For the first time in a long time, I am not being drowned in requests for Samhain interviews. This is novel. I'm not going to a Hallowe'en party by choice (and I love each and every one of you who has invited me to one, I really do, but I'm just not in a party mood, and plus the cost of gas is really limiting our outings). I'm not doing the round of Samhain rituals, either, just the one with my own coven. (See above, those who have invited me to one. Love you. Really. But not this year.)
I've spent a stupid amount of time crying this morning. I found one of Gulliver's hairs on a cardigan I just dragged out of storage. And it's sunny outside, damn it. I should be happy. But I'm snappish, tired, and irritable.
I'm juggling the need to be anti-social with a bad restless feeling. I'm lonely, but I don't want to talk to anyone. I'm rethinking my no-NaNo decision simply to get myself writing and doing somethign I usually enjoy, which is a stupid, stupid thing to do because I don't have the time and I'm burnt out from writing three books in fifteen months for publication plus last year's NaNo novel. Doing it in this state is not the way to fun. Besides, Ceri and I have already reinstated the weekly writing jams which will gently offer me writing time at least once every seven days without overwhelming me entirely. I'm back into editing The Moments of Being Pandora, too. Taking notes, even, to make it consistent.
Chocolate cake would be nice. The kind Jeff and Paze brought over for my birthday, in particular.
Gah.
Have I mentioned HRH is already up to 40 hours per week? Full-time again. Very nice. Except because he came back to the project during a pay week, we don't see a paycheque till the end of the third week of work. Slightly frustrating. And there's still no sign of my final green witch cheque, either. It's been six weeks. I'll give them one more week before I do the polite query thing, because it can take the standard 4-6 weeks for the pay request to be processed, cut, and mailed out. And despite the fact that I've been assured that my address has yes, really, truly been changed in the main company computer, I've got that bad feeling that it hasn't, or that it's mysteriously reverted to the old one yet again. And my mail redirection runs out very soon.
I hate that so much of our feeling of security rests on financial stuff. And I hate that I know we have money coming, it's just not here when I could use it. On the bright side, HRH has promised that this year there will be a Christmas present, which is nice. Not anything huge, of course, but something. This will be the first time he's worked at Christmas in about four or five years.
All right. Enough wibbling. I should probably go feed that baby-person yet again.
I love rain, but the amount of water that's been in the air over the past few days has made everything wet inside. You sit down on the couch -- it's damp. You pull your jeans on in the morning -- they're damp. You grab a towel to dry your hands or face -- it's damp. And the damp makes the air feel cold, but you can't put on a sweater because it's too heavy against the skin.
Ick.
We're keeping a close eye on the garage today, as it flooded a month or so ago after the last major rainfall. HRH has since dug out the drain at the bottom of our sloped driveway, and so far so good. All the boxes were put up off the floor on bricks and boards last night, just to be sure.
And the other drawback to all this water in the air is that my hair is frizzing like crazy. Argh.
So the US has decided to extend Daylight Saving Time by two months, so that it begins in March and ends in November. This is to save energy.
This has Canadian governments in a tizzy, because it plays havoc with our trade, apparently.
Honestly, why are we worrying? For March and November, we'll just be an hour off, and I'm fairly certain we can remember that. I don't think extending the DST is a bad idea; I'm just bothered because once again, US internal policy is affecting our own. Why do we have to do it simply because they've done it?
Grumble grumble.
Another good reason to visit Liam:
The nursery is air conditioned to a lovely just-barely-cooler-than-room-temperature.
The cats are all puddles in various places where they were walking and just fell over. I might join them after a cold bath. I'm certainly not going to get a hell of a lot of work done today with my brain stalled by the humidity.
Here's one of the ways I deal with this nasty humidity:
I close the windows in the morning once the air coming in begins to be just hot instead of a cooling breeze. Then I turn a couple of the ceiling fans on to circulate what cool air is inside. If there's direct sunlight coming in a window, I close the curtain or blind.
