I’d never been to Bulk Barn before, so I didn’t know it was a candy-lover’s paradise. I bought all my favourite candies and some pot barley. I chided myself later for buying $9.91 worth of candy, but then I reminded myself it wasn’t ALL candy, there was also the pot barley. So what if the pot barley only cost 17 cents? And there were fortune cookies too. I don’t what possessed me. Maybe it’s because it’s the Chinese New Year and this is the Year of the Pig. And speaking of pigs, check out the Pigs Ears. Yummy.

Some people were actually in Bulk Barn with small children. I was dumbfounded. Why would you take a small child into a place like that? God, what were they thinking? There was one little boy about three or four who was having a meltdown. His voice was shaking with desperation as he repeatedly demanded irresistible things and was repeatedly denied them.

“I WANT THAT!” he cried, pointing to a bin of sugar pops.

“No,” said his mother absent-mindedly as she contemplated the bin of salted peanuts.

“I WANT THAT!” he cried desperately, pointing to a bin of Smarties.

“No,” she said.

This went on for awhile, until the poor child was shaking from the frustration of being so close to something he craved, yet so far away from having it. He needed a fix and he needed it bad.

“PLEASE!” he shrieked, “PLEASE!”

The magic word. The word that unlocks the universe for small children. The word that makes adults soften and relent. Unfortunately, it only works until you’ve mastered it, and then it loses its power. This little boy hadn’t completely mastered it, I could tell by the inflection in his voice. It wasn’t a pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top, it was a please-or-I’ll-spit-in-your-face.

See the difference?

“PLEASE!!!!!!”

“Keep your voice down,” his mother admonished him, “You can’t have it. Candy’s bad for you.”

Jesus lady, why did you bring him into a candy department store then? If you weren’t going to let him have any candy, you should have left him tied up outside. Christ. I’m in my 40s and I’d freak out too if I was in here and couldn’t have the licorice cigars and chocolate covered espresso beans. I’m already trembling because I have to wait till I pay for them before I can cram them into my mouth.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying people should give kids everything they want. Believe me, I didn’t overindulge my kid. He looked pretty damned cute as a baby gnawing on a licorice twizzler, so I gave him the odd one of those. But he learned early on that he wouldn’t always get a treat when we went to the corner store. He knew that the candy-flanked check-out line at the grocery store was not a last-minute impulse-buying opportunity. He dealt with it. But did I take him to Candy Land and torture him? No, I did not. Teaching a kid a little self-control is one thing, but you don’t have to be sadistic about it.

Before I left, I shoved one of these into his gaping maw.

Just kidding. I stood back and watched from a safe distance as he went through a full-scale boil, eruption and meltdown. Then I paid for my loot and stepped outside for a licorice cigar.

This morning I woke up, showered, put on my latex glove, cleaned my dog’s tumour, rubbed gel into it, drugged him, fed him, and took him for a walk through the barren, frozen wasteland. Then I took him home, put him inside, said goodbye, locked the door and left for work. I turned to go down the front steps, and what did I see? My dog. On the sidewalk.

I don’t know how he did that, but he did it. I called him. He didn’t come. I whistled. He didn’t come. I took off my mitten and did the hand signal. He didn’t come. He just stood on the sidewalk, with his nose pointing towards the park, looking optimistic.

It was brutally cold, and the wind was whipping at me from all directions, trying to find chinks in my seven-layered armor. I tried going back inside so that he would be eager to come in, but it didn’t work. He just stayed there. I finally had to go get him and half drag him back to the house, which pissed him off. He snarled at me, and I snarled at him. I pushed his recalcitrant butt up the front steps and into the house. We were both pissed off.

Then I locked the door and turned to go down the front steps, and what did I see? The Number 14 bus sailing by. I cursed my dog. But then I heard a kid gasp “OH NO!” as he saw the bus disappearing around the corner two blocks ahead. Did he give up and fume and curse his dog? No. He took off at a run. He was going to catch that bus no matter what. The kid was flying, but I knew there was no way in hell he could catch up with the bus. I trudged through his tracks, rounded the corner: no bus, no kid. The kid did it. He caught the bus. Crazy kid. I should have run too. I might have caught the bus. (Not bloody likely, I told myself, because I was wearing seven layers of clothing and the kid was half-naked.)

