Mmm pierogies

There’s no place
like this place
near this place
so this must be THE place

So says a sign on the famous local pierogie restaurant, where I ate a few nights ago with some friends. It’s basically an old house with a complicated floor plan that looks like it was decorated by someone’s grandma… which reminds me of a birthday party I had a few years ago at a friend’s grandmother’s house – the friend was living there while her grandmother was in hospital or something. Another friend, upon surveying the décor, said, “It feels like someone’s grandma lives here”. Well, it just so happens…

I'd write more, but I have to go away for the long weekend. Wah!

Cloud gazing

Yesterday, I was feeling really tired and lazy so I went for a bike ride to a nearby park. It was a hot, hazy, windy day. I was thirsty when I got there, so I bought a can of pop. I don't drink pop much, so it's always kind of exciting when I do have it. I laid down on the grass and looked up. There was only one kite. It was kind of an unremarkable kite, with no tail or shimmery bits or anything - it just looked like an oversized monarch butterfly - but it was doing a great job of flying. There was a sky-full of sunbeams shining down through the clouds, a spectacle which an old boyfriend and I used to call God. But not god.

As I lay there, I tried to recall in detail the steps I would take on an opening shift at the diner where I used to work. I imagined piercing the tape on a box of hashbrowns with a fork and tearing it off, stacking the bags of potatoes upright inside the box and slicing the tops off them with a serrated-edged knife as the grill heated up. A straight-edged knife slipped easily, especially if it was really sharp, so I was more likely to cut myself, which I often did anyway. I pictured opening the butter packet starting at each end and then unfolding the top, cutting the butter into four chunks which I'd then smear on the grill. Unfolding the butter packet in any other order meant that the paper would probably tear, or at least not come off as easily, which was annoying. I saw myself pouring each bag of potatoes in a line on the grill, careful to keep any of the butter from slipping into the trough, evening out the piles of little potato cubes and dousing them in pepper and seasoning salt. It was always easier to shake out the pepper because it was coarse. Then the sausages, and the bacon... I really had to concentrate hard to remember everything, not only because I've forgotten but also because it's so hard to prevent your mind from wandering if you're lying on the grass not doing anything in particular.

I was more tired when I came home due to all that thinking, but I managed to stay up and watch Little Children, which I thought was a really good movie.

(The photo is not of yesterday's sky but just a random prairie photo taken when I still had that camera.)

Tonne o' dirt

For the past week or so, there has been a big pile of dirt in the parking lot/alley/rink behind our building. I don't know where it came from, but from the moment it arrived there have been kids playing on it. They run up it and run down. They charge at it on a bike and make it half way up and then roll back down. They push one another up and somersault down. They make dirt angels in it. They throw one another off it and laugh. Man. You want to give kids something to do, put a big pile of dirt in their neighbourhood.

When I was here I took a boat from one part of the country to another and when we'd approach a village, all the kids would come out to wave at the boat, then they'd jump into the river and play in the waves from the boat's wake, killing themselves laughing. Then they'd jump off the bridges.

I love how kids will turn the most mundane thing into a source of serious fun. It just wouldn't occur to me to try to get enjoyment out of a pile of dirt. Well, it's gone now, I see, and so are the kids, but they've probably found a sinkhole somewhere.

...has added you as a friend...

This morning, I woke up at 4 am. It took me until 5:15 to figure out that in fact I was not falling back asleep, so I got up to read. First, I thought, I'll quickly check my facebook account. Five hours later, having combed through all my friends' profiles and scanned the jillions of networks searching for anyone who popped into my head, I'm debating if I should post a few pictures. Fucking facebook.

I (and probably everyone else) have been living in this unreal world for months now where I feel like I've reunited with people I haven't seen or thought about in years. After only exchanging shallow greetings or a poke, or even just seeing their names in print, I'm now thinking (and dreaming) about these people regularly. All I have to go on, though, is this little glimpse of who each person is now, and I try to fit this into my old memories, which doesn't always work. It's so strange. It's not at all the same as bumping into someone from junior high at the grocery store, but I can't decide if it's better or worse. Or just different. It's amazing how people get into your brain and stick around after so little interaction. Maybe I just have nothing better to think about right now.

Around the house

Do you see this? How it buckles in like this, due to excessive sock-stuffage? I hate this. It's my view from bed. Horrifying.










