Politics, Religion, Sex

So you know how you're not really supposed to talk about politics in polite conversation?

Yeah, living in DC for a couple of years made me forget about that, too. In college most of my friends were interested in politics and activism and that sort of thing, and moving to the Washington metro region didn't exactly help me kick the habit. Most of DC's economy rests on the government, so even if you don't work directly for the gov, you're most likely working for an association or a group that lobbies or you work in a non-profit that is trying to squeeze grants or whatever.

So when I came up here, I did some looking around and some research on the Canadian government and the kinds of social issues Canadians are interested in. I'd taken a sociolinguistics class a few semesters ago with a prof who'd taught here at Macgill for a while--the same one who gave me the tip about the pretzels also gave us an overview of the kinds of identity politics that are going on in Quebec and Canada as a whole.

But nobody wants to talk about it. Canadian citizens--both anglos and francophones--either jump at talking shit in a completely unproductive way about the other side, or they get uncomfortable and change the subject. I personally am interested in what's going on with the Quebecois identity and how that's tied into the French language and Canadian politics, but nobody's talking.

I decided to stop trying the other day; Ben had his yearly "don't harass people" workshop at his job and apparently talking to someone about Quebec sovereignty is on the same NO list as sexual harassment and threatening people. So rather than harass people about politics, I'll stop. It's just frustrating when I take a "who should you vote for" quiz online and that is where I find out that Canada has a Senate that might get dissolved.

I am apparently suited to the Bloc Quebecois, even though I answered every Quebec-related question with "I don't know."

Passers-by, not passer-bys (& Stevie Wonder)

Our street sees a reasonable amount of through-traffic considering that it runs for only about 3 blocks.


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Avenue Melville runs between Rue Sainte-Catherine O and Rue Sherbrooke O (the O stands for "ouest"), which are two major east-west (est-oueste?) streets in Montreal. Several of the local universities are located along Sherbrooke
and Sainte-Catherine runs parallel to it, and has a lot of entrances into the underground city when you get downtown. When I walked to meet Ben at work the other day, I went straight down Sainte-Catherine for maybe 40 minutes and I was there.

We sit on the eastern side of Westmount Park, which means that if someone wants to cut between Sherbrooke and Sainte-Catherine, Melville is either the last street before the park or the first street after the park. This means that a lot of people use my street to cut through, and they drive down it at a million kilometers per hour despite 2 or 3 speed humps (I wish I knew the word for that in French).

So, for whatever reason, this results in a lot of running-of-red-lights and squealing-of-tires. Maybe the idea of having to wait for several blocks to cross from Sherbrooke to Sainte-Catherine is enough to test the patience of a Sainte and people just lose control. Most people who cruise through, however, obey the traffic laws. Since we're right on the corner, we can see the traffic light through our window, resulting in strange red and green reflections. Luckily we are a bit above ground-level, so occupants of cars can't see us and we can't see them when we are sitting in our living room.

What does filter up, however, is noise. Our old bedroom window faced out onto Route 50, so we got a reasonable amount of road noise in Arlington. It was mostly white noise, though, and we often used it to tell what the weather would be before we got out of bed--wet roads sound different than dry ones. Since we're right next to a school, sometimes louder school buses come by, but I don't find that to be particularly distracting.

What IS distracting is the music. People cruise by my apartment blasting their jams all the time, and the angle must be such that the sound waves go right into our windows.

What really gets to me about the music, though, is the fact that I can't recognize most of those songs. I've always been relatively skilled in playing name-that-tune, but as time has progressed I've paid less and less attention to popular music and mainstream hip-hop. It makes me feel old and out-of-touch, which I am--in just a few more years, we will buy a house that will have a lawn that I will yell at kids to stay off of, and I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway, the whole point to this long story was simply to tell you that I finally heard a car blasting a song I knew, and it was Stevie Wonder's "Cherie Amour."



See, it's kind of funny because the title is in French. And it's a song about someone never noticing you. And who the hell blasts, "Cherie Amour?"

