I Love a Bargain

Last night, we finally took delivery on some furniture for the guest bedroom downstairs. For about six months now, I've been actively looking for a nice, gently-used queen size bed for that room. It actually proved quite difficult to find what I was looking for, and more than once I spotted something I liked, only for the seller to withdraw.

Anyway, courtesy of a graduating Dal law student, we now have a nice set from Ikea which is only about 18 months old. We got this bed frame, this mattress, and this matching bedside table. To buy all of that new from Ikea would have cost over $750, plus tax and shipping. But we got the lot for $180, total. Needless to say, I'm quite chuffed. :-)

We've now moved the two twin beds we had from my in-laws to the other spare bedroom upstairs. It will be rather nice to offer a proper bed to visiting couples. Until now, we've had to push the two twins together - which mightn't have been so bad, except that they're not the same model of bed, and one is slightly higher than the other. Heh.

In My Garden - April

The end of the month is nearly upon us - which means it's time for my first set of garden pics for 2006. Things have begun to stir these last couple of weeks, and May promises to be glorious. On inspection today, it seems likely that tulips and grape hyacinths will appear over the next week or so, in addition to lots more narcissi. And the forsythia should be in its full glory by the weekend.

I'm off to Toronto tomorrow, and will be back Monday. Since that's the first of May, I thought I'd better get my April pics posted now.

Hankies at the Ready: Extreme Cuteness Ahead

Although I love animals, I'm not normally one for cutesy animal photos. But my boss sent me an email yesterday with pictures that were so adorable...gah. Well. I'm posting them here cos they're just too freakin' cute.
BTW, I Googled the details of this story and found out that it is, in fact, true. It was reported in the Seattle media and has been verified over at snopes.com.
I can't imagine this squirrel ever being released back into the wild, though!

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Finnegan the Squirrel

For about as long as she can remember, Debby Cantlon says, friends and strangers have brought her animals in need. So it wasn't much of a surprise when someone asked her if she'd care for a newborn squirrel found at the base of a tree somewhere near Renton, WA.

Debby Cantlon, who plans to release Finnegan, the young squirrel, back into the wild, bottle-fed the infant squirrel after it was brought to her house.

When Cantlon took in the tiny creature and began caring for him, she found herself with an unlikely nurse's aide: her pregnant Papillon, Mademoiselle Giselle.

Finnegan was resting in a nest in a cage just days before Giselle was due to deliver her puppies.

Cantlon and her husband watched as the dog dragged the squirrel's cage twice to her own bedside before she gave birth.

Cantlon was concerned, yet ultimately decided to allow the squirrel out and the inter-species bonding began.

Finnegan rides a puppy mosh pit of sorts, burrowing in for warmth after feeding, and eventually working his way beneath his new litter mates.

Two days after giving birth, mama dog Giselle allowed Finnegan to nurse; family photos and a videotape show her encouraging him to suckle alongside her litter of five pups.

Now, Finnegan mostly uses a bottle, but still snuggles with his "siblings" in a mosh pit of puppies, rolling atop their bodies and sinking in deeply for a nap.

Finnegan and his new litter mates, five Papillion puppies, get along together as if they were meant to.

Finnegan naps after feeding.

Finnegan makes himself at home with his new litter mates, nuzzling nose-to-nose for a nap after feeding.

Tuesdays With Morrie

Another Saturday, another show at Neptune. Tonight's show was the last in the Studio Series this year - Tuesdays With Morrie, based on the gazillion-selling memoir by Mitch Albom. Went to the show in somewhat cynical mode. That book is the stuff of classic Oprah-style schmaltz, with its story of a man reunited with his dying college mentor and learning What Is Truly Important In Life. But I had to admit that it was touching, and the performances were very competent.

As A. is presently off on yet another army weekend, L. joined me for the show. Beforehand, she and I had supper with M. at Piccolo Mondo again. It really is a very good restaurant, with a more sophisticated menu than is usual for this city. I had marinated, grilled wild boar for supper - very very tasty.

Lovely Girls

Shag-all on telly tonight - the Miss USA Pageant is on, for God's sake. In 'honour' of such a splendid event, I took the opportunity to re-screen one of my favourite episodes of Father Ted on DVD: "Rock-a-Hula Ted". In which a militant feminist singer comes to Craggy Island just as Ted is due to judge the annual "Lovely Girls" competition (which is an obvious piss-take of the Rose of Tralee pageant).

Heh. Classic!!

