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December 01, 2006

day without art

December first is a Day Without Art, in honour of those in the artistic community who have died of AIDS, and in commemoration of World AIDS Day.

I have closed my website for the day, but don't know how to close the blog. So instead of scrolling down and looking at my art today, visit the above links, give a donation, wear a red ribbon, use a condom. Be safe.

Posted by jodi at 07:38 AM | Comments (0) | categories:  general

November 02, 2006

as a child I must have read more books than I had conversations, because I think I was at least 20 before I realized that "misled" was not pronounced "my-zulled".

Sorry if I caused any confusion yesterday, but I didn't mean to imply that I'm crazy enough to try posting here every day when I have that huge list of things to do in the next seventeen days; I only meant to say that I hope people post lots of pictures so I don't have to look at all the words every day. However I can try, although I promise nothing, to put up a picture every day, how's that? Let's start with this lovely shot taken this summer at Dru and Em's wedding, which I just know my mom will want to frame for the living room. I mean, who wouldn't?

Peter, when he saw this one, said that it illustrates perfectly the true nature of our relationship. Just for the record, he's totally full of shite.

Posted by jodi at 08:53 PM | Comments (13) | categories:  general

July 11, 2006

le peu

Walking home from Greg and Mita's last night, we were approaching the alley that runs behind our house when we saw what looked like a skunk coming out of our driveway (I think it may have come out from under our dead van, please please don't let them be living there) and moving in a strange, wobbly manner towards the street. It looked like the beast with ten heads, and ten fluffy white tails. Just one block previous we had been met by a friendly, scrawny little black cat who had decided to accompany us home. I scrambled for the camera with one eye on the writhing mass of skunk and the other on our little stray, lest she give chase and get us all sprayed (Peter and I just bathed his mom's cat in tomato juice on Sunday, we're not doing it again). Meanwhile Peter was saying, "you'll never get a good picture, it's too dark, holy shit there are at least three skunks there, no there's four, your flash won't work from that far away, get closer, don't get too close, no, it's five skunks!" (I'm paraphrasing a bit here).

This crappy grainy papparazi shot is the best I can do. You don't seriously expect me to get closer than this to five skunks, do you?

Afterwards we were sitting on the porch and saw the skunks crossing the street a block down, still writhing together in one big mass. It's so funny that they walk around like that, it was like all the little kindergarteners holding onto the rope. What's not so funny is the asshole in the SUV who deliberately swerved to try to hit them (he missed). Don't worry though, I've taken care of that guy and soon his milk will be prematurely curdled and his cakes will fall in the oven and his hens will lay rotten eggs.

Yes, we gave the kitty some food. She was very thin, very affectionate and very, very hungry. But before anyone suggests it, we're not keeping her! My dad and his wife are a couple of crazy cat ladies who have had as many as eleven cats at one time, and now that the cycle of life has whittled the cat population in their house down to a manageable five, suddenly they've found a baby kitten in their flower garden, they've got a new skittish stray coming around to get fed, and are talking about getting another kitten to keep the little one company. Gah! I refuse, do you hear me I REFUSE to be the sort of person that cats in need seek out because they know I'll take care of them. At least until Benny's dead so she'll stop chasing them away.

And no, I didn't see last night's stray again today, so hopefully she's found herself a new home already; she's sweet and loving enough that I'm pretty sure somebody would be happy to have her. As for the Old Kitty, he actually tried to walk right in my front door today (Benny put a stop to that, and when I went out to have a look I found that my neighbour Darlene's cat was out there egging him on; I swear they've got a conspiracy among them, to turn me into this).* So I went to the back porch and called him over from the neighbour's back yard, where he'd fled to in mock terror of the fat girl, to get fed. And he came. I'm doomed.

*how many more times do you think I can link to this story? I could forget about this lady and get on with my life if it weren't for that amazing giant dildo she's carrying.

Posted by jodi at 05:06 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  general

June 21, 2006

more self indulgent diarizing

Here is a picture, from last weekend's bealart year end show, of me and art history teacher Marg Blackie. Marg is the person who taught me to knit, fifteen years ago, when she held a sockknitting workshop in the art annex library. I finally got to say thanks, and brag about my accomplishments to someone who cares, and look! In keeping with the contrivances of the genre, Marg even agreed to pose with my Opal Tiger sock (since completed; just a heel and shank to go on the other, but I'll confess they haven't been warranting too much of my time of late). Because I'm a vain little bitch I had to put the photo most flattering to me here, but here's one where Marg doesn't blur like a bobblehead.

The prints on the wall behind my head (not the ones behind Marg) are by Raven Buckingham, the daughter of some old friends of ours and now a graduating bealart student and printmaking superstar. I haven't seen Raven since she was 13 years old (she's 20 now), and barely recognized her at first, but I think it's so amazing that she grew up to do the same thing I do, and she's damned good at it too! This is what it feels like to get old, isn't it? I should have found out where she's going to university next year.

I also have to tell you all this: the old kitty let me stroke him last night. I felt his skull, his ribs and all of his vertebrae; he even pushed his head against my hand, wanting more. He's got such a sweet, gentle disposition, and if he had had a different life, I know he would have made a really loving pet for someone. However, he is a wild cat, and I will never be able to take him into my home. I am going to keep giving him food though, and Peter says he doesn't mind keeping it up when I'm gone, since Old Kitty is really the only truly wild alley cat we've had around here of late (all the rest have either been scooped up by the city or have not survived). I never dreamed that I could turn him into a domesticated lap cat (although it's happened in my family before, with a 16-year-old tom who was wilder and more savage than Old Kitty could ever be), I only wanted for him to trust me. And I have that. Now all I want to do is get some meat on his old bones before winter.

Posted by jodi at 04:05 PM | Comments (10) | categories:  general

June 02, 2006

disconnected again** updated, yay!

