I wouldn't even use this book!

hehe

http://flickr.com/photos/pbjellayfish/1733139871/

Story Time!

So I used to get upset at my parents because my brother* and sister* were in their wedding photos and I wasn't.


*Both from my mom's previous marriage and significantly older.

Bairstow Haus vs. Columbia House

So I finally got around to canceling my Columbia House DVD club membership. It turns out that it's much easier than I thought.

You just call the number and after you choose English you're presented with the following options for reasons why you're canceling your membership:

1. You're moving out of the US
2. The membership owner is a minor (or is it a miner)?
3. The membership owner is diseased (Luke told me that it might actually be deceased - the automated person had a thick American accent) - he did however admit that if he was diseased he would probably watch more DVDs.
4. All other reasons.

So finally after a long time, Columbia House and I are planning on seeing other people. It's tough. I hope that I don't run into it in the Super Market with Amazon.ca

I have Gmail. One thing Gmail does is come up with ads based on your mail subjects. So for example, if I get an email requesting my drumming services, the banner ad is for used kits or music community sites. This morning I signed in and got this:

I need to stop talking about my inverted nipples on Gmail.

Black Mondaze

Let us get the sad news out of the way. My grandfather died on Saturday just shortly after they removed him from life support. It was very tough but most of us stayed by his bedside until after he was gone. He was 93, he had been married for 63 years to my grandmother

If you're interested in the information for the memorial service, please let me know.

This past week for Friday night youth events we played Live Monopoly in which you roll dice and go around the neighbourhood "buying" people's houses (they know you're coming in advance, it would be funny though if they didn't). Our place was supposed to be Boardwalk and Parkplace (we needed to have each place be a colour). But sadly I couldn't make it so the oh so classy portable at the church was the expensive-blues.

Here are a couple of stories I was reminded of this past weekend:

My mother the boxer: My family was sharing all sorts of skipping school stories and so my mom told the story of when she skipped school to help her friend with her prom date. You see, her friend didn't want to go with the guy, and so she had my mom spend the day punching her in eye so she would have a black-eye and he wouldn't want to go with her. It didn't work. She just had a really redeye and he wanted to go. They're married now, well I don't know that, but it could've happened.

Steve vs. The Vatican: So my brother decided that he would take his girlfriend (now wife - from Sweden) to go and see Niagara Falls. It was a Wednesday and he figured there wouldn't be too many people. Except for a special visitor that was there that day. The Pope. So there was a ton of people there to see the Pope and get in my brother's way.

We got some mail today that was addressed to Swiss Chalet Fan, must be Luke, man that guy loves his chicken.

In addition to METAL MONDAYS we're entertaining the idea of having Black Fridaze.

The garbagemen finally stole our dishwasher, so if you come looking for our haus don't look for a dishwasher.

I got to stay at a Bed and Breakfast for the first time ever this weekend. So I think that once Kerry goes to Teacher's College Mook and I will open a Bed and Breakfast of our own called Brunch S. Allen. It's going to be awesome, and mostly be toast and cereal.

Grandfather of all updates

Today I got a call from my dad letting me know that my grandfather isn't doing well, and tomorrow after my aunt from Australia gets to see him they are going to be taking him off of the life support system.

I took it pretty harshly and ended up leaving work early. I'll be taking the day off tomorrow to be with him and with the rest of the family.

It's seems messed that after 93 years of living his death is "scheduled".

Pray for him, pray for me, pray for us.

Bring your daughter...

Make sure that in reading this post you do not forget about Kerry's awesome re-telling of the first official METAL MONDAY!

Many of you have seen the movie Donnie Darko.
Some of you know that I enjoy that movie quite a bit.
However,
Few of you know that I ordered it on Amazon.ca from the toilet at work.

In moving we seem to have generated quite our fair share of cardboard refuse, so much so that the city won't take it unless it's properly bound with twine. Something we just don't want to do. So, in exercising benefit #3 of living so close to the church we decided to present the cardboard back to God, in the way of using the church's cardboard dumpster. A very hand thing to be near.

Speaking of garbage (heh), we have a dishwasher on our lawn. A dishwasher that predates out very existance at this house. We are guessing it came from somewhere in here, but none of us remember it and cannot figure out where it would've been from. So, I guess for now it's the marker for our haus (similar to Kristi's bike, the Pink Flamingo or the Pink Monkey), maybe it needs a pink paintjob. Well, what I am getting at with this story is on Thursday morning I heard the garbage truck and since we were discussing whether the garbage men would take it or not decided to watch from the bathroom I was occupying. So I looked through the blinds and watched the garbageman (I say that because he was a man) examine the appliance quite thoroughly, then look up frustratedly at our haus. I then acted on instinct and closed the blinds and hid up against the wall, from the garbageman!?! Why was I hiding, what was he going to do? Later talking to Mook, I found out that he was doing the same from his room and also hid from the murderous gaze of the man of garbage.

