Odd Coincidences

[Please note: "anecdotes" have nothing to do with "antidotes."]

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According to Wikipedia, the population of Ottawa is a little over 800,000. I don't think that can possibly be accurate, based on personal observation and curious coincidences. I think the population is more like 1,000.

Take our segment of the short street we live on, for example, which has maybe 50 homes on it.

• My nephew's partner grew up here.
• My colleague's ex-boyfriend lives across the street from us.
• My sister-in-law's husband's ex-wife just moved in down the block.

At a party recently, we had a fairly long conversation with strangers about older homes, only to discover that we were talking about the same tiny subdivision (all crescents and cul-de-sacs coming off one road) where we used to live and where the other couple now do live.

We used to have a nanny. At one point, she moved to a new house; turns out it was directly across the street from my best friend's house.

My daughter just realized that she went to elementary school with her cousin's band partner. 

The brother of a good friend of mine was at a function in Arnprior or Renfrew (towns near Ottawa) and struck up a conversation with a stranger, who turned out to be Steve's sister. 

It's not just Ottawa, either. Turns out one of my colleagues is actually related to Steve, via relatives in B.C.

One time we were selling our house and, for some reason, I happened to be home when a man and his mother came to see the house. I let them in then stayed out of their way. All of a sudden the man shouted, "Are you Wynn Anne?" He'd seen my diploma hanging in the office. Turns out he was an ex-boyfriend and neither of us had recognized the other after more than a decade. Awk.Ward. We both knew he wasn't going to buy the house. (His mother shot daggers out of her eyes.) [It's not like I have so many ex-boyfriends that this was bound to happen!]

And here's an even quirkier one: my high-school best friend moved from our home town to another province after high school. One day at the mall in Saskatchewan a stranger walked up to her and said, "I think I know you." Figuring it was a pick-up line, she was about to walk away when he said, "We both went to Queen's University; you're Wynn Anne." She never went to Queen's; she had never met him.

I really don't think we look that much alike!
Aside from both being petite, brunette Caucasians.

Seriously, what are the odds? It's like telling a stranger you're from Ottawa and having them in turn ask, "Oh - do you know Catherine who lives on Somerset?" and realizing that, yes, you do know a Catherine who lives on Somerset!

Does this happen to everyone? Is this normal?

Getting a Little Dirt Under My Fingernails

Remember our desolate backyard?

Well! We've been busy moving rocks and boulders, digging holes, planting stuff.

This is the detritus of planting more than 50 plants over the past two weekends.

And I am sore. My back hurts, my knees hurt, my hands and feet hurt.

My feet are just sad and dirty.
Think it's time for a pedicure.
(And I have renewed sympathy for elephants.)

 But, on the bright side, after all that work, here is what we are rewarded with.

And, as another sweet reward:

All in all, a good way to spend a late-spring day.

Phonetic Follies

How would YOU pronounce
encyclopedia?

When I was six years old I was listening to our school librarian introduce our class to the library. Several times she referred to encyclopedias - those vast storehouses of human knowledge that preceded the Internet. But I was distracted by the books she kept pointing to. They were ENN-see-clop-uh-DEE-ahs, not encyclopedias.

For some reason, I had never made the connection between the word I heard and the word I read. (We had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica* at home, as did most families in those days; it shared a bookcase with all the National Geographics we used for school assignments.) I'd been reading since before kindergarten, so was pretty confident about reading phonetically, but this word defied all logic!

It wasn't the last time this happened to me. I read the word gazebo and, in my head, pronounced it GAZE-bow. Why on earth would it have a long E? It was many, many years before I heard that word out loud.

The name Hermione was a challenge, back in the days before Harry Potter. Was it Her-me-won? Or Her-me-own? It never occurred to me to pronounce it her-MY-uh-nee.

I've already told you my trouble with "mishap." (An appropriate word to have trouble with, it seems to me.)

When I met him, Steve still thought "awry" was pronounced "AW-ree," and we still pronounce it that way at home.

In Ottawa, there is a Baseline Road. Should it be pronounced the same way as Vaseline -- "BAH-suh-leen"? That's how we pronounce it at our house. And my Aunt Winkie tells me that she used to avoid saying the word "geyser" because she wasn't sure if it was pronounced GAY-zer or GUY-zer or GEE-zer (with a hard G). She just said, "Oh, one of those things they have at Yellowstone Park."

Surely this has happened to you, too. What words surprised you when you finally heard them out loud?

* The encyclopedias we had at home were white, like the ones in the photo. The ones in the picture are actually Children's Britannica from 1970, listed on eBay, and don't have the word "encyclopedia" on the cover. I'm guessing that, although my parents referred to them as encyclopedias, I'd never actually seen the word written down.

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

Last summer, when I first introduced you to the forest near our home, I called it, "a magical place, which I look forward to exploring in all seasons." Well, I almost missed spring! Steve and I finally went for a walk in the woods today, and it is lush and green.

Much like the summer pictures, but wetter
and with plenty of that yellow, of which Robert Frost wrote.

But if you look closer, there are spring things happening.

Berries? Already? Yup.
And in the centre of the bottom row: Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Next year, I'll try to get there early enough to snap some fiddleheads (both literally and figuratively). But for now I shall leave you with The Road not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Unlike Robert Frost, we do get to come back to these woods - our woods - "another day,"  so no sad sighs from us.

Don't rub it in.

Steve has a high pain threshold. He regularly notices that parts of his hands, legs, or arms are bleeding and can't figure out how or when it happened. I'm not kidding; this happens at least once a month, and often it's not just a little nick, but an actual drip-drip kind of bleeding.

He also has a slight masochistic tendency and loves nothing better than a really good deep-tissue massage. The kind that leaves bruises. He likes it when the massage therapist reaches in under his shoulder blade to loosen up those muscles. Or digs her knee into his buttock muscle.

Okay, that last bit sounded rather inappropriate, but it was actual therapy, folks, nothing dirty. Sheesh. My husband and Jack Layton have something in common.

Source

Me? Not so much.

Despite having given birth to three of my four kids without ANY pain medication (except for an early-labour glass of wine because I'd been told that it would stop false labour, but not the real thing, so the glass of wine was a test), I am a complete wuss when it comes to massages. I like a gentle massage that just gets the blood flowing. But not so gentle that it tickles.

I'm a tough customer.

I also feel the same way about massages as I do about pedicures: impatient. Just get it done, already. After a fairly short amount of time I'm just ready for them to stop touching me. Not a terrifically relaxing feeling.

All in all, for relaxation, I'd rather just take my Kindle and a glass of wine and soak in the tub or sit by the pool.

As the Bloggess said after her recent Swedish massage, "That was not relaxing at all. Next time I’m just skipping straight to the drunk part."

[English Nazi note: I put today's title in "sentence case" (and I'm not even sure if that's what it's called, but I think Jeff used that term once, and it sounded right, so I'm using it here) because I can't remember whether the "it" and "in" are supposed to be capitalized in "title case." Jeff, please weigh in.]