K I T S C H — Cate's Blog

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Welcome, new bunny!

Today we adopted a new rabbit. She doesn't have a name yet, since we have to see what her personality is like before we give her something as important as a name. A name she probably won't learn anyway since, you know, we never train our bunnies in the ways the book tells us to.

We first stopped by the shelter on Sunday. It was mid-afternoon, so all the bunnies were either lethargic or sleeping, and nobody really stood out. And, obviously, life really should be judged by the stringent and totally realistic standards of casting calls.

We did see this particular bunny and commented on the fact that the shelter had named her Cindy, and that she looked like a miniature version of our second bunny, who had also been named Cindy by this same shelter.

We genuinely do have trouble with the naming thing. Usually we just end up taking the name the shelter has given the bunny and keep it, or maybe just alter it slightly. That's how we've ended up with Bouncer, Bundle Buggy and Thindy (we had just seen The Brady Bunch Movie and were pretty taken with Cindy's lisp).

We've got some really good possible name ideas, but if none of those pan out, we may have to call in the pro. That would be Gwen. Yeah, that's just an excuse to get Gwen up here to visit again.

So, the new bunny. She's affectionate and curious, and she's probably young. Nobody knows for sure since she was a stray. She's also been at the shelter, apparently, longer than is normal. I just don't get it. Yeah, now that she's mine, I'm obviously duty-bound to think she's great, but let's face it, she is! She's fun.

As we left the shelter, Peeter and I were both feeling a little teary-eyed, but happy, about choosing this bunny. Apparently, our great adoption agent felt that way also. I won't embarrass her by mentioning her name, but when she gathered up our bunny in the cardboard box and handed her to Peeter, there were tears in her eyes too.

I could never do her job. I won't even volunteer to foster young animals because I know I would get altogether too attached. Yeah, I'm weak.

Thank you, adoption lady, for caring so much.

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Hello! My name is Blotto! What's yours?

Whoa! Blotto are back together? And they have a website! When the hell did this happen? And why did no one tell me?

They're a legendary Albany band from the '70s and '80s, with great songs like "It's Not You (It's Your Family That I Can't Stand)" and "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard (A Wet Dream)." You may have seen their video for "Metal Head" on MTV (MuchMusic too) in the mid-'80s. I didn't, but I heard it was good.

They were still together when I was in high school, and I remember having a great time at a few of their shows in Albany.

Hey, speaking of Albany (and really awkward segues), we recently went to the NYS Museum and saw "Lost Cases, Recovered Lives: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic." Neither Peeter nor I have the sanest families on the block, so this one was a natural draw for us.

All right, let's call a spade a spade. My theory is that the average person does not go into this sort of exhibit hoping to see something that humanizes people. Most of us (myself included) just aren't that nice. When you hear about a museum exhibit that features the left-behind suitcases of patients in a "mental hospital," you're in there at least partially hoping there will be something shocking. You know, maybe mildly shocking, titillating. Again, most humans aren't necessarily nice, but we're usually not complete assholes either.

Anyway, the exhibition? Fascinating. And the most shocking thing about it was just how easy it was to get thrown into the "insane asylum" back then. Yes, they actually used to call it that.

I know the reality of blogs is to provide encyclopedic links to everything, and that a lot of these links never get clicked on. My links are the same, obviously. However, I must insist you click on this one. Oh, go on, humour me. You won't regret it. Jennifer Gonnerman does a killer job of describing the exhibit in ways I could never even imagine.

Unfortunately, my photos didn't turn out very well. I think the combination of museum lighting, Costco film processing and my general photography ineptitude made them suck with a yellow backlight that I just don't know how to fix.

I'll post one photo, though. These are some anonymous grave markers dug up from the site. I guess they're not completely anonymous, since there are numbers on them, but apparently there were multiple graveyards, and there wouldn't necessarily be any real differentiation between person #122 in Graveyard 1 or Graveyard 2, so your odds of finding someone's grave aren't that great. Well, especially once the markers are dug up, like these.

By the way, I can't remember the exact details of how these markers ended up in the exhibit, but obviously the curators did not dig up them up. Peeter remembers it as being a landscaping issue, where it was too hard to mow the fields with all those pesky markers there. That rings a bell, but I think I've kind of blocked all that out of my mind because it's a little too horrifying.

And that's not just because this movie freaked the living hell out of me.

If you get a chance, do make a field trip to the museum, though.