For some reason my server refuses to accept my password and let me access my e-mail. I haven't been able to get my mail since early Wednesday, so if anyone has sent me anything important since then and not heard back from me, please try me again at jodichartreuse@yahoo.ca. Please continue to use that address to contact me until further notice. Argh.

All fixed!

Posted by jodi at 09:59 AM | Comments (4) | categories:  general

April 06, 2006

Not lost, just misplaced

And within about a foot of where I was pretty sure it had to be.

Posted by jodi at 01:20 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  general

March 06, 2006

Snippets

1. I did some printing today; same woodblock, new prints. Yet again I've been plugging away on plates and blocks and not doing much printing, which makes me feel like I'm working all the time and never getting anything accomplished. I hereby resolve to actually PRINT at least two days a week until the end of the semester. Next week is break week, so I'll be printing every day.

2. Walking home from the studio this afternoon I realized that full-on summer is only about a week away. Never mind daffodils and crocuses, people. There are freaking ROSES blooming here already. Full bloom. I am not kidding.

3. How many ounces of rock do you think the average adult is carrying around in their head from all the times grit blows into their eye and they blink until it shifts to a place where they can't feel it, where it probably gradually works its way around their eyeball and right into their head, maybe settling against the skull and calcifying there (or something), or orbiting their brain forever? Is it more than the amount of bugs we unknowingly swallow, do you think?

4. When I got home today there was a package in my mailbox:

I swapped some badges to TheAmpuT for the ball of Noro Silk Garden, and she's so generous that she threw in two skeins of Koigu KPPPM as well. Thanks, hon! I'm spoiled, and I can hardly wait until the end of April when I'll be free to do something with it.

5. To alleviate my homesickness after Peter left I splurged a bit on some fine Canadian tunes. And I found out that Sarah Harmer is playing in Decatur on Saturday night. Does anybody want to go with me?

6. While I was home over the xmess break, I lost my knitting needle gauge. Peter has searched all over the house for it, in all the dumb places I thought I might have left it. I'm rather lost without it, and don't know if I can still get one like this (I inherited it with the knitting inventory of Lynne's mom when she passed away); I've looked in some stores but I really hate those big flimsy aluminium rectangular ones with the stupid corner slot that I just know would get caught on everything in my bag. I just want my old one back! Mom, did I leave it at your place, or at Gramma's? It looks like this:

Except it's grey, not gold. It's only gold in my memory, because I miss it so much.

Posted by jodi at 06:35 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  general

February 09, 2006

Tonight, we're gettin' stinko

Happy 70th birthday, Stompin' Tom Connors!

Posted by jodi at 09:49 AM | Comments (5) | categories:  general : true patriot love

February 05, 2006

Great women, gone

People lined the blocks by the thousands last night to pay respects to Coretta Scott King.

And today I awoke to read that Betty Friedan has died (go to www.bugmenot.com for a login to access the New York Times article).

Thank you Coretta, and thank you Betty, for working so hard to move us closer to the sort of world I hope to someday live in.

Posted by jodi at 11:28 AM | Comments (4) | categories:  general

January 01, 2006

Things I learned in 2005

You don't have to know what words like "hence" mean in order to get a job writing ad copy.

There are only two degrees of separation between me and Vincent Van Gogh, the same number as between me and Alice Munro, even though Alice is still alive and lives near my hometown and I could go knock on her door anytime.

Norma and Claudia are not sisters. That might not come as a surprise to most of y'all, but somehow I'd gotten the impression that they were sisters, and I always wondered why Claudia and Silvia would link to each other when they said "my sister", and never to Norma. I thought they were playing favourites, and couldn't figure out why they'd be so mean to Norma when they otherwise seem so nice. Well. I only figured it out about a month ago when Claudia referred to Norma as her "friend". Duh.

It's no use arguing with crackpots, you should just walk away instead. Not that I walk away from arguments, mind you. I just learned that you SHOULD.

When Southerners say "bless your heart", that's an insult. It means you're stupid.

Pecans aren't any cheaper in Georgia just because they're local. Even if you can listen to them landing on your roof all night every night, you can still go next door to the BiLo and pay a freaking fortune for them.

Living eight hundred miles away from your home and the person you love for four months at a time is really, really hard. Really hard. I'm hoping that what I'll learn in 2008 is that it's worth it.

What I've learned so far in 2006: if you go to bed early with a migraine in a room next door to where teenage boys are rocking out with drums and a bass guitar, don't expect the migraine to go away. Also: champagne makes a pretty good breakfast.

Posted by jodi at 02:00 PM | Comments (13) | categories:  general

December 24, 2005

There are easier ways to get a day off school

Remember when you were a kid and you used to sing at Christmas, "joy to the world/ the school burned down/ and all the teachers died!/ We're looking for the principal/ he's hanging from the flagpole/ with a rope around his neck/ with a rope around his neck/ with a ro-pe, a ro-o-ope around his neeeeeeeck.

You did so!

Two years ago today, my old elementary school burned down. It had been closed for a few years and the building was sitting empty. My brother had picked me up to drive me out to our mom's (she still lives in our hometown) and didn't tell me about it until we got almost to Dashwood Industries on Highway 4 and I said, "what smells like burning?". We got there just in time to see Grades 4 and 5 collapse (Mom and Lynne and Dave had watched the gym fall down earlier in the day before he came to fetch me). After supper we walked back over to see that Grades 7 and 8 had also given in to the flames, and that was pretty much the end of the whole building. Considering how unhappy I had been there, I was surprised at how much I cried.

Here are our gifts, all wrapped and ready to be gifted. Can you tell we hate this holiday?

The stuff inside all has a scaaaaary theme too. Sort of.

Posted by jodi at 05:23 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  general

December 23, 2005

We're sorry. . .

