One-day weekends

I worked most of yesterday. I got a fair amount done, and expected to feel satisfaction and/or accomplishment, but mostly I felt resentful that half my weekend was consumed by what I do every weekday - sit on my rear in front of a computer. I spend so much of my life seated and staring at a computer screen, which seems completely unnatural. I've read that our distant ancestors would travel up to 20 or 25 miles a day in search of food, and would often go days without eating. Compare that to how we live now! I like my job, but I do fantasize regularly about landscaping or a more active profession. Something that wouldn't involve my muscles atrophying and my hips attaining secretarial proportions. So if I haven't been sitting and writing much here lately, it's because I'd rather be doing this:


No footage of our mats in action, but we like to think we look a little something like this. Or we would, except we haven't figured out how to make them both work on one computer, so we're taking turns or using our own laptops. Fun!

Anyway, today we did get out and about. I met a friend at an art show in our neighborhood, then Jeff and I walked around (not across! see photo below) the Port Meadow and ended up at a cosy thatched-roof pub with a roaring fire and Chrismas decorations (it amuses me that they put fake snow on the windows). We walked back into the city centre, stumbled by accident upon a travelling French Christmas market on Broad Street, and ended up sitting in the front window of a coffee shop (okay I admit it, it was Starbucks) watching shoppers rush by and the city's Christmas lights flare up. I LOVE this time of year! I have so many deadlines to meet at work before I fly home that I haven't really been able to get excited yet. But I'm starting to have that holly jolly feeling. Bring on the mulled wine!

Not that it looks like Christmas around here. It's a balmy twelve degrees, and all is muddy, all is wet. The Port Meadow has become a lake.


Also, just when I thought the British had covered EVERY POSSIBLE REALITY TV SHOW IMAGINABLE*, I've discovered Cirque du Celebrites. Yes, celebrities doing circus stunts.

* Some of the more horrifying: Chubby Children, where kids audition to go on a fitness and diet regimen; Break with the Boss, where a boss takes two or three of his/her employees on a vacation where they compete for a promotion; or Jade's PA, where people fight for the extremely unappealing job of PA to a D-list celebrity, famous only for distinguishing herself as the stupidest person in Britain on ANOTHER reality show, Big Brother.

Maybe postpone that safari

This is the saddest, most unsettling article I've read in a long time. Shouldn't come as a surprise, though.

The elephants are going mad

I'll owe you an apology after this

For about a week, we've been inadvertently and annoyingly breaking into song. I've done it at work when I wasn't thinking. I've done it while walking down the street. I'll arrive home, having blissfully cleared the tune from my mind with my iPod, and Jeff will walk in the door an hour later and be singing it. The reason is a ridiculously catchy tune by a ridiculously large group of people who rented a high school gymnasium to record a ridiculously low-budget video. They're called I'm From Barcelona. They're Swedish. I know, it blows the mind.

Click on this link to see 23 twenty- and thirty-somethings who appear to have stepped out of a 1970s class photo (outsized specs! inexcusable hairstyles! cardigans on men!). You'll hate me tomorrow when you can't stop la-la-la-la-ing. Twee, indeed.

Ha ha, and then watch this one.

The first of many years of being 29

The nicest thing my parents ever did for me was to give me a brother. One whose laid-back demeanour allowed me to boss him around. Who never pestered me when we had to share the back seat on long car rides, because he was too busy memorizing makes and models of every other car on the road. Who made my parents' anti-television laws bearable by being a great Lego architect. Who wasn't embarrassed to have a sister on his all-boys soccer team, and made a great lead singer in our band.


I sometimes resented his smallness and cuteness, since I was freakishly large and had terrible front teeth (he never needed braces; I had them twice). I still remember standing at either side of a door frame to be measured, he standing on tip toes, me scrunching down in hopes of denying the three inches I always seemed to grow. Until he started to catch up, and then it got competitive. At age 18 he passed the six foot mark and kept going, enabling him to eat twice the calories I could and not gain weight. I have never forgiven him for this. (Though his thinness is also due to admirable discipline and lots of biking and hockey.)

