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December 27, 2007
boxing day madness
My hometown was once a Royal Canadian Air Force training station. In the 60s it was decommissioned and sat empty for a while, eventually becoming the property of the Ontario Development Corporation, reconfigured into a booming little industrial park with attached town. You couldn't buy a house there when I was growing up; the town was an experiment, an attempt to draw industry with its conveniently located cheap rental homes for factory workers and its military sized airport. It worked really well all through the seventies, before the factories started moving to countries where they could more easily exploit their workers.
Now the houses are being sold (not the land, though; so the industrial park I grew up in is now a trailer park, and my mom, who now owns the house she formerly rented, pays lot fees for the land her home sits on). There are a lot of changes happening here, in a place that sat virtually unchanged from the late 1960s to the turn of the millenium. Houses that have looked the same for decades are suddenly having additions built on, sunrooms, southern-style wraparound porches. I've already watched the disappearance of many things I loved about my hometown, like the school (which had already been closed for a few years before half of the building burned down, and is now a boarded-up eyesore in the middle of a neglected field), the air force dormitories and tennis courts, and the airstrip where we used to play as kids and, as teens, drive out to the middle to do beer-addled doughnuts (the airstrip hasn't gone anywhere, but it's all fenced off now so kids can't get onto it anymore). So most of the changes happening to the houses don't bother me too much (except for that one particularly hideous one). But this is really lame:
Huron Park has been rebranded as "Huron Village Green". Blech.
Cleo had an exceptionally good Boxing Day this year. My dad's wife Sherry made little catnip pillows for everyone (my dad and his wife are crazy cat ladies; the kitty population in their home recently swelled to fourteen and now sits at eleven indoor cats and one outdoor cat). I don't think Miss Cleo has ever had catnip before, and she tore into it with abandon. We had to eventually take it away from her after she became so totally baked she was wobbling a little.
She started yelling outside our bedroom door at 5 in the morning, no doubt suffering from a killer case of the munchies.
Posted by jodi at December 27, 2007 02:57 PM | categories: crazy cat lady : dumbass
Comments
Heh...nothing says Christmas like a little stoned cat.
Posted by: cari at December 27, 2007 04:33 PM
The drugged kitty pix are hysterical. Thanks for the smile!
Posted by: claudia at December 27, 2007 09:57 PM
Huron Village Green? That is bizarre. I will have to make a trip out to see that for myself.
Posted by: Heather G. at December 28, 2007 01:30 PM
Awwwwwe, miss cleo is so CUTE!!
Posted by: Sylvain at December 28, 2007 10:30 PM
heh - kitty buzzzzz.
Posted by: brenda in toronto at December 30, 2007 03:28 PM
Sorry about the neighborhood changes...glad you have that cute Miss Cleo to make you (and me) smile!
Posted by: mrspilkington at January 1, 2008 07:26 PM
I love the fuzzy kitty photo. Very cool.
Posted by: NWJR at January 2, 2008 08:40 AM
Yup, kitties on catnip are hysterical!
Posted by: Carol at January 2, 2008 12:46 PM
They get a bit of the 'nip and there's no telling what's next...
Posted by: nstssj at January 7, 2008 02:49 AM