ashleybristowe.com

Sunday, October 19, 2008

So in the interests of up-catching, I'll keep these catch-up posts brief, and mainly be steering you toward piles of photos.

We spent August in Nakusp! Did you know? Yes. The Bristowe-Turnersseses decamped fully to the Interior for four weeks at Strawberry Hill, and took up residence in "the cottage" aka The Mobile. See some of the Flickr photos here!

Categories: Nakusp

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Monday, June 05, 2006

Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: Week 63

Sloaner, she like-ah the goggles.

But you? She no like-ah you.

So: To Hell-ah, You!

I-ah eating-ah chips-ah! And, ah, you-ah can't-stop-me-ah!

At the Gustafsons' place, Browse Loop, Nakusp.

Categories: Nakusp | Sloane

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Sunday, June 04, 2006

What's That You Say, Sonny?

All my life, my mother has been deaf. Deaf, deaf, deaf. There was a very obvious component of selectivity to the deafness, of course. I think every mother has to choose what to hear and what not to hear. With 3 kids running around screaming at each other all the time, I don't blame her for tuning some of it out. A crucial nugget of my whole sense of humour comes from the following scenario, which played out many many times in my youth:

"Mom?"

Waiting. Nothing. Ash goes to the back hallway and calls.

"Mom!?"

Waiting. Nothing. Ash goes and checks the garage - yes, the car is still here. Val is in the house somewhere. Ash heads towards the kitchen, calling as she goes.

"Mom? Mama!!"

Waiting. Nothing. Val isn't in the kitchen. Ash winds up and takes a deep breath.

"MAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!"

Nothing. ...No, wait, Val's voice comes from very far away, upstairs:

"...She left!"

While frustrating at the time, that, my friends, is truly hysterical on all kinds of levels. I fully intend to employ this one on Sloane and her siblings.

Now, most busy households are noisy, I'll grant you. But I grew up in a house of hollerers. Part of it was the house. Frickin HUGE is one way of describing this thing. I had no proper frame of reference for its size until I took some friends past it (we didn't live there anymore, by then) waaay after university. We rounded the corner and Thab goes, "Holy Sixteen Candles! That thing is massive!" I kind of cocked my head and looked at it again. Superimposed it onto the other houses I'd lived in since high school. And she was right. It was enormous. I don't know why I'd never really noticed before. It was just our house.

But so anyway, we lived in this big mausoleum of a thing, and whenever the phone rang and it was for someone else, common courtesy dictated that we cover the receiver before bellowing at the top of our lungs, JOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHNNNN! PHOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNE!!! Because the house was so big, people could be any number of places upstairs or downstairs or outside and usually far beyond the reach of your lazybones teenage feet. So making use of the lungs god gave us was the Bristowe solution to this situation. That's the first thing.

But the second thing is that Mom was, and is, deaf. There was really no use in using an "inside voice" at our house. Because whether you screamed or you whispered, chances were Mum wouldn't hear you anyway (the above "she left" example notwithstanding). More often than not volume dictated the day and we were screaming down two flights of stairs at each other, even when whoever we were yelling at could hear just fine. It was par for the course at the Bristowe residence because over the years we just normalized to a very loud environment. People who came to visit our house would always say with a slight cringe, "Gee, do you have to yell?" And we'd be like, "We're not yelling, we're calling." The visitor would give a little nervous giggle and feel to see if their ears were okay.

Now, we'd tell Mom that she was deaf, but it never really occurred to me that Mom might actually be deaf. Brucio for his part had looooong been convinced Mom wasn't just deaf, but that she'd exacerbated the situation with "all that crazy aerobics music" over her years of being a fitness instructor. I wasn't so sure - us kids just figured Mum was losing it a bit, and it's not that she didn't hear us, she was just tuning us out. In high school I took to calling her "Val" if I needed her attention in public places, since she'd respond to that name when "Mom" didn't work.

