Home, sweet home

Our plane landed in Toronto at 11:30 yesterday evening, and we arrived back in Montreal just under 24 hours later.

Although more detailed posts will follow, I just wanted to start out by saying that it's good to be home. In the past 24 hours I have:

- drunk numerable glasses of unadulterated tap water, and used it to brush my teeth;
- eaten produce that had not been soaked for 20 minutes in a disinfectant solution;
- carried on a whole conversation with a perfect stranger in a language I actually speak;
- showered in water that did not smell of sulfur;
- flushed my used toilet paper directly down the toilet, instead of leaving it in a pail.

And it's been very nice.

I don't want any of that to give the impression that I didn't enjoy Guatemala. Quite the contrary, it was fun, relaxing, exciting at times, and overall an excellent experience. I saw, tasted, and experience many new things, and developed at least two new skills of which I am very proud. I also met more of Dave's family and cuddled with some very cute dogs.

I think two weeks was the perfect length for this vacation. I wasn't sick of Guatemala when we left, but I am definitely happy to be home, and looking forward to getting back to work.

Yippee!

Vacating

I'll be in Guatemala for the next two weeks, and won't have internet access for most, if not all, of that time.

If I don't respond to emails, comment on blogs, or post here, that's why.

I'm excited and nervous as hell, and just hoping my allergies are better there than they are here (I would say they can't be worse, but experience tells me that's just not true). I'll post pictures and exciting stories when I get home.

Cleanliness is next to...

Flohdot is living with me for the next couple of weeks. She got here late Monday night, and the first thing she did Tuesday morning was start helping me clean.

We decluttered together, then she vacuumed the bajeezus out of the place and decluttered some more while I was working. She also bought groceries and made me dinner and today I mopped.

Floh stated reason for doing this was that she'd just spent two months in Costa Rica, where her parents have maids, and she was itching to do some housework, but we both know that the real reason was that she couldn't stand to live in the disaster area I had allowed my apartment to become.

Regardless of the reasons, the place now looks great. Not perfect, but much better than it was.

Danke vielmal, Flöchen. Ich habe dich viele Liebe.

---

Also,

Rain! Sweet rain! My vegetable garden can grow, the heat can break...
Oh, how I love the rain.

Grandad

I dreamed of my maternal grandfather last night.
In my dream I was still in bed, with my sister, in the basement of my parents' house. My mother came downstairs and told me that grandad was visiting. She told me that he was going to drive her to work, but that if I got up I could see him once he got back.

After she left I got up. I was cold, but I only wrapped myself in a sarong, and I went out to the garage to wait for him. Before long he arrived. I watched him turning the steering wheel as he manuevered the car into the garage. He got out of the car and said "Hello, dear" just like he always did. I said hello back and got up to hug him. I commented to him that he hadn't visited us in several years, and he said yes.

His arms had strength as he wrapped them around me, and in my arms he felt fuller than he used to. He was thin, he always has been, but he didn't feel like he'd snap in half if I hugged him too hard. He told me I looked tired and asked if I'd like a cup of coffee. I said yes. We both headed back into the house, him to the kitchen to make coffee and me to the basement to get dressed.

Then my alarm went off and I started to wake up for real. I put a shirt on and headed for the kitchen. Still half asleep, I half expected grandad to be there with coffee for me, and eggs poaching on the stove.

Once I reached my kitchen the sight of it woke me up the rest of the way. It wasn't my parents' kitchen in Toronto, it was my own kitchen in my apartment in Montreal. And then I remembered. I remembered why the strength of his arms had surprised me, why the fullness of his shoulders had seemed so odd.

I remembered why it's been so long since I've seen him.

It was a good dream, though, and I feel more peaceful than sad. It was nice to have one more chance to say goodbye.

Wanna See a Wet Pussy?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Again via Bitch Ph.D., the flying cats take a bath.

All together now: Awwwwwwwwww.

Doing 43 Things

Dave pointed me to the 43 Things website today. It's kind of a cool concept, you create a list of up to 43 goals, not day to day goals like doing dishes, but bigger goals, like finishing a degree or eating better, and then you can be in touch with other people with the same or similar goals, and you can post entries about how the goal is going, and you can check it off with a sense of accomplishment once you've done it. I'm very excited. These are my goals:

1. learn to drive


2. become a paramedic


3. meditate daily


4. eat well


5. get in shape


6. live simply


7. have a farm


8. live off the grid


9. grow my own food


10. eat organic food only


11. go hang-gliding


12. see the aurora borealis


13. hike from the Italian Dolomites to the Austrian alps


14. visit a 3rd world country


15. save a life


16. speak French fluently


17. spin my own yarn

What do you want to do?

I'm Bad At the Cool-Down Period

I've dealt with it twice today. Over the course of yesterday and today, Dave and I made Mushroom and Spinach Stuffed Zucchini from the Low-Fat Moosewood Cookbook. We quadrupled the recipe so that there would be enough for both of us to eat them for lunch all week. Once they came out of the oven this afternoon I had to leave the room and fool myself into thinking I was busy so I wouldn't eat our lunches right away.

Then, this evening, since I have a houseguest coming tomorrow and should be cleaning the apartment, I decided to bake. I made Tracy Jorge's Oatmeal Raisin Bars. They just came out of the oven and they're sitting on the stovetop, cooling. I'm *terrible* at this moment in baking. I hate it every single time I bake. I know that if I don't wait for them to cool properly they won't hold together when I cut them into bars. I know that I'll just burn myself if I try to eat or cut them now. I know that they'll still be yummy and warm, but not scalding, if I can just wait a little bit. But it's SO HARD! The whole apartment smells like yummy and the batter was SOO GOOOD.

