Part-time prevaricator
The last thing I wrote today:
The road split, right at the edge of the playground, forked into three gravel roads, each leading deeper into a wooded cabin area. A sign at the fork had arrows that named each subdivision: LABRADOR, GREEN GABLES, and BLUE ROCKS. “Down here,” said Arnie, leading them down the GREEN GABLES road.
August long weekend, Kathleen and I took a little trip, just a couple hours in a Westjet 737. We flew out to Ottawa for a family reunion of my mom’s side of the family.
See, Mom lives in Manitoba, along with me and my middle sister. My youngest sister — who ended up not making it to the reunion, and she was sorely missed — lives further west, in Alberta. My uncle R lives in Nova Scotia, out on the east coast, and one of my aunts, M, lives in either Manitoba or China, depending on if school’s in session. So my other aunt, V, who lives in Ontario — in the Capital Region — decided, Hey, I’m right in the middle! So we had the reunion out at her place.
We arrived on Thursday afternoon, and were picked up at the airport by V. We went to her house — in a bedroom community about 40 minutes from Ottawa proper — and settled in. Most of the family was there already — my sister and her family had arrived earlier in the day, having driven from MB instead of flying. Brave, that; they have four children, and it was about a four-day drive. R was there, and M, and my mom. Most of V’s kids were floating around, too.
On Friday, we went into the city to do some touristing. Kathleen had never been to Ottawa, and my last visit was when I was 17, so the time was right. We got dropped off about a block from Parliament Hill, and toured around the grounds for a bit before taking the free tour of Centre Block, which is the building that houses both the House of Commons and the Senate. Government wasn’t in session, so we got the full tour (except the Peace Tower, which was closed).
Photos from our tour (click through for descriptions):
Things I learned on our tour:
After the tour, we had about an hour and a half before our scheduled pick-up, so we wandered around downtown Ottawa for while. We found a little place called Byward Marketplace (I think) and had some samosas and naan from a little Indian food kiosk. Mmmm.
Then we wandered some more, and found a park to rest our tired feet and finish off our naan. The park had a view of Parliament.
A bit more wandering, and we found the National War Memorial, which features the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
After that, we found the buskers’ festival, and for some reason I have no photos of that. After that, we got picked up by one of my cousins, and we returned to V’s house.
Tomorrow: a few more photos, mostly of family.
_____
* She’s welcome in the Senate, though. They have chairs for her and her husband in there.
** The Library survived.
I set my camera up outside at my in-laws’ farm, and set it to take 15-second exposures all night. I was hoping to catch some Northern Lights, since the sun fired off a coronal mass ejection on the 12th.
Thirty seconds before this photo, there was nothing. Black sky. Then, without any ramp-up, the sky turned green.
This shot is from midnight, almost on the button; probably 12:00:30 or so. The lights along the bottom are vehicles on the Trans-Canada Highway.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Moose Jaw to be born?
…for possible inclusion in my nascent zombies-in-Canada short story.
I saw a tweet from Innsmouth Press — purveyors, IIRC, of latter-day Cthulhu stories and the like — that spoke of a new anthology of Canadian zombie fiction, to be titled Dead North. I thought Hmmm, that could be an interesting challenge.
So I’m currently ruminating on a short story about local zombies. So far I’m thinking about zombies in government, running the show, and a small enclave of people struggling to cure what they perceive as the zombie curse. Once I’ve got a draft, I’ll be looking for people to read it and offer critique. Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in helping out.
On your nightstand right now:
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, thanks to an essay in William Gibson’s Distrust that Particular Flavor.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Strangely, it was probably The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I grew up in a house where my father’s science fiction novels dominated every bookshelf — and there were a lot of bookshelves. I didn’t understand a tenth of what was really going on in the book, but I read it over and over all the same.
Update: it’s mostly fixed now, though there remain a couple little weirdnesses to sort out. I’ve learned two lessons from this: 1) backups and 2) child themes.
I just updated a bunch of stuff on this site, including my theme. And remembered moments too late that I’ve made some customizations to the theme.
Which are now gone.
Whoops.
(For instance, right now, the Fiction links don’t work. I’ll get them working again soon, though.)
Some of my short fiction — all the stuff I posted on Ficlets (RIP), for instance — is licensed with a rather permissive Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that when it turns up on a site like Compumatrix, I can’t request that it be taken down.
Not that this bothers me, really. My words are being read, and sometimes in places I’d never expect. Maybe it torques me a little that someone’s “monetized” my works, but I have the feeling that the money involved is pretty small. (I don’t know; maybe “Wilma(logima)” is rolling in long green thanks to me. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. I also doubt I’ll lose sleep over it.)
Most of the ficlets that I wrote were dashed off in fifteen minutes; sometimes the hardest part was trimming them down to fit the site’s 1024-character maximum. I’m glad people still find them so fascinating.
I’m sure it’s popped up other places, some of which I’ll eventually stumble upon. Like I said, the Ficlets are licensed permissively, and I have no intentions of trying to get any of them taken down. (I’ll do what I can to make sure they’re properly attributed, of course.) I’m just glad people are enjoying my fiction.
Speaking of which: There’s more fiction over here, if you’re interested. (The bulk of which, please note, is not CC-licensed.)
