Essays from East Lawrencetown

The wearing of the poppy

2011-11-11T12:45:00.002-04:00

The many faces of Remembrance Day. Here, where there was no war, just commerce and volunteering for service overseas, it is a very sombre week, everyone wears poppies and it is full of ceremonies remembering all the soldiers who fought in WW1 and WW2 (and others of course). (it is also a big drunk for many). It was a defining issue for the young country of Canada.

Over in many of the countries of the mother continent, whose ass got saved, it's either a normal day or if you're on FB, it's Spinal Tap day.

In Ireland, at the trial of some IRA men who murdered british soldiers out collecting a pizza, it was mentioned multiple times that the families were wearing poppies. (Of course they were, it was November and they were at the trial of their murdered BA soldier sons).

This year, the Occupy Nova Scotia crew were camped at the cenotaph. After some negotiations, they packed up and left for a few days to allow the Remembrance Day ceremonies to take place, despite a lot of the veterans saying that they fought so people could protest and they didn't need to move.....

Now we will see whether the Occupy protesters will get back into the site....that will be the true measure of what the poppy stands for.

Why I'm not a badass

2011-05-13T21:48:00.000-03:00

So occasionally, Himself and myself have conversations about whether I should be a badass or not.

It usually goes along the lines of:

ME: I did some enormous favour for someone today at work and they didn't even say thank you.

HIMSELF: Well, why did you do that?

ME: Hangs head... I dunno. I guess I thought it would be nice.

HIMSELF: Well why are you home moaning about it.

ME: Hangs head... I dunno. I guess I thought they would be nice.

This evening, we were having a major life-changing type conversation along the lines of 'if we're just going to be nice, then maybe we should not work for people and work for ourselves', which is kinda where we're heading right now due to being sick of working for deh man. I was getting a lecture about not taking any more shit from people. Himself was unloading the dishwasher when he was lecturing me, which meant it was serious, as usually he doesn't multi-task.

Then I noticed the dog was pawing at the spice cupboard and opened the door and found a mouse nest.

Then I realised that some of the spice bags were gnawed and empty:
- the pine nuts
- the almonds
- the filiberts
- the walnuts
- the brazil nuts
- etc.
- and the rosemary.

All gone.

Himself set a trap with some trail mix and dental floss.
I was very upset.
After dinner, we were sitting watching tv when suddenly

- SNA-AAP, CRASH.

I ran in.

It was a pregnant female.

I got it out of the trap and laid it gently on top of some straw in the strawberry patch.

I dunno. Maybe she'll live.

We stood on the deck for a moment, savouring the lack of rain.

I can't win at work, I said. I can't even kill a friggin' mouse.

We have to kill the mice, Himself said. We'll be inundated.

On an intellectual level, I know all this.

Tonight I apologised to my husband for being the biggest woos in the world. And he said it was okay.

So I guess it's okay.

I'll just go and check now, see if she made it.

It's Paddy, not Patty

2011-03-17T21:49:00.000-03:00

I hate St. Patrick's Day. I always have.

Please don't think because you have turned up to work in a green sweater that I will be happy for me.

I am happy for you.

I am homesick also.

I am also embarrassed that the most Irish of days is about drinking.

I am also annoyed that it's about him.

That guy who ruined a perfectly good matriarchy.

Still, I only ranted at one person today.

I guess after six of them (St Patrick's Day in Nova Scotia), I am mellowing slightly.

If you really care about me on Paddy's Day, just give me the friggin' day off.

'Night.

To Libya with love

2011-02-22T21:40:00.001-04:00

We see the carnage on Twitter. We want it to stop. As Western Europeans/ North Americans, we reach for the tools to do that. Call on Obama. Email the EU Commission. March on the embassy. Campaign to motivate NATO.

I am reading Amin Maalouf's "The Crusades through Arab Eyes". It is as gut-wrenching as the photos I am clicking through on Twitter. Disembowellment. Siege. Starvation.

The theme that Maalouf, ever the watchful eye for Arab dissension, returns to again and again, is the inability of the tribes to band together to fight off the Franj.

A thousand years later, and the Franj are still raping half a continent of all its resources, secure in the knowledge that the strong man in Arab politics rules by divide and conquer. And in between those two positions is where the money is made.

Coming from Ireland, I know what that does to a country's soul.

The crusades may have been about the 'holy place' for a simple man, a second son, tramping through the desert in the hot sun, but further up the food chain there was money to be made. As always.

So here's the thing.

Maybe we should do nothing except try to stop the modern day Crusaders - Blair and his cronies - from heading in to mop up the spoils. Maybe that's our job. Maybe our job is to encircle this nascent democracy and protect it from our own with all our might.

Maybe this is a fight that is a long time in coming. Maybe it has to be, like that time when you spent all night trying to prevent two friends from brawling in a bar and then realised, they really really really wanted to kick the shit out of each other. Because that is the only way they are ever going to sort out whatever it is that keeps them apart.

Bone crunching on bone. If it were us, it would be a Coen Brothers movie.

But it's not us.

It's real.

I don't know. I just know that I was on the winning side in 1096 and a thousand years later, as a woman, I am still not allowed be a minister in a catholic church. Or get divorced. I am still the ludicrous object of a million ridiculous poems and songs of a type of courtly love that could only be invented by ten thousand monks on the march across the middle east in a drought.

If Justin Bieber was alive in 1096, he would have been a Crusader.

We are at a strange point in our history when we are calling on a black man in a white house to sort out a fight that has been a thousand years in the making. If I was Obama, I would be making the point that both Libyans (and Egyptians, and Tunisians) and Europeans spent most of the last millennium making money off the trade in slaves of people just like him.

Why on earth should he step in?

Me, I would wonder where the Arab brothers are right now.

If February were a blog post...

2011-02-12T19:20:00.001-04:00

Almost half-way through February. It's starting to sag though, the positive attitude.

Frozen branch near Terminal Beach, 2011

February is very difficult in Canada. January, you have had Christmas vacation and a bit of a rest and you are just getting started with the real snow and the cold. There's a sense of settling in for a spell of it, the winter projects kick in, the NHL gets interesting, and when it's fit to go out, there's sledding, and skating, and ski-joring or ski-ing or whatever it is you do to stay one step away from catatonic.

Also, there's still February - April to get through, so you don't want to over-think anything.

The end of January is a bit of a milestone though! Cheers you right up for a minute.

And February is a short month. The positive attitude gets a surge. In the second week of February, the days stretch perceptibly at each end, so I am now driving to and from work in the dawn/ dusk, as opposed to the pitch black of January. I can see the ice and snow on the road. I feel less scared. The cold makes for some pretty spectacular dawns.

Easy, peasy...

So here's the thing.

Round about the tenth of the month, you remember that February is not a short month.

In fact it is not a month at all.

February is in fact the moment in time when the long-suffering son-in-law of the meanest, coldest-assed, tightest-fisted, mascara-dripping bitch who ever produced a spoilt blonde turns away from the nagging to stoke the fire, but instead picks up the poker and hefts it.

If February was a scene in a movie it would be the Tommy Lee Jones soliliquy at the end of no Country for Lost Men.

If February was a book, it would be written by Franz Kafka.

If February was a song, Joy Division would have recorded it.

February is when the light is so harsh that every line on your face, every grey hair on your head is screaming 'LOOK AT ME EVRYONE, LOOKAT MEEEE'.

February is when the Caribbean music on your iTunes makes you cry instead of dance.

February is when your body has had enough of minus 28 and just wants to sleep all day and eat all night. But you have to haul it to and from an office with forced air heating that makes your skin crawl.

I was on the phone with a federal colleague the other day, and I couldn't find my words in a week of not being able to find my words (not good in a week with an interview) and I said 'I'm sorry, i can't find my words, I have February Brain' and she said "THAT'S EXACTLY WhAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!!! I haVe it Too"

And that's the real problem. We all have it at the same time, so life is a little grumpy right now.

Thankfully the Canada Games are on now, so the kids are off school for two weeks. The disgustingly positive people have all gotten extra days off to volunteer. The disgustingly selfish people are taking advantage of cheap trips to the Caribbean.

And the rest of us....

Hopefully there will be enough people gone out of the office that we can all hide in our offices, watch people having revolutions in countries where you can actually stand on the street for more than five minutes at a time.... and ignore each other in peace for the rest of the month.

Nearly only five weeks to the Equinox.
Eight weeks to the fishing season!!

Stay warm everyone.

We don't want a cell tower near our beach - we are NOOBies

2011-01-25T23:25:00.006-04:00

Online petition - No Cell Towers Near Lawrencetown Beach

Rerun of Dear Dublin

2010-12-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

I found this on a blog I contributed to in July, 2009. Almost eighteen months ago!!

It is strange to me that it is still relevant.

Maybe the hiatus, the fear, can be lifted soon and we can all move on.

Dear Dublin,

My grey, brooding, dirty, old forever town. The country bus spewed me out one Sunday night and never found me again. Trinity’s grey walls encircled me. Enough books in Berkeley’s library, even for me.

Unlike him and old Ed Burke, we founded our enlightenment in the soft afternoon glow of a stained glass pub window. Talkin’ to an auld fella. About poetry. Or painting. Or maybe politics.

There was a lot of politics in Ireland back then.

Artists critiquing their rival’s work on the walls in Grogans. Writers bitching in the Fleet. Folk songs and revolution in the Cobblestone. Everyone piled in on top of each other in O’Donohues after a good funeral, roaring and shouting over creamy heads.

Come on now ladies and gentlemen! Drink up! Have ye no homes to go to!

One night, a crowd of new fellas appeared at the doorway of the snug where I was warming up in Doheny and Nesbitt’s, waving a wad around.

Enough talking lads, there’s money to be made…. let’s get to work.

We all peeled off, got ourselves one of them brand new, shiny, knowledge economy jobs.

The boys stopped shooting each other up north.

We ran riot on the Nasdaq.

Bono got bored with us and went global. Never mind, every band in the world came to play and we were all on the guest list.

Standing around in our Jimmy Choos all sexy and citified, texting each other the next instalment of our very own show – Celtic Tigers.

Starring a horde of red-freckled-beer-bellied, Armani-drenched Paddies, hoovering up Mediterranean resorts and coke in equal quantities; lining up in the drizzle to drink Russian vodka in a Manhattan martini bar served by a French sommelier with a Polish accent.

Or was it Ukrainian vodka in an Italian martini bar from a Latvian economist?

One time for sure, it was Mongolian vodka in a tapas bar served by Yale students over trying to make a buck.

That was a good episode.

After a while, I came to be a little tired of all the new talk. Of yak leather sofas and Southern Cape cellars and ‘will we helicopter to the races’ and ‘how many apartments in Portugal now, Mick?’

So I went looking for an auld fella.

I tried the Palace. I tried the Fleet. I even held my nose and stuck my head into stinky old Grogans.

Not an auld fella to be had anywhere.

Down on the quays trying to hail a cab, I found one asleep under a construction crane and shook him awake. It was cold and he didn’t want to talk about poetry. But for old time’s sake he asked me to buy him a drink.

Get an effin’ job, I ses to him, walking away with my nose buried in my Nokia.

Which is how I came to bump into the ghost of Paddy Kavanagh.

King of the Auld Fellas.

Queenie, he sighed, don’t you remember what I taught you?

To my shame I could not find the words, so the canal-bank trees whispered them to me.

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when the sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

My eyes started brimming. Paddy took pity on me. Which everyone would tell you was unusual for him, miserable aul’ fella that he was. Queenie, he said,

Your soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven

Next day I packed my bags and left you forever, Dublin. I flew out over the cranes and the trucks and the Disney Guinness and the apartment blocks, my heart bleeding down on them in a cold empty drizzle.

If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.

We forgot ourselves, didn’t we …

Time passes.

I hear the lads with the wads are missing. And the wads have disappeared. And everyone’s blaming somebody else.

I went home to see were you alright, my dirty old forever town. Together we breathed in the hops from the brewery and walked in the mizzle along the spine of the city: the Garden of Remembrance to the GPO, across the bridge past Trinity’s grey gate. Up Dame St. to Christchurch and beyond into the Liberties, where no one ever had a wad that was big enough to go missing.

I met an auld fella I knew.

Jaysus, Queenie, is it really you?

I heard you got eaten by a bear.

Not me, Brother Rabbit.

Not me.

Mothered by a warm breeze

2010-08-16T21:34:00.000-03:00

Tired and flat and hiccupy after an enervating week and too much emotion, I managed to force myself to put the cleaning rag down and sit out on the deck in the darkness for ten minutes.

I was rewarded by a warm breeze cooling me off, playing a soft melody on the pewter wind chimes. And crickets.

Thank you August.

I will not have a meltdown and spoil what's left of you.

Because you won't let me, will you.

On adding to the moisture of the greenhouse

2010-08-11T21:39:00.000-03:00

Would you believe I had crafted a 1700 word essay on this subject before the keyboard gods decided my fingers were too long yet again and I hit some random key and arbitrarily deleted the entire thing, including photos?

No, I figured you wouldn't.

But it's nearly true. The lie is I didn't craft, I just spilled, which is what I always do on the blog.

But it was 1700 words and it was pretty good I thought. I had even started reading it back and removing the rambling repitition.

But I guess it was probably maudlin, so the universe kicked it out for probably good reasons.

I fucking hate the universe right now.

Yes, it's all really funny till someone gets hurt

2010-08-05T22:00:00.000-03:00

Smart ass anti-baby comedy sketches inc.

So we were talking about it this evening, in that part of the evening when we stand in the kitchen after work drinking tea and telling each other what really just friggin' sucked about the day.

What really sucked about my day (and it was a sucky day) was that my friends got turned down for adoption after YEARS of filling out stupid forms and undergoing stupid tests.

None of us could believe it.

Himself couldn't believe it. And he doesn't even know them.

When you think of all the babies in the world that are hurtin' and starvin' and lonely and scared and your friends want to raise one, and there's some asshole somewhere says they can't.... that sucks, man.

YUP.

Me, I had spent an hour or so last night looking at footage of George Carlin and Bill Hicks on YouTube, including their 'why would you bring a child into the world' sketches (see the link under the picture), which always make me laugh because it's exactly how I feel about the whole children business. But last night, while I was watching the video I happened to think of those same friends and how determined they were to have a child despite all the hurdles. And I felt a little surge of happiness because finally it seemed they were on the back straight to their dream.

And then they get SHAFTED by some bureaucrat today.

This is a trip down the rabbit hole on so many levels.

On the first level, there is the macro argument. There are millions of children in the world who need love and parenting. There are people who want to parent. It should be possible to match them up.

Except it seems to be nigh on impossible, such are the levels of perfection that prospective adopters must reach. Not just in Ireland. I have friends here in Canada jumping through similar hoops. But at least you can be a bit eccentric and still have a chance.

In Ireland, you have to be perfect. Heterosexual. Married. Conformist. Boring.

Normal.

But that is necessary, they say, in order for children to be safe. We must make sure that the people in charge of them are not psychopathic or perverted or dangerous to the child in any way.

R.E.S.I.D.E.N.T.I.A.L. S.C.H.O.O.L.S.

....yes, old schtick... it's because of that that the rules are so strict now.

Hmm. Tell that to the Nigerian children who are accused of witchcraft and abandoned by their communities, usually on the authority of the caring US and Canadian Pentacostal missionaries working in those villages. I don't see the combined adoption personnel of the world working themselves up into a frenzy of tongues about that issue.

Yes I know hard cases make bad law. I don't friggin care.

But let's pull the lens in a bit.

Ireland's Health Service Executive. Responsible for adoption procedures and for looking after children in care.

Here's a snippet I found on the Internet:

The Health Service Executive now believes that approximately 200 children have died in state care in the last ten years. The figures are emerging as part of a nationwide probe and are ten times greater than the previously admitted number of deaths - the HSE had said that 23 children had died in care.... A senior figure in the HSE told The Sunday Business Post that it still did not know the precise number of children that had died while in care, but it was feared that the true tally could be in the order of 200. - Sunday Business Post, May 2010

Actually, the final audited figure was less than 200. But that's not the point.

There are two points of immediate relevance:

1. Children died in the care of the HSE, which proves they are not perfect.

2. The HSE did not know (until a month ago) how many children had died in its care in the last decade, which proves they are incompetent.

But that imperfection and incompetence doesn't stop them acting as judge and jury on honest, hard-working people who just want to have a kid and be a family. That doesn't stop them defining what it is to be a good parent.

Let's pull the lens in a bit more.

If you are lucky enough to have all the right bits in place and find a man who has all the right bits and bobs in place and functioning efficiently, you can lie back or sit up or whatever, and have a bit of fun and slap and tickle as they say and then, bob's your father's brother, if the day's right, baby magic happens.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, you can be a sociopathic liar, a thieving whore, a child-beating egomaniac. It doesn't matter. You can just pop one out whenever you want. Or pair up with someone who can pop one out for you.

If you are not lucky and try to adopt, you will fail.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, and you are a good person but you have struggles in life, say... a brief period of mental health instability ... you can stay home with baby and try to get better and get some limited support from the state. Then, if you fight real hard, you can get some help to go to school or get yourself back into the workforce.

If you are not lucky, forget about adopting. You are not normal enough to be a parent.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, and the father/ mother of said child runs away and leaves you and your child in the lurch financially, you can get the government to track him/ her down and make him/ her pay you for up to 22 years, at no cost to yourself.

If you are not lucky, and you did any of those things ever, you would not be allowed to adopt.

If you are lucky enough to have that gift of life, you can injure your child severely and more than once before anyone will even investigate. And even then, it would be a long time before your child was taken away from you.

If you are not lucky, you are prejudged on your disposition and ability 'to keep a child safe'.

Speaking of prejudged, let's pull the lens in a bit more.

If you are childless, you are prejudged automatically. Unconsciously. That little grimace when they ask you about your children.

Poor woman.

Can't.

Selfish bitch.

Won't.

One or the other.

You can tell by the grimace.

Either way, you are not really whole.

Not normal.

A cause for amusement or horror on the part of the ignorant of those who can just pop one out whenever.

Some of us can't and spend our lives mourning and trying.

Some of us won't and spend our lives just mourning.

Some of us won't and don't give a shit until the grimace happens.

None of it is fair. You're prejudged if you try and you're prejudged if you don't try.

This week I was amused and a little angry that the now pregnant ongoing carbuncle on my otherwise deliriously happy existence felt yet again that my childlessness was a stick which which I could be beaten relentlessly.

See, according to her, my childlessness is proof that I am a bad parent. That I must be kept away from her children at all costs. Lest I infect them with my selfishness.

The social worker's report on her 'incident' is sealed, so I can't prove that she is a bad parent. Nor am I interested in pursuing such malevolent thoughts. Life being too precious and her children too fond of her and all that.

But after today, I am not amused and very angry because the thought has struck me that her outburst is really just the sociopath's verbalisation of what all those child-bearing people think of us barren wans.

Really think of us, deep down inside, near their brimming with life wombs.

I can think of no other explanation that makes sense.

In the meantime, she can pop one out whenever she wants, without a licence or a psych. report.

And my friends can't.

So how do we fix this?

Do we prejudge everyone?

Or do we take a benchmark of real parents and apply those standards to prospective ones?

I don't know. Any argument on this will be battered with the child protection argument.

I just don't understand how an organization that doesn't even know how many kids died in its care can even begin to use that one.

Maybe we should start with the word compassion. In all its imperfections.

Compassion for bad parents.

Compassion for non-parents.

Compassion for would-be parents.

Compassion for parents that are a little different to us in whatever way.

Compassion for non-parents that are wildly different in every way.

Compassion for fantastic parents having a bad day.

Compassion for children who need parents.

The Lawrencetown worm massacre

2010-08-04T20:03:00.000-03:00

It rained all day today which was good because the garden needed it, but bad because I didn't have my brain in gear and so left my umbrella in the car. So did everyone else on the bus apparently, because when the rain burst onto the bus windows as we trundled over the bridge, everyone looked up from their book or paper and mouthed 'shit' simultaneously.

Then ran for cover when we had to get off a minute later.

But it's stopped now and my flip flops are drying out and so is the lawn.

Turdus Migratorius (American Robin)

From the window right now I can see eleven American Robins on the lawn. I think that's a record for our house. The poor worms that live beneath the grass are being massacred as I watch.

Hoppity hop hop hop - stop.
Head cocked.
Listen.
Pounce.

Another poor little worm gets hauled out of the clay by its neck, then pecked to death before the robin flies off to a tree to eat it.

I am waiting for one of the robins to encounter the two snakes that live on the front lawn. I wonder who would win that contest.

On Reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

2010-07-29T21:10:00.002-03:00

I have been reading Coetzee again.

Elizabeth Costello this time.

As usual, I have only the faintest idea what the novel is about.

It takes me a while with Coetzee usually.

In this case, he introduces the story, such as it is, with an attempt to distance the reader from the story a la the deconstructionist trends of the eighties and nineties. After doing that, he then presents a massive novel of ideas. Then he rips a massive shredding rent between the world of literary ideas (as represented by the novel) and the other world of philosophical ideas (as represented by rights) by depicting an elderly Australian novelist -- who achieved fame with her novel of the real 'Marion Bloom' -- midway through her swan song tour of the world. Dipping in and out of the lecture circuit, she insists on talking about vegetarianism and animal rights instead of literature.

She is accompanied by her increasingly bemused physicist son. (Coetzee is a mathematician by trade). Who presumably represents the poor reader.

Because it's Coetzee, it's all very readable and spellbinding, but it is also very annoying to be sitting on the Portland Hills 159 commuter bus at seven in the morning, not very awake, having your mind blown apart by a six page atom bomb of a treatise on how chicken farms are the new Holocaust, and wondering what in the jaysus name is this man trying to tell me right now.

I have decided that Coetzee is getting older (he was in his sixties when he wrote this) and thinking about whether or not there was any point in him having been a writer. I hope I am not wrong, because I will have wasted my time (and more importantly, his) otherwise.

Anyone with an opinion on this novel is invited to share it. Of course, I will have sent it back to the library at that point so it will probably be moot.

This is what the Telegraph (Andrew Marr) said about it:

"In the end, as his heroine confronts death, he has been able to raise the deepest questions through some fictional safeguards - without settling on answers, or defending all the arguments as his. But this is fine, because the attentive reader will have been badly jolted. It is why Coetzee is famous: Elizabeth Costello is no cheap shock. It is a serious one.

The New York Times says this:

Old age is for Coetzee what nausea was for Sartre: our defining condition, the necessary horror that grants us access to a moral existence....... Coetzee's unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put.

So I guess I am on the right track.

But that is just the purpose of his depiction of the writer Elizabeth Costello. As usual, his protagonist is someone past the height of their powers. However, the ideas she puts forward in a series of lectures are mostly about animals and man's relationship to them. And the suffering that ensues. Usually his books are about the suffering we inflict on one another (humans) through totalitarianism and ideology.

Coetzee is felt by some to be the African Kafka (in a third subsection of the whole compendium of ideas that are not ideas, he has a section in the book which rips the idea of an African writer to shreds, which almost broke my heart... with a final plea to please read Okri who is the only African writer... and throughout the book he gets Costello to talk about Kafka at length).

Is he trying to write the definitive treatise on himself?

At one point, Coetzee tries to put the two completely disparate themes of the novel together in a lecture by having Costello speak at an Ivy League college and tell them that if she can imagine herself dead, then she can imagine what it's like to be a bat. Or a chimp. Or a chicken. Or a beef steer.

Understanding our own mortality will guide us towards a deeper compassion for life in all its guises kind of thing.

I don't know. I haven't finished and because it is so fantastic, I will probably slow right down to make the most of his artistry and pleasure in tormenting us with ideas.

I also have the distinct sense that he is taking the piss out of Margaret Atwood the whole way through the novel, there's something about Costello that really reminds me of the worst of her....

Whatever. JM Coetzee is probably the greatest writer to have lived while I did. If you haven't read this book, you should, but you should read his earlier stuff first, so you understand where he is coming from. I particularly recommend:

The Life and Times of Michael K
The Master of Petersburg
Disgrace

in that order.

On collecting the manure dividend

2010-07-19T21:29:00.000-03:00

I harvested the first of the peas tonight. Which is the first of the vegetables. If you discount the spinach, which I planted in a crappy wet part of the garden to see how an 'above the ground' crop would do. And then really ignored, because even though I could see from the deck it wasn't doing so well, I don't like spinach enough to put the effort in.

I ignored it and ignored it, and then half-heartedly checked on it, and realised the tall ones were in fact dandelions, and then trudged over to the shed for the hoe (which was broken) and then didn't buy a new one, and, well, you get the picture...

So I have a lot of spinach gone to seed, which Bunny likes to nibble on when he's bored of dandelions.

And some peas.

I went out with a bowl, and even though I only had to go through one gate and not the two that led to our garden at home, suddenly I was nine again and it was Sunday after 10 o'clock Mass on a breezy summer day and I was picking peas for the Queen Mum to go with the roast beef dinner.

My fingers touched every pod and there was that old satisfaction when I found one that was bursting with goodness, straining against the pod.

Twist and pull. Just like Paddy showed me.

It was all I could do not to sit on the back door step and shell them immediatey, stuffing most of them in my mouth.

But Himself is working nights down on the waterfront this week, so I will leave them for him to enjoy when he gets home... seeing as he designed and built the special stands they are twined around.

There is nothing that man can't do with some 2 x 4 and a piece of netting.

If he decides he wants to, of course.

After a lot of work, and some sunshine and just enough rain our garden is starting to make progress. The potatoes and corn are very vigorous, so I am hopeful. The pumpkin patch had about a 10 per cent success rate, which is not too bad considering we were making it up as we went along.

We only need enough pumpkins for Hallowe'en anyways... I can't eat the stuff.

We are on our second round of cucumbers as Bunny likes them too.

And the tomatos are succeeding against all the odds. Just when they needed to be tended I took a huff with the garden and ignored it for about two weeks straight. Then got a rush of guilt and watered the bejaysus out of the little seedlings three nights in a row. It appears to have worked, we have about fifty sturdy plants now.

I can't wait until the greenhouse smells of tomatos... it is the best smell in the world. Better than cut grass even.

This year I managed to get a bit of formal gardening done as well. I put in a new small bed, and cleaned up the SEVEN beds we have found around the property.

Holy of holies, it's exhausting though. And back-breaking. I have been to the massage therapist so often this year he's been reading up on gardener's elbow. Basically what happened (I think) was that a woman who used to live here designed and planted all the beds. Then she split up with her husband and they sold the house. Before they left they mulched the beds.

