May I have the drum roll, please? After all, it’s an auspicious event: We’re launching a new day.
Now, sadly (or not, depending on your disposition) we’re not actually adding a day to the week. On the one hand, no one will have more time for work as a result of this launch (Hurray!); on the other, no one will have more time for leisure (Boo!). Instead, we’re adding a new purpose to an existing day.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce . . .
Sum-up Saturday!
Ta-da!
Heading out to Alberta a few weeks ago, I worried about being downwind from smoke from their wildfires. Several years ago I’d been in Yellowknife during their fire season–the stage where aroma-of-campfire had morphed into stink-of-cold-ashtray–and I didn’t need to do that again. As it turned out, Alberta was not what I should have worried about.
Ottawa started this week with an Air Quality Health Index of 10+, which translates to Very High Risk.
As a side note, if called upon to name a scale where “higher” means “worse”, I would not give it a misleadingly cheery name. Perhaps we could rename this scale to something more intuitively obvious: something like Air Awfulness Index.
Elevenses: Last week, a reader asked whether this unfamiliar-to-them usage was from my Alberta upbringing. Another reader explained that it was from Winnie the Pooh, who liked to have a little something sweet at–you guessed it–11 AM.
A.A. Milne used this word but didn’t coin it: It was, and is, informal British usage. The word derived, apparently, from a light meal called an elevener (circa 1823) and by 1887 had morphed into the elevenses we know today. Or don’t know, as the case may be.
A raptor hurtles low across the field, looking for elevenses I expect, although it’s only 9 AM. What kind of raptor? A fuzzy one, at least according to the available photographic evidence.
Further observation suggests it was a Northern Harrier.
Fragile tenacity: That sums up the magnolia.
Unlike the flowering crabapple, whose parchment-thin petals come and go in a few days, the victim of any passing breeze, the magnolia blossoms hang on and on and on. That’s if they escape the notice of the neighbourhood squirrels, and aren’t bitten off before they rightly have a chance to be called blossoms. If they get past that first gauntlet, their leathery petals gradually fade and twist as they dry out and as the emerging leaves push them aside.
Opinions vary in my household, but sometimes truth is not determined by a consensus. In my book, they’re lovely throughout.
In the last few months we’ve lost David Crosby, Harry Belafonte, Gordon Lightfoot, and Tina Turner: singers I grew up with, although Belafonte (born in 1927) was a durable star from my parents’ generation.
At 71, I’m at an age where I should expect these losses: the singers and groups I listened to as a teenager and as a young woman were often about ten years older than I was. You do the arithmetic. I’m doing it more and more often.
TF happened to the W?
Oh, sorry, I need one of those screen titles used for narrative effect in movies and TV shows to clarify where and when the action is occurring when it’s not presented in a straightforward linear path. You know the sort of thing, I’m sure.
A person clearly unused to holding a gun shakily points one at an understandably nervous doctor in an operating room and then the view pans out to an aerial shot of a big-city downtown and the screen says…
Eight hours earlier.
And then the story is told from the beginning, but with us knowing where everything is headed.
How old am I? Old enough to forget about long weekends, that’s how.
Long weekends–especially summer long weekends–hold a special place in our culture and, dare I say it, psyche. Having three whole-days-in-a-row off work is a stupendous, momentous, not-possible-to-miss event. Especially in the early decades of my employment, I could never understand how some people never seemed to know when a long weekend was coming. How could they miss it?
Save the children: Eat more cupcakes!
Email inboxes juxtapose messages incongruously as a matter of course: one of the low-level bugs of the system, I guess. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing credit-card-use alerts interleaved with jokes from old friends; electronic flyers I didn’t sign-up for nestled among posts from blogs I did.
But this screen a few days ago definitely took that weirdness-so-routine-it’s-hardly-weird-anymore to a new level.
Go, Blue Jays!
