I think it’s high time we had a contest around here!
Simon (the African Grey parrot) has spent several hours a day over the past few weeks practicing a song. I’ve recorded one of his practice sessions (see the black video below). The first person to correctly guess the song will win the prize. It might not be easy, since Simon hasn’t quite mastered the song yet. Even though it’s a work in progress, I think there’s enough here that somebody should be able to figure it out.
(There’s literally nothing to see in this video because Simon is camera-shy, so the camera was face-down on the couch throughout the making of this video. Make sure you have your speakers on, or you’ll have nothing to see or hear.)
GC and I went to the Nordik Spa up in Chelsea. It’s about a 20-minute drive from downtown Ottawa. Neither of us had ever been there before, or to any spa for that matter.
We went for The Baths, which are a set of indoor saunas and outdoor pools of varying temperatures. The recommended technique is you do a hot treatment, like a sauna, for about 15 minutes, followed by a cold treatment, like a plunge in an icy outdoor pool for 10 seconds, followed by 15 minutes in a relaxation area. The relaxation areas include comfy chairs by a water fountain, little pavilions with reclining chairs around a fireplace, heated stone beds and hammocks. Rinse and repeat as often as you like – hot, cold, relaxation. We stayed about four hours.
It was mostly couples and small groups of women. We were told upon arriving at 2:30 on Friday afternoon that we might have to wait up to an hour and a half to get in. We almost left, but we decided to stay. We sat on a couch and made lists until our turn came (sooner than expected – we only had to wait 45 minutes).
My favourite thing was the outdoor hot pools. There were three of them, I think. One even had a hot waterfall. My least favourite thing was the ice-cold waterfall. Most people avoided it, but I double-dared GC to do it, so I had to do it too. GC liked everything. There was lots of variety, so we didn’t get bored of the routine – there were wet and dry saunas, aromatherapy saunas, saunas in barrels, hot pools, cool pools, still water and running water. The relaxations areas were lovely and warm which was especially welcome after the cold treatments. We grew progressively more relaxed as the day went on.
We didn’t do any of the body treatments or the underground salt pools because they were extra busy and they cost extra money. Speaking of cost: it’s $54 per person on a Friday or weekend, or $48 during the week, and $30 extra if you want to use the underground salt-water floating pool.
We figure it must have cost many millions to build the place, but judging from yesterday’s crowds, it’s probably a very lucrative enterprise. In addition to The Baths and the body treatments, they also have a boutique and two restaurants, and they rent white terrycloth bathrobes for $11. (Or you can bring your own, which we did. It was funny seeing people walking around in their frumpy old housecoats from home.)
Anyway, it was lovely and we’ll do it again. Yesterday was a gorgeous spring day, maybe about 4 degrees Celsius, with lots of snow still on the ground. (These photos are from their website, not from our visit, by the way.) We’re curious to know what it would be like in the summer, when it’s hot outside. Somehow I think it would be better in cold weather than in warm. Have any of you been there in the summer?
I have what I know will be a very unpopular opinion about a highly volatile subject. I should probably keep it to myself, but I feel compelled to share it.
It’s about Tom Flanagan’s remarks about child pornography. The remarks for which he was roundly lambasted, fired as a CBC commentator, denounced by the Prime Minister’s Office, and cut loose by Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party. Based on the response I’ve seen so far, it seems the left, the right, the center and the apolitical have finally found something they can all agree on. The subject can’t even be described as controversial, since everybody seems to agree.
Except me. I see some merit in what he said. I don’t think he said it particularly well, and if he’d thought about it I’m sure he would have said it better (or, more likely, not at all), but I think I know what he was getting at even if he didn’t articulate it very well.
Here’s what he said.
“A lot of people on my side of the spectrum, the conservative side of the spectrum, have been on kind of a jihad against pornography and child pornography in particular. I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures,†said Flanagan. “It’s a real issue of personal liberty and to what extent we put people in jail for doing something in which they do not harm another person.â€
Now, to be clear, I emphatically disagree with him that consuming child pornography doesn’t harm another person. Real children are harmed in the making of the vast majority of child pornography. Further, to call child pornography “taste in pictures” is to trivialize the very real harm done to those very real children.
I don’t think any of us have a whole lot of control over who or what we’re sexually attracted to, but we do have control over what we do about it. It’s not the sexual attraction to children per se that is illegal. I absolutely believe incarceration is called for if someone lays a hand on a child sexually. If, on the other hand, someone is unfortunate enough to be sexually attracted to children, but refrains from acting on it, I say good for him. I respect him for that. And if he creates sexual outlets for himself using his own imagination and art supplies, I’m not convinced that should be illegal.
I believe there are a lot of people who would be quite willing to criminalize fantasies were it possible to do so. They would be quite willing to incarcerate people who are attracted to children, even if they never act on it.
