Sorry, Horatio

Leah, my 15-year-old, and I were out walking the dog this evening.

Leah: "So, Tiana and I were late for Math, we walked in after everyone was already there, but the teacher turned a blind eye and didn't say anything."

Me: "Do you know where that saying comes from? 'Turn a blind eye?'"

Leah: "I hope to God you're going to tell me it's from Mad Eye Moody."

Me: .......

Me: "Never mind, it's nowhere near that cool."

Sign #431 we watch way too much C.S.I. around here

While drying my hair yesterday, I managed to bang the back of my hand into the corner of the vanity in my bathroom. It hurt. I stood there, feeling it throb and watching the blood pool under the skin, a pale bluish dome with a small bloody scrape on top.

Me: "Leah, come and look. I've got a hematoma!"

Leah: "Cool! Subdural?"

Me: "Nope. Not a head injury, just a regular hematoma."

*comes into bathroom*

*looks at my hand*

*makes appraising face*

Leah: "Nice."

Me: "I know, right?"

Dispatches from the Arctic

Early January 2015:

It's cold. I mean really cold. Oh well, good excuse to hang out indoors and watch some Netflix. It's kinda nice to have to stay indoors and cocoon. Bring on the cold weather!! We love winter!!!!♥!!

Late February 2015:

It's a wonder we're all still sane. Or alive really. No one goes outside anymore unless they need to -- except the dog, and he has to pee fast or the stream will freeze up and stick him to the deck. We have to dress like this to go to work and school:

Even indoors we dress in more layers than a Winchester. We lurch around the house like Joey wearing all of Chandler's clothing. 

We are all pale and tired-eyed from too much TV. We have watched seven seasons of Friends, four seasons of The Walking Dead, and have nearly exhausted our Netflix show options. God help us, this is up next:

We are not only pale, we are dry and scaly and chapped. I am even tempted to take this guy up on his offer.

I gave up wearing makeup a couple of weeks ago. Walking into the frigid and never-ending polar winds getting from my car to my office turned my eyes into small crow's-footed Niagara Falls, and I'm damned if I'm going to let my tears wash off $5 worth of Yves Rocher every day.

Ottawa Catch-22: It's so cold the ice conditions on the Canal are perfect. It's so cold that anyone actually skating on the canal is quickly captured and placed on a 48-hour psych hold.

The days blur into each other. We get quite inordinately excited when the daily high goes up to -9, but our hopes are cruelly dashed when the windchill makes it feel like -22 anyway. We begin to wonder if this winter will ever end.

"Friends" post pictures of their tropical escape vacations online, or pictures of where they live their carefree snowless lives. 

We hates them. We hates them forever.

We descend into a scary hell of bad 1980s sit-coms and barely repressed profanity.  In fact, our feelings for winter can best be expressed like this. 

We no longer love winter. We wait patiently for Spring. Or death. Or the next season of House of Cards.

In which I live-tweet Saturday night at the pub. In sarcastic font.

I went out Saturday night. This is a relatively rare event for me, but I was invited to my friend Madeleine's birthday celebration, and it sounded like it was going to be fun.

And it was. Fun. So much fun. We were all crowded into a small pub in the Glebe, drinking beer on tap and dancing to Pleasure Craft, a retro 70s band. They were great. The crowd was really into it, and the vibe was infectious. I danced my ass off, ricocheting off the other people on the tiny dancefloor.

The crowd was.....interesting. I was unable to rein in my snarkiness. I blame the Church-Key Scotch Ale. I probably shouldn't be allowed access to Twitter when under the influence of alcohol and sarcasm.

'Peg' not 'Meg'. Stupid autocorrect.

After wishing Madeleine and the rest of the party goodnight at 1 a.m., I headed back to where I was parked, humming Steely Dan to myself as I walked the snowy sidewalks, lost in memories of high school.

I started my car and let it warm up while I brushed the newly fallen snow off the windshield.  Sam Smith's 'Stay With Me' on the radio vaulted me back into 2015, and I drove home, tired and happy.

Thanks, Madeleine. I had a blast.

Trying to educate her palate

The drive home tonight was awful.The Senators are playing at home and so the highway was crowded. It snowed on and off all day, so the roads were greasy and slippery, a horrible commute. I stopped at the grocery store for a few items and decided to pick up a bottle of wine at the wine shop there, instead of going to the liquor store for my usual Malbec-Shiraz.  I bought a bottle of merlot that I had never tried before.

At home, I poured myself a glass. It was very good. Dark red and tasting of cherries and berries. I offered Leah (my almost 15-year-old) a sip.

Me: Here, try this if you want. It's good. It tastes of cherries.

Leah takes a tiny sip, holds it in her mouth. Considers.

