Anyway… Before I get started, a heads-up. If you blush when watching prime-time television or are my mom, you’ll want to surf over to www.amish.com and check the new barns of the season. What can I tell you, my mom likes barns. For everyone else, I’ll try to keep this post at PG and not even PG-13, since I have relatives that definitely will read this and don’t want the inevitable Facebook snickering that’d otherwise ensue. Now, back to our show.

Oops, first watch this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wasn’t a bad movie, but not exactly Citizen Kane. Hell, Citizen Kane isn’t Citizen Kane, the way people tell it. My point is, not a great piece of art. That line, though – that always makes me laugh. So, when iTunes released it as a ringtone, I bought it and assigned it to Facebook, so every time an FB message comes to my iPad or iPhone, Sam Rockwell whines, “oh, that’s not right!” It’ll probably get old, but in the meantime, I get a laugh once in a while. Especially the day before yesterday.

Again, keepin’ it PG:

Jeff and I will have been married four years on December 18th, and they’ll also be the seventh anniversary of when he bumped into me at the magazine rack at Chapters on Robson. Even though we’re not exactly newlyweds or nothin’, we still get… ahem. I guess “frisky” is the word to use? There are shenanigans that occur. Let’s leave it at that. Other bloggers can get all prurient and such, but I still have my virtue.

Okay, I did laugh at that one. I haven’t seen my virtue since 1989.

I still won’t paint a picture for you, though. This whole thing ties up like this: Jeff and I were working on something or reading or watching tv and we… got distracted. The dog was asleep in his solarium and out from underfoot. However, because we’re good nerds our iPads or iPhones are always nearby, and even if we weren’t good nerds, our house is like, nine feet wide or so, so they’d be beside us at all times whether we liked it or not.

So, we were …distracting each other. For about 30 seconds or so. Then, just as things changed from “an episode of Friends” level of distracting to “pick your favourite HBO show” level, wouldn’t you know it, my phone says, you guessed it,

Click here to view the embedded video.

While I laughed hard, Jeff laughed so hard he fell off the couch.

I’m gonna end the post here, while I can still look everyone in the eye without going red.

I will say this before I go, though: laughing a lot is good for the shenanigans. We highly recommend it. And also, I changed my damn ringtone. I paid too much money for my damn phone for it to start getting all judgmental on us.

When I was a little kid, I watched television as much as and even more so than the average 1980′s North American rug-rat. Given I was growing up in Ontario, pretty much 90% of that television was coming from the good ol’ USA. Given the constant inundation of American commercials and tv shows with the requisite Reagan-era flag-waving, my six-to-ten year old self wanted nothing more than to move to California and buy a convertible and a gun.

Not even kidding here.

I didn’t even know where I wanted to drive to, and definitely didn’t want to shoot anyone. It was just drilled into me that to have a great life, I had to be American, preferably in Los Angeles, and have cool wheels and a semi-automatic.

(It goes without saying that I have since learned L.A., a place Jeff has visited often and actually where he was born, is a cesspool of poverty, violence, environmental blight, urban sprawl, over-population and general human misery. Your move, Los Angeles Tourism Bureau!)

My point is, I was indoctrinated, like every other kid watching American television since the 1950′s, to think that America was the land of the free and home of the brave, attractive people eat at Burger King, the A-Team never actually kills anyone with their assault rifles, stayed tuned for more commercials populated with nothing but white people, and the hero always gets the girl and never, ever gets the guy. Even  more sad, is that this pattern hasn’t really changed between the 1950′s and today.

In contrast to this, last week I applied for a new BC driver’s license and changed my last name to my husband’s, and nobody damn well batted an eye at me.

I messaged my cousin Pat a few months ago on Facebook in response to an update she’d put on her page, agreeing with her about an observation she’d made about her life since moving to the US. I don’t remember the wording, but the gist of it was, “the reason why most of the world loathes the US isn’t because it’s the richest country in the world, or works to influence through government action or the media. Individual Americans can be fantastic people, but the US as a nation and as an institution is a big, dumb, loud hypocrite. It’s like the loudmouth party guest who talks with his mouth full while simultaneously claiming to be egalitarian and telling a joke involving the “n-word”.

My overlong point? Jeff could get an incredibly rewarding and well-paying job in the United States, where the cost of living is lower and the pay is higher, as long as I didn’t come with him. Because the current (African-American) President of the United States has decided that civil rights are a states-only issue. Louisiana is probably wondering how they can leverage that so they can get back to lynching, preferably involving the current (African-American) President of the United States. Did I mention hypocrisy? I coulda sworn I did…

“My people” won the right to marry after a few years of active lobbying, and the debate over it from beginning to end, while contentious and occasionally bigoted, was nonetheless polite and mannered. Nobody threatened to kill their elected officials or people on the other side of the fence. Politicians didn’t run for office on the argument that they’ll revoke people’s human rights “because the Bible says so, and well, I didn’t read it but neither did you and we hate those people so let’s just say the Bible says we should.”

