poll: upcoming movies?

A couple of nights ago, Jeff and I took our Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring DVD over to his dad's house to watch the movie and some of the special features. His dad has only seen the movie once, and wanted to be able to ask questions while we watched it. I've seen the movie over a dozen times now, so didn't mind. In fact, I found that his questions made me want to reread the books!

So that's what I'm doing. I'm reading The Hobbit first, since I haven't read that in about 25 years and can't remember much of it, and then I'm rereading the trilogy. As some of you may recall, I read LOTR for the first time last year. For those interested, I'm posting my reports online.

Quite enjoy The Hobbit so far. :-) For those of you who have never been able to get into the heavier Lord of the Rings, you might enjoy this book.

I am so looking forward to The Two Towers. In fact, after a depressing dearth of good films during the summer, looks like the winter's much more exciting. Allison told me that filmmakers tend to like debuting their movies in December to increase their chances for Oscar nominations. But heck, wouldn't a good summer film be more memorable than one of many good films clustered together in a single month? I don't get it.





But this brings me to the next poll:

What upcoming movies are you most looking forward to seeing?

Answer in Blatherchat

News/Links:

Heather Munn is organizing a gathering of filkers with online journals at OVFF. "OVFF Online Journal Birds of a Feather" will take place on the Saturday of the convention, 7:30-8:30 pm ("at least").

A British tv station will air a 2 minute, 17 second trailer for the next Harry Potter movie, "marking the first time the full-length clip with scenes from the movie has been shown to audiences", according to
CNN.

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Today's Blatherpics:

I scanned these pictures as part of my ongoing Family Photo Archiving Project. Click on any of the photos above to see the larger image.

	Me on the beach during a family holiday, before I got braces. :-)
	Ruth, Jim and me. I'm pointing something out to Jim. Grandma's to the far left, partly cut out of the photo.
	My family in Toronto. This photo might have been taken in front of our house on O'Connor Street. Though I don't remember that big house in the background, hm. I'll have to go check this sometime.

sept. 11

(edited 4:56 pm)

Jeff and I were in Tokyo at our friend Alison G.'s apartment Words and music ©1998 Jeff Bohnhoff
(reprinted here with permission)

On a dirty street corner beneath a steel sky;
old Enid plays his blues
as the crowds just rush on by.
Just a crazy old man
-- dented sax and tangled hair --
wailing out his benedictions.

Crumbling old brick building,
Mary drinks her tea.
A well-worn Bible and a blanket on her knees.
She hears the gunfire from the alley down below,
while sirens sing of Armageddon.
Manhattan sleeps tonight
under a blanket of new-fallen snow.
Quiet as the light where towers pierce
the fog softly glows.
I can feel the ghosts haunting the streets far below.

A full moon rises, pulling people like the tide.
The snow keeps falling on an ocean deep and wide.
Each fragile crystal melts into the sea
in a moment of transition.
A frozen blanket, bathed in silver light;
the streets lie muted in the alchemy of night.
And when the spring comes,
who knows what will have grown
in the cracks between the stones.

Old Enid dreams, in the warmth of vented steam
of better days to come
Mary's fears seem to ring in her ears
as she stares out the window
at a million frozen, falling stars.

massage

Every few months, I treat myself to a massage at the Sutherland-Chan clinic. I have a weakness for professional massages. If I was a zillionaire, I'd have them every day. Though perhaps then they wouldn't be such a treat, who knows.

There's something enormously relaxing and liberating about having a total stranger run their hands over your body. You feel pretty vulnerable, lying there naked except for a carefully-arranged towel, but there's also freedom in that vulnerability.

I've tried different massages in different places, and I've found that not all massages are as good. On one of my Toronto-Philadelphia commutes, my flight home was cancelled; I was stuck in an airport hotel overnight. Tired and frustrated and depressed, I decided to treat myself to a massage in the hotel spa.

I was massively disappointed. The masseuse was a girl who seemed to have never gone to massage school (or whereever good masseurs and masseuses go for their education); she could have been someone I dragged off the street. She was tentative, poking and prodding me as if I was a wad of yeasty dough sitting on a kitchen counter that still hadn't risen enough.

The Sutherland-Chan people seem to know what they're doing; I've never had a bad massage in their hands. Yesterday was no exception. Yesterday was also my most painful massage...at my request. Usually when the masseur asks me what kind of pressure I want, I reply with "medium". This time, I asked for a firmer pressure because I was pretty stiff and sore around my shoulders and neck, probably as a result of the long drive we had on the weekend combined with not carrying a heavy knapsack properly afterwards.

So Stephen complied, telling me that if it ever got TOO painful, to let him know. He kneaded and pulled while I lay on the treatment table in blissful agony. One part of the treatment involved him pinching various nerves in my neck.

"This is going to hurt," he warned me. "Tell me when the pain goes away, and then I'll move to the next spot."

And wow, it sure did hurt. My first impulse was to lie and say, "Ok! It's fine now!" right away, but I restrained myself. I even dozed off once.

Anyway, by the time I came out of the treatment room, I was wobbly and lightheaded and virtually pain-free.





Sent out another query yesterday. The article query that was accepted last week is due this Friday. I wrote over 1,000 words for my novel. I'm pretty happy with how things are going with my writing in general.

Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon were across the street from our apartment building yesterday, for the premiere of "Moonlight Mile" at the Toronto Film Festival. I was at the gym on the treadmill (too hot/humid outside to run) when I saw him on tv being interviewed by the media on about thirty feet away from our front door.