So let's fast-forward a decade and more. Here we are in Nakusp, and it's 2004/2005/2006. By this point there's no question in anyone's mind that Mum is at least partly deaf. Over the years and after countless incidents large and small of Val missing "the middle bit"; and claiming we never said that; and not picking up the thing at the grocery store we called out just as she was leaving; after all that, everyone had finally come to an agreed conclusion that Mum was, truly and sincerely, partly deaf.

Everyone, that is, except for Val.

Talk about denial. "You people mumble!" she'd yell. "You go, 'Murrrrrmmm furrrrguuuuummmm murrr-murrr'... and when I say Uh? What? you get all red in the face and you scream, 'YOU'RE DEAF! YOU'RE DEAF!'. ...I hear just fine!"

"No you don't," we'd grumble.

"I heard that!" she'd screech.

"No you didn't," we'd grumble some more.

Michael was fully in agreement with us, by the way. While it might have been plausible that she didn't want to hear what we-all had been saying all those years when the Bristowes were a family unit, it seemed insane that Mom would willfully tune out her second husband. I knew things had reached some kind of crazy level of weirdness when I arrived in Nakusp one time and found a "Guide to American Sign Language" in the upstairs bookshelf, with Mike's name inside the cover. Mom held the line, though, never breaking rank. "I'm not deaf!" she'd yell. "You people mumble!"

But finally she snapped. Mike and I were yammering away at dinner last fall, joking about Val's lack of hearing. And Mom got all up in it. "You people won't be happy until I go and get my hearing tested!" she yelled. There was a pause. Mike and I looked at each other. Actually, that's exactly what would make us happy. Val just stared. "Fine! I WILL get my hearing tested and when it comes back tickety-boo all of you mumblers can go to hell!" We agreed to those terms.

I don't have to go on and on about what happened next, but I will say this. Mom went to Kelowna for tests and was pronounced deaf in a very specific portion of the hearing range - that being in the middle tones, where most women's voices fall. She hears high and low pitches perfectly. But in the centre of the range: almost nothing. Because both her ears have exactly the same kind of damage, the doctor concluded that she'd lost it in a high, prolonged fever, probably when she was young. True enough, an illness fitting this description was well documented in Val's youth. The doctor told Mum that she'd probably been lip reading the majority of what she'd been "hearing" for years. The kicker is that Val is a counsellor, and basically listens to people for a living. She's really good at her work, so the only conclusion to draw is that she's a champion lip-reader.

In any case, the deafness diagnosis finally and officially confirmed, Mum called around to eat crow.

"Welll... you were right. I am deaf," she said.

"NO KIDDING. HOW ARE YOU FEELING?"

"Uh? Just fine... How are you?"

"GOOD! GOOD. I'M SO GLAD TO HEAR THAT YOU'RE WELL."

"Uh Ashley, you don't have to yell, you know. I'm deaf, not foreign."

"SO ARE YOU GOING TO BE FITTED FOR HEARING AIDS?"

"Yes, I'm getting the top-of-the-line ones. They're exorbitantly expensive. It's criminal."

"EVERYONE IS GREEDY, THEY'RE ALL BASTARDS."

"Really Ashley there's no need to yell."

"I'M NOT YELLING, I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I SUPPORT YOU IN THIS DIFFICULT TIME. YOU WERE SO SURE YOU COULD HEAR PROPERLY, IT MUST BE SUCH A BLOW TO REALIZE YOU WERE WRONG ALL THOSE YEARS."

"You know, when people ask how I went deaf I tell them it's damage I sustained after years of listening to my children repeatedly yell, You're deaf!!"

"...THAT'S PRETTY GOOD."

So like Mum said, she got the expensive hearing aids. They're all digital and fancy and white-person-flesh-coloured and so tiny you don't notice them at all. Except. Except! Val won't wear them.

Why? I don't know. I've heard of this so many times - people's parents and grandparents are deaf, they get hearing aids, they're so pleased to be able to hear the world once again... and then they refuse to wear the hearing aids. I know that many deaf people find the world very noisy when their hearing is restored through a hearing device, and I can grant them that.

