Lunchroom Larfs- September 5, 2013

We lay the seed of keeping boys away regularly at our house by giving my daughter a large amount of Cliff Claven like trivia to sprout off ad nauseam. Our hope is that this keen interest will work for us when she is a teenager and she'll go out with a nice nerdy boy. This is really plan two, plan one is to somehow raise her lesbian. Anyway, my wife found this video of a Noodle Squid, which I feel would make a really trippy lamp, and showed it to her. She flipped out and that lead to a Wiki Wormhole of watching videos on many weird squid in the ocean deep and delaying bedtime by about an hour.

This combines her two greatest loves. Macaroni and squid. Which I'm sure we could order in China Town.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 4, 2013

Another water themed note for my daughter's lunchbox. That worm obviously has Stockholm syndrome.

Note that we are too cheap to get my daughter flippers, only a mask and snorkel for her.

Lunchbox Larfs- September 3, 2013

In lieu of writing actual blog posts I thought I would share a new hobby with you. Isn't it interesting that it's a hobby if it is vaguely productive, but an obsession if it's vaguely criminal? Building model trains is a hobby, building trains out of models is an obsession. Jefferey Dahmer would be known as merely a hobbyist if we could all just stop labeling people. 

But as always I digress. My eldest daughter started Grade One this year (or First Grade for you American readers), which meant a lot of changes for her. She would have to go full day (8:45 - 3:15). Man, I wish when I was in an office that was considered a full day. She has to to more learning through structured learning rather than play. And she has to remember her lunch box. This of course is the apex of difficultly for any five-year-old.

She was quite worried about being in the busy lunchroom with all the big kids and who she would sit with, if anyone. Her worries made it sound like there may be a separate dungeon-like room for introverts where they take away the ham sandwich you brought and replace it was a tasty gruel, then immediately be pummeled by the Grade Sevens.

One of the things that she and I love to do together is draw. I don't claim to be a great drawer, (that's the technical title right?) but I do enjoy it. Always have. At the age of ten I asked for a drafting table for Christmas, making my free spirited young parents quite worried that they were in fact raising "The Man". Thankfully I don't have the drive nor energy to be a powerful person, I just wanted to draw silly pictures.

So in order to help her through the terror that would be lunch time I drew a silly cartoon and stuffed it in her lunchbox, hoping that would make her feel a little more at ease.

Being that this was my first attempt at a note to make my daughter feel good on the first day it's not incredibly funny, so much as it's something she can relate too. 

My daughter has an amazing interest in giant squids. We have read many books, watched a number of documentaries and even communicated with one of the world's foremost experts on giant squids, Dr. Clyde Roper. All this has cumulated in a planned visit to the Smithsonian to view the display there and hopefully meet Dr. Roper. Hopefully I'll have an amusing post about that when it happens.

The Pen Is Mightier...

Last month we took an epic trip to support my wife’s epic trip. She took part in the Friends For Life bike rally. A biking adventure that would take her from Toronto to Montreal, two cities separated by about 600 kilometers and a real gap in the quality of bagels. During this trip she persevered through rainstorms, heat, mornings without coffee and one knitting needle punctured air mattress. At the end of this trip she achieved an incredible feat, and managed to raise a phenomenal amount of money for a good cause.

But enough about her, this post is about my incredible journey. One fraught with whining, attempting to order Tim Horton’s in French, and air conditioning that I just couldn’t get quite right. I drove with my two kids to meet her at the finish line. I hope to write a few posts about this miraculous trip I took, but I might just get fucking tired and not. We’ll see...

This is me well rested

The midpoint of the trip was in Kingston. Ontario, not Jamaica. I mean we all get lost sometimes, but don’t be ridiculous. We met my wife there and headed to a friend of the family’s house for some snacks. Each year this woman opens her house to the weary bikers; offers food that doesn’t have to be shoved in pockets, seats without pedals attached and showers.

You haven't lived until your partner has told you how to use this stuff. Then you haven't showered enough to get the icky feeling out of your head.

