Merry Christmas to all & to all a good life

Our backyard on Christmas eve.

Friends, let me wish you all a happy holiday season.  Today is the beginning of a nice, relaxing stretch of working less, spending time with friends, and setting my intention for the new year.

A lot has happened in the last year.  Much of which, I haven't shared until now.  For one, we bought a house in late October.  It's a cozy townhouse in downtown St. John's that includes a nice deck with a view of the harbor.  The place is over 100 years old, so it definitely has its wonky parts.  But all in all, it's pretty up-to-date.  (And there's plenty of room for guests should any of you care to visit.)  It's in much better shape than my place on Toledano.  And with the purchase of our new home, it feels like I'm able to close the door on what was lost in that house fire.

On the night we closed on the house was the first bit of nasty weather.  Nicole had been feeding a stray cat (shocking!), so we let her spend the night in our foyer.  And that's when she decided to deliver the kittens she'd been carrying--all seven of them!  At that point, it became impossible to turn the cat back out.  So we took occupancy of our new house with a mere 11 cats (that's "eleven") under our roof.  Here's a video of the kittens at about 4 weeks old.


Despite their helpless demeanor in the video, that quickly changed by the time their age doubled.  Here's the latest photo of them, eagerly tracking some toy.

Well in addition to the difficulties of moving, we were faced with placing eight cats.  (And by "we," I mean "Nicole.")  Fortunately, around Christmas, people go nuts for kittens, and Nicole quickly found great homes for all of them--even the mother!  Today, three of the kittens have been delivered, and the remaining four leave today.  The mother leaves by New Year's.  Thank God.  I had real concerns about having a house full of cats and nowhere to put them, but Nicole did a great job.

Observing the kittens' delivery was interesting.  It occurred over a seven hour period.  The entire time, the mother cat had this deep, open-throated purr.  When the seventh kitten appeared, she was near her mother's posterior where all the mother's nipples were getting some serious use.  So I gently moved the newborn to the free nipples, near the mother's shoulders.  When I did, the mother leaned up, ate the placenta, and chewed off the umbilical cord.  Then she leaned backed, resuming her deep purr with a vivid splash of bright red blood on her white chin.  She seemed to be in a state of contentment and peace that defied description, and witnessing it was incredibly visceral and mysterious.

This summer I had a really nice trip to Boulder, Colorado; Austin, Texas and New Orleans, and I happily was able to visit friends in each city.  Many thanks to Vanessa, Bart and Christy, and the Homans for their hospitality to us while we were in New Orleans.  We hope to make Mardi Gras this year, so hopefully we'll see each other then.

I wish all of you a happy, peaceful time during this week of holidays!

Stress & Distractions

Lately, I've found my life settling into some sense of normalcy for the first time since my time on active duty in the Army which began in 2004.  That is, I've got steady work and a stable home with little likelihood of seismic, life-altering events in the future.  And gradually, I've begun to take better care of myself, eating better, drinking less, exercising more regularly.  Recently, it even occurred to me that I should resume my meditation practice.

This shift revealed one of the chief coping mechanisms I employed during that stressful period--distraction.  I got through active duty by consuming too much bourbon, Playstation 2, and Reno 911.



Immediately after Katrina, I found myself, while completely exhausted, nonetheless staying up to all hours, refusing to sleep, and learned of other New Orleanians doing the same.  And in recent years, my once voracious news consumption has been replaced with a voracious comedy consumption.  The news itself seems like a joke, jokes with many set-ups but the same punchline--The wealthy and powerful are fucking over everyone else.  Now if I'm going to consume jokes, I prefer ones that will make me laugh over those that will make me cry.  Of course, what all of these practices have in common is a desire to avoid reality, to give myself something to think about that is immediately more pleasurable than the horrible circumstances around me.

Over the last few weeks, I've found myself once again in stressful circumstances at work.  There, we're on a tight schedule to turn an exercise in research and development into something that is operational and sell-able. So when I initiated the next task at hand, I thought it would take me a day.  One day became one week then two and three, and gradually, I felt myself move from frustration to confusion and then panic.  And as my stress escalated, I found my good habits eroded by those bad ones.  My distraction low point has got to be one of two events--seeing the Green Lantern movie or playing the old Atari game Adventure.  (Man, were those Atari games shitty.)

Of course, I have fixed the problem at work which is why I'm taking time to write this.  But what's interesting to notice is how, when difficult circumstances arise, those difficult circumstances can overwhelm the entirety of my reality.  In this case, while work was proving frustrating, the rest of my life was fine; it just didn't feel fine.

On the local front, Nicole and I are experiencing the bizarre local weather of June--almost constant, pea-soup-like fog with temperatures never getting higher than 12 C/ 54 F.  I'm not thrilled with it, but I tell myself at least I'm not sweating my ass off.  Nicole has a bigger problem with it.

But speaking of sweating our asses off, we will be in New Orleans from July 22-30.  We hope to see you then.

Old Sci-Fi Films

When I was in Seattle, I picked up the book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies.

