Yet more first-world problems

From the beginning, I suspected that it was going to be a less-than-ideal and stressful summer.

I hate being right.

See, I had a four-week house-sit set up for my annual visit to Victoria, BC where I can visit Demeter daily, have plenty of elbow room, and pretend I don't live in Ottawa.

These are people for whom I've house-sat four previous times.  They have recently downsized and frankly, I was a little surprised to hear from them, as they have sworn that they have to give up their annual boat trip on the Salish Sea.  Still, I was thrilled when they suggested I house-sit, and booked my airline tickets so as to arrive early enough to get my key and marching orders, and to leave a few days after the house-sit ended, because Demeter prefers that I don't go rushing off.

One week before my departure, we had our weekly "Skype date" with Demeter, who said:  "I have bad news."

Turns out the wife of the couple had been sick for six weeks.  First I'd heard of this; first Demeter had heard of it as well -- she only picked up the news in passing at church. Apparently Ailing Wife had spent the time hoping she would improve; her doctor had no idea what the problem was, but it involved a host of unpleasant symptoms.  I'll spare you.

This put us in a bit of a bind.  I find more than a week under my mother's roof a bit suffocating (don't you ever tell her this), and to complicate things further, my cousin from California and her teenaged son were coming up for a rare-as-hen's-teeth four-day visit mid-month.  This would coincide with the Resident Fan Boy's and younger daughter's two-and-a-half weeks' stay in Victoria.  My mother has one spare room in her apartment and may sign up for the downstairs guest suite on a first-come-first-served basis, but it only provides sleeping accommodations for four people and that's only if they sleep two-a-bed.

Demeter hurried down to the guest suite and quickly signed in the required dates -- except someone had already signed up for one night.  We started discussing bed-and-breakfast (bloody expensive for more than a few nights), and a friend from church had offered us the use of her air mattress.  Ailing Wife was making noises about going away for short trips, and said their guest room was available to us at any time.  Trouble is, I hated the idea of getting under the feet of a sick Leo, especially in a downsized house.

There was nothing for it but to come out to Victoria and see what emerged.  I decided to be philosophical -- with fifteen summers of house-sits, it's a miracle that this hasn't happened more often. Besides, aside from the lack of elbow-room, the only real challenge would be five nights:  the already-booked night plus the four nights of the California cousins.

And things went well.  Ailing Wife tried a two-day boat trip, then a four-day boat trip, and found them invigorating, so they planned a five-day trip that covered the problematic nights.  We felt a bit transient, moving back and forth between Demeter's condo and the downsized house (which was charming, by the way), but we reminded ourselves that this was really a classic "first-world problem".

Speaking of first-world problems, the Californian cousins were a delight, in their dreamy, laid-back Golden-State fashion.  They drove Demeter only slightly batty by disappearing and giving no indication of when they'd be back, and puzzled us slightly by being worn out by walking, but insistent on their regimens of Tai Chi and swimming.  We took them on one of the Ghostly Walks, toured Butchart Gardens, finishing with a splendid tea, and wandered around the rocky rim of Beacon Hill Park.

The last activity took place on their final afternoon.  We returned after five pm, and discovered that somehow, they had failed to book the bus for their crossing to Vancouver -- from whence their cruise ship to Alaska was departing the very next day.  However, dreamy Californians seem to have rather more alert angels watching over them.  They managed to book a flight on one of the harbour-to-harbour water planes - I had researched those, in addition to the ferries -  and got charged only five dollars each for overweight baggage.

They even got a last-minute hotel room.

("I have bad news," said Demeter.)

It seems that Demeter, in the confusion of the all the comings and goings, had crossed out a week's worth of guest-suite reservations, but didn't discover this until an upstairs neighbour came to claim the guest-suite keys for the cousins' final night in Victoria -- fortunately there had been no one wanting the suite earlier in the week.

As the blessed cousins flew out - teenaged son thrilled by the experience of a float-plane trip; his mother less so - we set about the business of cleaning our house-sit, before scooting to an outdoor matinée performance of Twelfth Night.  We discovered on the way that we were short of money, so had to hike to a bank machine, then realized that younger daughter had left her bus pass behind.

