Hiatused

June and July have not been kind months around these parts, and I've been struggling to find things to write about.

Things have been much better in the last week, though: we took a trip to Ottawa for an early anniversary celebration. I think of myself as a small town girl most of the time (Guelph, with its scant 114 000 people, is the largest place I'd ever lived) but there's something about Ottawa that makes me so happy whenever I go there.

This time, I got to realize a dream that I've had for nearly ten years: I got to visit the Diefenbunker. The Diefenbunker is the Canadian Cold War Museum, housed in a nuclear fallout shelter spanning 100 000 sq. ft. over four underground stories. It was built by the Canadian military during the reign of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker so that the government had a place to retreat to in the event of a nuclear attack. It was awesome. (There's a set of photos here if you're interested--lots of early 60s technology.)

The main purpose of the trip was to see The Lion King in its musical form at the National Arts Centre. (The background to this is that everyone else in my family got to see it when it first passed in Toronto except me, owing to work and school.) Now, The Lion King has been my favourite Disney movie since the first time I saw it in theatres when I was 12, so I might be a bit biased, but the theatre production was truly stunning. Julie Taymor has such a bizarre, over-the-top style to her productions (see also: Across the Universe) and it works surprisingly well for The Lion King, which winds up being rather Dali-esque.

I also snuck in a quick trip to Knit Knackers, which is a pretty fab yarn store--it has its own angora rabbits. I didn't buy much (a skein of laceweight and a needle gauge) but I did eye up some very pretty spinning wheels.

A pictoral explanation of the cats' relationship

Why bother?

As always, Karie over at Fourth Edition shares some interesting thoughts about why she blogs, which naturally makes me think about why I blog.

When I started blogging, I was in my final year of high school. I wrote a lot in high school. There were literal boxes full of things I'd written in my parents' basement until recently, notebooks upon notebooks of poetry, short stories, screenplays, etc. I wrote letters to friends. I wrote mini-essays when I was bored in class. I had a direction and a discipline at that time that seems breathtaking in retrospect.

I wrote a lot in university as well: essays, mostly, although I still made an effort to write creatively when I could. In the summertime, when I would work at THSWSNBN, I would carry a notebook and pen in my costume's pouch so that I could write in idle moments, or at least jot down any interesting ideas I had. Working there was very good for me in so many ways, not least of which was the sheer number of creative people that I worked with: there was always something to inspire me.

Now that I'm a grown up, though, I don't have the same drive to write that I did when I was younger. Writing takes both time and discipline, neither of which are abundant in my life. It also takes drive, and I think that is the bigger issue here. I actually blame my job for this: I spend so much time reading bad writing that it has affected my ability to be objective about my own writing, and it has lead to a terrifying fear that my writing might actually be terrible and no one has ever told me. Everything that I write sounds hackneyed and cliched at worst; at best, it sounds profoundly uninteresting.

So I write here because it keeps me writing--no matter how bad I am afraid that I am, I still can't quite bring myself to give it up. I've made a concerted effort to refocus my energy into this blog in the last year and a half, and I think it's been (mostly) working. One of the things that I preach at my students is that practice makes perfect (or at least better) for writing, so I'd best follow my own advice.

I'm unlikely to be a blogger who acquires Fame and Fortune through what I write here. (Heck, I'm unlikely to be a blogger who amasses more than thirty regular followers.) But I am a blogger who has found a voice that allows her to write as often as she chooses, about the things that she chooses, and who is able to use that to push her writing forward. I don't post everything I write, and I don't write in as much details as I sometimes think I might. So why bother? I bother because it keeps me writing. As long as I'm writing, I haven't given up hope.

Silverskin Adventures

I spent a goodly portion of the weekend doing Fancy Lady-type things. The most significant of these things was the time spent creating a dress form to use for sewing.



Essentially, you get duct taped over a spare shirt, which is then cut up the back, reassembled, and stuffed. (I used a whole pillow, a bag of fibrefill, and the filling from another pillow.)



The advantage of this is that you now have a double of your body to work with for pinning/adjusting patterns. I'm pretty happy with how mine came out, except for the bust, which isn't quite as prominent as it ought to be. I'm brainstorming ways to fix this...