Seven years passed and nobody disturbed them. Then along comes I, all vim and vigour last year and took out all the mulch.

Twenty six years of pent up weedlings saw their opportunity and SPRANG FORTH AND MULTIPLIED.

I am getting there.

It will be manageable in about five years, I reckon.

I've decided to plant lots of Asians so there will be no ground cover underneath. Hydrangeas, rhododendrons, wigelias, that kind of thing.

Starve the little bastards out, you might say.

A garden truly is a lifetime's work.

Himself is Home

2010-06-21T21:21:00.002-03:00

Himself is home. And not working nights, which is not home, as far as I`m concerned.

Let the normal times begin for the first time since February.

For a while at least!!

Hurrah.

Hoping for a white hot summer

2010-06-18T22:33:00.000-03:00

It’s after eight pm and it’s still thirty degrees. Even though it’s only June.

Everyone is hoping this will be one of those summers. We haven’t had one for a while.

The first summer I was here was one of those summers. Endless. Hot. A constant glare of white light pouring down from a cerulean sky; so white that it washed some of the green out of the landscape, but not too much.

There was a day in August that we spent at Bear Cove and the sun was so white it felt like a wide-as-the-sky laser that burned every bit of physical pain and mental regret in my body right out of it.

It was so bright that day that the sea was pure silver and the spruce trees on the shore were pure black. The stones on the beach were cool under my feet, but they seemed to be made of glass, reflecting the sky back on itself.

It was so bright that from about four feet in front of me, I could only see down a sort of tunnel of light.

The sun did all this to me all day without burning my skin. But it burned every unnecessary thought in my head right out of it for about three months.

And when the sun went down and I started feeling a little chilly, Himself and the other guys there built a bonfire that could be seen from Grand Manaan across the Bay of Fundy.

That day I decided that I needed to live in this place where the heat and light could actually transport me out of my body. And sitting at the fire could centre me again.

Every year since then I have looked forward to that day in August as a kind of mental resurrection, a sloughing off of all the crappy little physical and psychic nagging aches and pains picked up in the course of a year.

Bear Cove is a kind of pilgrimage. Of the type I used to do to Mount Brandon.

I start thinking about it at Easter, when I should be walking Mount Brandon.

Last year we didn’t really get one of those days.

We went to Bear Cove, but we didn’t spend the night there, and Himself was so tired he fell asleep on a rock at eight o’clock. But although I was disappointed at the time, it turned out that we didn’t really need it because we were getting married and that was the day that carried us through the winter this time.

But this year, it’s coming.

It has to. If I don’t have a Bear Cove day this summer, I will not be able to get through next winter.

I would like to bring everyone I know to this place on that day so that they can be psychically lasered too.

You can arrive at that place on that day with a lot of anguish in your heart and leave feeling lighter.

I don’t know if it’s because I have spent a lot of time this year on my own, and I am starting to imagine things, but I am starting to get a little floored by all the anguish I feel coming off people at the moment.

A little flattened. But denser. Not lighter, the way it should be.

We had to go to a funeral today. It was the remembrance ceremony for one of our wedding guests. She slipped away far too early.

The vicar spoke about anguish and about how sometimes people are better off letting go of the burden of it if it is too hard to bear. Being the person I am I sat there getting furious about a provincial healthcare system and a culture that allows people to carry that kind of load by themselves in the first place, and wondering why the family had to pick up a new load of anguish now that will be equally ignored by our society.

Maybe I am just imagining things. But from where I’m sitting I see people who are carrying unbearable loads of sadness, stress or grief, people who are sick and expected to embrace wires and tubes and machines and all kinds of technologies that they would otherwise ignore just to get better, people who seem to have fallen off my map completely, people who are just suffering quietly, apart from the odd comment on FaceBook, people who can’t stop gnawing at their pain no matter what I say.

All kinds of people.

Good people.

I wish we could all go to Bear Cove on the hottest day of August, and lie in the long damp grass there and let the clover tickle our noses, and feel the heat unknot our bodies, and the sun blind us to what we’ve left behind on the mainland. And then when we are all completely transparent and light as a feather, Himself and I would cook a million lobsters and everyone would sit up and eat them with the juices running down their fingers watching the sun go down over the bay and listening to the whales blowing in the cove.

Just as it got dark, we would work together to gather enough wood to light a fire big enough to speak to each of us of those things in our hearts that we only take out and examine once or twice a year. But because we would be all there together in a circle it would never get too quiet.

And at some point someone who had found their centre again would wander down the beach and haul back the whitened bones of a fallen spruce, and we would lever it onto the flames and watch the sparks rise to the moon, carrying all those unspoken words up to whatever the hell it is up there listening to us.

The moon is up and very bright already, although it is still very light out. It’s a half moon tonight. It feels very near, just above my head.

Cancerian, I know. No sense of where I end and you begin. Near my birthday too. Yes, I know I talk a lot of shite when the moon is near.

But if anguish has made a pass at you right about now, you should come with me this time.

And if you can’t, promise me you’ll find your own Bear Cove this summer.

If we get a good summer this year, it will be because we all need one.

It’s nine thirty now and it’s starting to get dark. The bottle of wine has been opened. The peepers are peeping. The birds are calling goodnight to each other. Someone is tooling around the lake in a motorboat, but quietly. The dog is asleep under my chair. My inmyday list is echoing out into the night, that song that reminds me that I am just a speck in the cosmos.

Time to enumerate my blessings once again.

I don’t let myself stop until it’s completely dark. That way I know how lucky I am.

Solstice post done much better by Jeanette Winterson

2010-06-12T22:29:00.002-03:00

She does it so much better than me. link is under the title.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/13/once-upon-a-life-jeanette-winterson

Formatting issues

2010-06-12T22:19:00.001-03:00

I can't get the new template to do paragraphs, goddamit.

Or can I.

Heading towards the solstice... then the darknesss

2010-06-12T22:11:00.002-03:00

It’shard to believe that we are almost at the equinox again. It’s almostnine o’clock and I am sitting outside (unlike the other equinox) and itis still bright. It won’t get dark for another hour and even then thelast of the light lingers lingers lingers, as if it knows that soon thedays will imperceptibly shorten again and it will fight the fightagainst the dark and lose.For me, the summer solstice is the saddest night of the year. Ridiculous I know, but I feel it so strongly, the momentary nature ofthe triumph of light over darkness, before the darkness begins toascend again.It also annoys me that the best time of the year lightwise is not thebest time of the year heatwise. Many nights you have to go indoors andsit looking at a beautiful evening that is too cold to be out in.Having said that, we have had a wonderful spring, and I have sat out onthe deck on many nights, listening to music, or just listening to thebirds settling down for the night; waiting for the peepers to start up,although they are fading out now as the heat dries up the muddy holeswhere they live.I am sitting here on my own of course. This spring has been unbearablysolitary. Himself had to go to New Brunswick for 'two weeks', I thinkit was late March or early April. Apart from a couple of weekends, heonly got back last night.We had to pretend I was threatening to divorce him to even get that tohappen. His employers don’t seem to think it’s unreasonable to makesomeone live in a hotel for nine weeks without any notice orconsultation. I think his bosses think I am the psycho from hell, I am always thereason why he can’t work unreasonable hours, or do the salting, orwhatever. Whatever works for himself I reckon. If I ever meet theseguys, I will be the psycho from hell, I am that fed up with theircavalier attitude to their workers. Anyways, despite the fact that he was finally allowed to come back toHalifax, he is now working night shift at the refinery for the nextwhile and he had to go to work at 6am this morning to do hisorientation and then back for 6pm to work a twelve hour shift. So eventhough he at least gets to sleep in his own bed and eat at his owntable for the foreseeable, I won’t be joining him as I will be at work.Sigh. At least the dog will be happy.I have spent most of the last few months just getting furiouser andfuriouser with the whole capitalist schtick. How did we let this happen to ourselves? I know how, I saw The Corporation, I am being rhetorical.How did we let such a stupid fucking system become so dominant? Why do so many people have to work so hard for so little and someothers just muddle along for a bit more, and yet others make anabsolute shite of the planet and all its systems and get paid more thananyone else put together?More importantly, how do you get off this bus?Of course, the beauty of it is that once you’re in it, you can’t getout. So that’s why we ‘let’ it happen. It’s pretty difficult to makeit unhappen when you’re groaning under the weight of a mortgage and acar payment and a couple of kids to put through school, etc.And you’re lucky if that’s all it is.Usually there’s a whole pile of other stuff to pay for too.Anyways, I am rehashing a truth we all have known to be true for a longtime. And currently, I'm furious for all the usual reasons, globalfinancial meltdown, government debt crisis, Gulf oil disaster, etc. But I am also furious because it is so pervasive now, this ‘to hellwith having a moral compass’ attitude that is rampant in capitalism,that it trickles down to the smallest cog in the smallest widget linkedto the smallest wheel. Hence Himself has to go to New Brunswick formonths on end whenever ‘they’ feel like it without a penny extra forthe turmoil, and I have to work on a rolling three month contractbecause public opinion wants smaller government.Also I am furious because the only way we have to moderate this ispolitics and politics is over.Politics is rubbish. It is moribund. It is about power and notgovernance. Politics is ruled by opinion rather than fact and thepeople who give the opinions that apparently are all that matter to thepoliticians (apart from sucking up to big business) are the same onesthat roll their eyes and say they’re never voting again...Here’s an idea, boys and girls...Stop doing telephone polls!Anyways, I guess I am grumpy because I never get to see my husband orif I do, we're both too grumpy to do anything. I have been an obedient, albeit reluctant, capitalist for almost fortyyears now. I am getting sick of being taken for granted.So are a lot of other people I think.Unfortunately, they are all joining the Tea Party.I think we should establish a Cabernet Sauvignon party.Much more relaxed and chilled out than tea.Maybe that will be my project for my forties.

Old Man Table

2010-05-28T22:16:00.002-03:00

I bought the coolest table today.

Well, the little card stuck to it, with the price on it, said it was a table, but it's more like a large potstand. About 3 foot high and 18 inches wide, the dark stained wooden top is balanced on the shoulders of a hunched up old African man, whose face peers out from underneath his load.

East African probably. The legs of the table/potstand are his arms and legs, and the base has his elegantly elongated feet and hands sitting on another circle of hardwood. There are a few cracks where the carving is coming away from the base, but I can live with that. I'm not a 'must be from one lop' purist.

It was sitting out on the street in front of the shop that is my consumer nirvana and which I walk past twice a day every day on the way from and to the bus stop.

Deliberately walk. There are alternative routes.

It wasn't there in the morning.

But I couldn't believe it was still there at 4.30pm on a payday in the middle of downtown.

He must have sold something earlier and put it out around three.

This store is the greatest kitsch shop in the world.

It is the John W. Doull (bookshop of which I write much) of kitsch and I am not going to tell you where it is because you either know what I am talking about and are my competition, or you don't know. In which case you aren't going to be my competition if I can help it.

The owner does a lot of estate sales and has an eye for African and Asian carving.
And seventies furniture.
And traditional Maritime fishing gear.

Which pretty much ticks all of the must have boxes for both me and Himself. And we like nothing better than a good hour long browse in there of a wet Saturday.

You can take your overpriced Agricola 'antique' strip and stick it. Yah!

Anyways, buddy, who's name I misremember deliberately, puts items on the street on sunny days. For to tempt you in. He's really good at it, and you have to swoop. Pronto.

But he torments you with a price list that's dated. So if you wait another three weeks the price will drop. If it's still there.

It's 'non-gambler with latent gambling DNA and a penchant for furniture' heroin. That's what it is.

On Tuesday, he had a fabulous seventies chrome and black leather armchair sitting outside at 9am.

I was on my way to one of those totally pointless civil service meetings that you only go to if you are too broke to buy coffee, or can't find any real work to do, so I couldn't stop.

Being in the need of some coffee.

But it preyed on my mind all morning.

I just fixed the car and I am broke schmoke.

He's good though. Real good. It was a great chair. A classic.

By lunchtime, I had figured out where I'd place it, how I'd pay for it, even how I'd get it home on the bus.

Stick it into the bike holder on the front.

I skipped buying a sandwich (in case it was really expensive) and hurried down, but it was already gone.

To my former hair stylist, apparently.

When I hauled the table in today to pay for it, he looked at me over his glasses and said 'what have YOU got today?'

Old Man Table, I said.

Mmmhhweh... he said.

We have an awkward relationship. We used to get on great, then he spent two hours trying to talk me into buying the most beautiful Burmese teak bookshelf that I have ever seen in my life.

That I still think about.

But it was the week we bought our house. And he wanted a thousand dollars for it. Which it was worth. Plus tax. Which means of course I didn't buy it because we were buying a house.

But I really tried hard to figure out how to buy it. And Himself told me if I wanted it I could buy it, which I love him for. And of course you repay that trust by not buying said object.

But I never really forgave Buddy for putting the yearn in me for it.

And he remembers those two wasted hours.

As we tried to furnish the house we got a few bits from him and made it up somewhat. In the meantime he sold the bookcase in March (just when I was getting back on my financial feet) ON TICK to some woman in a condo and faked innocence when I pointed out that I was not offered tick.

Then I got him on a bad day and sneaked two Zimbabwean stone sculptures off him for less than they were worth.

And told him of course. Because I CANNOT keep my mouth shut to save my life.

Which he didn't appreciate.

And it didn't work out for either of us in the end because now all the Zimbabwean stuff is way over-priced and he's lost his best buyer.

So the mwehh about the table could mean anything.

The fact that he couldn't be arsed finding a bag to put over it for me probably means it's a pile of crock.

But it's okay, I just like the table. And Himself will like it.

Because I didn't have a bag, and the table had sticky outy bits, I had to sit it on my lap on the bus.

A woman looked at it and said: 'I saw that table from across the street!'

Thirty five bucks, I said.

GODDAMN, she said.

We had a lovely chat all the way through Dartmouth about that store and furniture in general and how we love furniture because our mothers went to auctions and how cool it was that they could read the mysterious codes of silver and china marks, and how our gardens were doing and what's the best way to split a hydrangea and how difficult it is to grow snowdrops here and how difficult the soil is in Lawrencetown.

We bored everyone on the bus TO DEATH.

I could see eyes rolling in the heads of people who I have seen smile politely at the really annoying guy who stands in front of the bus door in January handing out the excuse for a newspaper we get for free nowadays.

And at some point I realised that even fifteen years ago I would not have been caught dead with my mother if she sat on a commuter bus somewhere with an African table on her lap discussing her hydrangeas with a stranger.

Not that that would have stopped her of course.

But now I understand how rewarding those activities are, I have a feeling I am going to really enjoy my forties.

More importantly, for sixteen months I have had a space beside the front door that needed something to put stuff on. Keys and mail and gloves.

Maybe a spider plant. Or a geranium.

And now the perfect object has found me.

I love when that happens.

A brief interlude of rain

2010-05-19T20:47:00.000-03:00

Tonight it is blowing hard from the north east (I think, Himself is not around to confirm this) and it is raining. Thank goodness.

Thank goodness?

Yes, we have not had any rain for a couple of weeks and my exciting new triple drum gutter rainwater siphoning system is bone dry. So if it hadn't rained tonight, I would have had to spend an hour hauling buckets over to the greenhouse to water the plants.

But it's raining.

So I have the night off.

Himself who is a hydraulics genius, constructed a simple yet ingenious (or genius) water collection and siphoning system using three old barrels we found in the yard, some recycled 2" x 4" (of course), a length of hose and a gutter.

I come home from work, I go to the greenhouse, I lift the hose up and turn a little knob, and hey presto, while the plants are being watered I can have a sit down and a little meditation on the day in the muggy warmth of the cozy framed building we put up last year.

Our first cycle of tomatoes are already up. I am hoping I didn't start everything too early.

Time will tell.

I haven't been blogging for a number of reasons.

Mostly, because my RSI is back and my arms are so sore after a day's work, I can't face the computer again.

But also, we had a beautiful early spring this year, so I have been out in the yard most of the time.

First of all, we had a fabulous March, so we started on our little woodstand. Cutting down the dead wood and clearing out the seedlings to let in some light.

Then we decided that the reason why the garden didn't do so well last year is because it's so shaded, so I started thinning out the tree stand behind the house. Mostly alders and baby spruce.

Then Himself ordered a one tonne truck of horse manure and disappeared off to New Brunswick for a month. Which meant that Queenie had to haul it into position in various spots around the yard.

I got it done just before he got home for a visit last weekend, and didn't he go and order another load!

Not much time for blogging.

Not much to talk about either, unless you want to hear about the difference in consistency between two year old and three year old horse shite.

Or the best way to uproot a baby spruce tree.

Like Socrates, I have retired to my garden.

For a spell.

Haiti brings out the pedant in everyone

2010-01-22T21:27:00.001-04:00

Haiti.

What to say.

I was listening to Stephen Lewis, father in law of Naomi Klein and kick-ass international humanitarian in his own right, talking on the radio today (as part of CBC's National Day for Haiti, which was mostly a rehash of the last week's conversations with some added Canadian rock stars telling us to contribute to the relief fund) and he said that yes of course, it is completely normal for us all to feel numb, overwhelmed, and devastated by the news coverage of the earthquake.

I was thinking, why would I feel any of those things?

My house didn't fall on my head.

I'm not from Haiti. I'm not trying to find out what happened to my family that I had to leave to come live in Montreal, to try and have a shot at a life.

My mother didn't die. My brother didn't have to dig his family out from under what's left of his house with his bare hands. My sister isn't lying under a sheet tent in a street with no food or water, waiting for an amputation when the MSF saws finally get through the 'bottleneck' at the airport. My dad isn't working a backhoe burying thousands of bodies in mass graves.

Obviously, I feel very sad for all the millions of Haitian people who are feeling numb, overwhelmed, and devastated by the earthquake. And supportive of all the brave kind people who are trying to help them.

But could we all get a little fucking real about this.

I spent the day shopping and getting my hair done.

Like millions of other western hemispherians.

Mostly today, I felt contented in a slightly sickening consumer-buzz kinda way.

Christ, I even put my dog in daycare.

To ease the guilt of leaving her on her own when I go out.

What makes me feel numb, devastated and overwhelmed at times is the fact that for the totally random reason of birth, I can do all of those things and for equally random reasons, billions of people round the world can't.

Ever.

Because if we all could do them, then there wouldn't be enough resources for it to happen. And me and all my privileged western hemispherian colleagues would not have such a nice time.

And so we have constructed a world in which we make sure they won't ever get off their knees enough to realise that we aren't so great after all.

I know Stephen Lewis knows these things.

A lot better than me.

So what in jaysus' name is he doing on the radio mouthing platitudes at us?

Because if he went on the radio and lectured us all on the unfairness of it all, we'd get mad and his foundation would lose funding.

It has struck me forcefully that the media coverage of Haiti is different to previous disasters.

For me, anyways.

When you think about it, go back to that Michael Buerk report from Ethiopia in 1984 that everyone my age remembers so well (because it resulted in Live Aid).

Bad stuff happened. You saw it on television. If you were in a house where there were newspapers, you read about it in detail. If those newspapers were broadsheets, you got some sense of why it was happening.

You got past the word HUNGER.

But mostly it was a narrative that hyped the unfortunateness of some poor people and the bountifulness of the rest of us.

Nowadays, it's a little more complex.

The news breaks on Twitter, it's reported on 24-7 rolling news, the videos are put up on YouTube, they're shared and dissected on Facebook and other sites, Google brings millions of opinions to your fingertips.

It's at the same time easier and more difficult to get past the word DISASTER.

Reading around the issue I am struck by how RIGHT everyone who is commenting feels they are.

The US ARMY ARE WRONG.

It's the Navy, was my impression.

The Aid Agencies ARE SURRENDER MONKEYS.

They`ve been outflanked by the speed of the military operations, was my impression.

The news media are DISASTER JUNKIES.

For a reason.

The Haitian government is CORRUPT.

Well, which G8 nation is propping it up.

Too many viewpoints for me to figure it out.

But the hum of the rest of us feeling good about throwing another couple of hundred onto the credit card bill is coming through loud and strong.

Thank Christ for that.... maybe it`ll help with the numbness.

Interestingly, a poll of Canadians found that 88% of them felt that the money they donated would NOT get to the people of Haiti.

But they are still leading the world in donations per head.

Tonight`s the big face off between the Canadian mega-fundraiser and the Yankee one. Which I have to go watch soon, because it is the thing to do in our house tonight.

I guess people are good, generally. But they cling to viewpoints for reasons of stability and that is not good, generally.

Hopefully the intersection of the two aspects of us will result in a new, better, Haiti at some point in the future.

Social media so far is not impressing me with its ability to clarify complex issues.

This week's Friday is Saturday

2010-01-22T19:23:00.004-04:00

I had the day off work today. It is a great scheme that the provincial government has. Basically, if you work an extra half hour every day, you get every third Friday off.

Talk about golden handcuffs. Very difficult to leave a place like that.

Even if being headhunted by a major corporation is a pleasure-suffused experience.

So I had today off and slept in till 9.30, which was not good because we had a date at the puppy resort.

I found one that had dates, not interviews. Which was also cheaper.

So threw some clothes on, put the coffee in the travel mug and off we went.

Dumped the dog off.

They said I could call and check up on her as often as I wanted to.

wow. I mean, I know I'm sad and all, but it would never occur to me to check up on her when she's in a place where someone else is being paid to put up with her.

Off I went to get my hair done.

Graham shrieked at my split ends.

I hadn't noticed I had any.

WHAT have you been doing to your hair? Have you been using a straightener?

Again, I was a bit bemused at all the fuss over nothing, but it was nice to have them oiled and rubbed and cut and shaped and then he put me under the dryer for a few minutes (because I have SO MUCH HAIR) and I nearly fell asleep such was the pleasantness of the hot air on my sore neck (from Pilates).

If I had a kid today would have been yummy muymmy day.

Graham and his partner are adopting two kids. One is 24 months and the other is 18 months.

I asked him was he insane.

No. He's just a really really nice person, I guess. He made me feel a bit selfish, what with not wanting to adopt any unwanted kids who will end up in care if I don't.

Ah well, selfish is as selfish does, I guess.

Then I went to the Home Depot and did the birthday shopping for Himself.

Power Tool section.

Of course.

I hadn't realised there was a power tool made that he didn't own, but apparently there was.

Then I went to the major store that I'm not supposed to shop in, but I do because it's cheap and I don't have a local electronics store to support (because they all closed down due to the intense competition from said mega-store!), and finally finally bought the external drive I promised Yandry the Cuban barman last November.

Now, just to get it there...

Also I bought a new phone, that is guaranteed not to cut out when the Internet is being surfed, like our current 24Ghz piece of crap.

And a new alarm clock, because I am tired of trying to sleep in a room that is bathed in eerie green glow all night.

And then I went to the bookshop I'm not supposed to shop in either, because it kills the smaller guy, and bought four books in the 80% off section...

Selfish selfish selfish...

I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do though - I got four books for the price of one. That's three weeks reading. I was down to Bill Clinton's My Life... yawn...

Then I went to an independent food store and bought lunch. To make up for all the other sins.

Then I went back to the puppy resort and picked up my girl.

The puppy resort technicians were in tears when we left.

My computer just posted my post while I was still typing... new keyboard... I keep doing stuff I don't mean to.

Anyways, either they are the best goddamn marketers I ever met, or the dog is one of those 'street angel, house devil' types.

Oooh, she's so gentle with the other dogs, and she's soooo pretty, and she's such a gooood girl...'

Whatever.

She's a pain in the ass most of the time.

Anyway, she's been asleep since we got back, so puppy resort is definitely ON!

Now I'll post until I think of something interesting to write about.

The thing I love about Friday being the Saturday, is that Saturday can be whatever you want it to be.

Sunday will just be Sunday.

Blogpost No. 650 - nearly five years of blah-di-blah!

2010-01-17T17:39:00.006-04:00

This posting is my 650th on the blog.

In two weeks, the blog will have lasted five years to date.

Percy's Depressed started on January 31, 2005.

In 2007, it changed to Chocolate Court, to mark the fact that we lived near Chocolate Lake in Halifax.

Just under a year ago, in honour of our new home, it changed again to Essays from East Lawrencetown. Which is a little clunky, and doesn't get as much drive-by traffic as something with chocolate in the title, but it's fine, and I'm not using this blog to market myself, I am using it to get rid of my writer's itch.

We bought our house a year ago tomorrow, by the way, I cannot believe we have owned it a year already. Here's a picture of the deer we share it with!

According to the site meter, which has had to be re-installed many times, I have had 16,500 visitors in the last 27 months. So that works out at about 16 - 20 a day I think, which puts me in the 'millions of other half-assed bloggers' list (below A-list, B-list, C-list, and up-and-coming list).

Personally, I am astounded that I am soon going to be able to say that I stuck at something (other than my education) for more than five years.

GO QUEENIE!!!!!!!!!!!

Bitter sweet Sundays

2010-01-17T17:16:00.004-04:00

Somebody mentioned on Facebook today that Sundays are so bitter sweet.

True.

I love waking up on a Sunday knowing I don't have to go to work. But round about 4.30pm on a Sunday, I always get a really sad feeling.

I think most people do.

Sundays are such a strange day. They've changed so much over the years (well, if you're a lapsed Catholic living in a country where religion is not part of the DNA they have).

When I was young, Sundays meant you had to go to Mass. Then you had roast beef dinner and listened to the radio. Which meant listening to people drone on about Northern Ireland.

Then you went for a walk. Sometimes we went for a walk with the Queen Parents. Which involved a long walk in Portumna forest park, or somewhere like that (long for a kid, obviously) and then you went to the hotel for a mineral (pop) and a bag of crisps (chips).

Sundays we didn't go walking with the parents, we went to visit Paddy. That also involved a walk. A very very very long walk. And then sometimes a secret trip to the lemonade shop.

Also known as Kellys pub.

But that's a different story.

Then when we got a little older, I went to boarding school. Sundays meant you were getting a visit or not. If you were getting a visit, Sundays were FANTASTIC, until about 4.30pm, when you were sitting in the grimy hotel in Dungarven, having a mineral and a bag of crisps, and you remembered you had to go back to boarding school for another four weeks of misery before you saw your parents again.

I think that's why I get so sad on Sundays.

The brother went to boarding school for six years, and on Sundays he got to come home, bolt his roast beef down, and see his friends, before making a loaf of sandwiches and buying a bag of Pot Noodles and heading back to prison for another week. Four-thirty was round about the time of day he would start on the Queen Mum, wondering whether he could just stay home this time, and not go back to school.

