Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
|
Posted by Zoom! on October 18, 2007, at 6:42 pm |
Do you remember Life is Everywhere, which was right next to Big Bud’s on Bank Street, and which was one piece in a series of street art pieces being discovered by local bloggers?
Well, a few months ago I reported that Life is Everywhere was GONE.
Today I’m delighted to report that there’s a new piece of art now where Life is Everwhere used to be, and I think it might be a creation of the same artist.
 It’s called The Swap Box, and it has an absolutely magnetic kind of appeal for people like me who like random and serendipitous connections.
The concept is that you take something out of the Swap Box and you put something into the Swap Box for the next person.
I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can see the Swap Box and walk right by it without looking inside, and those who can’t. You all know which category I fall into!
 When I looked in the Swap Box, here’s what was in it:
- a receipt from the Dollar-It (which is the store that took over Big Bud’s) for a one-dollar purchase.
- an invitation to a Halloween party at the Fab Forest Ladies’ place
- an ad for Capital Taxi
- a plastic fork
- a mailing label with a 1 and a heart symbol drawn on it
- and a bit of broken sidewalk chalk (I think)
 I took the mailing label with the heart on it, for Peg. Peg is my most eclectic mannequin, and the one who hoardes all my found stuff. See, there she is with the heart sticker tucked into her ample bosom (ample by mannequins’ standards anyway).
After I selected the mailing label heart from the Swap Box, I rummaged around in my pockets for something nice to leave. I seriously considered leaving my lottery ticket in there, because what nicer thing to give someone than a bit of hope, but then I realized I would always wonder. I considered leaving $2 so the next person could buy their own lottery ticket, but I decided money would be a crass offering. I didn’t have much else to leave. I rummaged through my knapsack, which mostly just held library books, and I couldn’t give those away.
 Finally, in the secret pocket of my knapsack, I found something suitable. It was a zip-lock baggie containing two avocado pits and six toothpicks. I had put them in the secret pocket back in August I think, when I went to Montreal. I was going to give them to Merle so she could grow some avocado trees, but I forgot.
I hope whoever takes them from the swap box knows that you poke three toothpicks into each pit and suspend each in a glass of water, so that the bottom third or so is wet. Eventually, if you are patient and lucky, the pit will split and a root will grow. Then you plant the pit in a pot, and it will turn into an avocado tree.
I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to think that someone will take them, and that that someone will also read these instructions. But you never know.
I’m going to put something else in the Swap Box tomorrow.
Posted by Zoom! on October 17, 2007, at 10:28 pm |
There’s nothing wrong with admitting your weaknesses. I happen to suck at driving.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a valid driver’s license, and it wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter either. I earned mine the hard way. I failed that test enough times I ended up skulking around the Ottawa Valley looking for places to take it where they wouldn’t recognize me. Eventually I passed the test in Kingston when I was in my mid-thirties. I squeaked in just under the graduated licensing wire.
It’s not like I’ve had a lot of accidents. Just one. Unfortunately it was on a road test, and they say that’s one of the worst places to have a collision because it counts as an automatic failure.
“I know,” said the tester, “that you’d like to have your license so you could drive yourself and your baby around,” (I was 8 months pregnant at the time), “but I think it would be better for you and your baby if you waited awhile.”
And then he consoled me by telling me even if I hadn’t had the collision, he would have failed me because I cut off a motorcycle. (And I thought I’d audio-hallucinated the motorcycle, because I could hear it but I couldn’t see it anywhere.)
I think the reason I find driving so scary is because my mother got her license when I was about five or six. Every time she thought she was going to have an accident, she’d scream “FLOOR!!!!!”, and Debbie and I would dive onto the floor and squeeze our eyes shut and cover our ears and hold our breath and wait for the collision that would completely change our lives. Then, when the accident was averted, my mother would say “Ok, you can get up now,” and we’d start breathing again and climb back onto the back seat, white as ghosts and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Then we’d talk about what would happen if there were a collision.
“You two would be okay because you’re in the back seat on the floor,” my mother would say, “It’s the safest place in the whole car.”
“What about you Mommy?” we’d ask.
