Flickr Frenzy

OK y'all - whole whack of new photos on Flickr, here.

Update: Hey, those of you who're our Flickr "Contacts", make sure you sign in -- a zillion more photos are online and set to "family and friends"-view only.

Categories: Ash

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Our Bottomless Pit

Sloane was 8 lbs. 7oz. at birth - the 90th percentile among her newborn peers for weight. At her first vaccinations she'd fallen to the 80th percentile. Then she fell to the 50th. At seven months old, she hit the 25th. Basically she's completely healthy, and the nurses and her doctor all say that there's nothing amiss; she's just small for her age, and obviously her development is excellent (what with the standing, and the pointing, and the peek-a-boo, and so on), so they pat us on the arm and tell us not to worry.

I don't care in the slightest if she's "little" when she grows up. Like, whatever - big, little, there's room for everyone on this earth. I think it's the numbers that scare me: I'm bad with numbers. Just ask Turner. He knows that one of the (many) reasons I married him is that he can do The Math. Somebody has to do The Math in this house, and it sure isn't going to be me.

The websites say a baby should double their weight in the first six months. But Sloane's just over 8 months old and she still hasn't doubled her weight. Furthermore, Sloane's current 15lbs 12oz now puts her in the 10th percentile.

So the internet and its questionable "wisdom" can be dismissed, but your baby being in the 90th percentile at birth and slowly falling falling falling to the 10th percentile? ...Um, a mother worries. (Especially a mother afraid of numbers in general. Going from 90 to 10 is, like... uh... 80. Eighty percentile points. Or something like that. Out of 100, 80 is a lot. Like, A LOT. Even I know that.)

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Just feed her more!"

Yeah. Well. We feed her.

Sloane scarfs the broiled zucchini (while wearing this season's must-have: blanched baby tomatoes with parmesan)

We put her on solids (known as "pablum") at the end of August, and she hasn't looked back. Most folks have to start their kid on watery baby cereal and then slowly work their way up, over weeks and weeks and patient months, to boiled-n-mushed veggies and soft breads and finally dairy and ground-up meats (for those of us who are carnivores and so train our children to follow our heinous, death-loving example).

Heh. Yes. Well, we tried that, but she got bored with the one-at-a-time introduction of various foods, as per the advice of all baby books everywhere. And mad that we weren't giving her more of the everything that we were eating (which she'd been sampling little bits of since she was three months old)? Whoo. Mad.

She seemed to be digesting everything totally fine, so about six weeks ago we just gave up with the "baby" foods and started feeding her anything that came to mind - kidney beans and cheese and oranges (loves oranges, Sloane does. They're acidic and give most kids her age tummyaches and rashes, but not our Sloanester. She shoves them in, grinning) and olives and any kind of cracker you can name (we boycot the transfat ones, of course) and cottage cheese and corn niblets and chicken and... well, you get the idea. Down the hatch, all of it.

Of course, we chop stuff up when necessary, and we watch her like a fricken hawk because I'm terrified she'll choke on the fistfuls of sliced beans and bagel and apple she stuffs in her mouth (sometimes all at once). She gives us a brief scare every so often but mostly she's not bad in the choking department.

When Sloane's having a good feed and she's pleased with the selection and pace of her meal, she does this satisfied back-forth-back-forth sway dance, grunting. We basically work towards producing that dance, three times a day.

Sloane slurps down her favourite soup: Italian lentil medley by Campbell's

We feed her monstrous amounts of food, the truth be told. Anyone who's seen her eat will attest to this fact. And variety - we're not scared to let her try pretty much anything. She'll spit it out if she doesn't like it (clearly demonstrated whenever you try to slip her something "peach flavoured" - that's my girl!), though there really ain't much she doesn't like. You wouldn't be able to call Sloane a picky eater by any stretch.

But it's the volume of food she can consume. She can eat and eat and eat. Tonight I'd fed her buckets of supper and at 6pm had drawn her bath and was getting her out of the high chair, but she gave me a big "No! Not yet! Not done!" moan, grabbing at the bits of bean and broccoli on the tray. So I put her back down, and strapped her back in, and kind of wandered to the fridge to see what else I could get for her, since she clearly wasn't done. 

And here's the thing: we keep saying to each other, "she must be going through a growth spurt". But then she doesn't grow. Granny Val calls Sloane "The Shrimp". And she is, in size. But she's a goat when it comes to her stomach. Here's a typical day's (today's, in fact) menu:

Breakfast: bowl of cereal (Heinz' soya-pear), half a banana, some sliced pear, half a pancake (buckwheat), two pieces of cheese (cheddar)

Lunch: half a piece of toast, two slices of ham, a piece of cheese, some banana

Dinner: bowl of cereal (Healthy Times' brown rice-banana), one small potato, five slices of zucchini, two cherry tomatoes, four slices of banana, a bowl of mixed veggies (frozen assorted "Asian" variety from Safeway), some sliced pear, and a piece of cinnamon bun.

