There's this brilliant guy named jouste on deviantArt who always draws the most unique and original character designs with these crazily hilarious bios. Finally a game company took notice and hired him to do some work on their new game Shellrazer, which comes out today. Giant turtles vs orcs and stuff!  Very cool.  I bought my copy so now Pallas and I will have something other than zombie-bastruction strategies to discuss at suppertime. Right now I'm working nightshifts so I haven't actually had a chance to try it out.
Here's the link. Only 99 cents!

Michelle saw some Halloween costumes at Costco yesterday and called me to see if she should buy one for Pallas, even though it's not even close to Halloween yet and who knows if she would still care about superheros by then. "Who cares?" I said, "Get her one for today!" Every day is a good day to dress up as Spider-man! Pallas agrees, because she was super excited! "I'll be the best Spider-man ever, I promise!" she told Michelle. So we spent the better part of yesterday fighting bad guys together- I may even have donned my Green Lantern costume from last years's Halloween. Cosplay day at casa homie bear!
Speaking of cosplay and the like, I just watched Comic-con Episode IV- A Fan's Hope. It's a documentary that they filmed in 2010, they year we went. So it was pretty cool, trying to find me or Michelle in the crowd shots (because then we could update our IMDB page) but I didn't see us. I did see lots of the cosplayers I met and photographed though.

So not only did I get piss-tested for that incident with the pickup truck a couple weeks ago (though described just a few posts down) but last night I got written up for it as well. But why? I wish I got to keep a copy of the form they make you read and sign. It said something like this:

On June 26th you had a pickup truck go into reverse and land in a sump, resulting in loss of a light vehicle. Any repeat occurrence will result in discipline.

 Hmm, I wonder how I can remember not to let any more trucks self-slam into reverse and drive into a sump so that I don't get disciplined? Because that seems like something I would forget.... and isn't being written up being disciplined? Anyways, there was a space for me to respond, and I did, thusly:

So, an inanimate object has a mechanical failure and I'm to blame?          That's how you spell                    B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

Also, no berm- bullshit. And, not even my job. Bullshit!

And in the space where I was supposed to sign, I wrote in "I'm not signing this."

Anyways, later I regretted my choice of words a bit. Technically, the Ford was not inanimate. The very fact of it being far too animate was the cause of the whole problem- it was a failure of inanimation. Well, these guys are hardly literary critics- I think they'll get the message.

I asked my union vice-president about filing a grievance, and he said he would be too happy to do so though by the time it got through, the ninety days of my disciplinary term would be up anyways. And there's really no consequences to being on the disciplinary term, so other than my disgruntled sense of injustice, not to mention my 11-year perfect record prior to this, it doesn't really mean anything. But goddamn it they just pissed me off!  Plus I want a new iPhone!

Pallas went downstairs this morning and informed Michelle, "Mommy, I've been thinking, I think I need to go to the library to buy my own Hulk books."
So of course I took her, thinking we would just grab a few of those learn-to-read books, but they didn't have any. So we grabbed Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 1, a Clone Wars Visual Encyclopedia or something, Winnie the Pooh and an animated movie called Hulk vs Thor. All her picks!
On the way home, she asked me about Hulk.
"Hulk's a good guy?"
"Yup!"
"He's not a bad guy?"
"No."
"But sometimes he gets very very angry?"
"Well, yeah."
"But he's a good guy."
"Exactly."
"He's friendly."
"Yup."
"But only when someone tries to bastroy him he fights them."
"Yeah."
"Green Hulk means go, Red Hulk means stop!"

Naia Peanut is in the 3rd percentile for weight. She is quite wee, it's true. But not unhealthily so. We are just a small people, us Homie Bears. Well, my dad's pretty big but he's the anomaly of our family, I think. A couple of years ago, I was edging up to the 200lb mark, and trying mightily to surpass it. Being 140lbs all through high school and university, hitting 200lbs was a big deal to me. Since I was a casual runner and worked out some, I figured the extra weight was all muscle, baby. Michelle tactfully informed me otherwise. So then I started running a little farther, and hitting the weights a little harder, and pretty much overnight I dropped down to my current weight which is in the 173-178 lb range, which includes, if I may be so immodest, some respectably cut muscles. Not bad for 37 years old.

I think I can mostly thank my genetic legacy and body type more than any iron discipline on my part- you should see what I eat at work. And at home...

Anyways I bring it up because I just  read The Cure for Everything! which was written by a local U of A guy, Timothy Caulfield. Pretty good book, just trying to debunk all the myths and misinformation out there about fitness and healthy living. That, and AJ Jacobs' Drop Dead Healthy have been my literary nutrition of the last few days. The messages are pretty similar and pretty simple- the only truly surefire way to lose weight and live healthily is to eat right and get lots of exercise. Easy, but hard.
I do have one question, though. Here's the thing- a guy like me, probably only supposed to eat around 2200-2400 calories a day, give or take, that may even be a little generous. For a completely sedentary person, less. I don't know if I've ever eaten that little. Doing the math a bit, I wonder how it is that I'm not way fatter? I don't run that much, and indeed, Caulfield asserts that, for all the many many benefits of exercise, weight loss just isn't one of them.
One possible answer, appropriate enough given the title of this blog: poo.
I'm not being funny or trying toilet humour, I'm serious. No one ever talks about the calories lost to poo. I guarantee you our bodies are not 100% efficient at sucking every single calorie out of the food we eat. So how much of the devastatingly bad food choices we make every single day wind up getting flushed out of us unabsorbed? Probably varies, and I'm not trying to provide another excuse for terrible eating, but it's gotta be some right? I know- I'll ask google.
Hmm, Google doesn't really know, or at least, I don't really feel like wading through all the internetz garbage such a search turned up.
Best guess: some.

Michelle took Pallas to see Brave today. We'd been wanting to go as a family, but it turns out it's a perfect mother/daughter movie anyways so it all worked out. (My amazing parents generously took both girls for the weekend so Michelle and I could have a beautiful, peaceful 7th anniversary. We saw Prometheus, which was beautiful, though not that peaceful. So yeah. Babysitter exhaustion fair enough!) The best story Michelle told me, though, is that when Pallas saw the giant poster for The Amazing Spider-Man she said, "Spider-Man! Hi! What are YOU doing here?"
Speaking of Spidey, I just read Avenging Spider-Man: My Friends Can Beat Up Your Friends which I thought would be a visual feast, what with Joe Madureira's artwork, but it turned out to be all about the excellent writing of Zeb Wells. Essentially a Marvel Team-Up for the new era, I liked the two stories where he teams up with Hawkeye and Captain America the best. Nice, character-driven stories (with lots of action, sure) that are the types of comic stories that stick with you.