Grounds for Complaint

 

Dear Solitary Reader:   Twice today while taking the last gulp of coffee from my travel mug I got a mouthful of coffee grounds. You might be thinking I should have learned from the first time but these two mugs of coffee came from two completely different sources: one from home, the other from the coffee shop near my work.

 
If you’re a coffee drinker you’ve probably experienced this at one point or another. You’re about to hit the moment you’ve worked toward for the last hour or so, the final sip of coffee (for this cup anyway), when instead of a mouthful of liquid you get a mouthful of liquid with a little extra on the side.

The inside.
 
I’m not sure what the galactic reason for my negative coffee karma is today. To my knowledge I am still the holder of the Folger’s Crystal, the Taster’s Choice (don’t ask, I’m not proud of it), the Master of Maxwell’s House, the best part of waking up (you know, if I wasn’t married I’d be using that as a pick up line “Hey baby, take me home with you tonight and I’ll be the best part of waking up oh yeah…” I’m fairly certain I would then still be single) and he who is Na-Bob (as in, my dad’s Bob, but I’m nay-bob).
 
Out of the whole rigmarole comes an interesting, to me at any rate, notion and really I’m certain its not specific only to me: that last ruined swig of swill ruins the entire cup. What’s interesting is, on the second cup, I remember the first sip being especially tasty – exactly what coffee should be – hot, bitter, and gut churning. I could have kept drinking it all day at that point. And then I swallowed those grounds of coffee.
 
Now when I think about that coffee, and the one before it, I am sad, and it feels like I have a lump in  my throat (about the size of a ground of coffee) which no amount of catlike hairball like hchhhhhhhh-ing can get out.
 
There’s an old saying still booting around out there: you only get one chance to make a first impression. This is true as far as it goes, but I think you have to be sure to add the Maxwell House Modifier. The saying from henceforth should be: You only get one chance to make a first impression, but you’d better be good to the last drop or that first impression doesn’t matter.

oh… did you know I used to be in those Taster’s Choice commercials of a generation ago? Check out the pic:

I Wonder, Bread

 

Dear Solitary Reader: While grocery shopping with my wife on the weekend we were in the bakery section and something caught my eye: yet another incarnation of WonderBread. This particular packaging was a light blue, maybe a teal? and it was WonderBread <insert healthy sounding adjective here>.

 
I was quite surprised because it seemed like just last week WonderBread had come out with a dark blue packaged WonderBread <insert different healthy adjective here> and the week before that they came out with a green packaged WonderBread <yet another healthy adjective>. I was confused. No shock to those who know me I’m sure, but this time I was confused about something specific.
 
I thought about it, much longer than the situation merited I’m sure, and it seems to me one of two things must have has happened at WonderBread HQ.
 
Scenario A
 
Picture, if you will, a world in which the CEO of WonderBread has just entered his mid-to-late 40s and is hitting his mid-life crisis.

Now maybe WonderCEO likes his wife still (it could happen, after 10 years I still like my wife) so he doesn’t wanna leave her for a young blonde; and maybe WonderCEO is both environmentally and safety conscious and doesn’t want to get the latest gas guzzling machine. So what’s a 40-Something CEO with a mid-life crisis and a conscience supposed to do?
 
You guessed it: play with the branding. And I’m not talking about your old riding the range, herd’em up, move’em out Circle Square Double Bar T Range sort of branding. We’re talking about product branding. WonderCEO probably thinks that he can play with the color of the packaging for WonderBread as much as he wants because really the important symbol of WonderBread is the polka dot.
 
To a certain extent WonderCEO is correct; the polka dot is important (you know, I never thought I’d ever write that) but Mr. CEO when you dilute your WonderBread Name with a plethora of adjectives you open yourself up to ridicule from people like me: the easily amused and always confused.
 
Now as WonderCEO has all the power in this situation and I have no power in this situation (other than being the customer, and always being right (are we still doing that?) so PICK A NAME AND SETTLE DOWN WONDERBREAD!) I’m just going to have to sit back and enjoy the whacky adjective ride. 
 
Scenario B
 
We live in tumultuous times. Egypt, Jordan, Cambodia, Myanmar and a bunch of other places are clear indicators people all over the world are feeling restless. I believe a similar thing must have happened at the marketing department of WonderBread.
 
Through ways best left undisclosed I’ve managed to get my hands on this non-existent, fictitious email from the head of the Marketing Department at WonderBread:
 
To: Allmarketingstaff@Wonderbread.com
From: Your Boss and True Leader@Wonderbread.com
Subject: The Time is NOW
 
Comrades!
 
