Rowing

I started rowing about three weeks ago. I’ve always wanted to get an Olympic medal and since they rarely go on sale and I don’t believe “Searching for Arcane Inane Facts on Google” is an Olympic event yet I took up rowing. I think two words accurately describe rowing, “really freakin’ hard”. I go Tuesdays and Thursdays but I missed the first Thursday to see comedy legend Don Rickles at Casino Rama. Since I missed the first Thursday I asked if I could do a makeup class and was lucky enough to get a spot in the Saturday and Sunday Learn to Row class. The weekend classes were three hours a day so by the end of it on Sunday I worked my abs so much I felt like they could stop a bullet. They’re now back to their normal pudding-like state.

When I went back to my regular team on Tuesday they had all attended the Thursday class that I missed and not knowing that I had attended the weekend session thought they were far and away more advanced than me. “This is an oar Skippy, can you say oar?” I tried to play along, hoping that if I did well enough they’d give me ice cream after the session.

There are two instructors for our sessions. One is a no-nonsense drill instructor kind of guy. If you’ve ever seen Full Metal Jacket you know the type. The other is a scatterbrain who praises us for doing the most basic of tasks. “You got in the boat, good job, good job. You moved your oar, you’re awesome.”

I’m in the scatterbrain’s boat. On the first night I rowed we hit an anchored boat and the dock. On the second night we didn’t hit anything; but, the person sitting in four seat (I’m in six seat so four seat is the first seat behind me with an oar on the same side) kept hitting my oar because he wasn’t in sync with the rest of the rowers.

The third night was the worst so far. The seats in these boats have wheels and are placed in rails so they slide while rowing. My seat was not properly in the slide and consequently I couldn’t row properly and because I couldn’t row in sync the person behind me kept hitting me in the back with her oar handle. On top of that I usually have a very attractive woman sitting in front of me but on this night we mixed it up a bit so we could get a feel for rowing on the other side and I had this terrible beast in front of me. Regarding the actual rowing, well, we got blown into a cove, hit an anchored boat and the dock and then had to be pushed out by a passerby. We also hit the breakwall on the way back but managed to get ourselves out of that with considerable effort. While we were in the cove we saw the other boat whiz by with their instructing shouting instructions at them (in German I believe).

On the fourth night we hit a dock and got trapped in some floating tires that have been setup to prevent you from hitting the dock. They’re going to need more than tires to prevent us from hitting stuff. After our session, the second group was short one person and asked if anybody wanted to row again. Being a bit of a sadist I said sure and maybe I can wear clothespins on my nipples for the ride. I went out again and the ride was so much smoother, the boat was balanced and everyone was in sync but the rowing was a lot harder. I was very happy to get back to dry land and walk on my rubbery legs to my car.

Garage Sale for the Relay

A few weekends ago we held a garage sale to raise money for the Relay for Life. Although, I've since heard that there was a massive garage sale the same weekend to raise money for another cancer event our dinky little one was not tied to it. There were 4 of us participating; myself, Daisy, Monkey and Joey Jo Jo Shabadu Jr (not their real names).

I'm quite pleased to announce that we raised just shy of $504.00. Here are some of the highlights and lowlights from the sale:

