Ferocious puppy, Linux to Mac, both Koreas with a side of mid-earthquake Japan, iStuff, kitchen and living room renovations, new Korean sister-in-law, visiting nephew, secret missions to Vancouver, too many College jobs to count (or file paperwork for), back spasms and nerve pinches, French classes, and on and on and on. Virtually all of it unblogged.

With the single exception of vowing to never bite my fingernails in the mid-80s, none of my New Year’s resolutions have ever stuck, so I won’t bother promising to post at a more regular pace in 2012. However, given the mass of material I’ve accumulated from this past year, and what’s expected to come, there’s simply no excuse not to.

Having already learned to install linoleum, carpet, tile, and decking, I must first admit that it was very wrong to have layered them in that order: carpet should always go on top of the tile, with but a subtle linoleum layer as the finisher. That’s the true secret to replicating bouncy castle foot-feel.

This year’s never-ending renovation project included a complete resurfacing of the bottom-most portion of the kitchen and living room. This time we chose laminate flooring, a high-pressure sandwich of wood-grain stickers, ballpark peanut shells, and refinery scrapings. Also sandwiches. Together with the look and feel of real wood, you also get the satisfaction of having reallocated a measure of the planet’s industrial toxin supply.

We chose a warm and cheerful interpretation of maple, but many other species are available: balsa, Dutch elm, baobab, and something new called OakALike®.

Installing laminate flooring is widely advertised as a novice do-it-yourself-er’s weekend project. And that’s true. It’s also true that a novice won’t do nearly as good a job as an experienced floorwright. As evidence, I submit exhibit A, the ground fault circuit interrupter that trips randomly when a certain electrical novice’s bathroom fan is turned off.

However, having now completed a full laminate installation with the aid of my able nephew, it is with no little authority that I proclaim the following hard-earned lessons.

• Tap the rectangular puck thingy gently — always along the longer side, if possible — to avoid chipping the delicate top layer of the planks.
• Always buy a few extra boxes of planks. Once emptied, you can use these to store planks with chipped edges.
• Most laminate floors are “floating,” meaning that all of your careful measurements will be for naught after returning from your lunch break.
• The spacers used to reserve an expansion gap around the perimeter are engineered to fall down if looked at, and will also chip the delicate top layer of the planks.
• Your two most useful self assurances will be: “Oh, we’ll just put an extra piece of quarter-round moulding on that wall,” and “This’ll be a perfect spot for a throw rug.”
• Planks are randomly assorted into their boxes, so when you randomly sort them as they’re removed, probability theory will reward you with a perfect, repeating, wallpaper effect.
• The claw-like gadget used to pull planks tight from a finished end should ideally be employed only by people without fingers. That, or use a Nerf hammer.
• Proper pre-location of floor register vents is essential to avoiding a rash of “guess holes.” You may simply have to resign yourself to bordering all registers with throw rugs.
• Gaps that later appear between planks can be remedied by not looking at them.
• A proper fine-bladed power mitre saw and table saw will produce the best cuts, but working the plank guillotine device loaned by the store is wonderfully cathartic.
• A plank with a chipped edge can be recycled for an end piece, just not the end piece that you cut it for.
• Careful measurement will always ensure that your last row of planks has to be cut to a width of 3/8ths of an inch.

As wrong as it seems to actually walk upon a newly finished laminate floor, try your hardest to do so. For the bravest among you, I even encourage a brief victory jig:

Not every floor installer is as cool as the dude with black socks and sandals.

With every purchase of a house, you get a free couch.

Or at least the one time I bought a house, a decade ago, it came bundled with a couch. The Couch. I found it standing on edge in the kitchen, having been wedged into the ceiling by the moving crew after they realized that no angle, twist, or profanity could manoever The Couch out the door.

After some investigation, it seemed that the previous owner also acquired The Couch via a real estate transaction. The general consensus is that it came in through a window during construction in the Eighties. Either that or it was manufactured in situ.

While not entirely uncomfortable, The Couch was well known among our circle for its posture-skewing carriage. First-time sitters were often swallowed whole. Despite repeated amateur repairs, The Couch’s underpinnings had deteriorated past the point of a residential safety inspector’s condemnation.

Yet The Couch stayed put, surviving several – unnecessary, in my opinion – redecoratings and rearrangings.

The Couch finally met its end yesterday; a victim of long-delayed home renovation. Bent and broken, it was ushered past the threshold with one final, desperate squeeze.

Goodbye, old friend. You — but not the wiry tines that periodically threatened to puncture my backside — will be missed.

