(I’ve always hated my feet.  If I had a therapist, she’d be very proud of me right now.)

Sometimes I even get to meet a real life blast from the past:

Recently, at the craft show in Regina I was approached by a crew from CBC Television.  The host looked ridiculously familiar and I was sure that I had at some point gone to school with her or seen her around my hometown of Saskatoon.  After comparing backgrounds she finally said, “Oh and I used to be on the TV show Street Cents…”

!!!

That was one of my absolute favorite shows when I was a teenager.  If you guys haven’t seen any episodes, I’m sure you can find some on You Tube.  “Fit for the pit!”  “What’s your beef?”  Loved it…

In any case, I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in one of their segments.  It aired this Thursday and they’ve posted the segments online.  It’s a brief appearance, and my hair looks wonky(!) but I thought I’d share it nonetheless.

Skip ahead to 17:50 and 21:30.  And seriously, if you know a hair stylist that wants to hit the road, that pines for long days in a car, that can handle the challenge of wicked bedhead, please send me their resume…

XOXO

Let’s begin:

First of all I just want to ask: what grade are we in?  How old does someone have to be before they can just suck it up and deal with pesky nuisances without whining about “starting a petition”?  There are so many injustices in this world that need representation.  Why waste your stamina tearing someone apart instead of acting like an adult and accepting the state of affairs as they are?

Would you get your neighbors to band together to oust the renegade on the block who only plants yellow flowers?  Is that worth your time?  Because if it is, you’re a rabble-rouser and you do no good.  Don’t fool yourself in to thinking you’re a hero.  (Now I’ve got THIS song stuck in my head…  Rabble Rabble…)

Hmm… maybe all this junk just happens to inspire me and you’ll get to sing this blog post when it comes out on my next album…  ☺

Enough of that.  But if you have a spare moment, send me some good vibes because I’m feeling a little shredded over here…

On a happy note, someone thought I was 15 today!  Sweet!

Love and kisses to all my good peeps…

I think we’re going to go with a coffeemaker and pair it with the gift basket being donated by McQuarries Coffee.  Holy cow!  If you’re in the Saskatoon area and you have an afternoon to kill, go visit McQuarries.  When I was a little girl I never hesitated to stop and smell those ground coffee beans.  While I’ve never been a drinker of the stuff, I’ve been an avid smeller for years!

After making our decision, we continued on our path to Calgary, dropped our gear off at the hotel and found a sushi restaurant on 11th ave (despite Google giving us incorrect instructions).  What a great place!  Check out Uptown Sushi for cheap but delicious food and great atmosphere: a huge bowl of Edamame, the best tasting yam tempura I’ve ever had, and a beautiful décor.  To cap it off, the woman at the till gave me an interesting wire photo holder…  just because!  I’ll have to take a picture of it to post here.  Thank you Uptown Sushi!!

Meanwhile, back at the inn…  Ah, (certain chain of) hotels!  You have yet to impress me.  In fact, you have yet to host me without complaint.  I’m open-minded however and would ADORE having this track record smashed.  I’m currently lying in a pretty comfy bed, so you’ve got some points right off the hop.  The temperature’s under control, the bathroom was clean, the front desk staff was courteous, and there’s no horrific aroma emanating from some indiscernible corner of the room.  Hmm…  I hope you prove me wrong!

Tomorrow I start another weekend with the Signature’s Craft Sales.  If you’re in the Calgary area, come on down to the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.  With the abundance of talent that I see at these events, if you do brave the parking fee and come on by, I promise that you will see at least one amazing thing during your visit.

A demain!

We’re billotted with one of the town doctors here in Medicine Hat.  Good thing too because I wanted a second opinion about a burn I recently acquired using faulty oven mitts.  (Check your oven mitts people!)  I realized after the show that during my last visit I also consulted with him about an injury I’d sustained in the very same place!

I think my right index finger is jinxed!

Thanks to the Prickly Pear for the great evening and for the YUMMY EGG SALAD SANDWICH!!!

I can’t believe how much there is to do!!  Besides just packing clothes and gear, we had to coordinate merch, keep the promotion in motion, clean the house for our house-sitter…  Darren even took time to remove the sticky gunk left behind on my guitar case after a run-in with some duct tape.  Peanut butter works like a charm!  A messy, unappetizing, “may contain traces of nuts” charm!

We didn’t have time to consume food ourselves, but we had to make sure the guitar case was fed.

So while the case ate like a king all out of Wonder Bread, I prepared an all-day buffet equally as nourishing:

Part of this complete breakfast!

