I guess I’m going to start providing monthly updates on the ambient lighting at chez Zoée. Last Saturday, in an effort to make their living space more crafting-friendly for their nyctalopic (yes, I just learnt this word) pal, Zoée hung an extra lightbulb above the couch and urged me to take the corner space.
Before I left for the mainland last Friday, my lighting technician encouraged me to bring a crafting project to work on, as they were on a roll with their first-ever knitting project: a sweater.
Yes, a sweater!
When I got into knitting a decade ago, I would never have ventured to make a sweater, even after completing five toques and a scarf. Choosing a sweater as a first knitting project seems completely insane to me, but Zoée seems to be managing it well.
For our enchanted evening of entanglement, I packed two skeins of yarn. Rather than knit yet another toque, I wielded a crocheting hook to form the cap portion of my mushroom guy. Not only can Zoée make a sweater in a dimly lit room, but they can also follow the plot of Bridgerton while doing so. The only scene I caught was Daphne experiencing her first post-nut clarity.
I’d paid for my ride and lodging with jizz cookies and egg salad sandwiches.
My visit to the mainland was prompted by Yann’s offer to have me fill the passenger seat in his car as he was headed that way for a tattoo appointment. He’d even made a ferry reservation, so it was unlikely the trip would be an 8-hour ordeal like the last time I headed that way. Yann did not ask me to chip in for the ferry fare or gas, so I offered to pack us lunch. Although I’ve known Yann for a decade, and we’d even cohabitated for four years, I still had to confirm whether he liked egg salad sandwiches. For me, egg salad sandwiches are my new passion as I’d only somewhat recently gotten over my aversion to mayonnaise.
“Eggs are practically my favourite food. If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be eggs.”
Me too, Yann, me too!
So, we happily nommed on egg salad sandwiches in his car until the BMW in front of us produced dance party vibes with the flashing of its rear blinkers. The anti-theft system of BMWs is notorious for going off during ferry sailings as the ship’s movements trigger the motion and tilt sensor, alerting everyone on the car deck with its wails. Fortunately, the BMW driver returned five minutes later to disable the alarm as we were ready to exit the vehicle for the insulation of the passenger decks. Until that moment, I had always been able to ignore these alarms since they’d never reached my field of vision. I can now confirm that incessant flashing of rear blinkers in my face is not the type of ambience I appreciate.
After we finished our sandwiches, I pulled out a container filled with two dozen lemon thumbprint cookies. I had originally planned to make these cookies while I was spending the week at Zoée’s house, taking care of their cat, Greta, during the holidays. The cookies were meant to be discovered on the kitchen table upon Zoée’s return, but when Zoée mentioned they were coming back with a cold, I abandoned the idea. Instead, I placed a bag of lemon cough drops on the table. In my note to Zoée, I promised to transform the handwritten recipe I had scribbled down in their notebook into a sweet treat to be enjoyed in good health.
I’d been so committed to fulfilling my promise that I even made the lemon curd from scratch. It’d been my first time making these cookies, I explained to Yann, adding that the indentations left by my skinny thumbs were unable to handle the volume of curd I’d added.
“When I pulled them out of the oven, it looked like they were overflowing with jizz.”
“You’re not really selling them,” Yann laughed.
“Wait…. wait… the good news is: the jizz solidified as the cookies cooled, so I was able to peel the excess from the cookies.”
Yann was still laughing.
“But then the recipe instructed me to re-jizz them with frosting made from lemon juice and icing sugar.”
Yann did not eat any of the cookies, claiming he was full from the egg salad sandwich. I left three lemony jizz cookies in a ziploc bag in the car’s centre console before Yann and I parted ways.
An hour after arriving at Zoée’s in Vancouver, we headed south to my ancient stomping grounds: Langley. As I learned that evening, my alma mater, Mountain Secondary, went from being the smallest school (by enrollment) in Langley to the largest in the province.
In 2000, Mountain Secondary tried to increase enrollment with a brochure featuring stock photo models.
