Pye in the Face

It’s remotely possible that you have yet to grow tired of my puppy chatter. If that is the case then I think you’re really going to enjoy this video I recorded and spliced together last night from various clips of me walking Shepherd and Rhuby up to the top of Space mountain. That’s what I call our most treacherous driveway which has been the scene of many Dodge Chargers sliding off the road this winter. OK - the same Charger, many times. An aside: I love my car but I would have gone with a 4WD vehicle had I known what I was in for out here in the wilds.

The aforementioned road is losing its ‘bite’ as the snow melts, and now the only real headache it delivers is two muddy little puppies who enjoy long walks from start to finish. I decided to take them for a good run yesterday, as they were bouncing off the walls of my room as I worked and I thought a new video was also in order. They’ve grown quite a lot since the last one and I’m sure there’s at least a couple of curious parties out there still reading. Enjoy the muddy madness…

I absolutely hate to impose boring videos on my friends, family or readers so I always take the time to try to structure it a little bit and most importantly keep it short and funny. In the next 3.5 minutes you’ll hear music from Black Francis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Travis. You’ll see a funny dog burp, a frightened herd of deer and my two muddy buddies. There are even a couple of Steve Austin sound effects thrown in for good measure. Hope ya liked it and happy Thursday.

I commemorated the holiday this year by sleeping until 11am, finally finishing the massive Brother Fish and then cleaning up my house. As all of my clients are American, no one noticed or cared about my personal day, and I hope everyone is currently gorged on turkey and watching TV with a glass of dry white left over from dinner in their hand. It snowed up here in Portland for the first time this morning and I realized since this house was built in 2004 no one has actually lived here late in the season enough to see snow. I am going to take some photos for my folks tomorrow and I’m sure it will be as strange for them as it was for me. Raise that glass to me at this point and toast to my not freezing to death in a couple of months only to be discovered come spring sitting upright and bearded in the filthy dining room with a half-finished letter bomb in front of me.

Does anyone know who won the Concord / Bedford football game today? I couldn’t find it mentioned online. I did get one especially exciting piece of news, however. Pixie, the mother of my soon to be puppy, is almost ready to drop. The breeder sent me some adorable new photos and poor Pixie looks fit to pop. She is due by the end of the weekend, apparently, so I may be making a trip over to Seeley’s bay to see my future best friend very, very soon. Wee Shepherd Pye cometh!

After 10 years of living in the North End, small town vignettes are not something I’m particularly accustomed with. That is probably why they stick out to me like sore thumbs. I drove in to Portland today for two purposes - to send a package at the post office and pick up some groceries. I decided to hit the post office first and walked into the foyer to discover they were closed. Yesterday was Remembrance Day so I knew it wasn’t a holiday-related closure. And the hours clearly read 8-5 so I was perplexed. There were two old men in the foyer opening their respective mailboxes and one of them finally muttered “something… something… 1:30“. I nodded like I’d actually understood what he’d said and walked back to my car.

After putting the items to be shipped back in the Charga I walked over to the little Grocery store on the main drag. A nice lady greeted me and I quickly asked her if there was any reason the Post Office was closed. Without missing a beat she replied “Mike’s on his lunch break until 1:30“. As I only had 15 minutes to wait I did my shopping and by the time I had put my groceries in the car I could see Mike, whom I’d never met before, puttering around with the post through the front window. I walked in, selected a big padded envelope and wrote out the destination and return addresses. I handed it over to Mike who glanced at it and asked “Did your parents get off to Florida like they’d planned?” I was shocked as I live a good 10 minute drive away… in the woods. But that’s small town life for you, and it’s growing on me.

I can’t help but wonder who I’d be speaking to if I ever had to call 911. The O.P.P. polices towns like mine which are too small to warrant their own forces and the closest station I know about is 15 minutes away in Smiths Falls. Would Gomer Pyle be the responding officer who arrived half an hour after my cat and I had already been hacked into a dozen pieces by an escaped lunatic? What if my imaginary girlfriend’s period attracts bears? I think Pumpkinhead may also be buried in the mound which makes up a good chunk of my mother’s garden. Good heavens, I need me a 12 gauge if I’m ever going to build that still.

I got the results of my boat license test back today, and your boy Dave scored a whopping 94%. That’s 34 out of 36 questions correct. The questions I got wrong were “How do you properly dry a life jacket?” There were 4 photos to choose from a) a life jacket beside a radiator. b) a life jacket on a clothesline. c) a life jacket on a coat hanger and d) a life jacket in a dryer. I chose the clothesline, as that’s the way we do it here in Portland, but the correct answer was apparently the coat hanger. Yes, I am still scratching my head as well. But I think the O.P.P. will look the other way on that slip up.

