I bake. Especially during the holidays when I bake a lot. Last week, I was out for lunch with some colleagues when this came up.

"I make really awesome cookies."
"You say that, but how can we really know."

Ok, message received. This week, I gave them each an assortment of a dozen cookies (chocolate chip, chocolate salted caramel, peanut butter, peanut butter square). The following email exchange occurred:

From: R
To: B; James
Subject: YOUR COOKIES ARE AWESOME

That is all.

R

---

Seconded. Did not get one step inside the door before my kids had extracted the bag from my hands…

B

---

Remember, old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance. And on that note: B, if you want more cookies, remember that R said his were staying in his office, and being a manager, he has many meetings that take him away from his desk.

Thanks for the compliments. Unabashed praise is a big part of why I bake.

James

---

I HAVE NOW LICKED ALL MY COOKIES. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

R

Remember the mystery postcard from a few months back?



For the record, the descriptive text describes no one that I know. Unless they've been keeping major aspects of their life a big secret (divorce, selling house, moving across the country. I don't know anyone who has ever lived in Minneapolis.

The mystery sender used the same ink, same stamps, and has the same handwriting as the original, which suggests a common origin.

But where's the fun in that?

No, clearly this postcard was meant to go to a different James Cyr - one in another dimension who actually knows this woman. If that's the case, I'm a little worried. What strange adventures could a solo woman traveller have in the Mojave desert? The desert is notorious for being a soft place, and home to... people?... looking to perform experiments or an arcane nature. And of course, the alternate me has not actually heard from this person, since I got the postcard in error.

And could there be a connection to our LTJG Jacob Keyes, recently released from his cryogenic tube? Mojave California is noteworthy for being the location of the Mojave Air and Space Port after all.  Are they connected?  Time will tell.

As for the alternate me - I wish him well, and hope his universe is a little better than my own.  If he can send me a copy of A Day at the United Nations, and season two of Firefly, I'd be in his debt.

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from going to Vancouver for Christmas. I had a standing invitation from garething and stephtopia, so I was fairly certain I wouldn't be imposing. I pulled the trigger about two weeks beforehand, and bought my tickets with my frequent flyer points, so the whole thing only cost me about $125, making this a fairly cheap vacation.

My spy was othelianna, who helped me to make this a surprise visit. I could sleep in her room (she is currently visiting friends and family in her hometown). Also, she would spy for me to ensure they weren't going away to the island for the holiday - I didn't want to be eaten by wolves while trying to get into their home.

Everything was going according to plan, until I got sick immediately before the trip. So on to the GBU

Good

• The look on Gareth's face when he opened the door Christmas morning.
  
• Being able to hang out with him and Steph.
  
• Having a nice place to stay.
  
• Gareth and I went to see Fury Road - Black & Chrome.

Bad

• Having the Christmas Crud. This was a fairly bad cold that started in the throat and moved north. At first it was a bad cough, that slowly moved north into the sinuses. As I write this, it's finally going away, so it was a constant theme of the trip. I was chugging cold meds just to function.
  
• Steph also had the Christmas Crud. We're really hoping we had the same cold, because getting over one cold, only to get another would suck. She was chugging cold meds just to function.
  
• The weather. Sloppy, slippery snow and ice all over Vancouver, and especially bad in upper Port Moody. Drifts higher than Calgary's. It was pretty bad. However, it was excellent weather for comfort food and hot buttered rum.
  
• Jon's car. He came to visit on Boxing Day and (long story short) had to do a controlled crash into a snow bank. Abandoned his car overnight after Gareth and I helped him reposition it into an apartment building's fire-lane, which was about the best we were going to do. No tow truck was going to try to retrieve his vehicle off that steep hill. On the bright side, if the apartment building bitched, no tow truck was going to try to confiscate his vehicle off that steep hill. Happy ending: He stayed the night, and the next morning road conditions had improved enough for him to simply drive away, no damage to the car.

Ugly

• Between illness and the weather, I didn't end up seeing anyone other than Gareth, Steph, and Jon. I certainly didn't want to give any of the Vancouver peeps my cold, and I'm really hoping Gareth hasn't caught it. If he does, I'm blaming Steph.

Meh

• Being sick, I also wasn't up to the orgy I was planning for Rosie's room. Next time though.

I probably should have cancelled the trip, but it was still good to see Gareth and Steph. Gareth suggested that they might do the Holidays in Cowtown in some future year. I think we should all encourage this.

