All posts by Peter

Fun in the Big City

Cool Stuff

PeterIn New York City, there exist a number of folks who like to shake life up a bit. They call themselves Improv Everywhere, and their motto is “We Cause Scenes”.

Scenes like sending in a hundred folks into a Home Depot and have them walk in slow motion, then freeze for five minutes. Or a cell phone symphony in the backpack holding cells at a bookstore. Or a time-loop scene in a Starbucks, where the same series of events occur over and over for an hour. Or to see if they could get the crowd at the ballpark to give directions to a fan whose lost his seat. Or having scores of people gradually fill the same subway train over several stops—all with no trousers, in January—and if you were asked, you were to swear that you had just forgotten your pants and didn’t know the rest of these people.

Some folks get threatened when life breaks its stride. Best Buy did not like a bunch of customers coming in dressed in the blue shirt and khaki pants, even if they never claimed to be staff. But Home Depot employees didn’t feel threatened by 225 statues, and just shook their heads and smiled.

Hooray for making things more interesting.

Paella

Cool Stuff, Family Life, Jon

PeterJon’s school’s cafeteria menu has fluctuated year to year, but this year’s is amazing. Chicken Cacciatore, Baked Sole with Rosemary Tomato Sauce and Mashed Potatoes, Garlic Shepherd’s Pie are typical entrées.

So Jon comes home the other day and says we should make paella sometime. Considering that we’ve never made it, I can guess where he’s had it! He even pronounced the word properly, which is more than I would have. Which reminded me of the first minute of this Posh Nosh episode: please picture Jon in the Richard E. Grant role, and me as Minty. Don’t strain yourself, though.

I’m sure our paella won’t be as good as theirs…

Return to Windreach Farm

Family Life

Jon holding up an apple

PeterWe spontaneously (hey, it’s a big deal, we rarely get a chance to be spontaneous) decided to risk the weather and took off for Windreach Farm, for the Apple Open House, like last year.

Laura, teeth underbit, with goat
Comrades in underbites

Jon patting cow on hayride
The mightily feared-and-fretted-about hayride turns out to be fantastic! You even get to pet cows!

turkey beside an old propane tank
The farm’s turkey tom reveals his fiendish mutally-assured-destruction Thanksgiving nuclear device.

Christine Lavin

Cool Stuff, Family Life

Laura, Christine Lavin and Peter
Christine, fresh from a 2.25 hour performance, said she looks like a freakazoid in this photo.

PeterWell, it’s been a looong summer, and we got out on our first time-together-away-from-Jon time last night, thanks to Grandma. And Christine Lavin (in concert at Hugh’s Room) made for a terrific break.

We’ve been Lavin fans for years, and I always suspected she was at her best in concert. On her albums, she can poignant or hilarious, but last night she was there to play. She entered the room from the back, strolling amongst the tables, singing a lovely lilting song about Windchimes, which started out nice, but ended in a dark place ;-). As the show went on, audience participation was often, and often not entirely voluntary. At one point, she had all of the house lights turned down and she put on a spelunking headlamp as she searched for the king of Canada, singing to all of the men she came across, and occasionally checking the colour of their socks (and praising their fashion sense if they were white). Yes, I was one of her victims on both counts (but I was not crowned king—phew!) and it was an odd version of pleasure/torture: Christine ethereal voice singing just to me (something about looking like a White House page), all the while all I could see was the blinding white light as it bore into my skull.

Oh, and I know at least one person who would kill for her guitar: a Bill Laskin custom job with the planets inlaid along the neck, ending with a model of the Pioneer spacecraft coming out of the headstock.

Christine's fretboard

No doubt Christine commissioned it because of her devotion to Pluto, whose identity conundrum she enshrined in song years ago. Bill Laskin sold her the guitar with a certificate that said if another planet was discovered in his lifetime, he’d inlay a new planet in the instrument free of charge. So close! (But the new chunk of rock, Eris (formerly Xena) has been classified a dwarf planet, and Pluto has been demoted—to what Christine likes to call “Pla-not”).

Anyway, she an amazing performer, and we haven’t laughed so hard in a while. We needed that.

Root root root

Family Life

PeterWe knew this day was in our future and it is here.

The massive silver maple in front of the house has almost entirely blocked the sewage pipe of our house, right at the Y-joint with the neighbours. (That’s private property, by the way. After the Y it becomes city property.) Meaning that we are going to have to get our front sidewalk dug up, and the plumbing replaced. Fortunately there are some city grants and such, but we’ll have to see how that goes. For now, there’s the negotiations with next door, and there’s gonna be a big hole in front of our house. Soon.