mundane details

By christ, I'm tired. It's 10 past midnight and I've been at work for nearly two hours. I'd do actual work, work that didn't involve refreshing my email every 2 minutes to watch the emails fly back and forth between our two tech teams as to why our box isn't working, but I can't touch our website, which is most of my work, and the other stuff I do calls for a kind of attention I'm not sure I can muster right now.

When I was a kid, I'm pretty sure I was considered a weird kid by most of my peers. Some of that I played up, some of it was just natural.

My friends Edith and Karen and I invented sayings for a lot of things. Like that feeling that you get when you're over-tired and your eyes are dry. "I've got chips in my eyes," one of us would say, late into a sleep over, stretched out in sleeping bags on couch cushions on someone's living room floor. "Yeah, me too, but let's just watch until the next commercial."

Big pieces of chips, right here, these eyeballs.

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.

Me: Well, I don't want to be the only one crying. Is anyone else crying? I don't see anyone else crying. Goddamn. I hate it when things make me cry. Oh, wicked, Jennifer just wiped a tear away. I'm good. Wait, I don't have any tissue. They should hand it out with the program. I should mention this to that lovely David O'Meara. Why didn't they warn people? You know, like on the pro-

Me: What, like maybe calling it DISASTER?

Ganked from Jennifer, saved for a day when the gas is low in the tank. I worked 5 hours at venus envy today, and I really enjoyed it, but fuck me. NO GAS.

Answer these questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

The instructions to create the mosaic are:
* Type your answers to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
* Using only the first page, pick an image
* Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker

Credit where credit is due:
1. liad&megan 44, 2. Kale II, 3. MVC-846F, 4. oh... the blues, 5. nobody, 6. coffee & the city, 7. Prague City, 8. Day 44: A good glass of Moscato (muscatel), 9. writer's teeth, 10. Friends, 11. "Thank you for being here", 12. megan0001

This morning I went for a run along the river, and saw two of my favourite birds.

First though, I ran through the flocks of Canada geese, which generally I don't much love. But the goslings are half-growed now, gangly teenagers in fluffy dirty gold coats. The birds are so used to humans down there by the river that they sit on the path, two birds here, three there, one loner a little ways down, 8 goslings all in a clump. Every once in a while, one may turn its beady eye on you and give you a little hiss, but otherwise you're darting from right to left around them and timing your steps to miss their shit.

To get my sleepy body warmed up, I walked a few more minutes than I normally do, taking me a little further than I normally go. Instead of turning at the first tree past the sign for Parkdale Ave, I rounded the corner past the tree, you know that one, the one where the river widens and spreads out in front of you? It's the seagull apocalypse there right now, all screeching and wheeling and diving for mayflies like it's the end of the world.

I turned around, and the graceful dipping neck of a great blue heron caught my eye.

There are three birds that remind me of my grandparents' house: hawks, kildeer, and great blue herons. They have a special place in my heart, all of them, imbued with happy family memories.

So I stopped, jogged in place a few moments, watched the bird pick its way down to a rock right in the water as it stalked something below the river's surface. I was hoping to watch it make the kill, because it is always impressive to watch beings do what they do best. But the prey must have disappeared, doing what it does best, and the heron turned its back on me, the white and black v slick down the back of its head, opened its grand wings to their widest and awkwardly flapped back up onto land.

I kept on moving home, through the already unbearable humidity.

Twenty seconds from the end of my playlist, a kildeer cut a jagged swath across the path, up over the stone wall to my right and down to the creek that comes out of nowhere and goes someplace else.

Life is just a good place to be right now, these past few days. I think I've managed to convince a certain cute Californian that he needs to visit Canada's capital this summer. I got a Mysterious Package from a Mysterious Person that rendered me speechless and hungry. Saw some good rock and roll with a good group of people last night. Lolled on the grass in Westboro to watch a great reading by Jennifer. Had a satisfying chat with Shelley, wherein we commiserated about how being in between houses sucked and how we couldn't wait to live together.

