Departures

There is a bit of a breeze today, what a blessed relief. The tomato forest is liking this weather though, as are the peppers and the basil.
The 'bit of a breeze' over in Illinois however seems to be arriving in the form of tornadoes, I can see that might be a touche more worrying. Much of the area where my friend lives is suffering from power outages. Widespread loss of power is more than just an inconvenience, my friend was unable to put petrol in the car on her way home from work. With the distances involved here in North America and the lack of public transport - some of which relies on electricity anyway - that can be quite scary.

In the comments to yesterday's blog, Karen confessed to multiple killings and the RCMP have been alerted of course, but she also mentioned the phenomenon of tempers fraying leading to violent crime in this kind of weather. I have read about this happening in New York and some of the larger inner cities in Britain, and yet it is surely not totally explicable by the weather.

I have mentioned before that I used to live next door to a family from Trinidad. Canadians and Brits have all seen those TV ads for Malibu where West Indians try to get more serious about selling melons or using mobile phones and so on. I have no idea whether the ads show on TV in the States, but friends down south can see them here if interested. But the stereotype of the laid-back West Indian is one that I recognise almost intact from my ex-neighbours. Firstly, as often happens with groups of ex-pats, other Trinidadians would visit very regularly, but secondly, they really were amazingly chilled - quite literally for most of the year since the weather was always way too cold for them. Warmer weather just made them more relaxed and amiable than ever. The hotter it got the more hospitable they became.

Today Alex, Lou and Hazel go back to the UK. Starbucks and Tim Horton's will experience a noticeable drop in sales. I will certainly miss my girl, but she now needs to get stuck in to working and saving some money before uni starts at the end of September.

So my life tilts. Having had three girls in the house has given it a more feminine shift, from this evening there will be more males in the house than females, well, just me in fact. Later this month when Laurence arrives, even more so. And yet, and yet...with all those tomatoes out on the deck producing fruit perhaps the balance is maintained after all.

My friend Karen told me on the phone yesterday to 'dumb down' my blog or to at least add footnotes, she was sure that construction workers read it. I'm not sure that construction workers necessarily need things to be dumbed down, but just for Karen, I've glossarised some of the more difficult words.

Tomato : a vegetable*, eaten heavily disguised in pizzas, you may even have eaten one.
Feminine : lesbian** but without the sex (necessarily)
Weather : main subject of conversation for all Brits and Canucks.
Public Transport : a mythical system of getting large numbers of people around.
Malibu : coconuty*** bliss in a bottle although drunk mainly by footballers' wives.
Starbuck : one of the lead characters in 'Battlestar Galactica', the straight woman's female crush.

*Technically a tomato is a fruit
**Not to be confused with Lebanon
***I have no real idea how to spell 'coconuty', maybe it should be 'coconutty' like 'nutty' but..that just doesn't look right. The OED online is no help, no help at all.