When we arrived there was no less than two giant tables filled with every imaginable food stuff. There was multiple salads, sausages, chicken, cut vegetables, cupcakes, a basket of full sized chocolate bars and tons of soda and beer. My wife’s team consisted of over twenty riders. We showed up to find three riders, and one rider’s mother already having arrived. I asked someone when the others were to arrive. He answered everyone was there. This woman’s generosity is huge. The thing to remember is that these riders are all rail thin in order to cut down on wind resistance. It took two Smarties to fill their tummies. For those American readers that don’t know what Smarties are, I guess the comparable thing in your country would be heroin, based on how my children consumed them.

Eat the red ones last because they are filled with powerful Hallucinogens

Anyway, very quickly after eating the riders needed to have a nap. Being that the opposite of nap is a five and a two-year-old child in an enclosed area, I took them for a walk.

The house was not far from a playground, which was not far from Kingston Penitentiary, a notorious high security jail where some of Canada’s worst offenders are housed (read: people who actually say “no” instead of “maybe”). I guess the American version would be Alcatraz, but with more politeness, “Thank you for my savage shower room beating, you are very skilled with a broken broomstick.”

After a few days of single parenting and sleepless nights I sat there in that playground and looked up at the jail. I imagined an inmate peering out his thin barred window and spotting me sitting there. Simultaneously we both think, “I wish I was that guy”. I could do time easily. Think of it, no cooking or cleaning, the peace and quiet of solitary confinement, a bed that no child would climb into, and all that time to read.

"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed...! That's not fair!"

Downside: The rape. Otherwise the scales tip pretty far on the jail is awesome side. 

After getting tired of being asked for the umpteenth time to “be the monster” since there were no other kids to play with, I decided it was time to leave the playground. We walked by the jail as my eldest wanted to have a better look at it and robbing a bank to gain entrance was out of the question because there were dinner plans.

We noticed the Kingston Penitentiary Museum across the street and being an education focussed father, and that admission was free, we went in.

The first room was about what I expected it would be, displays of uniforms worn by inmates and guards, the history of the construction of the jail. Then there was two displays of what cells looked like in the past and today:

This is better than my first apartment

"At least I got a window, eat it prisoner in the future"

The next room we visited was the corporal punishment room. Here there were displays of stocks, whips, handcuffs and leg irons. I rechristened the room as “My college dating life.” My two and five-year-old kids didn’t get the joke and after 20 minutes of graphic explanation, I gave up and shoved my eldest into “The Box” for not getting my sense of humour.

In the final room we were greeted by this friendly fellow:

Slightly less affected by tear gas then Mickey Mouse

This room was dedicated to riots, escape plans, and hidden weapons. Hollowed out books housed knives, pipes were converted into guns and lots of things sharpened to nasty points.

And this is the gift shop!

It wasn’t until after we left the museum did I remember the conversation I had with my eldest that morning. She had a nightmare about a man stabbing people with a fork. My response was that people didn’t do that sort of thing and she was perfectly safe. Then I took her to a place that not only proved that people stab on another with forks, but actually sharpen them up to make them more lethal.

The next morning she awoke, and told me she had another dream about the man who stabbed people with forks, but this time she had met his daughter who was “quite nice” and they got along really well. Some people might call what I did bad parenting, I prefer to call it facing your fears.

Besides, after leaving for a snack she wanted to go back in and check out “The Box” again.

We didn't have time to go back, so I bought the home version.

Hook, Line and Little Stinker

It’s summer which means taking trips to cottage country. It's called cottage country because you could be in an entirely different country in the amount of time it takes to drive the 100 kilometers (or 4,000 teaspoons for your American readers).

One of my eldest daughter’s highlights of any visit to my in-law’s cottage is fishing off the dock with her grandfather. My father-in-law never fails to buy worms and have a Spongebob fishing rod on the dock when she arrives.

Why does "Plankton Plug" sound do dirty to me?

Like most Canadian kids who grew up in a more rural setting I too was into fishing. I remember at the age of five having a fishing rod with a comically oversized plastic hook on the end. Oh the number of broken lamps I caught in our living room.

