Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by Zoom! on May 22, 2012, at 6:30 am |
Lately I’ve been falling behind. In April I went from a four-day-a-week job and two contracts on the side to a five-day-a-week job and four contracts. It’s temporary – the full-time job is over at the end of June, and then I’ll be looking for more work.
In the meantime, I’m not getting a whole lot of stuff done other than what absolutely must be done: work, laundry, food, pets, and a little bit of fun. The housework will just have to wait till July. Blogging will be intermittent and mostly in point form.
Here are a few of the things I’ve been doing for fun:
- On Mother’s Day my son took me out for martinis and poutine. This struck me as the grown-up version of the traditional Mother’s Day Breakfast in Bed: Cheerios in chocolate milk served with a piece of toast, a pickle and three gummy bears. I laugh every time I think of martinis and poutine.
- This weekend GC and I went for dinner at a friend’s place and had a really lovely evening just sitting on their patio, talking, drinking beer and feasting.
- We also found time for a romantic Sunday afternoon picnic at the Arboretum, with wine and a baguette and blueberry goat cheese.
- Saturday morning I went for a 14 km walk, Sunday a 16 km walk, and Monday I reined it all back in and only went for a measly 10 km. I listened to some excellent short story podcasts while I walked.
And here are a couple of fun things on the horizon:
- Today is GC’s car’s birthday. After work we’re all going to pile in (GC, me, Ernie, Duncan and Rosie) and go through the carwash!
- We bought tickets to go see Propeller Dance at the Centrepointe Theatre on June 1st. This will be our first time seeing them; everybody says they’re fantastic.
- The Great Glebe Garage Sale is next Saturday!
Posted by Zoom! on May 14, 2012, at 6:26 am |
I live in a row house. The woman who owns the next house in the row is an investment advisor. She rents the place out to one group of kids after another, each of which generally moves out within a year to make way for yet another group. It’s an endless succession of hot-headed young drunks and thumping bass lines.
One thing they all seem to have in common is they can’t remember garbage day is Thursday. Instead of throwing out a bag of garbage every Thursday, they throw out nothing for weeks, and then they throw out a mountain of garbage on a random day.
But that’s another blog post. This one’s about the all-night parties.
GC and I are often sound asleep before the party even begins, and we’re pretty good at sleeping through them. Sure, we’ll wake up and drift in and out of sleep and our dreams will be full of parties and bad music, and occasionally we’ll wake all the way up and curse the young people and the investment advisor who rents to them. But generally we’re okay unless the party turns ugly and people start tumbling out onto the street and screaming obscenities, which hasn’t happened yet with this current group.
What HAS happened with this group is that instead of partying in their living room like normal people, they party in the master bedroom. Right on the other side of my bedroom wall. Mere inches away from our heads. With their pounding bass lines and raucous laughter, they party late into the night and through the wee hours, and are sometimes still going strong when I get up for work.
I am impressed by their stamina. They party four, five, six nights a week. Even at my peak, I couldn’t have maintained that pace for more than a week or two.
I tell myself that this is penance for my own youthful partying that kept my weary old neighbours from peaceful sleep. It’s just the cycle of life, repeating itself. Karma is not necessarily swift or severe, or even certain, but I expect these young neighbours of mine will get their just desserts in about 30 years or so, once they’re firmly ensconced in a world of mortgages, alarm clocks and chronic fatigue.
One night last week GC and I were both awakened by the neighbours arriving home at closing time, followed by the music blasting through the bedroom wall. (Speaking of which, why is it that those with the worst taste in music have such a penchant for volume?)
“Turn on the radio,” I suggested.
“Good idea,” said GC. “We’ll counter-blast them with CBC.”
Ha ha.
Saturday night GC had finally had enough. At 2:45 he put on his clothes and marched out the door.
Now, if you know GC at all, you know he is a gentleman and a really nice guy. It is not in his nature to confront anybody and complain about their behaviour. So he must have been pretty pissed off to do this.
He hammered on their door and leaned on their doorbell, but of course they couldn’t hear him over their music. Finally, in a little space between songs, they heard him and one of them ran downstairs to see who in the world might be pounding on their door at such an ungodly hour.