To everyone I missed - you know I love you, I'll be back.

For the past few months, I've been going to Late Night at the Plaza, a live talk/variety show that is, naturally, at the Plaza on Wednesday nights. It's pretty good and a fun evening for your minimum $5 donation.

This week the musical guests were Benevolent Like Quietus. Not my cup of tea, but they seemed talented for their genre.

The hosts did their bits about Canadian news and sports, and they were entertaining. Then it got downright weird in a way I hadn't expected.

• The weatherman was a video short of a guy in a cardboard box.
  
• The comedians were some performance art piece by a pair of guys in morph suits slapping each other with paint and telling "jokes" that were all non-sequiturs.
  
• There were a number of video promos for assorted Storyhive shorts. I've no clue what the end results are going to be (Literally. I was convinced one of them was going to be about oral sex, but reading the synopsis online just now, it seems to be a retro horror).
  
• Last year's Storyhive winner was The Society of Birdwatchers. I was pretty sure this was going to serial killer land, but it was really just birdwatchers who needed to go watch some birds.

I mostly just sat their watching, while mentally going What The Fuck?

It ended on a more upbeat note - They have a competition between two audience members for prizes (brewery tour and Hitmen tickets this week) and this week was really good. They had to get into a homemade hurricane booth with hands covered in honey and grab Monopoly money.

Come to think of it, that was pretty surreal too.

Anyway, it's starting to sound like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I really do think it's a decent 90 minutes and I'm baffled that I can't get others to go with me. Aside from my personality that is. Oh, that and everyone I know has early morning jobs and can't stay out until midnight on a week night. Another benefit of flex time.

But the surreality wasn't over. As I left the theatre, one of the creators spoke to me.

"Thanks for coming"
"You're welcome."
"And thanks for all your support!"

By this point, a combination of oh-god-a-pretty-stranger-is-talking-to-me and an urge to get home to pee was conspiring to make me want to leave, so I basically brushed off the last statement. I mean, didn't the whole audience support it with their donations. I figured she'd say this to everyone, and I was just one of the first ones to the lobby.

"James?"

Well that stopped me in my tracks. I was pretty sure I didn't know this woman. If you know me, you know that these sorts of things always send me into a panic.

"Um. Yes?"
"We were supposed to thank you for all your support during the end acknowledgements."
"Whatever for?"
"You're our biggest supporter on Facebook."
"Good grief, all I've ever done was post a few photos."

Anyway, at this point the combination of social anxiety and full bladder forced me to retreat. I hope I didn't seem too creepy to the young lady. I didn't mean to run out so rudely. Anyway, you should check the show out. By the way, they're playing on my birthday, and I'd kind of like to have a crowd there for that, hint hint. Putting me on the spot won't be appreciated though.

Oh, one last thing, go vote for some stories at Storyhive. The ones the show was promoting (because assorted Late Night creators were proposing them) were:

• I Love You, Johnny.
  
• I Wake Myself Up.
  
• Poolside.

You get five votes, so you can spread them around beyond these three.

When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts. That means this all took place sometime between the ages of eight and ten. Call it 1976.

One of the other kids, a little asshole named Darwin, was showing off a project to the group, an electromagnet that he'd made for a merit badge. It was actually modelled physically after one of those big junk yard cranes you see in the movies. You know, something like this:


It had a lantern battery in the main compartment. The crane part was articulated, and the magnet could go up and down on a little line. It looked like model, was fully functional, was painted up really cool, and there was no way on Earth Darwin had done it by himself. I suspect his dad did it while he "helped" by fetching the occasional beer.

I went away thinking it was deeply cool. And I wanted to make one too. I wasn't too keen on all the model building, I just wanted something functional. I also wanted something a lot stronger.



I figured 120V wall current would make a magnet ten times more powerful than a 12V battery. There was only one problem with my reasoning. At no point had I learned that direct current was different from alternating current. Hell, at nine, I might not have even known that AC vs. DC even existed. It was all just electricity.

The Cub Scout manual had directions for making an electromagnet (basically, wrap wire around a handy chunk of metal and run current through it. Those instructions weren't anywhere near as sophisticated as these ones were. We had a lot of junk around the house, since we were pretty white trash. I needed a metal pole, a way to plug into the wall, and some insulated wire. I solved the last two items by taking an extension cord, cutting off the female end and then splitting it down the middle so that there were two insulated wires running out of the prong, ending in two severed wires. I attached the two ends to each other and wrapped it up with electrical tape. I didn't want to get zapped after all.

