Happy Friday/End of November/First Snow

It's the first snow of the year!
And I know that by February
my thoughts on snow will be contrary
but this is now and then is then!

First Snow of The Year by Hawksley Workman

Happy Friday

I don't have much to share today, but I came across this on tumblr and it made me smile. Whoever created this is really enthusiastic about atheism.

NSFWish.

All of my professional fears summed up in one gif

Thanks, internet.

Left Neglected

I read Lisa Genova’s  Left Neglected while I was on vacation. I read it because I really enjoyed (if that’s the right word) her book Still Alice. That was a very good first-person account of early-onset Alzheimer’s that, while hard to read, was thoughtfully written and very moving.  Left Neglected was about a woman who suffers a brain injury that causes her to loose her Left. She doesn’t recognize that she even has a left side to her body and she doesn’t see the left side of things. It’s very difficult to describe, and the author does a decent job of that in the book, but I still really didn’t like it. The disorder was interesting, and the treatment and rehab were as well, but I did not feel there was enough there for a book as long as this one. At times it read like an awkward PSA for handicapped people, and the author tacked on a superfluous childhood-trauma and parental reunion story that didn’t add anything to the overall story. 

I had two main problems with the book, though, and maybe I’m being overly picky, you decide.

"Guy in a smart car dressed like Elvis!"

My SiL's sister, the Other Auntie,  and I were driving back from Halifax Saturday night, at around 9 pm. As we pull onto the MacDonald bridge, we passed a smart car waiting to merge and she yells out "Guy in a smart car dressed like Elvis!" as the smart car pulled in behind me. I questioned her sanity, but she insisted she saw it all: sunglasses, the hair, the white rhinestone jumpsuit with the popped collar. I then ask if I should drive slow so he's forced to pass me, but we decide I'll just pull up alongside him at the toll booths so we can see. In the meantime, we wonder, quite rightly: what the fuck? Is he going home after working somewhere? But it's only 9, so was he working a kid's party? Because he has to be going home, if he makes his living dressed as Elvis there's no way he can afford to live on the Hali side.

Mob mentality

I was in Florida for a cousin's wedding. Did I mention that part? Anyway, a couple of nights before the wedding the bridal party and female family members went on a cruise. I assumed it was a booze cruise, but it was just a cruise with booze, which is different. It was a 2 hour sunset cruise with opportunistic wildlife watching. It was on a catamaran, which I'd never been on before.

The cruise left an hour before sunset. It had a cash bar and loud music. I love being out on the water, and it was nice to be on the water and not working. It was beautiful out there. And so calm. We did see dolphins, quite close to the boat. I didn't get pictures, though, because I wasn't fast enough.

Moment of Silence

I know one person on this list. I didn't know her well, but she babysat a close friend of mine when we were kids, and I remember swimming in her family's pool.

A few minutes ago

I went into my room to get ready for bed. I was looking around for the tank top I like to wear to bed, and I'm looking everywhere for the damn thing, pulling off blankets off my bed and everything (at any given time about a quarter of my wardrobe is on my bed). I finally gave up and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. And of course I'm already wearing the damn thing. Under a t-shirt, but still. I think ten years from now I'll look back at this moment as the beginning of my dementia. "Hey, remember that time I forgot what clothes I was wearing?" Except, the cruel irony is, I won't remember.

Celebrities I Didn't See

I have this bad head for faces. I have a bad head for lots of detail-oriented things, but faces is one of them. But I have seemingly endless memory capacity for pop culture and celebrities. This results in me casting celebrities in roles in a lot of my memories. A few examples from my recent vacation to Florida.

1. The tour guide for our tram ride through the Ding Darling nature sanctuary was Leonard Nimoy. Specifically the William Bell version. Except in a golf shirt and Tilley hat.

2. The tour guide for our kayak trip through the mangroves was Martin Freeman. Human sized, though, not Hobbited.

3. The captain of the sunset cruise we took was Oscar from The Office.

Most profound thing I heard all day.

I read this earlier. 

"Love is an African-American Republican."

It blew my mind. What a  philosophical treatise on the nature of love. 'Cause, if you think about, love really is like an African-American Republican. A marginalized entity in a system that doesn't accept you, yet you stay with it out of sheer hope or naivete. I mean - I'm not a deep person, but this...this strikes a cord with me.  So much so that I didn't even care when I realized I took it entirely out of context:  

9. Mia Love, the GOP's shining hope for inclusion and a key speaker at the GOP convention, lost her bid to defeat Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah). Love is an African-American Republican.  Source.

Way to go, America! (Bonus points to Maine and Maryland)

I ended up falling asleep at 9:30 and waking up at 12:30 to check the results. There was a lot of red on that map, but they were calling it for Obama. God bless electoral math. I went back to bed, happy. I didn't fall back asleep until 3 or so, though. So. Less happy. But still. 

Election Day

6:30 am: I'm very anxious today. I don't know if it's the apocalypse brewing in the States or if it's work stuff. It's probably a homogeneous mixture of both.

6:32 pm: I'm totally in the worst time zone for this shit. It's only 4:30 on the West Coast, polls there don't close until 11 my time. That is past my bedtime. This was so much easier last time, when I was living in Alberta. 

Sun scare - noun, a condition of alarm or worry related to exposure to direct sunlight.

 I haven't written much about Florida. I don't know why. I think the animals I saw were the best part. I spent some time on the beach, read lots of books. The problem with me and the beach (or any activity, really) is my sun scare. I don't like tanning, but I can sit in a dark room in Florida and still get a tan, so I went outside anyway. 

Rainbow after afternoon thundershower.

My defense against skin cancer was thus: I'd wear a bathing suit - because it's the beach, y'all. Then I'd wear SPF 30+ on every inch of skin. Then I'd wear a tank top and capri-length pants over my suit, a full-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. Then I'd sit in the shade under an umbrella. I still tanned  and I was freaking hot because it was like 40oC or some crazy humid shit. My aunt, a nurse, kept talking about the "melanoma conference" she went to and said all kinds of discouraging stuff about the amount of sunblock you actually need to wear and and now I know I'm getting skin cancer. In her words, you'd "need to put on a shot-glass worth of sunblock every 15 minutes." Man, people must drink a lot at those melanoma conferences. Don't get me started on what she said about dental x-rays. It was a good lesson for me in Aunting, should my niece develop any hypochondriac tendencies.

Sunrise on the beach. Not pictured: coffee.

I will say that I have never fully appreciated air conditioning until this trip. Hot cars in summer have nothing on SW Florida. I still think AC is a luxury in my everyday life, but I can see how it makes life bearable down there. Even though I had to wear sweaters indoors because my Aunt kept the temperature inside at around 17oC.  

Anyway, here are some beachy pictures.   

Fall Back

I love the Fall Back. I love how it reinforces how artificial time is - that we can just shift it around to suit us best. I love the day after the change when I'm constantly thinking, "It's 4, but my body thinks it's 5." And I love that all my clocks right now say different times. Because i haven't gotten around to changing them yet and it doesn't even really matter.

And while we're on the topic of time, I feel like I completely missed fall this year. I come back from Florida and everything is already in colour. And now all the leaves are mostly gone. I only got out on one fall hike, and it was a little too late to get the full effect. I'll have to make a more concerted effort next year. I'll go to Cape Breton and drown in colour.