grammardog

On our last day in England, Sally and I decided to take the train to Brighton for a little day trip. It was super-beautiful!



Two ladies loving life:





Tiny boy on a scooter, chasing a pigeon. Quaint!



I could have stayed here forever:



But I didn't.

Zebra making me sad at the Regent's Park Zoo in London:



Are you kidding me, nature?



This is a shot from the Ripley's Museum in Piccadilly Circus that I like to call, "Black People Don't Like George Bush":



On a London street:

Sally, trying to be patient while waiting for her breakfast. She can get pretty crazy when she knows bacon's on the way.

One of my favourite things about my apartment is that the boiler room is right below me. This means that when I get up in the morning, the kitchen floor is warm. Also, when I take my shoes and jacket out of the closet, they are toasty warm. It's sort of like having a butler.

Sally and I were total tourists and went to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum.



BELIEVE IT! Here are three things I enjoyed from there.

JFK made out of butterfly wings:



Pretty lady made out of postage stamps:



Royal wedding, if Charles and Di were ants:



( The Beatles in chewing gum, duck lady that scared the crap out of me, penny Liz, Mr. Bug Eyes, garbage duck, and lamb with a turnin' leg below the cut. )

Sally creating a diversion, natch:



Ha ha... I LOVE that picture so much.

Pretty glass beads for sale at Camden Lock Market:



Friends 4-Ever:

It had to be done:



The perfect vacation nightstand: a sweater, some Diet Pepsi, and a Judy Blume book:



Shop window:

Finally arrived and jetlagged as hell. The interdepartmental envelope holding our travel details finally gets delivered to its destination. Can I do a mail run, or can I DO A MAIL RUN!



Well, technically, I guess this IS two separate beds, but I don't think they could have gotten away with this monkey business on I Love Lucy.

Back from London! We had a lovely and very busy and exhausting time. My basic observations:

- Londoners do not eat ketchup, nor do they take it very seriously. And is it any wonder? There isn't a bottle of Heinz to be found anywhere. If Sally had realized this in advance, she definitely would have brought her own.

- As a general rule, everyone in London looks better on a daily basis than I ever have on a single occasion in my life.

- Public nosepicking seems to be an acceptable social norm. We encountered what seemed to be a disproportionately high number of people in up to their proximal phalanxes.

- There is SO MUCH COLOGNE.

- There really aren't very many fat people in London. I felt a bit conspicuous!

- Londoners are very friendly to out-of-towners as long as you ask for help.

- It is totally the city that goes to sleep pretty dang early. If you don't want to hang out in pubs every night, we could find little to do after 6 pm, not that we had enough energy at the end of the day to do anything at all. One night we even went to the movies, which confirmed to us both that we could never move to London: the popcorn wasn't even BRIGHT YELLOW.

Anyway, we had lots of fun, and didn't have time for even a third of what we had planned to do, but it's a beautiful city and I would love to go back someday. Photos will come, someday.

New parents, please help me: I am trying to come up with a nice gift for my sister-in-law's baby shower on Sunday. I'm pretty dang broke, but don't really have time to make anything. I was thinking about maybe getting them a night at a hotel including my babysitting services, so that at some point, when the baby gets old enough and they get tired enough, they can escape for 24 hours? Is that something that new parents might want? Or is that impractical/not desirable? I need some advice... what do new parents need that they don't really get?

Things to miss about my old place:

- hundred year-old solid oak doors with crystal doorknobs
- high ceilings
- a big out-of-the-way shelf to put my ridonkulously huge bowl:




Things to love about my new place:

- SPACE!!!
- STORAGE!!!
- putting my recyclables away in a closet so I don't have to trip over them every day!
- being able to fit more than one person in the kitchen at once!
- being able to see all of my kitchen things because they're not packed away tightly in cupboards that are impossible to open because the stove is only 6 inches away from the cupboard door!
- telling my landlord that a fuse has blown and having him happily replace it on the same day!
- big, airy, sunny windows where I can put lots of plants someday when I can afford plants!
- CRAFT ROOM!
- being able to sit on a comfortable couch while I watch stuff on my computer instead of a kitchen chair!
- not having the kitchen rendered totally non-functional after cooking one meal!
- CLOSETS!
- not having to climb over someone else in the bed when I want to get up because one side has to be up against the wall!
- not having my computer in my bedroom!
- having lots of extra space in my bookshelf!
- having a balcony!
- a giant pantry where all my food fits!
- freezing shit!
- having more than one phone jack!
- having multiple electrical outlets per room so I don't have to decide if I'd rather have the lamp or the fan on!

