Personally, I’d rather eat dog poo than ride my bike naked in public, but I admire people who feel so completely at home in their own naked skin. And you know what? Their comfort level doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how they look. Old, young, fat, skinny, well-endowed or not, all these people seemed quite comfortable naked, even in public with dozens of cameras pointed at them. My hat goes off to them. (But just my hat.)
At any rate, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so without further ado:
Here are some of the people trying to get the picture worth a thousand words:
And here’s the video. Only problem is, I made the mistake (again!) of holding my camera in portrait mode for the first little while. Duh. So you might have to turn either your monitor or your head to see it.
Here’s the edited version, in which almost everybody is right side up, but I had to sacrifice some picture quality in the process.
Okay, time for the weekend roundup of things to do.
The Naked Bike Ride, Saturday, 2:00 pm, Confederation Park. You can strip down and join the naked bike parade as it winds its way through the downtown core. If being entirely naked isn’t your thing, you can wear body paint. Or skimpy clothing. Or you can do like the rest of us and just take pictures. The naked bike ride is a worldwide phenomenon and is intended to protest oil dependency, celebrate body freedom, and curb car culture. But it’s easy to forget all that in the face of so much nakedness. Here’s my post from last year’s ride.
Saturday is also Worldwide Knit in Public Day. (For those who can’t decide between the naked bike ride and knitting in public, how about knitting naked in public?)
Propeller Dance is performing tonight and tomorrow tonight at the Arts Court Theatre. I haven’t yet seen them, but I hear they’re amazing.
Westfest, a free three-day music festival on Richmond Road starts this evening.
This weekend is also the annual BUSFUSION camping meet-up in Almonte – over 200 Volkswagen buses and campers and their people will be attending. For more information call Mike Cuff at 613-432-7181 evgs or email Mike at economan@hotmail.com.
There’s a Granny Walk leaving Parliament Hill on Sunday at 10 a.m. for a 3 or 5 km walk. The walk is sponsored by the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign in support African grandmothers raising orphaned grandchildren, and the Stephen Lewis Foundation. (More information: 613 730-6442)
And last but not least, GC’s parents are celebrating their 56th wedding anniversary on Sunday!
If you know of other interesting things to do this weekend, feel free to add them in the comments.
I just read in the Ottawa Citizen this morning that Mary-Elizabeth Harriman, wife of Colonel Russell Williams (who awaits trial on charges of sex killings, home invasions, sexual assaults and break and enters), has been ‘devastated’ by the charges against her husband.
“As a result of the charges, my previously anticipated future and financial security had become jeopardized,†the affidavit said.
The affidavit is in response to a lawsuit filed jointly against Harriman and Williams by one of his sexual assault victims, who claims that Williams transferred ownership of the house to Harriman on March 26th in order to protect it from legal action.
A couple of things caught my attention here. One is her focus is on her financial security. Frankly, I would think her financial security pales in comparison to what other women lost as the result of her husband’s alleged actions. And that brings me to the second point: she says she lost her security as a result of the charges.Since the charges were a direct result of the Colonel’s alleged actions, I would say she lost her security as a result of her husband’s actions, not as a result of the charges. Maybe it’s a minor detail, but the implication is that it’s the system’s fault rather than her husband’s fault.
This brings me to another question. I can’t help but wonder how much Ms. Harriman knew about her husband’s horrific hobby. Is it possible that she lived with him all those years and had no inkling that he was breaking into houses, stealing women’s underwear, raping women and occasionally murdering them? Did she never stumble across his massive collection of stolen underwear and baby blankets and other ‘trophies’? Did she never see blood on his clothing or scratches on his body and wonder where they came from? Did she never wonder where he went during his middle-of-the-night excursions?
Do you think it’s possible she turned a blind eye to her own suspicions in order to protect her “financial security” from the truth?
I got a bike! It’s a Kona Dew Plus. It was on sale because it’s last year’s model. I bought it from my old friend Peter Conway at McCrank’s Cycles, right next door to Irene’s Pub. (Peter and I are birthday twins. We met for the very first time on my 19th birthday, which was also his 24th birthday.)
