lazy saturdays

Sara and me.


Hot and humid in Toronto this weekend. I've never been much of a hot weather person. My favorite kind of weather is in early spring or autumn, when the air is just warm enough to get by without a coat, windy enough to make things interesting. I would far rather be out walking in the middle of a blustering thunderstorm without an umbrella than be sweltering beneath an unforgiving summer sun on a windless day.

Went to St. Lawrence Market this morning. To those of you coming to Torcon next month: St. Lawrence Market is only a 10 minute walk away from the convention, and definitely worth a visit even if you don't plan to buy anything. Lots of fresh produce and other edibles on display, you can get lunch for under $5 (limited seating, however, so be prepared to eat while you walk), and on Saturdays you can also check out the North Building on the other side of the street. On the way to the Market along Front Street, also be sure to visit Nicholas Hoare, one of my favorite bookstores in Toronto.



Annie at a week-long tennis camp.


Anyway, I bought a loaf of freshly-baked sourdough, some roasted artichokes (I try to make a point of always buying something I've never had before), half-dozen sesame seed bagels from St. Urbain's (still piping hot from the oven), some tomatoes, fresh basil. Checked out some of the craft tables, listened to various musicians providing entertainment around the Market, finally headed home and made myself a toasted sesame seed bagel with low-fat cream cheese and fresh basil leaves. Yum.

I'm starting to tune my harp, in hopes that I can start playing it again soon, at least a little bit. The strings are sadly out of tune after not having been touched in over four months, and I am doing them a few at a time since turning the tuning key for each string tires out my arms quickly. I've been playing a few minutes of flute every day, gradually increasing the time. Today I started playing my guitar as well, and that seemed to go OK. Don't worry, Sherman, I won't overdo it. :-) But on the advice of my physiotherapist, I'm starting to gradually ease into physical activities that I have been avoiding for four months. The key and the challenge, of course, is the word "gradually". Wish me luck.

I hope you're all having a great weekend!

(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

July/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

isight

Jeff taking a short break from chatting with Andrew and Jenny.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Paul Kwinn!

With the new iSight camera that Jeff bought for himself today, we were able to have a live videoconferencing chat with our friend Andrew and his girlfriend Jenny. Andrew lives in California and also owns one of the new cameras from Apple (not surprising, since he works for Apple).

Very cool. And very weird to think that it seems like not very long ago I was excited to have 8K in my computer and was saving my BASIC programs to a cassette tape. Things have certainly changed since the days of Pong.

Got together with Allison and Jodi at Jodi's place in Newmarket last night, did prep work for Concertino, which is in a few weeks.



Andrew and Jenny.


(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

July/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

kate was the smart one

Ruth, working on a sketch for the liner notes
of Urban Tapestry's new CD.


I feel compelled to clarify what I said in yesterday's Blathering. My favorite Angel in the current remake of Charlie's Angels is Lucy Liu. My favorite in the original series was always Kate Jackson, "the smart one". Farrah Fawcett Majors was too airheady, though I confess to styling my hair like hers when I was in grade school, like every other little girl in my class. Jaclyn Smith was definitely more interesting than Farrah, but not as smart as Kate.

I started writing a Charlie's Angels' song a while ago, but then this tendinitis thing hit. Have I said how much I'm looking forward to being able to play musical instruments again? I'm one of those songwriters who needs a guitar or piano to help concretize musical ideas, and it's been driving me crazy over the past few months when I get the songwriting bug and have no real outlet. Yes, I could sing musical snippets onto a tape recorder, but I tend to rely heavily on a musical instrument to help me establish the underlying harmonic structure.

I've had a similar experience with my novel writing. I have found ViaVoice to be fine for nonfiction writing, but incredibly awkward for fiction because of the cumbersome editing. I'm keeping track of all my ideas in a separate text file. My current fear is that when I'm fully healed, my head is going to explode with all the pent-up musical and written projects which have been dying to be written. Either that or I become a hermit, locking myself in my office around the clock to take advantage of my newly active tendons. Whichever the case, I can't wait.



Doug, John, Jeff and Reid at Scott's and Karin's place.


