This is North America and so there is neither irony nor symbolism in this title. An Early Frost refers to, well, the season's first frost this morning. And the first frost is of immediate interest to because, as I was walking on the wooden footpath of the early 20th century bridge that connects my apartment to my work (or rather, the portion of the city in which my apartment is found, and the other side of the river, where I work), I kept slipping and nearly broke my neck several times. Naturally, the opportunity to regale you all with my footpath adventures was too good to pass up on, and so here I am, and here you are, and there we go, and then there you are. Where was I?
Ah yes, the footpath. At first, when I started slipping on the splintered wooden planks, I thought maybe I had stepped into dog-poo. But then, I wondered to myself, this is Ottawa, people clean up after their dogs. True (slip), the footpath was dangerously frosted over (slip, slip), it was uneven (slip), the planks were sharded and splintered (slip, slip); and true, not even in Brussels, the land of the unkempt pavements, had I (slip) ever walked on something this badly maintained (slip) – not to mention that there was never any frost in Brussels (slip, slip). BUT, unlike Brussels, this was only frost and not dog-poo (slip); people here are civilised (slip); they clean up after their dogs (slip, slip, SLOP, slip). Except when they don't (step, slop, step, slop, wipe, wipe).
Luckily the accident happened at the end of the footpath, as I turned onto the gravelled walkways of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (le musée canadiennes des civilisations, in French, “civilisation” apparently multiplying when migrating from one language to the next) on the last stretch of my walk to work.
Work. It's going really well. Learning a lot about an interesting subject; I work with great people and have a wonderful boss. (She's one of the addressees, what else can I say?) It's just a daily blessing that despite my utter ignorance of the subject matter (which does NOT, of course, stop me from offering my views on anything and everything that inches past my offices) and general lack of organisation (the less said about this the better – suffice it to say that I have three task-books and ticklers set up to remind me of stuff, and still I forget), I have yet to be fired. There are advantages, I suppose, to working for the Government 😉 ….
What I really ought to be fired from is as a tenant in my own apartment. I mean, honestly, the place is a disgrace. For the first three weeks, my excuse was that I had 200 boxes (of which 30 were books, cds or dvds) crammed in a 75 sq.m. apartment, and that even getting the opened boxes out of the apartment was a challenge, let alone opening them and organising their contents. This was the period when the slightest unplanned move in the apartment could result in a veritable avalanche of books, skis, rolled-up carpets and, in one memorable occasion, a box filled with expensive Scotch (which ought to have been drunk at my “empty the larder” party … but that is a different story). Any way, luckily I survived the boxes full of books; now I have towering stack of books and dvds all around the apartment that, though unsightly and potentially messy, at least are not a death hazard.
Then there is the bedroom. It is large-ish (I mean, it fits more than a bed and a dresser, which is what I used to have when I lived in Ottawa) and quite airy. I have two large windows facing the US Embassy, which basically means that I have something like fourteen telezoom cameras, three marines, two parabolic dishes and an automated anti-Missile system aiming more or less directly at my bed. The poor schmucks who have been assigned to Ram-Bed duty have got to be the luckiest bastards alive, for two reasons. First, if it were not for me, they would likely be keeping watch over the Green Zone Wall in Baghdad; and second, their “daily rushes” (I'm guessing that is what their daily “intelligence reports” are called) are probably filled with four-letter words, such as “nada”, “null”, “void”, “bord” – OK, I'm stretching the point – and the like.
Any way, I have to confess that I feel quite safe knowing that I am watched over by so many eyes.