Bottom line for an overlong, rant-y post:

I haven’t blogged in a bit, mostly due to an overwhelming amount of life getting in the way. However, Jeff ‘n I had some interesting stuff going on this last week, so here I am to chat about it.

First off, if you’re reading this, odds are you’re on my Facebook so I won’t bore you with pics you’ve seen and info you already know regarding the end-o’-the-world nightmare that was redoing our floor. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.

Typically, over the last few years, if we took our vacation time together it was to do something- travel, an event of some kind, etc. It was always something that distracted us from the usual- y’know, what a vacation is supposed to do. This last week was different.

Apart from a couple of hours where I shooed Jeff out of the house, we were pretty much joined at the hip 24/7 for the entire time. This isn’t unusual- we tend to be together most always except for work hours. But that’s the thing, exactly- typically, we get 8 hours a day, five days a week to get Jeff-free-time or Chris-free-time to take a deep breath and enjoy a distinct lack of togetherness. At least, I always thought was how it worked.

You hear about this sort of thing all the time- “there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing”, “be your own person”, and my personal fave, “familiarity breeds contempt”. Wow, whoever coined that last one had some issues.

My point is, I was wondering if I, or he, or we would go snaky by day three and flee the house screaming. Not so much, as it turns out. We talked a lot, joked around, spent an ungodly amount of time, money and effort on getting our domestic shit back together after the ass-hat floor installer left, and not once did we fight or encounter one of those uncomfortable silences that drag on.

I joked in a tweet earlier that we got through the week without any murdering going down, but I was only half kidding. Without the distraction of travel, family visits, etc. I expected this to be a true litmus test for us in terms of getting along. It turns out we did pretty good, all things considered. I’ve been stressed out of my head about a variety of things and not the easiest to live with and Jeff has a lot on his shoulders at work on the best of days, but we managed to keep the needle where we usually do, squarely in the green. After the past few days, I’m reminded (again) about how very lucky we are.

The dog, on the other hand, spent most of the week pissed like a bear about the removal of his carpet and spent his time sulking until we bought him a rug. I’m not even kidding about that, and will be relieved when he goes trotting back to the office with Jeff on Monday.

When I buy clothes, I’ve got a pretty short attention span. I go for stuff that looks like stuff I already have, and my main requirements are that it isn’t paisley or polka-dotted or clown-striped. Or micro-fibre. I HATE that stuff. So yeah, me = not picky. I rarely even try on clothes in the fitting room- so much so for a while there I was referring to it as the “trying-on-clothes booth”.

You may see where this is going.

A couple of weeks ago Jeff and I were in Costco, buying a metric ton of dryer sheets and a whole cow when I caught sight of a giant table piled with several hundred pairs of pants. My job holds a mild dress code in that you can pretty much come as you are as long as you are wearing not-jeans and a shirt with some kind of collar. The pairs of pants I’d been wearing for a while were identical to each other and so I was guessing people at work thought I just had the one pair, and hey, look at the cheap Costco pants.

Taking a closer look, I was delighted- these were cargoes made out of some weird wicking cotton-ballistic nylon stuff. I’m a sucker for outdoor gear and these were the perfect casual-dress to work / survive-the-apocalypse type of pants. They were also wicked cheap and in the earth-tone / possibly-used-as-camouflage colours I tend to stick to. So I chucked ‘em in the cart next to the cow and we went to the till.

When we got home, I tried the magical pants on and found out two things:

1. I should try on clothes before buying them. My new pants were too long.
2. I should have kept the instructions, (yes, these pants came with instructions) because the built in ballistic-nylon belt had a freaky carbon-fibre buckle with a weird lever-y kinda catch that was difficult to figure out. More on this later.

Still, I was happy with my new super-adventure pants, and a few days ago brought them to Stitches to get them hemmed. Here’s where the fun starts to end.

First, the lady behind the counter was an evil Russian lady. Since my hearing crapped out in Achinsk while teaching ESL I’ve disliked Russians, and I figured this was a bad omen. She curtly pointed to the try-on-your-pants room and I went and hauled them on. I stood, she pinned, it was a delight for everyone involved. Anyways…

I get back to the fitting room, would you believe I had to Google the term because it kept dancing around on the tip of my tongue, and then went to change back to my regular pants.

This is where the fun began. I couldn’t get out of my pants. The stupid fancy carbon-blahblah buckle won’t UNbuckle.

I spent a solid minute trying to sort it out, which is a long time when you’re trapped in your pants. Finally I stopped, and being the guy that I am, hauled out my phone and Tweeted that I was trapped in a fitting room and couldn’t get my pants off.

