Friday night: Wuffy's birthday dinner at his mom's place, so the pup had ample time to rampage about the backyard before I took him home. Took him for a short walk around the neighbourhood, then we came home and he went into his crate. He slept like a roly-poly log. Myself, less so; I had a confusing series of dreams where I worked on the top floor of an office tower and he was kenneled on the ground floor, and the elevators never worked.
Saturday: Got up at 7 am, walked puppy for an hour.
I hand-fed him his breakfast, which was fun and touching and also kind of slimy. It helps to build the dominance bond, I'm told, since I'm controlling his food supply. Whatever - he ate happy, slobbered on my fingers, and didn't eat my hand. It was a success!
After that we were both tired. Puppy went back to sleep in his crate. I conked out for a couple hours.
Woke up, went downstairs for breakfast, and was immediately grateful that the roommates were out of town and the neighbours had left for the day. Taiga still has separation anxiety issues and was howling loud enough to summon his mommy from the deep Arctic wastes. Solution: Another walk. This ended up being a long one; I got lost in the suburbs across the streets, got stopped by a lot of puppy-adoring strangers, and Taiga got to play with an ancient husky and a young, very bouncy Labrador. It was good hour-and-a-half before we got home.
After his lunch he still seemed bouncy and unruly, so I tied him in the yard and kept a close eye on him while trying to get household chores done. He loves being outside, and happily dug himself a nice deep hole and curled up in it. I took him back inside, gave him his peanut-butter-filled Kong, and kenneled him up. Sated with exercise, he slept until 6 pm or so.
At 6 pm I woke him up for another walk, planning to meet up with Deuce a little later. This ended up being another hour and half excursion, during which I learned two things.
First, the pup was sick of the chicken jerky treats I had.
Second, peanut butter passes through a puppy almost unchanged in aroma and texture.
We attempted to play with him when we got home, but he was cranky and sleepy, so, back to the crate. Had a long chat with Duece. At 11, we took Taiga out for another walk-and-pee. Then we came home, Deuce left, and it was time to get ready for bed.
This is more or less when I found out that I had walked him at least twice as much as he is used to. And man, did I ever feel like it. I think I had a mild case of hypothermia from being outside so much.
Also, my room now smelled like puppy, dirt, peanut butter, and peanut-butter-scented doggy farts. And it also smelled like me, covered in sweat from walking so much. On the whole, icky. And yet somehow I slept in that funk.
Sunday: Taiga and I went for a walk at eight. Alas he was missing the Wuffy, so he whimpered a fair bit even when I was in the room with him and positively howled blue murder when I wasn't.
Wuffy showed up shortly after noon, and all was well, apart from some whining whenever Wuffy left Taiga's field of view. He was still dirty and had peanut butter all over his forelegs (from holding the Kong.) Since he is now too large to wash in the Wuffy's sink, we gave him a bath.
It went over about as well as you would expect. We managed to avoid getting water everywhere, but he was so mad that he passive-aggressively took out his rage on a rubber piggy chew toy.
And then, about half-dry but all smiles again, Taiga jumped into the back of the Wuffy's car and they drove off together. I turned my attention to laundry and the cats.
Aftermath: I am still hearing phantom barks and howls.
Tephi spent the weekend venturing out only when it was quiet. Whenever Taiga was out, she managed to sneak behind his back and into the basement without ever being seen. She has been very affectionate, cuddling up to me and purring a lot. She is either concerned that I don't like her anymore, or she's trying to rub his smell off of me.
Tawny appears to have missed the entire drama, and is simply wandering about, crying for Tony.
I'm looking after Taiga (the wuffy's 12-week-old mostly Malamute) this weekend. It's been an adventure already... he's not too happy with the new crate and the house that smells of cat.
He seems to be settling in though, knock wood.
We will see how it goes. Wuffy keeps saying "it'll be fine, it'll be fine." Then he says "Now you will know my pain. Mwahahahahah."
Ayup, just what the subject line says. A power supply failed on the server that hosts my sketch site. The Wuffy says it may be up later tomorrow, or it could be down a couple days. It all depends on when the replacement power supply arrives, and whether anything else failed with the old one.
Send the Wuffy some love and encouragement - this is a major pile of stress that he didn't need right now.
First of all, the evil doppelganger of Mel Gibson won't be in it, so we won't have to squirm uncomfortably when Max twirls his mustache.
