Bring on the Totems

C'mon. You know you want one. Bring home a totem print for Thanksgiving. And one of the pumpkins, too.

Know Any Good Jokes?

I thought I might regale you with some humour or some puns about totem poles. So I Googled, literally, jokes about totem poles. The result? It's kinda like when I was in junior high and did an internet search for a home economics class. Nutrition.Typed in milk. In the case of the former, I ended up with a plethora of sites devoted to jokes about Polish people (Poles... Do they even like to be called Poles? Is that PC?)... and one site of people attempting to make up totem pole related jokes. (Colossal failure. In case you need a few brain cells to die, please view said attempts here, none of which belong to me. Please note the emphasis on ANY, as if the poster were desperate for totem pole humour. OH MY GAWD. Aren't there ANY jokes??? But I digress.) In the case of the latter search, why oh why would a search on milk (with the safe search squarely on, in 1993, in a junior high school) result in an inundation of porn? I ultimately did my project on caffeine, the benefits thereof, a lesson I would carry with me to university.

So instead I'll tell you about our trip to Victoria, home to a number of spectacular totems. And Poles, I'm sure, but I haven't looked into that yet, whether there is in fact a Polish community in Victoria and/or if such a community would warrant the adjective spectacular.

Our first trip to Vancouver Island, we had just a few hours to spend in Victoria before our flight left. We didn't go far, so I decided to spend the last few megabytes I had left on my memory card shooting the totem poles near the museum. My husband's voice suddenly hits octaves I didn't realise possible as he squeaks excitedly, "Animal! Animal!"



Okay, so my imagination is going crazy here. First of all, I can't see what he's seeing, mostly because yelping "Animal! Animal!" leaves an immense slideshow of possible animals running through my brain. You yelp, for example, "Platypus! Platypus!" and my mind envisions the platypus and the eyes start looking for him, making the platypus more readily identifiable. I'm no neurologist, but I do believe it helps to know what you are looking for. The only thing I could conclude in those panicked seconds is that it must be an animal my husband has never seen before and therefore cannot identify by proper name.

So, the thing is, to my  knowledge, there ain't much my husband hasn't seen. I am bit of a zoo junkie and make my husband take me to the zoo in pretty much every major city and country bumpkin small town we visit. (Remind me to tell you about my experience at Ueno Zoo sometime), and hubby o' mine is on the up and up on dog breeds, too. He's no animal slouch. So what the heck animal is he seeing that he doesn't know the name for?

Gulp.



<insert list of strange and potentially dangerous animals into imagination here>

I began to wonder if I was going to photograph said mystery beast and therefore inadvertently document the last moments of my life, and would the pictures be shown at my funeral?

The end to this story is not nearly as interesting as the beginning. Evidently, my husband has never seen a North American raccoon before. Ja. Fer real. Raccoons. A pair of the critters. It makes sense if you've ever seen a Japanese raccoon, called a tanouki (Mario Brothers fans, remember the tanouki suit? Yeah. Raccoon suit.) and you'll totally get why the coons on the lawn were totally alien to him. But still. We had to add The Raccoons to the list of TV shows my husband has to watch in order to not freak out his wife unnecessarily better understand Canadian culture.

It was a good experience, though, because the next time he hollered "Animal! Animal!" at the corn maze a year later (in that case, for prairie dogs popping up and down like those gophers you whack in a carnival game), I knew I wasn't in immediate peril or going to die.



In the meantime, now that you've made it to the anti-climactic ending of my totem anecdote, I hope you've enjoyed the images. Some of them were in fact taken in Duncan, on Vancouver Island, where, if you must know, a wasp crawled down my decolletage during the shoot. (For our concerned readership, my spheksophobic cousin was obliging enough to coax the wasp out and my bosoms escaped unscathed.) I find that some of the shots really work well as a set, and if you're interested, they'll be available for sale shortly. In fact, a huge variety of totem shots are going to be available. And you don't have to tote'm to your house. We'll mail 'em.

Images of Autumn

A-maize-ing (Pun Intended)

It's autumn. In some places, it's still summer. Not here, nope, zero, zilch, nada. Officially autumnal. Yellow leaves, crunching, the perpetual smell of burning something in the air, cardis, oxfords, tights, jaunty hats, grasshoppers and wheat and red berries. And NO CAMERA.  Distress.

Right around this time of year, last year, we went to our very first pumpkin festival out in Bon Accord. We've been there several times since (albeit not for pumpkins), mostly because I'm inclined to believe my husband likes a good deal (in any language). They have a corn maze (which I love to tell people is a maize maze, mostly to see the expression on their faces when they don't get it, or think I am suffering from a speech impediment). They also have a canon that they shoot the pumpkins out of at a 2-D pirate ship. (Last weekend, pumpkins not being quite ripe yet, it was a corn canon. Seriously awesome.) I was a few months preggo at last October and not showing at all, yet the demands for 'belly shots' were rampant on Facebook. I was awfully tempted, folks, to stuff one of the pumpkins under my shirt just to freak people out. That, or find a picture of me from Thanksgiving when I've eaten too much and pass it off as baby bulge. Turkey baby. Baby baby. Same difference at four months, right?

