Category: Travel

Off to London.

Registration for the reunion stops at 7:30 pm, so all I have to do is get to London for 6:30 and I should be fine.  I didn’t get hold of Liz and will therefore be spending the night in a hotel, which, as long as it has wireless internet, is fine by me.  Funny to think of not having crash space after all these years… but I’m not bunking in with my elderly ex-mother-in-law; to invite myself at this point to crash with somebody who likes a little more warning than I had the skill to provide would be rude in the extreme.

It will be a long drive.  I imagine I’ll be doing a lot of singing in the car!

I had a lovely, lovely visit with Deb and Jim.  We ate at Lapointe Fish Restaurant; I had pecan pepper tuna and it was the ne plus ultra of om nom nom.

Comfortably ensconced in Kanata

Damn, I didn’t phone Sandra when I got in to tell her I was safe, what a jackass.  Oh well, she knows how easily entranced/distracted/daydreamy I am.  At some point I will have to thank Clem for the princely gift he made me upon my arrival.  I actually have thank you cards packed away someplace.  Anyways Chipper thanks for the tip about route 8, I’m sure you were right when you said it would shave at least half an hour off the elapsed time.

Jim and Deb made me a very wonderful welcome, and I got to meet Winnie the Wonderdog, who is just as charming and lovable as a pitbull can be (as advertised & she is one of the prettiest dogs ever and very expressive) and also Zoomer, who, at 11, is a sober and friendly individual.  Winnie just had her first birthday.  She got CAKE at the doggie park, the lucky little canine.

Dinner (of COURSE I have to talk about dinner) was yummy pasta shells with home made sauce with sliced chicken draped over it, plus mixed veg, plus PERFECTLY cooked garlic bread and strawberry rhubarb pie a la mode.  Jim presided over the concoction of this savory collation…

Then we sat about and chewed the fat until we realized we were all tuckered out (and Jim had to get up at hours ungodly) so after getting the key to the wireless and extracting a promise from Jim to bang on my door so I can join the folks for bird seed (what we call Red River Cereal) and coffee at six tomorrow morning, I am now doing up my daily report prior to unconsciousness.

Driving through the rolling hills of Eastern Ontario while the sun dances in and out from behind the clouds and the hills sing with colour and then the trees shake golden coins into the air and I chase the shadow along the road while all the trees lose the light and become… something different, less lively somehow… it made me feel very wonderful. I figured out how to use the cruise control, so my back is fine.  I was within five minutes of my predicted arrival time of 5:30 so I am very pleased with myself.

Deb and Jim have a house full of lovely pictures of family and many pictures of Jenn.  She is such a beautiful young women; one can always say that about the children of friends, but there really is something special about her.  There’s a picture of her with her dog Nolan, another pit bull rescue, that makes me smile every time I think of it, Nolan with her immense scary mouth gaping open and Jenn laughing.  I really like the house, the colours and the layout feels so relaxed and comfy… Deb says, “Just don’t look in the basement.”  Which makes me laugh, because that’s how I feel, too, what with all my boxes still strewn about and unpacked.

I thank everyone for their hospitality so far and feel so contented.  When I think how I agonized about getting her and how incredibly anxious I was about the travelling, I am inclined to poke a great deal of fun at myself.  Sooner or later I have to quit worrying about things.  Worrying never helps.  Planning does!

Very cold and windy today… got blown all over the show by great gusts of wind.  The Rent-a-wreck Impala dances around like a Westphalia when it gusts.

Food…. drink…. friends…..colour…..

The colours in Madawaska and environs are so stunning, and so exactly NOT what you get in the fall in Vancouver, that I feel like I’m high just from looking at trees.

After we got going yesterday, Catherine and I went to a very nice El Salvadoran restaurant (ate there last time).  This time I said, “I’ll have what she’s having’ and thus ate my first tamale (om nom nom) and I also had a burrito and pupusa.  It was really really awesome.

Then we walked along Bloor to Long and McQuade, where I acquired two thunder drums, one of which I donated to Sandra upon my arrival.  Then, off to Rentawreck, conveniently at the end of Catherine’s street, and into the car to get to Madawaska.

Today has been a day full of colour, incident, work and fun.  The most wonderful stuff that happened today I can’t talk about because I don’t have the permission of the folks involved, but trust me, YOU would have been laughing your ass off in that “I really shouldn’t be laughing” way.

