nature pics

I took the photo above yesterday. The bird had flown into the window at the back of the cabin while I was uploading my Blatherings; I looked up just in time to see something small and grey fluttering into the forest nearby. I watched the chickadee land on a branch and perch there rather woozily, its eyes half-closed and swaying back and forth. I took this photo when I went outside to check on the bird's progress. It didn't seem alarmed to see me, and let me get close enough to take this photo. After a few more minutes, it fluffed up its feathers, shook its head, and flew off.


[Added Wed. Oct. 10: I was wrong about the bird being a chickadee! Here's what Dave Alway wrote: "As near as I can make out from Roger Tory Peterson's Eastern Birds what you've got there is a female Golden Crowned Kinglet. Family Sylviidae, genus and species Regulus satrapa. The tell-tale mark is the yellow peak along with its very small chickadee size. In the males, the peak turns to orange at the topmost of the head. Chickadees have no such markings, generally having a solid black or deep brown cap. The area north and west of Toronto is where her winter and summer ranges overlap. According to Peterson, her habitat is conifers, especially Spruce or Norway pine plantations, or various other trees in winter."]





After the others left yesterday, Jeff and I went on a 8 km hike. On the way to the starting point, in the boat, we saw a female moose and her calf grazing by the side of the lake. We didn't venture too near, but drifted in the boat watching until both ambled into the shadows of the forest.





The photo above was taken a few minutes ago; it is completely unaltered except for sizing (to fit on my Blatherings). I was up just before sunrise this morning, so was lucky enough to catch the few brief moments when the rising sun soaked the sky and water a deep orange and scarlet. Only minutes later, the light had brightened and the colour was gone.


It is cold in the cabin right now, despite a crackling fire and an electric heater in the corner; I'm wearing fleece pants, fleece sweatshirt, and a fleece vest. The thermometer outside reads 1 degree Celsius. Bizarre to think I'll be in California with Paul and Beckett around this time next week (Andrew's midweek, the Bohnhoffs at the end of the week)! Jeff will be here on a Guy's Astronomy Weekend. Somehow I suspect none of them will be up early enough to enjoy a sunrise. :-)


On Telemarketing


I was amused by a Blatherchat comment from Simon Fairbourn in the UK (household consists of Simon, Talis Kimberley, young Corwin Kimberley).




"Re: Telemarketing.

Sorry, Debbie, I can't answer your Blatherings question. I do a combination of both answers. Politely baiting Telemarketers is too much fun.


My favourite option is to be literal with my answers. I have a head start with our combination of surnames. So you get something like...


TM: Is that Mr. Kimberley?

Me: No

TM: Oh, may I speak to Mr. Kimberley?

Me: He's at school.

TM pauses

TM: May I speak to Mrs. Kimberley then?

Me: No, she's dead.

TM pauses again

TM: May I speak to the homeowner then?

Me: No, she's unavailable.

TM pauses longer this time wondering who I am and what I've done to this family.

TM: Who is this?

Me: If you don't know who you are calling, why are you making the call?

TM: (Silence (This is so far off their script that they're panicking))

Me: Goodbye.


I should add that Annie Walker has a talent for this I can only dream of emulating. She's actually had people get their mates at the call centre to call, 'cos she's so entertaining."




Today's Poll: (Suggest a question)



Have you ever seen a moose in the wild?

thanksgiving

Still at the cottage. I had a cold and spent most of yesterday sleeping, but apparently there were several snow squalls which made the annual Cottagers' Turkey Bowl an interesting experience. Jeff borrowed my black socks to use as mittens during the game. :-)


The coloured leaves are GORGEOUS here right now, weaving so many brilliant reds and yellows through the forest that it's nearly impossible to wander even a short distance beneath the trees before you find yourself stumbling to a halt, staying open-mouthed at the breathtaking scenery. The autumn hues against the new-fallen snow makes an even greater contrast of colours and textures; I was going a bit nuts with my digital camera this morning; sadly, the cold temperatures shortens the life of the batteries, and they don't last long before needing recharging.