This, I love. It's a wiener dog. In a stripey sweater. Holding a pointer. On the cover of a computer programming book.










Slipper transformation!
On








Off








Em, a dab hand at knitting, made me these for my last birthday. B says they look like little duck feet. The Apple to my Pear, the other knitter in my life (apart from Mom, superknitter), made me a beautiful blue shawl with goldie bits and three different buttons, each amazing, but I have no photo of that. I do have a photo of Lumpy, though, which she made for me a few birthdays ago:

Isn't he lovely?

Here comes that sinking feeling

Today, I bought a new bag. It is blue-grey vinyl with a couple of trees on it and a tie for a strap. It was made by a local clothing shop owner who (obviously) makes new from old. She has some really great stuff in her store. Sometimes, I wander in their just for inspiration and ideas, only to return home and forget all about them. I need to write these things down.

This shop is in the cool part of One Great City! which has one of my favourite intersections ever, consisting of a Mediterranean restaurant on one corner, a cafe on another, the token drug-dealer-at-the-bus-stop vicinity opposite that, and a proper public seating area offering great people-watching opportunities next to the liquor store on the fourth corner. I love sitting there, even though it's just a bunch of concrete. I didn't sit there today, though. It was a bit too grey and blustery for that. Luckily, though, I stood at the intersection long enough to witness the common ritual where someone oblivious to the "No Left Turn M-F 15:30-18:00" sign decides to try to turn left, pissing off everyone behind. Horns are honking, people are shouting, but traffic in that lane is going no place. Then, right before the light turns red, Oblivious Driver realises what's going on and bolts straight ahead. Unfortunately, it's too late for the others, who have to wait another round. I remember from first year Psych class, the "weeder" class (and weeded out I was), that people feel much more disappointed at an opportunity that was just barely missed compared with one that was missed by a long-shot. I'm sure those drivers in the back felt that way today.

What the hell does this have to do with a new bag? I digress. No I don't - I just have to go out and look for things and write about them and make up those connections as I go along. Okay, I have made my connection and here it is: the drivers who missed that light were not so unlucky after all as they were the ones who got the opportunity to see my spiffy new bag as it walked past them. That should make up for the sinking feeling of having just missed a green light that was so close they could have kissed it.

Deny, deny!

Every day, I read about climate change. The part I find the most interesting is The Denial Industry (cue dramatic music), a well-oiled network capitalising on people's tendencies to believe what we like and to generally not be bothered. It reminds me of a magic show: if we really wanted to find out how to saw a woman in half without hurting her, we'd know how it was done. If we tried to find out whether a statement made by Tim Ball was grounded in fact or not, we'd learn the truth. Happily for the magician and Dr Ball, we people like a bit of illusion and don't necessarily follow up on footnotes.

Anyway, this Denial Industry really makes me think of when I worked at a certain science centre. As all non-profits, it was ailing in the funds department, so decided to sell its soul, er, name, to a certain telecommunications corporation. I'm opposed to selling out, etc., but the bit that really got me was that the whole organisation now had to completely erase all indicators of its previous identity. That meant that not only were we forbidden to ever wear a vest with the sweet, kind-of-goofy and therefore charming-because-it-wasn't-at-all-slick logo on it again, but all such paraphernalia had to be destroyed, never to be seen or spoken of again. So we all got to work dismantling Old Identity and began building up New Identity as though the new one was the only way it had ever been. This was The Denial Machine in action before my very eyes!

Perhaps you work in an industry where this kind of thing goes on all the time, but to me, this was absolutely astounding (as Dad would say).

Erasing history?

Eradicating collective memory?

Making like something had never existed?

Had I walked into 1984?

Well, no, because guess what? Thanks to the trusty interweb, The Denial Industry failed, at least in this instance, and I didn't even have to try very hard.

Cookie monster

The corner store near our place sells cookies that have been taken out of the packet and re-packed into smaller portions in little plastic bags. I'm pretty sure the Canadian Food Inspection Agency would have a problem with this. B has a weakness for chips, so to assuage his guilt, he often returns from the store with one of these baggies for me, because I am a cookie fiend. I have tried to stress that he doesn't have to do this, because I really don't need the equivalent in cookies to his chips. But they just keep coming. Tonight, it is a bag of Oreos. They look like the generic Oreo, but for some reason, these ones taste minty. Aren't the mint ones green in the middle? What the hell is going on? If I only had the original bag! Since starting this post, I have eaten at least three. The sweetness is killing my teeth, but I can't stop. Thank god it is just a little bag... only five more to go.

