lapsus linguae

We’ve walked up to the Jean Talon Market just about every weekend this summer. We’ve been buying whatever’s in season and planning our meals for the week around that. We’ve also been trying a new Québec cheese every week. I don’t know when this started but all of a sudden we have some amazing artisanal lait cru fromageries in Québec and the Fromagerie Hamel at the Jean Talon Market is a museum of them.

Back in June a number of regional cheese producers schlepped into town to offer tastings in front of Hamel. We’d already bought a semi-firm from Iberville, but we proceeded from table to table tasting cheeses for next time. At the last table we came to we met two goats, skittish ambassadors of some great chèvres, and we were blown away by a vache called le Rassembleu. The woman at the Rassembleu table invited us to visit their farm. We decided on the spot that we would.

Last week we rented a car for a day and headed up to Sainte-Sophie to visit Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde. We had no idea what to expect. We’ve never set off in search of a food item in quite this way before. We’re not galloping gourmands booking truffle-hunting excursions and then smuggling home crates of wine from France or anything. Generally we eat what we can buy within walking distance of our apartment. Whatever expectations we had of Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde they were well exceeded. We called ahead and had been advised to arrive before 11AM at which time a tour bus would descend. We didn’t want to be there when that happened! We arrived well in advance of the bus and had the place to ourselves. M. Alary, head of this family run operation, greeted us. Through a huge plate glass window we watched a woman dressed in white was mixing this mornings milk – already forming into curds – in a giant stainless steel tub. We offered out rapt attention to M. Alary who quietly explained everything we ever thought we wanted to know but didn’t know whom to ask about how they make cheese. I don’t’ want to spoil the tour for you, but here are some facts that really everyone should know: All the different cheeses come from the same cows. They make a different kind each day. It takes ten litres of milk to make one of cheese. You have to poke holes in blue cheese to get the blue into it. Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde has been producing organic raw cows milk cheeses for over four years now, but the farm has been in the family for generations. Artisanal cheeses cost less on site than in stores in Montréal. After our window tour we had a tasting and made our selections. We bought le Rassembleu, of course; le Fleurdelysé, a much younger softer bleu half of which we promptly devoured an hour later picnicking beside le Petit Rivier du Nord; le Fou du Roy, a young semi-firm with a pale orange rind; and le Pavé, which we later put on the most incredible pizza – le Pavé is like the Fou du Roy only the rind is washed off every day so they can age it longer so it’s firmer and more intense. M. Alary seemed impressed that we’d come prepared with ice packs and coolers. At any rate, he gathered that we were serious about cheese and gave us directions to a chèvre fromagerie a little further down the road. Our selection of cheeses, safely stowed in the cooler, the tour bus looming on the horizon, we walked across the field to say hi to the Alary cows and soon were on our way. Thanks cows.

Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde
317, route 158, Sainte-Sophie (Québec)
http://www.fromagiersdelatableronde.qc.ca

Fromagerie La Suisse Normande makes vache and chèvre cheeses; we were already stocked up on vache so we concentrated on the chèvre. We bought a semi-firm called le Capra, half of which disappeared during the afore mentioned picnic; two small dried Crottin, one of which we crumbled onto a zucchini flour fresh pasta last week that was so good we could have cried; a pyramid of le Sabot Blanchette; and two fresh Caprice that we put in a jar with herbs and oil to save for some dark gloomy winter day. It turns out that the goats we met at the market were from La Suisse Normande. When we asked the charming proprietor if we could meet them she said yes of course but she couldn’t promise that we’d find the same two that were at the market. We walked across the road and into the barn. The goats seemed excited to have company – they came running ove to check us out. They’re kind of like dogs – dog size and dog friendly – but instead of trying to sniff your crotch they try to eat your watch. Thanks goats.

Fromagerie La Suisse Normande
985, Rivière Nord, St-Roch de l’Achigan (Québec)
http://fromageduquebec.qc.ca/suissenormande
. . . . .

