Today, Life Is Good

Today, potatoes boiling on the stove, green beans ready to go in, bacon cut up, loud music playing in the background (Tocotronic), I went to the window and stood there for a moment, looking out over the white white snow a foot or so high, watching the occasional car pass by, noticing the guard guy from across the parking lot stepping out for a smoke, and I thought: Right now, life is good.
That reminded me of Boromir in the flashback scene in Return of the King, and how he said something like that to his brother, and how everybody was cheering and happy. It occured to me a moment later that that was just before he himself set out on a path which finally would lead to his death.
So I then changed my music to "Be my baby"* by Vanessa Paradis, a song I've liked since I was 14 years old (probably because of the video, in which Vanessa hangs out with not a lot of clothes on in and around an empty swimming pool with lots of autumny leaves everywhere). Singing along to it and with a certain spring in my step I danced back to my cooking and forgot all about it until I remembered it again just now.

*It's a real shame that the well respected and formidable Punk band Pulloverkleid Girls has never done a cover version of this tune.

Krazy Krazy

I managed to finally repair my glasses in a satisfying way.

Items needed:
- 1 drop of Krazy Glue
- about 5 cm (cut to maybe 5mm wide stripes) of black electrical tape

Result:
I think it'll hold for the necessary time. (Do you see the whiteness on the arm? The frame is losing its color. What was once black is getting all white. Kind of like Michael Jackson. I think it's because of frost - the glasses, of course. Michael I'm sure didn't get much frost in California. By the way, the other day I pricetagged "This is it", the DVD. It's finally out and available. I am really curious to see it.)

I also made an appointment with an eye doctor 12 days from today in the next bigger town. On that occasion I will purchase two pairs of new glasses, too. It's been almost three years after all. I will have scratch-free vision again! (And it's always good to have an extra pair.)
I wonder what kind of variety of glasses they offer over there in town. Reason to worry: Town is just one step ahead of bumfuck. Reason not to worry: Town is the only place to buy glasses for at least 6 hours (driving) in every direction. Maybe more.
Heavy. Where I come from you drive 6 hours you are in a different country, maybe even just entering a third.
Krazy World.

Most Surreal

Today at work I lived through a most surreal experience.
Since I couldn't just go home when I ran out of work halfway into the afternoon, and after I had busied myself with retrieving shopping carts from the parking lot, restocking showcases, tidying up shelves and repricing long forgotten items that had no price tags anymore I ended up working at the checkouts.
Not as the actual checkout guy, but as the bag-guy.
Here's how it works: The checkout guy moves the stuff across the scanner, I put it in plastic bags* and hand it back to the costumer.
Let me first say that this job is harder than it looks like. You have to be pretty fast, and you have to follow certain rules: No food together with cleaning products, meat goes by itself et cetera.
People from here may find it easier, because they are used to wasting a ridiculous amount of plastic bags. One pound of pork gets its own bag. A 4 litre jug of milk that has a handle and doesn't need to be in a bag at all gets its own bag anyway. Sometimes two, because 4 litres are pretty heavy, and we wouldn't want the bag to break, now would we? Someone buys a snickers. The one snickers goes into a bag.
You get the picture.
Where I come from you have to pay about 25 cents for one plastic bag. Where I come from people try to bring their own re-usable bags. That makes them want to pack efficently: Heavy stuff on the bottom, lightweight and squish-able stuff on top. Other people, especially those who come to the supermarket by car, often bring their own collapsible plastic boxes to put their stuff into. All the groceries go in the box, the box goes in the trunk. Very simple.
Basically:
USE AND WASTE AS MANY BAGS POSSIBLE! versus USE THE LEAST NUMBER OF RE-USABLE BAGS POSSIBLE.
JUST DROP IT ALL IN THERE! versus PACK SYSTEMATICALLY.
BAG HALF-FULL? START A NEW ONE! versus PACK SYSTEMATICALLY.
... In my head between these positions a kind of epic battle started:
There I was, being the bag-guy, weirdly conscious of myself and watching myself as if I also was a spectator while in my mind trying to ignore my European shopping bag ideas and in reality trying to keep up with the stuff going across the scanner. I could only keep starting one new bag after another, the groceries came at me fast and in no order at all, which made efficient packing impossible, but every now and then my bag-saving-mind interfered, and wanted to put that late bottle of household cleaner with all the other cleaning products from two bags earlier instead of giving it its own new bag, which delayed the whole process and earned me raised eyebrows from the costumers. I just tried to keep up my stupid smile constantly. I also repeatedly made the mistake of asking people the question: "Do you want a bag for this?", and they usually responded with an as astonished as unbelieving stare probably expressing a message close to: "Who is this guy? Is he kidding me?"
I felt completely out of place in that job position. It was most surreal. I will never voluntarily do that again.
(I also had to restrain myself all the time from saying things like: "Nah, you don't need a bag for that." or "Man, you can carry that bag of apples to your car as it is, can't you?" or "Are you sure you want a bag?" or "You know what? I REFUSE TO GIVE YOU A BAG FOR YOUR ONE BAG OF CHIPS OR YOUR THREE KINDER EGGS! BRING YOUR OWN FUCKING RE-USABLE BAG NEXT TIME!")

