You know what pisses me off??

Listen.
I buy running shoes for one reason, and one reason only. To run. If I didn't want to run, I would wear non-running shoes. Common sense to me.
Because of the miles that I tend to put in on my shoes, I check all the shoe reviews before I make a purchase. And this is what pisses me off.
I'll go to a shoe review site for the latest Mizuno or Adidas release for example, and see what other users have to say about it. I'm wondering about things like blistering, cushioning, how long that cushioning is going to last when the miles start adding up, whether it's going to cause shin splints on a bigger runner like myself.
But all over these sites, there are asshole reviewers, nurses usually, talking about how great these runners are for their jobs when they're on their feet all day.
Stay off the damn running review please!
By reviewing these as a work shoe you've told us 3 things about yourself. 1) You don't run. 2) You don't really do anything other than work. And 3) You're too stupid to realize that wearing a high performance running shoe for standing at work is excessive, pointless, and ill informed.
With that said, I've given up reading reviews by mall walking seniors and obese nurses of the latest marathon rated Asics number, and I'm going to bed.

Now I don't smoke that Loco-weed

but here's the thing.
There was a demonstration in Vancouver this weekend demanding action against gang violence. The news reports say that 'hundreds' of people demonstrated.
By contrast, thousands of people march in support of legalizing pot.
It's estimated that the BC's marijuana industry is worth $7 billion every year. Currently all of that money is going straight to arming and solidifying organized criminals in BC and across Canada.
How much is 7 billion? It's enough to bail out the auto industry in Canada for starters. Hell, it's enough to militarize a small nation. Canada spends only 12 billion annually on defense, not much more than the marijuana revenue of a single province.
It would be interesting to see how many gangs would survive with pot taken out of their pots.

Yep, We're drifting, time to leave the house

Okay, now I'm Drifting.

This was under related videos.

Google Drift, and Where I Wind Up.

The girls are upstairs playing together nicely for a change, the boy is watching some of the original 80s Transformers episodes that I downloaded for him, and I had the beauty of some quiet time to myself.
I set up in the office with a coffee the way I like it (rich full bodied dark roast as opposed to weak Swift Current 7-11 style that the wife likes) and I started picking my guitar. I decided to look for some tabs to a few country songs I'd like to learn (My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys) and these days I always Google up Youtube first when I'm looking for any kind of how-to. Youtube is a tremendous resource, and I think if I'm ever bored and trapped in the house again sometime I might look up some of youtube's most ridiculous how-to's for all y'all.
Today however I just wanted to post a video that I think you might like. Google Drift is a term that describes what happens when you're just mindlessly surfing the web and wind up a thousand topics away from what you were originally searching for. I'm the worst for it. I'll look up a chicken recipe, see a link for Funny Chicken and I'll say "ooh funny chickens!" and then off I go, then it's off to funky chicken, then funky town, then funk guitar, then Marvin Gaye, then the California Raisins, then before you know it I'm somehow on an explicit porn site,(funny how that seems to happen so often).
Anyway, today I didn't drift too far, and thought I'd share this with you.

And since we're talking about jelly beans...

I like 'em. I like 'em a lot. I'm a High Fructose Corn Syrup junkie, and jelly beans are the crack cocaine of HFCS. The next step past jelly beans is snorting sugar straws, and I've only done that once. It's a place I don't want to go back to.
But here's the thing with jelly beans. I don't like all of them. There are some I don't like. There are some, if I may say, that actually piss me off beyond all belief.
When I buy jelly beans, I buy them because of the HFCS as stated above. That's all I want. A jelly bean is like HFCS wrapped in pure condensed HFCS. The red ones, the white ones, pink ones, they actually taste like pure unadulterated HFCS, the kind you can't get on the street, the kind you have to go to a lab to find.
But then, and this is what pisses me off, THEN they (THEY being the jelly bean cartels) have to go and f*&K it all up by putting in all those flavored ones. Black ones for instance, that taste like licorice. WTF is that?! If I wanted licorice I'd go to some granola peddling hippie's natural food store and pick it up with my ginseng and freakin' gingko. Seriously. Or green ones! Minty muthaf*&^in' green ones! I don't want mints if I'm buying jelly beans. I'm not some fisherman's friend with a halitosis problem and low blood sugar. Keep the herb out of my beans man! that's what I say.
I don't even want to discuss lemon. Holy Shit! Lemon... Yeah, thanks for that one, I'll garnish my next Red Snapper with it. F*&(tards.