I can't come to the blog right now, I'm far too busy playing Kingdom of Loathing. Hey, quit laughing. It's no more geeky than reading about people's knitting on the internet. But because I know that most of y'all are geeky that way, here's my slow progress on the knitting I brought home with me for the holiday.

I'm still languishing on sleeve island with the Must Have Cardigan, but I only have to repeat that big diamond motif one more time before I hit the home stretch of the shoulder decreases. I'm still not sure how to deal with the closure on this one, but I'm really leaning away from a button band right now; besides my fear of button gap-age, I really don't want to do that much more knitting on the thing. I was thinking of maybe finishing off the opening edge with an attached i-cord instead and throwing in a two-way zipper, but that means I'd have to learn how to do an attached i-cord. Is that easy? Is it excruciatingly slow?

I've been breaking up the monotony of Sleeve Island by working in the odd row on the back of the Urban Aran, which is pretty close to the armhole now. I haven't really been working much on either of them except for when I'm away from the house*, because I've got all these design swatches keeping me busy at home. Plus my sketchbook project, plus my silly online game. Whew! Life's tough when you're on vacation eh?

The good news is that Peter and I are all ready for The Holiday That Shall Not be Named, and we don't have to go back to the Infernal Mall again. Wednesday night's mall madness expedition was frustrating and painful, and we still had to go back again this morning. Ugh. Two more days, and the schmaltz-fest will be over. I can't wait. This picture pretty much sums up how I feel about the Season of Getting (TM):

How I've longed to knock the head off of one of those singing Santas.

There was a little bit of holiday festivity in our visit to the Infernal Mall this morning, in the gee-it's-good-to-be-home sense; here's about as all-Canadian a treat as you can get.

Tim's and a butter tart. Let the overeating begin!

*have you ever tried knitting with long straight needles while perched on the edge of an examining table in one of those blue paper gowns while waiting for your pap smear? Fortunately the doctor didn't walk in and catch me standing with the front of the gown flapping open while fishing in my satchel for another ball of yarn; that would have been just my style. Still, by the time the doctor got there I'd poked a hole or two in my gown with the needles. I'm classy like that.

Posted by jodi at 05:11 PM | Comments (10) | categories:  dumbass : general : sticks and string

November 26, 2005

Studio Saturday: temporarily out of service

Due to camera difficulties and long-weekend laziness. Studio Saturday will return in its regularly scheduled time slot next week.

In the meantime, here are some photos from the Bauhaus show at Tabernacle in Atlanta on Thursday night, where thankfully the camera was still working for us.

You can see more photos from the show on my flickr page.

Posted by jodi at 03:55 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  general

November 18, 2005

I don't have anything interesting to say, so instead let me show you what I bought

Hunters and Collectors, godspeed you! black emperor and the Cramps. It's money I can ill afford this month, but well worth it, and who needs groceries anyway? I hadn't heard this Hunters and Collectors record before, and it's different from the ones I have, more. . . produced. And with backup singers. Weird.

I only stopped in at Wuxtry because I had 20 minutes to wait for the bus. When I found three things to buy in less than five minutes I knew I had to get the hell out of there. This is why I don't go there every week; I'd be safer from temptation in a yarn store.

Posted by jodi at 07:48 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  general

November 11, 2005

Remember

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Now go read this, and this, and this. And ask yourself is setting aside this day for remembering is nothing but an empty gesture, something we do merely because we learned to do it in school. A moment of silence at 11:11 am, then back to the business of making war.

Posted by jodi at 11:11 AM | Comments (1) | categories:  general

November 06, 2005

There may or may not have been some sexy pillowfighting going on at our slumber party last night. But there aren't any pictures. Sorry.

We had fun though. And ate so much food that I don't have to eat again for a few days. Rebecca is just as fun (and funny) in real life as she is on her blog, and we all sat around kvetching like a bunch of old ladies. If old ladies swear like sailors and drink like. . . sailors?

(that's a fuzzy foot on Sandy's head. I was thinking about making those too, since my Shack is so cold, but I don't know if I could get my head around making a sock that you could fit both of my fat cats into. It just seems like so much work).

Instead of knitting, I brought a backpack full of skeins to wind into centre-pull balls with Sandy's swift and winder, because I don't have a ball winder of my own *cough* - birthday coming up - *ahem*.

We had some minor equipment malfunctions and some fairly major tangles

but after an hour or two of drinking Guinness and swearing at the swift, I had this.

Aren't they pretty?

I also used my evil powers of persuasion to bully Sandy into making two ipod socks instead of seaming up Banff. Because she's on some kind of finishing kick, while I'm hoping that I can get rid of my startitis by passing it on to someone else. It's not working.

Peter will roll his eyes when he hears this

This post by Suzen today makes me homesick for Canada. How I'd love to be sitting by my dining room window back home right now, sipping my Irish Breakfast tea and watching the winter begin. Instead, here where I am, the leaves have barely begun to turn colour and people are still out doing yard work in tank tops. I am so ready to go home.

I'll crack one more bottle of Guinness tonight in honour of Alois Senefelder's 234th birthday, which is today. Honestly, he doesn't look a day over two hundred.

Posted by jodi at 04:33 PM | Comments (2) | categories:  general

October 16, 2005

Episode 200: potluck with the neighbours tonight

Here's what I'm bringing: spicy rice and bean salad. Long grain white rice, black beans, carrots, celery, red pepper, green onion and a crushed clove of garlic. Cut all the vegetables really small so they're not bigger than the beans.

For the dressing: mix up a basic oil and vinegar (I use extra virgin olive oil and a white wine vinegar) and add cumin, cardamon, turmeric, a little bit of nutmeg and cayenne, dried dill weed, pepper and sea salt. When I'm at home I sometimes also put fenugreek or coriander, but don't have my full complement of spices here at The Shack.

In the spring I like to use chopped garlic scapes instead of garlic. Chives from the garden are nice too, if you have them.