“Well,” she’d say sadly, “The driver’s seat is a very dangerous place, so I’d probably die.”
“But who would take care of us if you died?” we’d ask, because kids really only give a damn about themselves.
And she’d tell us that our grandfather, Opa, would take care of us.
And then we’d talk about where she would be buried and how often we’d visit her grave, and whether she’d be cold down there, and we’d say we wanted to be buried beside her when we died, and stuff like that.
I think it scarred me for life and gave me a lifelong fear of driving.
Or maybe it was those fortnightly treks from Montreal to Kingston, which included that treacherous stretch of highway known as “Death Strip.”
People literally plunged off the highway to their deaths all the time along Death Strip, and it was only a matter of time till we would too. I could barely breathe as our little red Renault hurtled through that winding, twisty passage. It was nothing short of miraculous that my mother managed to get us safely through it time after time.
My mom kept Debbie and me from fighting over the passenger seat by telling us it was the most dangerous spot in the entire car: more dangerous even than the driver’s seat. So dangerous, in fact, that it was known as the Suicide Seat. There really could be nothing more terrifying than being in the Suicide Seat on Death Strip. Neither one of us would sit up there.
After I grew up I had a car of my own for a couple of years when I lived in Wakefield. It was a little black Chevy. I got better at driving while I had it, although I never learned to like city driving. The world was too fast, and too many life-and-death decisions had to be made on the fly. The sign on the passenger side mirror caused me great consternation: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” Jesus. How much closer?? I wouldn’t change lanes unless there was nobody in that lane as far as the eye could see.
Driving just isn’t my thing.
My mom has been in Europe for the last couple of weeks, casing out the town which will be the setting for her next novel. Apparently all the men in this town are mentally defective. She left her car at my house, in case my little sister needed my help. The thing is, my sister’s living in a rural community with four children and no car. Unfortunately I’m too scared of driving to drive a car with children in it in case I kill them, so I haven’t been a whole lot of help to her.
The car goes back tomorrow: I’ve put a total of 4.7 km on it.
Posted by Zoom! on October 16, 2007, at 7:19 pm |
I missed National Grouch Day yesterday because I was all sweetness and light on my birthday. But I’m going to make up for it today by ranting about OC Transpo and babies. Yes, babies!
I know OC Transpo tries to be all things to all people and ends up being not enough to most of us. But jeez louise, the #14 has been overflowing with my pet peeves lately.
The #14 was late tonight as usual. When it finally arrived, it was crowded, just like it always is. There were 15 people waiting at my stop at Bank and Gladstone. We all tried to cram our way on, but the front part of the bus (the part with the sideways seats reserved for people with assorted difficulties) was jammed full of strollers and carts. It was difficult and treacherous trying to get through the stroller section to the jammed-packed, standing-room-only, vehicle-free rear section.
Why do they have the stroller section at the very front of the bus? It just creates a bottleneck and an obstacle course for everybody else, and I can’t believe the parents with the strollers like being in everybody’s way all the time.
When I had a little kid, we weren’t allowed to take strollers on the bus (except for folded umbrella strollers). Nowadays there are parents with outrageously huge super-deluxe strollers with trunks and trailers and canopies and built-in toyboxes getting on the bus. I’ve gone camping in smaller vehicles! Can’t there be some kind of limit on the size of stroller permitted on the bus?
So I navigate my way back there, and I’m standing up and feeling squished and I overhear some oversized seated woman going on about how sometimes she takes her eight-year-old brother shopping, and she uses a jumbo umbrella stroller for him. A bus driver in Hull told her to wake the child and make him walk and fold the stroller before getting on the bus. She was outraged. Outraged! Jesus. The child is EIGHT for crying out loud!
While I’m on the subject, let me just add that I saw two overgrown children in strollers this summer – one at the Lumiere Festival and one on my street – playing hand-held video games. Unless the child has a disability, he’s old enough to walk if he’s old enough to play video games. The parents are just too damned lazy to let the kid out of the stroller because then they’d have to actually parent him. It’s amazing that people that lazy actually manage to breed.
