Letting Minutes

Wednesday I headed off to the Blood Donor clinic for my latest round of blood letting. For the first time ever (I think) I went after eating dinner, and not before. I hoped this would be a good thing.

When filling out the questions I noticed a new one about contact with monkeys. I remembered to ask about that question, and it turns out that there is some ailment you can get from handling monkeys or their waste. That was the first of many changes since I was there last. All of the changes were good too.

The donation itself went quickly (around 5 minutes), and then it was off to cookies and juice after making sure I had stopped bleeding. I was in and out in about 45 minutes.

Woodpecker Nest

We have new pets in our yard. We don’t feed them but they still seem happy. A woodpecker couple has taken up residence in the dead tree in our yard. I was hoping to get rid of the tree this summer, but in the space of a few days that woodpecker drilled a hole large enough to get himself into it.

The birds confirmed my biggest fear that this tree is rotten inside. As I watch the male push mouthfuls of sawdust to the ground, I have a feeling this tree should be taken down. We don’t want to disturb the birds though, so we are going to wait until they vacate the nest.

Ride Gathered

Sunday morning is ride morning. This morning was beautiful out. Warm, sunny, and no breeze.

And yet I had no inclination to get out and ride. I wasn’t feeling into it. I used Sox’s old trick of just getting out for half an hour, and see how I feel.

I hadn’t drank enough water yesterday and today, and my breakfast wasn’t great for a ride, but I gathered my gear, and headed out with a route in mind. I actually added the out and back on the fly since I wasn’t feeling too bad and thought I should push myself a little.

According to the map maker this route was almost 24 km, and apparently I burned 2123 calories in the hour that I was out. That seems high.

I’m glad I did go outside and ride, since it was nice to feel the sun, but I could have used slightly warmer clothing. Now I have eaten, and showered, and am waiting for Sprout to wake up so we can play.

Police Baffling

not an attack dog

Thursday evening while driving home, I saw an unmarked police truck parked in a driveway. As I passed it, they pulled onto Lampson behind me, and turned onto Bewdley as well. They then pulled a U turn on Bewdley and sped off in the other direction.

Half an hour later I could hear some noise on the street in front of the house, and when I looked there were 3 officers standing there watching a fourth with his dog. The dog was in the scrub bushes across the street and was barking up a storm. Then I saw a guy behind the chain link fence and he was yelling at the dog and swinging a stick at it.

I was thinking that this guy was trying to outrun the dog, then I noticed the guy had a padded arm, and a very bulky jacket. These cops were doing a training exercise on our street.

For the next 10 minutes we watched as the dog apprehended the guy, another officer came in and arrested the suspect, then the suspect broke free and the dog re-apprehended the suspect. It was interesting to see this with such good seats, but I was a little baffled that the police never informed us this was happening in our neighbourhood.

Sure enough at one point a car drove through their exercise and the people in the car looked a little confused.

Also, Sprout watched with great intensity since he loves dogs right now, but if he were older we would have to prevent him from seeing that. I can’t see how explaining why a dog is biting a man on the arm would be easy.

This was all very interesting, yet baffling.

Shambles Progressed

Fuck.

That is what I wanted to yell a earlier today.

I had gotten to work late, and my morning was a shambles. I was looking after Sprout while Sox was returning from Vancouver. Sprout was out of sorts, and seemed extremely tired. Looking after himn when he is in that state is taxing and tiring.

I decided to grab a cup of coffee and noticed my mug wasn’t on my desk, meaning that the cleaners had run it through the dishwasher. I went to the cupboard to grab it, and was distracted as I reached for it.

I broke my mug. The cute dog getting himself a snack mug. I loved that mug. I almost want to cry.

It broke when I pulled it off the shelf and another anonymous white mug fell. I tried to stop the anonymous mug but in the process whacked my mug on a shelf, and it broke. Almost in half.

I hate mondays, this one especially. I would much rather be spending the day with Sox and Sprout.

The day progressed, and as I was leaving I noticed a bag of garbage in the parking garage. I didn’t think much more until I stopped at Oak Bay Bikes. As I jumped out of my truck I noticed someone had tossed a bag of tree branches into the back of my truck. Grrr.

Attention Customer

Sox and I were told about the Village Butcher a while ago. They are located out in Oak Bay, quite close to where I work. We were in the mood for sausages and wanted to try out the butcher shops so I walked up there one day after work and bought some.

I wasn’t paying too much attention when I paid but signed the MC receipt, but grabbed my sausages and took off. A couple days later I was looking at my MC bill online and noticed I had been charged $232 instead of $23.

The very next day I called them and explained what had happened. The staffer was incredulous that it had happened and apologized to me. She said she would talk to her boss and call me later to let me know what they would do. She never called.

A couple days later I walked up from work and explained who I was and why I was there. They knew immediately that their books were out for that day, and that I wasn’t trying to cheat them. I hung around for half an hour while one of the guys tried to figure out how to do a credit. Eventually the guy offered to look it up on the internet, then call me the next day.

I never got the call.

I went back and they said they figured it out, but wanted to wait for the owner to return. They were concerned about messing up the books for him. They requested I wait until he return from Costa Rica in a couple weeks. I said I could wait since the MC bill wasn’t due.

I returned on the day the staff said the owner would be there. The owner had been brought up to speed (thankfully) and was able to do the return to my credit card in less than five minutes. A quick apology and I was out the door, and will never return.

It took at least three weeks to return my money to me when it should have taken 5 minutes. Two broken promises and a couple lame apologies mean I won’t be going back. I was tempted to just call Mastercard and explain what happened and let Mastercard deal with it it, but I didn’t want to do that to a small, locally owned shop like that.

The bumbling cost them a customer, a potential repeat customer.

The sausages were excellent though.

Interesting Tankmate

I had this fabric based plant in my aquarium that started to turn brown. It was looking pretty gross so I decided to ditch it and try my hand at real plants. While at Petsmart looking at the plants I saw that they had some cool looking snails, so I decided to get one of those too.

It was called a Golden Mystery Snail. I asked a few questions about it, and learned that it enjoys eating zucchini. Interesting. It also eats algae. Some of the ones in the tank were pretty fast which surprised me quite a bit.

So now my 7 fish have a new tankmate. Hopefully this will last longer than my plecostamus’s did.