Library Thing: Finit

Life's exciting these days, I tell ya. Last night, I pretty much finished cataloguing the last of my books with Library Thing. *rolls eyes*

In the final reckoning, I realised I own far fewer books than I had thought. My LT catalogue presently stands at 316 titles. I'd say I have another 20-30 books lying around which I decided not to include, for a variety of reasons. And I may well find a few more books lurking in a box somewhere, which I'll add at a later date - not to mention future purchases. Still, that seems a fairly modest figure, given that I have always been a voracious reader. But of course, until relatively recently I didn't have much money to actually buy books, and I've always been a regular public library user.

Now that I've got my books entered, I really must work on my LT blog widget, which you can see over on the left sidebar of this page. I want to put a box around it and fiddle with the fonts, but am thus far insufficiently knowledgeable about the relevant coding. Luckily, I just found this instructive blog post, which might help.

EDIT 7.10 pm: It did. :-)

American Gods

Finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman over the weekend. I picked it up a few weeks ago as it's the current prescribed read for an online book club I joined last year. Very enjoyable piece of modern fantasy - but in the Clive Barker/Stephen King vein, rather than Tolkienesque.

I don't read much Barker or King, so I was actually surprised I enjoyed the book as much as I did. Having been very interested in world mythology when I was younger, I especially enjoyed the way Gaiman wove lots of different mythological tales into the storyline. And the central premise of the novel itself was intriguing - when immigrants come to America, do they bring the beliefs of the Old Country with them? And if they do, what happens to those beliefs, once transplanted? I'm quite looking forward to the online chat for this book, which will probably happen in a few weeks.

Eastertide

My in-laws came round for Easter breakfast this morning. Did the usual traditional spread I grew up with - boiled eggs, Polish sausage, ham, lots of bread - which is nonetheless somewhat exotic fare for the Morrisons. This year I went to the Polish shop in the Farmers' Market to buy kielbasa (and what an embarassment of riches - they had three kinds to choose from, all brought in from Toronto). While there, I found these little shrink wrappers for eggs, imported from Ukraine I think. So I bought a packet and tried them this morning. I coloured half-a-dozen eggs with food colouring as usual, and did the other half-dozen with these shrink wrappers. You can see the results above - they looked really good! It was almost a shame to break the eggs and eat them later.

But it's not been a total Polack-fest today. Before leaving, my mother-in-law broke out a nice Anglo-Saxon Simnel cake that she made yesterday. Very tasty it was, too - I do like marzipan.

And Now, A Public Service Announcement

New Neptune Season

Got a notice in the post yesterday announcing Neptune Theatre's line-up for the 2006-07 season. It looks great - thankfully, much lighter and more varied than this year's. Very promising bunch of plays, too - works by Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Aaron Sorkin and Neil LaBute amongst them. Othe other hand, the musical that's been chosen for next year is Beauty and the Beast - the Disney version. Oh well. Still, it's safe to say that we'll definitely be renewing our subscriptions for next year.

I might get tickets for the Christmas show at the same time - they're doing Oliver! this year, which is an old favourite of mine, and could be very jolly for the holidays. I know every word of that show - my school put on a production of Oliver! when I was in Grade 3, and I used to stay after school every day to watch the rehearsals, even when I wasn't needed. Which was often, as I was only a lowly strawberry seller in the cast. I tried out for the female lead, but was devastated to be informed that I was too short for the role. All the best parts ended up going to the Grade 6 kids. Life is, like, SO unfair that way. *stamps foot*

Maid in Canada

I've been reading Jan Wong's current series in the Saturday Globe and Mail, in which she goes 'undercover' working as a maid in Toronto in order to illuminate the lives of the working poor (especially poor, uneducated women) in Canada.

It's a bit rich, especially as she admitted in her first installment that she employs a 'housekeeper' in her own tony residence in Toronto. And the grim world she uncovers is no great revelation, at least to me. It's a sobering truth that a significant minority in this wealthy country of ours live below the poverty line, despite working grueling hours. And as others have pointed out, Barbara Ehrenreich undertook a similar, and far more thorough, experiment in a few years ago, which she documented in her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

What has struck me most about Wong's series, however, is her portrayal of the type of people who hired her and her colleagues to clean their slovenly homes. Overwhelmingly young, professional, and well-off, they treat the hired help with contempt, while at the same time behaving as though they are invisible. Wong relays nauseating anecdotes of turning up to sprawling homes only to encounter clogged and overflowing toilets, or pet droppings obviously untouched for days and left for the maid to clean up. It's no wonder that, by her second installment, Wong writes that she has come to loathe these people, and regard housework as endless drudgery that is beneath her dignity.

