my personal highlight reel (from today's ultimate game)

1) I jumped up and knocked a disc out of the air before anyone else could jump up and grab it (there were 2 of them on me).

2) I was jogging along somewhat close to an opponent, basically just trying to get out of the way, when I noticed from her face and posture that she was about to catch the disc in about 0.6 seconds. I didn't have time to find the disc in the air, so I just ran right in front of her and managed to have the disc bounce off my side without me ever seeing it. It was a successful, if unusual, defensive move.

3) I caught a point. Apparently the opponents decided that a tired female was not worth covering, and I ran unhindered into the open end zone. And then I caught it.

it is finished

I finished the new Harry Potter book. I can once again prowl the internet at my leisure, unafraid of spoilers. I can once again return to work without fear of my babbling teenagers. Victory is mine! And I will not spoil it for the rest of you, so read on without fear.

I am beginning to realize that I am a master of "willing suspension of disbelief". So many of the little plot twists and turns were things that had occurred to me at some point before they happened, but I never stood back and fully fleshed them out in my mind. I guess I'm not big on predictions because I'm afraid that I'll be right (or wrong), and in the end I just want to experience the story in the sequence that it happens.

random spazzy angry people

Today we had a staff meeting over dinner in a restaurant. As we were chit-chatting and settling down, my boss Jo (female) made a light-hearted comment to a fellow staff member, "Ask and you shall receive...if you behave."

Enter random spazzy angry woman, seated at the table behind us. Let us call her PShAW (It's quite a funny acronym if you don't mind a P in place of an R). She says, "Excuse me, did you just say, 'Ask and you shall receive if you behave'??? I don't know if I can stay in the same restaurant as you!"

Several of us make small comments about how we were just joking. One of my more hot-headed colleagues may have come across slightly antagonistically.

PShAW says, "Excuse me, but do you know the twenty-third psalm? My mother just passed away!"

Hot-headed colleague answers without sarcasm, "I'm sorry for your loss." We settle back into our meeting. PShAW mutters under her breath, "'Ask and you shall receive if you behave'!" *more muttering*

We try to settle back into our meeting. PShAW calls over the waiter. "Excuse me, I would like to change tables please!" As she passes us, she says quite audibly to all, "I don't want to sit near chauvinists."

Throughout the course of our dinner meeting (which is quite long), PShAW leaves the restaurant for some time. She returns and is disgusted to see us still sitting there, and makes more antagonistic mutterings.

Finally, as we leave the restaurant, she is standing outside the door having a smoke. As Jo walks past, she says (audibly again), "There goes the witch. I hope all the grease goes straight to her ass."

And all this because of one rather innocent joking comment. We talked about her later, and we couldn't figure out if she was a Christian who was offended by a perceived mockery of a line of scripture, or if she was antagonistic towards Christianity and didn't want to be anywhere near someone quoting scripture in a public place. Nevermind the fact that her comments were all extremely disjointed and didn't make any sense. Chauvinists?! It was a woman who made the initial comment! And what does the twenty-third psalm have to do with anything? Thankfully we all had the wits to just keep our mouths shut and not quote it back at her.

I figure that either the loss of her mother was so recently painful that she was lashing out, or that she has some sort of personality disorder, or that she was just a normal person with major issues. My vote is with the personality disorder, I don't see how a normal angry person could come up with that crap.

morning brain

Today I will tell you a little tale about how poorly my mind functions within the first few hours of waking up.

I took a shower this morning, and as I was rinsing off my light grey washcloth in the showerhead, I noticed a dozen or more tiny dark dots on it that were not washing off. For some reason, I assumed that they were lice. And then I freaked out because that's really gross. I figured they weren't washing out because they were holding on to the comfy warm washcloth fibres for dear life.

And then I started wondering where on earth they could have come from, and how long Aaron and/or I have had lice, and how there could be so many all of a sudden without us noticing, and if I would have to cut off all my hair to get rid of them. I tried to pick one out of the washcloth, and thought it was odd that it came apart in a fibre-like manner, but then again I had never really been up close and personal with a louse before.

So, I got out of the shower and continued getting ready for the morning, because I didn't see what else I could do about it right then, and I needed to get to work. So I took my dark purple towel and started to dry off. I noticed, for about the 28th time, that this towel had acquired several tiny light-grey pills of fuzz from being washed with our light-grey towels. I wondered why our grey towels never got dark purple pills.

