After one too many “comments” from my Lovely Wife, I buckled down and got my haircut this weekend. I’ll let you be the judge as to whether it looks better now.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Improvement?

This is a picture of my Nana and my Grandfather at the beach in Eastern Passage in 1947.

My Nana is 18 in this picture.

My Nana was a war bride and came over to Canada when she was 17 years old.

My Nana is an artist — her paintings have won awards and sold for quite a bit of money.

My Nana raised my father, who takes after her. I take after my father. So, I guess I take after her.

My Nana also raised my Uncle Dave, but he doesn’t take after her so much. He once gave her a Mother’s Day card that said, “You’ve Been Like a Mother to Me.”

My Nana takes the least crap of anyone I know… except for my Lovely Wife. They are in a dead heat.

My Nana is married to the Nicest Man in the World, John. They married in 1980. He swims every day. He likes to bake pies.

My Nana is the Hardest Person in the World to Shop For. My Dad has had many splendid failures over the years at Christmas time. Most notably, he once gave her a telescope, thinking she would sit on the balcony of her 14th floor apartment and watch the stars. The last time it was used, John and I were looking in the windows of nearby apartment buildings. (In my defence, I was a teenager. John has no defence. Except that he is the Nicest Man in the World.)

My Nana makes the best roast potatoes in the world. She also cooks other food very well.

My Nana has only cooked one thing for me that didn’t taste good. Her very first attempt at lasagna was unfortunately accompanied by a top layer of Kraft processed cheese. She has gotten much better at cooking lasagna and now it is one of her better dishes.

My Nana was, for years and years, in charge of holding all the big family dinners. She served a lot of them. I always had seconds. I rarely helped with the dishes. My Dad likes to make me feel guilty about that.

Now, I’m very pleased to be able to invite her over to our house and serve her dinner. We make certain to have the drinks she likes to drink. We make certain to put on music from the 1940s that she loves. We make certain that we offer her peas, which she eats every day.

We had my Nana, John, and my sister and my brother-in-law over for a pre-Christmas dinner last night. My Nana gave me this picture after dinner.

It was a very good dinner.

I made lasagna.

Not the best of days. Things have gone down at work. I feel like crap.

But then on comes The Housemartins singing Caravan of Love… and I feel a little better.

• Cute Overload! (via Boing Boing)

The entire purpose of this site is to find the cutest, most adorable pictures of animals in existence and then inflict them on us, the unsuspecting public.

Be warned.

What drives me mad, daily and without fail, in this lovely metropolis by the sea?

Freaking pedestrians.

I’ll throw this caveat in quickly as a defensive measure: I am not one of those drivers that ignore pedestrians or drives in a way that puts them in fear for their life. Far from it. I spent far too many years where my only means of transporting myself from point A to point B were by pedestrianing. (It’s now officially a word. Shut up.) Pedestrians have rights and should be given the right-of-way when they have the right-of-way.

However… in our fair city, a vast collection of yahoos seem to feel that the right-of-way means “everywhere we bloody well feel like it except in the middle of the highway, where we just might show a modicum of consideration. Might.”

The pedestrians here saunter. They perambulate. They freaking well mosey wherever and whenever they want. And do they look to see where they are going and what hulking gasoline-filled chunks of metal, plastic, and rubber are possibly hurtling toward them? Good god NO.

And why is this? Because the biggest problem is that the drivers in this city are enabling this behaviour. They stop, wily-nily, whenever someone decides to walk into the street to — I don’t know — look at something shiny. They stop because they expect to stop, because crappy-ass pedestrians in this city have, after so many years, trained them to stop.

Drivers in this town are sheep.

I spent seven years living in Toronto. God, now that was a town to be a pedestrian in. Not because you felt your life was in danger — I’m certain some out-of-towners probably felt that way, with the speed that everything went at. But by god, things moved in that city. Pedestrians had their rights, and they travelled with confidence. But they moved briskly. It was understood: “I have every right to cross this street right here, but my part of this social contract means that I won’t luxuriate myself in crossing. I’m gonna move with alacrity. Because while I have places to go, so does everyone else, and I ain’t gonna be the one that keeps other people from where they wanna go.”

That understanding is sorely lacking in this city. And it makes me grind my teeth in frustration.

But much to the delight of my dentist.

Notes:

1. This post was brought to you by the words “modicum”, “perambulate” and “alacrity”. They felt under-used recently and wanted to get off the bench. You have to oblige tenacity like that.

2. Because you were good and didn’t interrupt my rant, allow me to present an image from a Google Image search for the word “perambulate”:

I think that says it all.