Stevie Wonder songs I would not blast:
"That's What Friends Are For"
"I Believe"

Songs I initially put on the above list and then removed:
"I Just Called to Say I Love You""

I am embarrassed to say that I remembered this as a Stevie Wonder song:

Mystery screws

Ben and I had an odd moment a few weeks ago when we went to the Home Depot to pick up screws for our curtain hardware.

Almost every single screw in the store had a square hole in it. We looked around and found a few Philips head screws, but in very limited numbers that meant we couldn't get what we needed.

I thought, "What the heck?"

Had some revolution in screws been implemented since I'd last been in a Home Depot (probably only a few months ago)? Had I just not noticed this seismic shift in the screw world? I consider myself a relatively crafty lady; although I'm generally not building things, tools and such are at least on the periphery of my consciousness. And I mean, contractors shop at Home Depot too--could the entire construction industry have picked up and changed when I wasn't looking? It's hard to see on this page, but most of the screws appear to be the ones with the square holes.

We asked the man about the Philips head screws we wanted, and he said, "oh, well, why don't you want these square head ones?"

"Well," I said, "I've never even seen this type of screw before. We don't have a screwdriver that will work on it."

"Really?" he said, "These screws are a lot better than Philips head. You just put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off!"

So B and I decided to give these screws a try, since our options beyond them were extremely limited, and because it gave me an excuse to buy a pink screwdriver, which is fly.

The man was right--you put the screw on the screwdriver and it doesn't fall off, meaning that you don't need to use two hands (one to hold the screwdriver and one to hold the screw). I have the sneaking suspicion that these screws might be better than what I'm used to, although I don't know how they stand up against stripping and that sort of thing.

It turns out that these are called "Robertson" screws, and they're mainly used in Canada. Turns out this guy Robertson invented a screw so awesome that his competitors did some underhanded stuff that almost made him lose his patent. When Henry Ford came along and wanted to license the screws to use on his Ford assembly line, the suspicious Robertson declined and Ford went with Philips head screws instead.

I suppose he's lucky that Thomas Edison didn't find out and steal his idea.

So apparently Canada has been holding out on a better screw head.

The city I live in

I haven't ever really lived in a new city since my family moved to Richmond when I was fifteen, and then I wasn't really able to take advantage of the full depth of the city as I was often too young for things or later, didn't have a car.

DC was not entirely new--while I only found out that Arlington was more than a cemetery when I met a friend from there my freshman year of college, my grandparents had always lived in Silver Spring (Exit 33B off of the Beltway until they changed the way the exit was set up). Visits to DC with my parents when I was young mainly impressed upon me the importance of telling the driver what lane to be in to avoid doing something crazy like getting off on the 270 spur. I have nice memories of making a day at the museums with my mother, having lunch at some of the Smithsonian cafeterias, and gawking at the mangy mammoth in the Natural History Museum.

DC has certain things that it believes about itself. Maryland and Virginia drivers both believe that the other state has the worst drivers in the country. On the Metro, you stand right and walk left, and get out of the way of people getting off the train and THEN get on; if you do not do this you are an immoral person.

So as the arrogant interloper, I had to laugh when I got here and was informed of a few things:

1) It gets really hot here during the summer. (Some times it gets up to 79F!!)
2) Traffic is REALLY bad. (Heh)

Some additional things I noticed, which mostly have to do with driving:

1) Everyone LOVES to honk at each other here. You hesitate at the line, you'll get honked. You turn too slow, you get honked. You don't run a stale yellow, you get honked.

My favorite was the time a dude came blazing around our corner and considerately honked to tell pedestrians NOT to cross because he sure as heck wasn't going to stop.

2) I have seen so many people just pop their car into reverse and cruise back an entire block or two to take a missed turn or nab a parking space. It is disconcerting when cars whiz by in the wrong direction. When I am walking it makes me wonder if it is me who is doing something wrong that has somehow upset the fabric of the universe for a second.

3) Nobody waits for train occupants to get off a Metro train before trying to get on. This, to me, amounts to the total breakdown of society.

