Tag Archives: reyn

11.03.13 [Sunday]
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australia, comics, library, school, whining, writing

brain-weight

I am always completely amazed at how much better I feel when I have written. Today I finished off the first draft of a cataloguing paper (about the challenges of cataloguing webcomics) and while it’s nothing crazy impressive, I learned some shit and have some stuff written about what I learned. And my mood? So much better than it was yesterday, or all last week when I hadn’t written anything on this and was just dreading it.

A while back I was trying to figure out why I was so much less motivated this term with a month left than last term. And the answer was completely to do with the whole leaving for China the day after classes were over. I needed to get everything out of the way so I did. This term there’s cool stuff happening after classes are done (going to Vermont and then to Australia), but nothing I need to push myself right now for. And no Holly waiting for me right on the other side. (She’ll be coming to Oz in July.)

But today I feel good. I wrote a post for Closed Stacks (another library blog I’m contributing to) and a book review. I’ve got business cards in the mail. Tonight I’m going to do some real writing. Oh, and Reyn’s a dad (I saw it on his sister’s Facebook), so congratulations.

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10.07.03 [Saturday]
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winnipeg

healthy glow

Reyn’s neighbours have put a new roof on their house. Not structurally. They just put red vinyl siding (probably designed for roofing, so it’d be more like topping) over their crappy old shingles. The upside to this is that on the south side of the second floor here, the sun reflects in off that red roof, making everything near the windows kind of pink. If you are sallow and want to look a little less so, come on over!

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10.06.03 [Thursday]
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books, travel

rituals and the myth of choice

I’ve been getting fancy mail in the past couple of days. A classy wedding invitation, pictures from a wedding I couldn’t make it to, and a letter saying I’ll be getting a bunch of money in the next few months. That last one wasn’t very fancy. And it’s money that used to be mine anyway, but will still be nice to receive.

If I ever get married I hope that I’ll be able to say something like “We were married on ‘the day the drought broke.’” I like that a lot. It has a small society feel to it. That you could say that and it would provoke knowing nods among the right people. That’s the kind of thing you want your rituals to do.

I’m really looking forward to the Chicago road trip we’re doing this summer. We’re going to bring baseball gloves and hang out in a park somewhere and throw a ball around the way Sean and Reyn and I did the other day, and it will be a good time. Though I’m bringing my ball glove to Chicago, I’m sending it home with the driving folk, as that’d take up too much space in my bag to take to China and back. Holly doesn’t like baseball and it will be too hot there to do anything but possibly breathe. My passport should be returning to me tomorrow, Chinese visa in hand, making that trip possible.

I just finished Still Life with Woodpecker (review here) and one of the things I appreciate about that book is the celebration of choice. I’ll be registering for school soon and the whole doing something new feels really natural to me, like I’m not getting stuck in some life where I don’t have anything to choose between, that I’m keeping from having to make difficult choices. When I hear someone say “That was fun, now back to real life” I realize how much I don’t want to say that, at least not in the sense of real life being the boring routine you break from every once in a while. School isn’t going to be nonstop excitement. It may even be nonstart excitement, but I decided to go and try this out, and I will learn new things. That sits well with me. I’m no outlaw with a stick of dynamite, but I would prefer to be somewhere nearby curious about how it works.

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10.05.10 [Monday]
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food, sports

cook flesh with fire

Getting the chance to barbecue is something I missed living in the condo. Reyn has a barbecue on the back deck though, so I’m getting back into practice.

Yesterday I was at my mom’s and I barbecued steaks and portobello mushrooms. The steaks had marinated in tequila and garlic for two days, and I grilled the mushrooms up with a raspberry vinaigrette and fresh rosemary. Both turned out pretty good. I always worry when cooking meat, since if I fuck it up it’s not me who has to suffer the eating of it.

While eating, my mom explained to Sri’s son that the steaks were marinated in booze because it was Mother’s Day and that’s how she wanted it. (He wasn’t a fan.) This led me off on a reminiscence about canoe trip steaks with Ernie and Dave’s uncles. I can’t remember if those steaks were actually soaking in whisky for four days of hiking or if they were just aging to perfection. Still the best damned pieces of meat ever.

The earlier part of Mother’s Day was spent watching the Jays win in style while Mom napped. Oh, and dressing the dog up to celebrate surviving cancer for a year. She got the shirt specially made since, surprisingly, it is hard to find a shirt for a dog (or infant, which is what she ended up buying because it was cheaper) that has “Cancer Survivor” preprinted onto it.

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10.03.16 [Tuesday]
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tv, whining

too big to fail

I’m 30 now. Which is fine.

It was a good enough day. Had lunch with my mom, chatted a bit with Holly, worked a short shift, cut my hair and found I hadn’t doomed Reyn’s cat to a life on the streets by accidentally letting her out yesterday. I’ll finish moving into Reyn’s place tomorrow, bringing Sinatra with me. I hope she does okay with the new place and Kittenoh.

The second best part of my day was explaining to an eleven-year-old how pinchies on St. Patrick’s Day isn’t a “real thing” but also how that fact won’t stop you from getting pinched (for not wearing green) if everyone you know is doing it. The tyranny of the mob and their lies, I explained with a shrug. The best part of the day was finishing the last season of The Wire tonight, which explains why big lies were on my mind.

