The Breadbin

(Or, In Search Of New Paradigms)

Please forgive me. Trekking through a life in this world can occasionally make me feel dirty, and when I do, I find there's nothing like a soapbox to clean me up. Accordingly, much of what I'm about to write I have written before- -though maybe not in this fashion.

Have you ever felt as though the unwritten laws that govern our modern society are in fact written down someplace...in Martian? Variants on this thought seem to cycle through my head with increasing frequency as I age. That might be the very definition of aging: the overwhelming feeling that society is leaving you behind, and good riddance. I often feel like screaming "But it's not supposed to be this way!"...even though I understand that my scream will be lost in the insidious whisper of what Daniel Quinn called 'Mother Culture', I must, however, scream.

Mother Culture...according to Quinn, she lays down the conventions by which we live, and harshly punishes those…

I have worked 99 hours in the last two weeks. Not a personal record--that'd be 110 hours, done back when I was young and strong--but right up there. And it's been a trying two weeks. I'd like to detail why. Someday, when I have an entirely different job and am safe from any reprisal, I may do just that. Suffice it to say that three times in the past pay period I've reached what I thought was the end of the rope, and commenced to swing on it for a while. It seems to have held my weight, which is a good thing: there's not much of a safety net down there.
(And Eva? She's worked 121 hours in the same period. Not even her record, either: she's done 130. Makes me look like a part-timer.)
Holidays are a scant three weeks away. The Ottawa vacation has been scuttled in favour of this new (to us) computer. I'm not altogether upset, even though this marks the third such scuttling. Right now, a vacation involving anything other than laying in bed like a slug smacks o…

I'm not your typical man in oh so many ways.
I don't ogle women's boobs. Cars to me have four wheels and go places and that's all. I couldn't care less if I lose all my hair--actually, I think I'd like to: one less thing to do in the morning.
Let's see: my jealousy gene was never installed; I don't hog the remote (actually, my wife does that in our house); I actually have to love somebody--or at least like them a lot--to have sex with them; my job is what I do, not who I am. If you ask me the date of my anniversary or my wife's birthday, I don't have to hesitate.
Oh, there are plenty of ways I do resemble your stereotypical man...I derive an insane amount of pleasure from farting; I love several sports, especially hockey; unlike most women, I don't register dirt until it can support agriculture. I have selective hearing. Sexual thoughts enter my brain without knocking, kick around in there for a while, and then leave, only to come back later, …

Long time no blog.
Okay, where were we? It's hard to sort everything out when every day zips by in a jiffy and it seems like three hundred years since I last put pixel to screen.
TWO WEEKS AGO
...or a little more than that, now, we went to the Orangeville Fair. My mom and John were showing their miniature horses there. Outside of some jpegs, I've never seen a miniature horse before. Let me tell you, the jpegs don't do them justice.

Well, maybe this one does:







I admit it: I'm scared of horses. Full-sized ones, I mean. They're just so freakin' big. And I haven't spent very much time around them, so I don't know their emotional cues...I can't tell, for instance, when a horse will take it into is head to kick me and break one of my bones.
These miniatures are adorable. And the ones my parents have are getting quite famous, in their way. At the Orangeville Fair alone, they took home eight ribbons, a trophy for Grand Champion Mare, and some cash. The following d…

Well, that wasn't fun.
Eight days of detox.
I didn't exactly see mice crawling down the walls, but my wife tells me I was getting a tad..."obstinant" was the word I think she used. I attribute it to words building under pressure, seeking egress, not finding any.
We took our computer to Apex, and they informed us it was well and truly pooched. The hard drive was recoverable, thank the silicon gods, but that was about all that survived. Our power supply spiked and burned; the machine overheated; ZOT! Ken was left hanging on a high wire, Net-less.
That hard drive? About the only decent component in what was largely a pile of crap. Apparently these guys see so many problems with computers from MDG that they keep parts in stock.
We now have an off-lease computer a year older than what we had--but just as fast and, I'm told, much better quality. You can tell picking the tower up: it weighs a good thirty pounds, whereas our old tower weighed less than half that.

I've rea…

Dear Readers - our computer seems to be so tired that it is incapable of working...
Please forgive the disruption in my blogging, the computer is at the repair shop and we do not know yet when it will be back again. Keep checking in and I'll be up and running as soon as I can.
Until then

Work is insane, lately. I know, when is it ever calm and peaceful, right? In addition to the SAP project I'm involved with, we are also relining every last category in the store. Translating from the Retailese, that means we're pissing off all those customers who finally have our shelves memorized by moving everything around. It's a lot of work. And no extra help to do it. I'm actually looking at working a couple of overnights...it's the only time I can get serious work done without having to do any of that routine work that makes up my days.
Home is insane, lately. Eva's dad and brother are coming this weekend to install a new kitchen floor and replace both our front and side doors. So it's clean, clean and clean some more. I hasten to tell you that we do not live in squalor...but we do have a dog and two cats, all of whom shed, copiously...and we both of us are also a tad--what's the kind way of saying this? oh yeah, LAZY. Both my wife and I have a pat…

Back in grade thirteen--back when there was a grade thirteen--I had one class that shaped more more than most of the rest of my educational career put together...aborted university degree included. The class was called Classical Civilizations and the teacher was the now-late Reverend Roger McCombe.
I remember selecting the course out of a desire to learn about Greco-Roman society. Well, I'll tell you, Rev. McCombe taught a little about the Greeks and Romans, but mostly he taught us about ourselves. Every day was a new adventure. We'd be given a handout at the start of nearly every class and asked to read it and ponder it. I still remember several of these things, wow, sixteen years later:

"If you have one friend in the world, you are lucky. Two and you're blessed. Three is impossible."

"Odi et amo. quare id fasciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
(I hate and I love. Why do I do it, you might ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happe…