Voila: Cooler air is trapped indoors, and is moved around by the fans. No warm air gets in to heat it up. I open the curtains or blinds once the sun's low enough that it's not streaming in and baking the place, and I open the windows themselves once the day's humidity and heat has dissipated somewhat.
HRH has just pulled out the lawn mower and started it. He's now mowing his very own lawn for the very first time.
I can feel the waves of bliss and manly pride all the way up here.
Today's projected high was 24 degrees Celsius. We have hit 27. And all my loose summer dresses are still in a box downstairs.
I am so looking forward to my fridge. Room temperature drinks are boring. Even though it's remarkably cool in here (all hail that cross-breeze HRH discovered by opening the front and back windows!) I will so appreciate having ice cubes and chilled water again.
In an article written for WorkingForChange.com, Gev Parish notes:(From In The Name of Womanhood and Humanity by Gev Parish; found via this Witchvox article.)Julia Ward Howe called for the establishment of Mother's Day in 1870. Her gesture was intended not as a sentimental tribute to those who bear children, but as a call for women to wage a general strike to end war.
So it was originally an opportunity for mothers to protest against war. It never ceases to amaze me how watered-down, sugar-coated, and otherwise Bowlderised holidays become over time.
I got a lovely big bouquet of spring flowers yesterday -- freesias and iris and three kinds of lilies and roses and masses of other stuff that's pretty and I don't know the name of. They smell divine! I've been dying for fresh flowers lately, but I haven't been able to justify the purchase. As I was arranging them in a vase, the smell brought back memories of helping my mother out with Flower Guild duties at church when I was in high school. There's something incredibly blissful about being surrounded by masses of fresh flowers, particularly in May.
I was even more pleased to see them still whole and upright when we returned from dinner at my in-laws' house last night. No cats had climbed the mantel to disturb them. (Although I wonder how much energy I'd have had to be upset if I'd found them ruined, because I was so satiated by the plateful of tender and rare steak that my father-in-law had barbequed for supper.)
Edited to add: On the way out to dinner last night I thanked HRH again for my flowers, and he said, "Well, what I really wanted to get you was an amp, but it was a bit out of my current budget." An amp as a Mother's Day present! How cool is that?
Happy Mother's Day to everyone who has children, the human kind, the fur kind, and the scale and feather kinds! Mother's Day seems rather sudden to me; it feels really early, just as Easter did. It's just the way the calendar's falling this year.
Today: editing (I want to get that first chunk of book edits off to a very patient Tal out in California); coven; and then dinner with my in-laws. And it's another beautiful sunny day outside -- glorious. It does wonders for the soul.
The things I find when I research. Honestly.
World Sunlight Map: A world map showing current sunlight and cloud cover. Known as a rectangular projection, this map is one way of looking at the spherical Earth as a flat map. [...]The World Sunlight Map provides a computer-generated approximation of what the earth currently looks like. While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us.
I start with cloudless images of the earth during the day (from a pair of NASA satellites) and night (from a DoD program to map city lights). Every 3 hours, I download a composite cloud image based on data from weather satellites all over the world. And every half hour, these images are composited and mapped onto a sphere by xplanet according to the relative position of the sun. The flat maps are post-processed by ImageMagick to cut off the 15 degrees nearest the north and south poles where cloud data is unavailable.
Very nifty.
The problem with overcast and rainy days is that I have no idea what time it is. It's always that sort of vague, non-direct sunlight, always-four-o'clockish time.
I'm back to figuring out how much time has passed by hearing the noisy CD carousel turn to the next disc.
I know; I'll stack the CD player with appropriately glowering soundtracks. Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, The Ninth Gate, Matrix: Revolutions and The 13th Warrior will do it. Sleepy Hollow is actually too quiet, as is The Mummy; and, well, The Mummy Returns is just too fun. Might end up taking out The 13th Warrior, but we'll give it a try.
The bulbs at the new place are about three inches high already. Tulips? Daffodils? Iris? We'll find out in around a month.