But oh well, there I was, wrapped up like a mummy and shivering at the bus stop and trying to turn my back to a wind that was coming from all directions. It was minus 34 with the wind chill. Unless you’re an Emporer Penguin, that’s bone-chillingly cold. I thought about how I ended up living in Ottawa, how my ancestors had shaped my destiny so that I wound up living in the second-coldest capital city in the world. I traced it back one generation: If my mom hadn’t fallen in love with the ship’s skipper when I was seven, we wouldn’t have moved to Ottawa. We’d probably still be living in Montreal. I know it’s cold in Montreal too, but at least they have subways. Subways aren’t windy.

As I waited for the bus, I noticed that my shoulders were up around my ears. It’s an Ottawa thing. We have lousy posture because of the weather. We’re all hunched over, trying to make ourselves a smaller target for the wind, trying to protect our necks from the cold. Our chins are jammed into our chests and our noses are tucked into our scarves. We’re scrunched, hunched and rigid. Our climate has turned us into misshapen freaks. We have pasty complexions too, with dry skin and chapped lips. And we look twice as big as we really are because of all the clothes we have to wear. We have salt stains on our pants, fogged-up glasses and tears and snot running down our faces. Frankly, we look like hell at this time of year. Fortunately we can’t see each other because our twisted Canadian posture forces our gaze downward.

The bus finally came, and I climbed aboard on my icy foot-stumps. My frozen bus pass snapped in half when I opened it to show the driver. The ride was uneventful except that the bus was overcrowded and the driver kept ordering people to move to the back of the bus, and people got grumpy from the diminished personal space, and the bus got stuck behind a transport trailer that spent ten minutes trying to back into the Preston Hardware loading zone on Gladstone Street. I tried to look at the bright side, and I found two bright sides: 1) I wasn’t spending those ten minutes outside waiting for the late bus, and 2) my frozen stumps were getting some extra thawing time before I had to get off the bus to walk the last nine blocks to work. It wasn’t much, but it made me feel marginally better.

I spent the first half hour at work sitting on the radiator, rubbing my frozen stumps and drinking hot coffee. At lunchtime I decided to stay in the office and starve rather than go outside and freeze. I sustained myself with caramels from the communal candy dish. The day passed slowly.

At 4:00 I walked the nine gusty frigid blocks to the bus stop, and I was almost at Gladstone and Bank when I saw the Number 14 sail through the intersection. I almost resigned myself to having missed it, but then the image of the half-naked boy inspired me, and I ran like hell. I flew. And you know what? I caught up with the bus! I even got a seat!

So my day ended on a higher note than it started on. Tomorrow’s going to be even better, because I cheered myself up today by booking tomorrow off so I could spare myself the ordeal of commuting.

Stuart’s off to see the world again – Thailand, Australia, and then wherever else his serendipitous path takes him – so we had one final weekly barbecue last night.

For awhile it was just Stuart and the girls – Zita, Ruth, Mary Jane, Julie and me – but then TC showed up. For awhile. Before he dozed off, he had some wise words about the food chain, but I forget what they were. I knew I should have written them down.

Speaking of the food chain, I can’t believe I ate this:

This is Stuart administering last rites.

This is what the poor lobster looked like after it was boiled alive in a giant stockpot with a bunch of its buddies. Julie, by the way, somehow managed to accidentally sit on the giant steaming stockpot on the porch, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to catch that. (Hope your bum’s okay today Julie.)

We also had potatoes, barbecued beef, chicken satay, green and white asparagus and french bread. And wine. Lots of wine. (Which might explain why I arrived home with two scarves and no mittens last night, and why I’ve got a bit of a thumper today.)