Naturally, that's led to my watching some sci-fi films I hadn't seen before.  (That was the whole point.)  Here are some of them.

La Jetee

This French short was the basis of Terry Gilliam's great Twelve Monkeys, and just as Gilliam is a wildly original filmmaker, director Chris Marker made some original aesthetic choices as well.  Most notably, this motion picture has no moving pictures, just a collage of stills with an audio track (mostly narration).  Yet it works, and the choice actually seems like a shrewd way for an indie filmmaker to work around the issue of special effects.  Here it is on youtube with English narration:



Colossus:  The Forbin Project

"Colossus" is the story of the US military's handing control of its nuclear arsenal to a massive, artificially intelligent computer, Colossus, and like many stories' beginnings, "it seemed like a good idea at the time."  The story is compelling, complex, and clearly a precursor to 1983's WarGames, though much darker.  Conveniently, it, too, is available in its entirety on youtube:



Fahrenheit 451

Given that this film is based on a Ray Bradbury book and directed by Francois Truffaut, it seems set up to be great.  It's not.  It fails on so many levels I stopped watching after 30 minutes.  First, the tone and cinematography of this one are really terrible.  I've never watched Truffaut's films, though I've always heard great things about them.  But the staging of the opening sequence seemed so amateurish that I'm not in a rush. And putting the story on film exposed the absurdity of the book.  I mean, if you're going to burn about 50 books in a dry environment, you don't need a flamethrower.  A single match will do just fine.

Soylent Green

I approached this film well aware of its notorious ending.  What I wasn't prepared for was what a prescient, chilling presentation it is of the future (i.e., now present day).  Set in 2022, the world swelters under the effects of global warming.  Food is scarce.  Unemployment is rampant.  The masses struggle to survive; the wealthy are unaffected.  Does this sound familiar?  Watch this film.  Watch it again!

Since "Star Wars," sci-fi has been my favorite genre, but lately, I find it uniquely relevant to our lives.  Only sci-fi can capture the relentless effects of science and technology on our lives.  These effects don't just change our external realities; they change our consciousness, too, as human interaction evolves away from face-to-face contact, toward web surfing.  Unfortunately, it appears our mastery of science has far outpaced our ability to use it wisely.

A Great Weekend

Last weekend was a great one, and this one's not bad either, because it's 50% longer than the typical weekend.  But back to last weekend . . .

In my last post, you heard me talk about the poker game at the Rose and Thistle and how I'd found it frustrating at times.

The Rose and Thistle, where they believe in double awnings.

Last Saturday, I went back, determined to play looser.  Basically that meant hanging around in nominal hands (ie, having maybe a low pair), while others are raising like crazy.  Turns out I won the game and $280.  That is the single greatest victory of my life!  OK, not really, but at the time it did feel pretty damn good.

Actually, strictly speaking, I didn't win the game either.  Another player (Jeff, my nemesis) and I were in the top two.  The guy running the game gave us the option to simply split the pot.  While I would have liked to have played heads up, I took the option, because that evening I had to hurry off to the Ferryland, Newfoundland.

Our new friends, Michael and Donna, had invited us to attend a live music event in Ferryland and then spend the night in their cabin.

Michael's an interesting guy.  Like me, he grew up in the southern US (White House, Texas) and married a Canadian girl.  He's also very liberal, so we've had a lot interesting discussions about Southern culture and whatnot.  Another wrinkle, though, is that he's also British.  His parents are from the UK, and their work took them all over the world.

That night in Ferryland was nice.  There was a lot of nice music, the place was packed, and people were dancing and drinking like there's no tomorrow.  We left at midnight, and there were still two more acts to come.

We spent the night in Michael and Donna's quaint cabin with the wood-fired stove and got up the next morning and went for a walk.  Below you'll see a slideshow of the gorgeous countryside.

Speaking of good times, Nicole and I sent off the documents on the lawsuit after the house fire.  As most of you guessed, the settlement amount for indeed for less than two million, even less than one million.  The settlement was in the $10-20,000 range.  Certainly, that's a not a trivial amount of money.  But compared to the fact that the company destroyed my home, it doesn't quite seem like adequate compensation.  But then that's why lawyers are so demonized in the US, to make it almost impossible for regular people to gain adequate compensation when injured by the wealthy and powerful.  Mission accomplished!  (Note:  the wealthy and powerful always use lawyers.)

And in other good news, I got word at work that I'm going to be promoted.  

Catching Up

The demand for a new blog entry has become overwhelming, so here I am, scribbling just to please you, dear reader.

Basically, for the past two months, it's been a bit of a grind--a lot of get up, go to work, chill out a bit, rinse, repeat.  That's OK, but it's a quick way to burn through two months.

One of the ways I've been chilling out is playing poker at a local pub.  I think of myself as a decent player.  I played regularly in Texas and continue to on-line, not gambling in either case, just for fun.  Here, though, I find the style of play . . . different.  A lot of wild bets are being laid.  The last time I played I came as close as I ever have to an outburst in a game ("outburst," ahem, in a bad way).  It's been a few weeks since then.  I might try again today.  I have made some friends and acquaintances through the game, and that was the main point.