I don't know who was more upset...

As for me, I got to go to secondary school at home, and Mass had been scheduled for Saturdays as well now, so Sunday was a big long teenage lie-in, followed by roast beef of course, then sitting in the playroom watching MTV USA, hosted by FAB Vinnie. Three hours of music videos and desultory conversation with Eileen or whoever else was around.

Then back to school on Monday.

When I went to college, weekends were often spent at home. Get the bus down on a Friday night. Spend Saturday doing laundry or catching up with people. Out Saturday night.

Sundays were when you had to get the bus back to Dublin. If you hadn't cadged a lift with Willie Burns on Saturday night in the pub. Or you couldn't persuade mum to drive you to the train in Tullamore.

Long, wet, boring trips through the midlands (before the motorway was built) in a smokey bus. Then trying to get a bus home to wherever you lived. Culchies roaming the streets of the capital with bags full of lasagne dinners and bags of spuds. Trying to fit into a pub stuffed with bags of clean folded laundry sent with love from Cork and Galway and Portlaoise and Donegal.

If I stayed in Dublin for the weekend, Sundays were a long, boring day of trying to stay warm in whatever hovel I was living in; writing an essay or just trying to find enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes to have something to do.

It was only when I started working that Sundays became a little more interesting. Long brunches in Odessa or somewhere trendy, with all kinds of people popping in and out and enough money to buy the paper and read it with a latte or a pint.

Now we have every second Sunday. This is a second Sunday, which means Kitty and Little 'Un were here for two days of chaos and noise and loud telly and cooking and feeding and whatever activities are on the menu. Then around 4.30pm the doors slam for the last time and the car heads off back to Truro and the dog lies abject at the gate hoping against hope that they're not gone and I pace around the house for an hour trying to find things to do to make the bitter sweet feeling go away.

But it appears on the other Sundays too.

5.33pm. Suddenly, completely dark. Shannon won't come in from the gate. I will go find some nice raw meat to bribe her with.

Even puppies find Sundays bitter sweet...

At least we don't live somewhere where you have to sit quietly and read the bible all day.

Inmytunes 2009: a cornucopia of Canadiana, brought to you by Queenie (and Rich Terfry)

2010-01-06T20:04:00.007-04:00

Every year-end for the last few years, people who are members of the mailing list inmyday (of which I am a member, obviously) can put together a playlist of their favourite music of the preceeding year. Then share it with everyone else on the list.

Bingo!!

You start off the new year with a load of new music.

Of course, it being the inmyday Inmytunes compilation, there are rules, and of course it being Inmyday you are allowed to bend them. The original rule was that you had to make a compilation of the top 15 or so songs on your iTunes 'most played' list.

That turned out to be a little embarrassing if you had had a tough year emotionally.

So that quickly morphed into 'most played if I had a hyper-critical audience sitting with me at all times' list. Then as is normal on inmyday everyone just went off and did their own thing anyway.

By that I mean that I understand that sticking to the rules is some people's idea of doing their own thing.

Anyways, I have gotten to hear a lot of music that I would never have heard otherwise, seeing as I don't spend a lot of time buying music or reading about it anymore.

This year I was totally screwed. I think I bought two albums all year. And I gave them away before I ripped them. But I was saved by Buck 65.

Buck, or Rich Terfry as he was named by his mammy and daddy, who live near Enfield which is near here of course, DJs the Drive show on CBC radio 2. The show is for me and people like me.

People who don't like advertising.

People who like to listen to Rich shite on about baseball while they sit in traffic.

People who like the feel of the show, which feels like Rich is bringing in his own records to play for you.

People who want to know what's going on in the Canadian music scene, but who don't have the energy to go to gigs anymore because they don't start till ten pm, which is bedtime chez nous.

So, I cheated on the Inmytunes this year. Basically, anytime Rich and I agreed that a certain tune was a great tune, I made a note of it on a piece of paper I had stuck in the sun vizor (difficult on the highway trips). When I heard him spin it a few more times and we were still agreed that it was a TRULY GREAT tune, I put a circle round it.

Tonight I sat down and bought everything with a circle round it on iTunes.

Note to music promoters.... Rich Terfry moves downloads ... ohmylord he does... every song I bought was a massive spike of downloads, way ahead of everything else on the album.

So thanks, Rich. I really enjoyed this year's compiling.

If you're interested, on the Euro front, he plays Wilco and David Gray and the Waterboys to DEATH. And he's very excited about some woman singer from Dublin right now, whose name keeps escaping me, because he talks really fast when he's excited. But you should send him records. Because he sure sells them if he likes them.

I'm just going to take a moment to flip the playlist back to front. I had started with the electronica-type stuff and then got progressively folkier, but it's not working for me so I'm flipping it round.

Which is incidentally the order in which I downloaded them... I should've been a dj.

Inmytunes 2009

1. The Deep Dark Woods, All the Money I had is Gone (Winter Hours).

This is a very simple little song from a great folk band from Saskatoon. I thought it was pertinent for the year that was in it.

Rich and I dedicate it to all the capitalists out there who are hurtin'...

CBC Radio 2 had the strangest competition this year. The Great Canadian Song Quest. They got people to vote for 13 places (one in each province/ territory) and 13 bands (the same), who then had to write about said place in their province. DDW won the vote in Saskatchewan and wrote a song about Charlie's Bar, which sounds a bit like a Canadian Whelans and is being torn down.

Generally, the songs are a bit meh.... except for Quebec, which was won by...

2. Martha Wainwright, Four Black Sheep in the Snow (CBC Radio 2 Great Canadian Song Quest)

I think Martha missed the memo from Rich that said 'these songs are meant to be cheery for to cheer up Canadians who have lost all their money'. Anyways, I thought PFI would like to hear it, as Martha is 'known to us'.

Isn't it funny the way the guards say that about people. The Mounties don't say that. They just say 'he had a criminal record, that's probably why he got shot'. The guards say 'we don't know why he was shot, but he was 'known to us''.

Weird song. From a weird songstress.

3. David Myles, When it comes my turn (Things have Changed)

I think I am heading into my middle agedness, judging by the first three songs on the list. Or, maybe me and Rich are just feeling a little old arsey this year, what with getting to be married and all.

Not to each other of course.

I hate baseball.

I was about a month ahead of him I think.

Anyway, David is from New Brunswick I think, and he is just back from recording his new album on the SAME CONSOLE in some famous studio in Arizona as was used when Radiohead were there and recorded The Bends.

Which is my least favourite Radiohead album.

I'm shocked an album that miserable was made in the sunshine...

4. The Wooden Sky, The Late King Henry (If I don't come home you'll know I'm gone)

I just like the name of this song. And the tempo is kinda rollicking, maybe nice for kiddies.

Note to parents: Not only did I not put the song I really liked with the swear words on the playlist this year, I put on this song the kiddies might like.

Learning I am...

5. The Duhks, Mighty Storm (Fast Paced World)

I love the Duhks (ducks), who are from Winnipeg, Manitoba and so know a thing or two about weather. This is dedicated to all the Irish weather you`ve been having lately.

Bless.

6. Kathleen Edwards, Sure as Shit (Asking for Flowers)

This was our wedding song. So it goes on the list.

7. Bahamas, Southern Drawl (Pink Strat)

Man of mystery. Very difficult to find out anything about this guy. Apparently he's on tour with Amy Millan, so maybe he will turn up here some night and I won't go. Nice song though. Very smart.

Speaking of...

8. Amy Millan, Baby I (Honey from the Tombs)

Amy, the queen of Canadian pop. The homecoming queen for the nerdy boys. She pops up again later with The Stills. As she says herself: 'together, my own songs and these covers create a bed where the lonely can rest for a little bit, where little hopes, little deaths, and big loves are flammable but fallow'

Amy's fab. We are big fans, me and Rich. He nearly passes out when he talks to her.

9. Jenn Grant, Dreamer (Orchestra for the Moon)

Jenn has a voice like hot chocolate. Which is apt, because this song mentions her having a date at Chocolate Lake, where Queenie and Himself used to live (and dream), so it had to be included.

10. Cuff the Duke, Long Road (Sidelines of the City)

Okay, last of the alt: country, Canadiana type songs.

Onto more inmyday-ish type music.

11. The New Pornographers, My Rights versus Yours (Challengers)

According to the blog metatag, The New Pornographers are AC Newman and a group of ridiculously talented people uniquely equipped to realize his musical ambitions. You may know their album, Mass Romantic. It was considered the best indie album in Canada until Arcade Fire released Neon Bible. This song is from another album called Challengers. Either of them are worth a listen if you dont know these guys.

12. Metric, Sick Muse (Fantasies)

Emily Haines and James Shaw, the singer and guitarist in Metric also play with Broken Social Scene. Emily is one of those effortlessly cool blonde rockstars that make me feel completely inadequate, but despite that, I love this song.

13. Stars, This Charming Man (Nightsongs)

A lush retake of a Smiths classic, by the people who also bring you Broken Social Scene.

14. Stars, Your ex-Lover is dead (Set yourself on fire)

When there`s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

`Xactly.

Plus there are cellos. I do like a bit of cello in my eloquent, Montreal-based pop music. Even if they did support Coldplay recently.

... ah, the almighty dollar does strange things to us all. But these are the best lyrics on the compilation:

I`m not sorry I met you.
I`m not sorry it`s over.
I`m not sorry there`s nothing to say.

15. Holy Fuck, Lovely Allen (LP)

From the boys who are known as the Toronto evil super group, who brought you the Cowboy Cat t-shirt. Anyone who wants to buy me one is very welcome to do so!!!

Reminds me of God is an Astronaut a bit.

Anyways, folks, that`s it for another year. Hope you like them.

The Noughties: the decade of stress and destress. Destress!

2010-01-03T10:02:00.003-04:00

This was written last night during a power outage.

We got a weather bomb this evening, much to my amazement. It snuck up on me, whatever about other people. Yesterday the TV people talked about some snow and I thought, ah well, another evening on my own while my beloved ploughs shopping malls so people can buy crap even when it's snowing and they should be home where it's warm.

But when I got up this morning the weather network had a storm surge warning, a winter storm warning and an extreme wind warning. Despite all the warnings, I pottered about all day as usual until Himself's cousin mentioned something about candles, etc on FaceBook.

Shit.

Candles.

Even more importantly, etc.

Himself had already gone to work, so I rummaged around in the barn until I found the stove and the gas canisters and the camp kettle. I got the flashlight and tied everything down on the deck and the power went at 6.45pm, just as I was settling down to a night's mindless electronics-based entertainment.

Three long lingering flickers and she's gone for the night.

It's gone everywhere, so we'll have to take our place in the queue for service resumption.

It came back on at 3.15am, which was not so bad.

So instead of the opening of Season 4 of Dexter, I am sitting with a glass of Baileys (the ice is melting in the fridge so I have to use it up!), surrounded by the soft glow of candles. The furnace is out, but I have blankets and I heated water on the camp stove for a hot water bottle.

The dog is sleeping next to the back door, tired and sulky because I wouldn't let her run around the yard enjoying the 100 kph wind gusts.

I suppose that just about sums up the second half of the decade for me. I spent the first half of the decade feeling sorry for myself. The second half I spent accumulating the wherewithal to sit in the dark and cold with no company except for a crazy dog, and limited access to electronics, feeling thankful for the opportunity to do so.

Of course, I accept that this evening could not happen without battery power. I have a torch for when I need to walk around the house.

The northeast wind is HOWLING round the house.

I hope a tree doesn't fall on me.

So where was I with the decade... oh yes, I decided to move to Canada. To this day I don't know why. I get asked all the time by people who grew up here and think Europe is the bees knickers.

I just say it was a whim.

Sounds better than an inexplicable urge to get the hell out of the strait-jacket of a life I had put myself in.

Anyways, I don't know why I did it. Some days I'm glad I did, some days I'm not, and most days I don't think about it too much anymore.

The weird thing is how it all turned out. I came to Canada and something made me go to Nova Scotia, even though I'd planned on going to Alberta, and then something else made me go to a little island off its south west coast, even though there was no reason to go there apart from seeing a whale, and then I met Himself.

Destiny?

A series of bizarre coincidences?

Who knows.

And we decided to build a life together against pretty immeasurable obstacles at the time. But we have overcome every one of them.

So I guess the second half of the decade was also all about taking the stubbornness that I had honed in the first half, and putting it to good use.

Now I have everything I dreamed of having on those depressing Sundays so long ago. The soulmate. The home. The copse of trees. The ferns and the mushrooms and orchids hidden in its dank depths. The dog waiting for me every evening.

The deck with the bbq and the wind chimes I always dreamed about. The sound of the shore every day, every night. The dilapidated, monster camping 4X4. The canoe on its roof. The camping gear in the back. The special places we take off to by the lake, by the sea, in the forest. The friends we go camping with. The photos. The summer tan.

Not so much the mosquito bites on my legs.

The vegetable garden. The greenhouse. The flowergarden. The humming birds that visit in the summer.

The seasons. The colours of my maple trees in the Canadian Fall. The job (until March anyways). The trips home and away. The country of Canada to explore and love. The bookshelves. The books on them. The laptop. The global connection to everyone everywhere that I need to stay in touch with.

Peace. Peace and quiet. No sirens. No noisy neighbours. No fighting or yelling or loud television sets. Silence.

Yesirreebob, if you want silence, come to the Great White North.

What I don't have is a decent hair cut, highlights, lowlights, any kind of decent dye job, manicures, acceptable tights, a single suit or acceptable item of power wardrobing (although I have quite the collection of spark-burned fleeces).

Interestingly, I still manage the killer shoes... I wonder how that happens... but I have nothing to wear them with except denims!

I don't spend evenings in restaurants or at gigs or even in pubs, I can't spend more than $14 on a bottle of wine, or buy books when they are first published. I can't go to hotels for the weekend, and I'll probably never get to go shopping in Montreal or New York or Dublin again.

I miss every single one of those luxuries more than I will ever admit to my beloved. I still sniffle over the absence of Anthropologie clothes in my life. And I still lie awake at night worrying about stupid things. Because that's what I do.

I still try to talk myself into a funk every now and again, because that's what I also do, but it's hard to find the energy to be depressed when you have an animal who needs to be walked along glorious clifftops every sunset.

February of course, is another beast entirely, but everyone in Canada has the blaghs in February so it's okay to be morose.

The wind has dropped out completely now in the hour it took to write this. The moon is out and shining in the window. The Hunter is sparkling to the south east of the moon.

If the power was on I wouldn't have had the curtains open and I wouldn't see it.

I guess I should bring the dog out for a run.

One thing that interests me is where I got this dream from (Observer magazine? My childhood reading?) and whether all this positive thinking stuff is true - did I imagine it into existence as Mr. Chopra would have me believe?

Or is it just the culmination of a series of random choices I made this decade?

Who knows?

I wonder what I'll have done in ten years time?

As usual, I have no plan whatsoever, apart from a faint urge to move to the beach in South America (which I share with the rest of this huge country)!

Happy New Year everyone. Happy New Decade! Just think, in ten years, all those kids will be teenagers!!

The noughties: the decade of stress and destress. Stress!

2010-01-02T10:12:00.006-04:00

I have been reading my friends' summations of their experiences in the last decade with interest. It's probably a factor of our age (thirties heading into forties), but really, the noughties seem to have been littered with stressful (not always bad, but still stressful) personal events and major investments which did or didn't work out.

Oh and careers.

Lots of career magic thrown in there to keep us on our toes.

No different for me.

I've been trying to think what I did in the last decade.

Good opportunity to sit down and think about it, what with the ice pellets flinging themselves against the front windows, the dog having her post-walk, mid-morning nap, and Himself upstairs asleep after working all night again...

The major event of the decade for me was moving to Canada in June 2005, roughly halfway through the decade. Consequently the first half is a bit of a blur in my memory.

The first couple of years were spent mostly trying to flog the dead horse of a relationship I was in. In my twenties and early thirties, I liked nothing better than to flog dead horses. Out-dated left-wing politics, selfish men, pointless arguments over a bottle of wine ... that kind of thing.

I remember sitting in the park in Ballsbridge having lunch with Accent Monkey explaining the latest series of 'death by a thousand cuts' that was going on, and she wasn't saying much, but I started getting this very strong vibe that manifested itself as a voice in my head saying 'would you just fucking leave him so we can all get on with things'.

I'm not saying the vibe was coming from Accent Monkey, but the voice in my head had a strong Dublin accent.

So I did, readers.

Took a while. A long while. Very painful. Very very painful. Thankfully I took a notion one day in 2001, and bought an apartment in a dingy part of town, so although I wasn't living the glamorous life of a Celtic tiger cub, I wasn't homeless. But for the first time in years all the animals had paired off two by two, and I was solo, bunking down the back of the ark. The loneliness was a physical beast that prowled around me. I didn't sleep for months. I thought I was going to go mad from the tiredness.

My parents and my girlfriends and their partners hauled me through it.

That and India. I went to India on a truck trip towards the end of 2002 (I think). It opened a crack of longing for something in my mind that ended up with me leaving Ireland. I went to find myself, but instead I found a place at the other side of the world that has such hope and despair and joy and sorrow and materialism and spirituality all wrapped up in each other... coiled round and round each other like snakes in the temple of Haripad ... presided over by a pantheon of gods and goddesses that encapsulate all that is good and bad in all of us and in the world.

A place where healing and politics and sexuality are all written about in the same texts ... where they lay fibre optic cables using families that live in the trenches to do the work ... where filth and rubbish and all kinds of human squalor wash up against sublime architecture ... where animals are worshipped and lepers ignored.

A place where all of the world's major religions jostle for position in ways that are ugly sometimes but where the overwhelming sense of culture is that there is a reason for all of this chaos... there is an energy in the world that we are all part of.

There is no either or in India. There is what there is and it is all connected.

I also decided in India that I didn't like cities.

Back in Dublin city I limped along for a while, but my heart stopped being in it sometime in 2003. I had moved to a new job and I was working very hard and enjoying the stretch in my brain and my energy, but the by-product of that job - hanging around the social partnership clique - was not good for either my soul or my liver.

Social partnership is a good idea, but it needs work. You cannot 'help' run a country without any accountability. The representatives of workers and employers and farmers and the like, sitting round the table were accountable to their members but not to a higher outcome (e.g. social cohesion, prosperity, competitiveness, etc). That meant that they looked after their members' interests (of course), and so hobbled the hard choices that might have led to us having a chance now.

As for the government ... I won't talk about that here.

By 2004, I was earning enough to get out of dodge, but not enough to buy a house of course (that was for lawyers and couples only), so I traded up to a classier version of the apartment I was living in.

It was interesting that throughout all those years of banks flinging, throwing, shovelling seven, eight times their income at people, offering 100% mortgages over 45 years, with a line of credit to pay the taxes and the moving costs on top of that ... I was never allowed to borrow more than 3.5 times my income, and never allowed more than a 90% mortgage ... despite the fact that I was earning good money working for the government and had no debt to speak of ... other single women I know encountered the same discrimination.

... Although I was annoyed at the time ... it does appear we were saved by our unemployed girlie bits in the end ...

After the excitement of the move and the decorating wore off, I took a long, long, look at my (admittedly) very nice apartment and realised that 467 square feet was all I was going to be able to afford by myself.

And slowly fell into the worst funk of my life.

The city was getting pretty chaotic. It was easier to walk an hour to work than to take the bus or drive, but a two hour walk on top of a nine hour day was pretty tiring.

I took to going to the supermarket at 9pm on a Wednesday night, so I could get a parking space. Getting petrol took an hour. Going to yoga took an hour. Everything took an hour.

Life consisted of work, shopping to cheer myself up about work, going out or entertaining, then lying in bed all day Sunday feeling sorry for myself and agonizing about how soulless my life was.

I took a few weeks off and went to Venezuela for another truck trip. I was hoping for another India (great driver, great people on the truck, great country). We had some nice people, but the truck was partly populated by the four rudest people Britain has ever produced in millennia of producing arrogant jingoist arseholes...

I still had a good time. Again, Venezuela got me thinking about the pointlessness of a job tinkering at the edges of the reality of the economy. Apart from it paying the mortgage.

Then one day I had a stupid argument over nothing but a status issues, with somebody in work. Went for a walk to clear my head. Picked up the paper and saw an ad for visas to Canada.

The light went on in my head.

Canadians don't have egos big as the Rockies, sure they don't!! They have trappers and lumberjacks and people who have calluses on their palms!!

I'll go there!!

A day of two halves

2009-12-30T17:32:00.005-04:00

First half:

Woke up at 4am in the freezing cold because Himself had to go to work early.
Sort of went back to sleep.

Woke up at 6am in the slightly less freezing cold to the realisation that, yes, I do have to go to work today even though it's minus 25 and that means the car won't start for ages because the battery is on its last legs.

Walked the dog at 6.25am in the FREEZING windchill.

Got in the car and tried to start it.

Third attempt worked!! Hooray. Tried to open the window so I could heat the car for a minute while getting the dog's day organized.

If you leave the ignition running without the window open, the car locks itself.

Yes, I know I should separate the key and the locking mechanism. That would mean I would lose one of them.

The window was frozen shut, so I shut the car engine off, ran around in the FREEZING windchill for five minutes (which is a long time in FREEZING) and then got back into the FREEZING car.

Got to work and remembered I forgot to plug in the slow cooker.

NO GODDAMN DINNER SO!

Got off work early to get home before dark.

Bus broke down.

Waited eleven minutes (did I mention it was FREEZING) for another bus.

Fuel gauge on the car was on empty.

Filled the car at the Esso on top of Cole Harbour hill.

Stopped at the store to get groceries.

Finally got home.

Dog hadn't frozen.

Phew.

I think.

Walked the dog again in the FREEZING. At least I could see.

The diarrhea. Which I had to scoop up. Which meant taking my gloves off.

She's been in the potato chips again, judging by the look of it.

Got to the mailbox.

Two packages from Ireland. Hooray!!

Second half.

Slow cooker is on Fast.

Tayto crisps are unpacked.

Bottle of wine is in order.

I don't have to go outside anymore today.

Oh, and Reeling in the Years, the Nineties.

When I see my ex on the screen, should I point him out to my husband....?

I guess the memories are in my head anyways.

2009-12-29T20:25:00.004-04:00

I just hate when i break my stuff.

I don't have many things, and they are all very precious, because they are all steeped in memories.

But I guess the memories are in my head anyways...

So I just broke the beautiful dusky purple and blue, square pottery plate I hauled all the way from the Dingle peninsula back to Dublin in 1996, and then to Birr in 2005, and then to Canada in 2007 in a suitcase (worrying about it the whole way across the Atlantic).

The one I had Himself build me a tall tall bookshelf with a special shelf to display it on in 2008. Because it is so precious to me.

The one made by the potter who had studied glazing techniques in Japan and is now living in the shadow of Mount Brandon.

Not Louis Mulcahy. Not his pottery factory.

The one with the glaze on it that looks like Mount Brandon.

The one I looked at every day.

Reason?

I was rearranging my books and picking out ones to sell so I can buy some more, because I am already running out of things to read, despite getting four books for Christmas.

And I took one too many off that shelf they were sharing with my plate, and the rest slid down and knocked it off its stand.

I knew I shouldn't be selling my books.

GODDAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ah well, it could be worse.

It is the only thing left of Kerry that I had but.

I guess I will just have to make a pilgrimage back there.

Of course, I can't find the potter....

The weekend before Christmas is really the Christmas

2009-12-20T19:45:00.003-04:00

Big snowfall tonight.

Maybe two thirds the way up the ruler.

Standard ruler... 30 cm jobbie. Like in school.

OK. Mathematics starting.

Mathematics in the sense of one of Mr. Hensey's classes (fifth year honours) ... I am hanging out with my friends talking about the weekend, but I am also supposed to be doing maths.

The driveway is 100 metres long and four metres wide.

A little wider at either end.

The snow shovel is 45 cm wide.

I think.

Why am I writing a math post? This is not good.

Side to side. From lawn to woodland.

Over and back.

Over and back.

Pick up the spill.

Then over and back.

By my calculations (which are usually wrong and need John Brown to fix), that's 222 shovel swipes across the driveway.

Over and back.

And then scooping up spill.

Say, another 150.

That's 372 shovel swipes.

I'm pretty sure it was more than that.

Put the shovel into the snow with the blade aligned to the edge of what's left, and push along the line to the far side. Turn on your heel, and clean up the spill on the way back.

Then put the shovel back down against the clean line of the snow.

Scraaaape.

In early November snows it's mostly rain with some ice in it, so when you shovel it's like pushing water up a hill.

Heavy and wet and no fun at all.

After January, it's all ice pellets and misery. The shovel stops up on the ice and pushes into your sternum and it's hard and miserable to move it.

After I finished doing it seven times last year I found out all the men on my road used to watch me shovel ice off the driveway, and wonder at how Himself got himself such a hardcore woman...

But there's a couple of weeks in December when it's light and fluffy and perfect if it snows.

And shovelling is a meditation.

That was tonight.

I think about a lot of stuff when I shovel the driveway in December.

I feel so lucky that I get to do it. I need to think about a lot of stuff.

Today I was thinking about Ireland, because I was very lucky this Sunday; people from Ireland were all home suffering from pre-Christmas hangovers, so they were vulnerable and I got to talk to a few of them for quite the chat.

Well, I have to admit that during the section of the driveway from the road to the garbage box (about 20 side to sides), I thought about how difficult it is to build and maintain a mature and loving relationship with stepchildren who are the powerless pawns in a ridiculous battle of control freakery being waged by their mother against their father and me.

But I think about that a lot and if I write about it she uses it in court proceedings, so we'll just move on, shall we.

From the garbage box to the rhododendron bush, which is not very far, the rhododendron bush being near the garbage box for a reason, I thought about Ireland.

The lights on Grafton St.

Winking against the wet paving.

The weekend that was.

What a weekend that must have been. Everyone finally had time to go out and chew down on a few things.

I'm sorry I missed that weekend.

I would like to fly home for that weekend and then leave before Christmas. Would that be so awful?

How well everyone is doing!

Everyone I love has survived.

The recession. The revelations. The floods. The everything.

For my New Year's wish, I would like everyone I know in Ireland to be in charge of Ireland now.

It's the fact that you're not that's making your teeth ache boys and girls.

The demography is on your side, guys...

I was halfway up the section from the rhodo bush to the back of the car (the long, difficult, middle section), when I had to put the shovel down and go get the dog.

Neighbours again, not approving of the dog being allowed to wander about in what is ostensibly a wilderness backyard area...

