Dora Got Married, I Went to High Tea and Now Cuba Si!

After months and months of being overworked I'm finally getting my elusive two week vacation. I spent the first day of it helping my much loved friend Dora Nipp whom my children refer to as "Auntie Hardliner" marry the wonderful Lorne Foster whom the B & C refers to as a "Cool Dude" and I think of as a fab academic. After years of planning rallies and protests with Dora (where we would shout "No Justice, No Peace" for hours on end into a bull-horn while marching up University Avenue) it was so good to be able to help out with a wedding. The only disaster if you can call it that was the sound system failed and we were forced to pull out the bull-horns for the "I dos." It figures, this was after all Dora.

The reception though was something else. What do you get when you get a 4th generation Chinese-Canadian ethnologist, filmmaker and lawyer together with a Black Canadian educator, scholar and community activist with roots going back to the United Empire Loyals and the Underground Railway? A BIG, LOUD AND COLOURFUL PARTY at the Ontario Multicultural History Society.

The next day I followed that party with another by going uptown for high tea at Alterknit Cafe where I nursed my sushi and white chocolate, raspberry mousse cake hangover with even more indecent savouries and a white chocolate mango pudding. I did however, stay on my yarn diet.

Now we are off to Cuba, where I will sit on the beach and wait for hurricanes while the Surly Teen communes with the spirit of Che and the Imperious Goth Tween practices being a dictator by telling all the boys hanging around the hotel pool what to do. Cuba Si!

The Surly Teen Still Acknowledges I'm His Mum

After months of complaining to anyone who will listen about my son's generally annoying adolescent behaviour which is manifesting itself as what the Globe and Mail's Jan Wong calls "monotheistic Marxism" I have evidence that he doesn't hate me as much as he claims he does. (Well actually he doesn't he just calls me a latte leftist--a label I somewhat resemble but he distains. Mind you he calls his father a capitalist, which is a real insult. I find this all rather unfair on his part as his father is a Corporate Social Responsibility Specialist so that technically at least makes him an oxymoron.) This past week after attending his regular Leftist Youth Group meeting, which I understand is a lot less interested in discussing how to be"gauche" as much as they are into integrating a gender analysis into their work (a.k.a. meeting girls who will hang out with them--I think the members are all young straight men) he looked up a "protest blog", found this pic and forwarded it to me with a note that had both Xs and Os on it which I hope means that despite all his recalcitrance he really does still love me! Now if only he would accept Revolutionary Knitting Circle founder Grant Neufeld as a comarade in arms, I'll be happy.

When the going gets tough....

The tough get rough right? Well maybe not, sometimes we turn into wimps. When I had breast cancer I thought it was the end of the world then my friends and family rallied around me and I managed to pull myself out my snivelling self-pity.

Now that I am almost a survivor (I'm in my 4th year) I find myself often at loose ends and feeling quite conflicted about life the universe and everything. I'M ALIVE and it feels GOOD but at the same time I am ground down by minutiae of life. If one more person at work yells at me about something...if the IGT and the ST hate yet another lunch I got up at 6:00am to pack them...if the B & C has one more unscheduled business trip and can't find any clean shirts... Surely there is more to life than all these monotonous tasks? Shouldn't life have a higher purpose, like enlightenment, fulfillment, and liberation?

Well according to "three wise peeps" it does. My new friend Two Iguana glass--a stained glass artist in Colorado, who makes beautiful ojects d'art, told me that we are all enlightenment if we just take the time to stop, look and listen to what is around you and to pay attention to important details like the "wee wee beasties"--dragonflies, butterflies and ladybugs--who share our earth. The Wooley Mammoth, meanwhile, shows over and over again that fulfillment does not always come from a trip to the LYS or Lululemon but from just being there for your family and friends while the Neurotic Id ("You think you're suffering? Now I'm suffering!) reminds me at 9:00pm every Wednesday night (when I work late) that liberation can come from a weekly late night (veggie) sushi run as well as a lifetime of following the Buddha's 8-fold path.

Lady Godiva Had Something...

when she rode naked through the streets of Coventry to protest the onerous taxes her husband levied on the peasantry. Desperate times call for desperate measures and not just in the 10th century. This past weekend I was forced to take such action when I discovered that certain individuals who live in my house had decided to spend their leisure time actually recreating.

Untouched loads of laundry littered my basement floor. I had no clean socks and worse no clean underwear, so I threatened to wear my newly finished Lace Wings Shawl (knit from Handmaiden Sea Silk) and only that to Honest Ed's in search of new socks and underwear unless they got off their asses and did the bloody laundry.

Alas it was to no avail. They knew that given that I shroud myself in multiple layers of clothing (I've never met a button up cardi I didn't like) even in the heat of a Southern Ontario summer (remember 34C is the temperature NOT my bra size), I would never follow through on my threat.

Consequently I spent the weekend in my basement washing load after load of socks and underwear.

The Wonder of Girls?

"It must be so fab to have a girl," says my partner in yarn crime Loop de Loop-mother to three boys with a fourth on the way, "Think of all the cool things you can knit her."

She lists the possibilities, the Barefoot Knits Tankini, the Knitty Twinkle Toes and all the Nicky Epstein Barbie Knits. Then there's all the cool grrl gear from Stitch and Bitch

L de L however, has not spent much time with the Imperious Goth Tween whose favourite colours are black, camo and khaki in that order and believes that her raison d'etre in life is to wear clothes that are ripped and safety pinned together. Her straight legged jeans recently got their very first hole which made her tres pleased.

Her friends' closests are littered with all her fashionable hand knit discards, the "tutters" as she calls her closest girl friends own an impressive array of shrugs, pullovers and ponchos all in the latest colours purloined from her drawers ("Oh take it, my mum can make me another one anytime," she tells them when they admire her hand knits). Now that is not to say that the IGT does not appreciate my knitting. She loves wearing all the stuff I knit for me especially the blacks--which I only wear because they haven't invented a darker colour yet. It doesn't do any good when I point out to the IGT that she literally swims in my cardis and t-shirts, she just insists that she's "still growing". She also appreciates my knitwit by promising her friends hand knitted gifts for their "annual emotionally laden origin events" a.k.a birthdays/adoption days. I still haven't recovered from making three pairs of orange punk rock tweed mittens in three days for her playmates Kyle, Greg and Jarrod back in Kindergarten (to be honest it was the least I could do for their parents given how much the IGT terrorized, I mean bossed them around on the playground.)

Luckily for me her brother the Surly Teen (who is less surly at the promise of new Fleece Artist Socks in sea wool) wears everything I make him with no questions asked. I think L de L needs to start seeing the knit potential in her boys.