A NEW New Year's Eve Rite

I learned a new rite of passage for New Year's Eve last night that I'd like to share. Even if you're not a pagan, you can adapt it, if you like it, to suit your lifestyle. I just thought it was really neat!

So, at a couple of minutes before midnight, you open a bottle...If you don't consume alcohol in your home, no problem, open a bottle of something you do consume!

You open your back door, and you KICK OUT the old year! "Go on - GIT!"

But we did learn things this past year...so, in thanks, we offer a libation to the old year by pouring some of the contents of that bottle out on the ground. How much you pour is up to you...be guided by your senses, your instinct.

Then you close the door on the old year.

You go to the front door, and you open it wide, and welcome in the New Year. "Welcome! Come in!" You pour a glass for the New Year, and you set it down somewhere in a place of honor. (Out of reach of children, dogs, cats, etc.) You close the door, and if there's anything left in that bottle you can share it with whomever is up with you. But that glass for the New Year is left in its place of honor till the dawn light has come through the windows.

Isn't that cool? Oh, I should mention, this isn't new per se - it's a Germanic custom. It's new for me, and about to become my standard greeting for the New Year.

And I hope everyone reading this has a great, happy, healthy 2017.

Loved by the Fairies

I had another totally awesome Hallowe'en experience last night!

Over the years, I usually have one visitor each Hallowe'en who rocks my world and makes all the effort of the preparation worthwhile. When I was still in high school, I dressed up as a witch, handing out candies by stirring them in a huge pot and lifting them out with a ladle - all the while with my very cooperative black cat Tuffy perched on my shoulders! I cackled with glee and used my best old crone voice to great effect. The best reaction I got was from a couple of knee-high things who stood, heads tilted almost straight back to see me, their mouths dropped completely open. They turned around and ran to their mom and exclaimed "Mommy mommy! we just saw a REAL witch!"

It made my day! And of course, turned out to be prophetic, though nobody, not even me, dreamed it would one day be true at the time!

Another great reaction was from a 10 year-old girl one year. It was the year I had made "Big Bertha," a dress form that Hubby had helped me make out of - what else? - duct tape! So it was very much my actual shape, with no head. Come Hallowe'en, we stood it up on some kind of stand and dressed it in a long dress. Next to it we put a hay bale with a painted wig form holding a wig, and Hubby added a hatchet into the head and we put lots of red paint around.

This little girl walked calmly up to the grisly scene and stood in front of it for a few minutes with her hands on her hips. Then she shook her head and said "Good grief!" and walked away. I nearly asphyxiated laughing!

And then there was the sweet little 6- or 7-year-old French girl who happily clambered expectantly up the steps, only to have my cat, who wanted very much to come in the house, jump right in front of her just as she arrived at the door. She gave a stifled scream and spluttered away in French that my cat had terrified her. I did my best to soothe her with candy, but I must admit that, after she left, I secretly praised the cat!

Now, recently I've met a new group of pagans, one of whom is into Faeries. They are not to be mixed up with Fairies - watch the spelling here - and they are not to be confused with the dancing, fun-loving, teensy-weensy beings we think of - like Tinkerbell - and with whom we populate children's stories, making them all glittery and fluttery and fun.

No, these Faeries are not to be trifled with! They are the stuff of nightmares - mine, at least. And Boyfriend and I recently spent an evening with our new friends A and E, getting a rather scary earful about these beings. Well, they've been somewhat on my mind since then, or rather, at the back thereof, since I quickly pushed all thoughts of them down to where I didn't have to think of them, because I simply can't deal with the occult. In any way.

Not my path. Too many mood disorders, too close to madness for me. Here there be dragons. I don't go there! But I do have great respect for those who can, and do, manage to come out, if not unscathed, at least sane.

And here's where I got a message last night, from the Faerie folk, through a little Fairy, who happens to live across the street from me, one of two little babes I've enjoyed watching slowly grow from a bump in her mother's tummy to a walking, talking being.

She and her sister and her cousins came trick-or-treating as a group with her mom and auntie. Ours was the first house they came to. We were actually both waiting and watching for them, they're kind of the signal for us that Hallowe'en has officially begun, because they're so little they go out very early.

Three of them took their time working their way up our steps, but my little Fairy was on a mission!

"Debbie!" She was saying at the top of her lungs. "Debbie-Debbie-Debbie-Debbie-Debbie-Debbie-Debbie!!!" she kept on saying! And she THREW herself into my arms! I lifted her - she was IMPOSSIBLY light! I had to kiss her little cheeks, I think she was busy kissing mine, or else she was still saying my name. Her mother, in between trying to catch her breath from laughing, managed to say "She knows your name!" and proceeded to introduce me to her sister and the other children as I handed out treats (unsweetened applesauce snacks, puddings, and juice boxes, by the way!) but none of us could hear anything for this little Fairy saying my name!

She finally stopped when given her treat and I said "Okay, darling! Okay! You have FUN tonight!" And I told her mom her treat bag was too small (kids love to hear that!) and then they trooped off to the van to be whisked away to where the streets aren't quite so busy and they could trick-or-treat with less danger of being mowed down.

I'm pagan for a reason - I recognize a sign when I see one! I see that the Faeries have told me not to be afraid. I'm not going near them anytime soon, mind you, but now I'm not going to live with this apprehension in the pit of my stomach either!

I'm also going to cross the street with some home-made something soon and a piece of paper and go meet my neighbours properly and write down all their names and learn them! And...(groan) I guess there will be more quilts to make sometime in the future, AFTER I've finished the ones that are currently promised. At this point, I think I'll have to live forever to get them all made!

And the moral of the story is precisely this: Beings of great power are also capable of great love.

A Glimpse into the Future

I had a brief glimpse into my future today.

It wasn't pretty.

I was grocery shopping, at Maxi. The "welfare" Maxi, as a friend of mine calls it, where all the produce looks like it's first fallen off the back of the delivery truck, and half the customers are worse-dressed than I am.

Which is, sadly, saying something! Never one to look in a mirror before leaving the house, I am often appalled by my reflection should I happen upon it by chance when I'm out and about in the world. To those who wonder, upon seeing me in all my "glory," "What was she thinking?" the answer is simply, I wasn't. I never think about what I look like, unless I'm dressing up for a special occasion. So, when I go grocery shopping at the welfare Maxi, sadly, I fit right in.

And I didn't have the token you need to get a shopping cart. Or a loonie, either. I did manage to trade in four quarters and get a dollar so I could release a shopping cart from its chains at last and begin my brief course round the store.

Fast-forward to me putting away my groceries in the trunk of the car and returning the cart. Or rather, trying to. Because a few idiots had been there before me.

One idiot had jammed a small cart so awkwardly into a large cart - in order to get his or her token back from the locking mechanism - that it was impossible to wrench it out straight again, and nobody could use that lane for returning their carts.

Another idiot had managed to turn his/her cart 180 degrees and lock it up that way, retrieving their token but preventing anyone else from using that lane.

Several other people had just given up, and carts were abandoned willy-nilly.

Now this sort of thing makes my blood boil. I started wiggling first one cart and then another in an attempt the fix the problems. Soon I was joined by a rather tall young man who seemed to know quite a trick involving inserting and retrieving a token to free up the various carts, and in a few minutes we had organized the carts properly, leaving several of them unlocked for lucky patrons to find in the future.

I was happy to return my cart and get my dollar back though! But as I walked triumphantly back to the car, I had a premonition...

Greenfield Park Granny Teaches Lazy Patrons Lesson

The elderly lady who has been seen re-organizing shopping carts at local grocery stores appeared again last night at the Greenfield Park shopping Mall. Witnesses say she swung her umbrella at a man, believed to be in his 30s, who failed to put his shopping cart away properly in the parking lot at the Maxi store there. Moving unexpectedly swiftly for a woman of her apparent age, she managed to land some blows on the man's shoulders and buttocks, before he reached the safety of his car and called police. Passers-by convinced "Granny," as she has affectionately become known, that she should leave quietly, and when the cops got there both she and the man she had assaulted were gone. One of the remaining witnesses said "If people would just put the carts away properly, nobody would be inconvenienced and nobody would be upset! but there's always somebody who thinks they are so much better than anybody else...I think Granny might be a bit off her rocker, but she wouldn't be if people just did what they were supposed to in the first place!"

