Vasquez Rocks: It was, in fact, hot enough for me.

"I will conquer that, for it is there."

California is in the middle of a heat-wave. As such, we decided that today would be a good day to go for a hike to see the Vasquez Rocks, which is located in the middle of a desert, which in turn is sitting atop a giant frying pan, inside a massive convection oven, that is on fire. It was hot, it what I’m saying, and certainly not the circumstances in which strapping a baby to your back along with the associated baby-infrastructure and climbing up a steep hill with a cranky and underslept toddler would be advisable.

However, I am well aware that no one reads this blog for parenting competency  (I am aware that the way I update this thing, I could have stopped, more accurately with “no one reads this blog.” Shut up, wisenheimer).

In any case: Vasquez Rocks are about an hour away from where we live. I insisted that we go through a car wash before leaving: vehicles accumulate a lot of dust in Los Angeles, and we were overdue. This made us late to meet our friends and, unfortunately, gave Amynah lots of I-told-you-so opportunities when we got to the park and immediately drove into a cloud of dust kicked up on the park’s dirt roads. Amynah is not so saintly a person to rise above an invitation to smirk as tempting as that.

Anyway, the temperatures were scorching. Searing, even. The sun was blinding. Small insects were flinging themselves onto my car for the sweet relief that oblivion would bring from the heat. It was breathtaking. Let not my pampered, Northern-bred temperature tolerances fool you: our hiking companions are natives of Tehran (today’s projected high, according to the BBC: 35 degrees Celsius) and they said that the heat was clearly the cruel jest of a malevolent and wrathful god (I may be paraphrasing slightly).

On arrival Sana was thrilled by the landscape and the rocks – she immediately added to my load of camera, binoculors, water bottles, diapers, spare clothes and Inara with several handfuls of mineral specimens. She also made a bee-line straight up one of the larger monoliths, while Amynah and I struggled to keep pace. Clearly, I have done an inadequate job explaining gravity’s universal dominion to her.

In any case, that one climb, 15 minutes total, was enough to knock all of us out. We found a clump of trees that had themselves taken shelter behind some boulders, and hid in their shadows for the next 30 minutes while we waited for the visions and dizziness to pass. We then walked back to the car, even then managing to get slightly lost as we were disoriented by the unrelenting onslaught from the idiot fire beast in the sky.

Ramin and Atefeh along with proof that no, I did not forget Inara.

I will allow that the rocks and surrounding landscape were beautiful, and the company – Ramin and Atefeh – were gracious, especially as they allowed us a cool-down period in their apartment (promptly trashed by Inara) and then treated us to the best Iranian food we’ve had since leaving Montreal. But still, let it be resolved that I shall not stray any further than fifty feet from an air conditioner until November.

Such was the heat that when we took our break, I deliberately sat beneath this spiderweb in order that I could benefit from a few filaments more of shade.

Visiting The Last Bookstore

At least once a month, Amynah and the girls and I travel to downtown Los Angeles to have lunch with her uncle.* Downtown Los Angeles is strikingly non-vibrant, people-wise, considering that it is the nominal heart of a city of 12-million people.

On the other had, it does boast a great deal of attractive art-deco architecture, including some beautiful movie theatres (most of which have been converted to other uses, like churches).

It also boasts one of the so-called “Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World,” so honoured by no less an authority than Flavorwire.com. Who could resist?**

After dining, Habib guided us to The Last Bookstore (demanding to know, as was his wont, if I would not prefer to read things on my phone like a civilized person). It’s a used bookstore, and I suspect the fact that they don’t charge retail left them feel free to make their cashier’s counter out of old tomes.

It’s an enormous space, littered with couches and offering a coffe bar, all of which contributed to an inviting atmosphere. It also featured somewhat-too-precious decorative touches like fake taxidermy of a wooly mammoth head mounted on the wall, and a mutilated mannequin at the end of an aisle (both of which Sana reported with frightened certainty as being monsters that intended to eat her). It need hardly be said that a place like this would also have a section devoted to the paleo-technology of vinyl records, right?

Places like this always inspire me to buy some classic or other that I’d never tried before. I think the mannequins, in particular, guided my hand this time: I picked up Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”*** Similarly unnerved by the atmosphere, Sana picked up Sandra Boynton's “Birthday Monsters.”

·    * The presence of Amynah’s uncle and his family has been the aspect of Los Angeles that I am most going to miss when we leave. Yeah, we're leaving. BUT I WON'T TELL YOU WHERE OR WHEN.

** I have now managed to go to three of the bookstores on this list, though this last one was the only one whose threshold I'd crossed as the result of any intent or foreknowledge.

*** Will I get around to reading it? Not in less than two years, if my moldering copy of "Persuasion" is any guide!

These are photo experiments: because the world needs more black and white urban
 decay photos, and I am the man to elevate the genre from "trite" to "barely competent." 

Noted near my building

These handbills posted near our apartments, part of a compound owned by UCLA. Note, the "No Smoking" sign is not consistent with UCLA standards, and is presumably part of an ongoing feud.

A rose by any other name would still not look like that

I’ll cut right to the chase: I finally rescued my bike from the decay caused by it having been left, neglected and unloved, for five years in storage. I also installed a snazzy new child seat for Sana.

Sana narrates the trip: "What's that? What's that? What's that?
It's windy. What's that? You're going fast! What's that?
What's that? He's on a bike too! What's that?"

My first two-wheeled adventure in Los Angeles was modest in scope: a quick trip along the Ballona Creek Bike path, which sounded promising, and which received rave reviews from knowledgeable locals.


All I knew about the path was that it runs seven miles from Culver City to the ocean. There was an access point not far from us, and so I thought I’d try a quick jaunt to test out my long-atrophied cycling legs.