Close up

I used to have a subscription to Owl magazine. This was a while ago. One of my favourite parts was the close-up picture where you had to guess what you were looking at.

Can you guess what this is?
Let's make it a multiple choice question. Is it
a) a Chinese healthy ball?
b) a road on a snowy day?
c) a pair of pants I wore back when I had said subscription?
d) the mighty Mississippi?

Yes, it's d, flowing under a pedestrian bridge which served as the look-out to the collapsed I-35, which you couldn't see too well. You could, however, see lots of pedestrians, a pretty, hazy skyline and this interesting view of sludge down below.

The plaza

Minneapolis has many lovely plazas, and even though I thought about the writing of this very post as I wandered through them last weekend, I neglected to take more than one plaza photo.

Voilà:
It's not even a very good one - there aren't even any people in it. Oh well.

Plazas make me think of William Whyte's highly enjoyable film and book on the opportunities for social interaction presented by bits of cities which are well-designed. Plazas are featured. Apparently, lots of interesting things can happen in plazas, especially at lunchtime. Unfortunately for the sake of this post being interesting, nothing happened to me in any plaza in Minneapolis. They were really lovely, though.

"Plaza" was one of those words which Em and I thought was really hilarious. For a while, we even thought we had made it up. Who would really take a word like "plaza" seriously, anyway?

Re-use

I am reading a book of for the old thesis called "Car Cultures" and one of the chapters is about how cars are used to their very last breath in Ghana. According to the authors, Ghanaian people understand well how cars work and are quite apt at fixing their own cars themselves, using whatever might be around to repair and replace lost parts, and making use of their own bodies in the absence of tools, like tasting a battery to see if it is dead.

While it is poverty which underlies this, I really do admire it when people try to get the absolute most out of a thing - it's like an opportunity to be creative while keeping waste to a minimum. I've revived an old interest in sewing for this reason. The act of sewing itself kind of irritates me, which is why I gave it up in the first place, but turning an old shirt into a yoga mat bag gives me a feeling that turns the whole experience into enjoyment.

The camera which I borrowed had to be returned this week, otherwise I'd show you a photo which I would have taken of said bag. It's pretty ugly, but it used to be a t-shirt, so whatever!

Purple reign

I love Prince. He is fab. (I also love You Tube, because it means I can watch his old videos and see him play on television without having to endure any of the Superbowl.) He is a brilliant songwriter, guitarist and mover-and-shaker. Who else but Prince looks fantastic in a salmon-coloured jacket? Or in orange and blue together? Or lace pants? As if he had no influence on this fine lady.

So I was pretty damned excited to go here:

I stood outside in the afternoon and had my picture taken under the Jane's Addiction star. B and I planned to go later that night, but, horror of horrors, we got drunk elsewhere and didn't quite make it back.

Next time!

Dot city, dot dot city

Lolabola, One Great City! has a Dots! I passed it a couple of weeks ago. The huge “Closing Down Blowout Sale!” signs pasted in the windows were what caught my eye (there are in fact no visible dots at this location). I knew I had to return before long, and yesterday, having picked up my composting tin from neighbouring big box store nightmare, I had my chance. I wandered in with the goal of finding something to help me look a little less ratty, and emerged 45 minutes later with three nice tops and one pair of pants for $38. And only one item made in China. Wa-hoo! Good old Dots. Good-bye.

I’m not a big clothes shopper. I find the whole experience a bit depressing. Nothing ever fits, especially not pants. Shirts feel like they’re on the verge of falling apart. Almost everything is made a million miles away under god-knows-what conditions, and to try to shop locally is truly limiting, here in One Great City! at least. So, an experience such as I had yesterday is kind of refreshing, but part of me still feels uncomfortable. The volume of clothes available in the average ladies’ clothing store is completely overwhelming, and Dots was no different. Where the hell do all these things end up? Am I adding to the demand that more of this crap be churned out by buying some of it? It just feels like a big waste.