Middling

After a day of quite literally doing nothing, I have had an almost entirely sleepless night culminating in mild fever, thumping headache and a vague feeling of nausea. Actually, not so much vague as definite.
I'm middlingly unwell.

Middlingly unwell is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs, because I'm not ill enough to doze fitfully in my bed, drinking hot Marmite and watching daytime TV (a small mercy), yet not well enough to actually do anything.

Then the dog joined in. After an extended bout of yelping, he delivered evidence of an upset stomach, which of course, I had to go and clear up.

So now we're in synch. He lies limpidly on the floor, whilst I half-heartedly wash-up. Then I feel ill again and sit down, but sitting down puts me at eye-level with some dust, so I get out the lambswool duster, which re-animates the dog, who thinks of this as a yearned-for toy that he may not have, and barks and leaps at it, making the dusting even more trying. Then we both collapse for a while.

And of course, when you're ill, whatever you have in your medicine cabinet is insufficient, thus rendering it imperative to drive to Shoppers' Drug Mart, where you end up in the line behind the woman who speaks no English yet wishes to interrogate the long-suffering assistant about the points on her loyalty card. Behind me, two men shuffle and mutter. I try to will her to move on, but now she must make another fuss about bags.

Back on the road, things are even more mental. Getting out of the car park is no joke at any time of the day or night, but there appears to be someone weaving back and forth across the lanes and coming towards me. Will the driver mount the curb and plough into me I wonder, but she swerves away, narrowly missing a pedestrian.

Almost home, when, with no warning whatsoever, a car does a complete 180 in front of me. The driver grins at me in what I can only assume is some kind of soppy and useless apology. I give him my grim reaper stare, which is all I can currently manage, but this merely causes him to grin more stupidly.

On second thoughts, I must be more than middlingly ill, there's chocolate in the cupboard and I don't fancy it.

Birthday Girl

Thank-you for all the birthday wishes. It has been a week of eating, drinking and fire-making in this instalment of 'Sleepy Mansions visits the Schloss and the Static'.
Intense and enjoyable.

Today, the birthday proper, we went to see Henry the Fifth at Bard on the Beach.
Firstly, I want to say that I do understand the snobbery associated with driving a car with manual gears, I am that snob, but people, learn how to do a hill start for the love of dog.

But Henry was good, oh so very good.
"Cry, 'God for Harry, England and St. George!' " fair made me swell with patriotic pride.
There was some choreography to represent the battle scenes - superb. And there was some French - hohum, but classic humour to be got from it. And there was a rather cheeky joke in French that....may not have been cheeky if it appears in the original, but if it's an addition, then it is. I s'pose I'll have to get orf me backside and walk to the book shelves.
King Henry himself looked remarkably like my friend J's partner, to the extent that it was disconcerting.
But wonderful.

And then there are the pressies, perfect, perfect pressies. I have my Kobo e-reader from Kevin, I love it. Bowls from the Mansions, to match my extremely expensive and beloved salad bowl from Dix Mille Villages. A book of poetry from Austen and Sue, and the biggest of all my pressies, a London bus looming through a grey Piccadilly circus from Alex and Seth.

And then, and then....the Philly cheese steaks, cooked and assembled to perfection by Kevin.

Perfick!

Book Magic

Three-day wedding. My friends are well and truly married, which is what should happen if the bish marries you at the cathedral.
Lovely, lovely wedding.

Whilst there, I discovered that the Anglican cathedral has a Rabbi in residence. Truly, I wonder if we have an Imam in residence too. Maybe our church could get a Rabbi in residence, it might be better than some of the locum priests.
Ah, endurance is a skill best acquired young.

I have an early birthday present, finally, I have my e-reader. And I am loving it. I discovered that the back-lighting from e-readers can mess with your melatonin production, which in turn messes with your sleep patterns. Mine has no back-lighting, thus, although, just like with a book, if you want to read in bed, you need light, you CAN read in sunlight, and of course, it doesn't mess with your sleep patterns.
Lovely.

My first e-book is the last of the Stieg Larsson trilogy.
My last paper book was the INCREDIBLE 'Fingersmith' by Sarah Waters. I envy anyone who hasn't yet read this book. Book magic.
Lovely.

Sockeye

The denizens of Sleepy Mansions are here, and we have been touristing. Whistler, Steveston, monsoon day (yesterday), Liquor Store, Liquor Store, Liquor Store.

And much salmon.

This year, after several lean years, we have a record salmon run, and my goodness, have we had some amazing sockeye. Today, we bought one straight off the dock and it was superb. Er...well after Kev had cooked it of course.
We'll be well above our mercury level before the week is out.

Tomorrow, Alex and Mary get back from the Kerouac tour. I'm looking forward to seeing them.

Not Secateurs

Yesterday evening, a gift from a thoughtful god, thunder and lightning and then some much needed heavy rain.

Some random and often disconnected thoughts and links.

Creator of the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams, tells about his attempts to build a green house - natch as opposed to a greenhouse - and how he has a responsibility to do so.

Vampires are very fragile really, and we have created them entirely in our own image.

'True Blood' is too gay for some, not gay enough for others. A great post by Sparky on the site 'Womanist Musings'. Well argued.

Alex and her friend Mary are currently doing the Jack Kerouac tour, although the only on the road bit seems to have been my driving them to Seatac. The rain on the way back from there was more like a gift from a pissed-off-at-humanity style god.

At the Peace Arch border crossing, on the U.S. side, there is a sign giving the names of the people in charge. Painted onto the board is the name Barack Obama, but oddly, his title, 'President of the United States of America' has been stuck on as an afterthought. It was as though, when they got the board printed up, someone thought,
'We know who we want, but we're not sure what job to give them.'

Presently, the Women's Rugby World Cup is on. You probably wouldn't know this, but I don't care much for sport. I do, however, care for a woman's right to play it and to be lauded every bit as much as her male counterpart. Thus I mention it, and hope that sports enthusiasts will take a look.

Cladding

If you could see houses being built around these parts, you probably wouldn't want to spend a night in one. It looks as though they throw them up from mdf which then gets to stand around in the rain a while before being clad in coats of many,though subdued, colours.

Houses are built from timber around here because that's what there is a lot of, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they fare better in case of earthquake. A lot of planning and money go into earthquake preparedness here.

Ok, so back to the cladding. Now, it's really no-one else's business what colour anyone paints their own house, but hey, I have me this blog, just so that I can diss other people's taste in paint jobbies.

A short while ago, one of the other dog owners told me that a particular firm of decorators were cheaper than others. Very keen on low-pricing the dog walkers are. He pointed out the house they were painting at that time. Far from being subdued, it was more vivid, livid even.

There are certain colours that I think of as food colours, brown and yellow for example. And frankly, what goes in as food, comes out as bodily functions. If Dulux had a shade for the colour that house was being painted, they'd have to call it 'dehydrated urine stream', from their 'bodily function' range.
And who wouldn't want their house to stand out from the crowd thus?

Today, another house was being painted in a vibrant shade. This time, the colour was purple, violet in fact, bright, screaming violet.
Nothing wrong with that, in principal. I'd wear clothing in that colour, food would be...interesting. But for the outside of a house, it, well it shouts.

A couple of weeks back, Kevin was watching one of the TV progs that he watches that I don't. A pair of men were mixing paint colours from donated paints. It was somewhere in the San Francisco area I believe.
People would bring their unwanted paint in, it gets mixed and then it goes out again, free, to anyone who wants it.
And that's my guess. The painters want the same thing as the dog-walkers, they want a bargain and they are painting houses in secondhand paint.
Either that, or they're colour blind.
Doesn't bear thinking about.

Kid Gloves

Lafayette (the French one) "Merci Napoléon, ces maudites prisons autrichiennes me font chier!" (Thanks Napoleon, those accursed Austrian prisons piss me off).
Lafayette (the Bon Temps one) "Dem fuckers is a whole other dimension of trash". No kid gloves there.
Actually, I made up the first one.


