Two weeks ago I went to a friend’s birthday party, who decided that for her 30th birthday she wanted flying trapeze lessons. So a bunch of went to the local circus school to do their introductory course, which consisted of a couple of hours swinging in the air above a giant net.

As with most things, the scariest part is probably the anticipation. This meant the whole phase of climbing up a ladder to a wobbly little platform 30 feet in the air, having them switch safety lines on you (and telling you to “hold on” while you’re being switched), and reaching out in an incredibly unnatural position while trying to hold a heavy bar at eye level, with nothing but air and net beneath you. We each did about four or five jumps, though, which meant I got to revisit the scary anticipation phase several times. In my brief time there I didn’t get to the point where it became second nature… in fact, I think I actually got a little more scared as I went to do subsequent jumps.

The first jump was straightforward and fun enough: jump from the platform and swing from the trapeze, then when given the command lift your legs into a sitting position and drop into the net. My eyes grew wide with alarm as she described the second jump to us, though: we were to jump off the platform, then at the far point of the first swing lift our legs up into trapeze bar, then at the near point of the swing release our hands and swing by our legs, then once we’d swung once grab the bar again, remove our legs and return to an arm-swing, then as the next swing began kick back-and-forth three times, release and do a backflip to land in the net.

Perhaps even more surprising to me is that I was able to do almost all of it. I had trouble getting my legs into the bar and that delayed me a swing, and then my kicking was pretty uneven so my dismount lacked sufficient speed, and I only did a three-quarter backflip. The next time I went up, though, I managed to do the entire thing (although I still took an extra swing to get my legs into the bar).

Don’t believe me? Well I’ve got proof:

Last few weeks have been interesting for improv. Same weekend as the trapeze, I was fortunate enough to get cast in two teams: one on Friday and one on Saturday. Unfortunately my Friday team didn’t do so well, but my Saturday team had a pretty solid show and I felt good about my performance. We ended up losing by a single point… but what was really odd was that the audience practically revolted against the judges with their booing, to the point that the emcee decided to give us one more challenge to attempt to settle the score. Due to a judge’s error at the end of that challenge, we ended up tying (something which isn’t supposed to happen), so we ended up in a “sudden death” skill competition that my team got shut out on. So it was about the most crushing defeats imaginable, and one of our team members (who happens to also be the artistic director of the theatre) proposed we come back the next week for a grudge match. This felt a little weird to me but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to perform again. So we came back and we lost a second time, fair-and-square.

The whole judging thing in Theatresports is awkward. It’s designed as a way to engage the audience, focus their attention and galvanize them alongside the teams on stage against a common enemy. Whenever I judge, I always play the “arc of the show”: throwing lower scores at first and eventually opening myself up to higher scores at the end. But with King of the Hill and teams returning from week to week (which we’ve been doing for about a year now), the scores are a lot more significant and it’s a lot harder to get stage time if you don’t win, so it’s harder to keep the competition friendly. I, for one, would be happier if we returned to random teams, and we may do that eventually, but for now it is what it is. This weekend I am doing tech and judging, and who knows when I will improvise on stage again.

That said, I could certainly use the chance to redeem myself… Wednesday was Cinco de Mayo and my friend really wanted to do a tequila-inspired drunken improv performance with five players. I’m usually the first to shoot down drunk-prov as something that almost uniformly goes bad and is a bad experience for the audience, but he’d never tried it and I felt both obligated to him plus the need to challenge myself to something I expected to be very, very difficult.

So myself and four others showed up on Wednesday with bottles of tequila and prayers in our hearts. Now I’m a very light drinker to begin with, but knew I was going to have to show some mettle… we started downing the shots then eventually moved the table out to the right side of the house so the audience could see us getting sufficiently liquored up for our performance.

Now I’ve been plenty drunk before, but almost never to the point where I’ve had trouble walking upright. I did at least seven shots of tequila that night, and was a total mess. The improv went predictably similar to a car going at highway speeds through, say, a tree, but to my credit I at least tried to hold it together and had the sense to take my time responding, for all the good it did us. Elizabeth drove me home that night and put me to bed, and I was pretty much useless for all of the next day. It seems I just can’t recover like I could when I was twenty anymore.

