Good things:
In May we attend a Scott McCloud lecture in Toronto.
In June Douglas and Anne Fizzard exhibit at the MoCCA art fest in Manhattan. Simultaneously Heather starts to publish photo-comics as part of an internal communications campaign inside an email-addicted corporation.
Engineering feats in Hampton Park as an overpass is hydraulically replaced in one day in August.
In September Douglas starts drawing class at the Ottawa School of Art, and begins cartooning. Heather takes a spinning class.
Bad things:
Winter doesn’t start till mid-January.
In August our trip to TCAF in Toronto is waylaid by kidney stones. Sixteen hours in emergency.
In October, Heather spends her vacation cleaning and sorting at her mother’s.
We see Jethro Tull in November. Dude, hire a singer.
Yesterday I pitched the housework and went to the Gallery to see Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. It’s in the city until Jan 6th and I’ll probably find a way to go back for a second look since so many of the photographs have stuck in my mind.
I’m usually very careless when I look at a still life but this time I’ve come away from the exhibit with strong memories of the careful composition of Moshewka Langa’s images. I haven’t found an online version of my favourite (three stacked chairs with bottles) but you can see some of the show’s images here, a review of the New York mounting of the show here, and an interview with its curator here.
Heather
Though I haven’t been reading as much as I usually do, my year end count is about where it always ends up–not quite a hundred. Sometimes this number appalls me until I remember that I’m no longer in grad school. This year, though, a couple of new patterns are emerging.
Mystery novels are losing out to graphic novels and fantasy/science fiction. I’m finding Terry Prachett’s silliness more engaging than a stack of the mysteries; watching Pratchett spend 200 pages building up to a bad pun has become more satisfying than the unfolding of another puzzle with violence. Literary fiction is starting to lose ground to non-fiction: a mix of books for work, books about Canadian commies, and books about health issues. For a month or so this fall, I’d bring stacks of novels home from the library, read the first 20 pages, and decide I couldn’t bear to read the rest of it. (You’d be amazed at how many novels deal with memory problems and dementia. They just seemed to pop right into my hand.)
Odd to think that out all the books I enjoyed this year there are only a couple that will lead to more reading in the new year: Martha Gelhorne’s The Stricken Field and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning.
I’m dithering about defining reading resolutions for 2008–I see them in other blogs and they look very shiny, very attractive. My “should read serious stuff” side wants the shiny resolutions but my “just have fun wandering about” side will probably win out in the end.
Heather
1. Smuggle on to neighbour’s lot.
2. Each morning bring in a tub’s worth and let it melt in bathtub. Added benefit: Extra indoor humidity.
3. Set up slushie stand. Use profits to buy plywood.
4. Exploit geometrical efficiency: buy some plywood, build a squarish, portable form and pack it wide, high, and even.
5. Alternately, build a ziggurat.
6. Liberate some rink boards and build a backyard snow maze.
7. Fill in all sidewalk and driveway paths and build plank and rope walkways up and over.
8. Turn shed upside down and fill with snow.
9. Bag it up in green garbage bags and put out with the regular garbage.
10. Put it in the dryer.
We’re storm stayed. Stuck, absolutely stuck inside. Well, sort of. We do have snowshoes but a soft chair and a little nippy sweetie (aka Bailey’s) is far more interesting than figuring out where we’re going to put all the snow once it stops blowing around. While the sight of a neighbour skiing down the street makes me happy, the sight of another one using a broom as a pretend golf club is worrying. Cabin fever has struck early and, obviously, he needs another nippy sweetie.
I’ve been holding up the nothing side of this blog very handily don’t you think? I could, I suppose, deploy a random list to fill up the nothingness, a shaggy list of things semi-accomplished. I’m too chicken to actually check how long it’s been. Okay. I checked. Two and a half months.
In late September my mother had a health crisis that’s rendered me silent. For the last two and a half months I’ve written nothing and read very little. I’ve spent lots of time on the phone with her, with family members, with doctors and nurses. I’ve travelled hundreds of miles there and back by train and somehow over the course of the journey stopped reading, stopped writing.
My mother is going through one of the most difficult transitions in her life, a transition that she doesn’t fully understand, can’t fully understand. The loss of her short-term memory has taken away her art at the time when she needs it most. Her failing memory and a sudden plunge into dementia has taken away her home, her car, and her independence.
As she settles into a new apartment and mourns the loss of her self, we’re moving toward a new normal. There’s great sadness here and little hope for improvement. I hope for slow progression, kind nursing care, and peace amid the losses that accumulate.
Heather
Okay. I can’t even fool myself this week. I’ve come out even in the CD department (a Serena Ryder swapped for a Wilco) but I’m backsliding in the book department. In the over-ambitious, what was I thinking department I’ve borrowed a 500 page + biography of Lenin even though I still haven’t finished the Canadian CP history. Then I added in Denise Mina’s latest Paddy Meehan mystery, The Last Breath and Paul Auster’s latest and blessedly short novella, Travels in the Scriptorum. I rounded this all out by borrowing the 100 Mile Diet which has to be returned in seven, no make that six, days.
I’m giving myself false comfort by silently pointing out that I have actually finished Spook Country, never mind that I’ve been so distracted that I probably can’t give a credible account of its plot or merits.
Heather
Every once in a while you need to learn something new. Here’s what I made on a hand spindle on Saturday.
Kind teachers refer to this first effort as “novelty” yarn. It’s uneven and a bit lumpy but it holds together and is balanced with neither an s-curve or a z-curve.