They hurt, not least because I was riding with 30-odd pounds of toddler with which I never had to cope when last I biked in France. What hurt more was the disparity between the mental image conjured by the words “Ballona Creek” and the reality.

I couldn’t help but make comparisons to the scenery and conditions that had made me fall in love with biking in the first place – waterways were supposed to have trees nearby. And banks on which spray-painted graffiti could get no purchase. Rainbows and Ponies this was not.

But you know what was more painful? The constant taunting knowledge that the neighbourhood directly across the creek from me is called (drumroll please)…. Alsace.

Post Script: Some people find motivation to improve ourselves through competition. Some find it through fear of senescence. Some find it through their belief that the Almighty has commanded it. Others among us find it through the desire to find odd stories with which to fill the ever-grasping maw of their blog.

 The 3,000 odd kilometers I put on my bike during my three years in Alsace should have confirmed in me a love of cycling. The fact that Amynah and I owned bikes that were superior to our French bikes in every respect, and brought them to Los Angeles at some personal cost and inconvenience should have induced me to get them up and running just to make the trouble worth it. The fact that I have daughters with whom I like to spend time, and for whom I want to be a good role model, should have encouraged me to install a kid’s seat ages ago.

None of those things worked. What did work was my inability to resist the lure to my curiosity set by the neon-yellow sign of the “Libreria Christiana.”  The placard of the small store, located roughly 1.609344 km from my apartment, boasts not a cross, as you might expect, but a bicycle.

I mentally dubbed it the “Bikes and Bibles store” (their website is actually the much more ecumenical “bikes and books”) and vowed that eventually, I would have to go in there. But to do so, I needed an excuse, and so I resolved to rehabilitate my CCM roadbike from Montreal. 

I managed it last week. Books and Bikes is a family store, as one would expect. The owner is Freddy (I didn’t get a last name), who runs the store with his two sons. The “Books” part of the store pre-dates the “bikes” part, though today it seems to occupy only the first quarter of the store’s space, the rest being given over to bikes and bike parts of all shapes and sizes (creeping secularism?). Apparently, Freddy’s facility for fixing frames, footbrakes and fenders found favour, and soon the small group of friends and neighbours grew into a steady trickle of local customers, who would drop their bikes at the back of the bookshop, leaving them for Freddy’s ministrations. Eventually, it became clear he had the makings of a proper business, and Books and Bikes was born. I plan to become a regular, so that I might continue my campaign to convince them to rename the place “Jesus Spokes.”

Wedding madness

Sana found she had much in common with her great-uncle Ramzan.

Pretty much all of my last dozen or so blog posts have started with an apology for not blogging as much as I used to, but this time, I will provide you with an excuse: Wedding Madness!

In the last month, I’ve been to a highly American wedding of French people in the desert oasis of Las Vegas, and a highly South-Asian wedding of Canadian people that took place in the snowy wastes of Edmonton.

The bride wore sparkles, the groom was dashing in a sequined hat. 

Yes, it was already a Vegas wedding featuring Elvis, but certain 

organizers felt we needed a "theme" of "tackiness." I believe 

this person gilds lilies as a hobby.

Perhaps a comparison by the numbers, would be illustrative.

                                                    

Length of festivities:    Las Vegas:   7 min       Edmonton:   4 days

Guests:   LV: 10    EDM: 650

Number pregnant brides:   LV:  1          EDM: 0

Number of grooms whose legal identification was stolen 36 hours before the wedding:   LV:   1                        EDM:  0

Number of exotic dancers invited by a certain someone, because they were sweet, and claimed to be Canadian: LV: 1 EDM:  0 

Amynah was the Maid of Honour. Don't get technical: Just see
 how long you live if you try to call her the Matron of Honour

Number of invited exotic dancers who had the poor judgement to accept said invitation:  LV: 0     EDM: 0

Number of eggs smashed on groom: LV: 0 EDM: Several dozen

Number of outfits worn by bride: LV: 1    EDM: 5

Number of Elvises: LV: 1   EDM: 0

Number of wedding bands that invited Sana to dance onstage: LV: 0 EDM:  1

Sana saw snow out the plane's window, and silently thought
 for a moment, and then informed us: "I know how to ski."
 I think she has access to the Matrix.

Percent of ceremony I missed because of screaming baby: LV: 0%   EDM: 75%

Percent of ceremony I missed because poor directions that sent me out into the Mojave desert: LV: 75% EDM: 0%

Number of hours traveled one-way: LV: 6 (car) EDM:  6 (airplane)

Percent of that time during which someone in my family was crying: 50%

Proportion of that half that is mine: 1/4.

Number of duststorms: LV: 1 EDM: 0

Number of snowstorms: LV: 0 EDM: 1

Doctor Sana

I have about a million things I could have blogged in the last month or so: actually describing the Death Valley trip alluded to in my last post, talking about the fantastic new camera that has totally changed how I see the world (I now see it as That Which I Have Photographed and That Which I Intend One Day to Photograph) or talking about the various work-related obligations that have, at various points over the last month, removed the competent parent from the household, leaving my precious daughters in my unreliable care.

Such a trip is happening right now, though fortunately only for a day (Amynah’s an invited speaker at a conference happening in a nearby resort town: she was supplied a Motherf***ing Mustang with which to transport herself there. I am NOT best pleased).

Sana liked the horsey.

These trips leave me much to write about, and absolutely no energy to write it: no one wants to read my self-deprecating sneak compliments for performing the basic task of keeping my children alive.

My story, instead, is about how Sana is a better daughter than I am a father. Earlier this week, I was afflicted with the worst migraine headache I’ve had the misfortune to have suffered in well over a year. Over dinner, Sana noticed I was not well, and asked if I was sick. I told her my head hurt.

“Let me kiss it Dada!” I leaned over to receive her blessing, and she looked at me searchingly: “All better?”

What could I say? I told I was better.