Yesterday was apparently the day for people to come to me for really bad ideas. From the search stats:
"knit toilet seat cover in garter stitch"
"angora sweater masturbation"
"crochet pattern for granny square shower curtain"
"yellow tights"

People. Seriously. I don't promote activities that will have such obviously disastrous consequences. You are on your own.

Posted by jodi at 01:11 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  general

October 03, 2005

Man hands and gross insects

Here's a picture I forgot yesterday. Every good shack needs a junk pile out back. Mine features a drawer that says "man hands" on it. I'm tempted to drag it out and stick it in the garden (by garden I mean creeper patch, of course) and put something in it. Feet, maybe?

Let me tell you a story. When Peter and I first moved to Windsor we rented a really grotty apartment in a bad area of town, and Peter moved in by himself in August while I followed a month later with all our stuff. He lived there for a month with only a mattress, chair, suitcase full of clothes and some cooking utensils. The first night he was there, he went into the kitchen to throw out all the food the previous tenant had left behind, and dozens of cockroaches ran out from under the first thing he picked up. He spent the month washing everything, putting poison down, and washing again, and we spent the next two years trying to get rid of them before finally giving up, buying a house and moving out of there. Let me tell you, living with cockroaches changes you forever into the sort of person who will jump at any slight movement in your peripheral vision.

This is why these gigantic southern cockroaches are so hard for me to get used to. I've found a few at Green St. (mostly dead) and they give me the willies. And so far I've killed two in The Shack and let one get away. I'm trying not to get too worked up about it, because since I washed out the cupboards I haven't seen much sign that there are a lot of them living there. Still, every little noise last night had me jumping out of bed and running out to the kitchen with a box in my hand ready to smash them (I found none).

Now, I've heard that the roaches down here aren't as prolific as the German cockroaches we get in Canada; here they can live outside, and I'm hoping that they do their breeding and their egg-laying outside too. The fact that I've never seen immature ones would seem to back this up. I've also heard them referred to down here as palmetto bugs, and every time I see one I repeat that name to myself like a mantra, hoping to make it seem less roach-like, "palmetto bug. palmetto bug.". To which my self responds, "GIANT FLYING ROACH!". Gah.

So, those of you who live in the south, please reassure me that these giant flying roaches are not like the German cockroaches. Yeah, I could just go do some research myself, but I still don't have my internet hooked up in The Shack and I have to blog from the coffee shop. Also, I'm lazy.

Other than that, I love my Shack so far. It's a lot darker at night than my bedroom at Jenny's was, so I'm hoping that will help me sleep better. Everything seems to work okay and there isn't any water leaking anywhere yet (which was more than I could say for just about every other place I've ever lived after two days there). When the fridge runs, though, it sounds like a spaceship landing. A spaceship landing right on top of my house.

Posted by jodi at 09:43 AM | Comments (11) | categories:  general

September 28, 2005

Episode 187: births and birthdays

Welcome to the world, little Mats Darwin. Hope you like it here.

Posted by jodi at 08:10 AM | Comments (1) | categories:  general

September 11, 2005

I will miss this

Naughty Trout. See what she's playing with trashing?

A rolled-up sheet of Japanese paper. Good thing for her I don't really care too much if my art gets wrinkled.

I'll miss living with cats. In my entire adult life I've only lived without cats in my home for a month, right after my little Angus ran off to join a circus and before Fat girl's pregnant teenaged slut of a momma Erma moved in (bringing Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Frieda along with her, unbeknownst to me at the time). Who is going to annoy me and wreck my stuff when I'm living all by myself in The Shack? Whose poop will I clean up? Who will knock things off tables and make yarn-ball string art all over the house? Anyone got a kitty they can loan me?

Sigh.

Posted by jodi at 11:34 AM | Comments (6) | categories:  general

September 02, 2005

All the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream, and the steel rails still ain't heard the news

I've been struggling for the last few days with what to say about the tragedy in New Orleans, whether to say anything at all. I just don't have the heart to trot out my growing collection of amusing little Canadian-girl-experiences-Southern-culture-shock stories right now.

Had I been back home in Canada when this happened, it would seem so distant; a tragedy, yes, but I would be watching a tragedy unfold in a city so far away, a city I've never seen. But watching this tragedy from here in the South, I'm surrounded by people who are affected by this in a much more personal way than I. One of our professors went to LSU; one has left to go help his brother in Baton Rouge, because looting has begun there too and he's afraid to leave his house unattended lest it be broken into; one of our professors has his home in New Orleans, and while his wife and child fled to safety before the levees broke, his home and studio may be gone. And yet he is still here, doing his job, visiting our studios and talking to us about our drawings and somehow coping. Had I been at home I would be so much more removed from this, yet I would have felt the aftereffects of the storm pass through; here, so much closer to the disaster, we didn't even have rain.

I'm used to living without television, so even though my roommate has a tv I haven't been watching the news reports this week. Last night for the first time I looked at some photographs and video footage of rescue efforts, and was deeply saddened and angered to see that almost all the faces in those pictures are the same colour. And I have to wonder if the police and the media would be making such a big deal about "looting" if it was white people desperately searching the closed-up stores for food. And if the government would have acted more quickly to get people out of there if the people left behind had been the white people, or the wealthy people. Oh, look, they are acting more quickly to get the rich people out.

I know it's small and mean of me to feel a little twinge of glee on hearing that Trent Lott lost his house. I know that kind of meanness does damage to my soul, but I just can't help it. If you click on that link and read those quotes from Bush, it sounds like he's planning to help his buddy Trent rebuild before he helps the rest of the city. Like Peter said when we chatted earlier tonight, Trent Lott has probably had water and food in the last two days. Doubtless. I'm betting he's sleeping in a nice bed too, with warm dry feet and no decomposing bodies in sight.