Matinées for the Victoria Shakespeare Festival are a new idea and not particularly a good idea.  In the rush of the morning, both the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter had forgotten to apply sunscreen, and were decidedly sunburned, younger daughter for the very first time.  I was sunscreened, sun-hatted, long-sleeved, trousered -- rather heat-exhausted by the time we struggled back to the house-sit to call a taxi and transport our bags back to Demeter's condo, where she greeted us with:  "I have bad news."

The week she'd crossed off included our Saturday night as well, and the upstairs neighbour had claimed the guest suite for her own visitors, leaving the Resident Fan Boy and me with no bed for the night.

Demeter was close to tears as the RFB and I started searching for a hotel.

"How could I have been so stupid?" she repeated.  She'd phoned the friend with an air mattress, and left a message on her voice mail.

"She'll be away for the weekend," she said dispiritedly.

"Let's see if that's really the case,"  I suggested, in the brightest tone I could manage between heat exhaustion and the realization that the angels watching over our California cousins were evidently busy trailing them to Alaska.  All hotels booked solid.

At this point, the phone rang.  Air Mattress Friend was coming to our rescue.

We took her to dinner.

The air mattress was a thing of wonder, with an plug-in pump to inflate it.  It was hell to climb into and out of.

Yet another first-world problem.

Cafe society

The barista (baristo?  he's a fella) is blending the steamed milk into my morning mocha.  It's like a Japanese tea ceremony, only with coffee.

"Is it extra tough working after a Saturday night?"  I ask, breaking the holy silence, which is not at all silent with the hiss of the milk-steamer.

"Well, I'm not up to much interesting on a Saturday night, so not really."

It turns out he studying two courses in economics, one micro and one macro - the economics, not the courses.

"Yes!" he smiles.  "Really exciting stuff."

"I used to love summer courses,"  I tell him.  "The students were always that more motivated, so I learned more."

"Well, these are online."

Of course they are.  This is the twenty-first century.

We affably discuss the pluses and minuses of online study.  He's definitely in favour of it.  For one thing, he explains, you can read the lectures in a fraction of the time that it would take the professor to say them.

"How economic!"  I laugh, and I saunter out into the Sunday sunshine with my decorated mocha.

Ambushed by art

I only got to house-sit in Oak Bay for one week this year, but still, I don't know how I managed to miss these two, just outside of Ivy's Books on Oak Bay Avenue.  There's different temporary art in the municipality every summer, and if you're not alert -- and I guess I wasn't -- you'll miss it.

Book buddies

At Russell Books, I'm searching for a book that Demeter has long desired, the third part in an out-of-print trilogy about Elizabeth I.

A fellow is camped out by the British History shelf, so we have to pick our way around him -- good-naturedly, of course, as he is clearly a kindred spirit, just by being here.

"Such a wonderful shop," he glows up at me, as I step over him gingerly.


"Amazing!" I agree.  "What a selection, and the books are in great shape!"  (Russell's, if you haven't heard of it, claims to be the largest shop for rare, used, and out-of-print books in Canada, and the books are usually in pristine condition.  Elder daughter managed to acquire a large fraction of the works required for the Foundation Year Programme in her first year at the University of King's College in Halifax -- and that was one hell of a list.)

"I shouldn't be allowed in here with a credit card."

"There should be a buddy system for Russell's, like in AA."

This amuses him mightily.  "That's right! 'Just put your money in your pocket; I'll come get you...'"

He proudly tells us that the volume he's holding has more than twenty references to an ancestor of his, who had a position in the Elizabethan/Jacobean courts, and who miraculously survived, even after getting mixed up with Walter Raleigh.

A fellow family researcher, I think to myself as I head to the cashier to get help in my own quest.  I might have known.  Russell's must be crawling with them.

Demeter's book, as it turns out, is in the basement with the "vintage" books.

Kitty tonic

In a summer of house-sits gone patchy -- and sometimes just gone -- here's a feline oasis.

Oooh, let me have it

Oh, crud.  I believe I've finally found my tribe….


(In case you don't get the reference -- many don't --  this is the original "red dress" version.  I was more familiar with the "white dress" version.)

Dis-maize

I'm sitting next to Demeter at the bus stop.  Rather to my despair, she's planning dinner, after a hearty lunch.

"And we can get…" She stops, bows her head in frustration.
"Can you describe it?"
"We used to call it meeli in Kenya."

