Good News for Mt. Benson!

For those of you who live in the Nanaimo area and have been following this story, the owners of a large piece of Mt. Benson have recently reopened negotiations with the Nanaimo Area Land Trust, who are attempting to buy the property. Kudos to Judith Pennyfeather and Peter Reeve for being willing to start talks again and a big thanks to NALT for all their efforts to saving the mountain from logging and development. Let's keep our fingers crossed that an agreement can be reached!

Local Mystery

For the past several months I've found myself intrigued by a young man (he looks to my untrained eye to be around eight or nine) who delivers flyers in our neighborhood. He has a page boy haircut -- a cute one, not a debilitating one -- and is rather adorable in a "I'd rather not be delivering papers, but since I am, I might as well do it very slowly" sort of way. The thing that initially intrigued me, aside from the haircut, is that he delivers papers during school hours. Is he homeschooled? Is he part of an alternative lifestyle group that keeps separate hours? Has he moved out and the route is how he pays for his apartment?

Yesterday the plot thickened. I saw the boy walking in the direction of school. But with him were two other boys just like him! I mean exactly like him: same hair, same clothes, same face. My flyer delivery boy is an identical triplet! He and his brothers have been the ones delivering the flyers.

Now the question is: how do they do this during school hours? Does one sneak out of the class leaving the other two do a lot of shifting around to distract the teacher from the realization that there's only two of them rather than the usual three? The potential here for mischief is amazing. Is one a hardcore capitalist? A budding entrepreneur and the other two are lazy young fellows? Does one finance the video game habits of the three of them with his in-school manual labor? Or are they a flyer delivering collective?

I must find out more about the flyer triplets. For instance, do they like dressing the same or is that some parent's misguided idea of a time-saving device? And how do I find all this out without being creepy? Creepier... I already stare too much. My inner-Nancy Drew must find out!

Am I Turning Into...

a 16-year-old boy?

Evidence in favour of this thesis:

During a walk in the park with husband and dog on Sunday, James (husband) looked at me for a long moment and then said: "You know, you sort of walk like a rocker."

Me: "What?"

He begins to mimic my walk. It's kind of a loose-limbed, shuffling, head-bobbing stroll. "Dude," he says, "You going to the Van Halen show later?"

Me. "Hmf."

On Monday, I put a down payment on an Electra Rat Rod. It's a cruiser bicycle painted matte black and decorated with leather handles. It has a flame and dice motif.





Evidence that I am actually a mid-thirties woman:

I cancelled the hold on the Rat Rod and instead ordered a Jamis Earth Cruiser. I also checked my music collection and found not one single Van Halen album anywhere. (Okay, there were plenty of Metallica albums, but that's completely different.) I am also spending 15 minutes per day walking around with a book on my head to get rid of the rocker walk.

News

I've just returned from Winnipeg, where I learned that the Fort Garry Hotel uses L'Occitane for toiletries! As I do when a hotel uses Aveda products, I tried to get more by faking out the housekeeper. I arranged all the little L'Occitane containers, shampoo, conditioner and soap, messily around the perimeter of the tub as though I'd used them. Sometimes if you do that, they'll give you a whole new set. They don't want you to run out of cleansers because you might leave looking grubby and that would bring down the tenor of the place and it wouldn't look like the kind of hotel that uses quality toiletries. I couldn't actually use them, because those little bottles are as close to L'Occitane as I'm ever going to get. Anyway, the cleaner must have seen through my ruse because she didn't give me any extras. I guess I'll just have to save the ones I got for an important occasion, such as our thirtieth wedding anniversary.

In other news, I recently read an article in Salon that speculated that when all the oil runs out the suburbs in North America will become slums and everyone will need traditional skills. So I've decided that if I can't be a writer, I will try and be a horse wrangler. Horse wrangling is my only traditional skill. I'm not saying I can handle unruly horses, because I can't. But I'm quite good at brushing and buying blankets. Probably James and Frank and I will move to Smithers and expect my family to look after us. My older brother is a millwright so he can fix the plow, my younger brothers know how to garden and to do woodwork. My mom can make jam. James can fish. I can brush the horse. We'll be fine. Whew. I was worried there for a minute.

In still other news, the final piece of funding has come through for the TV series. That means it's really going to happen! Alice is going to hit the small screen! I plan to get very Hollywood about it. I mean, before we move back to Smithers and start a back-to-the-land horse-wrangling militia. From now on I will refuse to take off my sunglasses indoors. Today I'm heading to Canadian Tire to get a director's chair and henceforth I will be using that to sit at the dinner table. I will wear a ballcap all the time and get some Juicy trackpants. I realize that the production will be Canadian and the series will be shot in and around the lower mainland rather than California, but one has to make allowances for pretension. I'll keep you updated.

And a final note: Thanks to awesome staff at Greenwoods Books in Edmonton and McNally Robinson in Winnipeg and to Terry and Shona. Everyone was amazingly gracious and hospitable. Thanks to everyone who came out to the readings, esp. my new favourite family (Matthew et al), who brought their new baby, the extremely adorable Selima (sp?) who was read the books in utero. (I apologize in advance if that makes her prone to wearing thrift store finds when she ages. If Salon is right, she will be in good company after the oil runs out. We'll all be weaving our own rags or doing the thrift store thing.)

Finally, for those who appreciate the art of the elaborate comb-over, The Bay in Winnipeg has more customers rocking that hairstyle than anywhere else in Canada. Maybe it's related to the coming oil shortage. Hard to say.

YAY!

Miss Smithers won the Sheila Egoff Award for the best children's book by a BC author! We had a fantastic time at the dinner. This is the first thing I have won since that gift certificate for a full set of highlights in 1986. (I loved those highlights but have to say this is much better!)

Thanks to the amazing owners and staff of Vancouver Kidsbooks who joined us at the ceremony, to Sandy and Doug and Felicia from HarperCollins, and Debra from Raincoast Express who were all so much fun and made our table the rowdiest (something I always strive for) and to my awesome cousin Megan who created the cover for Miss Smithers out of chocolate to celebrate!