Happy Monday, everyone! If you are looking for a distraction, consider heading over to Favorite Thing Ever, where I am all abwee with love for Neal Stephenson’s eco-thriller Zodiac
Kelly tells you about the delightful The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagun.
Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica
Autumn shifts and shimmers
As I write this, it is Saturday evening and I am parked by the fire, finishing up a few things while Kelly makes butternut squash ravioli from scratch; yes, I am a lucky woman indeed. Beyond my window, the first real storm of autumn has the trees lashing to and fro. Raindrops are clinking glassily against the windows and there’ve been a few loud skid noises from the busy road outside. No actual crashes, thankfully. This happens a lot at this time of year: not only are the roads wet, not only are we on a hill, but there are the piles of slick, slippery leaves in the mix.
The storm is a real shift from last weekend, when Barb and I caught this heron out in the mists of Burnaby Lake:
It’s even a change from this morning, which was nice enough out that we ambled along False Creek to the electronics store (I keep hearing the siren song of an iPad I don’t really need) and a grocery I’d picked as a good prospect to have fresh sage for the pasta. The walk takes you through the shiny new developments that were the Athlete’s Village during the Olympics, and that are now supremely expensive condos, waiting for upscale would-be owners with high credit ratings to save them from emptiness. We talked a bit about how they might have been developed differently, or for a different demographic of potential purchasers, even as we appreciated all the Hey, this is gonna be on TV, let’s make it look fantastico and then make a mint for it! amenity-rich design features of the green spaces.
I got in a good round of agonizing over the gadget without actually buying one. Then, at the grocery, sage was scored along with smoked salmon rolls and delicious, decadent figs. We ate them in the park and walked back along a slightly different route.
It was still quite mild out when we returned to East Van. As the skies darkened and the wind rose I fiddled with my web page some more, checked on the current UCLA class, roughed out a synopsis for my spring class, finished drafting an article that has been giving me fits, watched a TED talk, by Melinda French Gates, about what nonprofit aid organizations can learn from Coca Cola, peeked at Twitter and, any second now, I plan to make a salad.
All that and it’s not yet six. I foresee loafing and some television–Merlin, perhaps?–in what’s left of the day.
Pretty, and witty, and gay!
It’s easy to imagine that all of Vancouver’s twenty thousand plus crows are the same. They have that black outfit, right, and the same favorite song, and they really only love you for your leftover taco chips. They also hate the camera. I can mime taking a picture of one and immediately cause it to flap off.
If they are sitting still, it’s because they know the light is bad. “No peanut, no piccie!” seems to be the widespread crow policy. But not this individual, who was only too happy to preen while I stood snapping maybe four feet away.
The lesson one might draw from this, if one chose, is no less valuable for being totally obvious.
Facelifting Planetalyx
I am tweaking my site this evening and the time has come to engage in a bit of judicious experimentation… I expect there to be a good deal of fiddling in the days ahead, but hopefully most of it will be behind-the-scenes stuff. An adjustment here, a new photo there, that kind of thing. But right now I need to beg your patience, because I need to see how this will look when it makes the rounds of LJ, Facebook and the like.
If you are curious about the source of the mess-in-progress, it’s here.
Attentive
There is a community garden about six blocks from our apartment and Kelly and I had a short walk-by on the weekend. The sunflowers are full blown and ready for the eating. In the past, we’ve been treated to hyper-spastic squirrel antics as the seedquest becomes desperate, but this time the visitors were more finchy:
Walking through East Vancouver in this way, taking pictures of the same things over and over and then winnowing out the ones that have something special to them, is, obviously, something I do for pleasure. But it connects up to other things. For one thing it’s physical self care, as much as it is mental. I get out, I walk, I stretch.
I also see it as writing, in its way. Paying attention to something so familiar it might be invisible, noting the variations, absorbing the sensory experiences on offer in the world: this is one of the things that keeps the universe from narrowing to the desk, the screen, the cup of tea beside the keyboard, and the occasional misbehavior of the cat.