Ice Cream Flavors of the Rich & Famous

Summer... when most people think of it, they think beaches, tanned bodies, tank tops & bikinis...

When I think summer, I always go back to my younger days in the streets of Canuckland, playing catch, shooting hoops or whatever.. and just yearning for the sound of Mr. Softee.. (if you haven't heard it in a while, google it and let nostalgia prevail!)...

and as soon as the ice cream truck rolled into the neighbourhood, all of us would absolutely lose our minds, drop whatever we were doing and run behind the ice cream truck screaming at the top of our lungs.. "ICE CREAM MAN!!!"..... No comedian has ever described this situation better than Eddie Murphy in Delirous.. (again, if you haven't heard it, youtube it and prepare for the lulz)..

As the summer heats up once again in So Cal, the Canuckian makes his ritual beeline for the Ice cream stores, and lines up behind the teenage girls all of who struggle to decide which ice cream they want, and proceed to sample a dozen flavors each before they finally arrive at a conclusion... "a triple scoop with brownies & bits and chocolate fudge, no whipped cream please Its gonna go straight to my thighs!" Yep, exactly the same as heading to McPukes and ordering a triple Big Mac with Bacon, and Diet Coke!

As I stand in line, waiting for this exact scenario to unfold every time, I always marvel at the wit behind the names.. .names like Cherry Garcia, Bohemian Raspberry, Mission to Marzipan etc... I love them..

I came up this post the other day pondering Ice cream flavors to describe the political climate of today.. Task in hand, I've decided to honor this blog with a list of the favorite ice cream flavors of the Rich & Famous (as thought up by the Canuck Engineer!):

• Obama's Campaign: "Yes Pecan!"
• Tim Geithner: "Cash for Chocolate Chunkers"
• Bernanke: "Housing Bubble Gum"
• Kanye West: "George Bush doesn't care about Black Cherry"
• Tony Blair: "History will be my Fudge"
• Chris Brown: "Chocolate Rihanna Batter" (Too soon?)

That's all I got for today.... besides, write any longer, and I'd have to settle for a Shake Formerly known as my Ice Cream Sundae!

-Canuck Engineer

In a TeleFunk

The ringing of the phone has always been associated with activity, and a range of emotions.

Back in grade school, the ringing of the phone, a land line mind you, likely meant it was the automated phone call from the Attendance Office to remind your folks that their beloved offspring had skipped earlier that day. So you ran full throttle to get to it before anyone in the family picked it up. In High School, the phone ring meant your friend was calling you to tell you how he'd finally made it past the next level in Doom3! You rushed to answer it, cuz you knew it was for you... sometimes you'd be surprised and maybe even get asked to the library to "study"... and then you'd hop skip & jump your way there.

In College, the phone ringing was probably an invite to the partie du jour, or a call back from a recent acquaintance you'd met at the last party. Usually the phone was answered with a hungover "huuuhhhlooo", or in some cases with just a .. "huh"

Once you graduate and start working, the phone calls change their tones. Now a phone ringing could mean you hadn't paid your gas bill on time. It could also be a voice on the other end telling you how much you could save on your cable bills if you moved to Satellite. Some years, it could be John Mccain calling you and asking you for your vote, ending the voicemail by identifying himself and letting you know that he approved that message.

Gone are the days when you made a beeline for the phone, risking a cardiac arrest and answered it on the first ring, just so "people don't think we have only one phone". Gone even are the days when you'd make a beeline for the phone and wait for a couple of rings before answering it so that "people don't think you have nothing better to do than answer a phone call". Gone even are the days where phone calls are necessarily answered. In today's call screening world, i'd wager a majority of calls are not answered.

Heck gone even are the days when the phone would ring as much.. now it just beeps with a "2 new text message" sign.

But the phones, they still ring. Nothing that exciting anymore. Its more a routine now, answering the call and dealing with it. Sometimes its work related, sometimes it about playtime.

Every now and then though you get a phone call that you'd much rather not have received. I wish I hadn't answered my phone earlier today.

-Canuck

Change

Every weekend I plan to be productive and do my taxes and run my errands. Every weekend, I end up going out and staying up really late and then sleeping in and not doing anything that I had planned. And then every sunday I vow to not let that happen again.

Its Sunday Night. Next weekend will be different.

That expectation of change. I wonder if that's human nature.. or more specifically male nature. Everytime I hear from my recently married friends, they're always a bit surprised at how radically their lives have changed. Girls are no different either

actually there is a difference. and its something that I've noticed in all my years of wisdom.. I had been thinking about it.. and I read it somewhere, and I couldn't have said it better in my own words.

Men marry women, hoping the women will never change. But they do!
Women marry men, hoping the men will change. But they never do!

Change! Seems to be the topical word this past year or so. Never before was change considered this cool.. .Not even at the Hobo Conventions..

But now we're in it..."Change We can believe in"!

A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink!

-W. CanuckEngineer Fields

You think this is joke?

For breakfast on Saturdays, I like to eat cereal... Well, I like to eat cereal on other days too, but I definitely like to eat them on Saturday... Its how the day should be started.. some milk and Wheaties.. after all, its only appropriate that I eat the Breakfast of Champions!

so when my day started yesterday, I opened the fridge and Bam.. no milk...! Well, let me rephrase that.. There was milk in the fridge...it just resembled yoghurt.....and I don't know of any Champions having lumps in their breakfast....although that might be debatable in this steroidal era.

