The Importance of Tea XII

“Extremitea”

1000 grams!

My tea fairy, Treena, gave me a sample of Davidson’s Organic Spiced Peach for my birthday. It’s one of the best peachy teas ever, and I promptly wondered if we can get it online?

Fast forward a few weeks. Treena emails to advise that she’s aiming for free shipping on something and a pound of Spiced Peach will push her total past the eligible amount. Did I want to chip in for half?

Naturally, I agreed (it really is delicious).

David’s “Tea of the Month” is Ginger Beer – a herbal infusion that demanded I stock two hundred grams pronto, which of course I did. At the same time, I topped up my tin of Mumbai Chai from Blenz. All that remains is to purloin a package of Murchie’s seasonal Snowflake, and I’m all set for winter sipping.

Once the Spiced Peach arrived, I happily informed Treena that my cupboard is stuffed to the gunwales and no new tea purchases will be made for the rest of the calendar year. She gave me the knowing sidelong look and said something about, “Yeah, until the Christmas flavours come out.”

I remain steadfast in my resolve. Murchie’s Snowflake won’t be out for another few weeks, but once I’ve bought my stash of that, I mean it, I’m done. After all, I have half a pound of Spiced Peach to plough through; do I need more tea???

*sigh*

My other tea buddy, Julie, roped me into visiting David’s so she could try their Chai and Mighty. I was happy to tag along, with absolutely no intention of buying anything beyond a cup to go. I bypassed the Halloween display and went straight for the counter. Julie, however, paused to peruse the merchandise. I’m chatting with the counter staff when she cries, “Ruthie! Stormy Night is back!”

I pivot so fast that my ears buzz. “What?”

“Oh, yeah,” says the store manager, “it’s back for Halloween, but only in the tombstone packaging. What you see there is all we have.”

Stormy Night is one of my favourites; I pitched a fit when they discontinued it and proceeded now to rant a reminder of my displeasure before I snatched up a tombstone. “Now you have one less,” I declared. “Chocolate Macaroon, by the way, is a poor replacement.”

I can order fifty grams of Stormy Night from their website for $8.50. Fifty grams in a cardboard tombstone cost me twice that much in store. And I didn’t care. I bought it anyway.

Now that’s scary.

The Day After

My desk calendar is hardly a forward thinker. It features no Buddhist wisdom or Zen images. Every quote is taken from A Song of Ice and Fire—I might be sour on the TV show, but I remain a loyal fan of the novels. Sometimes the saying is relevant, sometimes not, and it doesn’t really matter beyond the date. Each morning, I tear away the previous day’s page and flip it over to see the bonus feature. Mazes, word searches, sudoku puzzles, household hints, terrible puns, and the dumbest feature of all: the unknown holiday.

This would be a genuine bonus if it appeared on the back of the page before the date. Among other gems, I have missed Ice Cream Day, Name Your Car Day, Do Nothing Day, and the worst omission of all—Book Lover’s Day. This bibliophilic nod falls on August 10, but I didn’t know about it until August 11.

That August 10 also happened to be Duran Duran Appreciation Day is of little comfort. I am a ferocious book lover, perhaps even more than I am a Durannie, and while one might argue that every day can be Book Lover’s Day, it struck me as absurd that the notification was placed so as to be missed until after the occasion.

Doof.

The main purpose of a calendar, I believe, is to mark special dates ahead of time … though I recall a friend’s amusement at the notion of a Zen calendar. “A timeless watch,” he said quietly, poking fun with love at an attempt to incorporate some serenity into a crazy environment.

I’m a Virgo and it’s cheating to turn a page before the one you’re on is finished. I suppose it would be worse if the surprise holidays were statutory days off, but I’d have enjoyed the excuse to hit the ice cream shop on that day back in July … if I’d known about it at the time.

Bump in the Night

I think I’m dreaming when I hear someone screaming for help in the dark. Strident, desperate, truly panicked. Once I know I’m awake, my next thought is that the girl downstairs is in trouble. She’s pregnant and her filmmaker husband is out of town; they moved in two days earlier and if something is wrong with the baby …

The screaming gets louder. Someone starts hammering on our door. “She’s going to die! Help me; help me; why won’t you help me?”

