legstravaganza.

these arrived in an unmarked package from winnipeg with a bunch of other stockings, some pms tea, a package of ancient cigarettes, some pins and other things.

i have my guesses as to the culprit.

sneak peek from the deep.

here is a little sneak peek from the next two commissioned artist button sets due out next week. the picture's a bit hazy, but i hope this adds to the dense and murky themes of the sets.

by the way, i am being pointedly evasive about the name of the artist. that's because this is a test. the first person to name the artist responsible for this work, gets a set from each collection.

ready, set, go!

la belle provence.

toronto to montreal with a bunch of letters.

...i'll tell you why later.

bottles and jars.

pictures here are some tiny bottles that i have prepared for a mysterious future purpose. i will give you a hint: it has to do with crafts, small towns, and hotel canzine.

today (and most days lately) was mired in relatively boring but very important computer work. i did get to make it out of the apartment once, though - bank (stupid), post office, salvation army (a distraction). on the way out into the world, i did manage to stop into coriander girl - parkdale's newest (and only?) fancy flower shop. i had noticed it while it was in the works but just managed to shove my nose in the door yesterday. what can i say? i am a sucker for window orchids. while peering at them yesterday, i discovered that the shop is owned by alison - a lady i had met through the workroom.

today i was able to take a better look inside (my thursday babysitting charge had his own needs yesterday that didn't include flowers). i was happy to discover that alison had a huge jar of lavender for sale by the scoop, too. i have been meaning to make sachets to combat my constant moth scourge but didn't manage to grow lavender this year. what's better - i live right around the corner so i can bring my own jars in for filling! she'd probably be nice enough to scoop into your jars, too.

i have to say, my preconceptions of the nouveau parkdale fancy flower shop were challenged by alison's business choices. pre-made bouquets are $20 and she offers mini-bouquets for $3-$5. they make use of small cast-offs from the bigger bouquets and put forward more affordable shots of life and colour for budget-constrained neighbourhood homes.

so here we have it - out urban village's first florist. go stop in.

mythbusters.

nice try, vandal. willy and i call bull-oney on you.

i just left him there. it's almost a day later and he is still waiting for his bacon.

improbabilities on the highways of wisconsin.

who knew as we awoke in our luxurious madison side-of-the-highway motel room what a string of unlikely events lay between us and our destination of minneapolis. not us. and, probably, not you.

we took some time getting organized, finishing some little jobs and piecing the car contents back together like a tetris game. then we hit the road - a new scenic byway i had never taken before. on faythe's advice, we had planned out some roadside programming on the way to minneapolis (i am performing there, but that is another story/life of mine). wisconsin, it would seem, is full of roadside extravagances that we have never experienced. this, in spite of the fact that i have been through this whole corridor numerous times. but i used to be younger and i would drive endlessly without stopping. now, in my advancing years, i bother to look at things if only to give my aching back a break from the car.

sadly, the house on the rock did not figure into our plans although it was on the route. the collections there sounds thrilling but it apparently merits an entire day's exploration. it is also slicker (read: pricier) than our current mothy purses can allow. we managed to find plenty of cheap/free roadside mania to partake in, nonetheless.

on faythe's suggestion, we hunted down dr. evermor's forevertron, an entire art park of massive metal sculputres centred around the forevertron, a guinness book record-holding scrap sculpture of immense size. we wandered around the opening to the park, snapping photos and marveling.

then things got weird. as walked towards the entrance to the park proper a couple of other visitors came out and told us to take as many pictures as we could as fast as we could because the entire park was being shut down by "the government." when we tried to enter to snap said hasty photos we were turned away by a lady who said she ran the place. she was flanked by police officers and seemed quite demanding about our departure. while leaving, the other tourists informed us that a live bomb had been discovered among either the sculptures or materials on site and that officials were scouring the place for contaminants of some kind. one of these visitors also told us that a ufo sculpture on site was made out of a flammable metal. weird.

we took a few more pictures around the front of the space before being shooed out by the lady who worked there. this lady confirmed some of the rumours. a live bomb had apparently been discovered there by some visitors a couple of weeks ago and all sorts of police, government and health officials had descended on the place since. it just so happens we had arrived at a critical moment when the decision to close the park had come down.

