I grabbed a man’s sack yesterday evening.

It wasn’t intentional though - I was playing soccer, and it just sorta happened. 

I play in a friendly game most Wednesday evenings after work in the teeny tiny gym they have here in the hospital.  We play without goalies, and with hockey nets.  So I was a bit concerned when a guy on the other team was on the floor in front of my net, with the ball pinned between his legs, and him about to score.

So I did the most logical thing - if I couldn’t move the ball out from his legs, I’d move him.  He was a small guy, so it didn’t look too tough to do.

Unfortunately, he had other ideas.  I grabbed his legs and pushed on his shoulder to move him to the side, but that’s when the squirming started. 

Before I knew it, it…. had happened.

The strange thing is, he didn’t seem to notice it, or if he did, he wasn’t showing it.  But to me, the damage was done.

One man’s hand has no business on another man’s privates, unless if course they’re of the male variety that pushes just past the limit of metrosexual.  Actually, even at metro you’re still kinda borderline.

And it just had to be my left hand too… :D

Corruption of Canadian youths is a terrible thing.

Two young’uns from a high school in B.C. have been spending time with a co-worker friend of mine this week, learning stuff about molecular biology and, more importantly, exactly how a lab actually gets anything done with all the slacking off, tea breaks, coffee breaks, lunch breaks (the record stand as 2 and a half hours long), early finishing times (which fit in well with the aforementioned lunch break), abnormally frequent birthday celebrations and sporadic hockey games.

I don’t mean to be negative; I’ve just worked here for a while.

After a few days, one of the young’uns needed my friend/their mentor to fill in an evaluation in a booklet, - and get this - it was stamped with the seal of approval by none other than the Duke of Edinburgh.  Apparently - and I kid you not - if you fill up the entire thing (the young’un has been going since her early teens), you get to meet Prince Phillip the next time he visits Canada.  The young’un actually told us that she was going to meet Prince William (or the other one - you know, the delinquent!), but everybody knows that the Duke of Edinburgh is that incestual playboy, Phil.

So my friend is filling the book out for the young’un, and another co-worker (from France) is there as well, chatting up a storm with an accent that screams escargots.  Not that the opposite isn’t true for me in French, but hey, it’s still funny.  Some photos of the last office xmas party find their way onto the table and into the conversation, and my friend remarks that she’s not photogenic - to which the French man replies: That’s because you’ve never posed for me!

My interest is piqued.  I pose my question.  He rushes out of the room, and comes back with what I like to call his pornfolio, a collection of large photographs he has taken.  They were actually pretty good, mostly of nude or semi-nude women.  I leafed through the books, while the young’uns looked on in horror.

The pictures were tasteful, but all that wholesomeness was thrown out the window when another co-worker spilled a drop of water onto one of the pictures.  Aghast, the artist got some paper towels and started vigorously rubbing the picture to soak up all the moisture.  What was unsettling about all this was the fact that the picture he was rubbing was a close-up of a naked breast.  Remember… a circular finger motion works wonders.

Scarred for life, the teenagers ran screaming from the room.

I never thought I’d see the day where I named one of my parties by something that summons to mind the cheesy antics of Fraternities like alpha alpha alpha (Revenge of the Nerds was a fine and defining movie of our generation, by the way), but I can at least be thankful that I didn’t come up with the name myself.  I just follow.  Baaa.

Anyways, the party on Sat (yes, I’m still behind…) was chill, you know?  Relaxing, fun, plenty of beer being stolen, etc.  We filled the tub with snow, as it has become our tradition to do, and the beer was nice and crispy.  The apt was also re-arranged in a highly socialble fashion, measured by the angles of the seats relative to each other and the pouffiness factor of the cushions.  An entire dining room table also managed to make an appearance somewhere to the southeast of the flat, and it was good.  Good for Three-man (google it!) anyways. (8th picture below, involving the dart board… sigh)

And there are some pix!
 