Oh, God, it is the baby!

Ter is awake by now; I’m already dressed and flipping on the lights. Still confused, I blurt that it’s the girl downstairs and what the—

A shuddering sound: wood splintering as if a door is being kicked in, glass breaking, and the screaming in a voice gone hoarse. Ter beside me at the top of the stairs. “What is going on?”

I’m thinking, Great, the new neighbour is bipolar and having a seizure. I’m shaking with adrenaline, my mind racing in circles: call 911, go downstairs, see what the hell is happening in our building fo—

There’s an almighty BANG! and the voice receding as the owner takes her screaming back out to the street. Still shaking and moving by instinct rather than common sense, I take my phone and descend the stairs to our front door. There’s a jagged hole in the stained glass at eye level. “Oh, my God,” I say, “the window is broken.” I open the door and find that the foyer has been trashed. Glass shards are strewn across the carpet. The floor lamp that stood in the corner is bent in half and the shade lies in pieces. The building’s front door has been flung wide open and one of the porch chairs blocks the exit. The SOS sounds like she’s heading toward the point.

The door on my left opens cautiously and standing there in her jammies is our new neighbour. “Was that you?” I ask, stupidly.

She shakes her head, half-numb.

To help with the picture, our building is a five unit strata – two suites on the main floor, two on the second and the penthouse up top. The foyer is square, the main floor doors across from each other, the second floor doors side by side. This night, the folks in the other main floor suite are in Toronto, and the fellow who lives above them only emerges when our voices wake him. He’s as gobsmacked as the rest of us.

The screaming outside continues toward the water. Ter is on the porch, listening. “Ruthie,” she says, “time to call 911.”

So I make my first ever 911 call. I describe the events and give directions as best I can. Within seconds of me disconnecting, the cops arrive, a fleet of them, lights and sirens galore, accompanied by two ambulances, a fire truck, and what appears to be a marine rescue boat offshore. Whatever it is, its lights are aimed at the beach. By now I’ve called the folks in the penthouse and they have joined the rest of us on the porch. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” someone says to the new girl. “This never happens here,” someone else says, but she is adding security to the top of the agenda for the strata’s annual general meeting this weekend. (She proves to be a force of nature herself; when all is said and done, she and hubby are likely to be a super addition to the community.)

Eventually, half of the vehicles depart and an officer makes her way over to the house. Turns out that a mother and daughter have gone on a drinking bender and something went wrong. The cops found them in the water, and if they can get a confession, does anyone want to press charges? A conviction is unlikely, we’re told, given that there are no eyewitnesses or video surveillance to support any action taken. Names and phone numbers are exchanged, the officer leaves, Ter helps to clean up the lobby while I stand with the men and ponder the insurance portent. None of us gets back to sleep before four that morning, but we retire as a group more strongly bonded than we were before the incident occurred.

Since then, we’ve heard that the malcontents apologized to the police but they have no priors so no charges are recommended (to which I reply, how does one go about getting a prior unless charges are pressed?). The broken glass in three of the four doors is presently being repaired, and I presume the strata’s insurance is covering the bulk of the cost. Ter and I have an advantage here: being renters, we just comply with whatever work must be done and don’t worry about the finances.

This does not spare us the slings and arrows suffered by the owners, however. Since we moved in, we’ve been embraced as members of the family and have weathered the same storms as everyone else—everything from an upstairs water leak soaking our carpet to street parking wars to disgruntled neighbours foiling our recycling collection, not to mention the summer of constructing the Trump Tower out back. There is no dissention among the residents, I’m relieved to say, and now that the kids have moved in downstairs, we’re hoping for a warm and peaceful winter.

There’s no place like home.

No Quitter

There are shows you miss and think nothing of it. Then there are shows you might have missed but are glad you didn’t because missing them would be a crying shame despite not knowing what you missed. Does that make sense?

I might still be a little punchy after last night’s “might have missed but am glad I didn’t”.

I have yet to get my head around Victoria being more than a stopover for artists whose stars are on the ascent, on their way down, or on their way out. Even after seeing the Sarahs Brightman and McLachlan, after Sting and Sheryl Crow and a handful of Leppard shows, I am still surprised when a big name performer comes to town. So when word got out that Shania Twain was bringing her show here, getting tickets was, as Ter once put it, a no-brainer.

