A whole new town with a whole new way

I am here! Here I am! Montreal and all! The last 2-3 weeks have been wild and writing about them will be wilder still... brief recap: My life (or at least two thirds of it) was crammed into a Budget van and hauled 9,000 miles (approx. value) to Montreal by convoy two weeks ago, whereupon my dear sister and brother-in-law shoved/pushed/pulled/cursed/breathed deeply/shoved some more to get everything in here, and my mom cleaned, and I spun around like a loose tornado and eventually bought some beer (from the grocery store!!!). The four of us returned to London that Sunday night, I said my terribly and beautifully emotional goodbyes to the city of my lost innocence, then Derek and I headed back to the M-town with Tycho and the remaining third of my life crammed into his parents' Honda Accord.
The whole thing left a layer of cat hair in his car and a layer of candy wrappers on my apartment floor ... we saw some city, ate some cheese, drank some wine, tried like hell to get sick of each other enough to make the inevitable parting less of a gut-punch, but it didn't work. Romy didn't make it to town until this week but D's friend Sarah, a long-time Montrealite, came over for a while to toast my digs and officiate the first Avenue Gascon partyfest! Derek, Sarah and I were quite responsible and stuck to herbal tea and scones, but Tycho wasn't to be stopped... he drank some deadly concoction of raspberry vodka and powerade and ended up staggering around on the big chair and spouting incoherent half-french kittybabble before falling off his feet in a complete stupor:

Montreal is going to be rough on him if he's not careful.

Derek left Sunday night then on Monday Ian, Ingrid, and Linnea (aka the Dundalk non-bloodline chapter of Megan's family) stayed the night in Montreal on their way back from a CD recording session on the east coast! I hung out with those three rock stars for the evening - we ate great food, saw great (if enigmatic) outdoor cinema, I didn't lose my wallet, and Linnea and I danced through the streets (see picture, top).

Since then I've been stuck in my head ... in my head and in Concordian line-ups. Tomorrow is day one of orientation and I just realized that I have no idea what happens after that... I don't even know when classes begin, or what my first class even is, or wether I should try and get another year out of my old, battered, duct-taped, stickered clipboard, or finally splurge for a new one. It's not the price that's the problem, but nostalgia! That clipboard kicked off my first day of my first year at Western, and has been with me since. I realize, though, that I might have a wee problem with giving up useless/ugly/broken things because of nostalgia. Example: my pencil box. Tin, colourful, from the Body Shop circa 1993. It's entirely bashed in on the top, is held together with a hair elastic, and smells like thirteen years of decaying crayons, but I love it so much! I can still sort of make out the words that Sharon Edwards wrote along the side in white-out while we waited in the wings of Grey Highlands' makeshift stage during a performance of Cocktails at Pam's in grade eleven... and I can still scratch (even if I can't sniff) that scratch-and-sniff French Fry sticker that Jessica Hill gave me sometime in grade nine or ten... and I can still run my fingers over the dents that Brad Crawford made in it during the shuffle of chairs and desks as everyone in our Grade 8 Mr. Samson class sat down after the morning national anthem. Also I remember a whole series of times when said pencil box (remember: tin) has crashed to floor from various desks/backpacks/loose fists at the most inopportune moments. Tomorrow when it's my turn to recite a list of past publications I'll accidentally-on-purpose send my pencil tin flying to the floor and the crash will make everyone forget whose turn it was. Huzzah! Suddenly I feel much more relaxed.

Verdict: the clipboard stays.
Out into the world tomorrow!
I have a new M-town phone number now, so let me know if you want it but don't have it!

Always the best man, never the bride...

WELLLLL the weekend to end all weekends (or at least weekends in which Jordan and Erin get married) is officially over, and I am officially zonked. SO a meatier post hovers in the future for this ol' blog, but FOR NOW a wee taste of the weekend's swingin' sweetness...











More pictures soon!

JEN: CONRATS ON FINISHING YOUR [rough draft of the] THESIS!!! I will send you an email tomorrow... I would right now except that I just got out of the gym and only have 4% battery power left, both in my laptop and in my body.

Seven days of bookstore work left... nine days of London left...
I am starting to pack.

