Samedi á Montréal: la Vielle Ville et le Vieux Port.

"Dude, no way! You've only been home for nearly a month, and you're already finished with your post about day 2 of the Canada roadtrip? Such speed! Such efficiency! You deserve a big pat on the back!"

If only it were so.

Well, I guess the good thing about being so behind on my posts is that the binoculars of time make it easier to trim the fat and just focus on the highlights.
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Saturday, June 6th in Montréal: exploring the Old Town and the Old Port.

We spent this day exploring streets, buildings and monuments too numerous to track. I'll show you my favorite in a little while.

But first, I'll head straight to the highlight of my day: I got to be THAT GIRL. The one who the really cute street-performer guy with the dreadlocks picked out of the big crowd to assist him with his nutty knife-throwing, fire-juggling, and laying-on-spikes tricks.


I did not, however, get to help with his "Great Balls of Fire" trick.


Really, that's what he called it.

Of course, this had to be the one day when I wore shorts, something that I recently told Melanie W. that I would NEVER WEAR IN PUBLIC except perhaps for hiking/camping. Because they are flattering on ALMOST NO ONE BUT TODDLERS. And on runners. Some runners. Well, I brought them along in case of hiking, but decided I'd wear them in public on just this one day because it was the only day during our entire trip that was expected to be warm. So, be warned, people: I'm wearing shorts, and the legs are late-May/early-June/I-haven't-yet-bothered-with-tan-in-a-bottle PASTY. Never again. Because I never know when I'll be picked to be THAT GIRL again. Yeah, in like 30 years.

This big guy was also chosen as an assistant. So, Shirtless Kilt Guy was going to lay on this spike-covered board (obscured in this photo by the "DANGER" sign temporarily resting on top of it for the practice round), and then one of us was going to stand on him while the other one helped stabilize and balance the stander. The crowd got to vote about which of us should do which job.


Of course they picked the big guy to do the standing.

Shirtless kilt guy begins his descent onto the spike-covered board...


You probably can't see it here, but I'm grimacing.



At this point, Bryce is so stupefied that he forgets to take a picture while the big guy is actually standing on him.


Shirtless Kilt Guy survived the trick. But not without getting some gnarly craters on his back.


When he wasn't defying death, he was usually making us laugh. I apologize for the sideways nature of the following video (I occasionally forget that I can't rotate videos like I can rotate photos), but it's awfully funny. And it gives you a taste of the fun way he mixed French and English. I hereby dedicate the first half of this video to Aunt Nancy and my dad, and the second half to Melanie W. and Dustin C.



For his final trick, I just had to pass him stuff.



Shortly thereafter, we ended up in the Chateau Ramezay, a quirky museum in the Old City. There are dozens of museums we would have liked to have explored in Montréal and Québec City, but as it turned out, this was the only one we entered because there was so much to do and see that we weren't able to devote a morning or afternoon to another museum during the rest of the trip. This wouldn't have been my first choice of all the museum options, but we needed a restroom break, and knew we didn't have enough time that afternoon to go to one of the museums that were higher on our priority list. Fortunately, our serendipitous stop rewarded us richly, with a quirky mix of historical artifacts and contemporary objects, and a fun installation on the history of the bicycle. The bicycle exhibit alone would have been worth the price of admission. I took dozens of pictures there, but here are just a few.

The cutest baby booties I have ever seen:


I'm sure you must be wondering what this is:



Yeah, you read that correctly. It's a dog-powered spit-turner. Poor little doggies...

And this is a water fountain and wash basin:


Basically, this was a bathroom sink prior to plumbing. The basin did not empty itself automatically, nor did the fountain refill itself automatically.

For an early dinner, we ended up at a little Italian restaurant, where we were the sole patrons until halfway through our meal, and where we managed to score our most "non-awful photograph of BOTH of us" for that day:


Following dinner, we went back to the Basilique Notre Dame, which we had admired from the outside earlier, because a wedding had kept us from being permitted to enter. You may find that I spent an awful lot of time admiring churches on this trip, but the Basilique Notre Dame was definitely the most beautiful one we saw... possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen, possibly even eclipsing the beauty of the Paris Notre Dame Cathedral in my view.

