The first house on the left

Too tired, again. Just three more nights and days. 

This song is by 30-year-old Katherine Priddy of Birmingham, West Midlands. 

 Maybe we've all known houses like this, but the house in this song is an English house, and probably a lot older than most houses in Canada. There is a house on a hill 

One little corner where time has stood still 

And as though caught in some pendulum swing 

I try to go, but home pulls me back in 

Centuries passed through this door 

The stories we write have been told here before 

All of their voices still breathe in these walls 

It’s as though things never change here at all 

Oh, is this the boat made of old bricks and mortar 

That’s kept us afloat as we sail through the years? 

Or is this the light that shines from the shoreline? 

The port where we know we can rest? 

Or is it just the first house on the left? 

The garden tells most of the tales 

With fragments of china, old horseshoes and nails 

Flower seeds planted by hands gone before 

Asleep through the winter, then blooming once more 

And is this where they slept on the way to the jail? 

Or the shop where the lady had sweeties for sale? 

Or is this just the nest that was emptied by war? 

Or the room where the next generation was born? 

Fading

Elder daughter shows up tomorrow. 

This is fabulous, of course, but I'm nowhere near ready, so seized the opportunity today to locate the box with the Christmas wrapping bags and stockings in it, which I stored under several boxes in a corner of our bedroom.  My rationale was that, instead of having to retrieve it from our storage locker, it would be more accessible.

I hadn't factored in the possibility of a fall, and the consequent pain and fatigue.  Oh, I'm getting better.  By centimetres.  I find that every time I tackle a project requiring actual energy, I'm reduced to a quivering mass in less time than it takes to accomplish the task.  This is a heckuva problem, considering Christmas is coming, and this requires finishing gift-shopping, wrapping said gifts, preparing Christmas tourtières, and cleaning the damn house.

It's still a shock when the fatigue wipes me out like a chalk drawing.  It's a bit like being pregnant again.  To what am I giving birth? (I have a nasty feeling it's a much older version of myself.)

Meanwhile, the Resident Fan Boy has noticed more people are asking him to speak up.  He didn't think much of it until younger daughter, who has the hearing of a fruit bat, and can hear what we say from her bedroom with the door closed and our television on - particularly when we're discussing her - also starting asking him to speak up.  His fellow cathedral volunteers opine that this is wide-spread, and a result of a combination of isolation and ZOOM meetings.

I guess that, along with everything else, our diaphragms are atrophying from not having to talk boisterously to one another out of doors.

No wonder I find the cyclists at the coffee shop so loud and obnoxious.

Pastels were good enough for Renoir...

 

Sounds good to me

 Look.  According to my FitBit, I've walked 21,000 paces today.  (Younger daughter had a song competition, among other things.)  I'm wiped, and running out of day.

The spring before last, I had the pleasure of hearing Lucy Wainwright Roche, a daughter of Louden Wainwright III and Suzzy Roche [of The Roches], in concert with her half-brother Rufus Wainwright.

Spotify sent me this gem, where LWR sings with another three-barrelled name, Mary Chapin Carpenter, another firm favourite of mine.

Have a listen.  I'm dragging myself off to bed, where I hope to lie comfortably in my own quiet line.

Moon chaser

I walked fifteen kilometres today. One of the Resident Fan Boy's cousins is in town, and since the RFB is at work, I was escorting her.

For that, and a number of reasons I don't wish to discuss, I was making my way home through the dark streets. As I reached the corner of Cook and Fort, I looked east and nearly keeled over.

An enormous peach-coloured moon was rising over the hill. Of course, all I had was my phone, but I snapped and snapped anyway, chasing it up the street. This is the best I could do, shading the glare of the street lamps with the telephone poles. The orb is still blurred, and not nearly as clear and certainly not as peachy as it was.

I'm exhausted. G'night.

Keeps me up at night

It's been one of those days. (Plleeease don't let it be one of those months...)

Time to jump into the refuge of music. When I think of the latter part of 2017, a couple of songs will probably bring it back quite clearly.

Here's one of them, by Fionn, who are twin sisters from White Rock, BC. They are, of course, very pretty, so the dilemma they describe is not quite what I experienced as a young, certainly-not-conventionally-attractive woman, but I can empathize all the same. Most women, if not all, have experienced fellas who can't quite grasp the concept that females are living, thinking, feeling beings.

Not that being one tonight is a particular comfort.

