things i learned today

today i learned that my hero of the day is kardinal offishall. i’ve never bought one of his albums and am not a fan (he just doesn’t do the type of music i appreciate) but i read an interview with him where he said he’d never attend another juno awards again and gave the reasons why. read it. it’s good.

i decided to work from home today – it’s the best thing about working giving you a laptop. however, while working at home i’ve discovered that either the wireless router is beginning to cack out (which i don’t think is the case) or that the outlet i’ve plugged the thing into isn’t great. several times it turned itself off on it’s own. so annoying to have to get up, unplug it, wait a few moments, plug it back in, turn the modem off and wait for the whole works to reboot itself. *whine* technology will be the death of us. or at least of me. i’d hate to speak for you.

what else did i learn today? that when lightening hits right above your house – that also plays havoc with the router.

i learned that the downstairs neighbour has reddish-brownish hair. he knocked on the door and gave me an envelope with money in it. not randomly or anything – he’s paying for the use of the storage shed in the back. it’s a really cute brick building that was once a homing pigeon loft (coop? covey? dovecote?) and in more recent years, a car garage. the house my apartment is in was built in 1905. more than 100 years old… i don’t know enough about renovating older homes, but i think that through the years, the people renovating either kept original elements (fireplace mantle, wooden doors with skeleton key locks, mouldings and trim) or did a good job at restoring things.

i learned that 5 cups of coffee keep me in the bathroom most of the day. actually, i didn’t just learn that – i’ve known it for quite sometime now!

i learned that there are ignorant people out there. (knew this too, but still). some idiots with nothing better to do decided to knock over more than 200 hundred tombstones in a cemetery in toronto’s west end. the images on the news are really quite disturubing. why would someone do this?

and i also learned that the ttc monthly metropass is going up again. city council approved the hike last week and wasting no time, the ttc put it into play this past weekend. just in time for my april pass to be more money. lovely. it now costs 99.75 for a monthly pass. wow. still cheaper than a car – but i don’t see the service getting any better!

i hope that i learn less tomorrow. *wink*

[music | editors, “bullets”]

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return of golb

yeah, i know, probably a million other fallen bloggers have used that subject line before i have…. do i look concerned? for the record, i don’t, i kind of look bored and disinterested. but it may only be the juno awards i just sat through.

why did i sit thought it, i’m not sure – other than it’s the industry i work in and that i haven’t missed watching (or being at) one since i was about 10 years old. it’s kinda a thing i do. however, the show and awards themselves seem to have become increasingly out of touch with music. it’s much more about the politics of the labels and now with CTV televising the damn thing – it’s much more about the 3 or 4 acts that CTV decides to shove down our throats (not the least of which are from camp canadian idol). whatever, i actually worked through the awards and left it as an annoying backdrop.

one last thing… did the black eyed peas become canadian citizens and i just didn’t notice it? why the hell else would they perform at evey canadian event over the last year? (mmva’s, the grey cup and now the junos). strange and somewhat annoying. it’s almost like how CTV likes to slut it up with the rolling stones and somehow managed to include a pre-recorded clip from them this year.

for the past while, my cat raja graced this page… he still does, but you have to scroll down further. lots has happened since he left us. another kitten has been adopted. we adopted a female kitten, but as she’s growing, she developing quite a bit of gear in the back. i think our she is a he. and she’s named after a goddess – artemis. if she really is a boy, we’ll be calling him neptune. either way – the kitten is cute.

zelda and neptune/artemis in the new apartment

zelda in the old apartment… the new place has NO carpeting – rejoice!

artemis/neptune in box-world (aka my new place)

hat else is new… i’ve moved to a new apartment in a cooler location that i’ve lived for a few years (or ever, actually). it’s a big place and now there are still boxes galore kicking about. boxes and not enough furniture. you know how it goes. best bit… it has a dishwasher. how slothy is it to be able to just rinse dishes and throw them in a box under the counter and not have to see/deal with the dishes until they’re clean. quite slothy.

a little side-story about the whole needing to move because i was evicted from the old place. we were told that “tom will be using the apartment”. logically, the assumption was made that the landlording-overlords were splitting up and the male portion was moving out. well, guess again. the scummy liars that they are – they evicted us (not quite legally, truth be told) to move tom’s business into my old apartment. you see, tom runs a little record label and it all appearances seem to indicate that he can’t pay rent at his business location anymore. so they evicted me and my roomie for their stupid little record label. not that i’m bitter or anything – but if anyone out there was thinking of supporting holly cole or kim mitchell – don’t. you’ll just be supporting the enemy. jerks.

i still have a job… it’s quite nice to have that security. i’m bored to tears most days there – but it’s a start. for the first month i was actually very entertained. i was able to come up with a project plan, content sketch and site map for the re-vamping of the company’s website. the site hasn’t had a new design for more than 8 years (i’m certain) and badly needs it. other than that – my job has been pretty dull. it’s ok. they pay me. and i have a work laptop. could be worse.

lots and lots of other things have happened – some of them even interesting – but this is what happens when you don’t blog every day – you forget the stuff!

here’s hoping i’m back sooner than the autumn!

