The Grandpa Guru...

Occasionaly, when I want to escape the fluroscent buzz from my work and the lobotomy drill sounds from the one dollar coffee machine, I often meander down the street only to get stuck on the first shop on the corner. It's an 'Artisan Quebecois' shop primarily full of art, shoes and clothing made from local native artists with the exception of overseas products from Asia.
The man who runs this crowded little boutique is seventy years of age with gigantic ears, a huge nose and the appearance of a garden gnome who's look has been magnified.
He's become somewhat of a friend over the last few months because I seem to get lost in his store full of trinkets and pretty things and then before we know it we're both babbling away. To be honest, I have no idea of this mans name and in fact we have never even thought to exchange such knowledge but to give you a brief idea of him I have adopted him and named him my Grandpa Guru.
(Not that he has any idea of this, of course.)
He's the type of man - if you're ever privy to meet one - that has lived a life to it's fullest.
I recently had a problem regarding the cross bearing word choice. So one darkening afternoon, I opened up to him. I laid out all my thoughts and fears regarding this choice I felt somewhat responsible to make.
He stood leaning over the counter, listening like only a person with time can. I finished and waited.
He began with a story that went like this.
One day when he was travelling in a handmade canoe packed with stock through the Amazon Jungle, the water began to pick up pace. There were two other canoes also carrying cargo in front of their two maned vessel. He could see the rapids up ahead crashing against the rocks. The first canoe entered this dangerous part and turned over losing all their stock and injuring a man. The second canoe also turned over as they hit the troubled waters. The young Grandpa Guru lept into action ordering the other man in his canoe to copy him and lie flat. They lay flat just as they were entering the danger zone. The canoe rocked and tossed but regained its equilibrium.
"So you see," he says over the gypsy-jazz playing in the background, "if I hadn't got the guy to work with me we wouldn't have got through those fucking waters. And when the moment of choice comes about in your life, you'll have to work together with what you've got."
"But I wouldn't worry about anything until then..." he adds, "life has a strange way of working everything out. In the long run..."

I thanked Grandpa Guru and left feeling like I could get through those waters even if I had a canoe full of screaming cats.

Farmer Tan

After being bed-ridden last week without so much as a nurse maid to swab the pools of sweat from my forehead or to cook me a pot of my beloved chicken noodle soup when I wanted that sweet sweet grandma goodness, it was nice to get into some overallls and to plough a few fields. Not literally of course, I don't have a plough and its too icy outside. It was in fact, sitting around a warm kitchen table with a glass of port and some devine proscuitto snuggling a grape like a new born.
But how can you plough a few fields around a kitchen table you ask?
Agricola. The ultimate farming board game. Yee ha.
To give you a brief rundown of how it works, you have a farmer and his wife collecting resources like wood, clay and stone to build fences and barns to house sheep, wild boar and cattle. The animals really look special alas the farmer and his wife is simply a flat disk of coloured wood. So my blue flat farmers renovated the mud house, planted a few harvests and procreated along with the sheep! The choices were endless up until round 14 then what ever I had on my land was calculated and to my surprise I lost. Even though my farm was clearly the prettiest.
It made me entertain the idea that maybe I could be a farmer. A real one. Only the equivilant of a half a one though, because let's face it, I would no longer be living in the Land of Oz (no pun intended) I would tied to boulders in Kansas.
If only we didn't have to pay for land and everyone got a little share to build a little something on.
Wouldn't that be swell? Wait. Is this sounding a bit too much like utopia? Probably.

Well maybe I'll resort to growing my underarm hair and joining a commune to share the load - somewhere warm of course.