Yes Virginia, There Are Things More Boring Than My Posts About Knitting

I love having cats for pets. I've had cats all of my life--my mother has stories about how Spike and Muffet would "babysit" me very carefully when I was a newborn--they always wanted to be where I was, watching what I was doing. We owned several cats over the years, usually choosing to have them in pairs (and on one particularly ill-advised occasion, in quads). Leaving the cats behind when I went away to university was very difficult for me; the world always seemed like a much lonelier place without a cat to come home to.

(an early shot of Dorian being worn as a hat)

So I was pretty excited when Mat agreed that we could get a cat when we bought the house three years ago. Mat was raised as a dog person (owing largely to his mother's allergies) and he had always maintained that he was totally uninterested in having a cat. We went to the Humane Society here in town, and the cat chose us, as is the tradition in my family.

Bad Cat participates in tabletop role playing.

Dorian, so named because he was somewhat grey at the time we adopted him, grew into an enormous cat: nearly 17 lbs. at his peak. It seems quite obvious now that he would do so; just take a look at the size of those paws in his kitten pictures. Much to Mat's surprise, he found that Dorian had a lot of personality, and he found himself quite enamoured of our Bad Cat, as we'd taken to calling him. The cat, it turned out, was not at all like he'd imagined: the cat was affectionate, playful, and frequently a bit silly. He also has a fiendish craving for vegetables that makes it nearly impossible to do much food prep without a massive paw reaching up to beg for bits of pepper or lettuce or cucumber or...

Enormo-tron with Youngest Sister.

Over time, Dorian grew into himself, and then overgrew himself, tipping the scales at 16 lbs. 8 oz. Our attempts to feed him less food were initially successful, but when the hot days of summer hit, his activity level dropped so low that he re-gained most of the weight we thought he'd lost. He also grew lonely during the days when we would both be at work for several hours. We eventually realized that it was time to add another cat to the mix: my parents' reasons for always having pairs of cats were actually pretty solid. Dorian needed a friend.

Enter Hob.

Hob (named after Hob Gadling, a minor character from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series) came home to us in January. In an unintentionally hilarious contrast to Bad Cat, Hob is what we call "little". We had a hard time picking out a name for him (his shelter name was Jean-Luc, which I thought was awesome and Mat hated purely on the grounds that it wasn't a name that we picked for him) so he actually spent the better part of about ten days being called "the Little Cat". Hob was a stray for a while, which has resulted in a couple of fairly curious behaviours: he eats everything he can find, and he is a wool sucker (likely caused by not being nursed for long enough). It has also given him an overbite--his incisors hang out of his mouth like little fangs.

Tiny vampire cat being groomed by Middle Sister's cat, Jerkwin.

Dorian and Hob get along pretty well, although I'm not sure Dorian has quite forgiven me for bringing the tiny interloper home. They chase each other and play fight (16 lbs cat vs 7 lbs cat is hilarious, in case you were wondering--sometimes Dorian literally holds Hob off with a single paw). Dorian has lost enough wait that he's now appropriate for his frame. There's no sleepy snuggling together just yet, but I imagine it will happen in time.

It's good to know that there are always two things that are going to be happy to see you when you come home--even if it's only because they think you're going to feed them.

Long Weekend

July 1st is Dominion Day up here in Canada; our annual celebration of that time when some old white guys got together and decided that it was high time we separated ourselves from Mother Britain. This year, we got to take an extended trip to visit our parents. My parents and I spent Canada Day wandering around downtown Barrie. My mother went for a 5K run while my father and I took in the sights at a street fair. One of the things we found was the former Robert Simpson brewery, now branded the Flying Monkeys Brewery, which was selling beer samplers for $4. After we collected Mum from her run (complete with patriotic running gear, from that time she went and ran the 5K at the Loch Ness marathon), we made our way back to the brewery. The Confederation Amber Ale was my favourite, although they had an orange/wheat beer that was also quite good. About halfway through our beer sampling, we collectively realized that none of us had eaten very much that morning, and that the alcohol had gone straight to our heads. There's nothing quite like the realization that both of your parents (and yourself) are a bit drunk at 11:45 in the morning...

So we found pulled pork sandwiches and a most delicious lunch was had.

I also found a cheese shop called Gouda For You, at which I purchased a ginger-mango Stilton, a Mont St. Benoit, and a caramelized onion cheddar. Lovely all around.

