pants, socks, tea, painkillers

I'm not going to shave for three days!

I'm not even going to bring my shaving kit. And when I say kit, I mean 'plastic bag containing one(1) overused razor, one(1) nearly nonexistent crescent sliver of shaving soap, and one(1) damp shaving brush.'

Three days in Halfmoon Bay, where I will test the accuracy of my internal map of the little communities that are strung out along the Sunshine Coast like beads on a string. It's probably got quite distorted since I did taxes there for a season five years ago. That's okay; it's pretty distorted up there in brainland in general.

Speaking of memory, read some gorgeous memory stories at: www.livejournal.com/users/lemon_pickle by a grumpy bastard.

Does anyone else still go places looking for the Magic Castle? Not the clubhouse of the Academy of Magic Arts in Hollywood (www.magiccastle.com), but the locus of all your childhood fantasies of Place? Last night I was thinking about the central location (convenient access by bus, car, or fantasy) the Shopping Mall has occupied in my personal iconography.

For years, I've avoided them. Much like beef. Two things an ActIvisT just didn't want to cope with. Lately, in my struggle with Vancouver's tendency, shopping-wise, to be like a huge overstuffed closet, full of things, but never the thing you want when you want it, I've been going to the Mall.

Again, I'd have to say I kind of liked it, the first two times. I found sparkly things. I was happy. I went again the other day, and suddenly the Magic Castle had gone-- it was just a big building full of crap and teenagers. The same thing happened at IKEA. (But it was a big building full of yuppies, children, and still pretty neat furniture.)

I know what you're saying: this magic you crave -- maybe you should look to Nature! Yeah, no. I checked.

C. has gone. Sigh. (Oddly, lemon_pickle and I both had out-of-town guests on the same day, both named C. That's more impressive if you know that all the letters after the C. were also the same.) She left behind three 1/2-litre containers of gelato, two containers of meat candy, and her phone recharger. We posted the recharger express and ate everything else.

What is meat candy, you ask? It is a take-out container full of the Dry Ginger Beef from The Great Wok on Fourth. I was eating great tracts of these little chewy curlicues of ginger goodness, thinking, why am I enjoying this so much? I eat beef maybe once a year. I realized it was because this was effectively crystallized beef, in an 1/8" layer of sugar.

Man, it was good.

The last time I ate beef was at the Peretz School anniversary dinner, where they served a very good brisket. I think, although I've never really enjoyed hamburgers, that I actually quite like the taste of beef. Just in time for BSE. Which is sort of a relief, since there are so many reasons not to eat of the meat of the cow.

The gelato, and I know you've been waiting impatiently for paragraphs to read this, was flavoured thusly: coconut-chocolate-flake, chocolate-raspberry-truffle, and mango-candied-ginger. Yes. It was as good as it sounds. It was BETTER.

Did you know that the edge of your mouth, where your beautiful smile meets your lovely cheek, is called the vermillion border? I like that more than I can say. Normally I am irritated by arty people using metaphors from science that they don't really understand to describe (mostly) relationships, but I might have to use this one.

Speaking of science, check this show out (found it websurfing, but it doesn't seem to show in my area):  http://www.pbs.org/weta/roughscience/series/

It does reek a little of Survivor-ist media tourism, but I *love* simple improvisational machinery. Especially when you can see things work. Just yesterday I was digging out a dracena from the front yard by wedging it with my shovel and thinking: ah, yes, the lever. My favorite simple machine.

Yes, we have been gardening. We went down the road to the shop with the Inexplicably Rude Proprietor and bought about twice as much as we intended to, which is remarkable restraint. I dug out the dead plants along the front of the yard, moved some rocks to create the general impression that there is an edge to the front, and planted a white spiraea (thunbergii) under the tree. Also planted a redcurrant in the row of Things that Will Eventually Be Large, We Hope, in front of the house, and a columbine in the sort of a flower bed. And there are still several extremely pretty things to get into the ground.

Ok, so, fine, Nature, pretty good really.

I was worried that my improvisational approach to garden design would mean that our garden would be incoherent, but my co-conspirator says that that's exactly the strategy they used at his old place, and it had one of the greatest gardens I've ever seen. So. Hurrah for impulse gardening.

Farewell for three days. We are staying with my parents-in-almost-a-law. A little man in my head is dancing, dancing, dancing down the crooked roads of I Need a Vacation.

-rf

*Oh, if I sent you a postcard story, and you happen to know about it, can you alert me that you received it, or didn't? (You should have got it by now.) Even if you hated it, just say, "Yes, it came, curse the day." Some of my postage may have been insufficient (last year's stamps) and if you don't tell me you got it, I'll never know. And I'll always wonder. And brood.