You know what makes me cranky? Finding political junk mail in my mailbox. It’s a blatant abuse of power and taxpayers’ money.
I’m talking about those insidious campaign ads the Conservative Party (aka the Reform Party) is mailing out. I think I’ve received four of them so far. They’ve all come from that creepy John Baird, who isn’t even my MP. I blogged about this one back in March.
A week or so ago I got one called “CANADA’S BACK.” It says, among other things, “Canada has once again reclaimed its role as the True North, Strong and Free. After more than a decade of Liberal government rule, Canada’s reputation abroad floundered and even our capacity to patrol our own borders was significantly diminished,” followed by a bunch of blah blah blah Vote for Stephen Harper.
Yesterday I got another one, called “LOWER TAXES FOR SENIORS.” It says, among other things, “Tax relief….certainly matters to Canada’s seniors, who are on a fixed income and need to make every penny count,” followed by a bunch of blah blah blah Vote for Stephen Harper.
I’ve got nothing against seniors, but why should taxation be based on age groups?? Plenty of seniors are not “on a fixed income” and don’t need to “make every penny count.” Some of them are stinkin’ rich and don’t need subsidization. If taxation is based on income and wealth, seniors who need extra help will get it and those who don’t, won’t. That’s fair and reasonable, isn’t it?
But my point really isn’t to argue about the messages conveyed by these dumb, over-simplified ads (although the ads they’re blanketing Vancouver with are unconscionable). My point is that the Conservatives have no right to be sending these things out in the first place. They’re using OUR money to pay for their election campaign. All of these ads contain graphics of ballots with the four party leaders listed on them. They are clearly election ads. It’s illegal, and rightly so.
Anyway, I was very cranky about finding yet another one of these things in my mailbox yesterday, but I was pleased to see that both Saskboy and Wandering Coyote had something to say about them. So did McLeans Magazine. And there’s a Facebook group too.
I almost didn’t recognize my old friend Mike when I ran into him on Somerset Street this morning. That’s because every single time I’ve seen him in the last twelve years, he’s had his dog, Ebony, with him. Today he was alone, and we were practically colliding by the time I recognized him.
“Hey,” I said, “Where’s your puppy?”
I knew the answer before he even uttered the words.
She died last week.
Mike adored that dog. They spent virtually every minute of every day together for the past twelve and a half years. They lived alone in an apartment, and he sometimes thought about moving but he wanted her to have a stable home with the same dog park and the same friends throughout her life.
Now he says he’s rattling around alone in there, sensing her, almost seeing her, missing her, weeping. He still goes to the dog park to see the other dogs, and his dog park friends let him walk their dogs during the day so he’ll have some canine company. It helps, he said.
But he looks so lost and incomplete without his dog.
Ebony was a pit bull, and a very sweet and gentle soul. She adored children and tolerated anything from them. She would gently place her Kong in baby carriages, a gift for the tiny occupants.
There’s a blind lawyer who works in my office building. (He’s the guy who forced OC Transpo drivers to start calling out the stops, so that blind people could get their bearings.) This lawyer specializes unofficially in representing dogs on death row. These are dogs who have been ordered destroyed for ‘aggressive’ behaviour. Often, he says, they really haven’t done anything wrong. They were provoked or behaved in an entirely reasonable manner considering the circumstances. However, there is a bias against certain breeds in the canine justice system.
A pit bull will often be automatically deemed the aggressor in any
altercation between dogs, even if she didn’t start it and was just trying to defend herself from an attack. Frequently the lawyer’s defence rests on proving the dog is not a pit bull.
The other day he invited a couple of us up to his boardroom to look at photographs of his clients. These dogs are all alive and free because he successfully defended them. He has another client, a pit bull in Toronto, who has been on death row for three years now (that’s 21 dog years). The dog has been in a shelter that entire time. Apparently that case is heading to the Supreme Court.
Please give your dogs an extra hug today, in memory of Ebony and in solidarity with the underdogs on death row.