Remember: eight months old. Three teeth, cutting the fourth. And all this is in addition to the breastfeeding Sloane gets when she wakes in the morning and after each nap, plus in the evening bath. So let's call it four boob-feedings a day, though I usually let her nip a bit here and there just to check in.

So say to yourself, as you should, "Hm. That there is truly a lot of food. And plus the breastfeeding... where is that scamp Sloane putting it all?" And we say unto you: WE DO NOT KNOW. TENTH PERCENTILE.

Turner all cracked up at Sloane's concentration: "Hmmm... how best to ram this entire potato into my mouth?"

Sez Turner, after brushing off the widely scattered food bits (in her neck fold & ears, down the front of her outfit-under-the-bib) and taking Sloane for her bath tonight: "...That's okay Sloaner, you're just a little bit of a runt-insky, like your dad was. ...An' I turned out juuuuuust fine."

Okay, I can agree with that.

 

(We were doing the shortlist of photos for this entry, and Turner suggested I post them all. I was like, "Nobody wants to see fifteen photos of Sloane smeared with food, in slightly different poses." Turner: "My mother does." Me: "Good point. Mine too." So for Gramma Margo and Granny Val anybody else who's interested in the whole set, click here.)

 

Categories: Sloane

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 36.0

Sloane Four-Teeth of the snotty nose, and her Great Auntie Sharron visiting from Toronto

Categories: Family | Sloane

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Welcome, Mr. Rooster

The last two months or so, it became increasingly obvious that Sloane is a fan of animals. She loves to have dogs come lick her face, so the canine population out in Nakusp is a big hit; and we go out to the fence to say hello to our neighbour's keeshond dog, Bear, every day. Sloane giggles and sticks her fingers through the fence.

But when it comes right down to it, cats are what Sloaner truly adores. Like, loves. There are four or five local cats (among them, Brother John's siamese, Pema) that come around our yard on their rounds, and when they saunter into view Sloane goes into high-volume HEH!! HEEEEEHHHHH!! mode, reaching and smiling and squirming. She loves cats, loves them.

Considering her enthusiasm, we decided Sloane's was now a good age to introduce a pet (other than the rotating cast of characters through the fishbowl... our longest-lasting fish to date, Sammy, just died last week after a good 12 week run). Turner and I aren't really ready for another dog, yet. But cats, well, I love cats just fine, and Turner's willing to be nice to them. I went on the internet a while ago and sussed out the whole breed thing using "good with children" and "hypo-allergenic" as the prominent search criteria on the breed selector. And the front runner turned out to be the Abyssinian.

So I rooted around online some more, and found a lovely breeder out on Vancouver Island, Nightmist Abyssinians. Called the folks there, and talked up a storm about their cats for half an hour. It just so happened that Uncle Leo was going out to Victoria last week and gallantly offered to transport our new kitten back to Calgary when he returned. So we armed him with Val's cat carrier, and a bunch of cash money (yikes, purebred cats are not cheap!), and on Monday night we welcomed home Sloane's Christmas present from Mama, Dadada, and Grampa Bruce, a hilarious 12-week-old male Abyssinian kitten.

We've had some difficulty photographing the new kitten. When you haven't had one around in a while, kittens seem ridiculously fast. The autofocus on the camera agreed. 

After a few days of namelessness for the new el gato, we finally chose "Rooney" for him. It shortens to "Roo" or "Roon", and twists to the nickname "Rooster" (one of my favourites for the official name, nixed by T). Rooney is an old Irish gaelic label that means 'red', appropriately enough. ...And of course all you Ferris Bueller's Day Off fans may be starting to notice a pattern here around Chez Bristowe Turner, but only if you were looking for it.

A rare calm moment - Mama, Sloaner and Rooney.

And a few more photos, just for the cat porn angle of it all:

Veiny ear detail

Rooney's fur colour is really complex - the shaft of the fur "hair" goes from light to dark, root to tip; and is darker down the centre of his back and gradually lightens as you head around to his tummy

Categories: House | Rooney | Sloane

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 35.0

Our walk down by the Bow River with friends; Calgary's skyscape puts on a great show.

photo by Celine Bellehumeur

Categories: Sloane

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All Hail The Denny's Menu

Part Three in the Lost Archives series...

When I was 18 I was STRUCK DOWN by Hodgekin's disease, a type of lymph cancer. This relatively rare cancer filtered into the public consciousness over the 1990s when hockey superstar Mario Lemieux and the character Amanda on Melrose Place were famously diagnosed with it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I had it first.

If you're going to get cancer, Hodgekin's is a good one. Non-painful and treatable, it has high recovery and low remission rates. I had six weeks of radiation treatment at Calgary's Tom Baker Cancer Centre (all hail the Tom Baker Cancer Centre) after which I was loosed anew on the world, cancer-free (now 14 years in remission and counting...).  

