Summer into Fall

I keep meaning to update the ol' blog, but it's just that I'm so busy doing important, interesting things. I'll write soon. In the meantime, enjoy these photos from my vacation home.


Krista and I having an algae fight at the beach.


Here we are frolicking in the surf. Clearly one of us misinterpreted the photographer's directions. Krista's doing "Baywatch Barbie" and I'm doing "I just stepped on a razor clam and then got struck by lightning."

Now enjoy these photos from my new house. This place would be great if it weren't for the four other people who live here. I've lived here three days now and there doesn't seem to be any stand-out assholes, so I'm sure we'll all reside here happily together.

Trash Day

So not a great start to 2009. I spent the entire first day of the new year in darkness. The power was out in Bayfield for 23 hours. Compared to other people we were in pretty good shape. We had a wood stove and a fireplace. We had a battery-powered radio. We had a kerosene lamp, lots of candles and flashlights for every family member. We had lots of board games... It was the single longest day of my life. My family is great, but I was never so happy to have to go back to Wal-mart. Had the buses not been running, I'd have hitchhiked back to Halifax.

My brother sent pictures of his holiday adventures in New Zealand, which caused me to briefly reconsider joining him there. Over Christmas he went skydiving, hiked on a glacier, and helped build a house for Habitat for Humanity. I watched a bunch of Road to Avonlea reruns and ate two boxes of chocolates.

When I did get back to Halifax there was no heat upstairs so the bathroom and kitchen were absolutely freezing. I had to wear my winter jacket and hat to the bathroom. I let the shower run hot for ten minutes to warm up the room before even going in. This disregard for conservation went against everything David Suzuki ever taught me but it was really, really cold. The situation has since been resolved, but only after four days and two calls to the landlord.

Tomorrow is Trash Day. I hope to take out the trash. And by "trash" I mean Shorty, and by "take out" I mean wave good-bye to from the front step. Shorty has a date with the Tenancy Board tomorrow and I'm hoping it doesn't go his way. I don't really know what a Tenancy Board is but I'm told they may be able to get rid of our pest problem. The landlord seems pretty intent on getting rid of him, so fingers crossed. Chances are Shorty won't be coming home happy. I'm bracing myself for a day of cursing, yelling, and stealing the likes of which I haven't witnessed even at Wal-mart. Just two months ago, there was seven people living in this house. Now only the three toughest/craziest remain. The third roommate, the NSCAD student has had it easy because she has been gone for the last month. She returned last Monday from Christmas break and her greeting to me was "Is there a crack ho living in the basement?". Now, I understand her point of view; there is a crack ho living in the basement and that's definitely an important topic but she could have opened with "How are you?" or "Did you have a nice Christmas?". Whatever. Shorty's cracked-out lady friend seems to have moved in and while she seems docile enough, I am keeping all the sharp knives locked in my room, just in case.

7th Heaven

My craptacular house is now at capacity. Seven people live here. That's way too many. A Dal TA from France just moved into the last free room. He's optimistic and full of big ideas. "Wouldn't it be great if we could walk around in sock feet or barefoot? Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have too many dirty dishes in the sink?" You know what else would be nice? If Wal-mart paid me per stupid customer and I could use my knife to cut other things besides boxes. It's not gonna happen, Frenchie. It's almost as if he hasn't met Shorty. The good news is that all of the new roommates seem like responsible, respectful people. I actually like all of them. I have been systematically turning each person against Shorty, although he's doing most of the work. He's already asked everyone for money and cigarettes.

