At Work Upstairs

When I was a kid the end of August brought the horror of new school shoes, the pleasures of new school clothes, and the excitement of the Provincial Exhibition.

Source: Lester Public Library

The Exhibition with its fancy poultry barns, pie booths, and midway was held in the neighbouring village: a little too far to walk when I was a kid but only a ten-minute ride in the car once we were all rounded up.

Perpetually denied candy floss, my favourite thing at the Ex was always the Tilt-a-Whirl.

We’re shaking things up chez nous. We’re selling our house, moving to Halifax, going to school (me) and finding a new job (him).

I’m alternately very excited about the prospects and nauseous: an oddly familiar feeling.

Good things:

Finally this crappy nameless decade is over!  Maybe now the 21st Century can begin.

Music: Neko Case, Joel Plaskett, Chris Smither, Billy Bragg.

Manga:  Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei.

The graphic novel.  Jason Lutes's Berlin.  Aya.  Angora Napkin.  Tatsumi.

Web-comics.  Kate Beaton, Nobody Scores!

TCAF.

Books without pictures: The Year of Lesser, Home, Brooklyn, Too Much Happiness, Somewhere Towards the End

A visit to Halifax. Lots of tasty food (haddock!) which was needed to power up the hills. Oddly good weather.

The Ottawa Comix Jam.

Tiger and Elin.  Now maybe I can be my Mom's favorite. (Note from Heather: ooooooo. She's going to be mad.)

Lenore Zann elected to Nova Scotia legislature.  Take that, Italy! (Note from Heather: I dunno about Italy but I like my mother's finagling a campaign button right off Lenore, especially since Mum is a genetic Tory.)

Most popular post: "Fuzzy Yellow Caterpillar."

Douglas figured out cross-hatching.

Bad things:

"Kill your darlings."  The calculated and manipulative slaughter of favorite characters ruined the final half-season of Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and of course, before 2009 ever began, Lost.  Save the darlings! (Note from Heather: no one remind him about the Star Trek movie. Please oh please oh please.)

Bus strike.  Nobody won that. (Note from Heather: Though we did learn how long it takes to walk from the Byward Market in the freezing dark. It takes slightly longer if you're propositioned along the way.) (Douglas: No, it doesn't.)

Ottawa's dysfunctional city government.

Ottawa drivers.  You can divide cities into two groups: where a yellow light means Stop, and where it means Hit the Gas.  Ottawa drivers pass on a yellow light.  They also pass on the shoulder, turn right looking left, and always take the pedestrian's right of way.  Contrast Halifax and Calgary. (Note from Heather: This could easily be expanded into a discussion about the strange invisibility of Ottawa pedestrians at Stop signs.)

The end of bookselling.  If Pages can't make it, there is no hope.

Working through 9 months of CCAA/Chapter 11-induced craziness. Let's not talk about the missing severance package.

Heather busted up her hand in Halifax.  (Manga readers, think Madarame.) (Note from Heather: Sometimes I come over all-determined. May or may not be connected with being any sort of sensible.)

Good things

We're both still working.
A new niece and nephew.
Record snow.
Genshiken.  Seriously, this is how you draw a novel.
Raising Sand.
Yellow living room.

Bad things

Layoffs.
Record snow.
Overcast summer.
Missed a Lynda Barry lecture.
Bus strike.

Let’s see: it’s all starting to blur together. A sign that the time off is working. 

Tuesday was hiking day chez nous.  During the transit strike Douglas’ boss has been giving him a drive to and from work but wasn’t able to on Tuesday.  It was relatively mild and sunny so Douglas walked the five miles.  Those long skinny legs came in handy: he made it there in an hour and a quarter.  I have short legs and I’m lazy so my walk to the Rosemount Library was much much slower. I hadn’t been to the Rosemount before. It’s interior–layout and fixtures–is very similar to the Rideau branch I used to visit: small oak book cases, central desk, small non-fiction annex. I left with a couple of book (I might run out, seriously, it could happen) and trundled off to the deli and bought lots and lots of chutney since Douglas has recently decided that he loooooooves chutney. And then there was some reading.

Wednesday was a snow day so shovelling and a short dash to the grocery store. And then there was some reading.

Today’s what, Thursday? So far: a whole lot of nothing.

There was slightly less laziness today as Ottawa weather turned temporarily to spring.  It was Douglas’ day off so after a lazy start, we slushed our way around the neighbourhood.

Douglas got to have his biannual feed of liver and onions at the Newport. I got treated to a Heath bar from one of the three candy stores in the neighbourhood.

We hunted for a set of kitchen tongs while we boggled at the tone of a conversation between a young woman buying kitchen stuff and a young man telling her she couldn’t buy this item or that item. You’d have thought she was feeding fifty dollar bills to a small bonfire in one of the store’s chafing pans rather than thinking about spending fifteen bucks on a garlic chopper.  We couldn’t decide if the BMW parked in front of the store was theirs or not.

We ended up in the toy store buying this fellow for our nephew with a January birthday. We were sorely tempted by a Lego Troll Assault Wagon but set it aside after visions of what his soon to-be-walking baby brother would do with the trolls.

Then home for more lazing around, more tea, and more novel reading.