Monday, May 24, 2004

Half-watching The Swan while doing more important stuff

Oh, man, that was surreal. Leaving aside five billion reasons why this show sucks, the bottom line? From your average viewer's perspective, why would anyone but family members give a rat's ass who wins? No one can tell these women apart. Come on, I challenge you to try. It's like watching some demented promo for The Stepford Wives. I think the women have a choice of blonde or brunette hair extensions, but everything else is exactly the same.

Ah, I'm preaching to the choir, I know.

What can FOX do to top this, though? Wait, this show is on FOX, isn't it? Heh, I'm kidding, people. Just kidding.

The only thing that could top this train wreck would be if the super plastic surgeons they hire were all contracted to transform Jim Belushi, Jerry Falwell and David Hasselhoff into the same blonde waif. The surgeon who fails gets transformed into Paradise Hotel's Toni. Or Michael Jackson.

Which brings to mind another reality show idea Peeter had: Who is brave enough to go under the knife of Michael Jackson's Plastic Surgeon?

Monday, May 17, 2004

Wallowing in the 518

Hey, y'all, it's my last night in the old family homestead, and I was wondering if you wanted to join me here in this big old pile of self-pity.

Oh, come on, now. It's fun down here!

We can reminisce about how my parents moved to this town in 1968, and to this house in 1972. Heh. That sounds like some atrociously bad exposition masquerading as real writing. And you know what? I don't even think I'm spelling "masquerading" right, but how would I know? All the dictionaries are either packed away or sold at the fabulous garage sale we had on Saturday. (More on that at a later date. Right now we're all about the self-pity. That's right: the SELF. PITY.)

Part of it is that my mom's move is tied up with a whole raft of loss issues. I'm sure the move would have a totally different tenor if my dad were still here. My parents had been looking at selling up and heading elsewhere long before he died. Aside from the obvious (we all miss my dad like crazy), he would have taken a practical, logical, soothing approach to a lot of things that I'm not nearly as well-equipped to deal with. In short, I sometimes find myself figuratively talking my mom off the ledge over issues that really have me wanting to join her there. But what are you gonna do? It's probably character-building too, right? Right?

Sitting in the backyard a few minutes ago, I had completely different, flowery ideas about what I felt like writing. It's a hell of a totally inspirational fantasy backyard, though. (And try looking at stars or breathing clean air in my usual habitat and see just how far you get, bitches my curmudgeonly side.)

The perspective of everything in the backyard, though, is kind of...off. I remember how things looked when we first moved here. Of course, the trees have grown, and so have I. Still, it's all a bit Alice in Wonderland. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the group of six trees across the courtyard that I used to think of as "The Witches' Council" are still there. (Cut me some slack -- I was a fanciful child, okay?) The trees have grown taller, but they've all stayed relative to each other in height.

My climbing tree, however, has chosen to move on without me. If I were 40 feet tall, I might stand a chance of scaling it again, but as things stand, probably not.

I guess it doesn't want to wallow in self-pity with me. Bitch. Just kidding.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

So you want to know what Serbia is up to these days, hmm?

Just ask the merry mouth-breathing pranksters who scribble graffiti in the elevators of my apartment building.

According to them, Serbia:

1. smells


2. is the best, fuck the rest


3. sucks


4. eats ass


5. all of the above

Okay, come on. You know the right answer is (e).

It entertains me that more and more tenants are getting in on the act these days. And I hope it's not a genuine hatred for an entire country but, rather, disgust for the one loser jerkwad who always sets it off by repeatedly scratching this stupidity onto the walls in the first place.

The building management are promising us Elevator XtrEme MakeOveRs sometime soon. (Hey, don't be stealing my show idea and selling it to Fox, okay?) I'm all for the renovations, but I worry that if one can't scratch really dumb shit into the elevator walls anymore, won't we be sacrificing a valuable piece of our cultural heritage?

Please, won't somebody think of the CanCon?

Saturday, May 08, 2004

Let the garage sales begin!

Today we had our first full-scale garage sale trip of the season. Unfortunately, I was dressed very inappropriately, what with my sunglasses and sandals, combined with a complete lack of long underwear, gloves and heavy down parka. I could have used an umbrella too when the hailstorm started. Damn Toronto's weather, with its three weeks of nice days sandwiched between bone-chillingly cold winter and foul, humid summer. Don't get me wrong. I really do love this city. It is a very good place to live. And I'm sure I'll miss it immensely when I move someplace where the air is breathable.

Anyway, the garage sales. They totally rocked today. Well, three of them did. I hope this doesn't make me indifferent to the rest of the season like I was two summers ago. That year we majorly lucked out at the very first sale we went to and picked up a bunch of Peach Luster Fire Kings and four boxes of books -- including an entire box of old teen hygiene novels -- for five bucks. Then a few lackluster weeks went by where not a single person in the Greater Toronto Area was selling anything good, and we decided we'd probably used up all our garage sale luck for that year and would be just as happy sleeping in on Saturday mornings.