She's half wolf for fuck's sake... what do you think she's going to do in the snow.

I got feedback on the blog tonight and was told the dog bits were boring, which I knew, but dog bits = life right now, so maybe up the ante in the life is a priority for soon.

After Christmas, as Himself would say.

Anyways, got the dog, got back in the rhythm, over and back, over and back, pick up the spills, over and back, when I noticed it was blowing snow, like it said in the warning.

Your late thirties and early forties are all about 'blowing snow' aren't they.

You shovel and shovel and shovel.

And then you get up the next morning and all the snow is drifted up against the car again.

There you go, metaphor for next year.

I'm going to post this without a resolution because I am drunk and blind (dog ate my glasses)..

I will amend if something comes to me.

Oh yeah.... make Christmas about the kids for once eh?!

December temperatures going up and down like the proverbial's knickers

2009-12-16T19:37:00.004-04:00

Plus 5. Then minus 6. Then plus 2 and sleet. Then minus 12 with the windchill. Then plus 6 and rain. Then back down to minus 6 with no precipitation this time.

Suede coat and shiny boots. Then winter parka and snow boots. Then raincoat and wellies. Then back to the suede coat. With a shawl wrapped round it.

This morning I walked the dog in the suede coat and shiny boots and about 5 minutes out the heavens opened (I didn't notice it was cloudy because it was pitch-black dark) and poured on me, and then I had no time to change and had to drive to work in wet suede and damp patent boots, which didn't dry out properly at work because I am in the office of crazy air, so they froze (with my feet in them, and they are very pointy) when the temperature dropped to minus 15 this evening and I couldn't get the car to heat up before I actually arrived home in it.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

So now I am sitting at the computer (in a heated house) wearing my polar socks and my polar fleece with a hot water bottle pressed up against my internal organs, and I AM STILL COLD.

I wish it was March 31st, I said to Himself.

I wish it was May 31st, Himself said back.

'Xactly.

And it's to be colder tomorrow, apparently.

And the work Christmas do is on.

Although it being the Canadian work do, I can wear my polar fleece and snow boots if I want, and it will be all over by 6.30pm anyways. None of your Irish wear a nice dress and stay out late rubbish over here in the North Pole.

It could be worse. I could have said yes when Himself wanted to move to Alberta and I could be dealing with minus 40.

Yes, that is a feasible temperature for human existence.

No, I don't know how they do it.

So I guess I should just suck it up.

I'm all in a heap because it's coming up to Christmas and I should be in Ireland and I'm not nor will I be and I'm very sad and I keep trying to push it out of my head and it keeps pushing its way back in.

Persistently. Like Shannon when she knows the reason you want her on the deck is because there's steak on the grill.

And of course Christmas in the 'new' house is not very exciting when it's just two people and no presents to open.

We bought a new water system instead. I guess I'll just tie a ribbon round a glass and hydrate all day.

Still, I shouldn't moan. We had lots of excitement and fun with the wedding and our trip to Cuba.

It's just that was THEN.

And this is NOW.

And Himself just came back from the postbox with a key that means there's a parcel (although I think it's presents for someone else) in the parcel box but he didn't know what it was so now someone has to go back down there.

IN THE COLD!!!!!!

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Maybe I'll feel better at the weekend. When it gets closer to Christmas.

The eye of the storm is quiet... maybe too quiet.

2009-12-13T18:35:00.004-04:00

Sunday evening. Six thirty. Fed. Tidy kitchen. Very tidy house for reasons that are not good.

If this was the spring or summer I would be outside pottering around, but it's the winter so it's dark and cold and I am stuck inside with four hours to kill before I can go to bed with the only book in the house I haven't read which is a Patrick White, which is of course depressing the hell out of me. Which only a Patrick White novel can do.

Did he have a terrible mother?

All his novels (well not so much The Tree of Man, which is great) are about beastly women who struggle against the boredom of 1950s Sydney/ some beautiful-sounding outback station. Their children hate them. Their husbands are gauche hillbillies who get most of the sympathy.

And they take forever to die.

The current one is The Eye of the Storm. I'm not complaining about the writing, mind. it's beautiful...

... I just don't understand his obsession with the subject matter.

I'm reading an online essay about him now... apparently I am looking at the book through the wrong end of the analytical telescope... it's about Elizabeth Hunter reconciling living and dying and trying to find that 'eye of the storm', inner peace and a touch of the divine.

I had decided that the eye of the storm was the peace her family had at the beginning of the end... as in when you get to the eye of the storm, even though there is the rest of the storm to get through, it's usually not as bad as the first bit...

No wonder I didn't get a first in college!

As well as not being able to 'see', I cannot see right now, because Shannon ate my glasses the other morning.

Despite having searched the house (and tidied it on the way and having found lots of things I thought I had lost forever, including a 'congratulations on your engagement' card I should have mailed in September) I cannot find my old glasses so I am blind for the foreseeable.

I have to wait till January to get a new pair on the health insurance... major pain in the ass.

Why on earth would a dog eat a pair of glasses?

We have managed to spend another weekend without setting foot in a mall, which is one of the things I try to do coming up to Christmas, and we got our new water system installed, the dog spayed, and quite a few odds and ends done, so we are feeling pretty good about things.

And my online campaign against the crapness of the company that we bought Little 'Un's present from seems to have worked because they emailed us today and said they were express shipping it to us in time for Christmas.

So thanks to them for that.

While I was outside trying to find chores to do to get some of the sunshine into me, Himself spent some of the afternoon looking at land online.

The reason he did this (I think) is because when we checked MLS the other day to see the sale price of the house next door (which is for sale again), we noticed that an acre of swampy land down the road by the lake was for sale (for $180,000, FFS!). Then we noticed that a beautiful swathe of land by the seashore, that we walk on regularly is for sale (for $600,000 FFS!!) and that got us thinking and talking about how ludicrous the price of land is around here.

So today, Himself started looking at land in other parts of the province, and found 100 acres in Victoria County, Cape Breton, for $29,000.

Remote woodland now, not Cabot Trail picturesque.

But still.

Good price.

I hope he doesn't want it for Christmas!

I'm kinda broke right now.

But he reckons this will be the land for the compound.

Those of you who know us know about the compound.

The compound started out as a game, round about the time I read Cormac MacCarthy's The Road, which scared the bejaysus out of me.

The compound was an ongoing project we discussed while having a beer in the yard in the summer. The compound is where we'll go when the world starts to go pear-shaped.

We'd need some land. Build an off-grid housing complex. Invite some friends to come along if things ever got tough for them/ they could get there.

Some of our Irish friends got to thinking about solar-powered sailing ships... to get to the compound (although they'd probably end up sailing around a lot).

It got popular, so we decided that everyone had to have a skill.

People got really into this... we had beekeepers, librarians, flax-spinners, (hunters, gatherers, gardeners, cooks, etc).

What would we put there?

Fuel, food, weapons (yes dear).

You can while away a number of hours quite pleasantly talking about the compound.

In the summer.

When everything's good in the world.

When the winter comes, Himself gets bored and starts scouting for land.

At least this year, it's Cape Breton.

Last year, it was Northern New Brunswick.

Anyways, applications for residency at the compound if the times get too bad can be submitted to us on the back of a renewable energy source diagrammatic.

Just mail it to Eagle.

We're looking for engineers.

Specifically electrical engineers.

And, yes, I'm still in charge.

Somebody has to be and it was my idea.

That's why.

Apart from issues regarding perimeter security, of course.

And so the winter begins... a long, long drawn-out effort to not get too bored in the evening and end up gnawing my own arm off for something to do.

I need a hobby.

Any suggestions?

Nothing too expensive, I'm really broke right now.

And knitting I think is beyond me.

And nothing chewable of course.

For obvious reasons.

Maybe if I think about Cuba, I won't be so cold

2009-12-09T21:11:00.002-04:00

Tonight is the first big storm of the winter and the wind is very strong - it's knocked the Yule wreath off the door twice now - so I am praying the power doesn't go out, because we haven't gotten round to installing a generator yet.

We take a long time to get round to things in our house.

We are getting round to installing a new water softener/ filter system on Friday. This is very exciting, because we don't have 'city water', we have a well. Unfortunately the geology of our area means we have a lot of manganese in the water. This means reddish stains on the bath, toilets, washbasins, dishwashers, etc., plus non-potable water. Which means when guests come and try to get a glass of water you have to shout NOOOOOOOOOOO and explain.

On Saturday, we will have a brand new filter system and a drinking water filter installed under the sink with its own tap.

I am very excited. I have been dehydrated for months, and I can't get the shampoo out of my hair.

Saturday, I will have firm, plump skin and shiny hair.

HOOOOORAAAYYY!!!

I just have to go check the dog is still alive... she won't come inside... she loves sitting out on the deck face towards the prevailing blizzard...

The dog is back inside now for a bit, eating her squeaky toy.

For somethin' to do, as Himself would say.

I just had to stop typing and run around the house twenty times with the squeaky toy pretending to kill the dog with it.... when does this bit end...?

Yes, anyways, storm, blizzard, potential for no heat, light, water, alone in the house of course...

... think of Cuba, Queenie.

Cuba was great.

The air smelled of vanilla.

As opposed to petroleum.

The people were lovely.

Whether or not you gave them convertibles.

But as is the nature of humans, they were particularly lovely if you gave them convertibles.

I never did an all-inclusive before.

Here's the thing.

THEY ARE FANTASTIC. Unless you have deh guilt.

about food, liquor, lying round getting waited on hand and foot.

and deh guilt goes away after a bit.

We got up in the morning and wandered over to the buffet for breakfast.

I felt like a hobbit.

First breakfast.

Then second breakfast.

Then coffee at the bar, a nice cafe con leche made just right.

Then wander down to the beach.

Maybe take a trip out to the reef on a hobie cat.

Around eleven Roberto would walk down from the beach bar and ask me did I want a mojito.

I did wake up every morning promising myself I would go to yoga rather than have a mojito.

But Roberto just looked so sad if I didn't want one.

Lunch.

A three course affair just off the beach.

Back to the beach/ book.

Or maybe a little wander over to archery at three o'clock.

Around 4.30 the sun started to go down behind the hills and we would head back to our room for a beer on the patio.

Then dinner at one of the seven restaurants they had.

Then drinkies at the bar with some nice people we met.

Columbo spent a few days with us, despite the best efforts of Air France.

Two weeks of that.

Plus one or two little excursions outside the bubble.

I know I should talk about the interesting things I saw, but for me the interesting stuff was the all-inclusive. The rest was standard Carribean island stuff.

We have been wondering if we would ever do it again.

It is very seductive.

I'm sure my carbon footprint was enormous.

It's just, I love my food, and it was soooo good, and I didn't have to put any effort into it at all.

And I love my wine and cocktails, and again, I didn't have to think about it at all.

Maybe in a couple of years.

My arm is killing me now from my flu shot so I have to stop typing. Also I am getting a mini-flu I think.

Maybe more when I am feeling better.

Winter arrives unexpectedly... weatherwise in Nova Scotia and financially in Ireland

2009-12-09T21:03:00.003-04:00

So there I was the other day, talking to the Queen Dad on the phone, rhapsodising about the benign long term forecast for Nova Scotia for December....

... and here I am tonight, sitting listening to the blizzard wailing outside the house, wondering what the hell happened to our balmy Fall.

Nova Scotia weather. Bah.

Stingier than a Fianna Fail recessionary government.

First off. A big shout out to all my Irish public sector friends who got royally shafted in today's budget. I reckon if I was still working there, I would have taken a hit in my pay of almost EU9,000 per annum.

That is a sum not to be sneezed at.

There are arguments for and against how it all happened and whose fault it was which I am not going to get into (because I'm not qualified to speak on it), but I guess partnership is reaping the whirlwind it sowed when benchmarking took a second bite at the revenues.

Still.

It's not nice to be an essential service provider and get yourself kicked in the nuts because a shower of selfish greedy bankers and property developers (who have plenty stashed in an offshore account for just this eventuality) messed everything up for everyone.

If I were a nurse or a guard now, I'd be keeping a keen eye out for those boyos entering my sphere of influence.

I would.

The Wire comes to Lawrencetown

2009-11-29T19:18:00.003-04:00

This is an old photo of Shannon, she's about twice as big now, but this is pretty much what she's doing this evening. Very unusual.

Himself and I are racked with guilt.

We installed the InGround Petwire today.

Apparently, now that I know, what you do is, you buy the pack, you read the instructions, you install the wire, you hook it up to its electrical charger, you place the collar on your pet, you read the instructions again, then you take two weeks to train your pet.

We are a household that does not read instructions.

Why would we?

Most things that come in a box can be stripped down and put back together in thirty seconds flat by one member of the household and the other can't wait long enough to read an instruction manual because she wants to GET STARTED RIGHT NOW!!

Anyways, our neighbours had installed one for their dog and it was working really well for Simon, so we drove into Crappy Tire today and handed in all our C Tire money ($27 in 5c notes) and brought the device home and got to work.

We had discussed the best layout for Shannon. We laid out the wire in a nice big square that included lawn (to dig holes in), garden (to dig muddy holes in), bushes (to hide, lie, poop, hunt, stalk birds in), trees (to check for squirrels in), the deck (to view the world from) and under the deck, etc etc, then we hooked it all up and set the perimeter warning and laid out the marker flags and checked the perimeter about six times and thought it was okay.

Shannon was crying and whining on the deck because we were walking around the yard without her so we popped the collar on and walked her round the flags a couple of times.

According to the manual, which I have since read, you are supposed to walk your dog around the flags for 4 days before you put the collar on.

Ooops!

It went well for a while. Every now and again, as she veered past a flag she'd get a little Beeep beep beep.....

This means she is in the 'danger zone' and has a few seconds to get out before she is zapped.

It was all going really well.

I think she's getting it, dude, I said, let's see what happens.

I took her leash off.

She gave us a long look and then crouched and sailed over the wire and down the road.

While Himself got the car to go look for her, I consulted with the neighbours.

Put the collar on tighter, she's so furry it probably isn't affecting her.

And turn the charger up a bit, she's so furry it probably isn't affecting her.

Okay.

I'd just like to point out that in no way do I feel the neighbours are in any way responsible for what happened next.

Caught the dog. Took the collar off. Walked her through the zone. Put the collar back on really tight.

Turned up the perimeter setting.

Himself checked the collar against his hand and said, that's a bit of a jolt.

Walked her round the flags again.

I could hear the beeper going but she didn't seem to be getting any shocks so we kept wandering round and round (like we were supposed to apparently, according to the recently-memorized manual).

I noticed at one point that Shannon's fur was undulating. Ever so slightly.

Was it the wind?

Somehow I didn't think so, but she was acting fine. And we were pulling her away from the flags if the beeper went off for more than a few seconds.

She's one tough dog, of course.

We decided that if she walked very close to the wire we would let her have one shock, just to show her what it was like.

Sort of fast-forward training.

She walked over to the wire and kind of jumped and then walked back.

Poor puppy...

We decided to finish that round of the flags, and that would be it for today.

I'm standing by a flag waving her squeaky ball at her.

C'mon Shannon, good puppy, come over here....

Our poor dog kind of sighs, then jumps into a juniper bush, buries her head in the middle of it, and cries.

Sobs her little heart out.

Jesus, we are the worst puppy parents on the planet.

Later, much later, collar off and hopefully forgotten about, and Himself tries to take Shannon out for a pee.

She refuses to leave the deck. Legs planted. Immoveable.

Anyhow, a pig's ear and some chicken fillet pieces later she's still playing me like a violin, but at least she's sitting up eating her squeaky ball now.

Tomorrow we are doing it by the book.

Numb-assedness requires short post

2009-11-03T20:51:00.002-04:00

I did promise myself at least three posts while Himself was away. I reckoned without the lure of True Blood Series 2, which I couldn't possibly watch while he's here.

It's not The Wire, or Dexter or Hung, so why would I watch it?

Why indeed, dear, certainly not because of Eric the Vampire.

At all, at all.

However, I managed two, and tonight I have a numb ass because I got a gignormous injection in my right buttock this afternoon and the pain has made everything between my hip bone and my knee numb.

So sitting down is a challenge.

Which of course was good for Shannon, who is currently lying on the wet deck in the moonlight absolutely POOPED.

Due to all the FUN ACTIVITIES we had because Queenie needed to stretch her legs.

And Series 2 is over.

So despite that, this will have to be short, and then I will get back to Bored to Death, which showing on HBO Canada at the moment and is fun in a silly way, not least because Ted Danson plays an old lech in it.

A Mr. Big for Real Women who like to have fun. Not silly women like Carrie. Who wouldn't know fun if it bit them in the numb buttock.

Also, I now want to go to Brooklyn on my holidays.

Anyways, I have been home alone for a week now, Himself having gone to NB to work. And there's no point in posting about work, even if I would, so it'll have to be a post about the dog.

I know, I'm sorry.

Although, I must say I find her endlessly interesting.

Things I find interesting and amusing about my dog

1. We have a game called the saucepan game, where I chase her round the house banging a saucepan lid against the bottom of the saucepan. We have an open plan-ish type place, with no doors downstairs, so it's round and round and round the stairwell through three room until one of us collapses. (tonight I win, for a change)

Although there is a lot of ridiculous running around, the real object of the game is for one of us to sneak up on the other one and FRIGHTEN THE BEJAYSUS OUT OF HER! The interesting thing is that she's so good at it, I actually enjoy the game. There's lots of sidling up along the sitting room wall without breathing and trying to figure out where the other player is. Or hiding in the washroom. Or nipping up the stairs and jumping down at just the right moment. Or changing direction without making a sound (which she's really good at).

Tonight she hid under the dining room table and it took me five minutes to find her. Totally silent.

The other interesting thing is that for such a rough game, she has never broken anything, despite her route through the sitting room being under the coffee table and under the tv table.

2. Tonight she opened the coat closet, which has a round knob, tugged down my smelly old blue camping sleeveless jacket which she just loves because she spent so much time wrapped in it as a puppy, spread it on the ground, put all her bedtime toys on it and scratched the kitchen door until I went in and took a photo of it (see above).

Unfortunately, I will never be able to guilt trip her into putting all the stuff away.

3. She sniffs exactly the same bushes/ plants/ rocks/ bins/ trees every night on our poop walk.

How does she remember?

How do I know this?

4. Although she makes a good show when I get home at night, I know that she will be as excited to see the oilman when he delivers oil tomorrow. She's remarkably self-contained for a being that's dependent on me for pretty much everything. I am never quite sure if she gives a shit about me. Those eyes of hers are freaky too. Bizarrely, the blue one is the softer, more expressive of the two, and the brown one is the one that you can't see jack in.

When she needs fun, it's all 'me me me, talk to me, no get off the phone, me me me', but when I need some canine company it's 'so long sucker.... gotta go kill millers on the deck'.

5. I have never seen a dog spend so long chasing moths around a deck. The bluejays come and pick at her food all day every day and she just ignores them. But come nightfall, there isn't a miller safe on this property.

6. She hasn't peed in the house since Himself went away. Which proves my theory that it was his way of dealing with it that was the problem.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... I win this dog argument.... Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Of course he will say that his way dealt with the problem JUST BEFORE he left, and I am merely reaping the benefits.

In reality, now that she has my undivided, her routine is rock solid and probably she can relax and not worry about it. So we're both ini the wrong.

7. I was playing God Speed You Black Emperor very loudly tonight and she stretched up onto the countertop and turned the volume down on the stereo.

Coincidence?

Surely!!

I won't have a dog that doesn't like GSYBE.

8. She has figured out that if she doesn't poop on the post-dinner poop stroll, she gets another one later.

Go figure.

9. She has figured out exactly the distance between us that she needs to maintain when she's off-leash. Any more and I get anxious and start trying to trick her back onto her leash. Any less and I can catch her and put her on her leash.

We have an uneasy truce right now. Trying to get her off the highway was a nightmare, but she hasn't run out there since. Ideally, I would like her to be one of those dogs who trots ahead a little, but will come back.

We have 'trot ahead a little' down pat.

Babysteps.

10. She has wormed her way so completely into my heart now that when I think of vacation all I can think of is her in some awful kennel having a miserable time.

Which is horseshit of course because she's going to puppy heaven.

Never mind, Himself will be home on Thursday and the house dynamic will be back to normal.

If there's one drop of pee..... he's cleaning it.

All Soul's Day - getting set to live in the dark

2009-11-01T21:15:00.003-04:00

Today was such a beautiful day it was difficult to believe it was 1st November.

Positively balmy here on the Eastern Shore.

I got bitten by a mosquito.

The last time I got bitten by a mosquito in November, I was in Venezuela.

But of course the year has turned slightly and it got dark at 5.25pm so it is November.

Shannon and I went down to Lawrencetown beach to watch the sunset. Our sunset walks will be curtailed for a few months now, as I won't be home in time to walk her in the daylight, so I was happy our last one for a while was a beauty.

The surf was pounding the shore and about a dozen surfers were out bobbing on their boards like seals on driftwood.

Although there are generally at least two people out in the water when I am on the beach, I rarely see anyone actually stand up and surf in. They just bob around on their boards. Nova Scotian surfing I suppose! Not too much effort, just hanging out in the cold water for kicks.

The sun went down over Halifax Harbour and the nearly full moon rose simultaneously so we had half a sky of rose pink and slate blue clouds, and half a sky of luminous light filtered through the gauzy cloud the moon was veiled in.

Shannon picked around and sniffed stones (in the absence of trees) and I walked the shore and thought about my grandmothers and Jim and Eileen and Paddy Egan and Geraldine and Himself's Uncle Glen and all the other wonderful people I know who have passed over to the other side of the hallowed gate and wished them peace wherever they are.

Then we came home and I went downstairs to find something for supper and when I came back Shannon had an enormous block of Gouda (left on the worktop) in her mouth and a guilty look on her face.

Pulling expensive food off the worktop is the new chewing.

Anyways, we had a little row and she got put out on her line and sulked for a bit and so did I but we eventually made up and went for a moonlight gander around the neighbourhood.

It's too bright to let her out by herself when the moon is full. One of my well-meaning neighbours always spots her and brings her home.

Now it's about nine and cloudless: so bright out you can pick out individual trees in our wood.

The temperature has dropped substantially. I harvested the last of the garden today, probably in good time. I got a fair-sized bucket of onions - Spanish, red and 'normal' - and the last of the tomatoes and cabbage.

We had a middling garden this year, mostly because it was our first year and so the earth was not well composted or fertilized. I bagged four big sacks of leaves today for spring compost, and as soon as it gets cold enough I will start a proper compost bin.

We had plenty of radishes (of course), tomatoes and zucchini, and our corn was pretty good and our squash. Everything else was a little late, so our leeks and beets were small and our cucumbers never even tried.

Himself being an Aquarian loves beginnings. He loves getting the earth ready and planting. Tomatoes mostly, but he'll plant anything if you get him interested in the idea.

Then apart from watering, which is a manly chore that gets him out of cooking supper, that's it for him.

Unfortunately, that's not it. But fortunately, I don't mind weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, harvesting and finally pulling and cleaning up. Usually it's up to me to remember to do it, and he is pretty good at helping.

If he can't think of anything to begin instead.

I got him and Littl'Un to help me clean up the main garden a couple of weeks ago, but I have been on the road a lot recently due to work commitments so when I went in the greenhouse today it was the first time in over a month.

It was a tomato plant mausoleum. Tall, rotting tomatoes groaned under the weight of their fruit and leaned against each other in an orgy of decay.

It took over an hour to clean out.

GRRRR.

I think I need to hire a garden help who's a Capricorn. They're good at detail. Or another Cancerian... even better... the plants are their children.

Anyway, we have successfully completed one cycle. Hopefully it will be the first (and worst) of many. I am kind of annoyed (in a bizarre gardner way) that I am going away because the next three weeks present the cleaning up and readying for winter tasks that I like the best in the garden (it's cool, there aren't many bugs, you can't really mess it up). Hopefully we'll have a really mild November and I can get some work done when I get back.

When to do it though...

... why do they put the clocks back anyway? I hate gardening in the dark. I hate walking the dog in the dark. I hate cooking supper and not being able to watch the sun set. I hate wanting to go to bed at 8.30pm because it's been dark for so long.

GRRR.

Lucky I have a fortnight to prepare myself for what's coming.

So yeah, the wedding ...

2009-10-30T20:38:00.008-03:00

... it was a good wedding.

Apart from the incident with the hair stylist.

And the fact that it rained.

Which didn't do a whole pile for my hair either.

We got up at 5.45am and got our shit together and Himself went to get Dukie our Yugoslavian friend and pig roaster, and I tore the house apart and put it back together again so it would accommodate forty people.

My nearly husband and I bumped into each other again about 8.45am as I was going to the hairdressers with the Queen Mother and Tina my MOH and he was drilling holes in the timber frame we had built to cover the pig roast because the forecast was for rain and it had already started and he needed to get the tarp. up.

So he was wet at that stage. But I was still in bride mode and had a jacket on.

Status to date: no food.

At the beauty salon, the door of which I will never darken again in my life even though it is the nearest Aveda spa to me (Pure Energy, Cole Harbour, if you're interested), I got my nails done by a girl who talked about her immigrant boyfriend who couldn't get a visa and what did I think.

Well, I thought it was my wedding day so could we talk about that please, but I didn't say it of course because I am Canadian now, so I did the spiel. Yadda yadda do this don't do that call your MP don't call too often I think you missed a finger there love....

Then I got my hair done.

I should've gotten Gabriel to do my hair. But I just couldn't afford to. Either the time or the money. So I went the cheap/ fast route.

Stupid wench that I am.

Anyways two hours later, Tina my MOH's hair had been immaculately curled and then put in a ballerina bun, the QM had had a blow dry she could've done herself, and I looked like EmmyLou on a bad day in 1976.

Finally we got out of the place and got back in the car (in the rain) and I undid my hair.

I cannot begin to describe how FUCKED OFF I was. I'm a girl who likes a good hairdo.

Suffice it to say that I described the incident in work a few days later, and when I mimed the bit where I tore my hair out of the ridiculous clip she had it in, I actually tore a handful of my hair out.

I could have spent two hours in bed. I could have spent the money on starving children in Africa.

That kind of pissed off.

Status. Still no food and no coffee for two hours.

Back at the house, it was pouring, just pouring, and the pig was being turned on the spit by the first of a number of volunteers who are the real heroes of our wedding day. But it was looking a little pale for 11.20am.

I mentioned the paleness.

Ready at 5.

Supposed to be ready at 3.

Hyperventilation ensued.

The MOH gave me the second of many lectures on how it was my day and I wasn't to worry.