Some other questions that are plaguing me: Peter told me that he read that when authorities started knocking on doors and telling people to leave town last week, those who said they preferred to stay were asked to sign a waiver, to facilitate identification of their bloated, drowned bodies later on. If this is true, then why wasn't anything done to help those without cars (or gas money) to get out of town? And why weren't they evacuating hospital patients last week? It seems like the only people given a real chance to get out were the ones capable of climbing in their own SUVs and driving away.

Also: these soldiers being sent to New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders for looters? Is that their top priority, or have they been ordered to help evacuate stranded people first and shoot looters second? Which is more important? Are they going to be able to tell the difference between someone who is crazed and carrying a gun, and someone who is starving and looking for food? Do they care?

And, what exactly has this government done in the last four years to improve the nation's emergency preparedness? Apparently not much, judging from how long it is taking to get people out of there. Guess they must have been spending all their energy convincing Americans that invading Iraq would solve all of America's problems. And while Condoleezza shops for shoes in New York, in New Orleans thousands spend another night hungry, thirsty and wet.

I would rail against the "president", but others have already said it all better than I could. We all know that he is an idiot, so it shouldn't come as a shock to see him behaving like one yet again.

Instead I'll say this: if you're able, please donate some money to the American Red Cross. I know that there is at least one blanket-making project already started amongst my fellow knitting webloggers out there, and while that's commendable and worthwhile, before these people will need blankets, they will need a bottle of water, and breakfast, and a new toothbrush, and medicine. And socks and shoes, because for days now they have been walking in gasoline and shit.

Posted by jodi at 09:56 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  general

August 15, 2005

You'll have to excuse me. . .

I'm not at my best
I've been gone for a week, I've been drunk since I left
And these so-called vacations will soon be my death
I'm so sick from the drink, I need home for a rest.
-Spirit of the West, Home for a Rest

House Redhair, my home away from home. This is the first year that I've only been able to spend one week at Pennsic, and it was hard to say goodbye yesterday morning, especially since this week is when all the action happens. But school starts on Wednesday, and while I'd much rather be sitting around sweating in the heat in medieval costume with my friends, I have to be a grown-up instead. Ugh.

This year was House Redhair's tenth campiversary, and if I can clean them up enough I'll post some pictures later from Whiskey Cellphone Night (where we sample many, many whiskies and then crank call all our friends at home to taunt them for not being there having fun with us. Because we are all twelve years old).

On the night before land grab Pete and I ate at the P.O. Lunch in New Castle, where I did NOT eat fries on my salad. I don't know how we failed to notice the drive through window last year.

Fries on the salad, delivered right to your car. Great.

So Peter and I are in Athens now, while our friends are still having fun at Pennsic. Mardi Gras party is tonight (YES, on Lundi. I don't know why, okay?). Hopefully Thorvald's getting groped, it just isn't a successful party if he doesn't.

I can't be arsed to write too much more for now, too many hours in a steaming hot van on the highway has turned my brain to refried beans. Here's some goodies from last weeks search stats, just so it looks like I have something to say.

totally spies papermaking: I don't really have anything snarky to say about this one, I just think it's funny. If you're an immigration official, I don't know anything about spies.

angora sweater masterbation [sic]: Look, Glen (or Glenda), I offered you some angora last time and you never got back to me. Bugger off.

Pennsylvania masturbation partner: That's illegal in Pennsylvania. Also, I think it makes you legally married.

fat girl painted green: I didn't get that drunk on Whiskey Cellphone Night. And if you're talking about my cat Fat girl, it's a vicious lie, I never painted her. That's mean.

A sign we saw on the way to Athens:

According to the Georgia Welcome Centre, it's okay to hula hoop here. Thank god.

Posted by jodi at 10:23 PM | Comments (10) | categories:  general

August 04, 2005

All means to attract and distract

So. I'm leaving bright and early tomorrow morning to move to another country. Am I all packed and ready? Hell, no! As if.

I'm sorry I haven't been responding to comments lately like I used to; too crazy. Too busy. Too freaking HOT (our hairdresser is from the Dominican Republic, and guess what she told me? Did you know that it's hotter in Canada than in the Dominican Republic right now? Get me outta here! One more sleep and I'll be chilling in a tent in the Alleghenys, still hot all day but freezing my arse off at night. Can't wait!)

I don't have a finished skirt for you either (deal with it). I did take a picture of it today, but while my tits looked great for a change (bigger than my love handles, and we all know that can only be achieved by clever lighting and tricky camera angles), the skirt looked like crap; the waistband ribbing is too loose and it bulges out. Ah well, around here it seems it wouldn't be a worthwhile project if I could finish it right the first time and have it fit perfectly (I'm dying to know what that's like).

So instead let me distract you with photos; since I'm now using Flickr to host my images, I'm feeling picture-happy. I found a lovely package in the mailbox today, from Jae:

Take Back the Knit! I have an article in the second issue (on top), and there are tons of great patterns; if I didn't have a major deadline I'd be casting on for at least two of them right now. Go here to get your own copy.

I spent today getting haircuts (me and Pete both; his looks better), making photocopies of all my paperwork for crossing the border tomorrow, begging a walk-in-clinic doctor to prescribe me enough of my migraine meds to get me through until Christmas (he did!) and applying for an academic leave of absence with OHIP. Did you know that you're supposed to tell OHIP every time you change your address? She looked in the computer and said, "when did you move to this address? I have here you're in Huron Park". Yikes. Which means that in the thirteen times I've moved in my adult life, I've never let them know. Woops. But anyway, that's done. So hopefully if I have some horrible accident while I'm at school, OHIP will cover whatever the stupid school plan doesn't (the list of what it doesn't cover is ten times as long as what it does cover, and pretty much includes injury resulting from anything you could possibly think of doing). Really, I don't know how all you Americans can live there. A civilised country has free health care, that's all I'm saying.

On the way from OHIP to the yarn store (come on, I had to say goodbye), I found a cicada carapace for my collection.

