I have arrived in Jamaica. It took forever to get through customs. It is hot here, but not as overwhelming as I thought it would be. Air conditioning seems ubiquitous. The people at the airport are calling me a virgin because it is my first time at a Hedonism resort.

I got sucked into giving a tip. I guy took my luggage to help me to the bus. Then he wanted payment. He was sneaky with his demand for no coins. $5 for helping with luggage? I have only myself to blame.

The drive to the resort will take an hour and twenty minutes, so let’s see the sights.

As near as I can tell, this plane was mostly empty. So they started letting standbys on. Now half the Jamaican population of Toronto has decided to do the commute. I feel like a minority. Most are carrying expensive electronics. Not portable iPods but fully sized DVD players.

What bothers me is that even though I get here hours before, and paid full price, the standbys have nice window seats, and I’ve got the complete dregs. The light doesn’t work, the forced air is missing, I’ve got a neighbor who marinates in perfume, and the person in front of me doesn’t fully get the upright locked position. I guess I’m tired and cranky.

For my peace of mind, another standby who got on board was one of those caucasians who look like they want to be Taliban. You know, head scarf, poor looking, the pathetic attempt at a beard that only comes out as a wispy thing.

In-flight movie! Score! Wait, I’ve seen “The Bourne Supremacy”. The sound system is having problems. I might not even hear the movie.

I should have grabbed another breakfast.

Still waiting.

I read the instruction manual for my new camera, then pretended to sleep. I think I’m getting hungry.

There are lots of black people here. Well, more than I’m used to. Western Canadians don’t get a lot of access to Negroes. I’m going to be holing up in my resort, so who knows how many I’ll see.

I’m in Toronto now. I didn’t sleep much in the plane, only pretended, but I don’t feel that tired. It will probably kick in when I least want it. There is nothing to do in this airport. My flight isn’t until 10:30, so I still have a long wait. I’ve already eaten a small breakfast. There was food on the flight, but it fit airplane food stereotypes.

I’m trying to find a book, but the bookstores here are small. I don’t even know if it is out yet, but it would have been nicely traditional to have it. It’s the sequel to the great book I had last time I took a caribbean vacation, and it is supposed to come out this month. That said, if I spend time reading, something is seriously wrong with the vacation.

I’m debating spending any time in Toronto on the way back. There is a flight I could possibly catch. I couldn’t reserve it because it’s departing too close to my arrival time from another country. But if I did make it, then I wouldn’t have to expensively overnight here. I could instead spend Sunday recovering. There isn’t that much in Toronto that I want to see. Oh well, I’ll decide when I get back.

Now it’s either sleep or read for the next three hours.

Boy, that last entry looks cranky.
But I’ve tried to put that crushing episode out of my memory and I’m concentrating on my Jamaica trip. I’ve got high hopes for it, which is worrying. It surely can’t live up to expectations. Part of these expectations come from the “Don’t say ‘No'” policy I’m working with. I’m planning to finally imbibe alcohol. And it has taken on a mystical quality in my head. With this magic beverage I’ll loosen up, make friends easily, and have adoring women all over me.
Reality will probably having me throwing up all over myself.
I’m leaving in an hour.

Once in my life, I would like to have a date that I’m not ashamed of. I went to the coffee place and waited twenty minutes with no show from Whitney. I tried to phone her, but surprisingly (insert sarcasm) she didn’t answer. I left a message to try and give myself some dignity. (I meant 9:00 in the evening. Maybe you went to the wrong place.) There was a hope that when I got back home there would be a message for me. Nope. In the end, any self esteem I gained from Saturday has been ripped to shreds and stomped on.
This week has just been bad: I have gotten barely any sleep, because the loud dehumidifier has been working on the flood damage; I think I’m getting sick, in time for my vacation; I’m behind in my packing; George Bush won the election; This place is a mess. Based off of my current record, I’m expecting that something will screw up this vacation. (I’m sorry, we have no Mr. Allen on our list. Back to Canada with you.)
Something is wrong when you start envying the eunuchs. I’ve had no good experiences with women. So I’m a little depressed now. I’d cry myself to sleep tonight, but it is so dry in here, the tears would just evaporate. 🙂
This better be an awesome vacation, or I’m going to do something rash.