Priorities, people. I has ‘em.

There’s only so many ways to hold your pants up, so after trying most of them in reverse I finally figure out that you turn while pushing and twisting and Saturn has to be in the elliptic and during the third Tuesday of every month and that’s how you unbuckle the super-adventure pants and oh, is that why they were going for $24.99 at Costco?

Anyone who wants to give my a hard time about this, let me know and I’ll come over and make you wear the newly-named pants of doom. You can try to take ‘em off anytime you like.

This is an example of how we behave towards each other, and why our friends tend to make barfing noises when the witness it happening.

Aaaand this is an example of what happens when you’re not only lucky enough to find the love of your life, but also successfully trick them into thinking that you’re theirs.

Someone at work asked me last week what married life is like. I had to think about the best way to answer. After a moment I said:

“Marriage to someone you love, who you’re lucky enough to have love you back? If you’re doing it right it should scare the hell out of you. You want to give them everything and take nothing for yourself, because they’re more important to you than you are to yourself. It’s standing at a door and saying “no no, after you,” for five minutes. Or the “no, you hang up” thing except not that because everybody fucking hates that. Being married means being stronger, better, and more worried than you thought you could be, every day. And happier. If you’re doing it right, you’ll be amazed at what you thought true happiness was before you found ‘the one’. Because you had no clue back then.”

At that point, my work buddy kinda went “uh…huh,” and went back to his desk. And I went and texted Jeff just to say hey, because he’s my guy and I’m his and we start to jones for a text or two between us by lunch or so. Mr. Work-Buddy is young and likes his freedom and he’s his own first priority- which is fine when you’re that age and not interested in spending your life with one single person.

I have a friend named Jared who recently got engaged to his long-time boyfriend Wayne. They’re pretty young but the way Jared talks about him, I think they’ll get what I mean.

When I was in the fourth grade my parents noticed that I couldn’t see so hot, and I ended up with the crappiest, cheapest, plastic-est, thickest damn indestructible kid-glasses you ever saw.

I was stuck with those eyesores (pun definitely intended) until I was fifteen, when I transferred to a new high school that had never seen me in my short-bus specs, and so I fought tooth and nail for wire-rimmed Polo frames and real glass- and a year later, contact lenses. Freedom! I didn’t look like a massive dork. I was so happy, you have no idea.

Finally, when I was 26 and in the Navy, the technology caught up to where I wanted to be, and I laid down under a machine the size of a VW Bug and got my eyes lasered into better than 20/20 vision. I was so happy (after a week of agonizing recovery) to be free of contacts and solutions and glasses and schmutz on the lenses… you still have no idea.

But now…

Did you know, like, people get old, and stuff? I do. Mostly because I got old, and my expensive, laser-sharp new eyes became expensive old, dull eyes and now I can’t see sweet fuck-all. That’s quoting my optometrist. It’s a term they use.

So, a few weeks ago I dragged my ass out to the eye-doctor, as you’ve probably guessed, and got checked and confirmed that yes, I can indeed see sweet fuck-all. What’s worse, I can’t a) get my eyes re-lasered, and b) since I did get my eyes lasered in the first place, I can’t wear frigging contact lenses anymore.

So, long story short. I first got my glasses at the age of nine. And now, twenty-eight years later, I’m back at square one.

Now I’m waiting for the technology where they yank out my current eyeballs and replace them with 100 megapixel super-cameras and maybe radar. Or just a white stick and a new dog, because that’s what I’m feeling like these days.

Ugh.

I’m in Ottawa to see family, and I guess we’ll have to leave it at that. I don’t have the right to go into details and even if I did, I wouldn’t- to explain that reason and throw it out on the Internet would cheapen it and the reason for this trip was far more important to me than anything else currently going on in my otherwise cosy little life. So this is ours, and in the kindest possible way I’ll just leave it with “you can’t have it.”

Anyways and otherwise:

My nephew Ryan turned 6 on Friday and he is the most adorable little bugger you’ll ever meet. I’m serious- if you have a nephew that age, you’re out of luck because Ry is better in every way. He’s smart and funny and is going to be an amazing person. My other nephew Daniel is 9 going on 10 in July and looks like he’s going to play left tackle for the Argos. He’s kind and protective of his little brother and has a patience with the little kids my sister minds, and between the two of them it makes me want to clone them so Jeff and I can have our own pair.

I saw my mother and Step-dad at the kids’ party, and they look like they’ve got more energy than I do. Also of course my sister Stephanie, who for Christ’s sake still looks like she’s 22. I’m a little pissed about that, and I’m only kidding a little.