After dinner, it was the beginning of the bedtime ritual – bath, pajamas, bedtime story. Ever since the latter stages of Inara’s gestation, this has been almost entirely me responsibility. Change, in Sana’s world, is not to be tolerated. However, as the bath went on, my head got worse and worse. I explained to Sana that I needed a nap, but she got upset. Out of the bath, she gave my head another kiss, and in a tone that brooked no argument, declared “There. You’re much better.”

What could I do? I need to be able to use that same technique to distract her from her scrapes and bumps. I pretended I was better, even though I was seeing double at that point. She seemed very pleased with herself.

Nonetheless, demanding that I suffer through reading her three longest books after effecting her "cure" me seemed to be a little cruel.

Once More into the Valley of Death

Do you guys remember when I went to Death Valley? Amynah did. Having been intrigued by my ravings about its beauty (a sample of which are here) she suggested that we take a couple of days over our break to bring ourselves and our two children to a scrap of desert in which the animals are poisonous so that they are able to kill you before you’re too dehydrated to be edible.

Sana counting flowers on our lunch break in Shoshone: "...seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.... eight!"

Given the nighttime temperatures are below zero in the park, we had no intention of camping out, and so I had to make a reservation in a hotel across the state border, in Pahrump, Nevada.

The number I called to do so connected me to a chaotic-sounding call center in what I believe was the Phillipines. The young woman on the other end of the phone was, as far as I could tell, as new to her job as she was to speaking English. What she lacked in assurance and efficiency, she made up for in diligence: booking my room with her took 45 minutes where normally it would have taken five, largely because she repeated every piece of information at her disposal several times, at arbitrary points in our conversation.

She asked me to spell my name: “M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S” I said.

“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Alpha’ ‘R’ as in….” she would repeat back to me, inform me they had a continental breakfast, and then ask me my email.

“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, the number 3 at etc…” I said.

“So that is ‘M’ as in Mike, 'A' as in 'Alpha'….” she doggedly started again, before repeating for the third time that there were two beds and a crib. Then she asked me the name on my credit card.

“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y…..”

“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike’…” she commenced the grim march through the 12 letters of my name, finishing once more with a triumphal flourish of the continental breakfast reminder.

It was a painfully slow process, but I was nonetheless confident that my reservation had been well and truly taken, and that if nothing else in this fallen world could be counted upon, I could be certain of breakfast. Imagine my surprise, after a long day’s drive and wander around the more southern wonders of Death Valley, to find on my arrival at the reservations desk of my hotel that they did not, in fact, have any record of me for that night.

Given that my careful Filipina friend had checked and reconfirmed every last detail, this was surprising to say the least. Until the manager was called in, who reminded me of the one piece of information I had neither clarified nor had confirmed: my reservation, it turns out, had been made for December 30, 2012.

From this, I learned two things: it pays to be careful, and that before I book another hotel I must change my name to Mike.

Merry Christmas

I got a fancy new camera for Christmas. Incidentally, the three Muslims with whom I live went to prayers today. I tried getting a picture of Sana for the occasion, as she was dressed in a elaborate salwar kameez. It took an expensive camera, a carefully decorated  tree and some exotically beautiful clothing to prove that absolutely nothing can make my nose-picking daughter look classy.

Joshua Tree and the Horrors of the Hamster Tube

As part of our ongoing efforts to resist the easy path of using our weekends to recover from the chaos of the rest of our week, yesterday we got up at 5:30 AM in order to go to Joshua Tree National Park, with our friend Anna.

Joshua Tree is located on the cusp of the Mojave and Colorado deserts, and contains features from both (crazy rocks, cacti, wild-eyed desert hermits that’ll use your bones for patio furniture).  It’s only three hours drive from Los Angeles, so I’m somewhat embarrassed we’d never managed to make it out there prior to this weekend, but it was worth the wait.

Amynah strapped Inara to her front in a baby carrier, and I strapped Sana to my back in another, and we hiked through the relative crowds of “Hidden” Valley and to the if-you-squint-it-looks-kind-of-like-a Skull Rock.

As night fell, I realized I had failed to take a picture of any of Joshua's Trees.

This, and my trip to Death Valley earlier this year made me realize how conditioned we are by the nature we grew up in – the first time Sana was in a Canadian/Eastern North American forest on a trip back to Canada, she was clearly freaked out by the density of trees closing in on her with oppressive verdancy. On the other hand, she was delighted to stomp her way through the desert sands of Joshua Tree, and examine the thorns and brambles of the various types of cacti. For my part, I couldn’t help but be unnerved by the wide-open spaces and the knowledge that there were poisonous snakes of uncertain temperament lurking about the rocks. Not for the first time, I realize that Sana is going to grow up in a different world than did I.

This being the first trip of this sort that I’d attempted with the babies, I was also left to reflect on how much less I learn from trips like these than I used to: I’m a compulsive reader of plaques, but I had to pass by all of the helpful explanations the National Parks people had posted at strategic points identifying the local fauna and flora, as well as historical tidbits (I managed to read on one that Hidden Valley had something to do with cattle rustlers, but got no further than that before having to stop Sana from leaping off a boulder five times her height).

 Skull Rock (official name)

Bum Rock (not official name)

Post Script: Scarier than my paranoia of rattlesnakes and Sana's non-comprehension of gravity was our dinner:  we went to a McDonald's with a play room for children, the centerpiece of which was a three-dimensional pipe maze, complete with netting, ladders and slides. Sana saw the bigger kids playing on it and wanted to go. Because I am both a sucker and a terrible parent, I let her. Of course, I went in with her. Never have I made a bigger mistake: the inside was cramped and redolent of children's hamburger breath and Dr Pepper-scented urine. Kids were appearing and disappearing around the corners like the creature from Alien that was terrorizing Sigourney Weaver in the air ducts. They were shouting at each other constantly, but the sound bounced around such that it seemed we were surrounded by a million of them. Sana freaked out and clung to me the whole way while I tried to navigate the maze on two aching knees and one arm to find the twisty slide of salvation. I had nightmares about it all last night).