In the midst of all of this, something rather unexpected has happened: I’ve joined the cast of another play. Driftwood Players is doing And Then There Were None (better known as Ten Little Indians), a murder mystery by Agatha Christie. This show isn’t normally the kind I exactly leap out of my chair to do (not the least of which reasons include I’m unable to do a British accent), but I got asked by the director personally to fill in after one of their leads had to back out for health reasons just before rehearsals were starting. It looks like a fun cast and a decent play, and I get to do a nicely comedic character role. Plus I’ve wanted to work for Driftwood in the past so it can’t hurt to do this show for them. I am going to need an unbelievable amount of dialect coaching, though.

Dan.

It’s tax season, and I cut a cheque to the IRS for the first time ever. That stung a little, but I am glad to be fortunate enough to be in a position where I owe the money.

The noise from the construction on my condo has been wearing me down. They begin quite literally at the crack of 7 A.M., which simply doesn’t jive with my sleep cycle. After pressing the construction manager I finally got them to send their cable installation guy to my unit in order to reroute my existing cable line behind the wall, which was basically the trigger event I was waiting for before attacking my project of running additional cables throughout my condo. I knew there wasn’t much hope in trying to get him to do the entire project for me, but it was a good opportunity to learn what to expect when I went to do it myself. My plan was to run all of the cables through the crawl space beneath my building. Once I’d found out where the entrance was I scoped it out and did some reconnaissance – just a little bit – it looked pretty intimidating, with detached insulation hanging everywhere and tight cement bulkheads that would make it very difficult to get around. Possibly the worst part was that there are about six condos per floor of my building and the entrance was in a storage unit on the opposite side, and the underground was a complete maze that was going to be nearly impossible for me to navigate.

As it turns out, even just drilling down into the crawl space is fraught with complications. But the biggest discouragement came when his partner came back up and told us of his experience down there… “hell on earth”, crawling in the dark on gravel amongst dead rats and mounds of their feces, and putrid water that had been standing for heaven knows how many years.

I very nearly abandoned my plan… I’m not entirely faint of heart but it just sounded like too much; I’m creeped out enough by rats when they’re alive, and I wasn’t exactly Andy Dufresne trying to escape from Shawshank. But at some point I realized this was something I’d wanted badly and long enough for my place, that I wasn’t going to let a little rat feces stand in my way.

So I started drilling, which was difficult enough, as my drill is old and underpowered, and the batteries (I have two of them) can barely hold a charge anymore. I would only get a few minutes use at best before having to swap them and let one recharge. I’d managed to learn a few things from the cable guys, fortunately, such as that my office wall was plywood-backed (and that I would therefore have to drill holes; a drywall saw wasn’t sufficient) and where the concrete was I’d have to drill past. The poor guy who went into the crawl space before me also informed me that there was a white electrical cable running through the maze that I could follow which would lead me right to my unit.

That day I went to Home Depot and purchased what I could to prepare myself: a couple of mini-flashlights, work gloves and a surgical mask (in part to protect myself from the dust, but mostly hoping to ward off the smell). Once I’d finished drilling holes and dropping cables down in the evening I plucked up my courage and went off to the storage closet where the entrance was. I wasn’t keen on going at night when it was dark, but I needed Elizabeth’s help inside the condo to both feed the cables and retrieve them for me, and I didn’t want to put off the endeavour until the next time we were both there and available to do it.

I reckon the whole ordeal took about two hours. I had two sets of cable to run from two different locations: a network cable and an HDMI cable from the den into the living room, and then a second network cable and a regular phone cable from the bedroom to the den. The first set of cables should have been relatively straightforward as I would be wiring along the exact same path that the cable guys had. I wasn’t at first certain that I wanted to go the extra mile to do the wires to the bedroom, but I figured that if I was committed to going to all that trouble, I may as well get everything I want out of it and not leave myself ever tempted to go down there again.

Getting around was even more difficult than I anticipated, and I likened it to Catherine Zeta-Jones’ big payday scene in Entrapment. I was literally squirming on my belly through blocks of concrete and squeezing my body between pipes and the ceiling above me. There were smatterings of feces but I never actually saw a dead rat; I expect it’s because I chose to go in the evening and was spared by darkness and luck. Each room was its own miniature expedition to get across on my hands, knees and belly. That was the only way for me to do this kind of thing: very slow, patient progress, bite-sized morsels of a few metres or so and then stopping for about five minutes to catch my breath and summon the energy to proceed. My biggest regret was not thinking to get knee pads… my whole body was dinged, bruised and banged up pretty badly from the experience, but my poor knees on that rough gravel suffered the worst of it by far.

