Jiggety-Jig

Ah, home. I love my apartment. I love its crooked floors and bright white bathroom. I love the layout and my furniture and my lamps. I love that I can open a drawer and find things without looking. I love having all my music.

Simmi took wonderful care of my house and my cat when I was gone. It's been fun to do the little rearranges: colander goes here, green pottery dishes go back here. She left some wicked kamut cake for my eating pleasure.

The trip was a rousing success. I loved the cabin. It's quite something to wake up, pull the curtain back and watch the waves. I read a mystery and a half, got a good start on my next knitting project.

Chris and I went to a burlesque show in Montreal. It was really quite up and down. Lots of wardrobe problems. If you're going to be taking your corset off, make sure that you can actually do that without it jamming. Watching someone struggle with their corset is not sexy. But we really went to see her friend Stephen Lawson, who did a bit as Gigi L'Amour. On the way to the show, I lamented the fact that I'd forgotten my camera. "Don't worry," Chris said, "the image will be burned into your brain." He came out on stage wearing a two-foot tall headdress made of plastic greenery, with huge fake eyelashes. He had bunches of fake grapes at his ankles and over his crotch, shaking suggestively. At the end of his lip synch to Yma Sumach's Gopher Mambo, he whipped his caftan off to show us his three breasts. It was fucking brilliant. He and his partner have a website full of entertaining things: 2boys.tv Something Blue is pretty funny. The next day, we dropped by and spent a couple of hours drinking coffee with Aaron and listening to his great stories.

Halifax seems to have lost some of its hold on me. Maybe I'm more settled in Ottawa than the last time I went to the 'fax. It was nice to be there, but I didn't have that nostalgic sense of coming home that I'd had on all my other trips. Then I was kind of nostalgic for the nostalgia.

But then I was coming home to the people I love: Shelley, Steve, Mitch, the Grs + twins (they're so big! so adorable!), I've got Chris here for another week. That's what makes home home.

A surprise date with the Great Dater certainly wiped out any post-trip ennui that may have been tempted to bubble up. It was, however, very funny to spend the first night in my home town away from my actual home.