Now, the current Head Prefect of Canada is Mr. Stephen Harper and he is not winning any hearts and minds apart from those of the nutjob bigots. His latest idiocies have been to make the Census optional, thus rendering it pointless, and preparing to dismantle the long-gun registry, thus sending Canada back about 100 years. Police chiefs are furious and plan to campaign against him on this.

My beef with him however, is more sartorial. Now, in general, male public attire is not very liberated, the un-reconstructed men have not taken the brilliant lead of the gay community in making their standard clothing more stylish or individualistic. But that being said, Mr.H. doesn't even do the shirt, jacket and tie look with panache. Or even competence.
This thing where they leave their top button undone and the tie at home on the special tie-hanger, is all very well in casual settings, but when talking to the public on TV, in your role as its leader, you can't be doing with this half-arsed look.
When we had Mr. Paul Martin as our PM for all of twenty seconds, he could work the 'rolled up sleeves, tie-less' look, because he looked like a man who was PM in his spare time, and for the rest of the day, pulled a shift on the shop floor.
Mr Harper on t'other hand, looks like he spends his day sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for some lackey to come and give him a latte.
Not a man for kid gloves and yet somehow... a man for kid gloves.

Kid gloves have been on when handling the gradual reveal of my friends' wedding. Yesterday, in the Parish Bulletin, the gloves finally came off and it was announced that our vicar and her missus were to be tying the knot. So far, only positive and supportive feedback I'm very pleased to say. And actually, that is quite a thing to be able to say, given the general age group of most Anglican audiences.

Adventures with my Dog

It's not that I thought painting would be easy with a small dog in tow, it's just that I hadn't entirely envisaged how difficult it would be.

It goes without saying that every time another dog barked, I'd have to stop what I was doing and go and shut him up - which process involves the 'submit' position (for him, not me), but for some reason I hadn't worked out in advance that it would also involve him stealing the drop cloth, pulling the decorator's tape away from the skirting board and that after about thirty or forty such interventions, I would start tiring and walk into a bit I'd just painted. That it would of course involve his objecting to every person who walked or cycled by, every lorry or van, digging in the garden, hiding in the garden, finding a flower pot and recycling it orally, and of course, the fearful silence.
Silence.
If it had gone quiet for more than ten minutes, I also had to get down off the ladder and go and investigate. He'd chewed the cover off my book because I'd stupidly left it on the chair I'd sat in when I had eaten my lunch. He'd found a folded up paper towel somewhere and was shredding it. He'd gone over the sofa and behind a chair to get a colour sample.
Progress was slow.

But enough of that.
Austen sent me this BBC interview of Professor Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford, by Stephen Fry, about whether women and men use language differently. Cameron really knows her stuff, sadly Fry drops the ball a couple of times. However, nil desperandum, it's an interesting interchange.

And lastly, or rather most ghastly, Sarah Palin. On this occasion however, these Mamma Grizzlies speak out and against her nonsense. Make sure you click on the link to see the video clip.

The blog picture is inside the Capitol, the government building in Juneau.

Wheatgrass

Wheatgrass - it kills 99% of all known germs and then some. And it's growing in our kitchen. There it is, full of....grassy goodness. Think it tastes wheaty? No, no, no, no, no. It tastes of grass. I imagine Gillian McKeith eats nothing else.

But the most insane thing about wheatgrass is that you can practically watch it grow!
Alex has a seed sprouter, so it germinated very easily, and then we planted it. I make the coffee at 7.00 and take it back up to bed. About twenty minutes later I go down and pour a second cup. I swear, the wheatgrass had grown in that time. Why are we not air-dropping wheatgrass into areas of famine? - I mean apart from the fact that those places usually have no water. Oh, and that it tastes of grass. As soon as we work out how to extract all the anti-mortality ingredients from it, we will be ingesting it like mad.

Wheatgrass is mental. But it's hypnotic and it cleans your colon.

The Sun and the Moon

This is a picture by Alaskan artist, Rie Muñoz, it has a First Nations' legend across the bottom, 'The Sun and the Moon belong to Women'. We saw it in a small shop/gallery in Juneau, which, I believe is the Rie Muñoz gallery. I can't say I loved her style, but this one spoke to me.

So it is Ramadan. I found this out from a Dawn via Facebook. I am taking the liberty of re-posting her link here, because there are some reflections on Ramadan by women and men of Islam, and it's of course, another indicator or reminder of how close people of faith can be.

At church today, M gave us some powerful images that had stayed with her. One was of being on a train going into New York. The suburbs were grey and dreary and then suddenly, a bright, colourful image, an advertisement. There was an attractive young couple against a happy, countryside background, but across the bottom, the surgeon general's warning that smoking can kill, an ad for cigarettes.
This vivid colour against the grey, with the message, 'buy this, it will kill you'. This is what society is reduced to.

Yesterday, I went to my first ever bridal shower. I went because of the two people involved and the equally wonderful person who was organising it. In general I think I could give them a miss. It was a very pleasant occasion, fantastic food and great company in a lovely home. As such events go, it was well done. The two brides already have a home, so the host had made the theme 'wine'. Clever.
I think I would personally encourage a more streamlined method of gift receiving, go in, give gift, done.
Ah well.

Right now, if the sun belongs to women, then they must be having one very long hot flush. It is impossibly hot. Going outside is almost to give up breathing, and no end in sight.
Coming back up from the Static on Saturday morning, the line going down to the States was so long it wound back onto the motorway, it must have been three hours plus-worth of waiting. I reckon people had decided it was perfect weather to go down to the seaside, and then instead, have sat on the tarmac with the sun beating down on their metal box so that they could inch forward towards the equally over-heated women and men of the Homeland Security.

Vikings

You know how sometimes you have all the information but don't make connections? Well that happened to me yesterday with Norway.

Norway, as we know, has its own really excellent line in Fox's Glacier Glaciers, and fjords, famous for their fjords to the extent that I had no idea anyone else had any until I went to Alaska. This could be partly connected to my baffling and inexplicable hatred for the subject of geography when I was at school.

One of the up-sides of there being very little TV on during the summer, is that occasionally you get to watch some gems you wouldn't have even bothered looking for. And last night, we found such a gem, a programme about Norway.
Now, had I been asked about Norwegians, the only one I could have thought of was a rather odious man I worked for in an office for about two weeks before I went to the Nature Park.

But of course, really I know many others. Who, for example, hasn't read Thor Heyerdahl's 'Kon-Tiki Expedition'? It was almost compulsory reading for my generation. And Ibsen, everyone's heard of Ibsen. Amundsen, and then the Norwegian Whaling ship that rescued Shackleton after he had shown true grit by walking hundreds of miles across the ice in just his gym shoes. Liv Ullmann of course. Alright, so not that many really, but some.

Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', it transpires, was banned at first in Britain, for portraying women and men as equals.
And there's the thing.
The Vikings. Yes, not just a bunch of horned-hat wearing, sea-faring marauders, but actually a very advanced society, and one in which women and men were equal. They took equal parts in the governing of their society, in fact, negotiation and discussion, arguably more female methods of governance, were how it all worked.

So what could possibly have gone wrong?

Christianity. Yep, good ol' not-supposed-to-be, but-turned-out-that-way, misinterpreted Christianity came along and it all went pear-shaped.

Fortunately, with all that Vikingocity in their blood, the Norwegians are back on track again and remain in the top three of the global index of gender parity.
Which just goes to show you can't keep a Norse God down.

Out Rage!

The little town of Juneau.

A lot of rage on the news this morning.

