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Posted by zoom! on October 13, 2008, at 8:08 pm |
The long weekend’s wrapping up now, and the turkey soup is simmering on the stove. I LOVE the smells and tastes of Thanksgiving. I hope all of you had a happy Thanksgiving, or, at the very least, a good long weekend.
James, his friend Joel from PEI, and GC all came for dinner last night. We gathered around the coffee table and feasted on turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, broccoli, beans, carrots, and tangerine-maple cranberry sauce and wine. GC made a honey cake for dessert.
 I’ve got to start going to auctions so I can buy some dining room chairs. A few months ago, Ruth very kindly gave me a gorgeous 1930’s art deco dining table that she wasn’t using anymore, but I can’t use it till I get some chairs. You’d be surprised, though, how many people can eat comfortably at a coffee table.*
 Today GC made waffles and fruit for breakfast, and then we went for a drive and visited a pumpkin patch by accident. We were just trying to turn around, but we ended up in a pumpkin patch. I took this picture for AndrewZRX, who is living in Scotland and who sometimes gets homesick for Canada in the autumn. Look Andrew – this picture has it all: Fall foliage, pumpkins, and Canada geese! (Click for a bigger picture.) I only wish I could upload the smell of woodsmoke for you.
 These things are called Squashkins. The big ones are $4 and the little ones are $3. I guess somebody thought it might be fun to make a butt-ugly hybrid of pumpkins and squash. But there were no little kids at the Squashkin pile shouting “Daddy, Daddy, let’s get this one!”
After the pumpkin patch, we took The Dog for a walk at Bruce Pit. I love that place. It’s Doggie Nirvana. I hadn’t been there since Sam was alive, and then it was just an occasional treat.
 Unfortunately my camera batteries died (all 12 of them!) so there’s only one dog park picture. This is GC and The Dog.
And here are some extra pumpkin patch pictures, because you can’t have too many pumpkins in October.
  
*Five.
Posted by zoom! on October 12, 2008, at 2:06 pm |
The turkey’s in the oven, and I’ve got a few hours of relative quiet time before I have to get to the veggies and cranberry sauce and stuff.
 Yesterday GC and I were volunteers in the Beat Beethoven race, which is a half-marathon fundraiser for the Shepherds of Good Hope. We were road marshals. As such, we were vested with the authority to keep vehicles off the west-bound Western Parkway. We were also vested with vests. Reflective vests. And a road barrier. We were stationed at Parkdale and the Parkway.
“Don’t let anybody on the road, no matter what they tell you,” said the guy who dropped off our barrier, “They’ll come up with all kinds of stories, especially the cabbies, but don’t let anybody through under any circumstances.”
GC and I suited up in our reflective vests, and had a strategy-planning discussion. We thought a good-cop/bad-cop routine might be the best way to go, but we nixed that idea since neither of us could pass as a credible bad cop. We settled instead for a good-cop/good-cop routine.
We turned away cars, trucks, horse trailers, bicycles, motorcycle gangs and media vans. It was interesting to see the variety of reactions people had to a closed road. Some people took it in stride, smiled, shrugged, and set off in search of an alternate route, while other people got angry and squealed their tires. A few people felt compelled to tell us why they needed to get on that road. They were going to a christening, or shopping, or to the beach. GC and I were very helpful in suggesting alternate routes.
Lots of people wanted to know why the road was closed. We explained, over and over again, that there was a half-marathon on the Parkway. You could tell some of them were a bit disappointed. They wanted it to be something more dramatic. A major accident, perhaps, or a movie being filmed, or a police chase. We toyed with the idea of making stuff up for them.
“A race?” drawled one man contemptuously, “There’s always a goddamned race on this road. Every time I want to go somewhere, there’s a goddamned race on this road, isn’t there?”
“The eastbound parkway is open,” I said brightly.
“Well I sure as hell ain’t goin’ east now, am I?” he replied.
 Blocking traffic wasn’t quite enough to keep us fully entertained for hours, so we played the alphabet game with license plates, read the newspaper, and I taught GC how to knit. We thought about how much fun it would be to live-blog our road marshaling experience if only we had a live-blogging device. (If we had live-blogged it, we would have implored the blogosphere to bring us coffee and snacks around 11:00, since we were rationing the last handful of Altoids by that point.)