I will now go and rub my wife's feet to regain good Karma.

*On the plastic at the bottom it says something like: HELP THE ENVIRONMENT. RE-USE THIS BAG! In my opinion it should say: HELP THE ENVIRONMENT. DON'T USE THIS BAG.

**Man, it's fun to rant about things which seem so Stone Age compared to GOLDEN Europe.

New Work Time Activity

Today my field of duties at work expanded: I was introduced to a new activity, called price audit. Basically they had me walking the isles with a bar code reader checking if the prices on the items are still correct.
Probably a very useful activity.
Later I transferred stuff into the outside warehouse: a mattress, some patio folding chair & table sets. The path to the warehouse was half snowed in, so I couldn't cart the stuff all the way and had to carry it the last bit. Doing that I managed to, attention please, break my glasses.
Exactly.
No reason to panic!
It's not the glass parts that are broken, just the frame. Or more specifically: The leftside temple snapped right off. Probably caused by fatigue of material caused by continued exposure to severe below zero temperatures.
It's what can happen when you lift heavy boxes in snowy conditions: Hoist up box, maintain a good grip, lose that grip, shift box for better grip & on the frozen ground lose footing for a second, have box hit side of face, hear a crack!, have everything going out of focus, realize glasses must have fallen off, set box down, find pieces, examine damage, say FUCK!, put temple in pocket, put glasses on nose, find they stay there, finish the job, go inside, re-examine damage, use tape to fix it temporarily.
Now I've got to find a way to get the next bigger town (3 hour drive) and see a professional, maybe they can fix it, or maybe I'll have to buy new glasses.
The downsides of living in places like bumfuck: Things are not just around the corner.

A Little Oil In The Social Machinery

Unexpected days off are nice.
A bit boring, too. But nice.
No boxes for me on the truck today, unbelievable. "C'est impossible!" my boss said. I guess all the boxes are gonna be on friday's truck. So I'll probably work the weekend.

When you work, so it seems to me, people treat you slightly different. It's as if in every short conversation, hello or other small talk they're eradiating a subtle idea of approving smile. Or perhaps I'm just noticing the absence of disapproval of my former life as a non-working house husband. Or maybe it's me emanating a message to them, saying: Hey, it's me, I work, I'm like you, we're the same! You don't have to be afraid, I won't do you any harm! I'm normal!
And if the person I'm talking to doesn't have a job, the subconscious message is probably: Look, I work, you don't, why don't you get a job, you loser, I'm better than you! What, you don't have a job on purpose? Stop making excuses, you lazy fucker!
I'm exaggerating I hope. Society is weird.

Payday

On friday for the first time since I've started working at the store I've got paid.
Real money.
Very nice.
One can buy things with it. Like food. I think I will be able to satisfy all our food needs with it and still have almost half of it left.
Which I could spend for all kinds of ridiculous things, like a 12-pack of plastic guys with sticky blobs for hands, so they can 'climb' walls. Only 5.99! (I think)
Or not.
Puzzles for my wife, then. She likes puzzles! But everything under 1000 pieces I hereby declare unworthy. Perhaps I should get her one of those "'Major City' By Night" postcards in poster format as a 2500 piece puzzle. All straight black. On second thought this might not exactly hit what doing puzzles is all about, though.
Mh.
I'd better do dishes now.