It was great to see a bunch o’ peeps I haven’t seen in a while, so in my book it was a definite success!  Cheers, mates!

You’re gonna need a visual aid on this one.

Ideally, this post woulda been up on Friday, but hey, I’m a busy, popular, party-loving guy.  There’s just so little (or long, har har ugh) of me to go around!

Thursday was the actual St-Patrick’s day, as opposed to the 181st-year-in-a-row Parade love-in they had last Sunday.  Now, being Montrealers, this means that we must: a) Do our duty and go out for a beer, and b) Spend about half the night complaining about how freaking big the lines are.  I now present to you my unedited itinerary from Thursday night.  Please refer to the above gigantic purply numbers for guidance.

I get a lift with my friend downtown.  We resign ourselves to the fact that even though we were supposed to meet some of my friends in front of McKibbin’s (2) 10 minutes ago, it’ll take another quarter of an hour to find a good spot.  Lo and behold, the mother (1) of all parking spots vacates the moment we inch in front of the joint.  We do a little dance in the car (but not too big a dance, because we gots our reps to maintain) and shift that ride into gear P, dawg.

(2) ain’t looking so hot.  We can tell by the 20 meter-long lineup outside, and the obvious displeasure on the squished faces of the patrons that we see through the windows on the inside.  Disillusioned, but unsurprised, we decide to take a stroll down Bishop while we wait for the other peeps to arrive at McKibbin’s.

Further south, we spot O’Reagans (3).  Not only are we in search of the ultimate goal of the night - a good drink - but a phone.  We glance inside.  The place seems decently hoppin’.  We enter.

I am ignorant of the exact reasons why on earth we decided to not only keep going forward into the place, but to actually think that it was worth it to find a phone that may or may not be at the back of the joint, but I’m sure they seemed very reasonable at the time.  The bar. was. PACKED.  Sardine-city.  Fire-Hazard Deathtrap.  Pickpocket heaven.  Up-close-and-personal with the cougars.  To begin with, the bar was basically just a long rectangle with the short end facing the street.  Add about 300 people (yes, honestly), some tables in the corridors, and a band towards the middle, and you get friendly with a lot of folk.  We spent 15 minutes just worming our way through to the back to get to a phone.  The band deafens my left ear as I pass them by.

We get to the back, I spot the bathrooms, but of course, no phones to speak of.  Bah!  Back from whence we came, let me out of here!  We start our trek once again.  At about a distance of 12 minutes later, a girl whom I’m trying to squeeze by starts to cheer enthusiastically and look in my general direction.  She seemed to be saying something, but with my remaining right ear recently deafened as well on the way back, I’m having difficulty comprehending.  She raises her hand up to the sky.  Understanding dawns on me slowly.  I mimic the gesture, and I’m rewarded by the curious sensation of my palm being slapped.  She shouts something else to me, I happily respond to her in kind, and I’m on my way to the door.

Checking for any traces of being violated when we get outside, we scream in frustration when we spot the payphone (4) across the street.  My buddy makes a call, and I go back to good old (2), because time sure flies when you’re making your way through a pratically-static group of people.

My friends (5) are in line.  I look,  and  it seems the line hasn’t moved at all since we first left.  I dispense this valuable information on my friends.  No matter, they’ll stay anyways and see what happens.  Meanwhile, me and my buddy head down to Crescent (6) to see if we can meet our friend at Mad Hatter’s.  We turn the corner and laugh a little, because the lines for all the bars on this street are easily longer than our earlier numbers (2) and (5).  We happen to run into two more people from the same group I had just left, and we all make our way back to (2/5/7).  My friends have gotten in by slipping the bouncer a $20, with the promise to let the rest of us in when we get there.  Too bad there was a miscount.  The two girls we had met up with go in (naturally), and we take off to try and find someone else my buddy knows who’s at Fouf’s (8).  We jump into our ride, pause for a moment to savor the fantastic parking spot (1) once again, and head for St. Catherine street east.

