Ma Gill is currently down in a red state my brother in his newish home in Phoenix. This is our pre-voyage email conversation:

CG: I was wondering if you'd be willing to send email updates from Alex's pad--for my blog. Just your impressions of the bachelor life. And pictures, too, if Alex has a digital camera...

MG: Hey, I'm not sending you anything, not after what you implied about my Systems, which are sacred to me, like runes. Are you asking me to spy on your own brother?

CG: It's funny, you capitalize the word "systems" while I italicize. Notice the beautiful nuances that grammar affords! You don't mind if I do a bit of deconstruction here, do you? The last part of the sentence: "sacred to me, like runes." I detect a note of hyperbole and get the feeling you are flagrantly setting me up to take the piss out of your systems. I see what this is. I can't even touch this bait. I feel used.

Essentially, yes, I am asking you to spy on Alex. Spy vs. spy, if you will.

I'm trying to extract some digital photos. Ma G. is strictly analog and proud of it, so any images sent my way will surely be via Alex's camera, the operation of which is beneath her stooping, I'm sure. So I guess its the glossies in about a month's time, slapped into the scanner and sent out as monster attachments. The scanner is great for MG, because she can still send us newsclippings with the typos highlighted without the need for envelopes and postage. I always look at Lynne Truss's author photo--the one where she's correcting a movie poster with a giant magic marker--and think of my mum.

MG: Alex has a nice little house, a new bungalow near Phoenix in an area that's just being developed from farmland. Not a blade of grass to be seen--it doesn't grow here unless you divert the Fraser River into your golf course. (That's probably on someone's agenda.) In summer it must be like sitting in a frying pan.

As predicted, there's no food in the fridge; one small saucepan, no permanent plates, no mugs. A George Foreman grill, that favourite male indoor cooking tool. Not much furniture (I'm sitting on the chair.) Not one female touch to be seen anywhere--and no clutter, it would hide the gun, so he'd be late to work if he had to go looking for it. And yes, he does have books: a curious collection with Mother Teresa right next to a Ranger Handbook cobbled together with olive-green army duct tape (smacks of a System.) A skull on the shelf proudly wearing the Airborne red beret, and a DVD of Star Wars in the desk drawer.

CG: Tell me about the guns.

MG: It's just a regulation issue handgun they give the Border Patrol; what specifically did you need to know? Doesn't everyone have a gun round here?

CG: Can you poke around a little more?

MG: It's a Beretta, Italian-made; does this not strike you as odd, in a country that invented and glorified the handgun? Must be its design features. The Italians never made anything ugly. Now, if only they would let them design the Border Patrol uniforms, which are remarkable for their ugliness.

CG: Excellent work. Now, what's in the bathroom, esp. the medicine chest?

MG: I've been doodling aound on your blogsite with the gender-determining website, and lo! I seem to have had a sex change, being no longer male. Here's what I wrote:

"The house sits on the flat, sun-baked plain, indistinguishable from its neighbours that have been dropped onto agricultural land outside Phoenix, AZ. It's easy to get disoriented in this monochrome enclave, where the streets are paved with interlock brick, and the verges tastefully planted with native shrubs. Inside, the dwelling has the ambience of a hotel--clean, and sparsely furnished with well-chosen items and coordinating terra-cotta vases. The walls are decorated in strong colours; it's conspicuously lacking a feminine touch. The kitchen sports matching sets of utensils, rolling loose in the drawers; a limited stock of chinaware--no mugs--and a pantry whose forlorn stock of unrelated foodstuffs is arranged in no discernable order, power drills jostling sundried tomatoes, duct tape nudging packets of rice, ant traps alongside breakfast cereal. The bookcases reveal a similar miscellany: a skull with a red paratrooper beret is jammed between Mother Teresa and an army ranger manual carefully reinforced with olive-drab duct tape; Tom Clancy and Romeo Dallaire live next to a Star Wars DVD set. In the main bedroom a Beretta in its holster hangs from the shelf with the hairstyling products. This is the home of someone whose life is all business, coming home from long hours keeping the USA safe from illegals and other undesirables. Cosy, no--but well-suited to its owner's lifestyle, and purchased with a canny eye to its apprecation in value."

I am nosing aroung for hints of a feminine guest. There are none.

MG is on her way home tomorrow, but I did get a phone call this evening. MG will be glad to escape the gated communities and lack of neighbourhood colour. She claims to have witnessed only two people on the street, school kids alighting a bus. Then AG. He said it's kind of nice having our mum around. She systematized his closets into a state of order trumping the Dewey. He closed with: "My god, you sound like a Canadian. You say everything? Like you're asking a question? Eh?"