Remember my earlier blog post about listening? Well this TED video takes it to an even deeper and more scientific level. If you have time, watch (and listen!):
Did he say musicians have bigger brains?? 🙂
I knew that!
IJ
Author Archives: ij
Snow Idiots
I am a snow idiot. First of all, I love it, which amazes those I know who grew up with the stuff and can’t stand it. Second of all, I can’t drive in it. Third, I love to watch every other Victorian who loves it but who can’t drive in it when it actually snows here. Which isn’t often.
Our house is on a hill. You can’t tell by the picture above, but it is a fairly steep hill. And when we have a significant snow fall, it’s inevitable that a number of snow idiots will come bombing along in their cars over the crest of the hill on the street in front of our house, only to realize that IT’S A HILL. Then, stupidly, they hit their brakes.
I love it. One after another, they go fishtailing down the hill. I guess it isn’t so funny for the people parked on the street when they get sideswiped for the umpteenth time by a snow idiot. On the other hand, if they’ve lived on this street long enough, they should know better than to park their cars on it during a snow storm!
Today we’re having our first snowfall in probably a couple of years. My daughter and I have already been out on a walk in it. But before we could leave the house, it took us forever to find the right clothes and boots. We just don’t NEED them very often so they get lost somewhere during the months and years of non-use. This means we need at least an hour to get ready. People on the prairies must laugh their heads off at us. They wouldn’t even bother going out unless absolutely necessary, whereas we can’t wait to.
Oh yes, and then there are those westcoasters who use their umbrellas when it snows. I’m sure this only a coastal phenomenon because, you see, we HAVE umbrellas. And there’s something falling from the sky, so why not use them? I’m sure that makes for a few more laughs from those prairie types.
When my daughter and I were finally scarved, gloved and toqued (that’s a Canadian hat) so only our faces were exposed, we sauntered out and looked at everybody else who was out walking along, and we all smiled and laughed with each other. I suggested to one elderly couple as we passed them that they should be wearing hats. That’s right, they were walking their dog in a snow storm with no hats on. That’s Victoria. On some of the side streets we could see the tire tracks of the cars that had obviously skidded and hit the sidewalk…there were several of these along our route. “Isn’t this fun?” smiled another lady waiting at the bus stop. We nodded and grinned. As the bus came driving up, the driver didn’t look like he was having much fun, though.
My daughter almost slipped twice. I guess this is why people who are used to snow don’t walk in it unless they absolutely have to. You could kill yourself. I laughed as I saw a fellow out shoveling the snow already. It was only about a centimeter or two deep at that point, so why would he already be shoveling? And what did I do when I got home? Well, I shoveled the sidewalks of course. Might as well get ahead of the game.
When I got inside, there was a phone message from a student. She’s originally from the prairies, so I would have thought that she could handle driving in this stuff. “No,” she said. “It’s all of those other people who DON’T know how to drive in this stuff who scare me.”
Ah, the snow idiots, I thought to myself. I’m guessing that most of my students will probably cancel today, so I’m planning on parking myself on the couch by the living room window to see if I can catch a few fishtails.
IJ
The Inevitable Fall
Image via WikipediaI’ve been aware of it for a couple of weeks now, but I avoid dealing with it like the plague. And every day it gets worse, of course, because the winds whip up and more and more of those darn leaves come sauntering down, down, down.
So when I saw that it was a relatively wind-free and sunny day today, I finally put on the gardening clothes and the work boots, grabbed the rake and the smelly old tarp and proceeded to rake the back yard.
Is there supposed to be an art to it? A technique? I think I’m really smart at first and rake from the outside in to the centre of the yard, but it’s never quite as neat and organized as I’d like it to be. I huff and puff and a blister forms on my thumb where it meets the rake handle. I switch hands, but I’m not really good at it left-handed, so I switch back again. I stop and look back over what I’ve done. Did that bunch of leaves just fall there like that, or did I just miss them? Crap. Back I go to re-rake that part of the lawn. I re-rake a lot.
I used to laugh at guys who used leaf blowers. Wimps, I thought. Why do guys always have to use big, loud machines to do everything for them? Lazy wimps. So I scoffed at my husband when he brought one home one year. It took two or three years before I finally broke down and tried it. I had to doff the ear muffs and secure the strap over my shoulder and hold it just right before I was prepared to turn it on. Wow! If it’s dry enough, a leaf blower works like a hot damn. And I finally got it, why men like big, loud machines.
But I felt guilty using electricity to blow leaves, for pete’s sake. So I went back to doing it the hard way. In our city, the city workers come around once a year with one of those big trucks and suck up the leaves along the boulevards. They encourage home owners to rake the leaves from their yards out to the boulevard so they can be included in the great suck. That means finding a way to get the leaves from the back yard into the front. We use the tarp method…pile the leaves up onto a big tarp and drag it from the front yard to the back.
I didn’t have any help from my husband this time (something’s wrong with my laptop, dear, I have to take it in and get it fixed…ha!), so it was up to me to do the job. I huffed and I puffed and re-raked and scraped until I got half the pile onto the tarp. I folded the sides of the tarp up over the pile so the leaves wouldn’t escape and proceeded to haul it from the yard, around the van in the driveway, along the side of the house, all uphill, until I collapsed, out of breath on the boulevard. Why is it that streams of cars drive by and people are always walking up the sidewalk when I’m at my dirtiest, sweat-soaked, wheezing self in the front yard? It never fails.
One pile dumped, one more to go. So I brought the tarp to the backyard again and scraped and huffed and re-raked some more and finally got the last little bunch of wet leaves onto the tarp. I folding the sides of the tarp up, grabbed one end and stepped backwards, hauling it through the yard. That’s when I saw one leaf fall down from the maple tree on to the lawn that I had finished raking. It landed upright with its stock in the grass…it had two holes that looked like eyes and one hole that looked like a mouth.
And it was laughing at me.
IJ