The best news of the week/end for me, though, was that I finished my lovely cardigan:

This pattern (Cirilia Rose's Ephemera Cardigan) went into my Ravelry queue the moment I saw it as part of Berroco's newsletter. It reminded me of my favourite cardigan, a hand-me-down from my friend Jess, which was from the Gap and black. The cardigan, having since gone to the great thrift store in the sky, had hook and eye fastenings up the front instead of buttons, a look I find quite figure flattering.

The cardigan is knit from Knit Picks Gloss in the fingering weight, which is a 50/50 wool-silk blend. I had the yarn dyed by Sharon at Three Irish Girls in Eavan. Eavan is pretty much the perfect colour for me: a deep, inky blue (one of the colours of the sky at twilight that I can never quite capture with my camera). Eavan is also one of my favourite names, and it is one that I will be lobbying for if ever I have a girl child. This blue is a great colour for me, if I do say so myself.

I made some mods to the pattern, mostly with the hems and the button bands (is it still a button band if there are no buttons?), and I'm really pleased with the way that it looks. I can hardly believe that I made it.

ETA - The tape on my arm in the second picture is covering a henna design on my arm.

Cats are most helpful

Sunshine on my shoulders

After about four days of near-constant rain, the sun has finally come out again here. Not a moment too soon, really, as I've been feeling cooped up. It's been good for the garden, of course, but some sunshine will also go a long way there.

In good knitting news, I finally finished the bulk of the work on my Ephemera cardigan last night. It's all pinned out and blocking currently; if all goes well I should be able to start on the finishing tomorrow.

I don't know that I'll be in a hurry to make a cardigan in fingering weight again for a while (though I do have my eye on a Tempest done in two shades of blue) but I think that I will really like the finished product. I need a good worsted weight project to work on, but I can't find the yarn that I want in the craft room right now. So obviously the logical thing to do was to cast on another pair of socks. I'm using a yarn that has mohair in it, which should be awesome for my perpetually cold feet come winter. I really wish I liked knitting socks more, since I love wearing handknitted socks so much.

Pride is coming up in Toronto next weekend; I finally made a point of telling my sisters that it disappoints me that they have never invited me to go with them. (Their response was, "We didn't think you'd want to come--there's so many people there." While I take their point, I can handle people for a day or so, particularly if there's no expectation that I have to interact with all of them.) Part of the sisters' annual Pride tradition is that they decorate their own t-shirts to wear to the parades. Even though I'm not going this year, I am going to help Middle make shirts for her friends.

If I were going, my shirt would say, "Straight but not narrow."

Something New

I am undertaking something new here at Casa Skylark--something almost unheard of.

I am purging books.

So far I've got about twenty in a box. There are more I want put in the box, but they belong to Mat so I suppose the polite thing to do is to wait.

The other thing that I should do is start returning books to people who have lent them to me. I have some that I've had for several years now (and yes, that's years plural).

What brave new world, gentle reader. What brave new world.

Recovery

I wasn't looking forward to this weekend. Mat's childhood best friend and former roommate, James, is getting married this fall, and his bachelor party was held over the weekend in Killbear Provincial Park. Then Mat's dad organized a big Father's Day fishing thing for all of their extended family. Four days alone with no car and two bad cats? I wasn't thrilled about it.

And then I got sick. I looked after a friend's little girl for a few hours on Thursday, and by the time I got home, I could feel the tickle in my throat and the pressure building in my sinuses. I spent most of my time alone moping on the couch, watching re-runs of Criminal Minds and feeling sorry for myself. The recovery efforts were somewhat hampered by the bad cats, who persisted in waking me up to be fed breakfast at absurd hours of the morning. I was able to drag my sad sack self to World Wide Knit In Public Day at the mall, which went well enough. (Though it did result in the purchase of more tea, much to my beloved's chagrin. Who am I to resist a first flush Darjeeling?) I was pretty much wrecked by the time I got home (owing to a lack of sleep the night before), and my intended nap was sidetracked by a phone call from the bank to tell me that my credit card had been compromised. And I still had a baby shower to go to.

I was in bed by 11 and slept until about 7:30, excepting a brief detour to toss the bad cat ringleader into the bathroom around 5. It was glorious and I feel much, much better today, aside from occasional sneezing.

I really hope this week is a better week.

