This entry is not about my car, or cheese. It is going to be the one big entry where I catch up and stop feeling guilty that I have done cool stuff and not bragged about it yet. Actually, though, I've not done so much cool stuff, so it’s more an entry where I go on about a lot of trivia. Here goes.
When last I uploaded a picture or two, it was about a weekend trip that I took a few days after Labour Day. At the time, I was all pissy that it was *cold*, and that summer was *over*. It was early September, I wanted those bonus summer weeks that we seem to always get. I didn't yet know that this would be the Fall That Sucks, the sort of season which would nail the concept of "fall precipitation maximum" for undergraduate students. Nor was I aware that it would rain so much that my well would be contaminated with e.coli and for a while, I would have been happy to just not have an angry gastrointestinal system. No, no, I was still naïve and figured I'd go bop through the glory of fall colours and go oooooh, pretty, and then get all smug about living in Ontario, land of scarlet trees, on this website. That was, of course, before a nasty rainstorm ripped all the red leaves off the trees well ahead of the normal peak of fall colours. In early September, I didn't know that I would hit my full-on November mood by mid-October and thus was cranky about slightly cool (but sunny! with warm water!) weather. You don't know what you've got…
Yeah. So. Weekend #2 after Labour Day would have been weekend #2 that I skip a work event (what? I am not paid for Friday night!) and I relented. Mostly I relented because planning said event was delegated to me, which meant that even though I did my best to pass that buck, I still had to *go*. And, since I was devoting a portion of my precious weekend to work-related activity, somehow my mind got tricked into thinking I must work all weekend, and I sat at my desk. Oh, and made tomato sauce and pesto, from the abundance of tomatoes at the farm. Every year, come November, I wonder why I didn’t capture a little bit of summer’s glory in my freezer, and what is wrong with me that I don’t appreciate tomato time when it is happening – but of course, most every year, during that time, the weather is good and I’m playing outside and who wants to slave over a hot stove peeling tomatoes?
And then, the next weekend, I had plans to paddle on Lake Erie, but there was this stupid forecast of big wind and blabbity bla and we canceled and that was the wrong call because the weekend turned out not too bad. 
As in, not too bad in the context of what was to come. Which I didn't know about, at the time. It had only rained for a few days by that point. I took advantage of the not-raining weather to dig lots of holes in my garden and play musical chairs with the perennials. There was a lot of digging, and removing dead things, and cutting the grass one more time, and so I ran out of steam and decided that this year I would experiment with leaving the gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers in the ground over the winter, and if they died they died. Experiment is the new lazy. And I never really liked the dahlias that much anyway.
Gardening and cooking for two weekends in a row was a bit too much domesticity, so it was time to run away again before I started comparison shopping for sewing machines (I totally can’t sew. I was traumatized in grade eight home ec class. See, we had to make our projects, and mine was a shirt. On the pattern, it showed the shirt with solid sleeves and a stripey body. I thought that was great, and I wanted that. When my mother went to the fabric store, the only stipey fabric they had was this super slippery athletic stuff. Keep in mind that I wasn’t particularly gifted to begin with, but that stuff slipped all over the place and my shirt required endless ripping seams out and trying again. Plus, I did the math and realized that buying a shirt was cheaper than buying the fabric and making the shirt, so…? And the other project we had to complete was to make these pillows shaped like our initials, and the W was a bitch to stuff.) So, on what is us usually gloat-over-fall-colours time, I made plans with Elke. 
We planned to spend a weekend in Algonquin and make fun of the tourist buses and hang out at our paddle-in site. We did make fun of the (not exactly full) tourist buses full of people gawking at the trees that, before the stupid storm, were scarlet. You can't see it, ladies and gentlemen, but if you could, you would see a cloak of scarlet. Now please hurry back into the bus before you are hypothermic. Yeah. The weather was truly shite. Rain and cold and bleah. We made the most of it: we convinced ourselves to be smug about our palatial paddle-in site, which was indeed much better than the car-camping sites that cost far more money only a 15 minute paddle away. 
We drank a lot of wine. We welcomed John for a visit, and he came bearing much chocolate (so we warmly welcomed him). We even stomped around the Big Pines trail (those pines? Not that big) and the Spruce Bog trail (if other people hadn't already picked them, you would see pitcher plants here. But people have. So this is the sort of habitat you would normally see pitcher plants in). I wanted soup.