He quit a respectable engineering job because he had the sense to know it wasn't what he wanted, and has spent the past several years travelling all across North America with an auto-racing team. He seems to get eight times more things done in a day than I do, but still finds time to phone me on his lunch hours and make mix-CDs of all the great driving tunes I could want. Which makes it just a little easier to be living so far apart.

He's turning twenty-nine today. It's a very weird moment when you realise your little brother is almost thirty. I find that more shocking than being thirty myself. You probably won't be home to read this, bro, but happy birthday! I hope the year ahead is a great one.

Perspective

Both my grandfathers came overseas during WW2, as very young men, much younger than I am. I'm not sure one of them had ever been far from his rural Ontario farm. When I was in Edinburgh eight years ago, contemplating getting on the next plane home, I found some comfort in sitting beside the same floral clock (in the Princes' Street Gardens) that he had been so impressed by nearly sixty years earlier. Even now, when I get homesick, I think of how much more overwhelming it would have been for them, facing genuine hardship and knowing they might never make it back to Canada. I don't think I'd have been strong enough.

For Fawkes' sake!

I've been even jumpier than usual lately, because people have been setting off fireworks at random times of day and night all over the city for a week now. Just a few minutes ago I died a little death when, minding my own business and washing dishes at the sink, I was blinded by a flash of light and then deafened by a squeal and an insanely loud CRACK. I'd swear it was in our backyard, but it must have been the neighbours. I can hear other bangs and pops in the distance. Honestly, people. It's called bonfire NIGHT, not bonfire MONTH. I know it's a subtle distinction but let's give it a try. This is even more tiresome than the week-long car-horn celebrations in Toronto whenever Portugal beat some downtrodden developing nation in the World Cup. People of delicate sensibilities, such as myself, should not be subjected to such shocks. My right eyelid has developed a twitch due to jangled nerves. (Or it could be due to the fact that I stare all day at a truly awful computer monitor at work. I put in a request for a flat-screen LCD monitor. I was given a voucher for an eye test. Stalemate.)

Today I experienced my first real old-fashioned English pea-souper. I walked to work this morning in a thick fog. I walked home from work nine hours later in an even thicker fog. (I spent the intervening hours also in a thick fog, but that was the lack-of-sleep variety.) It was dark by then, and I had to pass a cemetery on a fairly deserted stretch of road, and, well, reading all those mystery novels doesn't help at such times. It was like something out of Sherlock Holmes. The other side of the street was nothing but dark shapes. Bikes and pedestrians, and the Hound of the Baskervilles (or at least an impossibly large dog), loomed out of nowhere. Headlights and streetlamps ineffectually bounced off the droplets of water in the air, only decreasing visibility. Trees dripped even though it wasn't raining. Double-decker buses looked like alien ships. It was all kind of cool in an eerie way, for about five minutes. Then it because claustrophobic. The air was vaguely suffocating, like breathing through a damp cloth. The pressure on my sinuses was intense.

And then more of those blasted fireworks! In a dense fog! When I'm struggling to focus my eyes on anything a few feet ahead, and momentarily wonder if I've been shot! It's such a trial to be high-strung. (As opposed to strung high, which is what happened to Guy Fawkes before he was summarily drawn and quartered. The English are nothing if not thorough.)

Well, at least I made some sort of impression.

My close encounters with mystery novelists continue. I went to see Ian Rankin talk about his new Rebus novel tonight. He charmed the audience with his self-deprecating wit, charmed me by admitting the last two albums he bought were Mogwai and Arab Strap (he quoted Cure lyrics in one book, and I swooned), promised not to kill off Rebus in his final novel, answered inane questions about his favourite cheese, and drew naughts and crosses in the book he signed for me.


I totally dorked out, as I do in these situations, and blindly rambled to him about how I discovered his books while living in Edinburgh and how they enhanced my appreciation of the city (or some such mortifying drivel). This of course surprised him as Rebus's Edinburgh is dark, gritty and crime-ridden. He asked where I was from, and said 'Ohhhhhhh, I know Kingston'. I suspect the fact that I hail from a city with four prisons made everything illuminated. You KNOW I'm tough.

Sigh. He's just so cool.