Me: Well, what do you think of the taste? It tastes like cherries, don't you think?

Leah: It tastes like peroxide on an open wound.

Me:.....

Me: But with an aftertaste of cherries, right?

Sorry about your date, hope you got lucky anyway

Well, I saved my pennies and went with a bunch of girlfriends to Le Nordik, a Nordic spa in Chelsea, Quebec, about an hour's drive from my place.

We like to do this once a year, in January or February, when the excitement of Christmas is over and spring still seems like it's a long, long way away. We rent the lodge for one night of wine and Indian food, and spend two days in the baths, going from sauna to steam room to hot pool, braving the subzero temperatures in our bathing suits, robes, and flip-flops.

I like it best at night. We try to stay late at the baths on the Friday night before heading back to the lodge.  My favourite place is the infinity pool, it's built high on a hill and there's a lovely view of Ottawa and Gatineau in the distance, plus it's one of the places where you are allowed to talk. (Most of the spa is zoned as no talking, so that it's soothing and serene.) So, after dinner and a few glasses of wine at our lodge, we headed back for a sauna and a swim/soak in the infinity pool.

It was cold. Very cold. Probably around -25C. And a brisk wind was not helping. Giggling like 12-year-old boys because a wet towel that was hung on a hook and froze into a long cylinder with a rounded end kept its shape when I picked up and waved it around, we flip-flopped up to the infinity pool.

The cold wind was whipping up billows of steam from the surface of the hot pool. We put our towels in the heated hut, and ran to the pool, kicking off our flip-flops and squealing down into the blessedly hot water. We had the pool almost to ourselves -- a few other women down one end, and a couple, their heads very close together above the water, were languidly kissing at the other end. It was undoubtedly a romantic setting. At least until we got there.

So I would like to offer the following apology:

Dear Le Nordik Lovers,

I am really, really sorry about your date.

Look, you did everything right. I can't think of a more romantic setting. The sky was a black velvet background lit by the brilliant half-full moon. Jupiter was pinned against it like a flawless diamond and a scattering of stars blazed above the necklace of lights that was Ottawa on the horizon. Smooth jazz was playing over hidden speakers, and you and your girlfriend were half hidden in the steam, pressed together, clad only in bathing suits.  Yep, A+ on foresight and planning. You were in like Flynn.

It wasn't your fault that a pack of middle-aged women, with a few glasses of wine under their belts, yelping from the cold and still cackling about the towel erection, splashed down into the middle of your seduction.

And the one woman, who had lagged behind a bit in the heated hut, so that she was separated from her pack mates and disoriented by the gauzy billows of steam, and ended up yelling "Marco" so that the others would answer "Polo" and everyone was reduced to helpless giggles? Well, she is really most sincerely sorry.

We tried to behave. Really we did.

I hope the rest of your evening went as planned.

Fondly,

Alison

Don't you wish you could have dinner with us?

Our conversation during dinner last night.

The actual speakers have been left unidentified so that you can appreciate that the weirdness is pretty evenly spread out amongst the three of us.

At Harvey's, a burger joint, having a quick bite before shopping for badly needed winter boots:

"'Hiving' is too a word."

"Well, OK, but not how you're using it. It doesn't mean 'having hives all over your body'. You can't say, 'Crap, I'm hiving today.'"

"Mum, is 'hiving' a word?"

"Yep, but it doesn't mean 'breaking out in hives', you can say something is hived off from something else, and it means 'separated out.'"

"Oh. I thought 'hiving' was a thing." [side-eyes her sister] "Like hearing something out of [breaks out the air quotes] 'the corner of your ear.'"

"'THE CORNER OF YOUR EAR' IS TOTALLY A THING!!! I looked it up on the Urban Dictionary. It's a thing. [calming down and becoming thoughtful] Though I did used to think toothpicks were called 'picksticks' and that's not a thing."

"That kinda makes sense though because mostly you stick them in cakes to see if they're done or to pick up things like cheese squares."

"It's not a cheese square, it's a cube. Three dimensions."

"Square, cube, same thing."

"No. It isn't. A square is two dimensional, a cube is three dimensional. If you ate the cheese, it's 3D. If you draw a square on a piece of paper, then it's in two dimensions --"

"But what about the pencil lead being left on the paper when you draw? It's a couple of atoms thick, so, three dimensional."

[rolls eyes] "Well, technically. [stops to regroup and launch new logic attack] OK, so how about a square drawn on a computer monitor in pixels?"

"Computer monitors are three dimensional."

[sighs] "But the surface of the computer monitor is a plane, so, two dimensional."

"I don't think so."

"Me either, I'm with you." [gestures at sister with a french fry] "I vote that it's still three dimensional."

"You can't vote on that. PHYSICS IS NOT A DEMOCRACY."

