Since Matt Walsh has so thoughtfully answered the question What is a Woman?, the question now on every thinking persons mind is, quite naturally, What is a hippo?
I know you must have been struggling with this question as much as I have. Fortunately I’ve got all the answers right here in my recent humour satire The Hippo.
It follows the story of Wally, who has courageously rejected the species identity arbitrarily assigned to him at birth by his bigoted, narrow-minded, reactionary parents. Despite what his birth certificate says, he now knows he’s really a hippo, and he wants his parents to cough up the cash so he can get the species affirmation surgery he desperately needs.
The other hippos, however (the real ones), turn out to be problematic, as Wally discovers they are not so open-minded about accepting a trans-hippo into their herd.
They won’t even let him use the same washroom, for heaven’s sake!
The good news is that Wally doesn’t have to undertake his journey alone. He has a whole group of transspecies friends at his side: there’s Kitty the tabby-cat, Rover the rottweiler, and Erica the transsexual kangaroo who aren’t about to let any biological facts stand in the way as they shake off the shackles of oppressive species bigotry to forge their own identity.
What happens next is enough to make even the LGBTQ+ look transphobic…
To find out more, you can go to the book page here on my website, or check out the Amazon book page, or better yet buy your own copy today!
We just got through a period of roughly 3 months of almost complete lockdown in which we were barely able to leave the house. Recently things have gotten better. In my province, Ontario, they’ve allowed restaurants to re-open, and just last week I sat inside a restaurant for the first time in 4 months. But we still need to be careful, and medical authorities are already warning of a second wave. We might be subject to another lockdown come the fall or winter.
Knowing how to maintain your sanity has become a vital new life-skill in 2020, and not everyone is coping so well.
How do you stay sane while in quarantine during a pandemic? I’ve kept my sanity with hobbies, two of my favorites being: writing novels and making knives.
This is a knife I forged from steel cable, using deer antler, brass and leather for the handle.
As much as I love the creative process of writing, it has one serious drawback: it involves sitting down at a laptop, which is essentially what I do for a living all day long. I’m a Project Manager at a large financial services company, in which I spend most of my day on the phone with my laptop in virtual meetings. It had always been a dream of mine to write a novel, and I’ve spent the last fourteen years getting up between 4 and 5 AM to put in a couple of hours writing before going to work. People look at me like I’m crazy, but that’s what you have to do if you’re serious about writing. It’s worth it and I feel really proud of my writing. To-date I’ve completed 7 full length novels.
And I’m glad I’m pursuing that dream, but I also needed to find something that got me on my feet, is physical and hands-on and kept me in shape (more-or-less). Gym memberships never worked for me, even before Covid-19 made them unwise. I’ve tried them several times and I’ve always found it too boring to keep up, and they are not a viable option during a pandemic.
What I needed was something physical that wouldn’t bore me to death, and keep me interested enough to stand and use my muscles for hours. So in the summer of 2016 I started another hobby – knife making.
I forge them by hand from raw hunks of high carbon steel. It seems to be working. One hot Saturday in the summer, I rolled my forge and anvil out into the backyard under a shade tree and spent the entire day forging.
I was in complete bliss, and lost almost 10 pounds. It was in that moment that I realized I’d found something that holds my interest enough to keep me physically active for hours at a time.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I made my own forge out of an old barbeque I found abandoned at the side of the road. For an anvil I use an old piece of railroad track that was given to me. Some good files and a couple of heavy hammers, and that’s basically all you need to get started.
The knife I made pictured below won’t win any prizes for beauty, but I had a lot of fun forging it.
I forged this knife from a car leaf spring. A piece of the leaf spring it came from is shown above it. The handle wood is from an old horse yoke that was left on the wall of our den by the previous owner when we moved into our house.
It’s important to have interesting hobbies when you are stuck at home self-isolating. Forging steel may not be your thing, but you could try baking bread. Take up cooking. Learn to sow and make masks. Take up carpentry. Start blogging or write that novel you’ve always wanted to. All these things have become huge since the pandemic. In my area stores can’t keep flour in stock because of the numbers of people who’ve taken up baking. I see that as a very positive thing. Stay safe and above all, stay sane!
** This post has been updated a few times since it was originally published in July 2020 during the dark days of covid and quarantines.
As one might suspect, with novels such as “Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte”, and “Coffee to Go, With a Spaceship”, I rather like coffee. I don’t think that should come as too much of a surprise.
In today’s post I thought I’d share links to some of my favorite coffee related blogs. Sometimes it’s just really nice to ignore the news, Facebook, Twitter and anything else on the internet that can get too serious, and go to a website to relax and read about something you enjoy without having to hear anything about wars, pandemics, Donald Trump, or American election cycles that never seem to end and are always in crisis mode.
Sometimes we need a mental break. So here are some good coffee blogs and links to other interesting and fun stuff. I’ll be updating this list from time to time.
Roasting Coffee Beans at Home for Beginners. This article explains how to roast beans at home without special equipment, using a pan on the stove top, or in the oven, or using a popcorn machine. An excellent all-around article for the beginner who wants to try roasting without making a big investment in equipment.
The Bean Ground Coffee gear buying guide and reviews. If you’re shopping for anything related to your favorite addiction, this is a good place to start. Also, good indepth info on coffee beans.
The Coffee Channel. A great all-round website for coffee lovers, with reviews, blogs, buying guides and recipes all about coffee. They also have a list of what they consider the best coffee blogs.
Brewed Coffee. As they say in their About Us – “We are All about Coffee, including coffee news, tips, recipes, and more!”
