At Work Upstairs

Good things:

In March Douglas sent out Shaolin Cricket, saw Queen in Toronto, and had some good beer. And inherited a laptop.

In April, Heather got new specs and a luxurious second set of reading glasses.

In May, Heather finally managed to convince the flyer people to stop dropping an inch’s worth of paper on the stoop every week.

In June we both discovered Alison Bechdel’s books.

We started the blog in August.  We have readers!  And the porch ceiling finally got painted.

In September Douglas saw Billy Bragg live.  Heather went to Frenchy’s.

In October we saw Alison Bechdel live!

In November the Americans turfed the Republicans out of Congress!  Hooray!

Bad things:

War in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Trailer Park Boys movie was a disappointment.  When exactly does it take place?

Heather spent the December shutdown sick in bed.

Miscellaneous good reads: Bechdel’s Fun Home, A Woman of Berlin, Coady’s Mean Boy, Waters’ Night Watch, Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, MacAulay’s Crew Train, and George Elliott Clarke’s George and Rue.

and diffidently changing the channels every 10 seconds in a circular search for something amusing. OMG. Serious colour commentary on Jack Russell terrier races. And the dogs–they are demented. Small packages of craziness chasing a plastic bag. Must watch these freaky dogs. No, no, don’t put lumberjacks on instead. Lumberjacks are no fun. Must see more crazy little dogs.

These YouTube dogs are calm in comparison to the hurdling terriers.

Must learn more.

Heather

We now specialize in the lazy winter holiday. I count as the laziest since I get a week or so off between solstice and New Year’s; Douglas is less lazy since he gets only three days.

Yesterday was extra lazy. No one felt like cooking so we ate the figgy bread pudding for breakfast, snacked on good cheese all afternoon, and treated ourselves to cold chicken sandwiches in the evening. And since no one felt like going outdoors, we stayed in reading graphic novels and chattering all day long.

Today was less lazy since showers were taken and some shoveling took place. I’ve also been informed that hockey cards were purchased during a constitutional stroll. And since I felt less lazy today, a roast is cooking away with lots of root vegetables. Still too lazy to make a pie.

Not exactly a traditional holiday but it suits us. Now, if only I could do something about all this hockey.

Last year’s green stripey pair have been joined by these.

I hope the other more sedate unders don’t start to feel neglected.

I saw this over at Knitnut and as someone who lives with a man who knits, it made me giggle. But there’s something off about the music. What, though, would count as knitting music?

I’ve been carrying the Repka book about the internment of Canadian leftists during WWII upstairs and down with the computer for a week or so. Physically it’s not very prepossessing. Dun cloth covers and sadly yellowing paper: published by a small BC Press nearly a quarter of a century ago. I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It’s both fascinating and annoying.

Annoying first: since it’s basically an oral history, it’s missing some of the apparatus you’d find in more formal studies: indications of how the accounts were collected and how much editing was involved; framing text placing the people and events in the social and political context of the time; or a consideration of the strengths and gaps in the accounts.

It’s not so much that I want to know if the memories were one-hundred percent accurate. No memory is. But I wanted a greater sense of their experiences–something a bit bigger in scope. There’s not much to be found online and it’s hard to imagine myself immersed in military history. But you never know where curiousity leads.

The barbwire-surrounded cabins of Kananaskis where they stuck one Canadian anti-fascist in with eleven fascists are long gone but this is what the camp looked like at war’s end.

(source)

Camp 33 at Petawawa housed German PoWs, Italian-Canadians, Japanese-Canadians and Leftist-Canadians. It has a long history as an internment location.

(source)

The Camp 32 (the source for this bit of philately) was in the Hull Jail which probably was pulled down when the Ottawa River’s edge shifted from industrial to bureacratic.

The men in these camps wore uniforms made by these war workers.