wednesday night/thursday morning

As always, we had a relaxing evening of fun and stimulating conversation with Ingrid and her mother, Marlene. Ingrid is, in every sense of the term, a free spirit. She remains single at 40, owns her own property, and does pretty much what she wants, when she wants. When she wants to stay in Edmonton she stage-manages local plays, and when she wants to hit the road she signs up for a touring show. (She was in Moscow SM'ing 42nd Street when the Nord Ost hostage crisis occurred.) As long as I've known her, she's had purple hair. Like Marlene, she has a love affair with books, movies, theatre, and CBC radio. Right now she's putting together a blog, encouraging people to share their stories of what makes them happy in the hopes of inspiring people who aren't happy to make themselves happy. "If people stopped and thought about what really makes them happy, they probably wouldn't want to sacrifice their whole lives for jobs they hate and stuff they don't need." She owns a couple of houses in the States (like me, she's a dual citizen), but prefers to live in the basement of her 1950s house in li'l ol' Edmonton while an artist friend lives upstairs. Marlene's much the same way. She retired early to spend more time with her late husband, Wolf, but she now does more volunteer work in a month than the average person does in a lifetime. She helps immigrants learn to read, does fund-raising and production work and sewing for Walterdale Playhouse, and a lot of other things to which she won't even admit. Just generous and humble, very centered, people. They remind me a lot of my own family.

Richard is happily watching Titus, all three or so hours of it.

The hamsters had a nasty brawl last night. Butters, the small one, is usually very nervous and submissive around Tweak, but yesterday she apparently just had enough and went all Cujo on her. She chomped into Tweak's foot. Tweak now stays faaar away from her.