GC came back five minutes later, saying “His name’s Tyler, and he’s a nice kid. He apologized and said he didn’t know he was disturbing us and he won’t do it anymore. We shook hands.”
And everything was blissfully quiet. So quiet, in fact, GC had to turn on the radio and do a crossword puzzle in order to fall back asleep.
Posted by Zoom! on May 9, 2012, at 6:03 am |
There has been a cluster of cat deaths among my friends lately. Several good friends have lost beloved cats, and they’re grieving. It doesn’t seem to matter if the cat was old or sick or the writing was on the wall…grief is grief. It’s hard and it hurts and my heart goes out to them.
Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping an uneasy eye on Duncan since his kidney disease was diagnosed last year, and especially since the vet said she suspected something else was going on with him. Something worse than kidney disease. Something bad.
Duncan has been losing weight ever since I adopted him. At first the vet was happy about it, since he weighed a ridiculous 25 pounds. But then she became concerned because it’s normally very hard to get a cat to lose weight, and it was suspiciously easy in his case. Besides, he lost a lot of weight even though he was eating ravenously. At his December check-up, he weighed less than half of what he did four years ago.
Here’s a picture of Duncan with his former vet in January 2008, right after I adopted him.
Here he is in late 2008, when he was the featured on the Elgin Street Irregulars blog for Tank Top Tuesday.
And here he is now:
Last year, the vet switched his food and asked me to mix it with water to ensure he stayed hydrated. In December she prescribed a course of antibiotic/anti-inflammatory medication. And she had me give him regular Vitamin B12 injections. We were hoping these measures, together, would curb the weight loss.
On Saturday we went back for his twice-yearly annual check-up. (He’s a very special cat.)
Dr. Hughes gets a big kick out of Duncan. He likes her too. He comes when she calls him, and he follows her around like a puppy dog. He makes himself completely at home in her office, walking on her desk, knocking over her thank-you cards, and checking out her treat jars. He’s part cat, part dog, and part person, and she sees all that and appreciates his unique personality and special charm.
At one point Duncan sat in the chair beside me, across the desk from her, and she burst out laughing.
“I love that,” she said. “Whenever a cat sits in the second chair, next to the owner, it makes me feel like a couples counselor.”
She checked him out thoroughly and was very happy. Not only has the unexplained weight loss stopped, but he actually gained a third of a kilogram since Christmas! She says he’s looking really good. There were other improvements too – he used to experience a lot of pain when she felt his abdomen, and he didn’t this time.
However, he does need dental surgery. And since it appears he’s not going to die anytime soon, I’m going to spring for it.
Duncan and I highly recommend his vet, by the way. Her name is Dr. Glenys Hughes, and she works out of the Merivale Cat Hospital. She was subjected to a little bad publicity recently, but Duncan and I think the world of her.
Posted by Zoom! on May 7, 2012, at 6:12 am |
GC and I want to travel a little, maybe go to Newfoundland or New Orleans or San Francisco…anywhere, really. But when we have money we don’t have time, and when we have time we don’t have money, and sometimes we have neither. So we decided to start tucking a little bit of money away each month in a joint travel account.
Our appointment to open a joint account at the RBC Royal Bank was…peculiar.
We explained to the accounts manager what we wanted to do.
No problem, she said. She’d just create a new account for me, set up GC’s profile, and then make the account joint.
She then proceeded to pull up my account information and swivel the computer screen around to face GC and me. There was a list of my accounts and balances.
“Oh,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “Is it okay if he sees this?”
Since he’d already been looking at it for 10 seconds, what could I say?
“Okay,” I said.
I’m not particularly private about my financial information. I’ve always been a little puzzled by people who guard their financial information like it’s some kind of state secret, or who keep their salary a secret from everybody else. But I know there are plenty of people who would freak out if someone at the bank showed their financial data to someone else, so I was pretty surprised when she did it. Especially since she already knew by then that we aren’t married and we don’t live together.
But then she went even further. After setting up the joint account, she asked if I’d seen My Finances, which is an online Royal Bank tool for tracking one’s money. I said I had looked at it, but I didn’t use it.
She then clicked on it and showed GC and me exactly how much money I make, how I spend my money, and how much my net worth has decreased over time. We watched as bar charts and pie charts of my personal financial data materialized at the end of her cursor. How often I take money out of the ATM. How much my mortgage payments are. Etcetera.
