A Long Day

I am sitting in the backyard and it is 9:30 PM. It is still light, still warm and the neighbour kids are still playing instead of sleeping. Everything is good.

Normally, it is far too cool for me to sit outside at this time of night, but we are smack dab in the middle of a heat wave that shows no sign of letting up. It isn’t a heat wave like my friends in Ontario endure from time to time. It will still cool down to 13 or 14℃ and be quite nice for sleeping. Well, until that fucking crow starts up at 5:30AM. It could be a fucking magpie, but whatever it may be…if I ever get my fingers around its neck…

According to the weather network there is really no end in sight. I put off installing the air conditioners in the kitchen and bedroom because last year we only had one day over 30℃ and just not worth the effort to install them. This year is going to be a warm one though. I put them in the other day and am still experiencing the effects of strained muscles. I think this will be the last year I don’t ask for help from Brendan. It won’t be any easier, but shared misery is much preferable to just plain old misery. It will be six or seven years before I trust Hurricane and Tornado to help.

Let’s see, what else you don’t care about. The garden is growing more or less. Some of the plants are more and some are less. The roses are doing really well and I treat them badly. Not intentionally, but just thru ignorance. The tomatoes are doing Calgary well; they are growing and will produce tomatoes. I don’t know if they will ripen on the vine, but I live to dream. My potatoes are doing well but I have no idea what I did to help them along. Probably stay away from them is the key. The onions are growing as are the carrots. The carrots aren’t doing as well as they should and I have had several stern talks with them to no avail. We planted bell peppers this year and they haven’t died yet which I think we can all agree is a good thing.

If the weather stays warm, the crop should be a bumper one. By a bumper crop I mean that the garden produced more food than I could have bought with the money I spent on the plants. No, I don’t get a lot of satisfaction from watching my garden grow, that is what Mary, Mary does. The food tastes better I guess but I am not and never have been a foodie. Just boil it, toss it on a plate, salt, pepper and butter will make anything taste good.

Well, I have to go and psyche myself up for tomorrow; it is going to be a long day.

A Guy Has To Make a Living

I have been writing a blog now for a number of years and for the most part it has been an interesting way to spend part of my day. Sometimes it is just an onerous task, but for the most part no one gets to read that because I just don’t write. That works for everyone.

I don’t have a large following or what anyone would call a following at all. Just a few curious people that check it out from time to time. They are like people rubber-necking while driving past an accident scene. They have interest, but not the morbid curiosity that would cause them to get police scanners so they wouldn’t miss any of the gory details. My followers would never go out of their way to read this drivel and quite frankly, I don’t blame them.

On the particular blog platform that I use, I am able to change the way my page looks, control who reads it, read any comments that anyone might make and check the statistics of who is reading and where they are. I can see what their web browser is, where it is located and how they got to my blog. I don’t mess with the look of the blog and there are rarely any comments, a few from friends agreeing with my opinion, but not so strangely, few of those. I do get some cryptic comments every now and then and I am convinced that spies use random blog comment boards to pass secret messages to each other. The bulk of the comments seem to be from non English speaking countries. I suspect that reading and commenting on a blog is part of an English as a second language course. The words are correctly spelled and probably every sentence has a verb, noun, adverb and dangling participle needed for correct structure. They just seem odd and really quite meaningless. I like to think that those odd comments are high praise in whatever language they are most comfortable with.

More often than not lately, when I check the site that led some poor, unsuspecting soul to my blog I find that I am at a Slovakian bearing companies web site. Slovaks need bearings too and probably more than most. I wonder just how bored the Slovak employee had to be at work to struggle through reading my blog. I have to assume that English wouldn’t be a first language and probably not even a second one. French or Bulgarian would be much more useful in the Slovak bearing industry.

I get my fair share of comments from European or Russian porn sites. I assume they are porn sites from the pics of naked women, but they could be models in the Russian version of Victoria’s Secret. I don’t read Russian so I am really in the dark. I suppose it could be a catalogue to find an Eastern European woman that is looking for a North American husband. Sorry ladies...I’m taken! Get back to me when and if Louise ever comes to her senses. You would think that I would enjoy getting linked to from porn sites. I’d rather that bored office worker in Bratislava struggle through my site.

Maybe the porn sites and bearing manufacturing places are getting me down. You know, I just had a thought. What if the same guy in Bratislava is running the porn site and teaching ESL on the side at night. Anything is possible…

A guy has to make a living.