4:00am insomnia blogging
July 19, 2011
There is a smell being drawn in from outside by the bedroom window fan, a fresh and not-fresh, green brown slimy smell, like algae. Nerve endings buzz, high on cough syrup, and restless legs twist in the bed but don’t want to stand up and walk around, either. This is (hope) the last of several risings, sitting upright in the dark to suck on cough lozenges. The stomach rebels at the sickly sweetness of those, but the throat demands them. In the late afternoon the heat wave gave way to torrents of rain then curled in close again, holding that moisture, keeping it warm so that the only relief comes from stretching out bare feverish feet in front of a fan that sucks great algae stinking breaths from the hot wet outside. I feel like I’m living in the South again, where damp settles into houses and never goes away and things slowly rot and you don’t even notice the scent of mould in sheets, in clothes, in hair, in everything until you go away somewhere and open up your suitcase and the stench hits you and you wonder, is that what my life smells like?
It almost wouldn’t be a surprise at all to wake up and find the house overgrown with kudzu, like in a story. Or a dream.
Posted by jodi on July 19, 2011 at 3.29am
i used to live here
July 10, 2011
These photos of every house I’ve lived in have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, waiting to be made into a page on this site called “every house I’ve lived in”. Which page is clearly never going to get itself made. So, here begins a new level of navel gazing at jodi’s weblog. Enjoy!
166 Columbia Drive, Huron Park, Ontario: December 1971 to spring (or early summer) 1975. I was an only child in this two bedroom 1.5 storey house, from which we moved for more spacious digs when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. Above is how the house looked in 2006 with an ugly new wood porch and beige vinyl siding. When I was a baby the house had light blue slate siding and the wartime housing standard issue concrete block porch with fat iron railings, painted black, as seen in this photo from 1973:
scanned from negatives, Kodak Safety Film
Fun fact about this house: maybe four or five years after we had moved to a larger house up the street, when I was about six or seven, there was a late night fire in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept as a toddler. I’m going to guess it happened around Easter because my memory of the fire is all tangled up with that of some chocolate bunnies that were so tall my parents had to move a shelf up in the fridge just to get them in. Anyway. My mom woke me in the night and said she had something to show me, and she took me down to the back porch and pointed across the back field where we could see the sloped roof of my former bedroom engulfed in flames. Then she told me that the fire might have started because of all the socks I used to shove down the heating registers when I was little, and “so you shouldn’t do that here, because we want to live in this house for a long time”.
I didn’t find out until I was around twelve that the fire was actually started by grow lights in a weed closet.
In my mom’s defense, she was very, very young, probably about 24, and she has no memory of saying anything like that to me, and I have a vivid imagination and also some other memories from around the same time of walking up a tree-lined lane on what looks like an old-timey Southern plantation, hand in hand with two women in long dresses and big floppy hats, sweating through my pyjamas from the heat. And I’m fairly certain that never happened.
Here’s what we drove when we lived at 166 Columbia. This was after the white VW bus had bitten the dust, and before the green Austin Mini. My parents always had the cool tastes in imported motorcars.
scanned from negatives, Kodacolor X
Posted by jodi on July 10, 2011 at 9.22am
me at seventeen
June 24, 2011
1. Silver foil abstract paint swoosh wallpaper
2. OZZY
3. Home cut mullet
4. White tank top (4.1 no bra)
5. Peter Frampton drawing, laminated
6. Red eye
There is not one thing not to love about this picture. Me at seventeen = amazing, y’all.
Scanned from old 110 film negatives. Taken with a ten dollar camera of unknown origin, but I remember that it had a quarter, a penny and a four-leaf clover scotch taped to the outside of it, and that I took it everywhere. Hard to believe there was a time when I only had one camera in my purse.
Posted by jodi on June 24, 2011 at 7.28pm
workout update
March 21, 2011
Seriously, this is all about my workout, so feel free to skip it if you just don’t give a rat’s arse. I’m not offended.
