Simian Farmer

Doldrums

I had a really hard time falling asleep Sunday night, and I ended up watching Master and Commander on DVD until very nearly 3.30 AM.  (MAN! did I drink a lot of coffee on Monday!)  Even then it was a while before I actually nodded off.  Say what you will about the asshole reputation that Russell Crowe totes around with him like some favourite leather jacket, I do like his movies.

Near the mid-point of the flick, Captain Jack Aubrey's ship, the Surprise, in pursuit of the French privateer Acheron, wallows for several days in the doldrums, bereft of wind and without any rain to replenish its dwindling fresh water supply.  The crew starts to get surly and a miasma of discontent spreads, to the point of the word 'mutiny' being bandied about in quiet with fearful, surreptitious glances.  Superstitious blame for the bad weather was placed on an obsequious midshipman who, in the face of concerted derision from the entire crew, ended up committing suicide by lobbing himself over the rail of the ship with a cannonball in hand.  He couldn't handle the stress of so much perceived incompetence, and so ended it.

I am in a similar - though far less perilous - position for want of something to write in this space.  The derision is only self-made, and I don't feel like tossing off in any literal or figurative sense.  The last couple posts have been photo fodder (not necessarily a bad thing, but still), and, looking even further back, I haven't really updated verbally on much of anything since the very beginning of November.

One of the first and cardinal rules of Bloggers Who Want To Be Taken Seriously is never to say that you have nothing to say.  So my intent is to imply that, without coming right out and whining.  I hate a whiner.

This, then, is really a call to anyone who would like to pose any sort of question for me to answer.  Anything.  Do you want to know the meteorological reasons behind the title of this post, the doldrums?  I really do know that and would be happy to try to turn it into an educational and (hopefully) entertaining post.  Perhaps a question you're certain I won't know the answer to?  I'll research it and get back to you.  Honest.  Something more personal?  Go ahead, try me.  I'm good for it.  This is a taboo-free zone.

Rather than lob myself over the ephemeral edge of the blog, weighted down with the cannonball of incompetence into the sea of mediocrity that is the internet upon which we tack, toil and pitch, I turn to you, good readers, to be the wind in my jib and the salt spray upon my brow as I seek less temperate and more challenging climes.

Weekend pics

Basement renos are in the home stretch.  (That's Phil painting.)  He should be done in a couple weeks and then it's just carpet, mid-December.  Hooray!

More pics and less words after the jump...
(Click 'em for bigger versions.)

Progeny

It's been sort of a slow weekend for us.  We can't even go downstairs to do anything since there's a fine film of drywall mud dust over most of everything.  The washer and dryer are unplugged until Tuesday (ish), so our laundry will have to wait as well.  And Tavish has been a bit of a monster for quite a few of his waking hours while he forces through the last of his baby teeth.  (Amy and I are both afraid he'll more than make up for Declan's relatively docile trip through the Terrible Twos.)

So here, while we're whiling away our Sunday afternoon, are some pics of the boys taken yesterday and today.  We're going for supper tonight at Granny and Grumpy's house, and they're pretty much always golden over there.

(Clicking the pictures will give you bigger ones!)

Trigonometric winter

One of the reasons I'm not nearly as harsh a critic of winter as most others I know is that it displays a certain mathematical beauty that is rarely ever extant through the year.  Did you know that the tilt of the Earth creates, with sunlight on the surface, a perfect representation of a sine wave function?

The sunsine in winter is a beautiful thing to behold!

Grandma Do

This is my grandma.  Her name is Frances.  One of my brother's high school friends came over for dinner when my grandma was out west visiting us a number of years ago, and this friend didn't know how, properly, to address her.  So to make this friend feel more at ease, Gram just said, "Oh, you can call me Grandma, too."  She was slightly mis-heard, and so the mistaken moniker of 'Grandma Do' was applied that evening.

I got to see my grandma again this past weekend when I was out to visit some friends in Toronto.  We almost lost her to a big health scare this January, so I was pleasantly surprised at the spry strength that greeted me in the form of her hug when I walked in her back door on Friday evening.  She make six of us a meal of macaroni casserole and sausages, and it was absolutely delicious.  Pumpkin pie and Oreo cookies for dessert.

She's undeniably the most remarkable woman I've ever had the pleasure to know.  She's a mother to six (of which my own mother is the second), a grandmother to nine (of which my brother and I are the oldest), and a great-grandmother to my own two boys.

The picture above doesn't do justice to how perfectly and comfortably she fit under my left arm.  It's a feeling of comfort, love, and utter protectiveness that I've only felt paralleled in holding my own children.  Except with Gram there's a great deal of respect and awe added in there too.

I love my Grandma Do.