Bear in mind that country music and I don’t like each other very much. I must remind myself that country music today is not the country music of yore—thanks in good part to Shania herself. When she met producer “Mutt” Lange, she changed the course of country tuneage and made it palatable for rock/pop snobs like me. She’s bright, she’s upbeat, she’s funny—and she rocks.

She is inspiring, though, for more than her stellar status in the music biz. In short, small town Canadian girl loses both parents to tragedy, keeps her siblings together and alive through smarts and sheer strength of will, somehow meets world famous record producer, falls in love, marries him, and proceeds to make history. The Cinderella story should end there, but after she becomes a global phenomenon, she learns that the love of her life is cheating with her best friend. Talk about your world shattering. She lost her voice, her marriage, became a single mom, quit performing, quit singing, and seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be down for the count.

But she came back. She fell in love again, she found her voice again, she rebuilt her confidence and took it to Vegas. It took her ten years, but she did it, and from there, she embarked on a world tour and man, oh man, she is back with a vengeance. It’s like she was never gone.

So. Last night. There are no really bad seats at the Leppard Dome (aka the Save On Foods Memorial Arena); the people surrounding you are more often the challenge. Fortunately, Shania doesn’t attract the same hardcore individuals that are drawn to the Leps or Bon Jovi. Her crowd consists of cowboys and angels: guys in jeans and plaid shirts, women in jeans, bling and boots, and their daughters dressed in sweet summer dresses and cowboy boots. Far less frightening than the mother/daughter pairs we saw at the Leppard gig in April, where the mothers were dressed like the daughters and there was nothing sweet about any of them.

We hang out on the concourse while the opening act is on, watching people and gradually losing our hearing to the increasing hubbub in the lineups for beer and popcorn. There are so many pretty young girls in the cute outfit started by Taylor Swift that they all run together, but there’s the odd pop! of a red lamé jacket or a rhinestone collar that can only be worn to a rock concert.

Ter and I have aisle seats, me next to a burly dude who proves to be as mild-mannered as most giants so I’m able to focus on the show rather than spend it dodging the flailing limbs of an inebriated neighbour. Just before the lights go down, I lean over to Ter and whisper, “I hope she plays ‘I Ain’t No Quitter’.” A long shot, I admit, because that track was written for her greatest hits album and wasn’t a big single. Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” starts up, the lights dip, and the crowd sings along. Full dark for a few heartbeats—then the stage explodes with light and sound worthy of, well, hey, a Las Vegas show, and rising up from the fog through a hole in the floor is a tiny power-packed figure with big blond hair and the warbling pipes of a chipmunk.

Yup, my hearing went early.

Her voice, like the rest of her, is really quite strong, and as pure as that mandatory country twang will allow; however, I rarely go to see someone whose catalogue I don’t know, so I was familiar enough with the music to know every song as it was played. She tipped Nashville on its ear with her sassy female take on the conventional country lyric—check out “Honey I’m Home” if you want an example—and while she kicks butt with empowering attitude, she is clearly a romantic who’s in love with being in love. “From This Moment” is as sappy as it gets, yet when she sings it, you feel the commitment that true love deserves (and which, for her, was ultimately betrayed). I was resigned to hearing it because it was such a huge hit for her, but the lighting that accompanied it onstage set her in the center of a laser diamond, so multi-faceted and flawless that I was awestruck for the duration.

Actually, there were enough lasers to have corrected the vision in every member of the audience—one of the best light shows I’ve ever seen. Mostly red and white, punctuated with bursts of flame so hot I felt them on my face (“I’m Gonna Getcha Good” was pyrotechnically brilliant!), and backed by video clips that filled the gaps during a costume change. She may be little and fiery, but she is also an elegant example of beauty blending with inner resolve. She proves that a woman can change the world without compromising her femininity. Now, that is inspiring.

The fifth song into her set? One she said she has never played live, but wanted to sing for us now:

“I Ain’t No Quitter”.

She certainly ain’t.