Up next was the one and only truly glorious weekend of the fall, and it was even Thanksgiving. Thus, the best weather weekend of the entire fall was also the long weekend! How wonderful! Time for a trip! Except, of course, I was banished to Regina that week and didn't get back until early in the morning on Saturday – so everybody who was cool and into doing stuff was already doing it, and my email just gave me a cheery "not going to work for you!" message (instead of "we'll be here and here if you want to join") and I would have sulked if there was anybody to sulk to. But there wasn't, they had all disappeared to the backcountry. And 
besides, by this time I was relying on over the counter pharmaceuticals to deal with my innards, so maybe a long kayak trip would not have been the best move anyway. But the weekend was wasted! I baked a (crustless, because I can't actually bake, but that’s not the fault of some home ec trauma) pumpkin pie – using a real pumpkin, not the contents of a tin! I cut my grass one more time. 
I puttered in the garden some more. I repotted my houseplants and brought them inside after a summer in the sun (and rain, lots of rain). I looked at my bookshelf and realized that the accumulated books were exceeding the space allotted to books, and purged a good 25 books from my library (the pictures are the “before” pictures). I had a lot of naps.
We're almost caught up. If you were to look at a calendar (which is what I've done while writing this entry, since the whole season has blurred into a rainy gloomy mess in my head already), you would see that there is 
only one not-accounted-for weekend. That was last weekend. On Friday morning, I buggered off. I felt like hanging out in Vancouver, so I did. In Vancouver, I went to the aquarium and watched the belugas from the underwater viewing area for a really long time. I really liked the belugas. I also gawked at the totem poles in Stanley Park, that was on the way to the aquarium. On the way home, we were hungry, so we went to Cardero's and plunked ourselves by the fire and 
ate some seared ahi tuna and some wok-fried squid and drank many beers, and then it was later, so I ate a wild pacific salmon burger and drank some more beer. Which of course meant that we were the world's lamest people and spent our Saturday night watching movies on tv and eating potato chips. We have become bundles of energy in our mid-30s, it seems. I hadn't seen The Sixth Sense in some time, so whatever, I watched it. I fell asleep when 
What Women Want came on (but not before realizing that I really disliked both the leads, and there is a reason I only ever see movies of that ilk on airplanes when I am a captive audience).
Last Sunday, Holly and Joey gave me a tour of the many types of rain in Vancouver. There was the drizzle outside our window at brunch at Horseshoe Bay. There was the constant 
spitting all the way through Kitsilano, the steady downpour on Point Grey, and I'm running out of synonyms for rain in South Van, New West, Coqitlam and Burnaby. I wanted a new brolly. I settled for a ride to the fancy-pants hotel where Holly and I were to meet bossman for a drink. Holly then got to go home to the glass and steel tower in the sky, but 
I went with the bossman to the helijet and got my very first helicopter ride ever.
Yeah. It sounds exciting, doesn't it? A helicopter ride from Vancouver to Victoria? Over the Gulf Islands? Very exciting, that. The helijet holds 12 passengers and two pilots. My seat was in the middle in the back row. Beside me, a man doing a crossword puzzle (what a waste of a window seat! But I noticed that *all* of the people who had scrambled to get the window seats had their noses buried in books and crossword puzzles!). Below me, rain and fog. Immediately in front of me, the unflappable bossman, looking calm. Beside me, a woman casually reading a disaster book (Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb, which I was interested in because like everybody else on the planet I read Into Thin Air, and after that Kevin let me borrow his copy of David Breashear’s High Exposure, and we chatted about that for a bit before the noise got too much and we all put in earplugs). Far in front of me, one pilot was busily flipping through some big manual-type-looking book for most of the flight while the other one was at the controls. Above me, the bits that make the helicopter helicopt. And let's keep in mind that I had never been in a helicopter before, and thus, every change in the noise was a source of terror. The changes in noise were noticeable even through my earplugs, and they were accompanied by changes in vibrations. I was scared. It should have been reassuring that everybody around me looked bored with the whole experience – nope, I just fixated on the pilot in the left-hand seat, the one who was probably looking up how to fix a detaching rotor while in flight. I wondered where the lifejackets were. I wondered if they'd help me as the helicopter went plummeting into the ocean. I ate all the chocolate éclair candies that I'd liberated from the candy bowl at the check-in (no, really, I did. See, there was a huge bowl of candy, and the bossman's girlfriend picked out an éclair. I wanted one too, so I tried to casually find one. I failed on the casual part, because when I started tipping the glass bowl so I could see the contents at the bottom better, the cute check-in guy laughed at me and went to the back and got a giant bag of mixed candies and plunked it in front of me and told me to go nuts. I wanted the éclairs, and it was a *really big bag*. So I took more than a couple. And I ate them, since I'd rather die on a sugar rush than feeling virtuous).
