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Watch my life unravel...
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A sign in GC’s neighbourhood:
Speaking of driving carefully, here’s a video my friend Murtisha posted on Facebook yesterday. It’s seven minutes of car accidents. I watched the whole thing with my hand clasped over my mouth. It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. Viewer discretion advised. Be careful out there. As you know, I spent much of the weekend watching birds having sex. But that wasn’t all I did. I also spent a fair amount of time glued to my computer, monitoring the constant stream of Twitter updates from protesters and journalists at the G8/G20 protests in Toronto. Trying to make sense of it. At this point, I have far more questions than answers. For example, why did this happen? Who set the five police cars on fire? With 19,000 cops on the ground, why were they permitted to do that? How did they get such easy access to police cars? Since – by all accounts I’ve heard – the vast majority of the 25,000 protesters were behaving legally and peacefully, why were peaceful protesters and journalists detained while the so-called Black Bloc were allowed to run rampant? Why were people beaten up? Could it possibly be true that detained women were literally threatened with rape by the police??
Amy Miller – Alternative Media Centre, Independent Journalist from Darren Puscas on Vimeo. Now, in the aftermath, it’s all about the battle for public opinion. My political inclinations put me on the side of the protesters, but regardless of where our political inclinations lie, I think we should all want to know what really happened out there. I want a full public inquiry into the events of this weekend. There’s an unprecedented amount of video and photographic evidence which needs to be examined and analyzed in order to provide a more complete picture of what happened. There are thousands of eyewitnesses. Someone asked me if I always think the cops are in the wrong. No, I do not. But they’re the ones with the most weaponry, armor, power and anonymity. They’re the ones vested with the authority to use that weaponry and power. Power is so easily abused, especially in large numbers, especially under the cloak of anonymity, and probably more so under volatile circumstances. I have no doubt that some police behaved in an entirely appropriate manner, and others did not. Same with the protesters. But the police can infiltrate and impersonate protesters to manipulate the situation (and have been known to do so), whereas the reverse is not true. Even more important than any individual and spontaneous acts of wrongdoing, I want to know which acts of wrongdoing were part of the plan.
I used to occasionally watch Roller Derby on TV when I was a kid. It was, to my mind, the female equivalent of wrestling – violent and theatrical. But that’s not what it was like on Saturday night. The Rideau Valley Roller Girls is a much friendlier league. There was lots of action and plenty of spills, but also a spirit of camaraderie between the two teams.
Anyway thanks to Ciaochow and David Scrimshaw for turning us on to Roller Derby. We’ll go again. In other news, there have been some developments in the Love Nest. Billie laid her second egg on Saturday morning. There appears to be a small hole in one of the eggs, but we’re hoping it’s just dirt. We’re expecting a third egg any minute now. You can watch the live cam in the nesting box here. Also, we harvested our only broccoli from our garden yesterday and shared it with the birds. They like broccoli, and it’s good for them – particularly during egg-laying season, because of all the calcium. You know how human mothers are supposedly “eating for two” during pregnancy? Well, bird fathers need to literally eat for two, because they feed the mother birds. Billie has been eating next to nothing the last few days, but Lester regurgitates his food for her many times each day. It looks like they’re kissing, but really he’s feeding her. (After you get used to the idea, it’s really quite sweet.) Billie spends a lot of time on her eggs. She only comes out to poop, have sex, drink water, and gather more paper for shredding. Lester spends about a third of his time in the nesting box with her, preening her, regurgitating, and being very attentive. Speaking of sex, here’s a video of Lester and Billy having sex yesterday. I’m not sure this was an entirely successful coupling – it looks like Billie tossed him aside before he was finished. What else is new over here? We went to the Friends of the Experimental Farm used book sale on Saturday, and I got a ton of used books for $5. My favourite is a 1956 book about the sex lives of wild animals. I also got books about Zelda Fitzgerald’s art, tree identification, gardening, Morocco, and crime. We planned to go to Fringe Fest last night to catch The Sputniks, on Arden’s recommendation, but we didn’t make it, for reasons too boring to recount. Instead we stayed home and watched a pretty dismal movie called Life is Hot in Cracktown. The last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about