As we left the bank, GC said “Did you think that was weird?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It was like she was snooping through your financial information right in front of us,” he said. “I felt like I shouldn’t be looking.”
I keep thinking about how I should have said something to her before things got that far. But then it would have seemed like I have financial secrets, which I don’t, and it would have been awkward.
What would you have done?
Posted by Zoom! on April 29, 2012, at 10:49 am |
First off, I’m happy to report that Cindy Lou was found and captured on Friday afternoon as she was running down the Queensway! It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed. Two police officers were trying to catch her when someone from Genesis Dog Rescue came along and managed to snag her to safety. She did not escape unscathed, however. She had been hit by a car at some point during her ordeal and suffered a broken leg and road rash. She’s on painkillers and she’ll be having surgery on Monday but she’s going to be just fine. I love a happy ending.
I witnessed a goosebump-inducing spectacle the other morning on my way to work. It was about 7:00 as I was cutting through the Carleton University campus. I heard some extremely raucous crows screaming blue murder, so I turned around to see what was going on.
I saw about six or eight crows chasing a red fox towards me. He was running up the concrete path and they were flying low and screaming and dive-bombing him.
I thought briefly of trying to film it, but I knew by the time I got the camera ready, the chase would have moved out of view. And there’s nothing worse than not seeing something fascinating because you were trying, unsuccessfully, to capture it on film.
I don’t know what that fox had done to incur their wrath, or how long they’d been chasing him, or how far out of town they were planning to run him, but he was definitely looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. I love crows, but I did feel sorry for the poor fox. He looked tired. I watched as he loped along and deked behind the Architecture building, the crows harassing him relentlessly. I heard the chase continuing long after I could no longer see it.
Posted by Zoom! on April 26, 2012, at 8:41 pm |
 There is an amazing drama unfolding in Ottawa. You might have heard of it.
Remember a few months ago, when GC and I were looking for a dog and we had that bizarre experience with Friendly Giants Dog Rescue? Well, we didn’t lose faith in the rescue community, in part because we had the good fortune of meeting some very special dog rescue folks. One of them was Jennifer.
Jennifer is wonderful. She’s kind to animals and she’s also kind to people. She devoted herself to the rescue operation when the Paws R Us puppy mill was shut down. Six hundred dogs and puppies needed volunteers to care for them for several months. Jennifer was one of those volunteers.
While she was doing that work, she met Cindy Lou. Cindy Lou is a little Jack Russell terrier who was used as a breeder by the puppy mill. She’d had a truly miserable life, and she was a truly miserable dog. She was scared half to death by just about everything. Â She was petrified of people.
Cindy Lou was too damaged emotionally to be adoptable. She would need a great deal of rehabilitation, skillfully delivered by somebody with a great deal of knowledge about damaged dogs. Jennifer took Cindy Lou home with her. Many of us followed Cindy Lou’s story through Jennifer’s Facebook status updates. I cried the first time Cindy Lou emerged voluntarily from her crate…it took her weeks to gather up the courage.
Over the months, with patient, sensitive and consistent treatment, Cindy Lou gradually came out of her shell. She  learned that people could be kind to her. She was still skittish and frightened, but she was making progress.
I’m not certain what happened, but my understanding is that a few days ago Jennifer left Cindy Lou with a babysitter for a trial visit in anticipation of an upcoming trip. Cindy Lou discovered a small hole in the babysitter’s fence, and escaped. She’s been on the run ever since. I think she’s been gone for three days and nights now.
There is an intensive search taking place. Jennifer’s extensive dog-loving network has rallied to help Jennifer and Cindy Lou. There have been a number of Cindy Lou sightings, many of them around Bruce Pit. But she’s too frightened to come to people, and she’s eluding capture.
GC and Rosie and I went to Bruce Pit last night to see if we could help. (Bruce Pit is a big wooded area where lucky dogs get to romp off-leash.) We were so impressed with how many people know the story and are trying to help. There were signs everywhere, and groups of searchers. Even the people that were just there walking their dogs knew about Cindy Lou and were watching for her.