Of course, I didn't die. I can say that all matter-of-factly now, but then? Not so much. I was happy to hit solid ground. And, as a means to recover, I got on the phone and called both Ian and Lorenzo for beers within two minutes of checking into the hotel. They both accepted, and I met them at the Garrick's Head and some beers were consumed. My terror subsided by my second pint, though it did briefly spike a bit again when Lorenzo told me of the time he was in a helicopter and it was too windy for the thing to land so it sort of hovered and they had to *jump out*). After that, it was time to move on to fancy-pants restaurant for super yummy dinner, and that was all good with me. The only "waste" on this particular day was that my room had a wood-burning fireplace, with a fire already set, just waiting for a match, and I never lit it. Of course, my room was also boiling hot even though I had turned the heat off and opened the windows, and I suspect this was intentional on the part of management so that nobody would want to light the fire. I did, however, sit in the whirlpool tub in the morning, but whirlpool tubs get boring really fast. And besides, it was now Monday, and on Mondays, I work.
Yeah. Work work work boring boring. 
Let's not speak of that. We were, however, done with the meeting by 2:30, yay! So I called Lorenzo again, and Polo, Lorenzo and I spent the afternoon talking about work for about 30 seconds and the rest of it drinking coffee and driving around. Lorenzo is a good host. As we drove by a park, I thought the pole there was huge, so we stopped. The parks department in Victoria claims it's the world's tallest totem pole, but that is a lie. It isn't. They will acknowledge this when pushed, 
because then they qualify it with "world's tallest totem pole from a single tree". They neglect to tell you that there is one much taller made out of two trees, but that the section that is from a single tree on the other one is actually taller already than this one, and then they stuck *another* section on top. The Guinness Book of World Records just promotes these sort of stupid qualifiers. But it isn't totally stupid, you know, because Holly's chub-chub 
cat has gotten fatter since I last saw him, prompting me to google fat cats to see how fat he really is in the grand scheme of things (not so very) and I discovered that the Guinness record-holding fat cat is by no means the fattest cat there is, but Guinness is no longer accepting nominations for that category because it might encourage people to over-feed their pets. And that's probably true, seeing as the frosh on campus turn themselves into a human freak show every fall in an attempt to get into the book (I don't get it! I thought the Guinness book was cool when I was 11, and not since…) so I'm sure that some non-cat-loving jerks would abuse a poor kitty-cat just to see their name in print.
(And yet another aside: my grocery store has perhaps seven aisles, plus the areas where there are vegetables and fresh fish and cheeses and the bakery and the butchery and all that, but let’s say seven aisles of non-perishables. One of these is devoted to cleaning and paper products. But then, there is a whole entire useless aisle: a whole huge supermarket aisle devoted to pet products. I’ll admit that I am not a dog person, so really the only sort of pet food I have any use for is for cats, but how much space does it take to put a few boxes of Friskies out? I have never actually wandered down the pet aisle to see just what sort of variety we can offer our pet and how many brands of kitty litter there are, but to me the pet food aisle really symbolizes just how seriously we take ourselves as a consumer society.)
But, yeah, back to Monday afternoon in Victoria. Where it did not rain. Which was the primary reason I flat-out refused to change my flight when the bossman suggested I do the same as him and head back to Ontario on the 4 p.m. flight. No! I want to walk outside without a coat! I want to feel sunshine on my face! I wanted to talk to Lorenzo some more! 
And I got all that… and then, sigh, I got the red-eye, with a really long lay-over in Calgary. And when I got to Toronto, it was raining. I don't think I wasted any time in Victoria, though Kevin disagreed because when I told him about it, I didn't go to the bar or coffeeshop or whatever it was that he thought was so cool, but that's ok – I'm back there in December anyway.
So. Now we are all caught up to today. It rained yesterday. I spent a lot of time at my desk, on the phone and on the computer and grrrrr. If I don't get around to updating, until Christmas it looks like this: fly to Alberta, go to China, return to Alberta, come back to Ontario, go to BC, back to Toronto, drive to northern Ontario, eat lots of Christmas cookies.