I dragged my bike out of the basement and put some air in the tires and pronounced it ready for summer!
Today I took it to work for the very first time ever. I drove through the Experimental Farm, then along the bike path that runs beside the Rideau Canal from Dow’s Lake to downtown. Then I headed west on Somerset to Bank Street, where I stopped at the Second Cup for my traditional apple-cranberry muffin, and then north for the final few blocks to my office.
I felt fast – the blocks were zipping by and the wind was streaming through my hair as I sailed past all the pedestrians. But even though I was going fast like the wind, all the other bikers were passing me. They were flying!
In the end I was a little surprised to see it had taken me 40 minutes to bike to work, since I usually walk it in 80 minutes. That meant I was only biking twice as fast as I walk. I think I must be a very fast walker and a very slow biker.
Unfortunately I had to leave my bike at work today because as I was getting ready to go home the sky turned an ominous black and the street lights came on and the winds started whipping about and there was rumbling in the sky. It was time for the daily 4:00 commuter thunderstorm.
Penelope and I went out to the bike rack and brought our bikes in and rode them through the corridors, giggling, before parking them in the Executive Director’s office and taking buses home in the pouring rain. It’s fun having a bike.
At lunchtime I walked down to the Glebe to check out Elmaks’ latest street art installation, but unfortunately I was too late. I could see where it used to be on the piece of wood on the telephone poll, but whatever it was was gone. (Did any of you see it? What was it? Did you get a picture?) The trip wasn’t wasted though because I got a chicken and avocado and spicy eggplant sandwich at that cute little coffee shop in the Glebe.
Speaking of pictures, my son took a picture of a swap box for me at the corner of Parkdale and Wellington, right by the Market. The swap box itself is gone.
But don’t be sad! There are others!
This one sprouted up near Preston and Gladstone in June. I visited it daily until I went on holidays. That’s one of my artist trading cards in it. It’s a meta trading card, because the Owl Woman is passing another one of my artist trading cards to the other Owl Woman. You can click here for a better view. When I got back from holidays, this swap box was gone. (I’m very curious to know whether they’re being removed by City crews or by passers-by. And I’m trying to be philosophical about it, like Elmaks, but it’s not easy. I feel very sad when they vanish.)
This one was recently installed near the Bridgehead on Elgin Street. I got a dragonfly necklace out of it and left a gummy hamburger from Sugar Mountain. (I also bought a tiny bag of red juice berries at Sugar Mountain for $3.96. Has anybody else noticed that the red juice berries aren’t as flavourful as they used to be?)
And then there’s the new swap box in my favourite swap box location: on Lisgar, just east of Bank Street. Near Wallack’s. Outside the Invisible Cinema. Across the street from Venus Envy. I’m tempted to take my drill over there and lower it a couple of feet, because it’s the kind that doesn’t have a door, so you need to look down into it. I’d need a ladder to look down into it. I don’t want to just plunge my hand in there without looking first. But today, guess what was in there? A bottle of money. I’m not kidding. It said “Change” on it. I opened it up and it was full of money – not just pennies either, real money. I left it there because there’s probably someone out there who would do cartwheels up and down Lisgar Street if they found that jar of money. My buddy Dave X would be ecstatic for DAYS if he found it. He’d probably talk about it for months! Years, even!
Speaking of money, a friend asked me recently who my RRSP investments are with. You know, which company do I use. I told him “I can never remember because they keep getting sold and changing their name, and all the names are double names like Midland-Walwyn and Wood-Gundy, but I think maybe they’re called Meryl Streep now.” Then there was a pause while we both reflected on why that sentence felt a little off. Anyway, it was Merrill-Lynch, not Meryl Streep, and I just got my statement and it turns out they’re not Merrill-Lynch anymore either.
That’s all the news from my Monday. How was yours?
I don’t usually jump on these things, but this year Blog Action Day is on October 15th (my birthday!) and the topic is poverty (my favourite social issue!).