Trudeau 2.0

Canada's "Boy Toy" PM

“He’s not your father’s Trudeau,” said Peter Mansbridge on election night.

I paid little to no attention to politics in Trudeau the Elder’s heyday, so I can’t say whether the country was ruined or not when Pierre was in power. I didn’t even see the reputed charisma he allegedly had, and which Justin (his eldest son) has in spades.

Prone as I am to picking my fantasy hockey team on looks, however, I do recognize that picking my politicians demands a tad more serious criteria. Despite the sense that election day snuck up on me, I was aware enough to appreciate how the campaign was handled by the candidates. Justin Trudeau’s strategy was similar to that of Barack Obama’s in 2008: upbeat, positive, and non-combative. I will always follow the optimist who speaks of hope and empowerment rather than fanning fear through ignorance.

I have voted for the Liberals in past Federal elections (never ever in provincial), but this time the candidate dropped out so I had to reconsider my options. I thought I’d go one way until I was actually looking at the ballot. My eye scanned the list in search of the name I wanted, but got stuck at the halfway mark and in the end, I chose that candidate.

Canada will always be run by the Liberals or the Conservatives. The NDP’s disappointment at losing half the seats won in the last election strikes me as willful naivete. Surely they realize that the seats won in 2011 were those that would have gone to the Liberals had the Liberals not self-destructed prior to the campaign. All that happened this time round was the restoration of Liberal support to a resurrected party under the next generation.

Duh.

Perhaps not so strangely, many folks I know said afterward that they did something similar to me—while voting NDP in their ridings, all are pleased enough with the Liberal win. The big numbers tensed a few jaws, but hey, minority or majority, let’s see what the pup can do. My older sister nailed it when she told me of her confidence in Justin representing us on the world stage. Canada lost so much ground under Stephen Harper. Now is our chance to regain our reputation as a nation of good neighbours who care more about the environment and each other than we do about preserving the wealth of industrial magnates worldwide.

Speaking of which … my one regret is that our shiny new PM will not get a chance to work with the current US President. Together, they might have been magic.

De-Throned

Warning:

·         spoiler alert

·         content may be unsuitable for some readers

Proceed at your own peril.

I’ve done something I thought I would never, ever do.

I’ve cancelled my pre-order for Game of Thrones 2015.

It’s a small comfort to note that GRRM had a severely reduced role in the production of season five, and the plotlines veered wildly from those in the books, so I can say this without betraying my loyalty to the original storyteller. Season five was absolutely no fun to watch. It was unnecessarily graphic in the sex and violence department—a constant through the first four seasons, come to that—but I have simply run out of excuses to defend the series. Almost every episode had me wondering why I was tuning in when most of what I got was pornographic, misogynistic, borderline criminal crap.

I have a pretty high tolerance for sex, and I understand that we as a society have grown so numb that more extreme visuals are required to engage an audience when it comes to blood and gore. I hate it, but I get it. I myself prize clever dialogue over vivid pictures. The banter between Tyrion and Varys was gold, but also like gold, those few nuggets were buried so deep in the dirt as to have taken up perhaps ten minutes of ten hours. Instead, we were treated to more of Ramsay Snow—a man whom we already know is a sadist, so must we be continually reminded of it with ever increasing enthusiasm? Of course Sansa was in for a rape on her wedding night—we didn’t have to hear it while it happened. Also featured was the burning at the stake of a child, and it was not enough for the producers to suggest it was happening; no, we had to hear the girl screaming for her mother until the flames were pretty well extinguished. Oh, and then there was the public humiliation of Cersei, whose walk of shame was indeed written into the books (Sansa’s rape and Shireen’s fiery death were not) but which lasted on paper for as long as it took to read. On film, they dragged it out for a longer eternity to me than it was for the character.

Painful.

Brutally painful.

And the final insult? The series won best drama at the Emmys this year.

Mortifying.

So, now what do I do? I have yet to cancel HBO—The Knick resumes this month and yep, I’m hooked—but the reason why I signed up in the first place has gone sour. The first season was awesome (except for the obligatory gratuitous sex), the second slightly less so, the third perfectly awful for the torturing of Theon Greyjoy, the fourth started to stray from the books and the fifth, well, the fifth isn’t coming to my DVD collection any time soon. In fact, I may unload the second, third and fourth seasons if I can find a taker. My office buddy teases that I’ll be unable to resist season six in the spring, but I wouldn’t put money on that one.