Sweet Charity

If you're a frequent reader around here, or someone who is (un)fortunate enough to experience my company in real life, you'll know that I'm often ambivalent about the role religion plays in my life. I don't want to sidetrack this entry by pontificating on what I believe or how I practice, but a small reference to religion is sort of necessary for a thorough consideration of today's topic, charity.

Religious ambivalence aside, I do believe very strongly in the concept of charity and good works, which is something that (however loosely) has trickled down from the long line of Scottish Presbyterians from whom I am descended. I do some volunteer work (though not as much as I ought to) in the community, and I donate money to charity when I can. Most of my money goes to scholarship funds at the university, but I also donate to the AIDS Committee of North Bay and Area, the OSPCA, the MS Society of Canada, the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and the Terry Fox Foundation. I try to keep my support to secular charities where possible, because I've yet to find a religious charity with a mandate to which I can reconcile my belief structure. I also try to support charities that are Canadian when I can, because I believe that we often forget that there are a lot of people in our own country that need help. That said, however, I will donate to international aid organizations when I can.

Which is how, in January of 2010 (some full 18 months ago, for those of you keeping track at home), I came to donate some money to Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders after the earthquake in Haiti. It wasn't even a lot of money--maybe $25? However, since then, I have been bombarded with emails and paper newsletters from the organization. (In fact, according to my gMail account, I've received 30 emails since that donation; I would guess that I receive at least one paper mailing from them per month as well.) I would be willing to bet that by now, they have spent at least the cost of my donation on trying to convince me to donate more.

I might well have donated more at some point in the future, I think, were it not for the telephone call I received from them last night. I should've just ignored the phone, but I didn't. When I picked up, I got a five minute spiel from the caller, who outlined all of the "like, amazing" work MSF has been doing with my donation.¹ She then asked me to consider a monthly gift of $25.² When I told the caller that I had just been laid off from my job, and thus could not afford to lay out a monthly sum, she didn't even pause before saying, "Well, look around your house and see if you can round up some loose change to donate."

At that point, I did hang up.

Part of me wishes that I'd given her a piece of my mind--as much as I try not to be rude to people who are just doing their jobs, I think that courtesy should end when those people stop being polite to me. I find it completely galling that after I've just told someone that I no longer had gainful employment, that person would turn around and ask me for money. Yup, stuff is bad in other countries, and MSF largely does work that I support, but if I can't pay my own bills, if I can't feed my husband or my cats, then things are pretty bad in this country for me, and going into debt to make charitable donations is just plain stupid. In soliciting from me this aggressively, MSF has ruined any chance that they have of receiving money from me in the future.

Any tips on charities who treat their donors like people, rather than endless money bags?

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¹ I have a personal policy of not hanging up on telemarketers; I listen, I refuse politely, and then I ask to be taken off the calling list.
² Given that I gave them $25 18 months ago, this seems unlikely.

Graduation Day

Yesterday, I attended my first convocation ceremony at the university. Just as I had completed my fourth year at my "new" job, the students I taught in my first year had just completed the fourth year of their degrees.

They came to me as teenagers, some as young as seventeen. I was their teacher, but they were my school: I had just come out of one of the worst years of my life to date, and I didn't know my ass from my elbow. I wasn't convinced that I should be teaching, or even if I could teach any more. You'll notice that 2007 was this blog's worst year in terms of posts, as well, which I think speaks to my frame of mind--I just don't write when I don't feel well.

As usual, though, time and experience are the best teachers. I learned so much in that first year, far more than I think the students got out of it. I learned the pleasure of teaching people who actually want to learn, and I learned the aggravation of teaching those who are only there because someone else has paid for them to be. I learned how to grade, how to explain grades in a way that seems clear and fair. I learned how to find plagiarists, which instincts to trust. I learned how to break out of my shell, how to see myself as an authority in the classroom, and how to get others to see me as an authority as well.

It is so much easier to see your own mortality through the aging and experiences of others. When I look at my students four years later, I can hardly believe the changes that some of them have gone through. Their faces are so much more mature; they are so much more confident than the little kids who came through my classroom, who were nervous about speaking in front of others and so eager to make friends. I couldn't be prouder of them, but the pleasure in their success is tinged with some sadness on my part. And so it goes...

Sock Woes

I knit differently than most people do--I wrap my yarn around the needles the "wrong" way. I'm a firm believer that there's no really wrong way to knit as long as you get the results that you want, so I've never felt the need to correct this little problem.¹ One of the results of this particular quirk is that my gauge (the number of stitches per inch) is looser than most, which can affect the fit of anything I'm trying to make. The easiest way to fix this is by using a smaller needle: smaller needle=tighter stitches.

