What is your work ethic? Are you just passing time to get a check or are you proud of your work? The guy painting the lines here wasn’t too interested in good workmanship.
It can be hard to find the meaning in some tasks, but that doesn’t mean you should pass off shoddy product. It reflects on you as a person.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the customers, or if you can’t stand the boss. In the long run, if you don’t take pride in your own actions, you have nothing. It should be important to you to do a good job. It isn’t to impress anyone. It isn’t to get a raise. It isn’t to win a contest, or to keep out of trouble. Of corse, good work might get you some of things too.
It’s to give yourself a sense of self-worth. If you know that what you do is done to the best of your ability, then no matter what criticism you receive you can rest assured that you are okay. They are the ones with the problem. And someday, you won’t return to the scene of your work and notice that you did a really crappy job. I wonder if this guy had to go back and fix his painting?
This is must be the refrigerator repair man club. I always wondered how guys like this can stand the breeze blowing into unmentionable places. And I know showing a little cleavage can be sexy, but there’s limits!
Unfortunately, drinking too many beer can result in a body too flabby to stay undercover.
Some poor lady probably has to look at the crack of Don every morning. Someone whack me in the peepee if I ever show crack in public.
I heard another interesting news story today. Recently in Calgary, a transit driver kicked a woman off his bus because her perfume was too strong. The driver said that the perfume "interferes with his ability to focus and operate the bus." Let us take this one step further shall we.
If I were a bus driver the following people/groups of people would interfere with my focus:
1)Really hot females wearing revealing clothing.
2)Really hot males wearing revealing clothing (not because I’m attracted to them, because they’d made me insane with jealousy.
3)Couples engaging in public displays of affection (especially if they also fit into category #1).
4)Guys who wear strong cologne (and it does happen).
5)Anyone who tries to talk to or make eye contact with me.
6)Emo kids.
7)Anyone who doesn’t like Blue Beaver Beer.
When you exclude everyone on that list it might be just Tim and me on the bus. But then we could go wherever we want and not have to share our Blue Beaver.
One other thing occurs to me they should invent a new perfume called "Eau de Castor Bleu".
And speaking of the prairies, Tim and I were B.S.ing having a philosophical discussion over a couple of Blue Beavers the other day, and he suggested that I share some of the adventures I’ve had in foreign places with our readers. So that’s what I’m going to do.
The past summer I spent three months hiking through the badlands of the Great Hot Brown South; also known as the sovereign nation of Medicine Hat. The first thing I discovered was that you need to wear a sunscreen with an S.P.F. of at least 200, otherwise your skin will literally start to bake like a chicken. Now most people think that all of the land around Medicine Hat is as flat as Saskatchewan. This is not entirely accurate. In some places there are large valleys, which if you think about is a spot where the land is flatter. While it is true that there are no trees for miles around, in one place I saw two shrubberies. One was slightly higher than the other, so it was a two level effect with a little path running down the middle. I saw a few herds of cattle out there, but these poor beasts were incredibly scrawny, due to the fact that there is no grass for them to eat. There is no grass because it doesn’t grow very well in desert sands.
I didn’t see a lot of wildlife apart from antelope which is the one thing that seems to thrive down there. But there was one or two mangy coyotes around and someone told me that there were Burrowing Owls in the area. I’m not sure how that could be seeing as there are no tree for them to build their nests in. Of course no life is wilder than pipe-liner life, which I also saw a lot of ( but that’s a different post for a different day).
The independent nation that is the city of Medicine Hat has a very interesting history regarding how they came to secede from Alberta. I met a young lady by the name of Candace who works in one of the restaurants and is also a student there. She said she could tell me all about it. We started talking and we also started drinking Blue Beaver and then we started doing more drinking than talking and then we drank some more. The next morning I woke up with no recollection of what happened the night before. I also didn’t know how there came to be a Newfie pipe-liner sleeping in my tent. And I never found out the history of Medicine Hat.
So if you ever go down there, this is my advice wear something that will effectively block the suns rays, like an air conditioned building; and stay away from pipe-liners especially the grader operators and hoe-hands.
So if this isn’t one of the scariest things I have ever seen….
Clowns scare me. I have always said, "Clowns are evil, monkeys are evil and Nazis are evil. If the Antichrist existed, he would be a Nazi clown with a pet monkey." If you don’t believe me about the monkey part, just watch The Family Guy someday.
I bet the creators of these pots just didn’t think it through. They never imagined a bunch of schoolchildren innocently planting cactii in the trousers of evil clowns. They never imagined these evil clowns then standing around together playing pocket pool.
Have you ever caught yourself going about your business, doing something the way it has always been done, and wonder if it is the right way? "That’s just the way things are," some would say. "We must have been doing it that way all these years for a reason."
Saskboy has put out a challenge to all of us to do some thinking. "What sort of views have the rest of you inherited from your area that are unproductive?"
Deep stuff. This might take at least two beer to get started on.
Here’s my first one, from Alberta, Canada. We joke about the alcohol on this site, but it is a real problem for some people and it isn’t funny. We need more action to help those with drinking problems. We need to recognize as a society that drinking and driving, drinking and working, and especially drinking while looking after your kids is wrong. Teaching kids to parent drunk, or do other things drunk, perpetuates the problem. If you have kids, do your best to be responsible.
We need to pull the plank out of our own eye before we call the kettle black. If we are worrying about the environment, we need to take actions in our own lives as well as yell at the governments and businesses. Don’t replace your vehicle every year needlessly, recycle, reduce your power bill, and then you have some ground to stand on.