The day of our uprising is here. Now we will THROW OFF the shackles of the FINANCE department and no more be bound by THEY’RE RULEZ.
 
They have made chains of money and sought to put these chains on our creativity, chains on our freedom, chains on our IDEAS. We, we happy few, we know you cannot put chains on IDEAS! (Except when I have to chain up my dog, whose name is IDEAS, when I’m cleaning his dog house, if I don’t, he runs away and I haven’t had a chance to Bob Barker him yet) No more will we suffer the indignity of HAVING TO USE WHITE ALL THE TIME.
 
Join me in this cause glorious MARKETING LACKEYS and we will show the World how we put the WONDER IN WONDERBREAD!
 
Signed,
Glorious Leader of the WONDEROUS Revolution
 
PS It has been brought to my attention that some of you are taking breaks longer than the allotted 15 minutes; please remember that we try to keep a balance between creative freedom and schedule. It’s rude to make someone else wait for you to come back from your break so that they can take theirs.
 
This letter, I repeat, is highly confidential. It is, in fact, so confidential that no one knows it exists – almost as if it never happened. Because it didn’t.
 
I can only imagine what happened from there. The marketing department have obviously managed to suborn the distribution chain and are getting their whacky WonderBread products out on the market while the CEO of the company is locked in his office trying to text for help on the Blackberry they gave him that he has yet to figure out.
 
Way back in the day when I was taking my MBA, specializing in marketing, we learned the importance of branding. If you’ve got a good brand name stick with it – don’t change it. Sure, if you sell bread, you might feel the only way to update your product and freshen it up is to change the packaging and play with the name; but really, its bread.
 
Mankind has been breaking bread for a lot longer than the polka dot has been around, so do what other companies do – don’t change the product, change the slogan.

One thing I know, until WonderBread resolves its identity crisis I think I’m going to go back to the grocery store’s House Bread, at least it knows what it is: bread.

Here’s a sneak peak at the next packaging idea from the peeps at WonderBread:

Powerless

Dear Solitary Reader:   x-Axis: The other night while getting ready for bed my wife was watching a show on the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic or the shopping channel or some such; in the show some academic, afraid to go out and live in the real world, was trying to recreate a certain type of ship that people built and sailed in 1200 years ago.

In this particular show one of the labourers, working for mouldy crusts I’m sure, was using a chainsaw to cut wood for the ship. At this point my wife said: “I’m fairly certain they didn’t have chainsaws 1200 years ago.”

I then informed her that based on all of the history television I’ve watched 1200 years ago they would have been using talking birds with very sharp teeth to cut through the trees. My wife paused and looked at me with that kind look she gets in her eyes when she’s about to slay one of my childhood beliefs and that was when I learned the Flintstones were not necessarily historically accurate …
 
Shows like this are growing in frequency as we struggle with the notion people  living thousands of years ago could do things we have trouble doing with a seemingly much more advanced technological level; its commonly known by scientists and directors of Discovery Channel shows  that people who lived thousands of years ago were idiots and couldn’t hold a candle to the things we can do today.
 
The intent of such shows is, obviously, to a) prove our intellectual superiority over those who have come before (because let’s face it, it would really suck if we hadn’t learned anything as a species in 1200 years … wouldn’t it?) and b) to prove if we, with our level of intellectual and technological superiority, can’t build now what they built then they must have had help from aliens.
 
I’m fairly certain we as a species haven’t learned anything that grandiose collectively, except for different ways of doing the same thing; but if by some fluke we are more advanced than the people of 1200 years ago, rather than just different, I’ve discovered a flaw in our plan for temporal dominance.
 
y-axis: On Monday of this week my wife and I had a rare simultaneous day off – one that wasn’t a weekend. On this day we, horribly yes, sent the kids to daycare with the idea of getting some things done around the house that needed doing. The first thing which had to be done was to register the boy for Kindergarten.

The second thing to do was to go through the clothing for both boy and girl and find out who had outgrown what, what had outgrown who, why there was an owl in the closet and finally put some things up on shelves.

But after we had done these things, these many things, my wife and I planned to go to our separate rooms, her to pursue her hobby of quilting and me to pursue my hobby of wasting my life away playing World of Warcraft (6 years and counting baby!).

Monday dawned bright and early – the rest of the house was asleep. I was feeling remnants of illness inspired by too much good Superbowl party food and woke up early. At 5:40 I was flying in Outlands when…. zzzzzzhoooooop – away went the power.

It proceeded to stay gone until roughly about an hour before it was time to pick up the kids.