But? Uh? The whole point? Of the hearing aids? Is to hear? You know? I can understand not wearing them while you're gardening, or sleeping, or going to the bathroom. But, like, at dinner? Maybe you'd wear them at dinnertime. Because people are all gathered around the table and you're all there, ostensibly, to enjoy each other's company. And probably to talk a bit, because that's what you do. At dinnertime. Around the dinner table. You know.

So every day we beg Val to put in her hearing aids at dinner time, and half the time, she refuses. After years of all the "Sorry, what's that?" and snarky head tilts and "I didn't hear you, you'll HAVE to speak up" and the denial, it's really rather aggrivating to have to endure it now, especially with the (ridiculously expensive) hearing aids sitting right there on the table next to Mum's plate.

But the other night, Papa Mike did us proud. The conversation was rolling along, and Mum missed a few things. Please put in the hearing aids, we said. No, she said. A little while later she was all, "Sorry? Repeat that?" And in comes Mike: "Well Val, maybe if you push those things up your bum the echo will eventually filter up to your brain!"

And that folks, as they say, was the end of that.

Categories: Family | Nakusp

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Thursday, June 01, 2006

Granny Val And Papa Mike Versus The Bats

The first I heard of the bats was years ago, some time after Mum and Mike moved to Strawberry Hill. They'd adopted their first Siamese cat, Ming, and she was driven just about to the edge of her sanity trying (and failing) to keep the house bat-free. Apparently there were a few living in the attic, under the drywall, and they'd flitter disconcertingly around the house at night, often meeting their end as Ming plucked them out of the air near the ceiling fan.

And yet there were always more bats the next night, much to everyone’s growing dismay. One or two bats? Okay. But one or two bats every day? Not okay. Not remotely okay. You start to worry that they’ll get caught in your hair. You start looking over your shoulder, and begin to imagine little high-pitched squeaks (a prelude to the imminent dive-bomb attack on your eyes). You start envisioning a tennis racket massacre with flying debris and bat juice all over the furniture. And you really hope it doesn't have to come to all that. Plus the cat was starting to seriously go round the bend, twitching at every bug and dust bunny to pass through her peripheral vision. Something had to give, and since Mum and Mike weren't exactly going to move house, they decided that the bats had to go.

So they looked into exterminators, but were told right quick that all bats are protected under British Columbia law, and that the only actual option legally open to them would be to have the bats captured and removed. So they hired a little man to come to the house. He arrived wearing an all-over-protective suit and carrying a wet/dry shop vac. Mom and Mike watched as he climbed the ladder to the attic and then boarded himself up, inside. From there we can only infer what happened, but apparently he crowbarred off the plywood 'drywall', exposing the insulation. And immediately revved up the shop vac, and spent the next twenty minutes pounding away on the ceiling of Mum and Mike's bedroom, staggering around the attic sucking up flying rodents by, apparently, the many many hundreds. Mama bats. Baby bats. All kinds of bats, many many many of them. Many. Because after the attic wall came away it was clear to the little man that what was supposed to be a "small bat problem" was, in fact, one of the LARGEST bat infestations he and his wet/dry shop vac had ever handled. Bats everywhere, squiggling and squirming, living all entwined in the insulation and escaping out big holes where the eaves met the roof. Bats! Lots!

When at last the vacuum whine fell quiet and the little man unboarded the attic door, what emerged from the top level of Mum's house was apparently a hunched-over figure covered in guano (bat shit), hauling a now very heavy wet/dry shop vac full of alive (and take note, British Columbia wildlife service authorities: unharmed! Apparently!) bats. The little man got into his little car and drove the bats down to Burton (50+km away), and once there, he set them free.

Now, bats like the places they like, and you can't tell them not to like those places. Bats will return year after year after year to the same spots - the same barns, the same trees, the same houses - after migrating back north every summer. You can't tell them to bugger off: Hey! Tryin’ to watch tv, here! Get lost! Because aside from being blind (which they're not), they really don't listen too good. At least to people. They've got their sonar ears which apparently work real well, which is how they manage to swoop around and get bugs on the wing. But I digress - you can't invite them to please leave. Back they come, every year, welcome or no.