It's not my day. It's never the bride's day. It's everyone else's day. When are we going to just say it like it is.

Did I mention the pig was turned by hand?

The squeaking sounded like a mediaeval instrument of torture.

It was relentless. For six hours. Christ, I could've spent the hairdressing money on an automatic spit!

Although, in hindsight, I really like the fact that the entire day had a sound track reminiscent of a 60s B-movie about Torquemanda.

I bumped into my nearly husband again. He was soaked to the skin.

Have you eaten? no. Eat. I haven't got time. EAT!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I got back into organizational mode I realised the liquor was in the shed and had to be moved to the house and the pig needed all the men in the house to focus on it (of course), so Kathlene who is my guardian angel forever and I moved the booze and that was the absolute end of my hair.

Time to eat. I did. Not Himself.

Then upstairs to dress.

I was wearing a backless dress.

Could I find the expensive boob things I bought to give me a bit of a lift?

CIF!

Could I find the pashmina I spent a fortune on because it matched the underlying gold in the dress so perfectly?

CIF!

It's 1.30, the house is full of people, thirty minutes before I plighted my troth to my beloved forever I'm wandering around upstairs in my knickers looking for my lifters and someone to iron my dress.

The QM was downstairs being the hostess.

The MOH was downstairs writing the best man's speech.

Kathlene was on the phone to her fiancee trying to organize a lift for Dukie's wife who was home baking bread for the wedding party.

It's not about the bride, it's about everyone else.

I screeched for help!

My beloved happened along, soaked to the skin and still fasting from the night before, trying to find somewhere to have a shower and change, grasped the seriousness of the situation and proceeded to try to iron my dress for me.

With his eyes closed so he couldn't see it.

This is why I married him, readers.

A few minutes later, Kathlene and the QM made it upstairs and did it properly.

My mother looked so beautiful it made me want to cry.

She popped the dress over my head and I slapped on a bit of make-up and I was ready to go.

Fay, one of the servers the PFW hired to save me from a meltdown came up with a glass of wine and made me neck it.

The Queen Dad came upstairs and gave me a hug that said goodbye and good luck and all that stuff, and that was it.

I cried, readers.

I cried in the bedroom.

I cried going downstairs.

I cried during the opening ceremony.

I cried when Swampy read his piece. And added in his own comments about vehement independence.

I cried when Elizabeth the JP told us to look at each other and Himself was staring in the distance worrying about the pig and I had to poke him with my elbow and say 'focus, dude' and everyone fell around laughing.

I cried during the vows.

I cried during the exchange of rings.

I cried while I signed the papers.

I cried when Noel read He wishes for the heaven's embroidered cloths

My voice wobbled the whole way through and Himself's was clear as a bell. And I'm the professional communicator. Which was vaguely irritating.

And all the while in the background was the 'eeetch, eeeetch, eeetch' of the pig spit.

And then Elizabeth said it was done and we were married to each other.

But not forever. Because it's Canada and they don't make outrageous commitments.

But as everyone there said, it is of course forever.

Lucky I do love a good cry. It was great. I loved getting married.

Then it was over and time to mingle and make sure everyone got fed.

It was a blur.

An hour into it, there was two bottles of red wine left and the Queen Dad had to reassure me that it was all going to be okay and there was enough white and beer left.

The servers started getting anxious to me about the food.

It's not the bride's day. It's everyone else's day.

It was 3.15, the appetisers were well gone and everyone was getting a little peckish, so I went out to Dukie on the off-chance that 5pm was the outside forecast.

Nope.

5pm.

Maybe.

Luckily, we had bought a turkey boiler so we did a turkey in twenty minutes.

It involves twelve litres of burning peanut oil, so a turkey boil is a guy thing.

After fifteen minutes Fay started hopping up and down, so I trundled out to the shed in the rain in my velvet Simon Chang ball gown.

We figured it was ready.

The guys brought it in and proudly presented it to Fay and the Queen Mother.

It's not done.

Yes it is.

No it's not.

The guys looked at me.

It's my mother and Fay, dudes, put it back in the boiler.

Fifteen minutes later they pronounced it done and we had food.

Twenty five minutes later we had no food left.

Apart from the pig.

The pig became the main focus of the day.

It's not about the bride, it's about the pig.

The wedding separated into two groups - the pig-roasters, and the people watching the pig-roasters.

It was generally felt that the pig-roasters deserved their own tv show.

During a lull in the tv show, we decided to cut the cake.

Mostly because I was sick of wandering around in the rain in a velvet ball gown and I wanted to be like my husband who had already put his jeans back on.

The Queen Dad made me cry again, with his beautiful speech.

Himself gave all kinds of hostages to fortune with his adamant promises that he would look after me forever.

I was sitting there thinking... .mostly I look after myself dudes, but whatever...

Then I went upstairs and put my jeans on and suddenly I felt like it was my party and I could relax.

Time passed.

The pig was roasted, Gordie who had a previous career in the meat industry took out the sharpest knife I've ever seen in a domestic situation, butchered a 55lb pig in fifteen minutes and everyone dug in.

Shannon the husky positioned herself under the deck and looked extraordinarily hungry and did very well I thought.

There was one small plate of pig left for the day after.

Thankfully we don't have 'afters' here.

We lit a bonfire and sat in its glow and enjoyed the conversation.

The neighbours came round, better late than never and some late guests turned up and replaced the early leavers.

It was a great wedding.

I think next time I do a pig roast for forty, I'll do it in August.

Postscript.

I forgot the absolute best part of the day. The music, which we'd argued over for months, it being the most important part of the day for us, didn't work during the ceremony, because I had forgotten to tune in the speakers.

This was something that Littl'Un knew that we missed. Him being thirteen and knowing all about how important music is to an event.

Also, he'd been around for most of the arguing.

So when everyone was gone, and it was just family again and everything and everyone that matters to me was together in the one place for one beautiful moment in my life, he lit some candles and arranged them around the sitting room and turned off all the lights, and set up the playlist, and the three of us slow danced to our wedding music.

Snowpatrol: Crashing Cars
Kathleen Edwards: Sure as Shit
The Waterboys: Fisherman's Blues

Thanks Little'Un. Guess now you're thirteen I'll have to negotiate a new name for you.

The day before the day the gate opens

2009-10-30T20:14:00.002-03:00

So tomorrow is Hallowe'en.

First one in the forever house.

Hopefully, tomorrow I'll get to hand out treats to a generation of kids that we will watch grow up. There are a lot of kids in our area, and they're mostly very small yet, so we will have at least twelve years of them before they grow up and leave.

I say I because I'm home alone again, Himself is in New Brunswick decontaminating a pulp mill or some equally necessary but truly gross activity. I am never quite sure.

It's kind of annoying because we had a date for Hallowe'en.

We don't have many dates.

Also, I've pointed out that we are going on our honeymoon in seven days so to make sure to come home before next Friday to get a ride to the airport.

Several times.

It's not that I think he'll forget, he's as excited about our first 'doing nothing' vacation in four years as I am. (As opposed to Ireland/ camping which are 'doing too much' vacations).

I just feel that pointing it out twice a day on the phone while they're all listening makes it easier for him to stand up to the company if/ when they decide he needs to stay in NB.

"She'll kill all of us."

They all know me.

So it works.

My codename is Grumpy, apparently.

Which is good.

Better than Pushover, anyways.

So tonight is three nights before the full moon. The moon is bright and the sky is clear. The temperature dropped twelve degrees when the sun went down and the omens are good for the gates opening tomorrow night.

We shall find out if the house is haunted.

We..

I mean me..

Whoooooooo...

On acquairing a Consort

2009-10-17T21:36:00.003-03:00

Queenie has a Consort.

It's Himself of course.

He was always her Consort, even before she knew him, but it's official now.

Elizabeth the JP sent the paperwork in.

We wrote our own vows and neither of us said 'till death us do part', I am not sure why.

Too much like tempting Fate I suppose.

Tonight, though, I am Consortless, Himselfless, as He has gone to the island to visit his parents.

Shannon the Husky has gone for a little wander in the woods by herself (because she is a big girl now), and so for the first time in about three months, I am the only being in the house on a Saturday night.

The only other thing using oxygen is a candle.

I have a glass of wine on the go.

The Radio 2 jazz show is on in the background (although I haven't heard any actual jazz yet), and the only other sound is the odd POP as the pickle jars seal themselves.

Zucchini pickle, chow chow, pickled beets.

Only two more batches to do, but I have run out of jars.

I am still trying to come to terms with being married.

I was trying to work it out today while the dentist wrestled with my inability to feel no pain while he drilled. And again while I was pickling (they should make pickling mandatory in prisons, it is the most soothing occupation in the world, you figure everything out while you're watching your beets simmer).

I always thought I would be the Elizabeth 1 of the Queenie world.

There are some advantages to being married though.

When somebody tried to talk me into spending $100 an hour on getting Shannon to be better behaved, I said I'd have to talk to my husband about it and they backed right off.

Then I told my husband to get a rolled up newspaper and smack Shannon on her pert little ass for chewing on my arm.

Unfortunately, it all went Pete Tong at that point, because my husband pointed out that he was already the Alpha in the house, so I would have to do the smacking if I wanted to achieve the deputy Alpha position.

I can't smack my dog without intense trauma on both sides. Himself waves a newspaper at her and gets instant model dog behaviour.

When I do that, she tries to chew the newspaper.

I smacked her once with a paper on her ass, when she shat in my brand new shoe while I was telling her not to, and it was so traumatic for the pair of us we have not gone back there again.

In any sense of the word.

Is there anything more mortifying than being ignored by a being who depends on you because YOU FAILED HER EMOTIONALLY?

I'd be a terrible mother....

I figure she'll just stop doing all the annoying things eventually. Thereby saving me hundreds of dollars in dog whispering fees.

Also, she's going to Chris at the kennels for a fortnight soon.

Chris takes no shit from any dog and yet they all adore her.

So Chris'll put manners on her and then she'll be so happy to see me when she gets home, she'll be good.

Kinda like me after I got out of Colaiste na Leanai, or 'the prison camp in Ring' as we called it.

Last Days of Summer on the Eastern Shore

2009-09-21T20:26:00.003-03:00

Tonight is the last night of summer here in Nova Scotia. It has been a beautiful seven weeks or so (July was a wet, foggy write-off) and today was no exception, 22 degrees in the afternoon and yet another beautiful starry, windless, still night tonight.

There are only two downsides to a windless night here on the Eastern Shore. You can't hear the surf roaring against the beach. Which is why we live out here.

And the mosquitoes have free rein.

Yes we still have mossies. On 21st September. I think I will enter ours in the mossie equivalent of the round the world race, they are that hardcore. They have to leave soon, btw, I hope they realise this.

Last weekend was the Eastern Shore yard sale extravanganza. It didn't stretch up the shore as far as I thought it would; when we hit Musquodoboit Harbour there were no sales, but the road from Gaetz Brook to Lawrencetown was pretty good.

We spent sixty dollars. We got:

- a pair of barely used Rossignol cross country skis and poles for me
- a brown leather handbag for me
- a hand-tooled leather tool belt for Himself
- Bill Clinton's My Life
- Dog training for Dummies (which include sad people who own huskies that are totally spoilt and think they are the alpha of the pack)
- an enormous box of camping equipment including a stylish kettle, numerous plates, cups, bowls, one of those plastic egg holding devices, an egg poacher, two saucepans, etc etc
- and a framing nailer (which is well hardcore I am told)

Not a bad little haul.

Last yard sale of the year...

Then we went home and painted the deck and the steps to the deck, and the other steps, and the steps up to the front door, and I hid the disaster of a side garden that I started deconstructing and got bored with, and cut down rag weed and trimmed bushes and we ignored the flower garden which needs to be sorted out (the Queen Mother has tonight stepped up to the plate on this one)

And hung the new curtains and the framed pictures we had sitting in the spare room for seven months.

And started cleaning the house.

So busy, you say....

We are getting married in the house soon.

Thanksgiving weekend to be exact.

So it has to be clean.

The house, I mean.

Normally it is tidy. Tidy is not clean, but it is enough for me as I am immune to my germs, Himself's germs and now Shannon's germs. But there will be foreigners and children and older people at this event, so clean is necessary.

That's a lot of cleaning, though.... And as I talked with the Queen Mother on the phone this evening, while watching the beautiful glow of the sunset light on the 'beginning to turn' trees and while realising I live in a wonderful house and how lucky I am (yet again), I also noticed that the dog has licked all the windows in a not even pattern, up to a height of about two feet so they will have to be cleaned too.

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No I am not stressed. I did the stress and told everyone but nobody felt it was special, so I gave it up because it was giving me indigestion with no positive outcomes! Also I decided against a hen party, which relieved me of all my stress immediately.

Really, I am not stressed. I am very happy and excited and looking forward to our beautiful day and if we have invited too many people and they all turn up and it rains and there is no room in the house, well then we will all just have to pile into the basement to party, and hey, it won't matter if anyone drops their plate of roasted pork down there.

We are having a pig roast.

Our friend Dukie is organizing it.

And Elizabeth is marrying us. And there will be music on the iPod. And maybe a few carved pumpkins.

And then we will be married.

How about that!!

And then it will be back to routine, which now includes puppy school.

I already hate puppy school.

I have been to one class.

But that's a whole other post.

Which may come tomorrow, as I had quite the chunk of the top of my big toe (left) cut off today as I cut it in a bizarre argument with a door frame, then didn't look after it, then went camping in the woods with it, then yadda yadda, so it was 'gone septic' and needed to be removed. So what with the antibiotics and the anaesthetic and the glass of wine to give them a little edge, and the pain and the blood that won't stop and the need for copious amounts of epsom salts and polysporin and clean gauze, I may have to keep my toe home tomorrow for a little rest.

I would prefer not to have to wear flip flops to my autumn country wedding. It would remind me too much of the fact that I was supposed to wear flip flops to my Carribbean beach wedding.

Maybe I'll just wear my comfy slippers.

Much love to all the sick puppies/ kittens/ cats in Laytown and other places!!

Critter attack at 1am

2009-09-17T12:32:00.000-03:00

In true Canadian fashion, at 1am this morning I was standing in my peejays throwing garden furniture at a raccoon on my deck that wanted to get in the crate to eat my puppy, or at least give her rabies.

The raccoon ignored the garden furniture so eventually I had to sidle up to it and beat it off the deck with a broom. Which took a while. Then I took a completely frazzled dog out of the crate and had to let her pee all over the deck to reassert her dominance. Which also took a while.

And then I had to clean all the critter waste off the deck.

Did I mention that it was 1am while I was doing this?

Goddamn critters.

Break in the Indian summer

2009-09-13T18:19:00.003-03:00

It rained last night and this morning.

I nearly didn't remember what it was, this mysterious water falling from the sky, but I'm not so formerly Irish that I didn't figure it out eventually.

It has been a pretty good four weeks weather-wise.

And a good six weeks company-wise.

Haven't posted for a while, but then a hot happening August is something to be lived rather than written about.

Also, puppies take up a lot of time. So no blogging time. Or putting on make-up in the morning time. Or lying on the couch in the evening time. Or faffing around reading other blogs time. Or putting up photos time. Or all the dozens of little things I spent my evenings doing, like the one acre garden (now jungle) I have.

No me time in other words.

Christ, at this rate, I could've had a kid and gotten some presents at least ....

Yes I know having a kid is more time in the long term... it just feels like all the time right now.

Myself and my neighbour commiserate each other daily, as we are haulin' one puppy away from the other in either garden.

Having being begged and begged and begged and promised and promised etc for a puppy by men and kids, they're off doing manly things and we are the sole proprietor of the chewy, poopy little flght risks for the foreseeable.

It's like having a baby in the house she says.

And she should know, with two young boys.

Her puppy is a Bassett Hound called Simon who arrived on our street the day before Shannon.

Simon's ears are longer than his legs but he can still haul ass down the street faster than either of us.

As for Shannon, well, Shannon's a Husky, born to run. And like the airport she appears to be named after, she's always taking off. And I always know when she's about to do it, because I get 'the look'.

Some people reading this now will laugh that the girl with THE LOOK is now, finally gettin' some karma from her dogma.

The photo above encapsulates the look, as explained by a friend who also owns a husky. It says 'hmmm, I'm thinking about running away now, and I'm looking behind at you to make sure you know, because I don't care if you do, because we both know I can run faster than you. And even though I recognise my name when there's a treat bag in your hand, I would prefer to run than have a treat right now, so um.. ahm.. I forget my name (lalalalalaa, can't hear you ca-a-a-lllin' me...).... until you catch me of course .... get ready, sucker.'

Having said that, it's a lot of fun too.

And she won't break out of the house to go into town to meet boys with cider bottles and then fall on her face drunk and get brought home by the cops when she's sixteen.

She'll be old and incontinent and farty instead.

Haulin' ass involves ignoring the puppy rules

2009-07-31T21:30:00.004-03:00

Worked from home today - beginning of a long weekend - in the hope that four straight days home will bring some order to the chaos.

I have a 'daily routine for puppy' that someone gave me. It involves bringing puppy outside for a pee 13 times a day.

This puppy's puppy likes to take about 20 minutes to decide if/when/where the deed will be done.

So 13 x 20 = 260 minutes = 4 hours 20 minutes = I don't friggin' think so.

Plus two x one hour walks = 6 hours 20 minutes.

Which is the total time I have in the day when I'm not sleeping or working or commuting.

This is my problem. Trying to follow the correct raising of a puppy rules.

The correct raising of a puppy rules are for people who have time to follow them.

Like many people who have dogs I have to go to work (or work from home) plus run the house plus do the shopping plus spend time on FaceBook plus sleep plus eat plus converse with lovedd ones plus plus plus.

Himself has had to work 13 hour shifts all week including an all-nighter tonight and on Sunday night, so he hasn't been able to help.

How do other people do the 'daily puppy routine'?

Me, I've decided puppy's daily routine is whatever the hell Queenie decides it is.

And she better learn to pee around it.

So there.

Ass-hauling has begun.

Now.... ignoring dirty house.... can someone give me a manual for that that I can tear up and scatter around the slightly chewed acacia wood coffee table?

Murakami's well, Queenie not so much

2009-07-29T18:49:00.003-03:00

What do you do when you can feel your fingernails slipping and you yourself sliding headfirst down Murakami's well, even though there is no earthly reason for it to happen right now because, according to everyone, you have reached the personal nirvana for which you have strived for so long?

Do you give in to the pull and let yourself slide down a little bit? Making it that bit harder to get up.

Do you haul yourself out again? Knowing the struggle that entails.

Do you ask someone to pull you out? Who can ask that of someone else?

Chemicals don't work.

I guess it's time to start haulin' ass.

Shannon arrives at Eagle Drive

2009-07-26T12:49:00.004-03:00

Hi, I'm Shannon and I've come here to live in East Lawrencetown with Queenie and Himself. I am nine weeks old, but I am a big girl already. I have David Bowie eyes and a wolf face but I am a sweetie really.

So far, I've jumped in and out of the mud hole lots of times and chased the cat from next door, and gone to the beach and tried to eat all the seaweed there and the foam, and chewed the deck and Little 'Un's jacket and some other stuff.

I like blueberry pancakes. And digging in Himself's vegetable patch. And peeing in the flower garden. I don't like the bristle brush on the barbeque much though, I tried to chew it and the bristles pricked my mouth, so I barked at it.

It's hot today, so I'm gonna go lie in the shade a little.

Is my secret Knuckelrock shame really shameful? Or should I give myself up to Twitter?

2009-07-24T19:40:00.004-03:00

While playing my nine new iTunes songs, the iTunes made me listen to Nickelback's If today was your last day?

Although I note there isn't a question mark in the song title.

Which kinda sums it all up for me.

I am the kind of person who thinks that you should put a friggin' question mark at the end of a question.

Therefore, Nickelback OFFENDS ME.

Because they are the worst kind of kock rock.

I am a girl who knows her Killers from her Kings of Leon; her Cary Brothers from her Kathleen; her K'naan from her Kaos.

But still, when I listen to a Nickelback song, my body escapes from me and sort of twists around like a teenager at his first disco.

Which further OFFENDS ME.

Because I am being marketed.

And I friggin' hate being marketed.

On a sidebar, I also noticed that the song is edging towards that christian rock crap that's going on in Canada right now, a Nickelback finds god kinda thing which I was really hoping NB would ignore.... but no... they've crunched the numbers and moved slightly to the righteous.

But anyways, I have a secret Nickelback shame. Which I can indulge because I am pledged to a man who thinks NB is great. And ToaD. Which is also a secret shame of mine - Santa Monica being the Chocolate Lake anthem of course.

And 3 Doors Down.

But I really hate 3DD.

And Snow Patrol.

Retch...

So here's the rub.

I have a Twitter account.

I would die rather than tweet @Queenie_NS Nickelback playing while Queenie blogs her latest intellectual thoughts.

Why?

Because Twitter is a haiku-type format. That calls for irony or outrage or one of the other pithy emotions.

And NB is a personal, unexplainable vice that needs context in order to set up the necessary irony.

Which is not possible in a haiku.

Well not for my brain anyway.... submissions welcome btw....

I'm reading a great book at the moment, about the social history of Europe from 1648 - 1815.

It's so heavy I have to steal one of Himself's pillows to prop it up to read in bed.

The chapter I read last night was about manufacturing, and it extolled the invention of the cotton ginny/ jenny as the pivotal moment in wealth creation.

I can understand something like that.

Holy fuck... Mozart's Requiem just ended and faded into Nickelback. Waaagh!! Although nice to see iTunes is still as ironic as ever.

Apart from the fact that this fact was beaten into me in school by Jim Loftus (figuratively beaten of course), it's obvious. It created cheap clothes. It increased the role of the state in the affairs of the individual because manufacturers needed workers. It created opportunities for home-based work, which helped break not only the power of some of the guilds (thus unleashing innovation), but the concept of serfdom and the seigneur, and consequently helped ease the plight of European peasants.

Of course when you think about it, as Jim Loftus made us do back in the eighties, it was the reason for the huge spike in slave traffic as well.

So, it changed the way the world operated. It improved things for some poor people and disimproved things for others and ruined the lives of still others completely.

Nowadays, people talk about social media like it's the new cotton jinny.

I wish someone would write a book and explain why being able to talk to everyone all the time on a number of platforms is good for me. And bad for others. And devastating for another group.

Or vice versa.

Or just recommend the book if it's already written.

So I won't feel like I'm being marketed.

Which I have felt since 2001.

I suppose this is how you feel when you are living through a seismic shift in something or other.

I guess I better just live every day like it's my last... like a good littel knuckeldragger!

Should we move to Halifax II

2009-07-24T18:39:00.002-03:00

Well, not right now because it's raining again.

That's because it's a summer Friday.

It's a summer Friday.

So we gotta rain down on all the poor plebs, who went to the liquor store, just in case it was warm enough to sit on the deck and enjoy a cold one.

You can sit on the deck tonight and enjoy a cold one.

Drip-drip-dripping down the back of your neck.

So I am inside.

Alone.

With a glass of wine.

First one all week.

I had an intense urge to hear Once in a Lifetime, by Talking Heads, so I just popped onto iTunes and bought it.

And some Alabama 3, and some K'naan, and some Cary Brothers, and some Mozart.

And you may ask yourself.... how did I get here?

And then some Nickelback, so I won't feel too guilty.

I won't tell Himself about the Nickelback until tomorrow but.

Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.

A wet Friday in July.

Come to Halifax for the weather.

I did.

People here literally fall around laughing when I tell them that.

They think it's one of my 'Irish jokes'.

The absurdist tinge to my humour which comes from being Irish is not really gotten here, but it is tolerated, which is as much as I can hope for.

But it is actually true.

The summer I came here, I was backpacking, I worked outside on a farm all summer, I met the love of my life, and therefore, the sun shone everyday.

So I figured it would always be like this.

Of course it still shines in my heart every day here.... aaah....

Letting the days go by...

Wow, I had forgotten about the crappy muddled ending to that song!

But yeah... to return to my point... despite the wonderfulness of the finding of the soulmate and soulcountry, the weather turned out to be the same as it ever was.

So don't move here for the weather.

Is my point I think.

Like I did.

So should we move to Halifax Canada?

2009-07-22T19:36:00.002-03:00

Interesting question.

It was in a comment I got the other day.

I don't know. I don't even live in Halifax anymore, I live thirty kilometres from the bridge across the harbour to the city. And I commute in and out every day. Twenty minute drive, then thirty minute bus journey. Longer in the winter.

But I did live there for over three years.

I suppose it depends on where you're starting from.

I mean, if you live in Victoria, BC, then I would imagine you are swapping one city for another similar city, minus the balmy climate.

Why do people move anywhere anyways?

I moved because I was bored and despairing with a 463 square foot apartment in a complex that had a sign stating that children should not play on the grass. It was looking like that was the pinnacle of my existence and there was a little voice inside me that said somewhere there's a house with a nice guy and a dog and a garden just waiting for me to find it.

Which reminds me... why is the dog guy not emailing me back?? We want the puppy NOW!!

But Halifax was a sort of random end point. It could have been somewhere else. It just happened that the job turned up, and then the little yellow house found me, and then the guy moved in, and then his job turned up, and then the credit union got on board, and finally the house that we bought emerged out of the mess of For Sale signs we were sifting through.

Still waiting on the D-O-O-O-O-G!!

At the same time, there isn't anything I particularly dislike about Halifax.

Apart from the mayor.

Someday in about six years I will get my citizenship and then he'd better watch the hell out if he's still mayor.

Well, there are a few things I dislike:

- the wind tunnel downtown caused by the high-rise development on the waterfront
- the tumbleweed zone that is Barrington St. which is mostly owned by one guy who papers over shop fronts with Starfish Properties logos while he waits for ... what? A mayor who will let him knock it all down and build more high-rises?

If you can't get this one to do it... you'll be waiting Mr. Resnick, or whatever your name is.

All the great stores I hung out in when I moved here are gone - Sam the Record Man, Ginger's Bar, Dooley's pool hall are closed, the craft gallery is off down the waterfront somewhere I can't find. The pawn shop is gone, the little clothes place beside it. I knew the staff in all those stores; before I had any friends here, I talked to them most days.

Before you know it, John Doull will cave to Starfish, the bookshop will be gone, and that will be the end of a beautiful little street.

I will be forced to shop at the Mic Mac Mall like everyone else. I may consider another province when that happens.

SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED, MR. MAYOR!!

