Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions


1. It's Jimmas again! (So soon?) What won't you drink?

What won't I drink? Well, I'm not a fan of cocktails. I mean, I'll drink 'em, but there's something about hiding the quality of the individual liquors that rubs me the wrong way. If you're going to drink, drink.

Insofar as your actual question goes, after drinking the Japanese Snake Liquor that Kat brought back, I can safely say there's nothing I won't try at least once.

2. How much do you miss having the crazy lady on your back balcony around?

She was fun. But then again, not having to chase crackheads off my balcony at 3am is also fun. More fun, in fact.

3. Imperial Guard. Bad 40K army or Worst 40K Army? Discuss.

Better than the Tau, you heretical swine!

I enjoy the Guard for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that everyone expects you to play one of two Guard armies: Mechanized Veterans or wave after wave of Infantry. So I play a mixed force. Mostly infantry with some Light Armour. People tend to get confused by it and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

4. Let's for a moment pretend we're both fully matured grown-up adult peoples. What was your dream job when you were 15-ish? What is your dream job now? Why the change?

When I was 15, I wanted to be... uh... I don't actually think I wanted to be anything when I was 15. Now, I'm still kind of in the same boat, but at least I know what I want out of whatever hypothetical career I'd hold: Enough money to live comfortably, to be able to do the things Emily and I would like and to be able to afford some kinder.

5. You've got just over two months. What Winter Olympic Sport do you plan to shine in, entering under the "Hosting Country Wildcard Entry" clause?

Why, Ice Dancing, of course!

Alternately, Ski Jumping.

So, last week was Jimmas and, on Jimmas Eve, my brother came down. He brought with him a duck and had the intention of cooking it for the three of us. The vagaries of fate being what they are, he did not get the opportunity to do so, which meant that today - being the first official day of the week-long vacation Emily and I got from work - I cooked the duck.

Now duck, for those of you unfamiliar with this most tasty of waterfowl, is a fatty bird, much like goose. The reasoning for this is twofold: First, the duck needs it avail itself of the fat's insulating properties, much like a goose. Second, fat is - as my illustrious Varsity Water Polo career in High School demonstrated - infinitely more buoyant than muscle. The trick with cooking duck, then, is rendering the fat while keeping the meat juicy. A tricky proposition at best. However, thanks to some poking around on the Internets, I have found a mighty tasty way to make a roasted duck (or roasted breast of duck) with crispy skin and moist flesh. Read on, gentle audience member, ( read on. )

That's done. Now to wait a week and see what happens.

3rd time's the charm, I suppose.

Here goes nothing.

More writing based in the same setting as this

Feel free to, of course, critique at will.

( Writing )

A long, but enjoyable, three days. Too much food, too much pie, too much booze, just enough fun.

Hope you all had an enjoyable turkey day!

Happy Turkey Day to my friends up here and happy Colombus Day to my friends down there.

We're off on our trek - K/W Saturday, Hammer Sunday and St Kitts Monday.

Have a good one, folks!

That is certainly an intriguing development.

More to come.

So, today Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that he was boycotting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speech at the UN as a response to Ahmadinejad's continuing Holocaust denial and virulent Anti-Semitism. The venue for this declaration? A Tim Horton's. I shit you not. He was at the Tim Horton's Innovation Centre in Oakville today during a meeting of the UN General Assembly.

Oh, he also ditched Obama's first speech to the Assembly to go to the Innovation Centre to congratulate himself on cutting Corporate Tax to a point where Tim Horton's moved back to Canada.

Smooth move, Steve.

Smooth move.



Also, links are from the Globe & Mail because they're the only outlet reporting on him blowing off the UN for this.

I just watched Alton Brown add ketchup to a tomato sauce.


The man is dead to me now, much to the hurt of my heart.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.

otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance,
of how much you really want to
do it.

and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like that.

you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
its the only good fight
there is.

-charles bukowski

Got Kaylee Wednesday and decided on what's going to be her regular schedule. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, at 9am, she gets let out of the crate, goes for a walk and does her business, comes back in, gets some food. At noon, the food gets put away, she goes out for a walk, goes back into the crate around 12:30. 8:45, when we get home, she gets let out, goes outside, has food. Midnight, she goes out again, the food gets put away. 1:00, she gets crated and we retire to bed/computer.

In theory, this works well.

However, she keeps on whining and crying whenever I try and acclimatize her to the crate and, while I still keep her in there - she needs to get used to it, after all - every time I hear her cry or whine it breaks my mighty heart.

Hopefully, though, she gets used to it by Wednesday, and everything'll be cool. Even now, she's quieted down, and I just put her away.

When Emily gets back from Connecticut, we'll take pics and post 'em for you all to see.

Why? Because it's AWESOME.

Trust in Jim.

http://www.youtube.com/user/kalleanka71

Also? Han Solo, PI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYntjR4-pY4

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Put this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read (and it seems you can use filtered HTML too, for you formatting types).

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling-x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee-x
6 The Bible-x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell-x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien-x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger-x
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald-x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams-x
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy-x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens-x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis-x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis-x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell-x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving-x
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert-x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens-x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley-x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-x
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck-x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov-x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville-x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens-x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker-x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante-x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zol
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens-x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mxistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White-x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad-x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery-x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams-x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas-x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare-x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl-x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo-x


37/100. Not too bad.

Got sent home way early from work due to technical difficulties. Got home before Emily left for work, to boot.

And now, tidying.

This is too ironic - and terrifying - for words.