Adventures in Babysitting

Last Sunday, Hawk and I babysat my nephew, CobraStarshine.


It was good.  He's four months old, so it went like this.


Play, play, play, poop, cry, diaper change, play, cry, cry for a long time while Aunty makes formula, eat, snuggle Aunty, Mum and Dad come home.


NOT INTERESTING!!!


Here's the dramatised version.

A dark and stormy Sunday afternoon in March.  Heavy clouds glower over trees.  Ominous wind blows.  Pan in through a living room window.  COBRASTARSHINE lies on his back blankly staring up at the ceiling, a stuffed monster in his arms.  HAWK sits on the sofa, staring at his Blackberry. RED PANDA sits in the arm chair, staring at COBRASTARSHINE.  CORA lies prone on the floor, vacant eyes directed toward the kitchen.

     RED PANDA:  Did you hear that?


     HAWK:  No.


     RED PANDA:  I'm sure I heard something.
     It was something like a grow-- there it is again.


Both adults pause, looking out the window.  HAWK looks at CORA.


     HAWK:  Cora doesn't hear anything.


     RED PANDA:  Since when do you put any stock in Cora?


CORA perks up when she hears her name and walks over to sit on RED PANDA's foot.  RED PANDA reaches down to scratch her ears, but CORA suddenly sits upright, pointing her nose at the door.


     RED PANDA:  Now do you believe me?


CORA starts to shake.  From without, there is an audible BOOM then a drawn-out HISS, followed by a flash of orange outside the window.  COBRASTARSHINE rolls over, abandoning his stuffed monster.


     HAWK:  Did you see that?


     RED PANDA:  Oh my god!
     CobraStarshine just rolled over!


     HAWK:  Oh, I missed that, I meant the fire outside?


     RED PANDA:  The outside is on fire?!


RED PANDA leaps to her feet, scooping up COBRASTARSHINE in one arm and the stuffed monster in the other.


     HAWK:  No, it's not ON fire, I saw a flash of fire.


There is another BOOM and HISS without, followed by a stream of fire outside the window.  CORA bolts behind RED PANDA and begins barking.


     RED PANDA:  Cora, shut it.


CORA shuts it, but doesn't look happy about it.  The whites of her eyes show.  COBRASTARSHINE, meanwhile, is flailing his arms, trying to get his monster back from RED PANDA.


     RED PANDA:  Hawk, what was that?


     HAWK:  Red Panda, I'm going to be honest with you.
     I don't know for sure, but if I were to guess,
     I'd guess that was a flame from the mouth of a dragon.


     RED PANDA:  That's ludicrous.
     There's no such thing as dragons.


     HAWK:  Says you.
     But that's what it looked like.
     It was too big of a flame to be from a flame thrower,
     and who would have a flame thrower on this street anyway?


RED PANDA gives COBRASTARSHINE his monster back to stop his grabbing motions.


     COBRASTARSHINE:  Coooo!  Giggle!


A knocking at the door, much louder than a human would knock.  All four heads turn toward the door in perfect unison.


     RED PANDA:  Who-who's there?
     HAWK:  [Stage whisper] Please don't be the dragon,
     please don't be the dragon!


     WITHOUT:  IT IS I, THE DRAGON!
     AND I WANT MY SON BACK!


The adults look at each other, open-mouthed.


     COBRASTARSHINE:  Fuck that, you're not my real dad!
     GET HIM!


Cora leaps to her feet, tearing open the door with her jaws, then ducks for cover again behind the adults.  The monster springs to life, muliplying in size.  As the dragon bursts into the room, seven feet tall at the shoulder, the monster matches its height and leaps to clutch its jaws shut with its arms.


     RED PANDA:  What?!


     HAWK:  The balls?!


     COBRASTARSHINE:  I said you're not my real dad
     now leave me alone!


COBRASTARSHINE leaps to the floor, turns, points his wee bum at the dragon, and lets loose a mighty fart.  RED PANDA and HAWK fall to the floor gasping, but the fart proves deadly to the dragon as it creates a fireball around its head.  Its tender eyeballs sizzle and melt to the floor like flaming marshmallows or that Nazi in Indiana Jones.  