I followed that white electrical cord with the same naked trust of a sailor navigating from the North Star for what seemed like an eternity… when I finally saw the first of my cables dangling from the ceiling I nearly collapsed out of relief that I’d found it. It took me quite a while to get my bearings and run the two cables that were there from the den to the correct spot in the living room, but it was a big victory for morale when it was done. The two cables I’d dropped from my bedroom proved far more frustrating, though, as I was completely unable to locate them. The worst part was being about 75% confident that I was in the right area, with Elizabeth above me banging on the wall, trying to give me some kind of sonar location, but still having that 25% uncertainty about both where I was and how I was oriented relative to the wall.

I finally came to the conclusion that the wires were most likely sticking into the insulation above me, and nearly despaired entirely as there were rows of the stuff overhead, I couldn’t be certain of where I was, the cables could still be anywhere, I was on the threshold of a bulkhead that was difficult and painful to cross, and I my reserves of energy were getting desperately low. I made my best guess, though, and was fortunate when I yanked on the insulation there and my two wires neatly dropped down. I ran them over to the den, and spent the next twenty minutes or so slowly but triumphantly working my way back to the entrance… even still, it took forever, and even the light of the trap door when I finally could see the exit couldn’t speed the passage of time.

Four days later I still ache and am tender from the whole experience, but I am healing well enough. I’ve finished most of the terminations and wall plates for the various cables, although I still have one special part I’m waiting on delivery for. Before this project, I had only wireless networking throughout my condo, no phone line to anywhere other than my kitchen and bedroom, and cable in the living room only by virtue of a hack job I’d done running an extension cable outside the condo and back inside. Now I have:

• Cable television run cleanly to the living room (instead of a loose cable outside my condo)
• Network cables run from both the living room and bedroom to the den
• Phone cable running to my den (where I have the fax machine for my office)
• An HDMI (high-def video cable) running from the den to living room (so I can run high-def off my computer to the television)

It was a gruelling mission, and I wouldn’t go back down there again if you paid me a thousand dollars to do it, but all in all I’m both happy with and proud of the results of it!

Dan.

Izzy turned out to be very little like Sundance. From kittenhood he was the grumpiest cat I’ve known, fiercely independent, extremely defensive and only ever playing or showing love on his own terms. He would attack frequently and heaven help you if you tried cradling him upside down (or holding him at all for more than brief periods of time). He was always such an old curmudgeon, and it was unusual that his body had to grow into his personality.

He was never the smartest cat, either. He used to charge at the other cat he saw in the mirror, for instance. It would sound like the galloping of a tiny horse as he got up speed and rammed that other cat with his head, causing the mirror to reverberate throughout the entire house. I think he grew out of that behaviour after a year or so, but I liked to joke that the damage was done by that point.

He was an indoor cat, and hated it. My parents used to tell me that indoor cats grew disinterested with the outside world, but I knew that was never the case for Izzy. He would constantly make mad dashes for freedom whenever a door was left open or if he felt he could claw his way through a screen (which he managed several times). Being the less-brainy type I described, though, he would always stop at the first flower he encountered in order to sniff it, giving us ample opportunity to retrieve him. There were only a few times he ever made it out unnoticed for any significant period of time, and he never went far. One evening he got out and the next morning my parents found him chasing after a terrified neighbourhood cat across our backyard.

We used to try taking him to my parents’ cottage, and that never went well: two hours of him sitting in his cat-carrier, meowing plaintively the entire trip. A lesser cat would have tired out or just given up five or ten minutes into the trip, but he would never stop for the entire two hour journey, constantly changing up his voice and pattern so we had no chance to grow accustomed to it.

He loved being at the cottage, though, exploring its nooks and crannies, and it was one of the places he would be most affectionate. I slept in the top half of a bunk-bed, and he would spend about ten minutes trying to figure out how to climb the ladder unsuccessfully until I finally helped him up, and he would sleep in the bed with me.

One story I like to tell is how I was napping on the couch at the cottage one time, when he suddenly jumped up on my chest and started nuzzling me. I was surprised by the unusual affection he was showing as I pulled myself out of my sleepy haze. I wrenched my eyes open only to have my gaze returned by a wide-eyed, terrified rodent that was barely centimetres from my face. Naturally I screamed like a little girl as my skeleton tried to leap outside the rest of my body, sending the two of them careening across the room. My dad heard this from the balcony where he was reading the newspaper, and as he opened the screen door all we heard was a furious galloping noise, and all we saw was a dark blur as the rodent darted out onto the porch and to freedom. My dad managed to slam the screen door shut just in the way of the cat that was hurtling after it in pursuit, separating the two.

