I can’t think of anything to write about today, so I’m inviting your suggestions, ideas and questions.
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Watch my life unravel...
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When I was a kid I used to think guerillas were gorillas. I wondered what the big deal was with gorilla warfare. Why were the gorillas fighting, and why did people care so much? Why was it on the radio every day? And who was arming and training all these gorillas anyway? There were other things I didn’t understand too. Like why, whenever there was a terrorist attack, various terrorist organizations would claim responsibility for it, as if it were something to be proud of. I was pretty sure that if I planted a bomb that killed dozens of people, I’d keep quiet about it, and if they caught me, I’d deny it. What was especially mystifying, from the perspective of a child, was the concept of admitting guilt even when you were innocent. Anyway. Here’s a shout-out from Laura Twiss to all the gorilla knitters out there. Anyone interested in participating or volunteering? Inspired by urban art and craft interventions around the world, this February 2010, Spins & Needles + the National Capital Commission (NCC) will transform the Ottawa-Gatineau winter landscape with a large-scale public urban art intervention that remixes warmth, cold, art, craft, music and the city. It will take place during the famous Winterlude festival, one of the largest winter festivals in the world, which attracts over 1 million Canadian and international visitors annually during its 3-week run. We’re calling on artists and the public, individuals and groups, of all ages and all creative levels to be part of this intervention. Submit a covering, or cozy, to be installed around trees, lampposts and other elements at two Winterlude sites: Confederation Park and Parc Jacques-Cartier. Cozies can be of varying sizes and made of textiles or other materials, as long as they can be wrapped around something. Contributions will be labelled with each participant’s name, uploaded online and geotagged. More details on where to submit your pieces to be announced shortly. The deadline for submissions is February 1st, 2010. Want to participate but not sure how to make a cozy? We’re also on the lookout for volunteers! These include: Cozy installers, to put up cozies around both sites For more information visit http://www.facebook.com/l/e8f6e;www.spinsandneedles.com/winterlude2010 or e-mailspinsandneedles@gmail.com.  Teapot and wine glass GC, The Dog and I hit the road on Saturday morning. First we swooped down on Chandler Swain’s house in the country for her Christmas pottery sale. Remember I said I don’t like tea? Well, I do like teapots. Especially Chandler’s teapots. I bought two more, along with a wine glass from her black and white collection. GC bought two mugs and a teapot. (Between us we now have six Chandler Swain teapots. We’re trying to stop.) We headed for Orangeville directly after Chandler’s, sticking as much as possible to the back roads and small highways. The GPS is good for that, although every now and then it tells us to do something goofy, like turn right off the highway, then turn right, then turn right, then turn right again. Just for fun, we do it, and if we’re lucky we see something interesting like a herd of goats or an ostrich. It took us a long time to get to Orangeville. Six or seven hours. We were going there to meet Chelsea. Chelsea’s the new baby: My niece’s daughter, my other niece’s niece, my sister’s grand-daughter, my great-niece. Chelsea, with the strawberry blond peach fuzz hair and blue eyes and long fingers and kiss-shaped lips.  Zoom and Chelsea She was born a couple of weeks early, and she’s about six weeks old now. She’s still pretty little – about eight and a half pounds, but just the right size bundle for me to cuddle. She’s very sweet. I loved holding her and kissing her and talking to her and marveling over her tiny wee fingernails. I loved listening to all her new baby noises, from the sweet little sighs to the bubbly little farts. And I loved seeing everybody else in their new roles as moms and aunts and grandmas and grandpas. She’s a very well-loved baby. I wish I lived closer so I could see her more often. GC and I were talking a few weeks ago about how to be part of a child’s life when you live so far away. She has so many relatives who will be part of her everyday life, and I’ll just be Auntie Zoom who lives a long way away. “You have to do something to distinguish yourself,” said GC. “You have to make an impression.” And that’s when I came up with the brilliant idea that every year on her birthday, I’m going to give Chelsea a new puppy! I won’t just be some hazy great aunt off in the distance, I’ll be the the crazy great aunt with all the puppies. How’s that for making an impression?  