Category: Travel

Coeur de Lion

On a day so blustery that it recalled the worst of Vancouver in December, with nasty horrid rain, we went to the Chateau Gaillard, what’s left of one of Richard Lionheart’s castles. 

It’s amazing, but after 10 minutes Tammy and I were only too happy to get the Peugeot down the 15 degree slope of the access road and into Les Andelys, one of the most delightful towns imaginable,  for a little bit of shopping and a meal of seafood salad and bifteck (18 Euros, cheapest meal you can imagine in this part of the world, and Marvellous).  We picked up some yummies for the morning, and some wrapping for my liquid gifts (which will have to be checked baggage, but c’est la vie).  Then some very very very interesting travel.  First a trip to the train station at St Pierre de Vauvray and god help me if I miss the 7:32.  Then an hour trip into Paris if nobody does anything stupid like strike.  Then hopping out at Gare St Lazare and grabbing a cab for a 60 Euro ride out to Roissy-Charles De Gaulle airport.  Then checking baggage, checking in (because it turns out I can’t print my boarding pass) and then hopefully not experiencing any difficulties with the return flight.  So there are potentially four places things can fuck up tomorrow, and I’m on a super tight timeline.

I have credit cards.  The way I figure it, the worst that can happen is I get stuck in Paris overnight;I may have to stay at the hotel at the airport.  Or maybe I’ll forget to composte my ticket and be grilled on some out of the way siding by the French transit police.

What’s all this about the Canadian government falling?  I understand  the Troughmaster General may prorogue Parliament sometime shortly.  I mean I hope Harper experiences a conversion to humanism on the road to Hull, but are we all ready for another freaking election?

I have more pictures of cats than anything else.  They really are adorable, and only one of them is tame enough to allow itself to be touched.

Scallops and scallions

We were informed that Le Neubourg had the best market in Normandy, or more properly, Eure, and by damn if it wasn’t true.  We will have lovely pictures when we finally get home.  We got a dozen freshly shucked scallops, scallions, lettuce, cress, grapefruit, a whole chicken and a snootful of ‘how the French really live’; for less than 30 Euros, which given that we had a 108 Euro meal last night at the mansion at the end of the lane kinda puts things in perspective.  The duck was amazing.

Driving in France is loads of fun.  I keep thinking of all the people I know who would love to be doing what I’m doing these days, tooling along country roads at 90K while sheep and goats and horses and cattle go about their business.  We got dreadfully close to two goats today.

 

I have very cute pictures of the feral cats.  There are apparently 18 but we’ve only seen seven.  Since I fed them the remains of my chicken lunch they’ve decided I’m a-okay.

I also have pictures of Connelles, the little town where we’re staying.  Hopefully we’ll get our cameras home in one piece.

Only one more full day and then…. back home.  It’s been a slice, but my own bed is calling me.  I’m not looking forward to 13 hours of being stuck in a plane and two hours on the ground in Toronto.

I really like the resort.

I am here and safe in Paris….

….and exsanguinating money like a drunken film star.  This keyboard is French; it is hard to convey how hard it is to type anything and make sense.  No USB cable so no pics.  Paris is a pretty overwhelming city but certain things about it just make loads of sense.  The legendary rudeness of Parisians is pretty much a thing of the past; everybody we have run into has either been super nice or just kinda clueless; hardly malicious.  I am taking daily notes and will provide more detail upon my return…. any blogging I do in the meantime will be cursory as it took me about twenty minutes just to type this!

Best …. line …. evar

So.  There is this filksong called The Mad Scientist’s Love Song which is performed by Lady Miss B and Dr. Filk.  In a startling development, they reversed roles and Dr. Filk got to be the charming assistant.

When I commented that I had never actually seen Dr. Filk in a dress before, this was the response from LMB (emphasis added by moi):

Subject: Re: Dr Filk’s ballgown

My favourite part was how he accessorized with big chunky biker boots.

Okay, no, my favourite part was him saying “Why, what would a day be like
 without a little public humiliation? I’ll probably never find out.”

I AM SO STEALING THAT LINE. 