Now I’m half naked under the fan, the bath water slowly evaporating. J. and I are going for sushi, and I’m going to have wakame, which for me is the kale of Japanese food. After that, J. and I will get foxified, hit the Babylon Club, drink some beer and tipsy-traipse our way home. Maybe it will be raining and we’ll get wet. We probably won’t care.

In no particular order:
- writing one of the two pieces I'm wrangling
- knitting and watching The Blue Planet
- working on my website*
- kissing
- watching my fish
- reading The Omnivore's Dilemma or Sugar: A Bittersweet History
- sleeping
- blogging**

*Yes, you read right. Coming soon to an interweb near you.
**What? I'm what? Now wait just a second...

Part of the end of year madness is that I've taken on an extra project at work. Yes, that was probably stupid of me. Except that it's paid. And Shelley and I are going to New York soon, hell yeah!, in a week and 2 days, and so the extra money will be nice, and it's a project with a potential source of consistent funding and there's no NGO in the history of the world that isn't going to do a little year end hustle to tap that ass.

So great, right, a little extra work, not so bad. Wrong, and wrong, and wrong. It is so bad. It is so bad. It involves going through a spreadsheet line by line, 367 lines in this particular worksheet, for inclusion in or exclusion from a magical list. 367 lines may not sound like a lot, but it's the last 367 lines. I've already been through over 3000 other lines.

During a meeting today, I told my boss I'd spent Saturday feeling like there were gerbils scrabbling 360 degree circles around and madly around my skull, squeaking desperate squeaky cries for freedom. He, who is currently auditing my Saturday's work, laughed. A short, high-pitched, almost desperate, laugh.

I don't love this time of year. It's about two weeks after the time of year where I'm at work and I pick up the contract with our funder and I say "Oh shit. Oh *shit*. Fuck. Me." And zing off a bazillion emails to my coworkers saying "OH SHIT." Though I don't exhort them to fuck me.

What is two weeks after that time, you ask? What is today? Today is when we're knee deep in the boring work of making the interesting ideas happen.

Which is why, yesterday, all day yesterday, for 11 hours yesterday, starting as soon as I got back from a tasty brunch at Milan's house, I had my laptop and my typewriter out, so I could clickety click away on the computer, moving giant chunks of data around on our painfully slow content management system, and start working on a story in the spurts of time between clicks.

Perhaps not the best way to write, but fuck, using the computer and having scads of continuous time wasn't doing me any good. Switching to the typewriter seems to have broken whatever block I'd put up. I only got about 500 words down, but that's 500 more than I'd had, and more importantly, I could feel those muscles loosening up.

From now until the end of March, the rest of my time is pretty much working and then working, interspersed with episodes of yoga and hanging out with cute girls. One of those episodes, you might be interested to know, is a date. A date date, on a weekend night, with booze, dim lighting, and perhaps a little cleavage.

Having just re-read the last half of the last paragraph, I might have to say that maybe this time of year isn't so bad after all.

Alright, Tuesday night, you've called my bluff.

Sure, I talked a good game - "Oh yeah, after work and yoga and more work and giving a workshop at venus envy, I'll just dash home, slurp up a bit of soup and head back out to babylon for the Xiu Xiu show. I'll totally have enough energy, even after only getting 5 hours sleep. Totally." - talked it all day.

And I think I had you fooled, at least a while. But you knew, didn't you, you knew as soon as I put my hand on the door to my apartment. The look on my face said it all. You hold the cards: warmth, solitude, a warm bed, the little death.

Well, last night is the last time I blog while tired. Such abrupt sentences! So little flow! So many typos and grammatical errors!

I used who's instead of whose. Horrifying.

Truth be told, I'm having a hard time writing lately. There are a few things that I want to get at, but. One, I'm feeling hella busy, it being fiscal year end and having taken on some overtime to boot. The things I want to get at are kind of big things and need a kind of time I don't have right now. Two, I'm trying to rock the fine line between good blog writing and respecting other people's privacy, and that is rough on flow.

Enh. Could be worse. After the 31st, I expect things will die down a little and hopefully I can get my brain and my fingers once more in sync.