lovebird sex, because, when you really think about it, there’s a lot to think about. For example, do boy lovebirds have penises? Doesn’t the girl lovebird’s tail get in the way? Do birds enjoy sex, or is it just a biological imperative? We’ll get to all that. But first we need to start with the basics. Lovebirds apparently need a nesting box in order to fulfill their procreative proclivities. So I got them a nesting box. It hooks up to the cage wall, on the inside of the cage. Next, they need nesting materials. Every evening I visited the lovebirds with gifts. I brought them fern fronds from my garden, and soft downy cat fur, and grass and twigs and weeds that looked like miniature trees once they were in the cage. The lovebirds accepted my gifts with interest. They played with them, but they didn’t use them for nest building. It turns out the only thing Billie (the woman lovebird) wanted was paper. Lots of paper. And here’s the weirdest thing. She uses her beak to shred the paper into strips about a quarter inch wide and two inches long. Then she tucks each strip into her tail feathers, like it’s a pocket. When her tail is full, she flies up to her nesting box, removes the strips, twists them in her beak and uses them to build her nest. (Her nest, incidentally, is not nest-shaped. It’s simply a big pillow of shredded, twisted newspaper.) Lester, meanwhile, just gets in the way. He tries to shred newspaper, but he can’t. Billie will give him a piece of shredded paper to play with, just to keep him busy for a while while she works, and he’ll try to tuck it into his tail feathers, but he can’t do that either. A few days ago they finally started having sex. I’ve only seen it twice so far, but it’s very cool. She sits motionless on the perch with her wings spread wide throughout the entire sex act. She lifts and points her tail to the side, to keep it out of the way. Lester climbs on top of her and pumps away non-stop for several minutes. Then suddenly he hops off and they both look quite pleased with themselves. Now here’s the big exciting news. Yesterday morning Billie laid her first egg! It’s perfectly egg-shaped, and it’s about the size of a cherry. From what I understand, she will probably lay one every other day for about a week or so. Then, in about three weeks, the first one will hatch. GC and I, at the urging of Facebook friends, went out and got a webcam yesterday and hooked it up and started broadcasting. You can watch, in real time, the inside of Billie and Lester’s nesting box, right here: The Love Nest. You might even get to see Billie lay another egg. We plan to keep it on during the days, and turn it off at night. (The site has a text-based chat feature too – if you want to chat, I think you have to register for free with the host site, ustream.) (Oh yeah – do male birds have penises? Most do not – however, the Argentine Lake Duck has a penis half a meter long – the same length as his body.) I was at GC’s house, watching the lovebirds engaging in elaborate foreplay rituals, when the earthquake hit. At first GC and I just looked at each other as the noise and the shaking intensified, and then the realization that it was an earthquake dawned on us. I’ve experienced earthquakes before, but this one was stronger than the others. The birds, however, were oblivious to it, and The Dog seemed unconcerned. I tend to be unnaturally calm in emergencies. Useless, but calm. Everything slows down, and since I can’t control the outcome, I just float with it. It’s the same thing when I’ve experienced a car accident and a home invasion. Just float. Don’t panic. Slide, slow motion, into the future. As soon as it was over, I remembered we should be standing in a doorway, so we went and stood in the kitchen doorway. Which felt a little silly, since it was already over. “Let’s go outside,” I suggested, so we did that. All the neighbours were outside too, describing how it felt to them, which was more or less how it felt to all of us. “Let’s go listen to the radio,” I said. We went back in, turned on CBC and the TV and wondered why the media still seemed oblivious to it. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, were abuzz with first-hand reports and earthquake jokes already. My favourite was the tsunami warning for the G20’s Fake Lake. (#fakelakequake). Social media was way ahead of mainstream media on this one. After about 20 minutes or so, media reports started trickling in. Which isn’t bad, really, considering they’d been evacuated from their buildings and had to verify information and so on, but still, it felt like they were late to the party. And even then, the TV stations were getting much of their footage from youtube. I’m still used to the olden days when we got our news from the media, rather than the other way round. The City of Ottawa, straggling onto Twitter at 3:57, looked a little lame announcing the earthquake fully two hours and 16 minutes after it happened. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing than to announce the occurrence of an event that everybody else already been talking about for hours.