I’ve just now realized that I’ve been blogging for five years plus a smidge. So, this seems like an opportune time to look back over the two-hundred-and-then-some posts and update any stale announcements and also see whether any of my predictions have come to pass.

Apache and the case of the spurious permission snafu was hands-down the least interesting thing I’ve ever written on-line, and yet the problem it discusses keeps cropping up: as recently as a month ago on my new Mac desktop when I set up a local webserver.

Only slightly more interesting, but responsible for an astounding percentage of traffic to my blog, were these unnotable entries: The letter L. How do you spell that?, How do you spell Queue?, Here’s your damned Yukon Blackout Map Mashup., How to convert a website’s content into simple text files. (by far the biggest hit), The Making of a Simile., and I must confess that I can only follow the diagrammed steps to the Time Warp… (mainly from folks searching for Riff Raff).

Cheechako’s is still The. Most. Wonderful. Yukon. Web. Page. Evar. Just click and watch the awesomeness.

I still get most of my readers from Urban Yukon. The automatic link from Facebook or occasional tweet also seems to help.

My hot-and-cold relationship with Yukon College is cold at the moment, but scheduled to re-heat come September. I think it’s safe to say that the College will never, ever attempt to hire me again for a full-time or permanent position, and that’s okay by me: Back to work at school. Breaking a half of two rules., For the first time in many a year, tomorrow is not a school day., No, seriously. BIG-TIME IT contracting opportunities at the College., Perspective Shift, and Manager no more.

In the Burying The Lede category, I announced my marriage ninth on the list after eggrolls and meatballs.

Aside from the weather, I’m freakishly obsessed with my furnace: on, off, on, off, and on (with sparks).

Still waiting for the States to completely Jump the Shark. Mortgages haven’t completely melted down either.

I am still soapless after a year and a half with no apparent harm to anyone but Procter & Gamble.

I have predicted the future of Social Networking. Unless Google+ catches on. But what are the odds?

Ye olde safety razor is a pleasure to use and I spend maybe a quarter of what I used to on blades.

The Dyson vacuum is really amazing. It picks up everything and only needs a filter wash every few months. It’s too big to roll under most furniture, and the attachment hose is downright cranky, but otherwise it’s a shinbone happystance glazierino, pappy. (I’m fresh out of superlatives.)

See you in five years, ere the Eon of Robotic Hegemony and the 3.1th Coming of the CyberChrist.

Dramatis Caninæ

Introducing innocent Hélène and fearsome Minuit.

Setting the Scene

A chill morning, a worn path, a poorly camouflaged lump.

Rising Action

No fool, Hélène senses something amiss. But what?

Climax!

The ferocious attack was over in seconds. Would our protagonist survive?

Dénouement

An uneasy détente is negotiated between the parties. We shall have peace in our time…

…until The Sequel

I think a small part of the reason I haven’t written much lately is that I had grown weary of this blog’s Facebook-like cram-it-in-a-blue-box visual design.

So, I stripped it down to just about the bare minimum, loosely basing its new look on a WordPress theme called Clear. Now the words have elbow room. Space to breathe. Lebensraum, you might even furtively whisper.

Customizing a WordPress theme is a tedious process, and while I’m not done yet, I’ll pretend I am for the moment. Ta Da!

For reference, the old gal used to look like this:

For those without a clear understanding of the F5 or ⌘R keys, the blog might still look like this.

Having spent a combined twelve days in the two countries last month, I am now something of an expert on all matters Asian. This is the first post in a series that, while not all that long, will certainly feel that way. If you prefer pretty pictures, I encourage you to check out Carole’s blog as well.

Before leaving for Asia, I was advised by both my brother and the Lonely Planet guides to bring cash, and lots of it. (I weighed both sources about the same, even though my brother has lived in and travelled through Asia for twelve years. If he had used a nicer font in his email, he would’ve rated more highly as an authority.) Despite their well-advertised lead in electronics manufacture and bowing, the economies of Korea and Japan run on paper currency. Plastic-inspired impulsive debt burden doesn’t seem to appeal to those backward peoples.

Note to pickpockets. Target folks headed to those two countries. They’ll be the ones sporting wallet bulges and toilet-seat-shaped neck pillows.

Since Whitehorse banks don’t stock Yen and Won, convert your loons and toons to good old ‘merican greenbacks. Believe it or not, you can also still buy travellers cheques, just as Karl Malden would’ve wanted.

