friends

For years, I hated my birthday. It's a sad story I don't feel like telling in its entirety, but I didn't celebrate the day for about 5 or 6 years, starting when I was 21. I'd have dinner with my family, but that's it. I didn't even tell anyone who didn't already know. After that, I started again slowly, with, I believe, a birthday dinner with Chris in 1999. Sometimes I do more than have dinner with one other person, but not always. I'm happy to be older, and I'm happy I was born, but I don't generally want a lot of hooha around that fact.

Last year, while my birthday certainly wasn't terrible, it was also not so much fun. I'd just come off of a few 10-13 hour work days in Edmonton and was bone tired. It had just hit me that things with Eric might probably be on the downswing. Shelley and Eric threw me a party, which was lovely of them, but my mom was there. And that was fine, she's a very nice person, but I spent 90% of my birthday party worrying whether she were having a good time. This lead to not a good time for me.

If I gushed in my last post, I think it's that the fun and loveliness of this year was thrown into relief by the sterum-tightening memories of last year. Because really, this year was the birthday of birthdays.

You already know all the great things that happened on Splendid Friday. While all this niceness was happening, I kept thinking, "You know, the only thing that would make this birthday better is one of my mom's peach pies. I mean, I like cake, who doesn't like cake, but really, I would like a pie for my birthday. A peach pie. Maybe I can get mom to give me one next summer and I can keep in the freezer until my birthday because really a birthday is a little less of a birthday without a nice piece of pie."

After dinner, we went back to the back house for drinks. I noticed something was baking, but didn't really pay attention. Then Shelley opened the oven door, and there it was: Rodenhizer and F. had made me a beautiful peach pie, a very emphatic M carved into the top crust.

I believe I clapped my hands and hopped in place.

++

You wanna know the suckiest part of throwing an event? The two hours beforehand, when pretty much everything you can do is done. You're in limbo, only waiting, hoping that people come, then worrying that even if they do, they'll have a bad time.

Such was early Saturday evening, before our housewarming party started. Shelley had a headache, I desperately needed a nap, Steve was feeling flu-ish. But thanks to Beer and Good Company, we all rallied - until the wee hours of the morning, no less. Lots of people came, most of whom we knew, and everyone seemed to have a good time. Both Jennifer and I were amused by the number of times we heard the phrases "So THIS is the Man of Science!" and "Oh! The pergola! It was totally worth it!" and "Sooooo, is the Born Ruffian here tonight?"

It must be admitted that the evening got blurry for me. You might think that was the fault of Beer, but you would be wrong. I had so many nice conversations about so many different things with so many people I like that the next day they all kind of blended together. I blame Good Company.

Goddamn. What a weekend. Busy busy busy. Some good busy, some tiring busy, some downright cranky busy.

The yard sale was a smashing success. Michael was there for a quite a while and kept Jennifer and I highly entertained. The Wren and F. and Hawkeye got there early, and cleaned us out of the best stuff. F. got the clothes I was hoping she would. We got to meet our two-doors down neighbours, Paul and someone who's name I sadly can't remember. Grace and Ruby and Fiona rolled up in the red wagon to kill us with a little cute. Eric wandered by, joined us for a coffee, and then wouldn't let me charge him less than a dollar for a tiny bluegreen owl. Mae came by, stayed for a nice chat, and thankfully just took the old window I pulled out of the garbage three years ago. The only unwelcome guest was the sun. Nice to have her there at first, but after an hour or so, really, I felt, she'd made her presence known and could have at least stepped back a few feet.

Doesn't help that my sunscreen application was artistic rather than efficient, and now I am the proud owner of a straight thick red line across the top of my chest gouged by a tidy pocket of white.

It was a weekend full of people. Saturday afternoon I ran into Michael again, and we talked about the new loves in our lives - our houses. Picked Grace up to go to see David Sedaris read, where we ran into Ian Roy and got to know him a bit better.

And I nearly passed out. Fuck me, it was hot in there. I'm happy for Collected Works that they got such a big name to come to Ottawa (apparently, they just asked enough times that it happened), but the hot damp heat of one hundred bodies in a small space on a muggy July night is no fun. Sedaris was fucking brilliant though, and Grace told a pirate joke on our way out the door that made him laugh.

The last thing I had on my plate that night was a skype date with CT. Except for the fact that trying to figure out how to work a webcam in the presence of a techie makes me feel like a doddering technophobe,* it was lovely to see him again. Email is nice, phone is okay, but I'm a bigger fan of words and image and sound altogether when it comes to people. We both did a lot of smiling. After one of us got it up to click END,** I most definitely did pass the fuck out.

