Chez Louise

05/25/2008

Running Away with the Circus...

Well, one more weekend is biting the dust as bedtime approaches, and it's back to work tomorrow. These past couple of weeks have been quite intense at work, and as a result, I've been experiencing some strange form of creative whiplash this weekend. Actually, now would be a good time to take a week of holiday, to continue my little explosion of "other-than-work"-ness ideas that I got going in the mere two days of the weekend.

It all began with a song that got stuck in my head not too long ago. I heard it on the radio on the station that doesn't announce what the songs are, so I got up out of bed after hearing it and wrote a couple of (hopefully) key lyrics on my white board so that I could google it later and find out what song that was. I had the words "balame per te" on my whiteboard for a couple of weeks and today I decided to google them, which resulted in more or less nothing useful. Then it hit me that I have heard this song before, and somewhere out of my subconscious popped the words "Cirque du Soleil". Eventually I just went to find all Cirque du Soleil lyrics and looked for a song that might be a good candidate. Sure enough, there it was: "Ballare" was the name of the song that had been stuck in my head. I wanted to buy it on iTunes, but before I did, I thought I would see if I could find the song on YouTube so I could listen to the whole thing, rather than the 30-second clip they give on iTunes.

As it turns out, on YouTube, you can see the spectacular aerial pas de deux which goes with this song, from the show Dralion. This is the song I had in mind, but when I saw the pas de deux, my jaw was pretty much in my lap the whole time. I thought about how incredibly cool it would be to be part of something so spectacular, and next thing I knew, I was looking up how people get hired into the Cirque du Soleil.

Now of course, I wouldn't ever try auditioning as these guys for a couple of key reasons:

1. Fear of heights, falling, and in general, having only the grip of two sweaty hands standing between me and certain death (or at least maiming) on a stage 60 feet below


2. Lack of physical aptitude. I've never EVER been able to do the splits, have never had much upper body strength, and last time I did a somersault in the air, it was over the handlebars of a bike and ended in a very ungraceful thud into the gravel.

BUT, say I practiced cello 5 hours a day for the next God-knows-how-long, maybe I could audition as a musician, and wouldn't that be cool! Except for the fact that I don't have 5 minutes a day to practice (details, details), what a great plan! Or, better yet, take my singing out of the shower and audition as a singer. Oh, the drama! And herein was born the plan to run away with the Cirque du Soleil.

Now of course, this is a completely unsensible plan, but how cool to dream of something exciting, where I didn't need 40 pages of documentation to make even the slightest change to something... ah, the freedom!

So that was the culmination of a weekend which otherwise involved the following:

• Discovery that the tree in our front yard which I thought was an ash tree is actually a honey locust. Who knew there was a tree and an insect with the same name?


• Researched the types of seaweed that would have been available to the characters in my novel, and discovered that seaweed can be burned and the resulting "kelp" can be used in glassmaking - a convenient tidbit of information which plays right into my plot.


• Trying to choose a water fountain feature for my parents' backyard. I think we'll just have to come to terms with the fact that we'll never agree, and I'll just let my parents decide what they're going to put in there.


• Looked into whether able-bodied people are able to join a wheelchair basketball team. This was a lark almost as big as the Cirque du Soleil thing, since as I mentioned I'm not strong in the upper body, and I suck royally at basketball on my own two feet; a wheelchair won't help things.


• Went for a big long walk on Saturday night which I thought to myself, I should try to work up to running this sometime. I thought it was my "big achievement" run, but when I mapped it out on MapMyRun.com, it turned out only to be a measly 6K. Wow. I don't know how people routinely run 10K or more. The farthest I have ever run in my entire life is 4K, and I remember thinking I was about to die. But something in the back of my mind is telling me I should get into the habit of running. All I have to do is actually DO it.


• Worked on the plot of my 3 Day Novel for 2008. Hopefully this will work out!

Anyway, that's what happens when my imagination gets too much time to run wild - I end up dreaming up all sorts of crazy things, and next thing you know, I'm trying to figure out how to go from being a mechanical engineer to a circus musician. Yikes! Maybe it's a good thing tomorrow is a work day.

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03/16/2008

Luck o' the Irish!

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and consequently I spent the entire afternoon at a dress rehearsal for a big dance show our school is doing to celebrate the occasion tomorrow. That was OK, except there was a lot of 'hurry up and wait' happening, and it's actually a lot trickier trying to stay lined up where we're supposed to be when we're in the middle of dancing. I'm sure the show will be fine anyway though, especially since there are a lot of the really showy girls who will be participating.

It's an interesting experience to be part of this, but on the other hand, I'm going to be really glad when it's all over and I can go to bed at a reasonable time on Wednesday nights, rather than stay up for a dance rehearsal that goes til 10 pm. A friend of mine recently sent me a list of tips for getting a good night's sleep, and one of the tips was to avoid exercising in the 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed. So I guess 10 pm doesn't quite fit in that category. Oh well. I'm looking forward to having some sleep time back!

Yesterday was actually a really good day for that - I've had a cough and a cold all week and have been dragging myself out of bed to get to work at the usual times, even though I felt zombie-like. Saturday was the first day I got to sleep in, and I stayed in bed until almost 11 am. It was bliss! It was my lucky day too, apparently, since I then went to the library, and on the shelves of used books for sale, I found The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin, a book I've been wanting to buy for a while because it is so relevant to the novel I'm writing. It was in perfect condition (but minus its dustjacket), hardcover, for $2. I was originally going to buy a copy off eBay, but that would have been around $15 for an OK-condition copy. I'm glad I took the time to scour the racks at the library yesterday! I also spotted a book on Wildflowers of Great Britain and Europe, which was neat, since my story is set in the Faroes, so I bought that for another $2. I also found a book on Shakers of Pleasant Hill and one on healthy(-ier) cookie recipes that minimize use of refined sugars and bleached flour, and a lot of the recipes looked good, so I bought that. I can't wait to try some of those recipes! So all in all, I feel like I hit the jackpot at the library.

So now all I have to do is continue synthesizing that information and get going on finishing that novel I started. I started re-reading it last weekend. It's not the greatest by any stretch of the imagination, and needs a lot of editing, but it didn't make me cringe anywhere near as much as re-reading my work normally does, so maybe this one actually has potential! Basically I just need to be able to "see" where this plot is going a little bit better, and I hope that will get me out of my rut. Here's to finishing the novel this year!!

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01/19/2008

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 3 Day Novel

Last year, I did the 3-Day Novel challenge, which was to write a novel in the space of 3 days, i.e., the Labour Day weekend. It was an interesting experience - a lot of writing, a lot of Breton crackers, and not much common sense. There were plot holes though which a Mack truck could drive; there were cardboard characters and contrived situations, worse dialogue, and once it was all over, it was a rough manuscript. However, it was *a* manuscript, and I actually made it from the beginning to the end of the plot! In other words, the whole skeleton of a novel was there, and can now be worked on, if I so choose. Of course, I didn't win, but since I didn't expect to, it's all good.

2008 is set up to be very different from 2007. I'm trying to follow my New Year's resolutions, and trying to get rid of things that don't do much for me, that I don't need, or that stand in the way to where I want to go in my life. Thinking about contests like 3-Day Novel, I figured it was fun, and I'm glad I did it last year, but that I'd rather take 2008 to work on writing I already had, rather than to spend 3 days (and $50) trying to pull a plot out of nowhere into a shabby manuscript I don't really need at the moment. It all made sense. It was a simple decision. No 3-Day Novel for 2008.

It's amazing what final decisions will do to your brain. A short while later that same day, a plot popped into my head, and wouldn't leave. It said to me, "I am the ghost of your 2008 3-Day Novel"... and has been developing ever since! I may just have to do 3-Day Novel this year, just so that the plot doesn't drive me bananas while I ignore it.

The idea is simple: a small gingerbread house in a sea of McMansions owned by yuppies. It's not supposed to be a serious plot, and the more I can make people laugh, the better. (Contrast this to my two NaNoWriMo novels and my last 3-Day Novel, which are part of an epic adventure/fantasy/romance featuring lots of battles and death).

Today I went to the Book Market (a used bookstore) and came back with 84 cents' worth of magazines - a glossy copy of the premiere issue of American Dream Homes, and a copy of Distinguished Home Plans from 2001. Both of these feature some really grand, over-the-top, hotel-lobby-of-the-Waldorf-Astoria type stuff. I find most of the home plans butt ugly, and it's great! 84 cents and I have all sorts of architectural fodder for my novel. Money well-spent, in my opinion! So 3-Day Novel 2008, here I come!!

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01/09/2008

Sword Skills, Day 1

Just before Christmas, I had the bright idea of signing up for a recreational class in sword handling, held at the local university. Today was the first day of it, and I was kind of nervous going into it, not knowing what to expect, not knowing anyone in the class (my attempts to drag my friends into it have failed...).

