I can’t believe that a diet pill company would choose this as their brand name.

I made oatmeal for my breakfast. I salted the water too much, I just realized. I’m eating very salty oatmeal. Actually I’m throwing out very salty oatmeal. Then I’m going to go scrub my tongue.

Someone set up a big sign on one of the pieces of commercial real estate in town. They’re planning on opening an A&W.

This means, in our little city of less than 15 000 people, we are going to have 9 fast food restaurants: the aforementioned A&W, two McDonalds (to be fair one of them is inside the Wal-mart so I’m not sure if that counts), two Wendys, a Burger King, and, if you count Tim Hortons, three Tim Hortons’. I’m probably missing some.

As for regular restaurants, where you can order from a menu and have something other than a hamburger: There are two. More if you count hotel restaurants and lunch counters.

I fear. I fear.

My brother’s two sons (almost-5 and almost-3) have been out of their strollers for years so it was kind of surprising to me the other day when I went over to visit and the four-year-old was pretending that his brother was “a baby” and wrapping him up in a blanket. The younger guy was not happy with this arrangement and kept screaming that he was not a baby and he could WEAR HIS OWN SHIRT (not sure what that had to do with anything) but his older brother was wrestling him into that blanket. My brother was taking a nap, so once he’d finished swaddling the “baby”, my sister-in-law sent my nephew to go let him know I was there. Here’s what we could hear, drifting down the stairs.

“Daddy, wake up”
(nothing)
“Daaaaddy, wake uuuuuuup”
(nothing)
“Daaaaddy wake uuuup, I need you”
(nothing)
“Daddy, wake up, Tante Louise is here to visit!”
(nothing)
“Daddy?”
(nothing)
“DADDY WAKE UP RIGHT NOW OR YOU ARE GOING TO MISS ALL THE FUN OF TANTE LOUISE!”

(I imagine this was punctuated with Little G. jumping up and down on my brother’s head because he did get up and come downstairs) (we talked about a soldering job that he’s going to do for Rob. That was all the fun that he could potentially have missed, had he not woken up. Close call, eh?)

The first year that I lived in Halifax, I taught at a school in the North End. I loved my students, and I hated to leave them at the end of that year, but mine was a one-year contract so I couldn’t stay. I daresay they were used to it though; since the school was in a very poor socio-economic area, there was a lot of moving on by teachers because teaching there could be stressful (example 1: One of my grade 4 students came to class one morning talking about his older brother who had been shot the night before in a gang thing. example 2: A student in the other grade 4 class was caught with drugs three times the year I was there – she was holding them for her mother to sell. example 3: A mother bursting into the classroom next door to me and physically threatening the teacher because the teacher had “smacked” her child (the teacher had actually had to restrain the little girl because she was kicking, punching, spitting on, and trying to stab another student on the playground). example 4: we had no books. Well, we had *some* books, but usually from the 1980s although we did get new science books that year so those kids knew their science). Anyway. The school building itself was beautiful, architecturally. It had been a Catholic school for years, and still had statues of the Virgin Mary in the hallways. The school had actually been destroyed in the Halifax Explosion (killing some students and priests who taught there – which of course gave way to rumours that the school was haunted) and rebuilt afterward. It was a good building, except for this one thing.
One morning I got to school at about 7:20 in the morning (I was such a keener — school didn’t start til 9 but there I was). A couple of other teachers were getting there at the same time. There had been some plumbing work going on in the school over the weekend. When we walked in, we noticed that everything – EVERYTHING- was covered in a layer of white dust. There was a huge sawed-out hold in one of the walls, with a plastic sheet duct-taped over it. There was also a note left by one of the plumbers saying that “We will have to come back later with proper equipment to finish this as the insulation is asbestos and is unsafe for us to work on”.

Um.

This was a school with over 300 students, and they had left a huge hole in the wall with asbestos all over the place?

I had no idea what to do. Luckily one of the other teachers did, got on the phone with some union/school board people, told them nobody wanted mesothelioma or any other disease related to asbestos exposure (meanwhile I was thinking “Oh my God I’m breathing in asbestos… yaaaaaaaaaaaargh!”) and had them close the school for the day. Of course some of the kids had already started showing up (some parents would send them at 7:30 in the morning, even though school didn’t open til 9) and we had to call all their parents to come and get them.

The dust was cleaned up, and the hole in the wall was patched, but I don’t think the plumbing ever got fixed. Huh. Just remembered that story. Now I’ll be worried all day that this cough I have is caused by lung tumours. I’m such a hypochondriac.

Remember my post last week when I talked about our too-many radishes? I pickled them. Then I canned a bunch of peaches. And now I’ve made pickles with cucumbers, onions, and cauliflower. All the recipes I could find were for sweet pickles, or dill. I don’t like sweet pickles that much, and I like dill pickles fine but I wanted to try something else so I did. I can’t actually remember measurements and such, but we’ll see in 6-8 weeks whether I did a good job or not.

They’re pretty, anyway (I promise I’ll post a photo later but I’m too busy right now with the Big Brother. It’s a sickness, I know)

I was just sitting here innocently watching Big Brother UK when someone started to ram his fists upon our door. It was Rob’s best friend and his girlfriend, unexpectedly come to pick up Rob and take him to a movie. Just him, not me. Not that I mind, because I am not in the mood to see Hancock or um… whatever other movie our local theatre is showing. I’m very content to lay around on the sofa watching bad British TV and crying over VISA commercials.

