Let it snow

It's the last week of summer, at least for all practical purposes. I know that summer doesn't officially end in a meteorological sense until later in September, but when the pool closes and kids are back in school, then summer is over as far as I'm concerned. And I hate when summer is over. 

But I still have a week, so it's not over yet. There's a week left to swim, and to eat dinner at 9:30 PM, and to sleep a little later in the morning because I don't have to wake teenagers up. And summer reading--there's a week left of that, too. I read all the time, all year round, but I do tend to read more than usual in the summer. 

I finally finished Entering Ephesus. I hated the ending almost as much as I hated the ending of Atonement, for which I believe Ian McEwan still owes me an apology, so I'm happy to have it out of my hair. Now I'm reading Lina and Serge, a biography of Lina Prokofiev. Lina was married to Serge Prokofiev, the great Russian composer. Like so many other Russians of the early 20th century, she ran afoul of the Soviet police state and spent years in the gulag. So this one is right up my alley, obviously. 

Last night, I recommended that a friend read A Gentleman in Moscow, which another friend had recommended to me. Lina Prokofiev's story made me think of the Count, thought the books are completely different. A Gentleman is a novel, and the reader comes to know the protagonist very well. I'm only a few chapters into Lina's story, but it's already clear that I won't get to know her as well as I got to know the Count.  Coincidentally, both of these characters, one historical and one fictional, passed through the Metropol Hotel. Lina had a chance meeting there that would later lead to her imprisonment, while the Count's entire story takes place there. The Count's story ends happily. I hope that Lina's does, too. 

*****

The word "narrative" is an interesting one, isn't it? In the strictly literal sense, it just means story. And I love stories, true or fictional.  But like so many other words, "narrative" has more than one meaning, not to mention lots of icky political overtones. Just to be helpful, because I'm nothing if not helpful, I'm going to try to explain how to use this word, and how not to use it. 

Let's say that you're Kelli Ward, and you say something idiotic and indefensible. And reporters report what you said. Here's a helpful hint, Kelli Ward--the suffix "er" is often appended to the end of a verb, like "report," which then becomes a noun that describes the occupation of the person who performs the activity described by that verb. It's a lot to take in, I know. Long story short, reporters report. That's their job. 

When that reporter reports (again--that's her job!) on the terrible and inexcusable and whiny and sniveling thing that you said, that reporter is NOT "creating a narrative." She's reporting a story. Even when you say something stupid and ridiculous--ESPECIALLY when you say something stupid and ridiculous--it's newsworthy when you are running for Senate. So instead of being a crybaby little snowflake* bitch and whining about "the media" and "the left," you could (crazy, I know!) just APOLOGIZE and move the hell on.  By the way, saying that you're sorry that other people "might have misconstrued" your remarks isn't REALLY apologizing, but it's a step in the right direction. 

I hope that was helpful. And I wish you well in life, Dr. Ward, but I also sincerely hope that you lose today.

*****

Summer and winter, and politics and literature, and truth and fiction. That's a lot in one blog post! Until next week...

*****

*Another word note. I hate the word "snowflake" to describe anything other than the cold white product of December storm clouds. But it's worth pointing out that it's not only over-sensitive college students who might need a "safe space." 

Something strange in the neighborhood

It's Saturday night, and I'm the only person home. My husband and younger son are at a baseball game, and my older son is at work. I'm unusually tired, so I'm in for the night at 8 PM. I'm going to watch the "Ghostbusters" remake with Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. I'm sitting on my couch with my computer on my lap, and without a thought in my head.

After I finished Lynn Freed's Leaving Home, I returned very briefly to Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends. I'd intended to finish it, in fits and starts, in between reading other books, but I find that I can't make myself care about what happens to the Seekers. Right now, I'm reading Entering Ephesus, by Daphne Athas, an author I'd never heard of before I found this book. Entering Ephesus is a novel about three sisters whose family loses its fortune during the Great Depression and is forced to move from an unnamed New England beach town to Ephesus, a fictional southern college town. Apparently, the novel is somewhat autobiographical, and Ephesus is loosely based on Chapel Hill.

