From: chris lloyd Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: pm@pm.gc.ca
Date: Aug 28, 2006 11:21 PM
Subject: Greens come of age; Le député bloquiste de Repentigny, Benoît Sauvageau, meurt dans un accident

Dear Stephen,

I can hardly believe that I haven't written to you since last week, since before Jasper's opening and farewell party. So much has happened since then! The opening went well, the beer arrived—there was a last-minute snafu with the beer, but it was sorted out—and a bunch of folks came back to the gallery for a farewell to jasper, and he showed some of the footage he shot of the harbour tour, which was both mesmerizing and dizzying, especially when projected large. Then there was the rock show at Elwoods, Les Païens, whom I finally was able to see, as Jess was working the bar for me. A fun show made even funner with some of Michael Buckland's beach balls added to the mix.

Saturday morning we had a farewell brunch with Peter and Judy, who is still mad at me, and Mary, and Rich and Katie. Rich was spinning records the night before and it went really well. Then we all packed up and headed to Moncton. We booked Jasper's flight back to Montréal through Moncton, as it was half the price of a flight from SJ. Plus Claudine and I were planning to travel to NS to visit some of my family and see Tim at his cottage for his birthday party but we did neither. Instead, after bidding adieu to Jasper, we became lost and confused at Chrystal Palace trying to find a book, then ate at a mediocre restaurant, then found a motel to stay the night. Watched Kung Fu Hustle, by Steven Chang, which was a totally, totally awesome and fun movie.

Sunday was major, major cleanup day. Since Claudine had to work Monday we decided to come home. We skipped tim's B-day party because we were just plain partied out. And our apartment needed major TLC. Kuan's pissing problem has not subsided, so we are now trying a tinfoil trick. Apparently cats don't like to walk on tinfoil nor hear the sound of it, so I've plastered tinfoil on all her favourite pissing places. We even found that she had hit the vacuum cleaner and the clothes dryer.

We decided to rearrange the apartment so now our bedroom is in the former living room, the living room back in the front room and my studio/sewing room in our old bedroom. Downstairs is still storage but now everything is a lot cleaner and better organized. Well, the studio, almost. Claudine made an impeccable Mexican Zuchinni soup and we watched Les Invasions Barbares in our new bedroom.

I realized today that the selection committee meeting for the gallery is tomorrow, not Thursday, so spent the afternoon getting packages to people. Luckily I'd photocopied everything on the weekend but Staples is on to me: they've finally installed counters on their self-serve copiers. Darn them! And darn Telus again, too, for being so downright confusing. I'm finally getting my cell phone reactivated but when I show up at the kiosk in Hell's Creation today the pleasant teenager behind the counter (why is it that the malls seem to be run by teenagers?) could only point me to the self-serve computer (the whole signup process happens online, on the Telus website), which, can you guess where this is heading? Didn't work. A dozen times I tried. "Username already selected" and "Internal server error" where the most frequent replies. Do you think the girl could fix it? No, she said this sort of thing always happens when the computers get updated. Real effing convenient. Like I've got all the time in the world to set up my own darn phone. Heck no! There were still supplies to get for the screening of Amélie. We had a good attendance, over a dozen folks.

I have to read through the rest of the submissions before tackling Telus again. And as far as we can tell there is no fresh piss for one whole day.

-chris