Tonight, if you are one of the 700 or so people who watch CityTV News you might see me and Michelle explain why we waited until the last minute to file our taxes. Uh, doesn't everybody? This year marks the first year in Homie Bear History where I had to pay extra. Which sucks. I had visions of our refunds paying for the garage we want to build this summer. Or at least a 2X4 or 4 for it.
Partly I can blame myself. Not to get too deeply into my finances, I will say I didn't really contribute much to my RRSP, didn't start any home businesses and worst of all, I only gave a miserly 1% of my income to charity. Yeesh. That's gonna change this year, and not for the taxation benefits either.
Anyways, check out Ursula Vernon's Taxman. And if that wasn't cute enough for you, go watch the sleepy sun bear cub video at Zooillogix.

This:


and this:

used to be this:

Chapter 6 (Prologue)

"It was a good thing I saved your life, don't you think? I think so. I think it deserves breakfast in bed." Dart was still relaxing in the cup of the bromeliad when Callie came to rouse him.
Callie rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't be sleeping in if I were you. Your bed is about to become a lake."
"What do you mean?"
It started to rain. It does that fairly often in a rainforest, though to Dart it was something new and surprising. He climbed out of his shelter and gazed up at the sky in wonder, sticking out his long tongue to catch raindrops. He would have been content to do that all day but Callie dragged him into Rana's daytime hideyhole- beneath the roots of a banyan tree. Rana greeted them blearily. He looked tired, but well fed.
"Make yourself comfortable. Plenty of room for a couple of froglets," he said.
Callie was indignant. "I'm not a froglet! And I'm not sure what your definition of 'plenty of room' is, but it seems to be different than mine."
"You're all froglets to me, my dear. But come, we'll just have to get snug. And if we get a little wet, well, a little water never hurt a frog. Or a froglet."
Callie rolled her eyes again. But she and Dart pressed in closer.
Dart spoke up. "What's that smell?"
"It certainly wasn't me," Callie said, "Froglets could never make that much gas. Must've been Grandpa Rana here."
This time it was Rana who rolled his eyes. Dart laughed. What he had actually smelled was the rainforest in all its humid healthy decay. The rain was soaking the leaf litter, contributing to its rot and eventual renewal. He looked outside. Yesterday it had been a splatter of greens, blues, reds and yellows of flower and frog. Today it just seemed kind of grey. But Dart liked it. He liked feeling safe with his friends.
Somewhere in the distance a frog chorped. Rana responded with a surprisingly loud croak of his own. Dart didn't want to be left out so he inflated his little froglet throat sac and let out a mighty . . . squeak. Callie covered her mouth to hide a giggle.
Embarrassed, Dart said, "I guess I'm still too young to join the Frog Chorus, huh?"
"We're all part of the Frog Chorus, Dart," said Rana. "Look at the female frogs, who don't have vocal sacs with which to sing. The Frog Chorus is more than the individual voices and notes. It's more than a song. Did you know that a spider can sense vibrations on her web and know when she's caught prey and when it's just a fallen leaf?"
"No, I never knew that," said Dart." What's a spider web?" But Rana was still talking.
"The Frog Chorus is similar to a spider web in that sense. The voices tell us of the health of the frog community, all our cousins out there in the forest. Individuals come and go, but the cousins persist. And they must be protected. The Frog Chorus can tell us when there is harmony and when there is discord. So as you can see, it is a web, not to entrap, but rather to protect."
"Oh," Dart said. He didn't really understand how the songs and poems he had heard last night could be like spiders at all.
Callie, who had been watching Dart more than listening to Rana, could see that Dart was not exactly enthralled. And who could blame the little guy? Rana was a kindly gentlefrog, a mentor for many who dispensed his wisdom freely, but he had a tendency to ramble. But one thing he was good at was telling stories. A good story was worth a thousand erudite lectures. She cleared her throat and said, "Why don't you tell us a story, Gramps? Something that shows the Frog Chorus in action."
"Hmm, an excellent idea. I know a story that you will like, Dart, it's about two blue poison frogs like yourself."
Dart brightened at this. "Really? What were their names?"
Rana replied, "Roar and Ree. They're friends of mine."
_______________________________________________________________________________