Other things:
- floatables, obviously
- the crappy bus system, which means I have to drive anytime I want to go slightly off-track
- the half hour lunch break. I mean, why can't we have an hour, like a normal city? We have fantastic restaurants here, we should have French eating hours, so they can make money and I can digest.

The fact that lunchtime is announced with a cannon roar every day rocks though.

The city itself is beautiful, a ramshackle pile of old and new all huddled up against the hills sheltering from the wind and the rain. Nice parks. Nice residential areas. Lots of room.

NO TRAFFIC.

Like I said, it depends on where you're coming from... if you're coming from Kennetcook well yes the traffic is terrible. But I came from Dublin, where the traffic IS terrible.

Quirky shops and did I mention the great restaurants?

Anyhoo, have to go watch Breaking Bad episode 4 with Himself and eat strawberry and rhubarb pie. More about this anon....

The summer is not living up to my expectations

2009-07-18T11:50:00.003-03:00

I am getting the teensiest bit annoyed with my summer so far. We've had the occasional spell of good weather, but mostly it's been rain on the weekend, followed by cloud, then glorious sun just at the point of the week where I am stuck into a piece of work and can't take a lunch break, followed by a glorious Friday evening drive home to the barbeque, whereupon the clouds descend for another two days of rain.

Which is making our mosquitoes legion. And legendary in size.

And of course no camping. Because if I wanted to go camping in the rain, I would have stayed in Ireland and bought a tent there.

Although all our vegetables are growing away like there's no problem with the clouds, my carefully planted humming-bird attracting flowers are mouldering away in pots on the deck.

No humming birds this year I guess.

My photography sessions have been non-existent this year so far, as I cannot be assed taking more pictures of the fog around the lake.

And now my laptop is starting to die.

My laptop is well over five years old of course, and in computer years that's about 120, so it is entitled to be a little cranky and slow.

But I don't want to spend money on a new laptop right now.

Because I am Fear of deh Credit Card Bill Girl.

Dear weather gods, make something nice and bright and extended happen soon, please.

Despite using the word extraordinary too much, Queenie is pleased

2009-07-15T21:37:00.004-03:00

Something extraordinary happened to me today.

I only use the word extraordinary because on reflection I used it a little too much in the experience I am talking about.

A woman I know and deeply respect agreed to my request, nay demand, that she interview me for a podcast series she's doing for the Mount (MSVU - Halifax) about political communication.

She had mentioned the series during a phone call about something else.

I hopped on it immediately, which is unlike me. Usually I wait to be asked.

But now I am 39 probably indefinitely, and the askings aren't getting any thicker (unlike the effing mosquitoes in our yard), so along with my youth I am losing my shame about these things.

Anyway, she agreed and I sent her some ideas, and then she came along the other day with her laptop and her headphones and after we had had a long conversation about current political events, I had to arrange myself and speak into the middle distance about my time with the Rainbow Coalition (Irish government 1995 - 97), and I was having a bad day and all the prep I had planned hadn't got done, so I explained that I was going to have to wing it.

Some day I will do something that I don't pull out of my ass at the very last second.

Some day.

Anyway, it was extraordinary. Instead of silence, the words just poured out of me.... except for the bits where I was supposed to point out my learnings. I struggled with them. I used the word extraordinary too much and I lost my train of though trying to describe the internecine bullshit of the post-ceasefire handshake ballet....

But she urged me on with her eyes.

First learning is, I am a media whore like everyone else. I didn't want to stop talking. In fact, if I hadn't had to go pick up Little 'Un from his art class I would be still talking.

She sent me the podcast tonight. I listened to it twice.

It was extraordinary.

It was coherent. The nuances of some of the issues are conspicuous by their absence, but I was speaking to an audience who knows nothing of coalition. Unlike us Irish.

Second learning, I cannot believe how much I remember of those days. They must be seared on my brain.

Third learning, I got a strange feeling about myself when I listened back.

Normally when I talk about that time I am careful to point out how junior I was, how irrelevant I was. This time, there wasn't time to explain all that, so I chose my words carefully to try to get the message across and I did to a certain extent, but I also heard myself describe situations where I think now I probably did help out in the sticking together of the various bits of that communications experience.

It strikes me as extraordinary that it took a woman teacher from that great woman's university to record the unrecorded work of a woman who didn't even realise she was doing something useful back in 1996.

And so it joins the canon of the quiet work that women do everywhere that is never celebrated.

The second part of my recent media whoredom is my imminent guest appearance on another Halifax blog tomorrow. I had to write a letter to my home town... Dublin.

It's a little mawkish. But I love the piece.

I'm dying to see what the reaction is.

I hope I am busy in work tomorrow or else I will spend all day fretting over comments/ lack of comments.

MEDIA WHORE!!!

I'm thinking though... maybe now I am nearly forty I can finally find the confidence to like my voice. I don't mean my actual voice. I like my voice, even though it is a little lispy on air, which it isn't in my head.

Is it lispy?

I mean my opinions.

stop laughing, people from Ireland...

and people from Nova Scotia...

No, that's not right. Yous are all laughing too much.

I mean my reflections on my experiences. Which are legion, and pretty interesting in a boring kind of way.

I think I heard something in that podcast.

I think I wrote something in that piece.

I think I might have something useful to say.

Finally.

Being Dave Gorman-ish

2009-07-04T20:15:00.004-03:00

Dave Gorman is a British comedian who made a name for himself by finding all (well, enough for a tv show) the other Dave Gormans in the world and then going to meet them.

I thought of him the other day when I googled myself (not out of vanity, it was a work thing..... no really it was...), and I was not only not the only person with my name in the googliverse, but the other one (who is a healthcare worker in Saskatchewan apparently) topped me in the results.
Queenie lost the top spot in her own SEO project... doesn't bode well for her future in deh world of deh online ...

But actually, after the shock, I was really thrilled. I have a very unusual name, so finding an exact namesake was pretty cool after about eight years of intermittent searching.

So then this evening I thought... Twitter has a search function...

And I'm able to blog because Himself and Little 'Un have gone fishing without me. Not that I wasn't invited. But it was that kind of invitation you get after they've spent four hours in the shed getting two rods ready and preparing the worms for trout and the thingummies for mackarel just in case, and discussed possible spots for both possibilities and packed the car and put on their fishing boots and are heading out the door sort of pretending I am welcome to come along.

So I said no.

Because if I were to go there would be delays because there would have to be blankets and chairs and thermos', and strawberry shortcake and all kinds of shenanigans. Which is why I don't get invited in the first place.

So it's all good.

I went mackarel fishing once and caught about fifty and it truly was the coolest thing I've ever done apart from taking the hooks out of their poor mouths and killing them.

Anyways, back to Twitter... where nobody dies... unless they're tweeting from Iran.

First of all I put my surname in the search engine and came up with someone who loved my brother's online tennis commentary from Wimbledon so much they posted it to Twitter.

Tennis?

Tennis!!!!!!!!!!!

D'ya have strahwbrees widdat, Baz?

So then I got myself orientated and typed my surname into the Find People engine which is what I meant to do (although it is always nice to see my brother online).

Aaron from Dallas, known as GoPearl, is an artist and writer who works hard saving companies money on their telecommunications. And only tweets about that. He sounds like a typical corporate dick, which is a pity because he's probably miserable (well I would be if I was an artist that had to spend all my time being a corporate dick).

Aaron, what you need to do dude, is to engage in the family tradition of sarcasm loaded with irony in your tweeting, in order to survive. Probably wouldn't save the companies that much money though.
300 followers.

Such a waste of a perfectly good following...

Benjamin from Arizona, otherwise known as Skulljammer is a comic book writer and has been up for 54 hours meeting deadlines.
120 followers. (plus me now so 121).

Dave won't say where he's from but he's moaning about the absence of UK adapters and he sounds like a Brit. He's here for a good time, not a long time.
34 followers.

Probably should vote for mr cameron next time then dave, if you're so fucking jingoistic you can't buy a universal adapter, yet so embarrased you can't put BRIT on your profile.

Matt from Phillie State doesn't like to use his full 140 chtrs. 'chillin'. 'summer'. 'witness'. etc. Having said that, he mourns the passing of Harry Kalas, the celebrated Phillie sports commentator who passed away during a commentary recently.
34 followers too.

A man of few words.

Must be from the Queen Dad branch of our surname tree.

Scott, also known as Mr. Blur, who is from a phone number rather than a place, is an avid cyclist who is tired of people thinking the world is their ashtray.
31 followers.

Well, guess what, Scott, me and my big fuck-off SUV, we're tired of people thinking the world is their velodrome.

Shannon, otherwise known as Supergrrrl, from Toronto is funny. And the first girl on the list.
30 followers. One of which is The Onion.

Attagirl!!!

John is my personal favourite. He appears to be in Iran, and he has the mullet to blend in well. But he's no Persian so far as I can see.
Give me liberty or give me death.
28 followers.

Here's a thought. You could actually pretend you were somewhere you weren't and tweet about it and get away with it, couldn't you... or am I missing some major Twitter honesty protocol.

This is my problem with Twitter.

That and the fact that the person from The Coast who is tweeting from the virgin mudfest is either really stressed or getting really drunk and incomprehensible, so even if I wanted to memorise the tweets and pretend I was at the concert I might make a big faux pas.... but then I could just pretend I was drunk....

which really is the key issue I have with twitter.

there is no truth protocol when you are dealing with 140 characters or less.

Having said that, look at all the nice people with whom I share DNA whom I have tracked down in just one hour.

There are pages and pages and pages of people with my surname on Twitter.

Follow one. Just for the hell of it.

Me, I'd go for the BeachBandito, otherwise known as Bruce.

That's me when I'm old.

Without the beard obviously.

Foggy times in the Maritimes

2009-07-03T16:53:00.003-03:00

"To get people to care about your blog they have to not care at all about your "blog." And they shouldn't. Just words on a page, after all. They need to care about things much more interesting than that.Those things are: The story. The content. The offer."

I am stealing these words from a PR guy in Halifax, Joel, who describes himself as a vegan nerd and marketing asshole. Which I like. He has a blog about social media which you can read here.

He goes on to talk about different types of offer, and the content/ story they should contain.

I fall into his what happens in my life variety blogger I think.

The offer: catch up on what I'm doing without paying for a phone call/ reading FB/ writing me an email to ask whassup.

The content: sporadic, a bit same same, and generally self-obsessed.

The story: right now the story is that there's been no sun here for a long long time and so everyone in Halifax is becoming mildly psychotic, including me and Himself.

So yeah, sporadic, same same, self-obsessed, mildly psychotic post coming up.

If I could be arsed.

Maybe I'll just check the Weather Network again instead ... to see if the Weather Canada joke's finished.

The joke being that the prairie foodbowl is suffering a terrible drought this summer and we are flailing in fog and drowning in mizzle here on the Eastern Shore.

I have already checked it twelve times today.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/index.php?product=weather&placecode=CANS0057#ltermfx

OHMYGOD... the sunshine peeping out from the clouds picture is up for Sunday!!!

No wait, it says cloudy periods.

Cloudy periods means the cloud cover will be so deep that it can creep into the house when we are asleep and make our hair wet, like it did last night.

Thunder storm tonight.. oh goody.

Maybe it will clear the air, said Himself.

Maybe. Maybe the psychotic stress headache we are all getting from the humidity will go away and then the sun will come out in our hearts, if not in our atmosphere.

Maybe.

Tina called to see if we wanted to go camping.

Apart from the fact that we lent all our gear away for the weekend... eh no, I am not spending tonight in a thunder storm in a tent that is located five hours drive from here, I said.

Only 60% chance of a storm, she said. We're leaving right now if you want to come.

I love Tina. She is the most optimistic person I know.

And they are going to New France. Where the sun always shines...

No, I'm too depressed.

Canada Day, I spent trying to plant our vegetable garden up to my knees in mud.

There is nothing more irritating than being completely mud-struck while being harassed by enormous horse flies.

Enormous horse flies who were vying with the blackfly and the mosquitos for the tasty bits of me located at the base of my spine, my ears, my elbows and the bits of the backs of my knees that were above the mudline.

I lost it.

FUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKING STOOOPIDDDD COUNTRYYYYY!!

I threw the spade down and watched it get sucked into the ooze that is my dream garden.

IWANNAGOHOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Poor Himself.

He always thinks I want to go home when I cry and say I want to go home.

Oh lord, he says, trying to cheer me up, imagine what the pioneers must have felt like!

IMAGINE??????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IDON'TNEEDTOEFFIN'IMAGINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I started looking around with that look in my eye that Himself knows means I am looking for something to kick to death so he ran into the house and got me a beer and made me drink it so I got the hiccups the way you do when you are crying and drinking a beer really fast at the same time, so the horseflies won't get it.

After a while it kicked in and I felt better.

But the sun better come out soon.

DO YOU HEAR ME, MR. FOG???

Universal engager with the private

2009-06-26T10:01:00.002-03:00

What a lovely occasion: Alice Munro celebrated in Trinity College Dublin (my alma mater of course... and the Queen Dad's.... and Gypsy's now too) for winning a prize awarded to her by a panel chaired by Jane Smiley, who was interviewed by Colm Toibin about that choice.

If I wasn't so delighted about the choice, I'd have Da Envee...

You can read about it here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0626/1224249575138.html

Cabbages and cherries and things that go slime in the night.

2009-06-15T21:02:00.006-03:00

Despite being at the tail end of sick in our house - Himself was the sicker and was taking killer antibiotics - we managed to have a nice weekend and get lots of yard work done.

I suppose I get to do the flower beds because I am a girl. And girls like flowers.

I am not one of those girls particularly.

I mean I like a nice herbaceous border as much as the next person, but you can't eat one nor can you donate it to Feed Nova Scotia come harvest-time.

Having said that, someone who used to live here put a lot of thought into the flower beds in front of the house. So I feel like I should resurrect them.

Currently they are buried in buttercups (hundreds of stringy roots with nothing to pull onto), dandelions (we all know about those bastards and the way they snap off and grow back), and some feathery weed thingy that has a root system comprised of interlocking elastic bands with a plant popping up every three centimetres along the elastic.

Really.

It has me stumped. I've never seen it before.

So I weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and eventually cleared most of the weeds from one bed and saved about six plants, a hosta, some silver lace and a couple of gladioli that sat shivering in the cold tundra that was the newly weed-free zone.

Which meant of course that I had to go to the garden centre and buy fill-ins. I got a tray of Creeping Jenny and Allysium and some foxgloves (I am determined to have hummingbirds this summer) and hopefully they'll cover the bare ground before the buttercups rebound.

Mmmm, planting bedding is sooo much funnn.... not.

Himself and Justin who was over for a visit were playing with power tools nearby, in order to avoid weeding.

PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..... 36 volts, man... that's a nice piece of iron, dude ... PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.................... listen to that, man.... hey, let's 'fix' the deck......

Prob'ly shoulda dug the bed out, said Justin, in between drilling holes in the deck.

Prob'ly.

The second bed is so much worse than the first one I don't know how I am going to even start.

Prob'ly should dig the bed out...

Goddamn, I hate giving into weeds.

As well as the beds in front of the house, we have four big deep beds alongside the driveway, made of old railway sleepers, which are quite nice but are painted a disastrous shade of rust.

To hell with flowers I thought. Just got in and dug the dandelions out and we planted veggies there.

Himself put the fully loaded 36 volt drill down and made himself available to supervise this, as veggies are much more interesting than flowers.

So I/ we/ us planted cabbage, broccoli, beets, chives and parsley.

Ho hum, a couple of hours passed and I was passed out in exhaustion on the couch with a nice glass of pinot noir when Himself went out to check them for the umpteenth time and realised that crumbly old sleepers are where SLUGS live.

So now we are on slug patrol.

Apparently, in a rare episode of garden alignment, slug genocide was taking place in Ireland at the same time.

Poor slugs.... there's nowhere for them to go.

Firstly, we cooked a big pot of mussels and ate them on the deck and then we smushed the shells up and sprinkled them round the cabbages.

Didn't work.

Not enough mussels.

Last night, we were out at 10.30pm with a torch killing them with a kitchen knife.

Thirty eight.

If you're interested.

This evening we found two, so we have put beer in jar lids and are hoping that the slugs will die happy rather than at the hands of Himself the Slugvader.

Of course, none of this healthy constructive positive gardening activity can call itself the real action of the weekend, which was the official planting of the cherry trees.

While I was deciding between the yellow bedding or the blue, Himself found some CHERRY TREES.

To go with the tomatoes, no doubt.

So we've planted our first trees here. A nice little milestone.

Saturday night, we tested our fire pit (built for Polly's visit in August). First impressions are pretty good - nice draught, not too much smoke, hopefully we'll have a wind-free week and we can have a couple of nice evenings in the yard.

JD the squirrel finds a new world order

2009-06-12T19:11:00.008-03:00

The feud between Himself and the squirrel living in his building ramped up a notch last weekend.

For those of you not in the know, the nature of the feud is based in the concept of 'his'.

Which one of them is the 'his' that the building belongs to.

The squirrel, having spent the previous Fall and winter living rent-free in the building, thinks it's his building.

Himself, having paid for the building, is pretty sure that it is in fact his building.

The noisy chatter that he gets from the squirrel every time he walks into the building to pick up a tool (in order to do some work) PISSES HIM OFF.

What does that goddamn squirrel do but eat corn all day?

But my man is nothing if not slow to anger.

A veritable leviathan progressing through the Bay of Fundy when it comes to rage.

But even the calmest leviathan will swallow a Jonah, if he won't shut the hell up!!

That is why last weekend, despite my best efforts at averting revolution by cleaning up evidence of grand theft corn, Himself went into the shed to do something and realised that the squirrel had gotten back into the carefully wrapped-up sack of cracked corn (which I had carefully placed in the thick plastic bin) and there was cracked corn all over the building.

ALL OVER THE GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MY GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The squirrel had managed to eat through the plastic this time. As well as the sack.

GODDAMN SQUIRREL, BATHIN' IN CRACKED CORN HE IS!!!!!!!! LYIN' BACK JUSTA SWIMMIN' AROUND IN IT!!! THINKS IT'S HIS EFFIN' CORN!!!!!!!!!!

I could hear the roaring from the house.

I'LL SHOW HIM!!!

Retribution was swift and brutal.

Every kernel of cracked corn (and when it was all found, it was a substantial amount of corn) got swept out of every crevice in the building, and the whole lot was put out in the yard in a big pile.

NOW!!

HE'LL HAVE TO SHARE!!

SERVE HIM RIGHT FOR BEING GREEDY.

Suddenly the rabbits, crows, wood pigeon, robins, jays, chickadees and other critters who had spent months getting by on just a tincture of cracked corn, provided to help them stay above the critter poverty line (with not even an increase to help with recent rampant corn inflation) .... they are all in carbohydrate heaven right now.

PARTYTIME!!!!

All the daily foraging routines have been disrupted in order to partake of the sudden corn largesse.

I have no doubt that this summer will see abnormally big baby critters emerging from dens all over the yard.

The babies will no doubt turn into a me-me-me Critter Generation Y and will break our door down in January demanding carb-rich three course meals, $120,000 jobs, and/or better EI (I mean corn) payments if this largesse doesn't continue.

Last night according to Himself, we even had Bob Rae the big old silver raccoon who pretends he's not living in our yard, come along last night for a bit of chow.

Seeing as it was goin' a beggin'.

If I was the squirrel, I would take my beating and my sudden eviction from the squirrel Versailles that is our buildin' like a man squirrel, and go find a new place to live.

Because the squeaking of tumbrils is quietly, but definitely discernible above the rhythm of the waves that is the soundtrack to our yard.

If I were JD the Little Red Squirrel, I would seclude myself, reflect on my loss and return in a few years... when the corn is gone... refreshed, with a new, superficially sustainable way of keeping everyone fed.

But no. He hasn't the wit to do it.

He is camped out on the pile of cracked corn, fighting everyone off.

As if he can.

He has been there all day according to Himself, who is home with a chest infection.

Instinct has kicked in and he's an aggressive little bastard.

JD the Little Red Squirrel ... not Himself.

Why wouldn't he be?

He's used to having most of the corn to himself.

He's used to being the only critter who knew where the corn was kept.

He's used to having unlimited access to the corn, to people turning a blind eye to grand theft cracked corn, to squirreling away some extra corn for the winter.

He's fighting for his political life as they say.

All the fat he's put on over the last couple of weeks is worn off him.

Our crows - we have three of them who are inseparable and who have that brilliant dark sense of humour that crows sometimes have - our crows have him driven demented.

It's so simple it's beautiful.

Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre take turns to run at him, wings spread, until he panics and runs away under the building.

While he's cowering under the building, they pick slowly and desultorily at the corn, with their backs to him of course.

After a while he can't help himself and he chatters at them like an Albanian matriarch with four fields to plough and every son in a tower.

That's when they leave the pile to have a big lawerly convocation on top of the old pine tree, or to stare intently at something moving over by the lake. (Probably the mo-fo eagle nesting on the island).

Ahaa.... JD thinks!! The Fools!!!

Back he goes for a moment, and every time a swarm of starlings swoop down from absolutely nowhere, kick his skinny red ass again and grab their piece of the action while the crows stare into the middle distance and nod knowingly at each other.

JD has to retire defeated from the bombardment that is those locusts of the birdworld.

JD the Little Red Squirrel has learned two simple, irrefutable facts.

The buildin' does in fact belong to whomever pays for it.

And Himself, who paid for it, is a force to be reckoned with when his ire is raised ....

....

... We had an election in Nova Scotia this week.

It was quite the game-changer.

The forthcoming redistribution of the provincial corn will no doubt be just as entertaining to watch as the antics on Eagle.

Me... I'm rooting for the crows.

And scanning the horizon for starlings.

A Neck like a Jockey's B****x

2009-06-12T09:56:00.005-03:00

As they would say at home.

GM has I mean.

General Motors, I'm talking about.

Or Government Motors as they call it now.

Here's their ad about the fact that they had to get a multi-billion dollar bailout from the taxpayers of the USA and Canada. I'm posting this mainly for the European readership - we have this advertisement inflicted on us approximately every twelve minutes if we are sad enough to be watching cable television.

The similarities with the all-American Budweiser beer commercials are obvious - they even have the thundering hooves of the American Mustang (which is a competing brand, no??) ... I wonder do they know they shoot mustangs nowadays.

Nice to see they're spending my money on getting down to business.... We're not going out of business, we're getting down to business.

Oh you are, are you? WTF were you doing up to now?

See, see, we have a photo of a solar panel in our ad, that means our cars don't use gas.

They just sold the Hummer brand to a Chinese company.

Roll on the resource wars...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/02/new-gm-ad-breaks-online/

This ad makes me so mad I could spit. And its ubiquitousness means that it is being hard-wired into people who make their cultural decisions from televisual images..... which appears to be most people these days.

Terrifying manipulation of the people using their own money.

Can't we ban this stuff?

I mean, we ban drugs?

This is worse.

Headache gone

2009-06-09T21:22:00.000-03:00

That's all I have to say right now.

Hope is giving me a headache

2009-06-05T10:14:00.008-03:00

I've had a headache for two weeks now. The back of my neck is being squeezed by an unrelenting vice grip. And my stomach is in knots. Churning, burning knots that end when I sleep and start when I wake up.

This morning I thought, okay, it can't be the cold I've had. It must be stress-related. So I went through all the things that are going on in my life to identify the stressor.

I don't really have any stressful goings on in my life right now though.

Not compared to what's happened in the last couple of years.

Himself and I have reached a plateau of calm right now.

Of course, when I eventually figured it out, it's so blindingly obvious I can't understand why I didn't realise it.

It's election stress!!

Not that I'm involved in electioneering. For the first time in my life, I have a job which forbids me to be involved in the democratic process.

I am closely following two sets of elections, which are being fought by all the people I have worked with and cared for and fought with and yelled at and laughed with for the past twenty years.

And ironically (or maybe I am just the biggest election Jonah in the world), for the first time in my life, my friends and colleagues and comrades and fellow adventurers are poised to win both sets of elections.

No wonder I am weeping with the stress of the hope of it all.

Thank goodness I am not involved this time.

I would be a basket case.

Speaking of hope, this morning, I watched some of Obama's Cairo speech.

Into history he walked, loping onto the stage in that incredibly rangy relaxed way he has. Speaking in front of 3,000 people who must be so relieved to see a man who is supposed to be their enemy but who looks just like them. Quoting their holy book back to them so eloquently. Speaking about duty, the way their Muslim faith does.

I am not alone in my hope.

I listened to Michael Moore on the radio this week. He was being interviewed about GM. He was in no mood to forgive them their Flint sins. The interviewer asked him whether he was hopeful. He said he was full of hope for the future, because his new President was sly as a fox, and he reckoned if anyone could steer America back on track it was him.

Was this how my parents felt in 1961?

Himself was born 92 days after Kennedy was assassinated, the world was probably still grieving. I came along six years later, among the last of the Gen-Xers. With a few small fillips, we have only experienced a paucity of vision and leadership in our lives.

We have lived through the 73 Oil Crisis, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Quebec question, Reaganomics, Mulroney and NAFTA, Thatcherism, US meddling in Central and South American democracy, the hunger strikes, the ozone layer, the fall of Communism, continuous conflict in the supposedly civilized Mediterranean region (Basque separatism, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, Libya), Bush I, Monica Lewinsky, Bush II, 9-11+ other bombings, two wars over oil, the failure of the New Labour dream, the destruction of democracy in Haiti, Tianamen Square, the continual rearrangment of the rubble that is Afghanistan, the rape of the continent of Africa by disease and colonialism, and the gradual disintegration of trust in all of the political and public institutions we were (well I was, Himself is a total anarchist at heart) taught to believe in - politics, religion, public services, charitable organizations, educational institutions and most of all, the benign shadow of the Land of the Free.

Now we are nearly middle-aged, as well as the beginnings of chronic back/leg/joint-ache and the growing finality of the realisation that we will never ever be rich/idle/debt-free, we are facing into global warming and peak oil and the dismantling of the welfare state model round about the exact time we will be needing a nursing home bed.

No wonder I have a headache.

I have had my hopes dashed so many times...

Today though, I am only going to think about the fact that this time next week, the wheel may have turned a little bit towards my way of thinking.

Farming dandelions while Aloysius sleeps on

2009-05-31T19:10:00.005-03:00

The sun finally came out today. As well it might, it being the end of May and therefore the day before SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I woke up at 5.30am because a) it was an amazing sunrise which my body obviously wanted me to see, and b) the virus that felled Himself and Queenie has morphed into the streaming nose bit, which is good because that means it's nearly over, and bad because I was sleeping with Aloysius Snuffelupagus last night.