I did miss the wedding of my good friend Matt to Veronica, a fact I'm not happy about.

Photographer

Nicole and I were looking forward to it a great deal, an opportunity to visit friends and family in New Orleans and beat the snow for a while.  But when the time came, money was simply too tight.  Ah well.

Speaking of snow, my slideshow of St. John's Winter Wonderland should be working here.  (And mine of the Battlestar Galactica exhibit is here.)   There's a lot less snow in St. John's now.

Yesterday evening, on my way out of work, I noticed this scene from my office building.  The snow in the sun had largely melted, while the remaining snow matched the evening shadow of our building.  One of our office administrators got a big chuckle out of my interest in this, but being from the South, I'd just assumed that snow melted uniformly as it warmed up.  That's how it does melt when there is snow in the South.  But having spent several winters in Canada, I can tell you that snow in shady spots can linger for months.  (I find it interesting.)

I'll also tell you that we have a third cat, Mouse.

Mouse, on the left, relaxing with Ella.

Generally, I'd never intended to have a third cat.  But basically, this little street urchin ingratiated herself with Nicole (an easy task) while I was in Texas for a semester.  That and none of my Toronto friends would adopt her, especially John and Ann.  She's a sweet cat, though, and I'm glad she's no longer on the street; she's the luckiest stray cat in Ontario.  She's a grey tabby like Oleanna, but they're very different cats.  Oleanna was long and sleak; Mouse is short and stubby, a furry little bowling ball.  Oleanna was very affectionate; Mouse is still a bit skiddish with that.

That link for Oleanna is to a blog entry about the anniversary of my house fire.  Apropos of that, I can tell you that just last week we reached a settlement against the company whose product started the fire.  I'll blog more about that later.  For now, I welcome your guesses about the size of the settlement:
Free Website Poll

The soundtrack for this blog entry was my friend Alex's nice, mellow music available here.

My Trip Out West

A couple of months ago, I was thinking about the people we know living out west.  Lisa and Elana had just moved to Vancouver.  My friend Tony had been in Seattle for a few years, as had Phil and Morgan.  I thought it'd be nice to have a vacation out there and visit both cities and all those friends.  Then, a few days later, my boss told me about the American Meteorological Society conference in Seattle and that we ought to go, and that was that.

One thing for sure, I didn't want to fly directly to Seattle because I didn't want to expose myself to the TSA's abusive practices.  My plan was to fly to Vancouver on Friday, hang out with Lisa and Elana over the weekend, and then take the train down to Seattle.  Unfortunately on Thursday afternoon I got a call that Lisa's mother was about to pass away, and that they had to hurry back to Toronto.

I was able to reschedule my flight to Sunday morning--early Sunday morning.

The view from my first flight on the trip.

But that also meant I would do all the traveling--from St. John's to Vancouver then down to Seattle--in one day, 22 hours of straight travel.  Several things made the trip easier, though.  I made the trip across the continent in only two flights.  I had exit-row or bulkhead seats for all of my flights.  And on the plane, I was able to watch most of the NFC championship game.  It was a long day, but it could have been worse.

In Seattle, I only had one chance to get together with Phil.  Unfortunately on that day, he injured his eye pruning some grape vines.  (What a wino!)  So we weren't able to get together.

I wasn't able to get together with Morgan either; she was sick that week.  When I told her where I was staying, she said my hotel was right in her neighborhood.  I thought it might have been a few blocks to a few miles from her place.  No, when I stepped out of the hotel and looked to my right, hers was the first building I saw.  I walked by it several times a day, yet strangely we didn't get together.  Ah well.

I was able to get together with Tony, though.

Tony, after I said, "Smile."

On Tuesday, he took me to a bar with 100+ beers on tap.  Then Thursday night, we went to the Science Fiction Museum, where they had a Battlestar Galactica exhibit.  You can see my slide show of the exhibit here.

The Sci Fi Museum's exhibit of the Tree of Life from Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film I highly recommend.

After the museum, we did some old-school bar hopping in a cool Seattle neighborhood whose name escapes me due to the old-school bar hopping.  We had a great visit.

In Seattle, a single of Bailey's in a regular tumbler.

(Let me now point out how impressed I was by the generosity of the Seattle bartenders.  Having grown accustomed to Canadian pours, I ordered a double whiskey; I got a full tumbler of booze.  Canucks, I love ya, but this is one area the Americans have over you.)

The view from the train.

As I've documented, the next morning did not go well, yet that had little to do with the night before.  Fortunately, Elana was able to pick me up at the train station.  Sadly, Lisa's mother did pass away that week, and she'd stayed in Toronto to attend to family business.  Elana and I had a great visit, though, and it did involve alcohol.  It also involved an early flight the next morning as well.