Sunday? It finished up quite nicely. I ended up going for a walk along the river with Ivan Coyote and her very adorable dog, who then sat in my lap all the way to the airport and back where we missed picking Shelley up by about 5 minutes. But then I got home, and then Shelley got home, and then we snuck a couple beers down to the sidewalk outside bluesfest and listened to some disco and talked about Donna Summers' hair and the possibly gay possible dads smoking up beside their possible daughters, all of whom had teenage-crazy outfits on and made me think of me when I was 16 and wanted to be different.

That afternoon, however, was completely frustrating. My computer broke. I'd been having the blue screen of death off and on for a little while, but it always fixed itself. And then the p stopped working. Or when it was working, worked too much. I couldn't find a virus with either of my anit-virus softwares, but who knows. I'd cleverly set aside the most humid day of the week to move boxes into my lean-to, clean my bathroom, vaccum the floors and use some stinky foamy stuff to clean the cat barf off the hall carpet. So while I waited for the virus scans to scan, I sprayed noxious substances on the tiles in my bathroom and up and down my very warm hallway.*** I coughed and sneezed and sweated.

The Stales guy is going to call me today to let me know how long it's going to take until my comuter is fixed. Till then, my only access is at work, so the osts may be fewer and further between than normal. Pppppppppppppppplease to bear with me.

*How was I smart enough to mute the skype volume but not smart enough to remember I'd done it?
**Okay, skype people, could you maybe make that process a little less unfriendly? A big red downturned phone with the word END underneath it is not a nice way to finish off an otherwise lovely conversation.
***Just so you know, usually I use various combinations of Borax, baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol and elbow grease to clean my house. You know what's a shitty choice? Throwing out the noxious cleaning chemicals you bought for some unknown reason, since that shit has always made you cough and sneeze, or using them up so as not to be wasteful. After yesterday's experiment, I would recommend just throwing them out.

Holy fuck am I tired. A couple of nights out boozing with Trish and CT, and last night, also the Plone boys, as we call them at work. And that gender assignation is mostly very true. Trish and I are two of the three women out of about 70 at the conference.

Trish and CT and I have been moving around as sort of a unit. People keep assuming that we’re all co-workers, and then give us a bit of an odd look when I say, No, I’m from Ottawa, in Canada. Oh, you’ve been to Kelowna? I hear it's nice.

Last night, in addition to looking confused, someone also said,

'Oh. Then how do you all know each other?" We three slid our eyes at each other – we didn’t have our how we met story down. I decided to improvise. "We were all in Bootcamp together and they looked nice so I glommed onto them."

It made me happy that they both laughed surprised laughs when I said that. Much better than silent nods. Not that they would do that, because they are sweet and kind people.

After the Redwings won the Stanley Cup, I bought CT a celebratory Canadian beer – a St. Ambroise Pale. I’ve been drinking the local microbrew, Abita. It’s okay. I even fooled myself into thinking it was good. And then I took a sip of the St Ambroise and remembered what actually good beer tastes like. Fucking heaven, is the answer.

What is not heaven is the food here. It’s mostly deep fried or covered in butter or both. One local delicacy is beignets, which are sort of like a cross between a cake doughnut and a French crueller, served in triplicate and covered in icing sugar.

This is one of those posts that doesn’t have any kind of story. I’m tired. My brain is full of information it doesn’t yet have the neural pathways to handle. It’s full of the names of new people. It’s full of seafood and lust.

In just over one hour, I will be going to another house inspection. I have everyone I know crossing their fingers for us. We really really want to own this house - these houses, rather, since it's two separate houses on one property. They're built against each other, but are entirely separate.

When we first started looking that would have been ideal. Their space, my space, very very separate space. To start, we really wanted a side-by-side duplex. Both sides with access to the backyard, lots of space inside, maybe my side would be divided into apartments and we could rent one out. But the only SxS's that came up were fucking dodgy and even more fucking expensive.

So almost everything we looked at was up-down, and we didn't think that was ideal. Little Dog really doesn't like stairs, and in almost all of the up-downs we looked at, the Ess's would have been in the upper unit(s). Not perfect. There was also the fact that in most of the units, the main floor unit (mine) was gorgeous and well kept and the upper unit was, well, generally not. Not perfect, but it's what was out there.

And then the more I envisioned how those spaces would work, saw us all living in the same house, the more I really wanted that. The more it came to seem like family all under one roof.

Because that is what this is about for me. Building family.

Mostly. Of course, finances play into it. I can't afford a home in Centretown by myself, and I won't leave my neighbourhood - my community - for the sake of owning. I love my current apartment, and I don't think that paying someone rent is throwing money down the toilet any more than I think buying food is throwing money down the toilet.

