For the last couple days I’ve had a routine – wake up, pee, restock my Tiny Tower, say hello to the three cats, then check on my pigeons. Coco and Dirk were wide awake this morning, and much more active than the last few days. I watched as Coco hopped all over the tiny balcony surface, looking all around her and even tapping on the glass – when I had a sudden flash of insight: my pigeons weren’t just friendly birds living on our balcony to make friends, they were STUCK. I watched the smaller of the two birds stretch out her wings and try vainly to get some lift, but the depth of the balcony is less than a foot – there simply wasn’t enough room for a full wing span and/or flight. I took my new theory to Ed, who immediately saw the logic in it. He got out of bed and donned some armour (a hoodie and a pair of gardening gloves) and went to work.

Thing is, the balcony is called a Juliet balcony for a reason – there isn’t enough room to even stand out there, let alone rescue some birds. He tried several times to (gently) grab one of the birds, but they just hopped to the other side and far away from Ed. This was frustrating, but it proved my theory – if the birds could get out, they’d definitely fly away from the giant wingless bird flapping senselessly at their bodies. Manually grabbing the birds was an epic failure, so Ed and I bandied about some other ideas for bird rescue, each more outlandish than the last. Then, just as suddenly as my flash of insight about being stuck came, Ed had a BRILLIANT IDEA: hockey stick.

He grabbed his hockey stick from the office and gently put it on the balcony. He tried to scoop up the birds like a spatula, but this just scared them. Finally, he moved the stick under the pigeon’s feet, and when the bird stepped onto the blade, he sloooowly raised the stick up to the top of the balcony. As soon as it was flush with the top, Coco hopped onto the railing and took off into the morning sun. Success! Ed repeated his Pigeon Elevator Service for Dirk, and he too flew off as soon as he could. Ed was very rightfully pleased with himself, as was I for realizing the predicament in the first place. We are Pigeon Saviours! I am proud of our Pigeon Wrangling ways! I will miss Coco and Dirk for the mild amusement they brought me, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to starve to death on my balcony so this is for the best. Hooray! Good luck to you, Coco and Dirk!

Last Tuesday night, Heather and I went to glass fusing class. It wasn’t so much “glass fusing” as it was “glass gluing” – you arrange your pieces, then they take it away for firing and you can pick it up in a week. Still, we had a lot of fun and are making plans to do it again.

I didn’t have any ideas going into the class, but eventually decided on a theme of “drunken Tetris”:

so bad at tetris

See, you’re not only really drunk and therefore bad at Tetris, you’re SO drunk that Space Invaders are showing up on your screen for NO REASON.

Making the Space Invader was a pain in the ass, as I had to cut all the “pixel” chips individually:

boop boop beep i am a space invader

Still, I was kind of happy with how he turned out given my utter lack of artistic ability.

Also, I made a thing:

seen here: one thing

I picked up our pieces last night, and they turned out kind of neat:

omg i'm like sooo drunk

Everything is all blobby, including my space intruder:

*bubble noises*

Nothing melted quite flat, but it looks pretty cool and the fancy glass I used for the long Tetris piece is awesome:

it doesn't actually show up here so you'll have to take my word of awesome

Super fun crafty goodness. As much as trying to do pixel stuff in glass was time consuming and difficult, I’m kind of in love – it would be fun to do a whole series of video game themed things. The plate I made is 8×8, but I could get behind doing a set of coasters or something with a single image on it (I added the space invader because there was too much white space on my ‘screen’). Hmm. Must plan additional crafts. Fun, and it keeps me out of trouble. It’s win win!

Heather went for pretty, and made a flowery plate:

less drunken, more pretty!

Her pendant turned out really nice as well:

pretty!

My smaller piece turned out .. okay. I made the mistake of using glass that was too dark for the surface, and they melted down into blobs. When held up to the light it looks pretty awesome, but it wouldn’t make a particularly attractive necklace so I’ll likely use it as a sun catcher in a window for full non-blobbiness.

Coco and Dirk update: they’re still there. No nest, but they’re not leaving. Wonder if they’ve decided to move in?

We have new friends:

cooooo? coo. coo coo coo.

Our condo building has a problem with pigeons living in our parkade. They’d nested above the 2nd gate, and pooped everywhere. At one point I think there were several pigeon couples living in there; at least one nestful of babies had been laid, hatched, and grew up all underground. The gate was wide enough to allow the pigeons to hop through, so they added wire screens between the bars. This meant the birds couldn’t come and go at will, but that didn’t really faze them – they simply waited until cars came or went, and flew out to get food. Pigeons are creepy smart, and they managed to circumvent or just plain ignore every anti-pigeon measure that went up in our building. They’re the avian equivalent of the honey badger – they just do not care.

