Dear Barrett's Privateers,

Okay, I was about to ask it to get out of my head, but actually I kind of like the way I'm wandering around muttering under my breath about canadian pie-rats. Okay, they weren't really pirates. Okay, they weren't even real, not that there weren't real nova scotian privateeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrs. arr.

I had my family over for dinner last night for mum's birthday. It was fun. I think I'll have to make more of an effort to drag them all to dinner at my place more often; normally we go to a restaurant on holidays and birthdays and that's that, see you next month, maybe. Though I guess that's not so bad; beats being estranged or something.

I got mum some wooden stakes for her birthday to slay vampires with. (a joke. she was called a vampire slayer in a newsletter article recently.) I had a hell of a time buying them; they were leftover pieces from some garden chair the Bay was selling but had run out of. After 20 minutes of them trying to figure out what they were, where the other pieces were, that there weren't other pieces, that I didn't know what they were, that I wanted to buy them anyway, they finally sold them to me for $1 each. The receipt says "giftware, miscellaneous." Hee, giftware. Not that it wasn't a gift, but I can just picture the hallmark store with a dainty little wooden stake section, maybe frilly lace garlic sachets and collectible pewter crucifixes from the franklin mint.

now I'm a broken man on a halifax pier, the last of barrett's privateers!

okay, I found the coolest thing ever on the street yesterday. a dead (maybe) dragonfly, a big one, 4 inches long, completely intact. The eyes are huge and crazy and blue. I have it in a tupperware container on my desk at home, and I pick it up to stare in to those amazing eyes every five damn minutes. Wow. I say it's only maybe dead, because while it's obviously in no state to fly or eat or anything, it keeps twitching, once or twice an hour maybe. I once had two much smaller dragonflies in my insect collection. I put them in the box in august; when I opened it the next january, one of the dragonflies flew away. (I keep my bugs in a box filled with gauze; I don't pin them.) It was nuts! I love the strange things life does, it will fool you every time. I was reading a question in New Scientist about the clinical point of death, but I bet any definition of it has exceptions and exceptions and exceptions, people back from their graves, plants long rotted returned to glory, half-eaten rats springing up again to forage and nurse, and yes, dragonflies in suspended animation for years.

how I wish I was in sherbrooke now! la dee da. I'd better stop, or I'll be punished by having the springhill mining disaster song stuck in my head. now that one's grim. through all their lives/they dug their graves/...

I have squid and octopus in my lunch, mmm! I bet you are jealous.