My house looked like it had been shaken by a giant fist. We ran from room to room, quickly surveying the damage while looking for Duncan. The second floor was the worst. Pieces of furniture had moved away from their walls. Things had fallen. In my bedroom, I have a dresser and hutch. The hutch had fallen to the floor, spilling the contents of all its shelves.
After a few minutes he was feeling much better, and we went upstairs to tidy up. Miraculously, my procrastinating ways had saved some of my treasures. In my bedroom, there was a basket of clean laundry in front of the dresser. Also, the bottom dresser drawer was open. When the hutch went flying, almost everything on it – from framed pictures to cast-iron pigs – landed either in the open drawer or on the clean laundry. As a result, there was very little breakage.
Anyway. That was my experience of the great quake of ’10. How was yours? Other things we did yesterday: 1) Attended the Grand Opening of The Oaks I was kind of excited when the mail carrier knocked on my door with a registered letter. A surprise! Maybe I won something? Maybe I inherited money from a long-lost distant relative? Awww, Zoom, you incurable optimist, you. (But perhaps such unbridled optimism is reasonable, give that this has always been a lucky mailbox.) It was an Order from the City of Ottawa. They’re giving me three weeks to repair or replace my front porch. Otherwise they’ll do it themselves and bill me, along with a fine of up to $50,000. The front porch is the worst part of the whole house, and there’s no question it needs repairing or replacing. As a matter of fact, I got a quote last year: $6,000 to remove and replace it. It’s a concrete block with steps, and I share it with my next-door neighbour, so $3,000 each. He wasn’t interested, even though his side is far worse than mine. His is so bad that the post office refused to provide home delivery unless he did something, so he relocated his mailbox to the foot of the steps. It’s so bad it makes mine look almost good.  Photo: My Side  Photo: His Side  Photo: His side, viewed from my side The neighbours on the other side replaced their porch last year with a wooden one, after their tenant caught her heel in a cavernous crack and fell down the stairs. My first order of business is to request an extension. Three weeks isn’t long enough to sort this out, especially since I have to coordinate the decision and work with my neighbour. Plus we have to rob a bank or something first. My ever-so-thrifty neighbour and I discussed it yesterday, and he seems to think we can get away with just repairing it again. But I think that’s like duct-taping duct tape. These steps have been repaired repeatedly over the years. The stoop is even coming away from the building now. It’s time to replace it. We could go with wood. It would be cheaper, and I think it would look better too. My neighbour thinks if we go with wood, we should leave the concrete stoop and stairs there, and just build a new porch over it. But the new porch couldn’t use the old porch as a base, since it’s crumbling away from the building. So it would have to “float,” which would make it larger than the existing porch, so I would lose some of my front garden. He said he has a biker friend who could do it. Does anybody have any other ideas? In other mail-related news, I received a card in the mail a week or two after posting the video of Duncan and the mouse. The envelope was neatly hand-written, and addressed to my full name. I opened it up and my eyes almost bugged out of my head. How did they know I had a mouse?  Photo: Front of Card  Photo: Inside of Card I’ve never used a pest control company before. I suppose it could just be a coincidence that I ended up on their mailing list, but I don’t think so. The card and the timing were just too perfect, and besides, the envelope was hand-written. So what I wanna know is, which one of you sent it?? My first guess is XUP. If not her, then one of those Elgin Street Irregulars. Or maybe Nancy and Doug? C’mon, fess up! It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around here lately.  Chelsea and her parents It was the first baptism I’d ever attended. There’s a part where everybody present has to repeat a bunch of religious stuff from a book. Chelsea chimed in with “Blah, blah blah,” in all the appropriate spots.
