Finally went to see the chiropractor today. He expressed a fair bit of dismay over the state of my back and neck, which I thought was pretty much all healed up. He could tell it wasn't, and then did unkind things to them, hopefully not as punishment. Now I kind of feel worser than before. But I still ran my 10 km, goldurnit.

Finished reading Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream by Jason Fagone. It was recommended by Christopher McDougall in that book I read last week. Pretty much the opposite of that book, in a way, but just as interesting. Funny, crazy, kind of alarming. It's all about the competitive eaters, whose major league webpage can be found here. I considered looking up some YouTubeos of eating contests but then I thought better of it. Besides my YouTube is about to burn out from all the Elmo videos we've been watching. At least Pallas can identify Feist by sight now, and thinks Katy Perry is a princess.

Somehow I was able to snag a vacation here in the most coveted bloc of the year. Actually, even though I have somehow accrued enough seniority to be one of the seniorer guys on my crew, I forgot to put in my requisition slips in time and was left with the dregs. But who's laughing now? The best week of the summer is upon us, and everyone else is going back to school leaving us free to wreak havoc at our leisure. And little secret- it's my birthday soonly. Haha! Evil plan complete. But thus far no actual havoc wreaked. However I was able to do a full workout today, almost completely healed up after my moto-mishap of not even two weeks ago. Even Wolverine wants to know my secret. And the secret is cale. Or possibly chia seeds. Maybe whey protein or even just the blueberries. Smoothies, anyways. Liquid healing factor. Enjoy a Game of Thrones funny sent to me by my friend Sarah. You know what's weird? New and improved Blogger somehow doesn't have the ability to make separate paragraphs. Seems like a step backwards to me.

Went for a short ride today, it was so much fun. I was a little nervous about spontaneously falling off again, like maybe I caught Wipeoutitis and was doomed to forever suck at motorcycling. So that's good. That I didn't.
Now for the home stretch of A Dance With Dragons. Spoiler alert- George RR Martin really really dug Avengers #9.
One time I was reading an old issue of ROM Spaceknight (I think) and there was a fan letter from Kurt Busiek (I think). Here's a good mission for you- see if you can dig up the old comic that has a letter from me in its letters page. Give up? I was only fooling!

NIghtshift sometimes is pretty cool. (Other times, not so much.)

I'm still working on A Dance With Dragons. After four or five weeks I am only about 750 pages in or so. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I like to savor things and also we keep getting all these great books from the library that have to be read within a certain amount of time. Such as:

Manhood For Amateurs, Michael Chabon: pretty much brilliant, just a bunch of loosely connected essays about his life, and being a dad, and being a man, and being a geek. I wonder why I related so much. There was even one essay that opened with his great love for Big Barda, a superheroine I had never heard of till I met her at the Calgary Con and then saw her all over the place.

Then I read two books by Sesame Street Muppeteers- Carrol Spinney who plays Big Bird and Kevin Clash who performs Elmo. I learned about them from two different podcasts, so that was weird, sorta like running into Big Barda everywhere 35 years after her brief moment in the sun. Great books, especially the Elmo one, actually. Kind of autobiographical but also made me realize how important Sesame Street is and so I have Pallas watching much more Youtubeos of Elmo. Him and India Arie doing the ABCs is pretty good. Me: India is pretty, eh?

Pallas: Yeah! Mommy, India is pretty!

Michelle: Who else is pretty?

Pallas: Me!

Silver Surfer: Requiem is one of the best comics stuffs I've read lately. Especially since I had no idea it was about what it was about. I really like J. Michael Straczynski's stuff.

The best book I've read lately is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Michelle found it in a bookstore one time and showed it to me, but even though I'm a runner I kind of put it back on the shelf, thinking that reading about running sounds like even less fun than actually running. Luckily she read it and kept reading me all these astonishing highlights that I had to give it a try. It's awesome the way books like Into Thin Air and Klondike are awesome, full of amazing feats and real-life characters that would seem too over the top if you put them in a novel. I'm not quite done it, so every few minutes I turn to Michelle and say I'm gonna throw away my shoes and go barefoot, and she keeps telling me to finish the book before I go entering any ultramarathons. Today was actually a run day for me but due to inexplicable soreness on the side of my body I fell on when I crashed my bike, I decided not to.