Especially when I do the math and realize how much money I will be giving the bank over the next 21.1 years.

Especially when buying food is literally throwing money down the toilet.

Buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do. It completely disrupts your life in a way that moving apartments and looking for a job (the former top two activities on the list of things that stress me out) don't. Part of it is situational, I'm sure, with one of us here and two of us in Halifax. Shelley has thanked me a number of times for taking this on, and I brush it off. Not because it hasn't been stressful and disruptive, because it has, but because it's been equally stressful and disruptive for them. Just differently.

But we're in it, and we're dealing each in our own way,* and it looks like the deciding is almost done. The agreements have been signed, the financing has been firmed, and if it doesn't fail on inspection, and please please please let this be an easy pitch, we will be waiving our conditions in the near future.

And, one roof or two, starting to build a life together.

*For example, Steve's facebook status often seems to be "Steve is stressed and going out to hit people with sticks." In martial arts class.

Seems like in the next few weeks, Shelley and Steve and I will be homeowners. There's many a slip, yadda yadda, but it's likely.

Stealing words from Steve's last email: Viva la commune!

This is what the stress has been for. I knew that even as I was feeling like my head might pop off, but now that we've a few days calm, I'm feeling it.

In fact, I'm about to snap the laptop shut and head out to the airport to meet Shelley in NYC. I can't wait, I can't wait, I can't wait. I am going to see her and grab her and give her a big long squeeze of excitement. And probably get a little teary.

I am so fucking excited that I get to live with them, and their Little Dog too.

The plan was to write more about the nature of family and friendship and the owning of things big and little, but all those last minute going-on-vacation house jobs kept extruding from unexpected corners, and here it is 1:38. I need to put on my boots and head out for slightly warmer pastures.

Chris says "Okay. They're applying metadata to these photos they're digitizing, right? Except it's students creating the metadata. So I look at this one photo, of the legislative buildings, and the student has applied the subject 'government'."

And I hoot, say, "You've got to be fucking kidding me. Like who is often inside?"

The same conversation, an hour later...

I say, "So I have to send out this cranky email today saying 'Hi everyone, Just a reminder that on the shared drive our capitalization convention is not ALL CAPS.'"

"Good for you," she says. "We've got to fight the good fight."

And I say, "I know, and thank you. But guess what was all caps. In amongst all the folders I set up for the major bits of our work, like "website" and "catalogue" and "networking" and "admin," there's a new folder called TRACKING MESSENGER. I'm curious, so I open it, and what's inside? One file. Called TRACKING MESSENGER."

And she can't speak, she's laughing so hard.

I realized, half-way through yesterday afternoon, that the last time I was single on valentines was in the year 2000. Not that I was coupled for 7 years running. Just in 7 consecutive Februaries.

For all those years, if there was VD acknowledgment, it was very low key. A-okay by me, since many of those years were my venus envy years. My guess is that people in flower stores don't much celebrate valentines either.

Now, say what you will about valentines being manufactured bullshit. Yes. And after agreeing with you, I will counter by re-quoting the immortal Rita Celli, and say that valentines takes as much effort to ignore as to acknowledge. And though my heart is mending, stitch by hard-fucking-won stitch, I think that last night without friends would have been a bit hard to take.

It was much fun. I was a little worried about getting seats. But the lovely Manx staff, who I cannot praise highly enough, worked it all out so that we got seated, and all together.

Andrea, her BH and Heather were there. Evey came. Milan too. Michael entertained us thoroughly for quite a while. Caitlyn and Ariel dropped by before taking off to romance each other in less crowded pastures. Jennifer and the MoS dropped in later for a quick drink before heading off for their A'romatic dinner.

The conversations were quirky, woven in and over each other, and flowed easy.

I think my favourite part was when Michael started to play devil's advocate.

"Okay, why blog? So you put whatever you want up there, but really, who cares?"

I think he really wanted to know. We all hemmed and hawed, came up with a few different answers. And then I said,

"Well, you start posting and you think that no one will. But then it's weeks, or months, or years later, and you find out people just do."

And they really do. Makes me feel like a pretty lucky girl.

I am terrible at getting my picture taken. There's no relaxing, there's no looking natural. There were about 5 or 6 years in my twenties when I didn't let people take my photo. "I don't like having my photo taken," I'd say. And they'd say "Oh heck, nobody likes having their photo taken." And I would say "Don't take my picture."

But it's 10 years later and there's digital cameras and the internet. And nice people with a good eye and fancy equipment who are willing to come to your house and take very many After Foxification pictures for the low low fee of one chocolate chip banana loaf. They will do it and be kind even if you can't relax while the camera is on because although you no longer hate having your picture taken, you are still trying to like it.