You know how you see alarm stickers on houses and you wonder whether they actually have an alarm? Well to put your mind at ease when you visit us, our sticker is a lie. Please don't rob us. We should also get a fake "Beware of Dog" sign.

I always like talking with people at dinner. It's a good time to talk. Especially about bodily functions and their weaknesses. The other day Mook and I had a great conversation about things that "go right through you" since I had been eating a lot of sunflower seeds around that time, and it was on my mind and in my...nevermind.

So my nephew has been quite the little talker (he's nearly three and lives in Sweden), and his new favourite thing to do is to inform my brother and sister in-law that they are running low on things, such as cereal. He's pretty much a food alarm.

If you could all keep my family in your prayers my grandfather (93) is not doing well. He went in for surgery last week to repair a blocked intestine and the surgery went fine but he suffered a heart attack pre-surgery. So they have him heavily sedated and aren't too optimistic about him recovering. It's tough for me. I've never had anyone as close as him die. So if you see me give me a hug, because chances are I could definitely use it.

In much better news. Mook S. Allen and I are going to be going to see Iron Maiden in Toronto on March 16!

Metal Monday I

Today is a special day in the Haus. Today is the inaugural Metal Monday. It became even more special when we found out the Gino's Pizza has a pizza special whereby you get a large pizza for $5.55, walk in. We thought it would be a good idea to each get a pizza so that we could all have leftovers. Our supper looked like this:

After about 20 minutes a large pizza seemed to be too large, and dangerous. It's scary what urges a cheese-addled brain will succumb to. Witness my despair and Caleb's dairy-drunk decision making:

We also went to Canadian Tire and picked up shovels and salt and a vacuum, making sure to buy a shovel with a METAL EDGE!!!!! to stay consistent with the theme of the day. We also got a rare glimpse of Caleb's dad in action at said Tire. We met a woman and her daughter in the vacuum aisle near a display for a really nice vacuum. There were two of those flip signs with the sale price (you know, the kind that the creepy Wal-Mart happy face is always messing with). Apparently Senor Wal-Mart Face had been there because while one sign read $229.99, the other read $29.99. The woman approached a clerk and asked to get the vacuum for $29.99. When the clerk went to check the price, I helpfully pointed out that the other price was probably correct. She responded with "Yeah, but if they don't give it to me for this price it's false advertising." I could barely squeak out an "OK" before going back to the guys to let them in on it. We wound up hovering around the section trying to look like we really interested in bikes/gravy boats/GT Snowracers (well, the GTs we were interested in) while trying to listen to the conversation. Basically, Mr. Mac said that the store has the right to refuse to sell anything to anyone, and he was invoking that right to not sell her the vacuum for $29.99. Is it bad that I feel good when the customer loses an argument?

That is all.

so after constant nagging, i've finally posted on here.

that's all i have to say. until next time...





















just kidding... har har har.

things are grand, the house is for the most part moved in, and i feel totally relieved. sure we had our worries moving in.... fears of one of the tenants staying a little longer than they were supposed too... hot water troubles... painting... renovations done later than expected... but it's been good. after 'transition living' for the last 5 months, i'm happy with the place, and especially my BED:

now i know what you're thinking: "Isn't the bed from that movie... The Sopranos???!?!?"

YES, indeed! Or so I have been told by Angelo at Bad Boy Kitchener. Or at least the model of the bed was called "Soprano". Hahaha I just looked at Angelo and Caleb and I tried to hide the laughter building up inside! Oh Angelo.... I miss him, being a bed salesman would be a killer job. I had gone bed shopping with Caleb that day... not that you should read into that... although i wondered if the salespeople did when we both got on the same bed. also, i need a ladder to get up in that thing, cause i swear it's like 10 feet tall. anyways, enough about the bed, more about the AMAZING CAT DRAWING IN MY ROOM:

Now it might be hard to see in the picture, but there is a beautiful pencil outline of a cat face with a diamter of about 3 feet on the one wall of my bedroom. Being the kind of person who doesn't like to see things unfinished, I took the liberty of ensuring that our unknown artist's original intent was fully captured with painstaking detail and accuracy:


i hope you are as pleased as i. oh, if only the artist could see their dreams come to fruition! What would they say to us? We may never know...

also, i work and stuff right now. it's good. and i'm listening to QUEEN. Awesome.