By the end of the day I was so tired that I just barely remember giggling while describing a t-shirt caption idea.  I will share it here knowing that it makes absolutely no sense, but I just want to prove my exhaustion:

It supposed to say “Oops!” but there’s an “O” missing.  This was side-splititngly funny to me at 4 am.  I don’t think you’d truly grasp the hilarity unless you stayed up for 30 hours straight, subsisting only on “baked not fried” crackers, OR if you banged your head really hard.  I recommend neither; I’m always up for a laugh, but this one’s just not worth it…

I was so pleased to stop in Wabigoon for my first show of the tour.  Thank you for hosting us John!  I hope you didn’t mind me grilling you about your job as a “flight medic”.  I’m just so fascinated with people who have that kind of information in their head, and those kind of adventures in their past.  I wanna learn how to trach someone at 20,000 feet!  (Although with my level of aerophobia I think I would find it difficult to wield a scalpel while simultaneously clutching my armrests…)

I was reminded of this tonight when we made a call to the police to inform them that we had just heard a bit of a scuffle and large amounts of breaking glass. Perhaps it had merely been a vandalized car window or some hooligans ditching several dozen bottles of beer, but it seemed appropriate to call considering the block I inhabit.  I’m not entirely convinced that the thugs in this neighborhood would attempt subtlety when endeavoring to gain access to a house without permission.

Sidenote: I feel like I need to rationalize my choice to live here in view of the frequency of my calls to the authorities. Living here has been a challenge, but I have confidence that the rejuvenation of this area is (slowly!) on its way.

That being said, we’ve called the non-emergency line on several occasions to report: garage break-ins (twice), kids intentionally rolling huge tires down church steps and into moving vehicles, young children climbing our garage and ripping the shingles off… right in front of us… despite the camera we had trained on them, and countless instances of plain vandalism.  We’ve also called 911 to report garbage bin fires and a few domestic disturbances on behalf of a young man who lives down the street.

But tonight when we called emergency services suspecting that someone may be getting hurt, we got a busy signal. ?!?  Now I have an alarm system, motion-sensitive lights, and great neighbors on each side, but when it comes right down to it, I am ultimately dependent on the police in dire situations.  It’s frightening to call the line you are taught to trust, and to hear that discouraging “beep beep beep”.

Sidenote #2: The only time a police officer has come to our house was when Darren chased down a kid who had been throwing rocks at our front windows.  And they came to give Darren s***!  Someone had called 911 because “a man was running after a kid”, and, in her (loud) words, it was “definitely a race issue”. Yuck!  Turns out the boy was just hanging out with the wrong crowd and he eventually came back and apologized to us.  We (me, Darren, the cops and the boy) were all almost in tears when he asked if he could do some yard work to prove he was sorry for his lapse of better judgement.

I’m sure by now everyone has read about the unfortunate man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours.  Unfortunately, his story is not very exceptional, and while not a daily occurrence, there are several news stories online about similar situations involving folks in “civilized” areas being trapped for hours, and even days, in elevators .

The crumbling façade here is that, in a number of the instances, there were numerous guards apparently monitoring the elevator camera feeds.  That safety backup is something that I would rely on, but they must not have noticed that it was the same guy in the same elevator for those two long days.

There are so many things that we want to believe in, despite so much evidence that they are flawed: food processing plants, parental love, the sanity of fellow drivers!  We have little choice but to continue to want to believe and to hope that our faith is not tested.  I think I might on the wrong side of the tracks to be so optimistic…

Since the first rainfall of the season my home has been in disarray, completely shutting down plans to record the next album.  Everything in the basement was removed to protect it from water damage (Some electronic items were rescued before the power was even shut off!  I guess if Darren’s computer fails he has nothing to live for anyways…) and the resulting shift has affected every single movable item beneath my roof.

I was away for most of last year and had intentionally planned an empty summer.  I had not unpacked my suitcase for 11 months and I was looking forward to nestling my toothbrush in an actual counter-top toothbrush holder!  I was excited to have some time in Winnipeg to be domestic, to sweep my own floor, to be inspired by familiarity.  But my down-time has been spent barking my shins on the overturned desk in the foyer and cautioning the children to stop treading all over the clean clothes.

So fix it dear Liza!! – you might say…  Unfortunately my areas of expertise are somewhat less practical than building and repairing healthy shelters.  And there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of dunces like me to keep all those tradesfolks in trucks and hammers.  AND being a musician who chose a “no-income” summer, I am at quite the disadvantage when it comes to negotiating or enforcing a punctual deadline.