There was the sorry spectacle of a woman who couldn't get chicken McNuggets during the breakfast service and so tried to push herself through the drive-through window and actually socked the employee working the window twice.
Seriously.
My son has worked this crappy job, not for McD's, but for another fast food joint, and whilst I am impressed with and astonished by the level of hygiene the place insists on, I was equally astonished by the level of abuse these workers have to face. Add to that actual physical violence and this bizarre sense of entitlement that some people have, I can't begin to understand why anyone thinks they have the right to treat other human beings like this, nor that they have some right to be able to just drive up to a window in their oversized vehicle and be served whatever food item they happen to fancy.

Then there was the incredible, changing story of Stephen Slater, the flight attendant.
On the first report on CBC, Stephen, a 38 year-old flight attendant, asked a man who had stood up and was opening the overhead locker whilst the plane was still moving, to sit down. The man let Stephen have it with a stream of verbal that couldn't be repeated on CBC, at which point the item of luggage fell out of the locker, hit Stephen on the head, who then proceeded to let out his own invective, stomped off, taking a bottle of beer with him, activated the emergency chute, which he used to exit the plane, went to the staff car park and drove himself home. Later he was arrested by the Police.
The second report, not ten minutes later, made it seem as though Slater himself was more to blame, by leaving out the passenger's bad language and the force with which the flight attendant was hit.
On the radio, later, the male passenger had become a woman and the whole interchange had been elongated. Stephen had now been with the airline for 28 years, which meant that he must have started with them at the age of ten.
Suffice to say, the real point, in my eyes, is yet again how staff are treated by customers. Apparently a lot of people feel this way and Stephen Slater can hopefully look forward to a career on the talk show circuit.

Why, wondered the CBC, was there more outrage over the awful situation in Pakistan than the awful flooding in China?
A British reporter explained very clearly, so that even those who hadn't yet had their critical number of cups of coffee could understand, that the Chinese government were well enough staffed, resourced and prepared, to be doing everything that could be done for their own people, what was making things difficult were natural circumstances, that no amount of equipment nor drafting of additional machinery, could improve.
Pakistan on the other hand, was not dealing well with its natural disaster because its government was not helping, the President had gone off on a tour of Europe whilst his country drowned and starved, resources were not getting through and the people worst affected were getting, basically, no help at all.

Lastly, rage I anticipate, or rather, rage I DON'T anticipate. Rod Stewart is to become a father again at the age of 65. And this, to my mind, is entirely his beeswax. But when a woman of any remotely advanced age becomes a mother, there is generally an outcry from people who think it's some kind of public outrage and something they should personally have a say in, rather in the same way they think they have the rights to make decisions about any woman's reproductive rights.

Jack and Jesus

I don't understand where the time goes too. I swear it's accelerating - which is bad news really. Still, the good news is that we've had some rain. The grass was almost entirely straw coloured, except, of course, where people had ignored the hosepipe ban and sprinkled their lawns and the pavement with it. This morning, a very fat man with earplugs, sitting on a motor mower, was attempting to cut non-existent grass in the park - for this, we pay our taxes.

Like the Governator, and in fact, almost everybody except the hard core religious right, I was ecstatic to see that Proposition 8 has been deemed to be unconstitutional. Of course, this doesn't mean that ordinary, tax-paying Californians can just go out and marry the human of their choice, since they have to put up with another time-wasting challenge by a bunch of imbeciles whose purpose on this planet is to poison everything, but hey, in time, we could be back to normality. The Governator gave a nice speech about how California should be leading the country not slowing it down, and I have watched this video with Jack Black as Jesus, about 17 times.

On the cover of Time magazine's 9th August issue is this picture of a young woman who was mutilated by her husband and his family because she tried to run away. It doesn't even bear thinking about, and yet, we need to, because it's just a matter of degree. Men in Afghanistan can get away scott-free with this kind of violence against women. Men in the west still commit acts of gender-violence and it's not ok just because it's not as horrifying as this. And both men and women allow a society to continue to treat women as the second sex and create an ethos where this happens.

This article in 'The American Prospect' shows how, when men are challenged on sexism, they simply continue it behind our backs, and it's still just as damaging, and underscores my point about how sexism in language works against gender equality.

But this article also brings home another point, and one that Kevin has brought to my attention before. Subversive workplace sexism like this damages men as well, and I don't mean in a 'what goes around comes around' version of reality.
No, because the good ones, the ones that fight sexism simply because it's wrong are excluded from these 'in groups', in exactly the same way that women who are happy to be 'one of the guys' are able to be included on the surface. Of course, by accepting that male is higher status and female lower status, those women are accepting that they are a lesser part of the group.

Likewise, men who believe that women are not the second sex, that gender equality is an absolute priority, are treated as though they are part of the outsider, lower status group. But at least they have integrity, and come the revolution.....

And then there is the casual sexism highlighted in this article by Bidisha in The Graun. Read it, it's startling, but so right.

The Unreasonable Coldness of Being

Oh, Lardy, Lardy, I wish I were sitting on that Fox's Glacier Glacier right now. It is too hot to move. I envy those in the south of England their recent thunderstorm, I'm prepared to storm the met offices of CBC if they are lying to me about the forthcoming rain.

Now, whilst I am a hot person, Alex and I have a theory about cold people, or in fact, anyone who has some kind of 'special need' as it were. If you go out in public, then you should, like any follower of Lady and Lord Baden-Powell, Be Prepared. You don't go to someone's house and expect them to supply you with insulin if you're diabetic, if you have small children, you normally take a supply of nappies and other assorted accoutrements with you, so why does someone who knows in advance they are freezing in the middle of summer at say, 25°, not bring warm gear with them? I mean, I get that ANY of us can be caught out, I myself had to ask for painkillers the last time I visited Sleepy Mansions, and of course, there are certain things it's reasonable for a host to supply, water, extra blankets for the bed in the winter for example, coffee, toilet paper, wine, internet access.

Likewise, Alex came up with the example of gluten intolerance. She frequently has people visiting her shop asking about what they can feed their guests who are coming for dinner and who have gluten intolerance. Again, it's a matter of degree. If I invite a vegetarian to dins, I would cook something without meat. One tries to remember one's individual friends' peccadilloes, Sleepy can't be doing with the pig flesh, Susie doesn't like mushrooms, that kind of thing.

But gluten-free tucker is expensive and hard to find, and if you have a doctor's note, you can claim your gluten-free nosh against tax, ergo, take it with you.

Or, if you don't have enough foresight to plan for your own special need, then at the very least, pre-establish a completely off-the-wall persona with random, peculiar behaviour, for example, this would be an advance warning indicator, some kind of foreign accent that comes and goes....ahh, right.
Hmmmm.....

Oops, I thought I'd better add that I am absolutely NOT talking about Dawn here, who, whilst being a colder-than-me person is the absolutely perfect guest and travelling companion and brings her own jumpers.

Fox's Glacier Mints

Only there is no polar bear sitting on it, nor a smarmy fox pointing at it, and in fact, it's not really a mint. Just a glacier. A beautiful, incredible, disappearing glacier.

On board ship, we had a naturalist called Milos, who told us interesting stuff and gave illustrated talks. One of his talks was about the sky at night. He took us all the way back to the big bang, it was fabulous. But it wasn't far enough for me, so I had to work out for myself what must have happened before then.