Radiation treatment has some side effects: hair loss, skin burns, increased risk of leukemia later in life. But the most prominent one, for me, anyway, was the nausea. Not as severe and debilitating as that caused by chemotherapy (I'm told), the nausea which accompanies radiotherapy is nonetheless intrusive, and pretty weird, besides. I had some wonderful anti-nausea meds that generally got me through the afternoons (treatments were first thing in the morning), but in the first weeks of therapy the balance wasn't perfect and I spent a number of miserable days curled up on the bathroom floor, wedged between the toilet and the wall. As such I have the dubious honour of probably having thrown up more in the month of December, 1991 than most of you ever will in your whole lives. Do with that nugget of information what you will.

I found that as the treatments went on, food tasted strange, sometimes waaaaay different than I expected. Chocolate tasted like chalk. Milk tasted like metal. Meat in general tasted oily - chicken, beef, shrimp, anything that'd once been alive had a distinct oily-ness to it. This re-jigging of my sense of taste put me off a number of foods for the duration of the radiotherapy (after which it seemed my taste buds slowly returned to normal). But some things became better, infinitely better. For example, and I don't remember how I discovered this, clam chowder (New England style). I ate a lot of clam chowder during that period, as a result. That, and club soda, were my staple foods - club soda seemed to be the only liquid capable of sating the INSANE and bottomless thirst that accompanies radiation therapy.

Relatedly, I had a bizarre reaction to some specific food smells. For some reason, the smell of frying celery was suddenly disasterous for me. I would start to tense, and whine, and eventually panic - it was physically and emotionally painful to me to have actively frying celery anywhere near me. (I don't know how my mum pulled off making stuffing for Christmas turkey that year without frying the celery at our house - maybe Nanny did it at their house and brought the already-fried celery to be mixed in with the rest of the ingredients...? - but she did. ...It goes without saying that my family were superstars thoughout my diagnosis and treatment.)

Sometimes I'd be STARVING but utterly unable to decide what to eat. And what's worse, talking about food made me want to hurl. So I'd be standing in the kitchen in front of the open fridge and cupboards, dancing from foot to foot with frustration, pasty and wan, and totally unable to deal with suggestions. Grampa would come in there and say, "Do you want a banaaaana? How about a turkey saaaandwich? ...Or some scrambled eeeeeggs? How about some egg noooog? ...Or tooooast, just plaaaain toast? Or with some hooooney?"  I'd be shaking my head, waving my hands, no no no, stop talking, stop talking, STOP! STOP! STOP!!!, completely sicked out by the list, and end up with my head under the kitchen tap, sucking water and breathing hard.

Possibly most frustrating of all, sometimes I'd be SO looking forward to eating one minute, but then suddenly and absolutely unable to eat anything, the next minute. This often befell me when I'd've plucked up enough energy to go out with my friends. If we didn't go dancing, we'd end up at Denny's, mainly because they're open 24 hours. So there we'd be, Jeff and Alex and Elliot and I, drinking coffee and being the newly-loosed-on-the-world, university-going teenagers we were. We'd order indulgent late-nite food. I wouldn't've eaten for hours and hours at that point, and was rip-rearin' to go. And the food would come.

...And suddenly, I wouldn't be able to eat. Just. Couldn't've. Possibly. I'd just sit there, looking at it, mouth watering, and thinking, knowing, Yeah, that looks great. And there's no way I can put that in my mouth.

This drove me CRAZY. But I will always be so grateful for how my high school friends stood firm and supported me exactly as I asked them to: bless them, they totally ignored the fact that I was "sick" and treated me just as they always had. So while everyone else was tucking in to their eats and making unselfconscious small talk, I'd end up with my doggie bag of uneaten food, feeling far less the freak than I could have. ...Save for my tendency to stare lovingly and longingly at the menu.

You're familiar with the Denny's menu, right? It's full of photos. Even in its present 2005 incarnation, the Denny's menu makes the food look pretty great. But the early-90s version of the Denny's menu was shot by some genius wizard of a photographer, and the food looked... well, it looked incredible. Delicious. Transcendent, even. Of course, everyone knows that the food you actually get at a restaurant never looks completely like the picture on the menu. But that didn't matter, in this case. The food photographs on Denny's menus went beyond Unattainable, into the realm of True Art.

One particularly nasty day, I found myself at Denny's with my friends, hungry, so hungry, but totally unable to eat. I was not in good shape this day. And the only thing that took my mind off the exhaustion and nausea was... the Denny's menu, and the pictures of the food therein. Now, you've heard of "food porn", I'm sure. This term became popular a few years ago with the explosion of high-profile hip cooking shows on the specialty channels. But I've known the concept and realistic use of food porn for a long, long time: pictures of food that look so good it can't be real; pictures that can substitute, at least temporarily, for the real thing.

Sitting there that hard night, I realized I needed a Denny's menu of my very own at home - as a salve, as a comfort during the hard times of my recovery - and resolved to steal mine from the restaurant that very night. Which I did. And that menu brought me a great deal of low-key satisfaction over the next four weeks of radiotherapy, I shit you not. Whenever I was too nauseous to eat, I'd pull out the Denny's menu and think about the pictures, instead. It wasn't Food I Couldn't Have. It was Food That Was Ideal. And in that way, it was perfect.

