$#@%^&@!

our fair city has brought in a new waste management system, which sees homeowners paying variable taxes based on the amount of trash that they put out--i think i may have reported on this a while back. i wholeheartedly support this, and wish the new program every success. it makes lots of sense to me...if you can recycle, compost and otherwise reduce your household waste, then you shouldn't have to pay the same taxes as someone who can't bring themselves to sort their recyclables.

we have been quite smugly putting out a couple of small plastic grocery bags of trash in our tiny garbage bin every couple of weeks...we once went a month without having our garbage bin emptied because we didn't consider it full enough to justify having the garbage truck idling in front of our house during collection.

i suppose instead of being self-satisfied and complacent we should have been chaining our garbage bin to our porch and writing our address on it in big sharpie pen, and realized that we are surrounded by people who create so much garbage that they have to GO AND STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S GARBAGE BIN in order to have properly presented garbage for the city to collect. jesus. we are now going to have to pay our fair city $50 for a new garbage bin. garbage put out in anything but an approved, registered bin does not get collected.

this is a test of my endorsement of the whole program, and of my beloved mayor miller. i don't actually know much about the man, and i do know many people who say things like 'feh, that miller, he's a bum'. i can't even recall if i voted for him, but i do like him and the things he is trying to do to make our city better. the garbage plan is an excellent one, but suffers from the growing pains associated with any kind of transition. i bet when this idea was being passed around nobody thought of a way to deal with mass bin thefts. i don't even really mind the $50 fee for the bin--apparently tons of these are being stolen all over the city, and well, someone has to pay for the production and delivery of them, right? i do sincerely hope someone at city hall figures out how to not punish people for losing their bins to theft. it was my hope that if they knew we were simply replacing a stolen tiny bin instead of upsizing to a bigger one that they would offer us a free replacement, but not dice. i can't say i blame them, really.

nonetheless, i am still pretty ticked off at this, and wish the person who stole our bin (but so thoughtfully removed the bag of garbage that was in it and left it under our porch, along with a few empty beer boxes) a bad case of bedbugs and a guilty conscience. (i also wish this on my neighbour john, and my boss at the dog food factory, for reasons that i may go into some other time). may all of them sleep badly tonight! grr.

the year of ten thousand snowmen

recently, while listening to christmas music at home one night (yes, this has already started in at the monkey house) i came to the conclusion that frosty the snowman really had the right idea; even though in the animated tv show he comes across as a bit of a witless buffoon, he has a good attitude. he knows his days are numbered (as are ours, every one of us) but he's determined to live out his days as happily as he can, rather than waste time being miserable about his inevitable melting. it seems very self-actualized and enlightened.


i remember in my youth flipping through national geographic and seeing photographs of Qin's terra cotta army and being blown away by the sheer number of them. in my more recent years, as a budding peacenik and treehugger, i've decided that i should embark on the zen-like practice of building my own army, but instead of an army of soldiers to carry out soldierly duties (ie killing, looting, and otherwise oppressing), it should be an army of ten thousand snowmen to bring peace and the sheer therapeutic joy of snowplay to the world.

i admit, ten thousand is a bit ambitious, but hey, if you're going to dream, you should dream big! last year i managed nineteen snowmen ranging from actual snow snowmen to this beautiful sculpted foam ninja snowman who is currently at large somewhere in my office.

i invite any and all snowman makers to help me in my quest. if anyone is interested in sharing pictures of their snowmen , I will be more than happy to set up a picassa web album of our growing population.

so far, this year's tally is four snowmen (not bad, considering we've only had one real snowfall). here's a couple of them, snowmeo and juliet, the famous starcrossed lovers. (juliet is leaning down from her balcony and gazing at the imploring figure of her man--the thing that looks like a ghost with a happy face in the background is the work of mother nature and had nothing to do with me.)

best wishes of the season, and happy snowplaying!

ah, procrastination!

in a rather lame and transparent attempt to put off cleaning the bathroom, i've decided to try to get some more pictures posted here. these are from my summer/fall adventures.


this is a bee stinger, with the guts attached. we've all heard that when a bee stings someone it disembowels itself, yes? this is true. they sometimes trail their innards around as they continue to fly around after they've stung. i got stung twice, once in the ear (it was un-fun). poor little bees.


we planted some wilted, sprouting ginger in our garden, then forgot about it. look at what eventually got dug up! it was tasty. this also works if you throw your sprouting ginger ends in a flower pot.





fall was painting season. we painted and painted and painted. we got sick enough of that vile puce non-colour that was on the walls, and put lots of color in our home. it actually feels like people live here now! the pumpkin orange bathroom and the green pepper living room do so much more to soothe the soul than dusty rose and beige-ish.

ok, i've successfully evaded the bathroom cleaning for 8 hours now...time to go!

miscellanea

it's a day off today, remembrance day is a federal holiday. i observed a moment of silence at 11:00, but only because it was a continuation of the 5 hours of silence that i'm still observing now. i've spent some time happily (and quietly!) futzing around the house--moving stuff from the porch, feeding the birds, reading honey recipes--it's a nice day off, as days off are so often wont to be.