This Youtube clip talks about the building of the vehicles and what Miller's trying to achieve. You can see what looks like an early version of Max's black V8, among other things. Miller also talks about how the cars will be filmed at speed... and stunts. Doesn't sound like he's gonna use CGI.
I'm cautiously optimistic that he's telling the truth.
This is like Christmas for me. Not only am I hyped to see another Mad Max film from the original director, but I'm looking forward to the trickle-down effect. All the cheap knock-offs will be dusted off and repackaged, and new rip-offs will be filmed. All the nihilistic post-apocalyptic crap I've loved since I was a teen has a second chance. A DVD release of "Warlords of the 21st Century," aka, "Battletruck," would probably make me explode.
Fingers crossed. I gotta start welding spikes and armor onto my roommate's Subaru.
Last night, around 9 pm, I stopped in at a gas station to get a chocolate fix. $2 for 2 Skor bars? SOLD!
There was one person ahead of me at the cash. He was in his fifties, wearing light blue overalls, and he smelled vaguely of sweet cigar smoke. And there was a name on the overalls, but I couldn't read it from where I stood.
Clenched in one hand he had a $100 bill. I didn't think any place on earth still accepted those.
Then I realized what he was buying. As I watched, the cashier slowly and carefully counted up... $50 worth of lottery tickets.
It was agonizing to watch. The guy bought multiple tickets for every lottery we have in this province - 6/49, Pick 4, Encore, and so one. The clerk had to count each one, individually, in increments of $2 and $5, all the way up to $50.
The cashier handed the guy his tickets, and wished him "Good Luck."
Without saying anything, the guy picked up an equally huge stack of old tickets. He held both hands straight out in front of him, almost under the cashier's nose, and wrung them together like he was squeezing the juice from them. Then he pocketed his new, theoretically luckier, tickets and walked out.
So, best guess, he won the $100 on his LAST stack of tickets, and spent half on the new stack, figuring he was bound to win enough to make it worth his while.
I have rarely seen such an egregious application of the Stupid Tax.
Episode 2 was going along swimmingly, and then I got wrapped up in preparations for Feral. Editing fell by the wayside, and now the episode won't be done until the second week of September, or thereabouts.
Well, it's time to let folks know what I spent a couple weeks doing.
I did a video review of a favorite bad movie.
Here's the premise:
Hello, I'm Neutron Bill. Outpost 786, Gamma Patrol. And I am bored right out my mind.
You see, I'm posted in the deepest part of the irradiated wastelands. There is no one out here. No one but me.
Well, me and Ted. Ted's a mutant hamster. He's like a regular hamster, but bigger and with opposable thumbs.
I haven't seen another human being in a long, long time. I just keep sending in reports on the prevailing conditions in my corner of what's left of the world. You know what's going on up here? NOTHING.
So to hell with my reports. I've trained Ted to run the camera, and I'm going to do something useful with my time.
I'm going to review movies.
Not just any movies. The kind of movies I relate to, the kind that I think most of us in this radioactive age can relate to. The ones that teach us important lessons.
In other words, post-apocalyptic films. Kick-ass post-apocalyptic films.
I've scavenged a lot of films and I can't go outside until the avian bovine season is over.
Rice Krispies are the most useless foodstuff in the world.
They have no real substance. No sugar, no fat, no real carbs. They're a thin shell of crispy rice paper made of air. I could eat an entire box of them and still end up hungry half an hour later.
I ate a huge, huge bowl of the Cocoa-flavoured ones this morning. Those at least have sugar in them. I had such a quantity I figured I MUST be full, right?
This was foolish, foolish mistake. By noon I was hungry enough to start gnawing at my fingers. I had an energy deficit for the whole day.
It's true, people: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Don't waste it eating a cereal that is little more than a sound effect.
This is something that took hold of me at work earlier today, and wouldn't let go. I caught myself in a half-awake, mid-caffeinated state, reminiscing fondly about a place that doesn't exist. I thought I would post a little bit about it.
Do you have a dreamscape? Is there an unreal place that your sleeping mind goes to again and again, yet you've never been there and have no idea where it comes from?
I have several. All have figured in multiple dreams. The content of the dreams may vary, but these places remain the same. They don't always recur, but every so often one will form the backdrop of some REM braindump. They always feel oddly comforting, like being at home.