Believer Coffee Company. This is a craft roaster in Ontario, who – in their own words “believe in the possibility of bigfoot & aliens, but most of all we believe in fresh roasted coffee for our consumer.” These guys get it!
Once Upon A Chef. You’re going to need cookies and other snacks while drinking coffee and reading great fiction. I like to cook (and eat snacks), and this site by a classically trained chef is my favorite recipe website.
Keep Food Safe. This is an excellent site about food safety. In their own words, “We support individuals who have fallen ill due to contaminated food. Recognizing that foodborne illnesses can lead to severe consequences, including hospitalization, we are committed to educating the public on current food outbreaks and promoting safe practices for both food service companies and consumers.”
Some other interesting & random stuff to pass the time
Custom handmade knives for the kitchen. Good cooking goes with great coffee (see above), so if you need some new kitchen knives check out this website (and a few more below).
BookGlow. This is a fun website about books, that also appreciates a good cup of coffee.
Fadir Knives in Ukraine. A blacksmith shop in Ukraine making high quality axes and bushcraft knives.
It’s a fact! Coffee drinkers live longer!
A fun fact that coffee lovers will appreciate! Studies show that coffee drinkers live longer. See this article from CNN:
Something beautiful to look at. While you’re relaxing with a coffee, check out these amazing watercolours by Jacquie Herron. Jacquie’s paintings have a vibrant originality and freshness I find absolutely delightful.
Wordle word game answer history: for all you Wordle nerds. Check your guesses for the day’s Wordle puzzle against previous answer history. I consider this good strategy, not cheating! There’s no point in wasting guesses on words that have already been used, after all.
Featured blogs
I like to keep track of some of my favorite blogs here, so that they don’t get entirely lost in the ‘Archives’ as time goes on…
Canuckle. Have you tried this 5-letter word game yet? I’m a Canuckle nerd and have probably spent far too much time researching possible starting words – constantly going for the thrill of getting the puzzle in one guess. But it has happened a couple of times!
It seems there is no news except Covid news. And for the last 8 weeks or so, what other kind of news has there been? What else mattered?
But some of us still remain preoccupied with much more interesting issues, such as “Do aliens exist?”, leading up to the most pressing question on all of our hearts and minds these days: “And do they like coffee?”
I don’t actually have the answers, but I’m pretty sure that …
When it is warm and sunny I have a great capacity for sitting outside. I’m very talented at it. I can sit for hours accomplishing very little, something I am very proud of. Maybe I’ll read a bit, maybe write a bit, or maybe I’ll just put my feet up and drink coffee and enjoy being outside. I get a lot of thinking done that way, but my wife says it doesn’t really count as ‘doing’ something. We continue to disagree on that point. But more on that in a future blog, perhaps.
However, I digress… my real point is that I’ve converted.
Before the crisis I did all of my serious sitting on the back deck, completely ignoring the front porch. Too many people out front, more private in the back. Up until this April, I probably only ever sat on the front porch maybe 4 times during the 12 years we’ve lived in our house. I much preferred the privacy of the back deck.
Since the crisis, I’ve converted to a front-porch-sitter. There aren’t many cars going by anymore, but lots more people out walking. I sit outside with a coffee several times a day now. And I get to say ‘hi’ to people. It’s exciting. Many of them are complete strangers and often they will stop and ask me how I’m doing – at a socially responsible distance, of course. And the question ‘how are you doing?’ is no longer rote pro forma, but has become freighted with genuine feeling. And a meaningful answer is actually expected and even welcomed. It’s wonderful. It makes me feel less isolated and actually part of the human race again.
I don’t even have the chairs setup on the back deck yet. Why would I? There isn’t anyone back there.
…I also get excited about taking a car ride once a week to the grocery store now… but more on that in a future blog post.
Can’t go out. Going to the grocery store feels like I’m putting my life at risk. I can’t just watch Netflix or be on Facebook all the time. They’re about to outlaw going for walks, and in Toronto they are now handing out $7500 fines for going to the park…not that we should anyway.
In times such as these hobbies are important. People are learning to sew and are making face masks. People are learning to bake for themselves in huge numbers. There is something very comforting in homemade bread and buns. If there is one good thing that comes out of this crisis – and I think there will be many good things, actually – is that people are re-learning how to make and bake and do things for themselves. The kind of things our grandparents always did for themselves, but we’ve found it easier to just go shopping instead.
That’s changing now, since shopping for anything but necessities has been cancelled, and the necessities are getting hard to find.
Keeping yourself occupied with hands-on, practical things is important to maintaining ones sanity while in isolation. I’ve been learning to work with leather and make knife sheaths. I’ve also been learning to make knives.
Here’s a sample of what I’ve been making. Made from bulk, raw materials, not from a kit. I ground and polished the blade down from a bar of high-carbon tool steel. Solid brass bolsters are set off nicely by the black micarta handles, secured with brass pins to the tang. I hand-stitched the leather sheath.
Now, some of you may be wondering why, as a writer, I’m talking about making knives as a pass-time instead of writing. Shouldn’t I be using that extra time to get that next, long over-due, Jack Winters sequel finished? When loyal fans are patiently awaiting the next sequel, why am I fooling around making a knife? Good question. But here’s the thing. I spend all day in front of a laptop writing and sometimes it feels like, well – work. So I need a fun diversion that is also physical, hands-on and gets me off my bottom and on my feet. Otherwise I’m going to get fat and out-of-shape, suffer health complications, and then I’d never get the next Jack Winters sequel finished!
Staying healthy and fit is very important to surviving a crisis.
