Yesterday morning Winter made her fashionably late debut in Ottawa. I slept in because I was awake much of the night, thinking about Paddy. The phone woke me at 7:22: it was Ken offering me a ride to work. I got ready fast, threw some of my leftover homemade pizza in a baggie for lunch, and took Sam out for a quick roll through the park.

Ken had a yogurt container full of his mom’s homemade Irish Stew, which he offered me in exchange for my leftover pizza. We traded.

When I was a kid, my mom made my lunch sandwiches with that wretched meat byproduct loaf with macaroni embedded it it. Nobody would ever trade anything for that, so I’d throw out the byproduct loaf and just eat the bread. Knowing Ken’s mom, I bet she gave him a picnic basket full of homemade goodies every day, leaving him with a very different problem than mine: he would have had many potential trading partners, but since he had the best lunch, he could never trade up.

At any rate, I was pleased with the exchange of pizza for Irish stew, since this was my first lunch trade ever.

Later in the morning I got an email from Homeless Dave X, thanking me for the pizza, but saying he didn’t think his system could handle pizza. Hmmm. So I guess Ken traded my pizza for something from Dave, but what could it be? Dave X pretty much lives on peanut butter sandwiches and lightly freckled bananas, and there’s no way he’d trade those for pizza. Maybe Ken just gave my pizza to Dave X. In that case, what did Ken have for lunch? And what did Dave X do with my pizza? Did he trade it to somebody else for something else? Did it work its way through the homeless population, getting traded for more and more interesting things along the way?

I hope a hungry homeless person ate it and liked it. The Irish Stew was delicious.

P.S. Oh, and here’s a treat for you. I tried to find a photo of the wretched byproduct loaf from my childhood, without actually going out and buying some and taking a picture of it. No luck. But I stumbled across something even more revolting than byproduct loaf, and felt compelled to share it with you. Sorry.

My former landlord, The Centretown Citizens Corporation of Ottawa (CCOC) might be the best landlord in Ottawa. They have a good supply of roomy, reasonably inexpensive apartments scattered around Centretown. They don’t make you pay the last month’s rent when you move in, they let you move out when you want, they are okay with pets, and they even offer you free flowers in the springtime for your balcony.

I’ve lived in three of their apartments – one on Arlington Street, and two on Rochester. CCOC leaves their apartments vacant for two weeks between tenants so they can make repairs, change locks, paint and clean. If you’ve ever moved into someone else’s filth, you know how icky it is.

I once moved into an apartment that was only half empty – the swine who lived there before me just took what they wanted and left their crappiest crap for me. The tub and toilet were disgusting, and there was rotting food in the fridge. It’s one thing to live in your own dirt, but trying to make a fresh start in someone else’s squalor is depressing. The slumlord did nothing to make the place halfway livable between tenants.

Speaking of slumlords, I had a Quann Agency apartment on McLeod Street with a front door fully 14 inches shorter than the door frame. No kidding. I used to come home and find the neighbourhood urchin eating my ice cream and watching my TV – he just squeezed under the front door. (Of course the landlord SAID he would replace the door or fill in the gap before I moved in, but once he had my money it was a whole different story.) The living room window had no glass. It was December before he replaced it – and I had to be a real bitch every day for a month to get that glass. (Sometimes I envy people who are naturally bitchy: I had to psych myself into bitch mode every day before making the call.)

I had a cheap little bachelor apartment on Lisgar Street that had dark brown water coming out of the hot water taps. Some days it was darker and thicker than others. I couldn’t see the bottom of the tub when I ran a bath. I had to brace myself to lower my naked body into that stuff. The landlord, an elderly man who could barely climb the stairs, would come over and look at it whenever I called him about it, then shake his head sadly, say something in Chinese, and shuffle away. He was nice, though, and ancient, so I wasn’t a bitch about it. Eventually I learned to share his sense of sad resignation about the dark brown water.

I passed up a few apartments that were even drearier. One had a suicide note stuck to the front door.

The only thing dreary about a CCOC apartment is the dark grey utility carpeting that covered every square inch of flooring in every CCOC apartment I’ve seen. It wasn’t pretty but it was practical…it hid a multitude of sins. Your dog could have explosive liquid diarrhea for a week and you’d never see it….that carpeting just ate it up.

Now that I have hardwood floors, I realize just how much dirt that carpeting hid. I love my hardwood floors. A person (especially a person with a dog) could spend an awful lot of time sweeping and swiffering hardwood. The novelty hasn’t worn off though. I’m still in awe of how often I can fill a dustpan. I swept the stairs just yesterday, and here is a photo of today’s yield. Sweeping’s much more satisfying than vacuuming, because I get to see the results of my labour in a pile. I’m not sucking invisible dirt out of a magic dirt-hiding carpet into the black hole of a dirt-eating machine. Plus it’s quiet and peaceful and the broom doesn’t scare the dog much. The only downsides: Sam likes to walk through the pile I’m creating, and I can never get that last thin line of dirt into the dustpan.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog unless you tell them. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a dog. My name is Sam.

I took Zoom for lots of walks while she was on holidays, but she’s back at work now and I’m at home with nothing to do but nap and blog.

C’mon, I’ll show you some of the interesting things I’ve seen while sniffing around my new neighbourhood.

