Tonight I'm hanging with my main man John at his house, playing board games. I lost all 3 times, so I decided to go upstairs and sulk. Okay, not really. We're finished for the night, which is good because it's almost 2am. But before I went to bed, I wanted to write about one of the stories I had forgotten. It's a quickie, so it should be okay to blog about it this time of day.

 

When we were in Texas, on the 2nd last night there, Jude was with Rebecca in our guest room. I think Rebecca was knitting, with Jude on the floor beside her, sort of keeping her eye on him out of the corner of her eye, I suppose, because she hadn't noticed what he was playing with. When I came into the room, I found him with my cellphone in hand. Not only was it turned on, but he was 45 seconds into a phone call with Allison. That call was on hold. He was in the middle of dialing Miranda when I got the phone from him. Long distance. From Texas. On a cellphone. I'm going to have to teach that boy about roaming charges. He's going to have to tell me how he got to be such a playa. And also, how to put someone on hold with my phone.

In the last week, more than one potential blog topic occurred to me. Unfortunately, I didn't act on any of them as they entered my mind, and as a result, I forgot all but one, which perhaps doesn't even merit its own entry, but I'll mention it anyways, for lack of anything better to talk about. I received in the mail one of those Government of Canada envelopes that gets under my skin precisely because it originated from the Canadian Revenue Agency. I wouldn't mind gathering some statistics about the number of Canadians that receive notices of reassessment, etc. from them so I can determine for myself whether my belief that they have it in for me is baseless or not. Anyways, I opened up the envelope to find that they sent me a notice for my quarterly tax installment. How much did they say I owed? $0.00, which is less than the value of the paper and postage used in their notification that told me something I already knew.

It's been a couple days since Rebecca and I were at Jesuspalooza, so I should write about it before I forget. We're in Texas. That may be part of the bible belt, I don't know. But they sure like their Jay-suss here. I come from a Roman Catholic background, so I'm used to certain things when it comes to The Jesus, as does Rebecca, who is also Roman Catholic. Now, Rebecca's dad is catholic (and was actually in the seminary for a little while -- before Rebecca was born, obviously), but her mom is Baptist, as is the rest of her family, I presume. It's Rebecca's mom's family that we're visiting, so that sort of sets the stage. When we got here, one of the things that was on her mom's agenda was to go to Lakewood Church, part of Joel Osteen's ministries. They televise their celebrations, so if you want to see what I'm talking about first hand, you can try and catch it on TV on a Sunday morning (I understand that there is a 3-week lag between the taping and the airing, consult your local listings for details).

 

The plan for the day was to go see Joel Osteen for the 9am service, then the catholics among us were going to go right from there to a Catholic mass at 11. To get to Lakewood church, formerly the building in which the Houston Rockets played, we had to leave the house at 7. Seven. The service started at 9. So for the next 90 minutes, I stood there and made some observations, many of them somewhat cynical. For example, if you want to get on TV at one of these televised evangelical services, it helps to stand and sing with your hands in the air and your eyes squezed tightliy shut in ecstasy, as if you're straining under the weight of an invisible barbell that you're hoising over your head in the clean and jerk event. Everyone I saw on the projection screens had that same look. Another interesting fact that of which I was formerly unaware is that God has given us the tithe as a way to get to know him. It's true! The only way you can truly know all of Him is to tithe, as I learned in a 5 minute lecture, just before the collection baskets were passed around. Interestingly, it was Victoria Osteen who talked about the importance of tithing, rather than Joel, who gave the sermon (which I can summarize as the commonsense advice to pay attention to your audience when communicating with them). My theory is that this was a deliberate division of the labour into "dirty work" and "clean work". Like I said, many of my observations were quite cynical. I did have fun pretending that I belonged there though, all with the singing along and the exclaiming AY-MENN!. I just pretended that I was trying to infiltrate the organization. But I drew the line at the religious ecstacy -- if I were to do that, it would feel more like a mean-spirited mockery to me.

 

Um, yeah, so that's enough about that. After that service, we went to a conventional Catholic Mass at St. Vincent de Paul parish, who had a choir that actually did some parts of the mass in latin with 4-part harmony. The contrast was like going from radio jingles to Bach. Am I a bad person?  Perhaps, but I know what I like.

 

And now... a quest for a Texas steak and a 10-gallon hat for my dad before we leave tomorrow.