I’m recovering today from walking all the way from King to Bloor last night.  Met Dave JD at Jump, walked about downtown for a while, ended up at C’est What, and I want to tell you ALL that I will die fulfilled and happy, because I HAVE HAD A BEER FLOAT.  Yes, the C’est What has Hazelnut Chocolate Bitter floats, with whipped cream and ice cream and a maraschino cherry.  Each mouthful had at least four flavours; the final top note of the hops in the Bitter danced on my palate for about 15 minutes before I regretfully had to wake up a bit with coffee and water.  PS, the meal at Jump was solid but there’s no ******* way it was worth $100 even with the alcohol.  Then we walked all the way up Yonge, deking into the Eaton Centre so I could see what it looked like tarted up for Xmas (worth seeing), and then coming back out of the PATH to view the ******* mess they made of the intersection of Dundas and Yonge. 

The entire downtown core is a mess of sodium vapour orange, metallic blue and piercing white LED lights festooned from every lamppost and filling every square; total Xmas yield = + 350 ugly points.  We continued up the street.  The Swiss Chalet I ate at multiple times a week when I was working at the Delta Chelsea is still there.  Many other landmarks are gone but plenty remain.  David’s is still on the corner of Yonge and Bloor with its array of expensive shoes; the Pilot is still there just off Yonge in Yorkville.  As is standard I did most of the talking; sometimes I wonder if Dave ever is thinking “When will she STFU?”  He deked into a CD joint and insisted on picking up a couple of Weakerthans CD’s so you may all be assured that Dave’s role in my life as somebody who forces me to refine my taste while I broaden my horizons continues.

We ended up at Flow for the last drink of the evening and after another fifteen minutes of aimlessly wandering around Yorkville while I critiqued the dresses in the window (Jesus, if I was a man I wouldn’t go near a woman dressed like that, I’d be afraid of getting caught on something, etc.) we decided that fun as it had been Dave had to go to work in the morning, so about 10:15 we packed it in; I came home by cab.

Vancouverites, listen up!  The cab driver ASKED ME IF HE COULD TAKE THE CALL when his cell phone rang.  I don’t know how often you take cabs (I gotsk no car, so I do a lot) but I nearly choked on my tongue when he said that.  I thanked him profusely and tipped him according to his deserts.  Speaking of which, prob’ly the funniest part of the evening was how animated Dave got when lecturing me (humourously, not pompously) about the importance of tipping.  The how, the why, the way it’s an inexpensive and effective way of spreading joy, the importance of not looking like a cheap bastard (I paraphrase).

I think I’m coming back in February.  There’s a play I want to see, and I like going to Toronto for Valentine’s day and hanging with friends – I had an AMAZING time the last time.  It’ll be a little awkward seeing as how I’ll just be back from Belize – current planning – who knows – but frankly now that I’ve figured out that I need to quit travelling on cheap airlines I think I’ll have a lot better time.

PS we leave for France soon.  Happy sigh!

At Tammy’s

Working backwards, I am ‘staying above the fray’ as Tammy and the exterminator battle with termites (this part of Toronto has them, and what can you do, eh?), I ate her goat cheese and garden picked oregano omelette (and it was nommy) with fruit and nut bread; I slept great, and in fact about two hours longer than I normally do; we had a very pleasant evening (she bought me Tuborg, the saintly creature, as she never has beer in the house); we figured out where I’ll be spending at least part of my restaurant money in Paris; I arranged to see Dave JD at Jump today around supper time (but nobody else in Toronto, I’ll make a special trip back for that) while Tammy’s at choir practice; I had a pleasant trip by transit from the airport (this being possible because I got to sit the whole way even though it was rush hour when I arrived) and then Tammy picked me up at Pape Station; I had a very pleasant flight because at the last minute I changed my seat selection from 34 row to 44 row (767-200, but Paul probably already knew that) so I had nobody sitting next to me fore. aft, port and starboard and I was close to an aisle and washroom AND I’d never been on an aircraft with functioning video-on-demand in the cheap seats, so I was actually SURPRISED when they called ‘we are starting our descent’; I got my money back from the WORST breakfast sandwich evar and by way of apology the server brought me a free bottle of water; Jeff very kindly dropped me off at the airport; I got a reasonable night’s sleep the night before.

