Ten Things I Saw Today

1.  The True Knit Art Show



2.  Shanan



3.  Yellow hair



4.   An elderly stairwell



5.  Religious leaders



6.  A giant nipple



7.  A hippie wall



8.  Candied bacon vanilla ice cream with salty buttercaramel topping



9.  Really smug aluminum foil



10.  Onion's feet

Vitamin Deficiency And Carpet Inspections

It's Hang Out With Shanan Week! Or at least it's a week in which I hang out with Shanan more than usual.


This is Shanan buying produce from Heliotrope at the Regina Farmers' Market.

She's all up on the vegetarianism and how to do it well, and, because she's been at it half her life, she's a little walking encyclopedia of nutritional know-how, which is how we ended up talking about vitamin B12 deficiency.

She started listing symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency, and I started realizing that all those times I thought HOLY CRAP, I AM GOING TO DIE over the last year, I was probably wrong.


I wish I had seen what he did with that creepy doll sticking out of his banjo case.

I mean, I am going to die, and nothing is going to stop this anxiety-ridden insomniac from sitting bolt upright in bed at two in the morning and shouting PALINODE, I AM GOING TO DIE. That's one of my favourite activities right after making melted crayon shavings and pill bottle brooches for my mom and right before sunset walks on the beach.

(Here's a weird aside that has almost nothing to do with the above paragraph, except that the above paragraph reminded me of summer camp, which is where a camp counsellor unsuccessfully tried to teach me how to use a bow and arrow: Geena Davis vied for a spot on the United States Olympic archery team for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. True fact.)


Sacred Earth has the best soaps ever. You should have some.

Anyway, Shanan helped me to realize that I'm probably not going to die, at least right away. Heart palpitations, confusion and memory loss, constipation, depression, dizziness and trouble maintaining balance, fatigue, numbness in my hands, pale skin, and my sore tongue are not all colluding to seal my fate as worm food. I could, in all likelihood, have a vitamin B12 deficiency.


Summer!

I actually have a blood test requisition form in my purse that my doctor gave me so that I can have my iron and B12 levels tested. I will get that done in order to make sure that this is, indeed, what is up with me, but I am waiting for a time when it seems convenient to fast and forego caffeinated beverages.


A mail carrier! At work! The strike is over!

Wait.

Did I just tell you that I feel like crap and lie awake nights worrying about my imminent death and then say that actually getting tested for what might be wrong with me is inconvenient?

I'm an idiot. Or I was an idiot. Now I have seen the folly of my ways. I'll go in tomorrow.


Tangerine celebrated its first birthday!

In the meantime, I bought some time-release B12 vitamins. They're pink. They make me feel proactive.


Shanan's face missed the party memo.

Take a moment to laugh too long and too loud about how sad Shanan looks behind the party cupcake.


This photo has managed to insinuate a 1970s porn flavour into itself with a strong Dacron sidenote. Dirk Diggler, anyone?

Sometimes a bottle of pop is just a bottle of pop.


This pink is cuh-razy.

I've been having these highly detailed dreams in which I am invited over to the homes of famous female bloggers, and I spend my entire visit in each home trying to covertly inspect the undersides of their carpets. I peel back the top layer, which is anything from a practical berber to an antique Persian, I pick at the padding beneath, and I investigate the quality of the floorboards.

In one blogger's home, I kept picking bits of blue underlay from beneath a throw rug, and I was trying to hide the evidence inside a delicious martini slushie my hostess had made.


This is a roasted red pepper tart.

And sometimes carpet is just carpet, right?


The tangerine icing on these cupcakes had just enough butter in it to make me pat my muffin top fondly and secretly give it the pet name "Butter".

Party cupcakes!

How I Spent My Fascinating Tuesday

I had a plan for today, and I was excited by my plan, because I was going to go to a public talk in the park hosted by the University of Regina Faculty of Arts. I felt as though I must be a very smart person to be going to a public talk given by a university professor.

Going to the park was the next logical step, then, so I did.

I believed that I was to meet Shanan at the gazebo in Wascana park, but when I got to the gazebo, it was covered in children. Unless the age of university students had dropped drastically, this was not the right place. Still, I waited for a few minutes just to make sure.

That's when I noticed how rife with goose poop the place was. Goose poop was here, goose poop was there, goose poop was under my butt. Good times.



You don't know how much you care about goose poop until it's stuck to your butt.

I checked through my e-mails to see where I went wrong with the meeting place, and I saw mention of the war memorial, so I googled the war memorial and headed on over to the one by the Legislative Building.

Again, no university profs or students were there. In fact, no one was there except me, and it was terrifically boring.



Wascana felt like some kind of windy, bug-ridden, overly bright, goose poop-ridden purgatory. I was really quite annoyed with the whole thing. I'm not a fan of direct, unyielding sunlight, and I also find bugs buggy and wind overstimulating.

Without thinking, motherfucker slipped out of my mouth a little too loudly, and a passing skateboarder gave me the finger and shouted fuck you.

Oops.

I ducked into the park's public washroom.

I made an arbitrary rule this morning that I had to take pictures everywhere today, so I did. Being that it was difficult to get much of a picture in such a confined space, I stood up on the toilet seat to get a better shot.



I'm glad that I did. Otherwise, I never would have been able to read the creepy, and possibly pervy, message scratched into the facing half-wall. How sweet.

I don't know why my toes are that colour, either. Stop staring at them.



Back to the geese. Wascana is lousy with them.