How to turn “One day we’ll take a vacation…” into a One-Day Vacation: Admitting that you need a vacation is the first step. Don’t think about all the places you can’t afford to go to. Think about all the places you CAN afford to go to. There are the Laurentians. There are the Eastern Townships. There are parks and lakes and hiking trails and festivals galore. And food! There’s lots of food to go visit. Got a favourite fruit? Find a place to pick it yourself. Got a favourite Quebec cheese? Go visit the creamery, go visit the goats. Whatever you do pick a destination that will get you out of the city. Don’t stay in the city. That’s not a vacation, that’s just a day off. And don’t do it on the weekend. That’s not even a day off, that’s just less time for laundry and groceries and giving the dog a bath. If you have a job, tell them you need to take a personal day. Don’t say it’s a sick day; tell them you have some family emergency you need to attend to. That’s no lie. Being in desperate need of a vacation totally counts as a family emergency. That’s one of the advantages of the one-day vacation – no one really needs to know where you are. Other advantages include: you don’t need a dog sitter and you don’t need to pack a change of clothes. Rent a car. Go on, you can do it. You can afford to rent a car for just one day. Forty-two dollars plus twenty bucks of gas. Split between two people. You could go alone, but don’t go in a group – group decision-making slows everything down. To offset costs, pack a picnic lunch, especially if you’re planning an out-doors-y and/or food-related vacation. If you’re going to pick berries, cream is in order. If you’re going to visit a creamery to buy cheese, you’d better bring a baguette. Either way, ice-packs and a cooler are a must. A picnic basket is not absolutely necessary, but sure helps get you into the spirit of the thing. As do sun hats. And shorts. And anything else you’d never wear in the city. Be sure to bring multiple contradictory road maps. You have to get a little bit lost, it adds to the adventure. But don’t get too lost – you only have a day. Don’t over-schedule – you’ll just get irritated. Don’t under-schedule – you’ll never get anywhere. Schedule one or two activities and add one or two more along the way. Start with a scheduled activity. See if you like it. If you do, see if they have any pamphlets on-site or ask them what they recommend you do next. Follow any hand-painted signs on the side of the road. Hand-painted signs lead to things like flea markets and home made pies and horse carrots (whatever they are) and sweet corn. Take pictures of silly brightly coloured things. Don’t tire yourself out. Have your fun then head for home. Hit the road earlier than you might think necessary. It’s a weekday; there’s going to be rush-hour traffic. And it’s summer; there’re going to be construction delays. If there’s too much construction on the highway, take a byway. Back roads are slower. But that’s okay. You’re on vacation. The car’s not due back until morning. So you might as well drive the hell out of it. When you do get home the dog will be so happy to see you you’ll feel like you were gone all week. And it you don’t answer the phone or the email for a few days after, then, when people ask: Where have you been? You can tell them: We were on vacation! See how easy it is? Go on. Have a great day.

. . . . .

an addendum to WORDS THE DOG KNOWS
compiled by Lisa Vinebaum,
also known as Auntie V.

After spending a week with Isaac the Wonder Dog Auntie V issued this statement:

sure isaac knows his name and a ton of ball-chasing + walking commands. big deal. m+d don’t give isaac enough credit for the theoretical aspect of his vocabulary, which i was fortunate enough to coax out of him when i wasn’t scaring him by screaming at the tv.

here then, is an updated list of some of the words isaac the wonder dog knows. (sadly he still has problems with his reference citation skills). thx isaac, for all your help with my dissertation this past week.

xo av.

ISAAC
Belief is the act of imagining. It is what the act of imagining is called when the object created is credited with more reality (and all that is entailed in greater “realness,” more power, more authority) than oneself. It is when the object created is in fact described as though it instead created you. It ceases to be the “offspring” of the human being and becomes the thing from which the human being himself sprung forth. It is in this act that ISAAC yields against all phenomenal assessment to Abraham, that Abraham yields to God, and the reader yields to the narrative.

— Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

STAY
The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people’s national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can STAY in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

NO
NO Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
NO eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.

— Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles

SIT
The mutual improvement school was to exploit still further this control of behaviour by the system of signals to which one had to react immediately. Even verbal orders were to function as elements of signalization: ‘Enter your benches. At the word enter, the children bring their right hands down on the table with a resounding thud and at the same time put one leg into the bench; at the words your benches they put the other leg in and SIT down opposite their slates… Take your slates.

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison.

LIE DOWN
Keimai derives from Greek and means to LIE DOWN, to fall down and to put to sleep and is related to words meaning “home.”
— Katherine Carl, on Monika Weiss: Drawing Cosmos

GO LIE DOWN
Do you want to GO LIE DOWN in the ice plants? Do you think they enjoy working for white people? Is that a fire in that trash can? What key, what key? Can it happen here? Is that the real color of her hair? What makes him prefer tangential
contingencies? Don’t you get your foreskin caught on things? Is it speech?
How far can you take it in? Do you prefer an automatic? When is form not
a distortion? Would you like to be queen for a day? Can you recall if you
have read this? Could you pick up the gun? Who broke that dish? Can you
prove that you exist?

— Ron Silliman, Sunset Debris

UP
Together with the build-UP of information superhighways we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation. A fundamental loss of orientation complementing and concluding the societal liberalization and the deregulation of financial markets whose nefarious effects are well-known. A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making. A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows.

— Paul Virilio, Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!

DOWN
A fall-off in production, consumption, speculation and growth (but certainly not in corruption!): it is as though the global system were making a strategic fallback, carrying out a painful revision of its values — in defensive reaction, as it would seem, to the impact of terrorism, but responding, deep DOWN, to its secret injunctions: enforced regulation as a product of absolute disorder, but a regulation it imposes on itself — internalizing, as it were, its own defeat.

— Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

COME
Let me turn to the issue of how those within a bounded sphere can COME to feel threatened by the presence of that which they deem to be “foreign”. (The anxieties which drive this process are well captured in Juan Goytisolo’s novel Landscapes after the Battle, whose “anti-hero” is disturbed by the “de-Europeanisation” of the French city in which he lives, “the emergence, in the perfectly ordered Cartesian perspectives of (Paris), of bits and pieces of Tlemcen and Dakar, Cairo and Karachi…”) The question is why the presence of alterity should so often be felt to be threatening. In this connection Azouz Begag writes that an “immigrant” is best understood as “a person designated as such by someone living in a particular place who sees the presence of the Other as a threat to their own sense of security within that territory”. Similarly, Marc Auge puts it, “perhaps the reason why immigrants worry settled people so much is because they expose the relative nature of ‘certainties inscribed in the soil’.”

— David Morley, Home Territories – Media, Mobility and Identity 2

DROP
There are the Rhetoricians, who dissolve all meaning into form and make form into the sole law of literature, and the Terrorists, who refuse to bend to this law and instead pursue the opposite dream of a language that would be nothing but meaning, of a thought in whose flame the sign would be fully consumed, putting the writer face to face with the Absolute. The Terrorist is a misologist, and does not recognize in the DROP of water that remains on his fingertips the sea in which he thought he had immersed himself; the Rhetorician looks to the words and appears to distrust thought.

— Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

HERE
For the thing as well as for the worker in his relation to time, socialisation or the becoming-social passes by way of this spectralisation. The “phantasmagoria” that Marx is working HERE to describe, the one that is going to open up the question of fetishism and the religious, is the very element of this social and spectral becoming: at the same time, by the same token. While pursuing his optical analogy, Marx concedes that, in the same way, of course, the luminous impression left by a thing on the optic nerve also presents itself as objective form before the eye and outside of it, not as an excitation of the optic nerve itself But there, in visual perception, there is really (wirklick), he says, a light that goes from one thing, the external object, to another, the eye: “physical relation between physical things.” But the commodity-form and the relation of value between products of labour in which it presents itself have nothing to do either with its “physical nature” or with the “thingly (material) relations” (dingliche Beziehungen) that arise from it. “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form [dies phantasmagorische Form] of a relation between things”

— Jacques Derrida, From Spectres of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International

GO
[. . . T]he mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we GO by the mirror disposition that the imago of one’s own body presents in hallucinations or dreams [. . .] or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which the psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested.

— Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

OUT
The problem with drag is that I offered it as an example of performativity, but it has been taken up as the paradigm for performativity. One ought always to be wary of one’s examples. What’s interesting is that this voluntarist interpretation, this desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body, is obviously out there in the public sphere. There’s a desire for a fully phantasmatic transfiguration of the body. But no, I don’t think that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of gender. I don’t think that if we were all more dragged OUT gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive. There are restrictions in drag. In fact, I argued toward the end of the book that drag has its own melancholia.

— Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler. Interview by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
. . . . .

The following is a third-hand account of some of the adventures Isaac the Wonder Dog had during his week with Auntie V. Much of this narrative was compiled from the WD’s own notes. Note that throughout this document, we are referred to as m+d. It took us a while to figure out, but that means mom and dad. Purely for comparison purposes we provide you here with a before photo of Auntie V and Isaac the Wonder Dog:

First night: Isaac stands out on Auntie V’s balcony watching m+d disappear down the street. Auntie V lets him sleep in her bedroom, even though he snores. The next morning m+d take the train to Toronto.

Second night: Isaac sends m+d a text message: auntie v ruined her sandals playin ball w me in the alley – shes so cool. 8 my dinner, now im napping.

Third night: Isaac texts again: went w auntie v 2 visit Milo, taught him to play ball. Note that Milo is a boy of approximately seven.

Fourth night: Isaac almost drops dead from the heat. Auntie V almost drops dead from the heat too. But as far as m+d know, everything is fine.

Fifth night: 10:14 PM m+d get a text message from Auntie V that reads: guess who just got skunked. fuck. fuckin fuck fuck. fk. A flurry of text messaging ensues. Isaac gets a tomato juice bath but he still stinks. Auntie V gets stinking drunk and at 4AM she punches her friend Dan.

Sixth night: Auntie V texts: has pooch had rabies shot? got it in the mouth – still bugging him a bit. tomato juice better not fucking count as people food. m+d had sternly warned Auntie V against giving people food to the WD, but she went ahead and wash Isaac’s mouth out with tomato juice anyway. And it did the trick! m+d text: u r our hero.

Seventh night: m+d text: has skunk stench abated? are you and Isaac still fiends? Auntie V replies: we r much better. back to scaring hassidic kids in the alley. m+d: u 2 r bonded 4 life now! auntie v: 4 life 2 long. till wed ok.

On Wednesday m+d are reunited with Isaac the Wonder Dog. By then Auntie V’s apartment doesn’t smell like skunk at all, though m+d had tacitly agreed that even if it did they would swear it didn’t. Auntie V would like to interject at this point to say: don’t forget the part about m+d not taking the skunks too seriously until… It’s true. She warned us that there were skunks in her hood. And we didn’t take her seriously at all.

As the after photo clearly indicates, Isaac and Auntie V came out of the skunk stench scandal smelling like roses and yes, they’re still friends.

. . . . .

Whenever I’m in Toronto I try to get out to visit my dear friend Norman T. White, who lives a two-and-a-half hour drive northwest of the city (in summer… much further away in winter) in a converted grain mill known as the NorMill. The first time heard about The Mill was the first time I met Norman, in Halifax in 2000. We were in a show together at the Dalhousie Art Gallery – Engaging the Virtual, curated by Doug Porter – along with Doug back, Juan Geuer, Liwan, Jacques Perron, Catherine Richards, Bob Rogers and David Rokeby.

