december 22, 2001. On the train, stopped at Campbellton Hour 24. I stink. We picked up a used copy of "Beaucoup Fish" in the course of our last-minute Christmas shopping, and it's been greatly entertaining in the past 24 hours. I will always associate this album with the night I was Q Girl and they let Q put the album on at Evil Morgan's party. Q was so taken by the CD that he spent the entire play time squirming, bouncing and dancing outright. And during the second song (the one I'm listening to right now), he came over and sang the words into my ear. You could say that this album has been imprinted for me, yessir. Third song. Time to talk of other things. The night was pretty sweet, as these things go. I plugged my ears with kleenex and curled up on the seat. Eventually the loud drunken man disappeared, probably while I was not-quite-sleeping in little floaty bursts. I'm not sure how much sleep I got last night - something between 6 and 8 hours, I would assume - but it's enough. At some point the Boy wandered off to read, and I claimed both seats without realizing what I was doing. This was my best sleep. I dreamed of a teenage Mr. Shoreleave who came to see me in a big Cadillac convertible, and who was such a good person that I regretted not inviting him to the wedding. Eventually I concluded that something was not right. I had not seen the Boy leave, yet I knew he had been gone a long time. Perhaps the passengers were being systematically murdered in an Agatha-Christie-type train intrigue (actually, this thought had occurred to me before but I'd been too sleepy to care.) This required action, although I was reluctant to put on shoes to meet that action. Stockingfeet it would have to be, then. I padded up the train and found him in the observation car, reading sf. He came back to the seat with me, but our reunion was somewhat marred by the discovery that I couldn't sleep in a paltry cramped single seat anymore. Twenty minutes after he sat down with me I returned him to the observation car, armed with the promise that I would let him sleep on me all through Quebec if necessary. (Off the point: there is something terribly enlivening about writing reminisces on a laptop while a speeding train rushes you through kilometres of snowy brushland and excellent techno pounds your brain into goo. I wish I could write like this every day.) Getting back to the early morning, it didn't quite work out as I'd intended. Even with the two seats to stretch across, I didn't manage to get any more sleep before the cabin lights came on for the day. I wandered back to the observation car to meet the Boy; there we did some yoga and watched the sun come up over Eastern Quebec. As I've grown accustomed to say: fan-fugoo-tastic. Aside from a 3 hour wait in the Montreal station and a journey at the end of serpentine line-up that threatened to swallow it's own tail, nothing much has happened today. The Boy is making good on his part of the deal and snoozing in the seat beside me. Unfortunately he can't sleep on me; we're in a commuter train now and the permanent armrests keep him firmly in his chair. He doesn't seem to mind. Snore. this time 4 years ago: spit-related activities