Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by Zoom! on October 4, 2012, at 9:47 am |
Tom Sawyer asked: “What was the wildly inappropriate thing you said to Mr. MacIntyre?”
This was in reference to the Ask Me Anything post about the moon, in which I mentioned that Mr. MacIntyre didn’t like me right from the start, because of the wildly inappropriate thing I said on my first day at my new school.
We moved to Ontario because my mother got engaged to Skipper, but she ended up not marrying him after all. Instead, she married a guy we’ll call Bobbity-Bob, and they bought a one-room schoolhouse near the village of Kinburn.
I was in Grade Five and Fitzroy Centennial was my fifth school. I was pretty adaptable but this school was a bit trickier than most. Partly because it was in the middle of the school year, and partly because it was my first rural school. Things were different there. The kids were different.
My teacher, Mrs. Cavanaugh, was unpopular and ineffective. A core group of seven bad boys seemed to be in charge of her classroom. She had nervous tics and she was utterly miserable and completely powerless. All she could do was smack her pointer on the desk and cry “Stop cutting up! Stop cutting up!” over and over again.
On the other hand, Mr. MacIntyre, the Grade Six teacher, was one of those cool teachers that all the kids liked. That very first day of school, he was on yard duty, and there was a big gaggle of kids following him around, waiting their turn to talk to him.
The group of bad boys from my class approached me with a suggestion.
“Wait your turn to talk to Mr. MacIntyre,” they said, “And then ask him if he reads Playboy. If he says yes, then ask him ‘Why? You’ve got Miss Badham.'”
I’m sure I looked puzzled, since I didn’t know what Playboy was and I’d never heard of Miss Badham, but the boys assured me that Mr. MacIntyre would think this was really funny. And because I wanted to fit in, I naively agreed to do it.
I got in line and slowly moved up in line until it was finally my turn to ask Mr. MacIntyre a question. (Honestly, you’d have thought this guy was God or something, the way the kids fawned all over him.)
“Yes?” he said.
“Do you read Playboy?” I asked innocently.
“Yes,” he said, bristling a bit.
“Why?” I asked. “You’ve got Miss Badham.”
Mr. MacIntyre clouded over, his jaw clamped, his face turned mean and hard, and he lit into me. I don’t remember what he said so much (it started with who the hell did I think I was) but I remember how I felt. I felt humiliated and confused. I looked over at the group of boys who had put me up to it and they were literally rolling on the ground laughing.
I slunk away.
A week or so later I found out what Playboy was, because it turned out my new stepfather was a subscriber. And I found out that Miss Badham was the Grade Two teacher. She and Mr. MacIntyre got married a year later and, according to Facebook, lived happily ever after.
I remained at that school for three and a half years and Mr. MacIntyre never liked me. But the kids did, even the bad boys, so it wasn’t so bad.
The Ask Me Anything series will continue as long as there are questions. You can leave a question in the comments, or send it to me by email at zoomery at gmail dot com. (I think I’ve lost a couple of questions, so if you asked me one and I didn’t answer it, please ask again.)
Posted by Zoom! on October 3, 2012, at 9:45 am |
 Connie’s quilt About a year and a half ago I blogged about wanting to learn how to quilt. So Connie, who lives in Maine and whom I’ve never met, sent me her sewing machine! Just like that! Just because she’s such a generous and kind person.
I promised Connie I’d make her a quilt.
I started it more than a year ago, and only finished it last month. But, in my defense, it’s the first quilt I’ve made completely by myself. I did most of the red, black and white sampler by myself, but I won free long-arm quilting for it, so I didn’t do the actual quilting (that’s where you sew all the layers of the quilt together, usually in some kind of decorative pattern). GC and I made Sienna’s baby quilt together, and he did the actual quilting.
So Connie’s quilt is my first complete quilt, and the first one I’ve actually quilted. (For those of you who know something about quilting, I did straight machine quilting on most of it, and free motion quilting in the borders.)
There were times over the past year when I had my doubts about this quilt. I thought it was too simple. But when it was finished and quilted and the binding was on it, I liked it very much, despite its simplicity and its imperfections…or maybe because of them.
I felt very happy sending this quilt off to Connie, and she and her cat were happy to receive it.
Thank you, Connie!