Did you ever see that movie One Week? Most likely not as it was a Canadian Indie about motorcycles and cancer. Anyways, the guy has cancer so he buys a bike and rides across Canada to sort things out in his head. There's one scene where he's driving along and alla sudden he's in the ditch. Or maybe there was a very good reason he crashed, I don't recall exactly. Well, a similar thing happened to me today. Except it was a corner I came on a little too fast and didn't really handle it too well. I'm okay, mostly, and so is the bike, mostly. It's even uglier now but at least the scars on it are my own and not the previous owners' doing. If only that one burger joint had been open in that one town we were in, it wouldn't have happened. Well, nothing you can do now, at least in the sense of changing what happened. What you can do is control how you go forward, right? I've given it some thought though I might need some more time to process it, it's kind of surprising how many different and weird emotions and reactions I'm having.
The first thing you can do, obviously, is get up. For some reason it was really important that I jump up immediately, as if in doing so I would guarantee that I hadn't been hurt. My Dad didn't see it happen so I had a few minutes to pick the bike up and try to get it back on the road, though I wound up needing his help to do so.
Then you have to get back on the bike, assuming it will still run. Mine did. Did I take corners a little more slowly on the way home? Yeah, but nothing wrong with that.
The rest is mental, as so much of life is, and here's some thoughts I tried, and mostly succeeded, to believe:
-yeah I crashed but I'm so badass I got right back on it and kept riding.
-it coulda been a lot worse and it wasn't so chalk one up to luck (both good and bad I guess) and be better next time

If it had been my bobber I think I would have cried. And threw up. Poor little EX 500!

So I did a kind of cosplay yesterday, we went to a supernaturally themed costume party. We been catching up on True Blood Season 3 (we just finished it tonight in fact) so what better than dressing up as Sookie and Lafayette? Especially since, with two weeks notice, going as Daenerys and Khal Drogo wasn't really all that feasible . . .although that would have been pretty kickass. Michelle would have to really amp up her weight training though if she wanted to pass as the Dothraki horselord. And of course I don't have long silvery gold hair. Hmm.
Anyways. Sookie was easy enough, though a little expensive as we had to order the t-shirt and apron with the official Merlotte's logo from the States, and pay extra to have it expedited here in time.For Lafayette you have a little more leeway, just have to wear something suitably loud, a necklace and jangly ear-ring and a do-rag. And eyeshadow and nail polish, of course. Nothing a quick trip to wal-mart can't provide. I had to get a kindly old lady to help me with the eye shadow- I pointed at a picture of a model wearing some and said, "What's that stuff around her eyes? I need some of that!"

So the race we ran this morning was called Iron Mama, and it was pretty cool since it was a lot of Moms and their kids. And four dads! I was one of them. Also Batman was there, encouraging you to enter to win. It was fun, and in support of a good cause, famine relief for Africa. We ran it pretty fast, too, so we wondered if it was really a full 5km- but no one was complaining too much. Last night when Michelle told Pallas we were running this race, and that she and her sister would ride in the stroller while Daddy pushed them, she said "Maybe Pallas race too!" How can you say no to that? There actually was a kids' race, though we were under the impression it was a 1km run, so we didn't go in it. BUt it was just a fun there and back again sorta thing and Pallas totally coulda run it. Anyways after the race Pallas said it was her turn so we let her out and I ran with her for a bit, she was pretty happy with that.



After that I went for another motorcycle ride with my Dad, so pretty much a perfect day!