[music | stellastarr*, “my coco”]

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raja-bean

raja at his regal best

i can’t believe that only 6 months from the time we lost our dear cat nes, that we have now lost her big brother and living teddy bear, raja.

we were with him today as the vet helped him ease into the long catnap. may he be basking in eternal sunbeams tonight. with great piles of cat nip and the company of his other cat family – nes and boris.

beanie-baby, i miss you. thank you.

sporting one of his, ‘i’m so much better than you’ expressions

ready for your extreme close-up?

chillin on the sofa

no one is pround of this shot – but it just had to be included! raja in his rolly-polly prime

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a day in death valley

as promised, i ended up dragging my dad to death valley. we both love, love, loved the trip – even though it took the entire day to get there and back. it ended up being a 14.5 hour trip in the car. i got up at 5:00am and we hit the road by 6:20am and got back in the house by 9:00pm. there were a couple of walks to sites within the park that i wanted to do – but realistically, we just did not have the time. as much as i am a city girl, i am a nature-lover at heart and i am always ever-so-happy to explore areas i’ve never been before. so, i took the chance to wring as much nature as i could out of this inhospitable desert.

a little primer on death valley : it is the lowest point in the western hemisphere (282 feet below sea level). it is also one of the hottest places on earth. in the summer, temperatures routinely hit 120F (no idea what it is in celsius, but damn, doesn’t 120F sound hot????) with the ground temperature once being measured at 201F. urgh. basically – you can die here. that message was probably the most advertised in park information. you can die here and many have before you.

the park that holds death valley is also the largest park in america and it apparently got it’s name from some gold prospectors in 1849. seems they tried to take a shortcut through the desert to make it to the gold rush that was happening on california’s coast. needless to say, their shortcut didn’t end up being a good bet. hence the name.

as always, pictures tell a better story than i…. so….. keep on looking down…

here we are with the devil’s golf course (a rock salt field. you wouldn’t belive how hard and sharp and hurty salt can be).

if you turn around at the devil’s golf course you will see this flat field of salt, doing it’s best snow imitation.

these are some incredible red hills. they look spray painted – but they’re not.

this is the artist’s palette. unfortunatley, the camera didn’t capture the amazing colours – we have reds, yellows, greens, turquoise, violet, mauve, chocolate and gold all in this one group of stone.

these formations were seen at one of the many look-out points in the park. stunning in person and pretty cool here too!

just to prove that there are living things in the valley i thought i’d include a few things that aren’t rock or mineral. i saw this little lizard during one of my mini-walks. he was pretty good at staying as still as the stone he stood on. these yellow flowers (they’re called ‘golden daisy’, believe the name or not) are just starting to bloom throughout the park. and finally, no visit to death valley would be complete without seeing one of the major scavenger birds, the raven.

[music | the doors, “roadhouse blues”]

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a canadian in california

it’s true… i am a canadian through and through. things i miss are little, but meaningful…

i miss being able to buy tropicana juice in the charming faux milk carton that it comes in at home. here, it comes in a big ole jug. no charm what-so-ever.

i miss good cheddar. the brand-name stuff here is practically worse than the no-name stuff you can buy at price chopper.

i miss celsius temperatures. i never know what the bleeding temperature is here. 75F. what the fuck is 75F? argh. i am left with no other option than asking my parents to convert the temperature into something that makes sense to me. fyi, 75F is about 24C. not too freakin’ bad… 🙂

i miss cp24. when i visit alberta during the holidays, it is somehow comforting to be able to turn on the 24-hour toronto news network and know that you can be up to date on all the shootings and random moronic goings-on that make toronto my quirky little home. i feel oddly out of touch with toronto right now.

i miss seeing bottles with mL measurements instead of a bizarre mixture of fluid oz and pints. (1 pint & 0.9 fluid oz = 0.5 litre). why the american’s don’t just join the rest of the world and go metric… i do not know. i actually have some theories, but i don’t want to be kicked out of california before i come home on thursday…

i miss canadian accents! i can only guess it’s a canadian accent because absolutely no one down here doesn’t sound like they have a rampant american drawl. no one.

i miss the haughty cold manner of the folk at home. i miss being able to just scowl your way through the day without anyone acknowledging you. here everyone is just so damned friendly. don’t they know that there’s good scowling to be had?

there are good things here too….

you can buy starbucks beans in the grocery store.

they have salt and pepper flavoured chips (i thought you could only get those in the UK).

they have gorgeous palm trees, mountains, blue skies and wonderful swimming pools.

i am the youngest person in just about every place i go.

the l.a. times is a really great newspaper. the paper actually has journalisic articles and opinions – it really puts the toronto papers to shame.

the neighbours are so nice… when i mentioned i liked making fresh lemonade out of the lemons on the lemon trees, they began leaving bags of lemons on the patio table for me.

with that sort of treatment, who needs to scowl all of the time?

