Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by zoom! on June 2, 2008, at 7:44 pm |
Years ago, during a discussion about the debate over the measurement and definition of poverty (a surprisingly controversial subject), someone told me about an interesting survey.
Ordinary Canadians were asked, in essence, where they would draw the poverty line.
The question was this: “In your opinion, what is the minimum amount of annual before-tax income a family of four in your community requires to meet its basic needs?”
Then everybody’s answers were averaged out, and, interestingly, the average came quite close to the actual poverty line, which is calculated in a totally different (and much less interesting) way.
So let’s do a little unofficial and unscientific survey right here and see how our results measure up against the poverty line.
How to Play
A) Please don’t look up the poverty lines before participating, and don’t read other people’s comments and guesses until after you’ve entered your own.
B) Answer the following questions in the comments:
1. In your opinion, what is the minimum amount of annual before-tax income a single person in your community requires in order to meet his/her basic needs?
2. In your opinion, what is the minimum amount of annual before-tax income a family of four in your community requires in order to meet its basic needs?
Remember, it’s not a test, there are no right or wrong answers, and I appreciate you taking the time to participate in Knitnut’s First Annual Unofficial and Unscientific Survey.
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Posted by zoom! on June 1, 2008, at 12:35 pm |
My Thursday lunch date was cute, but he preferred breasts to faces, he interrupted other diners’ conversations with his loud demands for food, and then, to top it all off, he took a dump at the table.
Did I mention he was cute?
Meet Jean-Gabriel. He’s the recipient of the Snake Charmer sweater and the cutest little baby booties in the whole entire universe.
Oh yeah. He brought his mom along on our date. Can you believe it?
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Posted by zoom! on May 31, 2008, at 2:55 pm |
 If I ever go to your house, you should probably hide your raspberries. Otherwise I will eat them all. Even though I know it is rude to eat all your raspberries, I will not be able to stop until they are all gone.
Just so you know.
Posted by zoom! on May 30, 2008, at 8:59 pm |
You know how your hair needs you to switch shampoos periodically because your pH balance has changed and your old shampoo just isn’t doing it for you anymore? Well, the same thing’s happening to me with coffee.
 Here’s my current coffee schema. It was all acquired at the Great Glebe Garage Sale, but in different years.
To be honest, I’ve never used either of the bodums/french presses because I haven’t taken the time to figure out how they work and to learn what grind of coffee they take. (In my defence, I’ve only had them for five and seven years.)
The little stovetop espresso machine has served me well over many years. And that Medaglia D’Oro espresso coffee? It’s cheap and strong and I’ve liked it just fine up until now.
But it’s not doing it for me anymore. I need a new brew.
I like my coffee strong but not bitter. I like it flavourful but not flavoured. I generally brew it strong and then temper it to perfection with some cream and sugar. (I know, I know, that’s not very sophisticated. But that’s how I like it.)
 Most importantly, it has to be served in the right mug. I come from a family that takes its mugs seriously. Some might say we’re neurotic about our mugs. But I’m sure we can’t be the only family to have seasonal mugs, weekend mugs, and special mugs for when we’re sick. This is currently my favourite mug.
Maybe I’ll go back to my faithful old coffee schema someday, but for now I need a change. This is where you come in: If you love your coffee, I want you to tell me how you make it. What equipment do you have? What method do you use? What coffee do you recommend? Tell me your secret for the perfect cup of coffee. Please.
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Posted by zoom! on May 29, 2008, at 7:45 pm |
I ran into John at Mexi’s the other evening while waiting for my Dad and Merle, and John plied me with tequila and said his favourite blog posts were the ones about the Swap Boxes. And, he pointed out, there hadn’t been a Swap Box post for quite some time.
His timing was perfect because I just happen to have some brand new Swap Box pictures AND some Swap Box news. Good news and bad news. I always like to hear the bad news first so I can get it out of the way and then get cheered up by the good news. Is that how you like it too?
Remember my very favourite Swap Box which was right outside the Invisible Theatre and across the street from Venus Envy? It was the Mayor Larry Swap Box. Pretty much every day I would put something into it – lately it was a daily tarot card.
Well, a little while ago someone yanked the door off it, and it wasn’t the same after that. I blogged about it, and Elmaks very kindly went and replaced it with a brand new Swap Box the very next day.