So I gets in my car and heads to the grocery store and pack in a couple of gallons of milk, some dill pickels and some Liquid Plumber. Just a coincidence there.. Moving on... to the checkout aisle, I see every one lining up for the self-checkout.. yet the express lane there is free.. "manned" by an eastern european cashier "Tatiana"...Eastern European girls in general are easy on the eye...and their names even more exotic... its usually a good deal... unfortunately this is my blog, so obviously it was an exception to the rule. I got the member of the Yugoslavian Wrestling team..."Welcome to Ralphs"...and then she broke out into what might pass for a smile...except that I couldn't stop staring at her teeth. oh my god, those teeth!! It was like multiple bar fights gone wrong. Someone up there must have threw a bunch of chicklets and hope they stuck..... I mean I know hockey players with a better set of orthodontics!

I had my best Usher moment right there. She reminded me of a girl that I once knew. Same type of messed up teeth...We used to call her "Summer"... "Why Summer", "Well, y'know.. cuz summer 'ere, summer there" :)

Anyways, so Summer's checking out my pickle... as I'm nostalgic about my college days. Once she's done checking me out, the total is "fortee three dowlers". Forty Three..!!!!

damn, I forgot to use my club card. So I asked her if she'd slid a card for me..
"No.. do you have Club Card?"..
well, I do, but I don't have it on me....
"Okay then.. Fortee Three dowlers"....
No, I mean.. Can you not slide one of yours?
No, you need to bring card.
well, I don't have it here, but i don't want to pay almost twice of what I owe.
Fortee Three Dowlers!
I know its forty-three bucks.. can i get a new card then?
You will lose old card
That's fine
Ok, fill up application


Fine, so i filled up my name and phone number on the new club card and handed it to Tatiana. She looked at me, and she's like..

"What is this"
"This is the application you asked me to fill out"
"You didn't complete it"
"Yes, I realize that, but I put in the relevant stuff. .Name and Ph No."
"YOU THINK THIS IS JOKE?"

no, I really didn't think it was a joke.. I mean, I know whats a joke.. like.. "whats the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker? A pigeon can still make a deposit on Ferrari"

See I know jokes.. and this was no joke!

"No ma'am, I do NOT think this is a joke"
"Well, you're holding up line.. Fourtee Three Dowlers"
"What was the whole point of me filling up the application form then?"
"ugg.. fine.. i slide this time. but you treat this as joke. Twenty three dowlers"
"Thank you very much Tatiana", said I as I slid my credit card through.

her face was worth looking at..I was channeling Heath Ledger when I considered.. "Lets put a smiiiile on that faceeeeh!"

As I was leaving, "Btw, Tatiana, can you please pack my liquid plummer with some Updawg?"

"What's Updawg?"

"Not Much, What's up with you?" quipped as I walked out with the biggest grin a cheshire cat would ever see.

As I looked back, I saw Tatiana there, muttering to herself, with a very confused look on her face.

Now to get my wheaties on!

Play it again, Jerry

For some reason, Jerry Maguire has made a resurgence in my life.

now, while that's something you might expect Katie Holmes and Brooke Shields to say, this past week, I found myself quoting lines from that movie more often than I was snorting them!

its been ridiculous at work lately, then again, rare is the week that its not.. of course, this year's been off the ridiculousness charts... but I think I worked hard... so much so that my boss's boss was quite impressed.. to the extent that he promised to double my bonus... Later that day, his boss, (so now we're at my boss's boss's boss) decided to double my raise. When I told my manager about what recently transpired, he agreed to quadruple both...!!!

Thats when my mind was like.. "SHOW ME THE MONEY!!"... yeah.. for once I actually held back what I was thinking... holding back.. my goodness, see what age does to a person!!! The only time I ever held something back were tears when family guy returned to primetime, but I digress..

So as I'm in the midst of my best Cuba Gooding Jr impression (sans the abs, of course, I've always been a staunch believer of the "why settle for a six-pack, when you can have the keg!" theory).... "Show me the money", My manager forwards to me the company wide email announcing the cancellation of all bonuses and raises for this review period..

I felt like the M&Ms from the M&M's commercial...and for those who may not have seen it...well, it'll feel like the raise and bonus I'm supposedly gonna get.. but never see!!!

That was followed by another colleague of mine asking me for help... this is one of the colleagues of Quick Questoin fame. Of course, as with every such question, I had to ask about 10 more follow up questions just to get the whole story... Once again, inspired by Mr. Scientology, I quipped.. "Help me Help You!"... and then I went into a whole routine ... "help ME, help YOU...".. seriously. >"HELP ME.. help YOU"... HELP ME HELP YOU.. .. help me.. just help me. help you.. Help ME Help YOU...."

by the end of that bit of course, said colleague was getting no help.. and others had already made me an appointment for when I could get some.... Help that is!! its all I'd be willing to pay for!!

and then just last evening I met this gorgeous woman... who seemed quite content with my company... and I was cranking up the charm.. after all, how often do you get a drop dead 10 hanging with you... (that was a rhetorical question...but if you insist, the answer is .. not as often as you'd think!)....and working it.. she said the 5 most beautiful words.. "You had me at Hello"...

this night couldn't get any better...and suddenly Stewie Griffin pops in and asks me how my blog is coming along.. the blog I've been working on for 2 years now.... WTF!...

BEEEP BEEP... ah the alarm clock... of course.. another blissful dream...

sigh.. i miss writing this blog.... this blog is my united way.. Without it there would no way... As I sign off for the evening, and in keeping with the theme of the post...

Dear Blog... you complete me!!

-Me, the Canuck Engineer