You Win or You Cry.

Normally on Remembrance Day, I would try to dig up some bit of Canadian military history to use for the purposes of making some sanctimonious point about the horrors of war and/or the callowness of the politicians who pursue it.* Maybe later. At the moment, I'm on day one of three on my own with Sana, while Amynah is out of town with Inara. Neither Sana nor I are feeling well at the moment, so I will be sacking out early. However, I couldn't resist sharing further photoshop foolishness.

* I'm thinking either the behind-the-scenes diplomatic machinations that set the only Nazi war criminal in Canadian custody free, or the 19th century crusade against an Islamic insurgent in the Sudan that saw Canadian civilian volunteers dying for less than nothing in Egypt. Votes?

This is what I Ment

I appear to have developed a habit of inventing holidays. Those who know me on Facebook are probably already aware of "Mark Reynolds Awareness Month," in which I make up facts about myself and post one every day for the month of September (a sample: Mark Reynolds has the power to marry people with his mind.")

My latest is "Ment." I have lunch with various colleagues and floor-neighbours of Amynah's - unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Type-A personalities. A few days ago, I was eating with a crew of women that had two PhDs completed, two PhDs in progress and three marathons completed between them (although, that's really two marathons and two half-marathons).

Everyone needs a running coach

For some reason the subject of Lent came up - one of the girls had, despite not being Christian, given up sugar for the last Lent. This led to a discussion of other diets, fasts and personal sacrifices we had made.

Being the type who takes great pleasure in undermining the decisions of others when they make me feel bad about MY decisions or lack-thereof, I pointed out that giving up something you like is much easier than forcing yourself to do something you hate. At that point, I had one of those flashes of personal insight I have learned to dread.

"Of course, it's not like I've ever really given up anything I like. I don't even know what I would give up," I said.

"Peanut butter!" said Amynah, sending a chill to my soul.

Now, I am not hooked on peanut butter, by any stretch.* But it is my go-to thing to make my breakfast carbohydrates palatable, and I will often rely on it when I don't feel like cooking. To put that in context, I feel like cooking maybe twice a year.

All right, challenge accepted. Only, I am contrary, and so I cannot have Ment (Mark-Lent) be the same length as Lent. Having it be shorter wasn't unacceptable either. And so, I will be abstaining from all peanut products until the New Year.

It gets worse: having somehow talked myself into a peanut diet that I did not want, I then pointed out I still needed the "thing I hated" to make it a fast/self-compelled personal growth that would be acceptable to the standards that I was quite happy to hypocritically apply to other people.

There were ridiculous and strict rules attached to this. The "thing I hate" has to be something from which I do not derive a benefit that I care about, and is far outside my comfort zone (i.e. reading classic novels instead of spy novels does not count, writing more does not count). Anything that would benefit me professionally or financially was also out. Whatever this was, it had to be as pointless as it was unpleasant.

Yeah. So now I'm getting up at 6 AM, three times a week, and running. Dear Lord, I hate running. If God/evolution had intended us to run, God/Evolution would not have given us the ability to throw spears at the things we were running from.

The problem with this is that the human mind rationalizes: as such, I am already turning what was supposed to be character-building suffering for its own sake (like self-flagellation or a hair-shirt) into a health crusade, and my peanut-butter fast into a semi-diet in which I've cut out most snacking and desserts.

I worry, if this trend continues, that I'll be one of those spandex clad health nuts measuring out their days according to their mileage and caloric inputs, or that I'll have to find something even more pointless and painful to make up the second part of Ment. Where does one buy a hair-shirt anyway?

 * Anyone who knows about the several hundred dollars that were spent shipping peanut butter to Strasbourg is encouraged to not talk about that right now.

Older and smarter, but not quite as mature, as a two year old

Guess who finally sprung for Photoshop? Guess who isn't very good at it?

I don't work on Fridays, and last week Amynah was invited to give a lecture out of town. Thus, I was left with Sana and Inara entirely on my own. Of course, Friday happened to be one of the three days a year it rained in Los Angeles, so we were trapped inside.

I was fully expecting to be overwhelmed, but I went remarkably smoothly.* Sana was respectful of Inara's allotted crying times, and vice versa, so I never had to cope with a simultaneous melt-down, which is of course the closest thing we on Earth have to a self-perpetuating energy source, albeit one too hazardous to human health and hearing to harness for good.

We played games. We ate lunch. I read stories to Sana. Sana "read" stories to Inara. Inara and I caught up on some bonding time while Sana had her nap. It was all very peaceful. The only moment of drama came when I was putting Inara in her swing, and Sana somehow managed to fall headfirst into a toy chest and get stuck. At the sound of her shrieking, I turned to see a black box with legs flailing wildly in the air.

That story has an unhappy ending - my reflexes kicked in before my brain did, and I pulled her out within two seconds instead of grabbing my camera and taking a picture of the hilarious sight with which to embarrass her once she reaches her adolescence, as a responsible parent would have. Fingers crossed for next time!


(In case anyone is curious, the background in the photo above is the view turned 180 degrees from the chapel pictured in this post while Sana took flight in early July, at Inara's "Welcome to Earth" Barbecue).

Don't touch that dial!

I'm probably not the first to observe this, but something I've noticed about parenting is that when it comes to your child's development, you are in a perpetual state of being nostalgic for the easier past ("the past" being anything from 1 week to 1 month ago - one's memory doesn't stretch back further than that) while simultaneously looking forward to an easier future. You can't wait for your baby to learn how to crawl, and once she does, you immediately yearn for the days when you didn't have to inspect the carpet at a micro-level to make sure there's nothing nays and swallowable down there. You eagerly await their first steps, and then freak out because all of the furniture has to be wrapped in cotton lest they bump their heads. And finally, you yearn for them to talk, because then you get a peak into the soul that has been co-habitating with you for the last year or so.

