Wednesday, March 23, 2005

no need for satire

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Monday, March 21, 2005

one of the less-celebrated national holidays

It's Picking Up Furniture Under Sketchy Circumstances Month around our house--the dresser we got from the bickering couple in the worst driving weather of the spring, the cabinet from two entries ago--but we now have a wardrobe. I can actually hang up my clothes! This is very exciting. For those of you who haven't already heard my lament, I live in a one bedroom apartment that has literally no closets. Yes, yes, it's a lovely metaphor, but not practical.

The best part? I didn't have to carry it up the stairs. The shop we bought it from delivers. (They deliver in a van which sounds like the engine is about to come through the dashboard and land in your lap, but I digress.) I live in a one bedroom apartment with no closets on the top floor of a three-story walkup. This is major. I am now going to go and gaze lovingly on the new addition to our home.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

It's official. I hate March break.

The mall this week has been just dreadful, and I can't escape it, because I work there. It's a zoo of bored kids and rude parents and nice-but-kinda-clueless teenagers making out in the corners of the store. Yesterday the cops took some guy out in handcuffs. He'd been harrassing these two fifteen year old girls. Yeugh. I was really glad that they said something to one of the staff, but I hate that someone was there following them around and kissing them on the cheeks and demanding their phone numbers. There's not enough ew in the world. To add insult to injury, they're from, I dunno, Ajax or something and the police drove them home, and you just know their parents are never going to let them come to Toronto again, which especially sucks since they looked like the kind of freaky kids who are counting the days until they can go live somewhere where most of the other people don't match their socks to their scrunchies.

The adventure today was the couple of guys sitting in the corner. One of them had been there yesterday too and engaged me in a long and pointless "conversation" about my job. I was irritated that he was back, because he addressed me like I was some kind of old friend (I hate nametags) and clearly he thought this was going to impress me. "You didn't think I'd remember you!" he said, all cheerful, and I thought "No, and I can't tell you how incredibly creepy it is that you do." The nice loss prevention people nabbed them for some petty shoplifting and then for extra points discovered that one of them had a big wooden club--the kind truck drivers use to test the air pressure in their tires. Yay, concealed weaponry!

I won't even go into the horror of the Spongebob Squarepants guest appearance in our kids' section, or the Radio Free Roscoe signing that the mall was hosting. (Recall the screaming you've seen in all that old footage of the Beatles, with girls fainting--yeah, that. For two hours on Thursday morning.)

And it's not over, oh no, because although all the private schools and the 905 area code had their March break this week, the Toronto District School Board has theirs in the week coming up. Too bad I can't call in irritable.

Friday, March 18, 2005

what? I'm harmless-looking. I am.

How, you might ask yourself, did I end up in the parking lot of the Tim Hortons in Coburg, holding a sign that read Don? and smiling like Miss America? I blame ebay.

See, spook bid on this funky-looking little cabinet, and then we won it. Despite its distressing minty-green paint job, we were excited. The owner wanted to meet us somewhere rather than having random ebay people showing up on his doorstep, and proposed the Hortons. He said he would email us again with directions.
We waited.
And waited.
And waited.
In the meantime, we rented a car and looked at maps to see if there was a nice place to take a walk in that general vicinity. Well, what I mean is, spook did. I am missing the part of my wiring that would allow me to understand a map. I nodded and smiled over the maps. Due to my over-careful reading of some parts of the information and my non-reading of other parts, we had planned to go to Colborne where ebay guy is actually located, and so our plans to go out to Sept-Iles were flummoxed when we discovered that we needed to be much farther west. We settled on Darlington. Don't laugh.
In case you're still tracking this, no, ebay guy had not emailed with said directions. Using the amazing power of the internet, we got our own damn directions to a Hortons in Coburg, and sent a few carefully worded emails. No response. At 11:00 on Monday morning, we sent one that read "Well, we're setting out now--hoping you haven't forgotten. We'll be at the Tim Hortons at the corner of X and Y at three-thirty."
As we walked down to get the car, spook said "Hey, I've got an idea--want to drive out to Coburg for donuts?" I concurred this was a fantastic plan for a date. We went.
Darlington provincial park is pretty nice, despite its proximity to the Nuclear Information Centre. (eeee.) We got our boots muddy and picked up pretty rocks on the beach, including one small piece of quartz that looks just like a jellybean. Then we drove out to Coburg, and settled ourselves to wait for the man known only as "Don."

It was like the most ill-conceived blind date ever. spook sat at a table with his cold hands wrapped around the token coffee we bought, and I jumped up and down like a little kid, running out to the parking lot to flash my Don? sign every time someone likely-looking pulled in. The drive-through is shockingly busy, so I kept getting psyched out by people who were only there to talk to the metal box. I was starting to wonder how long we should wait for our furniture-bearing suitor when spook said "I think that guy has a big green something in his truck." Yep, it was our man. We transferred the cabinet to our car under the wide-eyed gaze of Don's little kid, shook hands, and headed for home. Well, for Home Depot.

After our long drive, we were very restrained. There was, I confess, an orgy of paint-chip gathering, but we limited our purchases to a couple of strips of wood and some $0.49 dowels for my roman blind project. And some nylon cord. And a level and an L-square and a palm sander. Never mind.