demolition derby

handing over the harness

It is with great sadness and lingering nostalgia that I inform you that I cancelled my membership at Rock Oasis (i.e., the climbing gym) this past weekend.

There isn't actually anything wrong with Oasis; the fault, as they say, lies with me. I hadn't been climbing for a few weeks — the violent cough from April did a number on one of my intercostal muscles, which had to heal — and, upon my return on Saturday, we found that my harness no longer actually fits. It fit well enough to climb easy top-rope routes, but was close enough to my hips that it might have been dangerous if I ever flipped over. (Note: I have never flipped over. In my entire climbing experience I have only ever seen one person — maybe two — flip entirely over, and both of those were people who caught a foot on the rope while leading a route. Flipping over is not a huge concern.)

So I climbed, taking it easy, testing my muscles — 5.8s and under. I'd lost quite a bit of strength during my time off and, as Pd pointed out, I'm climbing a lot farther away from the wall right now, which is taxing my upper arms in ways I'm not necessarily used to. Anyway, there I was, on an incredibly easy climb, when the route asked me to reach out a foot or two above my head to the next hold.

And I couldn't.

Not because I lacked the strength, or the balance. Not because it was too high. No, it was because such a move requires one to almost shimmy against the wall — imagine: when you reach for something, you usually lean in as close as you can — and there was a very positive (read: sticky-outy) hold around my abdomen area ... and I couldn't get my baby belly over it. Seriously.

So I decided that that was a definite sign from the universe that maybe I shouldn't be climbing any more. (Although I maintain that harder climbs don't generally have sticky-outy holds, so really it would have been fine.)

We took a picture of me in my climbing gear, in which I look hilarious(ly humongous), and then I handed my harness over to a friend of ours, who has just recently started climbing and is about my size. I mean, I'm not going to be using it anyway, not for another four months plus, and she had been renting one of those awful and ludicrously oversized ones from the gym ... but still, it cost me something to do that. Couple that with the fact that I caved on Friday and went maternity-clothes shopping — I had hoped to be able to coast along on expandable sundresses for a little while, but this wretchedly cold and wet spring put paid to that — and I've kind of been feeling like a walrus. A walrus with a sense of humour, mind, but still.

We've also started demolishing the sunroom, and now it and the den are a big mess. (By "we," I really mean Pd. Technically, I napped.) So I couldn't find the USB cable for my camera this morning, and can't post that picture — although, honestly, in the sober light of day, I'm not sure if it's for public consumption, really. I think maybe I still want some public sense of plausible deniability: you know, I am big, but not that big.

shh. reading in progress.

I've been on a reading jag. If you average my reading over a year (or whatever), it's a reasonably decent but not excessive amount; the thing is, though, that my reading tends to be very sporadic. I will got for weeks or months being perfectly content to read the same thing over and over, or to read only magazines and not books, but then I will get on a kick when I read three or four different things at once. I don't mind this — I think I enjoy books more on these flights than when I'm simply plodding along — the problem is that this particular one was unanticipated. And started after I had already begun packing up the library in anticipation of the Reno 2.0.

The room used to look like this, more or less:




(I realised halfway through my packing that I should have taken a picture; these are from last year, when I was setting up the room, so the boxes you see are actually the result of unpacking. It's roughly accurate, though.)

Anyway, as you can see: the majority of my books were in this room. I'm not completely unknown to myself, though — I had put away several books so that I would have something to read during the next month or two. The problem is that I was still on the slow road when I did this, and so in the last two weeks I have gone through almost all of the books I had set aside: Dracula; The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel; At Large and At Small (several times) — Anne Fadiman's book of essays; Anna Pavord's book of gardening columns, The Curious Gardener, also several times; Buying In, by Rob Walker; Jane Eyre, and I've started on The Museum of the Missing, about art crimes — that one is going much more slowly because it's too big for me to commute with, or snuggle on the sofa with; it lives next to my bed right now. (I had also put aside Pride and Prejudice — of course — but I'd reread it too recently for it to be enticing.)