As it turns out, the class was great - I really enjoyed it. I am hoping this will help strengthen my upper body which is pretty weak right now, and this seemed more fun than pumping iron (though probably not as effective).

We all bought our bokken wooden swords from the instructor before the class started. Basically they're curved wooden swords about 3 feet long, made of what looks like oak. However, they're mass-produced, and came with warning stickers on them. The sticker says (and keep in mind, this sticker is fastened to a wooden sword):

This product is sold for use in HIGH RISK activities. [Blah blah blah terms and conditions blah blah blah consult physician before starting training blah blah blah] Injuries, including paralysis and death can occur when using this product.

I thought that was hilarious. Um, if you're training with a sword and need to read a label to realize you could hurt or kill someone with it, you shouldn't be training with a sword...

Anyway, it was a fun class! I'm glad I signed up! I'd love to practice even, but I'm afraid I don't think I can swing this sword anywhere in the house without breaking something or punching a hole in the ceiling. I'll have to work the logisitics of this one!

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01/01/2008

Christmas and the Dog

I almost forgot to mention how Christmas went. It came and went quickly and reasonably easily. The only interesting tidbit is the part about the dog.

Our family doesn't have a dog; it never has, and never will. So when my uncle and his family showed up, dog included, for the Christmas dinner, it was a whole new experience, to be in my own house and seeing this shaggy little furball wandering around. My uncle and his family were staying in a hotel overnight before returning to Montreal. Problem is, the hotel doesn't take dogs, and their Montreal dogsitter went AWOL when they tried to get a hold of her. So, we became the dogsitters. Note that the dog doesn't really know us, and this was his first visit to our house.

Also, my grandmother, another Montreal resident, was staying at our house overnight before heading back to Montreal. Since we don't have a spare bedroom in our house, anytime someone stays over, my room becomes the guest room, and I get to sleep in the family room.

So, by bedtime, the situation was that my grandmother was sleeping in my room, my parents in their room, my brother in his room, I was on the fold-out couch in the family room, and the dog was sitting on the rug in the foyer, just down the stairs from where I was. I turned out the lights, and all was well... for a short while.

"Bark!" went the dog. A few minutes passed.

"Bark!" went the dog. A few more minutes passed.

"Bark!" went the dog. "Bark!"... "Bark, bark, bark... owwooOOOOooo... bark!"

By this time it was about 1 am, and I don't know about the rest of the gang since they all had doors between them and the dog, but at this rate it was going to be a reaaaallly long night for both me and the dog.

None too impressed (must add "swear less" to 2008 Plan for Awesomeness), I turned the lights back on and went to go find the dog, who was sitting by the door. In my mind I could hear my aunt's voice telling my dad that the dog will bark at the door if he needs to go out and do his business. I knew he'd just done his business not long ago, but hey, who knows what happens to dog's bladders if they're nervous about a new environment. I tried to put the leash on the dog, but he kept dodging it, and finally I got frustrated and went to wake up dad, who had gotten the explicit doggie owner's instructions from my aunt.

"Does he need a leash?" I asked him. Dad said he didn't think so, and the dog is supposed to be good about staying close to the house to do his business. So I let the dog out.

Fast forward about five minutes, and here I am in my plaid pyjamas, winter jacket, and boots, trudging through the snow at 1:15 am, calling a dog I don't know to come back to a house he doesn't know. I was already visualizing how I was going to explain to my aunt and uncle that I lost the dog on the one and only night we'd said we'd take care of him. Fortunately, after some coaxing, the dog came back to our place, and dad then held the dog in his little blanket until he calmed down, and then mom and dad took the dog into their room for the night. Thank God.

So I did manage to get part of a good night's sleep anyway, but let's just say, now I remember why I'm a cat person...!

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2008: Here and Already Rocking!

Well, 2007 came and went. It seemed both like forever and the blink of an eye at the same time - strange how that seems to happen!

I'm still writing up my 2008 Plan for Awesomeness, which is basically a souped-up version of New Year's Resolutions. More like resolutions with a plan for accomplishing them. Otherwise, by January 3rd, I will have forgotten all about my resolutions and that would be that until January 1st, 2009. Anyway, 2008 started off well. In the first 2 hours, I'd already managed to track down a song I'd been looking for for literally the whole of 2007! I'd heard it on the radio, but the radio station I listen to plays lots of interesting stuff but virtually never announces what the songs are. In this case it should have been easy because the song had lyrics which, as long as I could remember a single line, could later be Googled. However, this song for some reason does not come up when the most obvious lyric ("Healing will come like a soft-beating drum") from its refrain is entered into Google. This time around I managed to remember another line long enough to enter that into Google, and it worked. I was so happy - forget the new year, I was partying and jumping for joy over that song! And for those who are curious, it happens to be "Still by Your Side" sung by the Celtic Tenors.

The other thing that happened in the wee hours of January 1st was that I found myself a new favourite music group - Amici Forever, which is an opera crossover band. You may be noticing a theme between this and the Celtic Tenors, which is actually kind of bizarre because I'm not generally a fan of opera at all. I really do enjoy beautifully sung songs, but in general I just can't stand the profuse vibrato in a classically-trained opera singer's voice. That kind of singing feels to my ears what a palm sander feels to my hand. That said I know lots of other people enjoy it, but in general, just not my cup of tea. Anyway, back to Amici, I don't think I've heard anything by them until one of their songs came up yesterday on that same radio station that never identifies anything. As per usual with songs I want to look up, I copied down a line of the song and went back to bed (I was having a bit of lounge in the morning, while I still had the chance. Back to work tomorrow. Bummer.) I Googled it at about 1:30 am, and discovered their music is really good as a whole, when I listened to snippets of their albums. Now I've got to find their albums!!

Whether I can afford the albums if I find them, though, might be another story. Part of my 2008 Plan for Awesomeness is racking up some serious savings for the down payment on the house I'd like to buy next winter. To get anywhere near the savings I'll likely be needing, I need to save like a fiend. I did some calculations, and this leaves me with a very small amount to cover my expenses for the entire month. I might have to go to Gail Vaz-Oxlade's Money Jar/Live-on-Cash technique! (See the TV show "Til Debt Do Us Part".)

The Plan for Awesomeness includes a bunch of other stuff too, including eating healthier, exercising more, finishing books from my to-read pile, and all that fun stuff. It should be an exciting year!

It's amazing how incredibly optimistic I get when I'm not sleep-deprived. Too bad I have to go back to work tomorrow...

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11/26/2007

51k Words, 3 Concerts, 1 Competition, 0 Sleep

Well, I'm actually in pretty good shape, considering how much I've been trying to cram into this month. Right this very minute I really should be writing more of my novel, but *shrug*, I think I'd rather write in my blog for a little bit.

I've got about 51,000 words of my novel written, though I really don't have much of the plot written. I think a full draft, at this rate would run over 200k, and then I'd have to chop about 7/8ths of the rambling mess to get something that makes sense again, and has a hope of being interesting. I am happy I made it through to 51k words though. Here are some assets I had going for me:

* Characters that repeat themselves
* An ability to write an extraordinary amount of words about not very much
* OCD which finally stopped applying to procrastination and, for a week or two, applied to writing instead.

So there we go, I have a part of yet another novel written. For those keeping count, this is #3; there was NaNoWriMo last year, and both 3-Day Novel and NaNoWriMo this year.

Right now I'm relaxing in the eye of the hurricane that is the Christmas-season concerts & corresponding rehearsals. I just had 3 concerts over the weekend: 2 with an evangelical Christian choir/orchestra, and one with my regular orchestra. The 2 Christian concerts were entirely last-minute; it was a group from Toronto that contacted a colleague of mine in the orchestra, looking for musicians to replace the ones that couldn't come to Ottawa for the weekend, namely a couple of violinists, a flautist, and a cellist. So, the bunch of us got an email on Thursday, had the music on Friday, and were in concert on Saturday and Sunday, with about 10 minutes of rehearsal beforehand. I think this is the most spur-of-the-moment concert I've ever done. It was fun (Handel's Messiah with a modern twist), but I'm glad it's over and not a permanent fixture of my life.

Sunday night after the last Messiah concert I had a bit of R&R time, and just about didn't know what to do with myself and 2 whole hours of free time (I told myself I could have the weekend off of writing). So, I started reading. Which reminds me, I finally got one of the books I've had on hold from the library since July: The 100-Mile Diet finally arrived! So far it's an interesting book, and I'll hopefully have more time to read it starting December 2nd (on December 1st I have two rehearsals and a concert all in one day). I also have a big long list of books I'd like to get around to reading, especially some which are more philosophical or at least pensive in nature, which kind of suits my mood these days.