We arrived just in time to snap up some remaining tickets for a light-and-sound show they present in the Basilique on some evenings. It illustrates the history of the city and the Basilique, and it's terribly cheesy, but at the end, you are rewarded with this jaw-dropping eye candy:



After the show, we were allowed to walk around and take pictures for a few minutes. My photos don't do it justice. There are many better shots on the website, but they don't even come close to conveying the beauty of it.





One unique aspect of the Basilique is that many of its paintings and stained-glass windows depict events in Montréal's history.

There was so much more packed into this day than what you see here, but the Basilique is the part that I remember most vividly and fondly. I am a big sucker for beautiful churches and religious iconography, which may seem ironic, given my views on religion.
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Coming soon (or whenever I get around to it): DRAG QUEENS!!! Day 3 of our trip will make day 2 look like a geriatrics' tourbus daytrip.

Arrivée au Québec! Or, the post in which I butcher Canada's national anthem. In French.

For those of you who don't know: Bryce and I went on a one-week roadtrip to Canada, focusing on Montréal and Québec City, in the southern half of the province of Québec. I tried to start the posts for each day on that day or the following, but the publishing of each post is being delayed by about five days because the crummy wi-fi connection at our Montréal hotel wasn't letting me upload videos. No problem here at our swanky Québec City hotel, though! The events related here took place on Friday, June 5th, and I began the post the next day, but as I publish this, it's Wednesday, June 10th. So just FYI, the dates attached to each post are fairly accurate, even though though the publishing of each post will be delayed by about five days.

I have been pushing for a Québec Province roadtrip for a few years now, because colleagues and friends out here have had great things to say about these two cities, and also because I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice my French. But when I found out about a year ago that I have Canadian Citizenship, I became insistent. Bryce might go so far as to use the word "whiny." Fair enough. My citizenship card isn't expected to arrive until February at the earliest, so it didn't get to flash it at the border, but maybe next time...

[To my M...han family cousins: contact me if this whole Canadian citizenship thing is a huge revelation for you, and you want to learn more about it!]

Québec isn't precisely the fatherland, since my dad is from Ontario Province, but it's easy to get to these two cities from Philly, and again, there's that whole French aspect. And let's face it... Toronto and Ottowa don't rank as high on the tourism to-do list as Montréal and Québec City! Maybe we'll visit them some other time, although as far as Canadian destinations go, I'd rather go to British Columbia next.

So, I invite you to journey with us virtually to Montréal and Québec City, through the wonders of the interwebs!

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It was a long drive up to Montréal, about nine hours including the stops for fuel, food, and toilets. Bryce heroically drove the entire way, never asking me to take a turn. Sometimes it was very boring, so to entertain us, I did things such as this:



Fortunately, I have a couple of audiobooks on my itunes. Because that got boring after about two minutes. Unfortunately, I hadn't packed my finger puppets. But, note to self...

I was so giddy that I didn't sleep at all during the drive up, despite having only been able to sleep for three hours the night before because we were up so late tying off loose ends that needed to be dealt with before we could disappear for a week. At least the drive was pretty, though. Much of the time, especially when we were going through the Adirondack Mountains, it looked like this:


As we were nearing the Canadian border, we started to see signs with French translations attached.


Yippee! And soon, we were nearing the border...


Getting closer...


Almost there (a boring, minute-long video in which I manage to sound very "duh")...



"Uhh... I don't know, I don't, I don't know...uh-uh-uh. No, 'cause that's like, exports is like, if you're selling stuff from the United States. We're just regular." Does anyone detect a Beavis and Butt-Head accent here? Please tell me this is not how I usually sound.

And very shortly thereafter, we had entered Canada.

Look Mom, a gas station with your name on it!