Which is to say, if you suck them up in a shop vac, for example, and then you go set them free somewhere, those little fuckers'll take one look at the night sky or figure out the vibrations of the magnetic longitude, or something, and immediately fly right back to where you took them from. Before he drove away the little man suggested that Mum and Mike had one, maybe two days max before the bats would be back, sure as God made little green apples. And then he was off down the road.

So Mum and Mike set about lickety-splitty filling in all the wee tiny cracks under the tin roof with wire mesh and expanding foam. I think they stayed up all night and took the next day off, too. They replaced the insulation and filled the holes from the inside. Replasticked everything and glued it all down and put in boards, and nails, and then re-hung the attic walls, carefully making what they hoped would be an airtight (and bat-tight) seal. Through all this activity, Ming watched from her place atop the bookshelf, suspicious and ever vigilant, not at all believing they'd seen the last of the bats swooping around above the washer/drier.

They finished up the roof and attic work with a couple hours to go before sunset the next day, and then they set to waiting. The first night: no bats. A few days went by, and no bats. A week went by. No bats. Two weeks. After three weeks they heaved a first, cautious sigh of relief. And the next day they went in to work and heard that a neighbour across the road had been recently dealing with a sudden onslaught of bats. That she was so surprised because she'd never had bats before. Hundreds of them, all of a sudden, she said. I think they’re in the attic! Oh you don’t say! sez Mum and Mike, rocking on their heels, eying each other and whistling don't-look-at-us tunes, but quietly high-fiving each other on their way out of the staff room. Bat-free city! Aw yeah… and they high stepped it back to work, celebrating.

Uhhh… We'd like to report that the story ends there, but you know it doesn't. No sir. Do I tell short stories? I do not tell short stories. But I will certainly tell a long story in many parts. So this is the end, as they say, of Granny Val and Papa Mike Versus The Bats: Part One.

Categories: Family | Nakusp

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Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Up To Nakusp

There are times when decamping to Nakusp feels like bringing the entire British administration from Delhi to Shimla for the summer season. The elephants, camels and coolies had nothing on the Bristowe-Turners when embarking on this journey - in tow: laptops, paint samples, window quotes for cross-reference, all the cleanse pills and jars and instructions (I'm doing the Wild Rose one, it's going well), the diaper-toys-kid food brigade, the footwear for the mountains, presents for Mum and Papa Mike, baby in the squeaky shoes for extra cuteness, and of course the 20lbs of paper and resources I'm using to finish up one of the NGO contracts from March. Lord have mercy, we're taking the airplane. See you from the dialup connection in the Kootenays...

Categories: Nakusp

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Monday, January 23, 2006

Val's One Liners

Coming soon to an embroidered sampler near you... Val's newest project, a comprehensive collection of truly funny One Liners.

A day without sunshine is... like, you know? ... Night. (Sez Val: "Ha ha ha! I laughed my HEAD off at that one!")

"We've got our shit together" has been henceforth been replaced by "we've got our poop in a group".

But Mom's all-time favourite one-liner is by Groucho Marx: Time flies like an arrow... fruit flies like a banana.

UPDATE - this just in from Val: what if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about? (12:48pm, Wednesday)

In the honourable mentions category, the best-ever inappropriate one-liner was made by my Grampa, in 1978, upon the news that a friend of the family had died: "... Well, there are people dying today that have never died before!"

I defy you to say that with a straight face the next time you hear of a death in your community. It can't be done. It's awful.

Categories: Family | Nakusp

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Thursday, November 10, 2005

Sloane's New Bag of Tricks

Turner comes back to Canada tomorrow after a long and generally successful research tour of Denmark and England these last three weeks. He saw the wind farms of Samsø, he toured the geothermal buildings of Manchester. Along the way he did a piece for the Globe & Mail on Christiania, the 30-year-old anarchist community in Copenhagen under threat by the Danish government; he figgered out the whatsit of London's best urban repurposement-by-skateboard-colonization in Southbank.