I'm almost finished with Entering Ephesus, and I don't know what to make of it. The racist language on almost every page is shocking, even considering the context of 1971, when it was published; and 1939, when the story begins. And the characters are mostly unsympathetic and unlikable; even borderline evil. On the other hand, it's hard to completely hate a book that includes passages like this:

"The linoleum rugs could not be taken up because the house was riddled with termites. In the middle of the night they could hear tiny, intermittent chain-saw noises as the termites worked, laborious as Communists digging the Moscow subway." This is part of a description of the broken-down house that the family rents when they arrive in Ephesus, having finally lost their beautiful 15-room mansion overlooking the sea.

In a later scene, the girls have entered the local school, where the youngest is instantly the most popular child in her class. Asked by the teacher to comment on an oral report presented by the  poorest, least fortunate child in the class, she praises the boy sincerely and winningly, causing his classmates to see him with new respect: "Even Miss Bogue felt a lump in her throat. There was a victorious feeling in the depths of her being, that feeling that arises when it is manifest that the underdog has won."

So I don't completely hate it. But I don't love it either, and I won't be sorry to finish it. I can overlook the racism, given the historical context. And unsympathetic or evil characters can make great novels, even if they win in the end. But I have an old-fashioned need for redeeming value in a novel; evil characters must be evil for a reason and must more importantly be opposed by good characters. And that's the deepest textual analysis and most insightful literary criticism you'll get around here. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a 5, and three of those five points are conferred on the linoleum passage.


*****
Now it's 8:10 PM on Monday night, and I'm taking a break from work to write about work. I work too much. And that's all I have to say about that. Actually, I'm not really writing about work, but about something that happened where I work. Melania Trump visited HHS today to speak at a summit on cyberbullying. And if you think that I'm going to snark it up about the wife of the mother of all cyberbullies speaking out about cyberbullying, then you're wrong. Because I like Melania. I think that she means well, and that she's trying her best to make something positive of her situation. And her spokeswoman is savage AF, as the kids say. She'll probably lose her security clearance.

*****
Tuesday. Once again, it's 8 PM; and once again, I still have work to do. And once again, I'm writing about it rather than doing it. It's a pattern.

I took a break for 30 minutes, to swim in a pool that was a tropical haven of rest yesterday and an icy Norwegian fjord today. OK, so I'm exaggerating. But it was cold. And it occurred to me, as I swam one chilly lap after another, with the sky gray and lowering, that yesterday might have been the turning point. It might have been the last day of warm-water swimming for 2018. Two weeks from today, the pool will be closed. I kept swimming as a few raindrops fell.

If you have ever worked on a huge proposal, then you know that some proposal tasks are worse than others. If a proposal is an aircraft carrier, then resumes and letters of commitment are KP. Do they have that in the Navy? Whatever the kitchen duty is called. I guess on a ship, it's a galley.  But it could be worse. I could be writing a compliance matrix. That's latrine duty.

I turned on some music a little while ago, because I needed an energy boost.

• "Mr. Blue Sky," Electric Light Orchestra. It's not possible to sustain a bad mood through this song.
• "Cheap Thrills," Sia. This song appeared on at least five "Worst Songs of 2016 According to Snotty Hipster Critics" lists. Morons. This is one of the greatest songs ever.
• "Forever," Chris Brown. Yeah, I know. Me too. But no one can be all bad who can make people so happy with just one song. 
• "Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. Shut up. 
• "(Lay Down) Candles in the Wind," Melanie. My mom had the album, and we played it all the time. I could listen to this song a hundred times and never tire of it. I sing along like a six-year-old holding her mother's hairbrush like a microphone. 

*****

It's Wednesday now, and I have work to do, so of course I need to write about having work to do before I can actually do the work. The whole house of cards might be about to come down now, but I can't worry about history in the making. I have a proposal to write. 