"dr. evermor's negligence with materials," she said. "i've got to go eat at the welfare...just kidding."

so we left.

onwards towards baraboo. we had seen signs for a circus museum but got distracted by a saint vincent depaul before we even got there. we have been going pretty nuts with thrifts over the past few days. there is a big list of things to pick up and even more things by which to be distracted. but my mind was entirely blown by this discovery:

no big deal, right? just some weird tacky wall thing, right? only, if you look carefully, you will note that is it a souvenir from bruno, saskatchewan! possibly, you might remember our visit there last year. as far as we know, there is little in bruno other than 500 people, all citizens, tyler, serena (sometimes), a religious school, a grain elevator and the usual trappings of a rural town (grocery, bar, pharmacy, bank, insurance, senior's centre...) i mean, it's not nothing. it's a fantastic place. but it's a tiny place, and one that we have a slim but tenacious connection to. and to find such a strange souvenir of it here, in wisconsin. and what are we even doing here, in this small off-the-freeway place? and why did we stop to go to this particular shop? we drank more water and hoped we weren't hallucinating.

we plan on passing through bruno later in this trip so we have to wrestle with the final home of this object until then. we both kind of want to cling to it as a reminder of the difference between impossibility and improbability (a clear difference when living out in the world as we are). but possibly it deserves to be brought back home. tyler and serena, will you cry if we don't leave this with you? let's work it out. we are troubled and dehydrated.

after all of this excitement and confusion, the circus museum seemed pointless. and our drive through the wisconsin dells was entirely too overwhelming to digest. my god, that place is incredible. this is about as much of it as we could actually absorb in our saturated states:

...and there is so much more where that came from. maybe on the way back (with any luck). i kind of want to sleep in an elephant's trunk, or under a water slide, or in an upside down house. why didn't i listen to dr. dave when he told me to go here years ago?

now onward into minnesota to find graham. wisconsin, you have more than piqued our curiosity; you have challenged its limits.

security found (on late night south-bound roncesvalles streetcar).

last night, as we were coming home from a grand night out at ghost jail theatre (the sweetie pie brother is visiting from vancouver and i am trying to impress him with worldly delights), i discovered a very special something on the floor of a streetcar. it was a slightly crushed security envelope button. what kismet. i guess the world is finite and circular after all. i get excited enough when i see buttons i made on the backpacks of strangers but to have one returned to me by the fates...well, it was just too much.

so i am having a two-part contest to celebrate.

part one - if you think you lost this on the king/roncesvalles car on sunday, march 29th, 2009, then i will return it to you.

part two - if you want to win a care package of mysterious sweetie pie goods, then leave a comment under this post. and if you want a second entry, then say something nice about me on your own blog (you will have to leave a link in another comment here to get a second entry). entries must be posted by midnight (est) on friday, april 3. yup, this is a quicky.

after all, i have to return the favour to the gods of stuff and chaos. i can feel karmic debt looming over me as i type.

mysteries of the universe revealed (they mostly have to do with clothes).

photo of iron cobra with ken farrell by skye regan

above is a picture from the show graham and i hosted a few weeks back - the one where i wore the borrowed dress from honest threads. i was hoping to be able to report more interesting findings regarding my experience of trying to be someone else by wearing their clothes. really, though, i think i just discovered that i must be bigger than anyone who wears this dress in a comfortable manner. i am very tall, so the dress' waistline hit me in the bottom of the ribs. the sensation of being squeezed from all sides really eclipsed any subtler experiences that may have been offered me in this borrowed gear. that said, i did feel much more myself when i returned to my plaid a-line skirt and turtle neck sweater in the show's second half (about four hours into the epic line-up and seven hours into wearing the dress). as a curious side note, the dress was bruisingly tight but the cardigan was massive.

all this brings me to some actual points of interest regarding my evening's attire. when i went to return the items to honest threads, i did, indeed, find information about them on the wall. the reason we had missed it in the first place is that these articles had be part of another artist's piece and were thus photographed and written about as part of something bigger. actually, they seemed to be part of two interrelated projects by toronto artist stephanie cormier. the series, called the goodwill and salvation project, consisted of purchasing garments from thrift stores, embroidering inspirational sayings into their seams and then donating them back to the stores (or returning them). the dress i borrowed was kept (and presumably worn) by her because the embroidery was visible. the cardigan, on the other hand, seemed to be part of an offshoot project. it has a name sewn into the collar (a feature that drew me to it, actually). miss cormier would set pieces with names in them aside in an attempt to research and/or track down the former owners. i know that the embroidered dresses were photographed by her in organic heaps and forms but know very little about the clothing genealogy project and where/if it terminated. i would be very interested to find out, though, as both of these undertakings sparked just as much curiosity in me as the garments i was so drawn to. i see she also contributed to the portable library project, so if anyone has any big scoops on her or these project, feel free to pass them along. it felt like such a treasure hunt to find as much as i have. it also feels like a hunt similar to the one she is on in finding former clothing owners. miss cormier, did you ever fathom that this intrigue would extend in two directions? maybe you did.