     COBRASTARSHINE:  Yeah!  Believe your eyes, bitch!


As the air clears, HAWK stands, then helps RED PANDA to her feet.  A ray of sun shines through the window, directly onto a smiling, silently sleeping COBRASTARSHINE, who is cuddling CORA.


                        FIN

Actual Celebrity Sightings

Today was a big day for me.  But you won't appreciate it fully without some context.  It will make the good part of the story so much sweeter if I bore you first.


I really like my workplace.  You'd hardly know it to speak to me.  Thinking back on most of my conversations about work, it's bitch, bitch, whine, bitch.


But that's not because of my work, specifically, it's because I have to work, period.  Take a bird's eye look at my career and you see a woman, under thirty, employed as the director of print production and graphics at an educational company.  I received on-the-job training from an exceptionally talented graphic artist and now spend a good part of my time drawing for a living.  I also get to lay out books so they are easy to read.  My team is small, but excellent.  My management is intelligent and compassionate.  Basically, I have it made in the shade.  A bird's eye look at my work indicates that I should really stop bitching.


There is one real problem, though.  We don't have a receptionist at the moment, so several of us have been taking half-day shifts at the front desk.  I was supposed to be up there Friday morning, but someone needed this afternoon off so I took a switch.


Now for the good part.


I arrived at reception at noon, looked through the glass doors into the conference room, and promptly had a stroke.


Not really.  What actually happened is I thought "What is our tech guy doing in a conference oh wait that isn't our tech guy wait I KNOW THAT HAIR!"  But it felt like I might be having a stroke.  I said to the person whom I was replacing at reception, "IS THAT DAMON ALLEN?  Oh my god that's DAMON ALLEN!" in a ridiculously loud whisper.


She said, "Yes, he was telling me he played football for the Eskimos for about six years."


I took my spot at reception and sat there, mentally freaking out.  Also managing to think, because it's my duty, Eskimos Schmeskimos.


You may not know this about me.  But I love football.  I am a BC Lions fan like my father before me, and his father before him.  Football is amazing, and there, in the conference room, was the further-to-that-also-amazing DAMON ALLEN.


Okay, let's pretend you're a new immigrant to Canada, or for whatever reason you don't follow football but have some other redeeming feature that will make me like you in spite of your sports ignorance*.  You may not know who Damon Allen is.


Damon Allen is one of the great quarterbacks.  "Who is the best quarterback ever?"  Is a matter for debate; there are many different ways to determine something as qualitative as best.  For me, there is greatness, a category few players attain, a category you earn not just with talent, but with time.  Then, there's personal preference.  


For example, my Mum can't get enough of Geroy Simon (I suspect part of it is the way he looks in his uniform pants).  My Dad is unable to choose a favourite football player.  Maybe it used to be Joe Kapp, until he tackled Angelo Mosca at the 2011 CFL Alumni Legends Awards, "because that was a stupid thing to do".  There's Willie Fleming, there's Dirty 30, there's Brent Johnson, I could have been on the phone all night with Dad discussing which football players we admire and why.  I almost was; we got as far as comparing Damon Allen's throwing motion with Travis Lulay's.  My Dad and I are intense.  Don't believe?  Here's a family portrait from 2009.

There are two Flemings because the shop left the number off the front of the first one.  The corrected one was free.

I personally choose Lui Passaglia as my favourite because his winning field goal in the '94 Grey Cup is what got me permanently hooked on football.  And because he is the best.


Oh hey, look what I found on Wikipedia.  It's the star of this story (Damon Allen on the right) with the star of my childhood (Lui Passaglia, the CFL's all-time leading scorer on the left) with the 2000 Grey Cup!

Credit here because this is not my photograph.

Wow.  I got all distracted there thinking about Geroy's butt the Lions winning Grey Cups.  Where was I?