Okay, I’m done ranting about the babies and their buggies, but I’m not quite done with OC Transpo yet. About a week ago I got on the overcrowded #14 and there was a woman using the bus to MOVE. She had two cardboard boxes and six large plastic bags with her. It took her four trips to get off the bus at her stop. Part of me felt bad for her, because how awful must your life be if you have to use OC Transpo to move, but part of me just felt annoyed at her for choosing to move at rush hour.
And finally, I have a fashion tip for middle-aged men who wear maternity pants: Don’t tuck your shirt in!
Posted by Zoom! on October 15, 2007, at 10:50 am |
 Yup. Oscar and I share the same birthday.
Last night my son James and his girlfriend Tara had me over for a very nice dinner and an ice cream birthday cake and a few games of Wii. They gave me a guitar stand for my birthday. Interestingly, it was not their first choice.
It seems my son had been bidding on a certain highly coveted auction item which he intended to give me as a birthday gift. But in the 11th hour he got distracted by TV and forgot to return to the computer in time for the hot & heavy last-minute bidding action, which is how I ended up with this lovely guitar stand instead.
This is me, Wii bowling.
And this is Tara and me, Wii boxing. (She knocked me out in the third round.)
A couple months ago it occurred to me that I’m about to turn 49 and 49 is almost 50, therefore I’m almost 50, and wow. That’s a big number. Fifty’s, you know, kind of OLD. So I’ve been freaking out in a low-level sort of way for months, about 50 looming on the horizon and the inexorable momentum of time and how it’s easy to think you’ll grow old gracefully when you’re young, but it’s a whole different matter when you’re almost freakin’ fifty. And, you know, I got a new wrinkle last week and maybe I should start dying my hair or at least get highlights and I should probably start doing crossword puzzles and brain twisters because I’ve lost a lot of IQ points and attention span and vocabulary in the last year or so and it’s probably just going to keep on getting worse after 50 unless I take Immediate Steps and Drastic Action.
The good news is that I got myself so worked up over fifty, I actually felt relieved this morning when I woke up and realized I’m only 49 and 50’s still a whole year away. Woohoo. I’m still young!
I also cheered myself up by reminding myself that age, like most things, is relative: my friend Roy still thinks I’m young and he will still think I’m young when I’m 50 because he’ll be 87. I think I will spend this year cultivating a whole bunch of really old friends.
So now that we’re firmly entrenched in the internet age, have you noticed that you get more birthday gifts and greetings from people you don’t know than from people you do know? I got eight emails this morning from companies wanting to wish me a happy birthday and give me a present – everything from a Tarot card reading to 10% off anything I want. Yahoo Health sent me something called How to Slow Down Your Body’s Aging. I’ll share it with you, in case you’re aging too.
1. Change your perception of time. Don’t be in a hurry.
2. Get restful sleep.
3. Eat fresh, nutritious food.
4. Take at least two multivitamins with minerals every day.
5. Practice a mind body technique such as yoga or tai chi.
6. Exercise regularly.
7. Don’t put toxins in your life, including toxic food, toxic
emotions, toxic relationships, and avoid toxic environments or toxic relationships.
8. Have a flexible attitude to minor hassles.
9. Look at so-called problems as opportunities.
10. Nurture loving relationships.
11. Always have an attitude of curiosity, learning, and wonder and spend time with children.
 I’m pretty good at most of this stuff, but I refuse to look at problems as opportunities and I have a bit of a toxic relationship with yoga. I don’t intend to change these things either, because at my age you tend to get a little stuck in your ways.
Enjoy National Grouch Day! I can’t think of anyone I’d rather share my birthday with than Oscar!
Posted by Zoom! on October 14, 2007, at 11:55 am |
I took these pictures over at the Experimental Farm this morning. I LOVE Canada Geese.
One of these things is not like the others! (What is that bird anyway?)
And here are a couple I took last weekend up in the Gatineaus, of the carbide factory ruins.
What do we love about Autumn?
Canada Geese
Leaves turning colour
Hiking in the Gatineaus
Driving in the Gatineaus
Fall jackets
Crisp mornings
Pumpkins
Back to school
Thanksgiving weekend
Crackling leaves
Exuberant autumn colours: orange, red, yellow!
