Penance.

Note: Just rolled over 1000 page-views on the counter! Many thanks to all who read and comment, and special thanks to the nice folks who brew me my delicious fizzy Medicine. No beer today, but a post to mark the occasion nonetheless.


The woman gazing pensively out into the misty beyond in this picture is my lovely wife, and ninety-nine percent of the time, she is kind and loving and wonderful beyond words. I am perfectly aware that I have many faults, chief among them the inability to organize my way out of a wet paper bag even when provided with a giant pair of pruning shears, a headlamp, and a large-print edition of the book "Organizing Your Way Out Of Wet Paper Bags For Useless, Bumbling, Incompetent, Pea-Brained, Blithering Idiots: A Pop-up Book".

If she ever leaves me, it will be about ten minutes before I'll be found dead, curled up in the fetal position in a pool of my own drool, vomit and urine.

So ninety-nine percent of the time, she's great, and my heart leaps about in my chest like a gaffed salmon just thinking about how much I love her. However. HOWEVER. One percent of the time I go running with her, and then the bubbly sweet-natured girl I married turns into something that makes Pol Pot look like a recess lady. Forced death march doesn't even come close. You can see from the picture that the rock surface we are descending is as slippery and dangerous as Charlie Sheen. She made me run down it, and then run back up it again, even after I'd already climbed up the other side of the mountain (it's Mt. Finlayson, local peeps).

But even here I appreciate her for the prodding, while she leaps up the hillside like a deranged mountain goat and I labour on behind, tomato-faced and apoplectic, because without it, I wouldn't really get any exercise. And with apologies to Left4Beer and his studies around the health effects of drinking beer, and taking the general view that a beer now and then lowers my stress levels back down to a more-manageable DEFCON 3, there is only one thing I absolutely know about the physical effects of drinking beer: it makes you fat.

It has been clinically proven, without shadow of a doubt, that if you drink enough beer regularly, you will turn into Zach Galifianakis. After he's just eaten John Goodman. Deep-fried. Except you won't be funny.

And given that I have the build of a teenage Laotian ladyboy, I can't really carry any extra poundage unless I want to resemble a burlap sack full of suet that somebody's stuck four pipe-cleaners into. So today is a beer-free day, and tomorrow I have to go for a run, and Friday I should probably do a long bike ride, and maybe by Saturday I can think about cracking open something delicious (suggestions? Howe Sound, perchance?).

However, I'm happy to do Penance for my beery sins since the good craft brewers of B.C. continue to tempt with lascivious hoppiness. Ooh, that reminds me! Naughty Hildegaard soon?