Mayor Larry Swap Box:
Replacement Swap Box (nicknamed the LCBO Swap Box):
What they look like now:
So that’s the bad news. I no longer have a Swap Box on my daily route.
The good news is that I ran into some of the CCOC women at the Red Salon Artists show at Patrick Gordon Framing, and they told me about another Swap Box and a street art project I didn’t know about. Monday I went down to Gladstone and Percy and checked it out.
Swap Box
Full of Treats! I took a hair clip and some jazz beads (the kind they throw at the audience at Bluesfest), and left a tarot card and a cat toy.
Kitty-corner from the Swap Box was this Plexiglass Flower Case screwed to a telephone pole. It’s got real flowers in it! Isn’t it fabulous?
 And then, on Tuesday, when I was walking to Mexi’s in the Glebe, I stumbled across this very cool Swap Box. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to clean up a Swap Box when it’s full of icky stuff that nobody will want, like soggy sticks of gum or empty coffee cups. In this case I didn’t: it was full of flyers but they looked kind of interesting. Occasionally I’ll remove something if it’s so gross it’s going to affect the Swap Box’s usability. I only do it if I have no doubts whatsoever, because it feels a bit wrong for me to decide what’s good enough for the swap box and what isn’t.
I’ve been saving all the things I get from all the swap boxes and one of these days I’m going to make a piece of assemblage art out of them.
I love street art, especially participatory street art like the swap boxes. I think it should be encouraged. It brightens the city and makes it feel friendlier and less alienating. I’d love for Ottawa to host a Street Art Festival.
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Posted by zoom! on May 28, 2008, at 5:27 pm |
 There’s a bus shelter near Dow’s Lake that has this ad on it. You can click on the image for a larger version, but here’s what it says:
YOUR DAD HAD A VAN FOR A REASON
DAMN RIGHT YOUR DAD DRANK IT
It’s got a picture of a young guy in jeans with his shirt unbuttoned. In the bottom corner there’s a picture of a bottle of Canadian Club whisky.
I pass this ad every morning on my way to work, and every morning I spend the next five minutes wondering what the hell it means. I don’t get it, but there’s something distinctly creepy about it.
Maybe i just don’t get it because I’m not a guy. But I’ve tried flipping it around and I still wouldn’t get it if it said:
YOUR MOM HAD A VAN FOR A REASON
DAMN RIGHT YOUR MOM DRANK IT
Whadya think? Who’s the target demographic for this ad? What image is CC trying to sell? And why DID your dad have a van anyway?
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Posted by zoom! on May 26, 2008, at 8:41 pm |
It was such a crazy busy weekend, I’m having trouble catching up on the blogging of it. The past is slipping away while the future comes slamming into the present and I’m blogging as fast as I can but it’s not fast enough!
Dramatic, eh? Heh heh.
Okay, here’s the weekend in a nutshell:
Friday night I went to a vernissage where I ran into a couple of readers of this blog and they told me of the existence of some new (to me, at least) street art. Today I walked a different route to work so I could see it – pix to follow.
 Saturday I went to the Great Glebe Garage Sale. I bought a bunch of stuff (including warmer clothes; I was freezing) and then I met XUP and her daughter for lunch and checked out all the stuff they bought. Our lunch was made by Juno Award winner Drew Nelson.
As I was walking back home along the Canal I ran into Robin from Watawa Life blog, and we stopped and talked. We had both been at that exact same spot earlier in the day (but at different times), doing the exact same thing: taking pictures of geese and goslings and ducks and ducklings. I won’t post my pictures because Robin’s is so much better: if you haven’t already done so, I urge you to go look at his picture. You don’t want to miss this one.
Saturday evening I watched the running of the 10k, which I’ve already blogged.
I managed to convince someone to come watch the Marathon with me on Sunday! It’s not easy to get people to do that, and I understand. It sounds boring, watching people run. But it’s really not. However, I did lure him out there with the promise of all kinds of marathon spectacles that never materialized. I told him he’d probably see a blind person running, and a woman in a burqa, and a soldier with a pack full of rocks, and people so blistered they’d be carrying their shoes, and men with bleeding nipples and people collapsing from exhaustion and clowns juggling fire while running on stilts. These are all things I’ve seen at past marathons.
