Posts Tagged ‘family’

Reek of delish

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

People seem to still be downloading iProv, which is cool. The Seattle Festival of Improv Theater is coming up, and I may try to promote it there. I’ve started work on a casual game in the meantime… it’s coming along well.

I’d been away from Unexpected a couple of weeks, and when I came back to play this past weekend I was amused to find a certain photo printed out on the managing director’s desk, with the caption “UP alum Joel McHale gives Dan Posluns a noogie”. It never takes much of an absence for me to feel the nostalgia when I return.

My washer finally got repaired today, nearly two weeks after I first set out to have it fixed. The repairman missed our first appointment because he was sick and I was never notified. He came two days later and identified the problem, but it required ordering a replacement part. He was supposed to come back with it on Monday, but phoned and told me it had arrived busted and they were going to have to order another one. Finally, today, I was able to do laundry again and stop smelling like a hobo.

In the end the affair cost me nearly three hundred dollars, with about half of that just for a new dial control. Admittedly cheaper than buying a new washer, but not enough to keep me from feeling really jilted if anything else goes wrong with it.

The Superbowl was this past weekend, and for someone who’s normally not very entertained by football, I found it enthralling. In fact, the game was probably more interesting than the commercials, which were an unusually paltry crop this year. Some were worse than others, but the one that angered up the blood most was the one that was criminally ignorant of some of the most fundamentally basic geometry:

Someone at the party was following Wil Wheaton on Twitter and I think he summed it up best: “It’s like a million geometry nerds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

My parents sent me a very excellent birthday gift I meant to blog about some time ago. One part of it was a bottle of the jalapeno vodka my grandmother’s brother brought with him in his most recent (and in all likelihood final) visit from Russia. Unlike normal vodka (which is normally pretty flavourless and used mainly as a mixer), this stuff has a really nice, mild taste to it that makes it great for shots. Plus the jalapeno sitting at the bottom of the bottle is all kinds of awesome.

The other, far more valuable part was a package of slices of the salami obtained from the St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, which is more than an hour’s drive west of Toronto. This is an aged, all-beef Mennonite salami that is unlike anything else – I need to keep it shut up in a cupboard or my entire condo will reek of delish. I’ve been rationing it carefully but I’m already more than a quarter of a way through the stuff. My parents had to sneak it across the border (beef is prohibited) when they drove down to Florida for their vacation and shipped it out from there. It took nearly a month to arrive, and I had assumed that it had been confiscated by the post office (since it had a Canadian return address on it), but it was a very pleasant surprise the day when it turned up.

I could use more pleasant surprises! Get on that, blogosphere.

Dan.

Secret plan

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I’ve spent the past couple of months bringing a secret plan to fruition, where I hoped to surprise my mother on her birthday by dropping in unexpectedly on their summer cottage vacation.

I had really hoped to kill two birds with one stone and help my dad out in his purchase of a new van by buying it for him in the States and driving it up to Canada, magically saving him about ten thousand dollars because that’s just how much more things cost north of the border. Importing should be almost trivial to do except that Toyota doesn’t want you to do it, and makes it extremely difficult to do so (with new vehicles especially). My dad compromises on some things, but the make, model and age of his minivan are not up for discussion.

In short, they won’t sell to Canadians, only Americans who are registering the vehicle to an American DMV. The hope was that we could use my residency status and address in America to buy the van, and it looked like it would work except that it takes 6 to 8 weeks to title a vehicle in Washington and without the title we’d need a manufacturer’s certificate of origin to import it, which the dealerships wouldn’t provide us with because Toyota is run by assholes.

We finally gave up on it and I settled on flying to Toronto directly instead of Buffalo. I caught the red-eye which included a stopover in Vegas, during which I played my first ever slot machine… I spent a dollar that someone had given me beforehand and lost it before I was able to even figure out how the machine worked. I failed to sleep on the plane and arrived in Toronto at 7:30 AM local time, all sweaty and bleary-eyed. My mom was nearly shocked senseless when she came downstairs and I was there, and much blubbering followed.

I’m now spending the week with them up at their cottage in Muskoka. I am sad that I’m not getting to see any of my Canadian friends this visit, but the downtime up here has been really theraputic for me. We’ve caught one of the most gorgeous weekends of the summer… it’s been sunny and warm and the lake has been quiet and calm. I’ve gone swimming and boating with my folks and working on my part in Rocky Horror but most of all I’ve just been lounging and resting, and it’s been niiiiice.

My biggest complaint is that we only have dial-up Internet access here, and I didn’t discover until I arrived that my fancy-pants laptop doesn’t actually have a modem in it, so I’m forced to use my dad’s computer for all Internet-related activity. I’m trying to goad them into getting high-speed up here, mostly because I think it’d be fantastic to lounge around on the lower deck out by the water with a wireless connection to the rest of the world. Don’t think they’ll go for it any time soon, though.

For the curious, I have some pictures of the cottage taken a couple of years back in my gallery. Pretty much everything is the same… except the baby ducks have grown big and fat now, and still like to hang around our little bay.

Dan.