Here is a brief biography of Norman T. White: Norman is an artist. He builds robots, and he’s been at it for a long time. He had a chemistry set as a kid, that sort of thing. He built his first major electronic work, First Tighten Up on the Drums (1967-68) for a show called Some More Beginnings (Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY – 1969). And then – I’m skipping lots of stuff here – in 1978 he started teaching at the Ontario College of Art & Design. His courses in Digital Electronics, Computer Programming, and Mechanics for Real-Time Sculpture have had a massive impact on two or three generations of electronic artists; he and his students have shaped the landscape of new Media art in Canada today. Norman retired from OCAD in 2003. He still teaches similar courses at Ryerson and he still builds robots at The Mill.

The first time I visited The Mill it was deep winter. It’s massive brick and stone building, pretty damn hard to heat. But the kitchen’s warm. And Norman’s one of my favourite people in the world to stay up late sitting at the kitchen table with, talking bottom-up thinking, telling tall tales, trading travel stories and pondering behaviours, human or otherwise. In Norman’s kitchen, hanging high up on one three-foot-thick brick wall is a neon sign, that I’ve never seen lit, that says: WE FIX TOASTERS. On Norman’s web site he explains:

I don’t really fix toasters, although I’d be proud if I could. Almost nobody fixes toasters. This is because a modern toaster is nearly impossible to fix, held together with little bendy tabs, which break off if you bend them more than twice. The toaster manufacturer naturally expects that you do the Right Thing — toss that dysfunctional item in the dump and buy a new one! All in all, the working toaster is a perfect symbol for modern utility in general… glamorous and efficient! Nevertheless, staring at this glamorous efficient high-resolution computer screen for hours at a time, you and I are both wrecking our eyes, not to mention our social lives. But, hey, I don’t mind… do you?

The first time Norman came and stayed with us in Montreal I was in the throes of a massive head cold and pretty pissed off about it. Barely able to carry on a conversation, I stumbled off to bed after dinner leaving Norman and Stéphane to fend for themselves. Many hours later I wandered out to use the bathroom and there they were, still at the table, deep into a conversation that I couldn’t have followed even if I didn’t have a fever – something about harmonic resonance and tonal frequencies or maybe it was harmonic frequencies and tonal resonance. Really, I have no idea.

Ever since we’ve been working to get Stéphane out to The Mill. Took us a few years, but finally we did it! We spent two days with Norm, talking our heads off about everything under the sun while sitting under the sun on the loading dock, on the dock by the river, at the kitchen table, up on the roof and all through the cavernous NorMill.

Norman’s a self-professed pack rat. The Mill’s on it’s way to becoming a museum of sorts. As it is it’s preferable to a Museum in the way a field of wild flowers is to a garden. Norm says:

Being attracted to obsolete tech, I collect computers which people have thrown out. Last time I counted, there were fifty-one vintage personal computers lying around, of various brands and working states. But that was a long time ago and I’ve stopped counting. Anyway, someday I hope to bring them all back to life in my NorMill Personal Computer Museum. For now I’ll just keep them in a big unheated room out back.

Norman T. White, Stéphane Vermette pose with Low Life (2003).

Special thanks to Sandor, a friend and former student of Norman’s, who overcame sudden car troubles to drive us to The Mill. Once we were there he jumped in the river with his clothes on four or five times, for reason’s that escape us, and then after dinner he explained how the dictionary works, which really was very helpful. Thanks Sandor!

On the way home we detoured us through Norman’s favourite wind farm. This is old farming country. But the windmills seem to fit right in. Makes sense to me. Aside from through horses and guns, windmills and waterwheels are pretty much how the west was won. Finally! We make it back to square one. Don’t get me started on the Don Quixote theme. Let’s talk instead about reverse engineering. Yes, let’s. The next time we’re at the kitchen table at the NorMill.

Visit The NorMill online: http://www.normill.ca/
. . . . .

On our last day in Toronto we finally found our way to the Coach House Press. I say finally because though it wasn’t all that hard to find once we were actually looking for it, it had been pretty hard to find when we weren’t looking and weren’t even in the neighbourhood.