(I’m currently taking clomifene. The clomifene, it is making me insanely weepy. But if your heartstrings weren’t a little bit tugged by that commercial you are dead inside)

There are little kids on the swing sets behind our house (they installed swings and slides all around the neighbourhood here back about 30 years ago and they?re still well used). They are swinging higher and higher. One of them just dared the other, and now, as they reach the apex of their swing?s arc, they scream ?HECK!?

Because ?HECK!? is a swearword to six-year-olds.

When you read this ‘blog, doesn’t it always seem like I’m either really really happy about something, or that I’m bitching and moaning about something? Guess which one today’s going to be?

Rob and I have managed to save up about $1200 for our trip to NL. This doesn’t mean much, because just the boat ride (which, by the way, is going to take between 18 and 19 hours, instead of 12 to 13, as they’re slowing the ferry down to save on gas) is a little over $700 (round-trip). Then there’s gas for the 8-hour drive to the ferry – probably about $250 if not more (round trip) depending on how much the price of gas escalates. Which leaves us with a very small cushion, but a cushion nonetheless. We weren’t planning on doing anything fancy with our two weeks; basically just staying around the house and maybe going to St. John’s on one day, so $300 would be a fine amount; we could pay for our food and rent movies now and then.

Except.

Our car has been a total asshole lately. Every now and then, since probably mid-June, it would just not start, but then I’d try again and it would start. This past Tuesday, I took it in to the mechanic saying that we needed our starting motor replaced because that’s what everyone’s been telling me is wrong – I even paid $3 (with $12 pending if I’m satisified with the answer) to a website where you write in your questions to a mechanic and they tell you what they think is wrong with your car. And the mechanics said that it was my starter.

Shut up, I don’t know. Rob and I are not mechanic-type people. I know how to change my own oil, change a tire, change the spark plugs. That’s it. Same for Rob.

SO! As I said, on Tuesday, I phoned our friendly neighbourhood mechanic, Bren, (actually he’s not friendly, really, and isn’t quite part of our neighbourhood – about half an hour away but he’s the first person I found with a used but good starter for our car) (yes I generally go with used parts. I know that sounds stupid but paying $60 for something instead of $300 when the part has been in a car for two months and then the car got totaled but the inner workings were all okay? Fine by me) and he had us bring the car in at 3 pm. It actually started (the past few days, it will start like, once a day. If I get out of the car to go into the store, I’m stuck for at least 15 minutes, sometimes up to an hour or so waiting before it will start again, and even then, it’s not a guarantee), we went up there, he took the car, we waited around with his dog in the office. When he was finished he said “Oh! It wasn’t the starter – there was a loose wire so we fixed that and you’re good to go”. $42. Awesome.

That was Tuesday. Yesterday we went to the hospital (I have to get my blood tested every so often – I’ll tell you later about that if you’re interested). After I’d had my blood drawn, the car didn’t start. W.T.F. mate. We walked up to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled, which took about an hour total because Rob also had to see his doctor whose office is above the pharmacy. When we got back to the car it started and we drove straight home. When we got home, Rob called the mechanic who had looked at our car the day before, and told him what had happened. “So can we bring the car in today for you to change the starting motor?”… and the mechanic said no.

Because, you see, the day before he had THOUGHT he had the right starter for our car. But since we have an overhead cam engine, he DIDN’T have the right starter for it. But if we could find a starter, then he’d be glad to put it in for us. Thanks, Bren. We called around to a couple of other places and they didn’t have the part. I got really annoyed and went to bed, because that’s how I deal. By sleeping. I have some form of stress-induced narcolepsy, I swear.

This morning the car just wouldn’t start. I phoned my dad, because he is the Mastermind of Car Part Finding. Why didn’t we call him yesterday? Because he was at work and therefore out of a phone area. He made a couple of calls and located a starter for my car but I had to borrow my mom’s car (which meant walking over to my brother’s house because that’s where my mom was — I didn’t wear the proper shoes and I kept sending Rob text messages about how walking is not rad at all) and drive an hour to go get it. I brought my sister with me, because even my sister is more mechanically inclined than I am. Then we brought the part home, stopped in at my regular mechanic’s (because Bren? Is not my regular mechanic. But I’d figured that since he’d gotten me the part I should let him install it, and also my regular mechanic was busy that day and Bren had an opening right away) and made an appointment for him to install the part – on Tuesday.

So here’s what I’m whining about: IF it costs alot to get this part put in ($25/hr, but who knows how many hours this will take) OR IF the part isn’t what’s wrong with the car… our trip is cancelled because either we won’t have the cash (and we’ve been saving this for months… I hate HATE that it’s being used for the stupid car but if it has to be done it has to be done) or our car won’t be usable and whatever.

Alright that is the end of my whinging. I hope that you loved it.

Because I have a lot to say, but not the mental capacity to write it all out… here you go. If you can sit through this, you’re a superstar:

(if you haven’t seen Empire Records, you must. I wonder where Liv Tyler’s character got her speed before you could buy diet pills online).