Take a gander at this

I'd really hate for this to become one of those blogs that focuses solely on geese, but they've been on my mind a lot lately.  I've moved near a river and walk to work through a park, and this is the kind of thing I get to enjoy.

It's rare that I see these little versions of geese.  I normally see adults and get hissed at by them.  It's scary!  It gives me goose bumps.  Ha ha!  Goose bumps.  ===> Goose, the exact type of waterfowl this whole post is about! <=== bumps.

Anyway, I'm out.

Future people

Dear Kitty,

Oh man, I just had a sneezing fit.  It was terrible.  Well, I suppose it wasn't terrible as far as things called 'fits' go.  Here is the ranking, from best to worst:

1. Sneezing fit
2. Conniption fit
3. Epileptic fit

I have a tip for people having sneezing fits. Rinse your mouth out with water vigorously, including plenty of gargling. Repeat until you are better. There. I feel like I've contributed something useful to the world.

That's Small Talk!

Oh! I'm thinking of introducing a new segment to this blog called "That's small talk!"  I would record small talk that I hear or am involved in and then people in the future would have good insight into our culture.  For example, in Calgary we were having a week of -30 C weather and it was due to clear up the next day.  I held open the door for a woman at Starbucks (that's a global coffee chain, to you future people), and she said something like "Only one more day!"  I chuckled knowingly but also nervously, trying to be friendly but also trying to say "Please don't continue talking to me because I don't know the small talk protocol and am just here to buy coffee and banana bread."  Anyway, that's some good knowledge for you future people because you probably don't have weather or social awkwardness.  I reckon you've solved both those problems.  Congrats!

Did anyone else notice that I needed to explain Starbucks to the future people but not what 'Calgary' is or what '-30 C' means? It's ok, they won't care! All they care about is laser guns and robots.

Silly goose

I went walking along the river and saw a goose, so I took a picture of most of it:

It was very calm despite my being fairly close. It must see plenty of people. I wanted to edge closer and closer to see what its limit for closeness might be. Best case scenario, I would spend the rest of my day carrying a goose. Worst case scenario, I'd be the guy fighting a goose down by the river. And I don't ever want to be that guy. I left the goose alone.* You always regret the things you don't do.

This past weekend I took a trip to Unity, Saskatchewan (pop. 2759). That's my birthtown and is where my grandparents live. My mom, my brother, and his whole family were there. We played games, checked out the playground, went to the ice cream parlour**, and visited the outdoor history museum. To help prove it, here's a picture of my brother in an old fire truck:


The end.

* Not literally. He actually had a friend or relative nearby.

** It's just a normal looking ice cream shoppe***, but because it's in a small town I have to call it a parlour to make it seem quaint and olde****-fashioned.

*** Oh man, I did it again.

**** I can't stop!

Snow, sun, guitar, lesbians

Snow

I stepped out of my girly apartment in mid-April and this is what I saw:















It always snows a few times in April/May here but it always seems like a fun surprise.

There is an unspoken rule that Calgarians follow: you must act as though this didn't happen last year, the year before that, and so on.

I think this behaviour, and a lot of human behaviour, can be explained by this fact: humans really love to complain. And if there's a shared complaint, people really bond over it.

Sun

After the snow melted I wandered around neighbourhoods I had never been in before. There were houses, houses, houses, and then there was this:















It looked really nice but it doesn't come through via the crap phone camera.

This city goes really quickly from neighbourhood to brush and back to neighbourhood. I like that.

I saw some fat geese on the frozen reservoir nearby.

Guitar

Here is a pic of my brand new guitar:















Sometimes when I'm playing it I give it a kiss because it's beautiful.

My friend Ian and I are playing 'draw and folder over' but musically. He sent a beat and I played some guitar on top and now he's adding something. It's hard.

Lesbians

I found a great blog written by a lesbian geared towards other lesbians and her posts are mostly good because she's a good story teller, but they're also good because she writes short paragraphs interspersed with images (of attractive girls, usually).

I'm trying to copy her style a bit to make this one more fun to read. Now I just need good stories.

Homemade standing desk

I've been wanting to try working at a standing / stand-up desk for a couple of months now but didn't want to buy a nice expensive one before knowing if I'd even like it or not. So I made this one.

That's my regular desk beneath with the legs extended as high as possible. The white boards holding the monitor and laptop are Lack wall shelves from Ikea (about $20 each). And the stuff elevating them is floral foam ($12 for 12 bricks), which I had no idea existed until today. I think it's used to make flower arrangements -- you stick a bunch of flower stems into it so each flower can be positioned how you like.

I'll be trying this bad boy out for the first time tomorrow. I bought that stool so I wouldn't have to stand all day, which I believe is just as bad for your back as sitting all day. I've got some running shoes to wear and soon hope to have one of those soft pads that cashiers stand on.

The shelf that the laptop is sitting on is 42 inches off the ground which may be an inch low for me (I'm 5'10" or 5'11" tall). We'll see.

This was a pretty cheap and easy way to make a stand-up desk. It looks nicer and seems more stable than some of the other homemade ones I saw on the internet. The only weak part is that the floral foam crumbles if you touch it. If I had known I would have tried to find another type of foam.

To my two blog readers (hi Jay and Annette), this post was long and boring because I want to help generate ideas for anyone looking to build their own desk. It helped me a lot to read other people's blog posts about it. Go see the movie Pay it Forward and you might* understand what I'm getting at.

* I haven't seen that movie but the trailer made things pretty clear.

Snake

For Christmas my brother and sister-in-law got me a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet. I went to a how-to-draw cartoons site and found this snake. So I drew it. I think I did okay considering I hardly know how to draw.

Expanding the ol' horizons

I was in Chapters this evening, thinking about how great magazines are. There are so many! It seems like there's one per interest, no matter how obscure. I reckoned that reading them might give great insight into different types of humans. They might help me expand my horizons.

So my plan is to read one magazine in a new subject area each week or two. I'm starting with 'Horse & Rider' and moving on to 'Heritage Railway' afterwards.

Yes, soon I'll be able to shoot the bull with horse enthusiasts, but that's not all. This reading plan will hopefully lead to new hobbies and interests. One day I hope to find it hard to find time to blog. I'll be too busy being enthusiastic about steam trains or another fine topic.

Photograph of horses by Trevor Lowe (http://www.flickr.com/people/72659237@N00/).