In third year university, I rented the basement of a family home. The woman had her Masters degree in Early Childhood Education. She also had a three-year-old son and a new born. During the day, she took care of other children in the neighbourhood.

As I went upstairs one day to use the bathroom, I saw Evan (the three-year old) and a neighbourhood girl (about two years old) standing around the toilet with their pants around their ankles. I overheard him say, “Watch. This is how I do it.” Followed by a few seconds silence. Then I heard him state matter of factly, “Oh. Maybe when you get to be my age, you’ll grow one. It’ll be easier!”

Last week on the way to work I hit a bird on the middle of the 101 highway going from Cotati to Petaluma. Posting one story about road kill brought a slew of other stories. So, on the road kill theme, here is another story about road kill. This story is compliments of Stephen because he could remember far more details.

Dopey Dave (a friend from Ottawa) hits a deer with his brand new pretty-little-CRV in the town of Lac St Marie, about 15 min from the Mount St. Marie ski hill in Quebec. He hits the deer in the head. Its body spins around and smashes his passenger side door and window. Upon inspecting deer he discovers it is immobilized, but still alive.

The humane thing to do would have been to hit the deer with the CRV again and simply kill it–but no, Dave has other plans. He decides to leave the deer by the roadside and drive 15 minutes up to Mt. St Marie, expecting that one of the ski patrollers would have a gun that he could use to kill the deer. (Do ski patrollers carry guns as part of their standard first aid kit? Is a bullet in the head the recommended treatment for a skier with a broken leg?)

Luckily, none of the ski patrollers has a gun. One of them suggests that Dave might find a gun in the bar across the street from where Dave hit the deer. So, 40 minutes later, Dave returns to the scene of the crime. The deer is still immobilized but still alive. Dave enters the bar and asks if anyone has a gun. Nope, no guns – this is Canada. If this were the U.S., the first soccer mom to come by in her mini-van could have no doubt provided a selection of weaponry, but not in Canada.

However, the barmaid does have a nasty looking kitchen knife. Dave decides that he’ll take that and go out and slit the deer’s throat. So, Dave holds the deer by the antlers and starts sawing away at its neck. After several minutes of sawing Dave realizes that the deer’s hide is really thick and the knife isn’t doing anything.

Dave returns to the bar, looking for an alternative method to dispatch the deer. This time the barmaid gives him a hammer! Yes, a fucking hammer! Dave goes back outside and proceeds to whack the deer in the head. Repeatedly! Bonk! Bonk! Bonk! The deer has a thick skull. Dave pounds away, but the hammer just bounces back. The deer is becoming more and more panicked, but no more dead.

Back into the bar and Dave emerges with a big screwdriver. By this time the deer is trying to get to its feet and flee the scene. Being hit by a CRV was bad enough, but the looney with the tools is just too much. Also, another car has pulled over and a family is getting out to see what’s going on. Dave decides that he’s going to stab the deer in the neck with the screwdriver. The concerned father ushers his kids back to the car so that they don’t have to witness the horrific scene of Dave stabbing a deer in the neck as it tries to get to its feet. The father decides to help Dave, so he wrestles the deer to the ground while Dave stabs away.

Finally, the screwdriver stabbing takes effect (or perhaps the shock of the situation took effect) and the deer meets is maker—about 2 hours after having been hit by Dave’s pretty-little-CRV.

Dopey Dave is a ski patroller. He’s the guy with first-aid training and bucket-loads of common sense (hmmm). He will assist you should you have had an accident on a ski hill. Just hope that he doesn’t come to your assistance should you have an accident with a car.

I was walking to the Steel Bear Deli last Monday to get my milk for my coffee at work and I saw Chucky on this truck. I thought, I have to take a picture of him. My sister worked on the movie The Bride of Chucky in 1998. She would get a laugh from knowing that a doll of him was stuck in a truck on the roadway outside my work. I think it had something to do with Halloween. Here are a few pictures of Chucky stuck in a truck outside my work on Halloween.

Last year when I went home to visit my parents, we watched The Bride of Chucky on TV. We even watched the credits roll so we could see my sister’s name on TV. Somehow, it was all very exciting at the time–but maybe you just had to be there.

This week’s theme of road kill reminded me of another accident I had. Not only was I hit by a Ford Tempo, I have also been hit by my own car. How many people do you know have been hit by their own car when there wasn’t anybody driving it?