So all in all, I don't think the driving here is nearly as bad as it was in DC, but it's a strange blend of bad-in-a-different-way that I wasn't expecting. I suppose these aren't things that people think to warn you of if they're normal habits...I wonder what tips I'd give people about DC now that I'm gone from there and have some other-city perspective.

Still living in another country

KFC is called PFK.

Where the posts at?

I sent this email to a few friends a couple of days ago. It basically sums up what I've been concentrating on for the last couple of weeks.

Dear Friends of Miss P:

Penelope hasn't been doing well for a while now, and her ultrasound yesterday turned up several masses and nodules in her liver, small intestine, pancreas, and lymph node. She is a very sick pup, and while we're still waiting on results from some cells they aspirated, it looks pretty certain that it's bad, and probably cancer.

She's lost a lot of weight and doesn't have much energy, but she's still as happy and waggy as ever; she just takes more naps and goes on shorter walks. She mostly seems tired and wants to lay around.

We don't have a real diagnosis or anything yet, but I think it's safe to say that there's not much we'll be able to do, and that her time with us will be limited.

Anyway, since you are Penelope's best friends in the whole wide world, I thought I'd let you know.

Love,

Conner

Today I am going to see a different vet to see if there's anything else that we'll be able to do for Penelope. I've been treating the situation like on any morning I could wake up and she'd have passed in her sleep, but she might have another couple of months if we change something. So I'll pay a little bit more for a second opinion and some peace of mind.

Somebody must hate these cans

Man, I totally had it worked out. I took this picture before I actually cut open the box and looked inside, but the plan was to post this on the blog to point out how silly it was that we have enough spices to fill up this box. But in a smug foodie sort of way, where I know that other people who are interested in spices would look at my enormous box and say, "My goodness, If Only I Had That Many Spices!" And I would chortle.

I am sharing this less-than-flattering look into my inner monologue (although I would be surprised if anyone I know has an inner monologue that casts them in a favorable light and if so, what a bland person!) because, you will be glad to know, I got SMOTE. I was HOISTED on my own PETARD.

I've always loved that phrase, because while it mostly means "to be blown up by your own bomb," the word "petard" also has links to a Latin word that was the verb for "to fart." So being hoisted on your own petard is kind of like being made to smell your own fart.

I digress.

The real point of this story is that the box marked "Spices" was actually full of cans, each individually wrapped in packing paper. The box was deep for someone of my stature, so I found myself reaching down, grabbing a 1/2 lb. lump of paper & can, unwrapping it, and putting yet another can of black beans in the cabinet. It took me about an hour to unpack this box. It was awful. So that is what I get.

Ben and I spent some time last night measuring the rooms and our furniture so we could make a little map of the rooms to figure out where the best place to put things would be. This approach is pretty painfully non-Information Age, but I've never found a piece of software that's been able to supplant graph paper and a measuring tape.

We've now moved the couch and entertainment center (or as B likes to call it, the "edutainment center") into the smaller of the two rooms and hooked up the Xbox, so now I can play Stacking, which is much better than actually having to stack more cans.

Underground Adventures

On the 26th, we went to the Blanche Nuit festival, which is an annual arts festival that happens here in town. We wisely chose to attend Art Souterrain, which took place entirely in the Underground City.

You can go and read about the Underground City at the above link, but essentially it's a series of underground malls and metro stops connected by tunnels that is located in the downtown area. When Ben takes the Metro into work every morning, he gets off at the McGill metro station and can walk to his work at Place Ville Marie without going above ground. He can also walk to say, Eaton Center, which has a huge food court (including a place to get bahn mi, joy of joys!)

The Underground City generally closes up in the evenings, so it was kind of a special treat to go there around midnight and wander around looking at art. We saw some pieces that we liked--the one in this photo is actually painted on a series of clear acrylic panels that are suspended at the edges, giving it a 3d effect.



This is a moebius strip made out of photographs of the Place Ville Marie area, right near where Ben works.