Bruce Wayne, I feel your pain

oh my goodness so TWO NIGHTS AGO was one of the scariest nights of my life… and anyone else telling this story would meet only skepticism from me, because such an event, to the disinterested listener, does not appear to warrant such a ranking as “scariest thing ever,” but now that I’m among the experienced, I can whole-heartedly say that I feel like I escaped near-death and even just thinking about it right now is sinking me into a cold sweat. It would have been a good night for me to have roommates to help face the dreaded incident, but luckily I had Tycho instead, who completely saved the day and deserves a medal of honour…

What happened?

3AM BAT ATTACK!!!

I was telling Derek tonight about how much new empathy I have for the little Bruce Wayne who falls into the bat cave and is never the same. Maybe this means that I, too, will become a superhero? Only time will tell… but meanwhile I can say that the REAL superhero in this apartment is T-Dot, who, at the first sign of danger, morphed from THIS




to THIS



in order to save both of us!!!

THE EVENT: So around 3am I kind of drift awake because of a vague tapping noise somewhere in the room, at first I think it’s rain at the window, then I think maybe the bedroom door opened and Tycho got in, but in the dark I can make out that the door is, in fact, closed, so Tycho is presumably still sleeping in his little bed just outside in the hall… the tapping noise continues, gets more erratic, I can hear it over by the closet, then by the window, then things start getting knocked over, and by this point I don’t know what to think except that these might well be my last moments on earth and it’s all I can do to reach for the light as calmly as I can, but the second I turn it on this GIANT KILLER BAT swoops straight at my face!!! I just kind of shot from my bed to the bathroom, I don’t think my feet even touched the ground, and slammed the door. It took me about two seconds to remember Tycho, and all I could think was that he’ll get rabies for sure, or bitten in the eyeball or something, and I’m trying to remember if there’s an all-night vet in my area, and wondering how to get there if needed… I wish like hell that I had somehow brought my cell with me into the bathroom, although I don’t know who I would’ve called (can you get campus police over for something like that?)… I learned that it’s an awful thing to find oneself barricaded in a tiny room with no helpline to the outside world. Especially when there’s a battle going on on the other side of the door and something is making a blood-thirsty screeching noise like nothing else you’ve ever heard! I finally get up the courage to open the door a crack and see what T’s doing… and lo! he has the bat pinned to the ground!!!! the thing has this sort of incredibly high-pitched sonar scream, I’m sure the whole building is awake by now, and I can totally see how much T is enjoying himself… pinning it, then letting it flap away, then jumping for it and pinning it again, all to the terrifying soundtrack of these unreal screams…. I know I have to do something because I was still afraid that the bat, if scared enough, could do damage to T, so I finally got the courage to slip from the bathroom to the front door of the apartment, and I know that I should have maybe gone to the balcony door, but it was much further away, and around corners… I opened the door to the hallway and Tycho had a clear path and he obviously understood my game plan because he pinned-freed-pinned again all the way out the hall… once they cleared the threshold I grabbed T and hauled him back in and slammed the door. I don’t know what happened to the bat… it wasn’t there in the morning when I left for work, though I was prepared for the worst and looked out the mail slot before even opening the door, although now that I think about it that was a stupid idea because if the bat was really out for revenge (as I imagined) then he would have had a straight gangway to my eyeballs. ANYWAY after Tycho and I got it out of here we both just kind of paced for a while, and T was soooooooo proud of himself… he was all kingly and smug, looking at me with that cat-smile he does and those slow-blinking eyes, those I’m-the-man eyes. I picked him up and kissed him (probably not the smartest thing, considering his recent relations) and squeezed him and kissed him again. I have no idea what would have happened without him. He completely saved both of us… I’m serious… I ran and hid and he took charge, got control of the bat, and ushered it outside so that we’d be safe. Isn’t that incredible??? I lay down on the bed and tried to get my heart rate back to normal, and Tycho lay down right in the bedroom doorway, as though on guard, and we spent the rest of the night with all the lights on, jumping at every little noise and shadow. He’s my hero! I feel like we’re even closer to each other now that we’ve survived something that scary together. And I feel good that Tycho got a little excitement in his life… after all those months of watching birds through the balcony window, he finally got some action!!! And he was soooo good at it! Today I’ve learned more about bats than I ever wanted to know, including the advice that if your doctor ever asks you if you’ve been in a closed room with a bat, you should say no because otherwise within thirty seconds he’ll have you quarantined and going through rounds of painful rabies treatments. I called Tycho’s vet from work today and told him what happened, and he said that all T’s shots are up to date so he’s not at risk of anything. Thank goodness! The crazy part is that I remember having a brief debate with myself about whether I should really get him all the shots, considering they cost a million bucks AND he’s an indoor cat… but this just goes to show that they are important! So that’s my lesson for you today, folks. It’s twofold: (1) get a cat because he will save you when no one else is around, and (2) get him vaccinated!!!