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10.03.14 [Sunday]
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books

book review: radical simplicity

Dan Price wrote this book about living in a meadow. The book is called Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life and it was probably the wrong thing for me to be reading while packing up my apartment to move. I would like to live in a meadow, in a kind of hobbit house like Price has done.

The most interesting part of his experiments in housing (he had a tipi and a shack and a dugout cave with a skylight at various times) for me is how he wasn’t cut off from everyone. He had the place wired for electricity. Not gobs of outlets or anything but he had a line built in so he could run his photocopier which he used to make his zines. I like the idea of not being completely isolated from the world. His wife and kids lived in town and would come visit him and he would visit them. He said that when the kids were little he would keep on hoping they’d want to stay in the meadow. They didn’t. He and his wife were separated.

So yeah, I’m looking forward to living in a room in Reyn’s house for a few months. Just to get rid of the extra crap. I’m not going to be thinking about the condo corp and can just get things done. One of those things will be a paring down of the extra books in storage and the other cruft I’ve been accumulating. I hope that doesn’t sound like dipshit new-age hippie horsewank. I just feel like making some choices, for good or ill.

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10.03.12 [Friday]
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winnipeg

it echoes in here

It’s like the condo is doing its best to make up for the shitty year this last one has been by making my moving (in stages) quite painless. Painless apart from the cuts on my hands and a bruised left ring finger I mean. But all the stuff that’s going into storage is no longer going into storage; it is being stored. Reyn spent his morning generously helping me carry shit, which isn’t the most fun way to spend a morning but we’re old men eager to prove we can still do these things. I was talking to some eighth graders the other day about Jurassic Park and they said it came out before they were born. Le sigh.

There’s still room in my storage locker for a few bodies, so ask if you need. You have to provide your own carpet to roll ‘em up in. Sorry.

Now it’s just a matter of throwing junk out. Did you know I still have all my university-era schoolwork notebooks? Once this weekend is over they will be in the recycling bin, so if you want to learn what I learned about matrilineal systems and such, go scouring blue boxes across the city. I will be running a scavenger hunt with fabulous prizes.

I haven’t decided exactly when I’m moving over to Reyn’s for real, but Sinatra is the last thing I’ll be bringing over. And then I’ll be watching her closely to make sure she and Kittenoh settle their territorial disputes in a civilized manner. I’m partial to the Queensbury Marches duelling rules myself. We’ll see who shall be amenable.

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10.03.10 [Wednesday]
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winnipeg

my socks are wet from puddles

Today’s moving of stuff went so well. Reyn and Steve were here helping and it all just happened. I’d been hoping to get the furniture I didn’t need off to the MCC furniture thrift store, and maybe move a shelf over to my new room. But Steve’s vehicle is a surprisingly good little hauler so we got stuff to MCC and all my boxes to Reyn’s in one trip apiece We didn’t lose any fingers, didn’t wreck any vehicles and had time for lunch before people had to go to work. Way to go, day. You were a good one.

Of course the annual thaw puddle/lake in front of the building has started up. I really wish that could have held off until the money for the condo was in my hand, but whatever. It’s not like it’s a bunch of water in the condo they bought, right?

In non-moving news the BBC thinks I think like a girl. I took this series of tests the other day and my results put me in the average female brain. Because of my empathy and my willingness to share I guess. Although that empathy score is pretty awesome because it’s a combination of perfect results on the “being able to tell how someone feels” scale and nigh-sociopathic (my hyperbole) results on the “how good of a shoulder you are to cry on” type stuff. Which seemed about right.

Now this was just some internet quiz thing, but it seemed a step or two above the quality found on Facebook surveys. I’d be interested to see what someone who knows something about psychology might have to say about if the test was anything actually interesting or not. Evidently Holly already goes around describing me as someone who thinks like a girl (thus making me easy to get along with), so I’d like to find out if science actually has her back on this or not.

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09.07.25 [Saturday]
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games

scared of saying the southern multisyllabics

India Rails has its own quirks compared to the other games in the series (though in truth I’ve only played Australia Rails the one time so I might not be the best qualified judge). Example: Northern India has a shitload of rivers (which make building through mountains feel less expensive) and there’s only the one ferry. My play wasn’t stellar. I never really got a good daisy chain going even though I had a circuit of the subcontinent laid out. It took us all forever to head into the south. And Reyn is a horrible shuffler. But I’m glad I got the game so we have it as a rail-game option. I’d like to play Australian Rails again with more people sometime to compare the feel of these smaller-than-Europe map games.

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09.06.09 [Tuesday]
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books

book review: axiomatic

Another book I grabbed at the CBC Calgary Book Sale last month, Axiomatic is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan. The first time I read this book was when Reyn and I were in Turkey. I’d never heard of Greg Egan and then these stories of jewels in brains and designer viruses and belief attractor zones were so intensely weird. Now, after reading a small pile of Greg Egan novels, I realize these stories are actually the more accessible chunk of his work.

There are two stories that are very similar in the collection. Both are about runners going into a disaster zone. Both involve describing these weird landscapes formed by the anomalous event. This was the only part of the book I wasn’t a big fan of, feeling like I’d already read that. It sort of highlighted the “ideas man” aspect of his writing. Apart from that one near repeat, the book was as good as I remembered it, and I’m super glad I own it now, since it’s long out-of-print.

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