total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

So among the several glories of Toronto is the Merrill library, which is a branch of the public library system devoted entirely to science fiction, including an archive of convention programs and zines and other paper ephemera related to fandom, which is an amazing resource. And the Merrill is holding a fundraiser in the form of a SFF short-story contest with a nominal entrance fee.

So, um - I appear to be writing a story to enter into this contest. It's short - probably no more than 2000 words, maybe less - and it's basically just serial-numbers-filed-off Iron Man/Thor/Avengers movieverse fanfic, except set in Toronto. But I would seriously appreciate a beta reader or two. Or three. Or really as many of you as I could talk into reading it, that would be helpful. There's no hurry at all, as the deadline for the contest is next February and I have the first draft nearly complete already. But let me know, and thanks in advance.

*****

p.s. anyone who can think of a better substitute name for Spider Man than Racoon Boy, please speak up right now.



...

I just got back from the funeral procession, and then the funeral, for Jack Layton. ( It was kind of amazing. )

Living here in this orderly and sometimes red-tape-ridden city, I often wish for more of what Mexico City has – that sense of desmadre, the feeling that everything is going to tilt over into chaos at any second (but not always in a bad way.) It was so good to be reminded that Toronto can rise to the occasion once in a while, that we too can improvise celebrations of death and life, and make meaning out of disaster.


...

There's still quite a lot of life in the garden this fall. This weekend I gathered up beets, onions, chard, herbs, tomatillos, strawberries, raspberries, and tomatoes. The tomatoes were mostly green but it seemed like time to bring them in to finish ripening. We'll get some more raspberries, squash and tomatillos before frost kills everything, some chiles, and maybe another eggplant. Oh, and the greens from the sweet potato vine, we need to eat those up too. There are figs on the fig tree but the frost will set in before they ripen, same as last year, and they won't ripen if I pick them green. Figs are fussy.

And there's still plenty of flowers: nastursium, mums, marigolds, morning glories, black-eyed Susans, thyme, a few stray roses still hanging on.

Last winter, and this summer too, were colder and a lot wetter than we usually get around here. That meant the grapes and apricots were unusually plentiful but not strongly flavored, unfortunately. And the peppers and tomatoes just hated it - they suffered from the lack of sunlight, and also from the slugs and snails we got in such abundance. (Are those kind of snails edible? Because if so, if they come back next summer I'm cooking them, purely in the spirit of revenge.) But this year's apples - not, alas, apples grown by us, but the local apples - are astonishing: big, crisp, sweet but not too sweet, intensely flavored. Apple trees love a hard winter, someone told me once, and it's true.

A raccoon, or something raccoonesque, has been knock over the garbage bin that the wet trash goes into, to get at the chicken bones (we think.) I am trying to regard this as a good thing: raccoons who are eating our garbage are too busy to be eating the zillion tulip bulbs I just planted. In other urban-farmer-lifestyle news, I've been in touch with these folks, who will come harvest your backyard fruit in my neighborhood if it all gets to be too much for you and donate the results to charity. So next year, if they decide to add grapes to their list, maybe we'll get some help with the horrible arbor that is totally the worst thing ever, I mean it.

Yesterday Fishwhistle cut the grass for what will likely be the last time this year. Tomorrow we'll put the backyard table and chairs in the garage, take down the air conditioners and put them in a closet, finish pulling up the tomato plants, clean out the wheelbarrow, pop some rosemary and parsley into a pot for a well-lit windowsill ... it's been a warm, sunny weekend, but it's time to get ready for winter now.



...

Hey, look! A post that is not about Remix! Go me!

( So, Mr. Adorno, you're telling me that ideological agreement should trump esthetic judgement? )

Reading Little Brother did make me think that I want to read novels about the characters at its margins - the people stuck in off-shore prisons without habeus corpus rights, the teachers unable to figure out what to say to their students about the national-security state, the military recruiters ... I'm just not as interested in the technologically-empowered (white, male, young) activists. Maybe it's just that I feel like I know their story already.

( Meanwhile back in the garden... )

All of this gardening was made complicated by my desire to not drive anywhere this weekend, because of the surprise public transit strike that began midnight Friday. There was going to be a strike last week, but then they called it off, but instead the union went out with less than two hours' notice Friday night. Luckily every one of the eighteen guests who came to dinner on Friday (yes, Ratty, it was a potluck) had carpooled or walked or biked or taken the suburban trains from out of town, so they could all get home all right.

My still-new-ish job, it appears, turns into an eighty-hour-a-week monster in February and March and some of April, and last week was still a very long one, but things are winding down now, so that's good. And it's been interesting - so interesting, in fact, that it will have to wait for a less public post.

I was driving from campus to the gym on the only highway that cuts through the middle of Our Fair City, just before rush hour. Traffic was heavy enough that I'd just come to a halt, in the perpetual traffic jam that marks the end of the highway as it empties out onto the street in midtown. Suddenly there was a big jolt and a loud noise: I'd been rear-ended.

I pulled over to the very narrow side of the highway and so did the person who rear-ended me. She got out of her car (a nicer and more recently produced Honda than the Honda I was driving) and carefully edged her way along the shoulder, to lean into my window. She turned out to be a small young woman in very large sunglasses. "Hello!" she said, "I'm so sorry! I fell asleep!"

So I called the cops, and then we exchanged information, and then we inspected the damage, of which there wasn't any, and then I insisted that we stay there and wait for the cops anyway, and then we waited some more, and then three tow trucks showed up in quick succession, each with disappointed tow truck drivers who, upon seeing the no real damage, assured us that there was no point in waiting around for the cops and that we should just go away to the accident-reporting site. The last of these was still arguing about it when a cop did finally appear. The nice young woman told him the same story she'd told me, including the crucial words "I fell asleep."

"Ah," said the cop, and the turned to me and began explaining, at some length, how there was no visible damage and I should just go to the accident reporting center. I said that I understood that and in fact had no intention of even bothering with the accident reporting; I just wanted to make sure that this person, who was falling asleep while driving, did not get behind the wheel of her car again today.

The cop said, yes, that was a good point, and turned to the sleepy young woman, and explained to her at great length that the nice tow truck man was going to tow her car to the nearest parking lot, and she was going to leave the keys with the cops. She wasn't very happy about it, but he was adamant. The discussion was still going on as I drove away.

So that was ninety minutes of social awkwardness by the side of the road, in the interests of doing the right thing.

Also I appear to have a relatively mild case of food poisoning. So, all in all, not a happy day.

I've been meaning to write about all kinds of stuff - interesting music heard lately, the opening of the new scary half of the Royal Ontario Museum, some thoughts on the collectively authored soap opera in which I am a minor participant, an article I'm writing very slowly - but things have been busy, you know? So instead, merely this query addressed to Torontonians:

I need a hat tree. Well, actually I need something to hang my bags on, but a hat tree would do. Where in this area, other than IKEA, would you go to procure a hat tree?

Thank you!