Today I was sent a poem which had been attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, called A Farewell Letter. As it turns out, it's apparently a hoax, not written by this author but by some obscure Mexican, but nevertheless I think it's touching and full of truths. I enjoyed reading it. Sometimes for me, it's poems like this that remind me how human I am, and not so much the number-in-the-system I almost expect to be everywhere else in my life.

And, a last little nugget for the road. This blog entry about an African farmer popped into my mind again recently. A friend of mine spent a couple of years in Ghana with Engineers Without Borders, and at the end of it went on a trip along the Niger. It was incredible the amazing people he ran into along the way, and I think about this farmer every so often, and it inspires me.

Enjoy the rest of November!

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10/28/2007

Apparently, I'm "Petite"...

This has been a crazy busy month, and if I thought October was bad, November is going to be ten times worse!

Two days ago at work, I got the news that they will be extending my current contract until January, when my boss will be putting in a requisition for a permanent position, with a raise. Yippee! So, since I've come to the realization that I won't be unemployed in December, January and February, it's time to beef up my winter work wardrobe, which is a bit sparse at the moment. (Good thing they're pretty relaxed about dress code where I work!) Yesterday, I headed to the shopping mall for my first serious clothes-shopping expedition since January, and it was interesting.

I still can't stand the retro 80s fashion trend that seems to be happening, but at least with the winter clothes, there are more neutrals and sensible clothing to choose from. What surprised me the most is how small I suddenly feel! I'm not short; at 5'8", I'm taller than nearly all my female friends, and as far as I know I'm the tallest of the 8 dancers in my Adult ceili team. Not only that, but the height really does come from "legginess" - I have long legs and arms. Or so I thought. Yesterday, I walked into a trendy type of shop which sold wide-legged jeans in both regular and tall lengths. I went to try on a pair of the regular length jeans, and found that I would need to be wearing 5" stilettos just to get the hems of the jeans to clear the ground. I just about asked the sales lady if these jeans came in petite sizes, but that was just too weird of an experience for me to handle so I just said they're way too long and walked out. I suppose the enormous length of these giraffe pants means the fashion trend must be to have the jeans dragging on the ground, so that you're constantly standing in a pool of your own jeans. This is fine and dandy for places like Florida. But for places like Ottawa, there's winter to worry about. If I bought those jeans, the hems would be dragging in the slush, and not only would the bottoms of the jeans be constantly wet, but when the started to dry, I'd have big awful white salt stains on them. So, no 40" inseams for me!!

I actually came home from my little shopping expedition with a lot of corduroy, and I've also found the perfect solution to my warmth vs fashion office woes: The casual blazer. I now own a black corduroy blazer and have a denim one on order. Hopefully it'll be a bit dressier than some of the sweaters I've been wearing!

All this to say, I went clothes shopping. I'm a bit reluctant though to spend lots of money on clothes, because the other thing I'm trying to save up for is a house. I want to buy a house this winter, somewhere closer to work (now that I know I'll have a job). It's going to be a tight squeeze, as there will be no significant other to help pay for the house, but on the other hand, I have no car and the only hungry mouth to feed will be mine. We'll see what happens. It's hard to find a detached or semi-detached in Ottawa for under $200,000 so I may wind up with a serious fixer upper that I won't have the cash to fix up til later. Still, it's an exciting prospect, to imagine I might have a place I can call my own, even if there is orange shag rug and dark panelling and harvest gold appliances.

Anyway, so that's October. November contains NaNoWriMo, the Eastern Canadian Region Oireachtas (irish dance regional competition), an orchestra concert, rehearsals for 2 more concerts in early December, and not a single statutory holiday in sight. It should be interesting! It's NaNoWriMo that's going to be the killer. While I love writing, and I love my characters, I have no clue where I'm going to get the time to write 1667 words a day for 30 days. Right now I barely have time to catch up on my emails!

I really do want to slow my life down and get more time to myself, but on the other hand, so many things interest me that if I pulled out of some of the activities I'm in now, I'd soon have them replaced with other interesting things. I guess I need to learn to strike some sort of balance. I'm the sort of person who gets cranky if I don't get enough time to myself, and these days I'm already verging on being unable to spend any time just relaxing. I hope in the new year things will calm down.

In the meantime, I need to find a plot for my NaNoWriMo novel, as I have to start writing in 4 days. Ack!

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08/25/2007

Back from Wales and Ireland

Well, I'm finally back from Wales and Ireland, and I've survived my 4-day work week afterwards. It wasn't as rough going back to work as I thought, though it's been a rough week overall. The long and short of it is, I went to visit my boyfriend in Wales, and we broke up at the end of the trip. Oh well, I guess it could be worse.

Anyway the trip itself was nice, even though we didn't get all that much sunny weather. It was mostly grey and sometimes rainy. Fortunately we didn't get rained on too badly when we tried to do the touristy stuff. It's just that there's no way the photos of the brooding landscape can be mistaken for the Caribbean or anything. (Anyway, at least Hurricane Dean didn't pummel Ireland...)

So now that I'm on the rebound from the cold I caught while I was over there, the breakup, and the jet lag, I've set myself another hair-brained goal. I've decided that if my work contract becomes a permanent job, I'm going to buy myself a house closer to work. I'm tired of renting, and I think I can build up some sort of a reasonable down payment, so I want to get into real estate and cut down my commute at the same time. It's actually kind of fun looking through real estate listings, even though I can't currently afford what's in there. Things will change though! Hello to Operation Mi Casa 2008!!

In other news, I'm now 117th in line for that book (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) that I mentioned last time. That should put the book in my hands either around Christmas or early 2008. Yay!

Single and fabulous house hunter on the roam!!

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07/29/2007

144th, and Proud!

I saw a book that I'm interested in reading, called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It only came out this year, so normally my instinct would be to buy it and read it. However, I'm trying to curb my spending on things like books which I generally only read once. Option #2 would be to look for it at a second hand shop, but for a book so new, it's unlikely I'll find it there for a while yet. Option #3 is to wait for it to come out in paperback, so it's cheaper, but that still doesn't solve the problem of spending money and then having the book sit on the bookshelf because its value depreciated to basically nothing as soon as it's bought. So, I went with Option #4: Borrow from the library. Or, Option 4a in this case: Request it from the library and wait. I'm the 144th person in line waiting to read this book!! I've never put a hold on a library book with so many people waiting, but... there you go. In any case, my to-read pile is still tall enough to occupy me until my name comes up for this book. I'm not sure how long it will take to go through that many people in the request list, but judging from the number of copies in the system and the 3-week borrowing system, I expect I should get it sometime between October and Christmas. With any luck!

So that was my money-saving venture of the day. The non-money saving venture of the day was a shopping trip to the local mall, which was a flop basically. ("Un nul", as I'd generally call it.) All I can say is that I really, really can't stand the current retro 80s fashion! The 80s were a bad enough fashion disaster the first time, so I can't believe it's making a comeback. What are people thinking? This is totally the sort of thing where we'll be looking back at today's photos 10 years from now and going, holy smokes, we were utterly colourblind and hopeless at picking flattering cuts for the human body. Is that a fluorescent pink potato sack she's wearing? Did she get dressed in the dark, when she put her polka-dot sweatshirt over her psychedelic-print shirt? Hopefully when I'm in Europe in the next couple of weeks, there'll be something classier for sale that I can pick up, even if I do have to pay in pounds sterling (yikes).

I sold my violin a couple of weeks ago (yay!), but now I'm already itching to buy a new one! There are a few criteria this time around:
1. It has to be playable.
2. It has to be reasonably-priced.
3. It has to sound good.

#2 and #3 tend to conflict with each other, so it could be interesting. Ultimately though, I don't need a violin. What I really want to do is learn to fiddle -- on my cello. In other words, since I already know how to make a good sound out of a cello, I want to then learn, stylistically, how to fiddle in the Irish tradition (and I want to try for a Donegal regional style, if only because that's about my closest connection to Ireland!). Trouble is, there aren't exactly very many Irish cello fiddle teachers floating around. Soooo, either I'll have to learn on a fiddle and translate that to cello, or find a teacher daring enough to show me the general idea on a fiddle, and have me copy it on a cello. We'll see! The other problem too is the time factor. Basically, I have none. :-) Or, I should say, I have some now, but when orchestra and dance class start back up in September, I won't have any time anymore. We'll see what happens. Hopefully when I go to Ireland shortly I can pick up a whole bunch of interesting CDs and, with any luck, catch a couple of shows. I can't wait!!

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07/22/2007

Summer has Finally Emerged

Well, it's been a great weekend. The weather was *gorgeous*, which was a complete contrast to Friday, where it absolutely poured rain all day long - some farmers' fields were basically turned to lakes, with hay bales floating around! Fortunately our house is on higher ground and we didn't have any problems.