all roads lead to bruno.

today our most gracious hosts treated us to a full day of rural tourism. really, we felt profoundly spoiled. i felt particularly treated, because i got to take a day off driving while tyler drove us around to see the sites. endless vistas aside, there are a surprising number of sites. oh, and speaking of driving - this is what boris' headlights looked like by daylight after driving in last night:



boris is the name of our car. he has probably earned a whole blog post, actually, but we can save that for a later date. maybe when we are in boring old vancouver not action-packed bruno...which gets us back to the story at hand.



we started off with a walking tour of bruno, a town that has all a town could need - post office, old-timey hoosgau, convent and western canada's largest dwarf sour cherry orchard. we also ended up getting a tour of the old hardware store (now the home of the family that runs the adjoining grocery) after inquiring about the amazing tin ceilings. as it turns out, these ceilings are in a whole row of buildings on main street. we noticed them in the drug store, too.





after our walk-around, we collected ourselves and then got in the trunk to go visit some important sites in the vicinity on the way to collect on a dinner/visit invitation from tyler's cousin-in-law, wendell.

first we went to a nearby ghost town (or near ghost town - people still live in farm houses there but the town part has been abandoned) called peterson. it seems there are a lot of places like this in rural saskatchewan; small towns that were able to support a few businesses when the grain trade was a little stronger and it was a little harder to get to the bigger towns and visit their growing number of big box stores.





in peterson, tyler also decided to go look in the windows of some old abandoned buildings on main street and then found a wood tick on his neck. more on that later.



after peterson, we went to look at the sawhill buffalo ranch - a ranch built on what used to be some sort of cold war radar base. apparently, the institutional buildings in the distance used to have big white spheres attached to their tops (there were also spheres scattered about the property), which made for quite a site. tyler told us that the ranch owner doesn't allow random people to come look around and take pictures anymore (and who can blame him? it's his home.) tyler also said that the rancher lives in the old curling rink of the base, it being one of the most stable and permanent buildings on the property. it is good to know that the army had their priorities in place when developing bases. i think i mean that honestly.

after that, we made our way to dana, a small hamlet not too far from bruno where serena and tyler first lived when they decided to make the leap from vancouver to saskatchewan. tyler's cousin-in-law (or just cousin; i'm not sure how that works), was pivotal in all of this. it was at wendell's wedding that tyler first visited dana and wendell let tyler and serena stay in his house when they first came out to the prairie.



this is wendell's son, john. he has some sick skateboard moves.



we also discovered that wendell makes little forms out of a substance called orgonite (related to the orgone boxes that william s. burroughs was so fond of sitting in). i had never heard of this wild invention before but it involves taking steel wool, metal shavings, crystals, wire and other whathaveyous and casting them all into molded resin. allegedly, these conglomerates can cleanse a space of bad energy. if you make them big enough, you can also blast a hole through overhead clouds and chem trails from airplanes. or so i am told. we have yet to try any experiments of our own. although serena and i did point these at our foreheads when nobody else was around. if wendell ever makes a new batch of these guys, they will be available at all citizens.

we ended our big day out with a trip to the mysterious totsky overpass. like peterson, totsky is another of these ubiquitous saskatchewan towns-that-aren't. only totsky really isn't there anymore. like at all. well, with the exception of this big concrete overpass that goes over nothing and connects with no roads.



of course, its non-existence doesn't stop totsky from appearing in driving directions, but that's another story. tyler says he's been asking around about the source of this structure and nobody seems to know anything. it seems to have run over train tracks, but this is also a place where train tracks cross the road even in towns. a google search for totsky only yielded one birth record from 1908. from what we could discern at our visit, it seems the overpass is currently being used by grad classes as a place to burn piles of wooden palettes. but it must have had a grander purpose at some point. if you know what that grander purpose was, please let us know.



oh yeah, and when we got home in the evening, tyler discovered he was covered in wood ticks (presumably picked up in peterson). it was a little creepifying and kept me eyeing my moles sideways all night. aitor was the big man and managed to extract the most attached one from tyler's leg. no more spelunking in abandoned buildings for us.