Since our time in Boot Camp ended at the end of January, Peter and I have been working out together 5 mornings a week, using a routine and schedule that Peter put together to see him through from Boot Camp to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. At which time he begins to set the alarm at 7:00 instead of 6:00 (shift your schedule instead of your body; avoid the pain of DST lag! It works!), ride his bike to work and go to the gym in the evenings, leaving me on my own in the morning. In order to stay motivated without a workout buddy, I need a finite goal to focus on, one where I get some kind of cookie at the end (even if the cookie is just the knowledge that I achieved a goal).
I also have another goal, although it’s starting to look like a fairly modest one:
And that goal is to be able to run all the way around that lake up there, without stopping, by August.
I’ve never been much of a runner; my ankles roll over easily and beside, I’m totally lazy, y’all. But last August when Pennsictime rolled around I was two months into a three month stint with a personal trainer, and I didn’t want to lose all that I’d gained (or gain back what I’d lost, har-de-har). Marco (formerly of Refine Fitness, our neighbourhood gym) gave me a couple of workout routines to do in camp, and Peter and I ran around the lake first thing in the morning before getting down to it. Now, for real runners this lake is a piece of cake, and I’m anticipating that getting around it once is only going to take around seven minutes (seriously, it’s tiny) but last year I couldn’t even make it a third of the way (for Pennsic folks, that’s from Wulf Den to Pandora’s Box) without stopping for a breather. Yeah, seriously out of shape.
So today I started the Couch to 5K programme, with the help of the lovely free podcast from the NHS. The plan was actually to start C25K and the One Hundred Push Ups programme at the same time, as the two together seem doable in a single workout, but I forgot to do the pushups test ahead of time (early fail!). So this week I’ll be working C25K into my regular 5 morning workouts, and starting next week the official plan will be thus:
Monday, Wednesday and Friday: Couch to 5K on the treadmill at the gym, then upstairs to do the 100 Pushups training, after which I probably won’t bother with any cooldown beyond stretching
Tuesday and Thursday: 20 minutes cardio on the bike or cross trainer, one of my 5 weight routines, then 10 minutes cooldown on the treadmill
Saturday: optional, probably light cardio and once through the weight machines circuit
Sunday: day off.
The 5 weight routines are the ones Peter and I have been doing together since February, which I’ll talk about in more detail in my week-end recaps (because this here is already enough reading about something that interests only me, am I right?). There’s one kettlebells routine, two that use mostly body weight working a mix of upper and lower body, a routine that’s mostly abdominals, and the Day 5 Grab Bag, which is where I just pick a half dozen or so free weight exercises, whatever I feel like doing (it usually involves those wide grip pulldowns and barbell rows, which are my all time faves). I’ll also be working on raising my weights, so I’ll be recording the weight here to track my progress.
Couch to 5K is a 9-week programme, 100 Pushups is 6 weeks; I expect it’ll take me longer than the six weeks to get to 100 pushups, and Week 1 of that will be starting when I’m already on Week 2 of C25K. So this plan should see me through the next nine weeks before I need to come up with another goal and another plan. And come Pennsic I’ll be running around that lake 3 times without stopping, just watch.
I’d like to insert a photo of rippling quads here, but my quads have a soft blanket of fat over them that’s quite becoming, really, but pretty much hides all muscular definition away from view. So instead, because a blog post loves a picture, here’s one of that lovely lake (which I may or may not have posted before) Shot with the Holga, hacked with foam and rubberbands to hold 35mm film.
again, for Pennsic people, this is from the back of House Redhair (across from Wulf Den), gazing across at an angle to Casa Barducci. Whoa, nerdy enough yet?
Posted by jodi on March 21, 2011 at 3.06pm
like a record, baby
January 30, 2011
New tattoos: shoulder (me) and inner forearm (Peter). Slightly different red inks but otherwise the same. Inked by Qpaukl Kimmerly at rEvolution gallery + studio, Kingsville, Ontario.
