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'?

Hell and Earth

Something is rotten in the state of ....hmm...well let's start with the Vatican. Although, amusingly so. The mistresses of forty Italian priests, have written to the Pope, calling for celibacy to be no longer required. About bloody time. Still, I won't hold my breath and nor, I'm sure, will they. El Papa would rather risk the continued sexual abuse by his foot soldiers, than allow what God ordained.
Pope Pillock the ...how many?

Meanwhile, Elton John is being a cheeky little bugger (sic). He is stirring things up with his concert in Muslim Morocco. Nice one Sir Elton.

Yesterday, my friend told me that her partner had been on a plane, returning to YVR from New York. An Hacidic Jew made a fuss, refusing to sit next to a woman. No-one seemed at all sympathetic, and presumably, had a woman (or man) refused to sit next to an Hacidic Jew, all hell would have broken loose. Eventually, another woman went and sat next to the first woman, leaving a space next to a man.
Hrmph.

Today was full of the warm kind of Judaism and this afternoon, the weather mirrored that. It was perfection. Warm, in a just-the-right-temperature kind of way, bright, but not blazingly sunny, a gentle breeze whispering through the trees, and an edge of sultriness.
Blissful.

Happy Birthday Alex

Happy Birthday to my darling daughter. So wonderful to be able to share it with you. Sorry I had to steal the photo.
Bandits are everywhere.

Hope and Politics

Britain swelters under a heatwave. I smile because we're not. Then the sun beats down again and it becomes ridiculously hot here too. D'oh.

Kev and I went down to Washington State at the weekend. There the weather was teasing, cold, hot, cold, hot, hmmm...sounds more like a fever. We swanned past the queues with our Nexus passes, but soon I will have to get another visa waiver. It was definitely worth the minor effort of getting Nexus, to cross the border when the weekend contains a bank holiday.

On Friday, my general ennui with the new government in Britain, suddenly fell away as I learnt that Diane Abbott was to enter the Labour party's leadership race. Holy Carp! I thought, not only is she a woman, but she truly is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. I immediately wrote to her office expressing my support. Not that it helps them, since I long since let my membership of the Labour Party lapse, so I can't even vote for her, but I'll be cheering from the sidelines. Go Diane, go!

I was also greatly cheered to learn that some subversive Catholics have ordained a woman. Sorry, rebel Catholics. Glad tidings indeed, as Maria Vittoria Longhitano herself says,

""I have opened the way. Catholicism means universality, and without women it is mutilated." " Well said your priestliness, well said.

On a rather distasteful note, a pensioner in Britain has been gaoled for having sex with a donkey and a horse. And in my opinion, that's all it is, distasteful, why the bloody hell should the British taxpayer have to shell out to have a man imprisoned for sex with animals when actual rapists roam free? Personally, I find many sexual things distasteful, for example, the idea that Jeremy Clarkson might be allowed to freely have sex with another human being, but I don't think he should be sent down for it. Oh wait, maybe...no, no, really, no.

Mitchell and Webcams

Isn't Madonna queen of Malawi or something? So why isn't she doing something about this outrage? Why is the British government not intending to stop sending aid? Holy carp, it's not two years since I sat in the dolphin tank room at Van Aq and listened while two gentlemen from Malawi droned on about how men in their country force all the young girls in their village to have sex with them, and the bloody judge in this case has the fecking brass neck to call the perfectly normal and consensual sex between two adults as 'gross indecency'? Aaargh!!!!

However, almost as important, is the unveiling of the London Olympic mascots. I understand they have been reviled by the whole planet. They are, apparently, gender neutral webcam-based lifeforms. Not too inspiring, I must admit, but then the mascots we had were just cheesy and unappealing. I'm not entirely sure why we need mascots at all. I also don't know why we need Sebastian Coe, but there you go.

Whatever, David Mitchell cheered me up. Our advertising industry here is doing its best to break the English language, they have given us such gems as 'Live Healthy!', 'Much more cleaning ingredients' and 'less tissues'. I now add to that, 'two pair glasses'.

Incidentally, after I had had this picture taken yesterday, someone came along and said, 'oh, good old WC Fields!', hopefully they were talking about Winnie and not me.

Blues

So much, so much.
Saturday. The day started early, really early.
At 5.30 the sprayer plane was strafing the area again against Gypsy Moths.

At 7.00, we had to get up, had to be downtown by 8.30. Synod.
Someone joked that we are no longer the Conservative party at prayer. I think it was a joke. But of course we are, of course we bloody are, oh, for sure not one of us is a card-carrying Tory, many might even be card-carrying socialists, but we're the righteous wing of the Tories. When we pray, God fidgets from boredom.