A huge fan and consumer of Coach House Books, I would have been happy to just stand around bpNichol Lane looking at the Coach House they come from. Coach House founder Stan Bevington found us doing just that and invited us in. Turns out droppers-by can take a self-guided tour – Coach House publishes a Magical Mystery Tour pamphlet to this end. We consulted the hell out of that pamphlet, read fascinating facts aloud to each other such as, did you know that a sheet-fed one-colour Heidelberg offset printing press can go through six miles of paper a day, or that the bathroom at Coach House used to be a greenhouse?

We were so obviously intent on taking every step of the tour that after a while Nick Drumbolis took over from the pamphlet and then things got really interesting. The pamphlet describes Nick as “irascible.” He was lovely to us, demonstrating presses and folders, gluers and cutters with great finesse and filling in gaps in the pamphlet’s knowledge. We were somewhat dismayed to learn that after a book is printed its films are stored in a giant shelving unit known as the morgue and we developed an unhealthy fascination with the perfect bind gluer, in part because we just loved it’s name: AUTO-MINABINDA. Also, we still had Sean Dixon’s recent run-in with that machine fresh in our minds.

At the Coach House spring launch in Montréal, Dixon told a story about how he’d stopped in at the CHP and they’d offered him the opportunity I’m sure every author dreams of, to catch a copy of his own book – The Girls Who Saw Everything – coming literally hot off the presses. Well, hot off the binder. “The Girls” were already collated and all glued up when all involved except Dixon realized that they’d forgotten to put a cover in place. They were yelling NO! STOP! But the author wound up catching the coverless “Girls” by their hot glue spine. The glue is not made of horse-hooves and is heated to 300 degrees F, according to the pamphlet. Fortunately the author had heavily calloused hands, presumably from some activity other than writing, and no harm was done. We were only slightly disappointed that when Nick demo-ed the AUTO-MINABINDA for us the cover of the book in question was well in place.

Our self- and Nick-guided tour of the Coach House Press was one of the highlights of our trip to Toronto. It was almost a week ago already but we’re still trying to slip words like Heidelberg and AUTO-MINABINDA into casual conversation.
. . . . .

While we were in Toronto everyone kept asking us what we were doing in Toronto, which seemed like a funny question. We quickly realized that we weren’t doing in Toronto was going to galleries. We didn’t make it to a single one. Everyone kept asking us if we’d we seen the new addition to the ROM yet. Nope, we didn’t see that either. We did see lots of art though.

On Friday we had a studio visit with Toronto-based electronic artist Sandor Ajzenstat. Sandor let us play with several of his machines, none of which we broke, and then he showed us their insides, and then he made us lunch. What a great way to see art. Galleries hardly ever serve lunch. Here’s an article about one of the works we dined with, the Convergence Machine.

Besides this studio visit, we amused ourselves in quite pedestrian ways. We walked around a lot. And took pictures of pleasing things. We made two separate trips to Little India to buy bangles, acquiring seven-dozen in total. That’s eighty-four bangles! Four-dozen we gave away. The rest were for keeps.

We bought three kinds of tea in a shop in Kensington Market with an ocean-blue ceiling adorned with dozens of globes of the world. The idea being, I guess, that tea comes from all over the world. Both the globes and the teas pleased us very much.

Maybe next time we’ll get to the galleries. Maybe next time we’ll see the new addition to the ROM. We’re certainly not opposed to the idea. Just distracted. There are so many interesting things to see along the way to art.
. . . . .

Before we left town last week we asked one of our neighbours if she would water our window-box geraniums while we were away. She said sure, and asked where we were going. Toronto, we said. For vacation? The look on her face… made her thoughts on that city quite clear. To visit friends, we explained. Montrealers love to bad-mouth Toronto and vice-versa I’m sure. But even the most consummate Montrealer will admit that there’s fun to be had in Toronto. And good shopping. And good friends.