Anyway, I’ll only be going near a computer or screen in the most minimal way for this time off, as it’s obvious my internet addiction is hijacking what’s left of my life, so if you don’t mind I’m off to abuse Pentium and George, two of the nicest and most sucky middle aged cats I’ve ever met, both of whom think I’m kinda keen.  George slept on my feet last night and emitted never a peep.  Happy sigh!  Also, and this if for Keith, Tammy of Surpassing Excellence has Alan Moore’s Lost Girls in hardcover… can such things be?  Who needs the internet?  PS it’s snowing…. that desultory November snow….

It has suddenly occurred to me that I Don’t Want to Go To France.  I want to stay in bed for two weeks.  However, life will likely hand me that kind of vacation in the form of a dire illness at somepointinmylife so maybe I should just do a tarot reading for the trip to France and see if I can apply some mellow to my pre-travel jitters.

Gee whizzickers spirit of the Tarot, leave the rebukiness at home wujja?

Anyway the tarot reading said, and I paraphrase “Don’t be such a ****** wuss; it will be a great trip, there will be great spiritual benefit and you will return in triumph.  Are you nuts?  Do you think you don’t deserve a trip like this?”  With (harrumphing) a side of references to self-delusion and feeling lonely.

I tell people I got the world’s most no nonsense tarot deck and they don’t believe me.  I still can’t believe my last reading for Tanya; she asked for a blind reading (no question, and no cues for the reader) and at the end of it, I said, “I will stake my reputation this reading isn’t about you at all – this is about your brother”, because she’s been really concerned with his fate, of late.

Anyway, I’m slowly going through the checklist.  I feel better though; I know it’s ludicrous and after all what would I have done if it had all been death and destruction (which was Tanya’s reading…).  How can I possibly reconcile reason and the tarot.  I guess I’ll have to sit down and work through the rationale at some point.  I’ve tried in the past but I think I need to take another stab at it; please expect references to string theory and archetypes.

In an hour Jeff and I are off to Petcetera… kittehs HONGRY om nom nom and muts be fooded!  Here’s Gizmo grabbing the mike to sing Bella Chow.

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Biscotti has occurred

I don’t think I have quite enough data points to do a video yet, but I have a script and some of the pictures necessary to made a how to make biscotti video.  This is a hard bloody kitchen to film in.  Maybe I should be making biscotti someplace else, and evil thoughts come to the surface. I’m sure there are LOTS of people who would just HATE IT if I came to their house and made biscotti and left them there.  Yup; maybe I have a career as a biscotti fairy, setting up in people’s houses as they are expecting the open house to sell it.  I should contact stagers and ask if they have an opening.

The economic news continues to be confusing and dreary.

It was so nice to see Keith yesterday.  We watched Pitter Patter, the fourth episode of the Singing Detective.  I know it’s a really hard series to watch, and that the incessant racism and misogyny is a trial, but the stuff Dennis Potter does to narrative is a marvel for a writer to watch.  Anyway, Keith left to go see Katie, who for reasons of her own decided to go see her dad rather than me.  I ‘spect that has something to do with me asking her to, like, sort through her stuff while she’s here.  I’ll give her until mid-December and then I will simply haul all of her crap out of here and take it to the storage locker.  In the meantime I’m going to bag it all; her clothes smell like smoke even when they are clean and she hasn’t been living here in ages.

It’s very nice to have yummy food in the fridge to take to work for lunch (orangey coconut brown rice with mushrooms and bacon, leftover roast beef and chicken and bok choy stir fry).

Less than two weeks before I go to France.  Kinda puts the next little while in perspective.  I have a list…..

a big stew of links and updates!

I won something worth $720 and I gave it to a coworker after briefly toying with the notion of selling it.

I support the United Way, which is I why I won the above noted item.

I’ve been up very early every morning since the time change.

Patricia and I brainstormed a problem at work and the results were high five worthy.

I’m shopping today for my France trip.

Haagen Dasz Mayan Chocolate ice cream is REALLY good.