No, I didn't know his name was Aloysius either. There you go. You never leave this blog without learning something useful.

I lasted until about 6.40am and then I had to get up to get away from the noise.

I banged the door on the way out of the bedroom just to drive the point home.

But it was worth the early start to sit on the deck and listen to the birds justa singin' their little hearts out. Susan Boyd my ass - I counted eleven different melodies, most of them coming from pretty drab little birds.

We have a lot of smallish, brownish type birds that I haven't nailed yet. As well as blue jays (but they don't sing, they scream), a pair of wood pigeons who sound like owls, a pair of robins nesting in a tree near the driveway, chick-a-dees, the woodpecker of course, and a bird that sounds like a blackbird but I don't know what it is here.

Today, Raven visited us. That's the first time I've seen him.

Raven is of course, very important in Aboriginal storytelling, and his role in stories is very ambiguous, so I don't know if Raven is good or bad.

Whatever Raven feels like being I think.

And Bunny was sitting in the gravel pile munching on dandelion flowers.

How do I get Bunny to sit in the lawn and do this....

I wish I had a million Bunnies.

I should just call what I do in the yard what it is and tell the world I'm a dandelion farmer.

Anyway, I can't type for much longer because my hands are sore from weeding. I spent all day on the flower beds and really you can't tell I did.

The problem is my response ability. It's not up to a Canadian summer yet.

In Ireland, around March, weeds start to poke their heads up, and you mutter, yes.... hmmmm... must weed that bed.... and eventually you either get it done bit by bit, or you are useless, and the weeds get big and then you have a problem.

In Canada, around the end of April, the ground is still frozen for the most part, and it's about minus 3 in the morning, so there's nothing to be done unless you get a great day. Then in May, you start getting everything ready (Irish style) ... buy seeds, plant seeds, water seeds, mow lawn, get compost, draw garden plan, browse stores which open on Mother's Day, etc.

Then it's late May and suddenly its plus 10 in the morning and there are a gazillion fucking weeds where there was nothing but mulch the day before.

So instead of the nice day planting you had planned you spend the day communing with the fecundity, wondering if this is a plant or a weed.

Thankfully, the plants are similar enough so that I know what is a weed and what is a plant, but they come up INTERTWINED...

Anyways, because of the early start, quite a bit of the list got done. Himself got up and even though he is still ill did his best to help out with the heavy stuff.

So the beds are done, the pruning is done... I made one serious error so one of my plants look like it shaved its head with a lawnmower... the path to the front door is freshly gravelled, the lawn is mowed, (we only have one million dandelions now), the whipper snipping done.

Himself even tried to do some transplanting in the greenhouse, but it appears to have been taken over by hordes of angry biting ants. Judging by the bites on his feet.

Those of you who know me know that several years ago, I had an extraordinarily bad night one night. It involved a tent, a carpark, a horde of biting ants, a one horse town in central Venezuela, and a carload of copulating gauchos. It was traumatic. Needless to say I won't be going in the greenhouse until they've been eliminated.

Getting places.

Finally.

Of course, after a day of sunshine, there will be one million more weeds tomorrow.

Surprises with the morning coffee

2009-05-30T10:27:00.002-03:00

Facebook is full of Irish friends enjoying the sunshine of the June Bank Holiday weekend.

Goddamn them all!

Here it is not a bank holiday weekend.

It is raining.

And we are still struggling with whatever insidious virus felled us this week.

Himself is still asleep, so I made my morning coffee and perambulated around the garden.

I'm starting to realise I've bitten off a little more than I can chew.

Without a Paddy.

This morning, I found a pile of wild strawberries blooming by the side of the shed.

And a slug in the greenhouse.

Curled around one of the zucchini plants.

How did he get in???

Today I really need to start transplanting those seeds into the beds we put into the greenhouse.

The grass needs to be mowed again.

We have too much grass. We could just mow the lawn and nothing else and that would be a full-time job.

The flowerbeds need to be weeded.

The main garden beds need to be worked on - we don't even have them cleared enough for topsoil.

I need to whipper snipper around the yard.

I need to prune some bushes so they'll grow up instead of out.

And all I want to do is go back to bed.

Bah. Hate being sick.

Nevermind what I felt about Nevermind

2009-05-28T11:36:00.005-03:00

One of the problems with writing a personal blog is that you generally aren't near a computer when you are having slightly better than shallow thoughts. And I do my thinking in the car, or when I can't sleep, which makes even scribbling things down on a piece of paper difficult.

So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.

But it's the journey, boys and girls...

We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.

I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.

Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.

Well, I did.

While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.

It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.

It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...

It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...

...because slacker's a dirty word these days...

Why, I don't know.

Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.

What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?

I hope I never get taken in like that again.

I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.

Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize

2009-05-27T09:57:00.003-03:00

Hooray!! The Man Booker International Committee has decided to honour Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer this year.

Here's a piece from The Chronicle Herald: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1124082.html

Everything I ever needed to know about being a woman I read in an Alice Munro story. Her writing has so much insight into femininity, being in a relationship, getting older, and just being a woman in today's world.

She is one of the greats.

And she's just the sweetest little old lady nowadays... when she's on the CBC news (as she is whenever she wins a prize) Peter Mansbridge just melts.

If you are near Trinity College on June 25th, when she gets her prize, give her a little wave from me and tell her I love her!!

And in other exciting female CanLit news, Anne Michaels has a new novel coming out this year, a long-awaited follow up to Fugitive Pieces.

Hard day at the Superstore

2009-05-25T20:52:00.003-03:00

I feel stupid even writing about this, but I was so upset, I need to get it out of my system.

I've already tried two glasses of wine and telling Himself, who give him his due, got adequately upset on my behalf, but the stone is still in my shoe.

Here's the thing...

In our house, I usually do the food shopping.

I hate doing the food shopping... hate hate hate... and Himself quite likes browsing the bargains, so really we should swap chores and I should clean out the water filter or something. But it just works out better if I do the food shopping because I am the cook most of the time and I keep the mental tab of what's missing because I make it missing.

In other words I am a control freak who likes to know what's in the fridge.

Plus I hate doing the water filter.

So we spent the weekend on the island and I didn't get the shopping done and I realised on the bus there were no decent options for a nice Monday supper for a man who worked a ten hour day, so that meant even though it was already 6pm, I had to do the shopping.

Also I had to get gas.

Those of you who know me or read this blog will know I have an irrational hatred of getting gas.

It's expensive, it destroys the planet, it gives me guilt, and causes me poverty between May and November, plus I have to stand in a wind tunnel for ten minutes.

So this evening, with a heavy heart, instead of just heading on into the beauty of an Eastern Shore sunset, I turned into the Superstore that's near the Esso on the way to Hwy 207.

Heaved myself out of my replenished gas guzzling machine, retrieved my recyclable bags from the enormous trunk, felt the inevitable twitch of irony about that particular situation, and went in.

Note1: We are currently going through the transition from plastic to recyclable grocery bags in Nova Scotia, and Gifted Typist recently wrote a post on how that transition is going for her (never has a bag in the car) which was very true and very funny.

Note 2: There was a ridiculous but typical 'shock horror, germs invading Canada leading to appalling death, ohmygod' CBC piece on the radio this morning about how people are not laundering their recyclable shopping bags enough, and consequently there are germs in them from the meat (even though it is wrapped in plastic) and WE WILL ALL DIE.

Me, I had to do the recycled bag thing in Spanish in 1989, in German in 1990, and in Ireland in the 2000s, so I am an old hand at having the bags ready.

GT - Hang the bags on the inside front doorknob!!

Note 3: I am so friggin' cheap, I brought my recyclable shopping bags with me from Germany via Ireland.

Note 4: My green bag *shame* - I have never washed them. Everything I buy is wrapped in plastic FFS!!

So, I tear around the fresh produce section and buy veggies and meat.

I ignore the centre aisles, like a good shopper is supposed to do.

The supermarket is quiet. I trundle up to a checkout and unload.

She's talking to her friend.

She is a 'pass it over the scanner and toss it anywhere' checkout girl.

Normally in this store, they are Grade 12 'after school and a quick toke behind the store' checkout boys. So they forget to scan half the stuff, and then you have to unpack and tell him they are leeks or porcini mushrooms, or parmesan cheese or whatever, so they can find the code, and find the label and put everything on the counter straight etc.

This one is a full-timer.

But me, I am the Queen of anal retentive.

I am ready for her.

My bags are open - I catch the produce and throw it in one bag, I catch the meat and put it in the other.

While I am doing this, she is foostering under the counter.

I know what her game is, so I haul my bag of meat out of harms way back onto my trolley.

Credit card in hand I stand there, the picture of 'I packed my own bags and now I want to pay using your store's credit card so I can get points for my green bags' innocence.

Because you get extra points for using recyclable bags.

Which would imply that the store WANTS you to do that.

Plus you get charged for plastic.

She hauls out a roll of plastic bags and shouts at me.

YES, SHOUTS...

"I was GOING to pack the meat in plastic bags."

I said, 'that stuff about germs, it's just a plot created by the plastic bag companies.'

I was just trying to be funny....

She shook her fist in my face and screamed at me in frustration.

I stood there and said nothing, thinking, wow, every auld one in the store today must have insisted on wrapping everything in the green bag in plastic.

I felt her pain.

I did.

Then she *forgot* to give me my credit for my recyclable bags.

They don't forget, it's just really complicated and stupid, so they *forget*.

Which meant I had to a) ask for it, b) get one of those customer service shrugs which means, you are a nightmare green customer beyotch, c) get mad enough to queue up for a 'raincheck' at the Lotto counter, and d) feel like a fucking cheapskate doing it.

By the time I got back to the car I was in tears.

Mainly because I have to go through this every time I shop at this store.

Here's the thing....

1. If you as a company purport to offer me a choice to decline plastic wrapping, then offer me the choice:

Train your FUCKING staff to offer me the choice.

Untrain them to assume I want a different type of plastic and then shout at me because I decline it.

2. If you as a company feel that the plastics industry is in fact correct, and the plastic wrapping currently on the meat is allowing juice to leak into the recylable bags and potentially causing eColi, (and lawsuits) then stop using plastic altogether and wrap the meat in something impermeable... like... oooh... I dunno... greaseproof paper maybe...

Like they do in the store where I am planning to spend my $700 a month food budget starting on Friday.

3. If I pack the bags like your checkout person is supposed to do, then tell them to say thank you, like they do in the Spryfield Superstore, because I'M DOING THEIR FUCKING JOB.

I'm calling Stephen the manager tomorrow.

I'm really upset.

On so many levels.

And all I wanted to do was buy some meat and veg.

Hard day at the Superstore, Himself said.

Hard day indeed.

The respectable will always be with us

2009-05-25T08:41:00.002-03:00

The utter shame I felt when listening to survivors of the Irish industrial school system speak about their ordeals last week on Canadian radio... I haven't really been able to put it into words.

But I thought Ann Marie Hourihane did a good job of it in today's Irish Times:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0525/1224247322712.html

Here in Canada there is a similar story with First Nations people...

Wolfram Alpha know nahtink!

2009-05-18T18:20:00.003-03:00

I tried Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine, that's apparently not a search engine. There's a great article in The Guardian about it today, which says (and I'll try not to do a Maureen Dowd on this) that asking Alpha something is like asking someone sitting in a room full of idiots savant. In other words, if you ask a question and one of the IS knows the subject you'll get the dish on it, but if the expert IS is not in the room, the answer is 'huh?'.

So I typed in my hometown and got Egyptian currency, the birr.

I typed in Halifax and found out that the city is 52m above sea level.

I typed in my date of birth and learned that I was born on the same day as Beck.

I don't care to learn any of those facts. If I did, I would've bothered remembering them the last time I heard them.

Still, it's very excellent for doing hard sums - you just type in the equation - so I added it to the Favourites list anyway. Check it out.

Competition is good.

Even for people who don't do evil.

Bunny's back

2009-05-17T09:33:00.007-03:00

Queenie and Himself don't have any pets. Mostly out of pure laziness, dressed up as concern about their care. We don't have a dog because we're gone for almost ten hours every day... too long for a dog to be left alone. No point in thinking through a solution to the issue.

We don't have a cat because... well because that would involve finding a cat and getting all the cat accoutrements and looking after the cat.

Etc.

Pure laziness.

Happily, here in chez Eagle, we have lots of critters, who are now our pets. Who are great pets because they feed, house, exercise and clean themselves and all we have to do is admire their cute antics.

Himself has a special pet.. a rabbit that appears a few times a day to eat our lawn. Himself loves bunny because he's very tame (he obviously hasn't heard of Himself's previous life as a bunny shooter and boiler). In fact, he's so tame, he pops out of the undergrowth every evening to say hi when Himself pulls up in Albert the Station Wagon.

Not me. He never pops out to see me.

Just Himself.

Except that for the last few days he has been missing.

Coyotes gottim, Himself decided.

I was thinking maybe she's a lady bunny and she's been off having babies.

We were a little sad.

Then this morning I opened the back door to check the rain and there Bunny was. Chomping away like there's no tomorrow.

Bunny's back.

Thank goodness for that.

Goddamn Mercury... you devil you....

2009-05-15T19:18:00.003-03:00

We have a joke in the office. The joke is Queenie knows about astrology, and when weird planetary alignments occur, she warns everyone in the office.

And they all laugh at the weird Irish woman in the office.

And then it all goes Peter Tong because the SHIT IS REAL!

It's kinda like a weird grown-up-lady version of telling zombie stories in the tent with just a flashlight at summer camp.

Before you go for that last trip to the toilet pits....

So, last week, I let the Office LayDeez know... mercury is going retrograde again.

Three times a year.

Six weeks a time.

Plus the turbulence four days fore and aft.

That's a lotta days a year.

Retrograde Mercury's like a poltergeist - cars, computers, electronics, contracts, job offers, all that kind of necessary shit... it all goes pear-shaped. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....psssssssssst... stuff breaks down, blows out, messes up... things you think are legally nailed suddenly take off and fly through the atmosphere.

You just avoid avoid avoid.

I've been pretty good at avoiding it, but the Universe has been gunning for me for a while as I have been floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee for far too long.

Today the little bastard got me.

Queenie had a day off.

Queenie's Day Off.
By Queenie.

5.40am. Get up. Shower. Put work clothes on.

6.10am. Drive Himself to work because Albert the Station Wagon is at the doctor with a potentially extremely expensive light on and a desire to stall constantly.

6.20am. Get to Himself's work 30 minutes early because Himself hates to be late.

Sit in carpark because it's raining and I still love him too much to make him stand in the rain despite the fact that I could still be in bed asleep.

6.47am. Leave carpark and drive 275km to Antigonish. Notice there are no other cars on the road because it's the Friday of a bank holiday weekend and everyone else is winding down, Nova Scotia-style.

9.18am. Get to Antigonish one hour early for meeting. Drive around Antigonish looking for nice alternative Fair Trade-type cafe for breakfast.

9.55am. Give up and order Tim Horton's Bacon Breakfast sandwich with no cheese.

10.05am. Eat THBBs with cheese.

10.06am. Gag on cheese.

10.10am. Try to pull out of Antigonish Main St. onto Hwy 104 at weird Yield Junction where speed limit is supposed to be 70kmh.

I have to paste this, because I can't write it again:

I've just come off my favourite highway - the 104 highway of death - and some cnut in a tandem truck just veered over and put me out of my lane, and put me ahead of the path of an suv doing about 150 so I just put my foot down and closed my eyes and said goodbye to you all.

After a moment the suv started beeping like crazy so I reckon I got ahead of him and woke him up.

O joyous life!!

That is the third time this has happened to me on this stretch of road.

Anyways..... I have a mad adrenalin rush on now!!!!!!! Jibber jibber jibber.......

1030am. Facilitate meeting between ten engineering types who have no intention of ever fucking agreeing about anything.

Get them to agree on what they disagree on. Facilitation 101.

11.59am. The weekend starts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

12.01am. The car won't start.

Thirty minutes, three sets of cable, and a conclave of engineers later, the car starts, but I have to drive to Halifax without stopping to strengthen the battery and I only have half a tank of gas.

3.38pm. Glide into the Ultramar on Victoria Rd. on fumes, fill the car, pee (oh bliss), get a coffee, get a water, get a bar of chocolate, pay $80 for the lot, start the car again.

3.39pm. It starts!!!!!!!!!!!

And I would remind you boys and girls, that I am alive at this point, having nearly died earlier.

4.00pm. Pick up Himself at work where I left him in the rain nine hours earlier. Albert the Station Waggon needs a new fuel pump. $1200. Minimum. Plus $300 for the spark plugs.

Goddamn Mercury... you devil you.. you got me this time.....

But I'm ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Victoria Day everyone... it's not about her, it's about VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Taking the yard back in piles

2009-05-12T20:07:00.010-03:00

Those of you who know me know that Queenie likes nothing better than to potter about in a garden/ yard/ farm/ pumpkin field/balcony pots/ terrace/ whatever.

So long as she has to scrub her fingernails afterwards, despite wearing a pair of gloves, she's happy.

As you can imagine, with a whole acre to play with, I am now in Queenie Heaven.

Every evening, I get home from work, I change into my yard clothes, I water my seedlings (my watermelon seeds started to sprout today) and I tackle something.

Someone in work asked me about my yard today (note - a yard in Canada is a garden, not a yard).

I said it was an okay yard, but it wasn't my yard, so it would probably take me about three years to get it right.

Probably 4 - 5 then, he said. Totally serious.

Probably he's right, he seems like a guy who knows what he's talking about.

So, five years....

I knew this year would be the back-breaking, re-organizing year, but all we seem to be doing is creating piles.

Piles and piles of stuff the previous people left behind.

There's the pile of paving stones.

They're everywhere.

Not just the piles.... the stones.

Coming from the Paddy Egan 'put the tools away' School of Gardening, I'm pretty anal about a place for everything and everything in its place, so when I find a paving brick, I have to put it on the pile.

Pretty soon, we had gotten down past the grass and they were everywhere, and that involved so much walking I was getting nothing done so I have created several piles.

I don't even like them.

The bricks.

Not that I like the piles either.

They're the red brick pavers... you know the ones.

There are three types: the octogon on top of a rectangle one that looks like a grandfather clock, the one that looks like a grandfather clock cut in half, and the rectangular one.

I have found over two hundred already... lying just about everywhere in our yard.

And I am such a weakling I can only put twelve in a wheelbarrow and carry them to the main pile, so it's taking a while.

There's something a little depressing about spending a whole day hauling someone else's boring red brick paving stones around the yard.

But HEY!!! When I get bored, there's the pile of building supplies.

It's bi-located - one pile under the blue tarp to be taken away, the other in the building for re-use.

There is building deitrus everywhere.

Wooden steps. Balustrade spindles. Large round balls for the tops of the spindles. Roofing felt. Wood. More wood. Gyprock. Rotting gyprock (the worst task so far). Different kind of more wood. Aluminium piping. Bathroom tiles. Copper piping. Lead piping. Paint cans. Tools.

Parts of cars.

ugggggghhhh.....

Then, you lift something up and you find a little pile of fiddlerheads.

Or tulips.

It's kinda fun in a back-breaking way.

We are trying to reuse as much as we can, but while we think what to do with the stuff, it's in a pile.

We found three huge tarpaulins.

I'm talking really expensive well-made stuff here.

Someone obviously had a boat at some point.

Then, I started to get mad...

One day, after about an hour, I finally dug up a really nice canvas tarp for a speed boat. Left out in the yard until it sank under the grass and rotted.

GODDAMN. IF YOU'RE GONNA LEAVE IT FOR ME PUT IT IN THE GODDAMN BUILDING SO I CAN USE IT.

Our building (which in Canada is the shed, not the main building) is a sturdy old New England type three room affair with a woodcote on top. I love it. We are going to put a wood stove in it so we can be outside in the winter. Sort of.

On Sunday, I realised it has a beautiful attic. With throw open windows at both ends and a warm, sweet-smelling spruce floor. it's going to make the most wonderful summer sleeping room for kids who are staying, or adventurous adults. All we have to do is build a sleeping platform and redo the mosquito nets... simple.

It took me a while to realise the potential. We're all a little more fire alert now, seeing as we're only two weeks into fire season and we've already had one major conflagration.

Sunday, I remembered seeing a lot of paper rubbish in the attic. I hauled myself up the ladder.

Five enormous garbage bags full of squirrel-chewed styrofoam later, I found the floor.

Forty five moving boxes (to add to our collection) later, I realised there was a second window. Four chest-height boxes full of random pieces of paper later, I just started throwing stuff out the windows.

Himself got a barrel and started burning the crap because we have enough piles.

But now, see photo above...I have a whole new pile.

Six in fact.

(I would just like to point out that I hauled all that shit out of the ground BY MYSELF).

There's one pathway into our little wood and with a little work it can be brought back to its original bucolic bliss - someone who used to live here worked really hard on it and planted all kinds of forest floor stuff, including fiddler heads and primroses and lupins and other flowers. But I haven't been able to find the end of the path - where it leads to.

I figure it must be near the building, but there's an enormous pile of brush left over from a tree fall lying there.

At least that's what I thought it was.

This evening, I waded into it and started lifting some of the brush.

And I found a cord of wood underneath.

A friggin' cord of wood.

Note: In Canada you buy wood in cords. A cord of wood is worth about $150 - $200 depending on the wood.

About four cords will get you through a winter.

So, wood is useful. It is currency. People need to buy it.

This wood was rotting.

The top layer was fine.
The second layer was softish, but it'll dry out.
The third layer was an interesting example of how wood fibre breaks down.
The fourth layer is what we call mulch nowadays.
The fifth layer was peat.

So now I have six more fucking piles.

In my driveway.

Brush.
Good wood.
Wet wood.
Useless wood
Mulch.
Peat.

Soon, I will be able to get a grant to open a garden centre.

I should be happy I suppose, I could spend years trying to get this level of decomposition going.

But the thing is, I live on the Eastern Shore, where there's lots of wood, and lots of wood stoves and lots of houses that would embarrass you with the beauty of their enormous wood pile. But I drive past houses every day that have a wood stove chimney and no wood outside and I always wonder.. is it some old couple that can't get any wood, or can't afford to buy wood or just need wood for some reason or another.

But there's always a truck in the yard, so the people in the house could come get some free wood if it were available. And they knew about it.

Himself drove in as I was working myself up into a tantrum about the needless death of the trees, and the waste of biofuel, and the lack of community spirit, yadda yadda... plus I was after pulling the leg attached to my recently Yoga/Pilates obsession with The Plank-destroyed right knee out of a particularly deep and dangerous mulch hole.

Maybe they were trying to fill in this space so it wouldn't get washed out....

WITH A CORD OF FRIGGIN' WOOD?

Maybe not...

Or maybe they just didn't like dirty fingernails too much.

They liked ball games. I have found - two soccer balls, a rugby ball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a space hopper, and a basketball so far....

I've been trying to think what kind of little community festival I could have here now that I have more space than I can possibly think to do with.

Maybe we're heading inexorably towards the little festival of piles....

In the spirit of Paddy Kavanagh, we could stand on the steaming dungheaps of my piles and recite potery...

Like Paddy.. I'll have to find ways to avoid the haulin' and draggin' that goes on in the stony grey soil of the Eastern Shore so I can write potery.

Or maybe my piles are a little Song of Myself for the New World...

Addendum:

I just mentioned my piles post to Himself and he was horrified that I had forgotten our gravel pile. A previous owner had a child who had cancer, who had a playground built for them by the Make a Wish foundation. The toys are all gone, but there's sixty cubic feet of gravel left. Right where the vegetable garden will go.

You don't know despair until you have tried to shovel sixty cubic feet of gravel into a pile.

I hate to work on it, because every time I do I wonder what happened to that child...

We are leaving one corner... for our fire pit.

Also, Himself wants to make it clear that we did not burn the styrofoam, we left it out for the recycling truck.

I had to rescue the neighbour's cat from one of the bags this morning, such was the excruciating smell of squirrel emanating from the bag...

Oh stoney grey gravel of Lawrencetown

The laugh from my love you took

etc etc

The negative Greenhouse effect

2009-05-04T18:45:00.002-03:00

From today's Guardian.... if I were to take this to its logical conclusion I would shut down my blog to save energy.

Hmmm ... not enough readers to make a damned difference.

Read on, boys and girls, read on!

But, just to be serious for a moment, as the Google rep quoted at the end states, the drain on resources is nowhere near transportation.... so now that we're all connected electronically, why do we all still have to go to the office everyday?

The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.

"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.

"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."

With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.

One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.

And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.

However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.

"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."

One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.

Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.

"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."

Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.

To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.

Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.

"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."

Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.

The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.

"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."

Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".

"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."

The positive Greenhouse Effect

2009-05-04T09:40:00.004-03:00

I was texting my sister Gypsy the other day and mentioned that we were building a greenhouse.

For Himself's cherry tomatoes no doubt!! ;-) she texted back.

Laugh!!!!

I nearly fell off the bus seat.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that last year, Queenie figured out the Canadian growing season after a couple of half-assed attempts. And managed to get a full crop of vegetables to harvest.

Of which achievement she was mightily proud.

But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in that harvest (not even the potatoes) came close to achieving the greatness of Himself's cherry tomatoes.

After I annoyed him by insisting on growing boring old heirlooms, one afternoon he took a hammer out and gunthered a lopsided, triangular 'greenhouse' out of some plastic sheeting he'd appropriated somewhere, and a few 2 x 4s he'd appropriated from somewhere else.

And nailed it to the neighbour's fence.

Hot, sleepy afternoons in our shared back yard were spent admiring the cherry tomatoes growing like crazy behind the plastic.

As well as having to do most of the admiring, Queenie had to do all the harvesting of course.

Anyways, this year we have our own garden and lots of space so as a reward for being the Cherry Tomato Cheerleader-in-Chief last summer, Himself promised me that my heart's desire - my very own proper greenhouse - would be the very first project this year.

We spent the last two weekends working on it, with the help of Little 'Un last week (who insisted on digging for treasure while not hammering, and found a fresh spring right beside said greenhouse which will help with our irrigation system. Go the boy.).

This year, we're using greenhouse plastic, as opposed to glass. To make sure it all works well. If it does, hopefully we'll replace the plastic next spring.

I love my new greenhouse.

For a start, it has the same dimensions as the living room in my Dublin apartment.

Yes, you read that right.

Build 'em on the fly 'n' stack 'em high, as they used to say in Irish property developer circles.... ah well, at least now they're saying ... get me that list of hot countries with democratic governments and no extradition, we're headin' out boys!!