 All in all this year’s was a pretty tame marathon: we did see a man with bleeding nipples, but that was about it. Oh – and we saw a man with a pulled muscle. This is him. He was pretty dramatic about it. And we saw a couple of marathoners chatting on their cell phones. And a Habs fan. One of the front-running female marathoners had taken the time to put her makeup on.
Mostly, though, it was just a sea of runners running followed by a sea of walkers walking.
 We timed it perfectly – he picked me up around 8:15 and that gave us just enough time to get there, park, and find the perfect spot at the 37km mark before the first of the elite runners came flying past us.
We were troopers: we stuck around from the very beginning til the very end. We watched the very last weary marathoner limping along, 4km from the finish line 7.5 hours after the marathon began, while a pickup truck tagged along behind him, picking up the pilons.
We even stuck around for awhile after that, because by then it was such a lovely day.
And that pretty much wraps up my weekend. I hope yours was interesting too!
Here are a few random pictures from the Marathon.
Oh! And before I forget, here’s a question for the runners: Do you find any of the spectators annoying? Does it bother you that total strangers are standing on the sidelines and giving you advice like “Stay focused – keep your arms moving and your legs will follow.” Does that get on your nerves? There was a woman standing near us and she kept repeating stuff like that and it was getting on MY nerves.
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Posted by zoom! on May 25, 2008, at 8:54 pm |
Judging by my emails, a number of people were understandably under the impression that I was running the 10k this weekend.
It didn’t happen. It was supposed to be a family affair, but my dad got sidelined by a back injury in the fall. I’m not sure what happened to Alex’s plans to run. Mike was going to start training on February 1st if it looked like everybody else was serious about it. I fell by the wayside in April because my left leg developed a profound aching from hip to ankle whenever I ran more than five or ten minutes.
I’m still running, just not often enough to make any progress or to take race training seriously. I’m doing about 3k once a week, and I’m alternating running and walking for the last kilometer. I’m going to make an appointment at the Chinese Ditda to see if they can put the zoom back in Zoom. Wish me luck.
I did show up for the 10k though, and watched as thousands of other people ran it or walked it. Here are a few pictures:
This is the cloud of elite women runners. They run in a pack for a good chunk of the race, and then I think they jockey for position, make their move and sprint to the finish line.
This is the cloud of elite men runners. Ditto.
This is the crowd of 8,418 ordinary people of all different ages and sizes who poured down the Driveway for the next hour and a half. 
That was last night. Today I watched the Marathon from start to finish and I’m so exhausted I can barely blog. I’ll post the pix later. Congratulations to everybody who participated in National Capital Race Weekend over the last few days – you were all pretty spectacular.
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Posted by zoom! on May 23, 2008, at 10:27 pm |
Some of my dates weren’t even dates.
This one definitely needs some context. I was seventeen and I’d recently rented a room in a shared house. I’d seen the “room for rent” notice on the bulletin board at the Women’s Centre, which was at Somerset and Booth (I think it was in that building that burnt down last year). The house was on Lorne Avenue, and the rent was $50 a month.
The first night I was living there, one of the women stopped by my room to tell me that they were radical feminist lesbians. They thought I should know. Also, they hated men and didn’t want any in their house under any circumstances. (They meant it too – if the plumbing broke down, they sent for the woman plumber in Toronto rather than call a male plumber in Ottawa.)
I was a strong feminist myself, but of the non-man-hating, non-lesbian variety.
But hey, I was only seventeen and still trying to figure out who I was and where I fit in. And I liked these women and their gazillions of radical feminist dyke friends who were always in our house. I met some pretty famous women in our house, actually.
They always included me in everything they did, so I was going to a lot of radical feminist dyke parties and consciousness raising groups and Gays of Ottawa dances and protest rallies on Parliament Hill. I was listening to Lavender Jane and reading Kate Millet and Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone. And I was starting to not like men as much.
I think the women I lived with and their friends just assumed I was a lesbian. I never actually said one way or the other, and I’d never actually had sex with anyone yet. At any rate, it was clear to me that they liked and respected lesbians much more than straight women. So I was kind of reluctant to confess to being straight. It was my little secret…nobody else needed to know, right? But I felt like a fraud, letting them believe I was gay.