Let's go back

It's Sunday morning. Normally, I write for a little while on Sunday morning, but I haven't left myself much time. When we return from a trip, the unpacking and laundry will often provoke a too-much-stuff-driven anxiety attack, and last night was no exception. Because we really do have too much stuff. So this morning, I cleaned rather than wrote.

I clean all the time, but routine everyday cleaning is different from turn-this-mother-out CLEANING. I'm organizing closets. I'm cleaning under things, and behind things, and on top of things. I'm purging.

But that's enough of that. What is this, HGTV?

*****
Memory is tricky, isn't it? You can be quite sure that something happened in a certain way, at a certain time. You might even be sure that you remember exactly what you were wearing, or what song was playing on the radio. And you can be wrong, even in your certainty that you remember every detail.

We went to Canada in 2010. We got passports for our children, who were 9 and 5 at the time, and renewed our own passports. I remember sitting at the Aspen Hill Post Office, waiting for our names to be called; and I remember completing the paperwork, and receiving all of our passports a few weeks later. My husband remembers the same appointment. And we did all go together, and we did sit and wait to hear our name called, and we did get our children's first passports.

Last Saturday night, we returned to the U.S. from Canada, via the same border crossing at Champlain--St. Bernard de Lacolle from which we'd entered Canada the previous Saturday. The very friendly U.S. Border Patrol agent chatted with us for a few minutes, asked us a few pro forma questions about why we'd been in Canada, and what we had purchased, and where else in the country we'd traveled. We answered, and then handed over our passports.

The border guard looked at our passports, and then looked closely at my husband. "Did you know that your passport is expired?" he asked.

"What?" we both exclaimed in unison. "No, that can't be," my husband said. "I renewed it in 2010, so it expires in 2020."

"No," said the border guard, "your wife's expires in 2020, but yours expired in June of this year. Didn't the Canadian border guards check it when you came into Canada?"

We looked at the passport, and realized that the man was 100% right. In 2008, my husband made his first return trip to Korea, the land of his birth (any excuse to write "the land of his birth"). He had renewed his passport earlier that year, and was only along for the ride when the boys and I got our passports in 2010. We had completely forgotten that small, but critical detail. Je ne me souviens pas. 

And the Canadian border guard? He had one job, as the hashtag goes. #RocketScience.

*****

Let's go back let's go back 
Let's go way on way back when
I didn't even know you, you couldn't have been too much more than ten
I ain't no psychiatrist, ain't no doctor with degrees
But it don't take too much high IQs to see what you're doing to me

I never used to cry at celebrity deaths, but as I've gotten older, I've come to understand the relationship between ordinary people and their favorite celebrities. They speak for us, or express something for us that we can't. And we don't have to know them personally, or to even meet them for a moment, to feel love and kinship with them, and gratitude for the gifts that they share. That's how I felt about Mary Tyler Moore, and Carrie Fisher, and Kate Spade. And Aretha Franklin. "Think," one of Aretha's own songs, was the one that I couldn't get out of my head today. You have to watch her perform that song, not just listen to it, because she used her whole body when she sang, with a combination of freedom and abandon, but total control, that was unique to her. I kept singing "Think" to myself, but I didn't cry until I saw a later performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman," a song written by Carole King but owned by Aretha.

We can listen to Aretha forever; but it won't be the same, knowing that she's gone and that there won't be any new Aretha performances.

People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don't lose yours

I'll be careful I don't lose mine. Aretha Franklin, rest in peace. 

Il est temps de rentrer a la maison

It always happens this way. When I come to a new city, I'm homesick for the first day or so (I get homesick when I'm 30 minutes from home) and then I get my bearings. When I finally feel completely at home, it's time to leave.

It's our last night in Montreal. I'm ready to return home, but I'll miss it here. I'll miss hearing French spoken everywhere. I'll miss seeing cathedrals on every corner, and smelling crepes cooking, and drinking Tim Hortons coffee every morning (we bought a can to take home, but it's not the same as buying it in a paper cup). I'll miss chatting in French with store clerks and hotel employees until they say something that I don't understand, and see my blank look of incomprehension and then switch effortlessly to English. And then they say "thank you," while I say "merci beaucoup." And they say "have a good day!" And I say "Au revoir, bonne journee!"