Imagine it, Sicily, 1923. No, sorry, that was Sofia in 'The Golden Girls'.
Imagine it, Infinity, six billion and a funny squiggle years ago. The Celestial Programmers are having a cuppa in the staff room.
XGVG - So, the new proggie, is it ready to go yet?
YHWH - Yep, yep, just about, I've fixed the little time blip,
XGVG - Excellent, I knew you only had to remodulate,
YHWH - Pretty much, yeah, oh and I had to get my head around this whole procreation thingie.
XGVG - Wha? Procreation, wtf's that?
YHWH - Oh, it's something I've built in to make it all a bit more interesting, actually, I'm anticipating it being very interesting,
XGVG - I'm intrigued, do tell...
YHWH - Well, it's a bit of an odd concept really. See, when I boot the whole thing up - I'm calling it 'The Big Bang' as a sort of working title, stuff gets formed, then it sort of spills out everywhere and some of it sticks together and whatnot, anyhoo, cut a long story short, after a relatively short amount of time, we get to the really good bit of the programme, and what I am calling 'Life'..
XGVG - Working title?
YHWH - Working title, pops up, in fact, some might say it looks like a bit of a googly in the programming, but I can assure you it's intentional. So, 'Life', gets more and more complicated, but in order to keep going, it has to somehow reproduce itself....
XGVG - Ah..because of the time thingie....
YHWH - Because of the time thingie, right, so, at first, the units of 'Life' can reproduce by splitting themselves, but when it gets VERY complicated, and here's the beauty of this, I'm dead pleased about it, two units will have to get together and sort of fuse and then divide to form a new unit.
XGVG - Huh, clever, I like it, so what's it based on?
YHWH - Was hoping you'd ask, here's the bit I really like, it's based on numbers,
XGVG - No way...
YHWH - Yes way, numbers right? Numbers work here, numbers work within the programme,
XGVG - THAT is elegant,
YHWH - Right? AND...to make it even more interesting, I have made two equal but different halves, but I've given them a different number of coding strings,
XGVG - Awesome! Wait, do we still say awesome?
YHWH - I believe we do, and are! So, one type will have three strands of code, the other four,
XGVG - Equal, different and one has an extra string of coding, I cannot wait to see it running. So, the whole programme, do you have a title for that?
YHWH - Eh...I dunno, I'm a bit stuck really, I thought of 'Creation' but then I thought, hmm...maybe The Sims? I mean it is a simulation...of sorts....
XGVG - One type has three strands of coding, the other four, it's just brilliant, brilliant! And what could possibly go wrong?

Sac Magique!

Denali National Park.

When I got back from Alaska, the foliage had disappeared from the spud bags, yep, not just died back, entirely vanished. I didn't have time to sulk straight away, so I put it off until today. Now, Sleepy's instructions were very thorough and included the dying back of foliage, but not the total disappearance thereof.

The spuds I had in the cupboard were starting to sprout, so, nil desperandum, I decided I'd start again and hopefully the second lot would be more successful.

But I hadn't realised that the spud bags really are magic. There, hiding in the soil were a whole set of brand new little potatoes. I think I like this spud game more than any other garden magic.
I've planted some more anyway, and so far, I've only looked in one bag.

Cultural vagaries

Cultural vagaries.

This evening, Whisky was having a canine Mexican stand-off with another small dog.
'How big this dog?' asked its owner. I looked at him. My immediate thought was to point at Whisky and say,
'This big,' but on second thoughts, I told him Whisky's weight. The other dog, a Dachshund, appeared to be wearing a pair of pants around its front legs and breast, to protect it from chaffing from the harness I imagine.
Nonetheless, odd.

A little further on I saw a woman wearing the most hideous hijab I'd ever seen. Usually, they look quite elegant, but this one looked like an oversized yellow duster. Then I realised it was an oversized duster, held on by a baseball cap, and the woman was most likely not of the hijab wearing persuasion.
The Chinese people here, especially the women, often go to great lengths to avoid exposure to the sun. Some wear full-face visors that look comical, others walk beneath brollies held up as parasols, they look serene.

It is blueberry season. However, the local blueberry growers by and large are not native speakers of English, so everywhere there are signs that say,
'Fresh picked blueberries.'
No, this really won't do, because it is quite simply meaningless. Two adjectives in apposition must be able to both qualify the noun, thus, 'fresh, British Columbian blueberries' makes sense because the blueberries are fresh and from BC. So, I'm willing to accept that the blueberries are both fresh and have been picked, but then, you don't need to say that. If they were fresh and un-picked, then the fresh would be superfluous because whilst they're on the bush, they are of course fresh.
Probably they mean 'freshly picked'. People, you need an adverb to qualify an adjective, everyone knows that.
Perhaps it's a characteristic of some other language.

This happens.
For example, some eastern European languages like Russian, which I personally have no knowledge of, clearly has a problem with articles. This leads to such gems as the one that appeared in our daily on-board bulletin, 'Say it with the Flowers'.
Right.

Along similar lines, I imagine that the Chinese languages have a different take on tenses from English.
'Whisky make poo?' doesn't in fact mean 'has Whisky been to the toilet?' but rather a question about his viability as a living thing. First biology lesson at secondary school, characteristics of living things, 'excretion'.

When Dawn and I arrived at Fairbanks, (where this dead polar bear picture was taken), we were given a diary to write in. On the inside cover, (journalling for dummies or some such) were some apparently common mistakes. Most of them were of the 'duh' variety. But one was crashingly, glaringly, incorrect.
'Always 'toward' it said, never 'towards'.' Wrong! However, in spite of a lifetime of reading some of the world's greatest literature, I checked with the OED before commenting on the error.

" Towards : preposition
*
1 in the direction of:they drove towards the German frontier
*
getting closer to achieving (a goal):moves towards EU political and monetary union
*
close or closer to (a particular time):towards the end of April
*
2 expressing the relation between behaviour or an attitude and the person or thing at which it is directed or with which it is concerned:he was warm and tender towards her our attitude towards death
*
3 contributing to the cost of:the council provided a grant towards the cost of new buses

Origin:

Old English tōweardes (see to, -ward)"


Obsessive? Ya think? Sure, but it's my obsession and I'm comforted by it :))

Sushi Day

I'm avoiding my stairs, which have become a dirt magnet during my absence. Or...they're always a dirt magnet, but right now, they're fully attracting.

Yesterday had a kind of a sushi theme. Kevin has had a heavy cold for a few days and I collected him from work early afternoon. He did what anyone does when they're ill, he watched mindless TV from the comfort of the bed. At one point, I came upstairs, and there was a programme on about cakes. There was a sushi boat made out of cake. I really couldn't get the point of this, I mean, I can understand why you would make a boat out of cake, even I would find cake preferable to wood as a means of sustenance, but sushi? I don't see sushi as a meal, but it's certainly a tasty snack, and I'd take it over cake any day.

In the evening, M had bought a big tray of sushi for writers' group, and R read a story that was sushi themed. And I won the 'who wants to take the rest of the sushi home?' competition and thus, have been stuffing myself with sushi.
I do love me some wasabi, it clears the sinuses out better than a spoonful of Coleman's.

It's very hot here, and I'm missing the cooler temperatures of Alaska.

When we were in Denali, travelling through the National Park in a coach - although more of a bus really, the driver told us that a passenger had once asked him what they do with the animals at night.
Hohum.
We didn't ever let that one lie, we applied it to everything - what do they do with the orcas at night? But I guess it was a trick question. There is no night. Perhaps the person meant what did they do with the animals in the winter. Jeez, don't people watch cartoons?

Inside Passage

Ah the luxury of all-you-can-use Broadband.

On Wednesday evening, round about 21.00, we sailed into Canadian waters. This didn't stop anyone from talking about us still being in Alaska, but my Canadian phone immediately changed back to Pacific Standard Time and intermittently, it was showing the name of my Canadian service provider. I managed to ring Kevin.

All day Thursday, we cruised through the most beautiful part of the whole trip, the northern parts of BC and down through the Queen Charlotte strait to the Johnstone strait - known as the 'Inside Passage'. Yes, I know. But then that's not the worst thing. I come home to find out that Kev now has a 'frequent beaver' card. Should I be worried? We'll get you one Sleepy, never fear, all we have to do is eat at the Flying Beaver.

Friday morning, we were home, well, I was. We docked in Vancouver at roughly 7am, but my slot for getting off the ship was 9.45, since I didn't have a plane to catch.

