Stuffed Birds and Magic Hovercrafts

Had an interesting weekend...though I was mostly sick for the duration. I got a little downtime at least on Friday and my puppy, thankfully, slept most of the day. Made for an interesting, over-hyper evening, but at least I had some help after 5pm. Saturday was spent mostly moving my grandparents into a senior's residence. They were still in their old house, but my grandfather was having trouble keeping up with all the house and garden work since my grandma can't really help with it anymore.

What I've learned from moving them is that my grandparents own a lot of weird shit. From various ceramic figurines to a FREAKING STUFFED PHEASANT. Yes. An actual, taxidermy pheasant. It was staring at me from the backseat of my car.

 

My cousin kept saying we should attach it to my car as a hood ornament. Instead my grandpa wanted to mount it above his door in the hallway of his new place. Thankfully, for everyone involved, it does not fit above the door. It's currently on top of a cabinet, surveying the living room area. The thing is, I had forgotten about this thing, but I knew about it. I remember as a kid I kept randomly encountering it various locations in their basement. 

In my grandparents' inventory as well was a life-sized ceramic dog (a poodle of some sort), a weird statue of two kissing naked people, another bird decoration which was not taxidermy (I think it was made of plastic or something), five half-full maxwell/kirkland coffee tins, three separate containers of other assorted nuts, a medical condition/symptom book from 1985, a Bible that was given to my great great grandfather in 1840 when he left England to go to Canada (which is pretty damn cool and has a record of births and deaths in the family in the back), a safe that's about the size of my forearm and weighs twice as much as me (or at least it seemed that way), a coat of arms with two actual swords in it, a bunch of certificates belonging to my grandfather (I assume for all the secret societies he's involved with), a giant mystery trunk belonging to my grandfather (that was from when he was kicked out at age 18 to travel to Calgary and work with CP Rail), yoghurt from September of last year (which I'm pleased to say did not arrive at its intended destination and took a permanent detour into the trash), a lot of Jesus books and cassette tapes (for whoever remembers what a cassette tape is), and some really hilariously awkward childhood photos of my cousins, my brother and myself (most of the awkward ones are me, naturally...the ones with braces are GOLD). 

It was also really hilarious watching my father try to back a moving truck onto their driveway for five minutes. He hit the snowbank twice and got stuck on the ice. He doesn't know, but he had an audience of about six people...i.e. everyone who showed up to help move. I thought to record it too late and ended up with a useless 10 second video. 

So after a lot of angry muttering from my cousins about my uncle's "supervising," a lot of confusion about some dirty old sleeping bags (which turns out were just to cushion furniture), chasing Lauren with the pheasant and contemplating the scariest place to put it, watching my father try to park a moving van in a restaurant parking lot, Lauren fixing my terrible decorating skills, trying to figure out which plates were for eating and which ones were decorative, avoiding about 10 crashes with the awful trollies available for furniture, having crazy heart palpitations from the cold medicine I took (I have issues with acetaminophen and no, I still don't know how to pronounce it), running across a parking lot in -21C weather with no gloves carrying two bed rods, and hearing about carrying the glass cabinet up the driveway of slippery doom, we got them all moved in. 

So hovercrafts. Played some more Sonic 2006 yesterday after like...a month or two of not touching it. I got very angry with Shadow and the bloody sand waves. What I did discover, by accident, is if you hammer the X button when you get airborne in Shadow's hovercraft, you can fly across the map (but only in straight lines...steering is not an option). I got into some interesting positions because of this. You can actually fly to the finish line from the start if you desired, only the game requires you to jump through some arbitrary hoops to activate the door at the end.

Pillars of Eternity and Resident Evil 7 should continue to go up over the next week. I think I have other things ready, but my brain is fried and I can't remember anything beyond hovercrafts and stuffed pheasants.