Shoe Museum Photos

I went to the shoe museum. It was kind of disappointing.  I understand that they have to control the environment to ensure that the shoes don't deteriorate, but I'd by lying if I said that being chilled and squinting in the dim lighting was enjoyable.

A lot of the shoes were quite worn out.  I guess I expected that the restoration experts would be able to work miracles.  If I saw some of those shoes sitting on an old tablecloth for $2 a pair at a lawn sale, I don't think I'd be interested; they were that beat up.

Some of them had been worn by famous people, like Elton John and Pierce Brosnan.  I wasn't impressed. I'm not the kind of person who gets excited by being in the same room as one of Marilyn Monroe's stinky old shoes.  I mean, they're just shoes after all.

The space boot that had actually been to the moon and back was neat.  I didn't take a snapshot of it because the lighting was extra-crappy in that area.

Photo highlights of my visit:
(Taken legally - photos were allowed so long as one did not use a flash.)
SQUEAMISH PERSON ALERT: The first description displays my gross sense of humour.


A replica of the oldest shoe ever discovered.  When the original was found, it was still on the foot of a guy who had been naturally mummified.  He didn't look so good in the photos they had posted of him.  He appeared to be made of beef jerky, with the bones still in.  His shoe was made of bearskin, deerskin, and linden twigs.  Apparently they field-tested a replica, and found it to be quite comfortable and serviceable.

Itty bitty shoes for ladies who had their feet bound in China back in the day.  Ouch.

Itty bitty snowboots for bound feet.  Mercy!  Imagine tottering around on ice in these.

I shall quote from the text provided by the museum:

"During the Tudor age, the broad physique of King Henry VIII (1491-1547) set the fashion. Throughout Europe, the style-conscious abandoned the attenuated toes of the earlier period and began to wear broad, blunt-toed footwear known as "duck bills" or "cow mouth" shoes. At their most extreme, these wide-toed shoes could be almost as wide as they were long."

I can see "cow mouth shoes" as the next big trend in retro footwear.  Moo.

These shoes are from the 1920's display.  They are super-pretty and I would totally wear them.

These are French, from the mid-1920's and caught my eye on account of their intricate floral embroidery.  So lady-like!

These are from the Roger Vivier (1907 - 1998) collection.  He was a French fashion designer who specialized in shoes, and is credited with the design of the first stiletto heel in 1954.  Some of his shoes were designed not to be worn, but to be appreciated instead as works of art.  He drove the point home by only making one shoe instead of a pair.

Bird shoe.  Awwwk!

So there you have it!  Shoe museum: done.  Once was enough.  I'm discovering that I'd like to hang out in the Art Gallery of Ontario for a few hours every week.  But shoes?  I'd rather just go shopping for them.

Go Team Go

My stay-cation has been restful, however not very exciting.  I have been doing a lot of sleeping, some shopping, socializing, and that's about it.  Pleasant times, but nothing substantial.

I've been checking my e-mail every morning and working from home around an hour each day, in order to keep some time-sensitive projects on track.  There are some meetings that I'm going to be attending when I go back to work, and I need to talk to my boss about how we're going to approach them.

My workplace is divided into regular staff and fancy professionals.  The regular staff is there to provide services to the professionals, so that the professionals can make money, and pay their overhead fees, which cover the staff's payroll.

My boss's approach for many years was:  The professionals are the geese that lay the golden eggs.  Give them whatever they ask for to keep them happy.  They are not employees, so we can't order them around.  They could go work elsewhere if they chose to.  If they are demanding, so be it.  If the staff don't like it we can also go work elsewhere if we choose to.

As of the past few months, things have changed.  For reasons which I won't get into, the company can't afford to give the professionals everything they want anymore.  The professionals, who are used to being asked "how high sir?" when they tell us to jump, aren't happy with this.  And my boss is not feeling sympathetic.

I can see the professionals' point of view.  They're used to receiving a certain level of service for their overheads, and no one consulted them about a change in the unwritten contract.

I can see my boss's point of view.  Times are tough, and everyone is having to buckle their belts one notch tighter.

The problem is that my boss appears to want to fight things out with the professionals. He's frustrated because they don't want to change.   He's tired of placating them and giving in.  But instead of approaching things assertively, he's gotten aggressive with some of them.  And he's encouraging the staff to do the same.  When an employee "takes a stand" or "holds her ground" in a conflict with a professional, he's on the employee's side, cheering and waving pom-poms.  And everyone's getting into it.