BLOG FLASHBACK:  Previously on UITGWN, I described how the circumstances precipitating my marrying Nicole had involved a trip to Vancouver and Seattle.  While in Vancouver, Nicole and I had brunched in Havana, a cool restaurant.  So when Elana and I were bar-hopping in her cool neighborhood, I was shocked to see and recognize the place, which I'd all but forgotten.  "I've eaten there," I said, which surprised her because she'd just learned about the place.  At the end of the evening, I dragged her there for dessert, which means she watched me eat creme brulee' as we each had one last white Russian.

Havana.

After the border incident on my trip with Nicole, I had returned to Seattle without her and went to a neighborhood bar to drink my sorrows away.  The next morning, I woke up late, still a little drunk, and had to speed through the Seattle rain to return my rental car and make my flight.  Last week as I walked to the Sci Fi Museum, I walked past the place, the 5 Point Bar.

5 Point, a friendly bar worth photographing but not worth crossing the street for.

It was odd to have this trip out west echoing that momentous trip from several years ago.  END FLASHBACK


So on this trip, I saw 40% of the friends I'd planned on.  That's less than I'd hoped, but I enjoyed all my time with them.  I noticed, too, how booze figured prominently in this blog entry.  That's telling me something . . . my friends like to drink too much.


Now I will leave you with a slideshow of the winter wonderland that's befallen St. John's.  Click here.

My shitty morning

This morning, I:

• Realized I'd left the book I bought last night in Tony's car, which is my fault.  But when I tried to call him, for the first time ever, got his answering machine.
• Tried to check into tomorrow's flight on West Jet and got jerked around by the web site, constantly getting conflicting information.  A simple web site outage would have been disappointing; that was infuriating.  I still don't know if I'm checked in.
• Had the worst taxi ride of my life.  Here's how you know your taxi driver sucks--he sits for a five count once the light has turned green and cars have passed him.  The guy was argumentative, slow, and took an absurd route to my two-mile destination.  Thank Christ I had the sense not to tip him.  My parting words to him were "Fuck off."
• Because I was flustered and running late, I missed that Tony had tried to bring my book to the train station.  (What a mensch.)
• Found a large, obnoxious party jamming up the boarding of the train.
• Once uderway, I bought breakfast at the dining car and tried to mellow out.  Once settled back in my seat, I discovered I'd failed to get a spoon and had to march back to the dining car for one.
• I started playing on-line poker and hit a royal flush, the best hand possible.  I've played thousands of games and never even seen a royal flush before, and this morning I got one.  Then shortly after that, I got disconnected from the game and lost.
• In Everett, Washington, the train picked up three, cap-wearing douchebags who've sat across the aisle from me.  They showed up with a case of Coors Light in the train; it was 8:30 am.  Now I get to hear their fat-girl jokes and crying-stripper stories. 

Douchebags on a train, the right-most one being the douchiest.

And I have yet to go through Canadian customs.

Update:  Douchebag #1 cracks his first Coors at 9:52 am.

Update #2:  I guess I jinxed myself with my Canadian customs comment, because naturally, I got pulled aside coming through customs, even though I'm a Canadian permanent resident, have a Canadian driver's license, and a Canadian health card.

I'm now mellowing out at Lisa and Elana's.

A Tale of Two Days in My City

Wednesday was only the second sunny day we've had in 2011.  Fortunately, Nicole and I had the good sense to take time to appreciate it on my lunch break.  We went to the top of Signal Hill and enjoyed the view.

It was good that we enjoyed that beautiful Wednesday, because this was Thursday.

Over a foot of snow fell on Thursday.

 The cold wasn't so bad, but getting around was a scary proposition.  St. John's is full of steep hills that don't make for great driving conditions when covered in snow.  In fact, on Thursday, a snow plow plowed into two cars parked on my street (which is very steep). 

When I moved here, my transportation plan for the winter was to live in downtown and have practically everything we need within walking distance (check!) and take the bus to work (no check).  For several months now, the bus drivers have been on strike.  And while I'm sympathetic to the union, I can't help but feel like they've overplayed their hand.  The strike's going on this long has trained people to get along without them and perhaps demonstrated that they're not that valuable.  Drivers, cut a deal and get back to work!

But back to the snow--I had the good fortune of putting my Firebird in storage before all of it hit.  But the guy storing it lives just out of town at an elevation even higher than Signal Hill, so there was some snow at his place.  When I got out, here's what I saw.

My size-12 boot print among the moose prints.

Moose prints.  First, I was impressed with the sight of them, how smooth and round their edges were and how nearly symmetrical they were.  Then once the mechanic confirmed it, I was impressed that I had correctly identified them in the first place.  

The snow's still lingering for now, though fortunately, it's not falling like it was on Thursday.  And really the cold's not bad either.  Now that things have settled down, I'm enjoying it.

 

A Great Time in Toronto

So after visiting Nicole's parents in Midland, we went down to Toronto for a few days.  While living in the city was a bit of a grind, we had a great time, simply hanging out there and visiting friends.

First we went to our favorite Toronto bar, the Communist's Daughter, to hang out with our favorite bartender, Michael Louis Johnson.