Quite the Revelation

I recently had an epiphany.

I was looking out my kitchen window at the backyard, and its contents.

The compost heap. Which worked (surprise!) this year, for most of the summer...till I put the sweet potatoes on top of it. The sweet potatoes had sprouted mid-July on my counter. By mid-August, they actually had leaves. That's when I gave up and sat them on top of the compost heap. I had delayed putting them out, because it was too late in the season for them to grow, anyway! We have such a short growing season here - mid-July might as well have been December, as far as hoping for any baby sweet potatoes to be harvested. But I couldn't bring myself to throw the budding plants in the garbage, either.

I was stuck. The potatoes were living beings. So, in the end, I gave up and put them on top of the compost heap, figuring Old Man Winter would seal their fate much more surely than I could.

It also meant the end of turning over the compost heap.

Scratch one compost heap.

So then I looked across the lawn where my hollyhocks had bloomed this summer. These were hollyhocks that my Grandfather had brought to Greenfield Park from Dunvegan and grew to great heights despite my Grandmother's disdain. One summer a hollyhock reached twelve feet in height! Grandpa was thrilled!

He was also blinded by his love of his hollyhocks. They were all prone to a dreadful blight. The plants were always spindly, with the foliage rusting away from the ground up, so that the flowers bloomed and were consumed by the blight one by one all the way up the stem. Really, they looked dreadful.

Mine were spared this blight, but some insect devoured them. I got one lovely picture of them, and one week later the plant had been razed. It looked like a matchstick, on the day that I was surveying things from my kitchen window, about to have my epiphany.

Then I looked at the deck, with my single potted plant on it - a potato. Not a sweet potato, just an ordinary potato that had - you guessed it - sprouted - and I had - you guessed it - planted it!

This time I did it during the correct growing season and I bought the correct shape of pot and I tried, I really did try to take care of it. Just then when I was looking at it though, it wasn't looking so good. The plant had grown really tall - not getting enough light. And insects had been having a good time munching on it. It had fallen to one side, still in the upright pot, because it was so tall, half pulling the original potato out. I don't know if there are any baby potatoes in there. In truth, it looked pretty pathetic.

There used to be a matching pot there beside the potato...that one had been started much earlier, when I tried to grow ginger. Some ginger I bought at the grocery store sprouted, and I looked up how to grow it on the internet. Promises of an unending supply of fresh ginger and a beautiful houseplant to boot convinced me I could do this. I got two more pieces of ginger to keep it company, and my three pieces of ginger began to grow beautifully inside the house, and eventually went outside on the deck, to be joined later by the potato in its matching pot.

Nobody told me the ginger would be so beautiful! It's leaves are like an artist's conception of leaves. Just looking at the leaves brought me inner peace! It didn't take me long to start talking to my ginger plants, saying good morning and good night, and telling them how beautiful they were.

In short, they basically became pets.

And so, one day, I was faced with a recipe that required me to hack off a piece of one of their babies. Just lift up this beautiful, living thing I'd been talking to every day, saw off one of its limbs, and shove it back down in the dirt.

Nuh-uh. I gave the plant away to a dear friend shortly after that, who explained that I had over-watered it unforgiveably. "I don't care," I said miserably, "just take it away and give it a better home. I can't keep it alive and I can't use it. Just take it." It was almost as bad as giving away a cherished pet. And so my potato plant sat alone on the deck, minus its ginger companion.

Lastly, I turned my gaze to the pot of dill on my kitchen counter, barely two days old, fresh from the grocery store. It was turning yellow already, and in my heart in knew. I knew what its fate would be. I'd end up throwing it out, because I wouldn't find time to hang it to dry or to wash it and freeze it.

I had all these good intentions with my plants, but none of them ever turned out.

And that's when I had my epiphany.

See, Grandma and Grandpa lived on a farm. They raised chickens. My Dad and Stepmom had a hobby farm that kept us in vegetables for a good nine months of the year. I grew up learning how to freeze and pickle and can and preserve things. Since I was a little girl, in the back of my mind, I always figured I'd end up...