After I finished the radiation therapy and life went back to normal, for whatever reason (probably gratitude), I saved that menu. It ended up in the archive box that Papa Mike brought from Nakusp this week. It doesn't look the same in my eyes now as it did then, but I remember only too well why that menu was so special. That restaurant lost one menu, but gained a lifelong admirer.  

 

The French Slam: possibly the most amazing-looking item on the 1991 Denny's menu, this meal is obviously more food than the average adult needs in a whole day. But gaze upon it - look at the eggs! So lovely, fluffy, yellow. Look at the bacon and the sausage... don't they look almost healthy? And the french toast, with the little scoop of butter or whipped cream or whatever that white blob is? Divine.

 

At 18 I wouldn't've dreamed of eating olives on nachos, but that didn't stop me from unofficially deeming this photograph the second-most-awesome-looking of the Denny's menu offerings. The colours, the cheese nicely placed just-so on that ball of... salsa? ...refried beans? ...whatever it is. The symmetry of the pointed chips, the clear reflection of sour cream and the guacamole, one to another... Point is, helluva picture. And the soups look superbo, too. Nice concentric rings on the bowls, well-propotioned floaty bits of vegetable matter and soupish whatnot... simply great.

 

 

Categories: Ash | Calgary | Family | Friends | Olden Days

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Part Two in the Lost Archives series...

Ah, grade eleven, when a young woman's thoughts turn to earnest political letter-writing.

 

Turner: Dear Ms. Bristowe, thank you for your VIEWS on the situation in Nicaragua...

Ash: Hey. I had VIEWS, okay? Like, VIEWS, man.

Yesterday I would have bet cash money that at fifteen I knew FBA about Central America. ...But apparently I knew enough to write a letter to my MP and express my "views". A few years ago I went to Guatemala and Belize as the photographer on a project, and I got some great photos, an Antigua recipe for rice n' beans, and a some super sound for a radio piece for CKUA. But not so much in the political insights department, I have to admit. Still, you have to admire the bold and rash willingness of youth to put pen to paper and give elected officials what for. On VIEWS. Because, you know, you have them, at that age.

Please note: I no longer live at the above address. Other nice, lovely people live there now. I can't speak for their views on Nicaragua, but I'm sure they're as concerned about the ozone layer as I was.

 

Categories: Ash | Canadiana | Olden Days

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Now Point: You, You, I-Know-You

Part One in the "Lost Archives" series...

Papa Mike arrived in Calgary tonight with a jeep full of my stuff: rocks stolen from the side-of-the-road near Sandon (for the garden - they're purdy), the water bottle I left behind last week in Nakusp, a cat carrier. But the item that's occupying my attention this evening is the giant plastic rubbermaid box Mum and I found in the attic during my visit.

Mum was rooting around up there, looking for a specific pair of beige leather boots that match her mink coat (which Sister Ains won in the "Visiting Nakusp" lotto in September ...Now, I won Nanny's fox-and-mink coat in the "Getting Married" lotto in January 2004, so fair is fair. If truth be told, Ains is welcome to Mum's mink), and I was up there too, keeping her company while Sloane napped. On her way to the boots, Mum pushed past a particularly heavy box. That's yours, she said. It's full of old twenty dollar bills and letters from god-knows-who. I think there're a few menus in there, too, for whatever reason. I've had it for years... are you ever going to take it?

Hot diggity! sez I. Of course I'll take it! It's always great to dig through old archives.

Actually, I thought I had everything that could possibly be deemed "Ashley's stuff" moved to our basement, by now. I certainly know my parents feared over the years that my burgeoning archives (I keep it all) might overwhelm even their combined enormous capacity to store my shit. But I always maintained an official "I'll take it all when I have my own house" line. Which I did. ...Or so I'd thought.

Anyway, Mike kindly transported it to Calgary, and tonight I pried open the box, and disengorged the contents onto the kitchen table and floor.

The stuff: it's old. Like, it's circa 1993/94, and lots that's earlier. So we're talking about high school and early university, for me. That means memorabilia from the guilt-tripping Glockenspiel, it means an old favourite pair of pants - which at one time I thought were the height of bohemian style - now simply horrifying to behold, it means yearbooks from the 1980s that I'm afraid to open (Melissa, remember how I commented on your blog about having all those old yearbooks? ...You can take them!). I'll talk about bits and pieces here, but right now I want to address the letters (so to speak).

...Boxes and boxes and boxes of letters. From penpals, friends, relatives. I was a hell of a correspondent, growing up, and these are only some of the letters I got in return (in the established Chez Bristowe Turner archives downstairs, there are more. Many more. Like, hundreds and hundreds more). I look at the piles of mail I received over the years and it makes me realize how much time I spent writing, as a teenager, to possibly deserve this largesse. How much of my life got written down, as stories sent to other people? Obviously: lots. As an obsessive chronicler of my own life, I'm now insanely curious about the contents of those letters sent to everyone else, written a decade and more ago.

And so. I propose a trade.