The Communist's Daughter, which was once Narare' Snack Bar

There, as always, we got into an interesting discussion, during which I met a visiting journalist Michael DiGregorio.  DiGregorio was there to write about the death of a local bicyclist and cycling in the city in general, a subject near and dear to my heart.  So we had a fascinating conversation.  He told me about a recent documentary, Scapper, he did which I'd also love to see.  Here's the trailer for it.


The next day, Nicole and I bounced around Queen Street West during the day and saw "Fair Game" at the Bloor that night.

On our last day in Toronto, we were able visit with several of our friends--John and Ann, Derek and Linda--as we had a delicious meal at le Papillion.  Linda's brother, Jed, was there, and later our friend Michelle joined us at Derek's house.  Here's a typical segment of our goings-on there:


As is always the case with such visits, we didn't get to see everyone we would have liked.  So if we missed you, we hope to catch you next time.  And we found that, refreshingly, Toronto is a much easier city to visit than it is to live in. 

This time off has been good; contrary to my intentions, I haven't touched my worked since Christmas Eve.  But tomorrow, I go back to work, and I'm looking forward to it.

A Cinematic Holiday Season

I'm going to blog about the holiday trip as a whole, but first, I've got to talk about some of the movies I've seen this season.

I'll say it started with Tron: Legacy.  When I saw the original, I was taken with its personification of programs within the computer world, and I've always loved any decent sci-fi film.  This one is decent, but that's all.  As is often the case, the filmmakers clearly gave more thought to the 3D effects than any rigorous conceptualization of the world they were creating.  There are a few interesting ideas, though, and Jeff Bridges was excellent.

Then it was Christmas day and time for my annual watching of Bad Santa.  The film does not disappoint. 

It's more than just a bunch of off-color jokes though.  By tearing down the artifice and sanctimony surrounding the holiday, it shows us what the holiday is actually about, sharing time with people who care about each other.  That, and--"Fuck me, Santa.  Fuck me, Santa.  Fuck me, Santa."

Then we went to Toronto and the Bloor Cinema, a great repatory theater in a wonderful old building.  The place is enormous; the balcony alone would be a large theater in and of itself.  In fact, the balcony has its own nicely appointed lobby.

A corner of the Bloor's lobby to its balcony.

 (Two years ago, we watched Obama's Inauguration there, and you can see coverage of that in this video, starting at the 8:24 mark.  It gives a sense of the theater, including some footage of Nicole and myself.)


This time at the Bloor, we saw Fair Game, which told the story of how Dick Cheney outed covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame.  It also stunningly puts the lie to the oft-quoted meme, "The intelligence community got it wrong."  No, the intelligence community did not get it wrong; Dick Cheney actively worked to fabricate bullshit to start that fatuous war.  The performances by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are excellent; I cannot recommend the film enough.


On the plane I got to see the documentary Inside Job.  It is to the 2008 financial crisis what Fair Game is to the Iraq War.  It calls people out on their bullshit.  It was so refreshing to see the filmmaker interviewing people from Goldman Sachs and Bush's financial team.  They'd frequently try to drop misinformation, and the filmmaker, who was actually knew about the subject, would call them out on it.  Watch this movie.


Then, still on the plane, I got to see Howl with James Franco playing Allen Ginsberg.  The film alternates between an interpretive animation over Franco's reading of the poem, a re-enactment of Lawrence Ferlenghetti's obsenity prosecution for publishing the poem, a re-enactment of a long interview of Ginsberg, and biographical episodes.  Unfortunately, I only got to watch about half the film before they threw me off the plane, so I really want to see the rest.


Last night, back in St. John's, we saw True Grit.  I'd seen the original.  This one is much better.  And Jeff Bridges is great.

Today we plan to see Black Swan.  And I still want to see the Fighter and the King's Speech.  I said it's a cinematic holiday season.

(Don't go see "The Tourist."  It's not right that Angelina Jolie cheated another mannequin out of a paying gig.)

Merry Boxing Day, a Better New Year, and Belated Christmas

The Georgian Bay at Midland, Ontario.

Like last year, Nicole and I are spending Christmas at her parents' place in Midland.  Her mother lives to cook, so you can't go wrong.  It's been a relaxing, enjoyable time.

Unfortunately though, this is as close as I'm going to get to sending a Christmas card.  This year I just had too many papers to push; Christmas cards simply weren't . . . in the cards.  But I hope all of you had a good one.

For me this is the first time I've taken any time off since I started my job, time that is needed.  Since starting, I've unleashed my inner workaholic, often working through weekends and holidays.  It's also good to be in Ontario.  Sure, Ontario is colder staying just below freezing, while St. John's has had an atypical winter often as warm as 8 degrees Celsius.  Nevertheless, the weather is better in Ontario, as St. John's has been hit with two solid weeks of driving rain.  (By "solid" I mean 196 uninterrupted hours of.)

On Monday, we're going down to Toronto to hang out and visit friends.

Visitor #2 and other events

This week I had the pleasure of my second visitor to Newfoundland, Dr. Sukanta Basu.