 Duncan with Connie’s quilt  Connie’s cat, Mickey, with Connie’s quilt  Connie’s quilt, between cats
Posted by Zoom! on October 2, 2012, at 9:16 am |
 GC and Rosie and I installed a swap box in the Enchanted Forest in honour of Elmaks. Turns out none of us are especially handy with a drill. Rosie played the opposable thumb card (again), but GC and I didn’t really have an excuse. On the plus side, you learn a lot about how to do a thing from doing it the first time, and now GC and I are much better at installing swap boxes.
The Enchanted Forest runs beside Fisher Avenue, on the edge of the Experimental Farm. I picked a tree that is smack dab in the middle of the path. In fact, the path diverges in two to go around that tree. Being a typical Libran, I always struggle a bit with that when I’m walking along the path. Should I go around the tree to the left or the right? Part of me always wants to go the same way, but part of me thinks I shouldn’t allow that part of me to decide. I always wonder if I’m the only one who struggles with this.
 Anyway. I was initially thinking the swap box should go over by the fallen log with the carved creature on it, since it’s street art too. Or forest art. But I wouldn’t want people to have to walk through poison ivy to use the swap box. The indecisive tree in the middle of the path seemed ideal.
 After we put it up, we put a few things in it and then we walked down the path and watched from a discreet distance as people approached the swap box. We saw two pairs of cyclists and one pedestrian go right past it without stopping. I can’t even imagine passing a swap box without stopping, but that’s what they did. One of them was even a kid about 10 years old. It doesn’t bode well if you’ve already lost your sense of curiosity by the age of 10.
We went back that night, under the full moon, and checked on it. It was still there, but there was nothing new in it and nothing had been taken.
The next day somebody took the Harry Potter figure.
 This morning GC and Rosie were out walking before the sun came up, and they discovered somebody had put something new in it. GC wasn’t sure what it was exactly since it was still dark outside, but he said something about pink chiffon. So it’s officially a swap box now!
 (A few minutes after we installed the swap box, Rosie found some street art of her own. It was on one of those “You are here” signs on the bike path.)
Posted by Zoom! on September 29, 2012, at 8:42 am |
 It was on this day, a year ago, that Ottawa’s favourite street artist hiked into the forest, lay down under a tree, and died.
His parents recently sent me a photograph of his headstone, along with an explanation of the symbols, and kindly gave me permission to share it here.
- in the top left corner is Lady Justice, because fairness & equality were very important to him;
- in the top right corner is the Moon he used in his paintings.
- in the bottom left and right corners are cats guarding him; he loved cats.
- between the cats is the Heart he used in his paintings.
I think about Elmaks sometimes. I think about how sweet and kind he was, how talented and smart, and how much he loved cats and babies. He was one of a kind.
Sometimes I think about why he died, which I still don’t understand.
But I take comfort from knowing that it wasn’t impulsive, that he’d thought it through and planned it well over the better part of a year, and that he was sure it was what he wanted. One of his best friends told me that.
I believe Elmaks lived a rich and full life, even though he decided not to stick around for more. It didn’t bother him that his art was temporary, destined to be torn down by vandals or worn down by the elements, and it didn’t bother him that his life was temporary. Art, and life, were ephemeral, and he had no problem with that.
But his memory lives on. Elmaks touched a lot of people in his 29 years, many of whom are celebrating his life, his memory, and his unusual gifts today.
 His friends at McGill, where he was working on a Masters of Urban Planning, got together and created swap boxes and installed them all over Montreal. You can see all the pictures here of them making and installing the boxes. They’re wonderful.
I believe there are other swap boxes going up in Ottawa today. (As a matter of fact, I know there are, since mine is one of them.)
His dear friend Jadis is lighting a candle and sending it down the river on a little raft.
And I imagine there are many others remembering him in their own ways.
If you’re looking for a way to celebrate Maks’ life today, may I suggest making a swap box, giving something away, feeding somebody, or singing to your cat? These were all things he loved to do, and they’re all things that make the world a better place.
Posted by Zoom! on September 27, 2012, at 10:00 am |
I’m outraged that Rona Ambrose, Minister of State for the Status of Women in Canada, voted to re-open the abortion debate. The legal right to choose if and when to have children is absolutely fundamental to women’s rights, and I find it appalling that there’s an anti-feminist in charge at Status of Women. Doesn’t the Harper Government have any respect for women?
 I’d estimate that half the women I know have had both abortions and children. Some had abortions in their youth, followed by children later on. Some had abortions after they’d had all the children they wanted.
It’s rarely an easy choice, but it is one of the most important ones we’ll ever make and it’s absolutely essential that we get to make it for ourselves.
