For the Love of a Child

This one is for the parents out there, cause unfortunately they are the only ones who are going to understand this entry at the visceral level. The rest of you might understand it at an intellectual level, but until you've got a kid of your own… well, you will never truly get it.

Parenthood is one of the 'great adventures' of anyone's life. Oh sure, you can climb Everest, you could swim with the piranha's in the Amazon (I don't actually recommend that one though…), you could hop into one of those big balloons and float around the world! All of those – well, not the swimming one – are no doubt one heck of a good time!

But if you want a down and dirty adventure that never stops, nothing beats parenthood!

Since becoming a father, I've been bitten, peed on and pooped on! I've been hit, kicked, head butted, and stabbed with all sorts of eating utensils. I've had toes up the nose, fingers in the ears and more drool rained down upon me than I could ever care to remember! Just the other day I was rudely awakened by my 13 month old, who made the executive decision that dumping a big glass of ice cold koolaid onto a sleeping Daddy was every bit as good as waking him with a shower of kisses! In her defence, I probably was dryer having had the koolaid dumped on me than I would have been with the kisses!

I've lost more sleep and spent more time in the hospital anxiously awaiting a doctor's prognosis on removing peas from noses and for the x-rays to be developed, than I ever wanted too. Honestly, if I never spend another moment at the hospital because of a hurt or sick kid, I won't complain. (Not holding my breath though…)

I would work three jobs to keep them fed, I would face down any threat and I have feel no shame when I say I would kill anyone who tried to hurt them.

In short, there is absolutely nothing I wouldn't do for my kids, even if I knew there was no way I'd walk away from it.

Not surprisingly, I found myself feeling a profound sense of kinship with a fellow I read about tonight on the Globe and Mail website! A 77 year old father, taking on one extremely unhappy Grizzly Bear mother protecting her cub (yes, animals are parents too!) to protect his 39 year old son.

Now seriously, I'm sure that there are lots of non-parents who might take on a grizzly to protect someone – hero's come in all shapes and sizes! But how many of you are going to do it bare handed? My hat's off to this gentleman!

So go to the top of Everest, plumb the depths of the seas – it will be over in a few days! But parenthood? Man, that ride lasts forever!

One hell of a hello!

As anyone who’s spent more than a few hours with me can tell you, there are few things that drive me more insane than stupidity and religion. Some will no doubt chime in now and remind me that religion is stupidity in a formalized setting – you know what, I’m not getting sucked into that debate. I know that there is a difference between religion and faith and that the former often has nothing to do with the later – but that’s another rant.

So what has me frothing at the bit now?

I tripped across this thing called Stumble a while back and have entertained myself to no end with the bizarre, inane and sometimes insane sites that fill up that nebulous thing we call the world wide web! And then every once in a while I come across one that just makes the little bubbles in my brain boil over!

Today was one of those days!

Some inbred butt monkey in Texas (Don’t get me wrong, I love our American cousins, I really do – but seriously, isn’t it time they started licensing breeding down there?) actually convinced a town council that it was a really good idea to change the official town greeting from ‘Hello’ – used throughout the world and sent into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft as a universal greeting – to ‘Heaven-O’ because, and I’m quoting here folks, the word Hello contains the word ‘Hell’. Apparently saying ‘Hell’ oh to every smiling person you encounter on the street is just one more of those paving stones on the road to the infernal swimming pool!

Don't believe me? Here is the Wikipedia entry that details it... (sigh.)

That sound you hear right now is the top of my head blowing off…

There’s a reason I keep my glorious locks of auburn hair cut so short – it’s so I can’t pull it out in frustration! But still, as an intellectual exercise (bet you didn’t even know I knew what that meant) I decided to extrapolate this idiocy a little further! So here are some other words you can no longer use and their new substitutions!

Henceforth you can no longer use the word ‘Grape’ as it clearly contains the nefarious word ‘Rape’, instead you will have to refer to the fruits formally known as grapes as ‘Those purple dangly things that make wine.’

