I went to the Ribfest on Sparks Street again this year, but as usual I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything. I like ribs. But for some reason I find them kind of disturbing at Ribfest. There’s just…so MANY of them. Everybody’s standing around eating ribs out of styrofoam containers, and I don’t want to eat ribs standing up. Ribs are sticky and messy and I’m not coordinated enough to eat them standing up. The only thing I want to eat standing up is an ice cream cone or an apple. For ribs I want a table and chair and a stack of wet facecloths.

Instead of eating ribs, I just watched other people eating ribs. There were a lot of people who thought ribs were worth lining up for. There were long lineups at pretty much all the rib vendors. (Of course, if I WAS going to eat ribs, I’d pick one with a long lineup too. I’d figure all those other people must know what they’re doing.)

All the rib vendors proudly display their trophies, most of which have pigs on them. It’s hard to believe there are so many rib competitions. Personally I suspect the vendors just buy their own trophies.

Here’s one of the Rib Chefs. She loves southern boys.

Some people got benches, which was nice. I like how she took her shoes off and made a makeshift table out of her legs. It wouldn’t be sufficient for me, given my particular rib-eating requirements, but it’s a lot better than eating ribs standing up.

More trophies. I’m not kidding you, there were hundreds and hundreds of trophies there. Ribfest is all about the trophies. The ribs are just a means to an end.

This kid was calling in a sell order to his broker. Seriously, how come he’s not in school, and who do little kids call on their cell phones anyway?

So anyway, that was Ribfest 07 for me.

Fast forward to today:

Man it’s stinkin’ hot. It’s 89 degrees downstairs and even hotter up here. This is one of the ten days a year when I wish I had air conditioning. On the bright side, at least I don’t work in a chip wagon. I wouldn’t want to be a roofer either, working with vats of boiling tar.

Speaking of roofers, I’ve gotten three quotes for my new roof. I think I’ll go with Sanderson Roofing, unless someone knows a good reason why I shouldn’t.

My friend Janet has a number of food sensitivities and allergies. She has pretty much avoided meat for years. But recently we met for a drink on a patio, chosen for its proximity to Saslov’s butcher shop.

“I’m going to start eating meat again,” she announced, “because the list of foods I can no longer eat keeps growing and I need to eat something.”

This winter alone she added eggs, gluten and sesame seeds to the Forbidden Foods list. Now that she can’t eat eggs, she’s not getting much iron.

A couple of days earlier she had been out shopping with a friend and she was suddenly famished and had to eat something immediately or she’d swoon and perish on the spot. This happened right outside a fast-food restaurant (Death’s Doorstep, so to speak) so she rushed inside and wolfed down an emergency burger.

The next day she felt good, and credited the burger.

So now here she was, sipping on a Killer Koolaid on Daniel O’Connell’s patio and contemplating the re-introduction of meat to her diet. Afterwards we went for a walk, visited the CUBE gallery, and then headed into Saslov’s.

Janet had a lot of questions for the butcher – questions about organic meat and bindings and packaging and the advisability of taking her meat home on her bicycle on such a hot day. The butcher answered all her questions and got her a bag of ice for transporting her meat.

Meanwhile, I picked out a mango-lime-cilantro marinade, which, as it turned out, wasn’t as good as it sounds.

I caught up with her in the checkout line: she had painstakingly selected some organic ground beef and organic lamb. She was going to make burgers and a lamb stew. I suggested she start with just one and see how it went. She could always pick up more meat another day. She agreed, and put the lamb back in the cooler.

Then she paid for her ground beef and sped off home on her bike with her ground beef carefully tucked into her knapsack on its bed of ice.

A few days later I emailed her and asked her how the meat worked out.

“Oh,” she said, “It’s still in the refrigerator. I’m going to cook it later this week.”

Hmm. I emailed her back and said I felt it my duty as a friend and a more experienced carnivore to advise her of the perils of eating hamburger that has been sitting in the fridge for a week.

“But,” she protested, “they told me at Saslov’s that it’ll keep for three weeks in the refrigerator!”

“Maybe they meant the freezer,” I said, “Because I’ve never heard of hamburger like that.”

“I can’t put it in the freezer,” she said, “because once things go into my freezer, they never come out.”

I was glad I’d talked her out of buying the lamb.

She phoned Saslov’s and they said it would probably be better to freeze the ground beef if she wasn’t going to eat it soon. So she did.

A few days later I asked her if she’d eaten it yet.

“No,” she said, “I told you, once it goes into the freezer, it never comes out. I might as well have donated it to the Smithsonian.”

In the meantime, she’d eaten half a burger and some cake at a party, and felt like death the next day. Of course there was probably egg binding in the burger, and gluten in the bun and the cake, so maybe they were to blame. Or maybe it was the meat. There was no way of knowing. She didn’t seem quite as enamored with meat as she had the day we’d gone to the butcher shop.

I saw these awful vintage meat ads today. I wonder if they could revitalize Janet’s fading aspirations of becoming a carnivore? They don’t exactly inspire me to fire up the old barbecue.

I don’t know how anybody in this city manages to grow anything from seed with all the vermin squirrels running around. Most of the time they don’t even eat the seedlings, they just dig them up to see if I buried a peanut down there.

They usually attack within minutes of me planting the seedlings, but sometimes they wait a few days so I can build up some false hope. And then I hate them even more.

I’m seriously considering putting a bushel of peanuts out in my back yard, covered with chicken wire to keep them busy for awhile so my next batch of morning glory seedlings will have a fighting chance.

Anyway. I hate them all except for this one. She lives near the Civic Hospital. I spotted her on my way to work the other day. She was pretty brave until I pulled the camera out, and then she got all coy on me and started spiraling around the tree trunk so I couldn’t get a decent shot.

Every other black squirrel I’ve ever seen had a black tail. I wonder how she ended up with such a lovely golden tail?

I’m so pleased I finally got a picture of this woman. I only regret that it happened in the summertime when she appears to be normal, which she’s not. She’s a lot hotter than she looks.

She dresses in this exact same outfit every day of the year.

It can be forty below zero with soul-shrivelling winds, and while the rest of us are wrapped in layers of down and still freezing our asses off, this woman will be strolling down Bank Street, pulling her cart, dressed in just her little blue sunsuit, with not a goosebump on her. No coat, no mitts, no hat, no boots. Just her little blue sunsuit. She is impervious to the cold.

In other news, there was a fire at the Middle East Bakery at Somerset and Percy Street! According to the sign, they will be “temperaly closed.”

I love this place. It makes the sidewalk smell good. Plus it’s fun to look in the window at the pita oven spitting out the fresh loaves onto the conveyer belt. They come out in big bubble shapes, and flatten as they cool.

Actually I haven’t stopped and looked in the window for awhile now, ever since the time the baker came outside and asked me on a date and I lied and said I was married. And I knew he knew I was lying, because I always look like I’m lying when I lie.

This is the pita oven, after the fire. It doesn’t look too badly damaged. Actually it looks pretty much the same as I remember it looking before the fire.

I hope the fire doesn’t affect the availability of pita bread in Ottawa, because I eat two pieces every day at lunchtime.

Speaking of the availability of pita bread, here’s a puzzling thing. You see that store called Shiraz, to the left of the pita bread bakery? See the blue rack in front of their front door? That’s their pita bread, which is delivered every morning from a bakery in Montreal. They have a pita bread factory right next door, yet for as long as I can remember they’ve been ordering their pita bread from Montreal.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation. Just like there’s a perfectly good explanation for how that woman can walk around in next to nothing in the dead of winter and not feel cold.