Last night we had some fine dining (Michelle's birthday is coming up dontchaknow) and then we took in some fine roller derbying.

Still no comments. The problem is, I wrote my own template with CSS (I learned just enough to achieve what I wanted), and then Blogger changed how they did things and now I dunno how to make them mesh. Blogging without comments is no fun! It's like farting in private, no one else can enjoy it.
So here's some pictures from work yesterday.

I remember these stickers!



Get your own here.

On the bus today someone was telling me about The Time Traveller's Wife, about how Eric Bana keeps getting yanked back in time against his will. Wait- are you sure you're not thinking about Star Trek? Poor Eric Bana. Typecast as the guy who always gets thrown back in time against his will.

For Steve:

I wish Megan would buy Steve some more Star Wars guys
More aliens and clones and Siths and Jedis
Then when he finally has more figures than me
I can tell Michelle that I need more, can't you see?

So get on that Megan, if you would!
Sorry it took so long to get to it, night shift was a hard one this week. Last night especially was a gong show. I don't think my foreman was too pleased when he finally was wrapping up one incident report (a dozer and a haultruck had a bit of a lovetap) when me and Robin walk in and plunk a pickup's sideview mirror on the counter. Better a mirror than someone's head right? Right!
Working on the comments situation.

For gabrielle:

Poe was on Facebook checkin out Lola's status:
"Of all the kittens in the world I think Poe is the fattest!"
Poe was spitting hissing mad so she wrote on Lola's wall
"You're a great big rusty car and the slowest of them all!"

Continuing adventures? Aren't they on totally different continents? Ah well, this is what I came up with off the top of my head. I liked the idea of a car and a cat keeping up on Facebook. Knowing those two they will be friends again in a minute.
Guess what? We bought snowshoes! Thanks to Steve for the inspiration. You can check out some photos from our snowshoe adventure here. On Flickr. Not Facebook, where all you ever get is trashtalking Sunfires.

For Sarah:

What should we do with old shovel 4?
It's rusted and broke and can't dig any more
Scrap it or fix it or sell all its pieces?
Or bury it right there and not tell the polices?

We went and saw Avatar last night. I was kind of indifferent about seeing it, but I loved it. Loved it loved it loved it. Even if the miners were kind of the bad guys. But consider this- they mention "The Company", which if you recall is the corporate bad guy from Aliens, Cameron's other masterpiece. And a lot of the military hardware was similar to the stuff in Aliens. So, obviously Avatar is set in the same universe and The Company are all a bunch of bastards! I can buy that.

SO I made a Flickr group called Scrap Iron, meant to be a place for photos of retired and abandoned heavy equipment. Though tractors and trains and trucks are cool too. Here are some of my favorites so far:


There's plenty more where those came from so click on through if you like to see more. Anyways, I know I have been Flickrering a lot lately and not really writing much, so this is what I'm gonna do: you give me a topic, can be anything, and I will write a poem about it. Most likely a quatrain but who knows. My comments are apparently going to go away forever sometime soon so do it now! Now I say!

Not too much else to say, I just want my blog to have an entry on January 1st, 2010.

But check these out- laser pointer goodness, no photoshop:

Happy New Year! The Old Year was pretty happy too. Everyone always forgets to thank the Old Year. But we couldn't have done it without him.

Well the oeys are almost over and everyone is doing their decade retrospectacades. Umm. I spent an inordinate amount of time making poo jokes and thinking about Star Wars. So there will be no such decadectical from me.
But I do like to annually tell you what my favorite musics and books and movies were. Ever since Pallas was born I haven't had much time to read, so my favorite book of the year was probably Mr Brown Can Moo Can You? Oh wait that was Pallas' favorite. Mine was either Anathem (Neal Stephenson) or Drood (Dan Simmons). Actually I liked The Terror even better than Drood but Drood came out this year and might be the only book I read that was actually published in 2009.
Movies- hmm. Definitely not Transformers 2. Star Trek. Also Up. Both of which I just saw the other day since they were Christmas presents.
Musics- A year ago I would have thought Green Day would be a shoo-in but their last one didn't quite take with me as much as I thought it would. Instead my album of the year is Bif Naked's The Promise. It kicks ass. She kicks ass. Seriously. Did you know she had breast cancer and kicked its ass? Because that's how she rolls. Why don't you just get it off of iTunes right this minute? At least get these tracks: Sick. Ciao Bella. Fuck You 2. Honeybee. River of Fire. Especially River of Fire. This part gave me shivers the first time I heard it (actually it was tears because of the cancer thing but I don't think it was meant to elicit tears): You have set the world on fire/ and I say let it burn!

Well have a great Christmas everyone.