Wow, I’m feeling safer already! Let’s see… We should probably also eliminate ‘Skill’ and all its variants because they contain the word ‘kill’, instead we’ll use talent! Oh, no, wait. That has the word ‘lent’ in it… I think that’s a Jewish holiday and that might offend supremacists… Ability? Yeah that works!

I could go on and on, but I it’s late and I’m heavily into ‘fuzzy logic’ at this hour… We keep censoring ourselves because something we might say might offend someone. There is nothing wrong with equal right for all races, creeds and sexes. But there comes a point, I hope where we have to say enough is enough!

We already can’t say we don’t like people who would like nothing more than to see our way of life destroyed. I don’t agree with racists – I think they are ignorant. But the Gods help you if you stand up and say I’m an idiot and I don’t like you because of the colour of your skin or the sex of the person you love, or the big deity in the sky you happen to subscribe to.

If it were applied equally to all, this sort of stupidity might almost be acceptable.

Make a cartoon of the prophet and half the world is suddenly doing its very best to rip your throat out – but make a cartoon with Christ visiting a brothel and nobody bats an eye because that’s not racism.

Say hello and damn your neighbours to eternity in a lake of fire…

So where does this leave us? Scratching our heads? If I were a member of this town I would be putting up a great big sign on my lawn that says ‘HELL – o’ – but then I’m a trouble maker J

Apparently the separation between church and state has become a little vague, not unlike the separation between logic and insanity!

We’re surrounded by idiots I tell you and they’re going to be the death of us all.

What's so Super about 8?

So, I’ve had one hell of a week. Mostly because I’ve been as sick as a dog – actually, that’s not true, the dog has been bouncing around healthy as an ox (why do we compare our health states to animals? Something for another day...) At any rate, I’ve been sick. Really sick. Missed two days of work in a row, which is not something that’s ever happened to me before!

But being sick isn’t what has me fuming! Nor is the unexpected drive to Fort St John to have the family cat’s dislocated hip relocated (It was there the whole time, it just looked like a chicken wing, which is why we were all so confused.); nor was the issue the $800 vet bill – though I have to say, youch! I learned a valuable lesson, nobody died – some might claim that it was money well spent. Personally, I think it was money... well... spent.

No, what has my hackles raised in all their magnificence, was the $180 bucks I spent at the Super 8 for what has to be one of the worst nights... I want to say sleep, but that implies that I might have...

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a one off rant. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck and through the Super 8’s retracting glass doors for the first time last night. No, I stayed there earlier this month on the company dime as well and was seriously not impressed.

Now before you leap to the defense of Super 8, let me say – don’t bother. It’s not just them. I stay at a number of hotels each year, mostly for work and they all seem to be going the same predictably annoying route.

So let’s take a look at my top three biggest bitches about these cookie cutter holes in the wall:

1. Who decided that rather than a central heating and cooling system, that every room needed to be supplied heat and cooling via it’s own industrial meat freezer/dehydrator unit? Have they tried to sleep with one of these damn things howling away all night? I bet not. And do they really need to be located right next to the bed? Okay, I grant you that there isn’t a lot of real estate in a hotel room to have one of the torture devices mounted – but come on!

For those of you who haven’t stayed in a hotel recently picture air quality so stagnant that you can taste the cologne of the last three people who slept there, now imagine if you will laying down next to the sweet sounds of a running diesel engine – the only thing missing is the exhaust smell. They are extremely loud. You can’t change the direction of airflow, so they howl either up and under the curtains, completely negating their usefulness by blowing them up towards the ceiling, or they somehow manage to avoid going under the curtain and you get the joy of sleeping in a gale force wind that hearkens back to the frosty tundra or moisture sapping desert. Either way, when you wake up (which I assure you, you’ll be doing a lot of) expect to have cracked chapped lips and a throat so dry that it will take you until lunch to regain your sense of taste.