I feel really, really happy in this place so far. I am looking forward to settling in all the way and getting Bea the hell over here with me so we can be a family again.

But FIRST! Gotta go to London! Flying out on 12 hours!

Poll: What Am I Forgetting To Pack?

Almost ready for London... the important part is done, anyway:



In other news, I've been packing like a mofo, and it still doesn't seem to have made a dent. I am feeling vaguely stressed out by having nowhere to put the boxes when packed, and the house is close to unlivable at the moment. There is a kitchen chair in the bathroom, to give some context. It's going to be a crazy, hectic, unsettled, and also awesome month for me. I am looking forward to being settled into a new place, but there is fun to be had before then.

Delivered the Dear John letter to my landlord on the first of the month, and e-mailed it to him, as well. No reply as of yet, but I'm sure he's very busy not fixing my fridge right now.

I wish it was time to go to work - 2:30 am and I'm wide awake. My bed feels like someone else's tonight... you know how sometimes you can't get comfortable and your feet feel all clammy and weird and the blankets feel tangled no matter what you do to them?

Sally and I booked our tickets for London tonight! We found an awesome deal on Hotwire... $1100 CDN ($911 USD) for a direct flight and a six-night stay at a central-ish London Holiday Inn (Regent's Park - it looked to be pretty close to most of the spots we want to go). SIX NIGHTS! Michael Jackson! Legoland! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. I called my parents to tell them my plans - big mistake! I forgot about how they resist joy. My mother reacted with hesitant "uh-huh"'s and skeptical "mmm"'s, and my dad told me I was in no position, and was being irresponsible, etc. Well, yes... I am living like the grasshopper and not the ant, I suppose.



But... how gay his little fiddle! Tra-la-la!

A bunch of my work pals and I went to see Coraline last week in 3D after getting turned away from a one-night showing of Labyrinth. Seriously, RUN DON'T WALK to see this gorgeous picture on the big screen. It was just so pretty I wanted to cry. It's basically a horror movie in animated form, though... don't bring any guests under... 28? I can't even look at the black buttons on Dodie's coat anymore. It was the first movie I've ever seen in 3D... so fun. Also - a female heroine in an animated film! Who isn't a princess waiting for love to save her! A++++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN.

Trying bed again.

I've sold the other two Michael Jackson tickets to a woman I work with. While this move didn't make me any money, I don't have to worry about selling the tickets in London, and she's also really fun, so we'll have a great time. Eeeeeee! Going to London!

It took all of ten seconds to convince Sally to be my London sidekick. I love that I can say to her, "Oh, Sal, I'm planning you a transatlantic vacation... I've already committed you to the plan with a large purchase. Okay?" and she's cool with that. We haven't really gotten past the dreaming stage yet, but we're going to need some suggestions for the planning stages. What's a never-been-to-Europe Canadian not to miss? It's SO EXCITING!

Less exciting is how I'm going to fund this trip, but I'm working it out. I'm seriously considering some part-time work, but between an upcoming volunteer opportunity, my inability to complete tasks as is, my fear of leaving Bea Arthur alone for 16 hours a day and the ensuing all night cat parties, my only seeing my boyf once a week anyway, and, let's face it, my extreme laziness and need for inordinate lengths of down-time, I don't know if I'm up for it. Instead, I'm trying to put away large chunks of money and cutting out fun spending for the next five months. I'm also going to try to cook more, as well as just eat what I have in the house, which is so tough for me. Everything looks boring if it hasn't been recently purchased. I've asked Dodie to try to sell my ticket to the (second) Neil Young show - much as I would love to go, I would love to take a jaunt to Paris more. I am also going to try to sell my bike on Kijiji. I really don't want to, but I think it's more the idea that's tying me to it.

