poll: tearjerker movies?

Both Jeff and I had a wonderful unproductive day yesterday, and I successfully met all my objectives: napped, played the harp, took a bubble bath, etc.

I also updated My Life In A Nutshell (my semi-autobiographical comic) as well as converting it to Movable Type. I'm anxious to get my comic self moved from her corporate life back to freelancing in Toronto so I can get the storyline caught up to my current life. Doing the comic in a dot-com environment was fun and good therapy for a while, but I confess I've lost interest in rehashing all that (probably a good sign) and want to move onto other topics.

I've been practising the harp in prep for playing at Larkin's and Rick's wedding, and I've also been working on a song to perform with my other sister-in-law (whose name is also Debbie :-)) at the wedding ceremony (which inspired me to ask that love song poll question).



Jeff and I watched One Night At McCool's last night, which we both enjoyed more than we expected. I was so used to seeing Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movie, though, that it was bizarre to see her trampy character in the McCool's movie. Thanks to Scott for lending the movie! We still have Blade and Magnolia to watch. Several friends have warned me to have kleenex handy when watching Magnolia.

Which brings me to my next poll question:

Do you cry at movies? What are your favourite tearjerker movies?

Do you feel self-conscious about crying at movies? Are you aware when the movie producers are manipulating your emotions? What kinds of things make you cry at movies? Or television shows? Do you ever cry during tv commercials (I am ashamed to admit I do)? If so, which ones?

Please answer in Blatherchat.

A belated happy birthday to Dave Weingart, who turned 40 on March 1st!

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Luis Garcia (when he was part of Ookla The Mok) about to record his "Teenybopper Love" part at Allison's.
	Scott Snyder and Paul Kwinn at some convention holding samples of Scott's home-brewed "Paul Kwinn No-Ose Ale" (I think that's what it was called).
	I took this photo of some filk friends years ago. From left to right: Adam English, Luis Garcia, Beckett Gladney, Jodi, Allison, Paul Kwinn, Mark Osier. I had told everyone to make a weird face.

skating

Busy day yesterday.

My dad's feeling much better so asked if he could be driven home (thanks for the good thoughts, everyone!). He has more tests this week; we're keeping our fingers crossed. After driving him back out to Bramalea, Jeff and I drove back to Toronto to visit with Alison and JeffL, or rather to meet their one month old son, Kye. Kye's a sweetie, and let me hold him without screaming. In fact, JeffL taught me how to stick my little finger into Kye's mouth (after I had washed my hands, of course) to soothe him when he got cranky.

At first it was really bizarre, this tiny baby sucking on my little finger as if his life depended on it (and as JeffL predicted, Kye stopped whimpering immediately). And wow, powerful sucking reflexes for such a wee guy! And then it went from bizarre to cute, though I did feel sorry for Kye...he wasn't going to get any satisfaction out of my finger no matter how hard he sucked, after all. But it seemed to do the trick, and he dozed off in my arms. Awwww....

Next we dropped by Andy's and Christine's place briefly to drop off some cables that Andy needed. Christine has been going through a very rough time recently, undergoing chemotherapy and radiation cancer treatments. The follow-up appointment she had on Tuesday seems hopeful (i.e. it looks like the tumour is gone), but we're waiting for the MRI test results.





We went skating with Annie, Sara and Kaarel after that, in a Forest Hill indoor arena. The original plan had been to go skiing, but the weather forecast had been gloomy, so we opted for skating instead. The rink was smoother and therefore more slippery than the one at Deerhurst, so I spent the first bit clinging to the sides of the rink, just as I had when I was a little kid.

Encouraged by Sara, however (and the fact that she kept pushing me from behind, see photo below), I started loosening up and started to have some fun skating around. Sara and Annie both love skating. Sara's starting to experiment with more difficult moves, while Annie's still content with shuffling across the ice without falling down. I was surprised by how well Jeff skated; I'd forgotten he used to play hockey a lot...like our skiing experience, he tended to spend most of his time moving backwards so he could coach Sara. :-)

After skating, Jeff and I went to Fune for Bryan Fullerton's birthday dinner. I had what's become my "usual"...edamame, shiitake mushrooms, steamed rice, salmon sashimi, tobiko with quail's egg. Yum. The others went to play pool afterwards, but by this time I was so burned out I needed to go home and crash.

Today is a much-needed "veg at home" day. I plan to do a lot of highly productive napping, reading, snoozing, with possible interludes of harp-playing and songwriting. And a really long bath with lots of bubbles. <happy sigh>





Hey, I turn 40 this month! My birthday's on March 29th (so is Katy Dröge's, as I recall).

