Unexpected Side Effects

Ya gotta love leopard print.

I love it when you come home from an outing and discover a bit of pepper or basil wedged in between your front teeth from the lunch you ate before you left the house.

Today I went downtown to resume the photo shoot I started the other day and to buy my favourite cookies. As I walked under the train tracks, I kept hearing something that sounded like the Muslim call to prayer I heard in Cape Town. I really only consciously heard it once in Cape Town, our last morning there, when we had to get up at some ungodly hour (pun intended) to catch a bus out of town. The song was haunting and ethereal, especially at that hour just before dawn, and it was beautiful.

The sound I heard today was buried under a million other sounds of afternoon bustle, just out of aural reach, even in such a quiet town as Guelph. Three times an ambulance wailed by, all while Swee'pea was asleep or nearly asleep. Luckily it didn't seem to bother him or I would have shaken my fist at the driver and glared at the sky (even though I know the ambulance helps people in need). I still don't know what the sound was, or even if it was really a sound. Maybe it was just the wind catching somewhere? Cars driving under the train tracks? Construction? Or maybe it was just the wind blowing in my ears. I'll never know. But I'm glad I heard it and remembered that early early morning on our last day in Cape Town, when Sugar Daddy and I enjoyed a silent, contemplative smoke in the dark living room before saying goodbye, and listened to the chanting call to prayer travelling on the wind like a magic carpet.

The other day when I walked downtown on my way to the graffiti, church bells were chiming. It was around 3 in the afternoon, and it occurred to me that it was pretty much the exact hour my Grandma Ruth died, exactly a year to the day before. It was nice to hear the bells and to take a silent moment while I walked to remember her again.

I'm experiencing some side effects from NoBloPoMo.

1. I have several draft posts in blogger that normally I probably would have just published, but because of NoBloPoMo, I'm saving for the day I don't have anything to say.
2. A Crisis of Confidence: several bloggers, both those participating in NoBloPoMo and those who have chosen not to, have talked about the risk of boring their readers senseless with lame mundane daily details like what they had for lunch. But this is totally what my blog is all about. So now I'm wondering if maybe I should be a bit more selective about what I blog about. But not right now... maybe later.
   

I think it may be time to put our patio furniture away for the winter.

I love this photo. Because the hole in the canoe looks deliberate and manmade, because the colour of the garage is so whimsical and because there's a gorgeous old door that I only noticed after I had pressed the shutter.