So anyway… last night I had one of those beautiful, lingering dinners with Blackmore at a Chinese place where they just keep bringing you steaming dishes for as long as you care to sit there, and he gave me a very detailed demonstration of what to do in a “bat emergency,” including all body motions, sounds, and facial expressions. then after he dropped me off at my apartment I went around (with Tycho under my arm, just in case) and prodded all curtains/posters/dark corners with a broom handle but didn’t find any rodents, winged or otherwise.

In other news, yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the engineering shelves falling on Jordan’s head at the bookstore, so to commemorate the event (and J’s sacrifice to the store) some of the managers & I gathered together in said engineering section for a moment of silence and remembrance. NB Jordan on the floor – symbolic or what!

S'il vous plait PAS!

Okay, well, I figure that since Jen has declared a brief blogging hiatus while she fills her brain with doctor facts it's a good time for me to pick up the gauntlet again! It has been a wild couple of weeks and I have only sticky notes and bits of string to thank for helping me remember the big roaring details of life right now - details like Jordan's wedding (this weekend!) and moving to Montreal in.... nineteen days! I cannot be expected to remember anything else, including my own name, apparently. This morning at the bookstore I was on the phone with a customer who asked my name and I drew a complete blank. It was a momentary blip, the phone hot between cheek& shoulder, curling my fingers into anxious fists and thinking, oh my gosh, what is my name? I recovered after a bit of fumbling and afterwards checked that I still had feeling in all my fingers & toes and my pupils were not unusually big or something. Everything seems under control but now I'm thinking that if I get through the next few days without a major system crash behind my eyeballs it will be a miracle.

there are many things that should be said but the one that most shouldest be said is
that this weekend was a ridiculously fun ROAD TRIP with my two ridiculously fun friends, Jen & Mark! WHOOOOO ROAD TRIP CITY! We burned a path to Montreal, where we camped out in my empty apartment, found Kevin, drank cheap wine, and walked about ten thousand glorious French miles through the city. I've said it about two million times, and I'll say it again: I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M GOING TO LIVE THERE! I've never lived anywhere cool enough to attract tourists, have a bongo park, sell croissants on every corner, and play hot music long into the night/morning. I can't foresee getting any work done there, but I expect such marginal details will get shuffled into the mix somehow. I also can't foresee walking a city block in less than fifteen minutes because of all the cats lying around to be petted! Seriously... Montreal has cats on the sidewalk the way London has baking earthworms. I don't know if Tycho will become an indoor/outdoor or not (I live pretty close to Sherbrooke St, which is high traffic, which is potential kitty doom, which is definite Megan doom) (I remembered my name again!!!), but the rest of Montreal seems to have no problem releasing their kitties to the world. A wee taste of the friendly felines we saw during our travels this weekend:





Lots of quality time was spent in the ol' Love Apartment Jr., which, thanks to Jen's skills with a broom and dust pan (and Mark's skills with sniffing out local poutine places for breakfast) is ready for The Big Move. Kevin came to join us for some apartment shenanigans and a wee night on the town (Montreal nightlife = incredible) and on Sunday the four of us stuffed ourselves with croissants and then stuffed ourselves into Mark's car for the trip home. Now Montreal is a very real, very persistent pulse under my skin, and the empty boxes I've smuggled out of the bookstore for packing are starting to pile up in my London digs. T-bot is starting to catch on, I think. He's got the jitters about such a big change. He's digging his nails into everything even more than he used to - upholstery, clothes, my skin - anything he can hang on to, as though clinging to this London life we've created together. I think that once he gets there, though, he'll love it as much as me... especially because there are so many cool places in Love Apartment Jr. for him to hang out!





The end! I'll be back soon, I promise!