So this weekend, I decided it was time to get a new pair of walking/light hiking shoes. The ones I had, I bought them probably in the 1999-2000 timeframe. (I distinctly remember paying for them because I didn't have enough in the bank so I had to pay some cash and the remainder with my debit card. It was a bit embarrassing!). And in fact, truth be told, I didn't think they were all that terribly nice-looking, even back then; I was simply told they were the best design and I went, great, let's get them in my size and get on with them. Now, I'm a bit more confident in my own decisions and more importantly, I listen to my gut feelings a bit more. So yesterday, I bought myself some nice walking/hiking shoes, and I really do like them this time. :-) They're Targhees from Keen Footwear (in the "Concord" mocha brown kind of colour).

Today I went back to the same place I got the shoes, and invested in a quality Messenger bag from Timbuk2. This was the "Commute" model, which has room for a laptop. I don't have a laptop, but it should work great for my Alphasmart. Yay! This one is the all-slate blue one, which was basically all they had. Actually there was one other, but it was a nasty orange colour so I went with the blue. :-)

No more spending money for me for a little while though. Phew! Stuff isn't cheap...!

Two more weeks before I'm in Europe - I can't wait. I'll be staying in Wales for a couple of nights, then Northern Ireland for a week, then back to Wales for the remaining week or so. It should be great! I haven't been to Wales at all, and only spent 3 days in Ireland, so the whole experience should be quite new. I'm sure I'll have plenty to blog about when I get back!

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05/21/2007

Go Sens Go!!

It's a long weekend, which is absolutely great. Here I am on a lovely Monday morning and I didn't even have to get up really early and spend ages on a bus or anything. I woke up when my body woke up, had a nice shower, some breakfast, and just plunked myself down in front of my computer 30 seconds after breakfast. This is heaven! I had some work I had to type up for the OCO, so I did that, and even though it took maybe 30-40 minutes, and wasn't a big deal, I'm glad to just get that off my back! And now, I have the day free. I can't believe my good fortune! (Ah, small pleasures...)

It's also great that the days are longer these days, so I don't have to get up in the dark even at 6 am. It really helps!

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to do the 3 Day Novel challenge, and I'm going to head to Winnipeg for that weekend to do the challenge with my friend Victoria, who's been my writing buddy all along. The idea is to write a novel (realistically, a novella) in the space of 3 days, i.e. the Labour Day weekend at the beginning of September. The only word I can think of to describe this adventure is 'crazy', but I'm looking forward to it anyway! I have an idea, so all I have to do is finalize a plot, which is something I'm historically not great at, so it's good I have til September to nail one down.

Then I'll have to think of a brand new idea that can keep me going for 50,000 words in November, for NaNoWriMo 2007! The last idea I had was great and worked really well, but it had been simmering on the back burner for a few years before I actually sat down to write it during NaNo 2006. On top of it all, I haven't actually finished that novel either, so that's another thing I should work on. I need to plan how I'm going to get back into it, as I left off right before all hell breaks loose in the story, basically. This could be a really long one.

So, that's all on my to-do list.

Then, there's dance class. I'm on an adult 8-hand team that's going to be competing at the North American Nationals (NANs) at the beginning of July 2007, here in Ottawa. So, here's what I've learned so far:
1. I need to get in better shape.
2. I need to practice more.
2a. I need to find time to practice.
2b. I need to find space to practice.
3. I need to get in better shape.
4. I'm glad this only lasts til July, because late-class Wednesday is always followed by Zombie Thursday.
5. I need to get in better shape.

Did I mention I need to get in better shape? It's one of those things where I always tell myself that every time I'm in class and my legs feel like lead weights. And yet, somehow, I never quite manage to do enough activity during the week to be able to offset this. It's that job!!

Next year (i.e., come September), I'm going to drop one orchestra. I wish I could drop both, but we'll see. I just hate having an air-tight schedule like the one I was running up until last week.

We'll see what happens! I need a way to feel like I can have my life to myself again.

Oh, and I'm planning a vacation in August to Wales and Ireland, to visit my boyfriend. That will at least be great and a nice break from the daily grind!

And I almost forgot to mention, the Ottawa Senators hockey team made it to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time ever. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!!

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Blog - April 4 2007 Delayed Post!

I originally wrote this post on April 4, 2007 on my wonderful little Alphasmart, and it's only now that I'm catching up on things enough to actually post it here. (Yay long weekend! Yay one orchestra over with for the summer!) I will endeavour to write more often from now on.

Passport Applications and Other Evil Things

I'm just having 'one of those days'. This morning, when I left home, it was pouring rain and it stayed that way most of the day. (I think it's supposed to snow tomorrow, God forbid...) We started the day with a big all-employees meeting with some head honchos from GE Healthcare, who have recently bought our company. The idea was to tell us what we're supposed to expect and how things are going to change, though I think most of the presentation was about GE itself and didn't tell us much we didn't already know. Oh well. Anyway, the real headache didn't start til the day was almost over. I was on a training course, which ended around 3:15-ish. I found a computer where I could catch up on my work e-mail, so I did that, and left the building around 3:50-ish. The plan was to grab a quick bus to Kanata Centrum (a really really huge big-box mall, as I discovered), submit my passport application to the post office there, grab a couple long-haul buses home, have dinner, maybe have a bit of downtime, and then head to an orchestra board meeting for 7:30.

Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. So I waited in the rain until 4:15 before a bus came, and it wound its way to Kanata (these two places look quite close on the map so it's surprising how long this whole process took!). I went to the post office to get my passport application processed, so the guy behind the counter looked at it all with a fine-toothed comb, making sure my address and ID numbers and all that matched up, and all was fine and dandy until he got to the part my guarantor filled out. As it turns out, she signed her signature slightly too big and it went over the lines of the signature box a couple of times, which meant my whole application was apparently void. (For crying out loud, it's not like I didn't get it signed!!). SO, not only was that a big waste of time, but now I have to go make another appointment to see my guarantor (and I think she's the busiest person in the city!), AND find time to go back to this place to try to submit my passport *again*, AND I don't have time to go home, have dinner, or pick up the car for the meeting, so I'm going to be bussing it home good and late after the meeting. (The alarm will be going off at 6 am as usual tomorrow). I think when they told me they couldn't accept this application because the signature was a couple millimetres too big, I could have just screamed, or cried, or sworn like a sailor! (And I'm telling you, it was tempting. All three at a time, even.) How ridiculous can this get???


So THEN, on the bus out of Kanata after the botched passport application attempt, I was in the middle of typing up a text message on my cellphone, and thanks to a couple of slips of the finger towards the end, it prompted me if I wanted to send the message (which I didn't, because I hadn't finished typing yet). So I said, no, and it asked, save a draft? And I said yes... and then when I got back to editing the message, it had only saved half of it and I had to retype the rest. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you need to press itty-bitty buttons 2-3 times per letter, it's annoying! And especially when my patience factor was already in the negatives after the passport detour in the rain that was all for nothing.

At least my ugly photo appeared to be acceptable. Grrrr.

Now I'm at Algonquin killing time until the board meeting, because I don't have time to go home. This V8 Splash (Tropical Blend) I'm trying for the first time seems OK though. I guess the day could be worse. (Let me knock on wood just in case!)

I've decided on a topic for my 3-Day Novel on the Labour Day weekend. It's basically going to be Dilbert in an Irish community in Quebec in the early 19th century. This passport drama I think will make its way into the book in 19th century disguise! Hopefully plotting that will help me blow off some steam. :-)

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03/31/2007

First Entry Written on an Alphasmart

Hello! I got my Alphasmart this past Wednesday and wrote my first blog entry on it on Thursday, which I'm just getting around to posting. But here it is, in all its glory! This Alphasmart thing is great!

***

My alphasmart has arrived, and faster than I thought! It's great to be able to finally do something useful on the bus. All I have to do now is get used to typing on a moving vehicle. It's a bit of cramped quarters, but I'm just so happy to finally be able to make someuse of this amazingly long commute! So now, I have all this capacity to do loads of writing. It's great. Too bad all of a sudden I can't seem to think of anything terribly interesting to write. I guess my brain really doesn't operate quite this early in the morning!

(Later in the day, on my way home from work...)

Well, today has been a pretty good day. At lunch I took the time to go for a walk on the Old Quarry Trail, which is only about a 5 minute walk from where I work. It's a wonder I haven't been down there before! The people I usually eat lunch with were away today, which is just as well, because the weather is currently glorious and I'd already decided I was going to take a walk. I guess it's part of the plan to get rid of the feeling that I'm living in a body cast now that I have a day job! It felt great to be out and about, though I don't really think my body is quite used to it yet. It was awesome though, especially as the bugs aren't quite out yet! The area is beautiful, and I think it probably would make a nice running trail too. The particular loop I did was 2.8 km I think, and it nicely fit into my lunch hour. There are interconnected trails, though, that go all through the Greenbelt of Ottawa, so if I hadn't followed that loop I could easily be in there for a day or two in that network of paths! I'm definitely going to do that walk more often. Anything to get up off my butt!