We celebrated Thanksgiving this year with Jeff's parents and his brother and family (Case, Debbie, Olivia, and Garrison, plus their Newfoundland dog, Kia). Very active weekend. :-) Everyone except Jeff and me left a couple of hours ago; we're sitting in the main cabin right now with our laptops, a crackling fire warming the room, listening to some CBC news coverage of the U.S./British retaliation.


Short Blathering today...Jeff and I are going to hike to Rainbow Lake today.


Link of the Day (thanks to Seanan for this URL!)


15 Things To Love About Toronto, from

Tomato Nation.





Today's Blatherpics:


- Photo taken this morning.


- Ladybugs at the cottage. I've heard at least one report of ladybugs not being completely harmless. My sister reports my niece Annie crying out in pain while playing with ladybugs...when a ladybug was brushed off her hand, they found small welts left behind. I got similar reports from some people at an AOL writers' chat. If you look at this photo, you'll notice that the ladybugs differ widely in their spot pattern; some have hardly any spots. Mutant ladybugs, perhaps? Pretty weird...


- My niece Olivia, while she and I were out picking coloured leaves for decoration at Thanksgiving dinner.


Today's Poll: (Suggest a question)



Do you like pumpkin pie?

leeza gibbons rant

Hey, looks like some of the people at Weta Digital (production effects for Lord of the Rings) are fans of my Waiting For Frodo comic strip:

G'day!


I just thought I'd let you know that us here at the coal-face are really enjoying Waiting For Frodo!


Even though we're working on it we still can't wait for the movie to be finished.


Not long to go now!


--

Shane McEwan

Weta Digital

Wellington, NZ

Pretty cool, eh? I've posted this letter in my spankin' new Waiting For Frodo press section :-)


More info about Weta Digital and Weta Workshop (the latter focuses on physical effects):


- "Where Hobbits Live Virtually" (Wired, Sept 12)


- Coverage of a talk given by Adam Valdez, animation supervisor at WETA Digital (Alias/Wavefront)


- Cinefex notes on who does what.





Had dinner at Parki's last night. He cooked everything (except the cheesecake) from scratch: curried apple soup, salad with walnuts and apples and homemade dressing, barbecued tandoori chicken and rice. Chocolate cheesecake with fresh fruit and raspberry sauce for dessert. Yummmmmmm.


During conversation, the topic of telemarketers and phone spam came up. Parki mentioned a particularly obnoxious phone spam left on his answering machine by Leeza Gibbons.


Despite my drowsiness (after the great dinner, I was curled up in The Most Comfortable Chair In The World, which happens to be in Parki's living room), I sat bolt upright.


"Leeza Gibbons!" I cried in outrage. "I got the same phone spam recording!" In fact, during lunch with my friend Cathy on Wednesday, -she- said she had gotten the same recording.


Getting telemarketing calls during the dinner hour is one thing, but I think it's particularly obnoxious to leave a long, rambling phone spam on people's answering machines when they're not home. Leeza was promoting some radio station...the spam has prompted my friend Cathy NOT to listen to that station. I'm sure many others feel the same way.


I wish I had kept the recording long enough to transcribe part of it. In addition to the length, part of the obnoxious factor was the tone...at first, you couldn't tell it was just a recorded message (layered on top of the fact that it was already recorded on one's answering machine, that is). The message went something like this:


LEEZA: "Hi there, I'm Leeza Gibbons."


(pause, obviously inserted to give the listener time to jump up and down in excitement and yell into the next room, "HEY HONEY! LEEZA GIBBONS JUST CALLED ME! WOW, THIS IS SO COOL!")


LEEZA: "I don't know you and you only know me because I'm a famous person, but I wanted to tell you why you should go running to your radio right now (or at least after you finish listening to this interminably long phone spam) and tune in to your new favourite radio station bla bla bla bla"


I'd be interested in hearing from all of you about how you handle telemarketers. And if any of you have ever worked as a telemarketer.