The goal of the organizers is to get as many bloggers as possible blogging about poverty on October 15th.
You can approach poverty from many different angles, and it overlaps with so many other social issues, like disability, child care, education, housing, health, social services, and addictions. Plus, poverty lends itself to so many different types of exploration – descriptive, analytic, personal, political, and photographic.
Even if you’ve never been poor yourself, it’s unlikely that you’re completely unaffected by poverty. I remember reading a few years ago that an astonishing proportion of women were afraid that they were going to end up as ‘bag ladies.’ A lot of households are bulging at the seams because grown kids are returning home (sometimes with children), unable to afford housing. In cities like Calgary the economic boom is sending shockwaves through its more marginalized populations, who are being displaced from low-end housing.
There’s plenty of room for everybody on the subject of poverty. It’s going to be good.
We were going to go to the Folk Festival this weekend: we had tickets and everything. But as the date loomed closer, the weekend got more and more crowded with other important and inflexible things. Eventually it seemed like we would not be enjoying the folk festival as much as we would be trying to cram some of it in between other things, just so that we wouldn’t have wasted our money on the tickets.
Finally we came to our senses and decided to sell our tickets, and as luck would have it, a friend and fellow blogger wanted to buy them. On Friday I headed off to work with the tickets in my pocket and a plan to meet my friend at a coffee shop where we would seal the deal.
I thought it was going to be a lucky day because I saw a bunny AND a groundhog on my way to work. But you know how you have a pair of unlucky jeans in your drawer that don’t fit quite right and aren’t very comfortable and you don’t realize it until you’re halfway to work? I was wearing those jeans on Friday. They were loose and droopy and I had to keep pulling them up and I told myself that after work I was going to take those jeans out of circulation. (Usually I just throw them in the wash after wearing them once, but then they tighten up and the next time I wear them they feel okay for the first hour or two, which is how they keep tricking me into wearing them even though they are bad, bad jeans.)
So. All day long my pants kept getting loser and loser, and by lunchtime I was walking around downtown holding them up. I even stopped at Cleo’s in the L’Esplanade and tried on a pair of replacement pants at lunchtime, but they were too long.
“How’d those pants work out for you?” asked the sales clerk.
“Just fine,” I replied, “Except they’re too long.”
“Oh, but they’re the Petite size – they’re the shortest one we make!” she exclaimed, as if it were not mathematically possible to have legs shorter than Cleo’s shortest pants.
“They’re too long,” I repeated.
“Well,” she said dubiously, “You could get them hemmed.”
Well you know what? Screw that. I don’t get stuff hemmed. I’m five foot one and three quarters, which is short but not freakishly so, and I will buy my pants from stores that make clothing for people in the normal range, like me. Eddie Bauer, for example, makes jeans for people who are five one and three quarters, and they’ve managed to stay in business all these years.
It’s a pet peeve of mine. Clothing manufacturers make regular and petite sizes. Petite sizes are for women 5’4″ and under, which is ridiculous because the average Canadian woman is five foot three and a half inches (and 153 lb, incidentally). (Also incidentally, the average Canadian man is five foot eight and a half, and 182 pounds. Source.)
So women of average height have to wear either petite sizes or high heels. At Cleo’s, I have to wear petite sizes AND high heels. Either that or I have to go to the trouble and expense of getting my brand new pants hemmed before I wear them. I won’t do this at the best of times, let alone while I’m standing there manually holding my unlucky pants up.
Anyway. I did not buy the too-long petite pants at Cleo’s, and I went back to work. Around mid-afternoon I ducked out of the office to meet my friend to exchange tickets and money. That’s when I reached into my big, loose back pocket and discovered it was empty. My folk festival tickets were gone.
What followed was the usual checking and double-checking and triple-checking of all possible pockets, the mental re-tracing of steps, the physical retracing of steps, and, ultimately, the acceptance of the fact that the $160 tickets had indeed worked their way out of the loose baggy pocket of my unlucky jeans and fallen on the ground, and they would remain lost forever.
