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Rumours of sofas and fireplaces

Within the walls of the cube farm, even the simplest of events can cause a stir. Like the time when someone brought in samosas. The entire sixth floor rejoiced and ate of the samosas. Then there was the time when they handed out free promotional CDs. CDs with interesting product information for everyone! And more recently, when they closed the bathrooms on this floor, curiosity led to rumour, rumour led to bigger rumour, and bigger rumour led to people walking into walls due to overstimulation.

The bathrooms were closed for not a couple of days, but two weeks. Two weeks! This was no small repair, but a major renovation. We could only imagine what wonderful changes awaited our bladders when the bathrooms finally reopened. Gold-trimmed fixtures? Wood panelling? Comfey sofas? A nice fireplace and decorative sculptures of scantily clad individuals caught in mid-frolic?

Finally, the day came that they reopened the bathrooms to the general cube farm populace. Breathing the heady fumes of drying paint, we entered.

Well, it was a bit of a letdown. They’d replaced the faucets and slapped a new coat of paint on the stalls and taken a very long time to do it. On the bright side, the intrigue brightened our small lives, and for two weeks we had regular exercise hiking up one floor. It wasn’t, in retrospect, a complete waste of time — the cubicle drones were able, for a short time, to pee in the very same fixtures as the executives. And that’s worth something, isn’t it?

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My blog entry about non-raw salmon

This morning a friend, for reasons known only to her, asked that I write something about salmon. Additionally, and probably due to my sushi addiction, Christine told me that I was not allowed to write about raw salmon. This makes my task much more difficult.

What can I say about non-raw salmon that hasn’t already been said? They’re a fine and noble fish, and particularly slippery if you try to bring one into your boat with your bare hands. I think very highly of those creatures, even if I can’t be certain what they think of me.

What would they think of me? What would they think if they knew that, somewhere out there, in the fishless wastes known as “dry land”, there exists a creature that particularly enjoys soaking their flesh in sauce for a couple of hours before cooking them over a barbecue until their flesh is firm and pink. I would guess that they wouldn’t appreciate the whole barbecue experience the way I do. If they had a brain larger than a pea, they might take exception to my eating habits, and possibly take action against me, legal or otherwise.

Thankfully, salmon are unlikely to think about these things because they’re preoccupied with finding that perfect shoal of herring that loiters in the shallows near that rock with all the seagulls on it.

So that’s my blog entry about non-raw salmon. I wonder how Christine is doing with her blog entry. I asked her to write about bubbly soup.

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Shiny new hoverbikes

I don’t know how it happens, but even when I try to take a break from Second Life, it somehow pulls me back in and I update another vehicle. This time, I dropped in to do a major upgrade to the Terra Hoverbike. What’s new? Check out this:

  • It now carries 2 avatars, so you can take a friend with you.
  • It can fly! That’s right, it works like a hovercraft as usual until you switch to “helicraft” mode. Soar above the clouds like a jet-powered birdie.
  • I added the Terra Combat System, so now you can duel with other hoverbikes or any vehicle with the Terra Combat System.
  • It now changes colour on command. Choose from one of the lovely preset colours or enter your own RGB code. Any colour at all.

Drop by my shop in the northwest corner of Abbotts and have a look.

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Sushi addiction, redux

Two days later, Matt, Ken, and I went back to the same restaurant. If the waitress recognized us as the freaks who ate several pounds of raw fish on Tuesday, she didn’t let on. This time, we approached the menu with caution. We enforced a two-item limit on ourselves, and only broke that rule once.

Then tragedy struck. The waitress emerged from the kitchen with the bad news — they were out of quail eggs. Out of quail eggs! My heart fell at the news, and Ken had to make do with only three of the four tobiko-and-quail-egg sushis that he’d ordered.

At that point we took matters into our own hands. What was a sushi night without an adequate supply of quail egg? We paid the bill and set out into the darkened streets of Vancouver to begin our search.

It was close to the corner of Main and Hastings that we were approached by a scruffy type in a trenchcoat. “Weed, hash, quail egg,” he muttered. “Weed, hash, quail egg.” This was the very man we were looking for.

I stepped into a darkened doorway with him, while my brothers lingered inconspicuously under a lamp post. “How much?” I asked.

“Two for twenty.” He peered at the other two through narrowed eyes. “Hey, you’re not cops, are ya?”

“Naw, we’re not cops. We just want some eggs.” I pulled out a twenty to show him I was serious. The sight of money bettered his fears, and in a smooth, practiced gesture, he took the twenty and slipped a couple of fat dime bags into my palm.

“Pleasure doing business,” he grinned and in a second, he was gone. I rejoined my brothers who still loitered inconspicously. They were by far the most inconspicuous persons on that particular street.

“Hey,” Matt said. “People here are really friendly. They keep calling me ‘bud’.”

“I got the stuff. I think we should get out of here,” I suggested.

After walking a couple of blocks, I felt it was safe to examine what I’d paid twenty dollars for. Tucked safely inside the tiny bags were eggs. I peered closer. They were blue. The bastard slipped me robin eggs, not quail eggs!

We thought about going back, but it would be too risky. Defeated, we trudged home as rain started to spatter from black clouds. There would be no more quail egg for us that night.