Cake & Red Wine. And Cheese.

It's my wife's birthday today.
That means: Cake!
And red wine.
Awesome.

And cheeses. And I don't mean cheddar or mozarella, which sometimes seem to be the only varieties of cheese in this country (not counting mozzacheddar and other Kraft products), I mean cheeses with actual names and different flavours.
Unfortunately I can't remember the names, but apparantly they are English cheeses, with names I don't know how to write, but pronounced like "glooster" or something. Actually there are two which sound kind of like that, one kind of pale colorwise, the other more golden and perhaps called "brooster" or so, and some very mild sheep cheese, and some very strong and very yellow cheese... Fortunately these delicacies were "imported" by a friend of ours, and even better, these cheeses go very well with red wine. Weirdly people from this country seem to enjoy their cheese with things like crackers and stuff called Chutney or something, which is okay, I would prefer dark bread, but we're out of dark bread.
I just replace the bread with more wine.

Cheese really is something. I remember when I was little and the "relatives" from the other side of the Iron Curtain were visiting, my grandparents would always dish up a great big cheese plate: A wooden rotating plate with a handle-knob in the middle, around which was sitting a great variety of cheeses (imported, too, for the most part).
Back then I didn't enjoy cheese, but I do now.
Back then I didn't drink wine either.


Update:
I found out 3 cheese names: Double Gloucester, Lancashire and Applewood. And Gouda.

Isn't It Satisfactory To Go Home After A Day's Work?

Reading yesterday's post about boxes makes me feel like Mr. Complainy-Pants somehow. Must be my nationality. They say a tendency for whining without proper reason is imbibed from infancy in my country. Or is it? Maybe I'm making this up.
However, opening boxes can be a very satisfiying spare-time activity. I was about to give reasons for that, but I'll just skip that part.

I've finished reading some more books:
The Angel's Game, by the guy who wrote The Shadow of the Wind.
That is a fine novel. It's epic, rich, well written and, most importantly, magical. It is also fast paced. It is dark & sinister, and features for example early 20th century psychiatric-wards, lots of blood, lots of love, cemeteries and tower houses, books and writers, sickness & cure, life and death. On top of that is has a lot of WTF moments, which I find most entertaining.
I suggest: Read this book.

The Time Traveller's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger.
A differerent novel, weirdly different at first, but then refreshing. A story awesomely executed in the given set-up. I would also recommend this book to anyone. The title, I may add, is also well chosen. Had it been only "The Time Traveller", it would have been misleading, since this novel doesn't center on time travelling in the usual science-fictiony way, but is in fact a love story heavily impacted by time travel. Good book.
The movie is quite good, too, but it is advisable to read the book. The film works fine, but it condenses the material, therefore you'll only get half-the picture (which of course you won't notice, if you never read the book).

Boxes, Boxes Everywhere

The number of boxes is infinite.
I went to work at 9 and started opening boxes. It's always the same feeling I experience when I ram in the cutting tool and slice open the packaging tape: Let it be anything, anything but children's clothes!
Why? Because normal clothes are bad enough. You have to find the already attached tag on every single piece of clothing, read the number on that, type it into the computer and find out the price, then enter the pricing information into the pricing gun, price tag every individual piece of clothing, and then security tag it with one of those metal spiky thingies wo come together with one of those plastic fuckers which, if you try to leave the store with it, make the alarm go off.
Compared to, let's say, a toaster, where all you need to do is put it back in the box (because the price information is already out there on the shelf) and have one of the Ladies take it to the floor, clothes are a lot of work.
Children's clothes, however, are on top of that also tiny. Small. Often made of polyester (hard to penetrate with the fucking metal spikes). So it's a lot of fumbling around attaching a plastic security device i.e. on a leg of boys' two-piece basketball suit. And they usually come in six or twelve packs.
Shoes are also bad, but not as bad. The thing about shoes is that the plastic things are hard to put on, because there's always a lot of shoe material between the metal spike and the plastic ufo. You have to press them together hard, which after a while is kind of tiring (especially to the fingers).