Being a farmer.

My epiphany?

I am not cut out to be a farmer. I'd be a dreadful farmer! Cripes, I talk to my frigging plants - can't you see me naming my little hens or piglets or la-a-a-mbs? I would never in a zillion years be able to slaughter an animal - I can't harvest a frickin' ginger root! I can't put a sprouted potato into a compost heap and turn it over!

I don't have to be a farmer!

And the silliest part of this is, it's such a relief! Like I'm still in high school, trying to work out what I wanna be when I grow up! I'm 59 freakin' years old, and I just crossed "farming" off the list! Like I can't wait for my Monday morning appointment with the guidance counsellor to say - Hey! I don't wanna be a farmer anymore! We can cross that one off!

Only, the office closed 40-odd years ago, it just took me this long to catch on!

Guess I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed...

404 - Pie Not Found

So, Son-In-Law has been staying with us.

We are thrilled, actually. We could only have been more thrilled had my Daughter also been able to come. However, she had other commitments, appearing at film festivals and being interviewed because of her film "Crazy Love," which was about domestic violence. She got interviewed - did I mention that? - by a women's org. Because her film was that good! But I digress.

Last time Son-In-Law stayed with us, I took to calling him the Boy Wonder, because I had to Wonder what the Boy had done with all my stuff, since he took it upon himself to (helpfully?) re-organize my kitchen, bathroom, and basement whenever he wasn't busy. And since he's about 30 years younger than me and at the height of his powers, he can run circles around me, so it was like that Star Trek episode "Blink of an Eye," where he was accelerated to superhuman speed while I was left wondering what the heck was going on, hearing an insect-like whine in the air every time he passed through the room...

This visit has gone much smoother, though it hasn't been without bumps entirely. There was that fateful day when the Boy Wonder came home, expecting his sugar pie to have waited patiently on the counter for his return, and he found it gone, vanished, eaten by the two resident piggy-wigs. And, not two days later, I'd used up the last of his spinach. 404 - spinach not found.

All in all, I fear I am greatly in Boy Wonder's debt this visit! He's been great. Oh sure, he has his personal preferences - for instance, he insists that I use a small container, a travel container in fact, of lens cleaner spray, in the bathroom. I had finally finished the small container he had set up from his last visit and was, with great relief, using the large bottle again at last, and came home one day only to discover that he had once again refilled the travel bottle and hidden the large bottle. Sigh. He just wants me to use the little bottle. I just want to save the little bottles for when I travel, and use the big bottles at home. 

Tonight while Boyfriend and I were out, Boy Wonder texted me about the beets I had roasted yesterday, asking if he could have one. Yes of course, have all you want. Then he texted back, did I know I had left the stems on? Yes. And he informed me that he thought beets were easier to peel after being cooked if one removed the stems before cooking.

Sigh. 404-Mother-In-Law's-Patience-Not-Found.

How exactly DOES one explain to a young man in his prime that I have made it through 59 years without his help? That, to this point, I have successfully navigated crossing the street without getting flattened by a bus? That the treasures he found in the basement the other day are there because we don't use them, not because we didn't know we had them? That I actually know how to cook, I'm just sick of doing it. 

To a young man in his prime, I'm a mystery for sure! Dear god, I'm sure he'll be glad to be back with his own parents next week and his wife the week after that! And he won't believe me, but Boyfriend and I will miss him TERRIBLY! Such a vivacious soul! And so determinedly cheerful! Such energy!

For a few weeks, he brought the sunlight back into our lives and shook us up and tried to convert us into ... something or other! I hope we didn't discourage him too badly.

After all, he's young - he needs to dream!

Waaaaayyyy BEYOND!

This is my formal review of, or reaction to, Star Trek Beyond. I will attempt to not spoil anything for people who may want to go see it, and I do recommend going to see it! But it's really just my musings, more than a movie review, about life and Star Trek and how the two have intertwined and changed over the past fifty years.

I was nine years old when "Where No Man Has Gone Before" lit up our living room in glorious black-and-white. (It was broadcast in color, but we were slightly behind the times in those days! In fact, I never did see my beloved characters in color until Star Trek: the Motion Picture!)

