#princess auto

[seat-safety-switch]

For years, I’d been telling myself to get a vise. I’d look at them at the store, pick them up off the shelf and turn the box around in my hands. With this, I told myself, all my project dreams can finally come true. With this, I sighed, I would no longer have an excuse.

Besides, my garage was too full of shrapnel from sold-long-ago project cars, valuable garbage, and bicycles I stole from the neighbourhood kids for scrap metal in order to have enough room for a workbench to mount the vise on. That was a good justification both for not cleaning up the Hoarders-esque layer cake of trash, and for not giving Princess Auto a hundo for whatever box of lifetime-warranty that had bribed its way through customs this week.

I was two-footing my way through traffic, trying to feed in enough throttle to keep the idle high up enough on my Isuzu Impulse that it wouldn’t stall out. It had been one of those long stop-and-go traffic episodes, and I could already feel the pleasant sensation of carbon monoxide poisoning settling in. The smoke was mostly from the open-header exhaust seeping through the holes in the floorpan, but I don’t think it was limited to it at all.

Through the clouds of pleasant overrich ashy idle-smoke, I saw it on the bumper of a work truck. A bumper-mounted vise. I could just park that shit on the street and do my metal working wherever I wanted. Nobody could stop me, and more importantly I wouldn’t have to clear out any room in my garage. One trip to Princess Auto later, I had bought and returned a MIG welder and tacked my new $39.99 “Machinist’s” (sarcasm quotes theirs) vise to the roof of the Isuzu.

It was the greatest idea of my life. Now I could finally press bushings, hold things still for painting, and carry stuff back from the garden centre without having to find room for it in the Impulse’s hatch. Plus, whenever I have to do some grinding, my neighbours are the ones who have to clean up the microscopic chunks of white-hot steel swarf. There’s no downside, unless you’re the guy behind me who caught a windshield full of Powerfist when the roof skin delaminated last week. Sorry about that.

[seat-safety-switch]

I don’t know why so many dudes have such a hangup about cooking once in awhile. You fire up the ol’ big-block, you slap on some pieces of bread and sandwich-internals, and you got yourself a hot sandwich. That’s all you need to keep the grim spectre of death off your body for another day, that and the nice shots that the emergency room doctors slip me to get rid of “rickets,” whatever that is.

Even so, I wouldn’t call myself an excellent chef. That’s why I was surprised when a local cooking contest (the prize was a gift card to Princess Auto) revealed that my grilled cheese was in fact the best in the city. The Mayor came up to me, tears in his eyes, gave me his sash, and left. We haven’t seen him since that day.

Soon, I had a steady flow of foodies storming to my front door, demanding to pay me thirty-seven dollars for some butter-slapped pieces of bread with cheese inside. It was profitable, sure, but they would show up at all hours of the day, which made it hard to schedule more important things like wrenching or less important things like sleeping.

So when the Crown Prince of some middle Eastern country made me a contract offer, I leapt at it. Finally, I would have a consistent set of hours from day to day, and I could also scoop up all those abandoned supercars that the other white people left behind when they fled the country. I was already thinking about the Ferrari-engined Chevette that I would build long before the plane landed.

Nerves set in fast. I wanted to make sure I would leave a good first impression; they had taken a big risk on me, not least on underwriting my visa. The government over there looked very closely at my record (regional, not World) of speeding tickets, and it took quite a bit of cubic money to get them to look the other way. After setting up the kitchen, I sat around for the day and eagerly anticipated my chance to prove myself to the Crown Prince.

Months later, I had still seen no hide nor hair of the man. The cheques still cleared, but I was getting ready to hop on the plane and leave. In fact, I had completely packed my bags by the time he actually arrived, asking for his once-yearly “American Grilled Cheese Sandwich.” He had been assured by his advisors that mine was the finest in the world.

I think I made a pretty good grilled cheese. It was here that I made a fatal mistake under the pressure. I didn’t believe in myself. The sandwich surely could not stand alone under such a rich man’s experienced palate, and so I would need to reheat some frozen French fries as a side.

Well, the Crown Prince caught food-poisoning from the fries, and died on the spot. It turned out you actually needed to cook them, and not just leave them out to defrost on the counter for a few months. I am still in the process of contesting my 1-star review on IndenturedServant.com.

[seat-safety-switch]

We were halfway free of the surplus aisle of Princess Auto when the old people began to kick in. Only the clicking of their walkers was audible over the scattered sounds of corduroy pants and moaning about carbon taxes. I knew that they were there for my companion, and I had to act fast.

Pushing a pile of surplus TV signal splitters to block their path, I began to shove my buddy into the next aisle, but it was too late. The fastest of the olds had spotted him and identified him as a Real Man To Talk To About Hunting. I considered my options. One, I could take out the sentry in one quick strike to the temple, but it both felt mildly unethical and would give the others time to catch up, at which point all was lost. Or, I could abandon my friend.

Well, nobody ever called me the most loyal person to have lived. My thin-soled Piloti racing shoes squeaked on the K-Mart-grade microlaminate tile as I barreled into the next aisle, diving for cover behind a scattered endpiece display of microfibre-cloth windshield mops. I had made it just in time. Through the shelves, I could hear the herald of the old-people party begin to ask my companion if he liked to hunt and fish, and then audibly unhinge his jaw to let forth a torrent of completely unverifiable stories about deer hunting.

An hour later, I returned, a shopping bag full of approximately nine thousand dollars in things I didn’t think I needed before I showed up at Princess Auto in my arms. As for my travelling companion, his arms were coated up to the shoulder in old-man blood, presumably from a series of brutal assaults upon their personages. Behind him, a group of retirees dozed the unsettlingly calm sleep of the forcibly unconscious.