I have a very long list of things to do.

Flying Spaghetti Monster made a Pastafarian out of me.

Can a squirrel be cute?

There’s a new Youtube video in my account of the little waterfall next to work.

It’s so rainy that it’s actively dangerous to walk anywhere except pavement.  Wet leaves, slick grass.

It’s so rainy that the ground is exploding.  What the hell is it?

I had to take shots from different angles.

Is it a Helvella lacunosa?

These guys at least are cute and not reminiscent of inimical alien brains.

Found art in the ladies can.  This one’s for daughter Katie.

Barack Obama’s family is going to adopt ‘a mutt, like me’.  bwa ha ha!  We’re all mutts, Uncle Rocky.

I already sent this link to Paul.  Folks like this should get taken out behind the hangar and shot.

Some people study psychopaths, and I guess that’s a good thing.

I have an offer of a weeklong stay in a bungalow in Belize, and I’m seriously considering it.

Eddie and Gizmo demonstrate vertical superiority.

Doug’s contribution to the art of pumpkin carving.

Sandy P at work took this awesome pic when she was in SF.

Death by black hole and other astrophysical meditations; I especially like the notion that Apophis could have been called Bambi.  A physicist explains it all for you.

I am just finishing making waffles.

We watched Objects in Space again last night.  Honestly, it’s in my top five hours of tv ever. (Along with Restless, Michael Moschen’s special, the moon landing, and the episode of Band of Brothers where they parachute into Normandy).

If fonts had personalities…..

I am messing around a lot with Garage Band.

I found the sound of a door on freesound that was so good I put in on LOOP and listened for half an hour.

My digestion is much better since I started taking acidophilus.

Keith is supposed to turn up later today.

Oh, Nutella, how you glisten!

We are very SF positive in New Westminster.

That should hold ya for a while, I guess.  I’ll be off shortly to commit myself some serious retail therapy.

Doug and Elly

Yesterday was quite the day for meals (which I did not have to cook). For Brunch, Jeff and ScaryClown and I sucked back an Islands inflected breakfast at the Reef on Main street and then took a tour of the shops; for dinner Doug cooked a magnificent roast lamb with greek salad, greek style potatoes (oh…my… god they were good) and hummus, pita and tzatziki.  I even drank red wine and didn’t get a migraine.  Keith and Jeff accompanied me on that trek to the golden kitchen of Doug.  As always, the soundtrack at their place is amazing.  I never go over there but that I think I want to live there!

When asked, why return to Toronto, Elly had a few comments.  It is home.  Her mother’s dying of emphysema (not that Elly means to get close to her or effect a reconciliation after all the crap…).  It’s closer to grandchildren; it’s closer to children; it’s closer to New York, where she is establishing a new chapter in her mental health career (her show went over really well).  Vancouver and her time in BC got her healthy, healthy enough that she tossed her journals.  (Why do I need them?  It’s just endless boohooing.  There’s no value in it.  Gave me a twinge about the blog, believe you me.) Doug’s career is portable, as is hers. And the maraschino on top is getting out before the Olympics.  Grr.

Doug showed off his new insulin monitoring device; he says if he can reduce the number of injections from four to five a day to one every three days he’ll gladly participate in the research.

When Jeff and I moved in here I whined about how I didn’t have any cast iron frying pans.  Well, I do now; Doug and Elly are dejunking and I acquired two.  Shout out for Jeff who enquired if they were dejunking.  Keith may get the computer desk but he has to run it by Paul first.

I don’t have a picture of Doug’s new beard styling, but it rocks.  I do have pics of his pumpkin, and will post later …

Five layers (what, like an onion? A really good chocolate cake?)

There’s stuff I don’t talk about with anyone. Some of it is festering; some of it is just the froth and bubble inherent in having a brain; some of it is me stolidly processing events and patterns.  Some is preverbal.  Most isn’t – I try to put everything in words.

There’s stuff that only the people it happened in front of know.  It never gets written down.  It’s ‘Hopi art’ or a coloured sand mandala.

