While watching the final scenes of “Pursuit of Happyness” the building fire alarm went off. In my experience, building alarms are generally false alarms, but I always evacuate nonetheless. Except this time I smelled smoke. So we scurried around to grab our coat, boots, and two big bins full of our important papers and took the 11-storey walk down the stairs, watching the floors fill up with denser and denser smoke on the way down.
Once we were outside, we saw the fire right away - a recycling dumpster full of plastic, metal and glass had turned into a towering inferno, sending smoke up the garbage chutes and into the rest of the building. The sprinklers managed to suppress the worst of it until the fire trucks showed up, and the firepeople made quick work of the bin that had mostly burned itself out. No damage to the building, but lots of smelly lingering smoke, and I suspect some of the nearest cars in the parkade are going to smell like burning rubber. (I’m hoping mine was far enough away to only get a sprinkler washdown.)
It was kindof nice to hobnob outside with the neighbors and hear all the local gossip. Also witnessed a very interesting trend – nearly all the people who had pets evacuated, but people with kids stayed up on balconies. It was like Noah’s ark in the front lobby as everyone was piling back in.
I ran into a crazy internet article this evening featuring videos of people from other countries imitating what English sounds like to them. It’s kindof mindblowing. This trippy video especially, because their singing comes off as a weirdly familiar noise but I can’t wrap my head around what they’re saying. Woah, dude.
Players of the Sims games might point out that Simlish is philosophically similar – a made up language meant to sound vaguely familiar to players of any language. Natasha and I have picked up a bit of Simlish vocabulary from listening in to Sims party conversations and playing the Sims soundtracks in our iTunes list.
Greg coerced me to go out for a winter run last night despite all of my usual protests; my running shoes always go in the closet the second the first snowflake hits the ground, and stay there till mid-spring. I’ve been on the treadmill downstairs a few times over the winter, but I was starting to feel the cobwebs creeping in and my joints getting rusty, and figured I ought to give Greg’s crazy outdoor thing a try.
Figuring out what to wear was hard. I put on my brother’s hand-me-down ridiculously orange pants (my “Cheeto” pants) and a blue windbreaker. I need to invest in some real winter running apparel if I’m going to do this again.
I had lots of visions beforehand of wiping out on salt and ice patches, but the streets were pretty clean and safe, and we did a 5K run in mostly well-lit areas. I found I was still in pretty good running shape, and the crisp cold air helped keep us from getting sweaty or overheated without being uncomfortable.
This morning my legs are okay, but my stabilization muscles all through my core and in my knees are feeling like they’ve been really worked hard (just from my paranoid tensing as I ran). Going up the 3 flights of stairs to my desk really took a lot out of me. I’m answering to the name “Limpy McShambler” for the rest of the day.
Go big or go home! I had to go move the car after Natasha parked it outside, and discovered a palette of crisp even snow begging to be walked all over.
Apparently I’m the last person to read Elizabeth Hay’s “Late Nights on Air”, it’s already a #1 Canadian Bestseller and it picked up the 2007 Giller Prize. For the two of you who haven’t read it yet, I offer this glowing review.
Elizabeth Hay’s depiction of life at Yellowknife’s remote CBC radio station is lyrical – her writing is incredibly beautiful, evocative and moving; it’s as close to poetry as prose can get. The characters are easy to slip into and out of, written full of passion and feeling and layers of motivation that make each one a fascinating study. Her writing is so fluid that most of the time I wasn’t even aware I was reading – I felt like I was experiencing their lives.
I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s a total standout in my recent reading pile, heads and above anything I’ve read in years. Completely deserving of the accolades. Natasha’s next on the reading list, but I think I’ll be putting my copy of the book into many people’s hands.
Extra kudos to Elizabeth Hay for being an Ottawa writer – fantastic that such a huge talent comes from our neck of the woods.
Natasha got me a fantastic birthday gift, but there’s a bit of a backstory behind it.
As a cool work perk, every now and then I get tickets to go see the Senators. The last set that came up were to see Philadelphia visiting, and on the way to the stadium in the car I kept going on and on to Greg how excited I was to see Sidney Crosby. Greg was at least polite about it enough not to say anything while I was puzzled, in our seats already, over why Sidney Crosby wasn’t on the player’s roster, and that’s when I realized… Philadelphia is not the same as Pittsburgh. I knew he played for the Penguins, I just experienced temporary insanity and got my cities mixed up.
Anyhow, it all works out in the end, because Natasha, taking pity on my downhearted retelling of my public sports-knowledge humilation, got me tickets to see Pittsburgh in March. Yay! Sidney Crosby actually plays on that team!
Anyone want to guess what this is? I think this will be a short-lived game, but I’m hoping the weird sea-creature-esque tendrils (I wasn’t expecting to see them!) throw some people off. To the first correct guesser goes a photo from the pile I’m putting together for a little show in February. (not of tendrils)
We parked the other night at the grocery store next to a spot that had a bit of trash in it, hopped out of the car (with our re-useable bags!) and went grocery shopping, but came back to a grisly scene. Unbeknown to us there was a full can of orange juice among the litter pile, and another car had rolled over it… BLAM! throwing orange juice up and down the entire driver’s side of my car. It must have been under a lot of pressure when it popped because it left sticky juice marks right from my back fender all the way to my headlight, with bits of pulp left under the door handle for me to discover.
This was all the more annoying, because I’d just come back from a car wash the day before. So I grabbed a bucket and washed the left side of my car by hand. It’s kindof neat to watch the car steam in the cold after you wipe it down with warm water. The lesson learned is that OJ is highly volatile and incredibly sticky. Exercise caution, juice drinkers!
One more flick to add to this flurry of reviews – while we were in Winnipeg last week we caught 2012, still playing (for only $2!) at the cheapy theatres on McGillivray. Thank you Winnipeg, for your outrageously affordable movie houses.
As a connoisseur of disaster flicks, I can say that 2012 is an epic masterpiece boldly spreading destruction far and wide – brilliant. I don’t know if it’ll ever be topped. It took a special kind of absurd disaster movie making genius to come with the completely insane wanton destruction in this film. I applaud you, Roland Emmerich.
The acting and everything were surprisingly not bad, considering the gratuitous ultra-shallow plotline. My only beef is with the very end of the film, which feels tacked on: this family makes it through a hundred impossible escapes by the skin of their teeth only to finally spend 30 minutes trying to close a submarine door… anticlimactic.
Natasha and I took my very awesome god-daughter out to see Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 this afternoon, which was a lot of fun. Sortof disappointed that they didn’t sing more, but the story was cute and made a weird sort of “chipmunks go to highschool” sense even though I never saw the first one.
I have to admit, I was a huge fan of the cartoon when I was a kid, so it was a big thrill to see the Chipettes brought to life. Holy obscure 80’s reference, batman!
You could tell the VFX studio had all the wrinkles ironed out of making CG talking chipmunks – the characters looked great and the lipsynch was right on. Lots of emotional range in their little chipmunk faces, and excellent over-the-top dance routine flourishes that would make Beyonce blush. Amazing cast, too – the Chipettes include Amy Poehler and Anna Farris, who I think are both really funny (although completely wasted in roles that crank their voices up 12 octaves).
No really, I actually liked it. Quit looking at me like that!
Also witnessed a very interesting trend – nearly all the people who had pets evacuated, but people with kids stayed up on balconies. It was like Noah’s ark in the front lobby as everyone was piling back in.