Overall, a lot of food for thought. The most important part for me was being able to spend time with my friend of 42 years, Dawn, but seeing Alaska was a privilege too.

Icy Point and Ketchikan

Yesterday's port of call was Icy Point Strait. This is a good stop, a tiny, but well-managed waterfront concourse of shops and restaurants and a beach and forest trail, all owned and operated by the local First Nations band, part of the Tlingit nation.
It is so pristine that this is where orca and humpback whales come a-calling. The first people out on a whale-watching boat saw pods of both, which is amazing and wondrous, however, at $144, this costed out at roughly $2 an animal, which you may or may not think is good value.
Dawn and I relied on the water beasties coming to find us, and lo, one or two did. We saw orcas and an eagle sitting in a tree.
The ship was anchored out in the bay and we had to be ferried to and from the shore, and we weighed anchor early afternoon.

Today we stopped at Ketchikan, a small tourist port which makes us realise that we are Alaska'd out. We schlepped out on a local bus to see a clan house surrounded by totem poles. Although everything we could see was outside, it cost us $3, but then the bus trip was only a dollar each way, so for $5 we were able to do most of what those who went on an organised tour paid $50 for.
Somewhere, there was a lumberjack show just waiting to be missed, as was the young man dressed as a lumberjack outside the breakfast room this morning. Every morning there is someone in costume with whom you can be photographed, but you have to be proactive about refusing. I asked where the LumberJill was, which gave them pause for thought, but I made my point.

At 21.00 we cross into Canadian water. I am strangely excited about this.

Juneau and Skagway

Yesterday we docked at Juneau, Alaska's capital city, although city may be rather an exaggeration. It is a pretty little town with a whole line of tourist shops, places where you can buy the same T-shirt, but also some very nice shops displaying and selling the work of local artists. The most surprising thing however, is the incredible number of jewellers. They offer free trinkets to the cruise ship passengers. Bait and switch, they get you in there with the promise of a pendant, actually give you a lump of amethyst because they're 'run out' and then try to sell you stuff. Dawn is my secret weapon, she's a canny shopper, well that and the fact that jewellery doesn't interest me.
We saw around the government building. Tours were on offer, but in fact they just gave you a leaflet and pointed you at the lift. If you like dark, carved wood, this is the place for you, to me it was interesting, yet dismal, in need of an Ikea makeover. It seems that Alaska has been more represented by women than most other places, and as is usually the case, the women were also the activists for social justice.

Today we docked in Skagway, another small town, reliant on the tourist industry. As with Juneau, it sells history, diamonds and T-shirts with plasticised jokes on the word 'bear' or 'moose'. Really, there is no end to them.
The history is based on the railway and the gold rush. Alaska seems to be largely kept alive by tourism and toruism is also killing it.
Dawn and I ignored the shops, didn't pay another $100 to sit on a train, or another 100 again to spend ten minutes on a zipline, and we hiked instead up a mountain, which we enjoyed. There's plenty to do on the cruise ship, but none of it is very physical, so we were more than happy to get the cardio-vascular system going again.

Hubbard

The first morning in ages that Dawn and I have been able to sleep in. Today has been just cruising. The atmosphere around the ship is fairly formal and respectful, and I must say it has a good effect on the language and manners of everyone.

Today we nosed up to the Hubbard Glacier. The sun was shining and it was just an incredible sight. We saw and heard the glacier calving, which was equally spectacular, but also sad that eventually there will be nothing left. We spent several hours watching, the ship was stopped and, like Leslie Phillips character in 'The Navy Lark', the captain did a bit of 'left hand down a bit', and turned the ship so that we could get the best view. There were seals lying around on blocks of ice. Enjoy it whilst you can my lovelies.

Now we're heading towards Alaska's capital, Juneau, where we will dock tomorrow. There is some dissent within the state about Juneau being the capital, since it is inaccessible except by air or sea, and the majority of people live between Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Seward

Now we're in business.
By the time we had found somewhere to eat last night, done so, and then walked back to the hotel, it was almost midnight and by the time we had packed and gone to bed, it was 1, and at 1, it seems, the sky is almost, but not quite, dark. We'd had to set our alarms for 4am, and so effectively got three hours' sleep, yeah, yeah, I know, believe you me, you have my sympathy those for whom three hours would be a good night.

But the Alaskan Railroad trip from Anchorage to Seward was a different kettle of glaciers. Finally, Dawn and I had found our wow factor, just jaw-dropping, extreme beauty. The journey was also not as long. We had checked our bags in at Anchorage and they were taken straight to the ship, so when we got off the train at Seward, we were able to walk to the liner and check ourselves in.

I kept offering my NEXUS card instead of my passport, but they'd never seen one, and didn't even seem impressed when I told them that Homeland Security themselves had scanned my retinae and fingerprinted me thoroughly. They told me the problem was the Canadians who insisted on a passport. At this point, I let it drop.

Our cabin is nowhere near as titchy as we'd both imagined, and it's very nicely laid out. Internet access however, is not cheap, so I will only be reading and replying to Kevin's e-mails, so for anything important, please get in touch with him and I won't be checking Facebook.

Tomorrow we will be cruising. You could eat yourself stupid on one of these things, should the inclination take you, but my personal goal is to not have to get up at 5 tomorrow.
Rock and roll.

Et Alia

Finally I have a connection. We've stopped in Anchorage for the night, before taking the train to Seward in the morning, and then on to the ship. I'm looking forward to not having to get up at 5 o'clock at some point, but tomorrow morning won't be that morning. I have, however. written something each evening, so I'll paste.

Today, we went whitewater rafting - the 'raft' was a dinghy, and we didn't get to do anything apart from sit in it and get cold and wet in spite of our dry suits. I had a panic attack when I was zipped into mine.
In retrospect, I prefer kayaking, but it was interesting to go down a long stretch of slightly turbulent water.
Afterwards we got the train, the Alaskan Railroad, to where we are now. It's still not properly dark and we have to be out of here by 5.30.

13/07/10
Of course now that we're at the cabin where we're staying on the edge of Denali National Park, there is no wi-fi. There is supposed to be, but there isn't and it's too freaking late to go and bug someone about it.
Here, late is meaningless, it's a pragmatic lateness, it's 22.30 as I write and no darker than late afternoon. In the winter, the opposite, the lack of sunshine, messes with the beavers, they go into a 26-29 hour diurnal cycle.
The road here from Fairbanks was bouncy. Apparently the permafrost messes with the road surface. The landscape was like BC-lite, and with shorter trees, black spruce and Aspen. There are also areas of forest fires, caused by lightning.
Then there is the coal mining. Although the mining companies are making good the blasted land from open cast mining, coal is still used to generate electricity here. Recycling is a theoretical. The Northern Wilderness is far from pristine.

14/07/10
Safari – well, a day on a bus at any rate. We drove 92 miles in 6 hours into the mountains and back country that is Denali National Park. It's bigger than Yellowstone, or was it Jellystone? Either way, we went around the kind of mountain roads you only see in films. We saw Moose, a Lynx, several grizzly bears with cubs, a grey wolf, snowshoe hares. We saw glaciers and braided glacier meltwater.
The light thing is still worrying me. I woke up during the night and it was almost dark.
We had to make our own arrangements for dinner after we got back, so, having been assured that the restaurants – a bunch of log cabins – run shuttles to take punters home, we stopped at the Salmon Bake. This little place reminded me of Squamish, very much so, it was difficult to remember I wasn't in Canada, apart, of course, from the different money and the annoying tendency of everyone to expect to be tipped. I'm sorry, if you do a job, you get paid for it, if you do it well, your employer deals with that, if you do it badly, your employer deals with that. The end.
Having said all of that, the cost of living is high in Alaska, compared with other States. Unless you want to eat Moose and other roadkill, all the food has to be expensively flown in and distributed. Dawn told me that Alaskan residents get an oil cheque once a year, but all that does is allow them to buy a few things they haven't been able to afford throughout the year.
And, Alaska has a short growing season. The plants flower and possibly fruit and the permafrost melts slightly, for 100 days in a year. By mid-August, the snows start and then everything starts to close down. By the 1st of October, the little town we went to today is completely closed, as is the road through the National Park.
To make up for that, there are no reptiles in Alaska, well, except Sarah of course.
Oh, and Dawn has come over from the dark side, she boldly informed the woman in the restaurant that we were not guys. And we're not.