Here's to this season being different.

This morning we had to drive around for a while before we came across the nice stuff. You'd think people who only had three empty margarine tubs, a box of broken crayons and a dusty old basket of dried flowers to get rid of would be far too embarrassed to have a garage sale, right? Wrong. Instead of carting this stuff to the curb on trash day like any normal person would, these people always go to the effort of writing out a hundred posters advertising the sale of their treasures. And they pretty much have to put up a hundred posters or nobody would ever find their sale, since their house is invariably located in the centre of a maze disguised as a housing development that has a road plan so convoluted that you're going to be spending the rest of the day trying to figure out how to get out of there again.

My degree of rage after someone has wasted my time like that is proportional to the number of weeks it took me to find their stupid house multiplied by just how shitty their wares are. In fact, I'm sure there's an exact mathematical formula in there somewhere just waiting to be discovered.

When you've been checking out garage sales for a while, you do get a sense of which ones are worth stopping at and which ones are drive-bys. After a useless hour this morning, where each sale was even worse than the last, we resolved that from now on, instead of just driving by the really offensive ones, we're going to start shouting, "Garbage sale!" or, "FAAAAAWCK YOUUU!!!"

We'd do it too, if we weren't so gosh-darn Canadian and polite.

Finally we made it to some good sales, like the one put on by the couple who obviously inherited their home from someone's grandparents. It wasn't just that these folks were barely out of their teens and had a Buick Century in their driveway; they also had no idea how to price their stuff. We bought a beautiful '50s mosaic tile plate and a carnival glass relish dish for $1.25, total. We almost bought an early-'60s blender, but I thought it was ugly as hell. After we paid for our purchases, we suggested to the nice people that they charge more for their lovely antiques. No idea of the outcome, but I hope they took our advice.

The next great sale was the one we found at the curling club that had a bunch of Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks from the '60s. I already had all the ones on offer, but this is such an amazing series that I picked up a bunch of them anyway to give to friends. At 50 cents for the hardcover version with all the beautiful photos, and 25 cents for the wirebound recipe books, you can't lose.

We've just finished preparing Chicken Paprika from The Cooking of Vienna's Empire. The cover of this book must be the best cookbook cover I've seen ever. Ever! I love how the centrepiece is a cake so encrusted with buttercream frosting, it looks like it's likely to topple over at any second. I just hope that when it does, it won't upset the coffee cup filled with whipped cream or the pretty silver bowl filled with, um, whipped cream. Does anyone want to take a crack at guessing exactly how high the mortality rate is in Vienna's Empire?

That aside, the Chicken Paprika is pretty tasty.

From the curling club, we proceeded to the "Old Lady Sale." I'm not sure if the apartment complex was inhabited solely by old ladies or if it's just that the sale was put on by a certain demographic, but the offerings were fabulous. I bought what I wanted and then went back to the car while Peeter did a last scout around for picture frames. I felt bad when the hail started, but not bad enough to go back out and stand in solidarity with the nice old ladies who were selling everything for 50% off. I was wearing sandals, after all.

Spamwatch

I'm not entirely sure about this, since I can't read Hebrew, but I think I've just been invited to a rave in Israel. And it's at a Holiday Inn Express. Woo!

Thursday, May 06, 2004

No, it's not a tribute to Friends

I had the drop date dream again, the one where I'm in university, it's the end of the school year and I realize there are a bunch of courses I haven't attended for ages. I mean for, like, so long that I don't even have any idea what essays and exams I've missed.

And, of course, I neglected the drop date for those courses -- the date in February when you finally accept that signing up for Calculus was a serious lapse in judgment and that, for what it's worth, you're obviously meant to be an English/Art History major. You lose all the tuition for those courses, but at least dropping them allows you to fish your GPA out of the toilet.

You know, I actually did have a course that I attended all of six times one year: European Economic History. Man, was that a bad course. Just thinking about it again makes me long to take a nap. On top of my lectural non-attendance, I never got around to finishing all the required reading. We had six books that spanned the period of the Roman Empire until something like 1950. I'm not even sure of the exact year, since I only made it through one and a half books.

The one on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire kicked ass. I sat down and just whipped through it because it was so interesting. Then I started reading the one on medieval history. I think I gave up somewhere around 800 A.D. and accepted an invitation to go out for drinks instead and then never bothered picking up the book again.