My Wal-mart shifts these days are mostly weekdays during the day. I don't know if I can handle these daytime workers. They take their jobs so seriously. I've always thought the daytime staffers were really rude to customers. Now I understand why. You just get so involved in your little tasks. Put hook in wall, put socks on hook, put hook in wall, put socks on hook. You develop a pleasing rhythm. Then a customer comes and asks you about a bra and you want to say "Can't you see I'm doing socks?! I can't think about bras right now! Geez!" The daytime staff would have conniption fits if they knew how little work the evening/weekend workers do. The last night I worked I spent two hours talking to a co-worker, not even talking while we worked, just talking. Then I needed garlic fingers and we spent an hour ordering, waiting for, and eating the garlic fingers. I don't normally need garlic fingers but I did that night because I was still drunk from spending the afternoon on a Class of 2008 library technician pub crawl.

My "new" job generates a lot of waste. After I empty 30 boxes of pantyhose and mittens, I'm left with a huge stack of cardboard and a big bag of plastic bags. Disposing of this garbage is the most traumatic part of my day. The cardboard goes in the baler, a big terrifying squashing machine. It's okay if I can just throw the cardboard in and run away, but if it's full, I have to turn the machine on. I'm always scared there might be someone in there. However unlikely, it is technically possible. I don't understand why if it's just cardboard, it makes a sound like crushing bones. The plastic is to be thrown into a giant recycling bin, the opening of which is at the height of a two storey building. Do you know how much a bag of plastic bags weighs? Like 5 ounces. The first day I tried throwing a nearly weightless bag that high, I knew it was impossible. The warehouse guys, who were there unloading a truck, stopped working long enough to offer tips and laugh like I was the funniest thing that happened all week. After it stopped being funny (approximately seven tries) someone finally did it for me. The next day I worked on my technique when no one was there and today I did it one try! I victory punched the air. Then I decided I should maybe work on setting higher goals for myself and possibly even start applying for other jobs.

Adventures with Shorty

For the last two months, there has been a subletter in the house. Although she was a quiet grad student, her inability to follow simple recycling instructions made me angry. I was also unimpresed with her poor dish washing skills. I'm not sure what she did to them that made her think she'd cleaned them. If I had to guess, I'd say she always used either soap or water, but never both. I just don't know how you can be so bad at something so simple. I was relieved when she moved out. Having recently met her replacement, I would give anything to have her back.

Last Saturday at 1'o'clock in the morning, Shorty moved in. I heard a commotion and went into the hall to find a dirty little pothead with a skullet moving into the room across the hall from mine, the room that smells strongly of gas and which I was planning to seal off with towels and duct tape at the next possible opportunity. In his early 40's, Shorty arrived by bike from the bad part of Dartmouth and I quickly realized my stories of mice and gas leaks were not going to discourage a man who can probably sleep through gunfire. He has a pregnant girlfriend who, by the sounds of it, is not at all happy to have been impregnated, especially by him. He can't live with her because she's "crazy, real crazy". I have identified all possible escape routes from the house in case she shows up with a shotgun and hormonal rage.

With me visiting home this week, Shorty will be all alone in the house unsupervised for five days. I didn't have time to train him before taking off. As best I could, I tried to Shorty-proof the house before I left. I locked my door, checked the smoke detectors, and put a sign on my brownies in the fridge: These brownies are not "special". Still, I shudder to think what I will arrive home to on Tuesday.

Murphy in the house!

I was at work today, minding my own business, when I heard a very familiar voice speaking loudly. It was local celebrity and lovable host of CTV News, Steve Murphy. He was walking around smiling and greeting people unprovoked. As he walked by my area, the young girl I work with, always friendly and eager to please, said "Hi! You're Bruce Frisko, aren't you?" It was definitely the best thing that happened all day. Mr. Murphy snapped, "Not the last time I checked." And thus ended his parade of terror. It was a completely innocent mistake on my poor co-workers part so I had to explain to her the gravity of her faux pas.

My latest issue with my house is that nobody lives in it. Two of my roomies have moved out and the other is gone to Newfoundland for a two month work term. I now live all by myself in a seven bedroom house. A girl at work asked me if I was scared living in a big house all by myself. I guess she must have been thinking of violent intruders or crazed murderers because she looked at me like I was a moron when I said that I was pretty sure I'd be okay because the house wasn't haunted. In my mind, the only viable threat to my safety would be ghosts.

