Think someone's telling me something...?

This hymn has been stuck in my head for about a month. There have been various songs vying for prime humming spot in my brain, but this is the one that consistently comes back.


The thing is, we haven't even sung it in church in ages, so I have no idea why it is stuck in my head, except that I may have had need of it over the last few weeks.


Or we all may have needed it, because my mom caught me humming it the other day and turned around and snapped "I am calm!"



Come and Find the Quiet Centre
Shirley Erena Murray, 1989 in Voices United (the United Church Songbook)*


Come and find the quiet centre
in the crowded life we lead,
find the room for hope to enter,
find the frame where we are freed:
clear the chaos and the clutter,
clear our eyes, that we can see
all the things that really matter,
be at peace, and simply be.


*There are more verses, and unfortunately, my computer and Youtube are not friends today, but apparently for those music peoples, it is sung to the tune "Beach Spring".

Canada's great contribution to literature

Forget the Margarets, forget all those authors with unspellable last names, Canada's real contribution to literature is the Harlequin romance.

Oh Harlequin, where would I be without you? Incredibly bored right now, I can tell you! My cousin has kept some of her romance novels from over the years, and every time I visit, I read a few more. It is so weird to read them now to see what our mothers' generation were supposed to have found romantic.

Apparently: Fairly vapid girls who have unthreatening careers (if they even have one) but an over-developped sense of right and wrong, in love with aloof mysterious men who are really mean to them and make them feel like crap, but they desire them passionately anyway. =Gag=

Case in point, The Man from Bahl Bahla. Published in Canada 1971 (1972 in the US)

It is set at a cattle station in the Australian Centre (that is what they call it in the book, I am thinking Outback?) The girl is trying to get over her father's death in a small plane crash and goes out to her school friend's station to help the friend's mother write her history book about the Outback pioneers. The love interest is the station owner and cattle baron and her friend's older half brother.

The girl thinks the love interest hates her for the entire book, right up until the end when he comes into her hospital room and tells her they are going to get married. He does kind of overreact sometimes (there seems to be far too much violent shoulder shaking), but the girl is a twit. She keeps on fainting when things get too emotional, and she keeps walking off by herself and almost getting killed by wildlife, even after repeated warnings. She also doesn't understand his dry sarcastic teasing. Far too sensitive this girl.

I suppose there is a lesson in all of this, like don't take advice from romance novels, but the historian in me just likes to read them for the construction of romance in the late 60s and 70s.

Really.

I swear!

Update of the Update

dad's surgery went well, they put 11 holes in him (slightly more the the promised "five max"), so he feels like he has been beaten up and can't laugh or talk too much. poor dad.

but i did get a delightfully dippy phone call from him last night!

Update

I decided there needed to be an update, so here is what has happened in the last few weeks, some of this may have been gone over already, but it is 30 degrees Celsius here and so I don't care.

1. My parents sold the house I have lived in my entire life and have bought a smaller house on the opposite side of town. They have the first week of August in which to move. Any strong people in the Guelph area are welcome to come over and help move stuff to the new house.

2. The next day, I flew out to Victoria to defend my thesis and visit with my friends. A good time was had by all!

3. Two days after I got back, it was my cousin's wedding (I will have pictures as soon as I find my USB cable). It was a lovely wedding, and the rain stopped just in time to have the ceremony outside in the middle of an old millpond. It was really pretty.

4. Two days later I drove back up to Muskoka with my cousin, and have been hired by the local historical society to help write their next book, which is a history of all the historical houses in the area. I also might be involved in some kind of database project for the library if they get the funding. So, I will be spending the summer on the lake. ahhhhh.

5. My dad is having surgery for a tummy hernia today, so we would appreciate it if you thought of him today. We don't expect any problems and he should be back home tonight.

That is all. I have to go down to the beach and have a swim now. tough life.

June 23rd

It is June 23rd.

It is 29 degrees Celsius.

I am in Muskoka.

I am covered in sunscreen and bug junk.

I just went in for the first swim of the season.

Ahhhh.

Booyah!

This evening my friend across the street called me up and asked me if I was interested in doing a Salsa lesson down at the park.

What's that? Salsa dancing lesson? In the old-timey bandstand in the park? Yes please!

it was a lot of fun, we would learn a few steps, practice them, and then the guy would turn the music on and we would do the little routine. It was partner stuff, so, of course, I ended up being a guy. I was pleased to see that there actually were quite a few guys, slightly more than half the couples had men in them.

they had just started when we arrived in the park, and it was pretty cool to run up the stairs to the bandstand and just start dancing (if we hadn't had to have instructions it would have been like a musical)

we left after an hour because we got tired, but the dancing was going to continue for another hour and a half.

we ruined any benefit we might have had from the dancing exercise by crossing the street and getting ice cream cones. mmmmm. caribou tracks and black cherry. mmmmm.

it was a good way to end off a friday!

They liked me! They really liked me!

Yeah! Huzzah! Thesis Defense a Success! (except for my excessive use of capitalization)

The defense went really well, I answered all of their questions well and they were all very impressed with the work i had put into it.

Fewf!

So now i just have to do some minor grammatical corrections and a bit of clarification, and i am done!

But more immediately, I will have to eat some cake.

Yummy white chocolate cake with chocolate icing and raspberries inside.

You wish you were having some too don't you? but no, it is mine! well, i guess i will have to share it with my friends who are coming over tonight.