I think that’s what Tom Flanagan meant – that people shouldn’t be jailed for who they’re attracted to or for what they think or feel, only for what they do.
Here’s his apology:
“I absolutely condemn the sexual abuse of children, including the use of children to produce pornography.These are crimes and should be punished under the law. Last night, in an academic setting, I raised a theoretical question about how far criminalization should extend toward the consumption of pornography. My words were badly chosen, and in the resulting uproar I was not able to express my abhorrence of child pornography and the sexual abuse of children. I apologize unreservedly to all who were offended by my statement, and most especially to victims of sexual abuse and their families.”
Posted by zoom! on February 27, 2013, at 7:54 am |
This is what my day looks like so far:
9:00-12:00 – all-staff meeting at work to do a SWOT analysis of the organization (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
2:00-3:30 – Conference Call
3:30 – meeting with funder
5:30-6:30 – House of Commons to watch Bill C-279 being debated. That’s the private member’s bill to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code with respect to gender identity and gender expression. (Or, as some notable Conservatives so crassly refer to it, the Bathroom Bill. They claim it will permit perverts to use the ladies’ room, where they will ambush women, when in fact it’s about the rights of transgender people to be who they are without being legally discriminated against.)
7:00-9:00 – creative writing class
In between those scheduled things, I have other things I must do, and I also need to get to the places I need to be, which means walking and busing through the snowstorm.
Some people thrive on this kind of schedule, but I’m not one of them. I’m going to be ready for a weekend by 9:00 tonight.
Anyway, I leave you with this little gem from Mudmama: Fum and Gebra.
Posted by zoom! on February 21, 2013, at 8:20 am |
GC got a sliver in his foot from the hardwood floor. He said it felt like a long, skinny sliver. There wasn’t much to see, but he was limping and wincing. Later, when we were getting ready for bed, we saw that his foot was swollen.
I insisted we go to the hospital because he’s diabetic and you should never ignore a foot problem if you’re diabetic. (My friend Jeremy was diabetic and he ignored a foot problem and the next thing we knew, they had to cut off his foot. And then, to make matters worse, he died.)
Anyway. We arrived at the Civic Hospital Emergency Room at 9:45 p.m. There weren’t many people there, so we were optimistic it wouldn’t take long. Little did we know that this was just the outer waiting room.
While we waited, a young woman who didn’t appear to be a patient circulated among the patients, asking for change. A man emerged from somewhere within the hospital, looking for a cigarette. He wore work boots, a bomber jacket, and a hospital gown which was wide open at the back. Nothing else. We all looked at his ghastly white bum as he wandered among us. He stopped to watch TV right in front of a pretty young woman who was talking on the phone. She turned sideways in her chair and shielded her eyes with her hand so his buttocks wouldn’t be quite so directly in her face.
Shortly after that, GC’s name was called, along with four other names, and we were admitted to the inner waiting room, which was both smaller and fuller than the outer waiting room. Half an hour later we were escorted to the Procedure Room, which was an examining room with a stretcher for GC and an uncomfortable chair for me. This turned out to be the real waiting room.
The thing about emergency rooms is after awhile you start wondering if you really need to be there, if your medical problem is worthy of all these hours and all the germs you’re exposing yourself to. After all, nobody is treating your emergency like it’s an emergency. But usually by the time you start questioning it, you’ve already invested a great deal of time, so you stay.
We read to each other and played games on our iPads and took pictures of everything in the room. At 3:30 in the morning I wandered out to see what was happening. There were all kinds of little rooms with mostly miserable-looking people in them. GC and I were having the most fun of anybody there.
I found the admin desk and asked how much longer it would be. The nurse smiled brightly and said there was only one person ahead of GC. And, she added, there were doctors on duty now, which suggested there hadn’t been doctors on duty earlier.
At 3:30 a.m. a very nice resident arrived. He poked around and tried to find the sliver, and then got his supervisor. The doctor prepared the freezing.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “This is going to hurt a lot. But whatever you do, try not to kick, because I might end up sticking myself with the needle.”
He wasn’t lying, it did hurt a lot. GC’s back arched in pain, and he gritted his teeth and grimaced, but he didn’t kick. The doctor dug around in his foot with a knife and tweezers and there was quite a bit of blood, and then he announced that he couldn’t find anything. He said maybe it slid in and right back out. They bandaged the foot and told us to go home and watch for signs of infection.
By this time it was 4:30 in the morning. Almost seven hours of waiting and all we got was a big hole in GC’s foot and a night out. We know how to have fun!
Posted by zoom! on February 15, 2013, at 7:59 am |
We’ve spent most evenings in the last week on the couch, hand-sewing the binding onto a quilt while watching Season One of Downton Abbey. This has been a lovely way to pass the time, though it hasn’t really lent itself to blogging.