[music | david usher, “going home”]

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night divides the day

i really shouldn’t get as excited as i did over breakfast at international house of pancakes.(signed pics of ice cube on the wall!!) sadly, it insists on being called “ihop” now. *sigh* for the uninitiated, it’s a giant american chain of restaurants and it has yummy yummy pancakes and omelets. mmmm…. so far, it’s been the best food i’ve had when i’ve been out to “dine” in palm springs. there has just got to be better food in america than the dry and abused and salty eggplant parmesana i had at tony’s pasta mia (signed pics of sinatra on the wall!!), or the slimy veggie burger i had at coco’s. (no signed pics on the wall, what’s wrong with them, don’t they understand where they are located??)

a few days ago my dad and i piled in the rental suv and drove our asses off to get to a place called the salton sea. the website, if you go to it, is far more impressive than the damned sea is itself. it took several hours of driving though the desert to come to a smelly stagnant body of water with an insane salt content (25% more salty than ocean water). apparently there are many many birds that come to this lake. i saw a bunch of gulls. what else can i tell you… uhm… the water is red…. seriously, it’s red – i did not alter this picture.

the other thing i can tell you about the salton sea is that there were people camping there. why there? i do not know… it smelled, was hot and there was nothing much to see. and someone camping there once apparently does not care for president bush… this is a picture that i took in the loo. heehee. just so you know, i don’t make it a habbit to pull out the old digital in the washrooms of the world.

the next day was spent in a more picturesque location…. the living desert in palm desert. it has a mini-zoo with giraffe’s, cougars, zebra’s and scary wild african dogs. there was something just so primal about them. i felt an uncomfortable thrill deep in my core when i looked at them. everything about them screamed predator. they moved very quickly and seemed to have an economy of motion that would lend itself well to a killing attack. *shiver* then last night as i was falling asleep i heard wild coyotes howling – which of course made me a little afraid of the african wild dogs! i just held my jim morrison book tighter!

i have also talked my dad into making the 5 hour drive up to death valley. i have no idea what we will see there, but ever since i was a little girl, i loved the name death valley. probably because it had the word death in it and i was always a touch morbid – still am. monday morning i’ll be getting up at 5:00am and will be hauling my cookies several hours north. the thing i like about it the most is that my dad hasn’t been there yet either. and when we go places he’s been before he tends to want to re-create the last time he went (on the way to the salton sea, we stopped in a little dust-trap of a town called brawley, only because last time he went to the salton sea, he stopped in brawley. you get the picture.)

speaking of getting the picture – here’s the latest installment of my photo-travel-log.

the very scary african wild dog. it was staring over at the gate. like it was trying to reason a way out.

the exhibit had 3 giraffe’s and apparently we were lucky that these ones were so close to us. seems they like to hide behind some of the hills in their enclosure.

a huge part of the living desert was the cactus gardens… there were literally 100’s of different types of cacti.

a simulated “oasis” of giant california fan palms. these trees had trunks about 3 feet wide and grew quite tall. the stuff you see that looks very much like shaggy mammoth fur is actually old palm fronds – which provides a lot of shade for those seeking refuge from the hot desert sun.

final picture tonight is of a female mountain cougar. between she and me was a glass barrier. she was really quite beautiful – i had no idea cougars’ eyes bugged out quite so much.

[music | the doors, “love me two times”]

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the west is the best

so here i sit in palm springs. on an unsecured, un-password-protected, unknown wireless connection. heehee. guess i won’t be doing any banking from this connection, will i?

after yesterday’s panic for leaving for the airport on time, it was nice to be able to just sit on a couple of planes and think of nothing for several hours. nothing but the amazing and fascinating stephen davis biography of jim morrison that i’ve been reading. holy, unholy fascination. since beginning the book a few days ago, i have begun to become a doors fan. yes, me. a fan of the doors. after spending most of my life trying to avoid their music, i’m now downloading tracks from itunes at a frightening clip.