I scanned and published these photos for a blog entry dated May 19, 2000. This is what 16-year-old Laura had to say about the brochure:
Let me explain why it’s really lame… NONE of the kids in that brochure goes to Welfare School. The kids there don’t even look anything like that! Shit. Besides, what the hell is that kid so happy about? weird. Oh right, he’s prolly happy ’cause he knows he doesn’t have to go there and because he’ll have steamy relations with Big Mouth Billy Bass later, I’ll bet. That girl, she looks like she came out of some tampon ad in a teen mag… Can you see how it says “High school isn’t what it used to be…” then on the inside, it says “IT’S BETTER!”. If you’re already a student at Welfare School, then you know that’s totally bogus! But wait… the lies don’t stop there either! There’s more in the brochure than what I scanned cuz it folds out and it’s like a big assed map, so I couldn’t scan everything. So much lies, ugh.
Fellow alumna Kristen explained that the building we’d been taught in was now the middle school, and a new, swanky building had been added nearby for the sudden surge of students that followed the area being swallowed up by townhome projects, one of which Kristen currently lives in.
Kristen and Phyllis had lured five of us to darkest Walnut Grove to play games and eat snacks. When I spotted the box of Yahtzee on their shelf, I questioned their taste in board games.
The first game was Hues and Cues. The board is composed of 480 squares of individual colours, with two rows of 25 greyscale squares at the top for scorekeeping. Gameplay was essentially taking turns describing a colour without using the name of a primary colour.
The game pieces were little inverted cones in assorted colours. When Kristen asked which hue I wanted, I took it as an opportunity to practice.
“Grimace.”
Kristen wasted no time placing three purple inverted cones in front of me.
Zoée literally grimaced.
“Grimace, you know, like the McDonald’s character,” I explained.
Zoée quizzed the other ladies on their knowledge of McDonald’s characters. Nobody else got it as they were not educated at the prestigious Mountain Secondary, where student study notable figures of McDonaldland such as Mac Tonight, Mayor McCheese, and Grimace.
At any rate, I was not off to a good start. My lyrical nyctalopic self did not fare well at this game and this was apparent as my Grimace-coloured cone lagged far behind everyone else the whole time. My final position on the board was DFL. Dead Fucking Last.
Zoée was also gravely unimpressed by my attempt to describe a shade of blue as “Twitter”.
The next game was math-based. Oh, super, my worst subject at Mountain Secondary.
In Skyjo, each player starts with 12 cards arranged face down in three rows of four. The objective of the game is to exchange one of your face-down cards for a card from the deck. You can draw this card either from the top of the deck or select one from the face-up cards discarded by the previous player. If you manage to create a row of three matching cards, you can discard them, and they will not count towards your score at the end of the game.
I had four very okay rounds that resulted in a third place finish. Jill did suspiciously well: I learned on the way back to Vancouver that she’d gone to a private school.
Much has changed since I was a student at Mountain Secondary: I can now add, subtract, strategize, and run! There isn’t much I miss about high school apart from regular access to sign language.
“Why do you live in Victoria?” Kristen asked after I described my mostly solitary life.
It’s been nearly six years since I moved to Victoria from Montréal, where I felt even more isolated, and I have no regrets. Before living in Montréal, I spent five years in Vancouver. Only the first two years of my time in Vancouver did I have an active social life within the deaf community. Eventually, many of my deaf buddies moved to the suburbs to settle down and start families. Even if I was willing to spend two hours on public transit to get to Langley, the demands of parenthood took priority and the differences in our lifestyles had become radical.
As a true out-of-towner, I find that people are more inclined to take the opportunity to connect with me when I’m on the mainland. With my BC Ferries discount, it’s generally inexpensive, but time-consuming, to travel to and from the mainland. Unless I take the sea plane.
Yann only stayed on the mainland for a night, so I had to either take the bus and risk encountering the ticketing agent I’d lied to last time in Tsawwassen, or splurge for the 25 minute flight to Victoria.
It was rainy and foggy in Vancouver on Monday. It didn’t seem like I was going to see much out of the plane:
Fifteen minutes into the flight, I thought up another answer to Kristen’s question about why I chose to live in Victoria: The Olympic Rain Shadow.
The moist air from the ocean moves eastward, hits the Olympic Mountains, is forced upward, cools, and drops its moisture as rain on the western side–that’s Vancouver. Therefore, Victoria gets significantly less rain and more clear skies. I believe the above photo is of Sidney Spit National Park.
And this…
appears to be a house being transported on a barge. Maybe instead of having to decide on which side of the Strait of Georgia to live, I could perpetually float between two lifestyles.
Zoée may not have gotten my “grimace” reference, but they’ll appreciate this closing:
The turf is always more titillating on the other side.
squaremeat.com 