Leroy Brown: The one that got away

By the age of nine I had a tackle kit filled with lures, bobbers and other shiny things that stupid fish might eat.

For fish that like to eat turds

For honest fish that returns money clips, even when they are empty.

For fish celebrating Pride

I have fond memories of standing by the roadside with my father, both of us in spring jackets and ball-caps with company slogans on it. We are a family who couldn’t give a shit about sports so I don’t think either of us ever wore a cap with a sports team on it. We both owned Canada’s Wonderland hats though. No family vacation was complete without a hat to show everyone we had been there.

"I have not, nor will touch these fish with my hands until they are breaded."

Anyway, we would stand by the road with our lines in the water, surrounded by other dads and their kids in their spring jackets with their lines in the water. It was perfect for us antisocial folks who could tell any other person to shut up because “you will scare the fish away”. Fact: fish don’t have ears. Hence why they don’t wear regular eyeglasses, and only prince nez glasses.

Make out! Make out!

We would stand there for an hour, my father baiting my hook and removing fish I caught, before heading home where he would then clean them, which is a polite way of saying eviscerating them in order to devour them.

Why the sad face Mr. Fish?

We had a family friend who was the very picture of the outdoors man. He spent his time fishing and hunting. There wasn’t an animal he wouldn’t kill in cold blood. He started taking my father and I out fishing at the butt crack of dawn. We would stay out until the sagittal trail of sunset.

Once this family friend took my whole family for a “boat ride”. This entailed dropping my mother and I off on a small island to pick blueberries while he and my dad when fishing. We had no water or food, only the blueberries on the island. They came back about six hours later. Honestly I can’t pretend to be certain that it was six hours as one hour adult time is equal to three weeks child time. The only thing missing from the day was a hungry bear chasing me in circles on that tiny island for the entire six hours while Yakety Sax played in a loop.



From that time on I always brought a book with me and in one outing would manage to read almost an entire novelization of a movie that I was not old enough or brave enough to watch.

This book helped me seem cool in junior high.

This book did not.

Because of this I have always left my daughter’s fishing adventures in the very capable hands of my father-in-law. However, last week during a week long visit to the cottage he was absent. After stalling for three days by offering to colour My Little Pony pictures my daughter became impatient and said, “I want to go fishing. I don’t even like My Little Pony. Where did all these colouring books come from anyway?” So I had to take over.



The first step is baiting the hook. I am a person who in science class pretended to be Mormon to avoid dissecting frogs and worms. It just goes to show how smart the teachers in my high-school were that I succeeded in my ruse.

"So what do you have against cutting up animals and boxer briefs?"

I started by grabbing a whole worm and shoving it onto the hook. It was at that point I wished it worked like cartoons from the 30’s and the worm just hung onto the hook rather than having to impale it.

It’s a harrowing experience letting a child have a steel barbed hook. They want to cast the line in themselves, but these are people who can’t even eat ice-cream without spilling it everywhere. The hook is flying through the air narrowly avoiding eyes and testicles before finally landing in the water.  Because of the precarious way I put the worm on the hook it fell right off (or jumped, the coward) and I had to reload my daughter’s hook.

I quickly realized that 1) this would be no fun for her to watch me squint my eyes and pretend to not be bothered by holding this snotty greasy animal for a good ten minutes each time, and 2) the fishing trip would be over in a matter of minutes if I kept using full worms, which would work for me, but the difference in time would be filled by a long droning chant of “I’m bored”.

Wanting to try and keep my daughter interested in fishing, I decided to start cutting worms into smaller pieces and putting them on the hooks. In my wife’s family there is a tale oft told about one of his kids fishing and asking my father-in-law if the fish got hurt when it got hooked. He off handedly answered that they did not as they had no nerves, and was faced with suspicion and disbelief, only years later to be vindicated by a friend of the family who reported back to him that a biology teacher confirmed his story.

Recently my daughter asked him the same question about worms and she got the same answer from him. I thought back to this story as I used an ancient rusty knife in his tackle box to cut the worms in half. I tried hard to pretend to be cutting cinnamon rolls to be baked, as my safe place is in the kitchen making delicious baked goods. However a cinnamon roll doesn’t ooze guts or start barrel rolling when you cut into them.

