No paragraphs, because a paragraph killed my dog.

Today is my one night off per week. So when I came home from work, I surfed a bit and then went to bed. And guess what?

Instead of waking up an hour or two later, I slept! And extra hour or two!

I woke up sometime in the very early afternoon, but when I opened my eyes I thought I was blind. Not because it was dark, but because it was BRIGHT.

I usually open the sliding door to my balcony when I sleep, as I like it to be a little cold when I'm in bed. Well, the sun was pouring through that narrow gap so much, and lighting up the drapes on all the windows so intensely, that it seemed someone had ripped a window into heaven.

So I went back to sleep. ;)

On and off for a few hours, and here I am nearly seven hours later slightly disoriented and not sure if I'm tired or not. But I get to sleep during the night, so that's a treat. Tomorrow I'll try to go out and see a movie or hit a bookstore or whatever, just to do something. Then go to work. :P

More random things:

It's snowed here a few times in the past couple of weeks. And I have a reasonably steep hill I walk up and down between the SkyTrain station and my apartment. This isn't a problem at all, since I have boots that grip like they're magnets.

However... after one snowfall, it warmed up for the next two days. There was also a bit of a wind. So a couple of nights after the snowfall, much of the snow that had been compressed by people walking on it was ice.

Again, that wouldn't be a problem since between my sense of balance and the aforementioned good treads ice is no obstacle. Except that this stuff was like a sea caught in mid-heave. So instead of being able to get good grip, I had less than 20% of my boot actually touching the ground. See where this is going?

So I'm walking to work. I'm paying attention and moving at a good clip. I cross a road and get about three meter farther when I'm suddenly on my ass and sliding downhill. I'm irritated that I failed my Dex check, and that there's no apparent way I can stop my slide without laying back and attempted to drag to a halt (which I don't want to do because I'm going to work and don't want to be covered in dirty wet), so I give up and just enjoy the ride.

For an entire block.

An attractive woman was climing the hill in the opposite direction as I was doing this, but she was cleverly walking in the clear street to do it. As she looked at me sliding down, I affected nonchalance and said "Wheeeeeeeeeeeee".

I'm sure she was fooled into thinking I was completely in control. ;)

Speaking of heading to the SkyTrain, the other day when I was a block away, there was a guy standing on the corner. As I walked by him, he said (as a statement, not a question), "Money".

I looked at him, he looked at me, and I said "Sorry". I'm still not sure exactly what was going on.

Then in front of the station entrance, just as I walked by him, a different guy said "Buying?" to me. I said "No thanks" and as I met his eye he said "Fuck man!". I was feeling slightly out of tune with reality for the rest of the night. :P

You know how when you're sucking on a hard candy, like a butterscotch, how sometimes you'll just swallow it for no apparent reason and be irritated that you don't get to enjoy the rest of it?

What, it's just me?

Nevermind. :P

There was some sort of semi-goth guy on the train this week. He caught my eye because we were in the lead car, and as they're driverless here, you can sit right at the front and watch the track ahead.

He was standing in the place, legs slightly spread for balance, and with his hands resting lightly on the window ledge. He seemed to be pretending that he was moving the train along by sheer force of will. ;)

So I watched him for a while, and then he abruptly turned around. He had long dark brown hair, a thin face, long coat, big boots with buckles... the works.

He did the Commander Riker head tilt and started walking rapidly towards the back of the train, grabbing the occasional vertical pole and swinging himself violently around them as he picked up speed. I wondered if he'd say something to me, but he went on by and after the train stopped I saw him and his semi-goth friend out on the platform striking poses.

I was greatly amused. :)

Remember the Romanian at work I mentioned a while back who'll believe anything as long as it's conspiratorial and doesn't make much sense? China invading Canada and aliens and the government hiding that the polar ice is melting? You can remind yourself about him here.

Yesterday he was going off about Jews. Jews control the media so they're conditioning us. That's why Israel is always on the news. Jews this, Jews that. On and on.

He kept mentioning Jew-controlled media with an agenda, so I asked him what the agenda would be if I owned all the media. This seemed to irritate him quite a bit.