And once we've moved in we'll be planting flats of pansies and such in the garden bordering the walkway, and window boxes of white and red geraniums and sweet alyssum for the front balcony. There's a huge iron hook above the patio doors in the living room, so we'll hang something lovely and cascading there to help with privacy (more red geraniums, most likely). There will be a window box or two of herbs for me on the back deck. Peppers, tomatoes, onions and such in the backyard. Maybe peas on a frame, because I love garden-fresh peas although there never seem to be many on a vine. Perhaps even cucumbers in a contained space.
You see what writing the green witch book is doing to me?
It really is a pity that we cannot set our cats forward when we set the clocks forward for Daylight Savings Time.
It was sunny when I got up, twenty minutes after sunrise. Really. Honest.
Then it was overcast and gloomy. Fine. I turned on lights and lit candles.
Now, snowstorm. Fluffy, heavy snow.
The only thing keeping me smiling: Sex and Violence as performed by Invisible. For the banter as much as anything else.
(Scott wasn't kidding when he said the bass throws the speakers. And on what appears to be a mono recording, too. Fascinating.)
Okay. Officially tired of winter now. The deep freeze has gone past affecting the physical body, and is now doing a number on my psyche. Can it be spring, please?
It occurs to me that those persistent low-grade headaches (which are now mostly past, thank the gods) might have been caused by caffeine withdrawal. I may only be an occasional coffee drinker, but I used to have at least one pot of good tea every day, and maybe a glass of Coke too. Cutting all that out could very well have triggered the headaches. Anywhats.
Christmas with my family and HRH's family was delightful. Apart from tons of food (including my mother's home-made tourtiere for Christmas Eve dinner), we were terribly spoiled in the gift department by new sheets, fluffy towels, two T-Fal frying pans in different sizes (thank you, thank you, thank you!), new clothes, a tea press and yummy caffeine-free tea (convenient), tons of chocolate (so much for the no-caffeine thing!), a handmade citrine pendant from HRH, an heirloom locket from my gran, and a selection of DVDs and CDs from my wish list. It was a wonderful two days as we shared quality family time and love, which is precisely what the holiday season is all about to me. We all cried three times as we exchanged gifts; I think that's a record. And of course, there was one very special gift given to my parents on Christmas Eve, and to HRH's parents on Christmas Day. It's on order, so to speak; it won't arrive until August. It will, however, be worth the wait.
Aaaaand... my holiday gift to me was snapping up the $65 USD secondhand copy of Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia when the ABEbooks e-mail notification landed in my in-box this morning. Even with the $10 USD shipping charge from the UK, it's the cheapest price I've ever seen over the past two years that I've been coveting it as one of the authoritative resources on the subject. Let's hope they still have it in stock and someone else didn't get to it before I did.
Dad was quite impressed when he saw my LCD monitor; I wonder how long it will take before he has one too. I'm still mucking about with the settings, trying to get the perfect blend of contrast and brightness; my tastes seem to change every time I sit down.
I love this season, because mixed nuts are widely available in the shops and less expensive than usual.
And oh, how I love Brazil nuts. There always seem to be more in the mixes during the holiday season, but still never enough nestled amongst the hazelnuts, pecan halves, almonds, and the cashews which I leave for HRH because he enjoys them so.
Minus thirty-eight this morning. This would account for the frost on the inside corners of our windows.
I think -- I say, I think -- that the whole holiday season party thing is finally over. I'm assisting at a public Yule ritual tomorrow night, and I get to work in the store on Wednesday (which is really playing, because it's the only day I'm doing during the holiday season on the floor), but those are pretty much the last seasonal-associated events on the calendar, thank goodness. We've had at least two events scheduled every weekend in December, and one or two during each week. I've enjoyed it all, and it's been good to spend time with people I haven't seen in a while and to celebrate various things, but I'm thankful that now I can look forward to simply being with my family. I'm just so tired.
I officially declare it the Yule Season in my household.
