What, besides baking potatoes, are they good for? Does anyone have any good recipes involving real food?
Today I am headed to the Redpath Waterfront Festival to tour the decks of a number of tall ships. I am exceedingly fortunate that I am able to legitimately call this part of my workday, as most of the ships in the Fleet of Nations on the world of Stormwrack are, in fact, tall ships. So ahoy, Mateys!
Buffy’s back from the dead this week on my weekly rewatch, which means I have two to go. Two seasons, that is. I’m headed into the grimmer stuff now, but remember these latter seasons as still having had some hysterically funny lines and character moments; I’m looking forward to rediscovering those.
The process of moving has turned out to be rather endless in terms of fiddly paperwork details. Connecting up people we pay–like our insurer, for example, and our RRSP guys–to the new bank accounts has been a mind-numbingly dull and rather tedious process. Yesterday I realized our old condo manager had taken our strata fees out of the Vancouver bank account, as usual, so I’m also chasing a refund, with the very kind assistance of our realtor.
I also have a pile of receipts waiting to be data entered so I can figure out how much we actually spent moving. This is important and exciting because when you relocate more than 40 km for work reasons, you get to write a whole whacking chunk of things off your taxes.
So, if you ever heave yourself halfway across the country, give yourself a generous dicking-around allowance, timewise. And consider the tax return, if it comes together, your pay for this fun temporary job.
Enough with the boring details! Here is a dog photo, sort of, that I found very cute.
Going to Montreal to see Camille Alexa and Claude Lalumiere made for a nice break from the paperstorm. (The Megabus we took there was twelve hours of horrible, though: next time, we train.) And this weekend we have an embarassment of riches to choose from: there’s a tall ship festival, a literary event, Luminato, in the park ’round the corner, and with luck we’ll find time to see Joss Ado About Nothing. (Much Ado about Joss Things?”
What are you up to?
Kelly and I went to our first SF community event Wednesday night, a ChiSeries reading featuring Guy Gavriel Kay, E.L. Chen, Jim Munroe and Leon Rooke. The monthly readings are held at The Augusta House, a pub conveniently near our place, and we met a few people I’ve known for years in a cyberspace way (I tend to forget that some of these friends of mine are people I’ve never actually looked in the face.)
One of the night’s unexpected delights was hearing the music of Kari Maaren. She is an amazing filk lyricist (Badger and Fearless, I suspect you will heart her bigtime, if you don’t already). Her The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
We slipped out at about nine-thirty, so very late by our ridiculous up-at-dawn standards, and walked home. It felt as though it might have been the first time–in almost a month!–that we’ve been out after dark. The pubs were just getting lively, filling up with crowds of people keen to watch hockey and socialize.
It was a warm and humid night, full of sights and cheer, an altogether magical walk.
I have probably mentioned this before, but when I was a tween, the Scholastic Book Order club was pretty much the highlight of my school existence. Every month they’d send out a two page book catalog, printed on newsprint, and I would pore over it, trying to figure out which two or three books I would order.
The next phase involved the wheedling of cash from my mother. I can remember very specifically the feeling of walking to school with the actual form clutched in my hand. It about the size of a postcard and printed on newsprint, and I would wrap it around the quarters and dimes with which I was going to pay for the treasure.
Until the recent move-related cull, I still had a few of those books: Ann Rivkin’s Mystery of Disaster Island
One of the Scholastic books I didn’t retain into adulthood was a biography of Nellie Bly, and it was absolutely one of my favorites. Nellie was an intrepid girl reporter who worked for Joseph Pulitzer, and the book told about how she went undercover at an insane asylum for women–writing an expose on its cruelties–before capping off her career with a ’round the world race to prove that Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days
Another magazine sent a competing reporter, so halfway around the journey she found out she was in a race with Elizabeth Bisland.
So. Not long ago my good friend Keph posted about Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World
On a barely-relevant note – I am now living within blocks of the Scholastic building. This is, for me, rather like living on the front lawn of the Taj Mahal or the Vatican.
My short story “The Sweet Spot,” which appeared in Lightspeed Magazine last year, Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing
Though I have only just started to recover from the blast out to Edmonton, I am headed with Kelly to Montreal this weekend. The last trip wasn’t a pleasure cruise, obviously, but this is–we’re going to see friends. I haven’t been to Montreal since, I think, the 2001 World Fantasy Con. I am looking forward to being there again, with savvy local guides no less!
And, in the spirit of three things make a post – a lot of pictures of Grandma Joan are coming my way and then getting uploaded to the Pham album on my Flickr account. Here’s one by Paul McNie that I think is especially nice.
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage
