A Winter Dog Walk-About…

Kaylee loves to make snow angels...
Kaylee loves to make snow angels…
Taken January 12, 2014 with Samsung Galaxy S3

There’s something wonderful about winter walks with the dog – especially on a Sunday afternoon, when it seems like no one else in the city is out and about.

We almost always go to the same place every time – a field across from a ball diamond just a few blocks from home. We usually pop across the road to the ball field, too, but it’s almost all I can do just to get around in there, as the snow is knee deep and Kaylee spends most of her time there “swimming” in the snow – which she LOVES to do – and is much less likely to break a trail for me, like she does very generously in the spot where these photos were taken.
Continue reading “A Winter Dog Walk-About…”

Mish-Mash

Little Red Shoes
“Little Red Shoes”
Taken October 20, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

The Little Red Shoes sit in my mother’s Etagiere, if I spelled that correctly. Elle? Wanna let me know, Betch?! My mom calls it a “What-Not”. I think it’s because it’s to display all your knick-knacks and what-not in. Anyway, that’s where the Little Red Shoes are, when they’re not in the bathtub, with me and my camera. Bathtubs make great backgrounds for some pictures. Wet bathtubs are not necessarily good for cameras, but mine’s tough.

I love the Little Red Shoes, but I don’t have a story about them. I just couldn’t come up with a pic for this post.

I’m having trouble catching up with all the posts I have in draft. Hence the title – “Mish-Mash” is about what this one will be – just a couple of bits and pieces that I’d like to get out of my hard drive and onto the blog. This clip from today’s post by Cardiogirl reminded me of a bit about my mom when she was a kid, which, in turn, reminded me of one about Ruby’s mom…

clipped from www.cardiogirl.net

So essentially we have a socially-accepted version of a wealthy pretty woman (former Ford model who must have earned a lot of cash) whose hobby is traveling the globe and shopping. So she finds “amazing stuff” and brings it back to New York to re-sell it. Do I have that right? I thought so.

And these aren’t your mother’s baubles. A telephone table finished in frog skin. I’m understanding this, though I find it crazy, until I get to the shagreen part. What is shagreen? Is it like shazam?

  blog it

A million years ago, when my mom was a little girl of about 12, she and her sister were down at the nearby fishin’ hole with their cousin. My mom is the older of the three, but for some reason, it was Auntie and Cuz that did the ordering around of my mom. This was the story that made me realize that my mom was a little mouse when she was a kid. How she managed to grow up into a stern (SERIOUSLY stern) School Marm, I will never know. My mom was the teacher you didn’t want to get, because you couldn’t get away with any monkey business, and you might even (OMIGOD!) learn something!

At any rate (as Mom would say), they were down at the fishin’ hole, dib-dabbling around in the water, when the conversation turned to frog legs. As an appetizer. Because that was what the rich people ate. Probably every day, even. Imagine, they told each other, all the rich people in the big cities paying unbelievable amounts of money for a plate of frog legs, when there were hundreds of frog legs attached to hundreds of frogs right in front of them. For free.

And so Auntie and Cuz decided that they wanted frog legs for dinner. My mother didn’t think that was a very good idea. She thought it might be a little hard on the frogs. Auntie and Cuz didn’t give a damn about what the frogs thought of the idea, and they didn’t give much of a damn what my mom thought about it, either. They just sent my mom up to the house to get a knife. And my mom went. Slooooowly.

The whole walk up for a knife, she tried to think of a way to save those frogs. She couldn’t think of a thing. She considered just not going back to the fishin’ hole, but decided she might pay for that later, so instead, when she got to the kitchen she decided she would bring back a dull butter knife. She reasoned that it would hurt the frogs less than a sharp one would. At 12, my mom was all for “less hurt”, apparently.

As it turned out, a dull butter knife does NO hurt to a frog, because it wasn’t long before the other girls gave up trying to saw off frog’s legs and quit in disgust. They didn’t get their frog leg dinner that day, but there were probably a few pissed off frogs in the fishin’ hole before they gave up.

Years later, one of those girls ate frog’s legs in a restaurant – by accident. She saw someone else’s order of what she thought was chicken and just pointed to it, telling the server, “I’ll have that.” Served her right.

Ruby’s mom, now, would have got the legs off those frogs lickety-split. She was a woman who got things done (she also had no forearmsthere’s a story for the blog, huh? Soon. Honest.).

Despite being a woman who “got things done”, Ruby’s mom had a heart of gold, and hated to see any animal suffer. She lived a hard, rough life on a farm, though, and there were times that some animals just had to be “taken care of”. Chickens had to be killed. Pigs had to be slaughtered. Sometimes, you had to shoot your dog. And there were always kittens that couldn’t be kept, and had to be “taken care of”.

Ruby’s mom hated that job, but it had to be done. She believed that the most humane way to “take care of” kittens was to drown them. Most people would shove the kittens in a burlap sack and tie it shut, and pitch the poor buggers in the nearest river. Not Ruby’s mom. That wasn’t humane enough for Ruby’s mom.

No, Ruby’s mom would pull on a pair of heavy gloves, fill a pail full of water and, one by one, she would hold each kitten (gently) under the surface until it was dead. Oh yeah, and she would make sure to fill the pail with warm water, so the little dears wouldn’t die shivering…

Random Song for the Day: “Alive” – Pearl Jam

Breathe.

"Trickle Down Theory"Taken October 20, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550
“Trickle Down Theory”
Taken October 20, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

I’m …. tired. The last couple of weeks have been draining. I didn’t realize how tense things were getting, what with the good things, like gearing up for NaNoWriMo, the bad things, which I will get to in a sec, and the confusing things – mostly just trying to find “my place” at the J.O.B., which is difficult, as I was sort of dropped down into the middle of the project, and I feel like I’m just sitting around picking my nose most of the time. I don’t feel very useful there, truthfully.

I’ve outlined a couple of freelance magazine article ideas – another good thing. One, I actually wrote a proposal for, because it’s about an organization that I want to write about, but needs “interviews” with staff, and I thought it best to get the blessing of the head honcho. I got an immediate ‘yes’, and I’m excited about the project, which I already have a publication in mind for. And now (Sigh…*), I have to break it down into manageable chunks that can be dealt with on my lunch hour, since I kind of want to be face to face with the people I need to speak with.

My father is getting better. This was one of the “bad” things that I thought I might be jumping ship for, and I didn’t want to post about it, because we didn’t really know how things were going to turn out. He had a stroke, and then a heart attack, interspersed with several gushing nosebleeds just to make it all interesting. Even more interesting, he made friends with an imaginary bug that lives in the ceiling above his bed in the Critical Care Unit. He spent his whole first day there watching it dig a hole in the plaster and run around the curtain rail.

Yesterday, his 87th birthday, they let him out of Critical Care and he’s now in a general ward. A Co-Ed ward. With two “chicks”. He was a little put out with this at first, because he says he has enough trouble with women hitting on him, and he couldn’t see how he’d get any rest with two more hanging around his bed all day… turns out, he and my mom know the grandmother of one of them, so now it’s all good. I guess you don’t hit on the guy in the next bed if he’s a friend of Grandma. Or maybe you do but he doesn’t mind so much – I’ll have to ask.

My novel, now… I’m off to a slow start. Somehow, I’m not worried, though – I’m not sure why I’m not worried, but it may be that my main character, Emma, is very very solid in my mind, and I love her to pieces already.

I’m having trouble getting to the “getting it down part”, though, and that’s entirely because too many of the new things are still too new, and damn it, there’s too many of them. I want to go back to the more laid-back schedule of school and Ruby, J.O.B. and Ruby, Mom and Dad and Ruby, and rum on the weekends. Routine, please. The writing is more likely to happen then.

I won’t be going back to that routine anymore now, though, because I’ve gone and changed things and started a few things up that are designed to force me out of this place and into the Great Unknown, which, in my case is anything beyond 50 miles of here.

What, me – scared?! Pah!

Yes. Shitless.

I find the picture at the top of this post very calming. It reminds me to breathe, and to learn to take things as they come and actually do something with them. I’m learning how to recognize opportunities and yes, create some that weren’t there before, and Ta-DA! A life away from here is now “seeable”. The last thing I want to do right now is what I’ve been doing my whole life: hide from the things I want, and make up reasons to let them float by. I can’t dive at them though, either, because I’m likely to get myself run over. They are bigger than me.

I’m growing into them though… 😉

Random Song for the Day: “Aerodynamic” – Daft Punk

Fun with Flowers

"Dewy"Taken October 2, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550
“Dewy”
Taken October 2, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

Ruby has been upset this year because the weather has been bad for her flowers. She spent our second-last visit alternately complaining that her flowers all looked “drug out”, and sighing over the fact that she has too many tomatoes left to “put down” (sometimes she says “put up” instead of “put down” – both times she means “preserve, jar, can, or stew”.).

I told her I thought her flowers this year were lovely, and wished that I’d taken some pics. She said, “If you want pictures, you’d better get ’em fast.” So I went back yesterday afternoon, and was delighted to find that the finished macros hardly made her flowers look “drug out” at all. The two pictures in this post are my favourites of the bunch I took, and I plan on getting them printed and framed for her.

You can see the rest of the day’s shots at “Photo-Play”.

"Elegant"Taken October 2, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550
“Elegant”
Taken October 2, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

Random Song for the Day: “Ev’rything I’ve Got” – Ella Fitzgerald

October 2nd, 2007

Taken October 2, 2007
with Canon PowerShot A550, in
Ruby’s Backyard,
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada

Taken October 2, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550, in Ruby's Backyard, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada
Sunshine

Ruby Roses

Ready to Burst

Jumping Jack

Infested

Infested 2

Hangin’ Out

Fade Away…

Elegant

Dewy