But last night, between the cedar-planked salmon and the chocolate-raspberry parfait, GC got down on bended knee and asked me to marry him! We haven’t sorted out when or where or how – all we know for sure is we’re going to live happily ever after.
The neighbours finally moved their mountain of garbage to the curb, and then the garbage truck came and took it all away, which is fabulous. But now we think they’ve flown the coop because everything appears to be gone – the garbage, the car that wouldn’t start, the people themselves – and they’ve left their bathroom window wide open. I know it’s not really my problem, but it’s super cold out there and the pipes could freeze and burst, so I sent their landlord an email.
In other news from the neighbourhood, one of my neighbours died in a house fire a couple of nights ago. She was 81. I didn’t know her. It seems kind of sad that a person could make it to 81 only to perish in a house fire, though I suppose it’s no better or worse than dying of complications from a fall. The house that burned down was right next door to the pink house, which is the house with the immaculate garbage.
Speaking of sad ways to go, I stumbled across a newspaper article the other day about a skeleton found in an apartment. The landlord decided to clean the place up and rent it to someone else, and found the skeleton, who was wearing nothing but socks. The landlord said he was a model tenant. It just seemed so bizarre to me on so many levels, not the least of which was what kind of landlord allows you to not pay your rent for years before knocking on your door?
(That skeleton, incidentally, is going to figure prominently in my next short story.)
GC and I were lying in bed when I told him about the skeleton.
“How long does it take for a dead body to turn into a skeleton?” he asked.
“Well,” I began, and then proceeded to give him a detailed breakdown of how a body breaks down. Different cells break down at different rates. Brain cells are the first to go, and the pancreas is pretty fast too because of the enzymes. The uterus is the last to go. I talked about bacteria and gases and how coroners can estimate the time of death by the kinds of insects present in the body. I explained how the environment in which the body is decomposing affects the speed of decomposition. Water slows it down, as does being buried – the deeper you’re buried, the slower you’ll decompose. If you want to hasten the process, put the body somewhere outdoors, exposed, near the equator.
“A body in an apartment in England would take approximately two years to become a skeleton,” I said, wrapping up my five-minute answer.
Remember Aggie? Aggie was one of my favourite bloggers. At one time she had multiple blogs. I have not given up hope that Aggie will blog again. Just like I have not given up hope that the Elgin Street Irregulars will someday have another Emergency Meeting.
After all, look at Boo. Boo was one of the very first bloggers I ever read. She took a four-year break from blogging and recently came back. Welcome back, Boo!
In other news, our dog Rosie has learned Pig Latin. She perks up and starts drooling if we say ookie-cay.
Oboe used to have a girlfriend. Her name was Oboe’s Girlfriend. We got her in a bundle of used bird toys from someone on Kijiji. She didn’t look all that special to me, but Oboe fell head-over-heels in love with her. She was lovely and soft and she had a sweet little bell-like voice, and a rubber head with holes in it.
This might sound a little unappealing to some, but Oboe would regurgitate his breakfast into the holes in her head, and then mount her and make her bell ring.
In the language of birds, regurgitating your food for the object of your desire is a pledge of love and commitment. It says I love you and I will take care of you and provide for you, and when we have babies I will provide for them too. It makes sense when you really think about it. In an economy without possessions, sharing your food means a lot.
Oboe and Girlfriend in the hospital, 2012
When Oboe was sick in the hospital last January, I took Oboe’s Girlfriend to the hospital to comfort him. She lay on the floor of his hospital cage and he huddled up against her and just sat like that for days. Even after he got home, he spent all his time with her until he was better. I knew he was going to be okay when he started regurgitating for her and mounting her and making her bell ring again.
Oboe loved that girlfriend every single day until she literally fell apart. I found her on the floor of his house one day, just a pile of soft fluffy strings, a bell, and a rubber ball.
Oboe was devastated.
Actually, I probably just imagined that under similar circumstances, I would have been devastated, and then projected it onto him. Either way, Oboe’s Girlfriend had died, and I made it my mission to find him a new girlfriend. I searched every pet store in Ottawa, and every online bird toy store in North America, but could not find one.
Finally I contacted Crystal of Crystal’s Bird Toys here in Ottawa. She understands how birds think and feel, so she constructs really good bird toys. Simon loves her stuff. I asked her if she could make Oboe a new girlfriend. I sent her pictures and she started hunting down parts. The biggest challenge was finding the rubber ball with holes in it, but she did it. She said it was her first girlfriend.
Oboe and his New Girlfriend
I brought Oboe’s New Girlfriend home on Saturday. As soon as I jiggled the paper bag, he responded to the sound of her bell. When I took her out of the bag, it was love at first sight. Usually birds need to look at a toy for awhile before they’ll trust it enough to touch it, but Oboe was on her before I’d even finished hanging her up.
I haven’t seen him regurgitating for her yet, and I haven’t heard her bell ring, but I feel confident they’re in the early stages of courtship.
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