 Sana has been learning to talk these last few months, and for the most part, it's great. She's funny, not too demanding, and as reasonable as a two year old can be - she seems to accept our explanations of why she can't have OBJECT X right now, but she can have it later. Which is great, especially as often, when later comes, she's forgotten she wanted it. The drawback is that while we have been enjoying making ourselves understood, we can no longer pretend that we don't understand what she wants.

 For a long time, the only way Sana was able to express that she wanted to listen to music was to yell "Yay! Yay!!! YAY!!!!!" at increasing volume until we gave her something to Yay about (the cheer became synonymous with music from the weekly live bands at our local farmer's market, where Sana learned that one applauds at the end of a song. She makes no distinction between pre-recorded and live music when according this courtesy). When in the car, "Yay!" means Raffi (a Canadian children's singer). I am deeply, violently, sick of Raffi. So, after a certain point I started interpreting "Yay!" as a request for music in general, not her music in particular. In this way, I was able to avoid having to listen to "The Numbers Rumba" or any songs in which duck sounds were a key element for weeks at a time, bringing them out only when Sana was in a particularly foul mood.

 Unfortunately, Sana somehow learned Raffi's name. God knows, I've never said it, but somehow she must have got on the Internet while I was sleeping and figured it out. So, the other day, she started yelling "Yay!" and I put on some commercial rock station, and she said: "No Dada! No radio! Raffi! No radio! Bad girl Dada!" That was a message as clear as day, sadly, however confusing it was for my gender identity. Feigning ignorance of her wishes cannot save me now.

While I'm desperately trying to turn her into a hipster (Arcade Fire - that's happy music, right? Adele?) I fear that my own car is going to become a roving sanctuary for Justin Bieber, just as I remember my Dad grimacing through my older sister's affection for Michael Jackson and Boy George. The only way to save her is to encourage her to become as near as possible to the pop-culture illiterate I was.

 I'm not much of a car guy, but perhaps someone can tell me - is there any currently manufactured model in which there is no radio or CD player at all?

The Mark-tricks: Resolutions

When I first started this blog, it had a clear purpose: to keep the friends and family I'd left behind in Canada up-to-date on my new life in France. And, incidentally, to make people jealous about all the adventures I was having in France.

In the last few months of my time in Strasbourg, it turned into something else - an attempt, to capture everything I loved about my life there: the history, the architecture, the lifestyle and, of course, our new friends, French or otherwise. If I could write it all down, I thought, at some point in the future I could look at those posts and capture an incredible time in my life.

The flurry of writing I did on this blog reached a fever pitch in the spring and summer of 2006, and then... pretty much stopped. Without Strasbourg and my imminent departure therefrom* to inspire me, all I had to write about was pollution, traffic, and urban sprawl.

What about Sana? I hear you ask: well, of course I had Sana. I also had another site that was paying me to write about her. Not wanting to scoop or repeat myself, I didn't write about my family here. And besides, the world does not need another "Daddy Blogger" (I cringe, even as I type the words) inviting people to fawn over his sensitivity and/or adorable children? Not in my view. The world also It also doesn't need another politics blogger, or entertainment blogger. It does need another Canadian history blogger, but I'm not exactly well placed to write about that from here, am I?

My professional blogging obligations ended with that site. And so I ask myself, why do I care what the world needs? I have been allowing cobwebs to gather on my writing. Why not become a Daddy blogger? There's no better way to record my daughter's lives. Why not write about politics? Everyone likes a good debate, right?

Writing more here might help me keep up on some other goals as well. In the last few weeks I have undertaken to: start exercising three times a week during the only hour available to me (i.e. 6-7 AM). I have undertaken to abstain from the greatest source of joy and spiritual sustenance in my life - yes, I'm quitting peanut butter, in all its forms, until January. I'm going to put in more effort into my freelance writing. AND, I've been harassed into writing a novel. Which is, uh, being thought about very hard.

I might write about those things. I might write about other things. But I need to keep writing about something, lest what skills I have atrophy entirely.

Please bear with me while I get my mojo back.

NEXT UP: Anything! Anything at all! Idunno... Hallowe'en, maybe?

* I was totally expecting spellcheck to tell me I'd made that word up. Apparently I did not.

Hallowe'en post: Yarmouth's first murder

I have erratically tried to post something Hallowe'en themed for each year of this blog (poo-pirates and Canadian cannibals being some of my previous efforts). This year, it didn't occur to me until the waning hours of the in the last continental time zone, so chances are no one will see it until All Saints Day. That said, a good murder tale always warms the heart, right?

In any case, the following is one of my earliest professional writing efforts, for the local paper in my former hometown. There is much in there I would not have written had I done it today, but the story itself was pretty interesting.


