halifax

The Halifax of my memory is breezy and cool. Not humid and burning hot. But that's what it was last week. Eric and I spent a lot of time walking around various neighbourhoods looking for shade. Eric and I and Shelley and Steve spent a lot of time out under their cabana, what I liked to call the lanai. We ate and read and chatted and drank beer. This picture is not the best picture I've ever taken, but I think it captures our activities fairly well. The visiting, the whole trip, the hanging out, was so easy. I loved it, but it also made me very sad that we do not all live in the same city. It's not fair and I'm going to stamp my feet.

Because I'm not in much of a story telling mood, I'll just jot down things we did that I enjoyed, and think that you should enjoy too, if you are ever lucky enough to be in Halifax.

1) The market. It's open every Saturday, so I actually got to go twice. One of my very fond memories of Halifax is going to market at 7 on a summer morning, buying big bags of peas and bunches of carrots, then going to catalogue for 5 hours at the DalTech library, which had windows that opened, facing the harbour. I would turn the music on loud, munch on peas scooped right from the shell and catalogue old reports from the CMHC.

2) Quinpool Rd. I actually hate Quinpool Rd. It feels like a strip mall. But Eric and I hit a couple of neat stores on it. Gaudet Optical is where Hilda gets her glasses, and Hilda, hands down, has the best glasses going. But I was in a funk by the time we got there, so it ended up like bra shopping. Every time I tried on a pair of glasses, I thought, Ugly. Uglier. Ugh. How can you be that ugly. I stopped trying on glasses right about that point. We poked around for a bit more. That is, until we got upstairs, and I let myself be cajoled into trying a couple of other pairs on. These ones took the pressure off of trying to look good.

Then we went to Aqua Creations, where we looked at every tank, and Eric told me about various fish controversies and pointed out his favourites. It sounds like something girlfriendy to do, like I would just suffer through it to make my man happy. I assure you that I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Maybe it was because I wasn't looking at my unhappy mug in bad glasses frames. But I learned a lot. In fact, I now know the difference between a sunfish and a pleco. Which I did not know before. I also know that fish people can get some weird about making new species for no good reason.

3) Bach's Cafe. It is a place who loves J.S. Bach, coffee, music and polar bears. They don't love air conditioning, apparently. But I love them.

4) Gottingen St. When I first moved to Halifax, my racist cousin told me I should not move to Gottingen St. Because, you know, that's where all the "gangs" were. And yes, it's likely there are gangs in the area. But he was using it in its Canadian Racist form. Gottingen is a great street and I ended up living not far from it. It's changed a lot since I was there, some places gone, some sprung up. If there were a few more trees, I'd have walked it even more. As it was, Eric and I walked it a couple times from stem to stern, once to get beer from Propeller Brewery, where we saw people buying growlers.

One of those times, Eric ducked down beside the Marquee, a den of iniquity for me back in the day, to see if they still had a terrible mural up. They do, of Ray Charles. I could put a picture of that up, but jesus, it's just ugly, so instead, I give you a picture of Eric that catches my breath every time I look at it. Hot and damn, he's a handsome man.

5) The reading. It went quite well. We got about a dozen people, I think, who seemed to enjoy all the readings on offer - Edwina Etiquette made a surprise appearance. And we raised $54 for the Bursary Fund, which made me really happy. Rita McKeough told me I was maybe a closet performance artist. That thrilled me to my toes. High praise indeed.

6) Shelley and Steve and Milo and their house. I had a great time staying with Shelley and Steve. Milo is such a cute dog. Their house is this sprawling, i'm-always-turning-the-wrong-direction house that is cozy and homey. They have supernice roommates named Rita and Mark. I adore Rita, who is a crazy brilliant performance artist. Mark seems very nice, though I don't have as much of a sense of him. He laughs a lot and sleeps very soundly, which is useful if you're going to be barfing in the bathroom next to his bedroom. I got to help Shelley organize her room a little bit, and we got it looking even homier.

Shelley and Steve are welcoming and thoughtful, inspiringly so. Shelley had put her lovely organic cotton sheets on the bed and made our room up so beautifully. I hope that we were half as good as guests as they were as hosts.

Also, did I mention it's not fair that we don't live in the same city?

7) Point Pleasant Park. I suggested a walk around PPP because we were post-barfing and the park is easy to get to by bus, and easy to have a quick and shady walk around. I thought. Unfortunately, I was remembering the pre-Hurricane Juan PPP. It is not so shady now. Where there once were trees, there are no trees. Only grasses and bush. I would stop and gape, sweeping my arm over the panorama of solitary trees and scrub, then stabbing my finger at a lonesome copse of pines. "This! Used to all be like That!" Beautiful cycle of renewal, etc., but still, shocking. We dragged our tired carcasses around some now very bright trails, ate a bit of left-over pizza, and collapsed happily in the shade by the bus stop.

This sign confused me. There's high voltage in the fountain? Or is it a pastiche homage to Electric 6?

So back to regular life tomorrow. I can't even remember what's going on at work, which is good, but might be surprising tomorrow. I've got a Special Top Secret Project that I need to get done by the end of the week. And I seem to have become addicted to the sweaty yoga, so I'm going to try to fit some of that in too, hopefully with Ariel. And I have gifts to give and babies to smooch. All in all, time to get back to regular old life.