In London Turner's been staying with our grand friend John J in Shepherd's Bush, he did a bit of drinking with a lovely producer from Richard and Judy, and he put in some envy-inducing hours with our flipside nocturnal souls Angad and Tara. ... Y'know, I love Nakusp, and Sloaner and I have been having a great time here with Mum and Mike ...but jeez it must've been a hella great visit in London this week. The only one missing is Renée. We'll get over the Pond soon, sez Sloaner and me.
Anyway, it's been three weeks since Turner saw our darling daughter, and three weeks since I had a husband and co-parent. ...Three weeks is a long time. Like, it's 21 days, over 500 hours. Turner and I haven't been apart for this long for years - since before we became parents in March, since before we were married nearly two years ago... we haven't been apart this long since 2003 when we were broken up and living in different cities, actually. I miss my husband!
Now, Sloane - being a baby and in that whole "sponge" stage where she's apparently learning faster than she ever will for the rest of her life - picks up new stuff every few days. The being-able-to-feed-herself-a-cracker thing from July, for example. Day after day she's poking herself in the ear with the cracker, poink-poink-poink. The situation looks hopeless. Then, suddenly, the hand-eye coordination gets all aligned and presto, she's able to put it in her own mouth. (The not-choking-on-the-big-pieces development came a bit later.)
Earlier today, I sent Turner an email listing the developments Sloane has made in the time he's been away, to prepare him for tomorrow's reunion.

Sloane's new tricks include:

clicking her tongue (...Barba-trick)

lunge biting (but it's out of love... And teething. She bit my nose the other day and not only brought tears to my eyes, but left a welt that lasted three days... out of love)

playing contentedly with the rubber duckie on the shower floor while I wash my hair (I used to leave her on the bathroom floor while I showered. Between the sound of the water and the ceiling fan she was sufficiently mesmerized into a genial stupor most days. However, since she got all mobile on us it seemed irresponsible to abandon her to the terrors of the bathroom floor - I kept thinking she'd tip forward into the toilet and drown or eat her weight in the under-sink maxi pads before I could intervene. So mostly I showered at night, or Turner watched her while I bathed. But in Turner's absence I was forced to finally try her out on the shower floor, armed with the rubber duckie for companionship. It all went unexpectedly swimmingly and a new era in Bristowe bathing was born)

sleeping 12 hours at night (sometimes it's 12.5 hours. It was a few weeks of hell to get her onto a solid schedule, and some days are a lot better than others. But overall, she's a totally new baby in the sleeping department. I bury this one in the middle because it's basically her hugest achievement... no needing the boob to go back to sleep, no needing to crawl into bed with me/us, no real middle-of-the-night emergencies anymore. It's a fricken miracle)

doing a crinkly face (it's not a leading-to-crying face, this is just a new face. I think she's still testing out when it's most appropriate; I've seen it break out at all different occasions the last few days)

head-on-shoulder/chest when she's ready to go for her nap (this is possibly the most darling, charming, amazing thing Sloane does. Makes you feel like the greatest parent on earth)

growling back and forth with another person (when Sloaner likes the food she's being given, she'll growl. It's compelling. So much so that everyone loves to growl back. She used to stop whenever you'd start, and the adult'd be left there growling at a blankfaced and henceforth silent baby with pablum in her eyebrows. But now she's got the interactive angle of the game and is all raahhhhh raAAHH! Rah. It's great)

tweedle-burbling with other people's fingers, and sometimes with her own hand

clapping hands (pattycake - pattycake - baker's man, etc.)
standing for a few seconds completely on her own (Sloane's been standing while holding on to our hands since her first weeks, and she's been walking along furniture by herself for a month. However, by "standing on her own" here I mean that she's managing to stand without any kind of support, mid-air, on her feet, on her own. It's freaky)

also, more hair (auburn, still thin on the sides; not exactly a "trick", per se, but still something new)

Come home soon, Turner! Our girl is getting all jiggy with the toddlerhood!