Yes, that's right, for my collection. I have about twenty of these things, and will likely bring four or five more back from camp next week. I'm planning to make a little curio cabinet to put them all in; won't that be cute?

Here are some of the other dumb things I collect (I told you I was picture-happy today):

Cow creamers. The one on the right I've had since childhood; the other I found secondhand. I love their legs, they remind me of this Lhamassa dude:

From Khorsabad, ca 720 BCE. (yes, I photographed it right out of an old art history book. don't tell.)

More collected crapola:

Scouring pad frogs. What's that? Hell no, I don't dust. Neither do you, shut up!

These ones are hiding. They're a different style that I've never seen before.

I stopped collecting snow domes because it's impossible to find the good ones anymore, the old kind with little plastic 3-d figurines inside. Nowadays they make them with a flat plastic printed picture. I have lots of both kinds, but if you want to send me one, I'm really only looking for the old kind. This one I found last month, brand new, in one of the cheesy fake trading post stores in Cherokee, NC, the tourist trap that time forgot. And they had lots, all the same design; if they had had more than one design, I would have bought them all, of course.

Some time, maybe at Christmas, I'll take pictures of my whole collection and make a web page. Because cyberspace is infinite, so why not fill it up with garbage? Maybe I'll show you my little apron collection too, but for now, those are packed. That'd be one of the precious few things that are packed.

One more, just because:

Pete found this Mr Potato Head hiding under our table at Marathon (the best. Ethiopian food. ever). If he was hoping to catch some table scraps, he picked the wrong people. We ate it all.

Posted by jodi at 06:10 PM | Comments (16) | categories:  general

August 03, 2005

Gotta get away from this day to day running around

Kirsti is the big winner for correctly guessing that my choice for first ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for rock and roll is Neil Young. It's not because he's Canadian, though, it's because he is the only person who can play a totally rocking guitar solo that is ONE NOTE. Here's what Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers has to say about Neil Young (I *think* I got the link from Cornelius).

Kirsti will get a fabulous ass-kicking prize, but we haven't decided quite what it will be yet. But rest assured that it will kick some ass. It will be a glorious one-note guitar solo soaring high above all those middling wankers. Or something like that.

Some of the other suggestions were pretty compelling, particularly David Bowie. But I just want to see Neil get it first.

I don't have the skirt picture I promised. I don't really have any excuse, after all, I've still got a little more than a full day before I move to another country, no big deal. And only forty or so errands and social engagements before I leave. You might get something from me tomorrow, but at this point don't count on it. Hopefully by tomorrow it will already be packed in a box.

I do have one cool thing to show you:

Catherine sent me these awesome stitch markers in the mail. Thanks, Catherine! I love them.

Posted by jodi at 02:08 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  general

August 02, 2005

Jesus Murphy. What a mess.

So my website has become a greedy little bugger, sucking up the bandwidth like there's not going to be any bandwidth tomorrow. Well, actually, there's not going to be any bandwidth tomorrow, at the rate we've been using it. Y'all have to stop coming here so often! So to save on bandwidth and server space I'm going to be moving a bunch of my blog images to Flickr. Bloglines people, I'm really sorry, but this means that as I move my photos over, my old entries are going to come up as new unless you have your Bloglines set not to notify you of updates to existing posts. Hopefully the inconvenience will be worth it, because it means that my site won't be unavailable for a whole weekend again. I think it's that post about the Jesus statue that started all this, so for now I might just move those pictures over and then wait and see if there's any improvement.

Here's a question: is there any way to stop LiveJournal users from syndicating my weblog on their journal? It bothers me to spend time crafting these fine entries and then see my writing appear in full on another website. I'm not really pissed at the users, just at LiveJournal for making it an option (especially since the images appearing in those posts are still sucking up my bandwidth, that I pay for and am obviously perilously close to running out of).

Okay, on to this Nobel Prize thing. Some of you guys have made some good guesses, and I agree that a lot of those people could be contenders for the prize, but should they be the first ever to receive it? Also, don't forget that the prize is for who can guess the person or group that I would choose as the first recipient, so while I do want to hear who you would pick, you need to think about who I would pick too. I'll give you a hint: nobody has guessed it yet. Remember that Nobel Prizes are given for lifetime achievement, and you have to be alive to get one.

And thanks, Snowball, for tipping me off that I'm now number one on the Google search for Jesus Murphy. That makes me feel better, because I just can't get past number two in the Pittsburgh Salad search.

For those of you who only come here for the knitting, I've got an almost finished skirt here in my lap that I'll be able to show you tomorrow. After that I'm packing away all projects other than Pete's birthday sweater, which I'll be finishing up on vacation next week so that we can photograph it when we get to Athens. It'll soon be making its appearance in an online magazine near you, so I won't be posting the pictures. In the meantime, why don't you all go work on something to submit to Take Back the Knit 3? All the cool kids are doing it. The deadline's August 19, so I'll be hard pressed to find time to put something together for it, but I'll try.

Posted by jodi at 10:26 AM | Comments (13) | categories:  general

August 01, 2005

Homoerotic dreams, fake contests and a little reminder of the rules

Hi everybody, I'm back. The website was down over the weekend because of some bandwidth problems which I hope to figure out soon. Although I don't think that this alone is what caused me to grossly exceed my bandwidth allotment for July, I'd like to remind readers of what I consider to be proper linking etiquette. If you wish to reproduce one of my photos on your website, please feel free to do so as long as the following conditions are met: do not alter the image in any way; credit me as the photographer and provide a link back to my website; and save the image to your own server or use a free service such as Flickr to host the image so that I am not paying for the bandwidth every time your site is viewed. If you wish to quote from something I have written and comment on it, please link to my website; please do not reproduce my writing in full on another website unless you have obtained written permission from me to do so.

