cottage

Reading LOTR updated.




At the cottage! Jeff and I spent the first full day doing cottage-opening type of stuff...putting out the deck furniture, making small repairs, cleaning cupboards, washing all the dishes, cutlery, pots, etc. before replacing them on the shelves. We only found one dead mouse this year, lying in a corner of the kitchen where it must have expired over the winter. I had to pry the corpse off the floor before dumping it in the garbage (yuck).


We visited the Portage Store on the other side of the lake to get some drinking water; it wasn't officially open yet, but they let us fill out containers in the restaurant kitchen. While we cleaned, we listened to CDs on the ghetto blaster...including Ookla's new CD, "Smell No Evil". Really great album! I highly recommend that you all order this right away, if you haven't already. Jeff's favourite track is "Me and My Monkey". I'm torn between "Hockey Monkey Song", "Son Of Kong", and "Conquest". Also listened to two Aimee Mann CDs (after recommendations from Rand and Parki), Sam Baardman's "The Rookery", a Celtic harp CD by Therese Honey (birthday present from Tom Jeffers), some Dave Matthews.









Last night, Jeff made dinner (AND cleaned up, woohoo!)...steak cooked on the grill, rice, salad, served by candlelight. :-) We've gotten into the habit of having our steak with slices of blue cheese. My sister-in-law's boyfriend (a professional chef) introduced us to this combination, and now we're both hooked.


Took a sauna before dinner to wash up after all the messing about with dust and grime and dead mice. Jeff put a big cooking put full of water on the coals to heat up, then we filled up a portable shower (the same kind we used on our Nahanni canoe trip) and took turns holding the bag above each other so we could wash our hair. Ordinarily, we'd jump in the lake after, but the water's still pretty cold...the ice just thawed off the lake last Monday!


Very quiet on the lake; not many people are here. That will change this weekend, I'm sure. :-)


Today's Blatherpics:

I took this photo this morning.

Loading up the boat just before heading across the lake to the cottage.


Poll:

You are buying a few souvenirs at a small tourist shop while on holiday. The clerk gives you too much change. Would you point out his/her mistake?

picture books

Updates: For those interested, I've updated Reading Lord of the Rings...The Final Attempt. Also, Bill Sutton has updated his column, Another QuarterNote Heard From.


Nearly finished packing for the cottage. The most difficult part is deciding what books to bring. It's going to be difficult being without Gwyneth Paltrow for three weeks, but I'm bringing the Therese Honey harp CD that Tom Jeffers gave me for my birthday. Also bringing my guitar and a pile of manuscript paper. :-)





Beckett pointed out in Blatherchat that "oobleck" is a Dr. Seuss word. She looked up the Amazon blurb for Bartholomew and the Oobleck:



"Bartholomew Cubbins serves thanklessly as pageboy to King Derwin of Didd, a headstrong man who's decided he isn't satisfied with mere sun, fog, rain, and snow. ('Humph! The things that come down from my sky!') He wants something else, something uniquely his own, so he calls in his royal magicians ("Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff. Fista, wista, mista-cuff. We are men of groans and howls, mystic men who eat boiled owls"). Happy to oblige, the magicians tell the king they can make 'oobleck' fall from the sky, only nobody--not even the magicians--knows just what oobleck is. But after a night of arcane incantations, everyone in the kingdom gets a taste of the stuff (in the case of the Captain of the Guard, literally!), as the green, gluey goo gums up everything in sight. Of course, Bartholomew tries to help, but it's up to the king to save the day, as he learns to utter not magic words but simple words with magic in them: 'I'm sorry.'"



I've never heard of this book before...I had only read The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. My favourite Dr. Seuss book was Horton Hears A Who, mainly because I found the whole idea of a world being within a world being within a world fascinating. Hm. Sounds a lot like an sf plot, doesn't it?


What were your favourite picture books as a child? You can post your answer in Blatherchat.


I add "as a child" because I'm sure if I asked you what your current faves were, you'd all pick my sister's books, right? :-)













Today's Blatherpics:

- Mimi's restaurant, where we had brunch on Sunday.

- Parki, Jeff, Lindsay, and Wendy.

- Part of the window display at Mimi's.


Link of the Day:

Amuse-o-Matic Songs. "Be a depressed, rich songwriter!" Just fill in the blanks, and lyrics are automatically generated. If you have time to waste, it's definitely worth checking out the rest of Amused.com (a.k.a. "Centre For The Easily Amused").


