Creampuff Revolution

No Luge for Creampuff

I had my Vancouver 2010 volunteer interview and orientation training on Wednesday! I learned a lot of interesting things about the volunteer process that they don't tell you in the FAQs on the Vancouver2010.com site. And I'm going to share them - pass the torch, if you will - with those of you who have yet to attend your interview.

• Your security check will be conducted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But note: these officers will not be on actual horses. If you ask them where their horses are, they will not divulge their horse's location. Surprisingly, I made it through the security check.


• There will be a group exercise where you work with a team to accomplish a hypothetical task. Another volunteer will watch the interaction on your team and take the occasional note. When you catch her watching you and say things like "I feel like a rat in a maze! Where's the cheese? Where's the cheese?" and make little "pfft pfft" rat chewy noises, the volunteer will record this.


• They don't let volunteers test the luge track. Not even if you have your own full body spandex outfit. Not even if you tell them you're wearing the outfit right now.


• The position of Quatchi the mascot is not available. Apparently it requires special skills. Apparently, being fat, fuzzy and belligerent are not the skills they're looking for. And no, there is no higher authority you can appeal to.


• We can put a man on the moon but we can't make decent coffee in large quantities.


• Cookies will be served. They will be moist and delicious. You might think about helping yourself to more than one, but you should resist. Two cookies may lead to sugar-fuelled delusions of grandeur during the most important part of the orientation - the stirring video about the torch relay. For a brief moment, you might think about applying to be one of the 12,000 Canadians who'll carry the torch - then the seams of your full body spandex luge suit will shift unexpectedly under your clothes, causing a taint crisis. You will suffer mutely. Tears will be shed.


• Kleenex will be available after each of the soaring motivational videos. And if you don't need a kleenex at least once over the course of the day, then you are DEAD INSIDE.


• On the way home from your interview, you will see some anti-2010 graffiti that reads "Burn your yuppie prison No2010.com". You will ponder the impact of the Games and vacillate over whether being aware of and respecting the opinions of the anti-Olympic movement yet still wanting to volunteer when the Games are coming to your neighbourhood makes you an unprincipled dingus. Then you will see a Dairy Queen and pull over for a Blizzard.

All in all, it was an interesting day. While I'm sad that my first two choices of luge track tester and plus-sized mascot weren't on the table, I'm hopeful that I might end up doing something equally thrilling, like talking on a two-way radio and using code names like "Striker One" and "Gidget Lips". I won't find out if I've been offered a position until the summer or fall - lots of time to practice. Creampuff over and out.

Creampuff Puts it All Together

I spent the entire weekend building IKEA furniture! A new desk named Fredrik for my lady (that's you, Katr) and two giant Hemnes dressers. My fingertips are raw and swollen, like Helen Keller's after a porn bender.

Katr and I are smart enough to recognize that IKEA building is a team exercise. One person on the team builds the furniture. The other person offers unlimited sympathy and support.

In our house, I am the builder and Katr is the water-bringer, soothing-platitude-utterer, online-solution-looker-upper and general encouragement operative. Both of us discharged our duties with great aplomb, I feel, particularly in the case of the misapplication of unremovable bolt 110519.

A tip for those of you building the Hemnes dresser - REALLY look at the instructions before you hammer in unremovable bolts 110519. You can't get those fuckers out, gang. Even if you haven't pounded them all the way in, getting them out is not a viable option. So you can imagine my distress when I discovered that I had installed the drawer sides inside out and could not attach the drawer slides because there were no holes. HA ha! Shitballs!

Fortunately, my teammate was at hand to look up tips for removing unremovable bolt 110519 (turns out your options are "OMG fucked! Fucked!" and "return the drawer to the store and get a new one"). Then, when we came to the conclusion that power tool intervention was necessary, my teammate brought me the drill. Because god forbid I actually stand up and get it myself.

It took the entire weekend, but I cannot tell you how excited we are about these effing dressers. We've been experiencing a real paucity of bedroom furniture ever since we moved to Vancouver and after keeping my ginch in the china hutch for two years, I was ready for a big blue change.

For you IKEA haters out there, I must point out that we scoured used furniture places, consignment stores and Craigslist for ages trying to find an extant dresser but after weeks of searching, we found mainly dressers that:

a) looked as though they'd been in a fight. With a flamethrower.

b) were priced to move ... into Donald Trump's mansion.

c) smelled like semen. 'Cause dresser drawers are a good place to keep that.

All in all, assembling Hemnes myself seemed like a small price to pay for a dresser that I was fairly certain no one had jizzed in. Thank you, IKEA! Thank you.