On Friday night, before I found out that my site was down, I composed this blog entry at Peter's mom's house, then hooked the laptop up to her dialup service to discover that I couldn't upload it. So here's the weekend's post, a little late.

It's Civic Holiday weekend, a made-up holiday that's an excuse to have a three-day weekend. Because summer doesn't last very long in Canada, so we need an extra day off. Since it's also my Gramma's birthday weekend, and my Gramma's a total rock star, let's have a made-up contest for a made-up holiday.

So. I want to know your answers to this: if a Nobel Prize for rock and roll were created, who do you think should be the first to receive it? Don't say Phil Spector; while he may have contributed greatly to the development of rock and roll, they don't give the Nobel Prize in Literature to publishers and editors. Who is the Jose Saramago, the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of rock and roll? I want to know who you guys would choose, but I also want to know who you think I would choose; first person to correctly guess my choice will get some kind of amazingly cool prize. Maybe a t-shirt. (Anyone with whom I've already had this conversation is not eligible).

Speaking of rock stars: this morning after the clock radio came on, I was still asleep and hearing the CBC morning show in my dream, and someone was being interviewed (I can't remember any of the conversation now). I was watching a film from the seventies, and the setting was a classroom (not really anything like the institutional green grade school classrooms with large square desks you could keep your stuff in and children's literature lined up along the window ledge that I spent that decade in; more Welcome Back, Kotter-style, with harvest gold walls and those high-school desks with the little arm across). A question was asked, and the questioner stood up from one of the desks; it was one of my (straight male) professors. A certain (straight male) rock star stood up from the desk in front of the Professor and turned to face him. Before answering, the Rock Star bent down (he is much taller than the Professor), took the Professor's face gently in his hands and kissed him, passionately. Thene he answered the question, and the Professor grinned like a goon for the rest of the interview. Like a smitten goon.

And another thing: that Jesus Murphy guy shows up in my search query stats almost every day now. Has anyone ever stopped to wonder if he's related to Murphy the Molar?

Posted by jodi at 11:12 AM | Comments (12) | categories:  dumbass : general

July 25, 2005

Invasion from the sea

Foam rested in the Sea's bed:
Swollen with wind, the deep played,
And the Welling Waves were washing
The awful heads of the war-ships.*

We saw this reproduction of an old Norse boat on the Detroit River yesterday. It was too far away to make out the heraldry on the shield.

*from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlson, ca 1200.

Posted by jodi at 01:11 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  general

July 13, 2005

Brand new me

jodigreen.ca version 2.0 went live last night. It's now much easier to navigate, and more slick-looking. All of the creative work as well as the boring slogging through html pages was done by Peter; my role in web design is pretty much restricted to sitting back at his elbow and saying, I want more green, or I want a fatter typeface. Thanks, Pete, for spending all weekend on this and for making it all look so classy (and for wisely talking me out of the orange and green stripes idea).

There's space for a shop now, and I hope to have that up and running in about a week. Pete still needs to design the pages and I have to come up with some content, and set up a shopping cart.

If you see any mistakes, typos or broken links, be sure to let us know so we can make it perfect!

Posted by jodi at 08:38 AM | Comments (8) | categories:  general

July 12, 2005

Stories from the 'hood: the kids are alright, but the animals are freakin' crazy

When we first moved to this town, we rented a cheap apartment in the second floor of a house, in what turned out to be the worst neighbourhood in town (east of the Casino). There's a lot of poverty there, a lot of substance abuse, a lot of chain link fencing around the front yards, garbage spilling into the street, and unhappy-looking, angry children with mean eyes who look like they might slash your tires just for driving by and disrupting their street hockey game. The guy downstairs was always drunk, always noisy and almost always fighting with somebody, often on his front porch (right under our bedroom window). In fact, our corner seemed to have some kind of magnetic attraction for angry people, or else there was something causing temporal-lobe stimulation that made people want to fight (maybe all the alcohol fumes and testosterone wafting out into the street from Louie's apartment below us). Many times we would lie in bed and hear people walking up the street, and when they got to our corner they would suddenly start fighting, then stop when they had walked past. One time it was a couple, talking normally until they were right in front of our house, then suddenly he was shouting "I'll rip your face off! I'll rip your fucking face off!" and she responded "rip my face off then! come on, rip my face off!". Then they crossed the street and resumed talking normally. No faces got ripped, as far as I know.

After two years there, we bought our house. Now we're on a charming, tree-lined street filled with young families, the children are happy and friendly* and nobody has chain link around their front yard or garbage on the sidewalk. It's only 8 blocks straight up the street from the old place, but it's like a different world. We're just on the edge of a pretentious little urban-professional neighbourhood (one of those neighbourhoods so pretentious that it insists on being referred to by its old town name it used to have before it became a part of the bigger city), and though it galls a girl with working-class roots like mine to admit it, we are part of the gentrification of this neighbourhood. However, since we're on the "wrong" side of W. street, our house cost us fifty thousand dollars less than people pay to live on the "right" side, and there are still quite a few rental houses owned by absentee landlords, and several crack houses in the next block over.

All of this is really just background to the story I wanted to tell about the crazy killer bird. But it's impossible for me to just tell a story, it's alway talk talk talk! around here, so deal with it. You should all be used to it by now.

So I was coming back from my walk out to the market and the yarn store (I got some black ribbon to finish Sexie--whee!) and when I came in my back gate the neighbour called me over to tell me that while she was on her back porch smoking a cigarette at 6:30 this morning, she stopped some guy from breaking into our van. She recognized the guy as someone who lives in or hangs around one of the crack houses around the corner (not that my neighbour goes to the crack house, she's just seen him around). These streets all have alleys running behind them and our parking is off the alley, and I'm sure that people's cars get broken into all the time back there. In fact our van was broken into back there once already, but we don't keep anything valuable in it; all they took were Peter's hockey sticks (only one was new, the rest very beat up) and our pop crate full of washer fluid and oil-soaked rags and a funnel. Very lucrative haul, there. My neighbour also said that a little while ago she saw someone break into the car of a house behind ours, and now they've installed a motion-sensor light out there. Maybe we'll get one too, but our stuff was stolen in broad daylight, while we ate our supper.