Sukanta was my favorite professor during the Wind Energy program at Texas Tech.  I had some good teachers at Texas Tech and one not so good one, but it's no understatement to say Sukanta's training made an enormous difference in my program.  This week he came to St. John's, because my company hired him as a consultant, training me and a co-worker further and advising us on our wind forecasting project.  We worked really hard but also got to hang out and get to know each other better.  So it was a great experience.

The view from my front porch.

This week we got hit with our first snow that hung around for any length of time.  The onset of heavy snow has been a concern, because I need to get the Firebird in storage beforehand.  Of course, I needed to get it registered here before that.  So that meant a lengthy, tedious process of importing, getting inspections and insurance, and finally getting both cars registered.  Friday, at long last, I put the Newfie plates on my cars.  I'm now done with lionshare of bullshit regarding car ownership.

Tomorrow I'm off to Montreal for even more training with Environment Canada.  I'm looking forward to gaining even more skills, and I'm looking forward to spending time in the city.  It should be great.

Seasons

This week my maternal grandmother, Mary Alice McCormick, passed away.   She was 86, had been in decline for a year, and went peacefully in her sleep with my mother and uncle beside her.

4 Generations:  Mary Alice, my mother Kathy, my sister Anna, and my niece Grace.

As I think about her life, I realize how I've seen her differently at different phases of my life.  As a child, she was, naturally, revered.  Now I realize how my tee-totaling, Southern-Baptist parents projected their values on to my perception of my grandparents; as a child, I assumed they were "good" Baptists, too.  Only later, did I realize that all of my grandparents, like most from south Louisiana, liked to drink; Maw Maw was also into ballroom dancing.  As a teenager, Maw Maw was a familial novelty.  And as an adult, I started to know her as an adult, and that's when the trouble started.

Maw Maw had a difficult personality.  She would frequently foist unwanted and unnecessary advice on you and do so in less than diplomatic terms.  She was often an argument waiting to happen, and as an adult, that turned me off.  Over time, though, I gained some insight into some of the psychological dynamics behind the behavior I didn't like.  And right now, I'm less inclined to think about some of the things that she said and more about some of the things she did.  Though she never had much (She married my good-for-nothing grandfather.), she was reliably generous and hospitable.  She loved books, and she was a good storyteller.  She will be missed.

The delicious pecan pie Nicole made for Thanksgiving.

It was Thanksgiving in the U.S.  In Canada, that occurs in early October.  Nevertheless, Nicole prepared a traditional tofurky feast, and afterward we watched the Saints almost give a game away to the Dallas Cowboys.  I was telling a co-worker that I prefer the U.S.'s Thanksgiving to Canada's.  There the end-of-year holidays begin with the light and fun Halloween.  A month later, the holidays escalate with Thanksgiving.  A month later, the holidays crescendo with Christmas, followed by a coda at New Year's.  Of course in New Orleans, there's Twelfth Night, too.  I thoroughly enjoyed the Thanksgiving here, and when I brought my co-workers half of Nicole's pecan pie, they enjoyed it, too.

St. John's Slide Show

"A Time" on George Street

After I mentioned the possibility of a slide show of St. John's, I was barraged by requests--nay!  demands--from followers of my blog for just such a slide show.  So relax, people.  Just click HERE to see it.  You might want to slow down the player's speed to read my captions.

It's hardly an exhaustive presentation.  Largely, I just took a few photos, as Nicole and I walked to our gym in the center of the city.  But I think it does offer a glimpse into the city's charms.

(Look at this!  An election just occurred, and I'm not saying anything political.)

Tired

Lately, I've been tired.  I don't mean for the past two or three days.  I mean for the past two or three weeks.  I get 7-8 hours' sleep, and I'm going to bed earlier and earlier.  Yet when I'm not working, I'm existing from one nap to the next.  I've also been having some vivid, odd dreams.  Last night I dreamt I was driving across the American southwest, when I ran into my friend Angelle Arata in New Mexico.  (Back when I went to Arizona State, I made that trip on several occasions.  I've got no idea how Angelle got in there.)  I've also been craving beer, though I haven't been drinking a lot, typically 1-3 each night.  While I've always liked beer, usually after the first, I'm moving on to the whiskey.  My tiredness and my beer craving seem related, but I don't know how.

(Also, Nicole has told me that on several occasions she's woken in the middle of the night and looked over at me, only to find our cat Ella sitting on my chest and just staring down at my unconscious face.  I've wondered if she's psychically tapping into my weird dreams.)



I think what's going on is . . . With our new life here in St. John's, we've arrived in a more stable, happy place, and I feel like my body's trying to catch up on all the stress it's carried over the past few years.  The same thing happened right after I got off active duty.  I was thrilled to be done with the Army, but suddenly my body had all these stress-related symptoms.  Later, I realized my body was pushing down the stress when I was on active duty until it could let down.