i've gotten out of the blogging thing, same goes for facebok. dunno why. i've been keeping busy, probably alot busier than in previous years. baking, composting, jam and jelly making, honey bottling, painting and fiddling in the garden have kept me pretty occupied (although i admit to spending many many hours playing video games ;) )

anyway, time to run...more to come (eventually...)

lament for two wasps (or enlightenment through profound intoxication)

5:00 a.m: two hours after returning from the wedding reception, and i'm wide awake, heart pounding, mind racing, still smelling of campfire and trembling from the cold while the lump in the futon gently erodes my spine with every toss and turn.

my poor addled brain, floundering in its own murky depths in search of sleep, instead inexplicably presents me with a weeks-old memory of wasps, and the tears begin to trickle.

*****

it's a hot sunny mid-august day in the beeyard, perfect for doing our customary maintenance and hive inspections. our bee hives are relatively healthy and robust, but we're always on the watch for signs of intruders who try to rob the hives. at the third hive we see them. wasps. again.
in a strong hive, the workers can defend their home quite capably against the odd wasp or wax moth, or even mice, by stinging or by cooking the intruder with the combined body temperature of many bees clustered around it, but take a bit of work and our bees have already encountered so many challenges this year...

"fuck off," i whisper to the wasps, quite conversationally. "crunch!" they say, and "craaackle" as they meet the business end of my hive tool. i frown at the blobby brown mess of legs and exoskeleton, and wander off to sit in the long grass, with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction that mounts slowly for weeks before being resolved.

*****

it was a lovely wedding, if you ask me. sort of a cirque de soleil of weddings, with something for everyone. vows exchanged under the shade tree in the backyard, a bouncy castle for the kiddies, hold'em poker for the grandparents and assorted elderlies, a popcorn vending cart, many cows worth of bbq'd steaks, a fire pit, lots of good company and some good old Regina style hospitality.

while poker players were whooping it up in the garage and the old friends gathered 'round the fire to reminisce, i found myself talking to a number of fascinating and brilliant people. the man who i'd found shouting at byron about different types of peppers calmly shared with me his philosophy for living a good life, the photographer let me look at his photos and ask questions about what he sees and learns about people when he photographs them, Don with the "I got dumped on Jerry Springer" shirt waxed sentimental about family and friends, and Jeff lent an air of sanity to my latest bout of save-the-world-before-the-apocalypse musings.

all the excitement and new people and mind-expansion and fresh prairie air must've jogged some gears into motion; by the time i finally fell asleep in an embarassing position with the bedroom door wide open to the high-traffic hallway, i'd realized why the killing of the wasps had upset me so much.

*****

i try to be a friend to nature. weeding is done by hand, rainwater is collected and used in the garden. vegetable waste is composted with great enthusiasm and helps our soil grow healthy plants. we have mice in the house? we live trap 'em and drive them to the park for relocation. spiders, centipedes, moths, pillbugs and other crawlies get removed to the back yard, and even slugs find a new home in the generation ship known as the neighbour's backyard. as i like to point out, we're all just trying to live, right? the slugs and i have different ideas about what the garden needs--they think it needs slugs to lick great gaping holes in the foliage, i disagree. on a small scale like this it's nothing to kill anybody over.

the thing that's bothered me about the wasps is that i killed them out of malice. if they were a big problem in our hives we'd be taking serious steps to handle them, but the fact is they're only a nuisance at this point. i've let my sympathy for the bees sway me from my "everybody's just trying to live" belief, leading me to feel justified in tampering with an environment that's already got a built-in control mechanism, and it doesn't feel good or right. may i never again need the visceral squelch as a critter's life is extinguished to remind me of how bad malice feels.

the gals get ready to kick some wasp ass

It's been a busy summer...

and i haven't felt much like blogging. sorry. i've spent many many hours in the garden and with the bees and other critters, have a look: http://picasaweb.google.com/MyLittlePatchOfThePlanet/BugsRBeautiful

gigo

i've just returned from an evening at foodshare, where i'm a volunteer. i normally put in some quiet,pensive and labour-intensive time in the compost yard, but tonight the garden crew were harvesting and cleaning up the vegetable garden and holding a potluck, so i brought some rhubarb sqauares and lent a hand. i got to eat some pretty good food and meet some pretty interesting people.

afterwards, i had to hurry on over to my pickup point for my good food box, which i get from foodshare for my volunteer efforts. i love this in theory. it's a symbiotic relationship between the organization, the volunteer and the local produce growers. in practice, though, this usually ends up being more beneficial to my compost bin (and, ultimately, my garden) than it is for me, as i end up not eating much of my bounty. why? i don't have any particular answer.

there's a lot of good stuff in the box, and i should be eating it instead of buying lunch at work. my self-imposed challenge, then, is to feed myself at every meal from my good food box. we've got cantaloupe, carrots, tomatoes, bananas, cukes, zukes, cherries, onions, apples, lettuce, broccoli and celery. let's see what i end up having to compost out of all of this (my money's on the celery).