I cannot keep up with the internet anymore.

Okay, so brantastic showed up out of NOWHERE last week and surprised the crap out of me, with the help and scheming of Sally. Brandi dreamed aloud to Sally that she would like to visit me since I have been feeling pretty crap lately, and the two of them worked out a plan. I was hanging out with Sally and my friend Nicole, innocently watching some Flight of the Conchords episodes, when I was snatched up, blindfolded, and driven to the airport. I didn't know what the bejeezus was going on until Brandi emerged from the international arrivals door. Seriously, it was the best surprise of my life. I don't really know how to thank them both for cooking this up for me... it just made me feel so loved and special.

Basically Brandi and I spent three days just acting the fool. We downloaded Vanilla Ice's epic film Cool As Ice, and uh, it was WAY more entertaining than we had expected... we laughed SO hard all the way throughout, and there was even one GENUINELY funny thing in it. I don't have as much tolerance for awesome-because-it's-awful material as Brandi has, but I enjoyed every second of it, and a second viewing is definitely in my future. If any of you have seen it, can we please talk about the ice-dripping scene? Oh my heavens. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, gawk, or gag.

We drove up the Eastern Shore on a wet, chilly day. I took these two photos in Lawrencetown, still experimenting with my new lens:





We also picked up lobsters from a cute strawberry blond fellow in Jeddore, and boiled them for dinner. SLOWLY. An inch at a time. The lobsters we bought were pretty fucking huge, as we realized when we got home and looked at my pots. We ended up cooking them in separate pots, and they were still too big to fit in them comfortably. I'm now going to tell you about one of the worst moments of my life. The water was boiling, the lobster was wiggling, and when I attempted to drop it in the roiling drink headfirst, it FLEXED and the only part of its body I could submerge was the CLAWS. I was SLOWLY BOILING IT STARTING WITH THE EXTREMITIES. I can't tell you the horror I felt realizing that this creature was not going to die a quick and painless death. I shouted for a cramstick, and ended up using a slotted spoon to cram the rest of the flipping lobster's body into the pot. I then I had to force the cover closed for several agonizing minutes while the lobster flipped around and basically it was horrible and that story is over now because I can't go on. Oh, also, Bea Arthur bit one of the lobsters in the swimmerette. That is everything, now.

Here are some shots from the cutest photoshoot ever:







Below, Bea Arthur and Brandi re-enact The Great Lobster Boiling Fiasco of '08. Bea Arthur snaps his tail wildly as the lobsters did, and flattens his ears to express extreme discontent. Brandi's face perfectly captures my experience.



Sally and Brandi and I went to Thursday night bingo together, and I TOTALLY WON! It was pretty awesome yelling out my victory, and even though I only won $59, I couldn't follow bingo hall protocol and pretend like I wasn't excited. I felt sort of bad taking the money from all of those elderly people who go every single night and maybe never win. But not bad ENOUGH.

Anyway, those were the highlights/lowlights of my surprise visit from Bran. There were a million other tiny moments and huge laughs, stuff that I wish I could have just recorded so I could watch it all again (Bran, today "Lady" came on the telly and I sang the whole thing at a 45 degree angle, and laughed so hard and wished you were there so bad). I was terribly sorry to see her go home. I just love her so much, you guys.

So, NEIL YOUNG! It was so awesome. I admit, I partly expected to see Neil phoning it in to some extent at this late stage in the game, but he fucking ruled. As moxieholic put it in his review, his first tune sounded like what would be a finale for most other performers. Also, Wilco! So much fun... I really hope to see a full show at some point in my life.