I know most people aren't as interested in their own written history as I am in mine, and I realize that most of the people I wrote to over the years don't have my letters saved in a box somewhere.  But I have some great letters from lots of people, and I'm totally willing to send you your letters back to you, if you're interested. I think that probably a few of you have letters I sent to you, somewhere... from Calgary, from France, from Queen's... and I'd love to see them again.

Obviously, I'm interested in getting my own letters back. However... if you don't have the letters I sent, anymore... well, I'm willing to send your letters back to you, anyway. I know how interesting it is to read your own lost handwriting years and years after the fact, so I'm okay with putting a bit back into the collective karma pile.

The following people may wish to be in touch with me (via the comments) if they google their own name and find themselves here, reading this post:

• Tim Andison (I saw you last at your wedding in 1996 ... I wish we'd stayed in touch)
• Stewart Burdett (Hey - I eventually saw your movie; well done!)
• Jennifer Elliot (of 1990 Villefranche fame, also of Vancouver)
• Kaitryn Campbell (you're great, we're both mums... I'm so glad we met in the gael group, way back when)
• Matthew Currie Holmes (y'bastard... one of your letters from 1990 has the return address as: "The Fucking Dutchess of Windsor, Who Do You Think". ...I think you want to see these)
• Bene Giusti (French penpal in Cormery)
• Peter Kaiser (German penpal in Nordhausen - huge, huge piles of letters from you)
• Richard Luxford (Are you stil in Wales? Does the rain still fall mainly in pails?)
• Marnie Mymko (I know your married name is different ... lovely cards and letters aplenty)
• Jill Ogston (I've called you at your old phone number in Wpg and can't find you... I have TONS of your letters, from grade 3 to university)
• Jeff Orston (of STS... wherever did you go?)
• Elizabeth Passey (of Cheshire, now of London)
• Carrie Rathwell (years' worth of yours, plus some from your mum)
• Anne Sam (of Singapore... yeah, I know you don't want to be penpals anymore. I get it. But I have acres and acres of paper on which you've chronicled your life. Seriously, hundreds of letters. I'm glad to send it to you, if you like)
• Vanessa Stettler (we said we'd be friends again... and then never called)
• Ray Vela (my man in Oklahoma, no wait... Boston. No wait... OK, are you a lawyer? Whassup with you?)
• Barbara Warner (can't find your current contact info - I have a dozen great letters from you, thanks for being at my bridal shower!)
• T.C. Waugh (M. le opera man, I have possibly the only written correspondence of your university years)

This list doesn't include the people with whom I am still in semi-regular contact. Obviously this offer goes double for you folks ...among youse of more prodigious and ongoing output: Travis, Margaret, and Jenn Foley (I have old envelopes from your Lawrenceville days here!). Just be in touch by email, I'll send them to you, all.

 

Categories: Ash | Friends | Internet | Olden Days

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Insomnia Memories

I'm in the grip of a bad bout of insomnia. As much as it's lovely to have a nice snuggly husband in bed after three weeks of sleeping alone, the husband comes with the snoring. And the snoring sucks. I wear earplugs, but I can hear it anyway. It's the uninvited slumber party crasher.

And upon our return from Nakusp on Friday, Sloane graduated to sleeping in her own room (thanks to Dad and Uncle Leo, who moved the crib while we were away, at my request). Even though she and I were both really ready for this change, it's also strange not to have Sloane there, right beside the bed. We used to wake each other up and generally disrupt the flow of sleep back and forth, but now that she's not there I find myself lying awake and listening for her (through the earplugs, no problem - I have Mom Hearing now. I could hear her blink through a brick wall), stirring, down the hall.

Plus all the standard downfalls of the insomniac brain, the random stuff that conspires to keep you awake: The think-think-thinking about the grocery list. Mulling over the family Christmas schedule. Reminding myself to call Purolator on Monday about the package they tried to drop off here last week. Round and round it goes. Finally after an hour and a half of lying there, I got up. It's no use staying in bed if your brain refuses to cooperate. I checked some email, made some lists, had some soup. Padded through the house peeking in on Sloane and quietly putting some things in order around the kitchen. Puttering. Thinking.

Being awake and sleepless at this quiet time of day, at this time of year, reminds me of the many unslept nights I spent during my Master's research in the Philippines in 1997-98. I'd work late late late doing number crunching and survey methodology under the blinky fluorescent lights in Josee's house, unable to sleep in the spring-strung bed until I was completely exhausted. Wired and bug-eyed, I'd head out to walk through the community at 4am when Christmas prayers started, nightgown tucked into track pants. ...Past the overnight stall ladies selling gum and cigarettes, dirty kerosene wicks flickering wetly on their trays; past the Iglesia Ni Cristo where the teenagers would congregate to 'guard' the church overnight, leaning blearily in doorways and dozing on the steps; under the heavy yellow streetlamps surrounded by palm leaves, the bats whirling and circling in the spray of light.

