Tirolese Family
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The Adventures of
Rubber-Man
Rubber-Man in the Dark
(July-December 2003)
Chapter 1: in which Rubber-man has a Special Offer....
| Rubber-Man's favourite Mother-in-Law (I'm sure that sounds better in a Muslim household) has compiled the previous eight episodes of The Adventures of Rubber-Man and Zehr's Woman into a single Word document. I have sorted out the type, added colour where it got lost and inserted some dates for your reference. I've attached this for your pleasure and edification. Or you can delete it faster than a spam message for non-prescription Penile Growth Hormones. It turns out that Rubber-Man has been gaining a cult following as his amazing adventures in domesticity have been passed from computer to computer to persons who don't even know Rubber-Man and wouldn't recognize him if he bit them on the kneecap. This both pleases and puzzles R-Man, but he figures it means he's getting something right. It also gives him something to talk about at extended family gatherings where people don't always recognize him without his mask and cape. |
Chapter 2: In which Rubber-Man works an awful lot...
| Rubber-Man been has been bellying up to the
All You Can Eat Overtime Smorgasboard this summer and fall.
Reviewing the Milk Marketing Board Calendar that hangs on the fridge shows
me that I've worked at least some OT every weekend since the
Big Adventure (see episode 8). There's also been a lot of 12 hour days
through the week; but those 60 hour week pay checks are pretty nice and I
wouldn't say no to more of them. Of course, watching the extruder spit
rubber out or parts go through the Ransburg isn't very taxing, there's a
certain amount of chair time as long as everything is running smoothly. My
foreman once came by while my partner and I were holding the chairs down and
I made a comment like "Oops, better look busy" and he observed that he knew
he was having a bad day if we were running around too
much dealing with problems (nice to work for a guy with a good sense of
priorities). Of course the Bride of Rubber-man has been doing her bit to
keep the morale up by filling me full of apple pie or lasagna after these
long shifts. Came home at 10:30 AM one day after a 12 hour midnight shift to
the smell of fresh pancakes just coming off the pan..... mmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
pancakes (oops, better wipe the drool off the key-board). One slightly disturbing thing is that sometimes rubber gets caught or falls off the belts in the ovens and Rubber-Man is the First Line of Defense for the Outpost of Mordor in case of a FIRE! in the extruder. We don't have fires all the time, but we do have them more often than I'd like. The first time the fire alarm went off I could feel the adrenaline kick in like some kind of booster rocket and then I finally ended up yanking out this little glowing ember with my gloves and stomping on it (the fire sensor is rather sensitive). Just a tad anticlimactic. My next fire had real flames and everything, so I didn't feel I had wasted anything by pulling the pin on the fire extinguisher. There have been days when the foreman has come by to ask how we were doing and I've answered "Well... no one is bleeding and we haven't had a fire." One of the new parts we're making for the Ford F-150 truck is a really different profile from the others so it didn't like going down the line at first and kept jamming up in different spots. Some days felt like a battle. One day the Foreman says; "So we'll pick up where we left off yesterday" and I reply "What? You mean smoking rubber on the floor and me swearing my head off?" |
Chapter 3: In which Rubber-man gets a new friend....
| So during one particularly bad day my partner and I are
battling the strip down the line trying to keep it from jamming up at every
possible spot, the rubber is piling up on the floor and in the dumpsters.
The material handlers who have to keep emptying our dumpsters are getting
cranky. The blue language is thicker than the smoke. It ain't pretty. So
this herd of suits are going by on a walk-around the plant and they all peel
off to watch us struggle. This one guy comes back later to introduce himself
and it turns out he's a production manager from the plant across town which
has 9 extrusion lines. He's just at our plant to train our new manager, but
he's going to push for some changes on our line since he thinks we're
working way too hard with some crappy equipment. Cool. Nice guy. Nice to
have one's effort recognized. He came out everyday to see what was going on
and actually got us some engineering support and things that have been in
need of fixing for years are getting fixed now. Actually, he's now my new
production manager (the guy he came over to train didn't work out). I
was singing his praises at home so much Elizabeth started referring to him
as my new best friend.