Like worms, tastes best fresh from the oven

As I watched this chunk of worm spin, It reminded me of my daughter when I try to put her to bed when she’s overtired, just rolling and rolling in the bed.

When it comes to fishing with the kids the fish caught are placed in a bucket of water and kept until the end of the fishing event and then tossed back in the water. It’s sort of a catch, terrorize and release system.

To a fish this is the equivalent to waterboarding

I of course have to remove the fish from the hook for this to happen. Being a tremendous pussy I found a pair of work gloves so I would not have to actually touch the disgusting fish. If you take anything away from this post let it be that fishing = slimy.

Of course one idiot fish decided to swallow the damned hook. Stupid idiot! That meant I had to get the hook out that was now embedded in the fishes genitals (I think, again I’m Mormon so I skipped that lesson). I considered cutting the losses and leaving the hook in the idiot fish, but that would have meant quickly learning how to tie a new hook on the line, and I had had enough new experiences for one day I tell you. I yanked and yanked and heard tearing inside the fish. My daughter saw the gills and yelled “Blood!” and ran away. If only a 38 year old man could get away with the same tactic I would be free. After what felt like a feature length version of an all fish version of Saw I got the hook out and threw the fish back in the water, It floated for a second and then swam away I assume to reenact an all fish version of Born on The Fourth of July. I on the other hand told my daughter it was lunch time so we should quit for the day. The day she learns to tell time and knows it’s only nine o’clock in the morning I’m dead.

"This fish almost made my Daddy throw up!"

Get Your Potatoes In!

I spend a lot of time in the playground after school. It’s a great place to meet people with similar interests and hobbies as me such as: sleep deprivation, getting feces out of clothes without leaving a stain and how to keep children from opening the bathroom door while in use. It’s also a great place to learn the newest and coolest playground games.

I have already covered the thinly veiled sexual assault known as “Kiss Tag”. The current game of choice in the school yard is “Grounders”, which is a type of Marco Polo tag on dry land.

Oh shit, that's not a game of tag. Those people are trying to abduct her!

I’ve spent the last few weeks observing and making notes on this game without the children spotting me. Many parents and police officers did, which is why I’m starting a kickstarter campaign to both further my research and raise bail.

"I understand I'm under arrest, but why did you remove my pants?"

Grounders has a ruling class who decides the initial fate of all players. The “King Counter” is a Benevolent Dictator that decides who is “it”. I say benevolent dictator because though King Counter is in charge there is a wing of government below him that has some influence. That is the Song Chooser, who chooses which rhyme will be used to decide who is “it”.

Despite using only one hand, Napoleon was a hell of a tag player.

In Senior Kindergarten there is four main rhymes in rotation right now.

Each Peach Pear Plum

Come on, they already have six inch claws, jaws that can bite through pine trees and now some idiot gave them guns?

“Each peach pear plum
You are not it, or your very best chum.”

The player this lands on chooses another player who is also exonerated with him. This instantly creates jealousy and hurt feelings as some other child with a complex will whisper “I thought I was his best chum,” through salty tears as he cries himself to sleep that night.

This rhyme also has the added bonus of being an unpopular four course meal menu.

Eenie, Meenie, Meinie, Moe

“Eenie, meenie, meinie, moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eenie, Meenie, Meinie, Moe”

The question is why catch a tiger by the toe? You should go for the throat. If he hollers let him go? Of course he’ll holler, you are subduing a wild animal here. This is a very inefficient way to get medicine for erectile dysfunction.

Nothing goes to waste.

I also remember when I was a small town rural child in the 70’s the word tiger was replaced with the n-word. That’s right... “necrophiliac”.

Dip Dip Chocolate Chip

“Dip, dip chocolate chip
you are not it.”

I’ve also heard a variation from older kids:

"It dit dog shit,
you are not it"

Listening to these rhymes made me think back of the incredibly violent rhymes we had as children.