Rogers is really eager. I currently get the whole shebang from them: internet, digital cable, phone and wireless. But they aren't satisfied. Why, you ask? Well, the reason we have our home phone through them is because a few years ago, they assumed Sprint's subscribers. We had swtiched to Sprint a few years ago because Bell really pissed me off. I hate Bell. When they call every once in a bit to let me know that they are now more competetive, I take some glee in telling them that I am not interested in their services because they irritated the hell out of me when I was their customer. But I digress (sort of). This is about Rogers, and why they're asking a subscriber to their home phone service to switch to  Rogers Home phone. What? Exactly. But there's a difference between the two. Bell owns the phone lines that go into the house. Rogers owns the coax cable that goes into the house. Currently, because I have my phone signal come in over the phone lines, Rogers has to give Bell a cut from my monthly bill. They would like to instead switch me to phone over cable, so that they don't have to share. 'cept I don't particularly want my phone over cable, partly because the first two people I heard of with the service, John and my dad, reported less than 100% satisfaction (John had a nightmare installation, and my dad kept complaining about dropped calls). Plus, while I hold no particular love for Bell, I'm not in love with Rogers either, so it's my way of thumbing my nose at them, because I know what they're up to.

I saw this movie about a month ago with Alan and Kevin and had been meaning to mention it in my blog. I was the dissenting opinion, and thought it was really good. Definitely a really cool premise. Al and Kev thought it was kind of 'meh'. But whatever. They don't know what it's like to be me.

 

Anyways, the premise of the movie is that there are a bunch of guys who wake up in a chemical storage warehouse, where it is clear that something went down. It is clear that there are two factions present: the good guys and the bad guys. What makes it interesting is that at some point when everything was going down, a cyclinder containing some noxious agent broke open, releasing a gas that not only knocked everyone out, but also caused temporary amnesia. How cool is that, thereby setting up the scenario where the characters know that the guys around them are either good guys or bad guys, but no idea who is who. So yeah, I'd definitely recommend it. The whole plot is a big twist.

Building shelves in my garage isn't exactly a hobby of mine, but it seemed like the best category of the existing bunch. While Rebecca was still away, my dad and I emptied a bunch of crap out of my garage to make room for some shelves. I had a weightlifting set that I had bought off Paul probably 15 years ago or so, but since I got out on my own, the only time I had ever lifted weights was in the process of changing residences. So they had to go. The actual weights I brought to a 2nd hand sporting goods store where I got a fraction of their value, but it's better than nothing. Later that day my dad and I went to the Home Depot and bought a pile of wood for to build shelves in the garage. I was duped. I was under the impression that we were going to get some shelves built that day, or perhaps the next. It did not happen, which is sort of par for the course as far as projects involving my dad goes. I think he might be ADHD. He's good for tasks involving a single step. If planning is involved, forget it -- he gets mired in the planning stage until something more pressing distracts him.

 

So anyways, enough about my dad. I'm not here to complain about him, I'm here to proclaim that I built the first shelf this afternoon. Holy crap was it hot working in the garage though. I'd put up a picture, but that would take a little bit of effort, and I don't think anyone seeing a picture of the shelves would be especially impressed anyways: they're purely functional, not a great example of mennonite craftsmanship. Maybe I will get the second shelf done next weekend.

I haven't been here in awhile. Was busy for a little bit back there, as you may have gathered. But Rebecca came back, the house was still standing, and I hadn't sold Pokey to the gypsies, despite what I might have told him in the middle of the night during the second week of our adventure.

 

During that week, I picked up a rear bicycle saddle-bag style panier. I thought that was the generic name for a rear basket thingie, but when I went into the bike shop on my mountain bike and said I wanted a panier, the guy game back with a woven basket and a confused expression. The only thing missing was a plastic daisy on the basket, and plastic streamers for the handlebar. Because of the frame on my bike, I had to get a basket frame that fastened to the seat stem rather than to the bike frame itself. That ran $30 or so. The real money was in the saddle bag which was $110. Holy crapface. And then it was $10 labour for him to put it on because I had cycled to the shop. Yeah, so $170 later I have a cool bike basket. Ever since then, I have had a drive to ride my bike. Also since then, I have had not much cause to go into school, and it has been somewhat hot, especially this week. The need to get out of the house outweighed the heat this afternoon, however, so I rode my bike to the Rogers Video to return an overdue movie (An Inconvenient Truth), and pick up some groceries for dinner tonight - mostly so I could get some more use out of my panier. Now I smell like outside.