I wish that damn groundhog would actually tell us when spring will be sprung. No more games with shadows. I know he’s not stupid: he’s not really afraid of his shadow. Based on my research, I also happen to know he can speak the Queen’s English. So Willy needs to stop all this crap and come clean! Oh God oh God oh God for the love of mud pies, when will spring be here?
You see, I have some stuff to do that doesn’t involve snow, and by stuff I mean life. There’s a great many people who have put off doing things because they can’t be bothered to expend the effort it would require in winter.
There’s a man north of here who has a body to bury: man gave the goosy eye so he done had to be shot. Problem is the ground has been frozen so he’s had to keep him in the freezer. Well, where’s he gonna put his pizza pops in the meantime? Damnit!
You know how it is: you start a new job with all this breathless excitement and anxiety-ridden exuberance and you think it’s going to change your life.
Well, it did change my life: I was certain when the Grand Master of the Lodge informed me that I would be the Illuminati’s newest recruit that I would be able to learn all I needed to know about the Gregorian Calendar. But that myriad geocentric dating system was too baffling for me to come to terms with and the black cabal was less than impressed that I kept confusing Ra with Aunbis. This all added up to me getting the boot in 2009, and since then I’ve felt a little empty.
Road trips are like a cult TV show. You hear about it from one of your friends, and it doesn’t sound like anything you’d be interested in: you might even wish they’d shut up about it. You might think, based on what you know about road trips, that there’s a group of people that can’t stand where they are and need to get the hell out of Dodge as soon and as often as they can.
I don’t think that’s it. This seems more likely to be the case of the frequent traveler who relies on airplanes to take them to far off destinations or the obsessed traveler who needs to find themselves by backpacking through [insert continent here].
In Canada we have a fifth season, sort of an umbrella over three seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall). Coined Patio Season (probably by a beer company), it begins partway through Spring or if the Hosers are lucky, at the tail end of Winter. Many years it opens in fits and starts as bar and restaurant owners drag their chairs and tables toward their railed-in curb only to have to cover them when chill winds and snows descend for brief periods in between sunny days.
You’ll know that patio season has begun because you’ll see a typical Canadian wearing a tee-shirt and possibly shorts and sandals in weather most peoples of the world would consider wearing a winter coat for. We’ll still wear the toque though, because we’re not stupid: we know most body-heat escapes through the head.
Are you still confused as to what Patio Season is? Well, it’s that time of year that Canadians bellow “Damn the wind, the chills, the freezing rain, the snow, the slush, the ice and the umpteen other words we’ve adapted to vilify winter! It’s time to drink beer outside!â€Â That’s all Canadians want to do. We want to drink beer outside. That’s right: “Peace, Order, Good Government and beer outside!â€
When you choose a profession (or a profession chooses you) there’s generally a straightforward path to follow. This is true in principal and strictly true to some professions more than others. This may also be decreasingly true over the last century as more and more skills are considered transferable and knowledge is regarded as more fluid.
But one profession that has shown little change in how the layman can enter it is writing: especially fiction writing. It seems to be purposely mired in the same archaic fog-of-war system that it was two centuries past. When you read books (or blogs) on how to get published, the frequency of contradictory information increases with each source. The only thing that remains consistent is the query letter: beyond that, it’s a craps-shoot where, even if you knew where you threw the dice, you can’t read them because a) it’s too dark and b) they don’t have dots or numbers, but alien symbols instead. Sometimes they aren’t even dice after throwing them: they could turn into doves and fly away.