Well, if children's clothes hold the negative top spot on my list, toys make a close second place. The reason is not so much pricing-work-related as it is morally insulting: 99 percent of the toys are crap. Nobody should be buying this, and a fortiori nobody should be playing with it!
Conclusion: Nobody should be selling it and I shouldn't be pricing it.
But then again this is a free country blah blah, and everybody is free to blah blah blah.

So I'm always hoping for toasters and kettles and stuff like that, but usually I find, especially these days, valentine related crap. I opened boxes until 12, went for an hour of lunch (which is: walk home, take off jacket, gloves, tuque, sit down, eat food, stand up, put back on jacket, gloves, tuque, walk back to work), opened more boxes until 4, then finally did all the accumulated paperwork from box opening friday and today (every box must be received in the virtual world, too, and then the paperwork must be signed and filed away), went home at 5:30.
Then I made evening meal.

The most fun boxes are the ones from the electronics supplier. They usually contain DVDs and Video Games and are very quick to process. Also they are usually small.

Sometimes people call on the phone. I don't know how they end up calling my extension instead of the store service or at least the store's main number. The thing is: I cannot help them, whatever they want, for the simple reason that I mostly do not understand what they are saying. They have their weird accent, which over the phone makes every word totally incomprehensible, and the fact that people seem to prefer one-word-communication doesn't make it easier, because if you don't understand the one word and they didn't give you any context either... I really have to learn how to transfer them to the main store phone. But I always forget to ask. So people: Stop calling me. I'm sorry, I cannot help you.

There are still lots of boxes left to open, and tomorrow they will also deliver new boxes. Yay.
While working today I often thought about Jack Bauer, and how peaceful a life of opening boxes is compared to his life. Nobody dies, nobody has to stay up for 24 hours all the time...
On the other hand, he has a gun.
And he doesn't have to open boxes ever.

Carpet Cleaning

For a while in the entryway of the building we live in has been living under the stairs a giant blue 4-wheeled plastic monster machine. It sports a long double-hosed shiny metal trunk, and his friends are a red water bucket and a bottle of extra evil cleaning fluid.
Today we allowed all three of them into our home for carpet cleaning.

The 3 most amazing things about carpet cleaning:
1. It doesn't matter how often you refill the machine with clear clean water, even after the umpteenth time it will come out again disgustingly dirty and black.
2. see 3.
3. see 1.

The 3 second most amazing things about carpet cleaning:
1. The carpet takes a fuckload of time afterwards to dry.
2. The machine is surprisingly unhandy: heavy, hard to move, all kinds of hoses and cables get in your way all the time, the machine's butt leaks (that's what the bucket is for), the trunk is made for short people (or those who whish to seriously damage their backs).
3. The dirt actually comes out nicely.

The 1 inevitable thing you have to live with when carpet cleaning:
1. Some spots remain.

The 2 things you have really have to do when carpet cleaning:
1.Turn off your imagination: The dirty water has an unpleasant smell to it. Yes, it came out of your carpet. No, you don't wanna know what it is.
2. Turn on your self-deception: Of course it looks cleaner now. Remember there were spots here and there and there? No? But there were. Now they're gone.

Conclusion:
Carpet cleaning = Another nice sunday afternoon activity.

Warmer

The cold seems to have passed, hopefully. When I came to work today, the whole room was literally stacked with *work*. There must have been extra deliveries. It'll keep me busy well into monday, maybe even into tuesday.
Back home I made chickpea burgers. They're not my favourite, but my wife likes them a lot.
Her verdict: "Amazing and chalked full of awesomeness, I could have eaten 'til my stomach exploded".
Well, we don't want to imagine that.
Now that I almost healthy again, I can go and work on all those emails that have accumulated in my inbox. Of course people start sending me emails when I am otherwise tied up (i.e. sick), and not all the rest of the time, when my inbox seems to be attracting either chessmail service messages or amazon newsletters only.
The weather is mild these days. Just minus 11.