Last night, however, was given over to food. I purchased chèvre with cinnamon cranberries, Raincoast crisps, 73% cacao chocolate, chocolate covered marzipan, Rooibos chai shortbread cookies, and about a pound of almonds, which, along with some very nice potato vodka and the final beer in the fridge, made for a lovely, chatty evening. Sandra introduced me to pickled hot peppers (Indian style) which, tossed in generously over the beef and cabbage curry, made for a wonderful and very fashionably late dinner.

Clem was here and we hung out briefly but he had to get back home to get enough sleep to deal with a root canal today.

Today, after planning her day like a military operation, it all got shot to hell and we didn’t actually follow the plan due to those damned extenuating circumstances and we ended up driving to Barry’s Bay and Combermere, the first for beer, wine, banking and comestibles, the second to get used windows and frames transferred from Vivian’s house to Larry’s house. Larry is Sandra’s special friend, and I got to meet him when we picked him up from his workplace for a late lunch at the Ash Grove Inn, which looks out over Kaminiskeg Lake (and the colourful trees scattered thereabouts).  Our companion was another local, a gentleman named Gary who is developmentally delayed.  Larry is (in addition to his other gainful employment) his worker.  Watching Larry deal with Gary was absolutely wonderful, and also very funny.  Gary would rather have fun and socialize with Larry  than stay home and watch tv  so Larry has tremendous leverage with respect to consequences for behaviour.  All I know is I make more noise in restaurants than Gary …. and make more mess eating…. so I am a chastened individual today.

We stopped for a smoke break by the lake after lunch and way off in the distance, I saw a man staggering down the road.  First thing I thought “Drunk off his keister.” Larry informed me that the gent had a progressive neuromuscular disease, which really put my current very small concerns into even more stark perspective, and although he did not try to engage any of us, he hung out with us and smoked a cigarette while we watched the scenery and took pictures, which I hope at some point to be able to share.  I didn’t take my camera, and now I hear it’s going to rain and blow like a bastard tomorrow, so I may lose my chance to take pics of the colour.

Larry is as good looking as a movie star, ps.  He had a full bushy beard and masses of hair until recently, and when he shaved it off Sandra went eep! when she saw him, which must have been amusing.

Anyway, we went to Vivian’s.  Vivian had all these windows left over from a reno, and some were to migrate to Larry’s place (conveniently located next door so we walked those frames over but put the glass in Sandra’s Jeep) and some here to finish up a cabin renovation.

The Lodge has had MUCH work of an improving kind done around here.  The little slough that bred mosquitoes is long gone; the number of campsites has been increased, there are various new buildings for storage and tools and boats, etc., but the heart of the place is still the same, and I am grateful beyond words to be here.

I don’t think I mentioned the breakfast Catherine made me the other day.  Four kinds of fruit, full fat yoghurt and toasted brazil nuts chopped on top.  Best breakfast I have had in many moons….

Tonight prime rib and veg.  O frabjous day! Tomorrow planting trees in the AM unless it’s really bucketing.  Then off to see Deb in Ottawa, woo hoo!

Nepalese food, a change in venue, a beautiful sunset

I got off the plane and went straight to Jan and Soon’s.  Jan blinked at me and said, “Weren’t you supposed to phone me?”

uh.

I had forgotten how beautiful the underlit sunsets are in this town.

Anyway, life in her household was sufficient for a cuppa, but not really for crash space, as she had hella work to do (I still hung out and we flapped our ears for a couple of hours and she had lots of news, good bad and odd).

So I called Catherine, and we had a very pleasant evening catching up (oooo, gossip about exes, I loves me some of that!) and eating at the Mt. Everest which has berloody awesome food and I had my first Kingfisher in ages.  Then we came back here and shot some more s*(t and then I crashed.  The wireless here works very nicely.  At some point I’m going to ask Catherine for another drum solo.  She has a really intense Chinese cymbal that sounds like part of the soundtrack for The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

While ScaryClown was sending me a link to This I was showing Colin a picture of him stretched out on HP Lovecraft’s cenotaph.

Ain’t the internet grand?