We left when it got dark, but we saw there were still small knots of people with flashlights and crates and hotdogs (Cindy Lou loves hotdogs), waiting for her.
This morning I read The Metro while waiting for the bus, and there was Cindy Lou, in the newspaper! She’s everywhere.
Jennifer and her searchers are still out there, huddled in the rain, waiting for Cindy Lou. They think she has taken cover tonight, as  there haven’t been any sightings in the rain. But nobody’s giving up. She’s out there, and she’s probably cold and wet and scared.
Cindy Lou is no ordinary dog. She is a symbol of hope and resilience. She represents what the very best of human beings can do to fix the harm done by the very worst of human beings. Â Cindy Lou was the happy ending to a very sad story.
We need to find her and bring her back home. We need a happy ending for our happy ending.
Please join the Facebook Group: Finding Cindy Lou Who . If you can, please join the search at Bruce Pit.
Posted by Zoom! on April 26, 2012, at 6:27 am |
He made me a lemon bread to take to the office potluck.
Posted by Zoom! on April 23, 2012, at 6:16 am |
At my new job, I phone people. Don’t you think that’s ironic? I’m phonophobic, yet somehow I ended up with a job that involves phoning taxpayers all over the world and asking them questions in an effort to sort out their residency and world income and so on. I didn’t even find out that that was what I would be doing until I showed up for training.
There’s more to it than that. I phone them and ask them questions, and then I process some of their paperwork. I have a big flowchart in a binder. If A then C. If not A, then go to Chart 14. If A and B, then cross this out and put this number in this little box and skip to Chart 25. That kind of thing. And then, when I’m finished my part, I send it back into the system, and I don’t know how many other people it passes through before it’s done. Each one of those people has their own binder full of flowcharts specific to the little piece they do.
The funny thing is I actually kind of like it. It’s not boring, at least not yet, and I get these glimpses into strangers’ lives. For instance, I’ll process the tax return of a migrant farm worker with eight children who earns $16,000 a year, and I’ll wonder how he does it, and then minutes later I’ll process the tax return of a single, childless guy who earns $322,000 a year and doesn’t make any charitable donations, and I’ll wonder if he ever wonders about the migrant farm worker who picks his fruit and supports eight children on $16,000 a year.
I don’t know what it says about me that I like the methodical, repetitive, regimented nature of the work. I asked XUP what she thought, and she said she could understand someone liking it, especially if they hadn’t worked for awhile or were coming from a chaotic work background, but that after 20 years of it, I’d probably want to slit my wrists. (It’s just a 3-month contract, so I should be okay.)
The job sounds easy, but it still requires a lot of concentration. I can be working on a return and then the phone rings and it’s a taxpayer returning my call and by the time I’m done with them, I’ve completely lost my train of thought about the one I was working on when the phone rang. So I have to start over. I’m still slow, but I’m conscientious.
About the phone. I’m hoping this job will help me overcome my phone phobia. Normally I procrastinate like crazy before making a phone call. But since it’s part of my job and I have to make a lot of calls, there’s no point procrastinating. I just make sure I know what I want to ask, check the time zone charts, take a deep breath, and plunge ahead. (People are quite deferential when you tell them you’re calling from the Canada Revenue Agency. You hear them sitting up straighter and turning off the TV and shushing their kids. You can detect both the apprehension and the eagerness to please in their voices. It’s like they think I’m a cop or something.)
Commuting is complicated. The job is 10km from my home, and requires the catching of three buses. It takes an hour and 15 minutes to get to work if I catch the three buses and everything goes according to schedule. However, if I walk six of those kilometers, it only takes an extra 15 minutes to get to work. If I do that both ways, I get 12km exercise a day, for an investment of just half an hour more per day than taking the bus.
So that’s what I’ve been doing. I leave the house at 6:30 in the morning, and I get home at 5:30 in the evening. I don’t have much gas left in my tank by then, though. I can’t imagine coming home to hungry kids with piles of homework.
Posted by Zoom! on April 15, 2012, at 10:59 am |
Last October, the Supreme Court ruled that Insite, Vancouver’s safe injection site, could stay open despite the Harper Government’s objections. The arguments hinged on whether addiction was primarily a health issue or a crime issue. If it were a health matter it would fall under provincial jurisdiction; if it were a criminal code issue, it would fall under federal jurisdiction.
