Stuff and Moonshine

We’re at the mall getting eye exams (I already ordered new glasses from Zenni last month when I mislaid my regular pair, but I plan to get new prescription sunnies (also from Zenni) and Andrew should get new glasses too.

The optometry place is decorated with whimsical paintings of animals and celebrities wearing glasses, including portraits of Bea Arthur and Rue McLanahan. The manager must be a fan of The Golden Girls—there’s also a Pop!(?) figure of Estelle.

A large glass nazar hangs up in front of one of the cupboards, which seems appropriate.

My office periodically gets calls where I can’t hear anybody on the other end, and the screen just gives a town name rather than a caller ID (I hate our phone system). But a bunch of them are from Anzac, AB, which is an unusual enough name that I finally looked it up just now. Turns out it has a population of 506 people, as of the last census.

Who the hell is calling us from Anzac? Which of its 506 inhabitants is so desperate to talk to a hardware-supply company three provinces away? And why can they never get through?

Checked the date for Nuit Blanche this morning and found out it was this past weekend. I haven’t bothered going in ages—after the first year or two it got too crowded to navigate—but I’d bought a Hallowe’en mask on Sunday that really cries out to be worn to something urban and nocturnal. It’s a cat mask of cheap plastic, but with pink pseudo-neon tubing that outlines all the features. It looks like a cyberberpunk bakeneko.

I don’t dare wear it around Andrew as even when the lights are set to steady they make a faint high-pitched hum that would probably bother him, which rules it out for Hallowe’en. In any case it doesn’t really give Hallowe’en vibes; it looks more like something you’d wear to a rave (says the woman who’s never been to a rave in her life). I’ll see if I can take some selfies with it later-- might at least make some good icons for this blog.

Andrew’s home, the cats are readjusting to his presence, things are basically ok.

We had lunch downtown with my mother and brother.

It’s coming onto a year since Dad died, and Mom’s been stressed this week since a lot of the activities she’s been doing to keep busy have gone on hiatus for the summer. They’d been married for over fifty years, so apart from grief she’s also dealing with the unfamiliarity of the situation. She said a couple of times that it was like being reset to 1968, except she’s not in her twenties.

She gave me a black wool beret that Dad had had for years (I’d painted a portrait of him wearing it). I’m pleased, not just for sentimental reasons but because a proper beret is always good to have. 

I got on the wrong bus.

I was trying to meet Mom and Aunt Heather in downtown Hamilton at noon, but I got on the wrong bus at a transfer point and ended up on a route that I believe is for the convenience of students at the various universities in the region, because we went first to the University of Guelph campus, then to downtown Guelph, then to Wilfred Laurier’s campus, and we were heading for Kitchener-Waterloo when I finally worked up the nerve to ask the driver if we would ever reach Hamilton, and he let me off so I could wait for a bus heading back the other way.

By this point it was around two in the afternoon, and I was at best another couple of hours away from the intended meeting point. Mom’s phone doesn’t do email and my iPad isn’t a phone, so Andrew had been relaying frantic messages back and forth until he had to take an ativan and was now not feeling capable of doing much more of anything.

Mom said I should cut my losses, head home, and we’ll try another meet up on Saturday when my brother is here. She called our apartment later after I’d finally made it back. I said, “I’ve been travelling all day and I haven’t been anywhere.”

At least I did manage to take a picture from the bus window of the beautiful griffin statue they have on the Guelph campus.

Alternating ear worms: Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” vs. this parody of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”

The Serial Diners had an in-person meetup on Friday, and we made it up the three flights of stairs to the rooftop at The Pilot in Yorkdale. Expensive, but a nice patio, and we only had drinks and split a plate of fries so… who am I kidding it was still fairly expensive. Worth it to see everybody after the long gap though. I was reminded that Donald follows my tumblr (and probably this blog— *waves*).

Andrew tripped as we were going back down the stairs and bashed into a wall; I was frightened for a moment that I’d heard something break, but we were fairly near the bottom by that point, and Don helped call a cab, and Andrew doesn’t seem to be concussed, though his head and shoulder are still sore, so on Saturday I felt ok leaving him alone for a couple of hours and did grocery shopping, gave into temptation, and bought several balls of yarn I’d been eyeing at the Dollarama for a while— Lion Brand bamboo rayon, $4 a ball, which is about half what they’d cost at Michael’s. Dollarama must have picked up a few batches at a clearance sale somewhere. They only had bright pink and bright orange; I went for the bright orange. It’s very soft and drapey, and I’ve started a loose-knit batwing sweater.

Sunday I went to a clothing swap, which turned out to have been organized by goths, so my wardrobe is now well-set for Fall with a couple of black sweaters; a purplish casual dress in printed jersey, like a long sleeveless graphic tee; a Diane Von Furstenberg-style wrap dress in a white-on-black floral print; a black cotten-twill kilt; a red paisley wrap/dressing-gown sort of thing; some textured grey tights; and a strip of iridescent black coque tailfeathers (i.e. the stuff Desire is wearing as a collar on the new Sandman show).

Realized last night I’d forgot to make the last property-tax payment of the year on Thursday, and I don’t currently have enough to cover it, so I’ll have to do it next week when I get paid. Hope they don’t penalize us too much.

Not Happy At All about the ongoing attempts by the Ontario and Quebec provincial governments to create public and private tiers of health care, which seem likely, if passed, to just make public health care worse.