• One of the items for sale was a gag voodoo kit. A tiny little doll with pins that you could use to get back at an ex-boyfriend, etc. A woman looked at it and said "I'm not ignorant but you shouldn't be selling this to raise money for charity." Whenever somebody says "I'm not ignorant but . . ." you can be sure that the next words out of their mouth will be something extremely ignorant. This woman also tried to buy our cooler for 50 cents, not realizing that it was actually the bottles of water inside the cooler that were going for 50 cents. When I tried to give her the bottle of water she said, "that's okay honey, I work at an after hours club and can get all the free water I want." We all can lady, it's called a tap.
• One woman asked Monkey if we still had the sombrero and how much it was. When she replied yes and 25 cents the woman gave her $20.00 and said thank you, keep the change. That's an 8000% mark up. Now I know how the cable company feels.
• On the flip side another woman took 2 purses at $2.00 each and a skirt for $1.00. She tried to give me $3.00. I said the price was $5.00. After trying to push $3.00 on me she finally broke and said she'd give me $4.00. I repeated that the price was $5.00 but I would throw in the mousepad that her husband wanted. She said $4.50. Obviously this woman wasn't getting it, I tried contorting my body into the shape of a 5 but I'm simply not flexible enough and was worried that people would start singing YMCA. I won the battle and got the $5.00 but they drove off with such hatred in their eyes that I wondered if I had violated their daughter (and/or goat) at any point during the transaction.
• Daisy purchased more goods than she donated but has a couple of nice summer ensembles now.
• One woman asked if we had any smaller planters. I told her I would check the storeroom and she waited patiently and then said "would you mind?"
• Monkey told a couple of slacker kids that they could keep their "stash" in a coconut head we were selling.
• We had one bin where anything in it was a nickel. These two kids almost cleared it out but left one coaster in there. I didn't know if they had such discerning taste that the coaster just wouldn't go with all the plastic tchotchke they bought or they ran out of nickels.
  
• An exercise bike was donated to the sale and we managed to sell it to some guy whose van was already so full that he wasn't able to fit the whole bike in. The handlebars were sticking out. Monkey told him not to speed on the way home and he promised to keep it under 90.
• On Saturday a man bought one mug out of a set of two. On Sunday, our first customer was the same man, looking for the matching mug. We didn't know if he met someone the night before and wanted matching cups to have coffee in or broke the first one after he got home and needed a replacement.
  

Boston

Despite buying our bus tickets in a Chinese bakery and only paying $15.00 for them the ride to Boston was uneventful, this is not always the case though as we learned later.

My main purpose for this entire trip was to see a couple of comedy shows in Boston (Somerville actually, just outside of Boston). On Friday night doktor cocacolamcdonalds, Eugene Mirman, Todd Barry and Emo Philips performed. On Saturday night The Walsh Brothers, Morgan Murphy, Jim Jeffries and Patton Oswalt were on the bill.

I’m a huge fan of Todd Barry, Emo Philips and Patton Oswalt and Toronto isn’t exactly a comedy hotbed so I figured I could kill three birds with one stone by going to Boston.

The other comedians were amusing though doktor cocacolamcdonalds was a little odd (hard to imagine based on the name).

The Walsh Brothers did their entire act about the Fung Wah Bus Company. Apparently, the bus has run out of gas on the freeway, caught on fire on more than one occasion, lost an axel, rolled over a few times and left many passengers stranded at McDonalds in Connecticut. They closed the act by performing a theme song they had written for the Fung Wah. One Walsh brother changed into a yellow jumpsuit a la Bruce Lee in Game of Death while the other wore a karate gi and a giant ceramic Hello Kitty head while “floating” around the stage. It was a catchy number.

As I mentioned, the venue was located just outside of Boston, so, not knowing our way around the city we took a cab there. The cab ride cost $20 ($10 each). This was only $5.00 per person less than the ride from New York to Boston. When we got to the theatre we realized there was a subway stop right beside it. We took the subway back but had difficulty figuring out how to buy a pass. We eventually got one and the plan was for me to go through and then pass to card back to Auntie Monkey so she could go through. The entrance is not a turnstile but doors that open like in Star Trek. You put your card in the front of the machine, it slides through and pops up, once you take the card back the doors open and you run through. We didn’t realize any of this was going to happen so once the doors opened we panicked and both ran through. After getting a taste for the criminal life we decided we might as well do this the next time we had to take the subway (plus, since I was always going through first, it would be Auntie Monkey’s ass they hauled off to jail and not mine). Total cost of two people taking the subway three times, $5.10.