I’ve made a second length that’s more even (but less balanced). Using a drop spindle is oddly calming and not nearly as frustrating as I thought.
Heather
I think I was actually fairly restrained. I dropped off 4 and picked up 3. No that’s not right–there was a CD too.
I’ve already finished the one the with most pressing promise–No More Kidney Stones– and, as you might expect, it tells me to
- Drink a lot more fluids
- Cut back on tomatoes, rhubarb, chocolate, sweet potatoes, nuts, citrus rind, and a lot of other things including salty treats and beer.
- And if I eat any of the semi-forbidden household staples, to drink two 12 oz glasses of water right away. Now I can do math — that’s really 3 glasses of water. I am going to to wearing a nice little path to the bathroom and you’ll recognize me from the sloshing sound.
The CD was Serena Ryder’s If Your Memory Serves You Well which is covers 1970s pieces. It had Douglas singing along, and for some undisclosed reason, he knows all the words to "Good Morning Starshine". I suppose it’s a good thing that there are stlll surprises after 25 years. All the same, I am not prepared for an onslaught of 60s and 70s musicals which all this singing along portends.
In the novel department, I picked up Gibson’s Spook Country which has been prolifically reviewed. I’m 30 pages in and so far I’m enjoying it. If it goes the way of LeCarre novels by 100 pages in I’m going to be struggling to remember all the characters and subplots.
The other novel is a mystery by Christopher Brookmyre--One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. I’d never encountered Brookmyre before but I’d read the opening lines of his most recent novel at Book World and was intrigued. If the idea of a wee Elastoplast as a cure all hadn’t hooked me, the titles of his books would have: All Fun and Games Till Somebody Loses an Eye, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, and Boiling a Frog are all oddly familiar turns of phrases.
Next week’s library run goal: return more than I take out.
Heather
This seventies stack of concrete is my regular library branch:
Carlingwood Branch
It’s closed for renovations until mid-September October (looks like something went wrong in the reno schedule). Last year they replaced the carpets upstairs and for a couple of weeks the heady smell of glue distracted me from the rearrangement of the stacks. Not so sure what they’re tackling this year but I suspect that it’s self-checkout machines.
So far the reno caused a weird disruption in my schedule. I’m no longer shopping at the mall next to the library so lots of small errands are piling up and money is going unspent. More striking though is the change in my borrowing habits.
Instead of dashing in to pick up the books I’ve requested, now I go to the main branch to pick up requests. Not so bad, really, in terms of transit time. The problem: the main library has many, many more books and I’m hauling home 6 or 7 each week. It’s murder on the back and shoulder and I’m not getting through them all. So this weekend I decided a temporary moratorium was needed: library run until I catch up a bit.
I’ve given up on the John Bell and have finished a stack of novels. Serendipitously the McCaughrean and the Brockmeier arrived at the same time and both feature Antarctic (sub)plots. White Darkness does a good job of teasing out adolescent female attraction to unattainable figures, in this case Lawrence Oates. Oddly I thought the non-Antarctic half of Brief History of the Dead stronger and more compelling than the re-capitulation of the Cherry-Gerrard journey to Cape Crozier.
The Deaver and the Ferris were amusements that didn’t leave much of a mark.
Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl–a mix of novel and comic–was compelling but not exactly pleasant in it’s unflinching account of 1970s adolescence. It’s horrors are more typical than Lynda Barry’s Cruddy but there’s something similar about the underlying tone.
That puts me about half way through the borrowed books and leaves me still way behind on reading what’s on my own shelves.
Heather
So. For the last couple of months I’ve been looking forward to this weekend. I had several vacation days lined up and we were planning on a jaunt to Toronto to go to TCAF where there’d be mountains and mountains of comics and graphic novels to look at and buy. Instead the closest I got to an interesting graphic experience looked like this.
After a 16-hour stay in the emergency department, I have learned
- If you keep vomiting up your painkillers, a trip to the emerg is probably a good idea.
- Also if you need to pee but can only pass about a tablespoon at a time, a trip to the emerg is also a probably a good idea.
- There’s a lot of waiting even if you’re rocking back and forth in pain.
- Gravol eventually works. Happy bonus: it will put you asleep so you don’t notice the pain.
- Intense lower belly pain could be an ovarian cyst and you will get a pelvic exam. This will be especially surreal if your partner is in the room with you and you know he’s taking mental notes for a comic he’s working on.
- The staff doctor will have second thoughts about the resident’s evaluation and will order blood work. When they say it will take an hour to get the results back, they are being wildly optimistic.
- Eventually the blood work will reveal that your kidneys are in trouble and you need an IV to replace the fluids you’ve been hurling up. It’ll also make it easier to do the CT in the morning too.
- The vein busy nurses prefer to use for an IV hurts more than you’d think.
- A stretcher in the back corridor is a weird place. I didn’t need to learn as much as I did about the cleaning staff. The cleaner who wore his latex gloves into the bathroom, peed, and then came out still wearing the gloves needs a refresher course in personal hygiene. The cleaner who was looking for attention and sympathy from patients on stretchers needs to rethink her job choice.
- There are two CT machines. Your paperwork will not be at the first one you’re wheeled to. Your partner will get semi-lost trying to follow your speeding stretcher to the other CT machine.
- By the time you’re inside the CT machine, you’ll be so tired that you will find the "hold your breath" icons intensely amusing.
- If you’ve been there a long time, especially past a shift change, you may need to make a small fuss to get someone to chase the CT results.
- Kidney stones are incredibly painful.
Heather