We said good-bye to our dog and our geraniums and went to stay for a week with our dear sweet friends. Fibre artists, food artists, garden artists and all around wonderful hosts, they surrounded us with food and wine, art and opera, made us laugh and spoiled us rotten.

We spent the better part of the week in their garden. When I say better I mean better. We did lots of walking shopping visiting strolling wining dining and wondering besides, but the better part of the week was spent in lush hush listening to the cool breeze leaves and fishpond waterfall. We sipped flutes of bubbly, tasted wine after wine and each night a different late night whiskey from turned jade cups. We learned how to crack open green lychees with our teeth. We flung our olive pits into the peonies at our hosts’ behest. We dined on many delights including: cooked-on-one-side salmon, wild leeks, grilled asparagus, baby bok-choy, black mushrooms, spicy Chinese aubergine, creamy soft tofu, white fish and turnip soup, peanuts cook in star anise, rice cooked in saffron and crayfish fried in a cast-iron skillet hot hot hot. The day after the crayfish we kept finding their antenna all over the kitchen.

Every now and then the neighbour dogs erupted in informative barks interrupting this bliss; backyard traffic police patrolling passing squirrels skunks cats and racoons. Missing our own dog we tried to bond with the fishpond goldfish but they ignored us and even the indoor fish tank fish were camera shy. How is it that their tank décor is so much more glamorous than anything in our apartment?

We came home inspired. We’re going to paint at least one wall bright pink. We’re going to walk to the market every week, rain or shine. And we’re going to save our pennies for our own art-filled house and goldfish-filled garden.

Our neighbour did indeed water our window-box geraniums and our spindly front-step rosemary plant. We don’t have the heart to tell our Montreal plants about our Toronto friends’ garden. As far as our houseplants know we went Toronto for the shopping, yeah, that’s right, shopping. If you happen to be walking down our street and you spot our window box feel free to wave – the geraniums love that – but please keep this secret garden story to yourself.
. . . . .

After photos are easy. Something dramatic happens and of course you take a picture of it. Just like that. But before photos are a little harder to come by. They require premeditation, or at least fair warning. I don’t know how many times I’ve wished I had a photo of the street just before a major snowfall or the pasta salad just before dropping it all over the floor or my knee just before falling off my bike onto it.

Last week Stéphane and I went away on vacation. I can’t remember the last time we went anywhere alone together to a different city without our dog or our computers for a whole week. It’s a pretty complicated endeavour. The gargantuan feat of coordinating our schedules with those of our hosts, our various jobs, our dog-sitter, the train and the changing seasons made us so thoroughly organized that it actually occurred to us to take before photos of our great escape.

What we were before was tired. And, as our before photo indicates, quite blurry. When we booked our train tickets – the prerequisite three weeks in advance in order to get a good fare – we had this fantasy of sleeping our way to Toronto. Sadly, our particular comfort class car was full of screaming babies. Literally. Full of them. Screaming. One in particular. Non-fucking-stop for four hours and twenty minutes plus twenty minutes of excruciating lateness in which we got a whole a year’s worth of birth control right there. We coped by sharing iPod headphones, pretending we were twelve-year-old Japanese girls. Fortunately I’d prepared a Summer Vacation playlist for just such an eventuality.

We’ve all seen before and after photos where before looks better than after or there is no difference whatsoever or after is clearly airbrushed or a stunt double or much younger sister. Our after photo may not say “after” to anyone but us, but to us it really does. We had a wonderful vacation. Our friends spoiled us rotten. Future blog posts will explain how it is that on our train ride home we were just as tired as our there. Of course we were a completely different kind tired, a sunburnt, foot-sore, fatter and gleefully poorer, late-night talking and laughing non-stop kind of tired. At the very least our after photo indicates that we are now lighter, smiling and much more focused.

Stay tuned. Future blog posts will feature before and after photos of our dog, our dog sitter, our various hosts and before photos of the meals they made us before we devoured them (because after they weren’t there).
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