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Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!


Appropriately there is snow but the Canadian Christmas shopping season does not begin until the first weekend of December and their shopping orgy is actually the day after Christmas – Boxing Day.  Therefore, Thanksgiving is about food, family and whatever winter sport floats one’s boat.

Fare’s birthday fell on the holiday this year. She was born on the day too, 27 years ago.  Rob celebrated by eating lukewarm turkey at Shelley’s sister’s home while wife and baby did what new mothers and their less than patient newborns do in those first hours – wonder what the hell they have gotten themselves into.

Because the older girls are at the mercy of their jobs, we celebrated birthday and Thanksgiving Sunday evening. I spent most of the day Saturday and nearly all of Sunday in food preparation. Saturday was peeling, shredding and baking four mutant zucchini into bread. Fourteen loaves of it. Excuse me now while I pause to bask in my own awesomeness. (Pause) Truthfully, bread baking is far less time consuming than it sounds because a lot of the time is spent waiting for loaves to bake. Sunday I made the rolls, pumpkin pies and cooked the spaghetti squash in advance due to the fact that the turkey breast was going to tie up the oven for most of the afternoon.

Thanksgiving Menu

turkey breast and dressing

mashed taters and gravy

flakey rolls

zucchini and pumpkin bread

green beans

spaghetti squash

pumpkin pie

angel food cake and strawberries

I know. The essence of my awesomeness is blinding even in cyberspace. For someone late in life to the whole housewifey thing, I have adapted and conquered nicely.

In addition to whipping up a fab family meal, Rob and I also planned a vacation. A real one. One with just the merest hint of family as we will stop over at Rob’s mom’s place in the Okanagan on the way back

“Are you sure?” I asked. “This is supposed to be a vacation with no obligations to anyone.”

“Family is always an obligation,” he said. “You don’t want to stop, do you?

He had me there. I love my mother-in-law, but she stayed with us two weekends in a row in September and always has a job list for Rob whether we visit her or she stops here.

“We barely get there and she has chores for you. I end up cooking dinner, and there is the small matter of sometimes she is so happy to see us, she tipples a bit much.”

The drinking thing, I confess, is entirely a personal issue. I am uneasy around drinkers. A glass of wine with dinner now and again, I get. The need to drink daily or past the point of seeing straight? I am baffled and put off a bit. Some of this goes back to my dad and some of it is residual from the early days of Will’s illness when he leaned on alcohol as a way to cope with the symptoms the doctors dismissed. My personal preference is to never be in close quarters with the inebriated. That’s just me.

But we are heading to Victoria in November over Dee’s fall break week. The trip includes a stop in Jasper, one of my favorite mountain towns, a ferry ride from Vancouver to the island, days in a row of vacationing with the possibility of meeting Sally and her family, and the tantalizing lure of warmer than where we live.

A most happy day of thanks.

The Widow of Saint-Pierre


Rob and I haven’t had time for movie watching lately, but he grabbed a couple of dvd’s from the book mobile on Wednesday after returning books. Normally book mobile duty is mine. I take Dee, return whatever, retrieve anything we’ve ordered via the county library’s online catalog and check out the dvd shelf for new or interesting offerings. I think the story has been told, by Rob on his blog or by me here, that he wasn’t allowed to go to the video store by himself anymore after returning one time with spectacularly poor choices. Well, The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn’t quite merit such a prohibition, but it does beg the question of what was he thinking?

Based, supposedly, on the true tale which took place on the east coast islands new Newfoundland that are still a part of France today, it endeavors to tell the story of Madame La and her husband Jean. The year is 1849 and Jean is a captain of the French forces stationed on the island to keep the peace. A senseless murder of a local by two drunken fishermen has taken place and Jean is charged with warehousing them until a guiotine can be shipped to the island for the execution of the man who wielded the knife, Neel Auguste. His accomplice is killed by a mob as they are being transported to the army compound. The island people regard the remaining murderer as a barbarian for whom redemption is not possible.

It’s never made entirely clear why Jean is stationed at Saint-Pierre. He is clearly a cut and a half above his men and even the men who make up the local ruling class including the Governor and his councilmen. There are hints that his being there is a punishment and that perhaps it has something to do with his wife. Madame La is clearly ahead of her time. She believes that not only can Neel be rehabilitated but that the local population can be re-educated towards him and the idea of executions as a way to maintain law and order.

The movie begins at the end with Madame La in widow weeds, but it’s misleading because in that time the guillotine itself was also know as “the widow” and the island of Saint-Pierre is rife with widowed women due to the hazards the local occupation of fishing poses to the male population.

Madame La is drawn to Neel for reasons that don’t always seem altruistic but she and Jean are very much in love and quite lusty.

“Maybe this is porn,” Rob suggested as the film wore on.

“French period piece, sub-titled porn?” I asked.

