on the road again

Insistin’ that the world be turnin’ my way, I have quite literally been on the road. Again.

Being On The Road, as Canadians will be aware, involves Eating At Tim Hortons.

The background to this tale is that I do not like sandwiches all that much. I don’t mind sandwiches, but they don’t exactly stop my clock. They are massively handy, though, and since this past two months there has been a lot of On The Road-ing, they have featured quite strongly in my daily menu. It means that by this point in the game, I could probably be quite happy never eating a sandwich again. Especially not one with a slice of (insert name of processed meat) and a slice of (insert name of sliceable hard cheese).

So, it used to be that if you just wanted some salad between two bits of bun at Tim Horton’s (because of the issues vis-a-vis Ham and Swiss) you had to ask for a ‘garden vegetable sandwich”. It also contains cream cheese. I learnt this through practice. I am able at learning by doing.

However in recent visits, asking for a garden vegetable sandwich has met with uncomprehending stares. I have had to describe the way in the old days they used to take that to mean lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes with cream cheese. Between two bits of bun. Once it was described, they caught on very easily, but it was a bizarre turnaround from not being able to use any other phrase than ‘garden vegetable’ to suddenly ONLY being able to use a phrase that WASN’T ‘garden vegetable’. (Either way, the servers look at me as if I have just got off the crazy train carrying a bag of mothballs and wearing half a Tunnock’s tea cake on my head, because NOBODY ever just wants a salad sandwich, but anyway).

So, armed with my description, and On The Road, I hit Tim’s.

ME: Could I have a sandwich with salad and cream cheese in it, please?
TIM:(for it is he): You want a bagel with cream cheese?
ME: No, a sandwich. With the cream cheese and salad.
TIM: An egg salad sandwich?
ME: No. It is the same salad you put in your egg salad sandwiches, the lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes. But with cream cheese. In the sandwich.
TIM: So, do you want an egg salad sandwich or a chicken salad sandwich?
ME: Well, quite honestly, I don’t even like sandwiches.
TIM:(trying to be helpful) on a bagel?
ME: No. No. It is two bits of bun, and on one of them, you put cream cheese. And on top of that, the salad items heretofore described, and then the other bit of bun.
TIM: Madam, I can only assume what you mean is a GARDEN VEGETABLE SANDWICH.
ME: Oh good heavens. Thank you. Could I also have a receipt?
TIM: Indeed.
(The sandwich comes)
ME: Please could I have my receipt?
TIM: Sorry. I forgot. Now it’s not on the register any more.
ME: Well, but I know this seems a little much, but the thing is, I am On The Road Again, and that means I should really by this point be getting’ the world turnin’ my way like a band of insistent gypsies, and it also means my organisation buys my lunch, which is basically the biggest solid it has ever done me, (the tears begin to well) and if I don’t get a receipt for this sandwich I don’t even want or like, that is literally four dollars and ninety seven cents that I WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN.
TIM: Oh good heavens.

it's what you do with time

Here is some Time. It's mine.

I am Biding it.

Things are afoot. There is much to do.

Alongside the biding, though, and the things underway (it's under weigh, isn't it, ship people? I know. I do know. But underway is less weird), I hit the big city lights with my book talk, Steampunk is the New Zombies, this week!

It's all on my own, so I don't even have to defend my (measured, literate, solid-as-a-fictional-steam-powered-juggernaut) theories against anyone. If you wish to challenge me, I will fight you with my ninja handouts. They have fonts. Zombie fonts.

And now, back to the Biding.

*bides*

the happy, from the weekend road trip

1. Baking a Grandma Cake (thatched with chocolate buttons) and taking it to share with the fam in the USA.

2. Merging from Highway 6 onto the 403 at Burlington for the first time. Dudes, the merge is BACKWARDS. You merge into the OUTSIDE LANE. Also, the merge lane is approximately two feet in length. It is massively exhilarating, provided you come out alive.

3. Three words: Dance Dance Revolution. Against my sister. Bring it on.

4. Fall colours in New York state.

5. The Coodabeens singing along to Wired for Sound.

6. Podcasting, enabling my entertainment - on the 403 back through the world's darkest country night, and without even the excitement of the Merge of Flying Death - to be the Coodabeens singing along to Wired for Sound.

7. My heroically super-fuel-efficient little car getting me to a deserted petrol station somewhere near Woodstock on said dark country night to give it a drink. I apparently forgot you cannot drive from southwestern Ontario to upstate New York AND BACK on one tank, and only noticed when the fuel light sputtered on. My car manual reliably informs me I then have 15 ks to save the situation, and we made it to the oasis at 12.4.

cutting-edge political joke

Okay, are you ready? Because here it comes!

Hey, everyone! Do you think the new Norwegian government is keeping its stick on the ice?

Ha! Oh, ha ha! See what I did there?

You don’t see, do you.

Because, okay, well, the new Norwegian government that just got elected – and that is, in fact, exactly the same as the old Norwegian government except one person no longer has a chair to sit on in the Big Important Room of Shouting At Each Other any more – is the Red Green Coalition.