The only other thing of note that happened in Boston was my running into the FBI. I was waiting outside a store when I saw a small group of Midwesterners standing around and two boys around 15 or 16, also Midwesterners, walk up to them pointing at their brand new baseball hats. Both hats had FBI written in large letters on the front and, wait for it . . . written in small letters just beneath, Female Body Inspector. I think George Washington wore a hat like that when he first crossed the Delaware. This proved to be the height of hilarity for not only the boys but the entire group. There were high fives all around, mixed in with tears of laughter.

Day Three in New York

Day three was much the same as day two. We walked until our shoes dissolved and then walked a little bit more. There were a couple of interesting stores around. One called Auto advertised itself as “the mini department store”, but it looked like a regular store to me. We went to Soapology which is like Lush but classier. Inside, there was a little man in what looked like a 19^thcentury riding outfit, or at least, what I think a 19^th century riding outfit would look like. Upon seeing him I thought somewhere a grandmother is looking out her front door wondering where her lawn jockey went. Soapology has a bathtub in the store and they give each customer a hand wash, followed by a rejuvenating scrub and then some softening lotion. I couldn’t stop smelling my hands for three hours afterwards. I don’t remember all the product names but one of them was a walnut polisher which of course sent me into a fit of giggles. I would repeatedly tell Monkey that I needed to go polish the old walnut. This tickled me to no end and got absolutely no reaction out of her.

Another of my favourites was Mondo Kim’s, which has to be the greatest video store ever. It’s three (maybe more) stories of bizarre, obscure videos, the exact kind my brother and I love. An entire section devoted to women in prison flicks. Are you a fan of Blaxploitation? I know I am. Blacula, Blackenstein, Black Mama, White Mama, they’re all there.

I asked Monkey if she saw a comedy section anywhere and she replied, “no . . . oh wait, here’s UK directors.” Not really comedy, but good effort. I asked the cashier if there was a comedy section, he said, “like stand-up comedy?” I said, “any type of comedy”, he said, “no”. If you have no kind of comedy, why did you ask me what particular type of comedy I was looking for?

Me: Absurdist comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Physical comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Highbrow comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Three Stooges comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Vaudevillian comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Teenage coming of age comedy?
Him: No.
Me: College comedy?
Him: Yes. Wait, what did you say?
Me: College comedy.
Him: No.

We also went to Chinatown to purchase our bus tickets to Boston and visited the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory while we were there. The little man at Soapology told us about a brand of green tea ice cream that we could get in K-Town. Quickly realizing via the glazed look in our eyes that we had no idea what K-Town was he said, Korea Town. Well, that was convenient because we were staying in old K-Town. All this is moot though because we ended up getting the ice cream in Chinatown. Around the corner from the Ice Cream Factory is a Chinese candy shop. Rows and rows of glass jars filled with things you’d only see in medical labs. Pickled squid, honeyed hog snout, crunchy granola chicken beak; this is what they were trying to pass off as candy. There were also samples freely available so I tried one and immediately asked if they had a pair of scissors I could borrow to cut out my tongue.

After rinsing my mouth with bleach we went to the Fung Wah bus company to purchase our bus tickets. The Fung Wah travels New York to Boston and Boston to New York. Tickets are $15.00 and the bus leaves every hour, or when the driver is finished his cigarette and feels like it.

Day Two in New York

Busy, busy, busy. I’m normally the kind of guy whose social calendar for the year can be written in large print on the back of a postage stamp. I go to work, I go home, on rare occasions I’ll go to a Christmas dinner or birthday party but of late I’ve barely had time to throw eggs at old people or yell obscenities at children, never mind update the blog.

I’ll try to finish off the New York/Boston trip shortly but my heart just won’t be into it since it happened so long ago.