My brother-in-law Kaarel had a funny age anecdote recently. Apparently he was with Annie and Sara, and Annie kept saying something over and over again. He told Annie that she sounded like a broken record, and Sara asked, "What's a record?"

:-)

Other news and updates:

The next version of Movable Type will be released very soon, yay!

My second Muse's Muse column is up now ("Songwriting Music Theory 101"). Topic: The Musical Staff.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Sara and Annie at the skating rink.
	Alison and Kye.
	Sara pushing me from behind on the skating rink.
	At Bryan Fullerton's birthday dinner.

the dance

Today is Bryan Fullerton's birthday! Bryan is the guy who hosts all our Web sites, including the Electric Penguin message boards. Jeff and I are going to his birthday bash later today.

My dad's staying with us; yesterday afternoon he and I went to see Lord of the Rings again (his choice). It was my fifth time, his second.

Having my father stay with us reminds me of my childhood and the family dynamics back home. We've always had a close family, but we were never physically demonstrative; hugs and kisses were rare events. It took me years to get used to the affectionate hug greetings so common at sf and filk conventions. I gave Dad a hug yesterday before going to bed, and he was all awkward about it. :-)

Our family bond, however, was and still is super-close. Ruth and I don't tend to do the stereotypical openly gushy-sister thing, for instance, but we've always been fiercely protective of each other. We may have bickered and had the usual sisterly squabbles over silly things, but if anyone did anything to hurt one of us...look out for the other! :-)

Family communication back in my childhood was very Japanese. Very little open conflict, but lots of layers of complicated subtle meanings and implications that could only be interpreted with years of experience growing up with us. Conflicts were resolved in an elaborate dance of half-hints and silences laden with meaning. And if we wanted something, we rarely asked for it directly; we had to gently guide the other person (through the same sort of subtle communication methods) into realizing that we wanted it.

Jeff and I had a lot of blow-outs in the beginning of our relationship because he refused to communicate with me this way.

Example:

JEFF: "What's wrong?"

ME (mad at him): "Nothing."

JEFF: "There's something wrong, I can tell."

ME: "No, everything's fine, really."

JEFF: "You're mad at me. What set you off?"

ME: "Nothing set me off!"

etc. etc.

After a long (agonizing) while, I learned the value of being more direct, of hashing things out in the open early on instead of letting things drag on, building up resentment, and to ask for things directly (even if it means risking the humiliation of rejection). I still have problems with this, but I'm getting better. It's complicated things between Jeff and me, though, because he still can't help but try to interpret what I say and do according to what I was like back in the early days (e.g. if I say nothing's wrong, then he thinks it means I'm hiding something).

Anyway, it was interesting to be reminded by my experience in Philly that the corporate world is much more Japanese this way, with its own set of unwritten rules of communication. Blunt honesty is usually not regarded as a good thing, and those who want to succeed in the corporate environment have to learn how to play the game like everyone else, be a team player even if you don't always agree with what the team's doing, not cause waves.

I'm not very good at this, though I suspect would have been better ten years ago. On the whole, this is probably a good thing.

I still have too much of my childhood ingrained in me to completely forget the elaborate dance. In fact, I'm doing it right now. This whole Blathering basically boils down to me saying that though my Dad still drives me nuts sometimes, I love him like crazy.

:-)

Today's Blatherpic:

Allison in the hallway at Ad Astra. This is one the expressions she puts on when I take a photo of her when she doesn't want me to take a photo of her. I think it's pretty cute, don't you?

$1600 plane tickets

Yay, I've finished moving over all my old archives, which means that everything is searchable and in Movable Type format. I added the search function on the lefthand navigation sidebar more for my own use rather than other people's, though you're all free to use it as well. :-) I love having all my archives in one place. Sometimes it's fun (and often enlightening) for me to see what I was doing a year ago.

As I moved over archived entries, I sometimes did a quick scan of the contents out of curiosity to see what was going on. Very weird to be reading over the entries from early 1999, when I got "major life event" phonecalls from both Writer's Digest and Barnes and Noble in the same week...but didn't want to say anything about it in public yet.

Ditto for my visit to New York shortly after, when I saw the offices of BarnesandNoble.com and had a breakfast meeting with Steve Riggio, who was recently promoted to CEO of Barnes and Noble. Riggio wore brown corduroy pants, I remember. He arrived late, left early. I remember being in a relative state of terror during the entire meeting, though Jeff told me later that I didn't show it (maybe he was just trying to reassure me :-)). I didn't eat anything, of course.