Fairbanks

We have landed and are awaiting our bus to the Grizzly Bear resort. We are contemplating a photo opp with a stuffed Grizzly, or maybe a stuffed Polar Bear, or perhaps both.....

Anchorage

I'm so sure that I won't be able to get any internet access when we get to where I'm going, that I'm taking advantage of every free wi-fi opp. Right now we're in Starbuck's at Anchorage airport, waiting for our flight to Fairbanks. Can't see any Moose - but all that means is that there aren't any on the runway - phew.
I'm wondering if the next plane will be smaller still, the landing of the last one was...interesting.

Today's Whisky's birthday, but so far, attempts to teach him to read have failed, so I know he won't be watching the blog.

We are.....

.....on the plane to Anchorage. Seattle is wired in more than one way.

And so.....

...we have arrived in Seattle. Hohum. We had booked a hotel room through hotwire, since our flight leaves so early tomorrow, and we had booked a room with twin beds. Ahhhh...but in Seattle, same-sex is standard, so we told our room had a king-sized bed. We changed that. We went up to our room. We put the credit card thingy in the door, we threw the bedroom door open....and clearly it was occupied. We went 'huh!' Then we went 'huh' again. We shut the door. We re-grouped. We prepared to go downstairs and remonstrate, but then the receptionist who had given us the keys caught up with us. I felt that, given the situation, her embarrassment was far too mild. But whatevs. It's Seattle.

The Excellent Adventure...

....will continue as and when I get internet connection.
Tomorrow we fly to Alaska.

Nest

Apparently no undue after effects from the Grouse Grind, damned hot during the night though, the a/c seemed to have developed AI and turned up its own override temp.

This morning church, this avo, kayaking and a heron led us to this eagle's nest. This evening, Dr. Who and True Blood. A splendid day all told.

The Grind

Yesterday, Dawn and I did the Drive - we sweltered - and then downtown Vancouver - slightly occluded sky. In the evening we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at Bard on the Beach - perfect temp.

Today we did The Grind. No, not that kind of grind, the Grouse Grind.
Holy Mary Mother of God.
I'm not sure how we got up that mountain but we did. At the top, there was a lovely mist tent, divine. Every few yards I thought I was going to expire.

As you start up the mountain, people can still talk, their voices clanged, broke into my zone, stressed me, it reminded me of the RS Thomas poem that thinks of God listening to our incessant voices for eternity.
As we got further into the torture, there was less noise, just the wheezing and heavy breathing of people who couldn't remember how or why they had started this.

God's stairmaster got steeper and steeper and more difficult to climb. I looked down and wondered why a religion would develop that required people to never cut their hair and to wear fabric around it, in a country as hot as India.

Dawn and I knew we'd get there eventually, it just seemed that night may fall before we did. Kevin had done it last year, he had more faith.

We reached the top after two and a half hours. On the electronic reader board at the top, the current best time for a female under the age of 13, was 54 minutes. I'd have wept, but I didn't care. I had my poutine and a pass to get down.
I mustn't grumble, we'd chosen to do it and I hear you have to do more strenuous things in the Israeli army.

Am I hot and bovvered? Hell yeah!

Dawn and I have been doing local stuff for local people. Visiting my wimminz. Oh, and the picturesque city of Richmond. And we have been sweltering. The poor puppy was walked off his little legs and his tongue was panting overtime. At this point I realised that in quaint little Steveston, what was missing was somewhere to just buy a bottle of water. Then I double realised that in quaint little Steveston, nice ladies invite you into their shops WITH your poor, panting puppy and put out a bowl of water for him. He was so tired this evening, another dog walker in the park remarked on what a calm dog he was.
'Not usually,' sez I.

Thank god for A/C. It has been on for 24 hours now and the temperature inside the house has been rendered tolerable.

Tomorrow we do Vancouver. Van-cougar. We're going to go to all the gayest places.

Flagpole

The Static comes with its own flagpole, presumably so that one can show allegiance to one's own flag.
Personally, I favour the Jolly Roger, sadly however, this has been well and truly spoilt for me by a neighbour of Kev's parents, who flies the Jolly Roger plus a truckload of other jolly stuff everytime he is at his Static. He also has a cutlass and a parrot, ooh ar Jim-lad. I think we get yer drift my hearty.

My second choice is the flag of the European Union, although you have to keep updating that according to how many member states there are at any given time.
I'm waiting for Greece to be chucked out.

The Fleur-de-Lys of Québec also appeals, just to be contrary really.

Apparently the Queen has her own Canadian standard which she used to fly when in Canada even before the Maple Leaf was thought of, but flying that might be one of those things you can still technically be executed for, like making knickers from the Union Flag; High Treason is still punishable by death.

The other thing is, I think Brownies and Guides has over-complicated flag flying for me. I'm sure it was really important to know how to properly fold a flag and even which knots were appropriate in its furling and unfurling, and there was certainly a lot of hoisting and slowly un-hoisting whilst singing Taps, but I don't ever remember any attaching. Still, how difficult can it be? I can probably google it.

At present, our flagpole needs painting and the only thing being run up it are a whole slew of bird feeders, baths and general feathered friend paraphernalia.
Maybe a pair of stout grandma drawers might be just the thing to show my pride, or maybe there's a Pride flag to show solidarity.

So long as there are no red flags.

Horseplay

Cripes, a whole week without blogging. Well I've been five days without internet access and that was rather annoying.

Mercury must be retrograde because we've been five days without post too. Our bloody postboxes have been vandalised.
Canada Post, in its infinite wisdom, feels it unnecessary to deliver post to our doors, so it makes us have a bunch of pigeon holes with lockable covers. Sadly, they seem to be made from aluminium and thus easy to jimmy open. The Friday before last, mercifully after I'd collected our post, this is exactly what happened. In spite of the Post Office having a legal obligation to deliver your post to you, they don't. In fact, the boxes belong to us, and we have to replace them, at a cost of $4,000 the set. AND....we have to schlepp down to the sorting office between the hours of 10.00 and 14.00 or some equally ridiculous time frame, and collect our own mail.
I did this today.

The lady who helped me kept shaking her head and saying how terrible it is that it's going to take so long to replace the boxes. She said it was down to the property manager. I told her that in fact, the people who make these mail box systems have a backlog - it turns out they are easily vandalised, who knew!? - and we won't be getting a new one until September or October.

She handed me one piece of post. She said that couldn't be right and went off to search in the bowels of the sorting office for more. She came back and shook her head once more. She wondered whether 'he' (presumably the postie) had decided to take the mail out anyway to see whether the boxes had been repaired.
Oh well.

Meanwhile, at the weekend retreat, the trailer which shall henceforth be known as 'The Static', the U.S. Americans seemed to be celebrating the fourth of July on the third of July. Fireworks were going off all day, intermittently, there was a pool party in and around the family pool and somehow, a siren seemed to also be going all day. By the time we woke up on the fourth itself, everything seemed to be still and silent. Well, except for the siren which we could hear feebly going in the distance.

In the woodland area of the park, life carried on much as usual, children played, dogs went for walks along the trails and people sat out in their little gardens, and in the evenings had fires in their firepits.
One of them, having been reminded by friends about a week-and-a-half ago of the existence of Pimms, had been longing for same since then, and had been unable to get any, but she suffered (mostly) silently.