Unfortunately, this makes sock knitting a chore: socks need to be knit at a tight gauge because they need to take a licking and keep on ticking, and feet are kind of a high traffic area. To get a tight enough gauge with many commercial yarns, I would need to knit with needles smaller than 2mm wide.² The smarter decision for me, in terms of avoiding general craziness and future repetitive stress injuries in my hands, is to use a heavier yarn. Handmaiden Casbah has been a good yarn for me for this reason. It also machine washes and dries, as well as surviving being pounded by my feet when I stomp/walk around.

I've been working on a pair of Nutkin socks for the last few weeks in the Hemlock colourway of Casbah. I decided to mod the pattern to be toe-up and to get rid of the purl ridge on the toe, which I don't like. Since I've only made a handful of toe-up socks, I decided to try a new heel construction, from Wendy Johnson's Toe-Up Socks With A Difference. Despite following the instructions, I wound up with a sock that was drastically too long for my foot:

As I also didn't care for the way the heel fit my foot, I decided to knit the second one with the gusset heel that I have usually used for this style of sock. It fits me much better. I finished the second sock last night, and once I could try on both of them, I realized that I was going to have to re-knit the heel on the first sock.

Not a huge deal, really, but I was so excited to be done my second pair of socks for the year, and now it turns out that I'm not really done. Boo-urns.
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¹ Plus, I've been knitting for so long at this point that I have a pretty good sense of how my knitting works, so I can usually compensate for this pretty easily. Learning to wrap the "right" way would throw all of that off.
² Yes, they exist, and yes, they do usually bear a remarkable resemblance to toothpicks.

Mooning and June-ing

Today is the first day of my unemployment. It was a surprisingly busy day--I finally talked Mat into helping put a garden in our backyard, which meant that he spent a good portion of the day ripping out the raspberry bushes that have been threatening to take over the back.

We're lucky to have a fairly large plot of land (the lot is 33'x125'), but unfortunately we've managed to do next to nothing with it in the three summers since we bought the house. I am not a gardener by nature (the green thumb in my family managed to pass me by all together) but I'm determined to make a go of it this summer. We've put in a 5x10 raised bed which is about half full sun and half partially shaded, and I'm hoping to plan a variety of veggies back there. I currently have a red pepper plant, two tomato plants, and a zucchini plant. I have plans to add a Thai chile plant, some cucumbers, some beans and peas, and some lettuces. I've planted some herbs out front: lots of basil (I have high hopes for basil and tomato salads this summer), cilantro, mint, rosemary...I'd like to get a cherry tomato, maybe as a hanging basket...

I'm excited for this little beauty, purchased at the local farmer's market last week.

Writers' Craft

So I wrote a story.

It's pretty short, as stories go, clocking in at about 900 words. It's for an anthology of "short, weird fiction" that a friend is editing. He's been very encouraging in getting me to write more over the last year or so, so I figured that I owed it to him to actually write something to justify his kindness.

While I'm mostly quite pleased by what I've written, I did feel like there was something there that wasn't quite right. I couldn't put my finger on it, so I got Mat to edit it for me. He thought there was something else wrong with it other than what I didn't like. So I took to the internet--specifically Twitter--and found a cadre of people to read the story and give me feedback.

The group was varied: a Raveler, a couple of guild friends, an old co-worker from THSWSBN, a NBRC twitterer, and Youngest Sister. The feedback was equally varied: Some liked it; others didn't care for it. Some of the feedback was contradictory. Some of it was hard to read. I've written approximately four short stories in the last seven years; this is the first one I've written with a specific purpose, and the first one I've shown to other people. Taking criticism--however well-intentioned--is a difficult thing to do. It gives me a new appreciation for what my students go through with their essay writing, and I will have to remember this lesson the next time that I have a set of papers to grade.

Trying to synthesize that much feedback was really challenging. One of my respondents began his critique by telling me that he hated the type of story that I wrote, which made it really hard for me to situate his feedback in with the others: If it's not the kind of fiction you like, is there anything I can do to redeem it for you? If the genre grates, isn't it likely that my tone and narrative voice will as well? It turns out that a big part of editing is allowing yourself to say, "No, I think her eyes are green," even when your readers keep telling you that her eyes are obviously blue. It's also about admitting to yourself that you have a problem with adverbs and also one with semi-colons. (Frequent readers of this blog are shocked by that information, no doubt.)

