Little Victor Sunday Update June 7, 2010

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Gabriel

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It’s pretty easy to tell Victor is an All-Star, especially when four dozen people stop so they can say exactly that in a single afternoon.

Diane and I took part in the most recent Vankleek Hill Trash & Treasure village-wide yard sale event this past Saturday and, at least on our street, Victor was the drawing point. People were crossing the street to have a little visit with him.

He had a great time hanging out with his mom on the front porch. His great-grandfather showed up later in the afternoon and the two of them laughed at each other… it’s pretty much at the point where, when they look at each other, it’s like they’re looking into a mirror.

Little Victor is well over sixteen pounds now. He may be seventeen pounds by now. I haven’t been to a “Watch Me Grow” session at the Knox Presbyterian Church in a few weeks, and I think Diane’s been working most Tuesdays, so getting him weighed regularly like we used to just hasn’t been happening.

…actually, I totally forgot to ask Diane is she went this week.

Diane’s oldest son, four-year old dynamo Andrew, has been a great brother to Victor so far… so far. When Diane was still pregnant with Victor, the doctor asked about other children in the home. When he found out about Andrew, and how old he was, he said it was the perfect age to introduce another child. Apparently, according to the doctor, there’s a lack of jealousy at that age.

So far so good. Andrew loves to hold Victor, won’t let anyone touch Victor if they’re sick, and he’ll ask Diane if he can feed him. And, when we’re changing Victor’s diaper, Andrew will even hang around and ask questions about Victor’s poo.

I know it’s a long, long way off, but I think there’s a better possibility of the two of them together making a good team than there is of them growing apart.

Victor’s been sick for almost 48-hours now. He’s got a cough, and he sneezes and as of a few hours ago his right cheek is slightly swollen. Diane, who has travelled this road way before me, says the liquid children’s Tylenol should get everything under control.

But he’s still sleeping and eating as well and as much as normal… which is to say he’s guzzling back bottle after bottle and sleeping away the milk hangovers for hours.

Over the weekend he also spent about four hours in his Jolly-Jumper. The kid’s going to have thighs bigger than mine before he’s two.

Victor will be six months old Saturday. Just to recap, he was born December 12, 2009, at 9:49pm in the Ottawa General Hospital. Technically he was born a day prematurely, but five weeks before his official due date. So, because of hospital protocols, he spent his first six hours in Intensive Care.

I spent two hours in there with him, but Diane and I were just too exhausted, so I found her room on the Maternity Ward and passed out… on the floor, because hospital protocol said dudes can’t sleep in maternity ward beds, even when they’re empty.

When I woke up — about thirty minutes after falling to sleep — the nurse had just brought Victor back from the ICU. After the three of us checked each other out for a minute, we all went back to sleep. At least that’s what I remember. I was so tired, for all I know Victor and Diane could have been shooting off bottle rockets.

Which is definitely something I’ll be teaching him how to do.

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Photo Of Victor’s Week:

Victor's photo of the week

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This week Victor, Diane and I watched “The Road” (2009) with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, and “The Killing Fields” (1984) with Sam Waterston and Dr. Haing Ngor. Not exactly the most upbeat of movie selections, but both were fantastic. I’ve seen “The Killing Fields”… it must be at least a dozen times now.

Both movies are based on earlier books, both movies are about surviving a hellish situation — “The Road” is about a father and son trying to survive in the aftermath of a global catastrophe by travelling to the Atlantic Coast. The “Father” hopes to have taught his young son all there is to know about survival by then.

“The Killing Fields” is a biography of Dith Pran, a Cambodian photojournalist during the end of the Vietnam War, when the Americans were pulling out of the region after destabilizing Cambodia, allowing the Khmer Rouge to take over. The main story is about his escape from the ensuing Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-1979, so he can return to his family. Along the way he adopts the son of one his abusers.

We also watched my favourite Nick Nolte movie, “The Good Thief” (2002), it also stars Ralph Fiennes and Nutsa Kukhianidze. It’s about an American curmudgeon, gambler, thief and heroin addict dying slowly in France, but willing to try “one more big score.”

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Bob: We give you Elvis, we give you Dylan, we give you Hendrix, what do you give us? Johnny Hallyday!
Roger: Don’t get me started about Johnny Hallyday…

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It’s be a wee bit of a stretch, but the relationship between “Bob” (Nolte) and the younger characters is very close to one of an absentee / addict father and his adoring children.

We do like themes when we rent our movies.

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Once A Year Vankleek Hill Becomes A Hoarders Paradise

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Gabriel

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My girlfriend and I, along with some of her friends, and our baby set up shop on my parents porch to sell stuff during Vankleek Hill’s 11th annual “Trash & Treasure Day” on Saturday. Most of the offers we received were for our baby… some of them seemed very reasonable.

