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 day saw a "sanctioned" show in Mount Forest where the horses compete for points towards a very prestigious 'Hall Of Fame' status--and a few of my parents' horses are well on their way.
Never mind the horses, though--they were simply the excuse to see my parents...for the first time in over six years. Our relationship has been rather strained, to put it mildly. There have been bad things said and done on both sides, the gritty details of which are far too personal to express even in this personal space...suffice it to say they chose not to attend when I married Eva--which I viewed as a sudden punch in the face and they felt had been provoked by years of mistreatment on my part.
We're rebuilding things on on a more healthy footing. Slowly and surely--which is the only way to rebuild something. It was nice to see them, and it was great to see them win.

ONE WEEK AGO:
The Heavy Duty Dude Brigade, consisting of my brother-in-law, his girlfriend (okay, she's a dudette) and his father, came down to put in our kitchen floor and also install new exterior doors, front and side. My contribution was largely to stay the hell out of their way and listen closely to the interplay. You see, Jim, among other things, is a roaring comic genius, and he plays off his father, his sister, his girlfriend, me, whoever or whatever's around, really, including himself. You can't really explain Jim Hopf. He's just larger than life, is all.
Something Jim has taught me: time, even make-work, drudging, horrible chore-filled time, passes by effortlessly when copious amounts of laughter are spread throughout.
Somebody told the previous owner of this house that she'd never sell it with the seventies style floor in the kitchen. So she hurried out, bought the cheapest stickum tile she could find, and without so much as cleaning the floor, proceeding to cover 'er over.
I wish she hadn't bothered. Within two days of our taking possession, tiles starting lifting and shifting, peeling and revealing bits of dirty brown gunky tile underneath. You couldn't keep it clean for longer than about half an hour; every time you scrubbed the floor it would just cause more dirt to exude out. Ugh.
We were certain we'd have to pull up at least one layer. Despite the peeling, these things are bonded together for life--no amount of grunting and groaning and inventing strings of oaths would put them asunder.
Bring on the laminate!
We got a great deal at the Marijuana Mansion. Other people call this place Home Depot--I choose to mispronounce 'Depot' and split it into two words. Anyway, they had a truckload sale on honey oak laminate: 77 cents a square foot, regular $2.49. All you do is lay down a vapour barrier and then click the floor together like a giant jigsaw. Well, that's not all you do: you have to cut the slats to fit all your crooks and nannies, which makes a gawdawful racket and scares your puppy dog. But once it's all in place...wow, what a difference! The kitchen looks like some place you'd actually want to walk into, now.

Oh, yeah, and just before that our computer went to silicon heaven. We had to raid our vacation money to replace it--priorities, priorities--and so now our holidays will consist of lazing around the house, a few brief excursions, one weekend cottage trip with friends (should be a blast) and....NOT WORKING!

NOT WORKING...precisely the backwards of what we're both doing right now. I worked fourteen hours of extra time this past weekend, and that pales beside the kind of time Eva's clocking. The kind of workload I'm under makes me fantasize about quitting for the rest that's in it.

There have been about fifty things happen that would have provoked a blog entry if I had a computer. Isn't that always the way? I guess I'm just going to have to ease back in.