proud to report that I'm not a wuss.

So - do you like what we've done with the place?

And for your viewing pleasure...WTF? I don't know which video is worse. The second one looks totally Canadian, and if it's not, that makes it extra disgraceful, if ever one could be so disgraced.

Oh, and while I was searching for the videos above (yes, I actually looked for them. You get what you pay for and YouTube is free), I found this awesome picture of the band Toto. Be sure to scroll all the way to the right. Enjoy

Someone Left Some Snow at Our House

So, someone left some snow at our house. Obviously, the "No Dumping" sign we put up was ignored. Sean and I had to go clean up the mess.

About 30cm of snow fell in the last 24h here in T Bay. Sean diligently blew out his parents' driveway in the morning while it was still snowing.

New James Bond villian - Dr. sNOw

In the afternoon when the skies cleared, we headed over to our place to clear the driveway there by good ole fashioned shovel power.

Holy crap!! Who the...? What the what? What? Are you serious? Let me tell you - a snowblower is definitely going to be on the wedding registry. Check out the drift on top of the garage.

Good thing the plow came by to make this blog post even more shocking.

Closeup of the drift on the roof



A couple of shots of the first pass with the shovel

Me, hiding behind the drift. It's only going to get larger.

You know all those uninformed things that parents say to explain snow to kids? God has dandruf and his head is really itchy. Angels are getting a wing trim. Zeus is sawing extruded styrofoam insulation for his latest home project. Woogie, the great freckled camel in the sky is shearing his lavender sheep. Etc, etc.

Well, here's a neat website regarding snow and how it works. The link below will take you to some fun lies people tell about snow. This will break your heart if you think water has emotions or a sense of nostalga.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/myths/myths.htm

It Finally Happened...

..."Surfer, Dude" starring Matthew McConaughey is finally available on DVD and Blu-ray (I think he plays himself) and I've moved to Thunder Bay. Both are momentous, life-changing events.

Can you tell which of the two photos above is from the set of "Surfer, Dude" and which one is just the Bongolier hanging out in his natural habitat?

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of phlegm, Snowmageddon/Windpocalypse, Christmassing, Boxing (Day and all our worldly posessions), moving and, now, watching TV.

I had been battling the beginnings of a cold for over a month and it finally took hold during the week before Christmas. I think I'm the only person who was happy to get sick this season. I was getting tired of waiting for whatever was brewing inside me to finally fill my brain with mucousy goodness. When random sore throats and general fatigue finally blossomed into a full-blown cold, I was elated. Even though I had turned into an Advil Cold & Sinus commercial, I was happy because Sean came home on December 16th.

Sean and I fell back into our normal routines rather quickly. Me, coming home from work, eating the food that Sean had prepared (see the picture of cookie mountain below) and then retreating to the office to watch Buffy and knit Christmas gifts. Sean, returning to his studies and/or doing something else productive. We got some packing done while Sean was visiting. We thought we had made a good dent in the packing before Sean left, but what we didn't realize is that the hard part about packing is not the packing of the majority of your stuff. The hard part is packing the dregs that you don't want to get rid of, but there's no logical way to pack it. I think the last box that I taped up had miscelaneous pens, markers and scissors, our front door mat, a piece of the lawnmower and a screwdriver in it. The cooler was packed with a pair of rubber boots, the hanging wire rack from the shower and a feather duster.

Christmas Eve was spent at my parents' place in New Hamburg. This was Sean's first Christmas Eve with the Seyler clan and our usual tradition of having cabbage rolls prevailed. In addition to the cabbage rolls, my mother also made the best meatloaf I've ever tasted. It was made with Lamb and Beef (consistent with another Seyler family tradition of having two meats at every meal) and a zillion delicious cheeses/fillings.

Mmmmeatloaf!

Cccccabbage rolls!

Before we headed out to my parents' place, Robo was doing his usual job of "helping" me wrap gifts. As you can see, his choice of places to sit on the bed was quite strategic. It's hard to be annoyed with him when he's so darn cute.

I decided to not pull my annoying aunt act with my nephews on Christmas eve where I gush over how tall they're getting and how I used to hold them as babies, blah, blah, blah. Instead I chose to just glare at Michael while he stood beside me, growing at a furious pace.

That glare could compete with Angela Basset, Queen of Glares. I think she won that title at the Teen Choice Awards in 1993.

Once the Christmas festivities were finished and Sean was safely returned to the North, my mother and I started packing. We spent all day on the 27th and 28th packing up the house. We created a fun game called "Where's the Cat in This Room?" Let's play with the pictures below, shall we?

Where's the cat in this room?

No cheating, now...

There he is!! Hiding behind the tapestry!

Where's the cat in this room?

There he is!!

He probably peed in that box while he was in there.

Where's the cat in this room?

There he is!

The movers came on the 29th to pack up the place. Look at my living room all empty and sad.

One of the movers, named Yves, looked very much like Yosemite Sam, without the guns and general rambunctiousness though.

While the movers created a virtual game of Tetris with household goods, I did, um, well, nothing. I guess that's what I paid for - to do nothing. I knitted on my throne.

I'm now in Thunder Bay staying with the Middletons. Our stuff will be delivered on Monday (fingers crossed - the TBay area is supposed to get 30cm of snow between today and tomorrow). And the worst part is that our x-country skis are packed with our household stuff in the truck :( Well...I guess I can go pick up a copy of "Surfer, Dude" to keep me occupied!