Poll:

Do you keep a personal journal? (either online or offline)

oobleck

Had brunch at Mimi's yesterday with Lindsay, Wendy, Parki, and Jeff. Very good blintzes (what a great word that is..."blintzes").


Visited with Sara and Annie in the afternoon. Jeff showed them a science experiment based on one he saw on the Discovery channel, involving a mixture of cornstarch (lots) and water. The resulting goo takes on unusual properties, tending to solidify when pressure is applied, but going back to being runny when you take the pressure away.


You can thus scoop up a handful of the stuff and squeeze it into a solid ball that melts back into liquid when you open up your hand. Or slap down hard on the surface of the liquid and not have any splash out of the container.





Apparently the stuff is called "oobleck", composed of both a solid and a liquid, and containing properties of both. Most scientists classify this mixture as a non-Newtonian liquid. The uncooked cornstarch particles have both crystalline and non-crystalline structures. When you slowly mix them with water, the non-crystalline bits absorb most of the water (hence resulting in runny goo). When you smack it or otherwise apply quick pressure, you increase the temperature and pressure on the mixture, which causes more non-crystalline structures to form. The non-crystalline bits absorb more water and the mixture becomes more solid.


VERY cool...you all must try this, if you haven't already. Jeff did this twice yesterday, once for Sara and Annie, and once for one of our other nieces, Brittany.


Later in the afternoon, we went to Brittany's birthday party in Alton. Brittany is -very- much into Barbies as evidenced by her gifts, decorations, and cake. The cake was a Barbie in a party dress. Because Barbie's legs are so long, the pastry chef had to remove the doll's legs and just use the torso and head. It was a little gruesome to see the legless Barbie discarded on a plate after cake-cutting. Even Brittany referred to it as "the dead Barbie" later on.









Jeff and I gave Brittany an ant farm (I love being an aunt), a kite, and two books which it turned out she already had. :-( One of her most intriguing gifts was a Dream Baby, from her mom. This doll was sort of like a highly advanced Tamogatchi (remember those cyber-pets?). It starts out acting like a newborn, crying when it's hungry or needs its diaper change, cooing and gurgling when it's happy, making sucking sounds when you stick a bottle in its mouth. Over time, it apparently "learns" to crawl, talk, respond to its name and other stimuli, and eventually walks. To tell you the truth, it kind of gave me the creeps (reminded me too much of certain horror films I've seen in the past!), but it was pretty impressive from a technological toy point of view.


'Twas highly entertaining to see Jeff bent over the doll and its accompanying instructions, brow furrowed as he tried to figure out how to activate it, while Brittany danced around him asking, "Uncle Jeff, can I change its diaper now? Can I give it a bottle? What are you doing?"


Working on my Writer's Digest article today, and packing for our 3-week cottage stay, which starts tomorrow. I'm taking my laptop with me but may not be online as much as I am right now, especially if the weather's nice. :-)









Today's Blatherpic:

- Barbie torso from Brittany's birthday cake.

- Jeff teaching Annie and Sara about non-Newtonian liquids.

- Jeff studying the instructions for Dream Doll.

- Brittany, at her birthday party yesterday.


Link of the Day:

Techno Personality Test. (Post your results in Blatherchat)


Poll:

Did you own a home computer before 1981?

lord of the rings

Comic updated today

Jeff and I went for dim sum at King's Garden Chinese Cuisine with Jen, Bryan and Christine yesterday. Yummmm. Christine and I are going to be collaborating on a personal project, by the way...more details soon. ;-)


After stuffing ourselves on shrimp dumplings and steamed pork buns, Jeff and I went to see Bridget Jones's Diary at the Paramount. Allison and a few other friends had recommended this movie. LOVED it. Especially liked Renée Zellweger. Does anyone know if her accent was faked? Being unfamiliar with the actress, I looked her up on The Internet Movie Database -- and found out she had grown up in Texas!


A question about faked British accents in North American movies...are these obvious to you genuine Brits? If so, how do they come across? Obnoxious? Stuffy? Side-splitting hilarious?


But I digress from my intended topic of today's Blathering: THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I never finished reading this trilogy. I did actually try once when I was much younger, and got within the last 50 pages or so of the third book. Then I got distracted, and never came back. My Tolkien-loving friends were incredulous and scandalized. "How can you POSSIBLY stop reading it so close to the end??" To tell you the truth, I found LOTR pretty dry, with dull characters and an interminably plodding plot.