I’ve been making an attempt to de-clutter my apartment recently, so this years T&T came at the perfect moment. It’s a town-wide yard sale put on by the Vankleek Hill Business and Merchant Association, and it usually brings in a lot of tourists from the neighbouring towns and villages.

The weather was a little dodgy this year — it rained in the morning, got hot in the early afternoon, then there was a downpour just after the event ended — so attendance appeared to be down, but we didn’t set up until 11am, and I was mostly concentrating on selling off most of my CD collection, three dozen DVD’s, a pile of games for the PS2 and twenty-six books.

I actually did all right, a lot better than I thought I would have. A buck a CD, two bucks each for the DVD’s, five for the games and three for the hardcovers and I came home with less than half the stuff I started out with. And now my apartment is nicely on the way to being de-cluttered, and I can afford to feed my baby for another week.

I was also kind of impressed with the fact I was able to hang out and talk to strangers. This is not something I can usually do comfortably. At least not in recent years. So that was cool.

There were a few people who stopped and wanted to talk about music, which was great. One of them wanted to talk about Blues, which was even better. A kid, who otherwise would never have been able to buy the game in a store, stopped to buy my copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and we talked video games for ten minutes. Which was also great.

…I should probably take this moment to apologize to his mother… and, inevitably, to his teachers and his parole officer. I totally apologize. But it was three bucks, and daddy’s got to eat.

During the last sixteen months, because of the high-risk nature of my girlfriend’s pregnancy last year, and now having Victor around, I’ve basically turned into either a hermit or a shut-in. So having an opportunity to hang out on a street corner during a high-traffic event like the T&T, where everyone’s getting deep into everyone else’s business, turned out to be a refreshing change of pace.

Whoever came up with the concept of the Trash & Treasure day deserves, at least, to have the day named after them. But whoever came up with the timing of the event… maybe not so much.

The Vankleek Hill-wide yard sale comes roughly three weeks after — after — the town-wide Vankleek Hill spring cleaning trash day, where people empty out their sheds onto the sidewalks for the garbage men to come and take away furniture, TV’s, old computer systems, boxes of crap, and my old mattress and box spring.

As a result, at the end of “Trash & Treasure Day”, the “Trash” part people can’t sell has to be hauled back to the sheds to wait for next years “Big Garbage Day”. And “Big Garbage Day” swallows up a lot of the “Treasure” people could be selling, or inter-village recycling, on T&T Day.

I’m not sure how it could be fixed, but it does seem a little backward, and a lot of stuff that could otherwise be recycled is probably heading off to the dump instead.

The strangest thing I saw sold off during T&T Day was a ten-pin bowling ball named Betty. It belonged, until Saturday, to my girlfriend, and she sold it for two bucks… including the case.

And, looking at him now, sleeping in his little basket, I am glad we didn’t sell Victor.

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Finding Shambhala On A Mother’s Shoulder

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Gabriel

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There is nothing so self-unaware, self-unconscious, so blissed out as a (non-teething) baby. They don’t even really exist, physically, to their own senses… I’d imagine the first six months of being a baby would be a lot like living in a sensory-deprivation tank, except in reverse. It takes a baby long seconds to realize the pressure they feel is indeed a pressure, then more time figuring out it’s located around their hand and it’s being applied by something else, something foreign… which means the hand the pressure is being applied to is theirs. And then the baby holds up their hand, accepts it as their own, and laughs like a maniac.

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Technical Stuff: The first things you need to get a shot like this is a patient woman willing to have your child. Then just make sure you own a camera. I took thirty shots of Diane and Victor with my Kodak C533 pocket digital. Victor wouldn’t stay still, so most of them (including this one) were blurred out, there was also some back light from a window in a few others… I had to adjust the lighting using PhotoShop, so this shot is “lighter” by 10%.

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Victor does cry. And he has attained a whole new, and infinitely annoying, crying range in the upper register lately, but he’s not miserable… I’m pretty sure babies would never cry without a serious reason… like when Victor cried after the Ottawa Senators were eliminated from the 2010 NHL playoffs, even though he knew it was inevitable. But he’s sensitive like that.

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How To Deal With A Hot Headed Neighbour And The Smoke From Their Fire

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Gabriel

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People living in rural communities such as the one I live in sometimes confuse rural with abandoned.

There are people who live in Vankleek Hill (pop. 1800) who, with their large and mostly enclosed backyard, forget what they do for fun can have an immediate impact on the rest of us. Like blaring their music during the day or night, using a nice shrub for target practice, or using a fire pit to get rid of piles of branches.