I was outdoors so much at night that year that I came to learn the northern winter night sky, and was taught many of the classical constellations: Aries, the whole of Orion, Andromeda, Gemini, the Dippers, and the Scorpion (who came out late, after everyone else had slipped under the horizon), plus a few Filipino ones. I went out at night to watch them spin across the sky, them and the moon, going through its phases. I'd never been so aware of the natural evidence of time passing as I was that winter, and I loved those stars, so well.

When I came back to Canada I tried to show Turner the stars I'd learned and loved, during those warm, long, stomach-trembly nights in Cavite. But as we well know, winter in Canada is damn, damn cold. The weather just isn't conducive to throwing back your head and yawping at length at the sky. We went out once, Turner and I - drove out north of Toronto somewhere specifically to look at the stars, and we did - shivering, hugging ourselves and clouding the view with our foggy breath while I chattered out the names, pointing through my mittens. ...But over the years I stopped thinking about the stars, I'll admit. Just stopped looking up, or even thinking much about them at all. It's just easier to be indoors, warm.

Then, a few weeks ago, I heard on the radio about Mars being so easy to spot in the night sky right now, and the idea was compelling, so I went out to take a look with our binoculars. Hello, red planet, I said. Then dumped the compost pail I'd brought out, and headed back inside. It was the first time I'd put my eyes to the sky in a long time.

I was sitting here in our livingroom tonight, sleepless and staring, watching the late-night Spiller Road traffic whizzing by, taillights smearing down the street. And then I looked up and saw Mars again, hanging all orange and bright, framed high in the window. Sat and looked at it, pondering. And my sight wandered down... to Aries, seeing it for the first time in years. And then, below it, Orion.

And I'm taken suddenly back, to somewhere that's all those years ago now - me as the before-Calgary before-marriage before-Sloane Ashley, 24 years old and slogging torturously through knee-high piles of housing surveys and translated interviews - to those cracked cement roads in Queen's Row, Cavite, when I'd walk sleepless and dizzy and happy through the quiet streets at night, watching the stars. And now I'm so glad I'm awake tonight, listening to the refrigerator humming, the furnace kicking in downstairs, my family asleep in the bedrooms. Life is lovely.  

Categories: Ash | Olden Days

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 34.0

Photo by Sean Monkman

Categories: Sloane

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Also, Happy (?) Armistice Day

Last year on this day we were in New Zealand on the book tour. I asked around, "Is it Remembrance Day? Is this a holiday?" People said no. People said they didn't know what I was talking about. People said that November 11th was a regular day.

And then I found a poppy somewhere, clearly designed to be worn in a lapel, like the Canadian Nov 11th poppies. And the evening news reported veterans of the World Wars participating in various ceremonies around the country. And I was like, Yeah! Yeah? ...Uh, yeah!

They call it Armistace Day, there. And mostly the poppies are for the old veterans who want to 'celebrate' in the capital with bagpipes and the trappings of the Commonwealth and whatnot; the real 'remembrance' day for WWI and WWII for Australia and New Zealand is sometime in the northern hemisphere's spring, a holiday known as "Anzac Day".

As a result of this un-coherence across Commonwealth nations, I ended up wondering if John McCrae (author of "In Flanders Fields") somehow kept Remembrance Day alive for Canadian children born long after the big wars. Wondering if somehow our proximity to Europe makes us more aware of the day the first war ended. Having lived in Guelph (John McCrae's birthplace and home town), I wonder if the poppies blow only in Canadian minds on November 11th, or if it's something more universal in the English-speaking world.

But Turner came home from England today with a poppy on his computer carry-on bag. I said, "What's this? It's the New Zealand Armistace Day poppy like last year...?" It was the same style as the one we'd picked up in Hong Kong, the one we'd eventually seen on the news in NZ.

And he was like, "Uh... I bought it in Heathrow. There were some veterans there, celebrating Remembrance Day."

The Nakusp hospital (Arrow and Slocan Lakes General Hospital, Nakusp: officially...) has a series of posters up of late, promoting/explaining Remembrance Day and the origin of the famous Canadian poem by John McCrae, In Flanders Fields. Having spent so much time in the hospital this last week (Nanny is interned there, until further notice - her heart, kidneys, and overall condition mandate her stay), I've read absolutely EVERYTHING they've seen fit to stick to the walls. It's a great poem, a truly great poem. I'm actually glad they made us memorize it in elementary school.

And as for the origin of Turner's lapel poppy this year: Good on you, England. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep... though poppies blow in Flanders' Fields.

Categories: Book Tour | Turner

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In Response To Viki's Comment

 No kidding. I am SO with you on the "fuck the outlines", Viki.

I had this shitty English teacher in grade nine. Let's call her "Ms. Bartel", because that was her name. Ms. Bartel was an asshole. A serious, serious asshole.

She was one of those teachers that in retrospect (after all the stories come out) the school is very very very sorry they ever hired. She was mean, and jealous of our parents' money, and frustrated that she'd never found the right man (even though she had two kids). She hit on the good-looking male students, she was blatantly biased and shamelessly played favourites, and her hair looked quite seriously like a bad wig.

