I finally had a whole weekend at home. It was heaven. I didn't actually stop working, (we had our first federal council meeting Sunday night and I had to catch up on a a few hundred emails) but I did get back to some of my favourite things. Saturday did a bit of "spring" cleaning in the fall, while also preparing some new Green Party materials and taking a dozen phone calls in anticipation of the first council meeting (by two hour conference call Sunday night).
Sunday morning I was back at St. Bartholomews Anglican Church for the first regular fall hours of worship...my regular worship is important to me and this particular parish is an extended family.
I spent Sunday afternoon like Martha Stewart -- not with an ankle bracelet, but busy in the kitchen. I had not baked bread since some time in June. While four loaves of organic whole wheat were almost out of the oven, a friend walked in with armloads of fresh organic basil from her garden, so pesto making started in another corner. I traded a loaf of bread for the basil (and also mint and parsley), an exchange my daughter found timeless. She imagined it happening 1,000 years ago. The aromas, bread out of the oven, basil and mint) were intoxicating.
Monday was off to Montreal for a series of meetings and events...meeting the Green Party web team which is based in Montreal, an interview with the UQAM paper, meeting "Generation Green" Quebec
-- reps from the local youth movement (McGill, UQam, and other campuses), a meeting with former Quebec candidates and campaign managers to consider our Quebec strategy and, last, a speech, the Mona Elaine Adelman Memorial lecture at a Westmount synagogue, that brought me to Montreal in the first place. The entire day also enlivened by the presence of the CBC national TV news crew, now doing a profile on me. So Leslie MacKinnon and her producer, camera man and sound tech, met me at the train station at 8:45.. I had not been sure they were coming, but realized I would need to leave the cab semi-elegantly when I spotted them on the sidewalk(lugging my computer bag, travel reading and note bag, purse and a canvas bag full of empty containers to bring home take-out for my daughter from our favourite restaurant in the world, Chu Chai on rue St. Denis in Montreal....everyone at Sierra Club used to tease me for the number of bags usually slung over my shoulders...). They filmed me boarding the train, then they headed off by van to Montreal, then filmed many of the meetings through the day and the speech. I watched them longingly as they set off before I tackled the Q and A session to drive back to Ottawa, knowing I'd be on a bus a few hours after them...Still, it was a great day!
Anxiousely waiting