This is the summer of confrontation.  Citifinancial, incompetent government organizations, petty returns, eavestrough guys, cement guys, landscaping guys…  Why can’t you just do what you say you’re going to do?!  The only person I’m not fighting with is my usual antagonistic muse (of Knife Song and Scorpion fame).  It’s all topsy-turvy!

I was going to write this blog about sewing in my
dining room and obviously being inspired by the locale:

Clearly the chaos in my surroundings is catching…

Last week I paid off my second Citifinancial loan only to get a statement today saying I was actually late and I now owe an extra $400.  Apparently their system failed to log any calls I made to their customer service, calls I made to determine my DUE DATE and my BALANCE OWING.  Now they advise me to contact their dispute department with my proof.  What kind of proof you ask?  “Well, like the name of the person you spoke with.”  It was an automated system!!!

Yada yada yada – they’re dinks.  If you feel like reading the nitty gritty, you can click HERE and see what I’m sending off to the BBB.

Although, after visiting the BBB MB website, I start to understand why the Citifinancial customer service representative that I was speaking with was indifferent about my threats to trash their name in the hallowed halls of the Better Business Bureau.  Read this:

Your Better Business Bureau is not a consumer advocate which believes the consumer is always right; conversly[sic] it is also not the “Champion of the Business World” believing that business can do no wrong.
Better Business Bureaus are self governing organizations established by the local business community. Each has a board of directors made up of local business leaders. A bureau is supported entirely by the membership fees of area businesses and local installations of national business.

So who is my consumer advocate?  Where is the accountability for these companies who can buy a membership to a “self-governing organization”?  Is the BBB just a ruse to make the angry public feel like they’ve really socked it to “The Man”?  Seriously, can someone please tell me what I can do!

Of course my conversation with the CSR wandered into more existential territory.  Surely the woman I was speaking with could clearly see that I had in fact called but had to follow protocol that forced her to say whatever she needed to say to protect the Pooping Giant.  Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Cat: I am shocked that you are still allowed to do business when you clearly deceive your customers.
CSR: If we were so deceptive we wouldn’t still be in business.
Cat:  That’s why I’m shocked!!

Their final offer was to reduce the interest by 60%, but they obviously missed the point.  If I accept their offer I accept responsibility for their error!  How can a customer trust an entity that controls THEIR money when the system can be so easily manipulated in the company’s favor? I know I’m being formulaic in my frustration but who are these people who can lie for a bank and still smile at the busdriver?

Yeesh, I’m getting so emotional about this and it’s only my f***ing credit score.  If you have advice for me, I’d love to hear it.  If you have a similar story, I’d love to commiserate.  If you can restore my faith in humanity, bring it on…

I finally got to see Rossport in the daylight, having only visited previously in December, arriving after dinner and leaving before dawn. This would usually be a great opportunity to spy some amazing scenery, but when the morning light blasted through our window at 6:30 am this morning, I was a bit less excited about the landscape.

I need one of these thingers, like Blanche from the Golden Girls! On the road it’s very hard to control your environment and while I’ve been tempted to bring along a hammer, some nails, and a large light-proof blanket, the aforementioned gizmo would probably save me some apologizing to my hosts.

Honestly though, everything is more agreeable in the daylight. This past November we were shrouded in darkness for the larger part of our trip through this region and, looking back, I realize the long drives sit on a different place in my soul when accompanied by the stars.

I just finished a book about the race for the North Pole and while reading I was challenged to wonder about the effects of several months of night. I claim to be a night owl, most comfortable and inspired in fake light, but it would be difficult to be so contemplative for so long without imploding and shutting down completely. It’s a great mind exercise to think about how ready one is to wind down at 5 pm in midwinter, and how jazzed one is to head to the park at 7 pm on a bright warm summer day.

Heading into Wawa today, I was reminded about our last trip through and how if we hadn’t stopped at their self-serve gas pump, we would have most definitely been stranded on a frozen highway until morning. I was glad then, to be afforded a pilgrimage back to the land of my deliverance. It was not exactly what I had expected…

There are evenings during which I am quite sure that the audience is watching those seconds tick by. I think many artists will agree that a completely silent crowd is unnerving. You start to wonder if there really is anyone out there…

Tonight I finished up my second set, turned around to put my guitar on its stand, and when I faced forward again I saw something that nearly brought tears to my eyes. The folks in the MHS Auditorium were still clapping. And they were standing!

Things are not always as they seem, and conclusions often depend on your own perspective (or the light!).