I’ll preface this by saying that Auntie Monkey has a bit of an obsessive personality. The way I like to visit a city is to do a lot of research and mark down anything I think may be of interest and try to group them by area and priority so I can minimize the amount of time wasted looking for stuff. Maybe, it’s actually me that has the obsessive personality. The way Auntie Monkey likes to travel is for me to do a lot of research and mark down anything that may be of interest to her (i.e., any place that sells shoes). Once we get to the city, if it’s on the list, it’s getting a visit, no matter how much time we have, or far away we are or little interest we have in it at the time.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, taken during the filming of The Seven Year Itch. She is standing on a subway grate holding her dress down as it is billows around her. One of the tourist books I was reading mentioned that the grate was located at 52^nd and Lexington (I think, I don’t remember the exact address). I thought, hmm, moderately interesting and marked it down in case we were directly passing it. If we were at 53^rd and Lexington I wasn’t about to walk down to 52^nd to see a grate. Each time we finished a little section we would decide where to go next. Inevitably Monkey would say, what about the subway grate, and I would reply, it’s a little out of the way from here. As in about 40 freakin’ blocks out of the way. When we had finally finished looking at every single woman’s shoe in Manhattan Auntie Monkey said, where to now?

I’m going to give you a little perspective here. Health experts recommend that you walk 10,000 steps a day. This is equivalent to about 5 miles. The day before we had walked 28,000 steps and at this point today we had walked over 31,000 steps (that’s right, I wear a pedometer).

I suggested we go back to the hotel room and get pedicures (because I’m a little fruity at times). She said, how about we go check out the subway grate. Several blood vessels burst in my eyes and just behind my forehead. I calmly explained that there could be nude ballerinas giving away hot caramel sundaes and iPhones there and I still wouldn’t go. I then carved the words out of the page with an exacto knife, set them afire, encased the ashes in concrete and dropped it in the Hudson river. Auntie Monkey then said, does this mean you don’t want to see the subway grate?

New York - May 06, 2008

I went to New York and Boston over May 6 – 11^th. I was hoping to do daily blog updates but the wireless connections in the hotels were terrible. Plus, I was really tired at the end of each day.

I’ll still spread out the entries by day to keep things easier in my little pea brain. I should also mention that I had a traveling companion; you may know her as Auntie Monkey.

We decided to drive to the airport ourselves and park there. The reduced rate lot is $65.00 a week and there was a 20% off coupon on the website so the amount was actually $52.00. The reduced rate parking lot was packed, what a bunch of cheapskates, we ended up parking at the back of the lot. You then have to take a train to the terminal. The trains come fairly frequently, and despite all the cars in the lot, were practically empty.

I got in the wrong line at customs. The guy ahead of me seemed to be trying to use his business card as identification and the customs officer was oblivious to the growing line-up at his booth. I switched lines with no success as that customs officer wanted to get to know each person as a friend and dismiss with all this stuffy customs business. I finally got through, even with my carry-on full of tiger blood. I did have to dispose of my orange though.

In the washroom at the airport there is a vending machine that sells:

1. Condoms – in case you get lucky while waiting for your flight to Duluth.
2. Polo cologne – you increase your chance of getting lucky if you smell like the gymnasium at an all-boys Catholic high school.
3. Looney Tunes temporary tattoos – these will entertain your illegitimate child while you are getting lucky.

The flight was on a tiny plane but otherwise uneventful. We had prepaid for a shuttle to the hotel and went in search of that. This was a terrible ride. The driver barely spoke, he just kind of grunted and we intuited to follow him. The shuttle was van size with three rows of 3 seats. We made three more stops at the airport to pick up more passengers until the van was at capacity and then dropped each of them off individually. The shuttle ride took a half hour longer than the flight.

Checking into the hotel was very smooth. The front desk woman asked how many keys I would like and I told her 27. I’m a very friendly person but I don’t want to stay in the room to let people in all the time.

The hotel was nice enough for the price. I think hostels run around $200.00 a night in Manhattan.

Approximately four seconds after we checked in (Auntie Monkey doesn’t like to sit still) we went to play the giant game of Frogger that is New York traffic. Here are a few of my observations:

• The time between a traffic light turning green and the time you hear the first horn blast can be measured in nanoseconds.
• New Yorkers are always in a hurry with the exception of when there is a vehicle barreling toward them; then, it’s saunter time.
• Traffic lines are merely suggestions.
• No matter how far you stand in the middle of the street waiting to cross, some New Yorker is going to elbow his way ahead of you in order to get to the other side a fraction of a second faster.
• Sidewalks may be driven on provided they are a faster way of getting somewhere.

