Life in Cowtown

This week has been full of weird and quirky info that I feel compelled to share:

Best poem:

I am sitting here in front of the window,
and I am being bored.
I wish I was two puppy’s
so I could play together.

I have no idea who to attribute it to, since it was sent to me by a friend without a signature. If it’s yours – sorry, but I love it.

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My friends two year old son is suffering from a sudden mysterious neurological illness that left his peripheral nervous system totally down. (The doctors think he’ll be okay, but they’d really like to diagnose him.) The neurologists are testing him for everything known to man to see what caused it, and some of the things he had to do were:

- Check to see if he has any unvarnished furniture in the house - take a white cloth and rub all furniture hard to see if it stains.
- Vacuum the entire floor with a special sealed vacuum bag to see if anything is present
- Bring in all household pills he may have had access to and so on.

What I got out of that conversation is that our houses are probably more toxic than we ever even imagine. I want to read Slow Death by Rubber Duck, but dread it at the same time. 

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Google does NOT in fact have all the answers. Earlier this week my boyfriend and I were watching that story on that guy who killed that young girl while she was jogging, you know? And he asked me whether pedophilia exists in the animal world. Weird but legit question. Well I’m not Google, so I fired up the trusty laptop and went to town. And I got nothing. No relevant search results at all. I don’t know what to make of that. I feel a little scared and lonely now that my search engine that could failed me. (Actually this is so not the first time I’ve stumped Google, but I can’t remember what else is NOT out there, and that’s probably a good thing).

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In other news, I am officially starting my tomatoes today, and the race begins anew. Seeds go in the pods tonight. Wish me a warm summer please!

While people down south have been gleefully shoveling rare snow and building gray snowmen, February has been unseasonably warm on the prairies. Like scary warm, with temperatures barely dipping below zero and daytime highs of 4-8 C.

Instead of snow Calgary has been frequently blanketed by insanely thick fog. The kind that muffles all the sounds and gives a cathedral like hush to the city. The kind that turns the sky dusky white, even in broad daylight. The kind that settles in a kind of beautiful hoar frost all over trees and railings and bushes and mailboxes. The kind that feels like there’s magic in the air and it could swallow you whole.

Most of the time this happens at night lending an otherworldly stillness to the evenings, but the photos below were taken at 2 pm or so on a Saturday a couple of weeks ago. It was enchanting, and I have a feeling we will dearly pay for this with crappy weather in April/May/June/July – take your pick.

Does someone want to tell me why this tree in my front yard never shed its leaves? Thanks.

I have not died.

I have not fallen off the face of the earth.

I have not contracted a mysterious disease that makes my skin fall off.

I have not been kidnapped by aliens and violated in uncomfortable ways.

I have simply been very very very, exceedingly, extremely busy with this thing called work (that I resent more and more the older I get). See in the accounting world we have this crap called year end. All you need to know about year end is that it entails shoving accounting data furiously into the system with a big shovel so that as much data is captured as possible for financial reporting.  Since our little company is still a bit understaffed (just not according to management), that means some long days and tired evenings for moi, especially given the fact that I’ve also gotten back on the exercising wagon. But I promise to be back very soon with a glimpse into a typical house in Cuba, a new place to eat brunch and new ponderings about the state of the world.

See ya soon!