Then the other week I was sitting in church and the leader is announcing who the celebrant, cantor, readers (including yours truly) are and who will bring up the gifts (we always have a different family bring the gifts [collection and the communion bread and wine] up to the altar each week) and don't I hear his name. Sure enough, there's my boss across the aisle from me. YIKES! Talk about getting rattled. I could feel my heart pounding ... but I managed to give my smoothest reading ever. Talking to him after Mass it turns out he's been a member of St. Joseph's for years and has heard me give many readings. When we met at work he was thinking "Where do I know that guy from?" Of course at church I'm not surrounded by smoking rubber and swearing my head off, so I'd be pretty hard to recognize. |
Chapter 4: Rubber-Man and the Hillbilly...
| One of the more colourful guys I worked with this summer was a bit of a hillbilly. He is originally from Maine actually, so I guess that makes him a yokel rather than a hillbilly, but I'm not going to get overly technical. Rob drives a pickup that has a rusty Ford cab with a rusty Chev box. When that isn't running he'll drive his Winnebego to work! I guess that makes packing a lunch easier.... He raises turkeys which the Bride of Rubber-man wants me to inquire into for next Christmas. He doesn't trust the management, knows more than the engineers and always liked to tinker with the line (I'm sure everyone's worked with guys like this). A couple of times we had the part in profile; not perfect, but passable, and he'd try and fine-tune things and put everything out of spec. The rest of us wanted to choke him, or put some disconnected dials on the controls for him to play with. To his credit a bunch of the stuff he'd been complaining about forever has finally been getting fixed. But everything he says has to be taken with a big bag of salt. As one of the other guys observed; "He doesn't have enough chemistry to make a cup of tea." |
Chapter 5: Rubber-Man in the Dark...
| So how about that BIG BLACKOUT eh? Pretty exciting. I was starting some Overtime when it happened. We usually get a blackout once or twice a summer in Stratford, so I wasn't overly alarmed until I got sent home and turn on the car radio and hear CBC Toronto talking about the power failure there too. Oh dear, this is big, thinks I. This is going to take a while, I think next. Then, Damn, I don't even have a barbecue to boil water for tea.... Instead I had to finish my last beer in the fridge before it got warm. Fortunately Bride of Rubber-man hadn't started making the planned meat balls for dinner. (We had cereal instead.) Spazhead was off at a friend's cottage so they didn't know anything was amiss until they got back from the beach and had to make their pizzas on the barbecue. On the next day we had just gotten the part in profile when the power went out. Then when the power came back on we had to clean everything up, pull the dies, clean them out, set-up all over again, and then the power went out again! The rotating power failures over the next couple of days made things interesting at work and I got lots of practical experience in what to do with the extruder when the power fails and you've got 300 feet of hot oven with rubber now trapped in it. (Answer: pop the oven hatches and start pulling.) |
Chapter 6: in which Bride of Rubber-Man and the Wienerheads get up to things...
| It's not all just about me. Apparently while I was toiling
away at the Outpost of Mordor,
Rubber-Man's Bride and Wienerheads had been having a fun summer of
house-work mixed with chick-bonding. Elizabeth got the girls outside to pull
weeds and much of the yard actually got done this year. Although a few beds
are still quite jungle-ish after years of neglect. Spazhead declared that
she liked sod-busting so I pointed out the back berm and what I wanted done
and left her to it. She got most of the sod lifted from around the shrubs
before the soil hardened into cement mid-August. So we gave her a sizeable
sod-busting bonus. Roo-bear got a smaller bonus for pulling weeds, which she
squawked about, but once we pointed out the differences in quantity and
quality of work, she settled down.
The wall colours also changed at the Townhouse of Solitude. The horrible pinky-beige has finally been expunged from every room except our bedroom and bath (where it kinda sorta not really works...). The downstairs and upstairs are now nice shades of khaki. Bride of Rubber-Man had to develop some Super Extendo Rubber Arms to paint the two story wall beside the main stairs. But she did it and feels much happier now, since the wall colours of our secret hideaway and love-nest had been bugging her for some years now. Roo-bear baked many cakes. One a week for a while there, until her mother had to say "No more cake!" Which isn't heard very often around here. She's also organized a few outings with friends; the gang of them went to the fall fair together and then early in December they mounted a shopping expedition to the local mall to do lunch and get some Christmas shopping done. Roo has discovered her Shopping Super Powers; we were quite impressed with the thoughtfulness and frugality of her purchases. Her buddy Katie made everything official by doing up permission slips for all the parents to sign. A bit odd, but it does make sure that everyone knows the what, where and when in question. Spazhead did not get lost (see episode 7 "Rubber-man and the Missing Monkey"). She and her girl friends were going to have a movie night and see something with a hot guy in it, but they ended up seeing Finding Nemo instead. |
Chapter 7: in which the Townhouse of Solitude gets assorted visitors....
| One of the high points this summer was a visit from one of
Rubber-Man's old school friends, who has been gallivanting around England,
living this bohemian Post-Structuralist life and actually making a living
off of his degree in Philosophy. It was pretty fabby-doo to finally get to
meet his wife of 9 years (who teaches philosophy at Oxford University) and
hear all about life in Oxford where they get to do exciting things like
drink beer in the Eagle and Child (the pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis and friends used to meet to discuss their writing, think of it as
Mecca to all us hobbit-heads), and apparently Oxford is a lot like Hogwarts
(except, I suspect, without the stairs and portraits moving about).