Apples
Running in the cooler air
Red wine
Country fairs
Whiffs of woodstoves
Flannel
Knitting
The word Equinox
Okay, your turn. What do you love about Autumn?
Posted by zoom! on October 12, 2007, at 3:04 pm |
Posted by Zoom! on October 11, 2007, at 7:51 pm |
Yesterday around rush hour I was getting ready to go out when I heard a commotion outside. Few things draw my attention more than a commotion outside.
This is what I heard:
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!!! OPEN THE GODDAMNED FUCKING DOOR!!!”
I looked out my goddamned fucking window and this is what I saw:
A woman hauling a violently vomiting child out of the back seat of a car. The child continued to puke all over the road while the mother went ballistic.
“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING JUST SITTING THERE AND PUKING ALL OVER THE FUCKING CAR?? WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR AND PUKE ON THE FUCKING ROAD?? WHY THE HELL ARE YOU FUCKING PUKING ANYWAY??”
ETCETERA!
Two boys emerged from the car. All three kids were about ten to thirteen years old.
The mother, fueled by rage, took control of the situation and cleaned things up, ranting and raging the whole time. She cleaned out the back of the car, and she found something in the trunk to wrap all the pukey things in.
She then proceeded to strip the child down to her underwear, right there on the side of the road!
The kid was mortified, of course, as any eleven year old girl would be at the prospect of being stripped on the side of a busy street in broad daylight. She begged her mother – in a panicky voice – not to do it (“Mom, please, people can see me, please mom please don’t”) but her mother was in full-scale high-efficiency bitch mode, and she snapped at her daughter to stand still and told her it was her own damned fault for puking all over herself like a baby.
The kid had a choice: submit to the most humiliating thing an 11-year-old can imagine, or rebel against her furious mother.
She submitted. She sobbed and looked around frantically to see who might be watching, and she tried to cover herself with her hands, but she submitted. It was awful.
I know it sucked for the mom too, having a kid puke in the car, but would it have killed her to let the kid stay in her pukey clothes till they got home?
Afterwards I kept wondering if I should have intervened somehow, and if so, how?
Would you consider this a case of child abuse?
Posted by Zoom! on October 11, 2007, at 7:23 am |
Knitnut.net is two years old today!
# of POSTS
Year 1: 205
Year 2: 235
# of COMMENTS
Year 1: 491
Year 2: 1136
As you can see, I got a little more prolific over the last year and you guys got a LOT more prolific. Good work – give yourselves a big pat on the back for me! A few of you might remember from last year’s Blogiversary post, my goal for the second year was for all of you to leave more comments. I didn’t have any goals for myself, just goals for you.
 I’m throwing in this week’s Statcounter snapshot of you, since I did it for last year’s blogiversary post, and I am a creature of habit and tradition.
Technorati ranks Knitnut.net as the 294,012th most popular blog in the sphere, up from 315,428th a year ago. (Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s out of 108 million blogs.) (Of which, 107 million have been abandoned.) (But still.) Technorati also gives Knitnut.net an authority ranking of 28, whatever that means.
According to Feedburner, Knitnut.net has 58 subscribers, up from zero a year ago! That includes email subscribers and all the different feed reader subcribers (including me, three times).
The most recent visitor to this blog was searching on the term “Richard Eveleigh,” which isn’t nearly as interesting as last blogiversary’s most recent search term (“21-inch penis”). Actually 32 of the last 120 visitors to the blog were searching for information about Richard Eveleigh, who is Ottawa Centre’s only independent candidate in yesterday’s provincial election.
This is the only post in the entire blogosphere that can be found by googling Richard Eveleigh’s 21-inch penis.
I want to thank all of you for visiting, for reading, for commenting, and for keeping on coming back. It wouldn’t be the same without you. (Actually, it wouldn’t be without you.)
What do you think my blogging goals should be for the next year? What would you like to see more of around here, and what makes you say “Oh Jesus, there she goes again!” ? Photos of dead people? Crack? Art? What?