This Old House

Clanging sounds woke me up this morning. Someone finally came to replace our leaking oil tank. Several weeks ago, my roommate (the cook/rodent removal specialist) discovered that my bedroom smelled like oil. I didn't notice or perhaps I'd just gotten used to it, but the tank was right outside my room and was seriously old and rusty. So in sleeping across the hall to avoid mice, I was also avoiding sleeping in a room full of noxious fumes. Every day is a new adventure in this house.

The sound of laughter also woke me up this morning. It sounded like there was a fun party going on in the kitchen. But it was only noon and I wasn't willing to get up that early just to make friends. When they laughed, I imagined the cook was telling the others she had found me in the kitchen last night at 3am ironing the tablecloth. Well, it was wrinkly and I needed something to do while my chicken fingers cooked. I was also making a salad. I didn't notice until later, but a piece of my celery had fallen off the counter and landed directly in the center of the blob of peanut butter on the mouse trap on the floor. The mouse trap is in plain sight. It's very likely she saw it. So they could have been laughing about that too. Now she's going to think I don't trust her trapping methods and that I'm the kind of person who thinks they can lure mice with celery. Along with the embarrassment, I also suffered the trauma of having to remove the celery from the trap without setting it off.

The roommates are all sick. Lucky for me, my immune system which failed me constantly in university is functioning well these days and has kept me healthy so far this season. Hopefully, whatever they have is not contagious or I hope they all have the mumps, to which I am immune. That's really a terrible thing to say. Mumps would be horrible to have. I would really feel bad for anyone who got the mumps. But seriously though, for my sake, I hope they have the mumps.

Because I was not happy with the quality of the recycling going on in the house, I came up with a plan. I didn't actually want to say anything so I printed off the recycling guidelines from the HRM website. I folded it, and after the mailman came, I put it with the flyers in the front porch. Later, someone brought the flyers in and put them on the table. The next day someone else discovered the recycling "flyer" and posted it on the fridge. Together, we run this household like a well-oiled machine, whether they know it or not.

Costumes by Kathleen

Halloween cannot be over soon enough. Working at Wal-Mart tends to suck the fun out of most holidays and Halloween is no exception. I'm not even the one trying on costumes so why, by the end of the day, am I the one covered in strands of synthetic blue hair, feathers, and glitter? And then there's all the people who are too creative for a store-bought costume and must design their own but they still all come to Wal-Mart for supplies. A person could make a small fortune selling only green tights in the weeks leading up to Halloween. This past weekend alone I helped outfit a pirate hooker, a boxer, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee, a zombie, Dick Cheney, that guy Dick Cheney shot, a pimp and three Amy Winehouses. I have used up every modicum of creativity in my body. I have nothing left for myself. Should I need a costume, I will have to go as a Wal-Mart employee or a librarian.

Meanwhile at home, the battle rages on with my rodent roommates. I was watching tv the other night when one scampered out from behind the coach. I hurled a shoe at it and said "Where do you think you're going, bitch?"...at exactly the same time my poor human roommate was passing quietly by my open door with her laundry. She was startled but thankfully she gave me a chance to explain. We got to talking about how none of us in the house really knew each other very well. We decided we should plan some activities we could all do together and to convert the spare bedroom upstairs into a common room. The first activity was going to the market Saturday morning which of course I couldn't do because my presence was desperately required at Wal-Mart.

We also had a mouse killin' party. It wasn't so much a party as a brief meeting in my room to set mouse traps and chat and sample the cheese/bait. Only one death occurred but it has ignited our bloodlust. Now I know how my cat feels after a kill. It was a great bonding experience but not as much fun as mouse hunting on Robie Street. I have fond memories of our adventures with those unkillable mice, one person banging on the radiator to scare the little vermin out, another person poised and ready with a broom or other murder weapon and someone else standing by with a bucket to be used as needed. Good times.