At the end of the day, though, housework has to be done, and someone's got to do it. If you can't or don't want to, I don't see any problem with paying someone else to do it for you. But there's no excuse for the contemptuous treatment Wong and her co-workers seem to be subjected to as a matter of course. Anyone who would treat another human being in such a way is loathsome, in my book.

Madonna Live

Wow, I'm turning into some kind of live show fiend. It was announced earlier this week that Madonna will be touring this summer, and so far, her only Canadian show will be in Montreal on 21 June. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, and will doubtless sell out in about three seconds.

As Madge is one of the few on my Must See Play Live Before I Die list, I think I could find an excuse to go to Montreal and see her. Just don't know about the ticket situation, though - we'll try, but the demand will be massive. Not to mention the price - the top seats cost $350. *gasp* *wheeze* I won't be paying that - but hopefully we'll snag some lower-tier tickets.

**UPDATE** Saturday, 4 pm - well, despite telephone and internet efforts by both J. and I, we had no joy in getting tickets. I must have used up all my ticket mojo. Tickets for a second show in Montreal, on 22 June, actually went on sale this afternoon without announcement, within an hour of the first show going on sale, but no luck there either. So, unless I get very lucky somehow, it looks like I won't be seeing Madonna. :-(

The Juno Awards: Been There, Done That

OK, so it was pretty good. Not life-changing or anything, but very enjoyable.

We got to the Metro Centre around 7 pm, and had a bit of a stroll as I wanted to see what kind of crowd the show had brought out. I don't think many locals had made a particular attempt to be stylish - I did see some sharp outfits on people, but I suspect they were mostly Come From Aways. Ah well, Halifax isn't known as a fancy town.

By 7.30, they started broadcasting from the red carpet outside on the big video screens all around the arena, and by that point we were in our seats up in the gods (three rows from the back!). Note to self - never buy tickets for the Upper Bowl of the Metro Centre again. We could see the whole stage (barely), but our view of the screens on the other side of the arena was obstructed. Still, in this case, beggars couldn't be choosers.

I'd never been part of a live TV broadcast before, so it was actually kinda neat peering at the backstage area through my opera glasses, watching all the techs during the show working furiously to get things ready for each act. And there were screens everywhere, so that everyone could tell when the broadcast had gone to commercials and when we were about to go live again - at which point we were all expected to resume hollering. This last point was especially important, apparently, as this year the Junos are being broadcast internationally for the very first time. Imagine! They're to be shown on MTV2 in the US, and on VH1 in Europe and Australasia.

Pamela Anderson's 'hosting' duties (which consisted mainly of posing and giggling in a variety of skimpy outfits) were mercifully kept to a minimum, with local Mount Uniacke boy Buck 65 serving as MC for the evening. As a PETA stooge, however, Pam couldn't resist dropping a few lame anti-seal hunt 'jokes' into her script, which went down like a lead balloon with the audience - she was roundly booed. But later in the show, while presenting the last award of the evening with Brad Gushue (Newfoundland's first Olympic gold medalist, for curling in Torino), the always-outspoken Jann Arden got the best reaction of the evening when she announced, "I'd like you all to know that my brassiere is made entirely of seal eyelid." I don't think Jann likes Pam very much. Heh. Controversy!

Performance of the Night? Probably Coldplay, mainly because the crowd went completely nuts when they came onstage. They definitely got the most frenzied response of the evening. They performed "Talk" quite respectably...though the entire time I was watching Chris Martin bounce around the stage like a demented baboon, I kept thinking of Liam Gallagher noting that he looks less like a rock star and more like a "f***ing geography teacher". 'Tis true.

Personal Fave Performance? Broken Social Scene, who were their usual disorganised mess on stage but done good nonetheless. And Leslie Feist played with them! (Found out later that at the show they did Saturday night at the Forum, both Feist and Amy Millan from Stars joined them on stage! Dammit, why didn't I get my butt there?!? *grumbles*) Oh yeah, and they won Alternative Album of the Year, which was cool.

Most Underwhelming Performance? Well, Massari and his flygirls were pretty bad. But the award would have to go to the Black-Eyed Peas. Given their general popularity, I figured they'd blow the roof off the place, but it was not to be. I suspect this was because they played more towards the TV cameras than the audience.

That freakin' tune by Bedouin Soundclash, "When the Night Feels My Song", drives me bonkers (mainly because whenever I hear it, I always think of that Zellers commercial it's in - never a good thing). But their performance was perfectly competent and had the crowd singing along. There's no denying it's a catchy tune. I suspect these guys will be one-album wonders, though.

