the perils of a canadian summer

My sister found an article in a Canadian Living magazine (tucked between a pemmican recipe and a feature on resoling skidoo boots) offering health and safety tips for the Canadian summer.

In addition to advice on coping with bee stings, food poisoning, and poison ivy, the editors included some helpful words on what to do if you CUT YOUR FOOT OFF WITH THE LAWN MOWER (emphasis mine, the editors gave it no more play than the bee stings or the rusty nail punctures).

Curious to know how common summer lawn mower-induced foot loss is, I consulted Stats Canada, and discovered their lighthearted "Summer by the Numbers" section. While they don't keep track of power lawn mower-related injuries, they do track deaths, and in 2004 (the most recent year for which numbers were available) these totaled 1. (Making lawn mowers as big a threat as lightning strikes).

Canada did, however, have 58,945 acres of sod in need of mowing in 2006, so it's not hard to imagine some portion of that acreage littered with severed feet.

I took the precaution of ensuring I never mowed the lawn and, as a result, have returned from vacation with both my feet.

Thank you, Canadian Living!

and we're back!

I waited months for season three of Mad Men - long, lonely months without Don or Peggy or Roger or their early '60s fashions or their rampant smoking and marital infidelity (fortunately, I live in a country where smoking and marital infidelity remain rampant, which eased the separation anxiety).

I've read that the man behind the show, the former Sopranos writer whose actual name I cannot be bothered to google right now - especially for people who clearly have both internet connections and time to burn - is obsessed with getting even the tiniest period details correct (as in, looking up actual train timetables from 1962 and ensuring the fruit in the bowls on the dining room tables is appropriately small and bruised).

I'm not sure that this is why it took them so long to get season three underway, but it seems to me it couldn't have helped. And I was willing to wait. Which got me to thinking...maybe I could claim to have been busy all these months getting the period detail correct.

What period, you ask? Well, I'm not exactly sure. But as I write, I'm wearing a dress I bought 13 years ago for an office Christmas party [See photo above] so maybe it's 1996. (I'm trying to pretend it's some sort of triumph that it still fits, but I think the truth is that it still doesn't fit - just in a different way. I find it hard to put a triumphant spin on that).

But if I were to get the period detail absolutely correct, I would have to find a Portuguese hairdresser. And she would have to squeeze me in on a day when she was also doing an entire Portuguese wedding party. And I would have to have spent all my money on my party dress, leaving me nothing for stockings. And I would have to have arranged to meet my friend Kevin in Toronto's gay village to borrow money for stockings and I would have to go directly from the hairdresser's, giving him the opportunity to boom across a gay coffee shop in his "That boy really should be a radio announcer" voice, "MY GOD! YOU LOOK LIKE AN IMMIGRANT BRIDE!"

(Which, of course, I did, at the time, having been mixed in with the actual immigrant bride and her attendants; and which I would have to do again, were I to get the period detail absolutely correct.)

That seems like an awful lot of effort to go to to avoid admitting something my three readers already know - namely, that I'm lazy.

So how about I just leave it at - "Good to be back"?