Very poopy day

My day was not all that great.  Paul came over and intuited that, the weather being so grisly (or drismal, as Donna H has remarked) it was a pho day.  So lunch was good and it was good to see a friendly face, but after he dropped me off back home …

My tummy has been upset, undoubtedly over the prospect of travelling, and when I sat down to do an itinerary the horrible thought occurred that I had Bitten Off More Than I can Chew.  Especially in ten days, with two days of air travel and who knows how much driving.  I am really not looking forward to it.  I thought about airports, and how aesthetic they are; sitting on the tarmac in the pouring rain for two hours while they find the luggage of somebody who didn’t show up for the flight; sitting on the tarmac in the dark while somebody removes thumb a from orifice b; getting stranded by global events; running out of money; and the whole doom spiral of horror.

So I am not leaving tomorrow morning.  I should visualize the fun I’m going to have, but all I can think about are the horrors of travelling and all the shit which may befall me.  And, candidly, some of my visits are duty visits and I’m not looking forward to them; fortunately the hardest visit is one to somebody who never, ever reads my blog, yay.

Emotional pointillism

Yesterday’s practical job interview was a disaster, but a low key one.  I’m not displeased with the haircut Katie gave me in the course of the interview, but I’d like to take the woman who supervised her and fire her at high velocity from the deck of the Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge… in effigy, of course, I do not advocate violence except when in an excited and irrational frame of mind, which advocacy, when it occurs, I am obliged to immediately retract as being contrary to both my core self interest and my belief system, spindrift as it is.  Katie was philosophical about it, which helps.

I googled Glenn Beck to find out what church he goes to, subsequent to learning that he blames atheism for the end of the American dream.  Personally I blame their judicial system, which, skipping hand in hand with television over the last 60 years, has f|cked the Americans to the point where recovery into a society where self-governance and personal responsibility are considered virtues seems very unlikely.  Anyway, Glenn Beck, a Mormon, blames atheism.  It’s a lot like blaming Canada in its charming looniness … and it sure as f8ck is easier than looking in a mirror.  Of course me blaming the judicial system without pointing to the interconnected power structures which have allowed Glenn Beck to make fabulous amounts of money by being emotional, uncommitted to the facts and verbally abusive to people who haven’t ever done anything to him personally, would be very remiss, but the courts could have done more in the last 60 years and they haven’t, so they are the notional cat I kick this morning.

Marc Emery was taken into custody on Monday.  He’s a manic self-publicist with a libertarian messianic complex and a smoking hot wife.  I still don’t think he should have been extradited.  I hope he isn’t injured or murdered in custody; I hope he comes out of it sane, or at least as sane as he is now.  I am very angry at the Canadian government, but as long as we have Harper, it’ll be like this.  I knew Marc when I weighed 132 pounds and wore aviator frames so I guess I am biased.

After the interview disaster in the late afternoon (softened by the Seabus ride somewhat) I took the girls (Cassie, Kashka and Katie) for a drink at drink.  Yes, the department of redundancy department has made adjustments, and there is a new drinking hole for adults who wish to have a conversation and properly constructed drinks.  This new establishment does not use drink mixes.  The music is not turned up full blast; the wait staff are attentive, professional and fun.  I am booking Katie’s 21st bday party now!  609 Columbia for anybody who is interested.

Today is a day of packing and worrying.  I f|cking hate travelling, but if you want to get someplace you have to travel, alas and oy vey iz mir.  Jeff says, mimicking piteous kitten for comic effect, “But what will I eat?”  He’ll be fine of course.  He got the Margot grooming course; she bitched at him exactly the same way she bitches at me, so that will be fine too.

I closed all the windows permanently in preparation for winter.  The air conditioner needs to get put away, except I’m damned if I can figure out where.

I’ve decided not to take my computer on my trip; but that’s only because the notion of backing it up before I leave makes me all exhausted.  I’ll take pot luck on internet access; I don’t imagine it will be much of an issue, as everybody I’ll be visiting has some.

Currently, it is raining.

I made mini-cinnamon crunchies yesterday and gave some to Landpeer Kim with the rent cheques for the next three months.  I had to do something after she gave me all those home grown tomatoes.  Yum!  Also, I invented the recipe while I was making it.  The two people I thank most for my current ability to cook are Catherine and Paul.  Catherine because of her very inspiring adventurousness, Paul because I got kinda competitive with him in the ‘not using a recipe’ department.  Now I feel like I’m a good cook almost without thinking about it.  I can’t remember the last time I cooked something inedible; the worst thing I cooked in the last year were those dreadful muffins; they induced heartburn of world class immensity.