The other side of the swimming pools and tennis courts, there is a covered wagon, such as would have carried families across the wild west. The other side of the covered wagon are the real RVs, the ones that actually go somewhere, and they are all parked on a gravelled area around the garbage bins.

In the 'adult pool', the one in which I swim lengths and then leave, there were some lads and their ladies, probably, I decided, from the gravelly area, messing about. One of the girls told the lads not to splash the lady (me). 'Can't you read?' she asked the lad, pointing at the list of rules, printed at the insistence of Whatcom County.
'No horseplay' it says.
'I definitely think that's Horseplay,' I said.
I love the word Horseplay, it covers a multitude of tentative sins.

The sign also says you have to be 21.

The lads and lasses looked sheepish and then the girls made the boys get out. I think it's because they heard my English accent.
Tim Roth has done wonders for us Brits on this side of the Pond.

Persona

Listen up Ikea, I'm not loving this summer's Pippi Longstocking range of tablewear and accoutrements, you should ask me before going with something as unappealing as red and green stripes. Also, had you run it past me, I'd also have advised against calling a range of pots and pans, 'Skanka', seriously, you all speak English better than many English, you know what you're doing here.

A while ago, I read a book by Sarah Waters, called 'The Little Stranger', it had me hypnotised. So I decided to read another of hers, 'Tipping the Velvet'. One thing I really like about Waters' writing is the quality of it, she is a great writer, but in both cases, she writes in a style that captures the historic period about which she is writing.
'Tipping the Velvet' is set in the late 19th Century and is about a young woman who falls in love with another. Hum, just had to re-type that, since at that point, Whisky plonked his head down on the keyboard. Now Waters herself is a lesbian writer, so it's not like me trying to imagine what it would be like to be in that situation, and so the feelings that the main character Nan has for her lover Kitty, are very honest. What strikes me is how love is portrayed without the socially constructed imbalance between women and men, so that when Nan wants to do everything to please Kitty, it's not because she's debasing herself just to 'get her man'.

Firefox has just updated itself, and it wants to offer me a new persona. I can choose from 30,000 options, and like any secondary school pupil, I spent time actually browsing through them. I couldn't, of course, find any drifting snow, but I settled for Antarctica. I also lost interest by about page seven, so good thing my actual persona doesn't depend on my choosing.

History

The G8 leaders are gathering in Toronto-ish for the G20 summit. On our news, the camera lovingly caresses President Obama as he runs down the stairs. Canadians are disappointed because Michelle isn't with him. Protesters have a special protesters' area with toilets and running water and a police guard. In spite of this, the protesters are upset about efforts to deter them from disrupting the proceedings. It all starts to look like a Russian doll, or one of those Esher pictures.
Personally, I'd feel safer if Gordon Brown were there, but given that he's not, I would settle for Decameron giving Harper a bit of a tongue lashing.

History in the making. Mainly blokes of course. You could argue that since they made this mess, they can bloody well get us out of it, but I feel a better balance would be more likely to come up with a viable and sustainable solution.

David Mitchell has a few things to say about older history. And he's quite right.

Then there's Spartacus. Sounds like an interesting series huh? We missed it the first time round, but it seems to be available for free on Shaw's 'So you missed it the first time round huh?' channel.

I don't like it when history is mucked around with, but if it's not terribly well documented history, I'm prepared for a little bit of wiggle room.
What I'm not prepared for, is something that has both the same quality of dialogue as an eastern European series circa 'Belle, Sebastian and the Horses', that has been dubbed into English, and the same standard of acting as a very small village's am dram group.

This is a three trick pony. Nudity - nowadays almost exclusively used to distract the viewer from poor writing; blood by the gallon, and that rather evocative camera technique where everything goes into slowmo and then suddenly speeds up.

Occasionally all three are used at the same time.

But yet, the unlikely duo of Lucy Lawless and John Hannah, the hope that at some point, the real story of Spartacus will be followed and the Welsh gladiator will lead his band of muscle-bound Aussies into the hills, thence to challenge Rome, and the current TV scheduling that consists of only two other shows worth watching, 'Lie to Me' and 'True Blood', somehow keep us moving on to the next episode.

Springfield

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....I know, me too, I hated Charles Dickens, although I think I came upon his work at the wrong time. I can't blame reading him at school, I loved the process of literary analysis, those brilliant women who taught us didn't ruin books for me, they made them great.

Digression.

I have friends and family here who are the best of people, but then there are the people of Springfield.

Now I'm not saying the people of Springfield don't exist back in Blighty, far from it. I believe it was the residents of Leigh Park who turned up with the pitchforks when they learnt there was a Paediatrician living amongst them. I'm not making it up.
The thing is, back home, they are easily recognisable.

The people of Springfield here are not plain-speakers, they don't respond well to criticism, hell, they don't respond at all, they go all tight-lipped, neither acknowledging nor challenging, they are spiteful and back-biting, they skulk and they sulk. They understand neither irony nor wit, nor sarcasm, nor long words. And they are passive-aggressive.
There are people who recognise passive aggression, claiming it to be a national trait, but mostly, those who label themselves in this way, are only so in a normal way, to the extent that any human is.
Others wear it like a poncho.

Just saying is all.

Orientation?

Now you can hardly have failed to notice that language is my thing. (As opposed to my thang). Recently, I've been having a bit of an Oriental problem.

On Sunday, a gentleman informed those around him that it (whatever it was, I can't even remember, but had something to do with the buying of staves), was no longer available because the Orientals had taken it over. Now I can see that that way of putting things is really not on, a bit like referring to 'the gays' or 'the women' or 'the blacks'.
However....last week, I queried someone who said he'd realised he'd written about another person, that he 'enjoyed oriental cookery'. The someone had changed it to 'Asian cookery'. I asked him what he felt was wrong with 'oriental', it is, after all, a rather useful word that simply means eastern. His reply was that it smacked of imperialism and subservience.

Now, this is something that doesn't occur to me, but I know it's an important marker in history here, and a negative one. I suppose we were just taught it as part of world history, it happened, then something else happened. It was given neither a positive nor a negative spin. It just was what it was.

I think it's hard to avoid viewing British imperialism particularly without seeing it as paternal, but then, whilst paternalism itself is outdated, there were certainly positive aspects of it in its time.

Interesting to ponder however.

On the subject of matters parental, it seems that, whilst a couple of major eastern countries have shot themselves in the collective foot by selecting to have boy children, in the west, couples who have been going to clinics that offer choice of a baby's sex to prospective parents, (notice how I use this phrase meaningfully, teaching at secondary school, we used to use it stupidly refer to parents who had children, but may like to send them to our large, inner-city comp) have been opting for girls, in some cases in a ratio of 2 : 1. Later in the article, it mentions a 75% preference for girl children.

I think the hyperbole of the article is both short-sighted and premature, but it certainly looks as though the future could contain either many transcontinental marriages and or many more women joining an ever-expanding sorority.

The implied imperialism of BP is starting to annoy me. It stopped called itself British Petroleum in 1997, largely due to the fact that by then, 40% of the company was owned by American oil company Amocco. And it seems as though this part of the global company is the part that has been drilling in the gulf and has had the misfortune to have accidentally caused the current nightmare.

Now, thinking back to my days as a Head of Department at Mayhem, had my department somehow managed to start an international incident, and believe you me, we had the capacity, I can see that the Headteacher would have taken the flack. But I also think, that at some point, said flack would have been concentrated on me. So it seems a little bit bizarre that Tony Hayward - a man who looks rather like the actor who played Tony Blair in the film 'The Queen' (and also the chief werewolf in something else)- has to stand and show stiff upper lip whilst being roasted over the fire by Obama, head prefect of the main culprit. Still, he has shown he has mettle.

Just a thought really.