One more, from the overlook at Chalet du Mont Royal

Au revoir, Montreal. Bonne journee, and many more. 

Picture yourself in a boat on a river

It's Thursday, our next-to-last day in Montreal. We haven't decided what to do tomorrow. My vote is for one more climb up Mont Royal, but we'll see.

We visited VIeux Montreal again today, after a stop at the Bell Center, because hockey. I watched another family as we waited to board the Bateau Mouche for a cruise on the St. Lawrence River. A father, a mother, and three children--a boy of 12 or so, and two girls, maybe 10 and 14. The older girl leaned on her father, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. The younger boy talked and joked with his mother, while the younger girl hopped around, singing, making faces, and generally competing for attention as best she could. Later, I saw that the older girl had fallen asleep on the boat, as the younger girl leaned on her father, basking in a few minutes of attention focused only on her. 

Back on the lower deck, a young mother worked to calm and comfort a fussy baby girl, eight months old or so. The baby flailed and howled, but the mother remained completely calm, bouncing and rocking the baby, and doing her best to soothe her. First, she tried to nurse the baby, who refused to participate. Then she offered toys, sang songs, and made silly faces. The mother seemed to be enjoying the challenge of finding and solving the baby's problem. Finally, she pulled a teething biscuit out of her bag, and the baby grabbed it eagerly, shaking it and munching on it happily. A snack and something to do with her hands--problem solved. The baby was also asleep as the boat returned to the dock. 

*****

Later, my husband and sons went ziplining. My older son was hesitant, and I urged him to try it, thinking that he'd later regret not having gone. I didn't zipline, because I was wearing a dress; and even though the ticket seller assured me that the harness would "close that right up," (what?) I knew that I'd feel ridiculous on a zipline in a dress. 

My husband told me that my son had a panic attack at the take-off point, and then he took a deep breath and jumped. He was happy to have done it, but I shouldn't have pushed him. And who am I to tell anyone to try to conquer their fears when I can't even conquer my fear of looking silly? 

On the boat, before the zipline incident.
My arm wasn't long enough to get a good selfie of both of us.
Plus I'm inept with a camera. 

*****

I'm in the midst of a crisis, and am not sure how to solve it, other than to suffer through it and wait it out. That approach usually works. It's harder this time; I'm not sure why. And now I'm rereading this and realizing that it's even worse than I thought, because I just wrote a sentence that includes the word "midst." "Amongst" can't be far behind; that's when I'll know that it's serious. Bonne nuit pour l'instant. 

Noblesse

It's 7:30 PM and I'm sitting up in my hotel room bed, in for the night. My sons and I will go swimming at 9:30 or so, but my feet are finished walking, and there's no chance that I'll leave this hotel tonight.

We walked to St. Joseph's Oratory today, 4 or so uphill miles from our hotel; and then returned to McGill University, and decided to walk to the top of Mont Royal, too. I recorded 26,000 steps today. That's not the real story, though (but 26,000! Impressive!). The real story is how amazingly beautiful the Oratory and Mont Royal Park are, and how much work and prayer went into the creation of both of these miraculous places.

*****
Most people know Frederick Law Olmsted as the designer of New York's Central Park, but apparently, he was also involved in the design of Mont Royal Park. According to Wikipedia, an economic crash in the mid 19th century prompted Montreal's city planners to abandon many of Olmsted's very ambitious plans for the park. This is astonishing to me, because it's still amazingly beautiful and welcoming, the type of public space that the great 19th century robber barons built with their vast fortunes. Using winding paths and wooden stairs built into the side of the mountain, visitors can either climb or hike to the top, where Chateau Mont Royal will welcome them with ice cream and cold drinks and overpriced souvenirs. (Buy an expensive t-shirt! It's not cheap to maintain a thing like Mont Royal!) Then, they can stand on the overlook, with all of magnificent Montreal spreading below, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with having climbed a mountain--even a relatively small one.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to take a panoramic picture.
Trust me, it's much more impressive in person. 