I’ll just wait for GRRM to publish the next book.

To Vote or Not to Vote

It shouldn’t be a question.

I have as much faith in politicians as I do in television evangelists. The US President has proven that a good man can be completely ineffective when he rises too high in the ranks. I believe that many people get into politics for the right reasons, but once they’re in, they find themselves trapped in a dysfunctional system that thwarts any effort to change it for the better.

This does not mean that we should give up trying.

All over town, I’m seeing the word “Harper” stencilled onto STOP signs. I laugh at them, but I know it’s no joke. It’s time for a change. Voting to get someone out of office, however, takes as much thought as voting to get someone in. If I back the wrong horse, I could help to split the opposition and result in another run for the baddies. It may be a minority run, but they’ll still be on the wrong side of the House.

It could be wiser to support the party with the best chance of ousting the incumbent. A new minority government might be at the mercy of a coalesced opposition (assuming that Harper can work with anyone outside of his party), but they will be new. As in different.

Or perhaps I should vote for the party whose platform best matches my concerns. A perfect match won’t be likely, but I’m good with the best of seven. I’m a single woman who owns no property and is close to retirement, who believes that arts programs are critical to the health and well-being of society, that health care should include proactive practices such as homeopathy and acupuncture, that a gay couple is entitled to the same rights and privileges as a straight couple, and that education should be fully-funded. Our children are our future, after all, and the means to pay for schooling does not ensure that the brightest minds apply. And the environment is in dire need of nurturing, rather than being subjected to ongoing abuse for industrial gain.

Whatever my objective, on October 19, I am going to vote.

Being a single woman who owns no property, there was a time in the not so distant past when I would not have been allowed to vote at all. This is important, but it’s not my motivation. Neither is the fact that wars have been fought and blood has been shed to ensure that democracy prevails. Nope, I am haunted by the provincial election that put Gordon Campbell in office for a third, count ’em third, term as Premier of BC.

In that election, the majority of voters voted Liberal. I couldn’t believe it. Granted, Victoria is an NDP stronghold, but still, everyone in BC sounded like they were fed up with this guy and his Trump-sized ego. Even his own caucus was tired of him, yet the majority re-elected him?

It’s all in the wording. He was re-elected by the majority of voters, not the majority of eligible voters. It turned out that fewer than half of those registered BCers who were reportedly sick of him didn’t even bother to turn out on election day. So, His Royal Heinie got in by the grace of less than one quarter of those who were empowered to vote him out of a job.

Three-quarters of us got what we deserved. The rest of us tried, but were overwhelmed by those who exercised their hard-fought right to choose their government body.

You have a voice. Use it. Even if your candidate loses, you will have had your say.

October 19, 2015. Vote. Please.

Gender Swapping

My tea fairy, Treena, recently sent me an anguished email featuring the link to an online article about the latest blight on the literary scene. The queen of vampire schmaltz has struck again, and with a new twist on the same blunt instrument. I thought we’d dodged a silver bullet when a draft manuscript of Twilight told from Edward’s POV was leaked and Stephenie Meyer sacked the idea of releasing it, but she has since re-written her horrifying-for-all-the-wrong-reasons series, this time with the protagonists swapping genders. Yup, mortal Bella is now Beau, vampire Edward is now Edyth, and werewolf Jacob is now Julie. 

It’s a new way of wringing a few more drachmas from the golden udder for sure—E.L. James has done precisely the same thing by rewriting her candy-coated S&M trilogy from the sadist’s point of view.

As my dear friend Nicole would say, BLERG.

Maybe it’s not new to take a familiar story and change the hero to a heroine or vice versa. I admit, the idea is intriguing. I’ve even spent an idle moment or two toying mentally with my own work and wondering how a female Julian or a male Cassandra might alter the plot of their respective stories. On a less daunting scale, I considered a revamp (no pun intended) of Between the Storms, but then I thought, wait a minute. I don’t have to regurgitate what I’ve already done. I can write new stuff!