For Thanksgiving we had Rubber-Man's mother, sister and most of her family (one niece had to work unfortunately) over for dinner for the first time in too many years. Bride of Rubber-Man, glad to no longer be Zehr's Woman and working her tail off around the holidays, threw herself into the preparations for the feast with a vigor I hadn't seen in a while. As I started bringing out the food I told everyone, "Elizabeth's been cooking for two days, you all had better be hungry!" The FOUR desserts were very popular, even the chocolate cake which we realized after that fact didn't have any sugar in it! It was still edible in spite of that little detail..... Even with 12 of us for dinner there were still leftovers for a few days. |
Chapter 8: in which Rubber-Man tells you what we've all been up to this Fall....
| Spazhead is thoroughly enjoying Grade 9, although she's
realizing that all the boys around her are a bunch of hormonally driven
dorks. She's in her 3rd year of Pathfinders and
is also volunteering as a Junior Leader for a Spark
unit. Sparks are the guiding program for 5 and
6 year old girls, which Spazhead missed the first time around so her unit
inducted her into Sparks along with the rest of
the 5 year olds. Apparently her lap is pretty popular at story time and
there have been a few fights over it. She's also in our Parish Youth Choir
and learning how to be a Cantor. Piano lessons are also continuing. On
Thursdays after school she has Art Club where she is working on a painting.
The Friday before Christmas break started, the lucky little weasel got to go
and see The Return of the King with about 180 other kids from school
who got picked at random.
Roo-bear is in Grade 7 and most of the time is enjoying herself. All her friends are in the other classes unfortunately, but she and the princesses have arrived at an understanding of mutual indifference. Her marks, except for the dreaded gym class are excellent. For a writing assignment they had to produce a children's story based upon the popular "Arthur" stories by Marc Brown (a decent animated version is on PBS and TVO). Her story D.W.'s Ducks (D.W. is Arthur's little sister) was picked as the best by both her teacher's youngsters and the kindergarten classes. Some of the other kids didn't understand the objective of a children's story and wrote about things like Arthur cracking his skull playing hockey or D.W. becoming a crack whore. Roo's teacher had to send several back for rewrites. Roo is a 1st year Pathfinder so for one year at least we can send them off on the same outings. She is also in the Youth Choir and we've got to start Confirmation lessons this spring. Bride of Rubber-Man has been keeping us all organized, cleaned and ironed. Plus painting the house. Rubber-Man has been working. |
Chapter 9: Rubber-Man and the bus trip into Hell...
| This year for the first time in many, I accompanied one of the girls on a class field trip. Roo-bear's class was going to St. Marie Among the Hurons a reconstructed 17th century Jesuit Mission outpost. Roo wanted me to come along. The museum itself was pretty fun; we played lacrosse, tried to make fire with a flint and tinder, and made our own quills and wrote with them. The 3 hour bus drive each way however, was horrible. The teachers were both rather inexperienced (I had to remind one that we really ought to take a head count before leaving the rest-stop) and the kids were pretty out of hand. Apparently there was some behaviour in the back seats that wasn't really in keeping with Catholic education, plus the on board potties were left full of McDonald's wrappers. Words were said. The principal had a couple of sessions with the classes and meetings with the teachers. |
Chapter 10: in which Rubber-man has a Rant....
| The week after the bus trip, Roo-bear came home from school
very upset. After some coaxing and serious use of her
Mom powers, Bride of Rubber-man got out of her what had
happened. Apparently there had been this woman observing their class, whom
all the kids had assumed was observing their new teacher. Actually she was
observing the kids for bullying behaviour. So the woman starts asking all
the socially isolated kids out into the hall way to ask them questions one
on one and Rachael's on her list. Not knowing what's up she gets totally
sandbagged and all she can understand is that here's this weird woman
telling her she has no social skills and how does she feel about that?
all because of one incident in gym class where as odd kid out she ended up
doing a ball passing drill with the teacher.