Head Cold

Bah. I got this terrible cold. It started with a slightly sore throat on friday, and delevoped further over the weekend, including evil night time sweat. Using over-the-counter daytime-all-in-one-anti-cold medication I willed myself to work on saturday and sunday, which was easier than expected. While getting up in the morning and walking to the store was a pain in the ass, the actual worktime went by quickly and without much thought of the sickness, probably because I kept swallowing those extra strength pills. Today the cold reached the stage of constant nose-full-of-snottiness, sneezing and coughing, accompanied by this very crude feeling as if the nose was dried out totally, while producing a constant stream of snot. I also kept drinking Buckley's, and it hurts like crazy for about 15 seconds in what feels like all the way down to the furthest ends of the lungs.
Well.
I restocked on anti-cold-pills, so I can go to work tomorrow.
I hope this will pass soon.

Yesterday I also watched a movie with Michael Douglas, called The Sentinel. Not bad, actually, enjoyable, especially while waiting for the next season of 24. I had to remind myself all the time: No, not Kiefer Sutherland, not him, Michael Douglas has the leading role, not Kiefer, not Kiefer!

More Cold

Whee, it's cold.
The other day I walked out the door in the morning, it was -15. It felt pleasantly warm, like a warm spring day, very nice. I guess that's what happens when it's constantly around -30.
The lakes are completely frozen over, and people use them as shortcuts to get to places. They drive on the ice with their cars and trucks. What amazes is me the dogs: They still hang around outside everywhere, doing their dog-stuff, and they don't freeze to death. Two humans already froze to death this winter. The dogs don't. They live and bark and wag their tails and jump people.
There's someting beautiful about all this cold winter scenery, though. The houses seem to duck down in the snow, and all the white brightness makes everything appear extra-focused, like HD vision. Youn wanna linger and enjoy it for a while. But then the cold wind hits you from the side and you think: Fuck this, I'd better get inside, where I can run around with my long johns on, and without my outer pants, and play video games all day.

Cold Steal

Man, it's cold here. Walking to work in the morning really is no fun (legs get cold, and somehow the icy chill keeps crawling up from below under the fat winter parka), though for some weird reason it seems warmer in the morning than at lunchtime, when I walk home again for some food. In the evening today (at -32) I almost froze my nose off. Wearing long johns helped with the legs, and was also very beneficial at work: Thursday is usually delivery day, so the big fucking warehouse door is open all the fucking time, exposing people who are supposed to be warm inside to the outside cold. And I, working away in my little room, busy sticking stickers on merchandise, counting shit, perforating clothes in order to protect them from getting stolen, am one of those persons, but people keep running in and out of my workspace, and I don't know, either because, as we say where I come from, they have sacks ouside the doors, or because they are locals and therefore oblivious to the cold, they half the time leave my door open.
But haha! I just close the door. And I wear long johns.

You don't believe what kind of crap and shit people buy in stores. The most crappy accessoires, the even more crappy plastic toys, small and big, tiny shit, useless crap, cheap, plastic, colourful, 99% made in China, stuff that after a week ends up in some corner, never ever even looked at again in a century.
But I price it. Business is business! If people wanna buy crap, crap will be sold to them. I believe that for example LEGO is completely unknown in this area.
So people can buy fucked-up plastic neon automatic toy guns and shitty plastic swords that make sounds when a butten is pushed. And I price it.
And I security-tag it. All of it. So people can buy it and don't have to steal it. Oh yeah, stealing. Here's what people do to buy clothes without paying: They go to the home hardware isle and look for wire cutters. They pick up the wire cutters (even take them out of the package), go to the clothes department, pick what they like, cut off the plastic "u.f.o.", put the garment on, et voilá, clothing obtained. Now all they have to do is walk out through the security barrier.
Or so they think.
Hehe.
Because if they do, the alarm will sound: MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP and someone looking as if he's working there will yell: The red bag, the red bag, stop right there!!
And we see it's Matt Damon, who suddenly remembers his UFC-skills.
How exciting a workday I have!
Luckily tomorrow I have a day off.
To even-up that I work saturday instead. And sunday. Yay!

Right now at present I am already totally surprised.

This Year's Third Post : "Pope Joan"

I've finished reading another book from the Christmas Pile. "Pope Joan" by Donna Woolfolk Cross. Apparantly this novel has just been made into a movie last year*, that might be a reason why I've found it under the Christmas Tree (the book came out in 1996 already).
Of course it is about a woman who ends up being pope. In the ninth century. Nice piece out of the 'Historical Fiction' Genre. Or did it really happen? Was there really a female pope once?
I don't see why not, especially after reading this novel. Nothing bad to say about it, really. Nice story, good characters, it works. If you have nothing to do, read it. Can't hurt.