Snide asides notwithstanding, change the sex of a character and you must change the story. I only got so far when contemplating the switch for my tale of a hit man on hiatus who discovers a girl washed up on the beach outside his house. Sure, female assassins exist, and the man washing up on her beach might be on the run from a control freak, but the rest of it would require more than a global replacement of character names. The villain, for one thing, would have to become female, and a man who runs from a domineering woman will be regarded with more ridicule than sympathy, possibly even by the heroine who saves his life. So the whole back end of the piece, including the resolution, would have to be redone, and if I’m going to write a story, I’d rather do it with all new characters and a new beginning.

On the other hand, I have considered taking a really badly written story and rewriting it to standard—but that would mean reading Fifty Shades of Grey first, and I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Off to a Boring Start

According to my newly downloaded Flyers app, my hockey team has a 0-1-1 record for the start of the 2015-16 season.

This is what I get for joking with an Oilers fan that everyone is in the playoffs except for the Maple Leafs.

I’m used to it now. Philly has been slow out of the gate for years, but when I see that Florida mopped the ice with them in a 7 – 1 loss on Saturday, I want to weep.

Unless the Panthers’ Aaron Ekblad racked up five points. I have him in the hockey pool, where Ruthie’s Renegades were, at last viewing, in first place.

Claude Giroux has yet to give me a point.

They got the loser point in Tampa Bay on opening night. The Bolts won in a shootout.

$*%#&

As I say, I’m used to a slow start. They’re rebuilding. They’ll gain momentum as the season progresses. They just have to gain it faster than they did last year if they hope to make the playoffs.

I know, I know. It’s too early to talk playoffs. Why do I get ahead of myself? It’s not Zen at all … but then, nothing wrecks my Buddhist-babe mentality like hockey season. Something strange happens over the winter. I become a member of the Roman mob. I want to kill. I want to die. Oh, the drama! My identity is attached to my team’s win/loss record. I get small. Mean. Nasty. Fetal. I spike my buttered rum tea with Captain Morgan. I revert to superstitious behaviour, like wearing my orange jersey for home games and my white jersey for away games, as if anything I do really matters to the outcome.

This is fun?

Well, yeah. Hell, yeah!


(Ed note: the boys won their home opener against Florida 1 - 0 on Monday night. Yay! Now we're 1-1-1!)

The Leppard Long Weekend

It started with Viva Hysteria! on Friday. Ter got the DVD for her birthday and waited a whole week for the viewing—the Leppards live in Las Vegas, playing their classic album in track order from Women to Love and Affection. Cool show. Had no idea it had been filmed.

One of the bonus features is the opening set they played as Ded Flatbirds—“the best Def Leppard cover band in the world”—and in that set was a song called Undefeated, one of three original tracks recorded for the live album, Mirrorball, in 2011.

I swear, if ever a song was written for Lucius, Undefeated is it.

So, next day, Mirrorball goes onto the car stereo for our sojourn to lunch with my folks. We switch to Yeah! for the drive home, and somewhere on the road, Ter observes that it’s been a Leppard long weekend.

It’s supposed to be a Thanksgiving long weekend.

But hey, I’m thankful for the Leps. Without them, and the King in particular, there would be no Lucius. My legendary hero would not exist, or if he did, it would be in someone else’s world.

I’m so glad that he chose to exist in mine. He takes up a lot of room and burns a lot of energy, but I’m glad of that too, because I’ve been reminded yet again that “it’s about Lucius”. Fixed Fire is the story of a family, and volume seven is Reijo’s romance, but no matter where in the series or who the protagonist, there he is, commandeering the spotlight, the great Golden Savage, Mr. Undefeated himself.

I have lots for which I am grateful. On a daily basis, I have a rotating Top Five, but if where you focus becomes your reality, then right now a rock singer from Sheffield figures high on the list.

Happy Thanksgiving.

With love,

Twistin’ By The Pool

my 2015-16 fantasy team

My executive director stuck his head inside my office on Wednesday. “Got a minute?”

“Make it fast,” I replied. “The pool draft starts in twelve minutes!”

He stepped over the threshold and dropped his voice. “I’ve done f*** about my picks. Can you resend me the link?”