Heather

One of the few glories of my worklife is the December shutdown which this year has mated with untaken vacation days to bring forth three weeks off. And since it's been a hard 18 months or so (kidney stones, Alzheimer's, layoffs, and an eye-crossing amount of work) I'm hoarding the downtime and spending it all myself in a slow blaze of small pleasures. 

The tiny universe that is Ottawa has conspired to make it a micro-local vacation: no buses therefore no jaunts to museums, no shopping expeditions, no movies, no idle wandering around the downtown. There'll be some grumbling, especially since my library access is somewhat compromised: the one with books waiting for me is a chilly 4 mile walk and the one where I could drop books off and avoid a fine is a chilly 3.4 mile walk. Doable I suppose if I weren't so lazy and so out of shape (see above about the priorities of the last 18 months).

The smart money is on the lazy approach.  So how's it going? Not bad, not bad, considering we're still on weekend time.  So far there's been a higher than usual number of naps, some more or less unconnected whiskey drinking, some book reading (one good book and one mediocre book), and no work of any sort getting done. Sometime this week I'll need to get groceries but for today we're getting by on scratchiti (all the leftover varieties of pasta go into one pot) and leftovers. 

Heather

At the doldrums of my workday, I heard Douglas trooping upstairs and I yelled out: “Is there candy?” The usual reply is “NO” and an eyeroll. (Yes, yes, “usual” suggests that when I’m grumbly and bored some part of my brain thinks candy can be magicked out of thin air.)  No response. I stuck my head out to repeat myself cause he might just be ignoring me. He rounded the corner and said “YES”.

When I regained consciousness, he handed me a package with a customs sticker on it that clearly said “candy”.  Elizabeth had sent me candy from her Japan dai boken! And a little card with more stickers.

Japanese Candy

There was a small argument about whether we’d open the packages. But calmer minds prevailed.

Banana Kit-Kat has to be the oddest tasting confectionary I’ve ever had. Each nugget has a yellow, nearly waxy coating that smells very, very banana-like. The banana “flavour” overpowers the interior wafers.

At first glance the Hello Kitty candy looks like wax on a bamboo skewer. It turns out to be a strawberry flavoured coating on top of pretzel-like pocky.

So many thanks to Elizabeth for the afternoon surprise.

Heather

Elizabeth and Linda have been in Japan collecting stamps, paper goods, manga, photographs, and various wounds and abrasions that come with travelling in a wheelchair in Japan and eating unfamiliar food.. I’ve been following their adventures in Elizabeth’s blog but hadn’t expected a postcard at all at all. There was, ahem, some undignified squeaks of delight the other day when the postcard was plucked out of the mailbox–Mount Fuji on the front and a note and stickers on the back.

How manga became a subject of interest in our household is a matter of debate. Maybe it’s an offshoot of comics. Maybe it’s a echo of 1990s conversations about anime. Or maybe it’s all Elizabeth’s fault. )

Good things:

In May we attend a Scott McCloud lecture in Toronto.

In June Douglas and Anne Fizzard exhibit at the MoCCA art fest in Manhattan.  Simultaneously Heather starts to publish photo-comics as part of an internal communications campaign inside an email-addicted corporation.

Engineering feats in Hampton Park as an overpass is hydraulically replaced in one day in August.

In September Douglas starts drawing class at the Ottawa School of Art, and begins cartooning.  Heather takes a spinning class.

Bad things:

Winter doesn’t start till mid-January.

In August our trip to TCAF in Toronto is waylaid by kidney stones.  Sixteen hours in emergency.

In October, Heather spends her vacation cleaning and sorting at her mother’s.

We see Jethro Tull in November.  Dude, hire a singer.

I think I was actually fairly restrained.  I dropped off 4 and picked up 3.  No that’s not right–there was a CD  too.

I’ve already finished the one the with most pressing promise–No More Kidney Stones– and, as you might expect, it tells me to

• Drink a lot more fluids
• Cut back on tomatoes, rhubarb, chocolate,  sweet potatoes, nuts, citrus rind, and a lot of other things including salty treats and beer.
• And if I eat any of the semi-forbidden household staples, to drink two 12 oz glasses of water right away.  Now I can do math — that’s really 3 glasses of water. I am going to to wearing a nice little path to the bathroom and you’ll recognize me from the sloshing sound.

The CD was Serena Ryder’s If Your Memory Serves You Well which is covers 1970s pieces. It had Douglas singing along, and for some undisclosed reason, he knows all the words to "Good Morning Starshine".  I suppose it’s a good thing that there are stlll surprises after 25 years. All the same, I am not prepared for an onslaught of 60s and 70s musicals which all this singing along portends.

In the novel department, I picked up Gibson’s Spook Country which has been prolifically reviewed.  I’m 30 pages in and so far I’m enjoying it. If it goes the way of LeCarre novels by 100 pages in I’m going to be struggling to remember all the characters and subplots. 

The other novel is a mystery by Christopher Brookmyre--One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. I’d never encountered Brookmyre before but I’d read the opening lines of his most recent novel at Book World and was intrigued.  If the idea of a wee Elastoplast as a cure all hadn’t hooked me, the titles of his books would have: All Fun and Games Till Somebody Loses an Eye, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away,  and Boiling a Frog are all oddly familiar turns of phrases.

Next week’s library run goal: return more than I take out.

Heather