Called Whitney again, apparently at a better time. So we’re getting together for coffee on Wednesday. It’s later in the evening because apparently she has school. I’m hoping she means University, because I really hope I’m not trying to pick up someone significantly younger than me. I’ve never gotten any sort of skill at telling people’s ages.
The pessimist inside of me (well, actually the one that dominates my existence) thinks she just gave me her phone number so she didn’t have to say no. That this entire experience is her just being polite. I guess I’ll find out on Wednesday and see if she even shows up.
The timing of this all isn’t great. I really should be getting ready for my vacation.

Okay, this is what has happened.
Apparently, during the construction of this place, a nail was driven through the pipes that form my infloor heating. It’s only now just rusted out. Hence the major leaking.
So in my living room there is now a big dehumidifier and a fan trying to dry everything out. Rather noisy, limiting enjoyment of the area.

You may notice the time I’m making this entry. I’ve been called back home because the leakage in my below neighbour’s place is getting worse. The management company called me back to let them into my place. The carpet is very wet now, and may be spreading.
In other words, it’s not getting better.
There was no fungus involved. It was just some dried leaves that had probably fallen from a former plant. They think it is the in-floor heating system. I’ve given a spare set of keys to my below neighbour so he can let people in or out. I’m going back to work.
It is fortunate timing for an unfortunate event. With me going on vacation they have free reign to do whatever they want.

So I sucked it up and phoned Whitney. It took me awhile because I had an awful lot of sucking to do. This is new for me, and I didn’t want to screw it up. I had Canticle‘s recommendations to guide me. I also checked through a book that supposedly gave tips on how to pick up women. It said that you shouldn’t leave a message if you call back and get the answering machine.
So I phoned, and I got the answering machine. I think I was relieved at that, because this is a lot of pressure. I hung up and walked away. The phone promptly rang. I was Star-69-ed and suddenly I was in a conversation with Whitney. The book had given recommendations to avoid this situation, but I didn’t take them seriously. I’d feel like a stalker if I was taking that many precautions.
All the preparations in my head went away, but I still stumbled through them. I did learn it was a bad time to call, as she was in the middle of her own halloween party. So I, I can’t say gracefully, proposed phoning back tomorrow. She was open to the idea of meeting for coffee. She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but that may have been because there was a party going on around her.

At least I hope so.

Yesterday, while I was getting ready to go to the bar, Brian, who lives below me phoned and said that there was a leak around his living room window. I checked my window, and nothing similar was happening to it.
Today, I noticed that the carpet around that window was moist. I looked under the bookcase at the wall and there is something green there, possibly growing. I’m taking this as a bad sign.
Stress level rising.

In the past, for halloween I’ve gone to Red’s, a big bar in West Edmonton Mall. It has lots of people with excellent costumes. They have big prizes for costume, but I’ve never won. I’ve gotten past the first cut so that I can get some token door gift, but never any further. And I agree, there were more deserving winners.
Last year I couldn’t go because I was being a nice neighbour and went to the people who live below me. It was a small party, and I think would have been better off going to Red’s. Foreign students aren’t the best party animals.
This year, I went to New City. There were some good costumes there, but nothing on the level of Red’s. Getting ready took forever, compliments of a few mistakes on my part. One of the problems was that I needed barrier spray, a magical spray that protects the large amount of makeup needed to make my face look like a cat. Shirley Potter (the big costume store) had completely run out, and every other halloween or cosmetic place I called had never heard of it. I wandered into Sanctuary on a lark, and found that they normally carried it, but had sold the last one an hour ago. D’oh!
Anyway, I still had a few spritz from last year that I tried to make last. I put the eyes in, the prosthetic on, the layers of makeup. Dinner was skipped because I was running late, and I just had a breakfast bar to sate me. (It didn’t.) Then I did the big mistake. I wanted to have claws this year, so I put on some fake nails. The lesson I learned was to do that at the last possible moment. There were still a few things I needed to do, and tying knots with claws on is not easy. They looked impressive, but I think they slowed me down quite a bit. So next time I do a cat, I’ll skip them.
Despite buying a new camera, I used the old one at the bar. I didn’t have time to figure out how the new one worked, and I was comfortable with the current model. Claws did not make operation easy.
So there were the hot girls dressed as sluts at the party. The hottest was technically a cat, but she looked more like a dominatrix who just slapped some cat ears to her very big hairs. I’m going with the theory that she is a lesbian because she didn’t seem to want to talk to me, and it helps my self esteem to think that.
But the smaller venue helped me. I won a prize for best male costume! $250! Best prize I’ve ever won. So I guess all the work payed off. I also won a $50 bar tab, but it expires on November 15th, the day after I come back from vacation. So I don’t think I’ll get a chance to use it. I’m going to talk to the management and see if it is possible to get it changed, but if not, I’ll donate it to Jake.
So why do I care about a bar tab? On this vacation I’m planning to say “No” to as little as possible, so there is a good chance I’ll finally drink alcohol. So I might come back as a nice alcoholic, and could really use the tab.
I was able to use the self-esteem winning gave me. I talked to girls I didn’t know. Well, the costumes help because it is always an icebreaker, and my god do I need those. The other surprise of the night was that I sucked up enough to ask a girl for a phone number. And she gave it! I now have the number to Whitney, a beautiful woman who was a fallen angel at the party. This is uncharted territory. I have to figure out what to do now.
Maybe I should go as a cat every time?
Anyway, I stayed until the place closed down. Then I had to spend hours getting out of costume. I wanted to leave parts of it to the next day, like the claws, but I can’t take out contact lenses with small daggers on the tips of my fingers.
Going running this morning was not going to happen. Strangely I was lucid at the time I would normally get up to go running. But I used that to eat something (remember there was no dinner yesterday) before going back to bed.
God bless “Fall back”.