This is my new dog park. It’s big. Even though there are no dogs, you can tell it’s a dog park from the sign. It looks like someone peed on the sign.

My old dog park had lots of snow in the wintertime, but this dog park has almost none. It’s too bad, because I love rolling in the snow.

I rolled in the grass instead. When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade.

My new dog park has a swimming pool and a skating rink too, but no water, ice, swimmers or skaters. This is the skating rink. There’s a sign that says dogs aren’t allowed on the ice. Maybe they think we’ll pee on it and melt all their ice. Maybe that’s what happened.

Speaking of peeing, I wanted to pee on those pink tires, but Zoom said no, they were art. Interesting.

I wanted to pee on this garbage can, but Zoom said no, it was an antique.

I wanted to pee on that white thing, but Zoom said no, it was art in progress. She doesn’t really get the whole peeing thing: I’ve never seen her pee on anything.

There’s a big farm nearby, called The Experimental Farm. It’s right in the middle of the city.

Zoom and I like to pretend we’re not in the city anymore when we’re at the Experimental Farm.

I was here:

Zoom let me pee on the giant pencils.

I saw a worm on the bike path. Zoom says it’s weird even being able to see the bike path in January, let alone a worm.

We didn’t see a lot of animals. Just these guys:

On the way home we saw a dog on his porch with a comfy blanket.

And here I am, back home again, waiting for Zoom to open the door so I can zonk out under the coffee table for a few hours and rest up for my evening crazies.

I came across this Seduction Style quiz on Boo’s site and, well, what can I say? Boo’s a tantric master and I’m a Bubble. Of course everybody knows such quizzes are meaningless. A bubble my ass.

By the way, I got mistaken for a hooker on Friday morning when I went down to Mechanicsville to help Stuart set up his blog. I was walking east on Wellington Street and someone traveling west in a big, beat-up, rattly pickup truck honked as he passed me. Then he pulled over and waited for me to cross the street, which I didn’t. I kept walking. He circled the block and came back and pulled over again beside me.

“You working today?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“You going home?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Wanna go for a coffee?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Wanna go for a ride?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

I’m such an interesting conversationalist.

You know what I almost did but didn’t have the guts to do? I almost pulled out my camera and took a picture of him. For the blog. For you. But I didn’t want to make the big, ugly, leering man mad. After he drove away I looked down at myself and wondered if perhaps it was my provocative style of dress that made him mistake me for a hooker: you know, blue jeans, oversized handknit sweater, hiking boots? Or maybe a woman walking by herself through Mechanicsville in broad daylight just screams ‘hooker’ to some people?

I realize now it was probably just my irresistible Bubble seduction style.

It’s 2007! I consider myself resilient by nature, but 2006 really tested my resilience. I was moving and going through a long and stressful layoff process and dealing with my dog’s dementia and insomnia all simultaneously for an extended period of time. Shortly after those things settled down I started househunting, so the moving thing started all over again. I lost a very good friend to crack cocaine, and I discovered there was nothing I could do about it except walk away in the end. There were a couple of sad deaths in 2006: Frank, and my son’s granny. Another lowlight of the year was killing my birds. That still feels surreal.

On the plus side, I got to keep my job, I emerged from my hermit stage, I met some new friends and I bought my first house.

Time’s such a freaky thing. It slips by in such a distorted way, you barely notice the days or weeks or months or years passing. All of a sudden one day you look in the mirror and you don’t quite recognize yourself. You realize ten years have crept by. You go to write a cheque and hesitate before writing the year – not because you don’t know what year it is, but because you don’t remember what decade it is. I feel like I could still reach back and almost touch 1997.

I’m celebrating the new year by decluttering. All those boxes of memories I’ve dragged around from place to place, things I get a glimpse of only when I move: it’s time to sort through them and discard what I can. But it’s hard to let go of things once they’ve survived this long. It’s like they’ve earned the right to exist by virtue of the fact they’ve survived this long. Did I drag them around all these years just to eventually throw them away?

Here, for example, is an Ottawa Citizen newspaper dated October 3rd, 1978. The big front-page story? Surly Suds Squabble. Men were pissed off that women would be allowed to drink in taverns.

“There’s going to be trouble and more people might get hurt,” warned Ian McVitty, manager of the Ritz Hotel, “The customers aren’t taking kindly to women wanting to drink here – things may get out of control next time.”

“We can’t go into their washrooms, so why should they be allowed in our taverns?” moaned 20-year-old George Meranger, “None of them act their age and you can’t talk about anything without being called a creep or an animal.”

What a creep.

The classifieds are interesting. A 5-bedroom brick townhome in West Centretown cost $42,500. In the Glebe, a large executive home, suitable for an embassy: $170,000. A luxury heritage home overlooking the Canal: $130,000. A 3-bedroom house in Hull: $19,000.

What else was new? Well, peace talks were about to start in the middle east. City Hall was reconsidering building the Rideau Bus Mall because merchants said it would do nothing to turn around the economic decline of Rideau Street. The Rideau Centre was in the planning stages. Rene Levesque was in the US trying to make friends with American business. Forty pothead whales beached themselves in Musgrave Harbor, Newfoundland. And here’s an interesting headline: “French feelings ‘natural’.” I bet that was reassuring for the French.

So what do you think? Should I throw the newspaper out?