My house is a very very very fine house fine house

I have taken photos of my house in Corner Brook.

The weather isn't bad here; I wear dresses still, but sometimes with long underwear. I wear a hat and mittens and usually a pair of boots. But the snow has melted, and the sun is sometimes out, and my walk to and from work is actually lovely.




HELLO!



Mom, I made my bed:









My boy, hanging in the kitchen:


My room:

Mysteries of the North

I went to Halifax. It's a city. I was mostly there to visit my friends, Lance and Jen, and their children: Alexander (almost 3) and Clara (6 months). One memory: as we drove from Halifax to Jen's parents' house, there were 5 of us in the car. Jen, her sister, her sister's baby (3 months), Clara, and moi. It started to snow. The wind blew, and we were in a little clunker of a car. Clara was crying, crying, crying. Angry loud crying. I sat next to Jen's sister, who was driving. She said "oh, poor, Clara. Doesn't that just break your heart?" And I thought No, it does not. This is not a mother's instinct. I think mothers are supposed to comfort the young. Meanwhile, I was cultivating a zen state. I ignored the crying, and I kept trying to talk to Jen's sister about various things (politics, travel, whatever) while she fretted over the baby in the back seat.

On the way to Halifax, in the airport, I noticed some rednecks of Newfoundland. The Newfnecks. It's in places like airports, all sterile and orderly, that you can really see people who are out of place. The Newfnecks waited for their family members who went through departures - there was a glass wall and I could see the family on the other side. They had come as a large group to see off a couple of men, and they waited around for a while. They wore baseball caps and camouflage, they alternated between hollowed-out thin and obese. Their clothes were layers and layers, hockey jerseys prominent. They were happy to be in the airport, at 5:30 in the morning.

Halifax itself was a city. I said to Lance, "it's kind of nice here, but what happened to all the old buildings?" and he guffawed in the way he does and said, "I mean, the city blew up in world war I." And we agreed that I was the most insensitive critic of architecture of all time.

Two ships, one with munitions, kissed each other, causing the second largest man-made explosion in the history of the world. And killed 2,000 people.

So Halifax has a lot of beautiful old cemeteries. I heard that there were gravestones from casualties of the Titanic. As my dad would say, "Poor Leo!"

I ate an entire lobster at Jen's parents' home. My cheeks got flushed and I felt like my skin was turning into lobster. I finally understood the adage that you are what you eat. No claws yet, but you never know.

The couch swimmers

I have now been on couchsurfing dot org for two weeks and I have met: a guy who cycled from BC to Northwest Territories to Newfoundland; a Quebecois who lives in the cold north of the province and works to help rural places retain French culture; five girls who bounced in and giggled a lot and had been cycling around the Maritimes; one girl who cycled here from Vancouver; and a French citizen who lives on an island called St. Pierre and Miquelon just an hour ferry ride from Newfoundland.

Newfoundland is one of the ends of Canada in a country with a lot of edges. At the edges, the roads run out and the people grow sparse and the industries that define modern third-world places assert themselves. There is an Asbestos, Quebec. Coal and diamonds and gold and tar sands mark the far north. The far east, the Maritimes and Newfoundland, rest on a diminishing marine ecosystem that is being fished out from the top down, the biggest down to the smallest. Newfoundland has anachronistic tendencies, the result of being isolated and proud. It has retained a diversity of dialects and the odd customs of a place that nurtures its past, keeping it around for consultation.

I have been very impressed, in general, with the quality of the CBC and with the pride that Canadians have toward their own music. At least in Newfoundland, radio stations play local artists and people of all ages are familiar with the same music; it is a generational uniter, rather than a divider. Weird.

I will think of things that I don't like about Newfoundland. But now I am concentrating on the things I do like. Probably the things I don't like include the weather. But I have yet to be sure about that.