Under a custard sky (write of passage number thirty-four)

If we don't make it out of the house by 7:30, we won't get the #5 Mackenzie King Bridge. We don't, so we must resign ourselves to the #5 Billings Bridge.

The back of the articulated bus is crammed with middle school students. I assume they're middle school students -- I know the classes at Lisgar Collegiate, where elder daughter went to high school, won't begin for more than an hour after the bus passes the building on Elgin Street.  Also, every second word of every shouted sentence, is f***, a sure sign of what passes for middle school conversation.

The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter take a side seat near the back door, leaving me to stand and gaze meaningfully at a barely adolescent boy sitting with his back to the window, knees drawn up, feet and packsack on the empty space next to him.  He can only ignore me for so long, so I sit down with the same enthusiasm he displays as he clears a space.

Now I must cast around for a way to survive this first twenty minutes of six hours I'll spend in transit today.  Younger daughter's lift to school has been suspended as her schoolmate spends two weeks in South Africa. It will take an hour and a half to escort her to Bells Corners, the same back, and another round trip in the afternoon to retrieve her.

As the profanities fly, I look past my unwilling seat mate to the sky outside which, this morning, is the colour of custard.  As the bus rolls through Sandy Hill and turns at Strathcona Park, the sun fights its way free of the horizon and collides with a cigar-shaped cloud, spilling gold on either side.

The young boy is now occupied in yelling playfully at an older girl and boy sitting in front.  Their responses are perfunctory, so he kneels on the seat and presses energetically on the backs of their necks.

I manage to avoid his rocking elbows and catch the eye of a bearded fella who is standing near my husband and daughter on the lower level.  I cast my eyes heavenward and I see a smile flicker across his face.

March goes out like a wombat

Winter is waddling out of Ottawa and taking its own sweet time. Woke up this morning with an iron-grey sky and black thoughts. Pep-talked myself, applied a little dab of the musk eau de cologne that my elder daughter brought back from Provençe. (Never mind the fact that Cologne is, in fact, in Germany; I was trying to cling to items of love and beauty to save myself from myself.) By the time younger daughter and I tackled the long hill to school, it was snowing outright, coating the filthy fossilized remains of old drifts with a creamy wrap, the muddy shards of ice poking through.

On the way home, still trying to stay high-minded, I took photographs of: frozen explosions in the park below younger daughter's school and:
deadly red former evergreens in the merciless grip of a winter's worth of snowplough droppings:

I was just angling myself to take a snap of piles of garbage bags against a backdrop of more frozen waste, when I felt my boot slide out inexorably sideways, and as I tried to regain balance, my other boot slid out in equal inexorability in the exact opposite direction. In agonizing slow motion, I made it to the ground in an ungainly split. I straightened out my legs and lay in the snow atop the black ice and wondered dispassionately if I would be able to get up. Two Russian women whose daughters attend younger daughter's school glanced in my direction from the corner where they were chatting, then resumed their conversation. I managed to regain my feet, figured my left knee, although throbbing painfully on the inside edge, would take my weight and hobbled home, cursing the posh apartment dwellers who never touch the sidewalk outside their building.

I'm now following the R.I.C.E. prescription (rest-ice-compress-elevate) and praying I'll be able to manage the trek to younger daughter's school to pick her up. So far, I'm managing stairs and have even done a load of laundry, gingerly picking my way down two flights, so I imagine I'll be alright, but am glaring sourly at the "to-do" list I'd optimistically posted on my brand-new iGoogle home page this morning.

Expletive deleted. Time for another Doctor Who video. This one, by exceedingly rare YouTube poster "HuaidanSam" combines an unlikely song ("I Wanna Talk About Me" by Toby Keith) with clever cuts and witty associations, resulting in a hilarious and rather sexy fanvid which tells Rose to get her head out of her navel:

There. I needed a good giggle. Time to get the gel pack from the freezer again...