The sweater I knit for Chelsea Speaking of gifts, last week I finally got around to sewing the sleeves into the sweater I knit her. I don’t think it’ll fit her for awhile yet. Maybe next year. Speaking of knitting, I started a sock on the road. It’s a Lorna’s Laces slipped rib sock, made from Arequipa yarn, which was a gift from a friend at my old job. We also got to see Tucker while we were in Orangeville. Tucker’s my niece Kati’s cat. He’s hilarious. He’s kind of lewd, the way he sits around with his legs spread and a goofy look on his face. Sometimes he dangles a back leg over his head and chews on his toenails. He ambushed The Dog a few times. It was a whirlwind trip – we were only there for about 20 hours and then it was time to come back. GC and I are not committed drivers so it takes us forever to get anywhere. But we do have fun along the way. We sing songs and play the alphabet game and stop frequently so he doesn’t doze off. I bravely offer to share the driving every now and then, but he knows I’m scared of driving so he doesn’t take me up on it. We stop for coffee, ice cream cones, burgers, fresh air, sandwiches, and pee breaks. And The Dog is no spring chicken either, so he needs frequent stops too, to pee and eat cookies. He’s a very good traveler.  Captain Morbid's Hearse I took this picture when we stopped to check out Captain Morbid’s hearse which is really long but only seats two people. It’s still got the original sliders for the casket. The Captain’s wife and most of his kids aren’t crazy about the hearse, but he and his youngest daughter love it. Captain Morbid looks like a biker and he has two gold teeth and owns a tackle shop (Captain Morbid’s Tackle and Bait). He was lamenting this year’s late start to ice fishing season. I regret not taking his picture. Speaking of pictures, we saw Santa Claus driving a motorcycle through Peterborough, but I wasn’t fast enough with the camera. And we saw multiple examples of incredibly tacky eye-popping 3D wildlife art at Kaladar’s general store, but I didn’t think a 2D camera would do it justice. But here’s The Dog.  The Dog at the Potter's And here’s the anthropomorphized ladylike teapot.  An anthropomorphized Chandler teapot <hr>  Canadian Blog Awards: Vote Knitnut.net has been nominated in two categories for the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards: best Personal blog and best Blog Post. If you’d like to vote, click on the banner* above to visit the voting site. (It appears you can vote repeatedly if you’re so inclined, which oughta produce some weirdly skewed results.) *I took this banner from Robin’s blog, Watawa Life. His excellent photo blog is a strong contender in the Photo/Art category.  Wooden cut-out art for children in the back room of the CUBE Gallery GC and I went to my favourite art show of the year yesterday: Great Big Smalls, at the Cube Gallery. It’s amazing how much little wee art can be packed in there. We actually went during the day, hours before the vernissage, because I found out it was open and sales were already taking place. So I phoned to double-check, and the owner, Don, said yes, come on down. But when we got there he was a little frazzled. He hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, he needed to put prices up, his assistant was late, he was stressed out and alternately cranky and apologetic for his crankiness. He even explicitly said at one point that he wished we would all leave so he could do what needed doing.  Sharon Lafferty pieces that I covet Well nobody ever said GC and I couldn’t take a hint. Especially such a subtle one as “I wish you would leave.” So we left. Before we left though, Don was kind enough to put red hold stickers on the two pieces we were interested in. We had lunch, visited Patrick Gordon Framing, and went on a high quality olive oil buying mission on Preston Street. And when we came back a few hours later, Don had eaten breakfast and lunch and done what he needed to do and he was smiling and gracious and helpful - an entirely new man.  Reid McLachlin works I bought a charming wee piece called Sometimes That Cat Gives Me the Creeps by Janet Moore, and GC bought a Reid McLachlin piece, which is something he’s been wanting for ages. If you get a chance, go check out Great Big Smalls at the CUBE Gallery. There’s also a fantastic show in the back room called PLAY. It’s art for kids’ rooms. Some of it’s a little freaky, especially the Sharon Lafferty stuff, but it’s hilarious. I loved it. Speaking of art, it’s time to start creating art for Everybody’s Art Show at Irene’s Pub. This is another of my favourite art events of the year, and that’s because it’s so inclusive. According to Irene’s Pub, everybody is an artist, even you and me. We’re all invited to create and submit art for this annual charity fundraiser. GC and I submitted pieces last year and they actually sold. We’ll be doing it again this year. I’m not sure where the proceeds will be going this time - I heard something about the Food Bank as a possibility. The auction will be held at Irene’s Pub (885 Bank Street) on January 27th. Art donations will be accepted until the end of December. Pretty much any media is acceptable, but they ask that it be no larger than 11 x 14, ready to hang, and in the $50-$200 value range. The art you donate can be made by you or by someone else. If you have any questions, contact Pat Golding at art@irenespub.ca. Put ‘auction’ in the subject line. It’s time for the Canadian Blog Awards again! The first round of voting is now underway and continues until December 12th. Thanks very much to the kind reader who nominated Knitnut.net for Best Personal Blog, and to the nominators of three of my posts for Best Blog Post ! These are:
The voting system has changed somewhat since last year, in that you can now vote for more than one nominee in each category. You just rank them in the order you like them. Lots of my friends and favourite local blogs have been nominated too, including XUP for best overall blog, It Ain’t Meat, Babe for Best Craft, Cooking and Other Activities Blog, Watawa Life for Best Photo/Art blog, the Elgin Street Irregulars for Best Group Blog, a Sibilant Intake of Breath for Best Science/Technology blog, Gone to the Dogs for Best Personal Blog, Miss Vicky’s Offhand Remarks for Best Personal Blog, and Greater Ottawa for Best Blog Written by a Journalist. I know I’ve missed some, since I’ve only just scratched the surface of the nominees so far. I’ll dig deeper later. The complete list of categories and nominated blogs is here. Unfortunately, the organizers only provided links to the nominated blogs in a handful of categories, which makes it difficult to actually check out the nominees. For example, there are 99 blogs listed in Best Overall Blog, and I can’t imagine anyone having the time or patience to google each of them so they can visit them and decide which ones to vote for. One of the things I’ve always liked about the Canadian Blog Awards is that it provides us all with lists of new blogs to check out, and it sends lots of new traffic my way. I don’t think that’ll happen this year without the links. (But you never know, maybe they’ll get around to fixing that before the voting ends.) Anyway, if you have a little time and the inclination, please vote. Back when I used to watch the Young and the Restless (yes, I did, for years!), I participated on a Y&R discussion board that also had an off-topic board attached to it, where you could talk about stuff like politics and the Iraq war and religion and abortion and all kinds of fun controversial flame-war type topics. This came in handy when you got tired of arguing about who was the bigger slut, Sharon or Phyllis. If you’ve ever been part of a long-time online community, you know how they work. There are power struggles and politics and coups. This group was no different. Eventually the core users defected and I went with them because they were my online community. The virtual space we inhabited together was not a particular discussion board on a particular server – it was these particular personalities. It was these people. We’ve been together, in one incarnation or another, for about ten years now. Most of us have never met, since we’re geographically diverse. We just talk online every day about the mundane, the political, and the life-altering things in our lives. Online friendships and communities feel real to me. These are real people, and they’re real friends. And as an added bonus for an introvert, online communities allow me to meet most of my social needs from a comfortable distance. Even my relationships with friends and family members are primarily virtual these days. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for GC and Duncan, I’d never see anybody. Okay that’s not true. I did have a lunch engagement yesterday (I got stood up!) and I do get together with people in real life at least once or twice a week. Then there are my blogging friends, many of whom I have met, and like, and get together with occasionally. But our relationships, too, take place primarily on the virtual plane, with them reading my blog and me reading their blogs. A regular reader of this blog – the penultimate Quiet Reader – emailed me one day to say hello. And she said something that comes back to me often. “Don’t you find that the blogosphere is a little like driving at night – you look in windows and see all sorts of warm, loving ‘families’ sitting at the dining room table or playing cards or watching hockey or eating chips and salsa?” And it’s true, isn’t it? Little glimpses into each others lives, little fragments of life playing out in front of uncurtained windows. That’s what blogging is all about. I find the imagery charming, but it occurs to me that between blogging, discussion groups, facebook, twitter and email, the vast majority of my social interactions are virtual. Is it just me, or is that just how it is now for everybody? Do you think it’s okay? Or are we losing something because of it? I read with interest yesterday that in the interests of holding our tax increase to 3.9%,  the City of Ottawa is considering getting rid of Crime Prevention Ottawa. I’ve attended a couple of community meetings organized by Crime Prevention Ottawa, and frankly I wasn’t all that impressed. I’m in favour of crime prevention, but CPO’s approach to it is – in my opinion – conservative and uninspired. They have some interesting board members, but the organization itself is boring. Among other things, they called for increased policing and surveillance, and they supported the proposed SCAN legislation, which fortunately died last week on the third reading. Crime rates continue to fall in this city, as they do across Canada, yet CPO seems to nurture the fear that crime is rampant. In an aging population, the trend is for crime rates to go down while at the same time people’s fear of crime increases. This is because young males are the most crime-prone demographic in any society. In our aging population, there are proportionately fewer young males