.....Come!
.....Home!

....Tuuurrrrr-Nurrrrr!

Categories: Dad-ness | Mom-ness | Nakusp | Sloane

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Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Academics' Confessional 101

Val staggers upstairs, favouring her arthritic knee. She's been downstairs, working on an essay for her Athabasca University course . Val writes her essays longhand and then punches them into the computer.

Ash: Oh! Are you done?
Val: [staggering into the kitchen] Uh, ....Haahh??
Ash: Are you done? Your essay?
Val: Yeah.
Ash: Really?! That's a lot of work for just this one night.
Val: Yah, well, I'm a fuckin' genius...
Ash: ...What's the course again?
Val: Ahhh, Nursing Leadership and Management...? Like, why? Who wants to know?
Ash: ...Um, me?
Val: Okay. Well, that.
Ash: [laughing]...How do you do it?
Val: [unpacking the dishwasher, clearly fried] Haahh??
Ash: [laughing] How do you do it - writing your essays. Do you do all the readings beforehand, or do you write out your arguments while you research - how do you do it? What's your "process"?
Val: [Pulling out the top dishwasher rack, stacking little plates on the counter] Aahhh, I do aaaaallll the readings. Most of them are horse! shit! but I doooo them aaaaalllll. And I write up little notes. And I research the topic and I think about it.
Ash: But mainly...
Val: But mainly I choose all my quotes from the sources and then I build my essay around the quotes.
Ash: [surprised] ...Really?
Val: Yes. Really.
Ash: ...That's exactly how I used to build my essays.
Val: [stops stacking dishes]...Really?
Ash: Yes. Really.
Val: And we've never talked about this before.
Ash: No. I really don't think so.
Val: Yeah... well, I've tried it the other way, [striking a thinking pose, chin on fist, mid-air] think-think-thinking about the topic, and coming up with some great grandiose theory, gunna-change-the-world, lookout, here I come with all my big brain! ...and you get buppkis from the markers. "Where are the sources?" they say. But when you go around and you quote everybody else, and fill in ideas in between, oh boy they really like that and you get good marks. I fiiiiinally figured it out, and that's what I do now.
Ash: [thinking, yep - nobody ever wanted to say this out loud, but this is exactly what I found to be the case at university, myself]
Val: [Rama is agitating to go outside. It is 11pm and Nakusp has just had its first snowfall of the year.] Rama, you can't go out there, you'll freeze your little ball sack. [picking up the cat, moving him to the chair]...You just sit here on the chair and be a good boy.

Categories: Family | Nakusp

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Saturday, November 05, 2005

Guy Fawkes Rocks!

I've long thought that it would be a superbo idea to spend my birthday in England; Turner flies into London this evening and he may catch sight of the massive fireworks display that always marks November 5th. Seems they had some "traitor" who was "burned" at the "stake" or something a few hundred years ago on this day, and to commemorate the occasion Britons blow up the skies on the night of my birthday every year. Sounds like a hell of a way to celebrate your birthday, innit? Maybe next year... hey Angad, want to meet me and John J for pints at the river?

In any case, today I am 32 years old. Seems like an amazingly large number, actually - not that I mind getting older. I'm not one of those people who gets depressed on their birthday, and I never lie about my age - I really don't understand why you would ever ever ever try to pass yourself off as younger than you actually are. You wouldn't know the right pop culture references, you wouldn't be able to take credit for all the years of living and experience you'd gathered up along the way... seems like a big vain stupidness to lie about your age, frankly.

All that said, suddenly this year things are a bit different. Given the events of the past year, I'm finding that the whole idea of "birthday" has taken on new meaning and resonance, understandably enough. Suddenly my birthday seems a thousand percent more connected to my mother than it ever did in the past. (Golly gee, the simple insights that come with becoming a parent, yourself.) To that end, I wanted to spend this birthday with my mum and daughter, all of us together, a lineage of women three generations strong -- so here we are in Nakusp.