After a too long time letting down the side on Plenty of Nothing, I’ve decide to give regular blogging another chance.
My hope is that I’ll have more to say now that I’m well past a long hard year in the corporate communication racket.
I hate buying new footwear. Doesn’t matter if it’s boots, sandals, sneakers, or flip-flops. New shoes of any sort have always meant pain.
I have rather vivid memories of walking home from school with wearing new brown shoes and bloodstains. And the next day making the same journey with smaller bloodstains and bunched up bandages futilely trying to protect the open blisters on my ankles. This went on rather sadly for years with new shoes and old shoes until I figured out that I always needed to put on bandages whenever I put on footwear.
I tend to put off buying replacement shoes to the last possible moment. And then knowing that the shoes only mean pain, I often rush through the process just to get it over. Is the sneaker a palatable price? Yes. Is it a tolerable colour? Good. Does it fit? Seems to. And then out of the store. I went through this ritual one morning recently and thought I found a good match even if the sneakers are too white and are ugly.
I take them home. A couple hours pass and it’s time to put them to the test: bandages, the athletic socks, and the gleaming sneakers. My left foot is very happy, my right foot is not so sure. I head out to try to find some dirt to shuffle through to take the shininess down a notch. I come home in agony. My left foot is now deliriously happy. My right foot wants to be put out of its misery.
After several days spent agonizing over the waste of money and my willful mutant feet, I face the facts and head out to buy another pair of sneakers. I manage to find the next size up in the same style of not entirely hideous and still-on-sale sneakers. They too seem to fit and I trundle home.
Before boxing up the first pair to donate to the St Vincent de Paul and after moaning and groaning about how happy my left foot was in the first pair, I decide to try an experiment. Size 8 on the left foot. Size 8 and a 1/2 on the right. Amazing. They pass the walking to the grocery store and back test.
It’s as if the heaven’s have opened and shown me the way. My feet are different sizes. The mind boggles: all those years with painful blisters and thousands of bandages.
Anyone out there who needs an 8 1/2 left and an 8 right?
Heather
Gymn class for me when I was this age was all about trying to avoid field hockey. Handing frustrated adolescents field hockey sticks and letting them have at it was hard on the ankles.
There’s something very appealing about these two forms of weightlessness.
Heather
So. I’m not doing such a great job at the regular blog posting.
- I’ve decided that one form of hell is called ‘User Acceptance Testing’. It’s a peculiar form of torture in which the “user” (only rarely known as the “customer”) tests the application and gets that special joy of reporting that the written requirements have not been met and knowing that the schedule is so tight that the requirements will never be met.
- This week I learned that a snake is the least effective means of clearing a clogged drain. Boiling water, baking soda, and vinegar can make tiny improvements. The real solution though is an angry woman with a plunger.
- I also learned that disgusting things moulder away in bathroom sink drains. How exactly do toothpaste, hair, and spit turn into such foul gunk?
- Reading has slowed to a crawl. Graphic novels/comics are getting some play (Wimbledon Green and Kabuki Dreams). The dragons in the Napoleonic War series has been finished. The overall effect has diminished by the let’s-make-this-into-a-fat-trilogy phenomenon. Still pecking away at the Communist histories.
- While I haven’t located a copy of Crow Shooting which I wrote about back in November, I did find a copy of Man’s Friend: The Crow at McGahern‘s. It’s a 1937 pamphlet issued by the Emergency Conservation Committee of New York. Its reference section has made me add “You Can’t Duck the Crow Question” (Field and Stream, 1934) to my want list.
Heather
When in doubt, RBOC:
- The flu is a pernicious thing. It zapped me over the holidays and I’m still dragging around. Some people around here think I stay inside too much. It’s the flu, I tell you, the flu, not fear of -30 weather or sloth. The flu.
- Why oh why are people seduced by Flash?
- I seem to have come down with a slight case of compulsive behaviour. First it was cataloging the books (just over 1900, and, no, I don’t really think that’s a lot of books). Then it was Weffriddles which passed quickly. Next up: editing Wikipedia pages. And now, God help me, Second Life looks interesting.
- Inquiring minds want to know: Why does anyone want to be a dental hygienist?
On the reading front
- McCarthy’s The Road was gruesome what with the roasted baby and the basement full of “provisions” and I haven’t read enough apocalyptic science fiction to place it in the range of pessimistic and dire warnings. The ending disappoints in the same way that the end of Beasts of No Nation disappoints. McCarthy’s prose is interesting tho–both spare and lyrical. I’ve not read anything else of his but I can see that I probably should.
