Saturday, September 24, 2005

Maybe its not so Onterrible after all?

Alright, its been a gorgeous last few days here in otTAwa. yesterday evening after i came home from my internship i was itching to get out because i had been cooped up all week sick with a nasty cold (which i insisted wasnt so nasty so that i wouldnt have to be cooped up as much...didnt do much good). So i went for a jog around down south along the canal from maclaren pretty much all the way to the queensway. It was a beautiful fall night, well really late summer- i hear fall is just begun. it was beautiful sun, perfect temperature and the light was amazing at that early evening time. So i decided to be adventurous and explore some of these streets. Was i ever in for a treat. I stumbled upon four embassies on my route (Greek, German, Armenian, and the Malaysian-i think- embassies, oh yes and i found two more in my office building, now bringing it up to three so far, apparently there are more though according to Annie, my supervisor). On top of that, i jogged up and down the streets picking houses or appartments i would like to live in. The thing is, houses out here are so different. In Van we dont get the old brick style of houses built in 1902. It seems like every other house has a Heritage Canada plaque on it. They gotta build them to last out here eh!
And while i do whimper and whine and yearn for ocean and the smell of sea salt and sea weed and well, um, sea gunk in the air, i think i can be "sufficiently suffoncify" my appetite as sarah says, by the canal. However today, i got a whack of water again, which was great. we took a day trip down to Kingston (hello can we say college town? hoary cow, Queens invaded everywhere!). This was a pretty sweet trip Although we were up at the crack of dawn because well, i still havent figured that out, but we were up pretty early, early enough to be the first group in the doors of the hershey factor in smiths falls after it opened at 9am. oooh sweet moses, can you say bulk chocolate? cuz i bought alot of it!
k, so next stop onto kingston and wandered around the town, gorgeous day, gorgeous town. kinda helps that the nicest university in Canada is smack dab in the centre so its all kitchy college town. but that was nice too. also, pretty stoked that i got home-made jam at the farmers market there.....yeeeesssss... i think i might go eat some now!
onward and upward, we went to fort henry, apparently the biggest fort west of quebec...."west" eh? glad to know that every one was concerned about the west back then too. (oooooooh zing!)
anyway it was pretty cool, definately the british army was short, every thing there was made for short people. pity, oh well, not finding husband material in there eh!
and final destination of the trip was a boat cruise around thousand islands. wow. it was rad i felt like i was back in the gulf islands again, except that everything was shorter (kinda like the british army), because there were no mountains on any of the islands. however i have decided that i would like to own one of said islands in my life. The tour guy said they go for $50,000 t0 a Million. So a million bucks, not gonna happen but hey 50,000! thats attainable! course the size you get for that is just big enough for your hut and a habachee bbq, but who cares? Its MY island!
so today was another beautiful day. I have to say, things are shaping up in ontario. i could live here- course i say that while its still gorgeous, and after its stopped being unbearably hot and before the snows come and everyone freezes their little canadian tushes off. did you know we have the second coldest capital in the world?? second only to Mongolia?? cool! (bahaha literally! ooh shoot i am turning into paul wilson and mark lott, bring on the puns!)
alrighty, so there it is, suddenly i am dealing with onterribl-ahem-ontario and you know, its got a charm all its own. i miss mountains and ocean like the dickens, but then again its like when i was in guat and suddenly dry volcanoes started to blaze with beauty, funny how that happens eh? I guess you just cant miss it when its around you as long as you quit thinking about the beauty you are used to for a enough time to notice it right here.
anyway, this is how i am doing, getting over the cold and starting to see things pretty nicely.


Hi mom from thousand islands!! Posted by Picasa


"Women's privy"- lemme tell ya, there aint nothing privy about these latrines! Posted by Picasa


Lookin' fine in Kingston Posted by Picasa


Princess street...named after moi peut-etre? Posted by Picasa


KevAn gilbert Posted by Picasa


Hi mom from the Hershey factory! Posted by Picasa


spider sculpture...very nice? Posted by Picasa


national art gallery @ night Posted by Picasa


Things are slow to change even in Ottawa: Notice: Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.... Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, September 14, 2005


Home Sweet Home, the ol' Laurentian club Posted by Picasa


Iran. Posted by Picasa


making friends in high places..Lion statue in the Peace Tower Posted by Picasa


JR watches over us- you the man, JR, you the man, mad props. Posted by Picasa


new and old all at once, kinda cool Posted by Picasa

Mamma K rides again!

I am at a loss to start off here, i know i have failed my faithful readers - all three of you, seeing that i have been in Ottawa for more than a week now and have given you nothing, not a morsel of exciting, pithy, lucid and concise writing. so we'll just start en medias res- all you need to know was that my so-called "O-week" was fantastic (i say 'so-called' becuase there were no hawaiian shirts, no demonic geese and no banana-milk-bobbing monstrosities, but really, i can live happily without that dark side of trinity).

anyways this week has taken a slight turn for the worse. Really the pathetic fallacy of it too is about all i can take. Not only did i have a horrible interview (well not horrible, but you know the type where you replay it in your mind for hours thereafter and thing of so many better things you could have said- and those things that you did say, 'oh sweet moses what was i thinking?'). I have said some rather incriminating things lately...but what makes it almost unbearable is the heat. I most definately showed up at this interview for my internship sweating profusely, red in the face (one of the most desireable qualities of us redheads is that we come with an inner mechanism so that our hair matches our skin in a lovely shade of rouge at the most inopportune moments. the weather is so stiflingly humid that i feel like i am in a Douglas Coupland novel, where even the nicests of vacation playgrounds are described like scorching, angry barren wastelands that no one in their right mind would ever set foot in. However i do feel some comfort in that i feel slightly more cultured now that i can actually refer to a Douglas Coupland novel. But then again, i am more cultured since moving to the east, I have had intensive etiquette training, I appreciate the finer elements in the swedish carvings adorning our building and i even visited a museum the other day, and not just any museum, but a museum of modern photography. I kid you not. I am also so cultured now that i have given up kidding entirely.

Well, not quite, as I am about to loose all credibility: Truthfully, i feel more like i am the girl in Confessions of a Shopaoholic who tucks a copy of the day's Financial Post under her arm before going into any meetings so that people will believe she seriously knows what she is talking about. I should have tucked a copy of the Economist under my arm when i went into that interview yesterday, or at the very least a copy of the brochures from their organisation that i had been given...

Anyways, i guess this all goes to show once again, that when you get cocky you are bound to get knocked down, but as the esteemed Chumbawamba so aptly put it (raise your tumbler with me and in full scot's voice we sing:) "i get knocked down, but i get up again- you're never gonna knock me out."

ooooh mercy...

I am also getting the sinking revelation that the fact that i can talk for hours on political philosophy and spanish literature really won't help me get a job after i graduate....maybe its good to find out now, but on the other hand, ignorance would have been bliss for just a few months more...