Here, our newest roommate (the cook) checks the traps in my room every morning, removes the bodies, and resets the traps while I sleep soundly in my makeshift emergency bedroom across the hall. She spent today out in the backyard planting crocuses and arranging rocks in the garden. How did we survive our first month in the house without this woman?

Roomies

We have a new roommate in our house. She seems like a perfectly nice girl but she'll take some getting used to by the original three of us who had already gotten into a comfortable routine. The first thing she did was rearrange the kitchen to be more efficient, wash all our dirty dishes and stock up on much-needed supplies. The nerve! She may prove to be a bit high maintenance for us. It will come as no great shock to most people that when I'm completely out of legitimate chocolate food sources, I go to my emergency double chocolate cupcake mix and stir up a small bowl of batter and eat it straight. I was having just such an emergency the other day when our fancy new roommate asked me what I was eating. Because she works as a cook at a classy downtown eatery, I was embarrassed and told her it was pudding. But she's not stupid. She knew. Girl needs to learn not to ask so many personal questions.

Rumours are flying that we may soon have another new roommate. But who would be crazy enough to move into this madhouse? Stay tuned for all the juicy gossip about roommate #5.

We also have several other new roommates of the furry, four-legged variety. I called the landlord and told him we had mice in the house. He told me we weren't allowed to have pets. I could tell he used that line on all his tenants who called with pest problems so I didn't laugh. This was not a joking matter. The preferred hangout for the mice seems to be my room because of the convenient access through the fireplace. For all the trouble that fireplace has caused me, it had better provide a warm cheery glow during the cold days of winter. A VERY, merry warm cheery glow. After today's mouse sighting, which was a bit too close to my bed for comfort, I have moved across the hall to one of the spare bedrooms. I'd like to see that wise-cracking landlord try and rent that room with me living in it. Although he would probably prefer it to my previous methods for a mouse-free sleep. I had been setting up several lamps around my bed on the floor because light deters mice (I have no idea if this is true) and I also set up my fan hoping the noise and breeze would keep them away. The fan made me cold so I had to turn the heat up extra high during the night. I'm sure it looked like I was performing some kind of weird ritual. Maybe I should stop being such a girl and just get some mouse traps.

Guess who won't be getting the mumps this year? Me. I got my shot at school on Thursday. I think the vaccine may have made me temporarily insane because I have no memory of the class I had right after the shot and the notes I took during that class look like they were written by someone else. Stupid re-emerging childhood illnesses.

Friday is the only day of the week that I don't have classes or work so the last thing I want to do is go to a boring library conference. This Friday I will be attending the Nova Scotia School Library Conference. This conference already has two strikes against it. First of all, it's in Truro, the second worst place in Nova Scotia after New Glasgow. Secondly, it's about school libraries and I never want to work in a school library because I hate schoolchildren. But now I have to go because all the overachievers in my class are going. Who overachieves at community college? What are these people trying to prove? Unfortunately when all twenty of us graduate in May, we'll all be applying for the same jobs and we'll all be using the same two teachers as references so I can't allow anyone to be too much better than me. Now I just have to keep my mouth shut about having a valid driver's license and being over 25 or I'll get roped into renting a van and driving us all there and that would not turn out well. Possible headlines include "Bespectacled book-enthusiast endangers lives of conference-bound classmates" or "Van full of nerds careens into guardrail. Highway closed for hours to clean up books, glasses and retainers".

Moving South

I am finally getting settled into my new house. Had I known what a huge hassle moving would be, I would have stayed put. Now that I have moved though, I'm glad I did. Being near Dal again is a nice change of scenery after a year in the geriatric district of the north end.