Eventually a truck pulled up and the driver told us he needed to go through. We said no, we couldn’t allow it. He said he was a law enforcement officer with the National Capital Commission, and he showed us his badge and said his authority superseded ours. I didn’t even know the NCC had law enforcement officers, did you?
GC cheerfully acknowledged that we were outranked, and was going to let him through, but I decided this would be a good time to pretend to be the bad cop. I said we’d need to call the Shepherds Base and request special dispensation for him to pass through our barrier. GC called and they said yeah, let him through, so we did.
Moments later he circled back to us and informed us that the race was actually over and there were cars traveling westbound on the Parkway. So we removed our barrier, packed up our knitting and newspaper, and went in search of coffee, food, and afternoon adventures.
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Posted by zoom! on October 10, 2008, at 9:11 am |
Last night we invented Hard-to-Spell Pizza. There’s just one rule: you can only use toppings that are hard to spell.
Toppings:
Zucchini
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Cubanelle pepper
Chorizo sausage
Abate Fetel Pear
Kohlrabi (if you’ve never had kohlrabi, you should try it; it’s the duck-billed platypus of the vegetable world)
Five Cheeses:
Mozzarella
Cheddar
Asiago
Brocconcini
Parmesan
It was pretty good. I think we’re onto something. Watch for more of our Concept Pizzas in the coming weeks.
Posted by zoom! on October 8, 2008, at 2:34 pm |
I went to the five-party debate on Poverty and Inequality in downtown Ottawa on Monday evening.
The most interesting statement was the one made by the Empty Chair, which is where the Conservative Party representative would have sat had the Conservative Party considered poverty important enough to at least show up and feign some interest in it.
The Empty Chair said Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party do not believe poverty is even worth talking about.
If you’re living in poverty, poverty becomes the single most important thing in your world because it shapes and limits virtually everything else. It creates anxiety and fear and isolation and despair. It exacerbates other problems, like depression and illness. It humbles you and hobbles you.
The Empty Chair said Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party see poverty as a fringe issue, of little interest to anybody who matters to them.
Poverty does not attack randomly. It follows distinct patterns. The following groups are always over-represented in Canada’s underclass: single parents, young families, children, students, people with disabilities, recent immigrants, visible minorities, people living alone, elderly widows, low-wage workers and Aboriginals.
The Empty Chair said these are the people Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party consider irrelevant.
In addition to those who are already poor, many middle-class Canadians fear losing economic ground and sliding into poverty. And, given the alarming state of the economy, it’s a pretty safe bet that more middle-class Canadians will become poor over the next couple of years.
The Empty Chair said Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are either oblivious or indifferent to fears of economic vulnerability among Canadians.
At first I thought it was insulting and arrogant of them to snub this debate. But after some sober reflection, I realized the Conservatives could not possibly have chosen a better representative to send to the Poverty and Inequality Debate. The Empty Chair spoke volumes; we got the message loud and clear.
On October 14th, we get the last word. Vote loud and clear.
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Posted by zoom! on October 7, 2008, at 9:18 am |
There’s a bit of a blogging backlog happening over here, because I seem to be doing stuff faster than I can blog about it. In the interests of catching up, here’s a whirlwind summary of the week’s highlights.
Eating:
 Von’s for breakfast, Irene’s for a Beau’s beer after the Glebe Flea Market. The Golden Palace for dinner. Fil’s Diner for the best club sandwich in Ottawa and Fil’s Diner again for Sunday breakfast. Homemade roasted vegetable soup from my new cookbook of 300 soups. One down, 299 to go.
Events:
 The Carp Fair, complete with giant hungry snakes, model railroads, well-groomed horses, suckling piglets, ferris wheels, funny-shaped fruit contests, cows, cowboys and bumper cars. Here’s a picture of GC and me at our very favourite part of the Carp Fair, which was the House of Mirrors. This picture doesn’t do it justice but we laughed till I almost wet my pants. Almost.
 The Buddhist Cowgirl Birthday Party. Donna invited twenty women to help her celebrate her 60th birthday. (60! She still looks exactly like her Grade 2 school picture.) The theme was cowgirls or cocktail dresses. There wasn’t a cocktail dress in sight: all twenty women came as cowgirls. It was a blast. The only thing that might have made it better was a mechanical bull. Giddy-Up-Go cocktails were served, which are a tasty and potent combination of vodka, triple sec, pomegranate juice and lime juice. I paced myself, but still had a bit of a Giddy-Up-Go-Woe hangover in the morning.