I just hope someone found them, and was able to put them to good use. I hope it was someone who desperately wanted to go to the Folk Festival but couldn’t afford it, preferably a wonderful person who deserved some unexpected good luck. It makes me feel better to believe this than to believe, for example, that they fell under the steamroller in the Bank Street construction zone.
You might be thinking it was careless of me to keep something of value in my back pocket, but on a typical day my back pocket contains my hipster PDA, my credit card, my bank card and my library card, and I never lose any of this stuff. That’s because my pants usually fit. (My bank card is shaped exactly like my bum, by the way.)
I’m giving Zoom a hand since she’s in a bit of a blogging slump lately.
This is the first instalment of my new column: Dear Duncan.
Dear Duncan,
I fell asleep drinking a beer out of my bowl one day and when I woke up I was the First Dog of the best City in the world.
But it’s not perfect. Case in point: The pathetic scrawny alley cats in my neighbourhood keep asking me for money. They say it’s for food but I’m certain they’re spending it all on catnip. Please tell all your readers to stop giving money to these alley cats. Instead, just put your money in a parking meter and I’ll pick it up later and give it to good-hearted and wonderful people who serve the plight of cats and believe in social equity. Then we can all feel good about my economic efficiency.
Yours sincerely,
Remi O’Brien
Dear Remi,
Woof.
Congratulations on the new thesaurus.
Seriously though, you do demonstrate a moderately sophisticated level of thinking for a dog. Have you thought of starting your own blog?
Sincerely,
Duncan
Dear Duncan,
Are you still peeing on GC?
Robin
Dear Robin,
That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it? Let’s just say that GC and me, we’re talking, and we’re coming to some kind of understanding. GC put his cards on the table and here’s what he said: “Duncan, please don’t make her choose cause I think she’ll choose you.” And then we got down to some serious negotiations about how we could turn this into a win-win situation. I don’t want to divulge the details of this deal since we haven’t finished crossing our eyes and dotting our tees, but let’s just say GC and me have tentatively agreed there’s no P in Team, but there is a yet-to-be-determined quantity of tuna and catnip in Team.
I got an email from Robin today saying that my two days of blogging silence had not gone unnoticed, and would be going on my permanent record. (I intend to appeal this ruling, as I never received my first or final warnings.)
However. In the meantime I feel compelled to think of something – anything – to blog about. As I alluded to in my previous post, the Ottawa blogging community has been remarkably uninspired lately. With the exception of a few determined die-hards, the bloggers have either been in transition or too weary or too depleted or too busy to blog.
I counted myself among the determined die-hards up until a couple of days ago when I abruptly ran out of things to blog about. (Your suggestions are most welcome.)
I can still think of things for other bloggers to blog about. For example, I had lunch with one of the Elgin Street Irregulars today and I had a brilliant idea for a series of posts for them. I don’t want to give it all away, but it would start with an official ESI policy statement on chocha shaving.
XUP and Jo Stockton and Em and Robin and Hella Stella and Milan are among the die-hards and they’re doing just fine without me, so I have no suggestions for them. Just kudos and thanks.
Gabriel admits to a case of blogging ennui, but he clearly knows how to break out of a blogging slump with style. Go Gabriel Go!
Nik’s bucking the blogging ennui trend and is on a bit of a relative upswing lately, what with single-handedly taking on Turkey and his multimedia insight into the workings of Satan’s mind. Go Nik go!
Aggie declared this International No Bogging Month. Don’t get me wrong, I love Aggie, truly I do, but this is just irresponsible. I mean, what if everybody did that? The blogosphere would lose all its momentum, the feeds would starve, and that would be the end of blogging as we know it. Aggie, I urge you to do the responsible thing. Stop Aggie Stop!
A & J have been blogging pretty regularly, but I’m concerned they’re going to run out of things to buy. This is clearly Buy Everything Month at Chez A & J. I think someone should blog up a supplemental shopping list for A&J, just in case. Shop J Shop!