2. After a long day of driving, I get out of the truck, stretch and make some rude noises and then curse about how sore my pretty little behind is! So when I get to my room, as I’m sure everyone else does, I’m hoping for furniture that is at least somewhat comfortable enough to relax in. Well, forget it. For your $180 you won’t be seeing anything of the sort!

Hotel furniture essentially comes in let’s say four modes, the stool – usually found near the door, useful for storing your suitcase on, or as a place to stop and put your shoes on or take them off. Not useful for much else.

Next you have what they like to call the ‘sofa’. At first glance, I know what you’re thinking, ‘it’s a sofa, what’s he whining about?’ Sit on it. (No that’s not my Fonzie impersonation, though it was pretty good  ) But seriously – how did the people who bought this thing come to the completely egregious conclusion that it was in any way shape or form comfortable? First off, it needs to be at least one and a half but cheeks wide – I can’t stress that enough. And the front must be higher than the back. Sliding off the sofa and onto the floor because you somehow decided that the average North American only needed a one cheek deep seat is just asking for trouble. Plus it’s not long enough to sleep on, assuming you could sleep on your side for any length of time and somehow manage to not slide off... So to recap, the sofa sucks.

The third torture device that they pass off as furniture is called the chair. A miserable thing, the chair. I know, I know, your thinking – ‘but it’s a chair! How can he attack a chair?’

Well, let me tell you about the average hotel room ‘chair’. Born on the mean streets of Mexico, the average chair is raised in abject poverty where food is a pipe dream and care and nurturing just words that nobody can understand (because they’re chairs!). The learn early to be visciouos, chaffing bottoms and causing back strain in any who encounter them. Then one day they escape the chair ghetto and make it to the big league where they discover nobody likes them. And they get oh so bitter. So they work out a deal with the internet guy, trading hidden camera pictures of the nations bottoms for the most awkward placement of the LAN connection, so that the prisoners, er... I mean guests, have no choice but to use them, thus perpetuating the cycle of chair violence onto the next generation of victims.

Lastly there is the classification that I like to call, the reclining chair. If, and I can’t stress ‘if’ enough, you get lucky enough to have one of these in your room, keep your head down and your mouth shut! It’s as close to decent furniture as you’re going to find and you’d best not brag about it!

3. So now you’ve experienced one of the worst nights of what can only in the most loosely worded of terms be called ‘sleep’. You’re even more tired than you were when you arrived. Your throat hurts, you can’t taste your toothpaste, let alone the freshly made waffle that you just made at the continental breakfast. You’re grouchy and not the least bit looking forward to the long drive/flight home. Now you have to run the guantlet of happy smiling automatons hanging around the hallways acting like cleaning up your crap provides them with the joyful bliss that makes them spring from their beds each morning.

You slog your way to the front desk with your suitcases and lap top, put it all down and let out a long disgusted sigh... ‘So, checking out?’ comes the chipper query of the annoyingly chipper desk jockey, who is clearly only so chipper because they didn’t have to actually sleep at their damn establishment the night before. Do I say what comes to mind? ‘Not at all, I am in the habit of taking my belongs for a walk at this ungodly morning hour, because they burn so easily once the sun is completely up.’ Or perhaps do I go with something a little less subtle? ‘Wow, I can totally see why they promoted you up from midnight urinal cake replacement specialist! You got that without any help at all!’

But no, I settle for ‘Yes’ and allow myself to be subjected to the endless barrage of trivialities that front desk staff are so famous for, so that by the time she slaps the bill down in front of me, I’m thinking I’ll pay twice that if you just shut the hell up lady and let me get out of the rat hole!
And all that for a measly $180! It’s amazing there aren’t more shooting sprees in hotel reception... God I’m glad to be home...

Time for an anti-vent!

I have been a little slow updating the blog of late, my bad – but as everyone knows life has a way of steamrolling the best laid plans of mice and men! And I haven’t been blogging long enough to have it ingrained in my soul like some bloggers – so I am able to still go a day without checking in.