Power failure

I took this picture exactly eight years ago, on the way back from dropping off younger daughter at her elementary school. Younger daughter is no longer in Grade Five (thank heaven, that was the cusp of another used year). There is no snow on the ground; I didn't even need gloves today. The utility boxes are long gone.

But I'm whacked and stressed out. God give you good night.

Homesick and tired

It's been a gruelling weekend with something like fifteen hours' worth of family history conference, so I'm cheating with a video a Facebook pal posted.  This is aimed at visitors to Victoria, but I guess that's all I am now…..
The Checkerboard Guy was one of our favourite acts at the Buskers' Festival this summer, and the berries are definitely a part of my Victoria summer.  (The zip-lining, not so much.)

It's bleak, but it's not mid-winter

I missed my connections and ended up walking into younger daughter's school from Iris Station. In normal weather, this takes about 25 minutes. Today wasn't normal weather. Well, okay, it was normal for Ottawa in December. Now my knee hurts. And it's a full moon. Whiiiiiiiine.

My daughters are fans of Calvin and Hobbs. And Christmas. (Walking, not so much.) This is for them.

Playing for time by playing a video

Look, I've been writing up a post, but it's not finished and I'm wiped.  Here's a song I liked not long after younger daughter was born.  It may even have been in June.

"Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand" - Primitive Radio Gods

Music for self-respecting and wistful drag queens (but no spanish techno)

Last week's school crisis seems to have taken rather a lot out of me. I've been working on some better-thought-out ideas for posts (or maybe I'm deluding myself again; maybe they're really bad ideas...), but find myself lacking energy and courage. This morning, I decided to download some more music on to my iPod, using a wish list I keep for that purpose. I got myself about a dozen songs off iTunes, so I thought I'd share half a dozen with you. There's no unifying theme other than they each roughly represent a decade.

For the sixties, "Pata Pata" with the late great Miriam Makeba. My strongest memory of this song is of Folk Dancing Club in university. (Yes, I did. You can stop laughing now.) Several of the other girls already knew a set dance to this which involved swinging the knees and elbows out from their bodies. Maybe that was the original "Pata Pata". I wouldn't know.


For the seventies, another powerful lady, Mavis Staples with her dad Roebuck and sisters belting "Respect Yourself". This is a song that could be aimed at most arrogant young men, no matter what their colour:


Here's one of my favourites from the eighties. "If We Never Meet Again" has been covered by a number of singers, but here sung by the songwriter himself, Jules Shear with his group The Reckless Sleepers:


And this wistful number from the nineties, "Stockton Gala Days" sung by Natalie Merchant just before she parted company with 10,000 Maniacs:


The "aughts" are represented with this arresting video for "Sing Me Spanish Techno" by The New Pornographers, featuring well-known (in their field) drag queens Juanita More from San Francisco and Michael Venus from Vancouver. (Michael's the tall blond, if you hadn't figured that out already.)


Finally, "Weightless One" by Prince Edward Island group Two Hours' Traffic, a song that's been getting a bit of airplay this year, although the album it's from is two years old. The only video I can find of it is this rather shaky and talked-over club version.

That's it. I'm going to bed now...

While we're waiting for the spring....

Ice pellets today as I struggled up the hill to the library to return a book I hadn't finished about tectonic plates and Krakatoa because someone had put a hold on it. I'm periodical and writing something, but it's not finished and I'm tired, so here's a song I really like from The High Dials from Montreal:

As a matter of fact, some of my days at university were like that....

Oh, oh, oh. Tired. Too tired. This day has left too little of me and too much to do.

When a "UVic" in Catalonia (this is important, the speaker in the video says "Spain" but some Catalan posters took issue) did a widely-viewed "lip-dub", Sean Slavin, of my alma mater The University of Victoria in British Columbia, decided to see what could emerge, mainly because many viewers had apparently confused the two universities.

What follows is what he and about a thousand volunteers came up with last September. When I watch it, I'm nearly undone by an avalanche of memories, but I think someone who hasn't been a student here, taught here, met one's spouse here can still enjoy this on its own. (Hang on for the "Rick Roll"):

Wasp wars (continued?)