St. Joseph's is even more magnificent. You walk and walk and walk down Chemin de la Cote des Neiges, growing more and more certain that you have the wrong directions and that your GPS doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. And then, just as you approach Chemin Queen Mary, you see the very top of the dome emerging from the tree canopy.

OMG! There it is!

St. Joseph's was also built during the midst of an economic crisis. According to the $2 Visitor's Guide, construction was halted in 1931. Brother Andre was supposed to have ordered the construction company to place a statue of St. Joseph in the open structure. "If he wants a roof over his head, he'll make sure that the money is there." A few years later, construction was complete.

This is what it looks like today, as you approach on foot.

Mont Royal Park was built with the help of municipal funds and private donations from Canada's robber baron counterparts (descendants of Hudson Bay traders, I guess). And St. Joseph's was completed with the help of private funding from donors large and small (but probably mostly large). 

I don't like to indulge in class-warfare rhetoric. If you compare my life to the lives of most people who have ever lived for all of human history, then I'm the one percent, and I could do a lot better at noblesse oblige. On the other hand, it's hard to compare today's super rich (no Donald Trump, not including you, because no one expects anything from you) to the super rich of the 19th and early 20th centuries and not feel a little bit shortchanged. The Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts endowed parks and hospitals and museums that were built to last forever. I guess it's still too early to say what the Buffets and the Gates and the Zuckerbergs will leave behind. If it's anything half as magnificent as Mont Royal Park and St. Joseph's Oratory, then I guess I can forgive them for Facebook and Windows Vista. 

9:00 now. I'm too tired to move, but swimming doesn't count as moving. More Montreal tomorrow, maybe. A bientot. 

En Francais, s'il vous plait

I had planned, before we came to Montreal, to study and try to improve my French a little bit. I use Duolingo for Spanish, and I thought that I'd just add an additional language and practice for a few minutes a day. And then all of a sudden it was the day before our trip, and I hadn't practiced at all. Zut, alors.

I took two years of French in high school, switching to Spanish during my junior year. I also took an additional semester of French in college. After that, I hardly ever spoke or read anything in French, so I was well out of practice. I also took only two years of Spanish, but everyone who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland can speak a little bit of Spanish; and between hearing Spanish spoken every day and practicing with Duolingo, I can get by in Spanish; or at least, I can follow a conversation.

But when in Montreal, I like to do as the Montrealers do, and I've been trying to speak French as much as possible, with limited success. I get a little better each day, though.

*****
I don't have much of a talent for languages, other than my own. It's humbling to realize that even as I gain a little bit of competency in basic French conversation (lentement, s'il vous plait!) I will never, and I mean NEVER, achieve real fluency.

I'm an editor, so when I read signs or posters, especially long signs (pool rules, for example), I edit and rewrite them in my mind. The English-language rules posted at the hotel pool, for example, are badly written. This might be because a French speaker wrote them; but I've been to enough pools in the United States to know that it's just as likely that they were written by a native English speaker--pool rules signs are always badly written for some reason. After I finished my edit, the sign was stripped of unnecessary capital letters (another Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome trigger) and altogether much better and more clearly written, in my mind. But the French sign? Who knows? Even as I congratulated myself for being able to understand 70 percent of the sign without referring to the English version, I realized that I had NO IDEA if it was grammatically correct. That sign could be a morass of bad grammar and poor word choices; and riddled with spelling and typographical errors, and I'd be clueless. Humbling.

*****
So this morning, we visited the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. My favorite exhibit was "Les Prophetes," a collection of tiny creations made of string and bits of wood and plastic and colored paper, all marked with handwritten labels. Each of the pieces is a three-dimensional representation of an economic statistic of some sort. I picked up an exhibit guide, but haven't read enough yet to know whether or not the statistics are real or made up for the sake of the project.