That being said, I thought today I would do something a little different than my stated ‘venting’, let’s call it an anti-vent! And on that note…

My wife rocks!

I say that with enthusiasm and pride and not, as I’m sure some of you might think, in the hopes of somehow getting out of the two months of unrestricted sexual favours I was informed that I owe her as of last night! (After all, why would I even want out of that?)

But back to my main theme here – the wife rocking – She does! I may be the one who brings home the income (only because we both agreed that one of us really aught to raise the children and that giving over an entire salary to a daycare made no sense to us, which is not meant as a knock on those who choose to, or have to.) but she is the glue that holds the family together!

One forgets on occasion just how much work being a full time wife and mother can be! Honestly, I sometimes wonder how she does it.

Let’s just look at the last week or so… Let’s see, she’s dealt with an ear infection in the big kid, chicken pox and conjunctivitis in the little one and my having a cold (which is probably the worst of the lot – I’m suffering damn it!). She’s planned out our meals for a month in advance and done the grocery shopping by herself (well, the baby might claim that she ‘helped’) saving us a lot of time and money in the process. I haven’t had to buy lunch in over a month and at $4-5 a shot, that is a pretty good return on her time investment!

This alone has made life happier for everyone, eliminating the 5 o’clock ‘what’s for dinner’ question! You want to know now, look at the list on the fridge!

And this past weekend it seemed that our dishwasher of 10 or 11 years had finally gone to the soup kitchen in the sky. Now after having to spend a day washing the dishes myself and then having to hear her go on about it for a second day – I came home and said let’s go buy a new one, expense is no object! ($700 is a small price to pay for a happy wife – you married guys know what I’m sayin…) So we go look and she doesn’t like what is available locally. Come home and instead of ordering one off the internet, she sits herself down on the kitchen floor and along with the help of one sick goopy eyes crying baby and an overly curious puppy, fixes the silly thing!

To say I’m impressed is an understatement! It’s clear to me that I made the right decision marrying a handy woman versus a rich one! (Not that I would complain if she suddenly got rich!)

At any rate, her horn does not get tooted enough – so today I’m tooting it for the world to see!

And honey – you really do rock!

Love you!

Stupid People!

You know, there are a lot of things that bug the heck out of me in life. There’s the recession, which I don’t truly understand – as near as I can figure if the news would stop reporting about how horrible things are, things would immediately start getting better. Then there’s snow – yes that lovely white fluffy stuff that everyone dreams about around Christmas time. It when you’re still dreaming about it (only those dreams now involve a shovel) and it’s almost April that snow looses all of its charm. Honestly, Frosty would last around here, about as long as it took me to find my shotgun!

But what I come back to time and time again is stupidity. Frankly, stupidity should be the enemy of every intelligent person out there. Why? Hmmm.

Clearly you are one of them, so I’ll use little words to make it easier.

Stupidity is bad!

Next to greed it’s probably the most destructive human emotion out there. The holocaust – designed and led by a greedy evil bastard, but if stupidity had been taken out of the equation, he wouldn’t have had a national following – nope, he’d have been the crazy guy who lived in the spooky house on the corner that got egged on a regular basis.

So why is it so prevalent? Sorry, I mean, why is there so much of it? It could be breeding – we don’t breed smart people enough. God’s joke of the ages, stupid people would die out if they all came in ugly packages. So let’s make them look good on the whole and then introduce alcohol and hormones to make them seem smart – at least until the baby making is done.

Or maybe it’s the media. Ever notice how most news stories involve someone stupid doing something stupid? Or how most of our popular media – your survivors and bachelors leading the way, are all about stupid people making other people look even stupider? Stupid is cool! Who needs to be smart when looking good while being stupid pays so well!

Or my personal favourite – the amount of intelligence on the planet is constant – it’s the population that keeps growing! This is supported by how the really stupid things, tend to happen in big cities! Individually, most people are smart enough to get by. Put them in a crowd and suddenly even the most intelligent of the bunch are hanging from light posts above the mob and throwing garbage cans through store fronts!