and hence less crime. Meanwhile, fear of crime is increasing because older people feel more vulnerable than they used to. (And maybe also because they’re sitting around watching more American propaganda crime fiction on TV, which is addling their brains and warping their sense of reality.) There are different approaches to crime prevention, such as target hardening, environmental design, increased policing and surveillance. Personally I like the social development approach, which consists of building a better community and addressing issues of alienation and poverty. It means creating plenty of legitimate opportunities for people – especially young people – to feel socially and economically connected to their community. To me that makes more sense than hiring more cops or enacting legislation that further erodes our civil rights. I went Christmas shopping yesterday and my first stop was The Tea Party, where I bought three different kinds of tea and a tea strainer. For me. And I don’t even like tea. It was an impulse buy and I was indulging a strange and recurring impulse: The impulse to want to like tea. There’s just something about tea, with its teapots and strainers and herbs and infusions, that makes me want to be part of it. I love the idea of tea, with its cornucopia of flavour choices and its quiet, understated rituals. Maybe I want to be more like my stereotype of a tea-drinker too: Someone a little more cultured and contemplative and cerebral and healthy. Don’t get me wrong – I like my stereotype of us coffee-drinkers too. We’re hardy and practical and we get things done. We like to wrap our cold hands around a steaming mug of joe as we plan our busy day. Our coffee breaks allow us a few precious moments to relax between tasks while refueling our energy supplies. Coffee culture is all about getting things done in the grand scheme of things, but taking a break right now. There’s tea people and coffee people and ideally I’d like to be a hybrid, just like I’m a hybrid dog and cat person (though I do lean more towards cats, it’s true). But when I put aside the culture and the stereotypes, the sad truth is that I don’t really like tea. I find it kind of bland and boring, like weakly flavoured hot water. Every few years I try again, but the outcome is always the same. Tea just isn’t as robust as coffee. It isn’t as satisfying. I am not, when it comes right down to it, a tea person. I am not a hybrid. So tea-drinking goes back on the list of things I wish I liked, along with reading in the bathtub, doing housework, running, driving cars, and eating breakfast in bed. Every once in awhile I give each of these things another try, and invariably I find that I still don’t like them. I used to have a toaster that I’d had forever and couldn’t even remember where it came from. It sat on the counter and made toast. It was just a plain, ordinary toaster. I didn’t give it much thought at the time; I took it for granted. I think about it a lot more now.  DeLonghi Toaster A few days later I realized the new toaster wasn’t very good at making toast. One side didn’t work at all, and the other side only made barely toasted toast. My friend Jane was in the process of furnishing her new apartment, and I’d been out shopping with her the week before. She had gone through much soul-searching because what she really wanted was this gorgeous, expensive red toaster, but she couldn’t justify the expense. She bought the $5.77 toaster at Zeller’s instead. I called her up and asked her how the new toaster was working out. She said it was fine. So I went to Zeller’s and bought myself one of those cheapo toasters. A couple of days later I realized it wasn’t very good at making toast. I had to keep sending the toast back down, three, four, five times, to get it adequately toasted. I was at Jane’s place not long afterward and saw she now had the stunning new red toaster. “Where’s your $5.77 Zeller’s toaster?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, “It wasn’t very good at making toast, so I went back and got the one I really wanted in the first place.” Hmph. Well there was no way I was buying an expensive red toaster, so I went to HomeSense and bought a Betty Crocker toaster for $12.99. It wasn’t very good at making toast either. I was a little mystified by all these toasters that weren’t very good at making toast. I mean, these are one-trick ponies, right? The only thing they do is make toast. Am I being unreasonable here? A couple of months ago I was on Cheryl’s blog reading about roasted vegetables, and she strongly recommended using a toaster oven. Hmm. I could solve my toaster problem (which by now had dragged on for several years) and make roast veggies without heating up the oven. The next time Loblaws had a tax-free day I went toaster oven shopping. I found a PC brand toaster oven that was usually $50, on sale for $35 and I got it for $25 because of a technicality. I was thrilled. Until I tried to make toast. It took forever to make toast and I had to set all these dials and manually turn the bread over when one side was done and watch it like a hawk so it wouldn’t burn. It was more trouble than making toast in a bent hanger over a campfire, and not nearly as much fun. Then someone at Irene’s Pub told me that toaster ovens are huge energy drains, worse than regular ovens even, which actually isn’t true but I half-believed her at the time because she sounded so sure, and because someone else agreed with her. She suggested I got to Paradis, the commercial kitchen wares store on Bank Street, and buy a commercial grade toaster. “You’ll probably have to pay a hundred bucks,” she said, “But it’ll be a good toaster.”  