The Platinum Ticket by David Beynon

The Platinum Ticket by David Beynon
Shortlisted for The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Prize

Thursday 7 June 2007

It's the little surprises in life...

This morning I was awakened around 4:00am by my daughter who needed a drink. After, I wasn't able to get back to sleep so I figured I might as well continue to load crap onto my desktop computer that came back from the shop.

We have a huge archive of digital photos as well as a bunch of film photo that the local photo processing centre put on disk for us before we got our digital camera. Well, I was copying pictures from when my daughter was about 6 months old (6 years ago) when something caught my eye.

There, right after a pic of my daughter holding a little plush toy, was a shot of a couple climbing a waterfall in what appears to be Mexico. It's a lovely, romantic setting but there's one small problem...it's not anyone I or my wife know!!!

What makes this story worth relating is that there was more than just one photo - in fact there are many. In a progression of photos that display a very nice resort, the couple - I'll assume they're newlyweds - are seen climbing the waterfall, swimming and standing in front of a large fountain. The guy actually pretends (let's hope) to take a leak in the fountain in another picture. All fun and games, right?

But then I came to the really interesting set of maybe four pics that got me laughing. In the first, our hero - the unknown groom - is lying in bed, still sleepy, with a plate of breakfast fruit balanced on his lap. The next shot is a little closer and the guy's awake now, all smiles and you can kind of see that there's not just fruit on that plate. There's something...well...something meaty. The next shot, closer still, makes it clear that there's sausage on the plate.

You guessed it - Man-sausage and lots of it. Yes, six years after the fact I discover that some minimum wage kid, probably with a degree in something or other by now, screwed up and tagged Fruitsaladman's Honeymoon Breakfast Plate photos onto the end of my roll of pictures.

Makes you wonder what the hell he ended up with???

Wednesday 6 June 2007

Back from the computer shop...

Today was certainly eventful. Called up the computer guy to see if my desktop had been repaired - fried hard drive last week - and the guy kind of chuckled and said, "Well, we got the new hard drive installed but the computer keeps wanting to power down. We don't really know what's going on."

By this afternoon they had replaced every fan in the damn machine, updated the memory and slid in a new video card and whadda ya know - it works. I also have a bitchin' new external hard-drive for backups - no more data loss for this guy.

Apart from the woes of technology I've been working on Nothing's Made to Last and things are moving in a slightly new direction. Not sure yet if I like where they're heading but I think I do.

Also, since my last post it was confirmed that I have moderately severe sleep apnea. What does that mean? Basically I stop breathing when I'm sleeping - a lot. On a randomly selected 3 minute section of my sleep readings I stopped breathing 4 times for a duration of about 30 seconds each. For two of the 3 minutes I wasn't breathing. Scary stuff, kiddies. Tomorrow I go off to get a CPAP machine to force my breathing to be more regular. I'll report back and maybe treat you to a picture.

Sunday 3 June 2007

Elora Writer's Festival

My lovely wife, Suzanne and I spent the afternoon at the Elora Writers' Festival today. It was a beautiful day for it and had a great line-up of Canadian Talent. Louise Penny (Mystery writer), Mike Freeman (poet - hilarious, no black turtleneck or barets here), Cordelia Strube were among the six Canadian authors that read for us.

The event has been taking place since 1994 and this was our first opportunity to attend. It was a great way to spend the afternoon and will likely become an annual event for the Beynon household.

The winners were announced for the Writing Competition with entries from as far away as Tasmania. I entered my short story about the 1987 introduction of the Canadian one dollar coin entitled Change but, sadly, I was not one of the winners.

Oh, well. There's always next year...