Yarmouth murder transfixed province
Mark Reynolds
"Murder, most foul! Murder in its cruellest and most hideous form," screamed the lead sentence of the February 28 1921 dispatch in the Halifax Morning Herald. It was to be the opening line of what would be one of Nova Scotia's most sensational murder trials, a case that would grip the attention of the province for the next six months.
"Yarmouth Captain Murdered as he enters home" was the headline. For a long time - though rumours, speculation and malicious gossip were to spread rapidly throughout the town - that one fact is practically all that was really known.
Captain George Henry Perry, 66, was a retired sea captain who had settled in Yarmouth to make a quieter living as a farming equipment agent. He was apparently well known and respected throughout Yarmouth, and lived with his wife Clara, and Eleanor, one of his four daughters.
The facts of this murder were clear enough. After eating a quiet dinner with his wife, daughter, and her friend Mansfield Ross on Saturday February 26, Captain Perry went out, without saying where he was going. Ross and Eleanor departed shortly thereafter to attend a movie, while Mrs Perry went to her room.
Ross and Eleanor returned at around 11 pm, only to discover Captain Perry was still not home. As it was his habit to smoke his pipe out in his barn, Mrs Perry asked Ross to go out back and check for him there. He discovered Captain Perry just outside the back porch, bleeding from three blows to the head, breathing his last. Ross immediately called a doctor, and summoned two neighbours for help. It was too late however. The doctor arrived at the Argyle street home an hour later, only to see the Captain die, too badly wounded to name his assailant.
It was very clear that this was a murder - the question was who? Robbery was initially suggested, but Captain Perry was not known to carry large amounts of money on him, nor did he have many valuables on his person.
As there was no sign of forced entry, it was determined that the murderer had lain in wait for the Captain in the back porch, which was usually locked.
The Yarmouth police force was not equipped to handle a case like this, and so Detective Horace Kennedy - who was something of a star sleuth with the Halifax police - was immediately sent to Yarmouth to lend his expertise. The Halifax Herald sent F.B. Edwards, one of their senior reporters, whose knowledgeable dispatches were as detailed and well informed as they were colourfully composed.
Upon his arrival four days after the murder, Edwards wrote in the Herald that Yarmouth was awash in rumour, and that, while he cautions that such rumour had no weight as evidence, "it is, nevertheless, interesting as displaying a vivid white light the intimate acquaintance with one's neighbors' affairs."
One's neighbours, in this case, were the Perrys. The inquest into the Captain's death revealed quite a lot of interesting detail that was to come out in trial. Most sensational was the revelation that Captain Perry had claimed that someone was trying to kill him months before his death. He told one friend that someone had left a poisoned cake out for him and that on another occasion, he had discovered that the steps leading to his basement had been loosened in such a way that would cause the unwary to fall to their death.
Much of the gossip centered on the conduct of Eleanor, Clara, and Mansfield Ross upon discovering the Captain. Clara apparently, refused to go out to see her husband, and remained upstairs in her room. Shockingly, Eleanor remained inside doing the dishes while the neighbours tried to help her father.
Most damning of all, Ross told the neighbours that the doctor, when called, had ordered them to leave Captain Perry in the icy yard until he arrived. The doctor later said that he gave no such order.
Another key piece of evidence was the supposed murder weapon - an iron bar which Captain Perry kept in the back porch for the purpose of fixing his shoes. An initial search of the house by Yarmouth police Chief Babin upon his arrival yielded no weapon - yet the next morning it was in a washtub near the back door. It had been apparently put through a fire, as if to cleanse it of all traced of blood or hair.
It came out that the Perry's had been separated some years before, and Mrs Perry returned to the Captain because he had not given her enough of an allowance to survive upon. The Captain's will left everything to his widow, a fact she admitted she knew.
Pressure in Yarmouth was rapidly building on the police to make an arrest quickly. Everyone knew who the guilty party was - or so they thought. When the time came for Captain Perry's funeral, the church was surrounded by onlookers, waiting for the arrival of the widow and her daughter. The two women had to be escorted into the church through a back entrance.
Weeks went by, and there were no developments. Mrs Perry's clothes were sent to Halifax for examination, which yielded no results. Captain Perry's body was exhumed, and examined by a Halifax coroner, but he came to no new conclusions.
Chief Babin tendered his resignation about a month after the murder, and a new man was brought in from Bridgewater. The implication was that new eyes may be able to solve this heinous crime.
Finally, more than six weeks after the murder, on the very day that Babin's resignation was to take effect, he and detective Kennedy arrested Mrs Clara Perry for the murder of her husband. Arrested with her was Mansfield Ross, her daughter's new fiancee, who was charged with being an accessory after the fact. Mrs Perry's trial was to start June 29, 1921.
Because the Yarmouth courthouse had recently been damaged by fire, and because of the intense public interest in the case, a court was set up in a curling rink. The Herald estimated over a thousand people were in attendance.
None of the facts presented at the case were new - only the testimony of William Messente of Montreal, a representative of the company of which Captain Perry was an agent in Yarmouth. He testified that Mrs. Perry had asked him what policy would be due her were "the Captain to pass away suddenly." For its part, the defense made much of a mysterious man who had been seen outside the Perry home at around 8 o'clock the night of the murder
Despite public opinion, Judge Mellish delivered a verdict of not guilty, which elicited "a long drawn out "Ah" over the huge enclosure of the curling rink," as the Herald described it. The judge said that the evidence, though reflecting poorly on Mrs Perry and Ross, was in the final analysis, only circumstantial.
Four days after the trial, a brief item in the Herald announced that Mansfield Ross and Eleanor Perry were married in a small ceremony attended only by family.
Mrs Perry meanwhile, in an oath that would be echoed some seventy five years later by a certain football player, vowed that "She would make it her life endeavor to discover the true slayer of her husband."

It's been too long

Ten signs I've been away from my blog for too long

10) I type in "str" into my browser, and the autocomplete supplies "strollers" rather than "Strasmark."

9) My chops are so rusty, I can't think of anything better than a tacky top ten list to write.

8) Worse, I can't fill it out with another 7.


I have much on my plate these days. But the cobwebs gather, and clever Facebook status updates aren't shaking them off. Watch this space. But not too closely.

Surprise!

I've been so bad at a keeping up on this blog that I managed to produce an entirely new human being without mentioning it here. Though, I guess Amynah's condition was apparently in my last post.

In any case, here is Inara Fatima, born July 20, weighing in at 5 lbs 13 oz, whatever those are. One day I'll do the calculation to determine what she weighs in Canada.

All are well.

Horsehoes and Ham grenades.

