Yesterday Sue Meech from the Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre called Celine and said the bat we brought there in January was ready to be released. She wanted the bat to be set free within 20 meters of the place he was found, and near a tree. So at dusk last night Connie (a volunteer at the centre) went to Celine’s apartment with the bat in her backpack. I went too, and Connie brought a friend named Brian (group photo). Brian used to own a record store in the same building and told me stories about standing in that very same hallway in 1980. His store was in Rheni’s studio.
We all went out onto the roof and Connie took the bat out. He was in a sock in box in her backpack. She had a second bat in another sock, and she and Brian were going to relase it at another house in Kingston. Celine opened up the sock and put it at her feet, and a minute later the little guy started wriggling out (close up). Once he was out he flew in two or three circles around the roof and then went straight into the crack between the buildings. He must be happy to be home!
The previous posts about the bat are here, here, and here.
I made an amazing discovery tonight. For weeks I have been irritated by a light switch in my apartment that doesn’t do anything, and by an electrical outlet that doesn’t seem to work. Today I bought some plastic faceplates with no holes so I could cover them up and was in the middle of removing the old ones when I suddenly realized that the switch controls the outlet. It’s kind of obvious, but I just didn’t realize it. Anyway, here are some photos of my apartment: living room, kitchen, “dining room,” hallway, bedroom, bathroom, building, street (Note the lighthouse. Well, maybe it’s more like a beacon than a lighthouse.), the view from my bedroom window, my new lamp.
Luther Wright and the Wrongs played at the Grad Club the other night and put on a really good show. Brian played with them on his fiddle, and I stood right up in front of the stage and even danced a bit! I bought a CD after the show and have been listening to it all weekend. The opening band was The Lady Racers, who were also very good. I wanted to buy a CD from them too, but they didn’t have any.
Last night Celine came over and we watched a few of Grandpa’s super 8 movies. One of them was filmed in Miami sometime in the mid-seventies and had a long segment of Grandma feeding the seagulls. I wonder if that was where Grandpa took the picture of her feeding the seagulls that Dad has a big poster-sized print of. They also went sightseeing at Coral Castle, which really surprised me and Celine. (Warning: clicking that link will play Zamfir covering a Celine Dion song!) We’ve talked about that place for years, but I never knew that Grandma and Grandpa went there. It was amazing to see how easily the 9-ton doorway spun on it’s hinge.
After Celine left I pulled some really old reels of film out from the bottom of the box. I think some of them were taken before my parents even met each other! Unfortunately, the projector started to eat the film and I didn’t get to see any of them. It only chewed up the film header on one of the movies and none of the actual movie was damaged, but I think I’ll have to find out how to stop it from happening again. Maybe all it would take is a good cleaning to make the projector work better.
When I was in Montreal for Easter last weekend Mesh and Grandma gave me many boxes of Grandpa’s 8mm and super 8 films, a film projector, and a couple boxes of 35mm slides. There are lots more slides, but Mesh is still sorting through them. I said I would digitize everything.
I picked one film at random, and it said (in Mesh’s handwriting), “1973 Apr. Coreen driving off. Cats. The twins with grandma (kissing and smelling a flower on the stairway).” It was strange to see me and Christine when we were three years old. And Grandma was 33 years younger too. We were wearing some of those dreadful matching twins outfits. Red with a blue and white stripe, I think. They were awful.
Some of the slides have mildew on them. I guess I should try to wash it off. I hooked up my scanner and scanned in one small box of slides. I am amazed at how beautiful Grandma is in these pictures! It seems to me that I have always thought of her as an old woman, even in my earliest memories. I guess everybody has their own lives, separate of your impressions of them. I made a web site for these slides: http://www.floatingeye.net/ephemera/
I just remembered that Victor said he had some slides at his house that Mesh wasn’t aware of. I’ll have to ask him about that.
I installed Linux on one of my old computers, got a static IP address, and started running my own web server. I wonder if I will start to enjoy editing all these configuration files by hand.