Oh yes.  Damon Allen is great, I was sitting at reception failing at working, answering the occasional phone call, trying not to stare through the glass doors at the genuine celebrity roughly ... 20 metres away from me.

Okay this is how great Damon Allen is.  He is 83% efficient.  In school, that is an A.  In cars, that is impossible.

He has 72,381 total yards.

THAT IS A BIG NUMBER PEOPLE!

He is a quarterback.  He is supposed to throw the ball.  But he has 11,920 rushing yards.

THAT IS A REALLY BIG NUMBER PEOPLE!  He is third in the league behind people whose only job is rushing.

He played in the CFL for 23 years.  That's almost as long as I've been alive.

So.  Me.  Reception desk.  20 metres away, greatness.

Guys, there's something else you might not know about me.  I'm totally not cool.  I'm like, totally, like, uncool.  I think the funniest thing I ever did was wear home-made Star Trek communicator badges to a Star Wars themed party.

So the very last thing I was going to do was walk into that conference room and say something suave like "Mr Allen, may I get you a coffee, tea, or water?" which would have been the really cool way to say "OH MY GOD I KNOW WHO YOU AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRREEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

No, instead of that, the second the CEO of the company walked past reception, I said, "Hey so what's Damon Allen doing here?"  Apparently they go 'way back and CEO is so impressed that I love football (note:  he was also impressed when he discovered I knew who Gregory Peck is.  Football and old movies are two good ways to impress CEOs.  Remember this, friends) that next thing I know I am grabbing my phone and heading into the conference room for an introduction and photograph.

I tried to protest that I didn't want to interrupt, that I could wait until they were done, but when CEO gets an idea in his head, and for once isn't seeing me stuffing dripping tacos into my face like I think they're going to run away*, there is no resisting.

Damon Allen is approximately the nicest person I have ever met in my entire life.  He said I must be happy the Lions won the Grey Cup this year (OVER THE MOON BUDDY) but I played it as cool as I could manage, which wasn't particularly difficult, because I could barely speak.

I think I managed to be fairly coherent because I got this out of it.

GREATNESS IS TOUCHING MY BACK!!!!!!!

Then when he was done he asked me to call him a cab and he had kickass aviators.  He was so cool I forgot to dial the area code the first time.

Damon Allen thinks I am an idiot.

BUT DAMON ALLEN KNOWS WHO I AM.

*This is obviously a hyperbole.  A bit.  I'm not like, a hockey fan.
*This is not a hyperbole.  7/10 times he walks past my office, I am either doing a stupid dance or shoving messy food, like tacos, into my face.
Football statistics from the CFL website.

Serious Things: Yes. More.

Overture

Free food is a Very Serious thing.

Hawk and I received a gift card to the Outback Steakhouse for Christmas.  Neither of us had been there in years so we were pretty pumped.  Date night is an awesome gift, and it’s even more awesome when it’s to somewhere you wouldn’t usually go.

We went very early on a Saturday evening and it seems our server was used to working weekdays.  In fact, he thought it was a weekday and reeled off the happy hour specials for us (which only apply on weekdays).  Extra-cheap calamari and extra-cheap booze?  Even on someone else’s dime, we were IN!

I’m not sure exactly what went down, or how it went down, because I was busy wandering around the restaurant looking for the washroom, but somehow, our poor eighteen-year-old-or-so server had to explain to Hawk that it was only happy hour on weekdays, but we’d get the deal anyway.

This is how I picture it.

ACT I

Then our food came.  Hawk had some sort of monstrous burger with deep-fried onions in it, and I had a steak because I was at the Outback STEAKhouse.  It seemed like the right thing to do.

Mashed potatoes?  Amazing.  Broccolis?  Amazing and there were snap peas there too!  Steak?  

I could barely cut it.  Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.  My expectations were too high from the deliciousness of the rest of my food.

Nope.

At the Outback, you have to order your steak cooked slightly more cooked than you would ordinarily cook it because they undercook their meat.  For example, I like my steak medium rare, so I ordered it medium.  But the steak I received was cooked well-done.