I have.


(Insert image of me seated in a chair on a talk show, the words "SHE CONFESSES SHE USED TO WORK AS A TELEMARKETER" superimposed across my perspiring forehead, just before I break down in tears.)


It was just after my first year of university during the summer, when my friend Sue Wong and I shared a cockroach-infested apartment at Spadina and Bloor. The summer job I had been counting on fell through, so I was desperate for enough income to help share the rent of the apartment we were babysitting for a few months.


My job was to go through a phonebook and try to convince people to subscribe to a newspaper (can't recall if it was the Toronto Star or Globe & Mail). I'd be paid on commission. In the brief training session, we were told NOT to accept "no" as an answer, and to keep talking, no matter what the person on the other end of the phone said (unless they wanted to buy a subscription, of course).


During the four hours I worked as a telemarketer, I sold zero subscriptions. I felt so guilty about what I was doing that I started apologizing almost the second the other person picked up the phone. The call that finally tipped me over the edge and made me quit was the elderly woman who gently interrupted my stumbling, desperate pitch to say, "I'm sorry, dear, but I can't subscribe to your newspaper. You see, I'm blind."


I quit on the spot, and so ended my brilliant career as a telemarketer.


(Years later, I realized that the woman could have been making the whole thing up. If she did, I have to admire her tactic for handling phone sales calls!)


Have a great weekend, everyone. And to fellow Canadians: Happy Thanksgiving!


News and updates


(NUA) The NUA reports "that the number of people with Internet access around the world is 513.41 million. Give or take a few million." (More...)


Today's Blatherpics:


- A drink in one of the zillions of drink machines we came across in Tokyo. Many had interesting Japlish phrases. I liked this one: "Sunlight and mist turn a young leaf into tea. Tea can turn you into something new. Tea. A natural gift of love."


I think I'd like that on a t-shirt, wouldn't you? :-)


Today's Poll: (Suggest a question)



How do you handle telemarketers? Choose "YES" if you tend to be polite and listen to their blurb before saying no. Choose "NO" if you tend to cut them off before they're finished.

Canoe interview

Hey, check out the article about my comic strip on Canoe Jam!Showbiz today. :-) Jeff took a look at my stats yesterday, and turns out that my personal pages have been averaging about 12,000 page downloads a day in October. "Waiting For Frodo" is the most popular entry page right now, followed by my Blatherings, followed by the message boards (likely Allison's Silmarillion Reading Group, which is going like gangbusters these days).


Took Jodi and Allison out for dinner to celebrate their birthdays last night, then went back to Allison's place to watch the first regular episode of "Enterprise" as well as the Sept.11 tie-in special "West Wing" episode. I had never watched "West Wing" before...seems like a very well-written show; I might try watching it again sometime.





Project Updates:


- Found out the editor I was supposed to meet at Writer's Digest later this month is no longer there! :-( However, the WD staff is still interested in meeting with me, so I'm going to drop by anyway.


- Got an encouraging nibble from a Web site about a potential column, sent some clips and a more detailed proposal. Wish me luck!


Links:


My interview on Canoe (yeah, I know I linked to it already near the beginning of this Blathering, but how often is this sort of thing likely to happen? :-))


Today's Blatherpics:


- Fortune drawer at a shrine in Tokyo. In exchange for a small fee, you can take your turn at shaking a fortune box and removing a piece of paper with a number on it. You take the number to the fortune drawer, where you open up the drawer with corresponding number for yet another piece of paper with the fortune on it.


- If you don't like the fortune you get, you can reject it by tying it onto one of the "rejected fortune" area strings. Of course this meant that if you had enough money, you could just plow through all available fortunes until you found one that you liked. Handy, that. :-)


Today's Poll: (Suggest a question)



Have you ever paid to have your palm read?

(re)discovering the library

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my music partner ALLISON! :-) Please come visit the virtual birthday party this week for Allison and Jodi.


