A day in the life

Went to Niagara Falls for work, saw none of Niagara Falls. Except the inside of the starbucks in the hotel where the convention was. Went to Toronto for work, saw none of Toronto, except the Second Cup across the street from where the convention was.

But I met a magazine editor today and pitched a story, and it's going to appear in the fall.

And I made bbq'd meatless chicken breasts, and mashed potatoes with chives that I grew for dinner.

By "that I grew," I mean, were growing when I moved in last and I managed not to kill them. Pretty great, eh?

My last thought for today is, Go Redwings, Go!

Short-term relief

If you need quick PIU fixes, you should check twitter.com/plagiarist.

Kid Moe

I would just like to say that Your Arsenal is a pretty good Morrissey album.

I would also like to say that in the absence of a firstborn, my next dog will be named Morrissey. Mo for short.

It never rains but it pours

I can't believe I forgot to blog this, it's almost a two week old story.

I'm doing some dishes and I hear dripping. But the tap's not dripping. And it's not raining outside.

It's raining inside.

And it ain't raining men.

My kitchen and livingroom are one large room. And water is pouring through the part of the ceiling that borders the two rooms.

So I put a bucket under it, in case that's going to do any good, and run for upstairs.

Where water is flowing out of the toilet bowl, and onto the floor, and the cats are playing in it.

There's an inch of water on the floor of the bathroom, where the toilet bowl has clogged at the same time that the tank did not stop running properly. Not only is my house flooded. Not only are my cats soaked in water. Not only is it freely pouring through the ceiling.

But it's toilet water.

A bottle of bleach, a dehumidifier set to "turbo" and several buckets of water later, the house was passably dry and passably sterile.

And I was only an hour and a half late for my meeting.

The challenge is on!

I am trying out microblogging - this means that all of my posts to you have to be less than 140 characters long. That's not very long at all, I mean, that first sentence is already almost 120.

Check me out :

www.twitter.com/plagiarist

Blast from the recent past

You know what's a great album? This is it, by the Strokes.

I overlistened to this one when it came out 5-6 years ago, but I'm okay with it now.

Holiday Monday

Of course, on a holiday Monday, you end up having to work. But the weather's shitty anyway, so maybe it's okay.

The coffee's hot, even if my house is cold. Even though the furnace is still on, in almost June, just to keep it at 18 degrees.

War on Women

So I'm reading Brian Vallee's new book, The War on Women.

Brian Vallee has become most famous for telling the story of Jane Hurshman, who killed her husband after years of torture.

I like that Vallee is a man who is advancing the agenda of ending violence against women. I like that her tells the stories that other people won't/don't.

I like that he speaks uncritically about the fear women have. That he debunks the idea that only weak people would stay. Or that no sensible person would put up with it. Or that it's as easy as just walking away.

Ironically, since women's shelters and other support programs have been put in place, fewer abusers have been killed by the people they abuse. Women are still dying.

I am not huge on the style of this book, though. And that might sound like a shitty thing to say, but my goodness. And I understand but don't understand the feeling that telling all of these stories would be too overwhelming, to distressing for a journalist. This is a question about ability and obligation: Some people get the call, we must answer as best as we can.

If you remember anything from this post, remember that twice as many women and children were killed by their partners and fathers in the last few years as there were troops that died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The deaths of those troops is an outrage - and it's a very public one. Where's the outcry for the ones who die at home?

The girl without the pearl earring

I have four pairs of earrings. One are diamonds and too nice to wear to the grocery store. One are huge, huge, hoops, appropriate only for dress-up stuff. One are my "work earrings" so neither too plain or too fancy. And one are my black pearls that match my black pearl necklace.

So when I lost one the other day I was heart broken. I mean, they are an integral part of my bad-ass June Cleaver get up.

My sister Cailin found one that I'd dropped on her carpet. And apparently I'd dropped the other one on my livingroom carpet at home and recovered it last night. So there is a factor of attraction between livingroom carpets and my jewellery. Watch where you step, everyone.

So they're reunited. But thanks anyway to my mom, who gave me a pair of white pearl earrings that are just beautiful. Come to think of it, she gave me the entire pearl collection.

The power of the pen

Check out this website of random weirdo notes and signs, like this one, which reads:

To talk to god, you do not need a cell phone. Please turn it off.

Teen dreams are made of these

So in other news, after a year of holding on to our tickets in our eager and sweaty little hands, my friend P. and I finally made it to see The Cure. And this is extra funny, because I never go to shows but now have been to two in two weeks.

Some people worry that when bands get older they won't be any good. Or their shows won't be so populated. Or it'll be dull or a waste of cash.

Truly, it was none of these things. A good mix of pop and darker tracks, with the audience hanging on every syllable. For almost three full hours.

Here's the set list, cureheads:

Open, Fascination Street, alt.end, The Walk, End of the World, Lovesong, Pictures of You, Lullaby, The Perfect Boy, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, Hot Hot Hot, Sleep When I'm Dead, Push, Friday I'm in Love, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Primary, Shake Dog Shake, Never Enough, The Only One, Wrong Number, One Hundred Years, End

1st encore: Lovecats, Let's Go To Bed, Freakshow, Close To Me, Why Can't I Be You?
2nd encore: Boys Don't Cry, Jumping Someone Else's Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing Another (?)
3rd encore: Play For Today, A Forest.

Total = 35 songs

You can play along at home

Amazing

It's a shame that in this world some professions are so disrespected.

Like today, when I went to buy a tinted moisturizer for my face. Should be a five minute thing, I figured, to get a moisturizer.

After twenty minutes and a consultation with Elle, who's just celebrated her twentieth anniversary as a makeup artist, I know how to use foundation, how to apply blush, and how to make my eyes look more blue or more green, and how to make them look fantastic.

Did you know you should use a big brush to apply foundation? Like a giant eyeshadow brush. And you put a stripe down the middle and blend it outwards. Sponges suck up your foundation and you end up wasting most of what you put on.

My skin colour is called Sweet Tea.

When I tipped her she said, "you don't have to do that."

Yes I did. I learned more there than I did all day at work.

It's been way too long since I went to a show where people played behind cages, at dangerous volumes, in grimy venues with lots of big dudes wearing black.

Although I could live without the ringing in my ears that lasted for sixteen hours, without being soaked in sweat, and without the feeling of terror I had when two of the aforementioned big dudes started a fistfight in front of me in the pit.

A video critique of the american government and their foreign policy is just frosting on the sweet, sweet cake that is Ministry's C.U. Latour, their last tour after over 30 years of performing.

Many people weren't happy with it, too much new stuff, guests singing the old stuff.

But you do feel very alive, in a peculiar way, when you can feel your chest vibrating with the bass, and when the strobe lights have stripped away your sense of reality and time, when hundreds of people are just throwing their heads up and down and jumping up in the air and letting go of whatever they hold on to in the rest of their lives.

You feel like there will never be enough hard rock shows.

That's right, the bathroom stall says

"Drink your
milk and
orange juice
or one of
these days
you'll be sorry"

Maybe next time

I whined a bit about having our conference in the Cosmopolitan room, but only because we were right beside this one:

Whoa....my tea bag is totally drunk.

This is actually the way it was printed.

If I could be any animal

I think I would be a kraken. A kraken is a legendary sea monster that lives in the deep.

Many people believe that this myth is just based on colossal squid. We don't know a whole lot about them, except that they are huge and possibly even sharks can't kill them.

These specimens are rarely found whole, but there's a slideshow of some of the examination. Check out that beak!

I think it's worth a few minutes of your time to read about how fishers accidentally caught one.

So in summary, I love bread and I love kraken.

Kraken, by Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

long time, no bread

It wasn't that I was doing Atkins or something, I was just really off bread. Like, I found it kind of gross, and it made me too full. So I didn't eat any of it for a year or so.

And then about two weeks ago, I started eating toast every morning. And wraps for lunch. And toast again when I got home from work.

And today, when I went to the fancy food store, I bought a baguette and a loaf or red fife bread, which is made from a heritage wheat that's descended from ukrainian wheat somehow. You can learn more about red fife here.

It's true what they say - you should never go to a grocery store hungry. I came home with two loaves of bread and two jars of jam (rhubarb ginger and blueberry lavender), and some mushroom soup. Dinner is a bit, ahem, unusual today.

In summary, I love bread. But not bread and meat in combination. You know what I'm talking about.

long time, no blog

Sorry for the delays, people.

So today I am not feeling very well. I have a plague that has been lurking inside of me that only activates when I'm not at work. I'm not kidding. I was sick as a dog last weekend, fine on Monday, and sick again today, which is my May Day holiday.

I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning because I have to work.

Happy May Day, though. I had a minor adventure, which I will tell you more about soon.