Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Work: Hey Keith, clean out the Fire Urchin tank.
Keith: Can do!
Work: Also, fyi, Fire Urchins are lethally toxic.
Keith:…
-Five minutes later-
Keith: Ouch… uh oh.
Work: Oh you’re okay. The long spines aren’t toxic, just really painful. Are you having trouble breathing? No? Yup, you’re fine.
Keith: Working in an exotic fish store is fun!
Yeah, my brush with death for the day.
This is for Keith’s 28th birthday. Love ya!
Jeff and I braved it twice, once to mow and weedwhack and once to pick up a replacement part for Jeff’s computer.
We watched The Railway Man; Colin Firth was excellent as always.
Yesterday we tried but could not finish Noah.
Thank you SO MUCH to Paul for accompanying me to see Lois and Bob. We had a wonderful time.
One of our adventures was pretty adventury and I won’t talk about it because no matter how I tried I’d just sound petty, but one of the days I was gone we went to Dinosaur Provincial Park, a world heritage site, and it was stupendous, spectacular, amazing. We went to the Centrosaurus Bone Bed and Bone Bed Number 50 and saw an owl nest (no baby wols, although they had been spotted) and did NOT see a rattlesnake, phew, and walked where every honey coloured rock was a dinosaur bone.
We also went to Lake Newell where I got into a big argument with a Ring Billed Gull (it was very funny, it kept flying back and squawking at me in an attempt to get the last squawk) and mostly we hung with dogs (Harley is a black lab and I LOVES HIM, I brushed him repeatedly and he loved on me right back…. and Lazzy is well, a terrier, and I watched the two of them play keepaway with a stick and I laughed until I HURT MY RIBS and the last day I was there Lazzy presented his belly for my approval and strokes) and people, and Bob cooked me an organic local beefsteak that brings tears to my eyes as I recollect it and we had Cambodian style food in Brooks and I admired how enormous the trees are that they planted 30 years back and enjoyed the comfy bed and quiet at night (except when somebody started spraying Roundup at dusk Thursday night, snarl) and really enjoyed the Nissan Maxima I rented and exclusively drove thanks for asking and OMG JULY 1ST.
We drove into Rosemary at dusk July 1st and set up chairs and blankies and watched a small town fireworks display. It was neither cheesy nor short; it was one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen and I got to be really close to it. It was a really sincerely trulio Canadian experience and it made me happy. A local country cover band was playing as we pulled up and they were good
Apart from how very hot I was for the second field trip at DPP (I got very tired of the field interpreter and spent a lot of time sitting in the bus) and the mosquitoes as we walked up to the Centrosaurus bone bed (black, ferocious, completely painless as they bit, and perfectly able to handle 30 degree C weather and 40 kph breezes) I enjoyed the entire trip. Paul as always managed the travelling portion perfectly and all the getting thither and in and out of Calgary was slick.
I brought neither my computer nor my instruments and I brought no cameras. I wanted memories, happy ones, and I am topped up currently.
It was SO GOOD TO SEE THEM. I miss my inlaw rellies and I am glad to have sat in their kitchen and caught up with them.
The good lands are any where the family is. I was in the badlands, walked among the dinosaurs, under the sentinel hoodoos. I was in nature and the birds flew over me; I got into a very long and impassioned discussion with a seagull
As you all know, English is a language so deficient in terms of kinship that it is as if it has been strip-mined by capitalism. What do you call the former spouse with whom you occasionally travel and are fraternal with? What do you call former and longstanding inlaws, when you were never married to one of their siblings but had kids, mortgage, all that stuff? What do you call a longstanding family friend whose friendship and love demonstrated over time came to be part of the structure of your family? What do you call the relatives you stay in touch with after a really bad breakup? How do you twist English, which despite its size is short on nuance, into words to which take the experiences of relationship and bind them into something useful and contemporary without being twee or clinical? How many of us have relationships which somehow aren’t important enough to have a word assigned to them and yet are everywhere once you start looking?
I call people who belong to my church my churchsiblings or churchsibs for short; we have us and our trust and our time and our food and our travails and our finances and our deaths and births and miraculous recoveries and dreadful runs of luck and kids who make the world finals and play in Junior A in common; we follow illness, divorce and mature student MAs and wonderful, hilarious children’s pageants with a wonderful sense of being in a large, complex and engrossing dance, which moves along in perfect time with all that is and yet is a very special subset of that Big Dance of which one can imperfectly say, That’s All Folks.
I’m thinking of the word breadrellies. Can you tell what kind of relatives those would be?
Although I am still going to Ontario later in July I’m actually leaving with Paul to go see Bob and Lois for three days this morning.
Since it won’t be confirmed space I’ll not be taking Otto, which will be strange… We’re flying into Calgary and I’ve booked us a car.
I may be too busy to post or somewhere I don’t have easy access so I may just be doing mini posts.
Margot is washing herself right outside my door. I can hear her little grunts of effort and concentration. She sounds like a little pig sometimes. Other times, like a duck.
Katie sent me a link to these two lovely women dancing.