Steve and I lived in a townhouse in Ottawa. The driveway was slanted downhill into the one-car garage. Steve used to park his car in the garage. I would park at the top of the driveway so he could pull around my car and into the garage. One morning, I started my car, then decided to clean out the garbage and stuff from the front seat. I left the car idiling in neutral and started off down the driveway to deposit the trash. Once I got to the bottom of the driveway, I was all of a sudden pinned to the garage door. I felt like I was being attacked.

I panicked for a moment (at the thought of being attacked) before I realized that my car had followed me down the driveway and bumped me into the garage door. I pushed the car off my legs and went back into the house. I thought I was fine. I decided to go to work. I could walk after all, no? By noon though, I had to ask a colleague to get me some snow from outside so I could ice my legs. They were swollen to at least twice their normal size. She ended up convincing me to go home. It wasn’t worth being at work with my legs elevated with snow on them trying to finish the project.

I guess I was pretty lucky that it didn’t break my legs. I just ended up with sore, swollen calves for a few days.

Everybody, it seems, has a story about road kill. Here is a story my sister told me when she read my blog entry Katie Bird. The following entry is guest-starring my sister as the author:

It was a few years ago when I was an Assistant Production Coordinator on a TV movie called “ICE”. We were working nights and I was alone in the office. I was getting set to run the callsheet. The transport driver had just arrived from set and was standing by for it. I finished the last of my tweaks and headed off to the photocopy room to do my thing. I placed the master in the top copy tray, punched in 100 copies and hit start. It took the top page and the machine jammed. I softly cussed. I took the pages back out, resorted them and started again. It took the top page and jammed again. I cussed a little louder. One more time and the same thing. By now I was starting to get a wee bit perturbed. I took all four pages out of the top feeder and lifted the top up to see what was going on.

The driver, who up ’til now had been patiently waiting came in to see what was up. He walked into the copy room in time to see me discover my problem. A mouse had found its way in to the copier and had gotten jammed in the path of the master callsheet coming through the rollers from topside. Effectively, he had been smeared across the glass from one side to the other. The driver walked in just in time to see me lift his decapitated body out of the rollers. He immediately turned around and went back to sitting in his chair.

I had to find the head of the mouse and clean its body print off the glass before I could successfully run my callsheet.

Katie told me her road kill story. She was driving in heavy rain and her windshield wipers were going full speed. All of a sudden–Whack!– on her windscreen. It turns out a bird had flown into the windscreen and got stuck in the wipers.

She is sitting behind the steering wheel watching the bird go from side to side on her windscreen. Ick! She stops, pulls over, and gets out to remove the bird. At least the bird has stopped with the windshield wipers and is no longer being dragged back and forth. As she plucks the bird from the wiper, she realizes that she’s only plucked the body. The head stayed stuck in the wiper! Yuck. Now she has a decapitated bird body and a bird head still stuck in the wiper. She discovers she has to dislodge the head from between the wiper and the windscreen.

It’s just gross. It’s a gross story. The poor bird! Poor Katie!

This morning on the way to work, I hit a bird with my car. I am positively horrified. I felt it hit my front passenger tire and pummel through the wheel well. When I looked in my rear view mirror, all I saw was a cloud of feathers. What on earth was a bird doing in the middle of the 101? Even if I had seen it first, I wouldn’t have been able to avoid it. I wasn’t speeding or anything. I was going approximately the speed limit. That is, I was not going any faster or slower than any of the other cars on the highway. Granted, I was trying to read the Clover advertisement on the truck in the slow lane. I was in the fast lane and approaching the truck. I love Clover advertisements. They are usually very witty. I discovered that Stornetta corporation takes advertisement suggestions from the general public. I love it. But, I digress from my roadkill story. Here is a link to Stornetta so you can read the witty advertisements yourself.

I am positively horrified. I am the type of person that whenever I see road kill, I say a wee prayer to ask for forgiveness of mankind for inventing such brute machines. Now, I am one of them. My little Honda is a brute machine and I drive a brute machine. I’m feeling terrible especially since many of my close friends are bird enthusiasts. I am just glad that I don’t think the bird suffered. It looked like it was over by the cloud of feathers in my rear view mirror.

When I got to work, I told my cubicle neighbour Wayde about my accident. Colin overheard us and came to tell his story about a turkey vulture. The vulture had staggered up onto the road (apparently drunk from its feast in the ditch). It was too heavy to take off properly and just flew right into Colin’s windscreen. Colin said the same thing. When he looked in his rear view mirror, he only saw a cloud of feathers. Wayde said that if you are driving a car, it’s inevitable that you are going to kill something. I guess I’m glad I’ve been driving over ten years now and this is my first fatal accident and it involved a bird–not a person.