So let me tell you about this place. Don't go if you don't have a giant sense of humour, because unless you can get into the kitsch and shabby attractions, you'll spoil your afternoon. The corn maze is awesome-- that is, unless you go at the end of the season, and people have tramped through it to take a shortcut to the parking lot. At that point, you're sort of wishing you'd worn industrial boots because, ladies and gentlemen, a cut cornstalk is actually quite penetrating and resiliant. They also hide a number of oddities, including discarded Timbits, which our schnauzer found (and was disgruntled to relinquish). Their petting zoo boasts an exorbitant variety of chickens. The first time we went they were roaming freely around the grounds. I have a thing for chasing chickens, and every time we've visited since, they've had the chickens behind bars. Alas.

The Enchanted Forest bit of the festival consists of things intended to be creepy... but what makes the Enchanted Forest legitimately creepy is that it looks like a playground out of a horror movie. The statues and whatnot that are intended to be cute and charming have fallen into decay, paint peeling, cement cracking, vines and grasses rising up and twisting around them, like an abandoned circus or playground where children were murdered. WAY freakier than the plastic skeleton sprawled in the dead leaves, although, I must admit that the plastic Kewpie doll in the muddy witch's pot was also somewhat twisted. The kids delight in the mundane plastic skeleton while the adults shiver at the legitimate and more subtle creepiness of the place.There is also an authentic 1970's hearse they pull out for Hallowe'en.

If you have children who have difficulty assessing the severity of a situation, do not take them to the toddler's maze made of six-inch-high bales of hay. I cannot tell you how many kids stand in the maze, unable to figure it out, and believe they are legitimately cut off or separated from their parents, also in the maze.  They stand there bawling until someone comes to rescue them. It never occurs to them that they can walk through or over the wee piles of hay... Strangely, they know that the skeletons in the "concert hall" singing country songs aren't real.

You can stuff your own scarecrow. The best part about this is that people leave behind their discarded scarecrow parts. It's like D-Day on Omaha beach. Lots of parts everywhere. Dismembered scarecrows with their faces drawn on by 6-year-old artists. It's colourful and comical and gruesome all at the same time. Be prepared, friends, if you go, to sit in a hay pile stuffing jeans with straw. 

And did I mention there are pumpkins? LOTS of pumpkins.

We're going back this year because my husband has decided he wants to take pictures of our son on all the pumpkins. We did a dry run of Oliver on the pumpkins and hay bales last week at the Harvest Festival (which really, was just an excuse to shoot corn out of a cannon), got him with an Olympus point and shoot. Epic fail. I have documented a plethora of Oliver expressions suitable for a number of  caption contests... I'm afraid none of the captions would be family friendly. Glare-o-rama. Lots of up-yours stares and eff-you grimaces, proof that kids are on to the ridiculous need of parents to pose them in "fun times" pictures. I can wait until adolescence for those looks, thank you very much.

And then there is the issue of my camera AND lens being in the camera hospital-- still in the waiting room to go through triage, I'm told. Must be a Canadian camera hospital. Luckily, aside from the glaring, Oliver hasn't started doing anything photo-worthy, like sculpting masterpieces or tap dancing. But, the next pumpkin festival is around the corner, and I haven't got a gawsh durn thing to get it with. Le sigh.

In the meantime, please enjoy the collection of foh-tohs I have to share from autumns past. I'm gonna give them their own post so you can enjoy them without the distraction of words. Although, if you're here, thanks for reading the distracting words. I'll also be setting up a new image gallery so if you're looking for some of these fabulous seasonal images, it'll be easier to find them.

The Busy Season

It seems, sometimes, that the months can fly by and feel like days. You look back and wonder where the time went, how you managed to neglect your diary, how your blog goes without updates, and you haven't bothered to answer those e mails from your mom. (I don't have that problem with my mom... I think if I somehow didn't assert my existence in the universe for more than three consecutive days, she'd inundate my phone with messages and eventually end up on my doorstep.) In our world, we moved, took a vacation, and started a new teaching semester all in the same breath. Looking at the calendar, I realise this was more than thirty days ago, not yesterday. It's a miracle some couples manage to find the time to talk, right?



My husband and I found an interesting solution to this problem that inevitably creeps up during the busier phases of our lives. We came across this Q&A book at the bookstore and bought a pair of them. Essentially, there's a different question every day that you answer, everything from philosophical questions (what's standing in your way?) to silly questions (do you need a cold shower?) to questions about what you ate for dinner (what was the last meal someone cooked for you?). The book allows you to record your answers over a period of five years (starting from any year-- you can fill in the year as you go), so in 2012, I can see what I wrote in 2011, or in 2015, I can see what I wrote in 2014, 2013, and 2012. I'm curious to see how my answers this year will be different next year.





My husband I keep them on our night tables, and as we're going to bed, we answer the day's question and talk about our answers. Sometimes we have about thirty seconds of sharing, sometimes the day's question actually gets us talking before we pass out.

A bigger project we've taken on is a sort of auto-biographical journal that prompts you to write down different memories and experiences, info about your family, quirks and quarks, and your philosophy on life... we're hoping to finish them before we're old, senile, and can't remember our own names. We thought it might be a nifty keepsake for our kids or our grandkids, who would never know us as young thirty-somethings, just wrinkly, doddering, doting grandparents. (What I'd really like is for my parents to fill them out, but I don't think that'll happen. They somehow manage to be two of the busiest people I know.) I'll try and find the links for you so you can check it out for yourself. It seems a little daunting, but again, it's been a project that has definitely stimulated some conversation between my hubby and me. It's amazing how much you don't know about someone, even if you've been with them a million years.