My Grandmother declared it a load of crock from the get-go. My dad and I were in love with it instantly. Grandpa loved it, too, but Grandpa never said boo to Grandma. With 20/20 hindsight, I realize now that we didn't see the broadcasts when the rest of North America did, since we saw them in the production order. The rest of NA saw "The Man Trap" first - we saw that third. From my DVD collection, I see that it was indeed third in the production order. I saw Where No Man Has Gone Before, followed by The Corbomite Manoeuvre, then The Man Trap. And that's the order I recommend to anyone who hasn't see the original series. It's a logical progression (pun intended.)

But I digress. From nine years old to fifty-nine, Star Trek has been a staple in my life. The appeal has been it's positive outcome for humanity: it depicts a future where humans made it out of the business of killing each other off, and into the business of helping each other out, and helping out thousands of other races throughout the galaxy.

As simple as that. "I don't like bullies," says Captain Archer. "We contaminated this culture, we've got to fix this," says Kirk. "Starfleet was founded on the principle of seeking out new life - well there it sits!" says Picard. And hundreds and hundreds more of equally generous, firm, solid principles expressed as lines in a tv show or in movies that say simply, these are our best qualities as human beings. This is how we would like to be.

Beyond has all that, and a lot more. My brain is well adapted to the original tv series, but is easily overwhelmed by all the action in today's sci-fi movies. Ever since Industrial Light and Magic, action movies are work for me to watch. And while I was very impressed by the reclining seats in the IMAX theatre and the fact that I wasn't a cripple by the end of the movie, I most certainly could not follow the action. And I was very glad that Boyfriend was there to explain to me what had happened!

My friend S, for example, bemoaned the fact that the villain played by Idris Elba, had so much makeup on at first, which they finally did away with later, and wondered why they put so much on at first. I barely understood that it had happened at all. Boyfriend explained. So, perhaps now I should say SPOILER ALERT:

Krall, played by Idris Elba, has learned how to absorb the life-force from his victims. At the beginning of the movie, he's been "eating" aliens, so he looks like the aliens he's been eating. As he eats more humans, he goes back to looking more human. 

Okay, so I didn't get that, nor did I notice it happening. I will, of course, go back and see it again on the big screen, at least once more, probably more than once. And I'll watch it many times on tv until I am as familiar with it as I am with the tv shows. But for now it is exciting to muse over what I missed!

I love that Uhura has a larger role to play. Mattel, by the was, has in theory made some 50th anniversary Star Trek dolls. There's a Kirk, a Spock, and an Uhura. I was thrilled to hear it, and I went to the Barbie exhibit on Peel St. in Montreal and I saw them. They didn't do an original cast, they did the reboot series - it's Zoe Saldana as Uhura. I love Zoe, but I wanted a Nichelle Nichols Uhura!

Anyway, Uhura plays a big part in working out who and what Krall is, which I will not spoil for you. And I like that, I've always liked the character of Uhura, and I like that the reboot is making an effort to put more into her character, as well as the other characters.

And that brings me to a sad point. This should have been a triumph for Anton Yelchin, Mr. Chekov. For those of you who don't know, Yelchin was killed in a freak accident, the victim of a faulty transmission in his jeep, which pinned and killed him after filming had finished. He was central to the whole film, it would have been his finest hour, he would have been celebrated, perhaps the reboot series would have gone on to make him captain of his own ship...now a talented actor is dead, ironically because of faulty engineering. 

Bad enough that Leonard Nimoy passed away this past year, but to lose a main character like that of the new films...I did indeed have a hard time putting off my disbelief and immersing myself totally in the moment. I am angry that north american car makers are not as careful as the engineers of star trek when they build cars, that they would let their cars go out on the roads and wait for them to kill talented people before issuing recalls to fix the problems. This is not star trek, and it is not the world I want to live in. I would like it to be better.

Back to Beyond. Captain Kirk overcomes his demons, Spock overcomes his. There is witty repartee, though you may need to be younger than me to catch it!

And you don't need to have fifty years of history to understand it. You don't need to have seen the other movies to follow it. I've got all that, and I still got all the aliens mixed up and Boyfriend had to keep explaining to me "no, that was the other one," etc.