A child is completely, irrevocably life-changing, and when you want one and you’re ready, it’s completely, irrevocably life-changing in a good way. But when you don’t and you’re not, it’s completely, irrevocably life-changing in a dreadful way. And by dreadful, I mean the thought of it fills you with dread. Other times (and this is the worst), you’re ambivalent.
I may struggle with the burden of choice, but ultimately nobody knows better than me if I’m in a position to devote my life to the raising of another human being at any given time. Especially not some politicians I’ve never even met! How dare they presume to know this better than me, better than the women of Canada? How dare they try to replace our fundamental rights with their personal moral code?
Parenting is way too important to be forced on women, especially by a bunch of right-wing anti-feminist politicians whose commitment to children ends at birth.
I honestly didn’t think it was possible to despise this government more than I already did. I was wrong.
Posted by Zoom! on September 26, 2012, at 9:24 am |
Cara asks “What do you like most about Ottawa?”
I’ve lived my whole adult life, as well as portions of my childhood, in Ottawa. The resulting sense of familiarity is intimately tied into everything I like about Ottawa, as well as everything I don’t like.
I like that whenever I walk around Centretown, I am entertained by a lifetime of memories. I spent a lot of time on McLeod Street, Lisgar Street, and Bank Street. I stayed up all night playing board games in a little apartment on Bronson, I partied in Dundonald Park, I met my son’s father in the alley behind Hartman’s, I lost my virginity on Park Avenue. I remember when Irene’s Pub was Cap’n Pinky’s, CCOC was the Alex Hotel, Roger’s was The Gilmour, Bridgehead was the Voyageur Restaurant and Venus Envy was my laundromat. There’s not a street in Centretown that doesn’t stir up memories.
But apart from Ottawa being home to my own personal history, here are some of the other things I like about it.
One of the things I’ve always liked is that it’s easy to get out of Ottawa. It doesn’t go on and on forever like Toronto does. In half an hour you can be up in the Gatineau Hills, hiking a trail, or in a little village in the Ottawa Valley, eating ice cream. Even if you can’t get out of the city, there are plenty of places you can pretend you’re not in the city: the Experimental Farm, the Arboretum, Mud Lake, Mer Bleue, the Rideau River, the Ottawa River, Shirleys Bay, Stony Swamp, etc.
What else? I love the cat sanctuary on Parliament Hill, the National Art Gallery, all the little galleries, the Great Glebe Garage Sale, Art in the Park, and Canada Geese. I’m not crazy about the weather, but I love the way our seasons change so dramatically. I like that we all kind of hibernate in the winter and emerge in the spring. I love all the music, art, culture and festivals that we cram into every summer. I like that you can get by in this city without a car. I like that the crime rate is low and I feel pretty safe.
Thank you for your question, Cara. I’m probably going to keep remembering things I love about Ottawa, which should make for a pretty happy day.
Let’s fill up the comments with things we love about Ottawa. Then we can meet back here in February, when Ottawa sucks, and cheer ourselves up.
Posted by Zoom! on September 24, 2012, at 7:14 am |
I’m taking a brief break from the Ask Me Anything series to tell you that at 7:50 this morning, my favourite son will turn 30 years old. (He’d still be my favourite even if I had more than one, but I probably wouldn’t say it out loud.)
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was young and he was a newborn, so it’s a little surreal that all of a sudden he’s 30 and I’m the mother of someone whose hairline is receding. It’s like we both catapulted through life and now I’m living in a cliche and asking “Where did the time go?”
James is coming over for his traditional birthday feast tonight: beer batter chicken balls, cucumber salad and birthday cake. His dad is coming too. It’ll be like catapulting backward through time, however briefly.
GC and I had an unusually good weekend. Friday night we were invited to Pressed on Gladstone to check out some live music. It’s a cozy little coffee house with excellent food and a liquor license. The music was great: Little Red Deer (with Leslie Dishslayer), Jill Zmud, and Ian Foster. They were all terrific, and exactly the right kind of music for the venue. I can’t even tell you the last time we saw live music, let alone stayed for a whole show. As an added bonus, we ran into three blogging-community friends there, including one I’d never really met before, and it was good to spend a little time talking and catching up in person.