Well past the border, having successfully tricked the pretty border guard into thinking that it was safe to let us into her country, it was time for the moment I had prepared for, err, I mean, looked forward to, all day. It was time to celebrate our entry into the country and my recent citizenship revelation by singing (if it deserves to be called "singing") the Canadian National Anthem while the sun set over this fine land. Et en français, pourquoi pas?

Since I still hadn't gotten the hang of the tune, the karaoke version I had downloaded was no help, and I had to go with orchestral accompaniment instead. What you are about to hear may be damaging to your ears. You have been warned. Proceed at your own risk.

In case you'd like to sing along (it helps to drown out my voice), here's the lyrics screenshot I had displayed on my iphone at the time:


And to all Canadians out there: I apologize in advance. I tried, really, I did.



About an hour later, we were crossing Pont Champlain (the Champlain Bridge), and entering the city of Montréal. Did you know that Montréal is an island located in the middle of the St. Lawrence river?


We finally checked into our hotel around 9 pm. It was a bit of a dump, which is pretty much what we expected. The price was right, and the location was awesome, in a nice neighborhood within walking distance of many of the niftiest parts of the city. Some guys on the 6th floor were throwing beer cans out their window as we pulled up to check in, which somehow reminded minded me of a certain Defcon 2007 incident, and so oddly, we felt right at home.

Around 10:30 pm, we finally headed out to find dinner and refreshing beverages, ending up at this brewbub (Mr. and Mrs. N. at a brewpub? Suprise, surprise...).


Our pretty bartender took a picture of us, and omigosh, IT DOESNT SUCK! Wow, a picture of us in which we appear to be neither severely stoned, nor mentally challenged! So here you go, proof that we were in Montréal:


And so I have set a goal for myself: one non-awful photograph of BOTH of us for every day of our roadtrip. Can it be done? Stay tuned to find out...

Oceanaire/Anniversary recap

It was a memorable evening. Our anniversary-celebration dinner at the Oceanaire featured the most excellent service we have ever experienced. We're pretty sure we had the best server on the staff that night. Drew, you da man! But I would have seemed even more like a fish out of water if I had stated it in those exact words that evening.

The building in which the Oceanaire is housed is quite nifty. It was a bank from its opening in 1897 until 1932, and it may have been used for other purposes through the middle of the 20th century (a quick Google search is inconclusive), but it was boarded-up and in a state of severe decay for much of the last few decades. When it was re-designed, a lot of the original architecture was left intact, and so instead of ripping it out, they carefully built façades over features such as the grand arches, as well as over the catwalks from which police officers would survey the inside of the bank. This was all relayed to us by Drew, and he even brought over an album of "before" photographs for us to see. The transformation seems quite remarkable.

One of the bank's original grand arches is beneath that beam façade you see toward the rear.

Here you can see some of the covered catwalks, flanking the façade over the arch in the previous photo.

It's supposed to remind you of the inside of a 1930s cruise ship, which I certainly bought. I kept feeling like Frank Sinatra or Al Capone was about to be seated at an adjacent table. I bet my Grandpa W. would love this place. Everything in it seems like his style, not least of all the huge marlins on the wall.


Our pretty sashimi apptizer:


The culinary highlight of the evening was Bryce's main course, bronzino baked in a salt dome. Drew was very accommodating about my obsessive photo-documentation.






If you know my personal rule regarding desserts in restaurants, then you would not be surprised that I insisted we order the creme brulée.


All the photographs we took of ourselves are unfortunately quite unflattering, but just so there's proof that we were there, here is Bryce with the bronzino and me with the creme brulée.



You can hardly see it here, but I'm wearing a dress I made out of the shirt that Bryce wore on our first date. It's a bit too small for him now, but I protested when he said he was getting rid of it, because I'm a sentimental sucker. So as far as he knew, I had put it in storage so that he can wear it as his paint shirt when we get to paint our own home some day. He was pleasantly surprised - I would go so far as to say touched - when I stepped out of the bathroom in it and did a little hands-on hips pose and said I was ready to go. Maybe I'm not the only sentimental sucker in this household.