Rubber-Man is hopping mad when he finds out about this at the end of his shift and I guess we're lucky it was late at night or some nasty words might have been said. Next morning we storm down to the school to see the principal. "No swearing" says R-Man's Snugglebunny "It won't help." "Not even a little bit?" "No." Darn. Bride of Rubber-Man elected to start crying during the interview to express how upset we were. Probably more effective than me swearing, really. (N.B. Not a deliberate thing. Kind of embarrassing really. B of R-Man.) The principal was horrified. The woman (a student at Fanshawe college) had exceeded her mandate to observe and collect data. And Roo wasn't even on her list of flagged kids. Of course not; we've been really pleased with Roo's progress in socializing this year (for proof I'll refer you to chapters 6 and 8 above). The student had over-reacted to the one incident and thought she was Jane Goodall or something (after all the similarities between a troop of monkeys and a class of 12 year olds are surprising...). So Roo was reassured, Bride of Rubber-Man dried her tears and I lowered my hackles. Hopefully someone was told off. |
Chapter 11: Merry Grinchmas and Happy Who-year...
| So we were all really looking forward to Christmas this
year. I had 10 days off and with Elizabeth not working I was looking forward
to Christmas dinner and maybe some baked goodies. The week before Christmas
she threw herself into high gear with her preparations. The fridge was so
stuffed full of groceries we had to make hard decisions over what really
needed refrigerating and what could stay on the counter for a few days. I've
thought maybe a new name for her could be Squirrel
Woman! able to stockpile food faster than a survivalist
before Y2K! OK maybe not...hey watch that knitting needle!
I turned down Overtime the day before Christmas break began because I was tired and cranky (even with a final tally of +370 hours OT for the year, I did actually turn some down once in a while!). Starting the Christmas Holidays having a stupid fight and getting carved like a turkey would not be a Good Thing. So we finally got our Christmas cards mailed off on the 23rd and started wrapping up the last minute details. The girls sang at the 5 PM Christmas Eve Mass which was a bit of a rush (I'm looking forward to them being in one of the adult choirs and then we can go later in the evening). Christmas Eve was spent cooking, washing dishes and watching most of It's a Wonderful Life. The last of the gingerbread came out of the oven around midnight, just in time for Mr. Claus. On Christmas Day I had volunteered to read at the 11 AM Mass. Rachael at first objected, since she likes the idea of slobbing around in her P.J.s playing with her presents on Christmas morning. Don't we all? But I always found afternoon of Christmas Day a bit of an anticlimactic wasteland. We've found that opening their stockings before breakfast, then church, THEN presents after lunch helps delay the fun a bit and keep everything Christmassy. Besides, Mass is sort of the whole reason isn't it? Otherwise it becomes "McGiftmas" and brought to you with regular upgrades by Microsoft. We also had Elizabeth's parents coming down that afternoon. We had thought we were going to visit them on Boxing Day, but my mother-in-law wisely decided to avoid the stress of cooking and cleaning when her daughter had already done it. So good thing Bride of Rubber-man had used her Squirrel Superpowers and made a feast that could have fed another 2 or 3 guests. On Boxing Day I was sitting around in my boxer shorts (that's why it's called Boxing Day isn't it? You slob around in your boxers, eating leftovers and playing with your presents) watching the extended DVD of The Two Towers when my honeybun says to me; "We're golden now, we can coast on leftovers for days!" With a whole week off, and fridge full of yummy food, I had hoped we could get to actually see my family at the holidays and even take in The Return of the King. I had bought Elizabeth a Mah-jongg game (an ancient Chinese game that involves collecting sets of tiles similar to bridge or poker) for Christmas and thought we could spend some time playing it with the kids too, but alas it wasn't to be. Spazhead's cold got worse and infected the rest of us. Roo-bear has it the worst; she's been kept home yesterday and today after a miserable night coughing up phlegm and high fevers. We know she's really sick when she doesn't want chocolate and doesn't want to watch a movie. I was fighting it off with my Antibodies of Rubbery Bounciness, but I think a couple of the germs had kryptonite and got through my defenses. I came home half way through my shift last night and Elizabeth may need me to help out this afternoon with a visit to the doctor for the both of them. Of course I started the new year on Overtime. We fired up the extruders this weekend and charged straight through. On Sunday my women were feeling just energetic enough to put together and decorate the gingerbread house they had hoped to do since Christmas Eve. (Rachael in particular was getting very discouraged about not doing much of anything fun over the holidays because everybody was too sick and tired. Something fun was urgently required and it was fun, if tiring.) After their exertions they all needed a nap, but the house looks great and I'm sure it'll taste fine once we're all done with sore throats and can actually eat some. Well, I think that's everything. So far no one is bleeding and we haven't had a fire. I think it's time to wish all of you a Happy and Healthy (cough! cough!) New Year and wait for my next dose of decongestants. |
Love
James
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