The second incorrectly answered question was “Which one of these buoys means to watch out for swimmers?” The cartoons included the “Diver Down” flag made famous by the similarly titled Van Halen record, a white stick, a green buoy and a red buoy. Now, everyone knows the red and green ones are channel markers and the pure white one looked really unimpressive and not at all conducive to keeping kids from being turned into chum, so I went with Diver Lee Roth. After all… a diver underwater is a swimmer, right? Wrong. It turns out that the plain white is the one meant to protect human life on a bright sunny summer afternoon. Now I know, and knowing is ha… (bump) … what was that? It’d be easier to see if you painted it blue and chained it a foot under the surface.

Writing may be sporadic over the next week. If you’re a Boston-based friend, call my old number to get the new one from the voicemail message. Godspeed to myself, on land, sea and air.

Sundays have been known to drag up here at the lake, and it’s important for me to keep my father as stimulated as possible. Over dinner Friday night at a pub in Portland, I asked him if he’d be interested in making a movie about his beloved potato gun. He smiled broadly and I knew I’d just have to start shopping it to the major studios.

Sunday morning we got a bag of spuds, a can of hairspray and headed down to the dock. Filming took about 10 minutes while editing took several hours. I’m getting up to speed with the software though, and I dare say this will probably be the first installment of a Gordo franchise. Even to those who don’t know my Dad, this is probably going to be extremely funny. Enjoy.

My parents are attempting to build a house on 2 acres of land near Portland Ontario. It’s been a long, arduous process which has taken four summers now. Thursday, they finally broke ground with an approved blueprint and the blessings of Parks Canada (or the Lake Nazis as my father calls them) and we were there!

Here are the first shots of our new as-of-yet-unamed house (I’m leaning towards “Graceland North”):

Note the awesome view of the Big Rideau Lake in the left photo, and the trailer in the background on the right. That trailer has been their home since we sold our house in Marlboro in 2000, and I for one am extremely excited to have a house - or even a muddy pit as the case may be. OK. As the case is - back in the family once again.

And let’s talk about my father’s new glasses for a moment. We spent the weekend calling him a mix of Corrado Soprano (left) and Bubbles (right) and he gleefully posed (in character, mind you) for both photos.

Speaking of Bubbles, I now have my little British cousin, Josh - thoroughly addicted to Trailer Park Boys. We watched every episode of seasons 1 & 2. And the outtakes. And the deleted scenes. Then we just stared at the DVD case for a while. I may have an obsession. But there are worse things to be obsessed with. Like clown porn, for example.

A more healthy obsession of mine has got to be garlic. I’ve loved it since I was old enough to say the word, and when our neighbors and longtime friends Steve and Judy (who own a beautiful house just down the road from our bomb crater) suggested we take a trip to the Perth Garlic Festival on Saturday, I was in the car faster than you can say “Sweet mother of God, what is that awful garlicky stink?”

When we paid our $5 and got inside, I noticed an abundance of chip wagons - and knew there must be poutine in the vicinity. Chalk up another new vice for Josh. But it’s hardly surprising since he’s used to English food and I’ve seen him go nuts for boullion cubes. After we “shared” an order (notice him murdering a few forkfulls on the left while Janet makes a strange face in the background) I got my own and kept him at bay with threats of grevious bodily harm. Then, the fever spread and Janet got herself a batch which Josh then proceeded to pilfer. The two of them were lucky enough to get their picture taken with “Clovey”, the festival mascot. It’s good to see Clovey back on the garlic circuit after his well publicized battle with heroin, which I’m not going to retread here.

It was also my parent’s 38th wedding anniversary this past weekend, and Steve and Judy hosted a wonderful Retsina/Port/Merlot/Champagne fueled dinner which was more fun than I’ve had in a while.

After dessert was cleared away, my parents shared conflicting accounts of the night they met. My mother’s version involves a city called “Fruitland“, a sock hop and another man. My father’s spin features cutting someone off in his Plymouth, student nurses and guarding a case of beer with his life. The line that went on to win my mothers’ heart?: “If I give you a beer, will you shut up?” My sister and I agreed - our conceptions were the holiest of miracles.

We wrapped up the trip with a good old-fashioned camp fire for which Janet and Josh went out in search of S’More fixings. Unable to find the traditional graham crackers and Hershey bars, they improvised with chocolate chip cookies and Aeros. I got a cavity just watching them try to slap them together once their marshmallows were roasted. And insanely jealous as well as fatter.

The swimming, the boating, the holiday hijinks - it’s all over for another summer. But I dare not shed a tear, as I know that next summer Graceland North will be in full effect. And I won’t have to worry about sleeping on an outhouse floor to get away from mosquitos. That’s artistic license, of course, as I stayed in a comfy bed at Steve and Judy’s and the closest I came to roughing it was watching 48 Hours in French.