I puzzled over it quite a bit the next day. I wasn’t sure what the message was supposed to be. Essentially in trying to save Neel, Madame La sacrifices both him and her husband without realizing until too late what she has done when it becomes clear that her husband has been shielding her from the displeasure of the Governor and his men who appeal to France to remove and court-martial Jean.

Jean loved his wife so much that he could not ask her to be anything other than who she was – even though her actions put them both in danger and cost him his life. Madame La, though she loves her husband, does not really take notice of the depth of Jean’s love for her nor does she return it in kind really. She takes Jean’s devotion and protection for granted.

I can’t say that I liked the film, but I didn’t dislike it. It gave me one of my new favorite lines however.

The rich and powerful of the town gather on Sundays for brunch and entertainment at the Governor’s home every Sunday. Jean and his wife do not regularly attend but on one occasion Madame La overhears the men in the smoking room discussing Neel and she enters to challenge them. Naturally she offends them and Jean comes to her rescue, verbally boxing one man and forcing him to admit he was wrong and apologize to Madame La for all those gathered – men, women and children – to hear. After Jean and his wife leave, the Governor’s wife remarks to the other women – loudly enough for the men to hear as well,

“Le Capitaine doesn’t even have to fuck us to make cuckolds of our husbands.”

Classic.

The Rosetta Stone #fridayflash


The Rosetta Stone

Drop-off was uneventful but for the unfortunate sighting by the alien culture’s ground crew required a swift dispatchment, regrettable, but incidental enough that a report would not need to be filed. Twee, however, took the necessary data and filed it internally anyway, just in case.

Accessing the aliens’ transportation terminal proved less difficult than the drop crew had led her to expect. The vaporization of her initial alien contacts made it necessary to find another to peel. The curious, and somewhat cumbersome, outer layers were a puzzling mix of organic and synthesized materials. Twee was certain her advisor had said the lifeforms were carbon based. The being she peeled before neutralizing had at least two more layers than she was expecting. Donning them over her own near translucent skin, Twee filed the new information before inspecting her new appearance. Normally her internal sensors would make the needed adjustments to features and skin tone to facilitate blending, but Twee noticed a wide range of features in the lifeforms she had encountered already, and she overrode her programming to consciously direct the process to suit her tastes and take advantage of the variety.

Twee enjoyed planet drops. She never shirked her rotation and subbed on as many as she was allowed per planetary system. Though this particular galaxy was known for its beauty, Twee was disappointed when only one of the planets revealed advanced life forms. Her colleagues preferred the collecting of particulars and small cellular organisms. Twee liked her specimens ambulatory and sentient.

Once inside the terminal, Twee wandered freely. No one gave her a glance or sought to interact with her. Instead they hurried by in either direction pulling interesting boxes of varying shapes and an array of strange hues. Some of the beings were smaller and others appeared aged, but mostly they were swift. Twee marveled at their speed, which seemed strange for creatures confined to such a small area. Why hurry from one end to another?

As fascinating as they were, Twee knew she needed to ascertain a way to communicate. Her time was limited and she needed to collect her required life forms. Standing very still, Twee listened and scanned the area very slowly. Aliens whizzed by her and one or two nearly knocked into her in their haste, but Twee ignored them, focusing her attention on the sounds around her. Normally, she had trouble picking up speech, but the terminal was cavernous and sound swirled around her like the watery wind on her home world, saturating her audio receptors.

There was such variation. Shrill pitches pricked to the point of discomfort. Gutteral tones rumbling like the engines of a ship. High summer sweet pitches that tickled her receptors. But among the noise, Twee could discern no single common language and that was problematic. Twee was programmed to localize and learn any language but she needed to be able to listen to a pure dialect. Variety was spicy but too many was a tasteless muddle. She wasn’t a machine despite her programming.

Thinking that perhaps she could get a lock if she stood off to the side of the hive like forms as they flitted back and forth, Twee removed herself from the common travel area and to her surprise found what she needed. An open kiosk manned by a short, dark life form was talking to the air in one dialect after another in perfect sequence. As nearly as Twee could ascertain, it was repeating the same information in each dialect. Twee stepped closer.

“Are you interested in learning another language?” the small dark alien said.

Twee blinked and flinched back. Aliens rarely made first contact unless her assimilation was incorrect in some way. Twee ran a quick diagnostic, preparing to make adjustments when the alien spoke again.

“We have programs for a surprising variety of the world’s most used languages,” she said as she handed Twee a box.

Uncertain, but feeling more confident, Twee took the box and scanned it. A smile spread unbidden but in response to the alien’s matching one. The box contained a set of polymer based disks loaded with language data.  Twee’s eyes widened and her smile with them.

“This is English? she asked the alien.

“Yes, but we have Spanish, French, Italian,” she took the box from Twee’s hands and replaced it with another. “We even have all the Chinese dialects. Would you like to see them?”

Twee placed the second box back on the kiosk shelf.

“Oui, merci.”