I kept pondering the louse problem. No light dawned.

Finally, when I was almost ready to go, I decided to take another look at the lice. I noticed that in the better light, the lice looked purple. I poked one. I thought it seemed to curled up tighter on the fabric. I picked it out of the washcloth. It trailed a few fibres behind it as if it had been holding on really tightly.

And then I finally figured it out.

Aaron can be very thankful that I had resusted the urge to run out of the shower and wake him up and make him kill the lice. He's even worse than I am in the morning!

reflections of a church bulletin doodler

Today in church I succumbed to the age-old temptation of all church doodlers: I coloured in all the O's on the bulletin (and also the zeroes). Instinctively, I tried to be very precise by colouring 100% of the area inside the O's, and 0% of the area outside of the O's.

Then I caught myself and thought some hippie thoughts along the lines of, "God is a creative and vibrant God! Why should we be limited by the institution of type? We should all be colouring outside the lines and across the lines; we should be thinking outside the box!"

Then I caught myself again and thought, "Nonsense! God created the universe to be quantized at the most minute levels! Empty O, full O, there need not be anything in between, for God's building blocks of the universe are beautiful!"

I continued to colour in the O's, a little less precisely than before, but still generally aiming for inside-the-lines perfection. I'll bet God loves both the organic mess and the quantum precision in the world.

it's geek time again!

In the World of Warcraft, Aaron and I now both have sets of armour that don't look ridiculously mis-matched and actually look decent as a whole for a change. (I once had a butt-ugly assortment of armour that I called my hobo suit.) To celebrate, we had a spontaneous photo shoot. Here are the results! I recommend clicking on the photos so you can see the bigger & better version.


In case you couldn't figure it out, I'm the girl elf with the green braid, and Aaron is the man-elf. The large cat is his pet, named William. I'm being cool and pointing at the camera! (It's a little hard to see at this angle.) And yes, we are standing on a giant mushroom.




Even in computer game photos, some loser will blink. This time it was Aaron.




Aaron flexes to show off how uber he is. William is unimpressed.



I give a girly cheer to show off how uber I am. Aaron is unimpressed.




And finally: our glory shot! Yes, I am being like Storm and making lightning. This time it's my poor little white kitten who is unimpressed. Meow!

bugs and snails and puppydog tails

Today at work we held a big sports day for the kids at our summer day camps. I ran the 100m sprint event, which was nice and straightforward.

The highlight of my day has to be this one kid who was completely fascinated with a bug on his hand, to the point of being oblivious to anything else. He stared at the bug while I was explaining how the heats would go. I had to call him up to the start line three times when it was his heat. The only time he broke eye contact with the bug was during my "on your marks, get set, go!" when he glanced up to see where he was going. He kept his head up for the first few steps, and then got worried that he'd drop the bug. He lightly jogged the rest of the race, eyes glued to that bug in his hands. Even when his group walked back to the start line to grab their stuff after the race, this kid still trailed behind with his bug. How cute!

romance alive and well among minivan owners

This weekend Karl and Terry came to hang out with Aaron and me after attending the bit Mennonite conference in Abbotsford all week. We had fun!

When we were all done with our picnic and frisbee-throwing at the park in Steveston, we returned to our car. Right next to our car was a minivan, complete with a pair of white, upper-middle-class, thirty-something, heterosexual owners. They were leaning against it and sharing a very romantic and intimate kiss.

We slowed down as we approached our car in order to give them some time to finish up. They took all that time and then some. Eventually we just walked right up next to them and got into our car. As we were buckling up, the woman started giggling a bit, presumably embarrassed due to how silly they were being with other people so close by. As we drove away, we caught the husband's eye, and we gave him a big thumbs up! He grinned, and they both laughed, and it was all very cute.

le beater extreme

On Friday, I took the ferry to a work retreat, and somebody was bringing this car on the ferry:


It looked like it had spent a year or two in the bush. Intrigued, I attempted conversation with the car's owner. I would have to deem the conversation a failure.

Me: "Neat car!"
Him: "That's what happens when you let a woman drive it for a few hours."
Me: *looking at my two female companions, trying to figure out who exactly he thought would receive his comment well* "That's not a very nice thing to say."
Him: "Huh? Why not?"
Me: *already walking away* "Because I can drive much better than that, thank you very much."

I wish I could have come up with a much cleverer response, but alas, I don't think that well on my toes. Any suggestions for a response to set my mental replays aright?