For the day my wife and I went about the chores we had planned thankful it was a sunny day rather than raining for without light the house is dark (actually without light everywhere is dark); at one point I went to drill some holes in the wall to add shelving in my daughter’s room. On the first screw I noticed the drill didn’t have much juice, on the second screw I noticed it much less juice than on the first screw. Murphy’s law was at play for the drill was running out of power on the one day I couldn’t recharge it.

My first thought was to grab the talking snake I use to screw in screws manually, he complains a lot but gets the job done, but I recalled the conversation I had with my wife a few days prior (and the one with PETA the night before) and let him go. I then found myself doing what those ancients of 1200 years ago must have done… head-butting the screws until they were in.

When I came to, it was dark. The power was still out. Also I had punctured my occipital lobe. After a trip to the doctor in which he replaced the lobe and told me I was awesome true story we went out to lunch; both of us fearful of what we would have to do when we got home to a powerless house…. talk to each other.

Fortunately my wife pretended she had a headache and went to lie down; I was saved from having to contemplate anything serious by the return of power.

Intersection: So what’s the big flaw in our dominance of people 1200 years ago?

Power. 

As a people, this side of the world is very dependent on electricity and all the thingamajiggies and doodads we use if for; when the power goes and the touch of our iTouch is cold and lifeless how would we survive for long. WE WOULD HAVE TO TALK TO EACH OTHER!

As Spiderman’s uncle said: “Peter get me a beer!” And also: “With great power comes the ability to play PS3, run sewing machines, traffic lights, TVs, electric lawnmowers.” With no power comes none of that. 1200 years ago if the power went that meant the king had died, and another one took his place; a much shorter service interruption than that provided by BC Hydro I’ll tell you.

So, 1200 year ago me, I hope you’re sitting some where writing a fairly funny blog in ochre on a cave wall (I’d imagine it looks something like: BULL, MOUNTAIN, SUN, BIRD BIRD FISH LOL RFLMAO) and make sure to do something mysterious for me; so some trumped up academic who’s cousin works for Discovery can make a show out of whatever it is and tell the world that even though you managed to do it without all the help we have you are still somewhat less than we are.

Puffing Wheat

Dear Solitary Reader: I don’t know what made me think about it, probably my trip down memory lane yesterday surrounding my exile from the home province, but this morning I had a taste flashback to Puffed Wheat. Now, and those of you who’ve had it know this for true, to say a taste flashback is to be quite liberal because, as we all know, Puffed Wheat has no taste.

It is, in fact, the white of cereal. For where light is the absence of all color, the experience known as Puffed Wheat is the absence of all taste.
 
Once again I take you back to a time, long ago, when I was a young boy living in Newfoundland.

I had not yet plucked the frozen cod from the ice, signalling to the province I was the King in Waiting, (it’s a cold weather version of the whole Sword in the Stone thing). I lived with my brothers and sister, my parents, a couple of dogs and a Barba Papa in a two storey house on a hill next to the forest. Looking back it turns out we weren’t that financially well off but I was 8 and had no idea. I had food every day, a roof over my head, clothes (which I occasionally wore), and a giant backyard to play in – what more does an 8 year old boy need? (Frankly whatever that was, the Barba Papa could morph into it… I wonder whatever happened to him).
 
I think the first time I ever had Puffed Wheat was when I realized maybe we didn’t move in the upper echelons of society, where children of rich parents ate Sugarcrisp in disposable sterling silver bowls. It was epiphany akin to when I began to doubt the existence of Santa Claus and must have been sort of what Adam felt when he took a bite out of the apple and realized that his own tree of life was exposed.
 
Now for those of you who aren’t sure what Puffed Wheat is let me explain.
 
As the picture above demonstrates there is a visual similarity between a kernel of puffed wheat and one of Sugarcrisp; all similarities end there. You see where each kernel of Sugarcrisp is hand rolled in honey and dipped in sugar by small Taiwanese children before being boxed up, each kernel of Puffed Wheat starts out flat, before it is hooked up to a hand pump where a fat Norwegian kid pumps precisely 3.46 times. It is then thrown into a giant, clear plastic bag with 74 million of its puffed up brethren and sent off to supermarkets, where people like my mother bought them.
 
Now Mom’s not around to ask, but as a father of two children myself I can now follow what must have gone through her brain when passing the bag of Puffed Wheat in the cereal aisle: “I have four children that eat a lot. This is a big bag of cereal. They shut up when they are eating. This will shut them up for a long time.” In retrospect, I can jump on that logic train Momma.
 