So now I have a cord that will do nothing but run current from one prong to the other. I wrapped it around the metal pole from my brother's weightlifting kit. It looked like the bolt in those instructions above, except the thing was a yard long.

I put some nails on the ground to test it, and I plugged it in. Several things happened more or less simultaneously.

• I short out the receptacle with a loud BANG and some smoke.
  
• The fuse in the fusebox trips, plunging the room into mild darkness. It was the afternoon, so there was still light coming in through the windows.
  
• The pipe I was holding became instantly too hot to hold and I dropped it.

I flipped the fuse back and discovered that the wall receptacle had scorching marks on the bottom. The lower port never worked again. The upper one seemed unaffected, but a wise man would have not trusted it. And I had the wisdom of a nine-year old.

I dropped the experiment though, because to seek help would expose my experiment to my dad, who would have likely whipped my ass (it was the 70s). So I never got my electricity merit badge.

It wasn't until years later that I figured out what I did wrong. Working with electricity when I didn't have a fucking clue? Ok, the two things I did wrong, that and the fact that AC and DC were different things.

When my buddy garething got into the electrical apprenticeship program, I asked him to help me with some wiring things in the house, and he swapped out the damaged-for-nearly-thirty-years receptacle, and also saw some other horrifying electricity-related things I did in the house. In return for this favour, he made me promise never to fuck around with wiring ever again.

About once a month, I get together with LA and thekillerb69 (BB) for lunch. Earlier in the week, I sent out an email to them to see if we were still on for lunch. And I decided to quote Macbeth, just for shits and giggles.

Me

When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

I was expecting, at best, someone to quote the next line of the play - "When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won." - I didn't get that. Instead, I got something much better:

BB

We can gather on the 17th plus three,
Should timing work and we're all free.

LA informs us, in a non-rhyming fashion, that she'll be downtown.

BB

Downtown is good, I have a car.
At U & Me, we'll wreck the bar.
If that doesn't work, I have a plan of attack,
We'll feast like kings at Booker's Clam Shack!

JQ

While crabs, not clams are what I savor,
Patio resting is what I favour.
The Bank & Baron is a fine choice I’ve found
Good drink, good food, on the 8th avenue ground.

BB

The food looks good and the prices are right,
shall we meet around noon for our gastric delight?

LA

It was imprecise to say
"Downtown" is my aim
The Beltline is actually where I will be

And downtown at mid-day
The parking's insane
So a Beltline patio seems to be key

Lounge du Laurier
or Avec win acclaim
And Boxwood completes my proposal of three

But wait - why do we debate?
It's BB's day, to choose and pay.

JQ

In the end, it was to Blowfish we went.
High end sushi was BB's money well-spent.
Next month I would be quite the prick,
if I made everyone respond via limerick!

...You'll dream up some decidedly odd ideas.

I was thinking that you could very easily make a Mad Men themed version of Kill Doctor Lucky called Fuck Don Draper.

The object of the game would be to get Don alone somewhere in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices and engage in some skoodilypooping. You'd have cards representing Don's various conquests on the show (of which there have been many) and you'd play them when your token and Don where in the same room, unobserved. The other players would try to thwart it with cock-blocking cards of various numbers.

"Don and I are in the conference room together."
"Sorry, I can see you through the glass partition."
"I'm moving Don to his office and playing the Faye card."
"Nope. I'm cock-blocking you. I guess Pete Campbell knocked on the door."

It's a game sure to offend the whole family, as it should.

Next up, the Mad Men drinking game. The object is to simply match the characters drink-for-drink. Caution: may cause alcohol poisoning.

I don't normally suffer from insomnia. I've heard friends who do suffer from it describe it and it certainly doesn't sound like what I get occasionally, which is "can't fall asleep in a timely fashion". It's very rare for me to be woken up for any great amount of time in the middle of the night. Strange noises will wake me up (I'm hyper-sensitive to it), but once I've identified the noise I generally fall back to sleep.

Maybe it was the vacation, maybe it was sleeping in a strange house, but I went to bed at about midnight and woke up around 3 am. And I couldn't get back to sleep. In my groggy state I decided that, since I was on vacation and didn't need to be anywhere the next day (at least until the evening) to have an adventure. I got up, got dressed and left the house.

Now this was a time of day when even the late-night clubbers and bar habitués have gone to bed. The city was, aside from people who had to be up, deserted. My travels included the Commercial/Broadway area and (after a quick cab ride) downtown Vancouver.