“My mother and your mother were out in the yard, hanging up the clothes.
My mother hit your mother right in the nose.
What color was the blood?"
(Person counter ends on picks a color, counter spells it)
And you are not it."

If you really wanted to fuck up the King Counter you would pick a colour like “turquoise”.

My money is on the one on the right. The one on the left has a glass jaw.

Once you have the person to be it. They count to ten, or whatever a five year old can count to so the other players can run off onto the playground equipment. Every kid does the same thing, they count as fast as they can in hopes that the other players do not get very far. I wish anytime there was a counting situation in life this would happen. That would liven up shuttle launches and New Years Eve.

I remember being in Ottawa at Capitol Hill for New Years Eve in 1999. The Hill was crowded with people and a mist of pot smoke encircled your ankles. The countdown was projected on the Peace Tower, but whoever was in charge of the slideshow either hadn’t bothered to double check the slides, or had spent some time lying face down in that mist. The numbers started at 10, went to 8, then quickly jumped to random numbers some of which were upside-down. This is similar to how a five year old counts while being it in tag.

Then the player who is “it” closes their eyes and tries to tag the other players. This is a loose rule as most kids are squinting so hard they develop bright white laugh lines within a few minutes of playing.

The other players are supposed to always be off the ground, and if the player who is “it” calls “grounders” while someone is on the ground rather than on the playground equipment that kid becomes it. Most of the time the children trying to evade being tagged lie and yell back “No One!” This then leads to an interesting Catch-22. The kid who is "it" knows, because he was cheating, that there was indeed someone on the ground. However, in arguing his case he would then incriminate himself proving he too is a cheater by having his eyes open. Often this is cleared up by either saying the unpopular kid was on the ground, who is so desperate for attention will gladly be it, or everyone sulking and shouting, “I’m not playing!”

Again, I wish that in adult life we could do this. For example during a presentation in a Board Room an executive points out a fatal flaw in a project, the presenter could just yell, “I’m not playing!” and leave the room. Then everyone would just move onto the next item on the agenda.

"But if it's on a Power Point, it has to work!"

The other rule in grounders appears to be that anything at anytime can become “T.O.” or time-out. My daughter is particularly is fond of this. When the kid who is “it” even comes close to her she shouts. “This pole is T.O!” or if she is helping out a friend will pick a colour, “Red is T.O.” Oddly, most of the time all the kids are fine with this. She tried to use me as T.O. a few times which lead to me shouting there was no way I was time out and to get off of me. As she was tagged she saw me as a traitor that day and looked at me the same way Han Solo looked at Lando Calrissian in Cloud City. I am not a fan of Star Wars so I had to watch an online clip of this scene. I really don't see why people are so gaga over this flick. It looks pretty cheap and awful to me:

The other quick way to get out of being tagged is to yell, "I’m hungry," and leave the playing field to get a snack, then eat at a painfully slow pace so the others won’t wait for you to return to the game or hope your father gets tired of standing around and wants to go home. Spoiler alert: He does.

Heart Attack and Banana Vine

Last Sunday I took part in the Becel Ride For Heart. I wish I could say it went as smoothly as margarine through my arteries but ironically, the ride nearly gave me a heart attack.

Those of you who read my last post know that I devised a foolproof way to raise money for the cause. Those who didn’t read the previous post are obviously self absorbed assholes. My plan was not to ask anyone for money, and it worked! I fundraised by writing my sponsors' names on my body and although no one came forward to get the top tier, I raised more than zero dollars!

Representation of what the top tier of sponsorship.

Actually given my lack of enthusiasm at asking for money I think I did okay. I’m not going to give you an honour roll of pictures of people who donated, but I will throw this picture of the top sponsor’s name:

Before

After

I hadn’t thought much about my connection to heart issues, but when my parents donated money in memory of my grandparents I was reminded that many members of my family drop dead unexpectedly from heart attacks. I remember that after my grandfather died we were cleaning out his house and I noticed that he about a third of the way through a Robert Ludlum book,  I imagined him wandering around the afterlife looking for someone who had read it that could tell him how it ended. Since then I try to read obscure books quickly.