what a fucked up individual (jim, not me). he is reminding me a lot of kurt cobain. growing up when i did, i was much more aware of cobain’s music and his demon genius. i also have a copy of his published journals (sorry, kurt, i know how much you would of hated that) and i have to say that the absolute messed-up havoc that pushed cobain seems to have also pushed morrison. it’s hard to know which one was pushed harder or further.

i will say that it does seem that if people like kurt and jim didn’t actually end up creating enduring music and art that they’d some of the biggest losers ever. then again – maybe their torment and addictions and bad behaviour were necessary to birth their creations.

anyway – after the journey across north america, i was happy to end up in joshua tree national park today. it’s pretty big, pretty hot and literally full of joshua trees. the best part of the day was the search for “skull rock”. i found a trail with a big-ass arrow on it pointing in a direction. we began to walk down the trail, assuming that after 10 minutes or so, we’d come to the rock shaped like a skull. well, we walked and walked and then walked some more. it was some very beautiful desert terrain to be walking through, but there was still no damned skull rock. we actually got to a bit of a dead end and decided to turn around and go back the way we came. thinking we’d come across this goddamn rock on the way back. nope. we just missed it… or so we thought. instead, right beside the highway there was skull rock. literally 10 steps in from the road. plainly visible. actually, it was just to the left of the big-assed arrow i mentioned above. heehee. i think my dad was a little regretful of the long walk under the very hot sun. oh well… i loved it!

taken as the plane was coming in to palm springs. come to think of it – this could very well be joshua tree national park!

part of the formation imaginatively called “jumbo rocks”

the joshua tree forest – you literally could look to your left and see these strange and twisted trees for miles and miles and miles.

a classic image of a classic joshua tree. it’s a lot larger than you think it might be.

doesn’t this look like the hand of a giant who is trying to climb to the top of this hill? it wasn’t, just in case you were wondering…

the infamous (and obvious) skull rock.

[music | the doors, “the end”]

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can i tell you two things?

this is short but sweet as i’m tired as all-fuck.

1 – i got a full-time job. yey me. don’t ask me what the job is… i really have no idea at the moment.

2 – i am going to palm springs on tuesday, jan 24 and not coming back to toronto until feb 2nd. i am SO going to the joshua tree national park. and i will come home with a picture of me by a joshua tree… just as it’s decreed that every good u2 fan should do.

who knew that by the end of this week that not only would i score a great apartment – but that i would also score a job that will help me to actually PAY for said apartment. i didn’t know. that’s for certain.

k – going to sleep now.

yey me.

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page 118

i am reading alex garland‘s most recent work. the coma. it made me cry on the subway on my way home this afternoon. or maybe it was because the job that i was considered the “best candidate” for went to another person out of work place loyalty.

when will i not be “the outsider”? i thought all that gets sorted out after you leave highschool. guess not.

what’s the passage that had me fighting back sobs?

“Long grass and black windows. A bit of rope hanging from a tree that once held the swing, whose wooden board had rotted away. A front path, where moss grew over broken concrete and dandelions pushed through the cracks.”

i think i need to read cheerier material. and i probably need to be listening to cheerier music than depeche mode‘s mid-80’s singles. it is a question of trust, indeed.

[music | depeche mode, “strangelove”]

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living

still around… just really don’t have anything new to add to this space. work situation is still unresolved, however it’s getting stupider by the moment. i’m told i’m the best candidate but that they’re offering the position to a person who’s been at the company for eons to show loyalty. yey. i think 99.99% of companies out there don’t have any sort of demonstrable loyalty to their slaves, er employees. i somehow have managed to find the 00.01% of companies that actually seems to have some sort of bizarre loyalty to their long-time suffering staff.

that’s all fine and well – but still leaves me without. there is still a chance that the person won’t accept the job. she’s thinking about it. she’s also been offered a carrot for later this summer and an even bigger carrot this autumn – but only if she stays in here current role.

i know. it’s fucked.

and i still am ready to book that flight to palm springs. it will cost my parents more to shell out to see me – but they are telling me that they still want me to come if i don’t get the job. i fear that they should be preparing for a sad little muffin appearing at their poolside.

the bit of good news is that today a landlord accepted me and my roomie’s application. as of march 15th i have a nice place to move into. i just hope that i can pay for it. *gulp*

we’re going to see it again on saturday (and to hand over some cheques) and i should have better pictures then. until saturday, here’s a sneak preview of my new place.

it’s in the 2nd & 3rd floor of this house. much better than a mainfloor.

the view of the dining room from the kitchen. the room in the distance is the living room

this is the lovely living room. or, rather, it’s half of it. the room is very very large. yey.

ok. that’s it. i’ll try to muster more cheer next time. i’m hoping it won’t need to be false cheer & that i will be able to write here about my wonderful new job.

[music | the arcade fire, “rebellion (lies)”]

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