Yesterday Sally and I went out to put up some posters for our "White Christmas" fundraiser, which is a week from today. It was a trying experience. I experienced my first tumble of winter when I wiped out on the icy sidewalk on Robie Street where cars were driving out of the car wash and leaving the sidewalk wet. I banged up my knee on the widewalk and wrenched my back a little bit, too. Very shortly after I got up and brushed myself off (so shortly, in fact, that I think he MUST have seen me fall), a man came barrelling up to me with his finger poking at me and shouted, "Do you know you're breaking a city by-law?!? You're making a goddamn mess! I'm calling the police!" and then started storming away. I was stunned, but called after him, "It's a FUNDRAISER for the food bank, sir", and without even looking back at me, he gave me the finger! I was SO ANGRY about it and still am. I'm just amazed at the kind of person it would take to, first of all, GIVE A CRAP, and second of all, behave that way to a strange woman on the street. It made me feel really, really deflated. The part I'm MOST concerned about, though, is that he actually WILL call the police, who will then probably call the charity we're raising funds for about the complaint. If they are complained to, I actually will have to go and take all five hundred posters down, which makes me feel just sick to my stomach and totally dejected. It just makes me crazy that anyone would CARE about some fundraiser posters on a pole, sandwiched between Steve-o-Reno's coffee barn, a four-lane traffic-congested street, and an Esso station on Robie Street - not exactly Banff National Park, or even a residential area. Argh... I just feel so mad about it, and mostly I feel mad about the way he yelled at me, in such an intimidating and threatening way.

Afterwards,we went to Clay Cafe to paint our frustrations away, which might have worked if it hadn't been filled to the brim with babies. So many very noisy babies! I did finish a potentially-disastrous Christmas gift though (word to the wise: don't try to paint perfect circles on ceramic bisque), and we also ran into iamom there, which was a nice surprise.

I don't really dislike babies. Proof:



They're just noisy, is all.

It's becoming clearer that my future at work looks pretty grim, due to a major restructuring that will take place over the next couple of years. It makes me really disappointed... I never thought I would still be doing entry-level work after 2.5 years, but that's just the way things have panned out because of some really bad timing . I was hoping to get a chance to try some other jobs out there, but it's not looking good. I would love to have some stability, and some challenge in my work, besides the challenge of "try not to weep from boredom today".

Otherwise, I have been quite busy but with some fun things in there, too, and any free time has been spent trying to get some Christmas gifts together. My no-buy Christmas is really going pretty well, and any money I have spent toward it has still gone into a handmade gift. I even wrapped some tonight, and realized afterwards I didn't take any photos of everything piled together, which I really wanted to do for my own satisfaction.

THE END. I'm so tired.

In Baddeck, Nova Scotia... taken at Bras d'Or Lake.

We went to a quilt show!



tvor saw this photo on my Flickr and was inspired to paint this painting! Isn't that lovely? I was very flattered.



I loved this weirdo lake weed:



Pretty, deadly lupins:





It was a perfectly grey day.

Joe's Scarecrow Village.

It scared more than the crows.







( More photos from Joe's Scarecrow Village, near Cheticamp, Nova Scotia )

Brandi and I were just about to begin our trip around the Cabot Trail when we happened upon this amazing display in Whycocomagh. The woman who lived here told us she had cut and painted the characters as a surprise gift for her son, who had just graduated from the Dalhousie law program. She said the only break he would ever take while studying was to watch The Simpsons. She had even made one of her son as a Simpsons character, complete with a graduation gown. AW!






(  More of The Siiiiimp-sonnnnnnns... )

I later Googlestalked the lucky graduate on Facebook with ladykutenay's help and wrote him a nice note telling him that his mom (biologically his aunt) was amazing and also sort of internet-famous thanks to Brandi's amazing photos. He wrote me a nice note back, too, and even assured me that I wasn't creepy or weird.

Isn't that the most awesome thing?

We stopped near Cheticamp to go swimming. This involved changing into a bathing suit that is six sizes too small in the back of a really hot Kia Spectra. It was worth it!

It only took us a half hour to get in the water. The nausea and pain only lasted about 20 minutes.



This stone lives in my bathroom now:



This tiny photographer was taking a picture of me while I took a picture of him.



My sandy foot:

Q. What do I love more than old, abandoned buildings?
A. NOTHING.

In Cheticamp, we found these old garages by the roadside. We investigated, obvz.





Spider in a broken window:









Watchful eye:



Come into the office:

I stopped the car so Brandi could take some pictures shortly after we had passed through Ingonish. While she was shooting, I wandered across the road and found this little shack:



A close-up of the sign above the door:



( Want to go inside? You're in luck; the door was unlocked! )