The Australian Pink Floyd Show 2012

Every year, the Australian Pink Floyd Show comes to Halifax and, being a fan by association and a sucker for a fantastic photo opportunity, every year I find myself in the audience, camera in hand. 2008 found four of us with floor seats, 2012 was courtesy of skybox tickets won by my friend in a draw. I'm not going to say anything other than that the music was, as always, incredibly spot-on. As for the spectacle, well, if a picture's worth a thousand words...

 

Hallowe'en 2012

 Another Hallowe'en, another excuse to go getting all creative. :)

Claire

I've posted about Claire before, but you've never seen her until now.

I love taking pictures of children. They're so natural. Innocent. Not self-conscious in the least. In the fall of 2012, Claire was 18 months old, and I was looking for someone new to shoot. With her dad away with the navy, and her mom more than willing to share some of her mother-daughter time with me, I found my match... and what a match it was!

 I was taught a lot by this child. How to look stunning when you're not trying, for example.

How to behave when you find yourself in a large pile of ... well, whatever.

 That quality time with Mommy is important.

and to take joy in the simplest things.

I followed Claire around the yard for hours that day, and though that's usually long past my usual tolerance threshold, I actually enjoyed the time spent just watching her enjoy life. It was a great day with a friend and her adorable daughter, and I'm hoping that maybe someday soon we can do it again... bring on the snow????

The Epic Saga of Simon Says

There is a Facebook group called Lost and Found Cats in HRM and Nova Scotia.  As the name would imply, it assists in returning missing cats to their owners by networking people in the various communities and supplying a central focal point to post pictures and descriptions of troubled animals.

When my friend Andrea (recently spotted here) shared a post about a purebred Siamese needing a home in late October 2012, I couldn't believe someone would want to give away such a beautiful and exotic animal. It turns out, his owner had a new boyfriend who was moving in with this new dog, and this stunning feline had essentially been locked out and was taking shelter in a neighbour's backyard.

We named him Simon and quickly fell in love with his quirky personality and crooked eyes. He was loud and obnoxious, as Siamese tend to be, so he quickly earned the title Simon Says. He joined Pickles and Montgomery in the tiny little house and staked his claim with the other two: a little forcefully at first, but then everyone just became content with ignoring each other.

Less than a week into Simon's adoption, disaster struck. The back door opened, and Simon bolted. The other cats never left the backyard, but Simon was used to running free on his own terms. He high-tailed it up our street, under a neighbour's deck, out the other side and under a fence. By the time we got around the fence, he was gone.

We were heartbroken. We searched for hours. We resorted back to the Lost and Found Facebook page, we accepted tips and ideas for finding Simon, and we drove and walked endlessly around the neighbourhood, putting up posters and calling out for our beautiful boy. We had helped locate the owners of a cat that had been missing for three months just weeks earlier, so I dared not give up hope. It was late October, though, it was getting cold, and Simon didn't know the neighbourhood or our voices

Then, five days later, I got a call from a lady two blocks away. She said she had been out for a cigarette late the night before and had seen a small Siamese cat trotting up her road. She hadn't wanted to call because it was late, but I assured her that we would come talk to her after work. I met and spoke with her and she showed me where she had seen the cat. She promised to call if she saw him again, no matter what time of day, and I spent the evening searching... to no avail.

That night, about 11:3o, she called again.

I'm not going to lie: I thought she was a bit wacky. What were the chances this was my cat? Halifax has a stray cat problem in the first place, and there were a ton of them in the area. In the dark, Simon looked white, and relatively unidentifiable. I had to go look, though, just in case. We piled in the car and headed back to the area.

We had actually given up and were driving back to the main road to go home when I saw him. I didn't know it was him: he was sitting on the railing of someone's step and I saw him there and took the flashlight to get closer. When he turned and looked at me, I freaked out: I couldn't even speak. I just waved my arms like a mad woman until the others realized what had happened and came over with the cat carrier.

