More Tidbits

Kieran is uploading photos RIGHT NOW! We've found a place that accepts our USB cable and it is, of all places, an Internet cafe/karaoke bar, so there's some drunk kids warbling their way through some Usher songs right now, which is pretty hilarious and oddly not annoying (yet). Anyhoo, until the photos are ready, allow me to divulge the minutiae of our lives for your amusement.

The fact that I am a mouth breather is not only unfortunate for me in that it's rather inelegant, it's also inconvenient and unpleasant to be reminded of this bad habit by way of inhaling a sizable number of bugs on any given day. According to my dentist, my mouth breathing has to do with my historical atrocious overbite. Truthfully, I think I only fall back on mouth breathing when I sleep or when I exercise (I guess when I'm breathing deeply, then), so it's not like I'm Napoleon Dynamite or something. Or I hope I'm not. Bugs don't zing into my mouth at high speeds and hit my teeth with a faint thwack to notify me of my gaping maw when I'm, like, buying groceries or something, so perhaps I'm walking around slack jawed half the time without realizing it. When this trip first started, I used to pause to give my mouth a swish with water followed by a dainty spit after a bug flew in, but now I just swallow and keep going. Just goes to show you you can pretty much get used to anything. (Aside: Once when I was jogging, I had a BEE fly into my mouth and start crawling around my tongue and I had to stop dead in the sidewalk with my tongue sticking out and heavy ropes of drool hanging out of the corners of my mouth until the bee decided it was done exploring the surface of my tongue and flew away. For everyone's sake, let's hope that THAT never happens again.)

Speaking of the surprising things that one can become accustomed to, it didn't take long at all for our lives to rearrange themselves into a series of ironic new relativities. Okay, I totally made up that word. What I mean is, things we now accept as Normal Life are pretty darn ironic relative to Actual Normal Life. Here are some examples: On days when we do what we call a "Half Day" (it's become an official term for us), which amounts to doing between 50-75 kilometres or about three or four hours of riding, I find I end up admonishing myself not to get dessert or reminding myself to get salad instead of fries*. I've only had three and a half hours of vigorous exercise, after all, and I don't want to get crazy here. Of course, there was a time not that long ago where if I'd done a three hour workout, I would have heartily patted myself on the back before tying into a piece of cheesecake. "Oh, go on," I'd say smugly while my fork pushed its way through the cool, dense mass of cheese and sugar, "you've earned it."

Along with what we currently both consider to be inconsequential amounts of exercise, there's also the whole "Enh, you can only smell this shirt from four feet away, so it's good for another day" thing, the daily "This knife is dirty; I will wipe it...heeeeerrree on this patch of grass to clean it," and the classic "Ooooh! A grassy camp spot! What unimaginable luxury a night's sleep HERE will be!"

And now, an impromptu reader poll: Do you find this picture creepy?

Notice how the world behind me is all streaming and bent? Notice how there's blurry shapes superimposed over different parts of the shot? Yeah. We took that in the schoolhouse in Delia. The one we thought was haunted (before we knew how the pics turned out).

Anyway, just to prove that I'm not completely hysterical when it comes to sleeping in creepy old buildings, we ended up spending the night in another old one room schoolhouse in Dyment, Ontario and I slept like a log.** I also successfully managed to sleep in the old jail in Ottawa (now the HI hostel), even though it was once featured on "Haunted Canada" and, indeed, there's daily ghost tours with a guide telling a rapt group of people things I would force myself not to hear. Despite my best efforts not to give my avid imagination any more fodder than is naturally provided by a 145 year-old jail (that was closed down due to inhumane conditions), I was unable to avoid learning that the hostel used to have the eighth floor--the floor that used to be death row--open to guests. But too many times guests staying on this floor ran screaming down the stairs in the middle of the night, waking up and terrifying the entire building, because a man holding a bible sat on their bed, so the hostel eventually shut that floor down. This did not happen to us in our cell, thank GODDESS, because I would NOT survive if the ghost of Patrick Whelan sat on my bed.

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*Uh-oh. I think a ripple of anxiety has just gone through all the family members who read this. Believe me, I'm as healthy and strong as an ox right now. I pretty much mean that literally. I think me, my arse, and I could pull a plow up a hill right now.

**That is, AFTER I convinced myself that the fugitive who was on the loose in Ontario was not what was making the creaking noises on the deck. It did take a certain amount of Creak Analysis before I was able to reach that conclusion. Weirdly enough, when we spent the night in Portage du Fort in Quebec, it was just after they'd caught that same fugitive of whom I'd been scared in Dyment, five minutes from where we were staying.