My back is really bothering me, which is another reason why I do not want to fly.  Or rent a car.  Silly me.

I light a candle for those killed and homeless in consequence of the earthquakes and flooding in the Philippines and Indonesia.

People keep sending me links I’ve already posted to my blog, in one case two years earlier.  It is to smirk.

I had a lovely conversation with Patricia the other day and look forward to catching up with her live upon my return.

I am a cool hunter.  One hundred thousand years ago I would have been finding tasty things to eat for my kids and grandkids.  It’s the same, but only different, as an ex-coworker of mine used to remark.

MilkDrop is a superlative visualization plug in.  Highly recommended; trippy as all get out. I occasionally have to look at the ground when the presets go into migraine-inducing territory but that’s my only complaint.

I am emotionally sensitive to certain wavelengths of light.  The more I consider this, the more I think, what?

I can hardly wait for the first snowfall so I can take video of Miss Margot.

She is very rotund.  We will have to start meal feeding the cats, which is harsh.

I have decided never to take her to my parents’.  Given her unaccountable urge to tangle herself up in people’s legs as they are going up the stairs, the prospect that she would either trip and kill one of my folks or get crushed by accident is too much to bear.

Going to Ontario… but WHEN?

I know that I’m heading for Ontario and I definitely have to be there for Thanksgiving weekend.  However, I am stuck in town until Thursday at the earliest as I have to be a model for Katie for the practical part of her job interview.  So, woo hoo, I’m getting a hair cut and a streak of purple put in my hair.  Or maybe green.

May I recommend for your viewing pleasure The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires?  It’s a Run Run Shaw / Hammer films coproduction from 1974.  It is one of the most hilariously awful films ever made.  It has Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.  Watch it and laugh your ass off.

plotting und planning

Spoke to Vampire Family matriarch Jan this morning, also ex-mom-in-common-law Phyllis, also Paul Mills to get the lyrics for “Willie was a loner”, left a message for Chipper, texted Colin, spoke to Keith about him starting to pay for his phone, and otherwise started getting in the swing of things for the trip east.

happy happy thoughts.

Now I have to pick out one song and do it before folks start coming over this afternoon.

Why I blog

Take that, people who say it’s nothin’ but narcissism.

Also, I have a terrible memory and a blog helps me remember when things happened.

Also, Katie has used my blog to help her remember when distressing and horrific things, as reported by me, happened.

Yesterday Paul and I drove up-island to visit his cousin Ruth in Nanaimo.  She’s living on an acre of land and she got it for a steal of a price, and she and her fisherman spouse are living very happily.  She has to walk fifteen minutes to get her mail, and another ten to get her eggs, but she’s a five minute drive from a yoga studio and she has her own well, so there.

She made us a fabulously warm welcome, and soon we were deep in talk about cob houses and straw bale houses and the Cuban 5 and the amazing local arts and politics scene, and after Paul re-strung her guitar I said I’m getting my mandolin, and she hauled out her Indian drums (sounds like tablas but they weren’t) and we had a fabulous 90 minutes of jamming.  I kept nervously checking the Malahat webcam.  Long about 4 we decided to head back.

And it snowed.  Paul and I were bemoaning our lack of cameras, because the snow slid down the road signs and just hung there, and some of the visual effects were quite funny.  The snow was worse in Victoria than up the Malahat, go figure.

Paul went off to hang with Dr Filk for the evening (more music, somewhere, and a meal in there too) and I grabbed some Mayan Chocolate Haagen Dazs and a small round of Brie (my god, they fell on it like animals…. well behaved, queuing animals) and Darwin had a noisy bath and went to bed and we ate pizza and I started reading The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling and at 7:30 I collapsed.  See what a day without coffee can do to me?  Also I did all the driving, since Paul has come to the realization that he can tolerate my tailgating and random lane changes way better than vice versa.  A couple of hours in the car also allowed us the opportunity for an airing of the grievances (or was more usually the case, the bragging of the amazingness) re the kids. Sometimes it’s good to have a chance to bash away at this stuff so we can present a united front when the next issue comes up….