After I went away to university I saw him a lot less, and my allergies made it difficult to spend huge amounts of time with him. He eventually moved in with my aunt, who took excellent care of him, and in his later years discovered other quirky things about him (such as one of his favourite foods being corn on the cob). I like to think he calmed down a lot in his elder years, although every time I visited he would be curmudgeonly as ever.

The last few months he apparently was having a harder time of things. My aunt had to feed him with a syringe and inject him with medications regularly. He seemed to improve recently and was even eating and enjoying food on his own, when he was hit with some kind of clot-related affliction that left him terribly weak and upset (my aunt thinks it was a stroke, but the vet isn’t sure). There was no reasonable choice other than to put him down and end his suffering at that point. I was woken up by the call from my parents this morning, and got the chance to talk to my aunt about it a little later on. It took a few hours for it to sink for me and I’ve been going back and forth between being shell-shocked and morose.

We are going to have him cremated, and bury his ashes up at the cottage, same as we did for Sundance over seventeen years ago. I like to think it’s where he would have chosen, if he could.

I knew about his declining health, and that it was unlikely I would get to see him before he died. I had still hoped he might make it through until March or so, when I have a wedding to attend on the east coast and might have been able to do a brief layover to see him in Toronto. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be, though. I am sad to have missed a final opportunity to see him, but seventeen years is a long life for any cat, and his was a good one, filled with people that loved and took care of him.

The brief time I visited back in 2008 and got to see him at the cottage, he chose this spot underneath an island table in the kitchen as the best location to keep an eye on foot traffic:

… of course, his vigilance had its limits.

So long, Izzy. I will miss you.

Dan.

In that vein, I just ordered a wall mount for my television, something I’ve been thinking of getting for quite a while and was on sale for only $26 (so how could I resist?). I’m a little nervous because these things need to be properly secured to a stud, and I’ve never been too trusting of my stud finder. So I may have to spend more money on a better stud finder as well. Sigh.

The creation myth of how I got my hair style is short but interesting if you’re one of the many legions of fans I like to believe I have. I’ve always hated my hair since I was old enough to care about what girls thought of me… if I let it behave naturally it parts in a way that makes me look like I’m in third grade. In high school I tried gelling it back but didn’t really know what I was doing and it just made it look stupid. In university I wound up giving up entirely and shaved my head for several years (I was repeatedly told I had a “good head” for shaving). I eventually let it grow back out again and returned to gelling it back, but never liked it.

Then shortly after I moved to New York City, I found myself commuting home on the subway one day when I saw someone with hair straight forward but gelled up to be spiky in the front, and thought to myself, “hey, I could do that with my hair.” So I proceeded to stare intently at the top of his head for the entire half-hour subway ride, burning the image into my brain and quite possibly weirding out any number of patrons. The next morning I whipped out some gel and attempted to sculpt what I remembered. To my surprise it worked and – in my humble opinion – actually looked good on me. I’ve since worn it or variants of it depending on the length of my hair, and been pretty content with it.

I’m right now at the length where I would normally chop it back down again, but on the recommendations of some ladies I trust I’ve been piloting out something new, which is letting my hair grow long and just flop forward without any gel. I must confess I’m not very comfortable with it… it seems dumb-looking to me, but I’ve already had a few compliments, so I’m giving it a shot. I don’t know if I have the willpower to stick it out, though. Change is so very scary.

We had our first couple of rehearsals for Cannibal this week. It looks like it’s going to be fun, but it’s hard to get past what a deliberately dumb show it is. Our rehearsal period is very short – we only have twelve on the schedule, and just about everyone except myself is going to be absent from a bunch of them – so I just hope we don’t wind up turning the quality of the script into an excuse for the quality of our performance. It’s far too soon for me to be making any assumptions there, though.

In the world of improv, it seems I can’t get cast in a Theatresports show lately. Granted my schedule hasn’t been as open as usual and there have apparently been a lot of teams calling in (which is the preferred route to getting cast), but I still feel a bit slighted. Both last night and tonight I did the 8:30 show, though, which is just short form with the new apprentices to the company, and they were both a lot of fun, and the apprentices are a very solid bunch. It’s amazing how much I miss doing improv after being absent only for a while.