As for Megan, I have to admit I was in a coffee shop with another blogger on Saturday and the other blogger mused, “I wonder what Megan’s doing right now,” and we both burst out laughing because we both knew what Megan and her angry red poon were doing at that very moment. Go Megan go!
Sassy Redhead just had a baby so she’s allowed to post pictures of baby puke for a little while longer. (Not a lot longer though.)
AndrewXUPZRX just had a motorcycle, so he’s allowed to talk about first gear for a little while longer. (Not a lot longer though.)
Mayor Larry just milked a cow, so he’s allowed to talk about what a great City Ottawa is for a little while longer. Go Larry go.
The Ottawa blogging community has been unusually quiet lately. I hope it’s just a summer slump and they’ll all be back in a couple of weeks making all kinds of noise and finishing their unfinished serialized stories and delivering their revolutionary new dating paradigms and stuff. Bogging’s just not the same without the full complement of bloggers at work.
In the meantime, I met up with the ever prolific and endlessly entertaining Urban Pedestrian for breakfast this morning and we were joined by special guests Julia and Peter. Did you know that Julia and Peter only have beer for breakfast? Yup. XUP and I had bacon and eggs and beer, except I got all the bacon because I’m not a vegetarian.
Peter told us about some hippies called the Phuxtables (sp?) who were around when he was growing up and you could hire them to do work and then they’d take some of the money you paid them and buy you a present with it. There were rabid goats in this story, and six tons of man-made clay. It was complicated. The rabid goats reminded me of Nik’s freaky film, How Satan Works.
After Julia and Peter wobbled off on their bicycle built for two, M came in. I hadn’t seen her for awhile, but she mentioned having spotted me on tv recently.
After breakfast XUP and I went to 10,000 Villages for a pee and then we went home.
In other news, I finally lost a game of Scramble on Facebook. Ember Swift beat me by six points. Needless to say, I am devastated. My winning streak has ended and my whining streak has begun. I hope you’ll bear with me.
I got carried away with the polls and made us a little five-question math quiz. It’s all anonymous – none of us will know anybody else’s answers unless you tell us in the comments. (And feel free to do so, but please don’t look up the answers before answering the questions, okay? I’ll post all the answers in a day or two.)
I returned to work today after five weeks of holidays and a couple of days of bad-back leave. I thought I was relatively upright today, but my colleagues thought I was relatively bent. (That’s relativity for ya.)
I spent the day drinking coffee, chatting with coworkers, trying to remember what I do, writing a to-do list, shoveling out from under an avalanche of emails, scheduling meetings, watering plants, returning phone calls, looking at the clock, and noticing that time was getting more and more sluggish as the day went on until it finally crawled into a corner and died.
Eventually I left. It took me a very long time to get home because the first bus was late and the driver said it was too full to take me (it wasn’t, there was lots of room back there) and then the next bus was late too. On the bright side, I read a whole library book before I got home.
The strangest thing happened today. On the way out the door this morning, I took another look at the outrageous weeds in my front garden (there’s nothing else in my garden, by the way – just outrageous weeds) and I pledged to pull those weeds when I got home from work. But then I had this weird feeling that the weeds wouldn’t be there when I got home.
I thought about the weeds again when I got off the bus. Would they be there or not?
The weeds were gone. GONE. Now even though I had a premonition that they would be gone, I was still shocked to see they were gone. Why? Because I’m not psychic, that’s why. I get funny feelings all the time, and nothing ever comes of them. (Well, hardly ever.)
So who do you think was behind this mysterious weed disappearance?
These are my theories:
1) One of my neighbours got sick of looking at them and chopped them down.
2) The City deemed them to be an eyesore and sent a work crew over to get rid of them.
3) A kind blog reader read yesterday’s post and decided to do me a favour.
What do you think happened to the weeds? And what do you think of my premonition? Was it just a fluke, or am I turning psychic?
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