After much gnashing of the teeth and rending of the hair, I finally managed to fix it into a shape that I'm not disappointed with, and I've sent it off to the review board. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

We'll be dead before our time is due

It's the Victoria Day weekend here in Canada, where we all get an extra day off to celebrate the birth of our deceased monarch. Her birthday is actually the 24th of May, but we celebrate it on the last Monday on or before that day. I usually try to avoid travelling this weekend, since it marks the beginning of summer for Canadians, which in Ontario means the beginning of cottage season. Unfortunately, I didn't think the dates through when my dad asked me if I'd like to go see The Cars with him in Toronto on the 20th. I wound up coming down on Thursday to avoid the truly awesome traffic that long weekends inspire around here, and I'm hanging around until Monday to head back up to the Bay with Youngest, who got hired to work as a massage therapist by Middle's workplace for the week.

The concert was pretty good--it's been a long, long time since I've been the youngest person at a concert, but I had to have been pretty close to that last night. It was at the Sound Academy, formerly known as the Docks, which is a venue that's right on the docks in downtown Toronto. The sound was excellent, which was nice, particularly since I was expecting something closer to the godforsaken Koolhaus (formerly known as The Warehouse, since that's quite literally what it was). In some ways, it was strange to be at the Sound Academy--in its previous life, it was one of the premier venues for techno music and rave culture, and Mat spent a fair amount of time there in his younger and more foolish days.¹ Having been to a lot of concerts with me, he always talks about taking me to a rave, but luckily I've never had to actually go through with that.

I have started a new pair of socks with Handmaiden's Casbah (80% merino, 10& cashmere, 10% nylon) which I think is probably my all time favourite sock yarn. My previous pair, now about two years old, are in great shape despite being washed and dried in machines on a regular basis; one may have an issue soon, but that's because of the lace pattern on the front--the soles are in great shape, even the heels. I'm really excited for the new pair and how quickly they're working up.
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¹ He'd actually never been to a music concert before we started dating, just lots of raves and DJ shows. He also had pink hair for a long time.

Because I'm a POTATO

I've been staring at this blank post for the last thirty minutes, trying to piece something together to write about, and failing admirably. My life is full of things that are not interesting. I've spent most of the last week in what feels like an increasingly futile quest to clean the house. Why can't stuff just ever stay clean???

My knitting has felt very uninspired lately, likely because I'm knitting a cardigan right now. It's a free Berroco pattern--the Ephemera cardigan--and it's knit flat in fingering weight yarn and then seamed. In short, a total snoozefest.¹ I mixed things up today by using the Exfoliate! pattern to make a blanket square for my guild.² I haven't knit with cotton in ages, and my left hand is all tense from working bobbles in a non-elastic yarn. I've picked out (I think) my next pair of socks, so I'm going to get those started tomorrow. Dad got tickets to see the Cars in Toronto on Friday, so I am headed south for the long weekend, and these will make some good companion knitting on the bus ride down.


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¹Which is not to say that it won't be fabulous when it's done. It's just that it's pretty much the least interesting knit ever. It's one of the tragedies of my knitting life that the things that I want to wear are often the things that I don't want to actually knit.
² Because what charity knitting project can't be enriched by the inclusion of Daleks?

In a corner of the world on election day...

Well, the election happened, and I was wrong on pretty much all of my predictions: Harper got a majority; the NDP took the Opposition; the Bloc Quebecois went down in flames; the Conservative candidate here won by a scant fifteen votes. The only things that I got right were 1) that Helena Guergis would be drummed out of office¹ and 2) that the voter turnout would be higher.

Watching my social network respond to the election was fascinating. Because Canada encompasses six different time zones, there is supposed to be a media blackout on reporting results from the eastern half of the country until all of the polls close. Violation of this blackout can earn you a $25000 fine or 5 years in jail. The ban is, in theory, a logical thing: news of an NDP landslide in Quebec could well affect how things fall out in British Columbia. Unfortunately, in the day of the internet, this isn't really feasible. #tweettheresults became the most popular hash tag on Twitter during the election, and people from other countries started to gather and retweet the early polling information. It was very neat to watch it happen.