It looks so cheerful, n'est-ce pas? Actual
caption: "Work Fatalities in Europe by Country." 

I loved this for two reasons. The world (meaning the part of the world in which I live and work) is preoccupied with "metrics," to an unhealthy extent, and I like the idea that each of these metrics can be reduced to nothing more than colors and shapes, no more meaningful than the string and colored paper they're made of. I also loved the finicky care with which each of the pieces is assembled and labeled. I pictured myself at age 11 or so spending weeks constructing and labeling something similar.

"The Unit Simplex." Reminiscent of a Spirograph drawing.

*****
In the afternoon, we went to the Montreal Botanic Garden, taking our first ride on the Montreal Metro, which is very much like the Washington, DC Metro. Pie IX station deposits you right at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, which is certainly the ugliest place in Montreal, and maybe one of the ugliest in North America. On a hot day, there's nothing less inviting than a nearly all-concrete stadium, as they were built in the early 1970s. To call the Olympic stadium reminiscent of East Germany strikes me as unfair to East Germany, which after all, I have never visited. Maybe it was pretty and cheerful in 1976. In 2018, it's a parched, sun-baked concrete bowl, marked by graffiti, its cracked walkways overgrown with weeds and unshaded by even a single tree. We didn't inquire about the tour.

The Botanic Garden, however, is beautiful and exactly the remedy for the soul-crushing malaise of the Olympic stadium. I took lots of pictures there. Here is one.

It's a flower. I have no idea what kind. 

It's 9 PM now, and time to swim. Mont Royal and St. Joseph's Oratory tomorrow. Au revoir a demain.

Je me souviens

Bonjour! It's Sunday morning, and I'm writing from beautiful Montreal, my home for the next week. We drove here from the Washington D.C. suburbs. It's a long, but pleasant drive, via my beloved New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and then through the Catskills and Adirondacks. Yes, I know that "beloved" is not an adjective that is usually used to describe the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike, but I love New Jersey, including its highways, and especially its mandated-by-law full-service gas stations.

*****
We crossed the border at about 6:30 PM last night, and because we weren't paying close attention to the (few and all but invisible) signs, we ended up, completely by mistake, in the NEXUS line. My husband (who was driving--I had taken the first driving shift) realized his mistake a split-second after it was too late to correct it.

"Uh-oh," he said, as an angry-looking Canadian border guard approached the car. My husband started to explain/apologize, when the border guard asked "Sir, can I ask you a question? What would make you think that you can jump the line in front of all of these cars, when this lane is clearly (not at all clearly BTW) marked 'NEXUS only'?"

The question having been asked, my husband attempted to answer it, only to be interrupted by the border guard, who held up his hand, saying "Wait, let me finish. You see a traffic jam at the border, and you decide that you should just blow past all of these people, hoping that breaking the rules will save you 15 minutes?"

"I apologize," my husband said sheepishly. "It was an honest mistake. I really didn't notice the sign."

"REALLY?" the border guard demanded. "What did you think that all these people were waiting for?"

I chimed in, as I do sometimes. "Again, we apologize. We have been driving for 13 hours and weren't paying as close attention as we should have."

The hand went up again. "Ma'am, there are people who crossed this border today who drove from Florida, 20 hours or more, and they got in the right line." I didn't argue. I hadn't seen a single U.S. license plate in the line of cars waiting to enter Canada, but maybe I had missed the earlier caravan of alert Floridians.

My husband tried again to apologize, and the border guard held up his hand once more. "Do you have any guns in the car?" he demanded. He asked for our passports, and after giving them the most cursory of glances, explained that in the future, we should remember that the NEXUS line is reserved for immigration cases. "It's not rocket science," he pointed out helpfully, therefore disabusing me permanently of the notion that Canadians are naturally witty. Having visited Toronto a few years ago, and having attended many NHL games, I already knew that they're not any nicer than Americans. After accepting another finger-wagging and scolding from a second border guard, we were waved through and just like that, we were in another country.

"Well," my husband said.

"I know, right?" I said.