Mary Jane is a Seed Analyst, and she brought something for show and tell.

These are 30-year-old wild oat seeds, and Mary Jane sowed her wild oats right there in front of us!

All in all it was a most excellent evening, despite the carnage.

Yesterday I walked from my office to my home, a journey of 8,177 steps according to the pedometer I borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library. The 75 minutes passed quickly because I was plugged into my iPod. (I found the iPod lying on the street months ago; I put up signs, but nobody ever claimed it, so now it’s mine. After replacing all the former owner’s hip-hop and rap with my own eclectic favourites, I was ready to go.)

It’s kind of weird how much music can affect your mood. First up: Vivaldi’s Spring, then Janis Joplin’s Summertime. Great evocative tunes, both of them, and good choices for a frosty winter day.

Then suddenly the iPod exploded into The Twist! Remember The Twist craze? Dancing the Twist was described like this: “It’s like putting out a cigarette with both feet, and wiping your bottom with a towel, to the beat of the music.”

One of my all-time favourite childhood memories is doing the Twist with my mom and my sister in the living room with Chubby Checker cranked up high on the hi-fi record player. I was six, Deb was seven, mom was 24. The record would end and we’d start it over again. We worked ourselves into a dancing FRENZY.

The Twist kicked my mood up a couple of notches, and then Sugar Sugar by the Archies came on, and that has GOT to be the catchiest little tune ever written.

Did you know that the Archies didn’t really exist? They were like Alvin and the Chipmunks, kind of a pop-culture comic-book band. Most of their records were distributed on the backs of cereal boxes. No kidding. You just cut the cardboard record from the back of the cereal box and played it on your record player. Not great for the needle, but oh my god, every 10 year old in the entire universe knew all the words to Sugar Sugar.

The lyrics are so dumb: “Sugar Sugar, you are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you. I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you, I just can’t believe it’s true…” but that song makes me so crazy happy. There’s something about it: whenever I hear it, my mood soars and I get an instant 1969 Sugar Sugar rush.

At this point in my walk – somewhere around the 2,800 step mark – I was so insanely happy it was all I could do not to burst into song and start dancing through Chinatown. (But then Buddy Guy came along with his rendition of “Done Got Old” and that brought me back down to normal again.) (Note to self: delete Buddy)

My family actually celebrates Groundhog Day. That’s because my mom used to be the Groundhog Lady of Ottawa. For about ten years, she adopted orphaned baby groundhogs from the Ottawa Wildlife Coalition and took care of them all summer until they were ready to be set free.

She fed them first with eye-droppers, then with baby bottles, and then they’d graduate to dandelion shoots and fruits and vegetables. They lived in a cage in the house until they were ready to move into the Groundhog Hilton, which was a huge groundhog hotel right beside the cottage, with hiding spots and tunnels and ladders and toys.

Even after they moved to the Groundhog Hilton, they were allowed into the cottage each day to play. They’d chase each other around and climb to the things they wanted, like the bananas in the hanging basket. They’d come when they were called. They all had names – I can’t remember them all, but there was a big fat one named Walter. She even had an albino groundhog.

You might not know this, but groundhogs are cuddly and they make noises. This is what they say: chugachoo.

Most groundhogs are orphaned in May or June, and there are usually three in a litter. When they were full-grown and healthy, usually in September, she’d drive around looking for somewhere good to release them: somewhere a groundhog would be happy, but not in the city, not in a farmer’s field, and not too close to a highway (groundhogs are notorious for not looking both ways).

After she released them, she’d visit them for a few days to see how they were doing. She’d call them, and they’d come running, squealing “chugachoo, chugachoo, chugachoo.” She’d talk to them and cuddle them and give them some dandelions, and then she’d be on her way.

I bet my mom has more photographs of groundhogs than she has of her grandchildren. But I don’t think there are any digital ones, since all this took place in the 80s and 90s. All these photos are of other people’s groundhogs.

My mom raised orphaned baby groundhogs every year until she fell in love with the Norwegian in Swaziland.