I think we misunderstand the changeless quality of God.
We think that because we change and God doesn't, that what that means is that God has always been as we have always perceived God.
What it really means is that our perceptions of God need to change, because actually, we didn't get it right before. We saw God in our own image, but as out own image changed, we forgot to update.

A Rabbi came to Synod. He gave up his Sabbath to spend it with a bunch of Anglicans. And he was an interesting speaker. He is working on interfaith with the Vancouver School of Theology, who are top bananas on inclusive language, which he used and it sounded so natural.
Since he wasn't observing the Sabbath in his normal way, he forgot to turn his phone off, and thus received a call from a Muslim colleague, whilst hanging with the Proddies.
He chided us gently and deservedly on a bit of Jew blaming that we maybe hadn't noticed.
And this is what I like about us. Despite our blandness, we understand enough to know that Christianity isn't the only answer. The Jews fight amongst themselves, the Muslims fight amongst themselves and the Christians fight amongst themselves. And yet there is at least a layer of each that can find the common ground, or enough shared ground to make it work, and to realise that any way of being spiritual is good and that the important questions like equality and social justice shouldn't be sheltered by nor the purlieu of religions.

At lunchtime, we go and eat at an Italian place, but Italian food is not designed to be eaten quickly, my soup burns me, my sandwich has to be taken away in a polystyrene box. I hate this, but I can't leave food to be thrown away, too cavalier by half.

There was a really good film about how the Anglican church in our diocese had treated Japanese Anglicans during the war. It had sold their churches, so that when they were finally allowed back from internment, four years after the war, not only had their homes and livelihoods been taken from them by the government, but so had their churches.
The bishop apologised formally to them.
This whole apologising for stuff that other people have done leaves me cold. How does it close that wound? How does it address what was done? It feels as though it is supposed to draw a line under the episode, but it doesn't.
Still, I look forward with eager anticipation to the bishop's apology to women for the ongoing discrimination and misogyny within the church, and for the misrepresentation of God as male.

Afterwards, I wander down to Coal Harbour and sit and have coffee outside a café. A young Japanese man tries to get his boxer dog to sit outside the café, but the dog keeps wandering inside. The man never succeeds with the dog, but eventually gets an ice-cream despite the protestations of the server. They wander off and the Boxer attacks a long-haired dachsie, The owner is not amused.

I make my way along the waterfront until I get to the cruise ship terminal. The ships are so big they are frightening. I wonder if this is like the one Dawn and I will go on this summer.

I meet up with Kevin and later with our friends who are moving to Toronto in a couple of weeks.
Kevin and I are passed by Sikhs on motorbikes. Hard Sikhs, allowed to wear turbans instead of motorcycle helmets. It makes sense I suppose, the warriors.
We go past a restaurant soon to be opened. It will be called 'L'Abattoir'. Seriously. I'm guessing it won't be a vegetarian restaurant, but even so, grim name for somewhere to eat.
In the restaurant where we are to eat, the server recognises Steve from a play he was in. That's weird. He's our friend, but he's in TV, films and plays and gets recognised.

We arrive home around 23.00 and there is an e-mail from someone in my writers' group. She is the exact same age as me, and her daughter has died, suddenly. I can't get my head around this. It has shaken me. Then today, an 80s number on the radio makes me lose it because she and I, in different countries on different continents, must have danced to this number as young women, everything ahead of us, and now I think of her on a plane, going back to deal with what awaits her there, the worst thing a mother can imagine.
Sitting in the cathedral yesterday, I looked at the stained glass window. A well-fed, modestly dressed, white Jesus, looks down from the cross, not in agony, but with an expression of resignation. Equally well-fed, white followers crowd around him. Only his mother kneels at his feet, her pose one of agony for the suffering of her son.

Ups and Downs

Today, the local rag reported that the girls from the Little Flower Academy - the school from which a music teacher was 'sent home' to sit out her contract, on account of her being heterosexually challenged - have been themselves experiencing a bit of ostracism. Apparently, bus drivers have been not letting them onto buses. For the love of Marmite, what is the world coming to when actual rich people are being singled out and treated as though they were different.

Meanwhile, over in one of the lesser Provinces, a Bill is being drawn up which, if enacted, would allow Marriage Commissioners to opt out of marrying same sex couple if they have religious objections. Frankly, the Law has been in place for a number of years now, if you object to marrying any particular set of people, then you shouldn't be a marriage commissioner in Canada.