This is the artist dressed up as a clown, doing portraits of people as clowns (the subject of this one was particularly thrilled to receive a hobo clown portrait of himself), in front of a loop of scary videos featuring clowns. One of the movies had Crispin Glover; I'm not sure what he was doing there.

We might have done more walking around outside--the festival had lots of routes you could walk through the various districts of the city to look at all of the art--but unsurprisingly, it was just too darn cold to do that. Either that or, as I suspect might be the case, I wasn't nearly as drunk as anyone who thought it was a good idea.

Unpackings

The process of unpacking has begun. In terms of square footage, I don’t know if this place is larger or smaller than our last apartment, but the bedroom is significantly smaller, which is just fine with me.

Having a bunch of people come and pack your stuff up initially seems like a good idea, but one downside is a lot of the tossing-out that generally comes with a move didn’t happen this time, since we weren’t supposed to pack anything ourselves. I’ve opened several boxes that were just full of…stuff that had obviously accumulated in a drawer in the kitchen or on a shelf and hadn’t been sorted through in quite some time.

A few weeks before we moved, I went through and got rid of a lot of books that I hadn’t touched in years, partially at least to prove to myself that I’m not a hoarder-in-training. More of that is going to have to happen on this end, too, because while we have a nice set of IKEA shelves that hold all sorts of things, we’re overall going to have less closet storage space and less cabinet space in the kitchen.

There are a lot of things about this apartment that simply aren’t as nice as the old apartment, but this place feels a lot more our speed than the wall-to-wall cinderblock joint in Arlington. The landlord appears to be pretty hands-off, with all of the benefits and disadvantages that come with that. I’m sure we can get away with doing almost anything to the apartment and it won’t be a thing, but we also have to deal with a refrigerator that’s crappier than previously anticipated. We may end up just picking up a better compact fridge on Craigslist for $200, but learning to live with less fridge space probably isn’t a bad idea anyway.

Yesterday, catastrophe struck: a bottle of fish sauce leaked onto the surrounding packing paper. If you've ever had Thai or Vietnamese food, you've probably eaten fish sauce--it's an important flavor; you might use it the same way you'd use chicken stock to improve the body and flavor of a dish. You also don't ever use very much of it at a time, because it's strong, salty, and smells like fishy death. My fear was that the dog would manage to eat up all of the contaminated paper, but luckily I was able to get it out of the box and double-bagged fast enough that she hadn't pieced it together. I tossed out a few spice containers that had been wrapped in the damp fish sauce paper, but our belongings mostly escaped unscathed.

Tonight I am meeting someone from Craigslist to buy a countertop dishwasher. I wasn’t able to get anything else move-related done today because the car had to be un-stuck from the ice while it was only -14, and the dog had to go to the vet because her tummy is still upset and she hasn’t gained back any of the weight she lost (about 8 pounds at this point). She’s also been drinking water like there’s no tomorrow, so the vet is running tests and we’ll see what is up. Hope it’s just stress and not something underlying that.

Once this place is set up and the dog is feeling better, then it is going to be a lovely home. I need to keep working on both of those for a while, and we’ll get there. I just wish I'd remembered to set aside the can opener, instead of allowing it to be packed in one of the twenty boxes labeled "kit. ware."

I am a grown-up (sort of)

Today I sat in the vet's office, waiting to pay a bill for a variety of tests and an x-ray of my dog's tummy. A woman walked by; she was wearing the gorgeous $200 snow boots I've been coveting for a month.

Every day I check online to see if they've gone on sale so I can justify their purchase, and I've worked hard to cook at home and eat out less so buying these fabulous boots wouldn't be a huge strain on our finances.

I paid my $300 and drove home, thinking about how all the expendable income had gone into figuring out what is wrong with Penelope, and how being responsible sucks.

So I stopped off at a high-end boutique I'd eyed a couple times on Rue Sherbrooke. Just my luck, they had the exact thing I was looking for, so I was irresponsible and splurged:

His name is Huey Hedgehog. He is a Hardboiled Softie, Penelope's favorite toy in the whole, wide world.


He squeaks. I bought him for no other reason than to make my dog happy. Take THAT, fiscal responsibility.