17' x 9', if you're that interested.

The apartment was 436 square feet in total.

And people wonder why I put up with Canadian winters!!

Anyways... back to the tomatoes.

I have a four foot bed running the length of the greenhouse, and a big worktable for seeding and potting.

I even have a rack for my tools.

We are hooking up water barrels with a pump so we have running water, and Himself spent a couple of hours last night installing a drainage pipe around the base of the greenhouse to draw excess water away from the soil. Which will also make it more difficult for our yard rabbit to dig into the building.

All in all, it's very professional looking. And as it's round the back of our garage/ shed well hidden from public view, I have no doubt the Mounties will be round to search it come the first fly-over of the summer.

Well they won't find any of that muck!!!

Just peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, chives, herbs, sweet corn, peas, beets, and hopefully, water melons!

I popped into the greenhouse this morning to see how things were doing on the seedling front and the warm, cloying smell of compost and condensation hit me and reminded me, as all my gardening efforts do, of an afternoon spent at home with Paddy in the greenhouse (which was also the boiler house) thirty five years ago.

I think maybe I shall get an old wood stump or two from our little copse, and place them in my own greenhouse, so I can sit there during a rain storm and listen to the shore and the birds...

Peep peep

2009-04-25T09:37:00.003-03:00

The peeper frogs are here.

Which means Spring has officially Sprung.

Hooray!!

Here's the gen. on the little bundles of joy, from the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History website.

Who can ignore a deafening chorus of Spring Peepers on a warm spring night? These thumbnail-sized tree frogs leave their woodland hibernation sites as early as March in southwestern Nova Scotia. Perched on grasses and sedges at the edge of ponds or roadside ditches, the males call mates with a shrill "peep peep peep". Their brown or gray colour, always with a dark stripe on the sides of the head and dark markings on the back provide excellent camouflage against the dead spring grasses. If the night is cold, Peepers retreat under leaves and stems. You'll likely hear hundreds before you ever see one.

About 1,000 eggs are laid singly on twigs and leaf litter at the pond bottom. Then adults head back to the woods for the summer, fall and winter. The males may continue to call from trees, clinging a metre or more off the ground with adhesive toe pads. Some call occasionally during the day throughout the summer and fall. The tadpoles develop rapidly and transform from July through September.

This treefrog eats mostly soft-bodied invertebrates. Small spiders, moth larvae and water midges are a common food items.

CAW take their medicine

2009-04-25T09:19:00.007-03:00

It appears that the CAW did the deal with Chrysler yesterday.

Tough times. All that fighting in the newspapers last week about how the company was spinning the benefits package wrong turned out to be true. According to the G&M:

The concessions, including cuts to health-care coverage, vacations, bonuses, incentives to buy Chrysler vehicles and other benefits, met the company's target of reducing labour costs by $19 an hour, CAW president Ken Lewenza said last night at a news conference at a Toronto hotel.

The CAW had me (and probably a lot of decent Canadians) convinced that the benefits package was all going towards paying for healthcare for elderly workers who needed heart bypasses. And now I hear they were getting cheap cars.

Cheap effin' cars! They've been holding out on a deal so they can buy cheap effin' cars? Why don't they just sneak the parts out of the factory and build their own cars during their vacations?

Yes, I know that would be wrong. And nobody that works in an Ontario auto-manufacturing facility would ever do that.

Silly Chrysler. If I were them, I'd have spun that part of the story... not the snowbirds healthcare story.

It stands to reason. If you want to divide and conquer, you have to create 'deh scorn' for the other side among the hoi polloi.

The snowbird health issue created 'deh jealousy', which is a useful divide and conquer strategy, but because it was about healthcare, it also created a 'hmmm, maybe I shouldn't dump on this because some day it could be me' factor. Because everyone wants to move somewhere warm with free healthcare when they're old.

Not very useful.

However, as we all know now, nobody wants a deal on a Chrysler. Now that I know they were holding out on that, I HAVE DEH SCORN.

Watching this public relations fight is like watching two drunk people mud-wrestle with their eyes blindfolded.

Dreadful application of the basic principles of a hearts and minds strategy.

Well, thank goodness for the deal I suppose.

The company is saved for another while.

Oh no, that's right, my tax dollars have to be handed over first.

Well, at least they're not going to be used to pay for people I don't know to get cut-price Chryslers.

Or. Fiats. Or Alfa Romeos.

You expect the banks to rip you off and fuck you over. You do.

But not the unions.

I am done with the Third Estate, until the model is changed and everyone can join a union, any union, and there are no more private clubs for 'certain' workers.

Done.

The Estates are crumbling

2009-04-23T20:23:00.009-03:00

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the three of the four Estates, a kind of early social partnership invented by the French, are crumbling.

I am working on the assumption that we accept the concept of the Fourth Estate.

And then there's one still doing quite well.

I bet you can't guess which one!!

I am beginning to realise that my entire world, my intellectual world that is, is framed by French Revolutionary philosophical constructs. And now that we seem to be going back to some kind of strange post-pre-Revolutionary version of society, it has me all a flutter intellectually.

The Estates were of course the clergy, the nobility, and the commons, the Rest of France.

And the Fourth Estate was the press. Or the meeja, as we call it nowadays.

Let's just take a quick scan and see how they're all doing.

The clergy we can pretty much agree on, I think.

They gradually lost relevance and by default power when people started to get educated and realise that hell was a concept rather than an actual destination.

An interesting side bar to this was that through the power of the replacement place of worship - television - people also found out that they weren't the only little boy that was buggered in the sacristy and consequently felt entitled to get very angry about it.

Which sped up the decline.

The Second Estate, otherwise known as the nobility, gradually lost some of their stranglehold on power and capital. There were various reasons for this, some of the more famous ones include: parliamentary democracy, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Crimea, in-breeding, the Somme Offensive, Communism.

They were gradually replaced by the common or garden rich. Also known as capitalists, or industrialists. Or self-made men.

Now known as the super-rich.

For the purposes of this post, we shall consider the nobility and their replacements the same.

After a long period of retrenchment driven by WWII, the GI Bill, and the creation of the welfare state, they are ON THE WAY BACK!

Why do I say that?

According to the Marquis de Vauban, a famous 17th century French engineer (and blogger for his time), the French population around 1690 consisted of 10% beggars, 50% near beggars, and 30% badly off.

Which left 10% who had most of the money.

That would be Estates 1 and 2.

And apparently it got worse before the Revolution, as there was a major recession followed by a period of high inflation caused by flagrant spending and a major increase in government debt.

Which generally enables a cash grab by those with the wherewithal to do it, i.e. the super-rich.
Nowadays, according to the UN, the top one percent of the world’s adult population owns 40% of the world’s wealth, while the top 2% owns over half and the top 10% owns 85%.

Which means, ehm, huh, blah di blah.... lookee see... seems that annoying 10% still has the lion's share of what's left of the planet.

And this was three years before the recent kick off of the latest major recession.

Which as we all know is resulting in stimulus packages and quantative easing (i.e. the printing of a lot of greenbacks and loonies), which will presumably result in ..... a period of high inflation blah blah blah....

I wish we could just call it the fucking cash grab it is and move on.

As I said, one of the Estates is still doing okay.

The Third Estate, known as the Rest of France, is the Estate I gave my heart to at an early age.

As we all know, it eventually became the Communes or Commons, which took advantage of the rampant inflation and poverty caused by the recession to seize power in 1789 and chopped enough heads off the other two to get some changes rammed through.

Mankind, well those of us born without a silver spoon in our mouths, entered a period of stability-ish.

In France, parliamentary democracy ensued and spread, along with capitalism, colonialism, the bustle skirt, culture for the masses, some dreadful poetry about nature and a few other things. (I'm synopsising here obviously)

It couldn't last.

Eventually, the poets had to grow up and get a real job. The military-industrial complex grew up on the backs of the workers. Markets were created for a load of inventions through the clever use of inter-locking treaties that impelled Europe into many many wars over some geo-politically important carbon-based energy resources (also known as the Alsatian coal mines).

However, some luck ensued for the hoi polloi. Eventually one of these wars became about FREEDOM. And consequently took so many working people to win, it forced through reasonable equality for our grandparents.

Yesirree bob.

It took a long time, some tyranny, some setbacks, and the subjucation of everyone east of the Danube for seventy years, but eventually the Third Estate prevailed.

Their victory over the Second Estate complete, the Communards all went home, went to school, got big jobs and grew big bellies.

And drove big cars.

That took a lot of gas.

Here in Canada their children are known as the Canadian Auto Workers.

They had it good for a while.

But times change, and the whell turns.

And they are fucked now.

And rightly so.

And not just because they make crap cars.

And this is an irrelevant sidebar, but if I ever go to Ireland again and have to sit in a restaurant and be told that I am a traitor to the working class...

By some bloke with a Donnybrook accent...

I will SCREAM.

The reason I am not up for the CAW right now, even though my heart is very sore on their behalf, is because they forgot where they came from.

The Third Estate was 'the rest of France'.

Which translates into the rest of us.

Not some of the rest of us.

All of the rest of us.

Dudes - don't think you're going to get my support by running a campaign that accuses the rich of dividing the working classes and setting us against each other, when you lot were the ones who drew the line down the middle of us with a big $79 felt tip pen.

And are prepared to lose 10,000 jobs rather than rub out the line.

DON'T.

Not only did you show them the weak spot.

You were so friggin' hubristic you forgot we can all see the line too.

I'm too depressed to go on right now.

Goddamn it and I still have to weep over the decline of the clippable newspaper (and by default truthful journalism).

The complexity of the world is giving me Deh Bloggin' Fear

2009-04-23T20:05:00.002-03:00

Apologies for not posting sooner.

Although, as someone whose opinion creates a deep indifference in my soul said today: 'I hate blogs, it's just blah blah blah about me me me and it goes on and on and on. I prefer Twitter.'

So maybe I shouldn't bother.

I was going to point out that there was a device called a back button that you could use to rid yourself of the blah blah blah, but the depth of my indifference was insurmountable.

Me, I hate Twitter. Particularly today. I spent all day today at an Internet marketing conference being told how great Twitter is.

I'm sure it is. Haikus are great, and Twitter is just a Western form of Haiku (Western in that there are no rules, just individuality, which means it's just other people's condensed blah). And it's not that I don't like blah.

It's just that if I'm going to read blah, I like a bit of context.

Hence my love of the blah blah blah di blah blah of other people's thoughts.

Now if we had a Twitter that enforced the rigid forms of a haiku, I would be a fan. Corporations that think they can send messages to our phones and pretend they have a relationship with us would have to actually hire someone with some creativity to write their 'relationship building communications'.

The world of marketing would be populated by Leonard Cohen types who built special relationships with the owners of the phones (sorry, mobile devices) they were messaging.

Now, that would be a marketing-driven relationship I could live with.

Did you know that customer service is the new marketing?

I was surprised to hear that....

Ah no, I wasn't.

I remember the last recession and the marketing lecturer I was forced to listen to for three hours a week at the time (I was doing a business post-grad to outwit the recession) used to say that.

Then the economy swung back up and customer service took a back seat to gouging clients who wanted to gouge customers.

Marketing is truly the work of the devil. I said that in 1993 when I had to study it and I say it again today.

Anyways, the fear is subsiding. Let me eat my supper and see if I can sort out the swirl of thoughts in my brain.

blah blah blah blah blah............. di blah.............

Makes me sick ... see how far we done fell

2009-03-23T20:23:00.003-03:00

This blog is about seeing the beauty in small things.

Like this afternoon.

I was home sick. It was snowing. I was trying to read an article on rural broadband and figure out what to do next. I had the tv on in the background. People were banging on about trillions of dollars and toxic debts and the death of Jade Goody. Then the door opened and it was Himself home for a nap until he had to go out and plough snow all night.

We sat on the couch for a while. Then I looked up and out the window and saw a deer's ass in the corner of the yard. We got up to investigate.

A young doe had her head all screwed up and her tongue in the slit at the bottom of the bird feeder and she was just a hoovering out the seed. I tapped on the window. She looked at me and tensed just a little.

Then I swear she gave a little shrug before she recommenced her hoovering.

Sometimes it's difficult to see the beauty in small things when the world is shouting at you about the big things.

And you can't see the point in fucking people, as Mrs. Monkey would say.

And it won't stop snowing.

There's nothing like an animal to make you see the pointlessness of the human race.

I should get a dog.

To remind me of my place in the world.

I'm going to call him Bunk when I get him.

This is for Mrs. Monkey....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA

Generation Loser has a great soundtrack thanks to Buck 65

2009-03-07T07:35:00.008-04:00

Seeing the beauty in small things is what this blog is supposed to be about.

It's quite difficult to do that at the moment, because the world and the weather keeps dumpin' a load on us all, don't they.

But as I am up at the crack of dawn this morning, due to the not-so-small snoring sounds that were emanating from the body in the bed beside me, I thought maybe I'd catch up on some of the small things that are keeping me going through this long winter and recession.

1. CBC Radio 2 Drive, with Rich Terfry (aka Buck 65).
Those of you who know me will know I am a Buck 65 fan anyways. I feel we are psychically connected (but not in a scary, over-enthusiastic way of course) because Buck 65 played Whelans in Dublin the night before I left Ireland for Canada. And then I ended up living in his home province.

Anyways, after spending time in Paris and New York, and just a few months after his amazing collaboration with Symphony Nova Scotia (take one hour out of your day this weekend to listen to this concert - you will not be sorry), Mr. Terfry abandoned the Maritimes again, moved to Toronto, but thankfully, was snatched up by the CBC for its relaunch of its Radio 2. The Drive show goes out 3 - 6pm every weekday.

So it's like he's here in a way.

It's a good show.

You don't want to get out of the car... yes, the show is that good.

The howls of outrage from the baby boomers who wanted wall to wall classical are drowned out every day by the best of Canadian singer-songwriters, roots, and urban (whatever that is).

Drive focuses on Canadian music naturally, but plays international stuff too (actually, Buck plays Irish artist, Damian Rice a lot... I keep meaning to email the show to tell him to check out good Irish artists) and there's a little sub-genre of south american pop and reggae and dub going on there too.

The best part of the show - apart from the music and Rich Terfry's rich-voiced ramblings about whatever - is the live sessions he hosts. Tune in here for the back calendar.

There, now I've done a 'nice thing in Queenie's world', there's a rant that's been building for a bit....

I was reading Macleans magazine the other day and they had one of those moan, whinge, complain, horror articles (well they had many, but I'm going to talk about one in particular) that was all about 'Generation Loser: the generation that will be poorer than its parents'.

It featured a nice, unfortunate, Ontario-based couple in their thirties, who had done the usual thing - arsed through college and their twenties, then 'gotten lucky' working for an auto-parts company for $33 an hour, then gotten even luckier in meeting each other. They bought a house and started a baby, before suddenly getting their pink slips.

Now he's making $11 an hour doing something menial, she's at home with the baby, and they don't know how they will survive THE FUTURE.

According to Macleans, they are typical of a generation that are losers BECAUSE WE ARE THE FIRST TO END UP POORER THAN OUR PARENTS.

A number of things struck me about the article.

Firstly, to go from a household income of $1ook plus, to one of under $25k two months before you have your first child is friggin' scary enough, without having Macleans come in to do a feature on what a pair of losers you are. Even if Macleans is using that term to describe an entire generation and not just you two.

Secondly, our parents did well overall, yes, but their high end manufacturing jobs and conspicuous consumption has damaged the planet, and..... as far as I can make out, they have mostly all just lost their pensions in the stock market (as well as ours) ....

....so I'm kind of at a loss about why we are the losers.

Are we losers because we are the first generation not going to be able to do the same as our parents because it's unsustainable?

Because we could maybe wait a few more years and get judged on our overall performance.

Oh, that's right, Macleans being a paper-based media organization, it will probably have folded by then. ;-)

Thirdly... what is this shit about 'the first generation'?

There have been thousands of generations. I'm sure there are earlier generations that lost more of their best and brightest to the sabre-toothed tiger than their parents, or got whipped into a worse chain gang building some more insane necropolis than their parents, or had to pay more rent to the local squire than their parents, or didn't last as long in some hellish part of the Imperial bureaucracy, or WHATEVER.

It annoys me intensely that economic commentators only look back as far as the development of the Model T factory line, and generational commentators only look back as far as the development of the American middle classes when they purport to examine historical trends.

It narrows the potential for insight so much.

The simple fact remains that under the current model of economic development (i.e. the growth model), if we were all (as a generation) to 'do better' than our parent's generation, the natural world would collapse under the strain.

So we can't.

I'm sure some of us will.

But most of us won't.

People who build a future on a job making car parts in Upper Canada certainly won't, unless they change life direction rapid.

Our parents did the best they could with the decades they got, and they got some of it right and some of it wrong and we will be the same.

I wish we could all accept, internalise and celebrate this concept and move on with it.

Then instead of wringing our hands about what a loser generation we are, we could redefine progress and get ourselves out of this mess.

After that wish, I wish I could find some economic commentators who are looking at the slowdown in sustainability terms (feel free to post links).

And if I got the full complement of wishes, I wish Macleans et al would find and publish numbers that measure the benefits of sustaining and repairing what we already have, rather than droning on with the shock horror statistics measuring cataclysmic drops in the creation of mountains of poisonous plastic and chrome.

As JD Irving, the Tree Growing People would say in their ads that pretend they give a shit about nature 'that's my what if!'

Most hilarious economic meltdown occurance of the week

What: The world's stock markets plunging yet again, after hearing that the Chinese government wouldn't spend billions on a stimulus package to make things better.

Why: Did the running dogs of capitalism actually think that the Chinese government was going to save them?

Chow time on Eagle

2009-03-06T08:16:00.007-04:00

When we moved to this house, we were very excited at the thought of lots of new critters to bond with and observe and work around, so much so that Himself went out straight away and got a big bag of cracked corn and another big bag of mixed bird seed.

So, the bird seed goes in the bird feeder at the back of the house, and the cracked corn gets spread out on the ground near the garage (or as we call it here, the building), so that it is far enough away from the house (which is also a building of course but not called a building). This allows the shyer critters to eat without disturbance.

The spare seed and corn are stored in the building.

Me, with all this largesse being spread around the property, I'm already worrying about my vegetable gardening prospects in a yard where the critters are used to being fed.

Apparently that's not going to be a problem.

Hmmmm.

It's my humble experience that if there's food, and there's critters, and there's humans, then critters beat humans to the food supply every time.

And so it goes on Eagle.

The bird feeder is not too bad. We have a large and varied clientele who seem to have organized themselves into an all day rota that involves tits and chickadees first, then jays, then other birds.

Repeat cycle.

The birds spill seed onto the frozen ground while getting it out of the feeder of course, and lately we've been seeing a northern short-tailed shrew (as in the picture) burrowing around under the snow to get at the seeds.

I'm so tempted to trap him just to pet him: his coat is the shiniest, furriest, most beautiful I've seen on a critter yet.

What a sable must look like against the snow???

I am very excited that he is living in our yard because Northern short-tailed shrews neuro-toxinate and kill snakes, which is a good thing as snakes are to Himself as bears are to Queenie.

And as we have a pond, that means we have frogs, which means we probably have some snakes around somewhere.

Further over near the building, we were absolutely thrilled to coast down the driveway one evening and catch a very big deer having himself a snack of cracked corn.

Himself in particular was beside himself with pleasure... none of this short-tailed shrew bullshit.... a critter isn't a REAL critter unless you can track it, shoot it, skin it, stick its head on your living room wall and eat what's left of it.

That evening, the deer watched us for a while, then ambled into the woods behind the house. Then, after a while, he ambled back into the yard and walked around. Chowed down a bit more, and then left.

Since then, he and his friends have been by quite a few times for an amble and a snack, but we've not had the pleasure of being here to watch them. We just find deer tracks all over the yard when we get home.

In addition, Himself has been finding pheasant tracks leading to and from the chow.

Yum yum, I keep thinking to myself.... corn-fed pheasant....

We rarely see the pheasants either though.

Himself is getting annoyed - he has a vague, irritating feeling that there's a whole pile of critters laughing at him behind his back.

He's probably right. Just after he leaves every morning, the pheasants start calling to each other. Ten minutes after I leave, I imagine they're knee deep in breakfast goodness.

This morning, I'm home waiting on the cable guy and sure enough, twenty minutes after Himself drove off, there were two pheasant, a partridge and a mess of crows standing around the cracked corn pile eating like there's no tomorrow!!

No doubt Mr. Bambi will be along later.

And the squirrel of course.

Our squirrel is one cheeky little bastard, as only a squirrel can be.

He infuriates Himself, who didn't spend a pile of money on nice cracked corn just so some rat with a furry tail could eat it all!

He's out there right now, engaging in a kind of hoover-sweeper movement across the cracked corn...

He spends a good part of every day scurrying around just to annoy Himself, with his cheeks full of corn and he has the temerity to sit on his favourite tree stump basking in the winter sunshine while chewing, right in front of Himself.

Then he got into the building, well, I think he lives there.... anyways, he managed to open the bag of bird seed, separate out every sunflower seed and eat them all.

Himself nearly had a fit when that happened, as Mr Squirrel dropped all the other seeds on the floor while sorting through them.

I sense many spats between those two occuring over the next few months. Himself might think it's his building.... but we all know who can more easily climb up on the rafters to shit on whose head.

Right now, the cable guy is here reorganizing our tv package - we're going digital in a last ditch attempt to find something to watch - and he nearly fell off the pole in excitement as a beautiful cock pheasant strolled across the lawn in front of him.

Yeah.. he's coming over for his breakfast I expect, I said.

Time for me to go to work... let the chow times begin in earnest.

Cllr. John Foley, Edenderry - take a bow

2009-03-05T09:51:00.002-04:00

This is priceless. You have to watch it to the end.

Cllr. Foley is the bearded gentleman towards the back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3elLmrCmOqo

With thanks to Baz for the heads up!!

The pensions conundrum continues with the Big Three

2009-03-02T12:59:00.003-04:00

I am reposting this article from Gwyn Morgan, founder of EnCana oil company (and current director of HSBC), because I think it's interesting in a 'how are we going to deal with this baby boomer pension issue' kind of way.

From today's Globe and Mail:

The recent Globe and Mail headline, “GM seeks government pension aid,” took me back to April, 2005, when former Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) president and labour movement icon Bob White received the Public Policy Forum's prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mr. White's acceptance speech was delivered with the serenity possible only for those of us who can savour our career's journey freed from the load of full-time stakeholder accountability weighing upon our shoulders. Nevertheless, as this retired union leader recounted his career, the most repeated word could just as easily have come from the memoirs of a famous war general.

That word was “fight” and it seemed Mr. White had spent his entire career fighting a never-ending series of battles: fighting to break away from the U.S.-based United Auto Workers union to form the CAW, fighting against the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement, and on and on.
But one of the biggest battles Mr. White recounted, and the victory he held up as his finest hour, was the strike-driven extraction of those rich CAW pension plans that may ultimately prove to be the deadweight that drags the Detroit Three down to their demise.

As co-chairmen of that Public Policy Forum dinner, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and I alternated the presentation of awards. As it turned out, I presented Mr. White's award. However unlikely an image this free enterpriser and that lifelong socialist made as podium fellows that evening, it's just as well that it was me and not Mr. McGuinty who presented Mr. White's award.

Now that federal Industry Minister Tony Clement has made it very clear that pensions are a provincial responsibility, it is up to Queen's Park to decide whether hard-pressed Ontario taxpayers should bail out the spiralling CAW pension funding shortfalls. In wrestling with this toxic dilemma, at least Mr. McGuinty will not have to recall honouring the architect of one of the biggest financial and political problems he will ever face.

At the end of 2007, GM Canada's pension plan alone had a shortfall of over $4-billion and, given the collapse of securities markets since then, the current shortfall is probably closer to $6-billion. But it is going to get much worse.

At GM, the pension plan Mr. White was so proud of now has 34,000 retirees versus only 14,000 active employees, and each time the foundering company throws workers overboard to try and keep the sinking ship afloat, most of those workers climb back on board as pensioners.

In an opening salvo designed to coerce government to include pension bailouts in the billions of dollars in taxpayer largess already requested, GM Canada's vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs, David Paterson, said: “Instead of carrying one work force like our competition at Honda and Toyota, we're effectively carrying three additional work forces out there, and those will grow further.”

Grow indeed. GM's bailout filings predict that its work force in Canada will drop by half next year to 7,000, and most of those laid off will be added to the pension fund. So, for every active worker, GM will need to pay pension costs for almost six retirees. While I haven't seen corresponding data for Chrysler and Ford, their pension plans are designed in the same disastrous way.

Even if Queen's Park were to saddle Ontarians with the huge decades-long expense of the Detroit Three pension plans, it wouldn't prevent more layoffs. The breathtaking rate at which the Detroit auto makers are burning through cash makes it highly probable that another bailout-begging trip to Ottawa and Queen's Park won't be far off.

Some insight into that question may be gained by looking at the $13.4-billion (U.S.) granted to GM by the U.S. Congress in December. GM has stated that without more funds, they will be in bankruptcy by the end of March. That works out to a cash burn rate of around $4-billion a month for GM alone, not including their burgeoning pension shortfall.

Meanwhile, GM and Chrysler continue their bailout dances on both sides of the border.
GM Canada's request is reported to be around $7-billion (Canadian). Using their projected 2010 employment number of 7,000 yields a bailout cost of a whopping $1,000,000 per worker.

And despite union and corporate assertions that their pitiful state is all because of the economic crisis, in actual fact, the Detroit Three were bleeding billions in red ink years before last fall's financial meltdown, at the same time as competitors like Toyota and Volkswagen were racking up record profits.

In the midst of this job-destroying financial crisis, and if the U.S. Congress keeps handing out cash to Detroit auto makers, Canadian politicians face the threat of the closing of all GM and Chrysler plants if they don't ante up.

But let's be realistic. The 18-million-a-year North American vehicle market is never coming back and a legacy of lethal decisions by auto executives acceding to union demands means they can't be competitive in a smaller market against more nimble and lower-cost auto makers.

The idea of taxing beleaguered Canadians to fund auto bailouts is already unpopular across the country. As politicians consider operating cash and pension bailouts now, imagine how much more unpopular those decisions will be when these companies fail anyway, taking billions of dollars of taxpayers' money down the drain.

The sad thing is that if only a fraction of the taxpayer money wasted on extending the tenuous life of these doomed companies were spent on transitional financial support and retraining, taxpayers and auto workers would both have a much brighter future.