For the first couple of days after Eric arrived in the 'fax, he and I had a running conversation about which one of us was on vacation and which one was on holiday. It went a little something like this:

"Nice to be on vacation, eh?"
"Or holiday."
"True." I paused to absorb the possible thesauratic implications of this. "Wait. Holiday?"
"Yeah. We're on different kinds of trips."
"Ah. Gotcha."

But you know, I didn't gotcha. I mulled it over. The next day:

"So okay. Which one of us is on holiday and which one of us is on vacation, then?"
"Well, you can't have a working holiday, but you can have a working vacation. You did the pride booth and you're doing a reading. So you're on vacation and I'm on holiday, because I'm not doing anything at all like work."

Right.

Conversations like that are one of the many reasons I feel unbelievably lucky to have found Eric.

Another couple days later, about 10 hours into our 36 Hours of Food Poisoning No Fun, I wandered into our bedroom from the living room, where I had been alternately reading the shittiest mystery ever, passing out, worrying that I might puke again, and feeling very very sorry for myself. Exhausted from the 15 foot trip, I sat heavily on the side of the bed. He woke up.

"Hi baby. How are you."
He blinked an owly gravol blink at me. It wasn't a real question anyway.
"So. Is this a holiday or a vacation?"
That got me a smile.
"This is a vacation from our holiday."

Neither of us had ever had food poisoning before. And even now, we're not sure. We spent a lot of time walking around out in the sun without hats and not drinking very much water. Because we're, you know, bright like that.

The trip actually ended up being quite a few firsts, the big ones being our first long trip together and the first sick together. Considering the fact that I miss him terribly after spending 6 nights and days with him in a fairly small room, I think we did alright.

The start of our Romantic Food Poisoning was Wednesday. Wednesday night was going to be a really fun night for Eric, Shelley, Steve, Aurèle and A's brother Phil. We were gonna see rock and roll on the high seas. Or, more precisely, the Maynards on the tall ship Silva.

Early in the evening, Shelley made us a delicious dinner of tofu and greens and rice, and then Eric and I wandered downtown for drinks with A. and P. We ended up at the Split Crow for power hour - a buck a beer from 9 to 10.

(This picture is the closest I will ever get to looking like a beer commercial girl. That is A. to my left, looking blurrily bemused.)

Ah! I can hear you saying, Megan! Sweetie! When you drink too much buck-a-beer beer, you don't get *food* poisoning.

But my response is ready: I was about to go on a boat and take gravol. So I drank only about a third of a glass to be polite, and then sat there, waiting to get anxious about being late for the ship.

We weren't late. In fact, we spent quite a bit of time waiting on the pier, where to pass the time I took a few picture of the stomach ache that was starting to get quite poky.

Apparently, the show was quite good. Nausea felled me early on and I missed it all. I did spend about 10 minutes of one band above deck, but I was shaking so badly that Steve lent me his hoodie to put on top of the sexy little t-shirt, 2 sweaters, jacket number I was already sporting, and A. gave me a fistful of ice. I stared stupidly at my fingers gripping it as my arm went numb. "It always makes me feel better," A. said, shrugging. The fact that it didn't totally give me the creeps meant that it felt pretty good.

Then I ran downstairs because I thought I was going to throw up. Eric came down not long after and stroked my hair and showed me the pictures he was taking of the actual party. I could hear the bands really well, so it was almost like being on deck. Shelley and Steve kept coming down for very nice visits too, taking care of me and keeping me company, even though the gravol had taken away most of my sentences. Though I do believe it is one of the few times in my life I have muttered "Yes, I would like to put my head in your lap," without the slightest whiff of salaciousness.

I worried for quite a while that I was wrecking people's fun, because E. and S. and S. kept having to come downstairs to visit me. But then, even in the haze, I realized that if I had said no I can't go, none of us likely would have been anywhere near the music. So this, really, was a happy medium.

That everyone was so nice to me is one of the many reasons I feel unbelievably lucky to have found my friends.

Okay, so a lot more went on in Halifax than sickness and sentiment. But it's late and I'm still a little dragged out from being sick. Tomorrow, more.

I'm sitting in Shelley and Steve's kitchen right now. Shelley's making a delicious dinner (risotto!) and Eric and Steve are floating around making plans and having showers and Milo the adorable dog just barked because Mark just got home and Shelley asked into the air "Who barks too much?" and Milo was too busy barking to answer.

All in all, perfect. Last night Steve and I drove out to the airport to pick that very cute Eric up. The sunset, through which that very cute Eric was flying as we drove. One thing I love about Halifax is the skies.

One thing I will tell you before I sign off is that I fucking love my laptop. I have all my music, all my software, access to blogging, access access access.

I tried to blog earlier, and although we've been doing lots, my brain is on vacation mode and I couldn't think of how to frame it. So I likely won't be writing much this week, but instead, drinking, walking, reading, and seeing.

Maybe the occasional photo. To close, here are a couple of pictures of Shelley and I on the Lawrencetown Beach this aft.