A Guy Has To Make a Living

I have been writing a blog now for a number of years and for the most part it has been an interesting way to spend part of my day. Sometimes it is just an onerous task, but for the most part no one gets to read that because I just don’t write. That works for everyone.

I don’t have a large following or what anyone would call a following at all. Just a few curious people that check it out from time to time. They are like people rubber-necking while driving past an accident scene. They have interest, but not the morbid curiosity that would cause them to get police scanners so they wouldn’t miss any of the gory details. My followers would never go out of their way to read this drivel and quite frankly, I don’t blame them.

On the particular blog platform that I use, I am able to change the way my page looks, control who reads it, read any comments that anyone might make and check the statistics of who is reading and where they are. I can see what their web browser is, where it is located and how they got to my blog. I don’t mess with the look of the blog and there are rarely any comments, a few from friends agreeing with my opinion, but not so strangely, few of those. I do get some cryptic comments every now and then and I am convinced that spies use random blog comment boards to pass secret messages to each other. The bulk of the comments seem to be from non English speaking countries. I suspect that reading and commenting on a blog is part of an English as a second language course. The words are correctly spelled and probably every sentence has a verb, noun, adverb and dangling participle needed for correct structure. They just seem odd and really quite meaningless. I like to think that those odd comments are high praise in whatever language they are most comfortable with.

More often than not lately, when I check the site that led some poor, unsuspecting soul to my blog I find that I am at a Slovakian bearing companies web site. Slovaks need bearings too and probably more than most. I wonder just how bored the Slovak employee had to be at work to struggle through reading my blog. I have to assume that English wouldn’t be a first language and probably not even a second one. French or Bulgarian would be much more useful in the Slovak bearing industry.

I get my fair share of comments from European or Russian porn sites. I assume they are porn sites from the pics of naked women, but they could be models in the Russian version of Victoria’s Secret. I don’t read Russian so I am really in the dark. I suppose it could be a catalogue to find an Eastern European woman that is looking for a North American husband. Sorry ladies...I’m taken! Get back to me when and if Louise ever comes to her senses. You would think that I would enjoy getting linked to from porn sites. I’d rather that bored office worker in Bratislava struggle through my site.

Maybe the porn sites and bearing manufacturing places are getting me down. You know, I just had a thought. What if the same guy in Bratislava is running the porn site and teaching ESL on the side at night. Anything is possible…

A guy has to make a living.

Buster Can Be a Real Dick Sometimes

If anyone has read this blog for any amount of time, they would have read about my dog Buster. Buster and I go for walks together where he gets to smell all sorts of interesting things, sometimes if I am not watching he will skarf down something dead and or rotting by the sidewalk. We both manage to get some exercise and I think he likes it when I have to pick up his shit on a corner of a busy intersection. He can be a real disk sometimes.

The rest of his day is spent either sleeping or sitting at the window keeping an eye on the neighbourhood. He missed the guy across the street getting all of his tools stolen from his garage, so I question just what he is looking at. There is this high school girl that he just hates and will bark at until she is well out of sight. He also barks at other dogs, birds (he hates birds), some cars that drive by and the guy that drops off the flyers once a week. Oh, and he barks at the wind, ghosts, hallucinations, airplanes, his reflection in the window, odd shaped clouds, time travellers and me if I appear to have dozed off on the couch. He can be a real dick sometimes.

Last fall I replace the old screen door that had a doggy door with one that actually kept the winter wind out. This impacted on Busters ability to run outside so that he could bark when the urge came upon him. The house was much warmer this year and the heating bill was a trifle less than previous years which made me happy. Buster not so much. However, the little jerk continued to bark and I would have to get up and open the door so that he could bark when he really ...really....really needed to. Thankfully we have a PVR so that I could pause my show no matter what mind numbing TV trash I happened to be watching.

Well, this spring we took a vacation for a couple of weeks and there was a wedding to go to which caused Buster to be pawned off on very nice in-laws with an acreage. He loved it up there, running free like his wolf ancestors had. The wolf ancestors probably didn’t have a bowl of food waiting for them when they finished running and when they slept it probably wasn’t on a king sized mattress. Even so, I am sure he missed me.

While we were away, I happened to see a wooden screen door at Norms Deli in Bowmanville. Great perogies, cabbage rolls and Kielbasa. The door was the kind that I remembered from my childhood in cottage country. It was basically just a frame with a very large screen area to let in the maximum breeze and minimum flies. I looked at the door and thought to myself that it wouldn’t take a lot of skill or materials to make a door like that with a doggy door. I could have fun making something I don’t really need and assuage my dog guilt at the same time.

So, that is what I have been doing for the past couple of days. I brought my lack of skills and left over materials into the garage and began constructing. Long story short, I am pretty much finished with the door.

Hopefully tomorrow will see me begin some other useless project. I just have to install a push bar to keep hands from going thru the screen and a little bit of trim work. It isn’t a work of art, but I feel good that I actually built a door and it works!

Buster isn’t as impressed as I thought he would be. It seems that he enjoyed making me get up and letting him outside. He is reluctantly starting to use the door, but it is under protest..

Buster can be a real dick sometimes.

Dickie Dee…Again

I suppose that when I was a kid if the ice cream guy came by I would run into the house and pester my mom for a popsicle, Buried Treasure, Creamsicle or any of a number of ‘sicle things. I would go to my mom because there was a very slim chance I would get one from her and no chance at all if I went to my dad. In those days, the ice cream man was a teenager peddling a bike with a large cooler on the front filled with his merchandise and probably dry ice to keep things cool. The kid would ring bells as he rode around the neighbourhood to give advance warning to all the kids that it was the time of day we should go and pester our moms.

Flash forward twenty five years or so and I would hear kiddie songs being played over a loudspeaker that heralded the arrival of the Dickie Dee ice cream guy into our neighbourhood. I hated that guy! Times had changed for the ice cream guys, now they drove trucks filled with more product and I imagine they were able to cover more ground, pissing off more parents as they did. I heard that sappy music and saw my kids make a beeline to their mom. It kind of hurt, but they knew that I would never buy anything from one of those guys. I wouldn’t buy anything if I were dying of thirst in a desert.

Sometimes, Louise wasn’t around when the ice cream guy came around and I would tell my kids that I would gladly take them to the corner store and buy them a popsicle. I knew that the store popsicles were ten times less expensive than from the truck. The kids would whine and say but “The popsicles in the truck are shaped like a rocket ship!” I would mutter something like “Sure they do, the prices are out of this world.” Let’s just say that if the kids have any ill feelings they harbour about me, one would be caused by the Dickie Dee guy.

I had the feeling then and I still have the feeling that May to September should be open season on Dickie Dee. I would gladly have shot and had the head mounted on my rec room wall. Maybe that’s just me and I need to see a therapist.

A couple of days ago I was sitting in the backyard enjoying unseasonably warm weather for June 1st when I heard the distant sound of music. The music came closer and a little more distinct as I knew that it would. I don’t have any little ones around any longer so I didn’t break out in a cold sweat. I was just intrigued by the selection. The ice cream guy was playing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Personally, I love Christmas music and will listen to it year round. I am aware that a lot of people feel that it should only be played in the month or two leading up to Christmas. I can’t imagine what those parents of young kids were thinking when they heard the Christmas music being used to entice the kids to buy those rocket shaped popsicles.

I can almost hear the shotgun blasts...