One thing about being this tired is that we've missed some things.  There was a women's film festival.  I'd wanted to go but missed it.  Every year here they have a big Halloween/Mardi Gras celebration on George Street.  (I know, they've conflated Halloween and Mardi Gras due to the costumes.  Actually, today I explained to a local that Mardi Gras is the day before Ash Wednesday.)  We missed both.  Ah well.

One of the things I've missed is my St. John's slide show.  It's coming, people!  But here are some tidbits about Newfoundland.  Though St. John's is very old, Newfoundland is the last territory to join Canada, in 1949.  It had been a British territory, and there was serious talk about its joining the US.  But Newfoundland isn't a province by itself.  For some reason it's grafted on to Labrador.  Labrador is about the size of Arizona, but has about 50,000 people living there.  It's total wilderness.  So the province is actually "Newfoundland and Labrador."

I know there's been some talk about my recent post, announcing my marriage to Nicole.  So I'd like to share this video with you.  Obviously, it's not of Nicole and me, but I was struck by the eerie similarities between the video and how I proposed to Nicole.

Catch All

I've been really busy at work these last two weeks, though I'm glad to have a productive task to give myself to.  I've been expanding the capabilities of an existing computer program, which is a living example of every bad programming practice.  At one point, I needed a break and went to see "The Social Network" about the founding of facebook and got to watch the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg programming away.  I identified with him completely.  Though of course by the end of the movie, he ends up a billionaire, and I am not one.   Though I do have more friends than he did at the end of the movie (none).  So I'd say I'm richer than he is.  (And yes, that means you can expect me to ask you for a loan soon.)  Nevertheless like Zuckerberg, I've neglected other aspects of my life (including this blog), and I've got to correct that.

I'd intended to offer a slide show of St. John's, but that's not going to happen tonight.  When asked what St. John's is like, I have to say "Ireland."  And I say that without having spent one second in Ireland.  But from what I've seen they're quite similar--green rolling hills over rocky terrain jutting out into the Atlantic.  St. John's is actually closer to Ireland  than it is to New Orleans.  But I guess the clincher is that the local accent is a real, full-on brogue.  (It is not the Canadian accent, eh.)  I'm constantly asked about my accent, and I think My accent?!  Have you listened to yourself?

Just the other evening, I was leaving a grocery store when a local guy ask me for money.  I gave him some change, and he asked if I had time for a joke.  Sure.  An old man . . . and after that he lost me.  His voice became just a low, ripple of rolly's, lolly's, holly's. So as I stood there, looking at him, I wondered how his face got so damn freckled this far north, and then I realized--out on the sea, fishing.  About that time, he reached the punchline.  I knew because he showed me his god-awful teeth in a big grin.  I gave him a convincing laugh and a nod and went on my way.

We're married!

Most of you know that Nicole and I got married.  Though there's some of you who don't, but now you do.  However, many of you don't know that this November we'll celebrate our fourth anniversary.

So here's the story.  Way back in 2006, in the post-Katrina summer, Nicole and I went on our first date to hear Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn's.  (If you've been watching the Treme, you're familiar with the act.  Actually, Kermit and his music figure prominently in this video.)

I found aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans rather romantic; things were starting over and just being there felt like an act of defiance.  I likened it to living in post-WWII Paris.  So naturally, we fell in love.

Our relationship was going great, when we decided to take a vacation to Vancouver in November.  But then,  Nicole wasn't allowed back in the US, because her papers weren't in order.  A week later, she was given a visa solely for the purpose of getting her van and belongings back into Canada.  The visa would expire in a matter of days, and then she'd have to remain in Canada indefinitely.

Well at that point, I'd had five straight months of her hot lovin'.  There was no way in hell I was letting my Canuck cookie out of my clutches.  So the next day, we went to the Gretna courthouse, eloped, and told Immigration to suck it.

So why'd it take so long for you to hear about it?  Well, at first, it was our secret, which made it all the more romantic.  We hadn't been together that long, and while we definitely wanted to continue our relationship, we weren't ready to publicly wear the "married couple" label.  Then after that, of course, we had the house fire and were completely distracted by that.  And the truth is the period after that has been a difficult one for each of us as well as our relationship.  There never seemed to be the "right" time.

But now that we're starting over again in St. John's, I hope that our lives and relationship are entering a happier phase.  And I'm happy to have Nicole in my life.

The Move

As I've stated, I felt bad that I couldn't help Nicole with the move out of Toronto.  So she and her 70+-year-old parents were left to load up a 14-foot U-Haul truck on their own.  (On the other hand, I told Nicole to hire movers, but she said was too busy to get around to it.  I say she was too busy not to.)  Some twelve exhausting hours later, they got the truck loaded.  Or so I thought.

When I called her around ten the next morning to see how their drive was going, they were still loading things.  But by about 10:30, they did depart.  Unfortunately, somewhere near the Ontario-Quebec border, a trucker dozed off and rammed his truck into a bridge over the main highway.  The trucker was unhurt, but his truck exploded.  More to the point, traffic was stopped for hours.  Nicole and her parents ended up stranded in a truckstop, whereupon learning the cause of the hold-up, Nicole proceeded to mock the incompetence of the said driver (in a truckstop).  They didn't make it to Montreal as they'd planned. 