Babysitting

Sorry that it’s been so long between posts. I’m still recovering from the weekend. We babysat Snake and Rooster. Please allow me to refresh your memory on the cast of characters:

Snake – a dynamic, almost seven year old, who sees and hears everything. Snake makes the Tasmanian Devil seem like an arthritis riddled 80 year old trying to make her way through quicksand.

Rooster – Two and half and has me wrapped around her little finger. Rooster has warmed up a bit since we last met. She now lets me pick her up without fuss. Rooster enjoys jumping and running. When she’s excited, which is 98% of the time, she will jump straight up and down for a few seconds and then go tearing through the house giggling before stopping to jump some more.

Pig – Just turned one. The happiest boy I’ve ever seen. At the stage where he is pulling himself up to a standing position. Very often you’ll see just the top of his head over the arm of the couch.

Jabberjaw – Pig’s mom. I call her Jabberjaw for two reasons; one, she had a Jabberjaw lunch box in grade school which I believe she still has to this day and two, she talks a lot. Jabberjaw deftly weaves the art of conversation with the inability to stay focused so having a discussion with her is like trying to map out the path of a superball to its eventual destination.

Gook Gook (rhymes with hook hook) – Pig’s father and coincidentally, Jabberjaw’s husband. A well-spoken gent who regales the children with tales of the real estate market in the GTA.

Auntie Monkey – Jabberjaw’s older sister. The thought process of Auntie Monkey is different than anybody I’ve ever met.

Given the premise:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.

She would round out the syllogism not by saying “Socrates is mortal” but “why is it pronounced Sock-rah-tees and not Sew-crates. I would think it should be Sew-crates. Did Plato invent play-doh? Or did he invent plates? I can never remember.”

Myself – Fat and cranky. Bit of a bastard at times. I will refer to myself as Uncle Fatty where necessary.

Mommy & Daddy – Snake and Rooster’s parents.

This weekend we also had company from:

Jook Jook – Rhymes with Gook Gook and is his brother.

Auntie Lola – Married to Jook Jook.

Coco – A mischievous three year old monkey.

Chili – A one year old with a head the size of a cantaloupe.

The babysitting started on Saturday at around 1pm. Mommy and Daddy unloaded an incredible amount of luggage and started bringing it in. Snake immediately wanted to play and dragged me down to the basement to put together a water activity toy. This thing came with various plastic parts attached to a plastic frame. Normally you can snap the parts of but in this case they needed to be cut so Snake ran upstairs to get two pairs of scissors. There were blue pieces and red pieces. She gave me the red pieces because she likes blue. She also instructed me on how to cut the pieces. “Cut pieces should be put here, if they need to be trimmed they go in this pile, cut close to the frame.” Thanks kid, I’ve used scissors before.

During the assembly I asked what Mommy and Daddy would be doing this weekend. She said, “they’ll have their fun.” I bet they will kid, I bet they will.

After the toy was completed we all went five pin bowling. Six adults, five children, one bowling lane. Coco has a peculiar bowling stance in that he holds the ball as if he were shot putting and tries to throw it towards the pins. Rooster was able to roll the ball halfway down the lane leaving it for the bowlers behind her to try and hit. Snake was a pretty good bowler and managed to get a couple of strikes.

We went five pin bowling because we were afraid that if we went ten pin, people would mistake Chili’s head for a bowling ball.

After bowling it was back to Jabberjaw & Gook Gook’s for a barbecue and soccer in the backyard. Snake loves soccer. I think I played about 15 hours of soccer over the weekend and was fortunate enough to be hit directly in the nuts only twice. I probably shouldn’t have been playing naked but hindsight is 20/20.