Good news! I figured out Bluetooth, so I can finally get all the pictures off my little cellphone. But the even more better news is I went out for a ride with my motorcycle gang today, which consists of myself the Homie Bear, Uncle B (the B stands for Badass) and uh, Big Papa. We showed how many rat's asses we just don't give by staying a shade under the speed limit the whole time! Another reason for doing so is technically I still don't have a motorcycle licence. Rat's asses I just don't give, I'm telling you! It's still legal for me to ride since my class 5 counts as a learner's so long as I'm in the protective care of my posse. And leave all my guns at home.
Anyways, all joking aside I just have to say how so so so fun it was. So fun. We rode about 200 kms, just going around some of the backroads a bit and then home on the highway. Big Papa found a killer deal on a Kawasaki EX 500 that was a little banged up from being dropped once or twice- it used to be a motorcycle school bike, but it runs great. Perfect for me to get some experience on.
My friend Robin, who also got the motorcycle bug from Big Papa, now has three bikes- a bobber like the one I'm building only his is done and runs, a small Honda for his wife and a new Triumph. HIs wife is totally into it,and we were discussing the possibility that Michelle might someday want to ride. I said it wasn't going to happen, srsly. Robin said, "She probably doesn't want a bike because she loves life."
"Yeah, that's basically why, in a nutshell. Living is nice."
"But I would argue that is the very reason she should get a bike."

You know what's fun? Running. Except that it's really actually not, no matter how much I try to tell myself it is. What's fun is being in shape and the knowledge that yes, I can run 10 kms without trying too terribly hard. There's also, I admit, a small degree of satisfaction in knowing that in all likelihood, you can not. Not to get too cocky though, there are tons and tons of people from children to senior citizens who run marathons and would use my laughably elephantine gait as a lesson in how not to do it.
Perhaps in an attempt to make running even more fun, I've noticed a proliferation of themed runs. A few years ago, Michelle and I ran a 5k race whose theme was, uh, cops and robbers or something. We were the only ones who dressed up! This year there's a run in support of mountain gorillas and other great apes where everyone is supposed to run in a gorilla suit! Remind me to register for that one. But the best one I've seen so far is this one in Baltimore (roughly a million miles from here) called Run For Your Lives, where you have to evade zombies while you run. Ooh! More locations coming soon. What better than one in Deadmonton?
(via Bonniegrrl)

Back to work today, but it was a really good day (for being at work) since I listened to a whole ton of podcasts and before I knew it the day was all done! Probably the most interesting one was an episode of NPR's This American Life about a bunch of prison inmates who put on a production of Hamlet. Mostly I'm a CBC podcasty kind of guy, but lately I been branching out to NPR for a little variety- I also really like Pop Culture Happy Hour, which is all about nerding out.
And I couldn't wait to get home to check out Wookiee the Chew, especially fitting because of our Winnie the Pooh outing earlier this week. That from another geeky podcast, the name of which I forget. I'll have to show this one to Pallas when I get home, since she loves Pooh Bear and she loves animated Star Wars stuff, Star Wars Gangsta Rap being her current favorite cartoon. I kind of wonder what sort of twisted version of Star Wars she's building in her head, since I haven't shown her the actual movies yet. She just really really loves Boba Fett (she always makes me Boba Fett tea, it's bountylicious!) and I think she will be devastated to learn that not only is he not the main character, when he does finally show up about an hour into the second movie, he's a bad guy. Who meets a stupidly silly end in the first hour of the third movie. She'll have to learn the truth some day. As Hamlet might say,

I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind

This might not be totally appropriate but since it's entirely innocent, I'm gonna blog it anyways. Where else can I preserve these memories?
So I'm on the potty today, and Pallas opens the door and announces, " daddy has a penis!" and then in a sweet little voice asks, " May I come in?" That's how Michelle has been teaching her to ask, and she is so good at copying inflections and tones that she sounded so grownup it was hilarious.
This is better than what she used to do, barge in and say, "Dat's Daddy's vagina!"
It's not a vagina I would kind of gruffly say. Than I would hear from the kitchen, "Tell her what it's really called!"
I suppose I could just learn to lock the door when I'm doing my business.