I have no idea where or how my mind came up with them. None of them correspond to a real place I've been to or consciously imagined. They aren't from any book I've read. And most of them, the ones that recur the most, are bleak, ruined places.
For example:
There's a broken, abandoned factory on the shore of an ocean, or maybe a lake. It sits at the base of long, sloping dunes. All the ground around it is dry, sandy. There are no plants and the soil is yellowish.
If you stand looking out to sea, there's an old wharf on the left. The pilings are all that remains, but they're enough. They are two feet in diameter, black with tar. They march in a double column, out a hundred yards or more into the water. I almost never walk down the slope to visit the wharf. It's splintery and foul-smelling, and kind of dull.
The furthest I've gone towards it, as far as I can recall, is the dry creek bed that separates dock from factory. It might once have been a gravel road, but now it's a river whenever there is enough rain. On one bank there is a strange artifact: a single timber, maybe ten feet tall. It's a foot square on each side, bleached almost white. It juts up at an oblique angle, its base rooted in a pile of twisted metal and another, smaller timber that braces it. There was at least one dream where we (whoever we were) tried to climb it.
Then there is the factory itself. The walls look like yellow sandstone, but are actually mortared cinder block or solid concrete. Parts of the roof have caved in, but not very far. If you go inside, you find that interior is choked with dirt and rock, shot through with veins of rusted machinery. Exploration is mostly a matter of climbing mounds of this debris to get up near the roof, which lets you access other holes, which lets you get deeper into the compound.
Its most prominent feature is a tower at least five stories tall. The walls facing away from the sea have partially collapsed. One of my favorite places in the whole compound is the room at the top of this tower. Looking over the half-fallen wall, seated on a bench made of some long-crumbled conveyor, you can see the empty countryside for miles around.
The dreams I have in this place are usually good ones. I've dreamed of exploring it, alone and with friends. I have dreamed of being chased around it by some well-meaning local who though we were in danger. I've dreamed of sitting in the tower, just looking around the countryside, or standing to look the other way out to sea. It's even been in the background of other dreams further up that stretch of coastline.
That's one recurring imaginary place. I might write about others later on if anyone is interested (or if I feel the need.) For now I would like to know: Do you have a dreamscape? What sort of place is it? What do you dream about there?
I got lunch at Tim Horton's today. I have an unhealthy addiction to their chili.
Tim's is almost always crowded, because there are few other restaurants near where I work, and because it's right across the street from University of Toronto. For whatever reason, the line was very short today. I stood behind the only other guy in the line, hopeful that I would get my food quickly.
The cashier called him over. He took a half step towards her, looked confused, then stopped... and went to a different register. I wondered what his problem was and turned to take the spot he'd forsaken. That's where things got weird.
There was someone at the register already. A large, filthy someone in a black toque, black coat, and a Happy Noodle Boy t-shirt. He was leaning against the counter unsteadily, one forearm propping him up. In his other hand was a can of Puritan Irish Stew.
His words were slurred and I couldn't hear him over the store's radio, but the gist of the conversation seemed to be that he wanted them to open his soup and maybe heat it for him. As he was very large and clearly very wobbly, the poor cashier seemed scared out of her wits. Actually, all the cashiers were. The guy that took my order never looked me in the eye, because he was watching the Stew Drama unfold. And I don't blame him.
At one point, after taking a step and nearly falling on the floor, Stew Man proclaimed loudly and cheerfully, "S'okay... 'M not drunk." And I'm not going to pass judgment and call him a liar... it could have been diabetes or a severe mental problem.
Someone came out of the kitchen. I didn't see what happened, but I am assuming they agreed to make his stew, because the next thing I knew he was over by the sandwich counter. He loomed over a small Asian lady at a table, waiting just a second too long to say, "S'okay... 'M not dangerous er nothin'.." before clumsily taking her spare chair.
He then parked at the end of the sandwich counter, blocking the exit from the kitchen. My chili took much longer than it should have because the sandwich lady was trying to pour it with one eye on him. He just kept cracking incomprehensible comments at her the whole time, laughing at his own good humor and generally creeping the hell out of all of us.
And then I got my chili and left. Anticlimactic, I know.
I really hope they didn't agree to make his stew, and that he was just parked there to intimidate them. If they actually did it, he might get the idea that he can do it again later, and I would rather my lunch not be seasoned with a hint of crazy.
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