The afternoon went by quite quickly with meetings and whatnot. It's great to be doing something proactive. Actually I was supposed to find time to sit down and read some QA type documents, which I didn't get the time to do, but oh well. I'll find out all about them tomorrow in my 2 hour training on "the incredibly torturous path to getting stuff changed at this company" (or something in official-talk to that effect). Should be interesting. My co-worker recommended I bring lots of coffee - that's never a good sign!

Wow, this blogging on the bus is the bee's knees. I can totally get used to this!

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03/27/2007

8 to 5 job with 3 hour commute: incompatible with life

Hi everyone, and sorry I haven't been posting lately! Just to confirm or disclaim any rumours or suspicions, yes, I am in fact still alive. (Bodily anyway...) For those who haven't heard, I got a job starting January 29th. It's a decent job, but the problem is, it's on the complete opposite side of the city, and it takes 1.5 hours in each direction just to get there and back. Plus, the official hours are 8 to 5, not 8 to 4 or 9 to 5 like most other jobs I know. So this job takes a HUGE chunk out of my life. Actually, I feel like I'm on an work-eat-sleep cycle. Any time I have an evening activity (orchestra, dance), which seems to be often, it eats into my sleep time. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I live at home, so my parents do the cooking. I can't imagine how I'd do this if I had to do my own cooking. I'd probably be eating breakfast cereal for dinner every night!

Anyway, to try to reclaim some of my life back, I've bit the bullet and bought an Alphasmart Dana. Or, I should say, I've paid for it; I can't wait til it arrives in the mail. Alphasmarts are basically portable word processors - they have a full size keyboard, a small screen, and batteries that last way longer than laptop batteries. They don't do much that a laptop would (no games, flashy colours, etc), but all I want to do is catch up on my writing, so hopefully this will allow me to at least get something done in those 3 hours a day that I'm on the bus. Hopefully that also means writing up more blog entries!

I'll post again with more news about the Alphasmart and my bid to reclaim my life.

Did I mention I currently plan to apply for the paramedic program in 2008?! Well, that's a whole other topic I can talk about later too.

For now, I'm off to bed!

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02/11/2007

Yes, I've been AWOL...

Sorry I haven't had much time to update this blog. I'm hoping once I manage to get into a steady state with my job, it'll be easier to get things done in my own personal time. Right now I'm away from home 12 hours a day 5 days a week, so once you factor in sleeping, eating, getting ready, and all that, there's not much time to spare. I really do wish I lived closer to work, and that the commute wasn't an hour and a half each way, but I'm going to try to hang on for a while at least, to build up a bit of a nest egg before I move out of my parents' place again.

To make things worse, this weekend and next weekend are both concert weekends, so my precious free weekends have been more or less blitzed away by the concerts. I like the music we're playing, but I kind of wish I had more time of my own to do the things I want to do (mainly talking to and/or hanging out with friends, practicing more cello, and the like). But like I said, we'll see how long I last with this commute. Maybe I'm just a wuss, but I really do miss the days back in Victoria where I could walk 10 minutes to a bus stop, ride the bus for 15 minutes, and be at the school. Ah, the good old days!

So, for those of you who've contacted me in the last couple of weeks, I haven't forgotten about you, and thank you all for your encouragement. I'm just trying to catch up with my own life at the moment!

In the meantime, Dad has lent me his iPod, so I am busy downloading music to the thing, to help entertain myself during those long bus rides. Next up: learn how to use the thing...

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01/14/2007

I have the Power

I've been helping a couple of my friends renovate a house they just bought. Yesterday, we were working on tearing out the floor in one room and the ceiling in another. I got to use... (drumroll)... power tools! Now for anyone who knows me, and knows how much of a klutz I can be, this can be a scary concept, but I actually did OK. I was able to use a drill, no problem, and even using the reciprocating saw went off with almost no hitch. (I saw almost because I did have plaster dust in my eyes for a while after... even with glasses!) That was all pretty cool though. Now I feel like I can do anything.

Tearing up the floor was interesting, seeing the sort of flooring they used to have in this house. They laid carpet right over the old floor, which was a wood veneer floor with some coloured rectangles painted onto it. It looks to be from the 50s or 60s, and kind of like something you might find in a bowling alley or disco club. Taking that stuff off was easy in some places, coming off in large sections, and hard in other places, not coming off at all! There's a tar backing on the stuff, and in some places it looks like animals peed on it, which seems to have had the effect of dissolving the tar and bonding it like crazy glue to the plywood below.

Anyway, it's pretty interesting. The ceiling in the other room (which is where the reciprocating saw came to be used) is almost down, exposing the second ceiling above it.

All in all, this is going to be quite the renovation. I've been shopping for chandeliers and gas fireplaces with them so far, but we didn't come back from those trips with anything but a Tinkerbell desk lamp. Now let's just hope their baby is a girl!

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01/04/2007

End-of-Season Sale shopping sucks!

Today I decided to venture out to the shopping malls. Being January 4, I figured it wouldn't be as busy in the malls, as Boxing Day was over a week ago and people should have gotten the frenzy out of their systems. Boy was I wrong.

I went to St. Laurent Shopping Centre here in Ottawa. I don't go there very often because there's another mall closer to where I live, but this one had a place selling calendars and day planners last year, and I bought a really cool dayplanner. Also they have a Sears, and since I was looking for boots I thought that might be a good place to look. Anyway, I was at St. Laurent for all of about 2 minutes before some idiot runs over my heels with one of those kiddie push-carts - they're kind of like strollers, except they look like little plastic go-karts that the kids sit in and the parents push with a handle, like an overgrown lawnmower. Well, he tried to mow my heels with the stupid thing, not once, but twice, and didn't even bother to apologize, as if it was my fault my heels were in his way. Hello? When did civility become outdated? Anyway, I'd be willing to bet money he also drives an SUV and is one of those annoying people who drive up to within inches of your bumper if you happen to be doing anything remotely resembling the speed limit. Good riddance.

So, let's say I wasn't in such a great mood, but I decided to try shopping anyway, since I'd already invested $3.80 in bus tickets to make the trip. Most of the stores looked like they'd been hit by a hurricane, and trying to find clothing in there was basically like a trip to Frenchy's - the Atlantic Canada chain of thrift shops where everything is arranged by category in bins and it's up to you to search through it all.

Out of this whirlwind I tried to do some wardrobe shopping and came out with... (drumroll)... a pair of pants. Yes, that's it. No calendar, no day planner (that place wasn't there this year, bummer...). No sweatshirt. Though actually on the way home I stopped at that other shopping mall I was talking about and managed to find a nice toque to replace the one I somehow lost around Christmastime.

Not that it really matters much, as it went up to nearly 10 degrees (Celsius) today! Holy smokes! It feels like April, not January. It's so weird. Part of me just wishes I was in Yellowknife or something so that it actually feels like winter!

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01/03/2007

Cleaning woes

Well, I never thought I'd say this, but the other day, just before the guests arrived for our big Christmas dinner, I think I was a little overzealous with the cleaning. I was cleaning the bathroom before the guests arrived on the 27th, and afterwards decided that all the rags in the cleaning basket were so dirty that wiping anything with them probably made things dirtier rather than cleaner. So, I put the whole lot of rags (about 3 or 4 of them) in the laundry hamper, thinking that when they come out, they'll be sparkly clean and much more useful for cleaning things.

Well, they've come out sparkly clean alright, but now my nice warm Carleton sweatshirt has big greasy stains on it that are permanent. It took us a while to figure out how it happened, but it turns out the sweatshirt and the rags were touching in the hamper, and some furniture polish from one of the rags ended up soaking into the sweatshirt. Nobody noticed (and I didn't think of anything like that when I put the rags in the hamper), so my sweatshirt got washed. Now the stain is permanent. D'oh! I really liked that sweatshirt and now it's ruined. :-( At least the good news is that while the rag thing was my fault, at least it seems to only have affected my clothing and not anyone else's. Still, it sucks. Now I'm down to two operable sweatshirts. Combined with my closet clean-out earlier, looks like it's about time I went shopping again! I'm thinking of going tomorrow - hopefully the sales will still be on.

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12/30/2006

Operation Resolution 2007

Wow, I can't believe there's only a day and a half left in 2006. Time has flown so fast!! As New Year's approaches, we all know what that means: New Years Resolutions! Actually last year, I don't recall even bothering to make any resolutions, but this year, not only am I going to make resolutions, but I have big plans. Or at least, elaborate plans. Or anyway, at least soon-to-be-elaborate plans. I have high hopes! So, like with any successful business venture, there's a business plan in the makings for a great 2007.