I never had a problem with the pigeons. I talked to them when I passed, and in my head we had excellent conversations about seeds and feathers. Yes, the disturbing amounts of bird poop they left in our parkade was kind of gross, but they never pooped on me or Lola and we have a maintenance man equipped with a hose, so .. no biggie. The building people didn’t share my nonchalance though, and eventually installed bird spikes on every possible surface which drove the birds out once and for all. I kind of missed them, but I am not right in the head sometimes.

Yes, the pigeons were driven out of our parkade .. only to relocate to a new, even better home: the Juliet balcony of Sparta.

Lemon was the first one to discover the birds – he spent hours perched in front of the sliding door, swishing his tail impotently. Yesterday I decided to find out exactly what he was doing, and I found the pigeons hanging out in the sun without a care in the world:

i eat them now, yes?

When Ed came home, I showed him our new friends and we named them: Coco and Dirk. Ed isn’t too thrilled with our new additions, but I like the pigeons. We sat watching them for a long time, and Ed took some video. There’s a screen door on our balcony (as with all our windows), so I opened the sliding door to see if my new friends would bolt: they didn’t. All that separated their fat little bodies from the certain doom at the teeth of an inbred cat was 16 inches and a piece of mesh, but they were unconcerned about any of it. When the noise from traffic became too loud and obnoxious to bear, I closed the sliding door and went inside to restock my damn tower again, thinking the birds would likely fly away to greener pastures.

That didn’t happen, even though I hung out with them several more times during the evening. Before I turned in for the night I checked once again, and the birds were fast asleep – fluffy feathers and heads under wings and all. They were also there when I woke up this morning; one still asleep and the other looking around for new, exciting places to poop. I don’t want to get too attached to the pigeons – Lucy and Hunky Pete will be the only bird couple for me – but I can’t help but squee a little bit at my new friends, dumb though they may be (I tried feeding them some bread, but they just looked at it and hopped away from me when I tried to get it closer to them). Will they still be there when I get home tonight? Who knows. Ed hopes not, but I kind of like them. They’re no pug, but .. y’know. Animals. I like ’em.

.. is not nearly as exciting or existent as it is in my head.

We’re doing criminal record checks at work, and I am perversely excited about it. This is sad on a number of levels: that I have little to no problem with an invasive look at my past misdeeds; that I have a thousand and one inappropriate jokes to make about the whole situation at work but I really can’t shouldn’t; that my own background check will come back cleaner than fresh snow falling softly on a newborn babe (who should really be inside, you monster). I have nothing to disclose (that wouldn’t be already on my blog anyway) to anyone that would shock or titillate; no double-life as a criminal mastermind that I’m desperate to hide from prying eyes. Yes, there was that time I was in an Asian Youth Gang, but I used to be an Asian Youth – anything I ever did was my “being in a gang”. Also, never been convicted of anything. So there’s that.

I have to admit my nose is a little out of joint, though – I just got an email from my boss asking me to not be involved at all with the background check process. I’d been going around with the HR guy to hand out forms and act as comic relief (as well as provide any missed information/accuse random people of having mafia ties), which makes perfect sense to me – nothing can be all bad if it’s all hilarious. From an HR standpoint though, this isn’t the best way to deal with the situation because it is Serious Times. Serious Times are as alien to me as family is; everything is funny. When things stop being funny, it’s time to be cremated. In the Game of Kimli, you laugh or you die.

My boss did reassure lil’ ol’ hypersensitive me that I didn’t do anything wrong, so I suppose I will stop pouting. Just in time, too – a large shipment of new minifigures just arrived for me so I am far too busy opening new Legomans to be petulant. Especially since the first figure I opened is in the middle of suicide. Oh, Lego! You joker you!

pre-release legomans, bitches.

In honour of my 2,000th Delicious Juice post (on WordPress), I would like to inform you that shit is getting serious up in here:

don't worry; all the dinosaurs are over 18

Things are about to get a great deal more awkward.

Bring marshmallows.

Last night I learned two things:

• My uncle died last week
• I had an uncle

My family: we’re not close.

I always kind of knew my mother had siblings, but it wasn’t something I gave much thought – honestly, I’ve devoted more time to selecting a brand of toilet paper than I have to thinking about the relatives I have floating around out there in the ether. I’ve joked that I can’t have sex anywhere in south east Asia because there’s a high chance I’d be fucking a cousin, but that’s about as far as my thoughts went. Family is an alien concept to me.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about the passing of this uncle I didn’t know existed. I feel as though I should be a lot sadder than I am, and I feel guilty because I just don’t feel it. I do feel bad that my mom lost a brother, but beyond that .. there’s not much. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t think I’m a bad person. Are you required to mourn people you’re related to, even if you learned about their life and death in the same sentence? That seems like a lot of work. Instead, I will drink a toast to my late Uncle Steve and wish we had met while he was alive. And maybe I’ll ask my mom about her other siblings, so I’m a little more prepared for these things. It would be kind of fun/scary to think about how different my life would have been if I had a big family; to think about what I’d be like if I grew up with a support system and cousins all over the place. Huh. Now I’m all thinky, and not just about whether playing the bereavement card (which, to be fair, only came up at all because I’m editing that section of our employee manual) to get a day off would negatively effect my karma enough to make me Lawful Evil instead of my usual happy standard of Chaotic Neutral.

true story: before I took this picture I was thinking "man, I wish I had a d20 here" then I remembered that I totally did

Erik the Red will now be known as Erik the FABULOUS:

by odin's delicious beard!