"Yes it is."

[dripping sarcasm] "Oh really. I don't care how many people vote, you can't stop gravity and levitate your butt out of that chair."

"Wooooo-ooooo-ooo!" [eerie noise accompanied by butt shimmying up and out of chair]

[explosive laughter]

According to Rachel: Dogs and dubious drug references edition

Apparently, today is National Dog Day. I'm assuming that's in the States. But just in case it's also a quasi-holiday here in the Great White North, this is my Rocky:  

A.k.a. Rocket Man, Rockstar, Rocky Raccoon, Little Rock Arkansas, and on occasion, BaRock Obama.

Yes, we're lame like that.

Rocky is a very sweet dog. A Chihuahua-Dachshund cross who acts like he's a Doberman. We love him.

He has some quirks, however. He gets car sick to the point of throwing up, so the vet told us that if we were travelling long distances, we should give him a small dose of children's Benadryl half an hour before we leave to calm him and make him sleep. We visited family in southern Ontario two weeks ago.

Getting ready to leave my sister's place for home:

Me: "Do you have your iPad?"

Rae: "Yes."

Me: "Did you pack your bathing suit?"

Rae: "Yes."

Me: "Did you --"

Rae: "Did you roofie the dog yet?"

Me: ...... "Wait, what?"

One roofied dog.

How the sugar bowl lid got broken. Or, I really ought to just sit down and not move around, like at all.

I don't think it's any secret that I am not the world's most graceful person. 

I am 5'10" with long gangly arms and legs. I also have balance issues that would lead any competent physician to suspect inner ear problems. So. Cut to the chase: Not graceful. Clumsy. Awkward.  I'm hoping to use this to my advantage somehow.

So there I was, clearing up in the kitchen, listening to my latest, most favourite jam on repeat on my iPhone, earbuds in, because I like it loud.  I was dancing up a storm, feeling very sure that this is what I looked like:

In actuality, I probably looked a lot more like this:

Only slightly less hairy.  

You'll have to imagine the general flailing and tipping too far to one side followed by the over-correction as I attempted to right myself, knocking an empty gym water bottle off the counter with my elbow.  I didn't see where it landed, I have a blind spot around my feet because...boobs. So of course I immediately stepped on the water bottle, which sent me hurtling to the floor. It's a good thing the dog is quick. It's the only thing that saved him from becoming crushed into a small, furry latke stuck to the tile floor. 

I got up slowly, and leaned a bit on the counter near the edge of the sink to push myself upright. My earbud cord snagged on a spatula that was sitting in a pot of water in the sink, lifting it up and dropping it neatly on my toes. The resultant hopping around dislodged the lid of the sugar bowl and, as if in slow motion, accompanied by my "Nooooooooo" it bounced on the tiles and separated into four pieces:

Shopping List

Crazy glue - for sugar bowl lid

Bubble wrap - for all hard surfaces in kitchen

Baby gate - to keep dog/cats out of squash zone

Mirrors and duct tape - for blind spot

Vodka - to help with the 'sitting down not moving around' thing

Insomnia thoughts, or, I wonder if I'm parking next to a crack house

This is what insomnia looks like:

Well, that's what insomnia looks like in a normal, tidy house with no pets and an attractive woman with normal hair.

This is what insomnia looks like in my house:

I share my bed with a cat, a dog, various dog toys, a book, at least one pair of glasses, and then there's the hair. (THE HAIR. I could write an entire blog post about the hair. But, I digress.) So you'd think that there's a lot that I could occupy myself with when insomnia strikes. Like that glass of wine on the night stand. Turns out, not so much.

On those occasions when I can't sleep, it seems that my neurons are determined to have one of those tequila parties where, when you clean up the next day, you find someone's bra under the kitchen table, miniature marshmallows everywhere, and that someone has drawn a moustache on the cat with a Sharpie. They (the neurons) drunkenly skitter through all the sensory input of the day (and with the internet and Netflix, there's a lot of input) and compose a list of random thoughts with which to torment me.  

Like last night -- here's a running commentary of what was going through my head:

• At work, I think I'm parking next to a crack house. 
• Sketchy neighbourhood? Check. Sketchy house? Double-check. Sketchy-looking people coming and going all the time? Check. Check. Check.
• If it isn't a crack house, what else could it be? 
• I heard about pizza in Vancouver that's drizzled with marijuana oil. To quote my friend Sasha, "Munchies: the problem and the solution all wrapped up in ooey gooey goodness. Duuude." But, wouldn't this just be a self-perpetuating rollercoaster? Eat the pizza, get the munchies, eat more pizza, get more munchies. I guess as business plans go, you could do worse.
• Maybe it isn't a crack house. Maybe it's a.....I don't know. Craps game? Bible study? Recurring Pampered Chef party?
• If I could create one piece of legislation, it would be to institute jail time for not returning your shopping cart to the shopping-cart corral at the grocery store. Criminalize selfish laziness, I always say.
• Beards without moustaches. I don't get those. I don't get those at all. Seriously, who thinks those look attractive?  I mean unless you're Amish, 

or Captain Ahab,

or Abraham Lincoln.