- Sangster’s history of women in Canadian Leftist politics was another one of those books that are alternately very interesting since the cover topics I’m dreadfully ignorant about and very frustrating because they’re surveys. I’m still curious about Annie Buller and more curious about Beckie Buhay, who was, it turns out, Tom McEwen‘s common-law wife in the early 30s. Then there’s Gladys MacDonald, who spent a year in the Battleford Jail for her newspaper work and once released she was interned in the Kingston Penn for being a Communist.
- I’m reading other things in a desultory fashion. Not much seems compelling enough to spend large chunks of time on it. That’ll change I hope cause grasshopper brain gets tiring after a while.
One last thing: why do people dislike the bagpipes? How could you sit still to something like this.
Heather
Warning: absolutely no hockey content. And that’s a good thing.
- The flurry of vacations at work seems to have ended–wonder if we really can accomplish miracles before US Thanksgiving?
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I’ve been reading more about Jean Ewen and have just finished her father Tom McEwen’s autobiography The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary, his rather rambling account of his years as communist functionary. (He was one the the eight men sentenced to five years in Kingston Penn for sedition in 1931). What I learned:
- never take anything from a blacksmith if he’s holding it with tongs
- RB Bennett and McEwen loathed each other and McEwen had a long memory
- a useful term: "swivel chair organizer"
- for a freakishly over-educated person, I know shockingly little about this period of Canadian history
- I feel a new interest coming on but I have no spare bookcase space. Then again, I can pick up some of the basics from one of my favourite websites: the Theses Canada Portal. (Yes wretched PDF files but free, accessible research material). Wonder if it has anything about the Hull Internment/Concentration Camp.
It’s been that kind of week. Eighteen hours to vacation.
- You can tell that it’s been a energy-sapping work week when I can sit down and calculate how much I am being paid per minute (after tax) but cannot remember how much I’m paid per annum.
- Lawn signs are sprouting as the municipal election looms. Our neighbours briefly sported a sign for the leftmost mayoral candidate. I nearly fell over when I saw it on their lawn cause they’re Reform Party supporters. It’s gone now–replaced with a sign for one of the more conservative people running for council.
- Douglas is drinking the beer that smells like desperation. Beer aged in whiskey casks.
- Jack of that show is getting on my nerves. Already. (See. Random.)
- Excessive tiredness led to brattiness last night. Slightly redeemed self by making the tea and sending bratty-self to bed. Lost points by forgetting to pour the tea.
- Did I mention that vacation starts in 18 hours?
Heather
Do these count as “frilly unicorn” or not? (via Scribblingwoman)
Heather
Back from visiting relatives. Oddly exhausting and much of the trip was a lot less fun than a sweaty concert.
Happy highlights of the visit included
- a trip to Frenchy’s where I scored a couple of t-shirts and a couple of wonderfully ugly work shirts with embroidered logos. (Frenchy’s made the New Yorker last week. Calvin Trillin loves it.) I think Douglas will look quite fetching in Paul’s Plumbing snap front shirt. I’m holding onto the minor hockey tournament t-shirt for myself I think; he can have the Take-One-Down-Hand-It-Around t-shirt
- a dash into Stanfield’s outlet shop where my search for long underwear was wildly successful. He now has all the wooly undershirts he could possibly need. And as an added bonus–even though they were seconds, the arms and legs are the right length. Genuine 100% itchy grey wool Windsor Wear remains elusive.
- a jaunt out Tatamagouche way to the Lismore Sheep Farm yielded some beautiful wooden needles, a drop spindle, and wool that should make up into some good working mittens. My guess is that it’d also make a good gansey.
Heather
In many of the blogs I read the seasons turn on a schooling lynch pin. August and September are marked by stories of getting ready to teach or getting ready to send the kids to schools of one sort or another. My seasons no longer turn with the schools.
In the years after I left the academic world, I remained connected to it through Douglas and exhausting patterns of selling piles and piles of books to alternately anxious and annoying undergraduates. This is the second year he’s been away from university-driven bookselling. He doesn’t miss his connection to the academic turn.
Me? I don’t know. I can count the number of years of my life spent without any connection to the school as a season-marking device–seven or eight depending on how I count. I miss the shape of the days, the sense of possibilities in books and people, the structured sociability. This nostalgia I balance with the memories of money worries, confusing hierarchies, and the usual round of disappointments that come with leaving.
I need new rituals for telling the changes that mark the fall.
Geese | Leaves
Sherry | Blankets
Hoodies | Woodsmoke
