Katyboo1’s Weblog

Ha ha! I’m so close now.  I can smell victory. It smells a lot like a lovely warm bed and a particularly nice pair of jogging bottoms I bought from Roots just yesterday.  Roots is like the Canadian version of Gap, more laid back and outdoorsy.  Basically a lot more brown and comfortable.  Yes! I am on my last blog entry before I have caught up.   You see, the cool thing is, for you lot back in Blighty it is Saturday already, but for little old me it is Friday night and I am about up to date.  This is good because it is now ten p.m. and my fingers are tired from a week off from tapping away at the coal face of blogdom.  I will probably be blogging in my sleep.  This is fine.  Last night I finished that book about the Anglo Saxon raiders that was so good, and spent most of the night dreaming that I was being pursued across some murky fenland by a man who wanted to chop my head off with a golden axe.  Tonight’s dreams have got to be better than that surely?  Although I am still persevering with the dreadful wolf book, so I will probably have lupine dreams instead.

Talking of wildlife, we actually saw some today.  The man promised us deer in the garden, and deer in the garden is what we got.  Admittedly it was deer arses evacuating the garden when they heard us coming, but they definitely were deer arses and not some other random arses just wandering about.  Typically Jason and I saw them, and the girls, who were too busy squabbling amongst themselves saw absolutely nothing at all.  Now they are sulking with us because of their failure to observe some wild arses in action.  Such is the unfairness of life.  We have yet to see the Raccoons breaking and entering but surely this is a joy to come?  Maybe I should leave a set of lock picks on the garden path to encourage them.  I’m sure they sell them in Wal Mart.

They did get to see some wildlife today though.  It was absolutely sheeting it down with rain all day, so we took them to the butterfly garden up the road.  It’s quite cool, and along with the butterflies they have flamingo, ducks, Koi carp, and a handful of what look like partridges scuttling about in the undergrowth.  Partridges are so cool.  They look like small, fat librarians scuttling around nervously, just after they’ve set the library on fire.  They don’t do it on purpose, it’s just they have so much nervous energy they spontaneously combust at regular intervals.  Such is the life of the partridge.  Think on, for those of you who are keen on reincarnation.  Partridges definitely r not u.

The children were ecstatic and Oscar was so excited he nearly fell in the pond twice, and was just about to get his eye pecked out by a rather strange bird with an extremely long bill before Jason rescued him, not that he got any thanks for it.  Oscar wanted to get his eye pecked out, probably so that he could wear a piratical eye patch at a rakish angle and attract the attention of some more Canadian old ladies.  Attracting the attention of women over sixty is his new holiday hobby.  He’s very good at it.  It gets us preferential treatment in lots of places where OAP’s or Seniors as they call them here hang out.  The girls kept running around and then remembering that they wanted the butterflies to land on them so standing still with their arms out like scarecrows.  They would then get so excited that the butterflies might be landing on them that they would jump up and down, thus defeating the object of the exercise.  It did make them very happy though, which was the main thing.

Two things made me very happy today.  One we went to Canada’s version of TK Maxx, which is called Winners.  It is rather rubbish, but I still managed to get an excellent pair of Guess wedges for when it decides to become summer, and a rather nice navy Ralph Lauren T-shirt, which due to my recent junk food paunch makes me look rather like a conservative sausage, but will fit nicely once I get home and start eating normally again.  We also went to Spinnakers Brew Pub for lunch.  This is an excellent gastro pub in Victoria and should definitely be visited by everyone.  Jason made a big fuss about going, because we’re spending a fortune on food at the minute, but even he had to admit that it was bloody lovely and worth every penny.  He hated admitting it, but he is a man, so he did, and that’s why I love him.  That and his fur and beard.

Two weird things that happened today.  I saw a man driving half a car.  When I say half a car, I mean half a car.  It was sawn in two and the back half of the car just wasn’t there.  Don’t ask me how it stayed up, drove or anything, but it did.  I commented casually to Jason as we were driving along: ‘Look! There’s a man driving half a car.’ as if if were the most normal thing in the world, then we were all silent for a moment, watching it.  Then we had a discussion about not only how weird seeing someone driving half a car was, but also how weird it was to comment on it as if it were completely normal.  Very, very odd.  The second thing wasn’t quite so odd, but it is worthy of comment.  I ate a lavender biscuit.  Now, I’ve known for a while that you can cook with lavender, and I have a recipe for lavender cup cakes somewhere, but I’ve never dared to make them in case they’re horrible.  So, when I saw some lavender shortbread for sale I had to buy some.  What I will say, in the spirit of scientific enquiry is, they were bloody horrible, and lavender tastes exactly like it smells, so unless you’re driven to a salivating frenzy of excitement by the smell of lavender I just wouldn’t bother if I were you.  Remember, I go there so you don’t have to.  it was like eating a crumbly drawer lining, or an old lady who likes Coty talcum powder after she’d eaten some crisps.  Yeurch!

One other good thing happened today, we found a decent supermarket.  By decent I mean one which doesn’t sell frozen orange juice concentrate as standard, and put fistfuls of sugar in everything including bread.  We’ve been a bit depressed over the last few days about the fact that we’ve been finding it difficult to source good food.  We hit paydirt today on the way to the butterfly gardens.  It’s called The Red Barn Market, and it’s great.  They sell organic fruit and veg and locally sourced meat with no chemicals or hormones added.  They sell Salt Spring coffee, which is wicked and tastes about a thousand times better than Starbucks (and I like Starbucks), and they sell food which actually looks and tastes like food.  We bought heaps of stuff, fully expecting it to cost about two hundred quid, and it was even reasonably priced.  We had been worrying that we would have to live on potatoes (they don’t even have Tesco beans here for poor people to live on.  I think the equivalent is cardboard boxes full of dried macaroni cheese), but we may well have been saved from both starvation and imminent diabetes.  Praise the lord.

All in all, a real holiday day today.  Sightseeing and everything.  Who knows, we may even be getting into the holiday spirit.  God forbid.