A fitting tribute, no?

The ride was tough. It took me about 90 minutes to do the 25 kilometre ride, with my eldest child attached to the bike. She, of course, was on a bike attached to mine - I wasn't just dragging her along the asphalt by the ankles or anything. My wife had the baby in the Chariot, or given how much she screamed in it “The Skinner Box”.

Yesh, just learn to press the red lever and you'll stop getting shocked.

We almost missed the starting cut off due to a last minute bathroom break. We were literally some of the last people to start the ride, which meant we missed the glut of A-type people who awoke at 6:30 in the morning to conquer the event. We hand had come from a drinking event the night before coupled with a baby who wouldn’t sleep. Here’s a tip, you know you are in trouble for the next day when you are walking home and you find yourself saying, “Who the hell would have a baby out this late at night?” only to find that it’s your jacked up baby with the sitter.

The ride started out fun along the Gardner Expressway which sits above ground level. I was close enough to the city smog to write our names in it. My daughter had a good time looking at the elevator going up the CN Tower, and all the other riders on the road. It wasn’t long before she got bored and started just talking at me. She is in a phase now, where I no longer have to acknowledge or respond to the things she is saying, “Daddy, what if this road was a pony, and we were ponies. Ponies that could fly and when we got off the road we all ate cake? Cake in the shape of ponies!” At first I tried to answer the hypothetical questions. “Well sweetheart, that would mean we were a pony riding on a pony’s back and I’m pretty sure cake isn’t good for ponies.” About 30 minutes in I responded with “yup.”

The flaw to this system of ignoring her is that I don't notice for hours after she's fallen off.

I think one of the hard parts of this event, unlike a marathon, or a walk is that people are of varying skill levels, equipment and patience for one another. Many people on very fancy bikes whipped by me as a blaze of spandex, while we were like a huge jabbering snail plodding along on the road, at least that was when I wasn’t walking the bike complete with pony spewing daughter up the hills.

It was supposed to look like a squid. I know, I know many other people already pointed it out.

The thing that struck me as most fascinating was the sounds during the ride. There would be a pop, and a sound of rushing air followed by a “Fuck, shit, fuck!”; the noise a punctured tire naturally makes in the wild.

As ridiculous a notion that dragging our kids behind us was, it was way better than the parents of small children that let their kids ride their own bikes. I heard parents screaming and struggling to stay balanced while keeping pace to their children who were riding in circles or dragging their feet on their tiny bikes. I imagine those parents are still out there a week later hoarse from yelling begging their children to keep pedaling.

"What do you mean these peddles aren't just for show?"

At the midway point my daughter got very bored. If ever you thought that driving a car while a child asks every few seconds how much longer the drive is, try physically dragging their sorry asses at the same time.

We happily got to the end of the ride to find the most anti-climactic end ever. I had imagined that we would triumphantly use a last burst of energy to pedal across the finish line to cheers, confetti and gold bullion thrown our way. Instead the one lane road caused such a jam of bikes that everyone had to get off their bikes and shuffle along trying not to bump into the guy ahead of us. Plus, because we were among the last riders, workers were deconstructing the starting line when we arrived. Nothing feels like a real accomplishment like teamsters swearing at one another, “Why am I carrying all these fucking things? You lazy piece of shit!” I would have plugged my daughter’s ears if I hadn’t been trying to keep the bike upright.

"I swear, we all really did bike it."

Because it was so late into the day and we were all starving, we decided to sneak into the VIP lounge for their brunch meal. We were told that it wasn’t allowed, but because it was the end of the day and no one really cared, we should go in. We were of course the only people standing in line without a fancy monogrammed shirt, so I felt rather conspicuous.

My plan was to eat quickly, and head out before anyone noticed that we shouldn’t be there. My brother in law decided to keep a low profile by having all the kids in our group go to the centre of the hall where announcements were being made and dance on a stage to music blaring along with a slide show on the giant screen behind him. Let’s just say he won’t be an undercover officer anytime soon.

It did however affirm that naming our next child “VIP” will ensure being allowed into anything.