Pioneer Daze

What is wrong with these pictures? Keep looking. Hint: faucets turned on full.... bottle of Purell next to the sink....

Last night, as I finally dragged myself away from petiteanglaise and set out to make a healthful, nutritious dinner for M and I, I found myself saying, "What the {colourful expletive}?!!" as I turned the kitchen faucet and got.................air. Not even a cough, splutter or hiccup. Just. Air.

On our street, whenever something like that happens, we go outside and ask the neighbours. Within three steps of exiting my house, I heard my next-door neighbour ask, "Water off?" Looking around, I saw most of my neighbours, milling around and all looking west, toward the southern end of the park where several trucks and a hive of city workers in orange jumpsuits were clustered around a gigantic hole where the sidewalk used to be. I am sure this is NOT what Shel Silverstein was thinking....

The workers, when queried, responded with, "A flyer was sent out, telling you the water would be cut off!" Um, note to City: Next time, send the flyers TO THE HOUSES ON OUR STREET. Not one neighbour had had any warning. All the charming gents could tell us was that the water would be off "for a while." That was 7 p.m. It is now 12:26 p.m. and I, for one, am tired of playing pioneer woman. If I had wanted to rough it in the bush, I would LIVE in the bush.

I have called the City. Helpfully, they told me that they DID get the water back on (sometime in the dead of night), but that, conveniently, it "broke again" (???) almost immediately thereafter. And that they have had "nothing but problems with it" ever since. Equally helpfully, the woman to whom I spoke passed the buck, I mean, passed me along to a "Supervisor" whose number I called only to find, surprise, surprise-- he was not answering the phone.

I have just spent the last 45 minutes trekking to the big, blue truck the City finally provided (after one of my elderly Portuguese lady neighbours went postal on the workers), filling up former CAT LITTER buckets with water. We have a sinkful, I have "flushed" one toilet (saving the other for later-- ooh! the excitement of having something to which to look forward!), and the bathtub has a good 20 litres in it.

Thing is, where the guys are digging the hole? It's right over the buried CREEK. Apparently, they can't figure out where all the water is coming from that keeps filling up the hole.... Rocket science, it ain't.

Right, off to churn some butter and weave some linen from flax I have grown and harvested myself.

Susannah Moodie, eat your heart out.

Paint it Black

Okay, Interweb, I am posting this because I have worked all day to disassemble, paint and then reassemble these two (previously Kelly green) lanterns from Ikea and, while I love my 'hood, I have no illusions about my 'hood. In short, I am not sure how long these lovelies will actually last... At the very least, I figure I am going to be replacing the pristinely beautiful, creamy white pillar candles sometime soon-ish. It is with no fondness at all that I recall our first summer here and the Evil Begonia Thief who, with surgical precision, extracted one of my pricey (but gorgeous!) orange begonia plants from one of the window boxes on my porch railing...

This year, I decided not to go with hanging baskets on the curvaceous iron hooks (that I risked a return to singledom for when I forced M to hang them for me two years ago) on either side of our front steps. I can never find baskets I like, I hate transplanting them from the cheap, hideous, white plastic, eye-offending pots they sell them in to the more aesthetically-pleasing and visually harmonious black wire hangers I have. No matter what I plant, it dies (because I am a lousy gardener) and all the dirt runs out everywhere when I water them, and a whole series of other whiny reasons to opt out of hanging baskets.

Lying awake, night after night, tortured by the design dilemma before me, I finally had an epiphany: LANTERNS. I have been craving big, rectangular lanterns but have had NO REASON to buy them. Suddenly, it all became clear: I would get (two!) such lanterns to hang over our new, sleek black planters on either side of the porch. They would look elegant. They would make me feel happy every time I approached the house. They would be welcoming when our (imaginary) guests arrived to attend our many (imaginary) dinner parties. Perhaps, just perhaps, they would distract passersby from the scraggly, Sanford & Son-esque field of dandelions that passes for our front lawn... They would, in short, be perfect.

But where to find these elusive epitomes of front porch elegance? A girl on a budget knows that the rich folk scamper off to Angus & Co, or Elte, or UpCountry Garden and, with a flash of their gold cards from within their Louis Vuitton or Birkin bags, find themselves in possession of (two!) $300 lanterns before you can say, "I'd like a grande skinny latte to go with my Lululemons," but such was not to be for a bargain-savvy downtowner like me. And it was important that the SCALE of the lanterns be right: no dinky, too-small lanterns would do. And so, off to Ikea, Swedish for "I'm no Lululemon-wearing fashion victim sucker with a bottomless decorating budget," where I discovered the cheekily-named Sommar line of goodies for cheapskates like me. Among said goodies was the perfect lantern.