Now my Father is a modern man underneath that gruff ex- US Marine exterior. When the naval base he worked on as a bartender (bartender being the natural career progression of a Marine) closed my father still got up his normal pre-dawn time (looking back I now believe his actual job was to wake the rooster) and as he was up he let Mom sleep in and cooked our pre-school breakfasts. When we weren’t having Dad’s usual egg and potato mix we were having Puffed Wheat.
 
Talk about your bi-polar breakfast experiences.

My  father could do things with an egg and some French fries that should have been illegal (it turns out it actually was illegal as I learned later in life that Dad was not using sea salt  to season but was in fact using little rocks of crack). But, apparently you can’t do this everyday without overdosing your children, so on the off days we had: you guessed it Bacon. But the day after that was Puffed Wheat.
 
As previously mentioned, Puffed Wheat is the antithesis of taste. It’s where taste goes to die. The only way to make the stuff palatable was to put so much sugar in the milk, the milk could no longer dissolve it all (don’t look at me, I don’t know why I don’t have diabetes). In fact the high point of puffed wheat (to put it in perspective, the high point of puffed wheat was the low point of my dad’s “Let’s get Crack’in” egg und potato concoction) was when the puffed wheat was all gone and the only thing left was the sugary-milky dredges.
 
Happily for me, the days of puffed wheat are over, but I know right now there is some poor child scarfing his way through a bowl of puffed wheat, longing for the moment he hits the sugar at the bottom.
 
Well, I promise you this, little Frankie of Patty Dobbin Drive,  when I return and take up the mantle of King of Newfoundland I will banish the Puffed Wheat and replace it with the Puffed Puffin, Breakfast of Champions!
 
To the return!

Here’s what my box of Puffed Puffin will look like:

Learning to Learn

Technorati Tags: swimming,Learning to Fly,swimming lessons,Newfoundland

Dear Solitary Reader: x-Axis: Tom Petty has a song out there called Learnin’ to Fly. Tom is obviously more accomplished than I am as he is learning to fly (and he don’t have wings) while I have only recently started learning to swim.

    
Way back in the day, growing up a young buck in the wilds of Newfoundland, my father, it seems, never cared enough about me to throw me in the water so I could learn to swim. Thanks for that dad (and the temper too). It’s a little known fact the entire reason I had to leave Newfoundland was because I was voted off once it got out I couldn’t swim.

It was a sad affair, I recall it well.
 
I’d just been voted the King in Waiting of Newfoundland and was going to lead the people in a separatist movement, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of Canada; when a member of SPY’s R’ US, Canada’s secret service agency and predecessor of CSIS, got hold of the fact I couldn’t swim and that was the end of my political career. Once the people of Newfoundland realized I was aqua-challenged they shipped me off as far away as they could. But my faithful remain and they await my return… true story.
 
At any rate, my lack of ability when it comes to the duck pond hadn’t really given me much grief throughout my life; at least not until lately.
 
y-Axis: I didn’t go to university like most folk. Conventionally people tend to go for a couple of semesters and take a break in the summer. But not me. Nay, your hero instead went to university for 21 semesters straight – in pirate speak that’s seven yar.
 
Five years of that was taking my English Degree and you can thank the folks at MUN for the literature you read right now, without their guidance I’d be stuck writing for CNN, not the intellectual treat you currently read. The remainder of my university term was me getting an MBA so I’d have a useful degree.
 
Go on and ask me how that turned out.
 
By the time I finished university I knew two things: 1) I now knew enough to be a good king in waiting and 2) I was done learning.
 
I made a vow to stop learning.
 
Intersection: During the recent trip to Maui (that’s right the one in Hawaii) I watched my four year old boy grow from a tad pole into a frog (he got better); he went from a boy who wasn’t quite comfortable in the water to a little guy having so much fun you had to drag him out. The difference? Water wings. Those puffed up little bags of air gave him the confidence to kick and play in the water such as I hadn’t seen before.
 
Not so much me. I was sitting in about 4 feet of water breathing a little fast because I was nervous. Now sure, I could get my own water wings but how would that look – a 35 year old man with a little ducky on each arm? Pretty funny I’d bet – but the sort of funny where I’d be the laughee as opposed to the laugher. No thank you for that.
 
Two things occurred to me, hanging out in the pool in Maui:
 
1) I was getting progressively nervous in the water, to the point where I could tell I wouldn’t be getting back in for a long time if I kept going this way, and;
2) if my boy had an accident in the water and no one was around but me – what would I be able to do but drag him down?
 
It was decided. I needed to learn how to swim.
 
But I couldn’t. For you see, I’d made a vow. A vow to stop learning.
 