Jay

I have been practising cruise control. Given that I don't like giving up control over the gears of the car, cruise control has been something I haven't liked the idea of, and yet I need to get used to it. It's scary. It's like someone else is driving the car, but I'm still steering. It does, however, contribute to fuel efficiency, so I have been practising and along the long roads that lead to the border with the States, there has been plenty of opportunity.

The picture is of a Stellar's Jay, sitting in the tree in our garden. Now, Schloss Schneewittchen doesn't actually have a garden, but the trailer we have just bought does. Mobile home, it's a mobile home. And it's very nice. And it's in Whatcom County, Washington State, so we had to brave going further down the I5 the other day to register our ownership and pay our property tax. We're going there this evening - er, to the trailer, not the Courthouse again.

Hot and Wet

I apologise before I say this but I am already fed up with the World Cup. I dunno, somehow, in Britain, it seems you can more easily avoid it, here, not so much.
It's almost as though, because the Canadian men's team didn't qualify, they have to overcompensate, sort of vicarious football victory. Of course, that may very well explain it. There can't be a single country that isn't well represented here.
Canadian women, on t'other hand, are apparently pretty shit hot at the old footie. Let them play I say, let the women get out there and take on the world.

We have had some serious rain, but equally, some serious sun.
Saturday was one of the latter. I was sat in a hot room at the Vancouver School of Theology. This building appears a lot in 'Fringe' and I think it is usually labelled 'Harvard University'. Hmmm...
The workshop, like the curate's egg, was good in parts.
The bus terminus seemed to lack any shade - or in fact any buses to take me back into Vancouver and thus the skytrain, but when one did show up, exodus was swift and painless.

Lie to Me, a wondrous TV series, I have realised wouldn't work in real life, not because there are not really people who can tell instantly whether a person is lying or not, but because everyone behaves too logically. Tim Roth is basically, any Brit, and speaks and behaves like any Brit. The problem is that in real life, outside of Britain, the majority of people don't simply listen to you and respond logically to what you're saying, they go all anal-retentive and block you out.

True Blood is back. The homoerotica seems to be up a notch. I wonder if Russell T. Davis is writing for them.

Dogberry and Dog

How easily we come to expect that all and every piece of information will be instantly available beneath our fingertips. I wanted to show Alex a clip of Adam Faith in the 70s series 'Budgie', saying, 'Leave it out 'aze,' to his wife, Hazel. Could only find three clips of the series in YouTube, and one was just the titles.
Hmmm.

My intensive cleaning therapy has recommenced. I have started from the front door and am working inwards. I cleaned the downstairs loo, and then felt very...well, clean. It wasn't that it was truly horrible, just, it was in need of attention. But the rain is working against me, or, the rain and Whisky are in cahoots. Not that Whisky is messing the toilet, but his wet muddy paws are undoing my floor cleaning as it progresses. At some point, I didn't spot that he'd opened the bug screen and was on the balcony undoing my gardening as well. And then the resulting muddy paws and snout managed to take out another section of floor and the bath mat when I took him up to be bathed.

So, yesterday evening, we went to see the first Bard on the Beach play of the season. We saw the dress rehearsal of 'Much Ado About Nothing'. It's one of the less intricate and interesting comedies, one that I seem to remember was performed by the senior girls at school.
The costumes were insanely wonderful, the acting, as ever, good, but the show was stolen by one actor who had one of those 'moving the plot on' bit parts. It was an English actor who played Dogberry, leader of The Watch, and he had the most incredible timing and mastery of physical humour. He also was canny enough to known that there's something intrinsically comedic about a northern accent, or...maybe the accent reinforces the humour. At any rate, this one man, with his small acting part, but huge talent, made the play.

Foiled

Dammit, a power cut last night meant I couldn't post this.
Foiled again.

My spuds in my Sleepy spud bags, are growing. They have foliage, or as, someone I know once said as though she seriously thought it was an actual word, foilage.
I have been following the written instructions I was given with the bags, and adding more soil to them.
AND...my peas have pods. I didn't even notice this until my friend R said that they had been eating their peas, and I thought...hmmm...better go and check.
Tonight we had a salad that contained spinach, lettuce, basil and rocket from the garden.

On the subject of things people say in all seriousness and without a hint of irony, someone at my writers group yesterday was quoting Sarah Palin, as though anything Sarah says has any meaning or relevance outside of her own head. It was bizarre - and confusing, and more than a little worrying.

Although spring isn't yet over, it's that time of year when all the TV programmes come to a grinding halt. And yet, from the ashes of TV scheduling, arise new series of True Blood - coming next week, and Lie to Me, which started last night.
Fab.
And as series finales go, the last episode in the current series of Glee was pure cheese, apart from one Sue Sylvester. Classic, classic Sue.
And here's some previous classic Sue, 'Sneaky Gays'. Swish it up Sue!

Dead Ears Mate

And....land.
Wham, jam over.
Contract over.
Playing catch-up.

At the weekend we were down in Birch Bay again, against all odds, and because of course, we hadn't taken the kayaks, the sun shone like it was going out of fashion. Sunday, the rain poured as though THAT now was going out of fashion. Either way. It was relaxing.
One thing we can't take across the border, is dog food, so we always stop at a very nice little supermarket on the way to the park. We bought some Paul Newman dog treats that contained good ingredients, Alex has made me very aware of what is in things. The late Paul Newman apparently has his dog food made in Canada and then shipped to the States so that Canadians, who can't ship it across, can buy it with $US.

Russell Crowe, who plays the eponymous hero in 'Robin Hood' has coined a new catchphrase for our households on both sides of the Atlantic. In this interview with Mark Lawson, he responds to Lawson's question about whether there is a hint of Irish in Crowe's Robin Hood accent, by taking extreme umbridge and telling Lawson, 'You've got dead ears mate, dead ears.' I'm told that Holly (nearly 6) can reproduce Crowe's own accent and outrage very accurately.
Our intention on this side of the Pond, is to use it as a riposte when one of us gets accused of being Australian, but then, in practice, I don't think any of us could be as rude as Russell Crowe.

This morning, our TV news crowed that British paper The Torygraph was reporting that Decameron would be taking fiscal advice from Canada. Yes, it seems that under Chrétien, a hard line policy to cut public spending, turned a severe deficit into a surplus.
Nicely done, Decameron, make it look as though you are trying something new, only....isn't that on page 1 of the idiot's guide to being a Tory? First priority - cut public spending.
A handbook in fact, that our own Canadian Tories could well do with having a gander at. Kevin tells me that in his first term, Harper rapidly turned the Liberals' hard won surplus, into his very own deficit.

Ah the Tories, can't live with them, can't cook 'em up and eat 'em.

Traffic Jam

Holy Carp. Tuesday already. My life is currently a traffic jam, complicated by the rain. In amongst this, Whisky has discovered the joy of shredding everything in sight. No, wrong, he always liked doing that, now he has discovered how to shred things NOT in plain sight.

At the weekend we had friends to stay who have now left to drive across country to Toronto. Alex and Seth went to Seattle and throughout it all - the rain. Every evening this week I have appointments, meetings, things that have to get done.
Things that have been getting me up early and keeping me up late.

Books. A friend of mine who writes herself, says that she never pays for books. I find this hard to justify. I have no objection to passing books on, nor borrowing them, in fact because of those two activities, it evens out, but I want to buy books and I do.
But how to choose them. Often I go on the recommendation of someone I know has similar tastes, or again because I have been lent or given a book. This can be interesting because they may not be ones I would have chosen myself. And there's a book I've been avoiding, even though a couple of people I know and whose book judgement I respect, have read it and enjoyed it. But it received quite the drubbing on the F-Word blog. Recently, I found the exact opposite view on another feminist blog, so now I've bitten the bullet and have to make my own mind up. I'm reading 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'.
What? You thought I was going to say 'Wind in the Willows'?