It's become a ritual. Every night, I put the backyard hose at this house-sit at full blast and stealthily climb the stairs to the deck. I aim the spray at the centre of the huge umbrella and soon, bedraggled wasps struggle from the top of the canopy where I wash them down and flood them over the balcony. Every morning, as the sun warms the transparent table on that same deck, a group of two to a dozen wasps cluster on one of the metal legs. I see others clinging to the underside of the umbrella. So, with the evening, I grasp the backyard hose and... eventually retreat to the house shivering in my wet blouse, wondering if I've finally destroyed the nest. Wherever it is. In the apex of the umbrella? In the tubing? In the (shudder) broad metal base? Still, I see the bedraggled wasps silhouetted against the amber clouds of sunset. (Amber? Isn't it supposed to rain tonight? Y'know: "Red sky at night; shepherds' delight"?)

Gawd, I'm tired...

House-sister

The thought came to me as I was gloomily gazing at my ruined toenails. The house we're sitting is quite far inland, out of reach of the sea breezes, so the temperature here is usually five degrees and sometimes as much as ten degrees warmer than downtown Victoria. The upper rooms are a good five degrees warmer than that, no matter how many fans I turn on.

So as the fiery ball finally made its way to the western horizon, it was finally cool enough on the back deck to escape the heat of the house. I was worn out by too little sleep, hiking around downtown Victoria laden with groceries and swim-gear, and the prospect of trying to prepare supper and water the yard on this thirty-seventh day without rain. (How big is this yard? Recently I was chatting to the Resident Fan Boy on the cordless phone while hiking out to the compost bin. We lost the freaking signal.)

I was having another long-distance chat with the Resident Fan Boy who is holding the fort back in Hades which has been plagued with thunder-storms and flooding. We could use some floods in BC where the sun has been reduced to a disc on several days from the smoke from forest fires on the mainland.

Clutching the cordless phone in my weary claw, I gave the RFB the latest update on the continuing struggle with the lady who owns this house. During my half-dozen house-sits over the past nine years, I've been the one to contact the home-owners: "So-and-so called; may I give her your number?", emails giving updates or requesting trouble-shooting instructions. This usually amounts to two or three contacts over the period of the house-sit; owners usually want to enjoy their trip and not worry about the house -- that's why I'm there, right? This year's house-sit hostess (I'll call her "HH", shall I?) seems to think the reason I'm there is so she can continue to run things from 823 kilometres (511 miles) away. It's gotten so my heart sinks when the phone rings and I see her number blinking on the screen.

This week, it's emails. Husband of House-sit Hostess (HHH if you like) came home from the sea, and opened their Outlook Express which meant all messages got downloaded to OE and she can't access them from her server's web site. HHH apparently got on the horn with the server and set up a default where all incoming messages will be copied to the web site. However, after he joined the air force (oh let's not go into that) and vamoosed to train in Ontario -- until Christmas -- she discovered that this doesn't apply to all those messages that arrived before HHH had that chat with the server.

So I get a series of phone calls and phone messages, each detailing how I had to get on a phone with a technician and "go through the process step-by-step because (HHH) did that and it didn't work." Fruitlessly, I try to explain to her that we used to have the same thing happen with our server and the trick is to forward those older emails. She sighs and says firmly: "NO. Trust me, we've been through this. He forwarded the emails and it didn't work."

So I phoned the server. Was put on hold for ten minutes, while they played the same ten-second phrase from Doctor Zhivago over and over again, punctuated with various automated phrases thanking me for my patience, advertising other services, and at one point, even asking me to press "One" if I wanted a scheduled call-back and "Two" if I wanted to stay on line. Eventually, I got a technician and gathered with some difficulty (his accent was a bit thick) that all emails prior to the set-up were now downloaded to the computer and it would be necessary to forward those email if she wanted to access them from the web site....

"NO," said HH, when I called her back. "He needs to walk you through this step by step. When (HHH) tried that, it didn't work..."
"Look," I pleaded. "Just let me try to forward them again. I think the problem may be that (HHH) couldn't send them all at once."
I hung up and grouped the 139 email according to date, making the date the subject line of each emailed group. When I checked the web site, they were all there, and I phoned back to tell her so.
"How did you think of that?" she stammered.
"Didn't I mention I'm a brilliant woman?" I reply wryly.

The whole damn summer is shaping up like this, directive phone-calls, cats who refuse to come in or out, long lists of things I'm suppose to do, or not touch, to say nothing of packing up and leaving every time Johnny comes marching home.