I was very unhappy about this.  I couldn’t eat my meat.  I was going to have to send my meat back.  But the rest of my food tasted good, and I have never sent food back in my entire life.  I’ve had completely incorrect orders plopped down in front of me, and I’ve eaten them with a “let’s try something new” attitude.  But this?  This was meat my Nana would consider eating*.  This was RIGHT OUT.  I was sitting there, staring at my food, contemplating this new sending-food-back phase of my life, when Hawk flagged down the server and took care of things for me.  Thank goodness for him.  I was ... frozen.

Back it went.  But, I was hungry, Hawk’s “yummy” noises were making it worse, and his fries were not only rather hot and crispy but right in front of me.  And the cursed man would not stop insisting I “help him out”.

Hawk is not a man who ever needed help finishing a meal.  This was shaping up to be a very strange evening indeed.

ACT II

An interesting thing happened while I was waiting for my meal to return.  One of the managers or owners or something of this particular Outback stopped by for a chat.  He told us that there had been a lot of turnover at this particular Outback, that they’d had staff issues, that he and his partner were trying to rejuvenate this particular Outback.  And he finished the conversation by giving the two of us a business card that had been converted into a $50 coupon valid only on March 27^th, customer appreciation day.

MOAR FREE FUDS?  Hawk and I looked at each other across his entrée, eyebrows raised.  However you cook it, free food is free food.  After that, it took a moment to get back into the actual moment.

ACT III

My food came back.  The verbose manager himself brought it out.  This time, it was cooked just right.  However, after eating a pile of my first batch of potatoes and vegetables, as well as half of Hawk’s fries, I was barely able to eat half of my steak.  Sad face.

But really, it’s okay.  As perfectly cooked as it was, it was way too salty.*

I have one more thing to say about that trip to the Outback.  The service we received was really good.  Actually, it was exceptional.

ACT IV

March 27, customer appreciation day, we go back to that particular Outback and seat ourselves in one of the few remaining tables in the lounge.  I have my doubts after the salt debacle of last time, but I’m excited for the free food.

We go for an appetizer again because it’s approaching 7:00 pm and I’m hungry.  Spinach and artichoke dip, cheap Rickard’s Red on tap.  We can taste all 8000 calories but 8000 calories tastes darned good so what do we care?

Entrées.  I stay away from the steaks.  I am once bitten, twice shy.  I get Toowoomba Pasta, which is shrimp and mushroom in alfredo with some tomato essence and some spice.  Dan gets chicken and ribs.  He almost doesn’t because it’s more expensive, but I remind him:  this is free.

My pasta is pretty good.  I estimate eight million calories.  THEN.

Our waitress does the unspeakable.  She comes to check on us … and my mouth is not full.  I thought in waitress school they taught you to wait until everyone at the table had a mouthful before you stopped by, but what do I know.  I am forced to actually speak to her.

I know.

Hawk finds his food overcooked and oversauced.  He eats it all anyway, then tries to eat the remainder of my food, but I chase him away.  Mine tastes good and I want it for lunch tomorrow.

This led me to determine the following must be true.

Still trying to impress your father, I see!

Wow, Mr. Caption, you got snarky there.  I'll show you "impress your father"!

Take that, haters.

This tale is more than just a convoluted restaurant review.  It has a moral.  Free food is good.  Free food is one of the best gifts you can give someone.  But maybe if the restaurant is giving away the free food you might consider these wise words.

*My Nana likes her meat cooked to a state known as "old boot".

*I think salt is the best thing after food so if I say something is too salty, that means that the food is basically fit to be put in storage for an Arctic expedition.

Image from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-a-trap

Excuses for Spending Money

I'm not a great photographer.  My sister often looks at my photos, or me while taking a photo, and yells at me for not knowing how to use my camera.  


"But Rad Panda!  You use great photos on your blog all the time!  You are being far too modest," you protest.


Thank you, that is very kind.  It is true that I try to use only my best pics on this blog.  But.  I have to take many, many pictures to get good ones.  This is based on statistics.  Here's a shot to show you Magpie isn't just a harpie.