Of course there are two more bookshelves downstairs, with plenty of books in them — including my beloved European histories and books by Bill Bryson — but this pile was supposed to last me at least a month. I thought I was being so smart! And of course the books that I'm craving are the ones that are packed up.

This is why I will never be able to declutter my books. I mean, I do weed through them — Goodwill did a sweep of my neighbourhood in March or April, and I put out a whole box of books — but I can't get rid of books for which I don't have a scheduled rereading plan (in the next three months, or otherwise). I love rereading things, and it's enough for me to know that I will want to reread it, because as long as there's that, I know that I will, eventually. But man, these things take up a lot of space, so it's nice to have a partner who understands. (Pd is on a reading jag of his own: he's reading through Agatha Christie — all of Agatha Christie, alphabetically. But he has an e-Reader, so I can't even poach them after he's done.)

When we haven't been reading, we've been watching hockey, and while we've been watching hockey, I've been knitting this:


It will be a patchwork baby blanket made of mitered squares — nine squares to a big square (that's a stack of them above), and four such squares on each side — sixteen big squares in total, so 144 small squares, plus an eventual border. I've done the centre four, and five and a half of the edge squares, so I'm about halfway.

Looking at it now, all I can think is: working in the ends in on this thing is going to be epic.

on politics

One of the things I don't tend to write about is politics, even though I'm a bit of a political junkie. I have seen how divisive it is, how on the Internet "I disagree with you" instantly turns into "you're an idiot" and I don't like it. I have friends who thrive on that kind of confrontation, but I don't, so I try to stay out of the quagmire. I know what I think and believe, and I am not threatened by other people disagreeing with me — even if they seem to think that my unwillingness to engage in a written boxing match means otherwise. I do, however, find it aggravating, so I tend to disengage.

Last night, though. We lost the election. A wise person (many wise people) once said: the problem with democracy is that the people who don't agree with you get to vote, too. And it turned out that more people disagreed with me than precisely agreed. That happens. And you know ... the world goes on.

It's not that I am terribly happy about the Conservatives being in power. I was an environmentalist before I became a teenager, and I consider myself a radical feminist now. I became aware of politics while living in Mike Harris' Ontario. In university, I took part in demonstrations against NAFTA and the WTO. Throw in my strong belief in the idea that poverty is not a moral failing, and I'm pretty sure the Tories and I are fundamentally incompatible in every way.

I'm saying all this because I want to head off any accusations of secret Conservative sympathies after my next sentence. Which is: I don't think this election was a disaster of epic proportions, and I would like us to recover a sense of perspective. Would I much rather have had another outcome? Yes. Do I think that, as time goes on, I will be deeply unhappy about the road the Conservatives will take us down? Yes. In fact, I am sure that, sometime in the next four years, they will make me furiously angry time and time again, as life gets a little bit harder for the underprivileged, and a little easier for the privileged, and it becomes clear that lower taxes cannot compensate for the loss of services and human goodwill. And I think that it's a shame that Canada will lose a little more of its international lustre.

But on the other hand: will the seas rise and the locusts fall? Will there be famine, riots, "Canada for Canadians" and mass deportations? No. Will we still be lucky to live here after Harper's term? Yes. We might feel a little less lucky, perhaps. But even just a little bit of that kind of luck, the luck that made us citizens in a wealthy, developed country in the 21st century, goes a long way.

It's that luck, for instance, that gives us this window of time to figure out how to work harder, how to work better, so that, in the next election, more Canadian voters will agree with us, rather than disagree. Because that's how democracy works.

brightening up a dreary day

The radio told me this morning that it's been a horrendously wet spring, and that, in general, spring has been delayed for two weeks this year. And that it's raining again.

But Saturday was lovely, and the tulips are blooming. I think I'm going to look at this picture once for every time I look out at the rain outside, just to keep things even.

Also? I discovered this weekend that the giant shrubs that grow like weeds in our front yard is not rosemary. It's lavender.

This gardening thing, it's a learning process.