Cuba, in pictures

When we got back from Cuba, the counter on my new camera registered the most recent picture as well over 500-something.  I winnowed that down to 108 that I got developed.  And here are the 22 that made it into the blog.  I have a bunch more up on my Facebook profile if you're so inclined.  I can upload them en masse there; with Typepad blogs, it's a one-at-a-time sort of thing.  So 22 takes a while.  And then I have to try to say something witty about each one.

Egad, that's a commitment!

Anyway...

(slightly bigger pics if you click on any one)

Christmas came early to Cuba

Or at least, Tropical Storm Noel made it feel that way a little bit.  Ho ho ho.  Good thing we were all well into the Cuban version of Christmas cheer by the time it made its presence felt.  Water?!  By that time, we scoffed at water.  We were akin to W.C. Fields for that week: "Water?  Never touch the stuff!"

There were nine of us, all told, at the beginning of all things, and we made a very fine fellowship, though by no means did we all know each other at the outset.  We didn't end as nine, but it was a good number to start with, and in other situations can be a good number to end with but, as I said, it wasn't the case here.

There were me (Simon; hi!) and Amy who left from Edmonton.  We abandoned our boys to the auspices of their grandmother, who had the generous nature to drive five hours to stay with her grandsons.  We went mainly to get the four esses.  Sun, surf, sand, and shivalry!  (OK, I lied about one of those.  And I'm a better speller than that.)  And we got... well, we got a whole lot of two of them.

There were Carie (yes, just one R) and Julie from Lethbridge.  (They're Lethbians.)  Carie is Amy's sister and she has NEVER BEEN ON VACATION IN HER LIFE.  At least, never like this.  I've also never seen the sort of smile on her face that was present for nearly the entire trip.  It would take one hell of an effort to wipe it off her face this next while.  A courtesy, no doubt, which her 13 year-old daughter will happily oblige.  (I'm teasing, HA!)  And Julie, well, Julie works with Carie at the CRA (which is the Canuck version of the IRS, only with marginally less social stigma, but fully as much catty in-fighting when you get an office of women working together... or so I hear), and she likes long walks on the beach, beer, long eyelashes, and backrubs.

From Calgary came James, Kelli, Andre, Monique and Rui (pronounced ROO, like that kangaroo friend of Winnie the Pooh's, only he's hairier, carries a gun, and has a slightly more pragmatic view of life).  James and Kelli abandoned their own seven month-old son to grandparents in much the same fashion, and with similar sounding whoops of glee, that Amy and I did ours.  (All four of us had Martin Luther King "free at last" moments.)  Andre and Monique don't have any kids, but after this past week I'm fairly certain they'd have been willing to sell one to ensure being able to come on a trip like this.  Then again, given the relative bartering prowess Andre put on display all week, I think he could have gotten a better deal for Manhattan than what those New Yorkers did.  And Rui, he's a Calgary city cop.   He bought James and Kelli's house from them, knows Kelli from the school she used to work at, and has an awesome (totally true) story that involves a flying car, a rookie, an ex-boyfriend (not his), and a dildo in a laundry basket.

That brings us to nine, which, as I intimated earlier, isn't quite the end.  All-inclusive resorts are sociable places, and being driven into confined spaces by the torrential rains of tropical storms is a sort of catalyst for interactions that would not normally take place, or ever really be sought out.  Add copious amounts of free rum to the mix and...   I forget if we found Jordanna first, or she found us, but it turned out she was from Edmonton too, and so tenuous a thread as an accident of geography was enough to cement a friendship for a whole week.

Our relationship (and by "our" I refer to the initial group of nine, and not just me, and there's a reason for my clarifying this, which will make itself known in a moment) can sort of be summed up by an exchange that took place Friday morning.  It was our first day of awesome sun, and it was our last day of vacation.

Picture it: the scene unfolds at the deck chairs only a few steps away from the stairs descending into the pool, themselves a 10 second swagger through hip-deep water to the shaded pool bar.  Rising from the stairs, water cascades off a twenty-something, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, bikini-clad lass, her swimming suit shouts to any who cast their gaze to one of three strategic places, the trifecta shouting out in white print on black: "It's All About Me."  She folds herself onto her chair and begins applying sun tan lotion.  She casually mentions to Amy that she might need her husband's services for the back application.  It's Friday, end of the trip, we've all become good friends by now: Amy gives the OK.  Simon, hearing all of this, has been personally consulted on none of it.  (It should be noted that the second half of the preceding sentence surprised him not at all.)

Jordanna approaches, turns to present, Simon applies, and a small yet appropriate measure of time elapses before the following conversation takes place:

Simon: Wow, this is taking quite a while to get in!

Jordanna: Oh, it must be because my skin's so wet.

Amy: **snort**,  **guffaw**

Simon & Jordanna: [pregnant pause]

Simon: It normally has the opposite effect, doesn't it?

*********************

Pictures and other stuff later in the week.  But you'd have to get Rui to tell that story in person.  It really is that good.