Once overseas, you can convert back to the local currency, at the airport, larger hotels, and certain unspecified banks. You will lose a hefty percentage in each transaction, and those fees and charges will be carefully explained in poorly-illustrated hangman stick figures at the bottom of your bill. You will also be asked to present your passport, so that your saucer-eyed photo may brighten the day of the money changers.

Choose wisely: one will pay for a night out on the town, and the other will buy two fancy coffees the next morning.

Fortunately, current exchange rates make conversion relatively simple:

• 1000 Won is a bit less than 1 dollar and will buy you a couple of bananas in Korea.
• 1000 Yen is a bit more than 10 dollars and will buy you a couple of bananas in Japan.
• 1000 Won won’t buy you any bananas in Japan and 1000 Yen will only buy you blank stares in Korea. (I speak from repeated experience.)

You’re not likely to accumulate much change during your travels. Neither Korea nor Japan apply a visible sales tax to purchases, and there is no tipping in restaurants. Korean prices tend to round off to the nearest 1000 Won, and Japanese prices round off to the balance of your savings account.

In the next installment of the Guide, I will presumably discuss some other aspect of Korea and Japan. You’ve been warned.

The reason that I write — from blog posts to shortest fiction to spiky bits of stage plays — is because my mind conceives new ideas on an incessant schedule. Most of these — especially the novel ground beef and noodle recipes — are better left unrecorded, but the remaining few clatter about my skull like roosters in a cement mixer (yet another grand idea!).

I’ve found that the only way to quiet the bedlam is to write down the ideas as they come. That simple act clears them from my head, allowing me to get back to my napping. I suspect many writers suffer the same affliction.

For years, this blog served as that release. Lately though, Twitter has taken over. As fortune would have it, most of my ideas can be expressed in no more than 140 characters.

So, on a nearly daily basis, my tweets have been emptying my brain, leaving this poor blog neglected. I must work to correct that.

And now, having emptied my brain of the “Twitter emptied my brain” idea, I feel refreshed and ready for a noodly burger breakfast.

I’ve been waking at 3am every day for a month or so to take the puppy out for her mid-night business. Somehow appropriate for a dog named Minuit.

Rocket Robin Hood and "Missiles" Maid Marian

Rising from sleep at that hour seems to lock random bits of dream into my conscious, usually in an ever-repeating loop.

Last night’s random bit was a ditty I composed many, many years ago for a small university humour publication. And now it’s stuck in my head.

Better it be stuck in yours. Here it is in entirety. Sung, for some unfathomable reason, to the chorus from the Rocket Robin Hood theme song.

We are German. We speak German.
We’ve got bods like Uma Thurman.
We’re known around the world for common sense,
For sausages, Mercedes Benz.
From the Baltic to the Danube to the Rhine,
We’ll apologize for nineteen thirty nine.
So hoist your beer and raise a cheer for…
Germany! Now! Let’s! Eat!

Tomorrow’s 3am gift from me to you: one can sing the lyrics of Rule, Britannia! to the tune of Oh! Susanna, and vice versa.

Warning. The following is intended for mature audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.

This horrible fiend will devour your family whole, raze your village to the ground, and, to add insult to injury, raise it's leg on your smouldering remains.

Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are contemplating introducing into your home a juvenile canis lupus familiaris, or “puppy” as they are sometimes called, mere moments before the gruesome demise of the speaker.

I feel I must caution against such a tactic in the most fierce manner possible. Should you follow my advice, you may thank me for saving your very life some day. Gift certificates from Tim Horton’s are also appreciated in lieu of grovelled thanks.

Did you know that your so-called puppy will…

• relieve itself multiple times per day, frequently in an inaccessible corner?
• wail and shriek at unimaginable amplitude if left alone for more than thirty seconds?
• require 3am trips outdoors regardless of the temperature or inclement weather?

This raccoon simulacrum has died a tortured death. In the glowing eyes of the terrible brute you can read it's mind: "You're next."

• down its own droppings with relish and then lick your lips?
• compel you to exercise it many times a day at length merely to temper its inexhaustible energy?
• drag you along the street on your leash as it pursues said exercise?

Seemingly at rest, the fiendish monster calculates its next bloody conquest.

• demand to be fed amounts of costly rations quite out of proportion to its size?
• chew on furniture, clothing, electrical wiring, and you yourself, every waking moment?
• destroy your possessions, drapes, and sanity with its exuberant leaps?

Avoid the scourge! Neuter or spay your adult companion, whether or not they’re a dog. We simply cannot risk the alternative.