I have just put on my first holiday CD. Naturally, it's Holly Cole's Baby It's Cold Outside. Next will be The Waverly Consort Christmas which did indeed arrive as a special order after last Christmas, but better late than never.
On the way downtown to meet MLG for lunch yesterday, my bus was caught in a delightfully dizzy little mini-blizzard, right in front of the Westmount library. Nothing much -- just dry little dots racing about, playing tag; maybe ten to a square foot, but they moved around so much that they presented the illusion of more. I saw grown men walking along the sidewalk, hands in their coat pockets, looking up and smiling, and it made me smile, too.
It didn't accumulate, of course; I'm fairly certain none of it even reached the ground in snowflake form. And it had stopped by the time we reached Greene Avenue. It was, however, snow. Not bad snow; happy snow. A cheerful postcard of sorts from Winter saying, "Can't wait to play with you!"
There were occasional snow dots wandering aimlessly outside my front windows earlier this morning, as well. They looked more bored than anything else. I do not want bored snow; bored snow can become dangerous snow. I want to be slowly introduced to winter as painlessly as possible this year.
It finally got cold enough today for me to break down and turn the heaters on. And really, the only reason I did it this early was because I just enrolled in the Hydro equal payments program. They add up last year's electricity bills, divide by twelve, and I now pay $60 a month for my electricity each month, no matter how much I use. Sure, they'll re-evaluate in six months, but for now, heat when I need it without worrying that I'll be hit with another $250 electricity bill! Woo-hoo!
Now the apartment is filled with the attractive odour of burning dust, because no matter how much you clean these damned things, you can never get the dust out of the coils on the inside. The metal pops occasionally as it warms up, and it's amusing me to watch all the cats jump as one unit when it happens.
Maybe the floor will warm up to the point where I can take off one of my pairs of socks. And yes, I'm wearing slippers too.
It's dark, it's grey, it's gloomy, and I have a vaguely nauseous feeling that's probably directly connected to the amount of food I ate last night at my in-laws' place. It's now pouring and HRH probably still won't come home early, just as he hasn't the last rain days this month.
I finished the rewrite of the proposal and sent it off, so I've done some sort of Real Work today. Let's see if the pub board is a bit more comfortable with a book which talks about using the seasons to support spellcasting.
I was already awake when HRH's boss called at 6.30 AM to cancel the morning's work. Environment Canada (who evidently foretell the weather with a rock, a pair of scissors, and a piece of paper) was waving about weather radar which said it would be a miracle if the Looming Storm and its accompanying offspring Fifteen Millimetres of Rain would miss us. HRH's boss said that he'd check in with everyone at eleven to confirm work for the rest of the day. HRH and I went out to pick up groceries.(You know, there's no one at all in a supermarket at 8.15 AM. And all the shelves are fully stocked. And the vegetables are attractively arrranged. Must remember this.)
Miracle of miracles! There were a couple of sprinkles, and that was all. When we came back at ten-thirty, there was a message from HRH's boss on the machine. Hey, well, that storm didn't happen, so the rest of the day is on!
I just looked outside, and it's pouring.
This, dear readers, is irony.
I wonder how soggy HRH will be when he gets home, and when that will be.
Honestly, apart from the cool bath before bed, one of the only things that keeps me sane in the summer is dampening a cotton ball with rose water and wiping my face, arms, and neck with it (especially the back of the neck). Standing in front of the fan directly afterwards makes it even better. Rose water can be found in most specialty and cultural groceries; the little place around the corner from me sells a good-sized bottle for under five dollars. I use it as an offering as well, and often add a splash to my altar water. Some day I'll pour three bottles into my bathwater and soak in my big claw-foot tub, but I haven't been that brave yet.
Unless you hate the smell of roses (like my friend Raven, for example), you'll likely find that this is a remarkably easy way to cool off and relax at the same time. And if you do dislike roses, you poor person, then there's always orange water you can use instead.