Slinking into Northern District Library yesterday afternoon, I felt like a recalcitrant teenager returning home after running aways years ago.


I used to be in the Library Club back in high school, helped out at Palmerston Public Library after I left my programmer/analyst job at Toronto-Dominion Bank. My dad used to take us kids to the public library every week, and each time we'd each come back with piles of books. Some were good, some were bad...my parents never tried to censor anything that we read, nor try to guide our reading interests.


As a result, I viewed -every- section of the library as an exciting territory waiting to be explored, not just the kids' area. I loved browsing up and down the aisles, breathing in the musty smell of books, running my hand lightly over the spines lined up neatly on the shelf, thinking about all the words and ideas waiting to be discovered in each volume. I used to secretly dream about having read Every Single Book in the entire library someday.


In university, libraries were my refuge and social centre. In Robarts Library, my friends and I used to have lunch on the floor outside the cafeteria, playing Hearts and munching on Flakies from the vending machine. We'd do homework and snooze in the cubicles on the basement floor. Though I didn't have much excuse to do research in the stacks, I'd sometimes wander through them anyway, just for the quiet and solitude.


Yesterday, I spent most of my time in the library with my laptop in a cubicle with a power outlet, working on my book. I've found I get more fiction writing done away from home because I'm offline and know I won't be interrupted. Not sure about you other writers, but it always takes me a few minutes to get ramped up into full writing mode, where I'm fully absorbed in the story and characters. And I always hope that I reach that near-mystical state where I'm not so much writing as chanelling, when my fingers can barely keep up with the story unfolding in my head.


I used to give up if I couldn't reach that state during a writing session. Over the years, I've learned to keep going anyway...it becomes to easy to use as an excuse NOT to write otherwise. Noel Coward summarized this well: "What I adore is supreme professionalism. I'm bored by writers who can write only when it's raining."


What drives me nuts, however, is getting yanked out of that wonderfully creative mode by something trivial like a phonecall or knock on my office door. I get pretty crabby and sometimes snap at the person, but then feel bad about my behaviour later. My solution: work outside of my home office, and to turn off my cellphone. I'll check messages every once in a while, but at least that's under my control. Seems to be working pretty well...I do my fiction writing away from home, my nonfiction at home (don't mind being interrupted as much then, and I usually need the access to the Internet).


After I finished my writing yesterday, I wandered about the library to remind myself of what I had been missing out on these past years. Which is quite a lot! In addition to books, there are books on tape, movies, CDs, video tapes, Internet access terminals (sign up in advance, 1/2 hr limit), courses, concerts, manuscript critiquing by the author-in-residence...all FREE. And most importantly (for me), lots of cubicles and table spaces near power outlets in a quiet environment.


I went to sign out a book on tape (a medical thriller to listen to during my workouts at the gym), and was mortified to discover that not only had my library card expired, but that I was no longer even listed on the library computer system! The nice Library Clerk didn't bat an eye, however, and cheerfully reactivated my card once I showed her a photo id.


So I'm back in the fold; I have a library card. And I definitely plan to make more use of it from now on. :-)


Project Updates:


- Wrote 1500 words for my novel yesterday.

- Got a rejection from one of the column applications I sent (an e-mail "cold call").

- Requested submissions guidelines from a bunch of online markets.


Thanks to lordoftheringsmovie.com, TolkienOnline.com, Valinor, Imladris, and RingZone for mentioning Waiting For Frodo.


Links:


(Reuters) TV networks are starting to broach the previously-taboo subject of terrorism.

(More...)


(OnePC.net) Guide to hosting a LAN party. (More...)


(Wired) An author speaks out against "reckless copyright enforcement". (More...)


(Canoe) Creator of Heathcliff cat comic dies. (More...)


Today's Blatherpics:


- This card was in our hotel room near the Vancouver Airport, promoting their main restaurant. I have to question the use of the word "specialize" here. (!)


Today's Poll: (Suggest a question)



Have you visited a public library in the past six months?