I figured I'd start off the year with a reasonably clean slate in a couple of ways, so I decided the first thing I wanted to do was clean out my closet: get rid of clothes that are worn out, I don't wear, or that don't fit. I thought I wouldn't come up with much, as I did something like this in the summer, but somehow that last category (things that don't fit) has actually turned up a lot of stuff this time around! It turns out, a whole bunch of my clothes are... too big!! I didn't realize so many of my clothes fit so poorly, but there are two reasons that I can think of. In the past, especially in late high school/undergrad, I liked to wear baggy clothes and didn't care what people thought of what I wear. So, as you can imagine, I tended to buy things roomier than they needed to be. The second reason is, and I only just noticed this now, I've actually lost weight since undergrad, about 10-15 pounds! I only very rarely weigh myself (maybe once or twice a year), so after I saw so many clothes were too big today, I decided I'd just check my theory. Sure enough, I'm physically lighter than I was. I'm not terribly sure why as I haven't been dieting, but I suspect it's because I do more dance and eat far, far less junk food now that I'm not stuck on campus eating cafeteria food.

Anyway, all that to say, I got rid of a whole pile of clothes that don't fit. Now I have room in my closet, but the downside is, especially with more business/formal type wear, I don't own much anymore! Things like my stash of t-shirts and exercise wear didn't suffer much, but the business clothes are supposed to be more tailored and classy, and most of that is either way too baggy now, or was picked up at Value Village before I knew the meaning of the word 'frumpy'. Theoretically the next step is to go shopping the Boxing Day/Week/Month sales for a few elegant replacement items which will complete my wardrobe and make me stylish at the same time, but there's one minor hiccup: I don't actually have lots of money. I don't really want to go back to Value Village, although once in a while there are some treasures there. On the other hand, I can't afford to buy very much at retail prices. Most of it might have to wait until later, or if not, I hope there are some really awesome sales in January!

Other resolutions for New Years include doing more exercise, staying in better touch with friends, reducing my to-read pile (which is currently huge), and procrastinating less. This last one just came back to bite me starting on Boxing Day, when it finally snowed. See, my family and I have different theories when it comes to shovelling the driveway. I think it should be shovelled clean any time it snows, so that way ice doesn't build up. They think it only needs to be done when it snows so much you can't drive over it with the car. What happens is, if I don't do the shovelling, it either doesn't happen, or they do a shoddy job of it. The problem with the it's-fine-if-you-can-drive-over-it theory is that the snow you drive over with the car compacts, and turns into ridges of ice - this makes it hard to shovel the driveway in the future because it's not a flat surface.

On Boxing Day it snowed, then it warmed up, turning things to slush; then it cooled off, turning slush to ice. So now we have some really nasty icy tracks from the car. Then it snowed a couple of days ago, and nobody did anything about it until yesterday, when I had enough and tried to do it myself. I couldn't use the broad scraper because of all the car tracks, so I did what I could anyway, then got the heavy flat shovel and tried to remove some of those ice ridges. That's hard work ("Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone..."), and I was tired, so I did about a quarter of the driveway and thought, well, it's not supposed to warm up til next week, so I'll do the rest tomorrow. After all, the ice isn't going anywhere! This morning, I woke up to find that... it has snowed again. Arrgh! So now I am going to have to shovel again, AND try to get rid of the ice that was originally there from before. This is the pain-in-the-butt part of snow, which is why I like to have some before Christmas, because at least for a while there's a bit of romance to it. Afterwards, it's just a lot of hard work!

Anyway, I'm off to shovel some more snow. I wonder if I can sweet-talk my brother into helping me...

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12/26/2006

I'm dreaming of a white... boxing day?

Unfortunately, we had a green Christmas this year, for the first time I can remember. Well, except the year I spent Christmas in Australia, but at least they had an excuse. Part of the reason for this year's green Christmas can apparently be attributed to our parish priest, who is from Nigeria and had been praying for a whole month that we'd have a green Christmas, which would remind him more of home. So, he was incredibly happy that we had a green Christmas, although to me, it's just not the same. It's hard to take Christmas seriously when it looks like Easter outside! And on top of it, when the snow does come, it doesn't get that grace period at the beginning when it's actually welcome, to contribute to the Christmas mood. Now it's just the stuff you have to shovel off the driveway.

Anyway, at least it's finally showed up a little bit, if only a day late! I'm not going anywhere today though. I'm staying in the comfort of my own home, because today's boxing day, and we all know what that means: crazed shoppers who, having left their brains at home among the debris of shredded wrapping paper under the tree, are out indulging in the full-contact sport of shopping the boxing day sales, driving around like everyone has a woman in labour in the vehicle, and in general proving to be the antithesis of the "peace on Earth, goodwill to men" Christmas wish. At least here in the house they can't touch me, unless they swerve off the road and drive through the wall of the house. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened! (Though luckily, our house has so far escaped such a fate!)

Christmas itself went pretty well - went to Mass on Christmas Eve at the local high school (our church runs two masses simultaneously, one at the church, one at the high school, because we have SOOO many more people coming to Church only for Christmas). It was generally nice, but I was thoroughly scandalized by the people who went and got some junk food from the vending machines during Mass. Right after communion, no less. And actually the 'communion crowd' was a phenomenon unto itself. Given the quantity of people who left after communion, you'd think the Mass was actually over. Except... it wasn't!! I don't know what possesses people to do this, but lots of people have convinced themselves they either can't stand, or can't bother, to stay the extra 5 or so minutes for the final blessing, which is an important part of Mass also. It drives me nuts!

Oh well. What're you gonna do. So Christmas itself was nice, we had a Christmas dinner with my aunt and uncle and their kids, who just flew in from Calgary. (They're the ones we helped move in the summer, with the massive amount of stuff.) I also got a bunch of books for Christmas, so my to-read pile just got even taller. I need to get some serious reading done!

So today, like I said, I'm hiding out at home and leaving the Boxing Day mayhem to those with the patience (and the body armour) to deal with it. I'm happily sitting here in the fuzzy reindeer pyjamas (that my friend Christina gave me: thanks Christina!! :-)), listening to, of all things, the live streaming audio of Útvarp Føroya, the national radio station of the Faroe Islands! I don't really have a clue what the commentator is saying, but at least they're currently playing better music than Couleur FM, which is what I normally listen to here in Ottawa. Even if 'O Holy Night' is sung in Icelandic. (The guy singing it had a beautiful voice though!! Wow!)

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12/23/2006

Louise's Christmas Baking Adventures, Part 2

Well, the day after my last post (i.e., December 20), we made the most infamous cookies of the year: the Poinsettia Cookies. Oh my goodness, did they EVER take a long time to make! Mom made the dough in the morning, and starting at about 2:30 in the afternoon, we began shaping the flowers. Thing is, each flower has 8 petals (well, some had 7 or 10, especially near the beginning before mom got the hang of making these things). There were in general 3 red (pink) petals, 2 mottled white/pink petals, and 3 green petals on each flower. Each petal had to be shaped by hand to look like a poinsettia petal, and once the whole flower was assembled, we had to take something pointy (we were actually using corn cob holders!) and make all the veins in the petals to make it look like a poinsettia. It took forever! Finally when my first batch of 6 cookies was done, we put them in the oven... where they promptly burnt. Arrrrrrrgh! At least we were able to learn from that and time the subsequent batches a bit better. Even towards the end, where we had the process all figured out and had gotten the hang of it, it took 35 minutes to make 6 cookies!

All told, mom and I made at least 72 of these things, and we were at it until past midnight (more like 1 am). I think we must've vowed about 100 times that evening never to make these cookies again! Especially as it takes 6 minutes to make a cookie and about 6 seconds to eat one...

So those Poinsettia Cookies now replace the Chocolate Cherry Cookies as the biggest headache of the year.

The next day I was still so wiped out I didn't do any baking. Dad made some fudge and some peanut butter bark, and yesterday we finished the baking with some pecan balls and some meat pies (those aren't for the goodie baskets, they're for the two Christmas dinners we're hosting).

Later in the evening yesterday I was up in my room when I heard this God-almighty scream come from the garage, and mom screaming "Help!!" Dad sprinted up from the basement where he was, I sprinted down from my room where I was, imagining all the horrible possibilities, imagining I was about to be on the phone calling for an ambulance, and so on... but when we got to the garage it turned out that in the process of retrieving the pie pastry balls from the plank we'd set up in the "big fridge" (since we were running out of room in the real fridge), she'd almost tipped the pans of peanut butter bark onto the floor and had barely averted disaster, simply needing help to right the plywood plank and balance the bark on it again! That woke me up quite nicely, anyway!