11th May 2010

Oh dear. I suppose it had to happen. DeCameron as Head Prefect. What a big pile of stinking poo.

On the plus side, it has led Austen to start a blog, writing about the general turmoil leading up to the big pile of stinking poo. I hope he keeps writing, I've been finding it very readable and interesting.

Women bishops are in the news again it seems. Apparently we could have some by as early as 2014! Yes, imagine! What I STILL can't fathom is how they can get away with saying shit that basically amounts to, 'but why isn't there any provision for the bigots?' Boo-hoo. Who cares.

Anyhoo, the most important thing about today, is that it's Sleepy's birthday. A big one. So, once more, Happy Birthday my friend! Good luck with 'The Resolution'.

Britsplaining.

I'm trying to make up a word like 'mansplaining', only instead of meaning 'when men explain something in simple terms for the wimminz', I want a word that means 'when people who know someone who knows someone who knows a Brit, who knows better than you, the person who lived there for well over forty years of your life. Maybe 'Britsplaining'.

This happens to me a lot.

Here's an example. Apparently, there is a now (quite rightly) not-to-be-used expression, 'to Jew someone down' and this seems to mean to haggle them down. (I think). I have heard this from a number of sources since I've been here. The other day, this expression was being explained to me again, and I was foolhardy enough to say that I'd never heard the expression before coming to Canada. WRONG!!!! The friend of a friend of a friend, KNEW that it was an English expression from Britain.

I am frequently having to explain how, in spite of having an English accent, I don't drink tea. In fact, coffee drinking is just as usual as tea drinking, particularly in the south. WRONG AGAIN!!!! Someone's grandmother's entire family came from England and everyone drinks tea there.

Then there is the Britsplaining based on TV. This can go hand-in-hand with communication difficulties because of language difference. The other day I had an entire conversation about turnip growing that turned out to be about tulips. But I digress.
Tonight's convo went like this,
'You leave England and come to Canada?'
'Yes,'
'Canada better,'
'No, not really, much the same,'
'Weather much better here,'
'Nope, pretty similar, much the same really,'
'No, no, no, no, no, it always fog in England,'
'No, nope, bit in November but not a lot really,'
'Oh yes, it alway fog in England,'
'Nope, really, no.'

And, sigh.

Gypsy Moth

This is the beginning of my frat-free weekend. Kevin has gone on the frat camping weekend, which makes me scuttle around cleaning and tidying. I imagine that drunken hockey listening is happening.
Do bears shit in the woods?
Most assuredly, but drunken engineers have to too.

The city has been spraying the area to combat gypsy moths, not the first world war aeroplanes you understand, the actual moths. They've imposed a ban on pesticides, so they have to spray with some kind of bacterial agent. And they have to spray at five o'clock in the morning. The plane going over sounds unlike any earthly plane, in fact it sounds for all the world like a gigantic insect flying low over the house and strafing it over and over again for an hour. Disturbing.

I have noticed, since being back at work this time, that the children have become more planet smart. Before Christmas, when ever I would ask them what we always should do when leaving a room or building, I hardly ever got a sensible answer. Since Easter, they have all got it almost straight off the bat.
And another thing that has improved has been the inclusive language of the teachers. I wonder if someone has been reminding them that that is what they are supposed to do. I can't see that the two are connected. The energy awareness was heavily pushed on TV during the Olympics, and then there was Earth Day.

Either way, it's all good.

All Greek to Me

I can simply not get my head round what the hell is happening in Greece. The behaviour of the Greek people seems beyond belief. And yet is it? Faced with having to make even the slightest effort, people bitch and moan, they refuse to change bad habits and would rather the planet died than that they had to drive less, turn off unnecessary lights or curb consumption. The Greeks are merely taking it to an absolutley ridiculous level.

Tomorrow, Great Britain goes to the polls - sadly without me, the Icelandic volcano made it impossible to register to vote from abroad. I'm sure I wouldn't have changed the outcome, but I'd like to have had a voice.

A strange day at work. The same school was due to come in for a programme both morning and afternoon. In the morning, they rang up to say that their bus had broken down and they were having to borrow St. Patrick's. Unfortunately, St. Patrick couldn't lend it in the afternoon. Lucky he was able to lend it all really, he never seemed like a bus owner to me.
We ended up making our own field trip to Iona Beach in the afternoon. Since we had to go to my house to get the car, we also picked up Whisky, who had the most puppylicious time romping through the wet sand. He ended up smelling like sewage and looking like some kind of oil spill victim. I took him straight up to the shower when we got home.