ETA just remembered: I got this weird phone call at work last Thursday from someone who identified himself as representing an “organization of ununionized workers” wanting to reach out in opposition to unions? I’m guessing some kind of union-busting astroturf group. Not knowing what else to do, I forwarded him to HR. Afterwards it struck me as a bit rich to be making that kind of call the week before Labour Day weekend.

The world in general continues to be on fire, but my own life is currently tolerable. I’ve been at [new job] three months and my benefits have kicked in, so I took Thursday and Andrew and I went for dental check-ups for the first time in about a year-and-a half. I’ll have to go back next month for at least one filling, but all in all our mouths don’t seem to be in as dire a condition as Andrew’s OCD has been whispering. Saturday I got him one of those sproingy office-chair pads from the dollar store to replace the cushion he used to take on public transit, and which we’d left on a bus on Thursday. So far, under living-room conditions, he reports that it’s very comfortable; and it will certainly be lighter to carry. I also bought a scarf at the dollar store which I have made into a sleeveless blouse. And during the trip I sat on a bench and fed some unsalted sunflower seeds to a pigeon. Just one— the rest of the flock were across the street but didn’t seem to notice. “It’ll be our secret,” I said as he scarfed seeds from my hand (I had disinfected hand wipes in my purse if you’re worried). Phoned my parents last night to wish Dad a happy Fathers’ Day, though as usual Mom did most of the talking. Dad complained that his voice sounded different— it is slightly higher, but for the first time in several years I could hear him over the phone, which seems like a decent trade-off.

This morning as I walked into the coffee room at work, the tv was on and a local news show was interviewing some kids who will compete in a championship spelling bee this weekend. The hosts asked one girl “what was the hardest word you’ve ever spelt?”

After thinking about it a moment, she answered “gimcrack.”

I recognized the word (and knew how to spell it), but I’d never realized until that moment that it’s pronounced with a soft g.

This week one of my coworkers suddenly decided it was funny to shout people’s names and “NOOO, DON’T GO!!!” after each person as they leave for the day. As I left work on Friday he yelled “SARAH! YOUR KEYS!!” I ignored him and walked the ten minutes to the bus stop practicing the “I’m fine with most banter, but that kind of thing stopped being funny before I started high school, Ryan” speech I was going to give him on Monday.

I waited for the bus. Then I discovered my Presto card, my bank card and the key card I use to get into the office had all fallen out of my pocket. My keys, otoh, were still there.

Hoping that Ryan had found and left my cards at the front desk and I hiked back to the office, this time practicing my “this could have been resolved faster if you hdn’t been saying wolf the past two days, Ryan” speech. A different guy was still at work and let me in, but there was no sign of my cards, and he hadn’t heard Ryan mention them; apparently I’d been right in the first place and Ryan had just been trolling.

Having searched everywhere in the office— I’d already scanned the ground on my way back— I left again and walked over to Black Creek Pioneer Village subway station where (eventually) I found a vending machine to get another Presto card so I could get home.

I’ve reported my bank card as lost and they’re sending me a new one. I’ll have to ask them to replace my office card on Monday. I thought everything must have fallen out at work, or how would I have got in the building on Friday morning, but now I remember another coworker arrived earlier than her usual time and I followed her through the front door; so I likely I’d lost my cards on the bus and just didn’t find out till after 5pm.

I still feel like this is all somehow Ryan’s fault.

Now the continuation of the problem is that when I set up my Presto account back in 2018, I apparently forgot to validate my email address. This has never come up because the original card was set to refill automatically from my credit card, and if there was a previous occasion when I needed to replace it (I think there was), I was able to remember my username and password at the time. Today I was able to remember my user name after several tries, and it let me update my password, which should have solved everything, but when I subsequently tried to sign in so I could update the account to acknowledge the new card, it began insisting the username or password was incorrect. (Update— figured this out) (Further update— I’m logged in but it doesn’t remember my old card so I can cancel it)

At least yesterday I got to go to a clothing swap downtown— indoors, but masks were mandatory and I’ve washed all the clothes I’ve acquired, except the cocktail dress which will likely need to be dry-cleaned. I suppose the wool trousers ought to be dry-cleaned as well, but I hand-washed them with cold water in the sink and hung them to dry (they needed to be just a cm longer in the rise, so I decided to see if I could stretch them; we’ll find out once they’re completely dry if that worked).

When I got home there were firefighters in the lobby. This time it wasn’t a problem with the alarm: Elevator 2 had stuck on the ground floor, with two people inside, and they were trying to get the doors open to release them. One of the trapped people was the concierge on duty, who also had the keys to take Elevator 3 off service-only so that it could be used. Elevator 3 was on service because it was a Saturday and a family was moving out; but also another one was moving in. The elevator had been double-booked even before one of the others just stopped working entirely. This meant that in addition to the firefighters, the lobby was also full of furniture, potted palms, and people waiting to use Elevator 1, the only one still available.

Totally unrelated to any of the above: I’ve decided to finally try Duolingo, and selected German as the language. It’s slightly irritating that I can already tell the translations are equivalent phrases. I’m pretty sure “es tut mir lied” has too many words to literally mean “I’m sorry,” and is probably something like “it’s all my fault/my bad.” However I did get the pleasant little brain-jolt today of figuring out that rechnung, which the site insists I translate as “check” (not even “cheque”) is “reckoning,” which makes it much easier to understand and recall. Also I’m currently learning how to say “my work is very stressful.”