It has been an eventful past few days, but I haven’t had time to update this. For instance, on Thursday, when I should have been getting things ready for a costume for Friday, I went to see a play: Blood Sympathy. A very pleasant vampire story. I had been thinking of doing the cat costume, but it takes so long to get that ready, that I decided to sleep in and just slap on a goth costume.
Of course I didn’t win any prizes for costume at work, but I’ve won the past two years. I didn’t think I should win. And I finally saw “An American Werewolf in London” using state-of-the-art early eighties special effects. Not scary at all.
On Friday evening I did nothing productive. I didn’t even go out.
On Saturday I went and looked at some digital cameras. I have one already, but it is using the moral equivalent of Betamax in storage media. So that media is getting expensive. And I figure that I should check some out for my vacation. If I’m an evil person, after the vacation, I’ll return it to Best Buy. God bless their 30 day return policy.

So on Saturday I went out to the bar. It was good and I stayed later than I had meant to. I am noticing a pattern of how I interact with women at bars. (I use the term “interact” in its loosest sense.) I’ll see a woman I would like to meet. I will try and figure out how to talk to her, but never get a good enough plan, or only come up with one after it is too late. This will shortly become obsession. I will try and make eye contact, but they will always avoid it. Get depressed. Then lather, rinse, repeat.
So my lesson is to not obsess over any one woman. Instead just go and pretend to have fun, and not try to meet anyone. Having typed that out, it sounds depressing.
Anyway, as I said, I stayed out too late. Come Sunday morning, I was too wasted to go running. I did enjoy sleeping in, and I only really got around to functioning when I had to go to the tanning salon. The tanning is good, and I’m well on my way to a base tan. My manager today noticed that I was tanned. But I think he was trying to change the subject to get out of making a decision.
After work I did an expedition to WEM. I was looking for ideas for halloween. Since my demon wing plan has totally fallen through, I’m looking for something else. I have two events I need to have a costume for. One for Friday’s halloween party at work, and then Saturday at New City. Since the Friday one is last minute I was thinking of rehashing a costume from previous years. I have a really good cat costume (pound for pound the most evil thing on the planet). I think I’m going to use an old demon costume for New City; It hasn’t actually been out to a party yet, but I’m not that proud of the wings.
Popular opinion seems to be against the cat costume. It might look too gay, and I’m not secure enough in my sexuality to disagree. 🙂 So I think I’m just going to go as a goth.