For those who do not have personal experience with the Canada goose, it is one nasty mofo. They hiss and menace and occasionally give chase. They pretty much hate any living thing that is not a goose, and that one down there hated me. I actually fell on my ass when he leapt forward a few steps to make sure that I knew what a beastly piece of work he was.



Shanan eventually called me to see where the hell I was. It turns out that I WASN'T EVEN IN THE RIGHT PARK.

She was in another park with another war memorial. It turns out the war memorials and parks go together like chocolate and peanut butter, and I had been wading through goose poop and documenting public washrooms and angering passing skaters a mile away from where I was actually supposed to be.

Speaking of peanut butter, Shanan and I finally joined up and decided to go to Tangerine, where Shanan ordered a peanut-buttery dessert.

"Can I take a picture of your moonpie and put it on the internet?" I asked, and she said yes.

We're very close.



Later, we picked up the Palinode and went to the Lil' Belizean Cook Shack, because this is what Shanan and I do. We eat together and work on my double chin.



Do you know what I Belize? I Belize that aside from the really tasty samosa, I ended up with some flat bean muck and a Jamaican patty that tasted like an old refrigerator around the edges. Yum.



And then the Palinode glared at stuff and I stopped writing this run-down of a very long Tuesday, because if I went into how we also went to Tea Kitchen and Rhoda's and Shoppers and Seed and met a hiccuppy baby and whatnot, this would get ridiculous. Plus, I have a date with the farmer's market in the morning, and I have to get some sleep.

The End.

Dead Birds, Shanan, Pasta, And The Palinode's Attempt To Operate Light Machinery

Yesterday felt strange in that way that signals me to take note. I don't know how to pin that feeling down for you, but it is very specific when it comes over me. It tells me to follow my gut, turn down different corners, which I did.

That's how I came across this pigeon on the way to work.



I turned down different corners, and then BAM! I ran into this poor bird.

My gut often brings me to birds. They are not always dead, but they usually are. My evidence supporting the dead bird majority came later in the day when I ran into my second dead bird:



Just as with the first bird earlier in the day, I had decided to go with my gut again during my walk home. I turned a different corner, and BAM! There it was, claws up.

My gut is a morbid sonofabitch, apparently.

The day took a turn for the less morbid, though, when the Palinode and I went out for supper with Shanan.



We went to Pasta Prima. The food is your typical pasta joint fare, and it's pretty good at that, but it has really gone downhill physically in the last couple of years. The cement walk up to the place looks like it belongs to a long-abandoned farmhouse rather than an urban restaurant. If I didn't live here and wasn't already familiar with the place, I would have assumed that it was pretty sketchy.

Still, though, the food is good. Just don't let the looks scare you away. They sell fresh pasta and sauces to take home, and you'll never leave either hungry or broke.



I figured that I had left the morbid birds-themed portion of my day behind at that point, but reality was all insistent about its BIRDS BIRDS BIRDS business.

Shanan opened up a pop-up book in the bargain section at Chapters, and BAM! Dead birds. Third time's a charm.

Okay, well, this third incident did not involve dead birds, exactly, but they were definitely not alive birds.



I felt strangely motherly of these two while I took the following shot. I had a strong urge to pat both their heads and maybe take them to my bosom:



And then I took Aidan to play on these crazy little car things in the kids' section, because Cenobyte introduced me to them a few weeks ago, and I love them mightily. I want one of these and a giant field of cement to rip around on senselessly. It drives just randomly enough that I can imagine it would be a pretty good cat-herder.

The Palinode tried his hand at it, but he mostly ran into bookshelves. I think this is one of my most favourite pictures of him ever.



So, dead birds, Shanan, pasta, and the Palinode attempting to operate light machinery.

I got nuthin, but it was a good day, even with all the dead stuff. Such is life.

Coffee With A Friend And iPhone Photography And Learning To Be Present

I had coffee with my friend Shanan today.

This is she:



She has an iPhone 4 and wanted to know a bit about camera apps, and she came to me because I have a bit of an affinity for the iPhone 4 and its camera apps. I agreed to be her sherpa, as @courosa put it.

It was crazy good to get out of the apartment for more than just work.

Since I took on sobriety, I have rarely left the house for much more than short forays out with the Palinode and maybe a handful of friends. I still feel like I'm on shaky ground. I haven't quite learned to trust myself yet when it comes to alcohol, what with its being everywhere all the time and looking so cold and tasty.

No, wait. That's not quite right. I have a lot of trust in my ability to stick it out when it's hard to say no, because I really get deep down into my core how important saying no is to my very life. I am just not comfortable with feeling that strong urge, that need, when I am out alone in the world. I still feel new and shaky, a little wobbly on my gams. I'm learning to be okay with vulnerability.

Hard decisions are hard.



I wasn't going to talk about sobriety today, but it keeps coming up in my mind over the last while. It's been an incredibly powerful force for me. It is an incredibly powerful force for me, and I am only just breaking through the surface of what it means in my life. I'm 38 years old, and I don't think I spent an entire week sober from the age of 15 until last August.

I shouldn't avoid talking about the power of learning how to be present in my own life. I am learning how to be here as I am, and there is nothing frivolous in that.



Anyway, the point of this whole thing was supposed to be that I hung out with Shanan and talked about taking iPhone pictures this afternoon, which is one of my favourite subjects, and I was going to tell you that she manages to take some pretty stunning shots of coffee mugs.

Sometimes, though, I don't get to choose the points of things.