And the ever-popular Canadian TV show that features duct tape and men doing comical things – on which Steve Smith always says, in his endlessly loveable way, “keep your stick on the ice” as quite literally nothing less than a hockey metaphor for life itself – is the Red Green Show.

My razor-sharp socio-political witticisms are just lost on you people.

some days

Some days, grey things happen.

But one day months ago I saw a little yellow car peeking round an orange tree.

That, I said, is a picture for a grey things day.

And I was right.

handy

If you are changing the headlamp bulb on your car, and someone comes to offer to help, what do you do?

Because there’s only one blown-out headlamp bulb, and there’s only one spanner. So the option isn’t really ‘help’, so much as ‘doing it for you’.

It’s nice when people offer help. They’re being nice. It’s what nice people do.

But you don’t need the help. You’ve got a spanner, and a bulb, and the know-how.

My new neighbour came over when he saw me under the bonnet of the car. To help. (I suspect, when he saw the very short-haired girl who looks like a boy, wielding a spanner and capably doing basic mechanical things on a car, he may have Surmised some Things. Surmisingly.) Anyway though, we talked for a bit. He has a daughter in Melbourne, so we talked about Australia. While we talked, I changed the headlamp.

There was a pause. Then he said, “Well, you’re a handy girl.”

I’m not. I’m not a ‘handy girl’.

But I’m someone who can read instructions and learn to do things. And if I can do them, I’m unlikely to hand them over and have you do them, is all.

the last box

When you are moving, the gods of moving decree that the final box you pack up must contain the following:

electric extension cord
box of tea bags (two thirds empty)
roll of bin bags
bicycle pump
unidentified cable that may be to do with a computer
pair of knickers
hammer
one CD without case
a fork

Here's a picture I took. It's a bird. On a rock. I didn't take the picture recently. Not very recently, anyway. Not this week, or last week, or the one before that.

But really? It's all I've got, today.





Look! Everyone, look! A bird!

the weariness of the long-distance folky

Y'all know, I am a folky. I love folkiness. I embrace it. I would not mercilessly ridicule it if deep down I did not bear for folkiness a love that knows no bounds.

But oh.

Oh.

After all this time, this is where we're at?

There were morris dancers, at our local folk festival, dancing Bonny Green Garters. This is often quite impressive (in morris dancing terms, which of course is all relative), in particular when a very large number of them dance it all together. Here, though, there were precisely four dancers. They did another one called Step and Fetch'er (o gods, ask me how I KNOW) but inexplicably, to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. Average audience: two people.

In a startling oversight, the festival organisers had not employed anyone to sell didjeridus. Luckily, some harpmakers stepped in to cater for all those with a pressing need to spend huge amounts of money on a large and unwieldy musical instrument they will never be able to play.

We must set aside that these women had clearly become as disoriented as a litter of panicked kittens as they tried to escape the Wacky Children's Entertainer wardrobe, for they were by far the most engaging and musical people there.












Food provision: as ever, a 'home made' lemonade stand. "Lemon tree, very pretty/ and the lemon flower is sweet/ but the fruit of the lemon/ is impossible to eat," says Judith Durham, so it must be true. But apparently if you sock it in a polystyrene cup with half a kilo of sugar and charge nine dollars for it, well. Suddenly possible.

Folk Miscellany Bingo; check 'em off: extraordinarily large dog gently terrorising smaller dog; socks and sandals; purposeful bearded man carrying deckchairs, camera bag and thermos; stall selling fairy costumes and staffed by women wearing fairy wings; tie-dyed t-shirt; person juggling craply and dropping beanbags into other people's picnics.

Suspicious absence of anyone playing Michael Row the Boat Ashore on an ocarina, though. Weird. I bet there was one there somewhere.

I just...people, the folk revival was fifty years ago now, and I used to find it reassuring that these things have been the same the world over since god was a boy, but this time? It made me so weary. We gotta do something.

where I am not

Cuileann over at Eating A Tangerine put up some of her beautiful beachy photos, and they made me all sunny and happy. Usually I would try to find something relevant to say that linked to a picture I put up on here, but this time, I just saw her beachy photos, and remembered my beachy photos, and mine aren't as good as hers but here are two anyway, because this is where my heart is:

debut book covers

Because I have plenty of time right now for things that are not work-related, I allowed myself to get completely distracted by this buzzy thing going around - building your own YA book cover.

The Alien Onions pointed at 100 Scope Notes, which has come up with a winning process, involving fake-name generating (to get your author name), random-word generating (to get your title), random-picture-related-to-random-word generating (to get your cover pic), and finally mucking about with the result to patch it all together and see if you can make it look like something you might see on the shelves.

(The process, if you wish to do it yourself - which you DO - is explained at both links above, where they have links to all the randomness sites and also to the rawther brilliant picture-mucking-about-with site, Picnik, where I whiled away several hundred hours a few minutes mucking about with pictures.)

And here are my two efforts:
I had to think hard with 'Air' because I had expected to get some sort of ethereal cloud-type picture, and instead I got a bizarre Miami golf course thing. And thank goodness for picture-weirding effects, because really the image of a cute baby stick insect on someone's fingertip that came up for the word 'afraid' wasn't absolutely the scariest thing I could've imagined.

This was fun. Go do it.