Over-exposed, composition includes someone's crotch and table junk, actual age number is upside down, and spiral candles look like it's someone's 33rd birthday.  Well done, Red Panda.

It's okay.  My feelings aren't hurt.  I just feel bad when I capture faces in a similar manner and make my beautiful friends and family look like uggos.  Sorry, no examples forthcoming.  I don't have the heart to publish something like that.  Some photographers capture the beauty within.  I capture the beast.

So I'm going to save up my money for a Canon Digital SLR.

After all my whining about lack of ability, why would I even bother?  My point-and-shoot is really an excellent camera for its class.  I will wait for it to break before investing in something truly amazing.  But given I use my current camera in snowstorms and let novice skaters take it out on the ice, I think its time might come before its time, if you get my drift?*

This is a demonstration of me trusting my man.
(Neither of us so much as stumbled and we had a most excellent time.)

My justification for replacing my good camera with a great camera is twofold.

Fold one.  If I have a great camera I will be like my dad and he will finally be proud of me!

Fold two.  This one time, with my dad's camera, I took this photograph.  

Magpie est le bad-ass, n'est pa?

And then I took many more kickbutt photos while borrowing my dad's camera.  This taught me an important life lesson.  When Mark Twain said "Clothes make the man", he was correct.  But not just about clothes.

I think this picture sums up my thesis about camera quality as well.

What Mark Twain didn't realise was that you don't have to stop with clothes.  Yes, you can put fancy clothes on an idiot and people will instantly take him seriously.  But, you can also give a hack musician a quality instrument and she will immediately sound better.  You can give athletes professional equipment, and their game will improve.

You can give me a real camera,  and I can make a dead animal look arty.

I rest my case.

*If you get my snowdrift! Hahahahhahahahah

Serious Things: Continued

Last Sunday at 6 pm I was hungry and I didn't feel like cooking.  Luckily, I'm on a strict budget that has plenty of money allocated for eating out, so I said, "Hey Hawk, let's go to the Blue Plate for dinner."


Hawk was delighted with this suggestion.  He loves eating out, and he loves when I pay.  That way, he gets to pretend he is a kept man.


False.  It is I who like to pretend that.  


Allow me a moment to muse tangentially.  I promise I will tie it together in the end.


Happiness is a hard thing to track.  Many times we say

  or perhaps

 or

et cetera.  Those things are also mainly false.  Adjusted memories.  Decorated life stories. Flair.  Flavour. 


So anyway we went to the Blue Plate Diner. And I can tell you that the following details are facts.  The only flavour in the paragraphs below is the flavour in the food I'm reporting on.


When the food arrived, I was pleased.  My plate was full.  But, when I started eating my food, I went from pleased to blissfully, ridiculously happy.  You may suspect, but I did not suspect, that they had released any substances into the air supply, because I didn't feel lightheaded, giddy, giggly, or, on the other end of the spectrum, ragey or suddenly very very strong (more's the pity, I'm sort of a weakling).


Nor did I drink any alcohol.  I'd considered a glass of wine, but I was still feeling stuffy from my Cold to End All Colds, so I took a pass.  (You need to be able to smell to enjoy wine fully.  When sommeliers lose their sense of smell, that's it.  I learned that on W5.)


I don't think the happiness was due to Hawk, because I was with him all along, and my mood took a definite upswing after that first bite (sorry Hawk.  I guess I have adjusted to your level of awesome and now compensate for it, thus making any mood elevation you give me into my new baseline).


No, after almost a week's worth of analysis, I have come to the conclusion that my happiness was from the deliciousness of the food.


As you know, food is serious business.  And this food made me seriously delirious.


I was eating the elk and bison burger, with fries.  And guess what.  If you order a burger and fries at the Blue Plate Diner, IT COMES WITH VEGETABLES.