Over the past twenty-four hours I have been driven slowly mad by the changing air pressure as mirrored by my sinus cavities.
Dear gods, yes -- the pressure outside changes as the mini-fronts come through, an ice-pick suddenly appears digging deep into my cranium from one of the many lovely little sinus chambers. I often don't realise it until I find myself attempting to curl my fingers through my skin and into said sinus cavity to release the pressure. Yesterday, I moved inside and outside my in-laws' house a dozen times seeking relief as the pressure subtly shifted by a kPa or two.
They grilled shrimp for my birthday. Wasn't that a wonderful treat? And they gave me a lovely leatherbound blank book, with a nifty red owl bookmark that will travel with me to Toronto later this week.
My newfound need for naps illustrates how miserable sleeping at night in Montreal has become, now that it's summer again. HRH put the air conditioner in, but I still seem to sleep better in the afternoons. I also attribute my odd need to sleep so much to a reflection of how mentally exhausted I am after producing a polished book in ten weeks.
I've read two books since I finished the manuscript: Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ancestors of Avalon by Diana Paxson (which was only so-so; I should have waited for the trade paperback), and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (which was absolutely marvellous magical realism). I'm halfway through Rebecca Wells' Little Altars Everywhere at the moment, which is possibly even better than Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (although equally disturbing in places). Today I'll finish two book reviews and send them off to the magazine for which I write them.
Words for thought, from t!'s interview with the Suffix9 zine:
"Regrets are for people who don't understand their present beauty."
I found the first ant of the summer in the bedroom. I tried to point it out to Nixie and Maggie, but they ignored it, so I gave up and squished it.
It kept moving. Not thrashing, or death throes; I'm talking moving in a straight line, moving with a purpose and a goal.
I squished it again.
"It's still moving!" I said in disbelief.
"Then kill it," said HRH.
"I have! Twice!"
And then -- I don't know, it must be the heady knowledge that I did over 5K today, or the sugar coursing through my bloodstream -- I said:
"It must be a reven-ant!"
And I giggled. I giggled so hard that tears came to my eyes, and I couldn't find the ant to deliver the ultimate killing blow. HRH looked at me for a moment, then returned to looking for a clean shirt.
"Your mother is nuts," he said to the cats.
"I know. You get used to it," Maggie told him. And off I went, still giggling.
Remember those electric heaters that were installed last summer? The ones we haven't really tested yet because it hasn't been cold enough?
Guess what. Yep. They're next to useless when the temperature goes below minus ten Celsius.
Have I mentioned that it's numbingly cold here in Montreal recently? As in minus thirty-nine-ish?
I have recently rediscovered the joys of wearing socks to bed. Last night I wore full pyjamas plus a flannel button-up nightgown over them. Over the past five years I have grown used to not feeling cold; my husband, the portable furnace that he is, usually makes up for any lack of warmth in the air. And yet, even he's finding the apartment cold these days. Even more than my multiple layers of clothing, this fact is proof to me that the heaters are substandard and the landlords were cutting costs.
Let's see - spring is in, oh, seventy days or so?
As last night was the official longest night of the year, we lit our candle in our wind lantern and set it on the dresser in my room, and fell asleep.
My husband woke me up at some unearthly hour in the night from a dream that was a vivid cross between Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.
"We have to put the candle out," he said. "The smoke detector in the room is giving off beeps."
Without waking up completely, I pinched out the flame, tried to open the window, couldn't, mumbled at my husband to do it, and sat in bed while he opened it.
"Better to open the outside window too instead of hoping the cross-draft does it," I said.
"Er," he said, "this is the outside window. See? Screen." He pushed his hand against the window and lo and behold, it was screening bending beneath his fingers, and not glass.
"It's not cold enough," I said stupidly.
"Welcome to Canada's banana belt," he said. "Want to sleep with the window open?"
So we did.
It was just strange.
If ever I needed assurance that I can write a book, the experience of editing professional authors' work is convincing me of it. Ye gods.