It feels like living on a reality TV set, where everyone is encouraged to take sides and dig in their heels for a good, sweaty struggle.  Some people are enjoying the juiciness of the drama.  The employees are understandably gleeful at getting a chance to tell off the professionals.  The professionals are not going to take this lying down.

People.  Keep your shirts on.  Has anyone ever heard of the phrase "solution-oriented problem solving?"  Say it with me!  There, I knew you could.

There is nothing to be gained from the type of confrontations I've witnessed thus far.  Fighting fire with fire is only going to burn down the office.  There must be a way for us to converse about the situation as mature, reasonable adults, yes?  Fortunately my boss is open to strategizing with me on possible approaches to these confrontations before we stage any more of them.

I don't like reality shows on TV.  I certainly don't like the feeling that I'm living and working in one.

Adventures in a Nutshell

What, you may ask, has Spark been up to lately, when she is not working and/or eating bagels? (Oh, sweet bagels, how I missed you...)

A few things.  Such as:

I took my mom to a concert for her birthday.  We didn't rock out.  This was an event in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.  The choir of an Anglican church sang hymns and ritual favourites such as God Save the Queen. An organist struggled through Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance.  We sat as still as possible in the old wooden pews, trying not to make them squeak, and sweated like professional wrestlers because there was no air conditioning.

I went to the Picasso exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  I didn't know much about Picasso.  To me he was that guy who painted an ugly cubist woman with a big nose and both eyes on one side of her face.  As it turns out, he painted in a range of styles throughout his career, and when that got boring he took up sculpture.  There was so much to see that I only got through 5 of the 7 rooms in an hour, and after that I got art fatigue.  I'll have to go back a second time to see the rest.

I have one message for anyone who might be attending that exhibit:
It is crowded.  You want to get up close to the artwork to get a good look at it.  However, if you stand right behind me with the toes of your shoes touching the heels of my shoes, when I turn to move to the next painting I will step on you.  Nothing personal, but please, if you can read this, you're standing too close.

I've been shopping online at LL Bean, and I'm officially hooked.  They offer the best selection of colours.  Most stores in malls only have two or three trendy colours on the rack each season.  I find this depressingly boring.  I need variety!  My latest acquisition is this in "bright capri" (their fancy name for "blue"), and it is my new favourite shirt.

What else is going on?  Well, I have this upcoming week off for my first staycation in a while, so something is bound to happen.

Let Me Eat Cake

Anyone who's been following this blog knows that one year ago I stopped eating wheat due to an allergic reaction.  I whined plenty about it.  My mother doesn't eat wheat either, so eventually I accepted it, as one must when something runs in the family.

Later I thought about it a little more.  My mom's been on and off wheat throughout her life, depending on how much stress she's been going through.  Years have gone by when she's been able to tolerate it without obvious problems.  Then something stressful will happen, and she'll be off it again.  I wondered if I might be able to tolerate it again at some point.

So I tried.  Very carefully.  The first thing I did was to gently, fearfully, lick a cracker.  Then I broke out in a cold sweat, worried that I might react.

I was fine.

The next step was to eat a crumb.  I use the word "crumb" only because it was not possible for me to isolate one single molecule of wheat from a cookie.  This crumb was so small that it was almost invisible.  Smaller than a grain of sand.  I swallowed it with trepidation.  And I was fine.

I moved up to a crumb equal in size to a grain of sand.  Then a crumb big enough to chew.  Then an actual bite.  A quarter of a pretzel.  A half.  A whole.  Two. Four.  Eight.  No problem.  I can eat wheat!

I still feel kind of anxious around wheat.  I did all this experimenting stretched over the past two months, always timing my doses carefully to make sure I'd be at home, and not alone, if a reaction hit.  This weekend was the first time I ate wheat outside of my own house.  An eggroll - man it was good!  And yesterday I ate chocolate cake for the first time in a whole year.  I can't even tell you how fantastic it tasted.

I don't know how long it will last, but I swear I'll never take wheat for granted again.

A Mile Wide and Twice as Deep

People can be really mean.

Everyone gets into a mean mood once in a a while, but some people are fundamentally mean.  They may know how to keep themselves in check so that they can operate in polite society, but they can only go so long before their fundamental meanness slips out.

I have a business relationship with a man who has a mean streak a mile wide.  The whole mile wasn't revealed to me all at once.  At first he seemed like a clever guy with a critical turn of mind and a gift for sarcasm.  As he got to know me better and felt more at home with me, he started sharing more of his opinions.

He thinks this person is stupid.  That one is fat.  A third - who knows what she does all day?  Probably sits at her desk playing solitaire instead of working.  And how about that guy - the ugly one?  Lucky for him that he married his high school sweetheart, because no one would date him.