Almost as good as a double prizer.

I had a moment today. It bordered on spiritual. To say it was euphoric wouldn't be exagerrating. This is just between us okay. Don't let it get out to too many people.
There is a Canadian Tire Store in the city with a defective jelly bean machine.
Here's the thing. I learned back when I was about ten years old that if you put a quarter into a gumball machine, then turn the dial really slowly, you might find the mythical sweet spot, where the prized candy within just keeps on coming. I've never managed to clean out a machine this way, but I've certainly gotten more than my money's worth more times than I can count. It all started with the gumball machine at the old Pinder's Drugs on Broadway and Taylor. By turning slowly to the limit of the dial, then exercising a couple quick twists of the wrist, I was often able to get 2 or 3 gumballs for the price of one.
It seemed that the candy companies caught on to this sometime in the mid 80s. I've haven't cashed out more than I put in for decades.
Then today it happened.
In the exit door of this Canadian Tire they have a row of candy machines. I love jelly beans, and the jelly bean machine did a Svengali number on the last quarter in my pocket. I sunk it into the machine, and gave the dial a slow clicking turn, the same way that I've been doing for the better part of 30 years now. I could hear the jelly bean bay filling up, and I just knew I was getting a little extra. At the end of the turn, when the dial would turn no more, I gave it the patented Pinder's Flick back a touch, and SCORE! I heard another payload of jellybeans tumbling into the bean bay. It all came back to me, all the subtlety, all the English that I used to know so implicitly, instinctively back in the day. I kept flipping the dial, and I found the sweet spot where the tumblers never locked. I filled the bean bay twice before the Canadian Tire flunkies started to notice my surreptitious activities, and making a mental note of the machine's location, I beat a timely, low profile retreat with a FULL pocket of beans!
Life is good people. Life is good.
Almost as good as a double prizer

When Live People Turn Dead.

Won't tell you how my train of thought got to this station...well okay, I will.
I've been watching clips from the show Scrubs on the net tonight. In one of the clips they lost 4 patients in one day, and they show the deaths in this sad little montage. In some cases it was flatlines, in others they reluctantly stopped trying to save the patient. One of the clips showed them pulling all the sensors off of the patient, which at that point had ceased to be a person and had instead become a corpse.
It got me thinking about that line between life and death. How in one moment a person is living and breathing, and in the next they aren't. How do you measure that moment? How fast does it happen?
It got me thinking about the infinite again. The smallness of that space between living and dead is inconceivable. It's non-existent in fact. One either is or isn't.
Anyway, the other thing it got me thinking of was my mom. She died in a hospital years back. She had sensors taped all over her. It didn't occur to me until tonight that somebody pulled those sensors off when she made that leap from was to wasn't. It must be a strange feeling to be that person.

Doubling Up On Exercise, Couch Potato Style

As regular readers know, I bought a treadmill just after Christmas, and have promised myself that I will run at least 3 times per week. I have been doing so. There has been the odd time that I've only run twice on the treadmill, but on such weeks I've been getting the extra run in when I receive the order at work, running up and downstairs with heavy boxes about 30 times, twice a week.
Tonight I found that I doubled my time on the treadmill, and enjoyed it more than ever as well.
The trick? I put a TV up in front of it, and now I can watch the Food Network or a documentary while I'm running. Absolutely fantastic, and not nearly such a chore anymore.

The End of Political Correctness?

When Obama became president we had an interesting discussion at work. Did his election mean the end of political correctness? Did the ability of a visible minority from a troubled Chicago community to attain the rank of President register null and void any and all arguments for affirmative action, and workplace legislations enforcing diversity? It seemed to me that the case for giving the disadvantaged of the world a government mandated edge to level the playing field has been broken.
Obama's election seems to prove that anyone, from any background, can achieve anything they desire, provided they have the will and the drive. Regardless of perceived social barriers or not.
I'd forgotten about our discussions until I read this article tonight.