I love my new bike. I rode it home from GC’s house yesterday. An 80-minute walk is a 20-minute bike ride! The gears change so smoothly and intuitively, compared to my rusty old Canadian Tire bike. (That’s rusty, not trusty.)
Speaking of my old bike, I put it out on the curb on Saturday morning, and five minutes later it was gone. I hope its new owner likes it as much as I like my new bike.
The other big news is that I purchased a nesting box for the lovebirds. You know what that means, right? Baby lovebirds.
Lovebirds apparently won’t mate, no matter how much they want to, unless they’ve got somewhere safe to lay their eggs. Lester and Billie (named after Lester Young and Billie Holiday) want to mate. They’re showing all the classic signs of sexual maturity – he’s regurgitating food into her mouth, and she’s flapping her wings a lot. Last night we cleaned and redecorated their cage and assembled the nesting box and attached it to their cage, while they were out enjoying a flyabout.
Then we settled down on the couch to watch them mate.
But they didn’t. No. Not yet. They haven’t figured out what that big black box in their cage is. It’s got a perch on the side, next to a round entry/exit hole. The floor has a rounded depression in it, where the eggs go. There’s a two-part sliding door at the end – one part is plexiglass, the other is dark plastic. We can slide the dark piece up to peek at what’s going on inside the box.
So far they’ve just been eying the box suspiciously. I think once they work up the courage to venture inside, Billie will turn to Lester and say “Doesn’t this remind you of a hollowed out hole in a tree? Wouldn’t it be a great place to lay eggs and raise a family?” Then they’ll go back out and look for nesting materials. (Nest-building is bird foreplay.)
After they’ve built their nest, they’ll have sex while balancing on a perch (she’ll flap her wings furiously to keep them from falling). Then, over the course of the next few days, she’ll lay 4-6 eggs in the box. About 24 days later, the first egg will hatch!
That’s what I expect to happen, anyway. GC is convinced I’m some kind of expert on this, but really I’m just flying by the seat of my pants.
My Dad tells me that about a third of the time when he clicks on his desktop icon for knitnut.net, he ends up at the Washington Post site instead. The address bar says he’s at knitnut.net, but he’s not. This has been happening intermittently for a few weeks now. I’m mystified. Has this been happening to anyone else?
This is our Square Foot Garden. We built it ourselves. It lives in our community garden plot. We also built a half-size one that lives at GC’s place and is growing herbs and lettuce.
The premise behind square foot gardening (SFG) is that by eliminating rows, and the walking paths between them, you economize on space and soil. Apparently you can grow five times more food in an SFG than you can in the same-sized traditional garden.
First you build the box. It’s four feet by four feet, and six inches deep. It doesn’t have a bottom. You place it in your garden on top of some landscape fabric.
This, by the way, was the first DIY carpentry project GC and I ever jointly undertook. Neither of us had much independent carpentry experience either. But we slapped that box together like old pros, and told each other carpentry jokes while we were at it. (“I see,” said the blind carpenter, as he picked up his hammer and saw.)
Next comes the soil. But you don’t use ordinary soil. No siree. You make your own soil, and it’s crazy rich stuff. It consists of equal parts compost, vermiculite and peat moss. However the compost has to consist of five different types of compost. We used sheep manure (of course), moo poo, shrimp compost, mushroom compost, and all-in-one. We mixed it on a big tarp just outside the community garden, and then trucked it in in a wheelbarrow.
Here it is in the box, which we then sectioned off into distinct square feet with a grid made of pink nylon cord. The book says to use lath, but Lloyd at Home Depot said nobody carries lath because it warps so easily. White cord would have been cheaper, but Lloyd said pink would be more visible and would also keep the birds away. So we splurged.
Next we had to figure out where we were going to plant everything. We had three heirloom tomato seedlings of various types (compliments of Robin’s lovely partner, Judy), a broccoli seedling, a green pepper seedling, and a fistful of seed packages.
We thought and sketched and planned and planted. But we made one fundamental mistake: We didn’t know that peas grow to be two meters high and need supports. If we’d known that, we would have planted them in the back row, where we’re going to build a climbing frame. Oh well. We’ll figure something out soon. So the back row has tomatoes in three spots and cucumbers in the other. The row in front of that has peas, beans, lettuce and broccoli. The second row from the front has nothing, carrots, something else and a geranium. The front row has swiss chard, onions, beets and mesculin mix.
