I have not posted in a while. I got so many reaction to the puppy photos…I was shocked. Like someone dancing on a stage thinking she is alone and then discovering that there were spectators in the hall…
I am over it now and ready to write again.
This is my second week of training in Toronto. The first week was spent secluded in a hotel near the airport but removed from anything else. No restaurants, no malls, no cinemas, only the garden café and my room. All I could do besides read, was to watch a lot of television and catch up on the shows that everybody is talking about. “The apprentice” and their ass licking participants, “Survivor” and their conniving, lying competitors, “Amazing race” with some very lovable and some very despicable contestants, “The Swan” where they can take women with all sorts of physical oddities and turn them into assembly line bimbos through major cosmetic surgery, “The Biggest Looser” where a group of obese people compete for the most weight lost, and my favorite: Trading Spouses” (or some similar title).
This is a show where 2 women get to spend two weeks in each other’s homes, complete with husband and kids. The perk for them is a $50,000.00 prize. The interest lies in the contrasts between the two families. In one show there was a wealthy, boisterous, swearing, well padded, easy going black woman trading places with a rather austere looking, very sensitive, skinny white woman. The white woman’s family was composed of a white haired, white bearded, barefoot, new age father who did yoga and tai chi with their two teen age sons, who still slept in the same room as their parents. Their house had almost no furniture. Needless to say the overweight lady had a bit of trouble with the hiking and the exercises and all the nature stuff…At the other end, the white lady never connected with the 2 spoiled teenagers and was very hurt that they made fun of her guitar playing. The twist is that at the end the women find out that they must each decide how the other’s $50,000 is to be spent. This show fascinates me, probably because of its voyeuristic qualities but also because it is interesting to see so many different lifestyles and the way they clash…or adjust…. They usually pair totally opposite families such as very religious Christians with non practicing Jews, or democrats and republicans, consumers versus ecologists, wealthy spoiled versus hard working poor and so on…
We had our first snowstorm last weekend in Montreal. It was all white and pretty when I woke up in the morning.
But for those of you who do not live in Canada and may think that it is all very romantic…let me tell you about the underside of the story…in this case: ICE! When I had to use my car I started brushing off the snow only to find that the car was wrapped in ice…it took a good 20 minutes to get it off the windshields and door handles. And then, the tires skidded on the mix of snow bank over ice …so I had to shovel the driveway and sand it down. Ahh the joys of winter!!!
I was attending a gift-wrapping party for a charity and was very embarrassed to notice that my nails were blue…at first I thought it was the cold but even as I warmed up the blue remained… Over the next few days even if I washed the blue away it seemed to come back…I was getting concerned…. Was the blood not getting to my fingertip? Was this some rare medical condition? Were my fingertips going to fall off? Was it the Toronto air? The bad lighting in the hotel bathroom? Until it finally dawned on me that I was wearing navy kid gloves and when they got damp the colour bled….DOH!