One more tangent, then I'll get to the story I meant to tell. Here is how much protection the residents of my neighbourhood can expect from the Windsor police: one afternoon about two months ago I was working at the computer and looked out the back window to see three men standing in our parking lot (there's a concrete slab at the back of our lot that stretches across the width of the property). They had bicycles and backpacks, and were looking over the fence into my yard and the yard next door. Then they started digging in their backpacks and pulled out some bottles of beer and started drinking it, and I noticed that one of them was wearing white gloves. So I called the Windsor police non-emergency line, explained the situation, and was told to call back if they did anything. I said, they are drinking beer on my property. They are sizing up the back of my house. They are WEARING WHITE GLOVES. Then they rode away. The lady said "call us if they come back". Why, so you can do nothing? Next time I'll go out there and take their picture and publish it on my website so when they do break into my house, well, I don't know what. I'll have their picture, anyway.

While I was in the back yard talking to my neighbour about all of this there was a sudden ruckus from the crowd of house sparrows who've taken up residence at our place ever since the mulberries started to ripen. They were shouting their heads off and swarming around a larger bird (the size of a starling, but it seemed to be solid black; my neighbour thought maybe it was a crow but if so it must have been awfully young). The black bird came out of the mulberry tree and landed on the sidewalk, and we could see then that it was attacking a smaller bird, and the other birds were flapping and shrieking, all in a tizzy. Then they all retreated and the black bird flopped and pecked around a bit then stopped and stood there looking down at what it had done. A neighbour cat who had been watching with interest from next door crept across my parking lot and under the gate, scaring the black bird back to the tree, where it did a kind of frenzied dance, gaping its beak but not making any sound. To my dismay, the cat did not avail itself of the fresh and free meal, and I had to go over and clean up the dead sparrow. The entire back of its head had been smashed in.

I don't think this is normal behaviour for crows. Is it for starlings? Is there some kind of bird gang warfare going on in my back yard (and if I cut down the mulberry tree, will it stop)? I hope it wasn't a zombie bird, bent on eating bird brains. Because I don't want that sparrow to become undead in my garbage can. Ew.

*The other day when I was on the front porch taking pictures of my shrink plastic, about half a dozen neighbour kids came up on the porch to bug assist me. The 3 kids across the street had just been running up and down the block calling for their dog and I had heard the older sister say "she jumped out my bedroom window". So I asked A., the younger sister, "your dog ran off?". She said nah, we found her hiding in the house. I said that fat boy does that all the time, I'll think he's run outside and then find him cowering in the basement. J., the ten-year-old from up the street, rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed, "Animals these days!".

Heh. Animals these days don't know how easy they have it. Why, when my dog was your age, he had to walk six kilometres barefoot in the snow twice a day to bring me my slippers. Uphill both ways, even.

Posted by jodi at 03:40 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  general

July 07, 2005

This much madness is too much sorrow

I'm fasting today, and I was going to use it as an opportunity to gather my thoughts about hunger, and gluttony (and buffet), and write some of them down. But today is not the day for that. I have no words today, only sadness.

Posted by jodi at 04:01 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  general

June 29, 2005

I wish you were there to see it when I scored a hat trick on the team that called you a fucking queer

It's a very good day to live in Canada. We knew that the same-sex legislation would pass and that there was nothing the Conservatives could do to stop it, but still I am very, very relieved and happy. Need another reason to be relieved and happy? That homophobic asswipe Stephen Harper will never be Prime Minister of Canada now, not after his latest asinine outburst, claiming that because Bloc Quebecois MPs are separatists, their vote on the gay marriage bill is "not legitmate", as if members of federal parliament who happen to be separatists cannot represent their voters on a federal level. Keep digging your own hole, baby, because I can't wait to see you fall into it.

Because I feel that by writing about my hairstyle the other day I pretty much tripped over a boring blogger stereotype and fell on my face, revealing myself as nothing but a self-absorbed wanker,

[the crowd, who of course knew this already, titters meanly into their hands]

I'm going to keep this post all about other people, and fill it with gratuitous links. So I'd like to say thanks, Sarah Rene, for letting me know that Rick Mercer has started a weblog. This is highly exciting for someone who doesn't have a television set; now I can get my Rick Mercer straight up, rather than simply having everything funny he said repeated to me by Pete or his kids. It's just one more tin can phone I can cling to whose string leads home.

qpaukl and tamara have started a website to showcase their work; because this isn't supposed to be about me I won't send you to the tattoo gallery today. Go check out tamara's fashion designs instead.
**Update: qpaukl has also started a blog! The sickness spreads. Good thing cyberspace is infinite, unlike the universe.

My good friend Krista at Pixiefashions has also started a blog, which you can find here. Not much to see there yet, but there's monkeys! So you know it's gotta be good.

Here's my new roommate Jenny's blog: Knittin' Sticks. Lucky girl's bouncing around all by herself for the summer in New York City.

And while we're at it, today's episode title was brought to you by the Quintessential Canadian Band, the Rheostatics. This is a band I'll be listening to more than ever in my feeble attempt to retain my Canadian accent while living in Georgia. Go check out the Rheostatics. They play hockey, and you can still see them live in small venues for ten bucks. Bam, bam, digga digga dam.

Okay. Got to go wash some chemicals off my head, so that in the morning it can be all about me again when I show you a big surprise. I think I may have totally cocked up with the hair alterations, and I wish I had someone who knows what they're doing, like Mandy or Jacey, to help me. Ah well. It grows back.

Posted by jodi at 01:23 AM | Comments (13) | categories:  general : true patriot love