i've ridden my bike more in the last week than in the last decade (read: twice) but don't have a helmet, so i've been using a paragliding helmet of J's. it's bright red and covers my entire head like a motorcycle helmet, but with no face visor. it looks really smart. it also covers my ears completely so that, when i ride, i can't hear anything at all and have to constantly look behind me to see what traffic's doing, which makes me wobble because i'm out of practice on the bike. so there i am, a cherry coloured balloon-headed crazy wobbling precariously down the road and falling off whenever i stop, face scrunched in the rain.
i don't know whether i look more like mr. mackey from south park, an alien from mars attacks, or strong bad.
in any case, i'm going for victoria's Hottest Girl in the Over 30 category.
the reason i've been riding around at all is that J is away in australia for a month (month!!) and i, the non-driver, am here alone with his 11 year old who takes tennis on mondays and wednesdays in the meantime. so we ride bikes to class. the kid knows how to ride with no hands. he also knows how to stop without falling off, and how to successfully avoid riding into bushes. i suspect that i'm more of a liability than he is on these rides but he seems to want the company, so there i go.
J has been gone for a week. the following is a highlights only account of my crash course in single parenting. if you're new to this blog, J is the papa, and j is the young'un.
Monday: J leaves in the afternoon. it's pouring rain. j comes home and amid a flurry of trying to figure out how to put more air in my long-unused bike's tires, we make it to tennis. at home afterwards, while watching his antics at the dinner table, i feel the familiar tingle and lightheadedness of impending should-i-pass-out-or-just-crap-my-pants panic. i excuse myself and meander into the basement with faux lightheartedness and have a full-blown freak out. did i really agree to this? because i don't remember agreeing. i call my mother to ask about her experience single parenting and send emails.
Tuesday: to avoid getting off the Anna Bus in Crazy Ville again i keep myself super busy. it hasn't stopped raining. i plant nearly 50 bulbs in the garden. very very very late bulbs that will probably come up in july if at all. but this gives me the chance to see what sort of turf we've gotten with our new house. i was happy to find it rich, dark and wormy. i map out where the vegetable garden will be in summer, and notice, among other things, half a dozen wine bottle corks, a startling amount of robust parsley, two worms humping, and hundreds of shoots from already naturalized bulbs under the fruit trees. hurrah! tulips and daffodils!
later that evening, while i'm on the phone, a message is left by one of j's teachers saying that he failed to come to detention (!) after school. it turns out that he's been lying about having his work done (reason for detention). i require him to call her back to apologize and make an alternate detention date with her, plus take his distracting technology privileges away for two days.
Wednesday: we go back to tennis. on the way i nearly wipe out, experiencing first hand what "locked breaks" means. it's still pouring rain.
Thursday: at lunch around 30 birds decide to come and bathe in the new lake in our yard created by five days of rain. they are soooo cute, and j and i have fun using his monocular and my new guide to victoria birds (thanks clare!) to identify them. we saw mostly starlings, robins, sparrows and crows, but also a varied thrush and a... something i forget. half an hour after j leaves to go back to school i get a call from his main teacher, with him in the room, saying that he's been a nuisance for the past few weeks, almost never has his work done, and is almost always late, and basically failing math.
oh great.
i wander down the road to the video store to collect my thoughts and take back movies.
when j comes back from his make-up detention, we talk and arrive together at a fairly stringent set of temporary rules for the next two weeks to see what he can make of himself. we watch the movie willow.
Friday: is a PD day. we stay in our pajamas until the evening when i go to get more videos and he goes to buy ice cream (sorry J!). we watch legally blond. there have been mudslides and flooding on the mainland because of all the rain.
Saturday: j's best friend comes over with his cousin who's a girl and who manages to rid j of several toys by offering to kiss him for them (!). together, the three of them make a racket unlike anything i've ever heard, and when i go into the basement where they were playing, i find it covered in tiny broken bits of styrofoam. everywhere. seriously.
i didn't know we even had styrofoam.
j does well tidying up after them all, though, and wants the other two to sleep over. the idea of this makes my eyes cross. thankfully it's logistically impossible that night and i'm off the hook. we order a pizza instead.
Sunday: today j surprised me with breakfast in bed complete with sliced apple, orange juice and a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. it was very nice, and quite a shock since even his dad has never done this (*wink* to J), so i don't know where he got the idea from. i'm pretty sure it was a bribe to go by bus to the distant video store, though, in order to find a specific xbox game. we'll see if the bribe works. i'm still a little freaked out by the whole situation, but distraction has been working reasonably well to counter act this feeling, and i'm beginning to enjoy sleeping in the middle of the bed surrounded by books.
tomorrow i'll have to don my giant, red, full-coverage helmet again for tennis class, so the more affluent neighbourhoods of victoria, where we are ever surprised to be living, will ring with the sounds of a 32 year old singing "Trogdor the Burninator!" once more.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Saturday, January 22, 2005
book wrom
don't give up just because it looks weird -- believe or not, you can read it:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid!