She said things like, "You know who the most unpopular kid in this grade is? ...It's Dele! And do you know why? Because he's Black!" ...when everyone thought Dele was pretty much A-OK (and it was plainly Jory who was the least popular, hands down). As a white woman born in southern Africa in the 1950s, Ms. Bartel thought she understood a great number of things, about which she very clearly (like, clear even to naive sheltered private-school junior-high students) had no idea.

Anyway, it was grade nine where "outlines" were borne, in my academic experience. And it was Ms. Bartel, who (do we need to say it?) hated me for no reason that I could ever discern, and who introduced the concept of 'the outline' to our grade. I was clearly smarter and more fantastic than anything this harridan could inject into my curriculum, in hubris-y hindsight. I spent the rest of my high school career writing my essays the night before they were due and with no formal pre-determined structure, in large part as a big middle-finger salute to Ms. Bartel's insistence that good essays depended on a solid outline and without them you'd receive an F.

She also insisted that in all true "Canadian literature" there were three key factors: 1. rural setting, 2. protagonist experiences a profound loss of innocence, and 3. the main character ends up going to Toronto. I decided to point out that in Farley Mowat's books no one ever goes to Toronto, and was roundly ridiculed at length for even suggesting that Farley Mowat's little tales about badgers and other furry creatures constituted literature. I guess I should have tried it the other way around - that none of Margaret Atwood's novels take place outside city limits. In any case, there was no mercy for those who crossed the Bartel line and as an unkind woman she took any and every opportunity to "power over" the students in her wake.

As personal revenge, I poisoned her classroom plants, which slowly died over the winter of my grade eleven year (as an avid indoor gardener myself, I feel it's such a shame that those plants had to suffer at the hands of my hatred and impotence in the face of Ms. Bartel's dominion over my English marks). ...You wonder why the Palestinians throw Malatov Cocktails at Israeli troops? As someone who once had no power over an unprevoked shithead in a position of unquestioned authority, I am not at all confused or conflicted about the tactics used against the assholes "in charge" of situations around the world. ...In retrospect I guess you'd suppose grade nine English wouldn't generally teach you such a fundamental lesson about the nature of man and the state of the world; though in this way, (and only this way) I suppose Ms. Bartel was an unintentional provocateur and genius.

Ms. Bartel was the gatekeeper teacher for grade twelve AP ("Advanced Placement") English, a course I was basically genetically destined to take. I wrote the obligatory "please accept me into English AP" essay and she rejected my application. As such I was relegated to the purgatory of the "regular stream" English classes, where they made kids like Brian read out loud whenever we had to discuss the literature at hand in the curriculum. It was fucking murder to a student like me, who had an eye and brain for reading and writing and a general disregard for stupid people who couldn't string a sentence together from basic English written on a page. I spent the whole year with my head down, writing in my journal (a banner year for my journal, as a result, I might add), with the tacit permission of the course teacher, Mr. Schmidt... I was scribbling away one time as one of the class illiterates read out the day's readings, and Schmidt came past my desk and muttered, "Bristowe, you could at least *pretend* you're paying attention", and kept going. Cheers, cheers, CHEERS to Mr. Schmidt, btw.

In any case, I wanted to take the AP exam at the end of the year. I had the highest marks in the regular-stream English program, and I was certain I'd score well on the AP exam. Ms. Bartel rejected my request to contest the exam, and to put it mildly, I was pissed. Fuck her and fuck her outlines, said me. I stewed for a few weeks and then happened upon a superbo idea: intervene at the exam-ordering level. I went to the teacher who was in charge of ordering all the AP exams in all the subjects. I plainly explained the situation: I wanted to take the exam, I knew I could ace it, Ms. Bartel had kept me out of AP English, Ms. Bartel was an asshole, etc.

He sat back for a while, didn't say anything. I had really put everything on the table, and he was a teacher of other subjects I took, so I might truly be in some trouble, here... but then he stretched. And paused. And said, "Yeah, Ms. Bartel is a bitch. I believe you. I'll order you an AP English exam."

HELL, YEAH.

Anyway, sometime on or before the day of the exam, Ms. Bartel figured out what had gone down. I was heading to the exam hall on the appointed day as inconspicuously as possible and she intercepted me in the Rotunda: "Ahhhhh, ASH-ley. You think you're SO CLEVER, ordering an EXAM. You CAN'T take it, though, I'm afraid. *I* have the final say on who enters the hall and... oh, I'm sorry but... you're JUST NOT on my class list."

She smiled one of those asshole "I gotcha" smiles and sauntered off. I didn't get to take the exam.

...This really should be a fictional story about a shithead English teacher, if only it weren't true. ...But alas, it's true. And I only scored a 92 on the Alberta provincial English diploma exam (higher than most of the AP folks from my school, better than 99% of the province)... hehhhh.