Hiking, sort of. The Gatineau Hills aren’t quite in full autumnal splendor yet, but they’re getting there. We checked the forecast first and headed for the Hills. The plan was to hike the O’Brien trail up to the ruins and the waterfall. The sky was looking kind of ominous, but we knew it wouldn’t rain because the forecast said so. Ahem. Plan B, formulated quickly after the skies opened up and poured rain, was to go back to Ottawa and visit the art gallery but we ended up at the casino instead.
The Casino. I lost $23 and GC won 500 nickels.
And that’s my week, more or less. I’m all caught up now.
Posted by zoom! on October 6, 2008, at 10:43 am |
There’s a catch-up post coming soon, in which I’ll tell you all about my week.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for something interesting to do tonight, there’s a five-party candidates debate on poverty in downtown Ottawa. It probably won’t be as much fun as the lesbian buddhist cowgirl birthday party I went to on Saturday night, but it should be interesting. (I’m not sure who the debaters will be, as the debate isn’t specific to any particular riding.*)
5-Party Federal Election Debate on Poverty and Inequality
Dominion-Chalmers United Church, in The Sanctuary, at 355 Cooper Street at O’Connor
On OC Transpo Bus Routes # 1, 4 and 7.
Wheelchair access is from both the Lisgar St. and the Cooper St. entrances.
Free parking at the church and on side streets.
Poverty and rising inequality in Canada are major concerns for Canadians in this federal election. To put a spotlight on these critical issues, a coalition of over 20 social justice organizations is pleased to invite the public to a five-party debate, in both official languages and with sign language interpretation. Parties invited to this debate are the Bloc Québécois, Conservative Party of Canada, Green Party of Canada, Liberal Party of Canada and New Democratic Party of Canada. The moderator will be CBC radio broadcaster, Adrian Harewood.
UPDATE – the debaters will be:
Francoise Boivin, New Democratic Party of Canada
Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal Party of Canada
Jen Hunter, Green Party of Canada
Réal Ménard, Bloc Québécois
The Conservative Party has not yet confirmed its participation or spokesperson for the Party.
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Posted by zoom! on October 3, 2008, at 1:58 pm |
We were pretty psyched last night about the debates. We got ourselves all set up with Chinese food, notebooks, knitting, and a remote control to switch between two pre-programmed debate channels. The plan was we’d watch the comedic American Vice-Presidential debate, tape the more serious Canadian leadership debate, and switch back and forth during commercials.
I knit a few rows and took only one note: it said “Six-Pack Joe and Hockey Mom.” (These are Sarah Palen’s nicknames for average Americans. Nice, eh?) I heard the words “Main Street” and “maverick” about 15 times.
Next thing I knew, we were waking up and the debates were over. I think we only caught the first five minutes.
Fortunately for all of us, Coyote was channeling Hunter last night, so his double debate coverage was more extensive and far freakier than mine.
Posted by zoom! on October 3, 2008, at 6:54 am |
Posted by zoom! on October 1, 2008, at 5:29 pm |
Time is marching inexorably towards my birthday. I can hear my heartbeat in my watch.
I used to be so laid back about the prospect of aging. I was excited about 20. I was happy about 30. I approached 40 with interest. Throughout it all, I laughed philosophically at other people’s dread of birthdays and aging and wrinkles. Not me, I thought, I’m going to age gracefully.
It’s easy to be smug about aging when you’re young.
I think I thought of aging as a buffet: I’d embrace the silver hair, wisdom and grandchildren, but I’d pass on the wrinkles, cognitive decline, fatigue and sagging. In other words, I would get older, but I would resist looking and feeling older.
It wasn’t till I passed 45 that I started feeling uneasy about my own aging process, and wanted to put the brakes on. I think it was when I started catching glimpses of myself in unexpected mirrors, and realized that I was starting to look less and less like myself.
And now…my 50th birthday looms two weeks from today, on October 15th. I’m trying not to let it freak me out, but it’s so huge and freaky. How can I be turning 50?? My parents are only in their 60s…shouldn’t I be about 35? I’m sure they’d both agree they’re much too young to have children in their 50s.
