It's All Heat in this Day and Age, I'll Raid Your Grave, Anything it Takes to Save the Day

So, first and most importantly, my early childhood hero shot my later childhood hero on TV the other day. "What?" You ask.

Yes, Casey Jones shot House!!! On Television!!!

How amazing, hunh? Ben should be happy at least.

Well, I've been gone too long to possibly catch up on all the important things, so here's my amazing synopsis, entitled "Caught in the Grip of the City: Madness"

1) Playmakers! managed to entwine itself around most of my life for about a week back there. The show was very good, everyone should be proud. Well. Everyone except that god-damned brat who broke the tea set. Also, after telling my mom about all the sopping comments you people were leaving everywhere, she's taken her own little leap into the Blogosphere. I was supposed to post about that a week ago. Oh well. If you go there, make sure you start with this

2) My job was awsome. I say "was" because between my last post and now, it has come and gone. Some of you may remember my many fond summers in the underground chasm that is the YMCA pool here in St. Ratford. So, while going in there trolling for hours, my boss asked me if I wanted a new job to get some more hours. I agreed and he told me that I would be the first "Y-cop", an experimental elite unit with good speed and sight range, low attack and armour, but a very high intelligence score and an attack bonus against.... PEDOPHILES!

How cool? Tres cool. Of course, this was the Y's response to the recent "I'll give you jelly-beans if you get into my big unmarked van" thing at Anne Hathaway Public School. It was only a temporary position. The sweeping powers of the Y-cop are too great to invoke except in the most perilous of times. However, it's probably the best job I've ever had or will have. Monday to Friday I came in from 4 to 8 and walked around the Y. That was it. I could stop anyone, go anywhere, and I had a seriously pimp walkie-talkie. Of course, that got boring really fast, so I supplemented my duties with other tasks:

-Talking to the lifeguards, specifically Elyse, Jaymie, and Sarah Mick-Kay
-Playing games in the loft: sometimes Fusion Frenzy with the children, but mostly foosball and air hockey with the loft employees
-Picking on the maintainence people because I could never find any pedophiles, "We are missing an 11 and 15/16 inch by 18 inch vent cover in emergency stairwell 3" or "There is an ill-fitting ceiling tile above the door to the Men's changeroom" or "The lights at the elevator landing on the 4th floor are a) burnt out and b) full of dead bugs. Could these be related?"
-Doing bitch-work for the maintainence people because I kept finding things they weren't doing. The best example of this was when I spent half of my shift cutting the lawn instead of keeping law and order.
-Doing facility tours for new members without any training "Actually, not only do I have no idea what machines our Lifestyle Centre is equipped with, but I couldn't begin to tell you what a monthly or yearly membership costs"

But I did do useful work too. Once it became clear that the pedophiles weren't beating down the doors to the boys changeroom I also got to do other things like test all the emergency exits to see if the alarms would go off (A 50% success rate. Two were fine, the third wouldn't trigger the alarm because the sensor needed to be lubricated, and the fourth, while having a perfectly useful alarm, was rusted shut). It was after that day that I began publishing "Pedo-files", my report on the day's activities and my recomendations (never followed) for the problems I encountered. Also, since I floated between all the departments, I managed to find plenty of things that no one else did. I discovered (both on different occasions) that the doors to the roof and the pool had been left unlocked before any children did. For both circumstances, I am reasonably sure that no one else would have found them (especially the roof) before I did. And yet, yesterday I was told that my time as Y-cop is over. I really thought that that wasn't going to happen. I truly believed I was being useful enough to ensure my position. But apparently not. I had heard my boss was going to meet with the CEO about me soon, so I spent that day taking an itinerary of what I'd done to show how useful I was. I caught the CEO on her way out the door and asked if the meeting was going to be soon. They'd already had it. It was classic, "I heard that you and the boss were going to have a meeting about me...", "Yes, didn't he talk to you?". So there we had it. Of course he didn't talk to me. Is Sobey's still hiring?