 Saturday night we went out and played at Nuit Blanche. It’s the first year Ottawa has done Nuit Blanche, which is basically an overnight city-wide celebration of art in all its various forms. GC and I did the Hintonburg stretch. We got free art from the Free Art van, checked out the CUBE gallery, saw the Dan Martelock exhibit (again) at the  Orange Gallery, visited Twiss and Weber’s knitting place, stopped in at Collected Works Book Store, watched the video flash cards in Lauzon Music’s upstairs windows, and checked out the dancers in the park behind Parkdale Market. One of my favourite stops was Twiss & Weber’s. The whole shop was yarn-bombed and there was a series of hand-knit, framed QR codes that you could scan with your smart phone, which I did.
Other than that, GC had to work this weekend and I busied myself sewing. I’m making a surprise.
On the not-so-good side of things, my Twitter account got hacked and someone sent spam to all my followers. It said “Your in this, lol” with a link that appeared to be going to facebook. I wonder what it says about me that I was mortified that the spammer made a spelling mistake while impersonating me?
Anyway, if you follow me on Twitter, I’m sorry about the spam. I hope you didn’t click on the link.
Posted by Zoom! on September 21, 2012, at 9:51 am |
MiKa Art asks: “Why is your blog name “zoomâ€? What does it mean to you? When and how did you find out you loved living with birds?”
As I recall, I was creating an online account somewhere, and I tried the name Sooze but it was taken. I kept adding on to it but everything was taken. Eventually I ended up with Soozooming. Years later, when I was setting up my blog, I shortened soozooming to zoom. Z is my favourite letter, and I like that there’s a zoo in Zoom. I prefer Zoom to my real name.
My real name is Susan, and different people call me different variations of it – Susan, Sue, Suzy, Sooze. So my name has always been kind of fluid and changeable and I’ve never really felt like it belonged to me. Susan was a very popular name the year I was born, so there were always at least a few girls in each grade that shared my name, which only added to my sense that my name wasn’t really my own. (Actually, my name was supposed to be Patricia Susan, but my mother claims my father got drunk on the way to the registration office and forgot my name, which is how I ended up with Susan as a first name.)
Zoom feels like my name though. I like that.
Now for the second question: How and when did I find out I loved living with birds?
Well, it all started when my mother’s fiance, Skipper, gave me two budgies for my seventh birthday. I named them Little Joe and Honeybunch. Honeybunch died after a couple of days, and Skipper skipped out after a short while, but Little Joe became a full-fledged member of the family. I loved that friendly little bird.
I always wanted a talking parrot, but I had to put it off until I had the time, space and money. Parrots require a surprising amount of all three.
I do love living with them, but I have to say there are times when I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. They’re messy and destructive and they’re surprisingly delicate, emotionally. I worry about how they’ll react if I take a vacation. It could be very traumatic for them. And I worry about the logistics of moving if I ever have to do that.
Simon is undergoing a radical personality change. Apparently it’s developmentally normal for African Greys to go through the Terrible Twos, but it’s not easy. He used to be the easiest bird, but now whenever he’s free he’s looking for trouble. Between challenging Kazoo, biting, stealing my stuff, flying and swooping, and landing on my head, he doesn’t let me forget about him for a minute. Even though he’s demanding more independence, he wants my full attention all the time.
But he’s funny, too. He’s got a stainless steel bucket hanging inside his cage, where I keep his foot toys. He likes to take all his foot toys out of his bucket, and then stick his head in the bucket and experiment with sounds. Peekaboo sounds completely different if you say it with your head in a bucket. He proves this to himself over and over by saying it with his head out of the bucket and then with his head in the bucket. Then he’ll try it with hello, wow, and his repertoire of clucks and whistles. It’s hilarious.
The Ask Me Anything series will continue for the next little while. If you have a question, ask it in the comments or by email at zoomery at gmail dot com.
Posted by Zoom! on September 20, 2012, at 8:33 am |
I’m answering Leeann’s question out of sequence, because I need more time to think about Auntiemichal’s question.
Leeann asks: “You often post about writing, but I don’t recall ever seeing a post about reading? Are you an avid reader? If so, what types of books do you typically read? What do you look for in a book? Is it okay to ask multi-part questions?”
Okay, starting at the end, yes it’s okay to ask multi-part questions.
I wouldn’t describe myself as an avid reader, but I do like to always have a book on the go. I especially love having a book I can’t put down, but that doesn’t happen as often as it did when I was a kid. I remember lying in bed late at night, so sleepy the words were swimming on the page, and fighting to stay awake because I wanted to know what happened next.
I still do most of my reading in bed, in the half-hour or so before I fall asleep.