In other news, I got a registered letter from the City, and I played hardball with a printing company. Also, I went to a storytelling event, I received an interesting card from a pest control company, and I’ve been helping the lovebirds build their nest. Details to follow. Duncan and I have only one major point of contention – he wants to go outside, and I won’t let him. All my other cats were allowed to go outside and live independent cat lives, but Duncan is my prisoner. When I lived downtown with five cats (Mr. Jones, Catastrophe, Mean Joe, Screamer and Beethoven), in a third-floor apartment at the corner of O’Connor and Cooper, I had bars installed on the kitchen window so they could come and go as they pleased, up and down the fire escape. Sometimes one of them would disappear for a few days, and I’d worry. But they always came home. They’d come home with burrs and battle wounds and ravenous appetites. They’d settle in for a good meal and some heavy-duty affection and deep, contented purring, followed by a long slumber. I was always a strong advocate of letting cats go outside. Even if it made me worry. Even if it shortened their lives. But Duncan? He’s different. He’s so unusual and trusting and affectionate. I just know that sooner or later, some little kid would drag him home and tell their mother that he followed them. (Which is something I did at the age of eight, and which, weeks later, resulted in that cat being taken to the Humane Society, for which I still feel guilty.) Something more sinister could happen to him too. I’m still haunted by the story of serial cat killer Craig Farkas. I wonder if my beloved tomcat Bud, who went missing in the early 90s, was one of his victims. Or something less sinister could happen. He could get run over. Every time I leave the house, Duncan tries to squeeze past my feet into the great, alluring outdoors. I understand his need, and I hate to deny him anything, but I would be devastated if anything were to happen to him. I love this cat with all my heart and soul. Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I can’t risk losing him. He must remain safe, even if it costs him his freedom. The other day, GC and I were outside. GC was mowing the front lawn and I was weeding the front garden. Duncan was standing on his hind legs, looking through the screen door at us and meowing sadly. I decided to let him come outside with us for a few minutes. He was such a happy cat. He stayed close and chewed tall grass and let the breeze tickle his ears. I first heard about George Guirguis (City Council candidate in Bay Ward) from David Reevely’s blog, when he shared some of the strange emails coming out of that campaign. Reevely also linked to Guirguis’ campaign video. Well, now he has fifty campaign videos on Youtube. They’re so bizarre. I haven’t watched them all, but from what I’ve seen, they tend to follow one of two formats: a photomontage of pictures of Guirguis, set to a sappy love song, or a video of Guirguis set to a sappy love song. The photomontages always include multiple instances of a picture of Guirguis with Stephen Harper. The videos include lots of footage of Guirguis campaigning and giving the thumbs up to the camera. There’s one where we get to spend two minutes watching him use his computer. But this one is a little different from the rest, in that it’s got people saying things. (Stupid people saying stupid things, but still.) This one exploits the Shepherds of Good Hope. It’s obvious from the way he’s making that sandwich that he’s not a regular volunteer – he volunteered for a single shift for the photo op potential. (“What can the Shepherds of Good hope do for me?”) Anyway. Gorgeous George is a weird narcissistic guy running a weird narcissistic campaign.  Photo: Corridor You should see this place. It was designed by architects who really took off with the theme of fertility and wombs and so on. I only took a few pictures – I wish I’d taken more, but for some reason I felt like I was intruding on something private. There are three floors to the clinic. The ground floor is for women who are trying to get pregnant. On the wall is a mosaic of photographs of babies who were conceived at the clinic. The second floor is for women who have succeeded in becoming pregnant and whose fetuses are being shepherded through the treacherous nine months to safe delivery. The third floor is the administration offices.  Photo: The Bioarchive There are also cryogenic freezers, an embryology lab, a genetics lab, a stem cell lab and a biochemistry lab. We didn’t get to see all of the labs because they have a million-dollar air quality system, and they’re very particular about who can go in there.  Photo: Womb Room I always took my fertility for granted – in fact, there were times I cursed it. All those periods, all that birth control. But while fertility might be a nuisance, infertility would be a far greater burden. Some people go to great lengths – medically, emotionally and financially – to have a baby. Currently Quebec offers tax credits of 50% of the cost of fertility treatments. It’s the only province to do so. Quebec is even considering paying the full freight for up to three rounds of in vitro treatments ($30,000) per family. They expect the number of couples seeking treatment will increase from 2,500 to 10,000 per year if it’s publicly funded. The Ovo Clinic – one of four fertility clinics in Montreal – currently has a waiting list of 300 couples. More clinics would need to be constructed if Quebec does decide to go that route. 10,000 couples times $30,000 = 300 million dollars. That’s a lot of money. (You could host one day of a G20 meeting for that kind of money.) What do you think? Should the cost of infertility treatments be at least partially covered by the public health care system? |
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