_{That is a pig in front of that man. It was delicious, and I apologize for nothing. (Photos by Michelle Cabassut)}

This weekend was our second July 4th weekend in the U.S., but the first for which we were actually invited to anything. Amynah’s co-worker and friend Monique was kind enough to invite us to her extended family’s annual horseshoe tournament and cookout. Monique and her relatives being exceedingly generous people, the invitation was flexible enough to include us, and three friends from France (via San Francisco and Duarte, CA, respectively).

The tournament was in what the French might call “La Californie profonde”, and is known locally as “Inland Empire.” This is not the California of San Francisco or Los Angeles. This is farm country. The tournament was a local tradition, for which a good portion of the town turned out, to bolster the friends and family that returned from all over the country for the occasion.

We weren’t quite sure what to expect out in the white spaces of the map in which Murietta is found, but when we arrived in mid-afternoon, the heat was scorching, the beer was flowing, and the horseshoes were darkening the sky.

I immediately noticed certain things about the locals. While it was not, evidently a law that the womenfolk be blond, if they did choose to be blond, it seemed to be a requirement that the shade of blond they be should blind onlookers if seen in direct sunlight. As for the men, the total acreage of torso covered by shirts was roughly equal to that covered by tattoos. (When I later pointed this out to Amynah she said “Yeah, there was a lot of eye-candy,” as if that is what I had meant).

I had not played horseshoes since I was about seven (a game in which I seem to recall I was allowed to stand 10 feet from the stake instead of the regulation 40), while Michelle, Manu and Qi had never encountered the game at all in their respective home countries of France and China.


_{Qi in competitive form, managing to be undistracted by the man-meat in the background}

Monique kindly let us internationals represent her team, and gave us a quick tutorial. We just as quickly disqualified ourselves with two losses in a row. I managed to score 3 points to my teammate Anna’s 8. I used the same girly-wrists excuse I attempted when shooting guns in Vegas – she used the excuse of being distracted by the shirtless tattooed guy playing next to her. My friend Qi meanwhile, scored 4 points even though she had never heard of the game before, while her teammate Manu – who also had never played before - managed 10.


_{Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when she comes for you?}

While this was going on, Sana was having a grand old time. She inspected the friendly horses and pronounced them dirty, and then freaked out when one breathed on her. She then commandeered a toy push police car which she used as a prop with which to act out her own action movie: leaping into it, riding maniacally for ten feet, dramatically kicking the door open and leaping out as if in pursuit of a bank robber. This was causing great amusement in Monique’s friends and various other people who I’d never seen before that seemed to be taking care of my daughter while Amynah held court in the shade and I watched the games.

We left soon after eating the food, the centerpiece of which was a pig that had been slow-roasted underground and delivered to the picnic area via a backhoe. All in all, it was a highly enjoyable time and we were treated like very welcome, if completely athletically inept guests. I can't help but wonder if we were welcome in part because we were inept: horseshoes is a very serious business out there, and I don't know how we would have been received if we'd been any threat to the locals' dominance. As it is, I was happy to have left with the souvenir t-shirt, though I hope one day to win the first prize belt buckle.

That is, if I’m invited back next year. If it helps my case, I know just the tattoo I want to get in place of my shirt.

It's like, the ultimate, man

I am to athletics what antelopes are to coal mines.

And yet, through some means of mind-control against which I am apparently powerless to resist, Amynah’s lab colleagues have convinced me to join them on a weekly basis as part of a pick-up Ultimate Frisbee league.

It was actually another Canadian who is the driving force behind the games, but that did not stop me from deriding the whole exercise as be-dreadlocked SoCal hippie nonsense. Which, initially, it was.

I’d never played before, so my first few times out I played largely how I approached soccer when I was 8 years old: that is, I took the term “position” very literally. Generally I’d amble over to a promising spot on the field and plant myself there, waiting for someone to throw me the disk, waving at my more ambulatory teammates as they zoomed by hither and thither. Occasionally, one would notice me and loft the disk in my direction, and – if I caught it – I’d throw it to someone else. Sometimes, it even landed somewhere near my target.

It was all very low energy and low passion: the first few games, I didn’t even notice if my team won or lost.

But, eventually, I started getting more confident. I moved a little more, threw a little more, scored a little more…. cared a little more. I even earned myself a nick-name of which I am moderately proud (Marktopus – I’m apparently really irritating on defense. It's much better than "Ladypants," which is the nickname of the guy who gave it to me).



I realized that I had gone from humouring the “hippies” to being “an Ultimate player” when I actually bought a new pair of sneakers in which to play, as my old ones were destroying my knees. I started coming home and boring Amynah with tales of my heroic exploits (a flying behind the head catch which I made while colliding with another player in mid-air, despite which I stuck the landing while he crashed around my heels. It was awesome). Our games are now competitive enough that we scared off one of our newer players, who thought we were too rough (if you don't want your glasses knocked off kid, don't put your face between Monique's elbow and the ground).

All of this is going to come to an end – or at least, a long hiatus – once the new baby comes along (have I mentioned that on this blog yet?) but in the interim, I’m getting good exercise, discovering a competitive streak I never knew I had, and apparently becoming just a little bit Californian.

I think I’d look ok in tie-dye, don’t you?

Death Valley IV: Surprise!

When planning our trip, Jon and I had intended that our crowning achievement of our sojourn in Death Valley would be at two nights backcountry camping, preferably two. Our delay to pump hot lead into (or rather, in the general vicinity of) paper targets at a gun range in Vegas rather threw off our schedule, so we were left with only one night.

We followed Jay Stone, Death Valley Park Ranger’s advice and decided to do our greenhorn best to make it in and out of Surprise Canyon, the opening to which was actually outside the park on Bureau of Lands Management territory. We would drive up an old mining access road, park the car, and hike six miles into the Panamint Mountains, and hopefully make camp in the ruins of Panamint City, a gold mining ghost town.