I suppose that I’ve been inured to these sorts of stupidity though. It is what it is. It’s when someone I know is intelligent starts making really stupid decisions. Decisions so colossally stupid that I’m left slack jawed and speechless. How the heck do you talk to these people? What do you say? Hmm, you just burned your house down because you didn’t like the colour of the paint in living room? Wow. You live in an apartment and can’t understand why your landlord threw you out for bringing home a pony? Yikes.

Faced with that sort of stupidity from otherwise intelligent people one has limited options. Rail at the stupidity that malignantly seems to run through the fabric of society… Weep for an intellect that seems to have gone the way of the dodo…

There’s no point trying to explain why their decision was so stupid or how they could get out of the trouble they are in. It’s like explaining a singularity to someone who’s never heard of a black hole or teaching a squid to tap dance. They just aren’t equipped anymore to understand what you’re saying…

Sigh… Or you can vent in your blog and not go gently into that dark night of stupidity… The Lemmings have it right. Now there is a race that knows what to do with it’s stupid people…

Death to SPAM!

Ok, it’s said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled off was convincing people that he didn’t exist. If that’s true – and that’s a rant for another day – then the second best trick he came up with was convincing people that SPAM was anything other than the scourge of the modern age!

Forget chick flicks, forget advertising that sells to the lowest possible of all common denominators – forget those darn twist ties that they use to secure toys to their boxes – if you’re a parent you’ll understand that last one, if not, Fort Knox should be so well secured!

Forget all of that!

It is SPAM that is eroding the very fabric of reality around us, as we sit on our couches, glued to the mind curdling drivel that passes for entertainment on the boob tube – never got that really – if there were boobs on the tube, it would be far more interesting wouldn’t it?

I’m sure you could quantify SPAM into three truly disturbing categories. The first is ‘Idiot SPAM’. This is the garbage that you get in your inbox trying to sell you garbage you don’t want and clearly doesn’t work. It’s the guy who, if you’ll only provide him with your bank account number so that he can transfer his vast wealth into it temporarily, will make you a millionaire over night! I call it Idiot SPAM because only an idiot would fall for it. Seriously, if Prince Mugabi of whatever war torn African nation has the wherewithal to pick your individual email out of the ether to make his plea – believe me, he can get his money out of the country without your help. It’s called a bank – look into them!

The second is even worse than the first – it’s ‘Well Meaning SPAM’. Seriously, I don’t even know where to start with this one… You probably get them all the time – usually from people of the female persuasion. It’s meant to give you a lift, or put a smile on your face, or give you a sense of empowerment – unless you don’t immediately forward it to thirty of your closest friends – in which case, Lord help you, but bad things will happen! Like powerful medicine, there will be horrendous side effects! Extreme flatulence. The development of a second head. Pregnancy in men! The horrors go on, but I can not.

My better half – her words, not mine – gets these sorts of emails all the time and by default, so do I. And the problem is that you can’t filter the darn stuff! Oh you could filter them out (just between you and I, I have on one or two occasions) but the problem with that is that these people are ‘supposed’ to be your friends! They are ‘supposed’ to be people that care about you! If you filter them out with your SPAM filters, you might actually miss something that actually DOES have meaning!

And as ‘reasonable’ as your relatives / friends / whatever claim to be, it’s impossible to send them a polite message (and not just because doing polite is really hard when you’re that annoyed) asking them to stop sending you that sort of stuff. Why? Because it always hurts their feelings! Oh sure, they claim not to be wounded, until you open your Christmas Gift from Aunt Sadie and discover, not the family heirloom you were expecting, but a tin of… well, SPAM! And won’t that just teach you a life lesson, junior!

The third kind of SPAM is a meat product made from completely unidentifiable meat-like products, which if it’s ever passed your lips, puts you to far into the category of lost cause for me to even continue.

So what do you do? Got me. I’m venting – it’s what I do!