On the not-so-neat side of social media, my Facebook page was a total clusterf-ck. I should have anticipated this, having just discovered how many 9/11 truthers I am apparently friends with, but I didn't. Seeing people's reactions to the election was really eye-opening for me: on one hand, a good majority of the people on my friends' list voted (including some for the first time), but on the other hand, some people became very belligerent and pouty when the results didn't work out to their satisfaction. A few people actually asked that their friends who had voted Conservative to identified themselves so that they could delete anyone who voted for Harper from their friends list. A few others have changed their profile pictures to upside down Canadian flags, and pledged to leave them there as long as the Conservatives are in power.²

I just don't understand this. I mean, I understand the emotion, I guess³; I just don't have the energy to sustain that anger for the next 4 years, nor to perform that anger publicly. My friends (and family) who voted for Steven Harper are still just that--my friends and family. As much as I wouldn't vote for Harper, I recognize and accept that some people would.


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¹ and she was, coming in third after the NDP candidate (my elementary school French teacher), a loss that I find enormously personally satisfying in a way that says bad things about my character.
² Little Hob, who has been nothing short of a holy terror all day, having knocked over the spinning wheel, the humidifier, and a glass of water all over a stack of books, has now decided to be extra cute by sitting on the back of the couch with his front paws on my shoulder, as though he's reading what I'm typing here.
³ And then he jumped off my shoulder and managed to hit the "Off" button on the remote control on his way down.

Grown Up Belugas

The election is less than a week away, and in the spirit of such, here is an important message from children's singer and passionate Canadian Raffi:

Jasper

We adopted Jasper in the summer of 1999. He wasn't supposed to come home with us; we were actually getting a kitten for Youngest Sister following the death of our latest cat. Every time we went to the SPCA, though, there was this one adult cat who kept sticking in our minds. When Youngest finally picked out a kitten, a little calico baby, my mom said, spontaneously, "Let's get the tabby, too; your dad really likes him."

He had been at the shelter so long (over a year)¹ that we didn't have to pay any adoption fees for him; they were just happy that he was going to a home. Later, we would remark that we couldn't understand how he'd gone unnoticed for so long: while he wasn't the most beautiful cat, his personality more than made up for it. He loved all of us (excepting, perhaps, Youngest) devotedly. Even though he and Padme² were not litter-mates or even related, they were best friends³, often snuggling up together:

Of all of us, though, Jazz was most devoted to my mother. He would stay up at night when she was working nights at the hospital, and he would wait for her to come home in the morning. If she didn't arrive home at 7:30, he would start to prowl around the house to look for her. He would then sleep on the bed with her for the day. He would sit on the computer desk when she was using the computer, and he would come up behind her and poke her in the back if he thought she wasn't paying enough attention to him.

He was an exceptionally friendly cat. My dad nicknamed him, "The WalMart Greeter" because he would forget about everything as soon as he heard someone on the doorstep, and run to the front door to say hello.

Unlike most cats, Jasper loved having his tail pulled. If you put your hand on his tail, he'd lean away from you so that you were pulling on it. We always had a hard time explaining this to people, who thought that we were making it up--until they saw him in action, and how loudly it would make him purr.

You may have noticed that this post is mostly written in the past tense. Jasper got sick about two weeks ago. Youngest took him to the vet's after he failed to get up for breakfast one morning. His bladder was enlarged, and he was unable to pee. After a few days of being catheterized, he peed on his own and came home, only to wind up back at the vet's for the same reason the next day. He spent a few more days with a catheter in, peed successfully, and came home again...and went back to the vet again two days later. My parents made the decision to euthanize him, and they buried him in our backyard on Thursday evening.

It was very strange to be home for Easter. Between missing him and wondering if she'd made the right decision, my poor mum was so sad. For me, the hard parts weren't the big things--I knew he wouldn't be there to greet us, and I knew that he wouldn't be begging for food around dinnertime. It was the small things: coming around a corner and expecting to see him on a chair; finding his fur on the bedspread in my bedroom; listening for him in the morning.

I'll miss him for a long, long time.
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¹ Thank heaven we lived in an area that could afford to have a no-kill shelter.
² Yes, 1999 was the year that The Phantom Menace came out. Why do you ask?
³ Except when he would forget about the time he had the Big Operation and force himself upon her.