Description 75 - Be...In This Place

And that place would be New Brunswick, an underrated province where I spent a beautiful, breezy and fire-y Canadian Thanksgiving. Includes music by The Monoxides, a mangling of history and stringy red seaweed you eat.

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Associated links
beinthisplace.ca
VIA Rail Ocean train from Montreal to Halifax
City of Moncton: Our Tide Is Rising
Woodstock: New Brunswick's First Town
(You're starting to get the idea that people in New Brunswick are good at slogans.)
Woodstock Sanctuary House
George's books @Google Books and his books @Amazon.ca
History of New Brunswick @Wikipedia
The Acadians @CBC.ca
Meduxnekeag River Association
The Best Dulse!
Paris 1919
The Monoxides: @myspace, @Facebook and @ReverbNation
The Monoxides Annual Holiday Show @Facebook
Iron Giant @myspace
Thanksgiving (Canada) @Wikipedia
Tourism Saint John
Irving Nature Park

The person on the phone ended up being my birth grandmother: one of the people who would call and know who I was.

The photo for this episode was taken at a convenience store on the way down to Saint John. I had seen those flags on houses as the train was heading along the east side of the province, only I hadn't seen the stars on them, so I thought they were French flags, which my hosts thought was strange in that the Acadians are not so crazy about the French French that they'd go around flying their flag. After some discussion and Wikipedia, we determined they were Acadian flags. On the whole trip, I had kept my eye out for an image of New Brunswick I couldn't get anywhere else, and it turned out to be the display in this convenience store.

I have two major regrets about screwing up the sound for the soundseeing tour of Woodstock. One is that my birth mother's arms almost falling off from the cold came to no purpose. Another is that I didn't get to mention Fusion Coffee Company, which we went into briefly. It's a really wonderful licensed café with coffee and food and drinks and music (sometimes live) and a very nice atmosphere. It serves as a creative hub for the small town, and my birth mother goes there often. When we went in there, I met the owner, who knew who I was and could not have been more welcoming. It's the sort of place that a lot of people in small towns wish they had, but usually don't, so I wanted to give this one all the support I could. Hopefully, I'll have other chances to do that audio-wise. But, hey, at least it can get more Google juice in text form.

Lost November, Lost Episodes

Ooookay, so I guess I couldn't do a weekly podcast and a daily podcast without the monthly podcast falling by the wayside. Sorry about that. That daily podcast for National Podcast Post Month, No Mood Swing, is finished (though still available at that link - and hint: there's a tiny Walking the Walk update in the last episode), and hopefully that means I can get back to business on this thing. I think I can post Description 75, about my Canadian Thanksgiving trip to New Brunswick, either this week or next.

Something else I've been working on is re-archiving the episodes after learning a while after the fact that my .mp3 host had stopped hosting. Episodes after Description 49 were moved to a couple different spaces of mine. As for episodes before 49, they're going to the beautiful and venerable (and very deserving of your donations!) Internet Archive, home of No Mood Swing, most of Movies For the Blind (that weekly podcast) and thousands and thousands of other things way more important than anything I've cranked out. So far, I've uploaded three batches, which are now arranged on three convenient pages:

Description 40-49 - (July 2007 - January 2008) Featuring Sam the Record Man, the Toronto Fringe, the Jays game, the Dalai Lama, my day doing location support and my trip to the Christmas Story House.

Description 30-39 - (January-June 2007) Including the trips to London, Paris and Hull :-) along with me making Kraft Dinner, driving home and going to Tim Horton's.

Description 19-29 - (June-December 2006) With the two-parter on NXNE, the Montreal Christmas parade, The Doodlebops, the Cleveland visit and the first episodes about Nuit Blanche and the U.S. absentee ballot process.

I want to wait a short while to put up the first 18 because I'm still missing a few, and maybe you might be able to help if you have a troubling habit of archiving podcast episodes you've listened to over the years. (Heck, I did it with Dubber and Spoons to an extent.) If you go into those archives already up, you'll see I'm already missing Description 23 (Honest Ed's) and the enhanced version of Description 37 (The Drive Home). At the moment, I'm still working on finding Description 18 (Valerie Takes the Streetcar), Description 14 (Michael Ignatieff's First Date), Description 05 (Monte-freakin'-forte!) and the first two Descriptions. I must have them somewhere, but let's just say that while I've been pretty good at backing things up, I suck at keeping them together and organised. So as I keep searching - and create that new episode for you, don't forget - if you happen to run across any of those missing episodes somewhere, please let me know and you will get props to no end. Thanks!