Hey y’all.

Bert and I are both having ‘life lulls’ at the moment. Work is not good (for either of us) hobbies are presenting unforeseen challenges, and the dog has completely stopped listening to anything we say.

What is our reaction to the lull, why the inklings of a plan. What kind of plan, you ask? Well the kind of plan that would take us to some foreign locale for a month or two.

The details still need to be worked out…what foreign locale, when should we go, how should we pay for it? But everyday that passes we seem to be moving towards the big ‘screw you life, we’re going on vacation’.

Now I know that we shouldn’t run away from our problems…but we can hide from them for a little while right? And if we’re going to hide, we may as well make it somewhere interesting.

But, dear readers, I need your help…where can we go that:

1. Is not too expensive
2. Is very different from Canada / US / Western Europe
3. Has a lot of variety (activities and landscapes) in an easily travelable area
4. Has good food
5. Isn’t in the middle of a civil war.

Yep that’s pretty much all the criteria I have…any suggestions?

Here follows a list of things that you didn’t know about me (but soon will) and a couple of things that you do

5 phrases I say a lot
‘Suck it up princess’

‘I don’t mean to nag but…’

‘What time is it?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I really do need to download more songs to my i-pod’

4 games I would play as a child
Pretending I lived in the ‘pioneer days’ (I even tried to make a skirt out of bark once)

Cabbage Patch kids (growing in the garden)

Baseball with a plastic bat and ball (or golf with a plastic bat and ball…basically the same thing)

Magical princess, flying pony, dolphin girl (who says I don’t have a great imagination)

3 drinks I crave on odd occasions
Chocolate milk (mmmm, chocolate in liquid form)

Iced tea (but not Brisk, that stuff is way too acidic)

Red wine (yes, even the stuff from the box)

2 places I rarely wash with soap
My face (I hate getting soap up my nose)

My feet (they are all the way down there and I usually just forget)

1 thing I thought I’d never admit
I stick with things even when I don’t want to because I’m afraid of people knowing that I made a wrong decision

The second odd duck (where does that saying come from?) who I’ve been running into at the dog park is an old man with torn jeans, long scraggly grey hair, slim shoulders, and black leather boots…in short, an aging rocker. His wrinkled face almost shouts ‘look at me, I discovered tanning beds while all the rest of you were still paying homage to the real sun.’ I’m sure that he has tattoos scattered liberally beneath his clothes and I’m sure I will be proven right the first really hot day this year. Yep, he definitely strikes me as a long jeans shorts and a white wife-beater with safety pins kinda guy.

He has a purebred dog, a giant schnauzer I think it’s called (pointy nose, pointy ears, lopped off tail). His dog is full of energy and in love with mine who barely tolerates the attention being far too young too devote much time to any one dog.

He also has a daughter, that much I know from a whispered admission to an old lady. He doesn’t take his eyes off his dog and constantly apologizes for his dogs’ mild manners and submissive behavior. And when he talks to me he always stares at some point just over my left shoulder.

And he swears! As every Canadian finishes a sentence with the word ‘eh’ he punctuates his phrases with ‘fuck’. Picture a gaggle of old ladies, their yappy mini-dogs sitting on their laps or perched next to them on a bench – enter obsolete rocker - ‘Fucking beautiful day today. Oh fuck, my dogs’ taking another shit.’

I know you’re all imagining Louis Vitton bags and Hermes scarves filling the air as half a dozen old women suddenly jump up with a ‘hmf’ and a scathing look. I know you’re all imagining designer wrinkles deepening with shock and outrage…well you’re all wrong. For some reason the old women love him, vulgarity and all. I don’t know who this guy is, or what he’s done over his life but by some freaky miracle he seems to have thawed the hearts of stuffy old ladies.

And for that I say, ‘rock on old-dude, rock on!’

On the weekends I expand my universe a bit and take the dog to the dog park on the other side of University St. (University St. is one of those mythical streets which seems to divide the island into two halves, it runs right through campus, science on one side, arts and medicine on the other, student ghetto on one side, million dollar houses on the other, etc.).

Anyway recently I’ve been running into two very interesting personalities at the dog park, both middle aged men and both very different.

The first is a well dressed man, usually wearing a golf shirt and khaki pants, his dog, ‘buddy’ is a mutt of the most unusual variety, with a head so big compared to its body that from the front you can’t actually see the latter because of the former.

My conversations with this man always follow the exact same tract. He asks me what kind of dog I have (a mutt), he asks how old my dog is (about a year), he introduces me to his dog (buddy), he explains that ‘buddy’ used to be really fast but he’s started to slow down now, and then he moves on to the next person to repeat the whole conversation.

What makes it odd is that we have the exact same conversation every time we meet, which is four times in three weeks so far. No I don’t have the best memory for faces but after the first couple of times I start to clue in that maybe I know this person from somewhere…honestly doesn’t he ever stop to think ‘hmmm, this girls answers seem spookily familiar’?

I have two theories for this odd behavior: (1) he never actually listens to my answers and only actually asks questions so he can get to the ‘my dog’s slowing down’ line, or (2) he is convinced that all of our previous meetings have been visions that he’s had due to his extremely strong psychic abilities; he move onto the next conversation quickly so as not to elicit suspicion over his smug expression once his visions are proved accurate.

To test my theories next time I see him I am going to say that my dog is a mix between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua and that she is 37 years old. If he doesn’t react to that (1) is proven true, if he seems shocked and surprised either (2) is true or he’ll leave thinking I’m a crazy nut.

I’ll introduce you to the other character tomorrow.

I’m beginning to think that I’m weird. I mean I’ve always known myself to have weird moments but overall I consider myself a fairly normal person…apparently not.

Case Study #1: My Boss

“You know Jaime, there’s something very unusual about you.”

“Unusual?”

“Yes, some streak that somehow you seem to pull off.”

“Hum”

“Yes, you’re definitely…unique.”

“Good unique?”

“Well…”

“Bad unique?”

“No, no, not bad unique. It’s impossible to describe. But it suits you.”

“Oh”

Case Study #2: The old guy I walk the dog with in the morning

“You won’t get rich just by working”

“I know, I’m going to make my fortune writing instead” (laughs at her own naiveté)

“Well you certainly have the personality for it.”

“Really, how so?”

“Well you’re not like anyone else, there’s something about you that’s definitely different”

“Different good.”

“Yes, in so far as it fits with being a writer.” (but said as if being a writer is not something desirable)

“Oh.”

So all you friends out there…is it just older men who think I’m weird or do I really put out this beacon of barely acceptable strangeness?

I mean I don’t wear leather, or yards of lace, or skirts on top of pants or anything. I don’t hold radical views on, well anything in particular. I don’t hum in the bathroom or wear six inch thich glasses. Please, I’d love to know what it is cause I always thought I was boring and it turns out that I’m actually a freak.