Why bother? And even he would have looked better if he'd added a moustache. See?

Debonair, right?

• Do cats have the capacity for sarcasm?
• Did I close the garage door?
• Poutine. I want some. But at 2:43 a.m. it's not going to happen. Peanut butter on crackers is a REALLY SUCKY substitute.
• Wait, I think I fell asleep there for a minute. CRAP, I just thought too loud and woke myself up. 

Eventually, of course, I do fall asleep. Usually about half an hour before the alarm goes off and I have to get up and get ready for work. And parking next to the crack house.

We still miss you, Linda

Yesterday a group of us went out to lunch. La Favorita on Preston Street -- Linda's favourite restaurant.  Pizza was eaten, and wine drunk in her honour. It's been four years since Linda passed away from breast cancer on Valentine's Day 2010, and the annual memorial lunch is a happy time now, rather than sad. We remember her vivaciousness, her energy and good humour. We toasted her memory and kept track of the score of the Canadian Olympic men's hockey team's game against Norway.  Linda would have been cheering along with us.

A Moment in Time
(originally posted in February 2010)

The Hacienda Hotel, Old Town, San Diego. A warm November night. Two friends and colleagues, their hair still in wind-blown disarray from a shoreline geology field trip of San Diego Bay on a boat, full and happy from margaritas and a wonderful Mexican dinner, are heading to their respective rooms.

So, your talk is right after lunch tomorrow?

Yep. The start of the second technical session.

And you have a Powerpoint presentation?

Nope....  Linda, I *know* this stuff. I can give this talk with just speaker's notes. I don't need a slideshow.

You need a slideshow. Come on, we can make one right now.

[sort of pouting] But I'm tired.

Come on, Alison....I'll bring the laptop out to the table in the courtyard in front of my room and we'll work on it outside. [wheedling] I have a bottle of wine....Let's see if these California reds are anything to write to you about.

'Write home about'.

Merci. 'Write home about'.

[sighing] OK.

Some night-blooming flowers are scenting the air. The fountain on the courtyard wall splashes softly in the background. A lot of laughing accompanies the work on the laptop. The wine is very, very good.

Thanks, Linda. The talk will be better with a slideshow.

No problem.

You know, I could get used to this.

Which, Alison? The working out of doors? Or the wine? [grins]

All of it. Seriously, this is the way to live. Very civilized. Could you imagine doing all our work outside, with a glass of wine? We'd either be super-productive, or very liver-damaged.

[laughing] We couldn't do this in Ottawa though. I don't know if you would get people to participate into meetings outside in November.

Probably not. Here. Fill me up. [giggles] Hey, let me take a photo of this: "Linda, working hard at her laptop."

You are too funny. Wait, let me hold the bottle up. For effect. [grins]

Linda Guay
1963-2010
Tu me manques, mon amie.

Going for it in Sochi

Well the Olympics are here again (yay!) and we are off to a good start, what with sisters Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe winning gold and silver in moguls, and Charles Hamelin earning gold in 1500 metre short-track speed skating.

Not to mention Canadian feel-good stories like the speed skater who gave up his spot in the finals to a team-mate, who went on to win silver; and the cross-country coach who gave a ski to a Russian competitor who had broken his. 

At noon, I'll be at a memorial lunch for my friend Linda, who passed away during the last winter Olympics, and won't be checking in on our boys as they meet Norway in men's hockey, but my heart will be with them.  

This post, from the last Olympics in Vancouver, kind of sums up our feelings towards the Olympics and Olympic hockey in particular.

GO TEAM CANADA!

I'm not sure, I think they might be cheering for Slovakia
(originally posted February 21, 2010)

I wrote this blog last week, long before anyone knew that Canada's men's hockey team would be playing Slovakia in the semifinals. I was just looking for a country whose national colours are sort of similar to Canada's. You know, for comic effect. No one at our house is going to be cheering for Slovakia tonight. Really.

We've been watching a lot of Olympics at chez Party of 3.


It's been amazing. While we are cheering for Canada, of course, we have been blown away by the awe-inspiring performances of the Americans, the Swiss, the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Koreans, to name but a few.

It has been a dream come true to watch the best athletes from all over the world compete and win gold here in Canada.


But fair warning: when it comes to hockey, the women's and the men's, let us make one thing perfectly clear -- it's our game.

GO, CANADA, GO!!!