"I mean, if 'it's not rocket science, sir' is the worst abuse I have to endure, then I can live with it. We probably saved 45 minutes, don't you think?"

Easily. EASILY.

*****
It could only have gone up from there, and it did. Montreal is lovely, and its people are delightful, proving that it's not hard to be kind to strangers, even if their French pronunciation leaves a great deal to be desired. Ce n'est pas sorcier.

*****
Last week, I finished reading Lynn Freed's Leaving Home: Blah Blah Blah. It's a memoir, and so it is of course filled with the author's memories, including her recollections of vague childhood envy of families who vacationed in what she called "caravans," or "trailers" as we say in the U.S. I thought for a moment that this was another reminiscence of a thing that used to be done, that is no longer done; and then I drove through upstate New York on a Saturday in August, and realized that at least half of Quebec vacations this way. We saw dozens (no exaggeration!) of cars bearing the "Je Me Souviens" Quebec license plate, towing vacation caravans on their way back to Montreal and Quebec City and Sherbrooke and Drummond. Years from now, a French-Canadian memoirist will lament her family's unconventional city vacations, wishing that just once, she'd had the chance to tow a caravan from Quebec to the Jersey Shore like all of her friends.

*****
Who knows what my 17-year-old son will do when he can't have poutine with every meal. During his first college visits, we explained the Freshman 15, cautioning him not to overindulge in dining hall all-you-can-eat pizza and soft-serve ice cream when he goes away to school. The Freshman 15 could easily give way to the Montreal 20 if we stayed here for too long. I don't get the appeal, but my son loves it.

*****

Last night, our crazy Arlo security system (another story, for another day) alerted my husband of a visitor at hour house. A person was knocking on our door at 1 AM. He knocked, peered in through the kitchen window, knocked again, and then disappeared. Apparently, our house was not burglarized, but it's a little disconcerting to know that something or someone might be threatening your home when you're too far away to do anything about it. Being me, I naturally had a panic attack that grew into a full-blown existential crisis. Bonne vacances! Eventually, I did go back to sleep, and woke up this morning feeling much better.

Henri Matisse, Portrait au Visage Rose et Bleu, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Last night, I was the blue part; this morning, I was rose. 

It's Monday evening. Time to swim. More on Montreal later this week.

Nerd rage

Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome: Characterized by flaming hot fury and acts of violence that include pen-throwing, foot-stomping, and keyboard abuse; sometimes accompanied by NSFW verbal outbursts, this disorder may be triggered by any of the following:

• Inability to distinguish between "e.g." and "i.e." OR (and especially) the misguided belief that these Latin abbreviations are synonymous and may therefore be used interchangeably. 
• Liberal use of both "e.g." and  "i.e." without the (necessary) comma to follow. 
• Note that "liberal use" means at least three times per page, throughout the entire length of a 174-page proposal. God help me. God help us all. 
• Use of the semi-colon to separate single-word list items (OH GOD THE HUMANITY).
• Use of the phrase "flush out" in reference to anything other than a toilet or a sewer system. 

So that was Monday. And now it's Tuesday. I slowed way down on my way home from the pool, to accommodate two (not one, but two) squirrels who were either blind or just not smart enough to get out of the way of an oncoming Subaru. I wondered for a moment if squirrels as a species might not have benefited if I'd hit one or both of them (NOT ON PURPOSE) because these two were obviously not the best contributors to the squirrel gene pool. But then I realized that as humans, we're probably better off if the squirrels don't become too intelligent. My family in particular doesn't need any more rodents that can outsmart us.

*****

Do you see what happens to me when I don't get out enough? I mean, really.

*****

I don't look at blog analytics very often, but I did look yesterday, and found an unusual one-day spike in visitor numbers. Interestingly, many of them are from Russia. So добро пожаловать. That means "welcome," if I take Google's word for it. I suppose I should actually learn some Russian, given that it will eventually be the primary language of the United States. Meanwhile, I hope that my poor grammar doesn't upset any Russian trolls. I know how that feels.