Dear Bigot, 

When I smiled at you identifying that I was Canadian and from Dorval this was not an invitation to tell me everything that was on your mind. 

I was genuinely quite happy to meet someone who had lived in Point Claire for 20 years, seriously I was. That’s why I smiled again. Now, and this is my fault, I should have immediately broken off the conversation when I told you I was from Dorval and you said “oh, is that still there?”. Every one of my warning bells went off. 

At this point I started doing math quickly and realized that you had fled when the PQ took power. This gave me an immediate foreshadowing of what was to come. 

From this point on all of my smiling and soothing conversation was no longer genuine and was the product of years of passive aggression and my trying to contain and manage you in much the way you talk to a 5 year old who is having a tantrum. 

When you started on with your delightful story about how the Quebecois don’t really speak French and how you once saw a French person refuse to talk to a Quebecois in French because they contended that they didn’t actually speak that language my smile was to hide my hatred of both you and myself. My hatred of you should be self explanatory, but I was hating myself for smiling and for not telling you off. 

What I would have liked to have said was “oh yes, when the colonizer comes along and prattles about how his or her language should be spoken it’s always funny. Because nothing is better than condescending bullshit. Hey, how about those Australians and how they think all of you here in NZ speak like stupid, backwards bumpkins? Isn’t that a hoot?”

When you transitioned onwards to your rant about bill 101, which you clearly don’t understand and never will, my smile was now the smile you reserve for the mentally infirm. At this point I was actually enjoying myself again, because all my hatred had evaporated and I now pitied you, in a sort of “oh look, she’s actually pieing herself. Over and over and over. How sad and funny.”

Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but I actually had the spine to turn off the conversation when you moved on to “So, are all the Muslims there still?” Because, honestly, I had more foreshadowing going on, and I just wasn’t able to figure out how we were going to wind up in a good place with this conversational gambit. So yes, there are muslims, and yes many of them came because they came from places where French was the second language. 

But most of them came for another reason. Because idiots like you are out numbered by people who don’t have their heads in their butts. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and live with my shame at not actually engaging you about yoru stupid. I suppose this shame will fade. Sadly your dumb will not. 

Good day.

So this morning, I’m all stunned with sleep and stressed about the day etc (as is my want), I got up, got Lucas downstairs and went to make breakfast.

So I got the loaf of bread out, chucked it onto stove top, got the tea water going (there wasn’t enough coffee for two cups) and then went away to the computer to check the news and the weather…

A minute or so later I smell something, pretty much simultaneously to this the smoke detector goes off.

I’d turned on the wrong element. So the water wasn’t heating up, but hte plastic wrapped bread was quite… well gross (and toasty).

Now the house smells of, I dunno, what I imagine toast for robots smells like.

When we had our door installed about a month ago we wound up in a kerfufle with the masons who were working on the bricks across the street. Our contractors had thrown rubble in their bin. This ended with the guy coming and trying to get into our locked backyard, yelling, people calling each other liars and one of my neighbors coming down the ally to back me up with a gardening tool in his hand. Fun times.

Mostly it was, like many things in life, an event tinged with regret. I’d watched these guys work on another wall down the street and they seemed decent. We need brick work done in the next year or so… it seemed a perfect match. So when this happened I felt poopy because we lost access to a contractor (I will not hire someone who calls me a liar… sorry).

So then they really got going on the work. By which I mean they put up the Tyvek and fucked off for a month.

Then they got the bricks here.. And stopped again for a week.

Now the bricks are going up. Unevenly, with no standard width to the mortar lines.

This morning they showed up and one of the guys went up the stairs to the second floor balcony to set up a board on the scaffolding. It was like watching a Rube Goldberg machine. Of course he almost got launched off the balcony. Of course the huge board fell down and went through the open first floor door…

Now they’ve spent the last 40 minutes cleaning up the mess they made yesterday and should have cleaned up then…. fun. *