What did I see? A handful of other people walking around late; Lots of Vancouver municipal workers running around maintaining things (changing lightbulbs, fixing signage, emptying trash). Mostly what I saw was empty side streets. Oh, and the inside of a Tim Hortons, where I had a breakfast sandwich.

I did this until dawn, at which point the first commuters where entering downtown. I took that opportunity to take an empty train back out to Commercial and went back to bed. This time I slept until the crack of noon.

One of my wee traditions relating to Quad War is to take highway 36 back to Calgary (it's a lot less aggravating than highway 2) and stop in Killam for ice cream.

The last three times I went there the urinal in the men's room was out of order. It had a black trash bag wrapped around it to keep people from using it. The last time I went through I noticed that the bag was dusty. Hypothesis: It's not that it's coincidentally broken around the same time each year, it's that they never fixed it at all.

So I made a little note to myself and hid it in the urinal. Nothing much, just "James Q was here, August 1st, 2011." I also told a handful of people about it. This was in 2011 and I figured I'd check to see if it was still there in 2012.

I was a little late getting there this year due to having to get a flat tire fixed in Wainwright. Still, we stopped and I went in to check. Here's what I found:



If you can't read the writing, this new note reads:
Blailith & Magda were here
August 6th, 2012
Hi James!
Possibly the most amusing thing that could happen in a men's room without involving a US Senator.

Underneath that note was the remains of my own, earlier, note. It was a little water (not urine, I hope) damaged, but was still legible. Hypothesis proved: They have no interest in fixing the urinal.

Want to add to the shenanigans? Go to the Stop Spot Drive-In in Killam and add your own note. I'll read it next year.

About ten days ago on a Saturday morning LA and I participated in City Chase. Our team name was, of course, Grätüïtöüs Ümläüt. Here's a quick recap with some hints for future City Chases:

We started at Eau Claire plaza and endured a lot of talk from the MC. A coworker and his race partner were honored for winning last year and also for raising about 3K for charity.

The race started when the MC announced that "security guards on Prince's Island have the clue sheets". This triggered a mad dash by all involved. LA and I second-guessed ourselves and went to one of the remoter parts of the island on the assumption that they'd be spread out. Nope, they were all smack dab in the center at the major crossroad of the park.

advice: During the opening announcements, you'll be in a large area that can fit everyone. It will likely be next to a big empty area where they'll hand out the clue sheets. Be at the border between the two if you can.

The clue sheet had puzzles describing each of the Chase Points that we had to go to. There were 37 ("Thirty-seven!") of them IIRC. There were some odd groupings you had to do, and also some "do this or that, but not both" situations where teh chase points were very close to each other (for example, two where a block away from each other on Kensington Road).

We hunkered down and started solving the puzzles, which required middling knowledge of the city and some google-fu. Make sure you have a smart phone. It took us a little over half an hour to have solved the majority of the clues (we only got one wrong, owing to neither of us having ever been to Flames Central) and have a semi-optimal route chosen.

advice: Take a snap-shot of the clue sheet and email it to a helper, then bolt to one of the mandatory check points!

Our route? Start at the University of Calgary and work our way back. So it was onto the train to go to the northwest.

Chase Point 1: At the UofC, near the library tower, we had to do each of the following:

• skip rope simultaneously with your partner.
  
• Run a soccer ball through pylons.
  
• kick the soccer ball to each other through the pylons.
  
• Leapfrog with your partner.
  
• Solve a four-piece puzzle.

The difficult part for me and LA was the difference in our heights, she being wee and me looking like Herman Munster. We managed it though.

Chase Point 2: We ran down to the Volleydome (just south of the University in Athletic Park) and got to play another team in beach volleyball. We lost 5-2, but had fun.

On the way back to the train we stopped at DQ for ice cream treats. Any race where you can have ice cream in the middle is a good race. Sadly, I dropped my cone before I could finish it. Oh well, it was just going to get into my mouth anyway.

Chase Point 3: At the North Hill Fire Station there were two possible chase points. One was for anyone who had raised $50 for charity. We qualified, so we got that. The other point was for doing a bunch of fireman stuff - dragging hoses, carrying a body, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, they only had a few fireman on hand to supervise and one or two sets of equipment. This led to a long line that wasn't really moving. Someone said "40 minute wait", which I can believe, except I think that number was a guesstimate. We skipped that one, even though it looked like a lot of fun.

advice: We should have rushed to this one first and beat the lineup, solving other puzzles along the way (after all, we had to go there anyway to get our charity point). Failing that, raising $150 instead of $50 would have got us the point and allowed us to skip to the head of one lineup! This would have been a good choice for that.