PIECE

Comparison Esteem

I moved this week, which necessitates a number of distateful tasks (cajoling people to help you, renting a truck, cleaning your room ,etc.) The onne thing I love about moving is going through boxes and boxes of my own stuff. It's at once an exciting and depressing experience. Exciting because it's fun to see pictures and items that remind me of where I've been and people I've known, and depressing because there's just so much of it. I can understand wanting to keep pictures, since they are an excellent misdirectional tool to convince people that I am more popular or better-traveled or generally cooler than I actually am. Same goes for newspaper clippings (by or about me), yearbooks, etc. These are all things I can point to and say “I was awesome in the past, and you therefore have reason to believe I am awesome now and will be awesome in the future.” They (kind of) serve a purpose.

What I'm trying to understand is why I feel the need to keep all of this other stuff that, while certainly connected to me, has very little value. Random essays, notebooks, schedules, nametags, and everything else inhabiting the wasteland of minutiae that is every 27-year-old North American’s past. For example: I threw out a terrible 3-page essay from 2001 that I got a B on and I felt a twinge of regret the moment it hit the can. Why? I am not particularly proud of the mark. The information contained therein is useless: I will be surprised should anyone ever again ask my thoughts on Albee’s Three Tall Women, and doubly surprised should I care enough about the question to research my response, and triply surprised should the essay I threw away have contained any information that a quick trip to Wikipedia couldn’t provide. My point is, recyclable properties aside, those are three functionally useless pieces of paper.
I think the reason I keep the useless essays (/nametags/schedules/doodles/and so on) is to misdirect myself into believing how awesome I am now. I look at that B six years later and I know that B would be an A if I were to write the same essay today. Nametags allow me to compare where I used to work compared to where I work now. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain sense of nostalgia connected to many of these items (and a wild, narcissistic hope that someday a team of O’Brienologists will need this stuff to completely understand me, their life’s study). But realistically there’s no need to have more than one paper saved per course (or per term, depending on how scholastically dedicated I was for those four months) because the best paper of that course represents the peak of my abilities at that fixed point in time. Anything else is an attempt to justify who I am now by comparing myself to who I was then.

Many of my friends post downright embarrassing photos of themselves on Facebook with captions like “OMG, look at my hair” or “pizza face” or something equally self-deprecating that would be downright fiendish if said about any other fifteen-year-old. These are the same photos that, as teenagers, they begged their parents not to give to their grandparents because it would then make the family newsletter and be seen by 50 relatives (who had likely seen them do much more awkward things already, like running around naked save for an Optimus Prime mask). All the tragic-haired pizza faces have turned it around are now willfully spreading those pictures to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who don’t understand the poster’s childhood as a backdrop to laugh it off. They are submitting their past into the public record not to explain their present self, but to enhance it. It’s not enough to be an indie kid wearing brands no one has ever seen and being tired of bands no one has ever heard of: you have to be all that and have recovered from wearing Hypercolor with perma-stains under the pits, while swearing that Color Me Badd would be around forever. This is no different from saving B essays. In fact, by inviting (at best) friends and (more often than not) total strangers into the process, it goes from personal self-appreciation to worldwide adulation-seeking.

On its face the practice of comparison-esteem seems very self-centered and, having done no research in support of this theory, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is almost exclusively a North American pursuit. I don’t think it’s unhealthy, unless you become obsessed with proving you're a smarter, cooler, better looking, more tasteful you then you were at 15 (and if you can't do that, then you're really in trouble). I think it's important to remember that the cyclical nature of comparison-esteem requires you to make mistakes in the present so that your future self has something to gloat about. So go do something stupid. You may need it after a rough day ten years from now.

And then there were none

So this is the day. The day where all three of us now reside in the haus. Before I talk anymore about that though, I will finish up with some more goingson at the convention.

I had a person from WMB who knows me, come up to me and comment on the suit I was wearing the one day (the one I ripped the crotch of) and say "you look great, remember back when you used to wear those thrift shop suits?", little did he know I was wearing a thrift shop suit, just not a 50 cent one (I've moved up into the $15-20 range nowadays).

On the last ever the under 30 MEDA crowd was hanging out in a room at the hotel and the one girl decided that she wanted some wine but didn't want to go all the way to the lobby for it. So she ordered it from the fine Hilton room service folks, so a while later we hear a knock on the door and sure enough there's a service person with a single glass of white wine on a platter for her. The cost for such a lavish glass of wine? $15.23!