And finally – just a friendly reminder – time’s running out!
Posted by Zoom! on October 9, 2007, at 9:11 pm |
 So yesterday I went to visit the baby Sam. I’ve been raving about this baby to anybody who will listen. How wonderful he is, how peaceful and radiant, how he never cries, how his eyes look deep into your soul, how he imparts calmness and serenity to all who are blessed enough to touch him, how he embodies everything that is good about the human race. (He’s a very nice baby.)
He was waking up when I got there, which was great because I really wanted to lock eyes with him and have him gaze into the very depths of my soul and perform a mind-melding peace infusion on me.
I reached out eagerly and Kerry handed him to me. He gazed into my eyes and burst into tears.
“Oh!” said Kerry, surprised, “He must be hungry.”
I handed him back to her, and he immediately became serene. She put him to her breast, where he suckled contentedly for several minutes. Then she passed him back to me.
He gazed into my eyes and burst into tears.
“Oh dear,” said Kerry, “he probably just needs to burp.”
I passed him back to her, and she burped him. He settled comfortably into his usual blissful state. She placed him gently into my waiting arms.
He gazed into my eyes and burst into tears.
“I don’t know what it could be!” said Kerry, almost apologetically, “He never cries!”
As you can imagine, this did not make me feel better. I passed him back to Kerry.
Then I noticed that one of his arms seemed a little floppy. You know how babies always move both arms together? If one arm goes up, they both go up. They don’t learn how to operate their arms independently till later. But Sam was flapping just one arm.
“Is his arm always like that?” I asked Kerry.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Kind of limp,” I said.
She laid him on the floor and started inspecting him. This was the first day he’d been wearing a sleeper instead of being swaddled, so his limbs were more noticeable.
It turns out Sam probably has a broken collarbone. The collarbone is the most frequently broken bone during childbirth, and Sam had a pretty rough birth. The collarbone breaks if it needs to, to facilitate the baby’s passage through the birth canal. It’s better than the alternative, which is the baby getting stuck in there forever.
Kerry called the doctor and the doctor said it’s not an emergency. There’s no treatment, and it’ll heal on its own. They’ll take a look at him on Friday.
Of course this doesn’t explain why he burst into tears every time he looked at me. I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation more palatable than The Baby Doesn’t Like Me. Do you think maybe the intensity of our mind meld caused him some kind of spiritual anguish?
Posted by Zoom! on October 8, 2007, at 9:41 am |
1. Those brilliant ESIs have put the most clever widget on their site!
2. Did you know that if your sink is clogged, you don’t need to go buy expensive toxic crap to unclog it? Just stuff the drain full of baking soda, then pour vinegar in. It foams and bubbles and instantly fixes your sink.
3. I had a dream that the provincial election worked like a leadership race, and Ottawa Centre was down to just two candidates: Trina Morisette (PC) and Danny Moran (The Family Guy). My candidate had been eliminated. Somehow I ended up with 90 votes to donate to Trina or Danny, and I gave them all to Danny.
4. Remember Rachael whose favourite cat Digit went missing for four months but then he made his way back home practically dead, but after much surgery he survived? Well, Rachael has written a romance novel, full of yarn and alpacas and sheep and hot knitter-on-shepherd action. She has entered it into a contest, and she really truly wants to win the prize, which is that someone from Simon and Schuster will read her manuscript. We can help Rachael win! Details are here.
5. Happy Thanksgiving!
|
|
It’s called The Swap Box, and it has an absolutely magnetic kind of appeal for people like me who like random and serendipitous connections. 
When I looked in the Swap Box, here’s what was in it: 
I took the mailing label with the heart on it, for Peg. Peg is my most eclectic mannequin, and the one who hoardes all my found stuff. See, there she is with the heart sticker tucked into her ample bosom (ample by mannequins’ standards anyway). 
Finally, in the secret pocket of my knapsack, I found something suitable. It was a zip-lock baggie containing two avocado pits and six toothpicks. I had put them in the secret pocket back in August I think, when I went to Montreal. I was going to give them to Merle so she could grow some avocado trees, but I forgot. 
Popular Posts