So today, we're mostly in cleaning mode. Mom cleaned the oven, so hopefully it won't smell of kerosene every time we use it. (Now why it actually smells like kerosene in the first place is a bit of a mystery, as it's an electric stove/oven...)

I still need to wrap my Christmas gifts, and we need to wrap our famous (infamous?) Christmas baskets as well. I'll let my parents do the latter. They like fussing over that sort of stuff. :-)

More stats from the Christmas baking adventure:

Amount of time spent shaping Poinsettia Cookies: 10 hours

Number of Poinsettia cookies: around 72 (everyone was too wiped out to count, by the end of it)

Number of times we swore never to make these again: too many to count

Amount of time spent shaping Pecan Balls: about half an hour

Number of Pecan Balls: 111

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12/19/2006

Louise's Christmas Baking Adventures, Part 1

... I say "Part 1" because we have 5 more recipes to bake for the Christmas goodie baskets for the family, and if things keep going the way they're going, there will be a lot more adventures!

Every year for the past couple of years (I think this will be year 3), we have made goodie baskets full of home-baked goodies for my relatives' families - 5 baskets in all. We started doing this after a bit of a breakdown in the Kris Kringle thing, where everyone would draw a name and buy a gift for that one person. Problem was, we were supposed to spend $100 on the gift, and our family being the least affluent of my relatives', nobody in our family spends $100 on anyone in the immediate family, never mind the extended family! This sort of chugged along through gritted teeth for a couple of years, but it all came to a head when mom had a meltdown the year she drew my younger cousin's name, and was provided with a Christmas wish list that included fishnet stockings and a lava lamp. Some of you may know my mother, but for those who don't, she's quite a conservative person, a church organist, and patently not the fishnet-stockings-and-lava-lamp sort of person. The year after, we put our foot down and started making home baked goodie baskets.

So that's what we're up to at the moment, and I'm beginning to think shopping for lava lamps may not be so bad after all. We started last night, or at least, had a solid false start. It only took a few minutes before we learned lesson #1 of Christmas baking:

Lesson 1: Start with the right recipe.

I had this brilliant idea that I'd make these chocolate and cherry cookies that I remembered were so wonderful, but as it turns out, there are two recipes for chocolate and cherry cookies: one that is tasty, and the other that is like eating sandpaper. Unfortunately, last night, I started with the sandpaper recipe. Which brings us to lesson #2:

Lesson 2: If your intuition is telling you something isn't quite right, there's probably a good reason for it.

I didn't want to start over so I ignored my intuition, and made the recipe anyway. Thankfully, it was only a single recipe - we're doubling or tripling recipes to get enough for all the baskets, but I fortunately decided to do this recipe one batch at a time. So we have these cardboard chocolate cookies which barely taste like chocolate, and it was when they came out of the oven that mom discovered the other recipe for chocolate cherry cookies. We called it a night, and started the real cookies today.

Those went a lot better, and just when I thought I was done (72 cookies, all hand-rolled, fitted with a maraschino cherry, and lovingly hand-coated in a chocolate-cherry icing), that's when mom got us started on the second double recipe, for some sort of Scandinavian almond bars. At least we started with the right recipe this time.

Overall things haven't been going that badly - just a few small mishaps, like the wrong-recipe-cookies, half of which nearly slid right off the cookie sheet into the bottom of the oven, and the Scandinavian bars, which stuck to the cookie sheet like crazy glue and were nearly destroyed in the process of scraping them off. That was shortly before mom nearly melted her measuring tape to the inside of the oven door (don't ask).

Anyway.

So as of tonight, here are the stats on the Christmas goodie-baking adventure.

Number of chocolate cherry cookies baked: 72 of the good ones (70 now, after quality control ;-)), around 2 dozen of the sandpaper ones.

Number of Scandinavian almond slices: around 64 (too lazy to count exactly but that's about right)

Number of fingers permanently dyed bright red from Maraschino cherry juice: 3

Kilograms of chocolate purchased for the goodie basked baking: About 3 kg total

Number of different recipes on the goodie basket roster: 7

Number completed so far: 2

Recipe causing the most headaches: Used to be the chocolate mint fudge (I don't want to hear another word about dimensions of fudge boxes and whether foil wrappers come in square or round!!), but I think 1st place is now tied with those infamous chocolate cherry cookies.

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12/14/2006

The Holiday Season is upon us

Well, you can sort of tell it's going to be Christmas soon. It's not because of the weather, as we might actually have a green Christmas this year here in Ottawa, if things keep going the way they have been. (Stupid global warming...) I can feel it's nearly Christmas, because as usual, there's this air of irrationality which floats about, as people slowly but surely start to take leave of their senses.

A couple of days ago I went to the post office, and all I needed was to have an envelope weighed and the appropriate postage affixed. Should take about 30 seconds, but I was standing in line at the post office for probably a good 15-20 minutes, in the middle of the afternoon. That is, when it should be deathly quiet as people are at work (this is a suburban post office). Instead, I was in line behind several people, all of whom seemed to take ages. One person had a thick envelope that happened to be just a bit too thick to fit in the 2-cm slot for letter mail, so she was told it would have to go parcel post at a cost of about $7 or $8. I felt for her, because I've ranted about this before. But while I just gritted my teeth and paid the money (after all, it's not the teller's fault Canada Post has a wonky system for this), this lady tried to cram the envelope through the 2 cm slot, until the teller had to tell her stop, there's no way it's going to fit. Then he suggested she put it in a bigger (i.e., wider, not thicker) envelope to see if it would spread the contents enough to fit through the 2 cm slot. So she got a big envelope and went off to do that... and when she was done, butted in line right in front of me just when I thought I'd finally made it to the counter to get my little envelope weighed. *sigh*. Another lady needed extra postage for her thick Christmas cards and was moping to the teller that the extra stamps weren't Christmas-themed and did he have Christmas-themed stamps he could put on there instead... and so on. Now I remember why I like to stay out of commercial venues around Christmas time!

Speaking of Christmas frenzy, Mom has decided we need a new centrepiece for either our dining room table, or for the little table in the entrance hallway of the house. This centrepiece itch happens almost yearly, so it's no surprise it's happening again this year. Mom loves the Michael's craft supplies shop, but she managed to find a whole bag of baubles and fake Christmas "picks" (little bunches of ornamentation) at Rona for 25 cents a pop. She's busy building a centrepiece as we speak, which is why I'm busy making myself scarce. Mom and I have very different taste when it comes to this sort of stuff. I like simple, elegant things. Mom tends towards more over-the-top things, whether she intends it or not. If I were to hang around while she built this centrepiece, we'd end up in a battle of wills stemming from our simple difference in taste, and one or the other of us would probably walk off offended and/or frustrated. So, since this is her house, I'll let her have her fun decorating the centrepiece and spend my time worrying about other things. :-)

I'm off to go write some Christmas cards, which I'll go drop in a mailbox far, far away from the craziness of the actual post office!

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12/08/2006

NaNoWriMo's Aftereffects

So NaNoWriMo is finally over, and I managed to write 64,000 words in total. That's more than the 50k challenge, which is great, but the downside is that my story is still not over, and now I don't have a deadline to get my butt in gear for it. Still, I'm really interested in my story so I'm hoping that for once, I can discipline myself to keep going and get the thing done. Then comes a major rewrite and lots of editing and, with any luck, a publishing contract with a huge publisher, zillions of dollars, a spot at the top of the NY Times bestseller list... OK, OK, I'm dreaming. But I like to aim high anyway. :-)

I went to the Thank God it's Over (TGIO) party here in Ottawa, and got to meet some of the people that I knew only by their online names on the forums. It's interesting how you can get a certain image of someone in your head, and then when you meet them they're totally different. Actually I should have known, any assembly of writers crazy enough to write 50k words in a month are probably going to be a weird bunch. Next to them, all of a sudden I felt so... normal! It was cool to meet people so passionate about writing, but on the other hand, there are some people who were absolutely obsessive, to the point where I was worried about them. (Usually the fanfic people. :-D) They're a nice bunch though, and I had a good time at the party, even though I was majorly late for an orchestra rehearsal because of it.

In other news, I've been on a couple of interviews at a company in Kanata. It sounds like it could be an interesting job, and I hope I get it, but on the other hand, man, does it ever take a long time to get there. The second interview was on December 1, when we had some really inclement weather. (Note to self: Check location of company on Google Maps before leaving home...) Fortunately I took an earlier bus to get there because I got lost and had to backtrack in the rain and sleet. And on the way back, the roads were slush and ice and it took 2 hours, 15 minutes to make it back home. It literally would be faster to commute from Ottawa to Montreal than to bus it from Orleans (East end of Ottawa) to Kanata (West end of Ottawa). Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Orchestra stuff is pretty busy these days, with the Christmas season and corresponding concerts, but in a week and a half it should be calm again, and I imagine I probably won't know what to do with myself and all that spare time! I already have a whole bunch of ideas and projects for writing that I'm considering, so that's probably what will happen, and hopefully also I'll be making a dent in my to-read pile, which just got a couple of inches taller, now that I found a used copy of Clavell's Shogun!