There’s something indescribably thrilling about seeds sprouting and little plants growing. This little guy’s going to be a cucumber when he grows up. The beans are the craziest though – you can practically see them growing before your eyes. (I could have sworn I took pictures of them, but apparently not. However, you can clearly see them in that top picture, which was taken about a week ago.)
Here’s the half-size square foot garden we put together at GC’s house. We planted chives, rosemary, thyme, cilantro, parsley and lettuce. All the herbs have been doing really well, except for the rosemary, which has had to compete with a chipmunk for real estate in the back square on the left. The chipmunk won, so the poor battle-scarred rosemary has been relocated to a square shared with the thyme.
Here are a couple of items that I forgot to mention yesterday. I’d love to go to these, but my weekend’s already overflowing.
This songwriting workshop and house concert feature Eve Goldberg (my wonderful guitar teacher when I was at Haliburton a couple of years ago – I loved her) and Cori Brewster.
Sat Jun 5 from 1 pm – 3 pm
SONGWRITING WORKSHOP
Ottawa Folklore Centre
1111 Bank Street, Ottawa
$20 members, $25 non-members
info: (613) 730-2887 or email: thefolks@ottawafolklore.com
http:///www.ottawafolklore.com
Sat Jun 5 at 8 pm
Westboro House Concerts
Westboro Area, Ottawa ON
$15 Sugg. Donation
for reservations, email Nicole at westborohouseconcerts@primus.ca
or call 613-323-1782
Also: The Carlington Community Yard & Plant Sale is on today. I can’t believe I forgot to mention that yesterday, since it’s in my own neighbourhood.
One last thing: Today is the official City of Ottawa give away weekend. Obviously you can leave things out on your curb any day with a “Free” sign, but today’s the day everybody’s encouraged to do it. I’m putting my old bike out because [insert drum roll here] I bought a new bike yesterday! I’m picking it up today and I’ll post pictures soon.
Penny sent me this picture yesterday – she said it reminded her of me the instant she saw it. I absolutely love it. She found it on this site, but there’s no information about how to buy it.
I MUST HAVE THIS CHAIR! I WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO MAKE IT MY OWN!
In other news, we’ve got a crazy busy weekend coming up. There’s the New Art Festival (formerly known as Art in the Park), the Christie Lake Kids Canoe Race fundraiser, Open Doors Ottawa, a volunteer gig at the Shepherds of Good Hope, the Fletcher Wildlife Garden Plant Sale, and my brother Graham, a long-distance trucker from BC, is passing through Ottawa in his 18-wheeler on Sunday, so we’re going to try to get together – I haven’t seen him in years.
It’s kind of ironic that Graham ended up being a trucker. He and I hitchhiked from Vancouver to Ottawa together when I was 18 and he was 19. At one point we caught a ride with a trucker in an 18 wheeler who said he needed to sleep a couple of hours outside a Husky truck stop in Brandon, Manitoba. While I was in the washroom the trucker locked Graham in the back of the truck and then, when I got back, he attempted to rape me in the cab. I was screaming and fighting and Graham was hollering and kicking the back door. Several other truckers got out of their trucks and came over to find out what was going on. The trucker let us go and threw our stuff out in the parking lot, while acting like we were nothing but trouble and shouting “I’m never picking up any goddam hitchhikers ever again!”
I hope he didn’t, but he probably did.
Anyway, have a wonderful weekend everybody, and if you know where I can get that sheep chair, please tell me!
What to blog about today? Hmm. I’m coming up empty. Maybe just a little smattering of tidbits.
1) That cat I was talking about yesterday? The one with the weird fur? I just added some pictures.
2) Yesterday I went out to mail some stuff, and I pulled some weeds out of my flower garden on my way out. I left them in a little pile at the end of my walkway, figuring I’d put them in the green bin when I got home. An hour or so later I returned home to find an old lady standing on my walkway eating my weeds.
3) I made swiss chard and chickpeas from It Ain’t Meat Babe. It’s supposed to feed four and I halved the recipe. But it’s a magic recipe – we keep eating it, and it doesn’t get any smaller. We’ve eaten it twice already, and we’ve barely made a dent in it. Good thing it’s good.