Before Charles and Amanda came over to snap and entertain me respectively, I went over to Jennifer's to do my hair.

Let me back up here. I am a putz when it comes to this kind of girly stuff. The 80s were not a kind decade to girls with bone straight hair. They were a decade of curling iron burns and hair sizzled from cheap, crappy crimpers. And then the 90s were a decade of grunge and coming out. I can't remember the last time I owned a hair dryer, but I do remember that I got it for Christmas when I was still living at my parent's house, which was, suffice it to say, a long long time ago. I hadn't worn make up more than once a year for nigh on a decade. Until 4 months ago, my black eyeliner was the same vintage as the lost hair dryer.

This year, that's changed. I seem to have turned back into the kind of person who needs Product. Which leads me to standing in Jennifer's bathroom while she patiently instructed me.

"It heats up fast, so it's probably ready now."
"Okay."

I stood there, watching the flat iron getting stealthily hotter. I hadn't realized how nervous I would be about putting something that hot near my face for the first time since 1989. But the heat pads were well protected, and I was not curling my bangs into a thick roll.

"Here, I'll show you on me. You spray the stuff on like this, and then with the iron, start here, like this."

She handed it over. I bucked up, sprayed on the stuff, ironed my hair. And it really was pretty amazing. I mean, I always thought of my hair as straight. I've got a cowlick over my right eye, and a bit of a curl on the back left side. Turns out I didn't know from straight.

"Look at that! It's straight! Really straight! It took 3 mintues! It's like a miracle!"
"It's a strange little hair machine, alright."

It was lovely to have a visit with Charles and Amanda. Charles posed me and tried to get me to relax, Amanda told me interesting stories about writers. We drank tea and ate loaf. A fine night of helpful friends.

*Should this not be the title of a Pixies song?

One of the many advantages of having a close friend live next door is that the before-the-show-drinks-at-the-first-bar can very easily turn into "Let's have a beer while you're getting foxy to go out and I am dreaming of crawling into bed even though it is only 9 in the pm" drinks.

As you can see, I know how to pack for a good time.

I was not so well prepared for my job as Blog Consultant to the Elgin Street Irregulars. But more on that tomorrow.

I did tell them I would come home, clean my fish tank and blog my own emergency meeting minutes. But I forgot that the fish are asleep by 8 pm. So instead, I checked Facebook and cried in the bath. Not quite as productive.

So tomorrow, tomorrow!, I will take a good chunk of time and write something witty and clever and highly entertaining about my attendance at one of the notorious and fabled ESI Emergency Meetings.

And generally, happily so.

My flight was fogged out this afternoon. On the Ottawa side apparently, though when I looked out Shelley's window, I couldn't see the bridge just a few kilometres away.

It was lucky that Jennifer was going to pick me up. I never check my flights, just assuming that things will run smoothly. But Jennifer was going to pick me up, and the timing needed to be reasonably precise and so I checked the flight online. When I saw it was cancelled, I was flabbergasted. It's never happened to me before. I had no frame of reference.

I did what any sensible person would do in such a situation, and asked Steve for advice. His advice? "Call them." Brilliant!

Easier said than done, however. The machine hung up on me twice while trying to transfer me to a person. When I did get transferred to a person, they really had to work at being helpful. Like it hurt, or something.

"Is that flight to Montreal tomorrow at 9:55 am?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied.
"Great, I can bus home from there."
Tappity tappity. Tap.
"Okay, your flight will arrive at 10:40 pm..."

Now, I have not flown between Halifax and Montreal ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take more than 12 hours. The direct flights to Ottawa only started Wednesday morning at 6 am. I took a more reasonable 8:50 am flight.

Luckily, I'm all set up to work from home. And by home, I mean "my computer." So I won't take another holiday day, but will probably ensconce myself on the red couch, drink tea, answer email and call into the 1:30 meeting, all while wearing Shelley's housecoat.

I do miss my cat and my fish and my stuff. My regular routine is pretty important to my overall well being. But that's all there waiting for me yet, and I am lucky to have friends kind enough to take care of my animals for two extra days on a moment's notice.

Being here is lovely. Not so much Halifax, which is a great town, don't get me wrong, but I'm pretty much Ottwegian through and through at this stage. What I mean is here at home with Shelley and Steve. It's easy and fun. We split a couple beers, we made dinner. We talked about bathroom renos. We watched a few episodes of my new favourite TV show (The I.T. Crowd). We laughed a lot. We drank port and ate chocolate. Milo sat beside me on the couch with his nose on my thigh. I knit.

I definitely don't mind the cancellation.

Bonus Question: Did anyone get the late-80s music reference in the title?