“They had so many opinions,” is all he could say, looking past me into the middle distance while absentmindedly rubbing the palm of his hand.

We would never stand in the scratch-and-dent airsoft-paintball-camouflage aisle again.

[queentrashgremlin]

my Gender is the surplus section of princess auto

[loreeebee]

What are Gypsy Moths and Caterpillars?

What are Gypsy Moths and Caterpillars?

This story was posted last August…please visit the update at the end. Gypsy Moth & Catepillar Damage Gypsy moths, at least the caterpillars that morph into the moths, have completely defoliated many deciduous trees and devoured the tops of evergreens in Eastern Ontario. The trees at our cottage on Palmerston Lake in Ompah, Ontario have not been spared. Caterpillar damage What do Gypsy Moths…

View On WordPress

[caflyers-blog]

ca-flyers.com is a website that is dedicated to current promotions and discounts in retail chains operating in Canada. The website presents current newsletters as well as other products covered by promotions. au-catalogues.com presents new daily newsletters of the largest stores in Canada.

ca-flyers.com is one of many websites owned by a customer serving more than 30 countries. The Canadian version of the website was created this year and has the ambition to become the largest website presenting the offer of Canadian newspaper magazines.

[seat-safety-switch]

It might seem paranoid, but I am now convinced more than ever that the Princess Auto weekly circular contains a secret code that tells of the Real Deals. I have dedicated my life to decrypting this complex puzzle, and it is only in the last few weeks that I have made major progress, thanks to my connections at the university supercomputer laboratory and enough Japanese convenience-store methamphetamine to stop the heart of an elephant.

Years ago, there was a dragway here. My friends and I would pop burnies in the water box and then, at the bidding of The Christmas Tree, pop that clutch and embark upon a spiritual journey to understand the true nature of speed. Now, that track had been lost, and with it any hope of understanding my place in the universe. That dragway was deconstructed into gravel by a conspiracy of corrupt city politicians and the unyielding thirst of homebuilders buzzing like hummingbirds to the flowers of just-one-more-deal Hail Marys to avoid the insolvency they brought down upon themselves.

Now, a Princess Auto sat calmly beside where the dragway once dominated. That humble store was still able to keep its head above water even after the loss of wild-eyed psychos raiding their hydraulic fittings aisle to construct last minute ghetto-fabricated manual boost controllers in the pits before tech. I was convinced that this was the Princess Auto that had sent me those encrypted circulars, that some force within it bid me welcome, to accept me into the weird hardware/surplus store family. If I could not have speed, I thought, at least I could have a well-developed understanding of the Chinese scrap-to-cheap-shit pipeline.

Someone had told them to expect me, I realized, as all eyes in the store turned to focus on my twin-turbocharged Buick Reatta, its Holset turbos pushing wailing furies of discarded boost through the screamer pipes mounted on each side. At first, I had thought it was simply the fact that, as in other places, I had the weirdest car around, but then I remembered that the average Princess Auto parking lot is ninety five percent Japanese imports by volume, their pilots so far gone that they were no longer even aware of the concept that what they drove was weird. It was inarguable: someone within had been waiting for the Reatta specifically.

I had barely entered the store when one of the associates stopped me.

“Mr. Switch,” he said, a shit-eating grin on his face, “Congratulations on being today’s Special Customer! Here is a $20 gift card.”

As I reached out for the card, everything became fuzzy for me. I awoke hours later, long after the store had closed. I realized that I was sitting in the Reatta, which was now stuffed to the gills with thousands of dollars in cheap tools that I did not particularly need. Those fuckers had done it to me again.

[seat-safety-switch]

It’s hard to lose a friend to a disease you know in your heart you could have helped prevent. If only you hadn’t given up, if only you had struggled a little harder, maybe things could have been different. I speak of course of the horrible addiction that is woodworking.

There’s no redemption in my retelling of this story, only further condemnation. I tell it regardless, if only so that it can be told. Although it is too late for me and mine, perhaps you can notice the precursors to this action and be the hero that I never could be.

It all started the way it usually does: at Princess Auto. We were searching the aisles, when my friend found a Chinese-made hand planer. The handle looked pretty good, almost like someone had ripped off a really nice planer made by a kindly old German grandpa. He bought it immediately, of course, and I thought nothing of it. Perhaps it would become a fine desk ornament, I rationalized to myself on the long ride home.

Even by the next day, I would find out later, my friend had been descending into the hell that is basic competence with hand tools. Whetstones, sharpening techniques, even vises, soon joined his list of vices. Weeks later, I decided that I would stop by, both to check in on him after our long lapse of communication, and also to see if he had an M12x1.25 Helicoil kit because I just ass-fucked my transmission crossmember bolt again.

The scene that unfolded before me was one of horror. In a brightly lit basement room, my friend was planing planks of wood to be perfectly square to one another. I stared at him, even as he went through a lengthy explanation of just how hard it was to get that perfect 90 degree angle, and an even lengthier explanation of how a well-sharpened edge looked. Slowly, I began to realize that the thing that was talking to me was not my friend, but this sawdust-choked Bob Vila monster that had taken control of his body and spoke with his voice.

After a low point involving a last-minute intervention that went wrong because we were dumb enough to have held it at the Boston Pizza next to the local Lee Valley Tools, my surviving friends and I agreed that he was beyond saving. It was just easier to go along with the crowd, I thought at the time. Maybe he would sort himself out, run out of room to place rustic end-tables hand-fabricated from half-inch Baltic birch ply.

When I read in the newspaper years later about a man who had gone to prison for axe-murdering a family of six for a perfectly-aged, kiln-dried live edge slab of primo black cherry, I put the paper down and wept. Friends don’t let friends use tools on innocent trees.