newagesoldier

Drove out the Golden Ears Bridge on Monday night, a couple hours before it opened to the public. It's bleached-bone skeleton will soon be littered with delayed reaction skidmarks and shards of gravel, but at the time it was unused except for the security guard SUVs that raced drunken construction CEOs on joyrides back and forth across the deck. It was weird sitting beneath this massive engineering achievement that, at the time, was completely useless. A hulking statue of wires and concrete that was no more useful to the local infrastructure network than the roof of a Safeway. An abstract artpiece of giants. And then, two hours later, it was turned on and it will be sitting there for decades as a vital artery. Imagine if halfway through our lives we suddenly grew a few extra limbs just to help our daily lives. It would be pretty fantastic until you realized that you had to exercise twice as hard to keep the new appendages looking just as good as the old. Or, I suppose, to keep this metaphor more accurate, one could tear off the old limbs when the new ones grow in. Bio-engineers, you could learn a lot from engineering-engineers.

I felt pretty insignificant, lying under a kilometre of suspended roadway that was constructed from nothing but rocks. Human turned the earth into steel and let fire connect all those peices together. All those people planning, designing, and building. Now they have a monument to show what they did, and that will stand there forever (although with peak-oil, who knows how long it'll be used for cars).

In the mornings, I drive down the King George Highway, long ago bypassed by Highway 99. Some sections still have white centre lanes, dating the pavement back to at least the early 1970s. I wonder about the people who paved that. Hard working people, possibly dead, with some very minor proof of their achievements. Yeah it's just shitty piece of a shitty highway. But what am making that will still be useful to humanity in 40 years?

Finally. FINALLY. FINALLY. It's been several months in the making, but a monster website is finally out the door. Ish. Almost. All the revisions and updates to photography are done and I can stop fixing all the formatting errors that come from people copy and pasting websites into Word into websites. It's an ugly cycle. Should I be learning important lessons from this? Probably. One unrelated lesson is I finally grasp the concept of arrays. Goodness.

Chest seizing up. Skull flesh and muscle overheating and contracting. Esophagus breeding fireants and/or building tire spikes. Sporadic communication with limbs, mostly broken transmissions of agony and hopelessness.

This is what I get for roasting squash.

Or maybe something else caused it.

Nothing is making sense anymore.

Carnal tectonic!

Vancouver is like a fat person who just lost a leg. To fire. If only we had our own Weakerthans to write a indie-rock poem about Duff's bridge. I just raved for a few paragraphs about the need of a TransLink Twitter. What have I become? In all seriousness, a TransLink Twitter would be awesome. Read all the sexy things like "trolley wires down on Oak" or "pothole in Knight Street bridge".

OR "bus cannot slow down below 80.47 km/h or bomb will explode. Also must jump gap in Pattullo Bridge"

The Lower Mainland has been locked in some sort of fog balloon for the past week. My whole life is now an N64 game. The world has lost the RAM to render all these people and buildings, so I imagine the Second Narrows Bridge and condo towers redrawing 100 metres away, just beyond the shroud of the fog. I've been enjoying it too much to simply sit and take pictures. We drove up to Grouse Mountain on Saturday night to see the whole city glow in the fog like Christmas lights under snow.

Reading hourly comics is highly entertaining. It's like spying on people who want to be spied on. Also my spy camera is broke and everything is squiggly.

Reading hourly comics is highly depressing. Everyone (and by everyone, I mean at least four other people) seem to be accomplishing a lot more than I.

For whatever reason, Ra Ra Riot is iTunes proof. It will not go into the library. It is an ornery teenager of an album. It is now smoking dope behind the Macs. Fuck you Ra Ra Riot, I'm not paying for your car insurance any more.

Got a new computer. From 40gb to 300gb. This means a lot of time will be wasted on reorganizing my MP3s and also I might actually use this computer for work.

You know who's curiously web savvy? The Washington State Department of Transportation. You can follow their blog, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts (not to mention their plethora of traffic cameras). I wonder if they have a Last.fm.

Anyways. There's too many internet things to keep track of.

Well, that streak didn't last too long. However, if you'd like to see what I DO spend my internet time on, you can track my startlingly unguarded privacy at my Daytum account. You can also find out how much sushi I eat and how much I love to drive. Also: am I drunk and on the internet? This is also a traceable stat!

I've managed to blog every single day this year. I wonder how long that'll go.

Spent the evening leaking mucus like Toskala leaks hockey pucks (that is to say I am sick and my nose is runny). Added another movie to the Hitchcock scorecard (To Catch a Thief). We are party animals.

Owen out.