Meanwhile, as I stated, Newfoundland was shit-hammered by Hurricane Igor.  No it does not compare to Hurricane Katrina.  But it was serious.  One man was killed.  Lots of homes were flooded, and more roads were washed out.  I was without power for two days.  And I also got my first direct exposure to hurricane-force winds, learning firsthand of the phenomenon "stinging rain."  As I told my co-workers, "In Louisiana, we stay home when a hurricane hits."

But the effects of Igor weren't done with us.  When Nicole and her parents arrived at North Sydney, Nova Scotia, they found the ferry--the last of the season that goes directly to St. John's--getting filled with military personnel and their heavy equipment.  They were going to assist with the post-hurricane clean-up, and it was looking like, because of that, our U-Haul wouldn't make it on.  Fortunately, Nicole's mother, Maria, was on the scene.  She's a little, septuagenarian with a thick German accent, and when she sets her mind to something, it's hard to say "no" to her.  She spoke to three different ferry personnel before getting assured the U-Haul would be included.

The ferry ride was 16 hours.  Fortunately, Nicole and her parents had their own cabin.  But the cats were left in the cabin of the cars.  And it freaked them out pretty good.  Ella spent the whole trip under the passenger's seat.

Fortunately, though, they arrived Saturday afternoon.  And the next day, we unloaded the U-Haul.  That is, I hired movers.  Best $169 I ever spent.

Things to do

Next week, Nicole and her parents (and our cats) begin their trek from Toronto to St. John's.  They leave Tuesday and will arrive Saturday morning.

 It goes without saying that Nicole has had a lot to do.  (Yet I say it anyway.)  I feel bad that I can't help her with it, and I feel glad that I don't have to.  But while I may have escaped the hassle of moving out, I cannot escape the hassle of moving in, starting a new job, moving to a new city, and immigrating to a new country.  The pile of tedious phone calls and documents seems endless.

I realize that few enjoy fumbling with the minutiae of modern life, but I honestly dread it.  Sure I get it done, but the whole time I'm, say, interacting with an automated phone system to, say, set up my internet, I've got a script rolling in the back of my head--Why in the hell am I wasting my brain power on this?  Such experiences have revealed something about myself--I like ideas, thinking about "the big picture," but I don't like dealing with all the details that go into that big picture.

Bart's photo of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, on an annual hike of the route.

Here's an example.  Years ago, I was walking with my friend Bart when we crossed a dead railroad bed, and I said that someone ought to make it a bike trail.  That happened one or two more times, before Bart started a group, Friends of Lafitte Corridor.  To make a very long story short, this group became the impetus for making this trail a reality.  That is, after a lot of work by Bart and other volunteers, New Orleans' City Hall signed a contract with a design firm; the bike trail/park is going to happen, marking a major improvement in New Orleans' infrastructure.  Bart has credited me with the idea, and I appreciate that.  But the truth is I didn't do, nor would have done, dick-all to make that happen.  I had a big idea but no patience for the details.

I can't wait for Nicole and our kittens to arrive.  As we begin our lives in this new city, I should invest myself more in the details of some of my ideas.

Canadian Milestones

This week, I've passed several milestones for life in Canada.

I've had my first visitor to St. John's.  (I know--that was fast.)  Elana had actually planned the trip before I got the job here.  (So she's staying in a hotel and not sharing the inflatable mattress with me.)  Circumstances provided a fortuitous bit of company and a good excuse to go out and drink more.  I also got my first taste of local music, a pretty good local band Quiet Elephant.  I'm glad I got to see Elana again.  She and her wife, Lisa, have been among the best friends Nicole and I have made in Toronto.

Second, I got my Ontario Health Plan card.

Me, post-sex & name changes.

That's right!  The horror of socialized medicine is upon me.  Oh, and the death panel--THE DEATH PANEL!  I felt like Charlton Heston in "The Planet of the Apes," stripped down and made to stand before that board of bureaucratic baboons.  They only gave me two years to live!  And I said, "Well hell, why bother with this fucking job, then?"  Oh, Auntie Sarah Palin, why didn't I listen to you?

Ahem, so this is where I point out that, based on everything I observed over 2+ years, there's no perceptible difference between the quality of treatment you receive in Canada vs. the US.  Are there waits?  Sometimes, but no different  than those you'd find in the US.  If you need immediate care, you go to a walk-in clinic or emergency room, just as you would in the US.  The big difference is that, here, there's no bill waiting for you.

I know, I know, that bill is in the higher taxes, right?  Because everyone knows in Canada they take half of your salary in taxes, yes?  Well, I just got my first paycheck in Canada, and its deductions for taxes looked no different than what I'd experienced in the US for comparable pay. 

It's almost like someone lied to us, so thoroughly flooding public discourse with misinformation that the misinformation becomes the default public perception, even when the perception bears no semblance to reality.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  I can't imagine.