So last weekend was somewhat unproductive for me. Well, unproductive on the relaxing front. I started doing some experiments on my Mac with XSL transformations and discovering my webspace on Shaw.
In my D&D campaign, I keep all the information about it in one big XML file. When I want to generate the information each player would know, I run an XSL transformation on it to generate a large HTML file that gives all the info. I’ve been using a adequate application to do these transformation. But I finally figured out how to run Saxon on my Mac, and so I started doing lots of updating. I can now generate an entire web site for each of my players.
Then one thing led to another and I started more experiments with CSS. Now I’m trying to make the pages look good. I’ve found that Internet Explorer is getting obsolete. It doesn’t support the latest CSS goodies, that most other browsers do support. So while I can make the first letter of a chapter be twice as big in Safari, Internet Explorer just ignores it.
I have no sense of style, so the site doesn’t look that great, but I’m still experimenting. Eventually it should look good.
If anyone wants to check it out, you can access the generic info at http://members.shaw.ca/erikallen/kire/. I have ripped a lot of this from other campaign information that I’ve found around. I’m not as original as some might think.

The City of Edmonton just had an election. I didn’t think voter turnout would be that good, considering it has been snowing since Saturday. (Florida is sounding really nice.) I did slog through the snow to vote though. I was thinking of doing the all-incumbent option, but at the last minute I switched to Stephen Mandel for mayor. I’m reasonably satisfied with my councillors, so there was no issue there. But for mayor, I was really stumped. I knew I didn’t want Noce, because he is the slimy Italian lawyer (I heard he actually set the bar.) I don’t mind mayor Bill Smith, but there is some thought that a change might be good. But Smith and Noce were tied for first, and Mandel was third in the polls. So after voting I was really thinking I should have voted Smith, just to make sure Noce didn’t get in.
I just looked at the results. Stephen Mandel is our mayor by a wide margin.

I went to Die-Nasty today. I have to decide whether to get a season pass, and from what I saw, I don’t think I will.
It was good. The medieval times are set in the castle Downs. There is talk of war with the Scottish land of Bonnie Doon. (FYI In Edmonton, Bonnie Doon is a great neighborhood with a good mall, but I don’t have much experience with the neighborhood of Castle Downs.) Mark Meer is playing Richard Eye Eye Eye who is doing a good job of plotting against the queen who is in charge of the knights of the little table while the king is off to the ice crusades. But with all that going for it, one thing has made me lose enthusiasm in seeing more.
There was a great scene happening where Richard Eye Eye Eye was telling the queen how he was her loyal servant, and would gladly follow her rule. He continually drips with evil. Then director Dana Andersen did what annoyed me every time last year. Just when the scene was getting really interesting, he ended it. It would be okay if we ever came back to the scene, but we never do. The players just refer to what has happen, but we never see it. So we start with a new scene that I’m not interested in, and may never be.
I’ll save my money, and enjoy free time on Mondays.

I’m not getting a season pass to Die-Nasty this year. My friend, Andrew, isn’t going anymore, and it hasn’t been that great for the past few seasons, so maybe it is time to let it go. I still pay attention to it. The actors recognize me. I even mentioned awhile ago to one that I would love to see it in a medieval setting. But I’m taking a year off.
So today I read in the paper that the season starts tomorrow. In a medieval setting.
Bloody Hell!

I saw the play “Boston Marriage” today. It is not light fare. It is set in the 19th century, and the players were all long winded. You had to really pay attention to what was being said. I really don’t like to have to work that hard for my entertainment.
The play, as near as I can tell, centered around a pair of self-centered lesbians. So it wasn’t easy to relate. The maid was played very well, and she was quite funny. But as a whole, I wouldn’t recommend the play.
Good line: “I forgot what I was going to say.” “Then say something else.”

I felt depressed the other day. I thought I would attempt to see if I could pick up where I left off last year in the construction of costume wings. I did a bit of experimentation, and it didn’t go well. I think I’ll have to accept that I won’t have cool wings on a halloween costume this year.
If I really wanted to be depressed I would concentrate on my company. Yesterday, a person I knew, who had worked there for four years, was let go. Apparently the company wants to lower its expenses, and people cutting is the way to do it.
There, but for the grace of god, go I.
I went to a tanning salon yesterday. I haven’t been to one in two years, but I still had time owed me. I figure I should get a base tan for Jamaica so I don’t burn as badly. I scootered down to the place in the dark (probably a bad idea) but the weather was unbelievably nice. It was warmer than some summer evenings.