In which I pretend to be worldly

The powers that be gave the library students a study week. Everything was due before the study week, instead rendering it a party week, so naturally I followed the party back home to "the 603" as the kids somewhat irritatingly call it. I drove back all by me onesie, which meant three things:

1. Listening to the same Paul McCartney CD for five hours, due to poor planning on my part, which, even for diehard fans such as myself, can only end badly and with undue disrespect for the man.

2. The farms on the road from Montreal to the Vermont border emit the rankest stench I have ever passed on the highway. Usually when I've passed farms with livestock, it's a little stinky, enough to make a quasi-inane comment in singsong like "oh, must be a farm nearby!" but nothing unbearable for the average country gal. I couldn't even see any cows from the road, and yet it smelled like I had just stuck my head in the toilet. Naturally, the smell filled up my car again a few miles from the border, and would not leave until after I had passed through customs, which may have factored into how fast I was processed.

3. On that same road, there are many cute little French-Canadian farmstands that sell cute French-Canadian farmstand stuff like mais sucre and bonbons à l'érable. Most of the surrounding area is similarly cute and farmy, but across from one particularly wholesome-looking farmstand is a strip club. No explanation, no other strip joints in the vicinity from what I could tell, just the one lonely building with a neon sign and pictures of naked women on it. It's too easy to just chalk it up to it being Quebec, but so far that's the best I've got.

Good old-fashioned American retail, and other border-crossing matters

Were you aware of the fact that SmartWool, the makers of most of my socks, also make clothing? I wasn't until I paid a long-awaited visit to the North Conway NH L. L. Bean, where I purchased perhaps the coziest sweater of my clothes-wearing career. I swear I am not paid by SmartWool. Though I would not turn payment down if they were to offer it to me. Tragically it is 100% wool and thus 100% dry-clean only, though dry-clean only labels have not stopped me from wet-cleaning before. I've decided, however, that it's a jacket, not a sweater, and thus can be cleaned as often as I would a jacket. So there.

Hypothesis #1: Quebec Customs only employs attractive, blue-eyed, 26-year-old males as customs agents. Scientific trials: 2. So far, the hypothesis stands. Will report later as evidence is gathered.

Also, can I suggest to the world's customs departments that the length of time you wait in line at the border should be proportional to the length of time it takes the agent to assess that you are not going to go on a mass killing spree or sell drugs in their country? I waited in customs traffic for an hour and a half and spent about thirty seconds at the window. "Where do you live? Where do you go to school? Any alcohol or tobacco in the car? Okay, you can go." Anytime I go through any country's customs, you can see the point where they decide I look too harmless to bother with more questions. It's pretty obvious that my oats mostly lie on the domestic side of the oat continuum, but I still harbor a fear that if I don't sit up straight and look them in the eye with a specially formulated combination of respect and earnestness, I'll be escorted to "the back room" where bad things will happen to me and I'll never be heard from again. If everyone made as concerted an effort as I do to look innocent, I would not have to spend ninety minutes inching along a quarter mile of highway, eyeing my empty coffee cup as a possible player in my mounting urge to pee.

tweed heals all wounds over 40 degrees

Excuse me, Post-Graduate Students' Society of McGill University, but you advertised veggie sausages at your Oktoberfest-themed evening, and there were no veggie sausages to be found! Soft pretzels, while tasty, are not an appropriate alternative. You are on notice, Thomson House.

While I'm whining, why does the elevator in my building sometimes miss its mark by, like, a foot and a half? This creates a situation where one has to exaggeratedly step either up or down into the elevator, which is a lovely combination of amusing, embarrassing and slightly unnerving. Nobody in their right minds would call this a "nice" apartment building but I would like to be able to convincingly assert that I live in a "functioning" apartment building.

Okay, spoiled chick rant over. It was 50 degrees and damp today, the kind of Londony weather I've been dying for all summer. I'll take it, even if I have to take the stairs (since I won't get sweaty doing it).


Fire escape, Rue Milton. 10/2/2008.

j'aime les marrons grillés

My question today is:

Is Montreal a roasted-chestnuts-in-the-winter kind of city?

I wouldn't be a librarian if I couldn't find that out for myself.

Then again, I'm housewifey, I bet I could make them.

At the McGill farmer's market yesterday, I bought tomatoes, squash, and some tasty but mysterious fried ball of dough. I was told it was vegetarian; that's all I know about it. I don't know if this is just me, but in my experience, farmer's market stalls come in two varieties: hippie and yuppie. Hippie stalls sell things for so little that you're not sure the commune's going to earn enough money to make supper for everyone. Yuppie stalls accept both legal tender and limbs as currency. There were only two stalls at the time that I went, one run by student types and the other by less studenty types. Now, I am glad to patronize local business, but Madame et Monsieur were charging $12 for a cluster of seemingly ordinary garlic bulbs maybe the size of my forearm. As far as I could tell, they weren't special in any way, smoked or roasted or tipped with gold, so I'm guessing I could get what would be, to my tomato sauce, essentially the same thing, down at Marché Lobo for maybe two or three bucks. And that's $1.89 to $2.83 USD. Yeah, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I understand that sometimes local and/or organic things might cost a bit more (though those tomatoes were only a dollar a pound, can I just say). But I'm a grad student. We're talking a few steps above ramen, here. I need produce, and I need it cheap. I can't save the planet if I get scurvy first.

Plus, your stall did not have anything fried, so points off for that, too.