Simon apparently had enjoyed his freedom. He bolted again, but this time we were able to follow until he cornered himself by slipping through a crack in the wall of someone's shed. While I guarded the hole, the shed's owner was woken up and brought outside to unlock the door. The key didn't work. The door got ripped off its hinges.

I broke down crying when Simon was placed back in the cat carrier and handed to me. 

All this for a cat we had known for 3 days.

 Simon came home with a scratch on his nose and an exaggerated attitude. While Montgomery put him right back in his place, Pickles was not willing to be so aggressive. Simon bullied her to the point where she would not come out of the bedroom, and even used the bathtub because she was scared to go to the litterbox. Once he realized he had this power over her, it only got worse, and nothing we tried would snap him out of it.
On November 17, two weeks after he returned home, I called the adoption agent to come take him back. It was incredibly hard. I had fallen head over heels for the little guy with the annoying voice and the big personality. But it was unfair to Pickles, who had lived there first and not caused a problem in her life.
Simon was fostered out to a lady who owned no other cats. He got along with her dog and she ended up keeping him permanently. I am happy to know that he has found a loving and stress-free environment, and I am still able to contact the adoption agent any time I want for updates on his well-being.

Simon Says: Have a happy ending.

Apple Picking and GPS 2012

This year's annual apple picking excursion saw pit stops at all the usual places: Willowbank UPick, Hennigar's Farm Market, and Kenny's Farm Market. There were apples galore, of course...

...and the stunning country scenery that is the Kentville/Wolfville area.

 

 

This year's mission also included a special guest: a hand puppet that I had debated buying, but which had sold out of the store we found it in in April. Then, when I found in Wolfville, I got permission to buy for myself as a late birthday present.  A hand puppet you say? For a woman in her thirties? Really?

I know.

But it was Lambchop!
Still... really?
I know.
But I grew up with sheep and they hold a special place in my heart. To make sure my point is clear, here's a picture of me feeding a baby lamb from a bottle circa 1991:

Besides, we ended up having a lot of fun with it and getting some good laughs...

,,,and all the way home, we enjoyed the peace of mind of knowing we'd make it safe, thanks to our new Global Positioning Sheep!

The Right Stuff

Let me take you back to 1990.

It was the year Iraq invaded Kuwait, Margaret Thatcher resigned, the Cincinnati Reds swept the Oakland A's in the World Series, Beverly Hills 90210 debuted, and in my little piece of the world, I was an eleven year old girl with a crush on a pop star.

The New Kids On The Block were a teen phenomenon, having mastered the boy band recipe and winning hearts the world over with synchronized dance moves and co-ordinated outfits. I had the dolls, the posters, the t-shirts, the cassettes... an entire empire of merchandise, but living in a small town on the east coast of Canada meant I did not have the one thing I coveted most: a concert ticket.

Fast foward to October 13, 2012, where I find myself in line at the Casino Nova Scotia with a couple hundred other soccer-mom types and a sparse few of their husbands and boyfriends to finally see my very favorite of the Kids on his solo tour, Jordan Knight.

"I waited twenty years for this," the girl ahead of me says to her impatient boyfriend. "You can wait with me for another 20 minutes."

He looks to me for help, but I nod in agreement.

Now in his forties, Jordan is shorter than he was in my eleven-year-old dreams, but he still looks remarkably the same. His music hasn't changed much, which I can appreciate: if nostalgia is your appeal, why fix what's not broken?

He still sings that incredible falsetto: no small feat for a grown man. He also played keyboard for a few songs, and showed he could still work some of those dance moves that had helped make him famous.

At one point, he called for volunteers so go up on stage. I pointed out the girl in front of me. I confess, she was the only thing between me and the very front row. I wasn't just being unselfish. Okay, I wasn't being unselfish at all.

Damn, did eleven-year-old me envy those girls!

It was actually an incredible experience to find myself 25 feet from my teen idol. It was a rush twenty years in the making and for two short hours,  I was that pre-teen girl again with no worries about any of the stresses that adult life had brought on.

And that was definitely worth waiting for.