Posted by jodi on January 30, 2011 at 9.18am
drop the needle
January 29, 2011
Peter and I are getting matching tattoos today!
Posted by jodi on January 29, 2011 at 8.11am
power
January 3, 2011
I’ve been reluctant to write about my workouts here even though they have dominated much of the last eight months of my life. It’s hard to say exactly why, but it’s related to an offhand remark that I made a year ago regarding buffet restaurants and Manifest Destiny, a remark that I was asked to clarify and which I fully intended to clarify but THEN! I became terrified that maybe anything I tried to say on the matter would be misconstrued as fat hatred (and a fat hater I am most definitely NOT) and I’m still trying to figure out how to say what I want to say about the buffet thing that has nothing to do with social class or obesity or hating on Americans without it being mistaken for those things because that’s what people think of when they hear the word “buffet”, and it’s now well after anyone who might have cared a little has stopped. Caring, that is.
So when I signed up for three months with a personal trainer last summer, I didn’t mention it here because of the racks of “women’s fitness” magazines at the grocery store whose cover stories are not about muscles and about bone density but about flat abs! and bikini bodies! and losing twenty pounds in two weeks! (like there’s any real way to do that which doesn’t involve lopping off one’s leg). I didn’t mention it because of the way that people but mostly the women people, at parties, feel obligated to hover around the sugary treats saying oh, I shouldn’t eat that, it’ll go to my hips/belly/ass/wherever, oh I want it but I shouldn’t, as if this ritual is somehow required before one shuts up and either eats the thing or doesn’t. I didn’t mention it because of the way that one can’t say anything about one’s body without prompting people to say, oh but you’re not fat like fat is some kind of diseased state or moral failing instead of just a word for something that is part of our bodies that we need to have in order to live. I didn’t mention it because people always assume, like just today I was on the phone with someone talking about my workouts and that someone said “I never would have thought someone like you needed to lose weight” like there couldn’t possibly be any other motivation for someone like me (someone female?) to work out.
Well, fuck all that.
I still don’t really know what to say about it, except for this: I want to be powerful. I want my body to be able to do amazing things. I want to repair some of the damage to my bone density that I can only imagine I must have done in twenty five years of consuming practically no calcium rich foods. I want to sleep well at night and have energy for the day and I want to have a healthier heart than any of my grandparents had and I want to shovel my own driveway when I’m eighty and I want to slay vampires and I want to be an ass kicking sweaty bundle of POWER. That’s all.
Posted by jodi on January 3, 2011 at 8.44pm
eryngium (sea holly)
December 15, 2010
A little early birthday gift to myself. I’ll now spend the rest of my life telling people no, it’s not a scotch thistle. Don’t worry, it’s not crooked, I’m just holding my arm funny.
Drawn by me, inked by qpaukl kimmerly at rEvolution gallery + studio in beautiful downtown Kingsville, Ontario.
Posted by jodi on December 15, 2010 at 11.40am
watch this space
December 14, 2010
I only just realized this morning that my desire to cross the line between “person with tattoos” and “heavily tattoed person” is a symptom of the same horror vacui that dictates that my prints must be buried under a stifling amount of imagery, that my dining room plate rail must overflow with tchotchkes, that the paper, fabric, yarn and drawing materials in my home studio must be visible at all times, that my wardrobe be a ragtag mess of colourful layers. Possibly also the same instinct that has me lugging around a purse containing three notebooks, a pencil case full of markers, anywhere from four to eight cameras at a time, two or more knitting projects. . .
Heading to Kingsville today to fill up some more empty space.
Posted by jodi on December 14, 2010 at 9.40am
photo
November 30, 2010
After working at Artcite all day I look like I’ve been in a Russian prison.
Posted by jodi on November 30, 2010 at 9.56pm