Jeez, people like Michael Bublé, don't they? I mean, they really like him. He won three of the seven awards given out last night, and grown women all around me shrieked whenever his name was uttered. It's a mystery to me.

Nickelback...ah yes, Nickelback. Their lead singer is as craggy-looking in real life as he appears on telly. Very popular, won several awards, garnered much 'lurve' from the audience, had crazy rock'n'roll plumes of fire and pyrotechnics during their performance. Whoo, and also hoo. [/sarcasm]

Bryan Adams (as introduced by Chris Martin) was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame partway through the evening. Which, given his international stature and shedloads of records sold, is a pretty well-deserved honour, I guess. I actually don't mind some of his earlier stuff (though his musical credibility nosedived steeply after that wretched Robin Hood song, in my opinion), so we anticipated he'd do a good medley, spanning his career. I was looking forward to a few bars of "This Time", "Cuts Like A Knife", and even "Summer of '69". But no, all we got was one song - the odious "18 Till I Die". A bizarre choice, to say the least.

Anyway, one can, if so inclined, view all the performances online (for now) at the CTV website.

Oh, and another good thing? The whole evening, we heard not a note of screechy fiddle or bagpipe music, or any other twee Nova Scotia rubbish. Excellent.

Results Pretty Much In

Well, I'm not really sure why we're going to the Junos broadcast tonight. Awards were actually handed out last night at a private gala downtown - thirty-two of them. That leaves just seven to be awarded tonight. What the hell? A two-hour show and seven awards? I mean, I understand them banishing awards in genres like classical, jazz, gospel and children's (?) to a pre-awards ceremony. But categories like best pop and rock albums, best R&B, international group and album, new artist, and group of the year?! (full list of winners here)

Enough grumbling for the mo...right now I'm listening to perhaps the most meaningful Juno Weekend event, the Songwriters' Circle, live on CBC Radio 1. It's being broadcast from the Dal Arts Centre...and if I were smart, I'd have gotten tix for that too.

Junos -1

Well. It's officially Juno weekend and this whole city is in a tizzy. It's great.

Having heard crazy rumours the last few days, I just went on Ebay to see what Juno tickets are going for. The cheapest one I found was a general admission ticket (on the floor, no seat) with a current bid of $260. I'll check again tomorrow afternoon when most of the auctions are closing - should be interesting. Originally I had heard that out of the 10,000-odd seats in the Metro Centre, only about 3,000 were available to the general public (the rest were for the music industry people), but today I read that it might have been as few as 500 tickets. I find that hard to believe, but you never know. A small block of tickets were actually released for sale this morning - to foil the worst of the scalping, I suppose.

The nice thing about the Junos being in Halifax is that there have been lots of other events this weekend in connection with it, so everyone who wants a piece of the action can probably find something to do, even if they couldn't get tickets to the show. The JunoFest looks really great, with all kinds of artists playing different venues all over the city. And for the kids there was the Fan Fare this afternoon, where you could go meet some of the nominated bands and get autographs.

This morning I had to do some shopping and decided to walk the three-odd miles downtown, given that it was sunny and about 15 degrees. Did a bit of recce for tomorrow night down on Brunswick and Argyle Streets, around the Metro Centre (the red carpet will apparently be on Argyle). I think we'll head in early - drive about halfway and leave the car well outside downtown, then walk in and maybe get something to eat, have a stroll, and see what's what. Apparently the Metro Centre opens at 6.30, with everyone to be seated by 7.45 - I think the TV broadcast starts at 8.

I tell you, even for a Saturday morning, I observed an astonishing number of hipsters, clearly From Away, on the streets, yakking into their phones and soaking up the sunshine. I'm obviously not the only one who's noticed - the guy writing the very promising Juno Blog over at The Coast (kickass Halifax indie weekly which has all the coolest and most comprehensive Juno news) opined:

Toronto has descended upon Halifax. At least, that's the impression I got after Night One of the Junos festivities. While out on the town, I saw men with more product in their hair than any Haligonian woman. I think they might have been wearing make-up too. Not that they looked bad. They looked damn good and I might have been slightly envious.

Eh...if I were hipper, I suppose I'd spend my Sunday evening after the show trying to get into the afterparties being hosted by the various record companies at Rain, Tribeca, the Shoe Shop and the like. I'm prolly too old, not to mention uncool, for that. I'm just grateful that we got tickets for the show.

Stay tuned for updated reports!