But anyway, she was fired - two years after I graduated, Ms. Bartel was offiicially "granted a leave of absence" from which she never returned. I guess the expansive details of her divorces (plural), and her childhood in Rhodesia (not Zimbabwe: Rhodesia) offered up in the classroom; and the sexual touching/pointed comments at the good-looking male students (I know you STS people are reading this and thinking, "Yeah, I remember that"...); the petty-minded mean and fierce approach to teaching children... all finally caught up to her... unofficially.

On the record I think she went to finish her Master's in American literature somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana. Anyway, good riddance. 

But also: I never learned to do an outline, in some kind of weird self-punishing retribution to Ms. Bartel. I managed to get all A's in my last two years of university by building my essays just in my brain, while stringing together quotes and ideas from sources. Although it's a strategy of crappy origin, it landed me a good degree and great marks... Vik (and others, whoever you are), I recommend you try it out: the reading-everything-and-then-some, and then-picking-out-the-best-quotes-and-stringing-them-together-between-brilliant-insights-etctera.

Categories: Ash | Calgary | Olden Days

Comments [17]

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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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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

Comments [13]

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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.

Sloane, Ash and Val - whoot, life's pretty grand.

Birthday kudos also go out to Fawkesian partner in brine, Mr. deVilla of the big TO.

Categories: Ash | Nakusp

Comments [13]

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 33.0

Sloaner eats toast with Papa Mike.

The dogs are thinking, "Hm. This new dog is strange... Access to human food: high. Dexterity: low. Better stick close.

Categories: Nakusp | Sloane

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New Mom Soundtrack

Having run through the gamut of every song that I've ever known in various attempts to soothe Sloane - in the car, while feeding, around the house - I've finally landed on one that consistently works (for now). How to know if you're a white, prairie-raised anglophone? Well, just hum the semi-obscure Christmas carol "What Child Is This?" (be careful - there is music in this link and it may be loud) to yourself and see if the Yoda-grammer'd lyrics float forward: What child is this? Who laid to rest, on Mary's lap, is sleeping...

But it's not all Jesus-freakdom around here in Turner's absence... in a conscious attempt to balance out Sloane's musical influences I try to play a bit of everything else, from Soul Coughing to the Mary Poppins soundtrack to Buena Vista Social Club. This morning we've come full circle through the collection and it's back to The Smiths. I must report that she's very obviously a fan of 1980s alternative music, and I swear it's the fast, bouncy guitar leads that put her in the dancing mood. Like, right now, to "Shoplifters of The World" she's doing this lean-on-the-ottoman-and-jiggle-jive thing, even rrrrrr!aaaaaah!-ing along, a dee-lighted grin on her face.

Puts me in mind of a story... This album, Louder Than Bombs, came into my life at the midpoint of grade eleven. My unrepentantly guilt-trippy high school boyfriend (we'll call him "The Glockenspiel") ran with a group of guys, some of whom I'd known since elementary school. One of these boys had a younger brother who, for lack of a better term, sort of went off the rails. On a very snowy February day in 1990 he was hauled off to juvenile detention ("juvie", if you were in the know - which thanks to this kid, we were) and it was decided that we'd "clean out" his room since he wouldn't be back for a while.

The sheer volume of stuff was just incredible, across the floor two feet deep and up the walls on shelves and stuffed into the closet every which-way. Among the assorted stolen debris there were several of those blinky traffic construction lights everyone secretly wants (but doesn't actually acquire until university, at which point the logistical realities of having a blinky light blinking nonstop in the room where you sleep become obvious, and the ownership tenure of same blinky light is understandably short. Obviously these were a recent acquisition), stacks of probably-now-very-valuable comic books (mostly X-Men featuring Wolverine, who I'd never heard of until that raid), several car stereos (one of which went into The Glockenspiel's car later that afternoon), and lots and lots of stuff that no one could see any point in stealing - old newspapers in various states of shredding, dirty clothes obviously not belonging to this kid, string and fishing tackle and balls of knitters' wool, beakers from the school science lab, old screws with washers on them. Most of it just went into trash bags, and was eventually dumped in the back lane. But we were told to just take anything that looked interesting, so the piles were pawed through and turned over and examined over the hours of the afternoon.

I skirted the edges, watching the boys push through the piles and pack the garbage away, feeling a bit sad about the bizarre collection of stuff in this basement bedroom and wondering if there was a common thread through the things this kid had decided to bring home. Eventually it was just obvious that that common thread was "stuff I stole", nothing more and nothing less. In the late afternoon most things of obvious value had been carted away and we were starting to think about dinner. I kicked through a few last corners that hadn't been cleared, knowing that everything that was left in the room was going to be thrown away later that evening. And just before we left, I uncovered a tape with a broken case, chipped in the corner and dusty but obviously not listened-to. It was Louder Than Bombs, and it was the only thing I took home - that, and a pair of old, too-big combat boots, the precursors to the Docs I'd wear throughout university.

Whenever I hear "Sweet And Tender Hooligan" (And he swore that he'd never never do it again/And of course he won't/Oh, not until the next time...) I smile and think of that Bonavista basement full of random pilfered goods, the unlikely provenance of my (and now Sloane's) musical taste.

Categories: Mom-ness | Olden Days

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