I will now proceed to "The Time Traveller's Wife", which also has been made into a movie last year.
Coincidence? Happenstance?

*I just found out: Last year's movie is actually not the first flick about our female pope. They have brought the story to the screen once already back in 1972. Is it any good? Regarding that question I'd like to quote from IMDB:

"Because this film was such a disaster, I do not see any film maker daring to touch this subject again. So we can therefore regard this film as an opportunity well and truly wasted."

Well, somebody dared. Let's hope the new movie does better.

The Second Post Of The Year: About Steve Hely's "How I Became A Famous Novelist"

Today we took our Christmas tree down. It's outside now, leaning against the trash recepticles. The room looks strangely empty without it.
What else?
I cooked a ham today. Well, not really, since it was a ready-to-eat smoked ham. Still, it took an hour 15 to get it hot. 2 kg. That's a lot.

I've finished reading one of the books I got for Christmas. "How I Became A Famous Novelist" by Steve Hely. I had ordered it from Amazon as a gift for myself, mainly to get the purchase value up to receive free shipping. Why not, I thought, it might be good!
According to what's printed on the back of the book Steve has been writing for at least one comedy show once. And that's how the book is written, but I didn't know that when I bought it.

It's basially the story of a ghost-writer for student's essays, who has the idea that most authors on the bestseller lists today are mere con-artists, pumping out book after book full of exactly what the audience expects. The guy then decides that he can do that, too.
So he makes up a list of things that have to be in a book designed to be a bestseller, i.e. a road trip, an american hero etc. Oh, and his basic reason to attempt to write a book is this: He doesn't want to come off as the slacker he is at the wedding of his ex-girlfriend a year later. So he starts writing a novel.
Up until here, which is maybe 1/3 in, the book is a nice read, funny, fast, interesting. You read it and you think: I could do it, too! I myself could write a bestseller! And you feel with him for accomplishing it!
You even forgive Steve for giving our guy a friend in publishing, thus saving him trouble getting his book out there, and yes, we even forgive Steve for cheating again by inventing some unlikely events that give our guy's novel a lot of media attention.

But then for some unfathomable reason Steve puts our guy into some morality shit, sends him crawling through the mud of all this honesty of writing-bullshit etc, which is just plain boring. But he doesn't stop there, the heart & emotions part is too important: He gives us the obligatory make-an-ass-of-yourself-at-the-wedding-scene, for example. People who were broken up with recently might enjoy all the heart-torn-apart/can't-get-over-it-fluff poured over them. Really a lot of pages to wade through, because it doesn't get better before the last fifth of the book.
While I dragged myself through that part I couldn't help remembering "Adaptation", the Kaufman movie, which actually depicted in itself on screen the senseless rewrites of its own script (think of the ridiculous swamp-action-scene). Is that what Steve had in mind? Giving me the emotional shit necessary to make his book sell better? Well, when in doubt we rule in favour of good intentions and say: perhaps, perhaps.
Fortunately Steve manages to get his novel back on track for the last bit of it, everything gets tied up nicely, the end is somewhat satisfactorily, even it waves around a lot the mighty mystifying finger of "what writing is really about". Yes, yes, character has evolved, blahblah.

Nice book if you have nothing better to do, especially the beginning is quite worth it. More precisely, I would very much recommend the first half (for good measure) to everyone. The second half: Not really.

The First Post Of The Year

Hello New Year,

there you are. I don't feel any different. Also I have not a single new year's resolution. All the usual resolutions don't seem to apply: No need to lose weight, no need to stop smoking/drinking/taking drugs, no need to find a/another woman, no need to find a job, no need to play less computer games, no need to do more dishes.
Haha! What fun to subtly praise myself like this!
I suppose I could work out more. On the other hand I have never worked out much in the wintertime in my life, so... wait a minute-
How about:
Finally Finish Comic Book Project!

That's something.
I guess I'm gonna do that. This year. There you are.