I've got your back, brother.

Even when you're napping.

Nine years? But dude, that's a long time!

May 20, 2005. Celebrating our first five years of marriage.

Nine years ago today, I happily traded my last name for one that is much less confusing to pronounce. We were young, and stupid, and in love. Now we're a bit less young, but probably just as stupid, and on most days, I think we're more in love.

I mean, you can totally tell, right?

October 10, 2008. Celebrating Dad and Sue's 10-year anniversary.

This year's celebration will be low-key: happy hour and food at The Oceanaire, courtesy of a gift card that our friends, neighbors, and fellow kitty-parents Doug and Sarah gave us for taking care of their kitties while they were on vacation - which was totally unnecessary, because they take care of our boys more often than we take care of their Lillith and Merlin, and our boys are much more work. I mean, Etienne needs an inhaler administered to him twice a day! Whereas the hardest thing we have to do for their cats is to scratch Lillith's belly when she rolls over on her back like a dog. Oh yeah, really difficult. I mean, if we were not allowed to scratch her belly, then that would be really difficult. Because she has a very cute belly. So obviously, the gift card was totally unnessary, but I wasn't about to refuse. I mean, it's the Oceanaire! But I digress. Severely.

After the Oceanaire, we're likely to mosey over to Eulogy, where the upstairs bartender always recognizes us and knows that I'm probably going to order a Duchesse de Bourgogne. If you're local and interested in joining us for the latter, give us a call or text. We both have to go to work tomorrow, so we probably won't make a very late night of it.

But enough about this minor anniversary. I've been daydreaming about some fun/wacky/romantic ideas for celebrating when May 2010 rolls around. Here are some of the thoughts that we or friends have put forth so far:

1. Take a long weekend trip to Vegas or a similar locale, and renew our vows in a cheesy ceremony. Bonus points if the ceremony is officiated by Elvis or a Klingon.

2. Take a long weekend trip to Vegas or a similar locale, get one of those quickie divorces, and then then get re-married the next day.

3. Try sky-diving.

4. Get our names tattooed on each other's arses.

5. Take a trip back to Paris and be sure to visit the Pont des Arts, where Bryce popped the question while visiting for the last few weeks of my semester of study abroad.

Clearly, some of these ideas merit more likelihood than others.

Okay, clearly, a lot of them merit very little likelihood. So that's where you come in. Do you have any fun, wacky, romantic, or otherwise merit-worthy suggestions for how we should celebrate our 10-year anniversary next year?

Haiku makes him easy to forgive.

Bryce handed these to me one evening when I came home from work a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I was still frustrated about something he had done or said the night before. Or maybe something he hadn't done or hadn't said. I don't remember what it was. You know how it goes. It's always the little things. And often, it's the little things that make it better.

Well-played, my love.

And in case you were wondering, yes, he did see two deer while walking from work to the bus stop. And the moon was crescent-shaped.

I heart my students.

Even when they submit their assignments late.
Exhibit A (this is a must-click-on-photo-to-see-it-bigger scenario):


Not that it kept me from having to lower said student's grade for the assignment on account of it being submitted beyond the due date... but hey, if you're going to hand your assignment in late, you might as well do it with panache. Especially if you know your prof adores kitties and Star Trek.

What do you do when the whole country steals your not-so-secret baby name?

Just to get this out of the way up-front: no, we're not pregnant. We still haven't taken away the goalie, and we aren't planning to try for probably at least another two years.

My mail.com account's home page offers random news headlines. Sometimes, it's important stuff, but sometimes it's much less important, like celebrity news, or a report on which are the hottest baby names du jour. And so just now, I read a headline that crushed me. As in, started-crying, ran-to-Bryce-for-comfort, threw-an-immature-tantrum, crushed me. The headline was this: "Barack, Miley move up; baby names Emma, Jacob rule."