Woke up at 4, edited the sound files I recorded yesterday of Darwin’s charming vocalizations, finished the Caryatids (three stars but I still want to know where the food of the future will be coming from), showered, and now I’m looking forward to a meal at my Granny’s place of residence and a nice ride home on the ferry, probably late in the afternoon.  And I can haz new quilt, which is actually a quilt that my mum made when I was tiny, so I am extremely happy about my ‘haul’.  Oh, also my grampa’s memory book (two thick tomes) has been delivered to me in duplicate for Jeff.

So far an AWESOME weekend, and watching Katie motor her way – reading, my god, she’s reading! – through the Sookie Stackhouse books is making me very very happy.

In Victoria

Paul and Katie and I made the crossing – my new boss, may he be praised and adored – another Finn, what is it with the Finns anyway? – let me out early enough that we could easily catch the six o’clock.  It is one of the new boats, the German ones, and it shudders and groans like it was a twenty year boat needing drydock.  Paul of course went and talked to a staffer and learned that the screws don’t submerge deep enough and the damned things burn fuel like a Viking funeral.  Argh, what the hell is wrong with this province?  Didn’t we learn about this kinda crap with the Fast Cat?  Argh I say again.

Work ended, amusingly enough, with me going to my new boss, who is, as far as I can tell, a man who prizes his ability to keep his facial expression under tight control, and saying, “Hey, somebody is going to come by you and say that I’m lazy, incompetent and a menace to the company!” “Which somebody?” “Really?  When she comes to complain can I ask her about the 15 emails I’ve sent her that she’s never answered?” Then his face twitched, and I burst out laughing.  What happened to Patricia?  Alaaaaaaaaaas, she went to the dark side and into Inside Sales.  LTGW said, tersely, “A good fit for her skill set.”  Well, duh.  Anyway, I have to come up with a good nickname for my new boss, because he richly deserves one and I am not going to use his real name because he does not have the same sprightly approach to life, work and all that as my previous (and much missed for the joy of her physical presence, I have to say) boss.

The middle part of work was also amusing.  The new VP engineering sat with my lunch bunch, which freaked the hell out of me.  VPs never sit at my table.  I looked around at the guys and said, uh oh.  New VP sez, What?  “Well I’m not really used to controlling my language,” to which the response was, “It’s okay, I was in the navy.”  “Not like this you weren’t” but of course that just meant that everybody at the table peppered the new VP with questions about life on a fast attack nuclear sub, for which he was the chief maintenance dude.  I should mention at this point that the new VP is in his mid forties, could give George Clooney a run for his money in terms of looks and charm, and is a triathlete.

SIMULTANEOUSLY ScaryClown and I asked if he’d ever been attacked by a giant squid.  Actually I got the question out first, but ScaryClown said, “I wanted to ask that!” Then we burst out laughing and gave each other a fist bump.  Our new squid overlords are turning out quite fine.

The rest of the day I sent angry emails, entered returns, made Tanya laugh, missed Cris, had yet ANOTHER email encounter with the WORST CUSTOMER EVER and wrote one email which triggered another email which said, “Oh yeah, we didn’t actually consult customer service about that.  My meeting, let me show it to you.”  Then I abruptly remembered that I have a new boss, and made a pretence of consulting him, and then he said, “Uh, I think that’s a meeting I want to attend… I have a few questions myself.”  So once again, I poked the bear and lived.  And my boss let me leave early.  And Paul let me drive.

Back to Victoria.  Lexi and Darwin -asleep and thus not evident- were here, as were the parents and Unca Barry.  Unca Barry had brought a really interesting documentary about the last sailing of a four masted cargo vessel around Cape Horn, which I didn’t watch because I was too busy blabbing with Lexi and Katie. 

I had a really good night’s sleep, although I miss wireless, because normally I sleep with my computer (what?  What?) and I just roll over in the morning and start surfing the internet. (Yes, I know that will have to change when the heavens open and I actually have a special somebody to sleep with on a regular basis, in the meantime, it’s how it is in my life.  At least it’s warm.)

Paul went off to stay with his bro, Dr. Filk, and will be back to collect me as we will be flying up the Island Highway to see his cousin Ruth IF the weather cooperates because it’s supposed to bucket snow.

Keith really wanted to come but somebody had to feed kitties.  Also, unlike Katie, he is actually physically and emotionally capable of getting here on his own; thus the requirement to have an adult always accompany her.

 

I can hear Darwin!!!! Time to go be a cousin.