I was probably the only straight teenager in the closet.
At the time I was going to high school in the mornings, working in the film library in the afternoons, and taking a couple of evening courses. That’s where I met Dan. We’d smoke and talk together during breaks in our Man in Society course. It turned out we both liked poetry, so we started showing each other poems we’d written. Dan was soft-spoken and shy and a little tormented and angst-ridden, just like me. (And just like half of all teenagers, now that I think about it.) Somehow I inflated these shared traits into some kind of soul-mate thing. I found myself falling in love with Dan.
Which was lovely, of course, but if I felt like a fraud before it was nothing compared to how I felt now that I was letting everybody believe I was gay while I was actually falling in love with a man. I felt like a fraud and a traitor and a liar and a coward and worse.
There was only one thing for it: I had to fess up. I had to come out of the closet and admit I was straight. I had to risk their scorn and rejection.
It wasn’t easy for me, not easy at all. But I did it. I told my roomies I was falling in love with a boy. And you know what M said? She said, “I’m sorry to hear that. But you should always be true to your heart.”
I felt so liberated once I’d told the truth. And then I hurried off to night school to meet with Dan and be true to my heart and tell him I was falling in love with him. Because, you know, the truth will set you free.
And you know what Dan said?
“I really like you too,” he said, “but I’m gay.”
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Posted by zoom! on May 22, 2008, at 5:47 pm |
Spring must be in the air – there’s been more than the average amount of talk about flirting and dating lately. The ESIs, for example, are about to unveil their much-touted and anxiously awaited Revolutionary New Dating Paradigm. Also, an online discussion group in which I participate has been exchanging worst date stories. I LOVE worst date stories.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never dated much. Somehow I’ve usually managed to bypass the dating phase and go straight from acquaintanceships into relationships. I’ve even been known to marry a virtual stranger. (Not that I advocate any of this: I don’t. Clearly I have no clue what I’m doing.)
However, I’ve done enough dating to be able to contribute a story or two to any discussion on dating hell. Here’s one of my best worst date stories from my own personal dating archives.
I was a 27-year-old single parent and student at the time. My son’s father had him every sixth weekend. I used to look forward to those sixth weekends as opportunities to put my life in order and catch up on my schoolwork, housework, recreational activities, sleep and social life. (By the end of every sixth weekend I would invariably feel I’d fallen short because I hadn’t gotten all caught up on all things. But, if I was lucky, I’d have had some grown-up fun and I would be feeling either refreshed or exhausted.)
So. This one particular Sixth Weekend, I was invited to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening at a cottage up near Masham, Quebec. “It’s a party at my friend’s cottage,” explained my date, “Great people, it’ll be lots of fun.”
We got there around mid-afternoon to find about twenty men and zero women at this party. I know first impressions can be deceiving, but these twenty men didn’t strike me as very likable or friendly. They were drinking heavily and consuming some serious drugs in startling quantities. Aside from the drugs and alcohol, the main sources of entertainment appeared to be gambling and watching porn.
I’m a good sport, really I am, and I like a good party as much as the next person. But you don’t need finely tuned spidey senses to get a funny feeling about a party like this.
I took my date aside and told him I wasn’t comfortable and I wanted to leave. He assured me that we’d leave as soon as he finished his beer. I thought he meant the beer he was currently drinking, but apparently he meant all the beer he’d brought to the party. Not only that, but he must have gotten into the drugs because he started drooling and talking in tongues. It was like a whole different language – I had no idea what he was trying to say.
Not that it mattered, because he obviously was in no condition to drive me home, and nobody else seemed either sober enough or kind enough to help me. I was stone cold sober, but I didn’t have a vehicle or a driver’s license. Nevertheless, one thing was certain: there was no way in hell I was going to be at that cottage when the sun went down.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I ended up walking about half an hour out to the highway and sticking my thumb out. I got picked up by a big, horny drunk driver who was every bit as charming as he sounds.
I did make it home safely, which was when I realized I’d lost my keys somewhere along the way. I had to break a window to get into my own apartment, but being home was so worth the cost of replacing the glass.
Okay, that’s my story. Now cheer me up and tell me about your worst date ever.
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