Well, exposition is a necessary evil I guess, at least in this type of story. Hopefully your eyes didn't glaze over like Dart's did. Oh well. I keep having to remind myself that this is just a draft and I can worry about cleaning it up and making it better when (if?) I finish it.
Also, I need to come up with a frogular word for throat sac, because throat sac cracks me up too much and is not the best word ever when you're trying to take it seriously. Any ideas?
Soundtrack: Hmm, how about Lyra, Roger and Billy, track 4 from the Golden Compass soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. It has a nice playful tone and is about three characters too!
Dedicated to my friend and neighbour (relatively speaking) Travis, soon to be a father, who also likes to explain sundry esoteric subjects at great length to any who will listen!
Next Chapter

The trailer for Clone Wars is out, in leaked, pirated grainyvision, but better than nothing.
And here's a pretty good action figure recreation of the duel between Darth Maul and Qui Gon and Obi Wan. Still my favorite lightsaber duel of all the movies. And this one is pretty funny.

I had to disable Haloscan, since they seem to be down the last few days, and they were causing some severe delays in page load times. I hope they come back, but if not I guess I will have to figure out how to enable Blogger's commenting system. I don't really like it, though, since you have to have a google account and do the typey typey funny word thing. Commenting should be easy and not a hassle, and Haloscan always seemed fairly painless.
Gabrielle, Whiskey River, sister-in-law, you all might want to do the same.
Update: gabrielle informs me that she has not had any problems at all. Weird! One difference between us is location- we are not on the same hemisphere. So if you are somewhere other than Canada and haloscan works, let me know by leaving a comment . . . oh right. Hmm.

It makes sense when you consider that Yoda and Miss Piggy are voiced by the same guy.
(Source)

Fanart Friday: Hoth!
Crazy blizzard at the mine today- I kept expecting snowtroopers and tauntauns and probe droids to show up. Since none did, here are some wampas and other Hothian fauna instead! Hopefully JimmyMcWicked's wampa doesn't eat Bloodhound-Omega's tauntaun!



And how about these two takes on the classic scene? First by Dantooine, second by RobbVision.



I'll leave you with a beautiful digital painting of the Battle of Hoth by Wicktone and something a little less literal from my pal Shane Cheffins.



I was trying out Safari the other day (meh) and I noticed that it doesn't give pictures a blue hyperlink border, so if you are a Safari user note that all FF thumbs are clickable to much bigger pics at the artists' site. And for that matter most of the pictures there have a fullsize option to click as well.

So I gave away LGJ, to a guy I work with- my buddy Robin's dad. His dad and my dad are coal miners from way back and us 2nd gen miners gotta take care of the forebears, right? He needed a new car badly and I wanted to sorta keep the Jellybean in the family. He fixed it all up and now it's in great shape again- probably got another 100,000 kms in it. I got 300,000 out of it after buying it from that first generation miner dad of mine who already had 50,000 kms on it. So I got my moneys worth and feel good about just giving it away. Plus I get rides home from the bus stop in it.
Anyways, for the two or three of you who are wondering where the latest chapter of Poison Dart is, I didn't get a chance to type up chapter 6. I wrote it a while ago but then went and rewrote it, and now I gotta make sure chapter 7 will be okay and . . . anyways. Next week. First I have to do some mining.
In the meantime you can check out wen-m's balloon froggie.

You can upload video to Flickr now, so I gave it a try. I had to install the latest version of Flash to see it, though, whereas with YouTube I don't think you need to worry about that sort of thing.
And, since we're on the subject, apparently I am not the only bear who knows some kung fu. Which is good since I actually don't know kung fu. But the kung fu Homie Bear over there on your right was made for me by a hitch-hiker I once gave a lift to, named Max. He was cool.
Have you seen the steampunk and WWII Star Wars custom figures on the Star Wars blog lately? I want some! They can teach you to kung fu!

Fanart Friday: Starbuck
Well, after rewatching nearly the entire series so my wife can get caught up, there's not much point in pretending I am interested in anything but BSG right now. So here's 5 0r 6 Starbucks for ya- go buy a vente latte!
First a pair each from Otis Frampton and Grant Gould, respectively:




And the above two are by LexiGeek and AmericanNinjaX.

With a name like Bear McCreary it comes as no surprise that he is a genius. He does the music for Battlestar Galactica. The haunting theme song- actually both of them since they changed it after Season 1. And then he outdid himself arranging Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. No one tell me why they were singing it way out there! I have my theories and they don't involve secret cylon codesongs, but no spoilers!