Where was I? Oh yes, contemplating how to get the strength up to give myself a pedicure before I cause nausea at younger daughter's next swim lesson, and updating the RFB. And no, the above saga wasn't it; that was just background. Now HH wants me to trawl through her June emails (she deletes nothing, by the way, not even the porn spam) to locate the owner/operators of obscure Mexican resort she's booked for Christmas. Doesn't remember their names.

That was when the thought hit me. Someone phoned and left a message last weekend wishing HH a happy birthday. Oh. My. Gawd. She's a Leo.

"That's it!" I gasped to the RFB in a moment of horrified revelation. "It's like house-sitting for my sister!" My sister the double Leo red-head. Resident Fan Boy understood immediately. He loves my sister, but shares my traumatic memories of both her weddings, and any number of other occasions where we've been crunched under the oppression of her A-type controlling perfectionism, all delivered with a sweet smile and appreciative words which RFB and I know to be a front for the deadly determination always there beneath the surface.

It's actually my sister's birthday today. Happy birthday, sis. God bless and keep you.....at a safe distance.

Oh, and it's raining today. I'm excused from watering the flower beds, shrubs and trees. If I focus on that and not on the long-range forecast, maybe I'll have a happy day too.

Lying low for Easter

Last Thursday, I had finished my weekly shift at the school library and was walking down to the supermarket. That is, I was forcing my feet, one in front of the other. I suddenly realized that I was exhausted. It had been a stressful week, what with the field trip, younger daughter's day-long visit to the other prospective school for next year, and my insistence on baking hot-cross buns for her class which I've done every year for the past nine Easters. So my own bloody fault, I guess. As I willed myself downhill, I was approached by two young Chinese women, who showed me some directions they'd taken down over the phone: "Manner Street, two blocks from Springfield, Maybell". I knew they were probably looking for Manor Street, but couldn't think of where that might be. Maybell? Desperately, I tried to think of the two cross streets nearest youngest daughter's school, but all I could remember was that they both began with "M". These are streets I cross four times each day. One of the girls patted me sympathetically on the arm, and we went our ways. I fished in my pocket for a raisin cookie that the librarian had given me, and by the time I reached the busy intersection at Beechwood, I hit the traffic signal button and exclaimed: "Maple! They're looking for Maple!" (The other street is Mariposa.) The two women were entering the store when I left, and I asked if they had found the address. They hadn't.

Anyway, that's why I've been lying low for the Easter weekend. The madness isn't likely to let up for months, and I'm desperately trying to dredge up some reserves. I've been gorging myself on David Tennant and Doctor Who, listening to radio interviews on the computer, and thanks to the resourcefulness of elder daughter, watching downloaded and highly illegal copies of Planet of the Dead and the accompanying Confidential. (Yes, Auntie Beeb, we'll be buying the DVD in due course, but we'll be keeping the full, unexpurgated Confidential thank you very much.)

It took several hours for elder daughter to download Planet of the Dead Saturday evening, so while we waited, we watched our copy of one of my very favourite Easter movies Jesus de Montréal (1989, written and directed by the marvelous Denys Arcand who appears briefly as a wry court judge), a parable of the story of Jesus told through a few days in the lives of some struggling actors in Montreal. The story is very clever and a sly commentary on the Québecois arts scene, although anyone involved in the arts in any city would probably recognize the stereotypes.

YouTube has one of my favourite scenes. I should warn you that the English swear words are there to give an approximation of the joual (Québecois street slang) used in one of the parodies the actors perform. In joual, like many languages of predominantly Catholic countries, to be really offensive, you don't go after bodily functions as we do in English, you go after religious allusions and family members. Here we see Robert LePage (now a high profile theatrical director whose works have appeared in London) doing his best Marlon Brando, and Rémy Girard (Québec's equivalent of Jim Broadbent, he's ubiquitous) spewing religious profanities. Most of the actors in this film are very familiar to audiences in Québec, but alas, next to unknown in the rest of Canada.



This Montreal Jesus succumbs to a concussion resulting from his cross being knocked over during a fracas between security guards and the audience, so the final scenes were extra harrowing for us this year.

If I rouse myself sufficiently, I'll watch my other favourite Easter film The Life of Brian, another movie that has outraged audiences, not because it goes after Jesus (because neither LOB nor JOM does), but because it takes a poke at organized religion.

Oh yes, and Easter Parade was on last night, while I listened to a pirated recording of the Planet of the Dead commentary (what gives, Auntie Beeb?). Younger daughter loved it.