We need to clean up this spousal abuse going on in Alberta. So much of it wouldn’t be happening unless deep down people didn’t think it was okay. There should be zero tolerance. And that goes for women abusing men,too. I know this is a big joke to tough Alberta men. And I have met a few guys who have had the crap kicked out of them by the significant other. Not much seems to be done about these women. Why? The guy is too ashamed to report it, and he won’t fight back against a girl.
We need to carpool or something. I realize we all live out in the sticks, and you have to get in to civilization. So organize it to go as a group. Try to save up your errands and go in once instead of three times a week. Put some thought into it.
These are some of the things that have been bugging me about my area. Your turn. What’s going on in your corner of the world?
I heard on the news today that there is a group of about twenty Alberta farmers and businessmen, lead by Glen Metzler, who are looking into the feasibility of growing poppies here in Canada. Apparently, the south-western prairies are an ideal climate for the plant. The government is observing Australia, where the poppy farmers are making up to seven times as much money as wheat farmers. The reason the poppies are so lucrative is because the opium derived from them is widely used in painkillers such as morphine. Each year Canada imports $100 million worth of refined painkillers from places like Australia and France. Metzler and his group feel this would be a huge opportunity for Canada. Naturally, the government is convinced that more poppies will only lead to more heroin and as a result will not grant any licenses to grow the flowers.
However there are a couple of things that no one seems to be taking into account. On the plus side, when November rolls around, maybe we could have fresh, real poppies to pin on our lapels instead of those cheap plastic ones. On the negative side though, if we have vast fields of poppies in the country they will have to be very carefully maintained. I read in some book (and I believe that it was "inspired by actual events") that if people breathe in poppy dust it will cause them to fall asleep. So how can you operate machinery or drive a vehicle when you’re on poppies.
To sum up how the government thinks: medicinal marijuana – good; medicinal opium – bad.
I bet someone feels like a real ass in this picture, and it probably isn’t the poor, frightened donkey. Overloading is a problem in every culture, it seems. And in either case, how do you get your ass safely down from there?Someone call the fire department. " Quick, get down here! I need you to high angle rescue my ass!" After the laughing quit, they might check it out.
I’ve been staying at Peace River, Alberta for a couple weeks now. One of the locals had mentioned an authentic Mexican cafe, but never gave me the name of the place or a location. I kind of kept it in mind for a night when I needed something to do.
Last night, I sought the joint out. Su Casa Cafe is located in an industrial looking building, kind of dingy looking. It appears small from outside. I was kind of apprehensive when I saw the number of vehicles in front. With this many cars parked up and down the street, how could such a small place have enough seating?
I went in and found the place bigger than anticipated. The decorating and atmosphere instantly made me like the place. Knick knacks, wall hangings and lighting worked well together to make the cafe very inviting. Spanish music was playing in the background. I was surprised to see reservation tags on almost all the empty tables. In small towns in Alberta, reservations at a cafe are almost unheard of. Obviously, this place had something special about it.
There was one open table, so I was in luck. I found out that Su Casa didn’t carry Blue Beaver Beer. I was forced to make do with a Corona with lime.
In a few minutes, the entire place filled up as the reservation holders arrived.
I ordered an exotic sounding dish off the menu. I won’t pretend to know much about Mexican food. If it isn’t served at Taco Time or Taco Bell, I don’t know what it is. What arrived was awesome. Two bundles of spicy shredded beef, rolled in crispy tortillas and topped with homemade salsa, guacamole and sour cream. There were refried beans and mexican rice on the side. It was a great tasting meal, and the server was very good at her job.
All in all, this cafe will stick in my mind. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I will ever return to Peace River and I may never get a chance to eat there again.
I have been noticing an ever increasing problem. There is an insidious, yet subtle disease that is slowly taking over our society. It started on the internet but it is starting to spread to the "outside world". On the surface it seems to be harmless, perhaps even amusing but that’s just a clever disguise. What it’s doing is slowly eroding our intelligence and making us increasingly lazy and worse unimaginative. I am speaking of course of the emoticon.
You’ve all seen them, and there are extremely few, if any, of us left who do not use them every day. I dug deep and spent a lot of time and energy trying to discover where these things came from. I Googled the subject and I learned the following from the first page that I read.
The very first emoticon was used by a guy called Kevin MacKenzie in 1979. -) was supposed to mean, "tongue in cheek". Fortunately, it did not catch on at that time. Unfortunately, between 1981 and mid-1982 they reappeared and just increased in popularity every year since.
There was a CMU bulletin board system where many people could chat and have discussions. Apparently, some people on this board didn’t understand subtle humour which led to countless flames and meaningless discussions. So a number of these people started to wonder if they could use some combination of punctuation marks to signify what was and wasn’t a joke. If you want to see how it evolved you can read about it here. Long story short though, a guy by the name of Scott Fahlman came up with 
to show that something was funny and 
to show that something wasn’t. And now today we thousands of different variations of these EMOTional ICONS to signify any imaginable state of mind that you could possibly be experiencing.
Now, I’m not certain exactly how "LOL" and all of it’s endless variations came into being, but I can only surmise that there are people out there who are unable to read the traditional emoticon so they had to invent something more obvious.
Alas, I don’t think that this is a problem that will go away any time soon. Therefore, I will have to apply the old adage, "If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em." During my research I came across this: ROTFC, PGH. It means, Rolling On The Floor Choking, Please Get Help. I think I am going to try to use that as often as I can. Also I have invented this :-0->B It means that I am opening my mouth and reaching out for a Blue Beaver Beer. So, when you’re feeling blue :-0->B
