Random is Awesome

mfree just called and said, "Stop what you're doing and google 'cats with short legs.' That is all." And I did.



Turns out it's a real breed. She thought the type might be called Midget Cat but that didn't seem politically correct so then maybe Dwarf but that was so 2003. Little Cat? Didn't seem right. But google had the answer:
Munchkin. Who doesn't love a little bit of random in their lives?

Dead Tree Cut Down!

As Hurricane Irene rushes towards loved ones E and Montoya, I will attempt to take my mind off the situation by blogging. But what to blog about. I need to concentrate. concentrate. concentrate. Concentrate! concentrate. concentrate. Echo! echo. echo.

Update on my extended family: it seems that Cousin Jeff - who I thought was in prison - was let out of prison about 4 months ago but now there's a national APB out on his ass due to several arrest warrants for things like grand theft auto, cheque forgery, fraud, drug trafficking, and a whole lotta failure to appear. Everyone is terrified that he will show up on their doorstep and the usual question at teatime is: if he rang your doorbell, would you turn him in? 95% of respondents answer "HELLS, YES!!!" The one holdout is my Auntie Mic, Jeff's grandmother, who everyone knows is in frequent contact with him and knows where he is and has been the chief Enabler in his life since forever, but who also swears up and down that she knows nothing about nothing. Cousin Allison (of being-left-out-of-Boulter-family-history-due-to-adopted-status fame) wants to begin proceedings to have the 84-year old Mic declared incompetent thus freezing Mic's assets and choking off Jeff's gravy train. Half of the family is with Allison, the other half (possibly the half that doesn't stand to inherent anything from Mic when she kicks it) is taking a wait-and-see attitude. The last time I actually spoke to Jeff had to be in the early 90s when we were both mid-teenish. I didn't like him then but thinking back on it no one liked him then and I wonder: did the fact that no one liked him lead him into his criminal life or did no one like him because we all knew he was a punkass punk? Also, I remember he ate an extraordinary amount of pancakes in one sitting and I thought that was strange for such a lanky person. We used to ride our bikes off of the barn roof into piles of hay. In retrospect, that seems dangerous but at the time it was really fun. Will keep you abreast of any updates.

In other news, have been contacted out of the blue by my Grade 5 teacher (being googlable sux). Topics of convo include: what happened to X-former-classmate-I-cannot-recall, remember that time the class played ukuleles, and which English monarch is your favorite? I can send her an email at any time of the day or night and will receive a long and detailed reply within 20 minutes. She just retired. I think all of this is related. I post this pic she sent me solely for your entertainment, so be entertained effers! It kind of looks like my head is detached from my body in the above. I have no explanation.

What else... I am becoming a cultured connoisseur of culture! Have acquired one painting by an actual artist:
Is a depiction of the Uruguayan Desfile de Llamadas (Parade of Calls) during Carnivale. Am I a neo-imperialist/neo-liberal/neo-whatever asshole by selecting such a scene? Maybe but I like the colours and what are you going to do? The jig of my non-neo-asshole-ishness is up by virtue of the fact that I maintain a blog and I'm shopping for art. Here's how the painting acquisition came about: my parents wanted to give me a gift for (finally) finishing grad school. This was very sweet of them! Ideas of special pens, brief cases, T-bills, etc were floated, but all of this didn't seem like stuff I'd want and then my mother suggested art! Skip ahead to days and days of shopping for art in Calgary post-Stampede. We saw about six trillion life-sized paintings of horses, bronze cowboys, aboriginal art (from the aboriginal art section), and more effing paintings of mountains than there are mountains. Also, I said hells to the no re: sweeping prairie landscapes complete with granaries, hay bales, big skies, and grasslands. That left few options. This series is done by an artist from Alberta, Linda Craddock (http://www.lindacraddock.ca, friend of my mother's actually) and somehow this one just seemed like the right choice.

Also! I really like Port. This one is my favorite so far:


To finish off this kinda boring post is a kinda boring story about a tree. The day after E and I got back to the 'Twa, the city cut down this tree that - to hear the community folk talk - gave birth to the community, Ottawa, and all that was good in the world through its very own oak-vagina. The day before the tree was cut down, there was a Community Gathering where people hugged the tree and took pictures with it and at the end of the night there was a big group photo to commemorate love, peace, and Sunnyside. Everyone cried their eyes out about the tree-cutting injustice the city foisted on our community, a community that rarely faces injustice or tension of any kind (except when rogue children try to skate on private rinks, dogs shit in inappropriate places, etc). We all held hands and sang while the nasty city workers sawed the glorious branches off the tree and we knew we were witnessing something momentous. It even made the CBC! Then we got back into our LuluLemon yogawear, took the kiddies to school, and started preparing for the annual Clambake.