I had the rare opportunity to catch up with three friends whom I haven’t seen in twenty years, and laughed louder and longer than I have in a while, and right when I desperately needed to. I met their better halves, whose humour and intelligence say something about the women who picked them, and vice versa. I wish I could say more, but I’m sworn to secrecy… For now. Dun dun DUNNN!

I saw my Aunt, who is at this point in my life I sort of view more as an older sister. That is something I mean as a high compliment. And I saw my uncle, who inspires me and frustrates me and intrigues me. I’ve known him all my life and every time I think I’ve learned all I can from him he does or says something that makes me rethink so much.

Driving and walking around Ottawa reminded me of much we’ve both changed, and how much I’ve gained since leaving, as well as how much I gave up to do so.

But the most important person in my entire life isn’t here, and I haven’t slept at all since I left him alone at home, and I’ve wanted to get back to him since I got here.

That’s how I know that the people here helped form my life and made me the man I am today, but my home and my life is over there, across the mountains and by the water. Because that’s where he is.

So I’m going to go sit on the plane and fiddle with my tech and distract myself as much as I can. Because as tired as I am I’m not going to sleep ’till I’m home.

Location:Ottawa International Airport (aka YOW, which tickles me to no end)

Lo these many years later and that object lesson is still programmed into me. I’m forever hounding Jeff out of bed earlier than he’d like to hike the seawall or go to Stanley Park or Granville Island. He’s a good sport and usually gets even by making me bathe the dog when we get back, Rumble inevitably being covered in whatever he’s bounced through.

This morning we took Rumble to Portside Park just North of us, on the South side of Burrard Inlet. It has an off leash dog area which Rum loves, and some amazing views, which he really hasn’t ever noticed…

Here’s some pics & footage of our domestic adventure:

The North Shore:

Here’s the downtown core:

Rumble gets the crappy view, tho:

Still, he got some exercise.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Abbott St,Vancouver,Canada

My point is, every weekday like clockwork I step on the Skytrain at Stadium at 7:11 am and board the SeaBus at Waterfront at 7:31. I’m not the only one, either. If you’ve commuted with any regularity yourself you know what I mean: you have workday cohorts that match your schedule more often than not. The middle-aged guy who can maneuver through the crowds of people without ungluing his eyes from the paperback he’s been working his way through; the tech lady with a laptop bag bigger than she is; and more and more commonly, the twentysomething with eyes only for his/her iPhone or Crackberry.

It’s the last example that I see the most of on my hike to work, which is ironic because nine times out of ten I’m doing the same thing- email, blog posts, news, etc. There’s one guy though, who is consistent as the Sunrise. If he’s over 22 I’ll eat your headwear of choice, and looks like any other cubicle monkey that rides the boat to work.

I’m not stalking him or anything, but I’m sure that’s what he’s thinking now. Starting last week he started watching Gone In 60 Seconds on his Blackberry, and I’ve been watching with him. I guess he saves the movie for the commute and we have a similar trip so far I’ve only missed like five minutes of it.

I thought I was being subtle, but yesterday, when we got to the part where the Shelby Mustang gets demolished at the end, I groaned out loud and he turned around and gave me a look. I guess his volume wasn’t that high. I dont know what his problem is- people eavesdrop on tech all the time on the train and boat. Infect, someone’s watching me type this right now. Yeah, you. Hi, did you see the end of GI60S with Blackberry guy? I didn’t catch the last bit.

Location:Dunsmuir Viaduct,Vancouver,Canada

I’ve always been dark around my birthday, and was expecting this year to be more of the same. And yeah, the couple of weeks leading up to it were a pretty consistent pattern of down and downer. So I was very surprised about yesterday.

First, gorgeous day. Beautiful. Caught the ass-end of a sea lion playing in the water off the seawall outside of work. Had a remarkably productive and fun day at the office (very unusual) and got the nod to take off an hour early. Woo!

Jeff bought me my iPad last week, so that wasn’t the thing of it- it wasn’t how much he bought so much as how much he did for me. I told him late in the day I was cutting out from work early, and Jeff still raced home to clean the entire house, do the laundry and the dishes (if you knew him you’d know this is a HUGE deal) and on top of that, bought and wrapped a birthday present AND had a cake waiting for me. Again, if you know Jeff at this point you’d want to do a DNA test or check for a head injury. I completely love him for who he is, it’s just who he is isn’t usually as great at birthday stuff as he was yesterday.

Anyway, after a slice o’ cake and a sit we went out for dinner… We had a pleasant wander around downtown, and passed like three different TV and movie shoots, before stopping at The Elephant & Castle for dinner and beers. So very good.

I was planning on going skydiving this weekend – something big (and expensive) to celebrate my birthday and/or laugh in the face of mortality and/or distract me from said mortality and birthday…

Not necessary. Got my guys and my family and my home and a fantastic life out here on the edge of the water. I couldn’t ask for more.