Hocus Pocus.

Further to the last note, it's worth noting that I don't get strep anymore. I've discovered a couple of home remedies for pretty much everything.
I think I've written about these before, so I'll just mention them briefly, for anybody that might be struggling with a similar recurring type illness.
The 2 cures that I found are Colloidal Silver, and Oil of Oregano.
You can find them affordably in any health food store. The oil of oregano tastes awful, and will actually burn in an open wound. You can learn more about it here I gave up on antibiotics after about time 15 with strep throat, and switched to colloidal silver and oregano. I use them whenever anyone in the house starts displaying symptoms, or whenever I feel the symptoms myself, and I don't come down with strep.
I was as anti-naturopathic healing as a person could be 2 years ago. But our strep battles frustrated me so much I was willing to try anything. These things work!

Bureaucratic Assholes.

My family and I have been at war with an almost invisible enemy for the better part of 3 years. We had a year of uneasy peace, where we thought we had won, but the enemy was just laying low.
The enemy is strep throat.
All of us have had strep at least 20 times in the past 3 years. This is not an exaggeration. Our family doctor is only available once a week, so most of the time we've gone to a local mediclinic.
Each time we go, we get a different doctor. The doctor gets the same file every time however. We've been told close to dozen times, that there are no antibiotic resistant strains of strep throat in Canada, and that the pain we've felt when we go in is highly unlikely to be strep, as we have just been treated with a course of anti-biotics for it. We then tell them, "Look, there hasn't been a month in 3 years that our home has been strep free. We all know what it feels like, we have strep." At this point the doctor will reluctantly do the old throat swab, all the while informing us that it's most likely just a virus, and he's not going to treat it until he sees some test results.
So whoever the victim is that week will suffer for another 3 days until we get the inevitable phone call "The patient has strep, can you come down and get the prescription you asked for 3 days ago."
Then we go down, and they try to prescribe us some kind of weak shit like penicillin or amoxicillin and we tell them "Look, my wife works with the wife of an infectious diseases research specialist at the U of S. She talked to him about our family's predicament, and he asked for the swab results to be sent to him last year. He found that we have a strain that is resistant to amoxicillin and penicillin, can you prescribe something else." and they'll get indignant, because we haven't been to med school, and they'll prescribe us amoxicillin, telling us in their condescending 'I'm a doctor and you're not" way that if it doesn't work, come back next week, and we'll treat it with something else.
The jist of this is that tonight I'm going to pack up my 3 kids and head down to the doctor, because my oldest daughter has strep, and has had it for about 2 weeks now. We went to see the doctor on the first day, he told us she was faking but swabbed her anyway, then 3 days later when he said "Wow, it is strep" he prescribed amoxicillin, and now a week later I'm taking her back in because this strain is amoxicillin resistant, but they don't freakin' listen. Grr.

Running

I've been damn busy at work, which means that there hasn't been a whole lot of time for blogging. I have managed to make time for running however. I've been managing to get in about 3 runs per week on the treadmill which is great.
I've had one of the side effects of being a runner kick back in again too. I had a really lousy day at work the other day. A lot of people pissed me off beyond all human comprehension. I was actually threatening to slit people's throats, and I probably would have followed through on it if anyone had challenged me. Anyway I came home still angry as Hell, and my first priority was to hit the treadmill and run it off. I pushed 30% further than I normally go trying to run off the fury and it felt great.
In other news, I managed to make it to mid January before the winter blues hit me this year. When they hit, they hit hard. Paranoia, dissatisfaction, irritability, overwhelmed by even the simplest of tasks. Even today, with exercise, vitamins, good diet, I'm still struggling. I find myself formulating tremendously complicated justifications for why I should quit my job and make some sort of drastic gypsy change to snap out of the rut. I haven't beaten it yet either. I have some fears that the irrational fears I get about losing my job are going to cost me my job, ha! How nuts is that?
On a brighter note, I've noticed that the sun is coming up earlier, the days are getting warmer and longer, and if I can just make it through the next few weeks, I'll have a major victory on my hands. I'll have made it through a summer, fall and winter at a job for the third time in my life!
For now though, I'm hitting the treadmill.