I went apartment hunting Randall-style. Four days before I had to be out of my apartment, I started worrying and called my mom, who came into the city to help me because I'm so very incompetent. We spent the day driving around looking at places. She wanted to look at some two bedrooms which baffled me. My thinking was "People aren't just going to see me on the street and want to be my roommate". Her thinking was "Let's stand on the street and people will want to be your roommate". I should have had more faith. The plan worked brilliantly. We stood in front of a house with a For Rent sign and within two minutes a girl and her mother came along and asked if we were looking for apartments. The mothers did most of the talking while the daughters stood by, embarrassed to be university graduates in our mid-20's apartment hunting with our moms, but at the same time resigned to their methods. Once both mothers were satisfied that the other's daughter was a fine upstanding citizen, we exchanged numbers and split up. Although we were looking for two bedrooms, we actually ended up settling on a seven bedroom house on South Street right across from Dal.

The landlord instructed us to ignore the broken glass and toxic sludge, so we did, and decided the place had enough good features to recommend it. Also, with only four days left on my lease, desperation may have played a part. I thought we may have to fight over the bedrooms but we both got our top choice; she, the one with a walk-in closet and Chronicles of Narnia wardrobe, I, the one with a fireplace and a private entrance.

So with Female Roommate and me and one SMU student, the total number of housemates was three, which is how it remains for now. There are still four rooms available that could be rented by crackheads, murderers, or first year students. At this point, I still have my own bathroom. Granted, it's a ridiculous bathroom with a bidet. I didn't even know bidets existed in North America. The previous tenants used it as an ash try. I want to plant flowers in it. The garage is dismal and unfinished but houses a bevy of treasures including a wheelchair and a pitchfork. I have been doing my best to steal useful furniture and fixtures from the spare rooms before anyone else moves in.

In educational news, I have returned to library school at the new NSCC campus on the Dartmouth waterfront. Getting to Dartmouth every day is a huge pain but I am getting my first hint of a tan this season traveling on the ferry every day. The school really is quite spectacular and high-tech with a fantastic view of the harbour.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

As I feared, my cousin decided to move all of his stuff out of the apartment. He came on Sunday and pretty much cleaned the place out. My typing is making an echoey sound as I write this. My parents came in the same day to bring me a few essentials to get me through the next two weeks. It was kind of like Christmas receiving a bunch of furniture and appliances donated by a slew of relatives eager to get rid of their old junk.

First I opened a set of dishes, untouched since my uncle packed them neatly into a box when he moved out of his first apartment in 1962. All the plates have metal on them, being from the pre-microwave era, so I have to remember not to put them in the microwave, which isn't hard because I don't have one anymore. In the bottom of the box of dishes, there was a decorative iron and ceramic coaster that says "Maine: The Pine Tree State" and has a map and pictures of Maine landmarks. It's one tacky piece of crap but I felt bad separating it from the rest of the kitchenware so I hung it on the nail above my sink where the clock used to be. It may just be me being overly sentimental, but I think the dishes are happy to be back in action after a 44 year dry spell.

I also got a new bed, straight from my sister's room. It's really awesome if you like big wooden headboards covered with animal stickers (I don't.) Its looks aside, I was happy to have any bed at all. After a long day of moving stuff, I hopped into it. Unfortunately, it couldn't support my tremendous weight. The box spring slid off the frame and it and the mattress crashed to the floor.

The itchy green couch is no longer here. It got dragged out the door and tossed in the dumpster out back. It's true that it smelled funny and there was a big hole in it, but as I sat watching tv last night in a lawn chair, I was tempted to go see if it was still out there. The slightly moldy lawn chair was not the only thing that made my tv-watching experience less than satisfying. Let's just say I can be thankful that the tv is fairly light and has a handle on the top because CTV will only come in on the north side of the room and if I want to watch Global I have to move the tv to the far south side of the room. Luckily there's never anything good on CBC because I can probably only get that in the bathroom.

My aunt contributed a set of lamps labeled with the names of dead people. She scored these from the nursing home after some of my grandmother's neighbors checked out.

I would describe the decor as creepy minimalist retro.