And I think my cats did some odd sort of "change the rain into snow" spell. Two of them fell behind one of my short bookcases this afternoon, at different times. I am convinced that it was no accident, but arcane action of some nature.
So I checked the weather in Pennsylvania, just to know how to pack for this week's camping trip:
27 degrees Celsius (or 38 with humidity -- that's 100 F!) and thunderstorms now through Thursday.
Hmm. Sounds like Montreal.
Guess I'll be packing light clothes and raingear. Oh joy, oh rapture.
More useful spam: Lose 32 pounds by Easter! If I lose 32 pounds I will be dead.
The main problem with moving (because of course there are several) is that there are never enough boxes. I fervently believe that it's one of those dark SF equations at work. Neil Gaiman should write something about this. No, really - it sounds like one of those mildly annoying things that the protagonist of a dark fantasy novel encounters as s/he prepares to move out of an equally dark house with A Presence. Protagonist gets boxes, packs, needs more boxes; calculates, gets more boxes, and falls short yet again. The pattern is repeated as an (apparently) minor amusing recurrance, and not until the end of the novel does the reader realise that The Lack Of Boxes Is Significant!
Sleep update: I didn't Wednesday night. Did last night, thanks to the joys of drugs enabling me to (a) sleep, and (b) breathe while doing it. All bow to the pharmacists, architects of my preserved sanity. Somewhere around four AM on Wednesday night (Thursday morning?) I began to understand why sleep deprivation works as a method of torture. You literally don't have a chance to download. No blessed darkness descends to make it all go away for a while. It's reality, 24/7. And even if your reality is nice and humdrum, it loses all appeal at 4 AM after a total of six hours sleep over four days.
It occurs to me that for the first time in quite a while, I'm hungry. Really hungry. Hmm.
Today, more packing, and I have to take the delicate stuff over to the new place - cello, viola, bodhran, harp, stuff like that. While I'm there I think I'll unpack what I can and bring boxes back. It's nice to feel well enough to plan things like this, although you can be darned sure I'll stop the moment I start feeling wobbly.
Curses. The rain has ceased. It's brightening up out there.
No! I want my husband to come home! Rain, damn you! Rain!
Woke up this morning to a dark, dark sky.
"Maybe it will rain," I said.
"Maybe," said my husband. "But I doubt it."
"Maybe it will rain so you can come home and we can run about downtown this afternoon, assuming the bank unfreezes my account," I said.
"No," my husband said morosely. "It's just going to play with our minds."
He left for work. I watched the sky for a bit. It really was much too dark to just be overcast.
It raineth. Oh, ye of little faith.
Sometimes, when you decide to rough it, life throws you an extra curve ball.
I went camping this weekend for the first time since grade seven. (No, I don't want to tell you how long ago that was.) It was quite enjoyable - we got there early, set things up, had a lovely quiet afternoon, had a communal dinner with others who arrived later, did the campfire thing, slept well, ate a couple more meals, packed up, left. Glorious weather. Lovely silence. Much green. Few bugs. I must make the observation that a disproportionate amount of time is spent preparing food or eating, which leads me to believe that camp food should actually be more of a gourmet experience than it usually is. I mean, heck, if you're going to spend that much time creating a meal, you might as well Create a Meal, right? I spent more time thinking about/working with food in a day than I usually do in a week. Next time, the husband and I will design ourselves a real menu, and gourmandise to our hearts' content.