So I said "Do all Romanians work together towards a common goal of world conquest?". He laughed (he didn't see where I was going with this yet) and finally answered "Of course not".

So I asked him how he thought that a subset of humanity that wasn't all a part of the same group (meaning, all the people from Canada don't think alike, but Canadians who join a particular political party might be more in line with each other. Choice, not geography or ancestry) were all working in concert to bring about control of the globe.

He got the expression on his face that he always gets when we don't take his alien abduction stories seriously, and said "Man, I worked in one of their brainwashing camps!"

This was so unexpected that I didn't have time to check my reaction before I started laughing. And laughing and laughing and laughing.

The tears were running down my face and I may have been sobbing as I choked out "Wait until I blog the story of the Romanian that worked at the Jewish brainwashing camp!"

Even he had to laugh at how ridiculous it was at that point. Although it didn't stop him from going on and on about the "diabolical Jews" all night. Here's a little link for him: Yiddish with Dick and Jane. Enjoy. :)

Remember another bike patrol guy at work that we kind of chewed out a little while ago? Refresh your memory here if you like. Anyway, we had to do it again.

Just to remind you of how it works, it breaks down like this:

I work for one security company and I'm stationed inside a building. That's my site.

The bike patrol guys work for a different security company, and they do random checks of seven building in the same area, but not mine. However, between patrols they hang out in my lobby. Make sense?

One of them does the occasional exterior patrol, but he mostly goes out and does the interior of one of the buildings every hour or so. He does each one twice per night (twelve hour shift).

The other guy who's on does strictly exteriors. He's supposed to ride around on his bike and make sure no windows are broken, nobody loading a truck with stolen computers, nobody hiding in the bushes. That sort of thing. He's the one we chewed out for not doing anything.

Well, that was a week ago. This time he was talking on his phone.

I know, no big deal right? Wrong.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I don't usually take personal calls at work. Or rather I take them, but I don't chat. I answer whatever the person wants and finish the call, since I'm not being paid to talk on the phone. I'm paid to be alert to my building.

This guy though, spends hours of every night talking to his girlfriend. That's not a problem when he's between patrols (well, it is if he's talking to her instead of doing his job, but that wasn't the issue here), but he was walking his bike around with the phone glued to his ear. For over two hours. I could see him through the windows of the upper floors of my building when I was doing rounds.

When I came down, his partner was there and pissed off.

They have combination phone-radios that they use - they're normal cell phones but have short range (a few kilometers) radio capabilities that they use to talk to each other or call each other for backup.

This guy had paged the yappy bastard no less than ten times (several in front of me) and the guy was ignoring him. Isn't that wonderful? His partner could be getting beat down but he's going to just keep chatting to his girlfriend.

Finally he answered "Do you mind? I'll be there when I'm done on the phone."

"Okay man," said the other guy, "do what you want. I'm not going to be responsible for you anymore."

And he went off on patrol and cool off.

When I came back from my next patrol, the yappy bugger was there. I went straight to him (he only seems to respond to shock treatment) and said "If you worked for my company you'd have been fired for how you've been tonight."

I went on to say that it's one thing to be a slacker and not do your job (even though it reflects on the rest of us), and it's another thing to be suicidal (as he's not paying attention to his surroundings when he's walking his bike and talking on the phone - just waiting for someone to club him in the back of the head), but to ignore his partner when he's paging him is just inexcusable.

As I went on in that vein for a while, he was saying "I know, I know" and then finally said "It was kind of an emergency."

I said "Unless somebody died or is in the hospital, or anything else you'd call 911 about, it's no emergency. And it's nothing you can fix over the phone anyway, is it?"

Then I noticed he was still holding the phone in his hand, and that there was a bit of squawking coming from it. He was still on the phone!

I won't go into all the details, but I kept on trying to hammer into his head that some things just aren't to be taken lightly, and personal safety (his and ours) is one of them.

When his partner came back, he let him have it too, but finally just said "Do what you want - I'm not interested in you anymore." The kid was stricken.

Hours later, when we were alone and his partner had gone, the kid finally told me what the "emergency" was. Ready for it?

His girlfriend had found other girls' names in his msn list.

I think in the future we're going to tackle this dude and take his phone away before he goes on patrol. :P