4) Duncan lost another pound. He’s a svelte 18 pounds now. Sometimes he tears around the house and up and down the stairs just because he can. I remember when I first got him, playing was too much of an effort for him. And when he wanted to lie down, he’d line himself up with where he wanted to be and then tip himself over. Also? I’ve started buying his canned food at Global Pet Foods, in Ottawa South. I buy all different kinds so he gets variety. So far he’s loved everything except a chicken & seafood pate.
5) A few months ago I mentioned that I needed clothes for job interviews, and Stephanie mentioned an organization called My First Suit. I contacted them and they agreed to help me out. This afternoon I’m going downtown to pick up my suit!
I finished my Experience in Motion course last Friday. It was useful – not just for the things I learned, but also for re-motivating me on the career transition/job search front. I was, admittedly, getting a little lazy with that. They say looking for work is a full-time job, and frankly I was dedicating more time to playing Bejewelled than I was to looking for work. Now I’m devoting myself to work-finding activities from nine to twelve each weekday morning.
I used to think that job-hunting was all about finding job ads and applying for them. But there’s a lot more to it than that, especially if you’re scouring the hidden (ie unadvertised) job market, which is where 80% of the jobs are. I have to do research and cold calls and information interviews. I have to come up with good answers to common interview questions, practice my 30-second elevator spiel, and write promotional materials for myself. I’m going to create a website, pull together some writing samples, and possibly start a new blog.
I’ve been in a bit of a catch-22 position with respect to knitnut.net. On the one hand, since I’m trying to make a career transition into writing (including, possibly, blogging for an organization), and since this blog is a showcase of my writing and blogging abilities, I’m tempted to include it on my resume. On the other hand, some of the content is a little too personal to show to prospective employers. I don’t mind showing it to family, friends and complete strangers, but I don’t think it’s wise to show it to prospective employers.
So. The solution is to create another blog. A professional one. One that I can direct prospective employers to. I don’t know what it will be about yet. Any suggestions?
In completely unrelated news, there’s an orange cat in GC’s neighbourhood who might be homeless and who looks very strange. I don’t even know how to describe him. He looks like he’s got another animal glued to his back. Imagine a cat with a huge lump of additional fur glued to his back, just behind his shoulders. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case, since the fur is the same colour as him, and besides, it’s just too preposterous.
I haven’t had a chance to inspect him carefully, because he’s very aloof. But there appears to be a gap in the centre between where his regular fur ends and this weird fur starts…like it’s attached on both sides, but there’s a hole in the middle. He was limping the last time I saw him, but GC saw him today and said he wasn’t limping anymore. I’ll try to get a picture of him for you. (Updated with pictures on Thursday June 3rd.)
Anyway. What do you think I should do? I’ve been tempted to capture him and take him to the Humane Society, but I’d hate to be a catalyst for him getting euthanized. I don’t know if they would or not, but I hear they’re overloaded with cats these days, and I don’t think he’s very adoptable in his current condition.
Update (Thursday June 3rd): I hadn’t seen him for about a week, and I noticed last night he was looking quite a bit better. So maybe he’s not homeless after all. But from the looks of his fur, he could still use some help.
To everybody who participated in Ottawa’s Race Weekend, this sign’s for you.
The marathon is my very favourite spectator sport. Actually, come to think of it, it’s the only spectator sport I really like. I think it’s partly because it’s undertaken by ordinary people instead of just professional athletes. And those ordinary people have worked so hard for so long and are so determined to do what they’ve set out to do, no matter how crazy it is or how much it hurts. I find it both humbling and moving to watch that river of indomitable human spirit flowing past me.
Another reason I love the marathon is because I don’t feel distanced from it, the way I do with other sports. I’m right there with the athletes. I can make eye contact and smile and say things to them. A lot of them smiled back at us, especially the ones who were running, as opposed to racing. There were a lot more smiles at the back of the pack than at the front.
I was exhausted after the marathon. All that clapping and cheering took a lot out of me.
These photos were all taken in the last 6km of the course, after the runners had already completed 36 or more km. I’ve got lots more on flickr.
And last, but not least, the obligatory bleeding nipple shot:
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