These bars are basically butter and sugar with enough oats and flour to hold them together. They use brown and raw cane sugars, rather than white sugar, and I'm kind of curious how that will taste and what kind of difference it will make.

You can listen to the oatmeal rasin bar recipe here or subscribe to The Vegan Cooking School's podcast here.

EDIT/UPDATE: I just wanted to say that creating this post took care of the cooldown period for me, and now I'm eating a bar and it's delicious. (Okay, so I didn't wait quite long enough, since it fell apart as I was taking it out of the pan, but still. I didn't burn myself!)
I also wanted to let you know that the baking time Jorge gives in her podcast (30 - 40 minutes) is way too long. I took these out after 20 minutes and they're already starting to get crispy at the edges.


(Cross-posted at Knife-Wielding Feminists)

Flying Cats!!

Bitch. PhD. links to this amazing slideshow on Flickr

The images are all copyrighted, so I can't show you one here, but Bitch has one on her blog.

Food is good

I just posted on Knife-Wielding Feminists for the first time in months! Frog has been getting on all our cases about not posting there enough, so there have been a few updates lately.

Go read it.

The thing about abortion

The thing about abortion is that it's not just about the zygote/embryo/fetus (henceforth abbreviated to zef). There's a whole nother human being involved in the equation.

Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Nick Kiddle of Alas, A Blog have written excellent posts recently, reminding us of this fact.

Nick Kiddle's post (which I can' t quote from directly because Alas appears to be down) reminds us that pregnancy isn't a passive state that leaves a woman unchanged except for the knowledge that there's a zef inside of her. Pregnancy, Kiddle reminds us, is a process. One that often has enormous, almost devastating, consequences on the body of the pregnant woman. Pregnancy causes permanent changes to your body. It causes you to go through nine months of hormonal fluctuation that can lead to nausea, drastic mood swings, exhaustion, soreness, headaches, and swelling of various body parts, among other things. Giving birth can be an extremely traumatic event. Complications at any stage can lead to anything from miscarriage, to a requirement of bed rest, to the death of the woman.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't want to over-medicalise or pathologise the process of being pregnant here. Pregnancy is an entirely natural process that women have been doing successfully for millenia. What I'm trying to emphasise here is how involved a process it is, and how profound an effect it can have. Many people in the enforced-childbirth camp would have us believe that pregnancy is not a process. That the only thing required to maintain a pregnancy is to not abort it. That a woman's right to bodily autonomy doesn't trump the zef's right to exist is only a valid argument if you don't see the pregnancy as particularly infringing on that autonomy. But it does.

Would men in the enforced-childbirth camp support a legal requirement to give up a kidney, or donate bone marrow, or even blood, for everyone who qualified, and whose body parts were needed by someone else? Should women who aren't already pregnant be required to undergo implantation of excess zygotes produced in vitro?

The fact is that every person should have veto power, up to the last possible moment, for anything that might infringe on their autonomy. Anything from playing contact sports to having sex to being pregnant to having surgery. Would we claim that a person who has agreed to donate a kidney should be legally forbidden from changing their mind? Even if without that kidney someone else would surely die?

So why would we treat pregnant women any differently?

Snails

Snails make good pets. They're unobtrusive, quiet and very low maintenance. They need food and water a couple times a week, and a clean tank and new cuttlefish bone every month or so, and that's about it. Snails are also very low cost pets. Once you've got the snails (which you should be able to do for free or close to it, see my third paragraph) and the tank (mine came to just under 60$ all told for a tank big enough to hold 2 - 4 large snails plus corrugated plastic signs as a lid) they're almost free. They eat vegetable table scraps (they're especially fond of cucumber and zucchini), and the cuttlefish bones and moss they live on are dirt cheap.

Snails are fascinating creatures, too. You can see their muscles expand and contract as they move, and if the tank you keep them in is transparent (highly recommended) you can see the ripples on their bellies as they climb the walls. Their eyestalks are cute as anything, and they make a neat little scraping sound when the eat. I like it best when my snails hang upside down. It seems so contrary.

There are only two problems with snails. One is that they're kind of boring. If you want a pet that will interact with you, recognise you, and play with you, snails are probably not the best bet. This also means that it can be easy to forget about them and forget to feed them. Which is why it's good that they only need food every couple of days. The second problem is that snails are horny little bastards. They reproduce like *crazy* and they make tens of eggs in one clutch. It can be hard to unload the little ones too, because not everyone wants snails as pets. This is why it can be easy to get them for free, though. Anyone who has more than one snail living in the same tank is probably desparate to get rid of the offspring, and will pay you to take them away. This is even more problematic because snails are hermaphroditic, so all it takes is two.

The snails that I have are Giant African Land Snails and are illegal in the USA because they're an introduced species that could wreak all sorts of havoc on the ecosystem. This means that when my snails do reproduce I can't just release the offspring into the wild. Generally I take care of the problem by either crushing or freezing the eggs and then throwing them out. I feel kind of callous for doing this but, well, it's either them or my ecosystem, and I choose my ecosystem. What can I say?

New Blog

I'm starting up a new blog because LJ is starting to get on my nerves. Right now I'm creating this post so that I can see how it looks and change the template around a bit.