=sigh= I am soooo lucky to have a friend like QWP, who is letting me stay in her house, read my entire thesis and helped me prepare for the defense, and is now busy making icing for the cake which she baked me. How did I get such wonderful friends?

****UPDATE QWP has posted pictures of the glorious cake check it out! we even had some for breakfast!*****

Fun times in Victoria

I have to defend my thesis tomorrow, so I need to blog some silliness today. But it actually happened, oh, how I have missed Victoria! (the previous statement may be sarcastic)

Anyway, went out for dinner and drinks with my old room-mates the other day to catch up and pick up right where we left off (i love that!). I then had to make my way back on the bus and find my on my own in the dark back to my friend's house where I am staying. I have only done this once in the daytime almost a year ago. It was black out, and there are few streetlights on side streets in Victoria, and the bus let me off at a different stop than I had used the last time. Even so, I was pretty confident I could find my way to my friend's house.

And then a rather sketchy looking guy also got off the bus and headed in the same direction. And then just as I was about to cross the street, I caught a glimpse of the unexpected out of the corner of my eye.

A young man wearing a box.

just a box, (and shoes) in the manner of old-timey cartoons of guys wearing a barrel.

He walked behind me drunkenly talking on his cell almost all the way back to my friend's house. He turned off one street earlier than me.

discussing it later my friend's husband suggested he was going to a "recession party". this makes his choice of outfit less odd, but somehow less fun too.

really, i am just glad neither guy decided to accost me, because I couldn't decide which was the lesser of two evils.

While we're waiting....

Conversation with my internet provider tech guy while waiting for the lights to light up on the modem:

IPTG: (in deadpan bored teenage boy voice) Is that your mom laughing in the background?

C: Yes

IPTG: Were you surprised I could hear her?

C: No, we're pretty loud laughers in this family.

IPTG: Oh... do you have room to adopt another person?

C: Umm...... We're pretty full up.....

IPTG: How many brothers and sisters do you have?

C: I have a brother

IPTG: Is he older or younger?

C: He's two years older.

IPTG: Oh. I guess that's alright then. ... I have two sisters. They're 10 and 12.

C: Oh, I am sorry to hear that.

IPTG: thanks.

C: .... Well, umm... The light is still just blinking .....

What's in a name?

I have been sewing up a storm lately, and making a lot of things for other people, so, i am starting to think of names for my sewing/crafty business...

First on the list so far is "llamalass sweatshop"

this idea came to me when i was sewing in the laundry room with the iron on and the dryer going.

that is really it on the list.  I thought about P.O.E.  but that is too limiting.  people expect only goth or alternative stuff if you have a name like that.

I showed my brother a purse i made on the weekend, and he said "don't you need a name or something if you are going to sell a bag?" so i told him i was thinking of llamalass sweatshop, and he said "oh, ok," and went on eating tostitos and gaucomole.  i think that means he liked the name.  not sure, but i think.

so what do you guys think?

i am also toying with the idea of opening an etsy shop.  does anybody know anyone who has opened one?  i do better with computer stuff with someone showing me what to do than reading their instructions.

Adventures with Wheezy

Guess who I got to look after this weekend?

These guys are, from top to bottom, fat-grey-and-white one, Stripy, grey one, and Wheezy.  A friend of ours fosters pregnant cats for the humane society, and this is the latest litter.  They just opened their eyes a few days ago.  They were looking much more like kittens by Sunday afternoon than the aliens with rudders they looked like on Thursday night.  They grow so fast it soon became apparent that Wheezy had a problem.

Wheezy and fat-grey-and-white one were identical on Thursday when i went to find out how to feed mama (no pictures of her, she was too busy eating).  Then, Friday night when i went to feed her, Wheezy was making a gurgly wheezing sound, like he had a hairball and didn't know how to get rid of it, or a throat full of mucous.  He didn't have quite as big a milk belly as his sibs either, which i soon discovered was because he had to come up for air a lot while nursing, and then Stripy would steal his nipple.  Bad Stripy!

Because he was still able to breathe, and able to nurse, i let him be.  the next morning, he was sitting at the end of the box, while his sibs were huddled at the other end.  He doesn't squawk when you pick him up, and if you put him down on the floor, he goes exploring, unlike his fat sibs, who scream if you pick them up, and head straight back into the box if you put them down on the floor.  So, even if he is sick, he is adventuresome.  I think he has enough gumption to survive.

I will leave you with some pics of fat-grey-and-white one, who was far to contented to move, and therefore much more photogenic:

Attack!  Get your own nap pile brother!
You are sooo jealous that i got to spend the weekend with baby kittens!  

Move over Chloe, there's a new car in town!

This is Chloe.  She is a 1997 Mazda Protege.  She has been a good car but...


... she has seen better days.

check out that close-up!  no amount of makeup can cover that up darling!  

Poor thing is also really loud, likes to make a fun rumbly noise at stop lights, and has had so much food spilled inside her that we can't really remember what colour her seats are supposed to be.  (yep, that's right, she has been around since the days of my mom's catering business, most of the spills are actually chocolate sauce!)

Enter new car!  a 2005 Saturn Ion.  Ain't she purdy? even the sunshine likes her!  spotless inside and out, hardly driven at all.  basically, a brand new car!  huzzah!  she doesn't have a name yet, but soon, oh soon!