My Swahili is limited.
"Honey?"
"You hold it and you bite off bits of it…"
"Corn?"
"I hate this!  I hate losing words!"

Later, I check Google Translate, which tells me that the Kiswahili word for corn is mahindi.  I check for different types of corn, different African languages dialects (there are at least five in Kenya), different spellings. Meeli doesn't come up.

Demeter is adamant.  She and her siblings called corn meeli.*

We get the corn, but it's too early and it's bitter.

(*Update:  Friend of the Right Hand tells me it's mealie, from the Afrikaans word mielie, so my mum and her family somehow got the word from South Africa, despite living in Kenya.)

Doo-bop

It's no secret that I love Postmodern Jukebox.  Here's their amazing doo-wap version….
…. of a song that looked and sounded like the seventies - at least in my opinion - when it first came out in the nineties.

Iron lady

It seems that every time I come out to Victoria for my summer visit to Demeter, I am confronted by another ghost in the obituaries.

They called Margaret Thatcher "The Iron Lady".  They never met Mrs Dupree.

She was our iron-willed, iron-tongued, and iron-lunged PE teacher. She also taught Social Studies (now there's irony), but I escaped getting her for "Soash", instead spending my English classes trying not to listen to her bellowing at the Grade Eights next door.  The other teachers, no doubt inured by years of this, ignored the enraged yells emanating through the wall.

Having Mrs Dupree for PE was terrifying enough, especially as I possessed no abilities in sports apart from, to her utter mystification, endurance running.  I rode my bike to school and played clarinet, resulting in increased lung capacity, I guess.

When I was in Grade Nine, she came up with the idea of rotating volley-ball skill exams.  The "spiking" test took place on the gymnasium stage.  Cowed, and with little hope of passing, I blindly spiked the volleyball straight up -- and it descended with the entire metal-encased florescent ceiling lamp, missing Mrs Dupree and me by inches.

As the glass tubes shattered and scattered, the stage was plunged into semi-darkness.

That wasn't the scary part.

Frozen in horror, I gazed as Mrs Dupree shook like a volcano about to explode.  She finally let forth a howl of laughter.

"You should see your face!"  she roared.

Whew.

Persephone unleashed - again

About three days before I set off for my annual retreat/flight/refuge in Victoria, BC, I "upgraded" my cell phone.  I'm not exactly a seasoned mobile phone user, but I've had my Android for three-and-a-half years, which, I gather, is the equivalent of fifteen years in washer-and-dryer years.  Our washer and dryer recently died within days of each other, like a devoted elderly married couple.

My old phone was waiting up to three minutes to send my texts -- a problem in an actual emergency.  It was also refusing to let me access the photos I'd taken with it. Elder daughter had a technical explanation for this; she informed me the phone was "evil".  This was odd, as she had helped me acquire it.

Nevertheless, I enlisted her help once more, and on a Sunday afternoon, we arrived at the outlet.  Elder daughter immediately started speaking for me, a bit to the bewilderment of the representative, who figured out that I was an English speaker in my right mind -- possibly due to my sly and dry asides.

Fortunately, she was a clever and courteous woman, who explained everything carefully.  In turn, we attempted to sell her on JazzFest and ChamberFest, but she lives in Barrhaven.  Bit of local humour there.

I departed with an iPhone on my person, which meant I had three days to re-learn my mobile phone skills - such as they are - under elder daughter's tutelage.

She nearly gave up on me the moment we arrived home.

As I updated my contacts list, I sent texts to the immediate members of my family.

To younger daughter, who was in the house but nowhere in sight, I texted:
"I've just got a new phone!"
The reply was immediate.  I could see the little typing icon.
Cool, who is this?
Nonplussed, I responded:  "It's Mum."
Can't be.  My mother's here.

Now, to be fair to me, I've had several surreal texting encounters with younger daughter, so I typed:
"Where are you?"
In the kitchen.

With dawning horror, I called to elder daughter in the living room:  "Uh, is your sister in the kitchen?"
"Why do you want to know?" she said wearily.  A number of unfortunate events over the years have severely damaged her faith in my ability to master social media.

I ended up apologizing to the remarkably patient person whose number I'd erroneously entered into my contacts.  No worries, said he or she laconically.  I kind of guessed.

Elder daughter's first and equally laconic text to my new phone:  Hiding. For obvious reasons.