We came home and went to a late afternoon birthday party for a very young lady, which was lovely - we saw all sorts of people we hadn't seen in a while. As an added bonus, we had front row seats to an exquisite electrical storm accompanied by waves of pounding rain and a terrific wind. We stood on the back porch with other storm lovers and revelled in the thunder and lightning (which hit the train tracks a hundred feet south of us) until it finally became just rain. We left not long after that, around seven-ish. I'm not sure what time we got home, because the entire neighbourhood had lost power at six-fifteen, according to the clock on my stove. That lovely storm we'd watched had knocked out a lot of the island's electricity, and - worse - had torn up our beautiful park with its mature trees. We walked through the park to check the damage before we even went into our apartment; the trees have been snapped in half or by a third, the branches lying strewn on the wet grass like the fallen after a battle. The trees were mostly all right; some had snapped due to the beginnings of rot, but others were in shock from having perfectly healthy limbs torn from them and flung thirty to fifty feet away. I comforted them as best I could because it just didn't seem right to walk away from them again after stepping over their branches and pushing past wet leaves. Yes, I hugged them, and stroked them, and told them it would be all right; I'm not kidding when I said they were in shock. I felt what I felt. An extremely violent sudden gust must have raged through the area - that's the only reason we can think of for the trees snapping like that, for snap they did, all in the same direction with similar breaks; it wasn't from a constant bending or weakening, and they certainly weren't all dozen or so struck by lightning.
We came home and lit candles in the darker parts of the flat and ate the extra-creamy chocolate ice cream that was rapidly losing the "ice" part of its definition, which was fun. When we went to sleep we were confident that the power would be back in the morning; in fact, we were slightly surprised that five hours later, it hadn't been restored. We put it down to reduced crews working on the Sunday eve of a civic holiday and blew out our candles.
Well, naturally it wasn't back in the morning. We bought ice (which was in short supply) and used the cooler we'd taken camping with us to pack our frozen (thawing) meat and such. My husband grumbled. I said, "Yes, but we had a lovely visit last night, and a wonderful camping trip!" to which he replied, "Yeah, well, still feels like we're camping somehow." Our kitchen is equipped with a gas stove, so we could still boil water for tea and soup and such; and the husband went out to the car and brought in the coffee percolator we'd used on the Hibachi over the weekend, which worked just as well on our gas elements. He went off to work fortified with percolated coffee, and I spent the day reading and napping on the living room floor. Oh yes - I cleaned out the fridge too. Funny; I so often don't have the radio or a CD on when I have the option, but yesterday the knowledge that I couldn't turn music on nagged me no end, all day.
We'd planned to do laundry, but with no hot water or power we ended up travelling to my in-laws' place on the South Shore (how ironic is that, after the ice storm?) so showers and clean clothes could be had. They had just returned from a weekend of camping themselves, but were happy to see us, and we had a relaxing casual dinner. When we left our apartment, we'd been without electricity for twenty-four hours. It amuses me to some extent; for six years I lived near the airport, and my power never went down - even during the ice storm I only lost it for a couple of hours or so. I'm not much for the constant use of electrical devices - I don't watch TV very often, I don't play computer games, I use candles a lot anyway, etcetera - but I missed hot water, and the loss of most of my frozen food irritated me. Bits of the neighbourhood were restored at various times of the day - the south side of our street had power early yesterday, for example; however, the poor depanneur next to us on our side of the street spent the day emptying his freezers and setting his shelves out against the building walls to dry off. Coming home late last night we thought the whole neigbourhood was back... until we turned onto our cross street and nearly had a fit to see that the street on our block was dark. Fortunately, we're on a corner, and our building is apparently wired into the main street, not the cross street; our power had been restored nine minutes before we came home, according to all our flashing digital clocks. (Note to self: find a nice old-fashioned wind-up analog clock.)
It's odd to notice that your mind automatically begins making plans. What do I have in the pantry, what do I need, is the grocery store out of electricity as well, what should I stock up on, who else might need help, etcetera, etcetera. I was thankful to have gas, so I could still have tea (while there's tea there's hope!), and overall it wasn't a huge personal inconvenience. It just served to remind me how thankful I should be for the tiny miracles that we don't notice - like flipping the light switch in the front entryway, or washing your hands in hot water. And laundry.
I have an osteopath appointment this morning, then it's off to work. The official countdown begins: including today, four days to go.
It's raining again.
