Another One Bites The Dust

29 January - Very little productivity today - highlights included finishing one book (Hearts In Atlantis - infinitely better than the movie but still not amazing) and starting another (Birds Without Wings - great writing and story but first real impression that the style and structure is completely identical to all of Mr de Bernier's previous efforts - a bunch of stories broken up into chapters and randomly shuffled together and all moving (very slowly) to some unknown conclusion).
One of my coworkers, Dimitri, has been off for the past few days due to a problem with his bike and I thought it was kind of strange that he'd not been in for three days - even my bike doesn't take that long to fix. My suspicions were confirmed by a call today and lo and behold, he has quit the business. He'd been voicing his dissatisfaction with the job for some time and was really annoyed by his microscopic commission cheque last month. I have to say that i'm not really surprised about it though - he's not a person who likes to be rushed and whenever I saw him ride past on his trusty iron cruiser, Frenchy, he'd always be going at the same languid pace with nary a care in the world. It's a real pity because he was one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet and we'd often meet before clocking on for our morning coffee. Still, I'm pretty sure we'll be staying in touch regardless.
Had planned on going to see one of my other co-workers' band at night - Flowers, a rather young lad who's currently struggling with living away from home for the first time, mentioned putting our names on the door and I headed downtown in the evening, ostensibly to go see him. I had myself an awful Tim Hortons coffee and a very nice Tim Hortons doughnut while I was steeling myself to find the club when I was confronted by Jason, another Novex courier, and his bird who were wandering the Vancouver streets. Ended up chatting with them for about two and a half hours in the fluorescent glare of Canada's favourite franchise. Mainlydiscussed the trials and tribulations on the courier industry and shard tips with each other on shaving valuable seconds off our runs and complained about the myriad number of things that just annoy the hell out of us in this jobs - also discussed the possibility of doinga bit of running together. I had gone for a rather short (only 40m) run out to the lake in the afternoon and despite not getting into the 'zone' and being even more sore all over because of it I still felt reasonably righteous for having done so. In any event, when me and Jason parted ways it was approaching 1am and I was still sore and tired and the idea of going to see some very loud music was not that appealing. Must be getting old.