In truth, somewhere between 200 and 300 years old, the Oak was deader than a doornail, was home to all kinds of mammalian and non-mammalian vermin, and was probably a fire or falling hazard. I don't say this bitterly, it's just how it is. Here's a couple of pics I took of it last winter.


For sure it was an awesome tree and definitely had its moments and in its last years it probably scared the shit out of more than one Halloweener because it could be giant and creepy. It reminded me of the tree in Pan's Labyrinth :
One of the city politicians wants to use a cross-section of the trunk to plot the tree-rings against super-special local Ottawa history! I can hear the CBC heritage moment coverage now. But he'll have a difficult time bringing this dream to fruition because when they cut 'er down, they found this:

Hollow! What does that say about Ottawa history?

Don't worry. A local artist has been commissioned to make Art out of the wood so the soul of the tree will live on! Am I going to buy some tree art? Stay tuned.



Also, I finally just watched The Social Network. It was okay but also - academy award nomination calibre? Must have been a slow year.

Back!

Friends, I know - it's been forever and I'm shitty for not updating the blog more. I know! I'm sorry! I couldn't access my account while in Calgary because 1) it was difficult to get computer time and 2) it was impossible to get computer time that was also alone time. My mother could teach Sauron a thing or two about surveillance.

The trip was fun, for sure. Will post a video at the end of this update that will hopefully attest to said fun. But, also, it was two full weeks with my parents AND 4 days with my sister. It seemed like a really long time.

Things I noted:

1) My parents' favorite hobby is to set the GPS for all trips, regardless of the length of the trip or their familiarity with the destination, and then not follow any of its directions. When driving separately, my mother seems to think it is a game of wits where the GPS will end up being thoroughly impressed by her municipal navigation and revamp its knowledge accordingly. My father sees it as an opportunity to prove his dominance by shouting unbelievably offensive invectives at the female-voiced machine and then willfully disregarding its her advice. I am afraid to think that this is their marriage in a nutshell and will only imagine that this is the roadtrip part of their marriage. Before I left, I changed the GPS in my father's vehicle to a male voice -- I await the phonecall where I am told that I have somehow made my father's GPS smarter.

2) My sister is in for a huge, giant, steaming, glorious pile of karmic retribution re: mutha'uckas 'uckin up her shi'. I spent two days of my vacation going through boxes of stuff I had left in my grandmother's house that my parents don't want taking up space in their house (Grumbling point: my sister has literally taken up loads of their space with her shit but 6 boxes of my stuff is intolerable, but whatevs, I'm over it) and this was waiting for me in one of them:
Yes, I wore rubber gloves. Yes, I found dead mice and horrible mice feces all in my boxes. Yes, I ended up throwing out most of it . My thoughts: That. Fucking. Slob. The house never had mice before my sister moved in, alls I'm saying. I was very angry at the time but I'm trying to move beyond it because there's just no point in getting mad at her. Indeed, I had this moment while I was spending time with her that was similar to that moment in High Fidelity (movie version, I'm thinking of) when Cusack's character looks at Catherine Zeta-Jones' character and suddenly realizes instead of being ubercool, she's kind of horrible. I love my sister, don't get me wrong, but I'm just saying that we share DNA and it's no big thing.

3) My sister's dog, Ryder, is wonderful!!! She's fabulous. She loves to fetch and swim - these two things combined means that walking her to exhaustion is dead easy: I drive her to the river, I throw a tennis ball in the river about 20 times, I throw it on the grass 5 times so she can dry out, we go home, it takes half an hour. The dog runs flat out fetching the ball the whole time, she falls into a coma for the rest of the day. It couldn't be easier. Ways my sister has trained her dog to do any of this: zero. I've tried to get Monty to fetch but he's having none of it.
4) My mother and I are seriously going to go to India to see my sister. Probably sometime next year. After traveling around Calgary with my mom, I don't know if we can do this. More later, I'm sure.

I can't be too negative about the trip or seeing my family because it was pretty good and I ate amazing food and saw old friends and generally had a good time. And, I'm back in the 'Twa to spend the remainder of the summer (ie/ 'til the 25th) with E! Am super happy about that.