I did well on my essays, but the final exam presented some problems. It was in essay form -- always good for us English-major bullshitters -- but still couldn't disguise the fact that my understanding of European economic history ended, oh, about a millenium before the course called for.

The first question was fine because you could choose an economic period to write about in depth; lucky for me, the Roman Empire was one of them. I wrote a killer essay for that, pouring my heart and soul into it. In fact, I think I was still finishing it off past the halfway point of the three-hour exam. I was stoked.

The second question posed a bit of a conundrum, though, seeing as how it asked me to compare two periods of European economic history, and Roman Empire vs. Roman Empire wasn't an option. Since I didn't have a choice, I just wrote at great length about -- wait for it -- the Roman Empire and compared it to what I actually remembered from the first half of the really dull book on the Middle Ages.

The third question tried to pull together all the knowledge we'd gained through the entire year into one mega-essay covering almost two thousand years. Well, that's fine, but what about people with low boredom thresholds who don't give a rat's ass about the impact of sheep-shearing on, well, something or other in the 8th century? (Sheep-shearing in the current day, however, is another matter entirely. This guy still cracks me up every time I see his picture.)

Anyway, I figured I'd have to take a novel approach to this third essay. Write what you know. Write what you know, dammit!

And I did just that. Throwing aside false modesty, I can say with confidence that I was able to consider the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with a perspicacity and attention to detail rarely seen in a first-year undergrad final exam. Yeah, you know, especially the "attention to detail" part. I also threw in a few token paragraphs about medieval Europe. Then I think I summed up the next thousand years of history in a single paragraph which read thusly:

The Renaissance period had lots of pretty art. It was prettier than a lot of 20th-century art. It costs a lot to buy Renaissance art these days. I like pretty pictures.

The End.

The truly amazing thing is that I passed this course with something like a C+. I think that says less about my intelligence than it does about the intelligence of the TA grading my exam. Frankly, if I had to mark the paper of a student who had so obviously read only one and a half of the required six books, I'd do absolutely everything I could to fail her ass.

I wonder what the drop date dream means, though. It's obviously about something I should be doing but am not. Writing those thank-you notes I owe? Answering email to loved ones in a timely manner? Updating this site on a regular basis? Heh.

It might be telling me it's time to find another job. There's nothing wrong with the one I've got, except for the fact that it is only a job, not a career, and there's really nowhere to advance from here. Otherwise it's great. I get paid decently to watch TV all day, and most of what I watch is interesting. My boss is fabulous. My co-workers are lovely. Still, I reckon this dream must have something to do with work.

My dad used to have a similar school dream up until a few years ago. I wish I'd asked him if the dreams stopped when he retired.

Anyway, in my dream, I was all excited because it was only February and I thought I'd finally remembered the course-dropping date early enough. However, when I asked someone for today's date, she told me we were already into May. D'ohh! Maybe it's a good sign that I at least remembered the course-dropping date. I don't know what it says about me that I've got such a bad grasp of time, though.

Sunday, May 02, 2004

Proof that I do, indeed, live under a rock

Remember years ago when everyone was writing fake reviews for Family Circus books on Amazon.com? Cheap humour, I know, but that doesn't change the fact that when I was reading printouts of the original reviews on the subway, I was laughing so hard -- and trying so hard not to laugh aloud -- that I was shaking and crying, and people were moving away from me in fear. It's the goofy, pranky sort of humour that always turns me into a helpless heap of laughter. I wish I ran across it more often, just maybe not in public.

So how the hell did I ever miss out on this guy when he was writing all his Amazon reviews? He's completely brilliant, and I'm devastated that he hasn't posted any new reviews in over a year. Some samples:

***
Aging with Dignity by James Becherer

The advice in this excellent cassette is sound, and it seems to work if the sleeve photograph of James Becherer looking fabulous at the wheel of his Ferarri, wind ruffling his Don Johnson mullet, and hot hardbody on his arm is anything to go by.

***
The Ocd Workbook: Your Guide to Breaking Free from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Bruce M. Hyman Ph.D., Cherry Pedrick R.N.

This book has released me from the grips of OCD. It is so well argued and lucid that I have now just finished reading it for the 247th time. Tremendous.

***
Krups 215-17 Citizen Home Shoeshine Kit

An excellent kit for keeping those shoes nicely buffed. I also found an additional useful feature when I accidentally dropped a coin next to my home shoeshine kit and it told me that word on the street was the Gambinis had been taking heat from the DA's office on account of that business with Frankie the Snake.

***
Henry, if you're out there, just say you'll marry me. You're not gonna make me beg, are you?