There have been murmurings that the Blue Plate is not what it once was.  If you have heard those murmurs, forget them.  If someone tries to murmur rumours about the Blue Plate to you, close your ears.  If you are among the murmurers, I now say to you, 

because on Sunday, I enjoyed the best meal I have ever eaten in my life, and it was just a burger (to be fair, a burger made of happy elk and happy bison who, how did I describe it to Sandcat and Magpie?  Ran around in fields under rainbows eating grass all day.) and fries and roasted veggies.  If they can make a meal that simple into a meal that takes tired me and turns me into happy, peaceful, blissed out, can't-shut-up-about-how-happy-I-am-because-of-this-food me, well then, friends, I think that says it all.

Living free-range makes cows both happy and delicious.

Things that Will Make You Jealous

From my seat at Transcend I can see into the kitchen.  If I can find a way to snap a picture unobtrusively, I will update this post.


In other news, I am working on some stuff while enjoying an Americano (perfecto) and ginger molasses cookie (delicious, reminiscent, if not equal to, Mum's ginger sparklers).


Just thought you should know.


UPDATE


I will never be an investigative reporter.  I didn't want to be seen taking a picture and people were in and out, in and out of the kitchen the entire time I was there.  So instead, here's a teaser of a post I'll be working on over the next few weeks.

All you get is the picture, no details.  That's why it's a teaser.

Meat Catchers

I have lovely straight teeth.  Otherwise they can go to hell.  I have weak enamel because a fever in my infancy permanently damaged it.  I have deep grooves in my teeth, trapping bacteria and delicious morsels of food as surely as does a Twit's beard*.  I have tight contacts between most of my teeth.  I have bruxism.  I get a cavity every two to three years.  I have so many cavities, I've even tried having them filled sans freezing.  I awake from nightmares believing my teeth have fallen out, desperately checking for each one with the tip of my tongue.  If I find a magical bit of hard something in my food, I assume it's either a filling making its grand escape, or a broken piece of tooth doing a runner.  Some people have daddy issues.  I have tooth issues. 

I booked a dental appointment a few weeks ago and figured I'd better start flossing.  I hate flossing.  I have giant hands and a small mouth and in order to see what I'm doing, have to put my face approximately six inches from the mirror.

But I did it.  I flossed for the two weeks leading up to my appointment, which was today, and Lord help me, Ima keep doing it.  This isn't going to be like my new year's resolution, the one where I resolved to brush my teeth more gently. I stuck to that so well I'd forgotten all about it until the hygienist asked me if I was a scrubber.

I should say so, yes.

Sigh.  Deep, deep sigh.  It seems that my scrubbing was, in fact, to no avail without the flossing.  You see, kids, two weeks of flossing directly ahead of your dentist appointment cannot prevent cavities, even if you brush twice a day and usually use toothpaste*.

And a cavity is what I have.

Not just any cavity.  I have the boldest, most daring cavity since the one my last dentist (retired, god rest his damned ass in Victoria where it is probably not snowing) described as "bombed out".  Actually, this is a fascinating story.  I will share it with you.

So one year I went to the dentist and he found a wee little cavity on the side of my tooth.  "No problem," says he, "it's wee.  We'll drill in a bit so it's big enough to fill and that will be that."  "Okay," says I, "I'm an expert at cavities. Let's do it today!"

"Oh, look," says he, "There's one on the other side of your mouth as well.  Let's get it, too!"  "I'm game!" says I.

So he freezes me up.  Top left of the mouth, bottom right.  I'm chill.  My Mum used to work in this dental office.  I grew up here.  I have nothing to worry about.

Except, I wasn't due for X-rays this visit.  There was no reason to expect my imperturbable dentist to say, in a perturbed manner, "It's bombed out."

Me:  "Ish wha?"

Oh yes.  The tiny little divots on both molars, one on the top left, one on the bottom right, were mere portals to the empty insides of my teeth.  Perhaps an artist's rendering will help emphasise the situation I was in.

I HAD THIS ON BOTH SIDES OF MY MOUTH!!!!  OPPOSITE SIDES!!!!
THERE WAS NOWHERE TO CHEW!!!!

