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