As you all know we set the clocks back an hour this weekend, so being the responsible individual I am I decided that before I went out for the night on the town that I would set all my clocks (including the hotel alarm clock). I then went out for the night to a jazz club. Returned. Then went to bed. I had a great sleep and even awoke to beat the alarm clock, feeling as though I had a sleep greater than what could be offered by the number of sleepable hours, but alas I had been pro-active and compensated for the change so I went back to bed, awoke to the alarm and took my time getting ready (as I had planned on arriving fashionably late to the buffet breakfast to take pictures well ahead of the Sunday service). I took the elevator down to the Convention level only to find it strangely quiet. Then I found the service folk putting away any remnant of the buffet, and heard worship music!? What could've happened? I had been so careful! As it turns out the Hilton has some way of getting all the clocks to change, so when I broke into it to manually change the time, I screwed with it and ended up getting up an hour later (I still have no idea how that worked). Grrrrrrrrrr.

I have a painted Mexican-esque border in my room. It's very nice. Kerry has matching glassware.

Ask Mook about the cat in his room :oD

Stay tuned for the date of the house-warming party and for my "best movies of 2007" night.

Come visit us. Email me for the address.

Whether you like soccer or not this link is pretty funny.

Day three: electric boogalii?!

today was the big day, the event that everyone came for, the Annual General Meeting (featuring my majestic Powerpoint masterpiece).

Turns out there's another Steve Martin here. No not the funny one from Hollywood, or the farmy one from Listowel (I must say I am a little disappointed myself).

In one of the speeches a man made mention of the CNN tower, that got a good snicker from the crowd that got it. But don't worry ted turner still doesn't own our beloved former-tallest-building.

I got really hungry late last night and upon discovering that none of the places around were open I tried to order something to go at the hotel restaurant, the man said no, but that I could go to my room and call down and order room service so that they can charge me extra for it.

I just ran into senor coffey (johns older brother), he's singing tonight for our enjoyment.

MEDA has a product called Microvest which is a Micro-investment service. Guess the only thing i can think of whenever it gets mentioned? It's a good thing that i wasn't around to have to design that logo for them.

I had an older gentleman ask me today if i was canadian, he then followed it up by telling me i looked like Prince Charles' son, then he told me i was handsome (I was deceivingly wearing a suit at the time giving me a +4 Handsome +2 Dashing and -3 Agility. If it wasn't for the loss in agility I would wear more suits). Watch out Kristi I am apprently the biggest thing since Matlock and big band music.

Yard tomorrow be the last day

...and on the third day...

28 hours in two days, that probably is a good way to start this entry. The camera is back I'm business and I am 2/3 done my appointed goal of 1,000 pictures of Convention. Tomorrow is the big day, the Annual General Meeting.

At the Hilton we use those magnetic entry keys and I had to go and get another because I managed to de-magnatize mine; maybe it was the swim, hottub or sauna I don't know, but I am going to chalk this one up to the man.

MEDA is on the front section of the KW record Etc. section tomorrow, check it out. Speaking of being published a guy from a Mennonite magazine (no not the Herald) approached me to use some of by photos, that would be the time any of my photos has gotten published (kristi aren't you proud of your non-Menno?)

Apparently I are lunch from the forbidden table of sandwiches (of the knowledge of good and evil) today at lunch. They had told most of the staff not to eat there, but neglected to tell me.

We had our Windows Vista laptop that is hooked up to the projector go nuts and make the desktop icons enormous, now it's fixed but it was hilarious at the time becuase they were probably 20
feet across on the screen.

Another day, a few more dollars.

I think Mook moves in tomorrow, go visit him.

Convention day 2

300 Pictures in our brand new Canon Rebel XTi may be dead. We should've gone with good ol' reliable Nikon. That is my first convention frustration. There'll probably be more to come stay tuned.

Where else other than a Christian Microfinance organization's Convention would you have a guy singing hymns that talk about finances and investments? Don't get me wrong, I think that they're good and make sense I just think it'll be a while before we have them in the regular line-up at WMB anytime soon.

I got to mwwt up with my sister for dinner and attempt some shopping at American Apparel (blasted Value Village ruining my abilty to shop at regular stores)

In haus news: it turns out that our current furnace is toast (no it's not made of toast), and we need to get a new one. I guess it's better it happen now than in the dead of Winter (late February). We also have a squatter (harass Mook to post the story).
Thus ends another day of Convention 08.

Goodnight and Godspeed (you! Black emperor)