If you surf through various Montreal blogs, you discover rather quickly that we talk about the weather frequently. For example, the five Montreal blogs I checked out this morning all mentioned that it rained this weekend. Mine didn't, but this post makes up for it. (I decided I didn't want to dwell on standing in the rain for forty minutes on the corner of Cavendish and Sherbrooke, where there's a nasty wind-tunnel effect. And you certainly didn't need to hear how miserable I was.)
We're very sensitive to weather. It changes, frequently. We're at its mercy, even though we don't allow it to stop us. A Montrealer can make it to work through pretty much anything, which is why we laugh at Torontonians when they call out the army after a snowfall. Still, weather play an enormous role in our lives. The sun comes out - we smile. It rains for six weeks - we grump. (And become perpetually soggy, which makes our tempers short.) Yet through it all, most of us find the room in our days and hearts to appreciate the weather. "Look at that wind!" we'll say. Or, "The lightning - it's so brittle and beautiful, isn't it?" Yep. Montrealers understand how weather fits into our personalities, all right. We are in awe, even if we grumble. We lean into a storm and relish it. We soak up the sun on the mountain when we can. Short skirts, sandals. Parkas, hiking boots. Gloves. Hats, sun or winter.
So, it's raining today. Like it did Sunday, and Saturday too. This time last year, the farmers were crying for rain. The corn was only a couple of inches high. This year, they're crying for it to stop. The stalks are rotting in the fields. Despite our lovely damp Spring, our fruits and vegetables will cost a lot more than usual this summer. They're calling for a damp Summer, which means you'll be seeing a lot of YUL posts about rain.
You've been warned.
So it was Ostara a couple of days ago - Vernal Equinox to most of you. Spring arrived in Montreal and brought another ten to fifteen centimeters of snow with it. This is funny because all winter we had practically no accumulation. In the past week we've seen about five to six times more accumulation than we have since winter began. Mother Nature - she's so wacky.
Anyway, one of the things about the Vernal Equinox is that it's one of the two times per year that everything about the Earth is so balanced (axis, gravity, blah blah blah), you can stand a raw egg in the shell on its end.
At work, we didn't have any real eggs, but we still wanted to experiment. So we tried using Easter Creme Eggs. They didn't work very well.
So we ate them.
There's always the Autumnal Equinox...
Insanity! Unnatural météo! It’s going up to 10° C today, and we’re over halfway there!
I went out this morning to take a walk to the pharmacy, and it’s warm – windy, but warm. You can smell that Spring smell in the air- the damp earthy odour, the aroma of dead grass… but it’s more than that. There’s a sense in the atmosphere, in the air that you breathe into your lungs, that your alveoli recognise and send the news racing through your cells to inform your whole body that in case it hadn’t noticed, the season has changed: rejoice! The sun now stays in my living room more than forty-five minutes at a time! I can leave the windows open again! I can wear shoes outside instead of boots! Soon I shall be able to wear my little fox-red corduroy jacket again!
Not that these events were far off the recent reality of the situation. (Except the sun staying in the living room.) We actually hit a high of 6° C in the city yesterday. I’m not certain if we’re setting records or not. I do know that it didn’t ever really feel like Winter for more than a week at a time. I have a sneaky suspicion that our average temperatures this month are hitting the standard March averages instead. I tremble to consider what our Summer might be like.
That, however, will be then. This is now, and I’m rather enjoying it! The unnatural weather this winter had me on edge – it was just wrong – but it’s the end of February now, and I’m more than ready for buds and the first signs of green, thank you very much. I suffer from a touch of seasonal affective disorder, but apart from that February usually has me fed up on several other fronts as well. Bring on March, say I!
CURRENT READING:
Fool’s Errand, by Robin Hobb
The first book in a new Farseer trilogy called The Tawny Man. This is pulling me right the way I need at the moment! It’s told in the first person, a departure for Hobb’s work, and it works surprisingly well. I’m possibly enjoying it more than I enjoyed the first Farseer trilogy. I’m much too near the end for comfort. The problem with reading newly released hardcovers is that you have to wait for the rest of the series!