These pronouncements are usually followed by an evil cackle.  The mean guy obviously gets a charge of delight from putting other people down.

He's even been mean to me.

Sometimes I wear crazy socks to work.  The rest of my outfit is all placid and beige and whatnot, but hidden under my trousers and over-the-ankle boots I might be wearing canary yellow, or rainbow stripes, or socks with birds all over them.  One time when I was seated with my legs crossed, my pants rode up enough to reveal a sliver of crazy sock.  The mean guy saw, and laughed at me.  Not with me.  At me.

He raised one eyebrow, smirked, said something like "Really?  You wear kids' socks?"  At that moment all I said was "Well, life is serious enough, don't you think?  I like to liven it up a little."  He sneered.  But we were about to start a business meeting, and I didn't care all that much at that moment what he thought about my socks, so that was the end of it.

But after the fact, when I had a chance to think it through again, I got pretty ticked off.  I don't know why he feels entitled to be The Judge of Everyone, or The Determiner of Sock Age Appropriateness, but it's a bunch of b.s.  Next time he says something mean, I'm calling him on it.  I'm just going to say, "Wow, that's really mean."  I don't know what will happen, but if I can get him to think twice before opening that sour mouth, I'll call it a victory.

Ten Things

Look at that!  I have received an award, thanks to the generosity of Tracy at Pull Up a Toadstool.  :-)

The rules say to pass it along to six people, however since I have such a small and dedicated group of commenters, I am leaving it open to any of you to accept this award and continue passing it along.  You all deserve it!

The rules also say that I'm supposed to come up with a list of ten facts about myself that are not widely known.  This I shall endeavour to do.  It's going to be tough, because I've spilled almost every detail about my life on this blog at some point.  Here goes:

1)  As a baby, I was an early reader, but a late walker.

2)  It saddens me considerably that I cannot wear most shades of yellow.  Yellow makes me look blotchy and ill.  Too bad, because it's such a pretty colour.

3)  When I was four years old I had a dream that I still remember.  In it, the creatures from "Where the Wild Things Are" kidnapped me from my daycare nap room.  They were planning on eating me for dinner.  They sat me on their kitchen counter while they prepared a salad.  I guess even scary monsters need their veggies.  (N.B. The salad was blue.)

4)  My middle name was supposed to be "Alexandra", but my grandmother complained to my mother that this would make my full name too long.  "Such a big name for such a little girl!" she said.  So my mother shortened my middle name to Ann.  I wish she hadn't.  I would have loved to have a long, romantic name like a character from a Russian novel.

5)  I can lean forward and put the palms of my hands flat on the floor without bending my knees.

6)  I have trouble opening bottles and jars. Recently I was so frustrated and thirsty that I came this close to asking a random young man on the subway to open a bottle of apple juice for me.  Fortunately, with a lot of red-faced straining and hand pain, I managed to get it open myself.

7)  [Squeamish alert: skip this one if you have a weak stomach.]  I have a scar on my right leg from when I was six years old.  I was running up a flight of stairs after a friend, when she knocked a framed piece of artwork off the wall.  The piece hit the stairs and shattered.  A chunk of glass flew into my leg.  My mother took me to the doctor but refused to let him give me stitches, as she felt the process would be traumatizing, so the remaining scar is relatively large.  It doesn't bother me much.  I don't bare my legs above the knee anyway.

8)  I used to walk with an exaggerated turn-out like Charlie Chaplin.  I wore orthotics for four years in my early 20's to correct my gait.

9)  I have really great teeth.  They're straight, strong, and never give me any trouble.

10)  I love to write, but I haven't been inspired to write fiction since I was a teenager.  Sometimes I wonder if I should try my hand at a very short story, and see what happens.  But there's so much interesting real stuff happening all the time, and it takes precedence.

Alright kidoodles!  Grab the challenge and run with it!  It's all yours.

Photos of photos

I took photos of the photos of my zaidy after the unveiling last weekend.  This one is stuck to my buby's fridge.  Here he is, her handsome prince:

When he was a very young man, he served as a airplane mechanic and test pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force.  Isn't he handsome in his uniform?  At 6'3" he was quite an impressive fellow. 

Here he is with my buby.  I believe she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of one of her 4 sisters.  My mother says that if buby has remembered the date correctly, she is pregnant with my mother in this photo.

Then I found this picture of my mother's youngest sister in 1960.  What is a nice, Jewish girl doing on a mall Santa's knee?  It's a mystery to me.  Maybe she was hoping that Santa doesn't descriminate.  He could pop down the chimney and leave some gifts for her under the hanukiah.