Have a good one – and stop sending me SPAM dammit!

To sing or not to Sing - why is this a question?

So here it is, my first formal vent! How exciting! The truth is I vent constantly, just ask the people who live with me – my youngest is only nine and a half months old, but even she has mastered the eye rolling when I get started, so imagine what the wife and older kid are like…

But deciding what to vent about in my blog has proven to be something of a revelation for me about how much there is to vent about in the world today! Do I write about crooked politicians? The environment? Do I rant on about crime and the lack of punishment, or the stupidity of so many people around me? What about religion? If you’ll excuse the pun, God knows there is plenty to vent on with that particular subject.

Odds are, sooner or later every one of those topics will fall under the wrathful focus of my attention! And odds are even better that they are going to, each and every one of them, deserve the tongue lashing they get.

Anyhow, today I came across this story while visiting CBC.com (I know, that’s a whole other vent session, I assure you…) To sum it up, Principle Erik Millet pulled the daily singing of the Canadian National Anthem from his elementary school because the parents of two children had issues with it.

According to the Belleisle Elementary School website there are approximately 230 students in attendance. So for concerns over two students who had to step outside the classroom while the anthem was being sung, Principal Erik decided to make a change that affected 228 others.

Not surprisingly, people got a little testy over this move. Some even got ornery! The superintendent, seeing the backlash building stepped in quickly and reversed the Principals decision – not before Principal Erik had to start seeing a shrink though. I’m sure law suits will follow…

So I have a couple things I would like to get off my chest on this one:

• I don't really care if they sing the anthem or not - they don't do it at my kid's school, though they do sing it at assemblies. But I see no harm in it and hey if it happens to help a generation of Canadian's grow up with a little pride in the country they live in, so much the better!

• Principal Erik, I know you had this foolish touchy feely idea that you were somehow promoting some strange politically correct idea of inclusion by not wanting to make the two students with parents of questionable intellect step outside each day, but come on. This is school – it hasn’t changed so much since I went there so many years ago. Different equals dead in a school population. These poor kids were probably more ostracized by having you mess with the entire student population than they ever were by stepping out of the room for a couple minutes. You really haven’t done them any favours!

• To the parents of the kids who started this whole mess – get over yourselves. If your atheist beliefs (Which you are certainly welcome to hold) can’t stand up to the mention of the word ‘God’ in the national anthem – maybe you should take a long hard look at just how strong they are! Perhaps you’re closet believers! Horror of horrors! And when your done that, look at the damage your doing to your kids by making them leave the classroom versus the ridiculously insignificance of having to sing a song!

• To the other parents who threatened poor misguided Principal Erik – Get your heads checked you morons. It’s not as though he introduced ritualistic human sacrifice to your child, he took away a song! Send in your emails, letters – heck phone and express your displeasure in a reasonable way. Call the school board! Write the editor of the paper! You know, be the proper example of how rational people deal with disagreements in the real world that your child needs you to be! Or go to jail… Frankly I’m not sure which would prove a better point to your kid.

• Finally, to all you politically correct pinheads out there that read the CBC article and sit back and think to yourselves ‘Principal Erik was absolutely right!’ Just stop. Stop trying to save the world from itself. Stop trying to make everything perfect. Political incorrectness isn’t going to go away. Frankly, I feel another vent coming on just thinking about it…

Anyhow, the red fog over my vision is starting to recede… Until next time!

Hey Look it's yet another blog... Hurray!

So here it is, Eth's blog! How exciting, I know! Try and control your bladder functions - I won't be responsible for any required cleanup!

This should be interesting - I never thought I would do one of these, I mean I have lots to say, but let's be honest it's mostly not that interesting :) Anyhow, just playin with the features for the moment, but like the title says Venting has never felt so good!

What will I be venting about? Damn good question - the current events of the day, things that make me go hmm... Things that tick me off... Things like that!

So sit back, put your cup on and enjoy! It's going to be one hell of a ride... assuming I stay motivated enough to keep posting!