The Thousand-Dollar Toaster I left empty-handed. Last weekend I bought a $36 four-slice Black & Decker toaster at Loblaws. It has a bagel setting and a frozen setting. GC toasted frozen bagels and was pleased. I haven’t made any toast yet. I’m still savoring the possibility that I might have a toaster that can actually make toast. I don’t want to burst my bubble just yet. The other night GC and I were out for dinner at one of those buffet-style places, when I discovered a human hair woven through my peas and cheese. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry anymore. I signaled the waitress and told her about the hair. The waitress was suitably horrified and apologetic, and set about to remedy the situation as best she could. First she took my plate – with the offending hair – back to the kitchen, presumably to inspect it more closely and identify the source. Next, she located the suspect dish, and had it removed from the buffet table. Then she came back and apologized to me some more and said the cooks (who always wear hairnets) were distraught and horrified and wanted her to convey their deepest apologies. She told me that there would be no charge for the meal. A little while later the owner came to our table and explained that the hair was longer than either of the cooks’ hair, but sometimes, in a buffet, a customer can inadvertently leave a stray hair in a dish. He said he was very sorry and hoped we would keep coming to his restaurant. GC and I were equally gracious, assuring the owner and the waitress that we understood it was an isolated incident and we wouldn’t hold it against the restaurant. At the end of the evening, they said there was no charge at all – both our meals were on the house. We thanked them and left a generous tip on the table. While happy with the outcome, GC was surprised that I had alerted the waitress to the hair in the first place. He said there are basically two types of people in the world – those who complain and send food back, and those who don’t. And in all the time he’s known me, I’ve been in the second group. But of course there’s a third group: those who prefer not to complain, but who will, under extreme circumstances, do so. I told him I only complain if the transgression is sufficient to kill my appetite, as it was in this case. ACT 2 I remember years ago I was out for lunch with work colleagues at an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet on Wellington Street. While gathering food at the buffet table, I lifted a chrome lid and saw a big fat cockroach scuttle across the tablecloth. I lost my appetite, and wondered whether to alert my colleagues, who were all preparing to chow down, and whether to say something to the wait staff. I didn’t. But that night I wrote a letter to the restaurant. A real letter, with a stamp and everything. (This was in the early 90s. Pre-email.) The owner phoned me when he received it, apologized profusely, and begged me to come back, with a guest, for a lovely meal on the house. He said the whole street had cockroaches, and all the restaurants had been sprayed earlier in the week, but the unfortunate thing about spraying is that any cockroaches who survive are disorientated and disrupted, so you’re more likely to see them in the immediate aftermath. I thanked him, and said I would visit with a guest, but I never did. ACT 3 The only other time I complained in a restaurant was at Mexicali Rosa’s on Bank Street in the 1990s. Donna Smith and I were sharing a jug of sangria and a lot of laughs one lovely afternoon. I just happened to have a small bottle of plastic house flies in my pocket. They belonged to my son, whose favourite store at the time was Bill’s Joke Shop. What happened next was completely unplanned. There was only an inch or so of sangria left in the jug, so I tossed in a plastic fly and called the waiter over. “Waiter,” I said, “There’s a fly in our sangria!” He apologized and brought us a fresh jug of sangria, on the house. Donna and I laughed ourselves silly. The thing is, we knew the guy and we really weren’t trying to scam a free jug of sangria – we were just joking around. We had every intention of paying for both jugs before we left. I wish I could remember the waiter’s name. Bob, maybe. He ended up winning $100,000 in Lottario a while later, and moved to Mexico for a few years, because you could live like a king in Mexico with that kind of money. Anyway. I digress. Donna and I knocked back most of our second jug of sangria, and then I tossed another fly into the jug. “Waiter,” I said, “There’s a fly in our sangria!” Donna and I were just about peeing ourselves laughing, because something like that is hilarious after two jugs of sangria. But Bob was not amused. He was mad. MAD. Anyway, those are my three experiences of complaining in restaurants. How about you? Under what circumstances, if any, do you complain in restaurants? |
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