Two weddings and a video shoot yesterday, so very happy about that. Over the next week or so I will be editing one of the weddings and I look forward to spending more time (at least in video) with those brides. Neat. :-) The first (unrecorded) wedding yesterday was in a park on King Street here in Toronto, and people walking by cheered and clapped for the two beautiful brides saying 'I do, I will, I promise'. The brides seemed overwhelmed by the support of loving and happy strangers. God(ess/s/whatever), I love this city so very much.

Six more business days left on the office contract I should not have taken, and it's sweet to have been able to honour it and to look forward to ending it.

Lt. Ripley has taken to showing displeasure in other ways: she punches. She's careful with her claws, so it's like being hit with a high speed, tiny, 14lb Nerf ball. She walked by fabulous husband last night, grumbling and foul tempered, let him have it on the way by. You know there's some aggression and attitude...but it's so gosh darn cute.

Also - I need, more than I ever thought possible, Penguin Cafe Orchestra recordings. That is all.

Hurray Roel for calling it! There's a wedding fad out there growing where after the ceremony, the dress is trashed in a massive photo op that can go well or poorly but in any case seems to me like lighting money on fire with more money (the cost of the dress and the expense of the photography) There are so many other positive things one can do with a wedding dress to honour the day. Even if a woman doesn't want to wear it again it can be:

1) Donated to a place like the Brides Project, where the resale of wedding dresses goes to financially support a camp for kids with cancer.

2) Donate it to a reputable charity organization for a silent auction item.

3) Rework the material into another dress, or christening/naming clothes for children from the marriage.

Some "trash the dress" shots look amazing, but that's more the location than the waste of an expensive dress. Just do some love photo's at the location of your choice, and call Roel. Some wedding dresses can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars - if you can afford to trash that? Just give me the money instead. I promise I'll do nice things with it, and say you thank you on this blog.

Also last weekend: Two wedding planning meetings and one shower chat, two boat weddings (Sept on Lake Ontario = Brrr), some editing work. Ended up getting home from work at 10pm the night before the clean up, then up at 7am to make sure I had everything packed for that.

But one of the best things?

Celebrating one week of Lt. Ripley defending her honour. Seems standard cat boxes are not to her liking - but the boot tray works for her, very well. Whether it's because it's lower/wider and less confining or because it has some scroll work on one edge and she likes pretty things, I don't care. Yesterday the Toronto Humane Society called, to a) see if we wanted to make a donation and b) see how we were enjoying our cat. I'm so glad they didn't call last month, when we were celebrating 8 months of tyranny from the Feline Liberation Movement in the form of protests staged on the floor every day. Well, we're not quitters. And she's pretty cute/worth it:



Well done, Lt. We're proud.

Got home from the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup around 3:30...after stopping four lunch. Our small yet fierce team learned a great deal, and many lessons were learned for next year and duly recorded.

Also recorded aprox 40kg of garbage and two full clear bags of recycling (left by that same Tim Hortons as Anneke and I walked back to my place around 1:30ish) Water bottles seem to be the biggest problem, with busted styrofoam being a close second. Plastic bags and bits of synthetic string, excellently designed for choking birds, were also in abundance. We likely cleared only about 1km of shoreline on the east side (and about 20 paces from the shoreline toward the road) but after 3 hrs and 7 bags (plus two ungainly items that didn't fit in bags, we called it a day and staggered off to find food. Wildlife spotted included 1 swan, 8 ducks, 12 geese, 2 snakes, innumerable copulating dragonflies (shameless things) and crickets and grasshoppers for as far as they eye could see. Buffy references? Two. Great piles of laughs.






(more photo's later if you want em, takes a while to upload and me tired now)

The main challenge with cleaning Tommy Thompson was identifying invasive from selected shoreline materials, since the shoreline is effectively made from huge slopes of construction debris. Arcs and angles of rusted re-bar jut out from bits of concrete, brick and mortar wall, foundation. Wet concrete had been poured over it here and there, rendering much of the metal scraps immovable and merging one destroyed building to another. At times it looked like a post apocalyptic view at individual lives in the form of failed homes. In a weird way, shockingly beautiful. Some of the material was being overtaken by moss, some brick and mortar walls had trees growing through them; plants at work reclaiming what had been discarded, nature reclaiming it's own. Some parts had obviously become home to wildlife. In accordance with the directions by the clean up kit, if it was somethings house or being returned to the earth in some way, we left it alone. Also two women against 100km of half buried re-bar? No. Nu-uh.



Of the actual shoreline, being with 5 ft of water, the biggest problem seemed to be balloons. I now hate balloons. When below the waters surface they are burst and flaccidly waving, looking like another planet's jellyfish, and bloody hard to reach. When above water, their strings were inconveniently tangled on difficult to access things. And the best part? When on re-bar which heated in the sun, they burst and melted onto the metal, gaining a consistency exactly like that of (worked in hospitals, this is how I know) phlegm. The kind that comes out of the old sort of tracheal tubes. I do not ever, not never, want a fucking balloon.

The staff of Tommy Thompson graciously offered to pick up garbage neatly stacked along the road, and we did the best we could. Anneke had a great idea for prizes next year - garbage bingo. Since the whole point (besides cleaning the area and making it safe for little wee things) is collecting data on how shorelines are uses coast to coast, there are data cards that come in kits for registered sites. Arranged as score cards, they could equal sponsored (again, with more time to put this together next year) prizes, with special note given to strange items sometimes found.

It was a great experience that I'll totally do again next year. I highly recommend anyone who still wants to be involved to seek out a site on the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean up's website that's in their area to clean. Thanks to Anneke for being and early morning trooper, and Greg and Angel for encouraging me to set up a site.

Telemarketer Games:
1) Insist you cannot get cable, because that's how they see you. (Yes, I've done this. We now seem to be off Rogers call list.)
2) Tell them you know it's Vanessa and not at all from Sprint, that the baby doesn't even look like him and why can't she just leave you alone?? (bonus points for sobbing, then hang up. Yes I've done this too.)
3) Beg them for the antidote. Insist you've held up your end of the bargain, and that they're a govt agent.
4) Sing. Invite them to join in on the chorus.
5) Ask them to hold, then put the phone down and walk away. Kind of mean because most systems won't let them terminate the call, resort to only if they're rude. If you have anything with a porn soundtrack, it's a good time to play that loud so they get a creepy visual.
6) Tell them about Jesus. Either the god made flesh or your pet fish. Mix it up a bit.

Any others?