I am so very, very tired.

If yesterday’s phone call had come a week earlier, my upcoming fall would look very different indeed.

The shop called around 5:30 with an update on Lola. She is both leaking and burning oil into an alternate dimension – the oil isn’t getting to the engine, because it’s going SOMEWHERE. Where that is, we don’t know. It’s just .. gone. All signs are pointing to a ghost in the machine (herp derp) and also a valve seal problem. Best case scenario: the leak can be fixed externally, the parts are in stock, and I get Lola back sometime next week. Worst case: the engine has to come apart, the parts need to be ordered, and I’ll get Lola back in time for Thanksgiving. This’ll involve opening up the cylinder to see if I did any damage to it while riding around without oil; all of which basically adds up to a METRIC ASS FUCK FULL OF MONEY. In fact, regardless of which cuisine reigns supreme, this repair is going to be vomitously expensive – and if it happened last week instead of this, I certainly wouldn’t have been buying tickets to London for a spot of tea with the Queen.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m perversely glad it happened this way, because I’m still so excited about going to England I could pee glitter. I’m just thinking about the cost – it doesn’t really matter what happens at this point; that bill is going to hurt. A lot. And it’s scary to think that if I hadn’t taken her in, I could have very well destroyed my scooter. The day I dropped her off I was having second thoughts about the necessity of it all – she was riding fine, none of the weird things had happened in a while, why bother with the expense – but I couldn’t shake the “what if”, and I took her in. It’s good that I did. I will still have a scooter at the end of this. A scooter and a very, very sore bank account what with all the expensive and intrusive anal reaming.

I spent all of yesterday being so stressed out about Lola that I was in no shape for socializing, so I spent the evening cram crafting for Sunday. I made some new stuff, too – in addition to the Lego necklaces, I’ll have some nerdy magnets, rings and pins made from l33t Scrabble tiles:

i have more tiles on the way. coming soon: SWEARING!

Come on by! Also, say the secret phrase for some FREE SMUTTONS! The phrase for tomorrow is “I’ve got taco fever” – tell me all about your insatiable lust for tacos, and you’ll get some free wearable porn. Hooray!

Back to worrying about my scooter now. Boo :(

me in happier times

An awkward phone call:

“I heard your company does charitable donations like gift cards and stuff. Can I have some?”

No. No, you can’t. Stop calling me, crazy lady.

My Friday started out well enough – I was in a good mood, managed to get a seat on the bus, was amused by the dirty looks thrown my way, admired some well-built calves on the guy standing next to me – but it’s rather quickly souring on me. A lot of stuff hasn’t gone my way since the aforementioned calf-ogling, and it’s bringing me down:

• I haven’t gotten any mail this week at all – my whore coins still haven’t arrived, along with a whole bunch of other stuff
• While my Cram Crafting for this Sunday’s Blim Market is going well, I’m out of chain for my Heart Shaped Blox and every place I’ve checked is out of stock
• I dropped Lola off at the shop yesterday, and I got a call this morning – she is FUCKED UP. I had an issue in June with some missing oil, and it turns out that my engine was completely dry. Oil is going from the tank to .. somewhere, but not the engine. The weird lurching I experienced on the Second Narrows was my engine trying to seize, and if that happened .. well, Lola would be dead because I can’t afford a full transmission replacement. As it is, I might be looking at one hell of a repair bill and I have no idea when I’ll get her back and it’s making me anxious and cranky.
• Cramps! I haven’t had cramps in so long I’d forgotten what they feel like. Turns out I don’t much like them!

With the exception of my scooter, the list isn’t THAT bad. My mail will get here eventually; I just need more patience. The cramps will go away. I will either find some chain tonight, or I won’t – not a big deal. And Lola .. well, I’ll find out soon. Fingers crossed that it’s just a clogged tube or something, and doesn’t require a complete rebuild.

Reminder: Heather and I will be at the Blim Market this Sunday from 12-5pm. It’ll be at Robson and Howe, as part of Picnurbia – a car-free picnic/festival in the middle of the city. Come get some Heart Shaped Blox (both regular and new fancy blinged) from me and some awesome photo cards and magnet sets from Heather, or just stop by and see the sights (and bring us Diet Coke).