In Kelly green, dingy white or galvanized tin.

NOT GOOD.

BUT, never fear: one too-small slipcover returned for incredibly small, 1/3 of the original price, credit note later, and I was whisking off with my two Kelly green lanterns, on my way to Crappy Tire for two cans of spray paint, and back home again in a jiffy. MacGyvering the glass out of the lanterns, I headed for the paint cans and, one afternoon and a whole lotta spraypaint on my feet and inhaled up my nose later, I have (two!) sleek black lanterns of JUST THE TYPE I had envisioned!

I have zip-tied them to the curvaceous hooks, optimistically (& foolhardily) styled them with lovely pillar candles and, lastly, written this long, dull-ish post as an homage to their beauty (as long as you don't get tooooooooooo close to them, anyway.....) so that, when the maruading crack addicts or the Begonia Thief Redux decide that THEY want my perfect black lanterns, there is some record of their fleeting perfection.

R.I.P.

One of the first items I heard on the news this morning, as I blearily fed the cats, concocted coffee and shot up Z with his insulin, was that Yves St. Laurent died in Paris earlier today. His own fragile beauty and the enduring beauty of his work came to mind and made me feel sad. He was one of a dying breed, I think; the art of elegant dressing is lost, I think, and YSL's work had a glamour and sophistication seldom seen today.

Later, when I got home from work and flipped the daily photo on my calendar, the photo was of a gold snake-motif YSL sandal from 1997. What are the chances? So, I felt like I had to jot a quick post about YSL and his genius.

That genius brought us, among other things, "Le Smoking"-- the gorgeously sexy (intended only for the tall and willowy among us-- the rest of us just look like stumpy little men should we be foolhardy enough to try it...), androgynous tuxedo for women. Think Marlene Dietrich. Insanely glamorous and confident, a "can-you- handle-the-incredibly-confident-and-sexy-woman-that-I-am?" look, if ever there was one. The Village Voice pointed out that "Le Smoking" was widely adopted by "the Sapphic set", but I think that diminishes it's appeal by narrowing it too much. ALL women, not just our Sapphic sisters, love a great pair of trousers, and YSL started it all. Think Kate Hepburn (or Cate Blanchett PLAYING Kate Hepburn) in wonderful, gorgeous, wide-leg trousers: what could be more fantastic and sexy and 1940s glam?

One day, several years ago, I was in Paris with my mother, my grandmother and my grandmother's sister. Completely by accident, we discovered a sweet little restaurant behind the (then-closed-for-renovations) Theatre Odeon in St-Germain des Pres. We had a quick bite, as we were on our way to see an opera (Les Noces de Figaro) in the Jardin Luxembourg, but we liked it so well that we made reservations to dine there on our last evening in Paris. On that night, we got all dressed up. I felt thin and confident. There was a ridiculously hot waiter. The staff treated us like we were the most important guests they'd ever had, making a fuss over "The Ladies" (my grandmother and her sister). The food was good. The wine was good. The decor was all Jean Cocteau murals. And, as the evening got underway, the maitre d' came over to our table to chat-- we were the only non-Parisians in the place and I think the staff were curious about how the hell we'd managed to find them. Part of the chat went a bit like this (except in French):
Maitre d': Do you the designer, Yves St-Laurent?
Lola's Sister: Yes, I do.
Maitre d': Well, you know, this restaurant, that table right there (points to corner table), used to be his favourite.
Lola's Sister: Really!?
Maitre d': Mais, oui-- he used to come here with his old boyfriend, every week. But now they are no longer together, so he does not come here any more. [conspiratorial wink that I do not, at first, understand]
Lola's Sister: Oh, that's too bad. [great conversationalist, no?]

At the table where he had pointed, there was a handsome, very chic, silver-haired, older man and a gorgeous, very chic, very young man.... It didn't take me long to start to wonder whether the wink and the story and the handsome older man were connected-- were we dining mere metres from Yves St-Laurent's former flame?

Hmm. This has ended up being a bit of a post about me. Go figure-- it's my blog.

RIP, YSL.