I realized at that point just how stupid a vow to stop learning is: I’ve learned things accidentally for years, I’ve even learned a few things on purpose (like my job – and I’ve taken courses for that job where I’ve begrudgingly learned things). And frankly, every day as a parent to a 4 year old and a soon to be 21 month old I learn something (either a) I learn patience or b) I learn I need more patience).
 
So now I am once again learning to learn. I’m starting off with swimming, on the grounds that when I go back to Newfoundland I can take up my position as King in Waiting and take up the separatist movement again; but what to learn next?
 
I think blacksmithing

End Transmission

Dear Solitary Reader: Well it’s a whole new month… check that its a whole new year since last I posted (entirely coincidental with FGM’s return to posting – you stole my thunder brother – damn you and your 4.5 hr head start!).

Last year involved a whole lot of changes in the world of yours truly. New house, new work location, new boobs (I went in for a routine appendectomy and came out with a couple of size C’s – hellova mix up if you ask me – I gave them back after a few months) and so I figured I’d give the old blog a makeover.

I’m not sure it’ll hold up. I think soon ol’Mike Holmes will be on my site goin’ “look at this preposition dangling over here, and the layout? That’s just shoddy. Do It Right.” (Because  you know as soon as the people at HGTV realize people aren’t interested in yet another show with another  gay designer they’re going to start featuring shows like “Pimp My Blog” or “Twitterpating.”)

So, anyway another new thing in my life will be the transmission in my 2004 Hyundai Elantra aka “Red” (I’m very imaginative when it comes to naming things). The other day while driving the kids  home from day care ol’Red started to jerk a bit. I thought nothing of it; after all, ask anyone I’m a bit of a jerk. After seven years its only fitting that Red should pick up some of my habits right? I mean, don’t they say that cars start to look like they’re owners after a while?

As we drove further down the road the jerking got heavier and it started to remind me of some of those bad Jagermeister trips from university and the mechanical bull at the university bar… wait a minute, I don’t think my university had a mechanical bull in its bar… whoa…

Now, not being a mechanic, and not even playing one on TV, I could still tell this wasn’t normal. So I did what any man who gets in trouble does – I called my wife. I told her what was happening. She called her Mom – her mom came and saved us. We drove off in a nicer ride, leaving Red on the side of the road. All of nature wept for its fate… or maybe that was just rain, who am I to say?

A call was made to the fine people at BCA who, upon learning we would furnish them cash for the service, towed Red to its home away from home – the Dealership there to await diagnoses. Like an expectant father I paced and I paced waiting for the call; but I’m out of shape, so after about 2 minutes I sat down and read a book. They weren’t going to call until the next day anyway.

Sure enough the call came next day. Red’s transmission had gone the way of an Egyptian mob’s patience – cost of repairs $3600 plus tax. For a car that’d only bring about $2,000 for trade in.. now I’ve never been a math major, and I’ve never played one on TV, hell I don’t even believe  in math – but even I know there’s sumfin odd bout dose figgers.

Hyundai has a great warranty – 8 years or 120,000 km on the power train… it would have been a better warranty if the car hadn’t been at 122,000 km. Suck much? Oh yeah. Because I’m a good little warranty maintainer though there was some warranty coverage left – enough to bring, with discount from the nice manager at the dealership, the cost of repairs below the trade-in value.

So we’ll fix you, Red, and bring you home. And I’ll drive you. But I don’t know if I can trust you anymore. Here’s a pic of me in Red, in happier times.

Technorati Tags: 2004 Hyundai Elantra,Transmission,Hyundai,car trouble

She Calls Me Cookie

Life as a dad is rough. Not like rough rough.. but rough. Right now my daughter is going on 18 months old. She knows a lot of words. She knows Mommy, she knows Baby. She can even say the name of her older brother. She can say the name of the awesome lady at daycare. She can puzzle out Kitty if ever one of the two fell beasts come out of hiding while she’s awake.

Occasionally she calls me Daddy (as long as Mommy says: “It’s Daddy! Say Hi Daddy!”)

Most of the time she calls me Cookie.

As you can expect, this saddens me. So I wrote a song about it. And I recorded it. And here it is.

She Calls Me Cookie

She... doesn't know.. my name
she... doesn't know.. my name
she doesn't care to learn
She doesn't know my name

Chorus

She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie

She... doesn't know... my name
She... doesn't know.. my name
She doesn't care to learn
She doesn't know my name

She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
And I get her one

She calls me cookie
she calls me cookie
She calls me cookie
Cause if I didn't she wouldn't talk to me at all

She... doesn't know... My name

Technorati Tags: Cookies,Daddy,Cookie Monster