Parki came over last night, and we watched three episodes of The Sopranos from Scott's DVDs. Scott watched all the Season Three episodes over three evenings already. I have a craving for Italian food now.

Links/News:

Harald Koch has a blog! (Harald writes as "chk" in Blatherchat).

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Today's Blatherpics:

	From our condo window, we get to see some pretty spectacular sunsets. Not as spectacular as the ones at the cottage, granted, but breathtaking in their own way. The light from one of them recently transformed our living room into something almost magical.
	Sign on the elevator to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.

poll: what are you reading?

Of the two queries I sent out last week, one got rejected and one got accepted. I love editors who have e-mail; I can get a response so much faster. I'm also involved into two projects helping companies/organizations set up online communities.

Recently finished reading Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop (thanks to Michelle for the recommendation) and Confessions of An Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire. I enjoyed both quite a bit.

The Anne Bishop is the first in a series. I'm always torn about novel series. Should I read each as it comes out, or wait until the whole series is out? The problem with reading one at a time is that by the time the next novel is published, I've forgotten what's happened in the previous one. Then I'm too lazy to reread the earlier one(s) again.

I enjoyed the Maguire book much more than I expected. I liked Wicked (told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West) but found it a bit too dark for my tastes. I had been told that Confessions wasn't as good by several people, but ended up liking it more.

Haven't decided what to start reading next. I'm always reading magazines to research potential markets, but I also like having a fiction book on the go as well. Though I rarely get a chance to do it except at the cottage when only Jeff and I are up, I love reading an entire book at one sitting. My butt and my head ache by the time I'm finished, but otherwise I feel great.

Poll: What are you reading?

What's the last book you read? What are you reading now? Do you read one book at a time, or do you tend to have more than one on the go at the same time? What type of reading do you prefer? (fiction? nonfiction? magazines? online?). How often do you read? Answer here.

News/links:

One year ago, I was eating Green Tea Haagen Dazs in Tokyo.

Five years ago, I was angsting about whether or not to drop Compuserve.

Napster pulls the plug...does anyone really care? (Reuters)

So when's the next Harry Potter book coming out?!

A geek records the first few months of his new baby daughter. Some pretty funny bits. Thanks to Andrew for the link!

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Today's Blatherpics:

Watching the Fellowship of the Ring DVD at Ruth's and Kaarel's place.

my generation

Jeff and I spent six and a half hours in the car yesterday. We checked out Aurora, Unionville, Markham and Scarborough, cruising through streets and looking at the houses, getting a sense of different neighbourhoods. Many thanks to Bryan and Elizabeth for showing us around Aurora, and Luisa for showing us around the Guildwood area. In the evening, we had dinner with Reid, Luisa, Ronnie, Scott and Rita at Reid's and Luisa's place; Luisa barbecued salmon, chicken, vegetables...yum.

Bryan and Elizabeth treated us to lunch at Chinook, a great restaurant in Aurora owned by parents of one of Bryan's friends, Blake. 21-year-old Blake came by our table to chat, and Jeff and I asked him how he liked living in Aurora. He said that he spent most of his time in Toronto, that Aurora was a little too quiet for him.

"It's probably better for someone of your generation," he told us.

I almost fell out of my chair with shock. What the heck did he mean, someone of my generation? Did I really look that decrepit to him? Sure, he was young enough to be my son, but it was the first time anyone had ever clumped me in the whole "older generation" category to my face.

But then I forced myself to remember what it was like to be in my twenties, and the associations I automatically made with someone who was in their forties, how ancient that seemed. Now I'm forty, and most of the time I don't feel old at all. Funny how much one's perspective changes over the years.

I also find that I'm not as aware of people's ages in terms of friendships. When I was in high school, a year or two seemed to make a huge difference in how I perceived people. Now, I find that age isn't nearly as important as the person's life attitude. Some of my closest friends are a fair bit older or younger than I am.

I still have trouble of thinking of myself as being middle-aged. I mean geez, the phrase "middle-aged woman in her 40s" has always evoked a less-than-flattering image (as well as having a certain redundancy in its wording, of course).

I started to think a lot more about the whole aging thing once I turned thirty. I suspect I'll always feel a bit of a twinge whenever I have to change the first digit of my age. I remember when I first realized I was starting to get wrinkles around the outside of my eyes, sometimes in my thirties. I was devastated. Whenever I looked in the mirror for a while after that, all I could see were wrinkles. But then after a while I got used to seeing them in the mirror, gradually accepted them as being part of the image I had of myself.

There's a commercial that used to air on television around here about women and aging. I can't recall what product it was selling, but it basically showed a series of close-ups of late 30ish and older women's faces, with each of them saying things indicating how she really didn't mind getting older at all. One of them even said, "I want to grow old."

Gimme a break. No one WANTS to grow old (except, perhaps, the pre-teen desperate to be an adult). I certainly don't. Or rather, I'm enjoying life so much that I'd like to live as long as possible. But I also strongly believe that growing older doesn't mean you have to give up your passion for life, and that you don't have to submit to society's preconceptions of what someone your age should be like.

But enough ranting on that subject for now.

I'll get off my soapbox now, but first I need to find that darned cane of mine...

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Today's Blatherpics:

	With Bryan, Jeff and Elizabeth at Chinook in Aurora.
	Luisa and Jeff in Scarborough.