Chase Point 4: We took the train down to Riley Park and found a fitness setup. You had to pick a snack from a list. They then told you how many calories was in that snack (it had things like a Mars bar, doughnut, muffin, bag of chips, etc.). Once you had a calorie value, you and your partner had to burn that many calories. They had a bunch of exercises there that you could do (examples: fifty sit-ups burned 40 calories, thirty 10-pound bicep curls burned 15 calories). This, more than anything else, contributed to my being stiff and sore the next day. I chose the Mars bar, since I know donuts and muffins have no standard sizes and can be as big as you like, but a Mars bar is constant. We had to burn about 350 calories.

Woof!

Chase Point 5: We headed south to Kensington road and had a choice of two chase points (we could only do one of them though). We went to Pages book store (the one beside the Plaza theatre) and were instructed to go to the upper level and find some "visual poetry that is neither part of a book or on a bookshelf" and identify the creator. A lot of second-guessing and we finally found artwork on one of the windows made up of a maelstrom of letters.

Chase Point 6: At the Kensington Running Room we had to find five differences between two mannequins, the mannequins being decked out in an assortment of merchandise. LA found four of the differences, despite my having the brilliant plan of taking pictures of one of the mannequins and using it to compare to the other (they weren't beside each other in the store).

We had now run through most of the convenient northwest chase points.

LA: Why don't we take the loser-cruiser to Inglewood?
Me: What's the loser-cruiser?
LA: The Bowness-to-Forest-Lawn bus.
Me: Of course!

Chase Point 7: Once in Inglewood we went to 4 Cats art store to do some finger-painting. We had to use three methods of getting paint onto a canvas and "recreate" some pollock-style art on the wall. One of the methods had to include popping a water balloon with paint in it (not much paint, thank Groo).

Now we had a dilemma, we could go to the nearby chase point at Fair's Fair Books, but that would mean missing the bus back into downtown. Or we could catch the bus and hit a chase point in downtown on the way down to 17th avenue. The bus was coming in two minutes, so we opted to skip Fair's Fair.

rant: Why does the city only run the #1 bus (the "loser-cruiser" referenced above) every 30 minutes on Saturday? Every time we were on it it was standing-room only - hell it was "move to the back of the bus so others can get on" crowded. That's not even including the handful of race participants. This bus is clearly being used and used well - crank up the frequency Calgary Transit!

We got downtown and discovered that what we thought was a chase point wasn't. We had got the clue wrong (which hurts more for this pair of geeks). We headed down to Melrose Cafe with less than an hour left in the race. Maybe we could finish if the chase point was a quick one. It wasn't.

Chase Point 8: At Melrose Cafe, the lower level was taken up by a martial arts school. What school you might ask? Ninjas! However, before we got to the ninjas, we had to cool our heels for a half hour in line. A line that went right by Melrose's bar. Any race where you can have a pint of ale in the middle is a good race.

We had to go through a bunch of ninja exercises to qualify for the point. Having read comics and watched movies throughout the 80's I had a bad opinion of ninjas (specifically the Westerners who learned it) as pretentious goofballs. Our guide did a lot to lift that bad opinion though. It seems like a fairly egalitarian martial art, and that pleases the socialist in me. We had to run through some obstacles, demonstrate our ability to skulk, sneak, dodge sword thrusts and missiles and finally we got to throw some shurikens! This was probably my favorite of the chase points that I completed.

This does suggest that the local SCA could get involved - volunteer to do a checkpoint where people put on armour and tabards and did quick one-off combat with Nerf weapons. Maybe not though - the ninja stuff was decidedly non-contact. Oh well.

We now had ten minutes left to get back downtown and check in before the 4pm deadline. We weren't going to be getting those last two chase points. We were a few minutes late, but were told before the race that they would have the finish line open until 4:15. This turns out to be incorrect, they finished at 4 on the nose and we missed check in, so there is no record of our team finishing.

All the race participants got treated to a free drink at Flames Central. Sadly that venue isn't quite large enough for everyone; neither LA or I were able to get seats as we were amongst the last people to get there.

City Chase was a blast and I recommend it to everyone. Vancouver peep: It's in your neighborhood on August 25th!