But I do recommend it, it's fun, like an amusement park ride, and it will keep you guessing!

The Archer is In

There it is, my first bruise from Archery class! It'll be a beauty tomorrow, that's for sure!

So, it turns out that I'm just a beginner, that understanding how and why things work isn't enough. It's going to take practice, practice, practice before I can aim consistently. Heck, tonight I had trouble finding my own eye and face! All these new things to do! Do them in order, do them consistently...well, I have my work cut out for me! 

But what a hoot! Part of me dreads the learning experience, because a former employer of mine once declared that I made the most ingenious mistakes of any employee he had ever known. That nobody in their right mind would dream of making the kinds of mistakes I make.

And he was right. I do make trouble for myself, and I think the operative phrase in his sentiment is "in their right mind..." 'Nuff said.

So I'm partly dreading whatever ingenious mistake I'm going to make in archery class. However, I've also been working really hard on being a positive person, so I'm just going to push that thought to the back and work hard at getting used to using a bow.

One really funny moment happened tonight - I had taken off my finger guard and stuck in my back left hand pocket. My back right-hand pocket was covered by the belt I was using to hold the quiver.

So when I next picked up the bow, I put on the "dragonne" (it's a string that holds the bow on your hand so you can't drop it). So then I tried to reach my back left pocket with my right hand. It didn't work. I had to ask the instructor to pull my finger guard out of the pocket for me. Everyone found it quite amusing. They found it even more amusing when I did it again, the very next time we picked up our bows! I was less than impressed. Boyfriend told me to not remove it, then I wouldn't get into that mess. But it gave the class a laugh.

Better, to my mind, was the two arrows I shot that landed touching each other. I was the last person in the line to shoot my arrow, so everyone was watching, and there was a collective gasp and some kind soul exclaimed "Robin Hood!" Everyone laughed, the instructor told Boyfriend to watch out, and I felt great for 20 seconds...till I couldn't reach my finger guard in my back pocket again...

It was a great first experience!

Buns of Steel

A few weeks ago, I came home to something funny.

Now, you understand, when I lived with Hubby, I came home to something funny on a regular basis. Hubby never minded a good joke, even if it was on him, and he was always up to something, so it was usually pretty easy to find a way to make fun of him!

Boyfriend, on the other hand, is much harder to make fun of. He's a very serious man. Oh, don't mistake me, he has a great sense of humor. But he doesn't use it against me, or against anyone else. And he plans and plans and plans so that everything is calculated before he begins a project.

Hubby...well...he plans, but differently. Like the time he planned to put his snow tires on rims. Without the right tool. In the livingroom. The livingroom, I might add, which we had just paid to have painted. (The blog on that adventure is called "Would a Jury of my Peers Convict me," and I think you know, the answer to that question is a resounding "NO!"

But I digress.

When Boyfriend comes home, like me, the first thing he does is get into his cozy-wozies. However, on this particular occasion, he was still dressed, even though by my calculations he'd gotten home an hour before me.

As I pulled off boots and coat, he began explaining to me that there was something new in the bathroom, that he had had to go out and buy after he got home.

A new toilet seat.

Why, you ask, did we require a new toilet seat? Badly enough to keep a man dressed in his work clothes?

Turns out, when he sat on the seat, it had cracked.

I could of course phrase this in a more embarrassing way: Boyfriend cracked the toilet seat!

Ha ha ha ha ha!

I said, did you have to replace it? could we have lived with it? But no, it split, and then it snapped shut on his poor, unsuspecting bottom!

So he had gone out and got another one. (This particular model is one of the pricier ones, because both the lid and the seat close slowly and silently.)

So, because it takes me awhile to come up with "zingers," it was late in the evening when I finally burst out laughing and said what I wish I had come up with immediately.

I said, "Is this some new kind of martial art? I mean, I've heard of people breaking wooden boards with their hands or feet...I've never heard of anyone breaking them with their bums!"

Boyfriend's eyes closed to slits as he declared, "I have buns of steel."

I smiled and said, "No, you're a practitioner of Kung Poo."

(No egos were harmed in the production of this blog: Boyfriend was happy to be so immortalized. Yes, I asked him!)