When someone is burning his yard waste the entire downtown of Vankleek Hill can become a nightmare for asthmatics and anyone with small children.

So what happens when, on a hot summer’s Saturday, you wake up coughing because your neighbour is burning yard waste? What happens when he insists on doing it every weekend, even after you’ve asked him to stop?

Apparently you can call the “by-law enforcement officer” and they’ll deal with him.

I did not know this. Or at least, when I did consider this, the office of the by-law officer always seemed just too far away, and never open on the weekends when the smoke was filling my apartment.

Recently, however, my girlfriend and I had a baby. So when I woke up last weekend to find smoke in my apartment, I made the decision to figure out the NY Times Sunday Crossword that is by-law enforcement.

And, instead of trying to ignore the problem, I made some calls and decided to chose a more confrontational method of dealing with the poor air quality, which was to take a photo of the fire as “evidence” which I could then give to a by-law officer.

In my defence I was receiving some really bad advice from someone who should have known better. It turns out, standing at a shared fence and taking photos of your neighbours’ fire pit while they feed it bundles of branches, can cause a commotion.

It can also set off a fifteen minute rant at the top of their lungs while you stand there recording everything on your pocket-sized digital camera because they’ve started making threats of calling the police and the Children’s Aid Society with insane, and totally ludicrous, accusations about your personal life.

Turns out, a resident of Vankleek Hill, or any other Ontario municipality, can make an anonymous call to the by-law enforcement officer. Or, the resident can show up during business hours and file a complaint which will be considered anonymous.

Again, you do not have to take photos as proof of the infraction.

So, here’s the phone number, URL and address of the by-law enforcement officer for Champlain Township — which includes Vankleek Hill:

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The Corporation of the Township of Champlain
PO Box 343 / 925
County Road 17
L’Orignal, Ontario K0B 1K0
613.675.4727 Fax: 613.675.1050

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And here’s a few selections from the By-Law regarding fires in Vankleek Hill — if you’re coughing, the most powerful one is L:

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By-Law Number 2010-19, or “The Fire Control By-Law”

Exclusions: No burning permit is required for an open air fire when such burning consists of a small confined fire, which is used to cook food, for enjoyment or set in an approved outdoor fireplace and is supervised at all times.

Regulations:

a. No person shall set an open fire or closed fire to burn any household kitchen garbage or construction materials made of or containing rubber, plastic, paint petroleum, tar, chemical wastes, pressure treated wood, synthetic or man-made materials or any other materials considered to create excessive smoke or smell;

b. Open air burning shall allow no more than one (1) cubic meter of material to be burned at any one time;

c. Means of extinguishment (sic) of the fire designated on the permit form must be available at the site at all times during the fire;

d. Open air burning shall only occur during daylight hours, except for a campfire and/or an outdoor fireplace, unless otherwise specified and approved;

e. Open air burning shall be supervised at all times and never be left unattended until it is completely extinguished;

f. The permit holder (applicant) must notify the Fire Department when the fire is lit and at the end of the day must extinguish the fire and advise the Fire Department that the fire is out;

g. The permit holder (applicant) shall notify the occupant(s) of adjacent property(ies) of his/her intentions of setting an open fire prior to setting the same;

l) No person shall set or maintain an open-air fire or closed fire when the wind or atmospheric condition carries the smoke over other residential properties causing any impairment or discomfort to persons and animals and/or damage to neighbouring properties;

m) No person shall set or maintain an open fire when the Fire Chief has issued a fire ban…

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By-laws are mostly laws regulating the things which piss us off locally, and in the moment. They differ fairly broadly between communities — pesticide bans, for example, vary wildly around Ontario — but even so there are some universal truths. Like how annoying it can be to get choked out of your apartment by a guy who likes to stare at fires.

If you want to find out about the by-laws in your municipality, the ‘Access to Justice Network’ — which is partially funded by the Alberta Law Foundation, and a project supported by the University of Alberta — does a pretty good job of keeping track of municipal laws on their website.

And, one more time, no matter what your family tells you, you do not have to take photos to prove an infraction took place. At least not while the neighbour’s whole family is out doing family stuff around the fire.

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Hi There, My Name Is…

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Gabriel

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My name is Gabriel Landriault. Admitting this is kind of a big deal, at least to me, because I’ve been blogging anonymously for almost five years.

Not including the six years I pretended my four Geocities accounts didn’t exist, I started blogging in late 2006 in reaction to a fairly horrific accident… where I accidentally erased three years worth of edits to my book. I have to put “accidentally” in there because there are moments when I think maybe it wasn’t.

In 2001 I signed a contract with ECW Press, a Toronto-based publisher to write a non-fiction, 80,000 word book about politics and my family.