After a week of cool, damp and thoroughly mediocre weather today was a beautifully hot and sunny Saturday. The meteorologists are calling it “summer’s last hurrah”. If I had faith in higher powers I would think they used this week to set us up to appreciate it. One of my more enterprising friends thought to have a barbecue at the Golden Gardens beach, and while I could only attend for about an hour it was a good time and a chance to get caught up with some old friends from Griptonite. I miss those folks, and I will miss summer.

Dan.

Work is now in that “hurry up and wait” phase of the project where I’m spending considerable time idling followed by sudden bursts of furious work at inconvenient hours. It’s better than the constant crunch I was dealing with before, but I’m still generally getting home from work much later than I’d prefer. I’ll be glad when the app is delivered to Apple and is out of our hands, which should be in just a few days now (fingers crossed).

It was unclear whether yesterday (July 3rd) would be a holiday for us, because on the one hand we’re theoretically at our most critically urgent phase, and on the other hand there really isn’t much to do unless there’s a fire to put out. It wound up being a bit of both for me: I fielded some problems at home, but mostly took it easy.

Yesterday was also Zombie Walk, an event where they were attempting to set a world record for the largest flash mob of zombies. I knew a lot of people who were attending but wasn’t planning on going myself; the effort required between costuming, makeup and time devoted to the event was just too demanding, and I was really looking forward to the day off. Besides which, the event took place quite literally around the corner from my work office, and I knew from experience how tough it was to find parking anywhere in the Fremont area whenever there was any sort of parade, street fair or other type of event.

As it turned out, though, between pressure from my friends to attend and a last-minute change in the project I couldn’t make from home, it wound up being a fairly good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So I carpooled with them, and they dropped me off at work while they went to go and get made up as zombies.

When I met back up with them we walked about fifteen minutes back to my office, where the registration line for the Zombie Walk had already grown and extended around the block. I walked with the three of them as they calmly cut past the line, crossed under the yellow tape into the main lot and told the staff there they were ready to get to work.

I did something of a double-take, as I had not realized my friends were part of the event staff and that I had inadvertently signed on as a volunteer. I stood there slackjawed as we were handed badges and orange traffic-marshalling vests, and two-sided signs that could be used to direct zombies (“stop” and “slow”).

The next hour or so was spent in mixed ways. The time of the event hadn’t been properly advertised, and one of my friends needed to get things from the car which was parked a fifteen-minute walk away, so she and I had to speedwalk it over there and back, lugging with us zombie makeup, picnic items and folding chairs for the outdoor showing of Shaun of the Dead that was going to follow the walk.

I should mention at this point that it was hot out. Extremely sunny and extremely hot. And I was wearing two layers of tattered zombie clothing with a large plastic prosthetic against my chest that didn’t exactly breathe. I was not doing so well.

When we got back I was given a very quick zombie makeup job, and our jobs were explained to us in a highly abstract and unspecific fashion. I had no clue what was expected of me and was extremely nervous. It wasn’t until the zombie hordes actually got to walking (led by a guy dangling a brain from a stick he was carrying) that I started to get some idea of what I should be doing to help keep it moving safely and efficiently.

We were about four blocks from having completed the tour and returning to the starting point when one of the main organizers suddenly ran up to me and said “I need you to go lead the next wave, NOW.”

“Okay,” I repsonded, eyes wide and positively betraying that I had no clue what I was even doing there let alone how one is meant to take charge of a several-hundred-person zombie horde, and I ran as fast as I could through the relentless heat up and over the four blocks it took to get to the starting point.

Over the next hour or so I twice led a swarm of zombies around Fremont, armed only with my orange vest and cardobard sign, doing what I think was an admirable job from the absolutely no training that I’d received. There were some difficulties and blatant errors in judgment I made regarding which intersections to cross and when, but it could have gone worse I suppose.

We stayed and watched the movie afterward, and heard the announcement that there had been nearly four thousand zombies registered (earning us the world record by a slim margin).

All in all, my day off wound up being consumed with about eight hours of zombie madness, many of which were spent walking all around Fremont in the hot sun. My feet ache like hell today, and soon I will be embarking on another walk of about 25 minutes from my work to a friend who has a houseboat on Lake Union, right near Gas Works Park where the fourth-of-July fireworks will be exploding from.

It will be an awesome party, but I look forward to giving my feet a rest in the coming weeks.

Dan.