We were finally able to take Pallas to her very first movie today, Winnie the Pooh. She loved it, and cried at the end. Not because it has a sad ending, but because she wanted "more dat movie" and we had to tell her you only get to watch it once. We also brought Naia, for reasons of logistics. Logistics, obviously, being very important when you have two little ones. Originally we were gonna drop Naia off at a friend's and take Pallas by herself. Our friend's schedule dictated that we would have had to go to a 1:00 or 2:00 show, which, logistically, was less than ideal because Pallas would miss her nap and who wants to have a grumpy child at a movie theater? Then again, with two children, the chances of having an unsatisfied theatre-goer more than doubles, it like, hundredifies. So we chose a 5 PM showing, figuring the theatre would be mostly empty and we were right, there was another couple of kids and we all agreed to just not sweat it if anyone cried. So success! For the most part.
The movie itself was alright. Now, I understand that I am not the target audience of such a film- my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter is. BUt even so I had pretty high expectations- only because I really enjoyed The Tigger Movie, which I thought was clever and had a good story with good action and even some rich emotional content. Srsly! I'm being serious. So I assumed this movie would be on the same level, and though it was totally fine and Pallas liked it, I was surprised there wasn't more to it- the Quest for the Tail and the introduction of a perfectly acceptable, if imaginary, antagonist made me think there would be. More to it, I mean. Oh well. You don't really wanna go the whole Spike Jonze route either, though imagine if the Backson had been the manifestation of a debilitating illness afflicting Christopher Robin in the real word, just like all the Pooh Bears and Tiggers are stuffed animals in his real life . . . anyways. Pallas liked it!

So. Wicked. MIchelle loved it and that was the main thing. And I didn't mind it- some funny parts. The sets were pretty good, the singing was . . . Broadwayey, but impressive in its way. Yeah. I loved Elphaba. The flying monkeys were a bit of a letdown, as I suppose all non-actual monkeys have to be. You know who did a really wonderful Wizard of Oz adaptation? Marvel Comics! Eric Shanower did the writing chores and the great Skottie Young arted it. Here are some of the covers he did for it. It won some Eisner Awards, which are handed out every year at SDCC. Hey, isn't SDCC going on right this minute?? Why yes! In fact you could go see Skottie Young at table 4601.
I actually finally gave in and joined Twitter today, just so I could follow pretty much anyone who's at SDCC. The second hand highlights of Day 1- Dave Filoni promised ScubaTroopers in Season 4 of Clone Wars! There's a Game of Thrones pedicab with the Iron Throne for the seat! Someone said 7000 people were unable to get seats for the Game of Thrones panel??

We're going to Wicked tonight. I'm half excited and half not excited, which I guess should cancel each other out to make me completely neutral on the subject. Here's the thing- I really liked Gregory maguire's book, the language was rich and it was a cool idea, the Wicked Witch of the West's life story. But the direction he went in was perhaps a little bit- okay a lottle bit- not where I would have taken it. And then the two sequels were not my cup of tea at all.
On top of that, I'm not sure if I've ever really mentioned it, but Broadway music is at the top of my list, the very very top, of types of music I cannot handle. However Michelle came with me to Slipknot and System of a Down (twice!) so I definitely owe her that one, and without a single complaint either.
On the plus side, though, who doesn't love a beautiful green-skinned woman? Plus there's flying monkeys! Flying monkeys!
In other news, San Diego Comic Con starts tonight, Preview Night. Can't believe it's been a year since we went already. Well, this year I can't go, but in a vicarious sense, I'm already there. I'll be checking blogs and Flickr photostreams and maybe even Twitter feeds all weekend. Here's one to start with, and please let me know if you have any.

Back from yet another week of work. As always, there were many ninja attacks, zombie apocalypses and alien invasions, but we dealt with them all. Plus I saw a squirrel.
Anyways. Remember how Jon Favreau was going to direct the Princess of Mars movie but decided to do Iron Man instead? That worked out pretty good, especially since they went ahead and made John Carter of Mars without him.
Remember how Peter Jackson was going to direct The Hobbit but then Guillermo del Toro was going to but then Peter Jackson did anyways? This past week has seen a bunch of official photos of the Dwarves! Pallas's favorite is Sneezy.