Emma is not #10. She is not #5. She is not even #2. She is #1. She is the Jennifer, the Mary, the Katherine, the Jessica, the Michelle, of the late 200_'s. How did I miss this? How did I not see this coming? Apparently, she has been #2 or #3 a lot lately. But I never knew. I didn't even think to check. Why would I have checked? We have never been pregnant. I had no reason to check. And even if we had ever been pregnant, I might not have bothered checking, because it is a foregone conclusion. Bryce has always known that he has no choice in this matter.

I have known for almost half my life, since I was in high school, that if I ever have a baby girl, I want to name her Emma.

Emma, for the charming character in the Jane Austen novel that was made into a lovely film starring Gwyneth Paltrow. It's my most worn-out VHS tape. I watched it when I was in high school. I remember watching it in my first-semester freshman-year dormroom when I was in college. In fact, I last watched it just a couple of weeks ago. And still on VHS.

Emma, for the baby girl I dream of, the one with the big nose that's just like mine and Bryce's, the one who will have lots of annoying body hair to contend with when she grows up, the one who will be human and make mistakes and I will love and support her all the more for it.

Emma, for the granddaughter my mom has dreamed of for as long as she has known that I would name a baby girl Emma.

But I have also always known that I wouldn't want my children to have very common names. I knew Emma was a well-known name. But I didn't know it was that common.

And guess whose fault this is? Friends. That 1990s T.V. show that never really interested me. No, I was too busy watching the various Star Trek series and Whose Line Is It Anyway. The cool, hip kids watched Friends. But not me. Apparently, when Rachel had her baby on the show, she named her Emma. So it's all her fault.

I know it's silly to obsess about this. I know it's silly to fuss over the naming of a child who is not yet conceived, a child who may never be conceived. I'll be at least 32 when we start trying. And then, who knows if my body will comply? Maybe it will be a non-issue, because maybe we'll only have a boy or boys. I know that worrying over the name of a child who may never exist is silly, what will all the other things that are going on in the world. But I'm upset. I'm genuinely, tight-chestedly, pouty-lippedly, upset. Emma was MY baby name. I know how Charlotte must have felt in that Sex and the City episode when she finds out that an old friend stole her secret baby name. Because the whole country stole mine, my not-so-secret baby name.

And so I'm dealing with my emotions by blogging about it. It does feel a little bit better. So thanks for letting me share this with you.

But if Quinn or my #2 girl name Jadzea make it to the top, somebody's gonna get punched in the face.

Lovebugs

I haven't been able to start any of the posts I have wanted to do lately, but I'm tired of the "litterbox advice column" being what's at the top of my blog. So, for your amusement, I present three videos, shot on a recent Sunday afternoon when the boys were being even more cuddly with each other than usual.

Cuteness factor: moderate.

For Kristen and anyone else who is interested: Litter box advice from a kitty-mama who thinks she knows everything

Okay, maybe not everything, but I brush their teeth and administer an inhaler to one of them. So I like to imagine that I have a good amount of kitty-mama street cred. Also, my boys are just really spoiled.

In a comment on my last post, my cousin Kristen asked for advice on managing the "litter" smell in a small apartment, because she and husband Odai are considering adopting a feline furkid one day. The response I started composing began as a few sentences, but quickly morphed into a lengthy, rambling advice column. So I figured that I might as well turn it into a proper post instead of a very long comment, as perhaps there is someone else out there who is considering kitty adoption and wondering how to make it work in a tiny apartment like ours.

Litterbox technology, if you will, has come a long way from what it was like when I was a kid. There are a lot of fancy automised and supposedly odor-controlling litterbox devices on the market right now. My brother Ryan swears by his lidded litterbox with an air filter and a small swinging door for kitty to enter and exit, but I think that a lot of pet-owners who have those don't scoop as often as they should, i.e. out of sight, out of mind. After doing an absurd amount of research (not just the internet, but also books such as The Cat Bible by Tracie Hotchner), we decided that a low-tech approach was best for us:

1) Large, sturdy, high-sided litterboxes.