My brief mention of a business meeting in Seattle in May the following year referred to one I attended at the offices of Amazon.com. I remember being horrified by the price of my first class plane ticket (which someone else booked and paid for), about US$1600. I saw some of the legendary door-desks, which was pretty cool. I also remember the beginning of the meeting, where everyone (as if at a signal) took out their business cards and set them in a neat pile on the table in front of them. I was the only one with no business cards, having opted not to bring my cheapo perforated-edge homemade cards (plus I didn't have a lot of warning about the Seattle trip). There were a lot of things like the ritualistic displaying of business cards at the beginning of the meeting, unspoken rules of the corporate world with which I was completely unfamiliar. The whole Seattle visit was somewhat of a blur to me, mainly because a favourite aunt had died on the day I left; I found out while waiting in the airport after checking in :-(.

More on my dot-com adventures at a future date. My Dad just arrived, so I'd better finish this up...








News/Updates

Jeff and I saw L.A. Confidential last night and both loved it (with some reservations about the ending).

Fox is going to air the new 2 1/2 minute trailer for Episode II: Attack of the Clones on March 10th between 8:30-10 pm EST. Source: USA Today. Hopefully it will be better than the last trailer, and show more of Ewan McGregor.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Sara and Annie playing Barbies with their cousins Taavo and Markus. It was pretty funny contrasting how the boys' Barbie play differs from Sara's and Annie's. More on this in an upcoming Blathering (I started writing about it here but it got way too long :-)).
	Sara practising blowing bubbles in front of the mirror.
	More of Sara practising blowing bubbles in front of the mirror.
	Success!

jeffb leaves

I've added a search capability to Blatherings, if you haven't noticed already. Feel free to test it out! You can find the search input field in the left-hand navigation column; it will search in all years except for 1999. I've moved over all my archives to Movable Type except for 1999; hope to finish that by the end of this weekend.

JeffB left early this morning to head back to California. We had fun hanging out yesterday. Activities included:

- Lounging about at the apartment in the morning and doing some musicstuff. JeffB and I are going to collaborate on a song, which will be fun.

- Visiting Steve's Music on Queen Street. Snooped around the recording equipment area, and I picked Jeff's brain about home recording equipment. The people at Steve's seemed to like Jeff a lot, and were impressed that he worked at eMagic (hey, I forgot to mention that JeffB gave me a very cool eMagic laptop case!). I picked up some new guitar strings (D'Addario Phosphor Bronze X-Light).

- Dropped by several shops along Queen Street including Acme Surplus. Acme is an amazing store with bins full of objects that lean towards electronics but also include (at least yesterday; the contents tend to change over time) things like mini disco balls on chains with clips, glass tubing, surgical masks, keyboards, sheets of coloured plastic, empty padded jewellry cases, night lights, condom holders, harmony balls, glass petri dishes.





- Browsed Pages and Chapters bookstores.

- Had lunch at Milestones. Both of us had my favourite meal there, Maple Cider Salmon Salad. I should probably order something else eventually at that restaurant, but I love their salmon salad so much that it seems pointless to try anything else.

- Walked to Yonge Street and checked out HMV. JeffB bought a CD for Jeff and me: Emmylou Harris's "Wrecking Ball". Thank you, Jeff!! :-)

- Snow! Lots of Toronto snow fell yesterday, will enhanced JeffB's Canadian experience, I'm sure.

- Hanging out with Jodi and Allison in Richmond Hill. We went to the Pickle Barrel then back to Allison's place. Lots of musicstuff and talking...we all had a ton of fun :-). We played all our new stuff for JeffB that he hadn't heard before, and he played a bunch of gorgeous instrumental stuff. Allison also played us a Great Big Sea song she thought we could learn for FilKONtario...she's asked me to learn some pennywhistle for it, which will be a ton of fun.





- After UT practice, JeffB and I headed back home. I was dead tired so ended up falling asleep on the couch while JeffB and Jeff did musicstuff (my Jeff actually played on the guitar! first time in a LOOONG time) and talked. Eventually I staggered off to bed.

Jeff and I really enjoyed JeffB's visit, and we're hoping that Maya can make the trek out here sometime so the four of us can hang out (or maybe we'll be able to make it out there someday).

My dad seems to be doing ok (largely due to the expert care of Sara and Annie, I'm sure :-)). He's coming to stay with us for a couple of days starting tomorrow.

I have an cartoon illustration plus a 1000-wd article to write and submit today, so I'd better stop Blathering and get to work. :-)

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Jeff Bohnhoff playing Gwyneth Paltrow.
	Jeff and Jeff talking.
	Jeff at our Urban Tapestry practice at Allison's place last night.