Or that time I..

Just remembering some funny moments. Like that time I lost my balance standing on the bus and actually fell on some strange man's lap. Looking back, there were so many things I wish I had said to smooth that over. But really, is there any smoothing over sitting in a stranger's lap? No. No there is not.

Or that time I decided to pick up my friend's travel mug and turn it upside down to see if it said what it was made of on the bottom. As mugs often are, it was full of coffee. I will never live that down.

Or that time I took a coffee onto the double decker bus and dropped it on the upper level, spilling it all over the floor. It meant that every time the bus went forward or came to a stop, everyone watched the coffee creeping further up and down the aisle and eventually spill down the stairs. You have no idea how horrifying it is to have to tell the bus driver that you had an accident. 

I should really stay away from coffee. And buses. Especially together...

Or one I really like: instead of saying "Have a good day" at the end of a call at work, I accidentally said, "Have a good idea."

Or that time I was really sweaty after biking to work so I decided to use the shirt I had biked in as a towel just to realize I forgot the shirt I was going to wear and now had to put back on the shirt I had just used to dry myself.

Or that time I watched some guy ahead of me step in dog poo in the middle of the sidewalk and as I watched I thought "Poor sucker never looked where he was going," and immediately stepped in the first part of the same dog's poo because I was too busy watching the other guy not looking where he was going. I tried to get his attention to commiserate with him but he pretended I wasn't there and that nothing had happened. Pride goeth before the fall but not before you steppeth in poo.



This is me, a failed bear.

Or that time I volunteered to wear the teddy bear mascot costume at a Christmas fundraiser for the Queen Alexandra Foundation and tried to convince a skeptical little boy that I was in fact a real bear. I mistakenly said something about bears celebrating Christmas and decorating Christmas trees. He replied (with disdain), "Bears hibernate during the winter." Nobody told me I was talking to Dwight Schrute's illegitimate child.

Or how as a child I had an obsession with carving my name into things, particularly our furniture. At the time I wasn't thinking that this was incriminating myself, I was solely thinking of one word: fame. I carved "F+R" (R for the boy I liked in grade two) into a cabinet and when my mother confronted me I tried to convince her it was someone else. Of the ones I remember, I wrote my name in our doorframe, our storage unit, my desk at home and at school, a bunkbed at camp and many trees. When I was thirteen I got in trouble with the park ranger at Miracle Beach campgrounds for carving "Faith + Mike" inside a large heart, into a tree on our camp site.  Mike was a boy I liked on a camping trip after knowing him for three days and, as we all know, 95% of all park rangers are bitter about young love (this is true, I swear). The day before he left he serenaded me on the beach with his Catholic school horror stories. He had a concaved chest and said his best friend was a girl with big boobs who offered to donate some to fill the hole. These are the kind of boys I like.

You will also find my name in many cement structures around my old complex: the rock wall in my back yard, a corner of the basketball court, my friend's patio, the curb on my street and outside my aunt's old house in James Bay.

I refuse to be forgotten.

Cougars and You

The cougars are out there people, and they're in my neighborhood. Carrie and Tillicum. Quadra and McKenzie. They smell poodle. Yesterday I tried to give my white miniature poodle Kezzie a stern talking to. She used to try and make friends with the townhouse complex cats in her younger years but they weren't feeling it. Maybe she's outgrown it like she seems to have finally outgrown eating poo. Her favorite were poopsicles in winter. For a while we thought she had outgrown it and then the feeling would come over her and she would get a hankering. I've heard people say dogs eat poo because they're not getting enough of something in their diet. What? Not enough poo?

Poodle or fluff in the wind?



I tried to tell her, "Cougars are not your friends." But she just kept giving me kisses. I don't think it got past her fluff. You see, she is exceptionally fluffy right now as I am in the long, drawn-out process of brushing her hair and haven't given her a hair cut in quite a few months for obvious reasons. 1. It is winter. 2. She is getting old so I like to think of it as cushioning for her arthritis or, more relative, padding against cougar bites, and so forth. Hopefully if a cougar tries to eat her he will just think he has eaten a cotton ball and gag. Even better he will mistake her for a fluff in the wind and walk on by. 

'Tis a New Year. I have some grand plans. I plan on submitting a lot of my short stories to get published and try out for some writing contests too. I have been waiting to submit things, out of cowardice or false logic I don't know, thinking I can't submit anything until I am the best I can be. NOTE TO SELF: you will never be the best you can be... you will be better! Just kidding, no. You must always try to be the best you can be but you will never actually be it. Instead you will learn and grow and fail and succeed but if you lean on God and not on yourself you will be better than you ever could be on your own, because HE is the best you can be, the "I am" that you can never be, and that, my friend is how you be the best you can be. That's the extent of my theology. I also plan on getting started on a real novel project. Novel as in book, not new. Though it could be both. I have many beginnings started and ideas in store but the word is "commitment," people. Maybe my book will be about cougars. And little, white, innocent poodles. And the dangers from mixing them. No! Don't go there brain! I have to go home right now and have another talk with Kezzie. Maybe I will make a slide show for her ongoing poodle-safety-education entitled, "Cougars and You."

 Cougars and You

Slide 1



Cougars are not your friends.