When the Supreme Court ruled (unanimously) that Insite could remain open because of the rights of addicts to accessible health care, it opened the door to the possibility of safe injection sites opening in other Canadian cities.
For those of you unfamiliar with how a safe injection site works, it’s a facility where injection drug users can bring their own drugs and inject them under the supervision of a nurse. The facility provides the client with a clean, safe(r) place to inject, and if he or she overdoses, there’s someone there to provide medical assistance. In addition, it’s a point of contact for other health care questions or issues the client might have – for example, drug treatment, pregnancy, infections, mental health issues, etc. In addition to the heath benefits to the individual, there are public health benefits to the community, such as lower rates of transmission of infectious diseases, and fewer hastily discarded needles in public places.
For the past four years, researchers at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto have been conducting a feasibility study to determine if safe injection sites were needed in Toronto and/or Ottawa. The study looked at costs, the potential impact on property values, and the effect on rates of transmission of infectious diseases, among other things. The study determined that Ottawa could use two safe injection sites.
Ontario’s Minister of Health, Deb Matthews, says Ontario has no plans to open any safe injection sites. Â Ottawa’s mayor, Jim Watson, says if we have extra money to spend on the drug problem, we should put it into treatment. Ottawa’s new Chief of Police, Â Charles Bordeleau, says he’s opposed to a safe injection site, suggesting he’s more concerned with the criminal aspects of obtaining illegal drugs than with any potential health benefits from how or where they’re consumed. The former Chief of Police, Vern White (now a Harper-appointed senator) says he is opposed to a safe injection site in part because it would be unwelcome in any neighbourhood.
I find the Mayor’s reasoning weak on this subject. Treatment and harm reduction are not mutually exclusive. We need both. Drug addiction takes place along a continuum, and we need to meet people where they’re at. I agree absolutely that we need more treatment centres. But we also need harm reduction initiatives, like safe injection sites, for those who aren’t ready for treatment yet (or treatment isn’t ready for them – ie, they’re on a waiting list). If we treat people with addictions like they matter, like their health matters, Â like their lives matter – instead of like vermin who are relegated to the back alleys – maybe they’ll start taking better care of themselves.
The Chief’s reasoning is understandable given that his profession demands that he look at everything through a crime lens. But I think he needs to try harder to understand that much of the drug problem stems precisely from the fact that drugs are illegal and addicts are therefore criminalized. To say you’re against a safe injection site because drugs are illegal is to ignore a complex set of factors that need to be taken into consideration in order to understand and alleviate the drug problem.
Former Chief Vern White argued against a safe injection site, saying it wouldn’t be welcome in any neighbourhood . True enough. But that’s not a good reason not to do it. There are a lot of things people don’t want in their neighbourhoods. Composting facilities. Shelters for abused women. Halfway houses. Children’s Aid group homes. Parole offices. Homeless shelters. Does that mean we shouldn’t have those things? Of course not. (And, as one of my colleagues said the other day, “I’d rather live next door to a safe injection site than a crack house.”)
Posted by Zoom! on April 12, 2012, at 5:17 am |
GC and Rosie and I were out walking on Saturday afternoon, when we encountered the following scene.
Two boys, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, had climbed up on top of a structure by the fountain in Centrepoint Park. They were perched up there dispensing financial advice to  a somber-looking  boy of about eight, who was sitting on the ground, listening attentively.
We missed the first part, and the last part, but we caught the middle. Here’s what we heard:
“…then go to university but keep living with your mom and then get a good job but don’t move out, keep living with your mom until you’ve saved enough money to buy a house. Whatever you do, don’t borrow any money, don’t use credit for anything, don’t have any credit cards, you don’t want any debt at all, this is very important. Then after you buy your house, you can move out of your mom’s house and get married and…”
I don’t remember thinking about stuff like this when I was a little kid. Did you? Are these kids unusual, or do kids think about these things now?
I wish I’d stopped and asked some of the many questions that have since occurred to me.  I’d also love to  follow up in 20 years and see how things have shaken out for these three boys.
I have questions for their moms too. For all you parents out there: Would you agree to the part laid out for you in a plan like this?
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