My arms continue to improve, yay. After dinner at my sister's place last night, Jeff and I took Sara and Annie to a nearby park and played Spud, a game I remember playing as a child. The rules: the person who is "It" throws the ball up in the air and calls the name of one of the other players. The person who is called catches the ball and then yells "SPUD!" The other players, who have been running away while the ball was in the air, freeze. The person with the ball is allowed to take three giant steps toward any of the other players, and then throws the ball at the player. Players can try to avoid being hit by contorting themselves, but are not allowed to move their feet.

Anyway, my arms were fine afterward. It's mainly the fine movement activities that are still difficult for me, like typing on a keyboard, writing, wrapping a present, and so on.



Annie and Sara.


On the way home, Jeff and I dropped by an Indigo bookstore. I had a coupon and used it to buy "Lost" by Gregory Maguire. While I was paying for my purchase (only $1.38 with the coupon, woohoo!), one of the other clerks behind the counter said suddenly, "Are you Debbie?"

I looked up and saw a pretty young woman in an Indigo's uniform.

"Yes, I am," I said, surprised. "Why?"

She smiled. "I read your blog."

And that's how I finally met Laura! :-) It was nice to connect a face with a name I had seen several times on Blatherchat as well as my NaNoWriMo cartoon message board.

To all you Americans out there: hope you have a great long weekend!

(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

July/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

my week

Playing Risk with Reid, Luisa, Michael and Ronnie.


Apologies for the hiatus in posting Blatherings and responding to Blatherchat entries. Things have been somewhat hectic, with a lack of private ViaVoice opportunities. ViaVoice is a great help to me these days, but it requires a fairly quiet environment and plenty of solitary time. Many thanks to RuthAnne for her ViaVoice tips in Blatherchat.

Highlights of my past week:

- Finishing the liner notes, CD imprint, and traycard. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out; anyone attending Concertino will get a sneak peek since we are donating a pre-release copy to the Interfilk auction. Many thanks to Jeff, David Barker, Ruth, Allison, Jodi, Beckett Gladney and Bill Roper for their help with the final stages of the layout/text.

- Dropping by the Du Maurier Jazz Festival and getting to sit in the sponsor section (Jeff was doing work for Nokia).

- Cottage visit with Helen.

- Cottage visit with Reid, Luisa, and their two sons. Sorry, Christo, I forgot to ask Luisa about her trousers. :-)

- Finishing my new Harry Potter book. I also read "A Year in Provence" (which made me very hungry).

- Checking out the Canada Walk Of Fame induction on our street last week. I was the most excited to see Lynn Johnston, but it was also fun to see Mike Myers, Linda Evangelista, Toller Cranston, Robbie Robertson, and Shania Twain in person.

- Seeing "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" last night. Didn't like it quite as much as the first one, and I hated the new Bosley, but was still highly entertained and will probably see it again. :-) Lucy Liu is still my favorite Angel.

- Saw the musical Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode at last! Loved it, am already watching it a second time.

Low point of today: I found out by accident that Nick The Cute Physiotherapist is going back to Montreal at the end of this month. I asked him when he had been planning to tell me, how he could abandon me like this. The callous fiend laughed in my face. My heart is broken. He claims that I may not need him anymore by the time he leaves, but I think this is a feeble ploy to deflect the wrath of a scorned woman.

There are 952 e-mails in my inbox. Thanks for your patience as I struggle to catch up.



Michael, Reid, and Ronnie.


(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

liner note weekend

Scott & Karin at their bbq party.


My Harry Potter book arrived on time in the mail on Saturday from Amazon. If I had known we were going to be around on the weekend, of course, I would have preferred to stand in line at midnight. :-) My first impulse was to read the entire thing on the weekend, but I forced myself to exert (unusual) willpower and work on the liner notes for our CD instead.

Thanks to Jeff, who sat down with me for a while on the weekend to do the layout for the liner notes in Illustrator, tweaking font size and leading, helping with some final editing. Jodi and I were e-mailing back and forth about small text changes and editing, e-mailing with Beckett about the cover placement. By the end of the weekend, we had the text portion of the interior liner notes pretty much finished (still waiting for a bit of info from Allison, who was away on the weekend).

Today I am working on the traycard (back cover) and CD imprint, as well as placing Ruth's graphics, and my column for Moira. I'm being very careful to take frequent breaks from the keyboard since using Illustrator involves a lot of keyboard and mouse work that can't be accomplished through ViaVoice easily.

(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )

June/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