Cooking turkey at 11:30 at night isn't going as well as I thought. On the extremely relative upside: say what you will about Wal-Mart, at least they don't leave their freezer lights on all the goddamn time. Motion sensors for frozen foods! Brilliant!

Today was "break everything" day. From the PC to the phones to the toilet - if I needed it, I broked it. I'm surprised the car didn't start to shed engine parts and body panels like a 50s cartoon.

I'm in to hour three of making African yam soup. Every time I make soup, it turns into a hostage situation where it's a race against the clock to see if I can use the blender before quiet hours.

Burke's going to helm the wayward Leafs. Some of the people on the radio are acting like he's the Obama of Toronto.

Bees can count to four and I made halibut tacos with mango salsa and grilled zucchini. It's a good Saturday.

I can't wait for the movie adaptation of The Great Craigslist Inner Tube Heist.

Suddenly, and without apparent reason, I am foolishly in love with the UK. I've spent most of the evening looking at pictures of rolling grassy hills and centuries-old houses built of stone. The Tudors, articles about curry shop arson, videos of BASE jumpers jumping off the Old Man of Hoy, tubular red mailboxes; it's all incredibly alluring. I just want to move here, drink scotch, and complain about infrastructure and politics all day.

No altimeter. No airspeed indicator. I'm pretty sure the oxygen mask is actually just a curly straw in a ziploc bag. I've got an agonizing feeling of unpreparedness and these wee little liquor bottles aren't helping. Nor are the big bottles.

On the upside, the weather is excruciatingly, wonderfully hot. Cars are melting, brains are misgauging, children are exploding. It's perfect weather for bad judgment. When things get uncomfortable and don't work as intended, I am at my best.

Blah blah blah more generalities. Saw Feist and The Weakerthans Tuesday before last, and Radiohead is this Tuesday. Hung out with Julia and some Aussies last week. Australians pronouncing r's = comedy gold.

Disappearing into the woods on The Island. I shall hopefully return with all my limbs attached and not smelling like a fire accelerant. Spellcheck doesn't recognize accelerant. It's been a bad day for spelling. Couldn't remember how to spell unbeknownst (also not in the LJ spellcheck!? what the hell?) for several minutes. I didn't even realize it was a real word initially, my mind just shut down and wouldn't accept its existance.

Finished the first season of Dexter last night. Fucking awesome. I had to deal with window graphics instead of blood splatter today - that made me kind of sad.

Not sleeping well. Maybe it's the cat's fault. He's a foul-mouthed jerk.

There's a banner ad reading "maple bacon lollipops". That sounds delicious.

I am about to lodge myself into a world of websites for about a month. I can't tell if I'm useful or the scapegoat.

Man, wine comes out of a box so much faster than a bottle. Whoops.

I've managed to go this entire month (so far) without gassing up. This may not seem impressive to some, but given that I LOVE driving and we live in a suburban hellhole, it's some kind of record. 560 km on an estimate 36 litres (the fuel gauge is hard to... um... gauge). Half of that has been trips to the ferry. Despite my love affair with TransLink, I still can't get over how difficult it is to get to Tsawwassen (unless I move to Richmond or Ladner). GOD THIS IS SO BORING. Took the 351 downtown last night, and damn, it would be nice to live in Vancouver. There are a shitload of buses that run down Granville. There were motherfucking convoys of E40LFRs, E60LFRs, and even old school BC Transit paintjobs on some D40s (which I think are all lurking in Richmond). Pretty sure I even saw a D60. I never get to experience rush hour because I live so far out in the exurbs or subsuburbs or whatever.

The bagel place was out of bagels at lunch. That's an unfortunate symbol of the economy.

edit turns out I got 572.2 km from 32.675 litres for a grand total of 41 MPG.

I've stopped drinking soft drinks and my innards have responded by being constantly farty. With the absence of carbon dioxide, my bowels have compensating by making their own gas. I am a fart factory.

Up and down day today. A lot of little triumphs were negated by a lot of little defeats.

Had a Chevrolet Sprint headache today (not very powerful, annoying nonetheless). The whole day kind of went that way. Too many unproductive phone calls, too many file resubmissions, too many problems resulting from software differences. The One-World Government better hurry up and take over the world so I can stop worrying about browser-specific flash embedding and European paper sizes.

Zoned out on Quicktime trailers at the end of the day. Came home and watched Charlotte Grey. It made me long for steam power and red wine (which, um, is not the point of the film). Regardless, the set decoration on this movie is fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys war movies, spy movies, and/or movies that feature narrow European bridges.

Also: Segways and military formations, together at last (scroll down). I do admire China's ability to be constantly at the ready for world domination (and forming such neat, colourful patterns too!)