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
i came across this while surfing (see dagkasher.blogspot.com ) and instantly felt a spark of excitement -- always having been one of those folks who can't spell her way out of a paper bag despite being reasonably well-read. mark twain's (or was it andrew jackson's?) musing that, "it's a damn poor mind that can only think of one
way to spell a word" was my credo -- and now the discovery that i don't even have to bother trying as long as the first and last letters are correct!? too good to be true!
but then i thought to myself... doesn't the above only work because we have the correct version of the word imprinted within grey matter somewhere acting as a context through which to view the erroneous?
hm.
so close.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid!
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
i came across this while surfing (see dagkasher.blogspot.com ) and instantly felt a spark of excitement -- always having been one of those folks who can't spell her way out of a paper bag despite being reasonably well-read. mark twain's (or was it andrew jackson's?) musing that, "it's a damn poor mind that can only think of one
way to spell a word" was my credo -- and now the discovery that i don't even have to bother trying as long as the first and last letters are correct!? too good to be true!
but then i thought to myself... doesn't the above only work because we have the correct version of the word imprinted within grey matter somewhere acting as a context through which to view the erroneous?
hm.
so close.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
ice worms
the streets are clear and there's a fine drizzle in the air here in victoria, but in vancouver, i see, there are five centimetres of snow on the ground. these weather images remind me of one night, a few years ago, when i was living in vancouver myself. i was working late in an office building and had seen, to my joy and excitement, the snow begin to fall in the afternoon. my excitement grew as i saw that the snow was STICKING.
i'm an east-coaster, a grace baby (to all you haligonians) and i've never gotten over being excited by the first snowfall of winter. i don't even snowboard.
anyway, nothing could have prepared me for the chaos that was awaiting my eager glee. i stepped outside from my building's lobby that evening, stopped, and stared.
the air was full of the acrid smoke of burning rubber as car after car spun its treadless tires in an attempt to leave the spot where it had been parked for the day. the cars that were lucky enough to be on the road all fishtailed wildly, and sometimes spun in complete, slow circles, the people inside clamouring and scrambling like unwilling captives for escape. everywhere were shouts and cries of alarm, panic, and near homicidal rage, people and cars shooting in all directions like they do when giant lizards stomp through urban areas in sci-fi movies.
i watched one wild-eyed woman drive white-knuckled at a breathtaking two kilometres an hour with a man tailgating two inches behind her, leaning on his horn while hanging out the window hurling every obscenity towards her with aneurysm-inducing ferocity. i don't think she noticed. she was staring at some point in the distance with the intensity of a person who believes that it is their gaze alone keeping the horizon in its place.
i saw another well-intentioned gal attempt to direct traffic at an intersection whose lights were down. there she stood, defying death in her office clothes, performing what looked like an interpretive dance commentary on corporate frustration. none of the drivers approaching her had any idea of how to follow her erratic and contradictory gestures, let alone any control over their cars, so they just tried not to kill her as they meandered helplessly through the intersection.
no traffic lights were functioning. pedestrians began adopting a herd-like mentality, waiting at curbs until sufficient numbers had arrived, and then charging across the road en masse, figuring that if they all rushed at the same time, the car-wolves would only be able to pick off a few of the people-deer, and most of them would make it.
on my walk home i saw busses sliding broadside down hills the size of a ballet dancer's boob, i saw groups of burly young men give up their entire evening helping cars up one particular hill, rushing out to push as soon as each car began its inevitable slide backwards near the crest. i've never seen anything like it. there couldn't have been more than five inches of wet snow on the ground.
i'm an east-coaster, a grace baby (to all you haligonians) and i've never gotten over being excited by the first snowfall of winter. i don't even snowboard.
anyway, nothing could have prepared me for the chaos that was awaiting my eager glee. i stepped outside from my building's lobby that evening, stopped, and stared.
the air was full of the acrid smoke of burning rubber as car after car spun its treadless tires in an attempt to leave the spot where it had been parked for the day. the cars that were lucky enough to be on the road all fishtailed wildly, and sometimes spun in complete, slow circles, the people inside clamouring and scrambling like unwilling captives for escape. everywhere were shouts and cries of alarm, panic, and near homicidal rage, people and cars shooting in all directions like they do when giant lizards stomp through urban areas in sci-fi movies.
i watched one wild-eyed woman drive white-knuckled at a breathtaking two kilometres an hour with a man tailgating two inches behind her, leaning on his horn while hanging out the window hurling every obscenity towards her with aneurysm-inducing ferocity. i don't think she noticed. she was staring at some point in the distance with the intensity of a person who believes that it is their gaze alone keeping the horizon in its place.
i saw another well-intentioned gal attempt to direct traffic at an intersection whose lights were down. there she stood, defying death in her office clothes, performing what looked like an interpretive dance commentary on corporate frustration. none of the drivers approaching her had any idea of how to follow her erratic and contradictory gestures, let alone any control over their cars, so they just tried not to kill her as they meandered helplessly through the intersection.
no traffic lights were functioning. pedestrians began adopting a herd-like mentality, waiting at curbs until sufficient numbers had arrived, and then charging across the road en masse, figuring that if they all rushed at the same time, the car-wolves would only be able to pick off a few of the people-deer, and most of them would make it.
on my walk home i saw busses sliding broadside down hills the size of a ballet dancer's boob, i saw groups of burly young men give up their entire evening helping cars up one particular hill, rushing out to push as soon as each car began its inevitable slide backwards near the crest. i've never seen anything like it. there couldn't have been more than five inches of wet snow on the ground.
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