Before we brought the boys home, be bought this one by Rubbermaid and a smaller, fancier, more aesthetically-pleasing one. Within a week, we had ordered a second one of these, and when it arrived, the little one was stowed away in a closet in case it ever comes in handy for travel purposes. The tall sides keep the boys from kicking litter out of the box when they cover up their "business," and if your cat is one who likes to pee into the corners or sides of their litter box, this prevents them from spraying over the edge. We are lucky that our boys don't do that. They are incredibly tidy. If you're adopting a kitten or kittens, you will probably need to start with a smaller box before graduating up to a larger one like this. Kittens present a whole other set of considerations that must be taken into account, none of which I can advise upon because I do not have experience with them.

2) At least one litterbox per cat.

Unless a human member of your household will be home a lot for the next fifteen years or so, I'm guessing you'll decide to get two cats so they can keep each other company? They'll be friendliest to each other if they're littermates. Obviously, I'm biased because of the boys. The point is, you should not expect two cats to share one litterbox. Cats can become territorial over this kind of thing. With territory issues can come peeing outside the box, which brings up a whole other set of issues that are not fun to think about. Our boys both use both the "upstairs" and "downstairs" litterbox, with no territory issues as far as we can tell, but they might be unusual.

3) Clumping cat litter is what works best for us, but there are many other options out there. We experimented with five different brands after we brought the boys home, and this is the one we like best:

Tidy Cats Immediate Odor Control Formula for Multiple Cats. They also make one with an orange and yellow label that is formulated for small spaces. The latter is our second-favorite because it gets tracked around the apartment less, but its scent is a bit chemical-ish and we're not as fond of the way it clumps, so this blue and yellow-labeled one wins, in our view.

4) Metal scoops.

I hate those plastic scoops that are sold at Petco and the like. They tend to get brittle and break over time, and even more importantly, the plastic absorbs odors, and not in a good way. I read this suggestion in The Cat Bible, and at first, I was skeptical and thought the author seemed a little nutty. But these work so much better than the plastic scoops we had at mom's house when I was growing up. These stainless steel spoons were wedding gifts that sat in our cupboards a lot over the years because we couldn't use them on our Teflon-coated pans (I was obviously not thinking clearly nine years ago when I added only stainless-steel kitchen utensils to our bridal registry at Target while also registering for only Teflon-coated pans). They are so much more useful this way. And why not have pretty scoopers? I particularly like that we have both slotted and non-slotted, because take my word for it, there will be scooping occasions when you'll want your scoop to NOT be slotted.

5) Scoop at least once a day, and twice a day when you can. This is, hands-down, the easiest way to control the litter smell. With the odor-controlling properties of most litter formulas available on the market now, you should not notice any "litter smell," except when one of them has just pooped. They can't help that any more than we can. And we find that even that odor goes away quickly if they have covered it well.

6) Invest in a bin for depositing scoopings, so that you don't have to take the trash out every single day.

Not having to take the trash out every day will also help ensure that you scoop frequently, since you'll have one less reason to procrastinate. This is just a flip-top trash can that we bought at Kmart. We usually only need to change the liners about every 4 to 6 days. Indispensable.

7) Their toilets need to be cleaned periodicaly, just as ours do. The litter-box should be emptied and thoroughly scrubbed every once in a while. While we're at it, we also scrub the scoopers, the scooper-holder, and the trashcan. We were doing it once every two to three weeks when we first brought the boys home, because that's what the "Bible" suggested. However, we find that every 6 to 8 weeks is sufficient for our boys. We haven't had any problems with them "messing" on the sides or outside of the box, so it doesn't get dirty, really. Just dusty from the litter.

I'm going to stop here. Does anyone else have any advice they'd like to offer to Kristen and Odai with regard to dealing with a litter-box in a small living space? Is there anything I wrote that you disagree with?