Before you Tolkienites start hurling big rocks at my head, however, you should know that I've decided that I might have been wrong about the book. Maybe I tried reading it at the wrong time in my life. Maybe I went in with too high expectations. Maybe I had indigestion. Anyway, I'm going to give it another shot, and to post mini-reports after each chapter. I got the idea from Allison, who recently told me about a similar project on a Tolkien site, by a "Tolkien virgin" reading the books for the very first time.


Why publicly document the process? Because I figure I'm more likely to finish the books that way. Plus I figure it would be intriguing to get feedback from others who have read (or attempted to read (or who are determined never to read)) the books along the way. My goal is to finish reading the trilogy by the time the movie comes out in December. I'm going to start reading the book in a few days, when Jeff and I head off to the cottage for most of May.


Posting reports in my Blatherings, however, would involve heavy spoilers for those who haven't yet read LOTR. So I've set up a separate section, which I hope to update on a regular basis. Like my comic strip, I will post links to updates on my Blatherings so you'll know when I've managed to get through another chapter. Feel free to check out this new section:




Reading LORD OF THE RINGS

...A Final Attempt




I've posted the URL on my links page. For the sake of those who aren't LOTR fans, I'd appreciate detailed LOTR comments being posted on that message board rather than in Blatherchat, thanks. :-)


Today's Blatherpic:

With Jeff, Jennifer, Bryan, and Christine.


Link of the Day:

Dancing Paul.


Poll:

Have you read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy?

web rings

Comic updated (yet again)

Comic strip help needed!: I need a name of an Internet startup company (xxx.com) that ISN'T already registered (you can check through http://www.qwho.com). Ideally, the name would have something to do with music or songwriting, but this isn't necessary. All the over-the-top "corporate dot com" names I came up with turn out already to be registered...my goal is NOT to use the name of an already-existing company (the potential lawsuit thing, y'know). Please e-mail me or post your suggestion in Blatherchat. If I end up using your suggestion, I'll send you some Inkspot pens. :-) Thanks!





So I've joined a Web ring. Two, actually. Inkspot was never part of one even though there are many for writers. I've never gone for the "become part of as many Web Rings as you possibly can even if it means taking up half your main page with links" method of self-publicity. My primary beef with Web rings is that most are completely open. I find that this results in Web rings with hundreds of linked sites of wildly varying quality and a gradually increasing number of 404s. This may not bother some, but I don't have the patience to click through the sites in a ring like this. Call me an Elitist Web Ring Snob, if you'd like. :-)


I think that the best Web rings are ones which are very specific in scope and membership requirements. On Display appealed to me because its focus is on strong writing and because it involves collaboration projects. Collaboration is a strict requirement, in fact...if you fail to participate in a certain number of monthly projects or miss one without making arrangements, you're out of the ring. If you don't join the mailing list, you're out of the ring. There are also several optional collaboration projects.


The concept is intriguing. Each month, members agree on one topic. During the month, each member must write one entry on that topic, then all the entries are linked to that month's topic page. Here's an example of the March topic page, where the topic was the word "red".


I think this concept of topic challenges is a wonderful idea, partly because of the "writing prompt" aspect, and partly because it builds community in a way that a typical Web ring never does. It would be fun to apply this idea to songwriting, wouldn't it? Hm...or the concept could even be done through a password-protected message board (for posting of lyrics, discussion of upcoming topics, etc.). You'd have to agree to abide by the rules to get a password. Hm...I'll have to think about this.





Went to see "Driven" yesterday afternoon with Jeff and his dad. I don't normally go for car racing movies, but part of the movie was filmed in our neighbourhood, so I was curious. The movie was pretty much what I expected. But it WAS very cool to see shots of places in Toronto I recognized. If any of you see the movie, for example, check out the scene where two of the characters go joyriding through the streets of Chicago in racecars. That's one of the streets just outside our apartment; I can see it from my office window. I was in Philly when this scene was filmed, but Jeff reports that it was VERY loud. The production company had posted notices in our building warning tenants that they would be filming all night, and that there would a lot of noise, but apparently some tenants complained anyway.


Last night, we went to Hiro Sushi with a bunch of friends (Luisa, Reid, Doug, Mark, Bryan, Parki, Scott) for a belated celebration of Scott's birthday. 'Twas good sushi, but I thought it a tad overpriced.


These days, I'm reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Enjoying it much more than I expected; I had heard only lukewarm reviews about it. The atmosphere reminds me a bit of that in the Gormenghast series, and some of the antagonists are truly nasty.


I've also become hooked on the game Black and White. More on this in a future Blathering. :-)


Today's Blatherpic:

My four-year-old niece, Annie.


Poll:

Do you feel that you lost your virginity too early?