For years I told myself adulthood has three stages: young adults are 20-40; middle-aged adults are 40-60; old adults are 60 and over. So at 40, I stopped being an old young person and became a young middle-aged person. I was cool with that. But I can’t seem to find a way to minimize the fact that fifty is getting way up there. I can’t nudge the age brackets a little wider and make myself young again. I’m well beyond semantics now: I’m seriously entrenched in middle age. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but time is gathering momentum and before you know it, I’ll be old. Then really old. Then dead. I don’t like where this is going.
A couple of weeks ago I met an artist and she told me she painted a picture for her son’s 50th birthday. When she said “50th birthday” I automatically conjured up an image of a fat, balding, florid-complexioned guy having his first colonoscopy. And then I remembered with a jolt that I’m turning 50 and maybe I should revise my stereotype.
I know 50’s just a number, but it’s not just a number. Things have been happening, too. Age-related things. Like throwing my back out, and a persistent twinge in my hip, and I think one of my freckles turned into an age spot this year. Also, I can’t seem to lose those 7 pounds I gained after I quit smoking last year, and I’ve even added a few more pounds recently because I’ve been eating like a horse and you can’t do that when you’re middle-aged because you have old metabolism.
I figured I should get more exercise, so I picked up the catalogue at the Plant Recreation Centre. You know what I saw in there? Exercise classes for seniors aged 50 and over. I am not kidding. Fifty and over! In two weeks I’ll be a senior! (And no, they didn’t offer a seniors’ discount.)
Anyway, enough about me. How old are you? How old do you feel? How do you feel about getting older? Is aging still kind of theoretical and abstract for you, or are you seeing it in the mirror and feeling it in your bones yet? Are you doing anything to try to slow it down?
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Posted by zoom! on September 30, 2008, at 7:56 pm |
Last night I celebrated Rosh Hashanah for the first time ever. There were candles and wine and some prayers, but mostly there was food. Lots of food. A veritable feast!
For starters: apple wedges dipped in honey. Much of the food is sweet for Rosh Hashanah because it’s the Jewish New Year and sweet food symbolizes a sweet year.
Then the wine was poured and the candles were lit and the prayers were said, and we had some challa bread sprinkled with salt and dipped in honey. Then we had matzo ball soup. After that, the main course was brought from the kitchen to the table.
I kept photographing the spread of food prematurely because I kept thinking GC was finished bringing it in. But he wasn’t. There was a steady flow of food from the kitchen to the table. There was a LOT of food.
Look at it all! There were only two of us eating this feast.
It was all yummy except for the gefilte fish in jellied broth; I have issues around fish and jellied anything. (Except Jello. I love red Jello.)
 I don’t remember what everything was called but I’ll do my best. Starting on the left and going clockwise: bulgur and bowties (wonderful), baked apricot pudding (sweet and tasty – it could pass as a dessert but it’s not a dessert), beef brisket, challa bread, potato knishes, I-forget-what-it’s-called-but-it’s-got-pineapple-carrots-and-raisins-and-it’s delicious.
GC’s dog watched politely from the edge of my chair while drooling profusely. He was optimistic that I might be the weak link in the food chain. (He was right.)
After dinner I passed out on the couch for awhile and when I woke up it was time for more food – Honey and Spice and Everything Nice Cake, served with coffee.
Today was a waddling sort of day.
Shana Tova!
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I’ve got to start going to auctions so I can buy some dining room chairs. A few months ago, Ruth very kindly gave me a gorgeous 1930’s art deco dining table that she wasn’t using anymore, but I can’t use it till I get some chairs. You’d be surprised, though, how many people can eat comfortably at a coffee table.*
Today GC made waffles and fruit for breakfast, and then we went for a drive and visited a pumpkin patch by accident. We were just trying to turn around, but we ended up in a pumpkin patch. I took this picture for AndrewZRX, who is living in Scotland and who sometimes gets homesick for Canada in the autumn. Look Andrew – this picture has it all: Fall foliage, pumpkins, and Canada geese! (Click for a bigger picture.) I only wish I could upload the smell of woodsmoke for you.
These things are called Squashkins. The big ones are $4 and the little ones are $3. I guess somebody thought it might be fun to make a butt-ugly hybrid of pumpkins and squash. But there were no little kids at the Squashkin pile shouting “Daddy, Daddy, let’s get this one!”
Unfortunately my camera batteries died (all 12 of them!) so there’s only one dog park picture. This is GC and The Dog. 
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