We start laughing again.  Driving by Foufs, not only can we see a line that’s easily the biggest one of the night so far, but we can see TWO OF THEM.  One going out in each direction of the sidewalk.  Which means that not only do people actively consider Foufs as a prime destination on St. Patrick’s day, but Goths apparently have deep Irish lineages.  We head on.

The evening ruined, with us ranting about the futility of even going out for a drink on Paddy’s day, we pass a couple of hookers on the corner of St-Elizabeth and St-Catherine.  Revolted at the sheer raunchiness, we turn our heads in the opposite direction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the pot-o’-gold at the end of the rainbow.

The immensely-charming if not horribly-situated St-Elizabeth’s pub (10), renowned for it’s rear courtyard completely surrounded by three adjoining brick buildings (open even in the winter!) and for the homeless shelter that sits just next door, beckoned us from afar.  We happily relented.

I’ll just note here that for the second time of the night, luck smiled upon us - the parking spot was prime (9)!

We strolled around the inside.  Full of people, but not packed, with no line.  We check the open-in-winter terrace, and feel the heat from the towering heat-radiating fire-lamps they’ve got scattered around.  But the third time’s the charm luck of the night was the parking spot we managed to grab for ourselves - a fantastic two-chair table across from the fireplace and the couches.

We had finally defeated St. Patrick’s day.  And the beer, oh yes, the beer was good.

Sorry about the second post in a row with the word ‘crap’ in it, but I felt it was appropriate given the grave set of circumstances that seem to hover around my family and cars.  Actually, that’s not totally true, I should rephrase: around my sister and cars.

And before we begin, know that everyone is quite safe and my sweet sister shares none of the blame.

My sis was out on the town come Sunday night, wining and dining at a Moroccan restaurant downtown.  Sunday also happened to be St. Patrick’s day, and it was fair game to see o’plenty of people revelling about in their drunken o’stupor.  What was less common, thankfully, were the drivers who were also partaking in the night’s festivities, all by their lonesome, moving about in their cars-cum-deathtraps.

My family gets the call:  "Euh, yes, can I speak to (sister) please?"
Mom: "She’s not here, can I ask who’s calling?"
Voice: "Yes, this is Constable,.. Mr. Constable.  Someone’s hit (sister)’s car."

My mom, not quite thinking straight, forgot the little fact that the guy had asked for my sister straight off the bat, and starts to panic thinking something had happened to her.

It turns out that Mr. Constable and his friends had been chasing a drunk driver down Stanley street, who, in an amazing display of brutal physics, managed to hit my sister’s parked car on the side of the street hard enough in the rear side to not only smash the thing to smithereens, but to cause it to spin a complete 180 degrees so the car was now facing up the hill instead of down, as it so innocently started out.

My sister’s OK, the drunk menace was stopped cold by the armored corolla tank my sister liked to call her ‘baby’, and no one else was hurt by the stupid, stupid man that was drinking and driving.

Why this is noteworthy (other than in on itself) is because it’s the second time such a event occurs.  My sister has a tendency to talk in the car on her phone after she parks, and she could have easily been in there when it happened.  In a very similar set of circumstances, my sis had just dropped me off at a friend’s house, and he and I were on our way to a Just For Laughs show that evening, when we happened upon (we were walking to the bus) the scene of my sister’s car positioned at a sick angle from the sidewalk, the passenger door completely smashed in, just where I was sitting a lonely few minutes ago.  I’m describing the scene calmly now, but I can assure you I was running as fast as I could and looking for my sister as soon as I recognized the car.  She was OK that time too, and the crazy dude who was speeding was also fine, if you’re one of those bleeding hearts that empathizes with every Jake or Jane in a story.  Anyways, it was another close brush with disaster.

And let me tell you, comedy (even the JFL kind) ain’t funny when you ain’t in the freaking mood.

The first car was scrapped after the accident, and since the damage is much more extensive this time, I imagine the same will happen to this one.

Which brings me full circle:  cars are crap.  Is it a wonder I still don’t have my license?