So we went to the Chapters Harry Potter party tonight it was really fun. Pallas enjoyed it, though she really didn't know what was going on. She got some candy and was sorted into Slytherin House, and waited for the Hogwarts Express and was even thrown into Azkaban! Stupefying. Also she sat in the Teacup of . . . uh, Horcruxes? Oh yeah and I got A Dance of Dragons. Sweet! Michelle got a cookbook, which doesn't sound that exciting but they are like comic books to her. If there was a San Diego Cooking Con she would want to go!

I had every intention of rereading all seven Harry Potter books before the movie came out, but plainly that's not gonna happen. Although I guess we can wait a year or two before we see it right Michelle? Tomorrow night at all the Chapters stores they're having a sort of release party or whatnot, I think we will bring Pallas, she doesn't know who Harry Potter is but I'm sure there will be people dressed up and that's always fun. Plus A Dance With Dragons is finally finally out today, so we'll have to pick it up right?
THis weekend another movie opens, and actually I am far more excited for it- Winnie the Pooh. We decided this would be Pallas' first movie we would take her to see at the theater. She just loves Pooh Bear. I let her watch the trailer, and she's started imitating Tigger when he comes on and does his Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo! She does it pretty good. And she says "Oh bother" when Pooh says it. My own first movie ever was Star Wars, of course, and life has never quite been the same for me.

I haven't posted about work much lately, mostly because work is the last thing I really want to think about. Here's some photos though:





Lately I've been spending most of my time actually doing my own job, driving Kress truck. So not too much exciting stories, just listening to a lot of music and podcasts. Which suits me fine. I had one night on pumps a couple of weeks ago which was a good reminder (not that I need one) that I made the right move to bid off of that job.

Been catching up on some reading.
John Scalzi recently released a reboot of the H Beam Piper classic, Little Fuzzy. I love that old book, must have read it three or four times. So when Scalzi, whose other books I love, got the nod to tackle the reboot, well that'd be like if JJ Abrams or someone got to reboot Star Trek. His version is called Fuzzy Nation. My girls got me the book for Father's Day (along with China Mieville's newest, Embassytown) and I read it in two days. You should read it- but first you should read Little Fuzzy. It's charming and fun but also has a great twist at the end, which Scalzi wisely incorporates but doesn't use as a twist.
I tried and tried to figure out the identity of the Red Hulk, and fastidiously avoided spoilers on the net, but in the end I was defeated by trickery. Well, if they hadn't employed a bit of the tricksy stuff it would've been too easy, and the tricks were perfectly legit tricks within the Marvel Universe, so I guess. But I wonder how many 8 year-olds got it.
Full disclosure: I've never smoked crack or even been idly tempted to try it. But I heard Christopher Shulgan on a DNTO podcast talk about his misadventures with crack while his newborn son was ... new. So I had to read his book, Superdad. Wow. Crazy. Here's a guy who's a year older than me, grew up in a small Canadian town then moved to a city. New dad. Pretty much exactly the same demographic. It would be easy to say the only difference between us is he has a problem with drugs and I don't. But what I found so interesting about the book is it's also a fairly deep examination of his concepts of manhood and fatherhood- ie, in his eyes, the two are mutually exclusive. While I was reading I thought "well his dad must have been a nightmare and that's how we have such different ideas here" and then it turns out he named his son after his dad since his dad is the greatest man he knows. Okay so,we also have that in common- my dad also is the greatest man I know. Well, I thought, obviously he didn't read nearly enough superhero comics or watch enough Star Wars when he was a kid, because if he did, then he would have had good role models to teach him how a man should be. Turns out he blames Harrison Ford for all his problems! Wow, did I see Han Solo and Indy differently than he did. Well, he worked it out and wrote the book, but I won't spoil it for you- this whole post has been spoiler free! Because real men don't ruin things for others.