Very late one night in 2006 I migrated everything I had ever produced — movies, stories, news articles, The Book — from my ancient 4G hard-drive PC to my brand spanking new Dell server farm of a PC. It’s black and cool looking. A few days later I went searching for the book, and only found early versions… but nothing recent. This is when I started growing my very first beard.

My first reporting job was as a columnist for The Review, the local (Vankleek Hill) paper. My grade eleven English teacher made it happen. I wrote about school politics, and local council meetings. I was seventeen, and my column was called “From The High Chair” because the stool the publisher gave me to sit on was ridiculously high.

In total I’ve worked as a reporter for seven years, mostly I covered technology issues like online privacy.

I haven’t worked as a reporter full time since 2001. In between now and then I also put in two years in “communications”. For a year I worked as a writer at an agency called Benchmark PorterNovelli, and then I was with Clearnet — during the switch to Telus Mobility. I sucked at both jobs.

I honestly do not believe I produced anything for either company.

…although I did get a surreal opportunity to take photos backstage at a Britney Spears concert for Benchmark. So, that was pretty cool… she’s tiny.

I signed the book contract while I was at Clearnet. I honestly thought it’d take a year, then I’d use it to get back into reporting.

But the “family” part of the book proved to be… difficult. Especially on my brain.

The reason I wanted to blog anonymously was because most of it would be about the Family + Brain stuff. And I didn’t want my mother to be waiting in line at the grocery store, and have someone ask her about something I had written. Also… there are some craz-eee MoFo’s online.

So as I moved from writing about myself, to starting another blog where I could write about news, I remained anonymous. Which made sense, barely… because finding one could lead to finding the other. Or something.

But what ended up happening was I created a five-year gap on the Internet, and in my life. The only work I was producing was on two (sometimes three) anonymous blogs. And so far it’s been really good work.

So someone searching for me on Google brings up a very few pieces I wrote for Toronto-based Computer Dealer News and eBusiness Journal, and Ottawa’s Silicon Valley North (SVN), from 1998 and 1999… it also brings up my SETI@home profile.

But it doesn’t tell anyone about the Ontario Community Newspaper Association award for column writing I won in 1997, or the CATA Award for Excellence in Science and Technology Reporting I — and two other reporters — won… also in 1997 — it was a pretty good year, we got award shirts.

And it doesn’t bring up anything from this blog. Again, it’s like I’ve turned invisible and my archives are slowly eroding. All of the work I did for SVN, for example, disappeared when it was bought by the Ottawa Business Journal.

Which totally sucks when you’re trying to make a point about the status of reporting in an online world in a Facebook forum…

Blogging anonymously, especially when it’s the only content you’re creating, sucks donkey testicles when it comes to explaining to people what it is you do all night.

“Sure… I publish 12,000 words a month, but you can’t read any of them.”

It’ll be nice to be able to talk to my grandfather about what I’m reporting on again.

Something I plan on doing is reporting on the region where I live… this part of Eastern Ontario is the poorest (off reserve) region in Canada, it also leads Canada in illiteracy rates, drug and alcohol addiction and unemployment.

It also has an incredible amount of potential. So there should be something to write about there…

Anyway. None of this matters, or will ever matter, if I don’t update this thing. Regularly.

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Almost Like Art | Christine On The Street

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Gabriel

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Of all the photos I’ve ever taken, and some of of them have been pretty sweet, this one is my favourite. It’s the b/w contrast, the way Christine is standing, how she’s looking at the camera, her eyeliner, the street and sidewalk stretching into infinity, my shadow on the sidewalk… I’ve taken better photos, and even more interesting ones, but this is my absolute favourite. The song is “Dissolved Girl” by Massive Attack.

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Technical Stuff: I used my Minolta SLR, or my ‘big boy camera’, for this shot. At this point I was still enamoured with Kodak Pro CN 400 film. It’s a black and white film that can be developed in a colour processor. So instead of waiting a week for my Tri-X or TMax to get developed, I could use any of Toronto’s street corner 30 Minute developers. Unfortunately the process leaves a green tinge on the prints and negatives. Which should have been an important lesson after developing the first two or three rolls. But I think I shot over 600 rolls with the CN BS. If you want a b/w photo, use b/w film.

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Christine and I lived as roommates together for about eight months along with another girl, Aurora. It was a basement “granny apartment” in the uber-swanky Rosedale part of Toronto. The ceiling was barely six-feet high, and there was no sound proofing between us and the main floor, so the kids upstairs used to make noise just to get a reaction from the kids downstairs — Christine (19) and Aurora (18) — who would then pound on the ceiling and scream at the children. It was actually a decent place to sleep. And I got to shop for groceries with CBC anchor, Peter Mansbridge.

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