I’m currently reading “Half-Broke Horses,” which I just started last night.
If you ever want to see what I’m reading or what I’ve read over the past couple of years, just click on Zoom’s Bookshelf over there in the left-hand sidebar. It’ll take you to my Goodreads page, where I rate and review most of the books I read. My most recent review is of Deafening, by Frances Itani, which I finished a few days ago.
My Goodreads page will also answer some of your other questions, like “What kind of books do you typically read?”.
But it won’t answer “What do you look for in a book?”
I have a Billy bookcase in my bedroom where I keep my unread books. Most of these books I buy second-hand, at yard sales or thrift shops. I generally look for books people have recommended, or whose back cover blurb intrigues me. I have always liked Canadian women writers and short stories, but some of my favourite authors are American men, like Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I read everything I can find by Ivan Coyote, and I wish Heather O’Neill would write more books. I am drawn to award-winning books, because I love good, solid writing. I’d rather read a well-written mediocre story than a fascinating, badly written story.
The Ask Me Anything series will continue for the next little while. If you have a question, ask it in the comments or by email at zoomery at gmail dot com.
Posted by Zoom! on September 18, 2012, at 10:33 am |
Future Landfill asked “Did you go outside and look up at the moon when Neil Armstrong went for a walk there in ’69?”
I wish I could say that yes, I did go out and look at the moon, but the truth is I don’t remember actually doing that.
What I do remember about the moonwalk is humiliating myself in front of all my new classmates.
I was 10 years old. We’d recently moved to Kinburn, Ontario, which was a rural community about 30 miles west of Ottawa. They didn’t get a lot of newcomers in Kinburn, and everybody else had known each other forever. I moved there in the middle of Grade Five, and it was my fifth school.
Changing schools often meant that sometimes I covered the same material twice, and other times I missed something entirely. For example, when I moved from Quebec to Ontario after Grade Two, I missed cursive writing. We hadn’t started it yet in Quebec, but they’d already learned it in Ontario. I was mortified to be the only kid in Grade Three who still printed. I somehow got it into my head that writing was incredibly hard and I built up this big mental block about it. Same thing with placeholder zeros. I didn’t think the placeholder zeros made sense, so I refused to use them. The result? Lots of wrong answers and lots of “remedial” time with the teacher after class. I’m sure Mrs. Shields found it just as frustrating as me, since I clearly could use placeholder zeros but I wouldn’t because they didn’t make sense.
(Eventually I started using placeholder zeros, and I learned cursive writing.)
Skip ahead a couple of years, to Grade Five in Kinburn. Apparently the Americans were sending men to the moon! This was the first I’d heard of it, since we didn’t have science in Bayshore. In Kinburn, this was big news and they’d been studying it all year. But I started in the middle of the year so I’d missed the foundational pieces.
(This is all a big lead-in to try to mitigate the humiliation of what I’m about to tell you.)
My regular teacher, Mrs. Cavanaugh, hated kids and hated teaching. She was miserable and twitchy and she was a lousy teacher and she wasn’t very nice. I never once saw her smile. Nobody liked her, but I felt sorry for her.
For science and math, our class went to Mr. MacIntyre’s room. Everybody liked him, but he didn’t like me. (On my first day at that school, the other kids convinced me to say something to Mr. MacIntyre that turned out to be wildly inappropriate, but I didn’t know it was inappropriate until he became enraged and made it clear that he would never like me.)
But I digress. It’s because I’m procrastinating about telling you the really humiliating thing about the moon.
We were in Mr. MacIntyre’s class, talking about the rocket ship passing through the atmosphere. There was a little model of the solar system, which I found really confusing.
I’d always just assumed the earth was a hollow ball and we lived inside of it. And now here’s this model of the solar system and it seems to be suggesting that the sun and the moon aren’t inside the earth with us after all. So how could we even see the sun and the moon through the earth’s crust, and was the rocket ship just going to blast through the crust or what?
I actually put up my hand and asked these questions. All the other kids laughed at me, and Mr. MacIntyre looked at me like I was a special kind of stupid.
I was mortified.
And that, Future Landfill, is what I remember most about Neil Armstrong walking on the moon! Thank you for dredging up that painful childhood memory for me.  (But I’d love to hear what you remember thinking about as you looked at the moon that night.)
The Ask Me Anything series will continue for the next little while. If you have a question, ask it in the comments or by email at zoomery at gmail dot com.
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