So we've finally gotten around to watching The Office, the first three seasons anyways. Having never worked in an office I enjoy this window into another world. That's one thing reality tv is good for, eh? Sometimes I think it's just a little bit scripted, and Dwight can't really be that idiotic, can he? He must play it up for the cameras a bit. Of course if they ever made a reality show of the coalmine, there would be some people who wouldn't believe these people were for real, either. Just think about all the bus drivers we've had. And there are so many other stories I could tell but I feel bad writing about my coworkers, most of whom are my friends and some I even consider my brothers. And the guys I don't like, well, I wouldn't want them stumbling on this some day either. "Hey Nathan, I saw on your blog you think I am a whiny baby." "Umm, no Tim, I was talking about the other Tim. The whiny one who acts like a baby all the time. Not you. You are nothing but sunshine all day long!"
There are some ex-coworkers, though . . . like the guy who was in a police protection program for ratting on his biker gang which got him out of prison for manslaughter. He didn't last long because he missed a lot of work. Because manslaughter is alright but don't even think about playing hooky!

Here's another facebook/tweeter repost- it's in Dutch but you'll figure out what to do eventually.

Also, I have one mroe day left before Christmas holidays! Sweet! Hopefully tomorrow is like today- except today was so easy I actually hope there's more to do tomorrow.

This is making the facebook/twitter rounds but since I am an oldskool blogger here ya go:

I tried so hard to like Transformers 2 but I just couldn't do it. This is what I liked: that blackbird transformer from the Smithsonian. He had a cool design and was funny. Umm, the heavy machinery transformer (Devastator) should've been really cool but only was kinda cool. Big difference between "really" and "kinda".
Shia LeBouf dies and goes to Transformers heaven? Rly? Good thing they let him come back to life to fulfill his destiny of bringing Optimus Prime back to life because there's no way Megan Fox could have stabbed him with that matrix thing. And just having the transformers angels send Optimus back would've been too easy. And speaking of easy, John Turturro's big moment where you thought he was going to nobly sacrifice his life to save the pyramid from being eaten by Devastator? Except all he does is call in an airstrike from the navy with the navy's new magic gun? Good shot navy! Way to go!
Anyways. Making fun of Transformers 2 is like taking candy from a baby. Only taking candy from a baby is much harder.

My little girl is not having a good night. I guess that's allowed. I am going on nightshift tomorrow so I stay up late the night before anyways.
We invited some neighbors over for supper last night, since we had all this great food for our Christmas dinner that wasn't. They have a little girl too, and she brought Pallas this funky monkey named Mo:



Here are some more photos from the past week since I seem to have nothing to say:

Thanks to the crazy weather our plans this weekend were canceled- my Calgary in-laws were gonna come up for an early Christmas. So that sucked. But on the plus side Michelle and I were able to go to the E-Ville Roller Derby tonight. Since we know BB Sting I've been to a few demos and stuff, but this was my first actual bout (Michelle has been to quite a few and provided me some color commentary). Los Pistolitas pretty much kicked the collective asses of the Black Gold Diggers, of which BB Sting is the captain. Doesn't matter! A hundred points for being awesome!

Okay so I'm not going to Star Wars Celebration V, but how can I pass up a chance to post a sweet Boba Fett pic? We already have our vacation plans- San Diego Comic Con 2010! I think there may be a Boba Fett or two in attendance at that event as well.
I don't know if you've heard about Edmonton's bid to host Expo 2017. It was all in the news again this past week because of some artist's conceptions and such. Anyways, the plan thus far is to spend $2.5 billion to hold a World's Fair around the theme of energy. You remember Expo 87, right? Vancouver. The theme then was transportation, I remember that from our brief foray. Although they had jets and stuff I remember thinking the whole transportation theme was pretty boring. Energy- also boring. Even more so. Absolutely vital to our civilization, obviously, but still boring.
Do you remember Expo 2008? You don't? Let me refresh your memory- since I just had to via Wikipedia. It was held in Zaragoza, Spain, and its theme was water and sustainable devlopment. Did you go? Why not?
This is why- if you have a couple of thousand dollars to spend on a family vacation and you want to do something awesome with it, you go to Comic Con or Celebration or maybe Cancun or New York. Whatever you happen to be in to. The Olympics or the Word Cup, maybe. Is Zaragoza on your list? Ummm. How about Des Moines, Iowa? I specifically mention them not to disparage that city, I am sure it is beautiful, but because Slipknot is from there and when they were here Corey Taylor said something like (I'm paraphrasing) "I love Edmonton because it's just like Des Moines- a godforsaken town in the middle of nowhere but you still know how to party, motherf*^kers!"
Let's say Expo 2017 gets awarded to Des Moines. Are you going to go? Maybe if its theme was Slipknot. I'm not sure how many Des Moinesians will flock to Edmonton in 2017. Or New Yorkers or whoever.
All this is to say I am not too thrilled with my city council spending my tax dollars (which have gone up almost $200 a year every year since I bought my house) to try and lure Expo 2017. I love Edmonton (blizzards and all) but I also know it's not Orlando or San Diego or London or Singapore.
But I might still jump aboard the bandwagon if the committee makes a few simple changes- like Expo 2017: Zombies, Giant Robots or Vampires- Which is the Ultimate Coolest?