Never too late.

Well hello, there! 

I hear you saying: "What is this - a huge, mind-blowing comeback?" Nuh-uh. Calm down, I know you're excited. "Okay, sweet longing for writing, need to do something other than just think about it?" Getting warmer... New Year's resolution? Nope. I know. It's December 31st, 2013. I've been silent. I keep doing this, right? I publish a few posts in a row, with high suspicions that no one is reading (with all due respect to you, reading this at this very moment). I'm picking up where I left off. It was an eventful year. It's not all been good. I'll leave it at that. 

We have a very cute, very sweet addition to the family - his name is Euclide Plouf. 

 

Besides being the cutest green thing in the Universe, he is smart, funny, and gentle. His voice (yes - it's a voice) is soft: he kind of sounds like a mix between a child and a chipmunk. Best description I can come up with. Really. He only squawks when he's pissed off. He has intelligent little parrot eyes, and I swear, the way he looks at us sideways sometimes, it's like he's trying to read our minds or understands things we don't. He is a mini-parrot (a Barred Parakeet, or Toui Catherine in French), and we've had him since the end of August. Hypothetically, his birthday is June 2. That means he'll be seven months on January 2. He used to live in a great big house my hubby (I shall henceforth occasionally refer to him as The Monkey) built for him. It is gorgeous. All wood, no nails, no screws.

Birch, pine, a little bit of wood glue and a lot of patience. My boyfriend built in two side shelves, outside the cage, just for greenery. Originally, we wanted to have a mini bamboo forest on the bottom shelf (on the left) and a betta fish on the top shelf (on the right).

However, little parrots with sharp little parrot beaks love to gnaw and bite on things, which we were told this specific little guy was not inclined to do. Well. He's eaten through four bars so far, effectively opening back doors to his home and undertaking his very own renovation projects, which in itself was not really a problem. There is one problem, though: this bird, sadly, does not fly. His flight feathers were cut off before he ever learned how to, and although these feathers eventually do grow back, the reflexes are just not there. I mean, he flaps his wings and kind of floats off for a few moments, then plunges to the floor and hurts his chest. He is an excellent climber, though - quite the acrobat! He has launched himself off the four-foot high cage once too many times. It's too high for him. So he's now moved into a temporary home, as we will build him a nice one out of wood and metal this summer. In the meantime, this is the temporary setup.

A la cucaracha, a la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar...porque no tiene, porque la falta, una pata pa' caminar...(or something which sounds like that, anyhoo.)

 In this picture, he is attentively listening to his favorite tune, La Cucaracha, sung in Spanish by my man. The day we welcomed Euclide in our home, he was understandably very nervous (as were we). As The Monkey started singing the song, this feathered cutie fell asleep. So it became his theme song, and the only way we know to calm him. Life lesson to me when it comes to parrots: they are not cats. I've still got some learning to do. Lots of it. 

Alright, folks. Go make the food for the New Year's bash. That's what I'm about to do. Oh - and nice to see you again. I've missed you. See you next year.

12 juillet 1992.

Twenty years (and a few extra moments) ago , I was at the Québec Agora. I was sixteen. It was a beautiful day and the setting sun had a greenish hue, because in memories, colors fade and change. A slight breeze blew from the river, but we did not care, because that night, that night, it was special. I recall the overwhelming trepidation. I can still smell the crowd, the excitement and the spicy smell of the remnants of the afternoon sun on our skins. It was Indochine in concert, July 12, 1992. That night, I lost my silver graduation ring, the one my mother had paid $110 for.

A colleague lent me a DVD yesterday, the show at Stade de France in June 2010, where the crowd roars and pumps its collective fist in the air, chanting the lyrics Nicolas Sirkis is crooning from the vertiginous stage, almost surreal. I have just been, after barely three songs, catapulted back twenty years. It takes a lot to do that.

Twenty years ago, I think Sirkis was the first man to make me feel that twinge, that slight twisting of the groin. The first instant where, while listening to the melody, the lyrics, the breathlessness caught me unaware. Question marks rolling around: what does that mean? Where does it come from? Indochine as a whole, but more specifically their lyrics, their music, were very sexual to me, and still are to this day, I realize. Maybe Paul McCartney did this for my mom, when she was sixteen. Huh. I'd rather not go there. ;)

Infinite Possibilities.

What? Have I done it again? I truly am sorry. I lose interest, then I come back. This usually coincides with creative cycles (whatever those are) in my life.

Anyway, enough rambling, here I am (tada!).

My readers, all eighty-three thousand one hundred and four of them, must have all gone astray. They have vanished. I am sitting in this big white room full of echo. Good. Finally some privacy.

Only Little Person Living Inside My Head is still here, and she is safely tucked away in her little condo, which I have built entirely out of bamboo, banana leaves and beach rocks. She is currently sleeping. So I'll whisper, now, if you don't mind. I'll whisper to myself.

So - I'm stuck. Maybe that's why I came here. I have choices to make, and no idea where to start. We're painting the new abode, which I am sharing with my husband (yeah, I know, right?) and we have settled on a very nice, calm but happy green for the dining room. But now, I am looking and looking and lifting rocks to look under them and shuffling aside pages and pages of the internet...to no avail. Nowhere to be found is the "zap" of sudden unadulterated inspiration which makes me rush to the store to get that colour. Where are my colours?