There’s stuff that only goes in a little hardback diary; I make an entry maybe once a month – more often when my love life, such as it mostly isn’t, gets more interesting.  I try to make it as much like Mary Astor’s diary as possible, you know, breathless and candid and o so girly…. although I have no George S Kaufman.  (Darn! he was quite the, uh, provider of exclusive, quality adult entertainment, or so Mary’s diary recounted).

There’s stuff I put in the locked on-line diary at livejournal, mostly stuff that’s bad and I want to remember the date it happened later.  Almost all of my entries are friends only.

Then, there’s this stuff.  There’s an inherent bias towards good news, because, after all, my mom reads this. There’s also a bias to not whine, although I do.  So consider this a virtual whine, because, by golly, I really feel like bitching right now, and what prevents me from doing it is knowing that in a week I’ll have completely forgotten what I was cheesed off about. That has been the overwhelming takeaway for me as a result of keeping an online diary for four years (yup, I started in April 2004 but lost everything prior to August of that year).  As bad as things may be, whining doesn’t help. Good news longs to be shared, and urges to whine should be entertained at a halberd’s distance. I consider whining and recounting ugly facts to be two separate things; it’s the absence of adjectives that denotes serious efforts not to whine. Also, I swear more when I’m whining.  Or ranting, which is whining spun into entertainment, at least as I care to practice it.

I light a candle for folks dealing with allergies; for the lonely; for the sick; for the hopelessly confused and socially awkward.  I light a candle for the unemployed who wish to work.

PS.  The World Series is actually very good baseball.  I was enjoying it immensely when I watched it last night.  It was the first time I actually got an idea of how a superb pitcher plays with the strike zone to mess with batters’ heads.

A special shout out to Mike McG, who opened a phone conversation with, “Hey, wordsmith!” and made my world a better place thereby.

A special shout out to Marc, who answered my email about visiting headquarters in France with a brief and charming email.  The upshot is I am welcome, but nobody is exactly sure WHERE to roll out the welcome mat, as apparently they are moving!  I would post notes about the integration but it might limit my future employment opportunities.

France planning

I called Tammy this morning and got updated on the trip planning, also the various stuff that’s going on with her (I light a candle for her health, which is good, but she has knee surgery in prospect and lives in a three story house).  Today I have to scrape the iron oxide offa my French and compose a letter to the hotel in Paris (shown is the view in front of the hotel, which is on Saint Lazare) asking if we can ditch our bags there because Air Canada in its infinite wisdom has rescheduled our flight.

I’m SO inclined to say screw it to the timeshare in Rouen (actually outside of Rouen) and stick with Paris, which has ZERO tourists in November – it’s all business travellers and locals doing Christmas shopping.  However, the call of Juno Beach, which has a Canadian interpretive center there now, and Calvados and Camembert out Normandy way is too much.

More France planning:  Review all the Dunnett references to Paris and Rouen and places between.

More France planning:  No car in Paris – it would be insane – and Tammy has agreed to book a car in Rouen rather than drive from Paris.  It will be a lot more restful to take a train and getting out of the city will be much easier.

More France planning:  I haven’t a thing to wear!  I definitely need an anorak and some mary jane style shoes.  If I didn’t know every women in France was a size 8, I’d plan on buying clothes there; as it is I’d have about as much luck getting clothes that fit in Richmond.

More France planning… internet access?  I wonder what it’s like at the time share.  I will enquire….

Home safe

Got in a brief visit with my Gran and Dr. Filk (who is some filking busy these days, what with recording and travelling) yesterday; listened to Juliana’s new album with my mother; collected a book and two maps of France / Paris; and then got home safe on the ferry.  Jeff came and picked me up.  I had a very relaxing weekend.  Then I got up and tidied my room, as I damned near killed myself getting up in the night to let Eddie in.

To do: read the family history about the bookseller and antiquarian (and friend of Thomas Carlyle) Henry Wake.  Make turkey soup. Email Anne and tell her to rearrange Friday’s lesson as I am going to be at the church gathering Friday night doing registration, or so I surmise. Work on Halloween costume which is work appropriate.  And hack away at the 10 other projects nibbling at my conscience, and consciousness.