That was brutally painful.  Which is why I am worried about today's little cavity.  At least there is only one cavity.  But.

It is located in my Meat Catcher.

My Meat Catcher is a gap between two teeth.  Well, less a gap than a cavern. These two teeth meet very closely at the top, then there is a hollow roughly the size of my ego where food (fibrous food, as my dentist described it when I told him I called it "Meat Catcher") likes to hang out.  This food is usually meat and I am constantly flossing there and it is called my Meat Catcher and I am very concerned about this situation.

You see, they have booked my filling in May.  It is March.  And if that last sucker bombed out two entire molars in between X-rays, well, let's just say that a cavity investing in my Meat Catcher has got himself some prime real estate.  Prime.

*If you don't know Roald Dahl's The Twits, FOR SHAME!

*This is a joke.  Always use toothpaste.  Jeez.

Breaking News Stories

Red Panda, Intrepid Reporter on location here on 104th Street in Downtown Edmonton!  Boy do I have a news story for you!


First Hawk and I heard sirens!


But we hear sirens all the time so I went and put on my fuzzy sock-slippers because my feet were cold.

They were in my stocking, Christmas 2010.  Thanks, Hawk!

After  I got my socks on, I took a peek out the window and I saw this!

No comment.

It seems this is more serious than we first suspected.  They've sent out the big hoses.  But where's the fire?

Oh, there it is.  It must be in this building all these displaced people are staring at.

They're standing awfully close for an emergency situation.

Wait a moment, I've got something coming in through my earpiece.  ... uh-huh ... okay, right ... I'm on it!  Hawk is telling me that there are more sirens and the displaced people are on the move!  Let's get a shot of the evacuation!

Too slow, Red Panda!  Learn to use your camera already!

Well, it's been about five minutes, and the sirens have ceased.  That means they're either fighting flames furiously, or everyone has gone home.  Let's check back in on the scene.

Where there's no smoke, there's no fire.

What an enormous let down.  Time for a drink.

Love Stories

This is Little D.

Little D lived alone for a long time.  There wasn't much for him to do.  Time was, he would spend hours watching people from his 14th-floor picture window. The view rarely disappointed.  Business people in the morning, noon hour, and early evening; delinquent teenagers and yuppie shoppers throughout the day; the trendy coming out to dine in the evening; the homeless late at night.

But one day, something started to change inside Little D.  The people-watching slowed, then ceased.  Any observer would have been able to see that Little D was suffering from a crippling depression.  The cruel twist of fate was that Little D was the chronic observer, and had no one to watch him.

The bad habits of the hopeless set in.

Little D was entering a spiral that seemed likely to end in disaster.

Little D!  Boxers go on your butt, under your pants!  Not on your head!

But, just when you hit rock bottom, life has a way of bouncing you back up.

That is an example of unspeakably bad writing.  Firstly, "you"?!  I don't mean you, I mean Little D.  Secondly, what an unutterably terrible cliché.  However.  I'm not going to delete it, because, in Little D's case, though possibly not in yours, since I simply cannot speak to your case, this is exactly what happened.  Here's how.

Little D ran out of underwear.  I won't go into the details of how he managed this, but yes, that last picture there did have something to do with it, and it did involve some experimentation Little D would like me to keep private.  The important thing is, one day, Little D found himself (commando, but at least he still had pants-pants to wear) in a lingerie shop.

That's where he met Li'l B.

Little D immediately noticed that Li'l B was not an ordinary monster.  Her velvet eyes were limpid pools of love and sincerity, not the loathing and pity he was accustomed to seeing every day in the mirror.  Little D went home that night with fresh underwear, a resolve to change, and Li'l B's eyes burned onto his retinas—in a good way.

Little D wasted no time in getting to know Li'l B.

He learned she was a literary monster ...

... who had her own demons to battle.

    

Love has its way of setting straight what needs straightening.  All it took for these two love-monsters was an awkward first date ...

... or two ...

... and a quickly-discovered mutual interest ...

... and love began to grow.

Life is good!

And love is beautiful.