Sounds simple, right? Surprise! It was not.

First, getting to the trailhead required driving up 3 miles of what was marked as a road on the map, but was a seemingly unending series of three-foot craters guarded by menacing rings of razor-sharp stones. I’m fairly certain some of those craters were miniature ecosystems hosting Rock Monsters, as every once in a while one would scrape their prettified claws along the chassis of my poor Civic, or terrify us all by suddenly punching the muffler in their rage at having been disturbed.

After whiteknuckling our way though what seemed like an eternity of shrieking, banging metal, we found ourselves at the trailhead, marked by an abandoned and fire-destroyed mill. Since we were only out for one night, we agreed to lighten our pack of absolutely everything that we could, leaving it in the car. Sadly, this included my camera, which had died the day before on the sand dunes.

There were a few things that we had read about Surprise Canyon that did not, apparently, register with us. It was located in the Panamint Mountains, for instance. It apparently boasted several springs. It lead to the Surprise Pass.

All of that sounds pretty innocuous, unless the logic part of your brain is working. If a canyon is in a mountain range, and leads to a pass, that means there will be hills – large ones, much like mountains - and they will trend in the up direction, requiring you to climb.

The presence of springs meant water, of course, but for some reason Jon and I both had the frankly bizarre idea, probably imprinted on our youthful brains by Road Runner cartoons, that these springs would behave something like city fountains: the water would be squirting merrily into the air, landing in a pool or something, in which it would stay. That is not how springs work: while you are working your way up the mountain, the water will be making its way down, burbling and chortling at you, the idiot in wet boots and carrying 8-kilos of bottled water on his back.


_{Natural Bridge Canyon, not Surprise Canyon}

Within 20 minutes or so of starting our hike, we were confronted by our first obstacle: a small waterfall, about six feet high. Not impossible to climb, but slippery and not offering much of a handhold. The real challenge had been carved by some condescending wag across the rock face: “There is no limit to human stupidity.” Jon and I looked at each other. “Oh yeah? We’ll show you the limits of human stupidity, buddy.” We then proceeded to do so by scrambling up a waterfall rather than investigating for the 10 seconds it would have taken us to find the perfectly servicable footpath going around it.

Onward we hiked. Because the canyon had hosted many a mining operation over the years, and those mining operations were, from time to time, wiped out in cataclysmic flashfloods, there was some interesting debris along the way. We passed a couple of heavy trucks modified to serve some inscrutable ends of heavy industry, and lunched by a rusted out, bullet ridden pick-up dating from the late 60s, I think. Near that were the gnawed over remains of one of the canyon’s wild burros. What had gnawed it, I do not know, and we did not linger to find out.

Another unsurprising surprise of Surprise Canyon was how lush it was: it was positively choked with vegetation in the early going, thanks to the aforementioned springs. It was full of what I assume were Pinyon trees, sagebrush and cacti. None of them were tall enough to provide any shade, but they did provide plenty of resistance as we made our way higher.

Did I say higher? Because I didn’t realize it at the time. The thing about climbing a canyon is you lose your perspective: you’re walking up a giant hallway, keeping your eyes on the step in front of you. We only realized that we’d been climbing when we cleared the vegetation level and looked back, only to realize we were halfway up a mountain range (again, what did we think hiking in the mountains would lead to if not massive elevation gains?)

In any case, due to a late start caused a failed attempt to buy batteries in a ghost town in the Valley (they had some, but they were all dead. Ha! Ghost town… dead batteries… hey! Come back!) it was now approaching sunset and preliminary scouting further up the canyon revealed no Panamint City within a ten minute walk. And we were tired. And it was hot. So, we set up our tent next to what we later figured must have been a trash dump for a later mining camp (it boasted a large pile of rusty cans and a smashed television).


_{This photo is near Golden Canyon, not Surprise Canyon}

Now, here is the real wonder of this trip. Men the world over are gearheads – we’re just gearheads about different things. Some of us love cameras, some cars, some tools. My friends Jon is a gearhead for camping stuff. When we were younger, his gear fixation served him well; he always had spacious, superlight tents, sleeping bags that could be compressed to fit into a woman’s change purse, a backpack of such unfathomable capaciousness that I am convinced that Jimmy Hoffa may yet be found in it.

Now Jonathan has a family. A lovely, hardy, adventuresome family, but a family nonetheless, and thus containing members with interests and ideas of their own, and whose interests and ideas are not as unquestioningly fond of outdoor life as is Jon. Given that Jon wants to share his passion with his family, he tries to make camping as comfortable as possible for them. He has therefore upgraded from a set of battered tin pots like what I use, into a fully equipped camp kitchen: boasting a full set of cutlery, several pots and pans, A PORTABLE KITCHEN SINK, and a cutting board.

Back at the car, while I was jettisoning the unneeded weight of my spare under-roos, Jon was bus rifling through his pack. I thought he was ridding himself of his superfluous crockery, but no – he quite literally, brought everything but the kitchen sink. Meaning that as we were preparing the only dinner we’d brought: canned beans, Jon looked sadly at his kitchen kit and observed “I guess I didn’t have to bring the cutting board, did I?” Given as how we had absolutely nothing to cut, no. Of course, this snarky observation is coming from a guy who insisted on wearing his fancy hunting knife on his belt for the entire time, even though the only time it ever came out of its sheath was when it snagged on a cactus (it's a nice knife, and I didn't want to get it dirty).

We watched the sun set in the west, painting the canyon walls every hue between gold and red, until night marched up the ravine and overcame us. Exhausted, counted the stars, and waited for a moon that never appeared, probably because it was afraid of being crushed under the stars, of which there are approximately 2.5 billion more visible to the naked eye in Surprise Canyon than elsewhere. We heard animals of some sort – burros maybe, maybe coyotes, it didn’t matter. We’d done Death Valley. Surprise!