I gaped at him. “Are you kidding me? I worked on mine for three hours last night! Oh—and Phil Kessel is with Pittsburgh now.”

My über-boss, who has a framed Leafs jersey signed by Wendel Clark hanging in his office, nodded. “I’ll probably pick him anyway. Just send me the link.”

I flashed it at him, our respective doors closed, and the games began.

A couple of years ago, before he took over the division’s helm, he drafted Claude Giroux before I could. I have not forgotten that, apparently, because when I saw that he had eighth pick over my seventh, I thought, Ha! No Giroux for you, buddy! All I had to do was fret through the first six picks, but I was able to nab my top guy.

We have a couple of rookies in the pool this year. I’m a veteran by now, the first female to join in 2010-11 and now comprising maybe a third of fifteen members for the 2015-16 season. Word has spread—and my old nemesis, the wire-and-fake-fur-Flyer fan, is back in the fold after a brief stint with another ministry. Figures that he drafted Jake Voracek and Ryan Kesler just when I was planning to click the button behind him.

Of course you know that this means war.

Or would do, except that the bulk of my roster features more players than not who made my list the day before the draft. Okay, so Nazem Kadri made it from sheer desperation, though I deliberately gunned for James Van Riemsdyk. I’ve got two young defencemen, one going into his second year which often results in a slump, but I’m hopeful that his talent will prevail. If not, veteran BC boy Brent Seabrook will come off the bench to replace him.

If my top five stay healthy, I have as good a chance as any—and better than the poolie who drafted Martin St. Louis and Daniel Briere. It had to have been one of the rookies. ESPN gaffed by leaving these guys on the list, but anyone following the sports news would have known that both players retired in the summer.

Easy pickin’s? Meh. It’s more fun to watch the stats and participate in the chirping. As I emailed when the draft was done, and in keeping with my reputation for choosing photogenic faces, “May the best-looking team win!”

Know Thy Elf

one day I'll get a more recent pic

A year has passed since I unwittingly freed my house elf. I was sure that I would rue the day when I thoughtlessly handed her a pair of socks and felt the *snap-pinng* of the bond breaking between us. And, had she taken full advantage of the occasion, I might have felt more regret. As it is, nothing much has changed.

She still drives me to work, asks what I want for dinner, vacuums the rug in my writing room, brings me tea, and tucks my polar bears into bed at night. She is still my armchair therapist, my surrogate guru, my confidence coach and my greatest fan. She coaxes, encourages, and always supports me in whatever mad escapade I think to undertake.

She rocks—and not just because she loves me.

She was my best friend before she was my elf, and she will be my best friend after we are done with this estate. Throughout our long existence together, she has been my sister, my counselor, my jester, my mirror, and perhaps, during a life or two, my rival.

No matter what life we’re in, however, she is always my hero.

Happy birthday, Ter.

With love,

Colour Me Gone

You might think that the term “adult colouring book” means extensive use of a flesh-coloured Crayola, but you’d be wrong.

What I think is a recent craze has actually been around for a while. My wee sister tells me that she had a grown-up colouring book when her kids were small. She still has it—unfinished, because the kids (now grown) made off with her coloured pencils.

Guess what I gave her for her birthday.

Colouring therapy goes even deeper into my history when I think about it. A Doodle Art poster of butterflies hung in the kitchen when I was a pre-teen; I would occasionally pause to fill in a wing or a flower, as would my sisters and maybe my younger older brother, though I never saw him doing it.

I’ve heard that colouring induces a mindset as close to meditating as one can get without actually meditating—good news for someone like me, who falls asleep when confronted by a lighted candle.

Truth is, I love to colour. It’s easier than writing. Way easier, in fact., though it can facilitate the process by giving me something to do while I mull over plot portents. I get completely lost in my Christmas cards each year. The hard part is the poetry; once the words are formed, the struggle ends and the joy begins—with colour.

It’s the perfect meditation. There are no rules, no time limits, no restrictions. You can even colour outside the lines if you want. How cool is that?

Ter gave me a book for my birthday. I love it, but like dessert, I have to eat my veggies before I can indulge, so I don’t spend as much time at it as I’d like. When I can no longer bear the wait, however, you’ll find me in the zone.