Chapter 5 (Prologue)

Every night there was a different monster. Ree didn't even pay attention to them anymore. What could be worse than what she'd already seen?
She was still trapped inside the lizard ribcage. There was hardly any flesh remaining over the skeleton, and it would have been an easy matter to escape except her leg was bound by an unfamiliar yellow slimy substance that emerged from the spinal column of the dead lizard, encasing her ankle. It was slightly elastic so Ree had some mobility, but she couldn't stretch it enough to snap it.
Ree thought she would be eaten. She had expected it. Instead the monsters brought her food- mostly ants, and mostly dead. The creatures came and went in silence. For the most part they left her alone, though occasionally they would scrape her back with various appendages. Claws, mandibles or stingers. Anything that was sharp.
Tonight's monster was a snake. Just a snake. No extra legs or missing eyes. No smell of decay. Ree realized it really was a snake rather than one of her captors. She watched as it sidled up to her prison. In the darkness it was hard to see its color, but there was no mistaking its eyes- they were shining red with reflected light. Its forked tongue flicked at the exposed ribs of the dead lizard, tasting and probing. Ree wondered what would happen if the snake ate her. Maybe the snake would die from her poison, but perhaps not before it pulled her to freedom. Probably she would die too, and even though that might not be much worse than her present situation, Ree wasn't ready to give up hope yet.
The snake had definitely picked up her scent now, or more likely sensed her body heat. It stared at her, absolutely still. Ree didn't know why it bothered getting all tense and wary- there was nothing she could do to stop it from doing whatever it wanted. Just for fun she flicked her tongue out at it and said, "Boo!" The snake jerked back in surprise but only increased its concentration on her. There was some consolation in knowing she would be the snake's last meal. And that whatever bizarre purpose her captors had for her would be foiled.
"Come on then, stinky," she said. The snake reared its head back to strike. Ree didn't close her eyes, though she wanted to. Prepared for what was in store, she was determined to face the snake with dignity. With a final breath, she braced herself. And then she saw the snake fall down, dead. She caught a glimpse of a misshapen clawed form dragging the inert corpse away.
The monster things had saved her life. Ree was pretty sure that wasn't a good thing.

____________________________________________________________________________

Just a short chapter this week. It was almost even shorter because when I opened my Google Documents page I discovered that the last couple of paragraphs had not been saved. Luckily I write a rough draft in longhand before transferring to computer. I call this version that I post the first draft, as I know there will be lots of work to do when I finally finish. Anyways.
This chapter is dedicated to the good people at Amphibians.org, who would never treat a froggy in the manner that Ree has been treated.
The soundtrack is Rusty Cage, either the Soundgarden original or Johnny Cash's amazing cover.
Next Chapter

Look! A new species of frog has been discovered, the first known lungless frog. Cool eh?
And you've probably already heard of the newly discovered flat-faced walking fish, but just in case you haven't.
And though there are no brand new species of cephalopods to tell you about, Mutley James is drawing a ceph-a-day in April. Remember when he did a creature a day? Because he's really cool. I can't figure out livejournal's interface to link to the creatures directly but they're from December 2007.

Well, it won't turn, it won't ramp down, it won't go very fast, but at least it'll go. Sometimes. We were supposed to get a brand new hydraulic shovel but it didn't pan out, and our even older 2100 gave up the ghost a couple of months ago so they decided to resurrect the venerable old 2800 that's been sitting partially dismantled for over a year. Sorta like a 50-year old Battlestar in drydock. That's okay because we're still running a couple of the haultruck equivalent of Viper Mark IIs! The above is an old photo I took about two years ago, back when it was only 28 years old. The other day I was operating it after it had been broken down for a few days, and it seemed to be running good. One of the accountants came up in the cab for the experience. She didn't believe me when I told her my Dad ran this shovel when he was 19.
Don't tell them about this one or they might get some crazy ideas:

You remember that bus crash that many of my coworkers were involved in. The Company for which I work donated 50 grand to the Hinton hospital as a way of saying thanks for helping out. Definitely a classy move, especially since the bus crash was not their fault- the buses are a service the Company provides for us by contracting a bus company. Not so classy was the bus company, which I shall call Boopy, sending letters to the injured passengers informing them they owed Boopy $650 to cover the cost of the ambulance rides they received. Seriously. Seems Boopy was underinsured and expects the people hurt when its bus crashed into a moose to help cover the cost.