3) May 24 weekend. It was a pretty good time. I got invited by Carl (Through Elyse, through someone else, through the person throwing the party) to a shindig in Mitch-hell on the Friday night. There were a few too many degrees of seperation for me to be comfortable, but then the above mentioned Ms. Mick-Kay told me I should come by anyway. It turned out that Blake, Alex, Nora, and Jordan were also coming. So it was a good time. Blake, Carl, and I stumbled out of a taxi at 4am and Blake and I hung our boots in the studio (note from Blake: the bier is a terrible bed). The saturday was spent loafing aruond until 5-ish when we toured into St Marys and picked up Nora and M-TOD. This was most exciting for me as I'd never actually met M-TOD before. It was refreshing to realize that Blake wasn't really that crazy after all. If she was older, I'd hit on her too. Why does St Mary's seem to harbour all the really cool girls? Nora and M-TOD both living there can't be some sort of mistake. Why does such a terrible place produce (or attract in Nora's case) such neat people? The world may never know.

That Sunday was another Carls party, and, amazingly, it was pretty awsome. I mean, an evening that starts with me and Carls making duct-tape sheaths for Bokens and baseball bats has to be good, right? Of course, I was a baby and wanted to go to bed by 3, so I got to sleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Oh yeah! I forgot! Another interesting thing:

4) Maggie asked me to prom. Maggie and I have some ancient history, so it was really out of left feild when she asked me. Of course, we were sitting in some strange man's house drinking his liquor while his kids slept above us, so "out of left feild" kind of describes the whole night. Anyway, at Carl's on that Sunday night (really Monday morning) Blake stole my prom date. Not really surprising, but there you have it. Given that I just linked to my last serious fiery debate about Blake's love-life, I'm not going to get into it. It was summed up pretty well in someone's car anyway:

Ellen: You can't please everyone all the time.
Liam: FUCK YOU! You can't steal my prom date and then ask me if it's OK! Go fuck yourself.

5) I pwn n00bs. Seriously. Monday night we played Starcraft at Brendan's over an improvised LAN. Basically, me and Shane killed everyone (much in the way that Blake and I would kill AI before). Then Yon Yonson and I gave out some hot dickings to Carl and Brendan. Then I had to go home and get up to open the pool. My alarm went off at 5:45am. I worked until 8pm. Then I went to Brendans and LANed again. I took on Carl and Brendan (at their insistence) and promised to "pwn them hard". And I did. But it took hours. Basically, I was pwning my way into every base expension I could find without a peep from Brendan or Carl. Things were going well. Then I heard "Nuclear Launch Deteccted". And panicked. I shouldn't have done that. I pulled my carrier fleet over to where the red light for the nuke was painted, but they had to cover about half the map to get there. In the meantime I tried to scramble my forces to find the Ghost causing the trouble. I couldn't find an observer to spot him though. So I fretted more. And then, just when I'd given up and moved all my forces away from the strike area, my carriers arrived. They all got nuked. That could have been the end of the game right there. It should have been. But Carl, being a nice guy, didn't move in. He never got another chance. This is what the map looked like:

The squares are self-explanatory and not important. The blurb of colour in the bottom right corner is actually a pretty good overview of what the last hour and a half of the game looked like. The white is Brendan who fortified his last island with hundreds of SAM sites against my (freshly constructed) carrier onslaught. I countered any ideas he might have been having about expanding back out of that island by building a 4-deep line of photon cannons with triple-redundant pylons. Then I waited for him to come out. I'd already won by score, and I suggested that he should sally his last forces honourably instead of making me come in and dispose of them as I'd already disposed of Carl. We argued. He whined about how he wanted to see if his base defense worked. I countered that wasting the lives of all my carriers was stupid and that he'd presumeably use the time it took me to rebuild them to come out and try to Yamato his way through a section of my photon wall. I ended up coming in. In the end I did, in fact, pwn them hard (while remembering that, by a fluke, Carl could have won the game in its infancy).

5) So that's it actually. I went to the Arts Gala last night. It was awsome. I showed up late with Jaymie, ate food for free, and got Espo to give me a medal. I was gonna go back to St. Mikes today to see M-TOD in the coffee house, but Blake didn't want to drive. So now I think I'm gonna go mow my lawn.