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11/23/2006

NaNoWriMo - I hit 50k!

I did it - I have written over 50,000 words of my novel. Actually, I'm at around 51,600 words, and I hit that point about 3 days ago, but still it's amazing. I can't believe I've written over 100 pages of straight text, not even padded with pictures or anything. (Padded with adjectives and adverbs, yes. Pictures, no. :-)) It's officially by far the longest thing I've ever written in my entire life. And the beauty of it is, I still haven't run out of plot. And not only have I not run out of plot, I am only just getting to where the action really starts! I have so much to write about still!

Which means... I probably have 100 pages of the most boring text known to man. Yes, I know, chances are I have an enormous pacing problem. I'll fix that when I go to edit though. Right now I'm just so psyched that I was able to get this much written. Not only that, but that I still love the story I'm writing about! This is wonderful!

I took a couple of days off though, because I was becoming quite sleep-deprived from all that writing. At least I got enough of a lead at the beginning to be able to afford some time off writing. It feels good though, to be on a schedule and see the progress real-time, and to know that I'm not the only one trying to nail my butt to a chair for long enough to pound out a novel.

Hopefully someday I'll be able to polish this story enough to send it off and get it published. That would be really awesome!

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11/09/2006

NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul

Actually, that's the name of one of the Forums on the NaNoWriMo website. We're on Day 9 of novel-writing, and wow, I haven't felt this overworked, sleep-deprived feeling since undergrad. However, I'm quite proud of myself: I'm already at 29,000 words (or so), making this officially the longest thing I have ever written in my entire life. Even longer than my master's thesis, which also clocks in at around 29k words, but that included the massive list of references, table captions, and all that stuff. This novel is 29,000 words of pure single-spaced writing goodness.

Well, maybe 'goodness' is taking it too far. It's going to need a serious edit (read: complete rewrite) once this is all over, and when I take out all the boring descriptions and redundant adverbs, I'll probably be left with about 10,000 words of useful text. Oh well, it's the fun of it!

Plus, the Ottawa region is trying to beat Sacramento region's wordcount this year. The only problem is, Sacramento has about 30% more writers than Ottawa! We're actually gaining on them percentage-wise though, so possibly by the end of the month, who knows, we might be able to beat them yet!

In the meantime, I'm going to aim for 100k words for my novel, rather than just 50k, mainly because I expected to be further along in my plotline than I actually am, given the number of words I've written. My planned plotline covers about a year's worth of events, and I'm officially on day, oh, five of the timeline, and I'm more than halfway to 50k already. I haven't even brought in the bad guy, the terrible ghosts, or the invading armies of the two giant neighbouring empires!

So, as far as NaNoWriMo goes, I'm in far, FAR better shape than I thought I'd be. Maybe I should have listened to my grade 11 English teacher after all, and become an English major. I haven't felt this happy about an accomplishment in a long time, and it's not even over yet!

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10/31/2006

Almost November already!

Tomorrow, I will be starting NaNoWriMo, and the idea is to write 50,000 words in the space of a month. Oh. My. Goodness. I can't believe I'm doing this. Part of me is very excited to get started, and the other part of me isn't ready to try to dump that many words into sentences in such a short time! I mean, I thought writing my thesis was like writing an encyclopedia, and yet that was only around 25,000 words. Now I'm lining up to write double that, in half the time! At least this one is going to be a (sort of) fantasy novel, so for now I can basically just write whatever and make stuff up, and I don't need to find a reference for every sentence I put in there. This will be cool!

The only downside is that I have a lot going on in November. Concerts and rehearsals galore. Hopefully it won't hamper my creativity too much.

And speaking of creativity, I'm pretty much finished my painting of the main character of my novel-to-be. I think I'm stopping here with the paintings though. One character was enough. It sure took a long time! This one is a 12x16" acrylic and I think I made every mistake in the book when I was painting it, but luckily my new acrylics are at least partially water-soluble (even after it dries), so I can sort of erase mistakes somewhat. Thank goodness! The photo's below. The colours aren't quite accurate because I can't use a flash (glossy finish) and it's nighttime, but anyway this should give an idea of what I was working on.

Anyway, so that's about all I have to report at the moment. I'll let you know soon how well this whole NaNoWriMo thing is going. :-)

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10/19/2006

Don't go shopping when you're hungry!

Everyone knows the saying, "Don't go shopping when you're hungry", but usually the context is "don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry."

Well, I discovered the corollary: "Don't browse the cookbook section of a bookstore when you're hungry." I might not be quite as rich now, but at least I'm now the proud owner of a really nice Comfort Food cookbook where I can see myself making nearly every recipe! Anyway, I bought it off the bargain books rack, so it's not SO bad, but still. If you're on a budget, eat before leaving home, and stay away from bargain bins. :-)

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Of Bows, Paints, and Plots

First up, an update on the bow situation. Both my bows are basically foobarred - for the bow whose tip is broken, it can be fixed, but only by a specialist, and only for more money than I originally paid for the bow in the first place. My backup bow, which is less seriously broken, is worth so little in the first place that it too, would cost more to fix than I paid for it. Soooo, now, I have to go bow-shopping, which is not my favourite task. It's not terrible or anything, but it's tiring. Plus, I don't have wads of time, as my only operable bow now is a borrowed fibreglass bow. I played on a fibreglass bow for a number of years when I started, but after playing on a much nicer bow for the last few years, going back to fibreglass is painful!!

Not that it matters at the moment, as my cello is sitting in the shop at the moment, getting a sparkly new bridge put on it. It's odd though - now that my cello isn't in the house, I feel kind of antsy, like something is missing, and I'm itching to play it. Which is strange, because if it *were* here in the house, it would be an uphill battle trying to convince myself to practice! The thing must kind of be like a comfort blanket. :-)

So what else is up? Well, I'm hard at work trying to plan my NaNoWriMo novel. It's getting out of hand I think! :-) I decided the other day that I would like to paint a portrait of my main character. I haven't painted in quite a long time, and I have a nice set of professional-grade acrylics I bought a couple of years back and never used. (Prior to those pro paints, I was using the craft-type acrylics.) Soooo, after priming an artboard and painstakingly tracing a face onto it (getting that face right was quite the ordeal!), I got started with these new acrylics. Initially I just took out my sketch book and made swatches of all the different colours, both straight out of the tube and watered down, to see how they would behave. I was using a palette which had already been used for other things, and this is how I discovered a unique property of these new acrylics: they can be re-dissolved once they're dry. With the craft acrylics, once they're dry, that's it: they're totally permanent, creating a plastic film. The professional ones, though, don't. Which is lucky, because after I was done with the swatches I went back to the artboard and started painting my character's face with a thick coat of paint - and realized it looked terrible. If this had been my cheap craft paints, I would have been totally screwed. But with these new paints, add a bit of water, scrub a bit, and you can more or less make the mistake disappear. Yay! The painting's not done yet, but hopefully it will turn out well.

So back to the NaNoWriMo story, things are going well. I need to nail down the plot a little better, but at least I'm still enthusiastic about the story. The only downside is that my main character has very little in common with me, which means he's an expert on lots of stuff I know nothing about (mostly boating-related, as he's a boat builder by trade). I must be the only person in Ontario taking sea kayaking books out of the library right before winter! I can't wait til November, when I can start writing the actual story! Woohoo! :-)

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10/04/2006

Getting on a roll

Well, in the basics, much is the same today as always. However, a few small things are cropping up, enough to make life interesting.

Starting a month from now, I'm going to participate in NaNoWriMo, where I'll try to write a 50,000 word novel in the space of one month (November). I've got a vague beginning of a plot, a few ideas for stuff that happens in the middle, and am not quite sure how it will end, but hopefully it will all work out well. I have a couple of solid, interesting (I hope!) characters that I really like, so we'll see what happens. This is going to be a fantasy novel in the sense of multiple dimensions, ghosts, and what appears to be magical powers (but turns out not to be magic). It should be interesting, because I haven't really ever written anything that was specifically fantasy, and I've barely even read any fantasy stories at all. However, this is the plot that spoke to me, so that's what I'll write. I'm excited!!

Job-wise, I'm still looking, though today I ran across a job posting from a company I've applied to once before. That job wasn't a perfect fit and they never asked for an interview, but this job description nearly looks like it was lifted from the cover letter I sent them last time! Weeeeiiiird. That