Category Archives: Frivolity

Friday I’m in Love

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alyx babyThree good things about this week:

Duacon! Jessica came, she saw, and she conquered, by which I mean we walked the streets of Toronto… far more than she probably expected. It is a trait of mine that the concept of “Not far” conflates all too easily with the cold hard fact of “Five miles later, I promised we were nearly there…” Do not trust me to have a grip on distance, my dear friends. Note my walking speed and ask me for an ETA. Or stand your ground, and demand to use transit.

Okay, tangent over! We dined out, we paid homage to the cats and the hot tub, and J and I spent an afternoon on that nice beach on Toronto Island. We did not actively workshop fiction, but we did go out for multiple writing dates, and talked shop constantly.

Kelly came home! Five nanoseconds after Jessica left, Kelly had a work retreat out of town, or too far to walk, whichever distance is longer. About the night apart, the less said the better. But it was a joy to watch the purple dot of my darling’s GPS coordinates inching home along the major commuter routes yesterday evening. I did this using an app that the iStore calls Find My Friends. It was even more of a joy to have her back home again.

Oh, what was the third best thing this week? Was it watermelons? Seeing horse cops yesterday? Having someone contact me to ask for a secret spy name of their very own, thereby indicating that my sense of humor is not, in fact, a trial to all who know me? (I wasn’t actually worried about that last bit.) Getting a reprint request this morning? Or was it… turning The Nature of a Pirate in to my editor at Tor? Oh yeah, that last thing. Let’s definitely go with that.

Today’s victory dance shall be… the Charleston!

In unrelated news, my WordPress page has about 24,000 users, most of whom have the sort of names and e-mail addresses that lead one to believe they are spammy hacky bastards, as opposed to real humans interested in my blog. Is this problematic?

Anniversary girl double-booking drama! Oh, the humanity! #alyxkelly25

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wpid-Photo-2012-05-20-948-AM.jpgYesterday I went prowling through our tickets and realized that I had not, in fact, bought tickets to see London Road on Saturday. No! I had bought them for Friday, which is also the evening of Debra DiGiovanni’s Late Bloomer performance.

The horrors! I hyperventilated for about an hour before I remembered that probably if I just phoned Canadian Stage and asked to change the theater tickets, they’d say yes. (Because, OMG, alyx, calm down.)

And in fact that’s just what we did. They were supernice about it, of course. The Canadian Stage guys, in case you’re all wondering, seem to have excellent customer service. One gets off the phone feeling as if you could ask them to swing by with a juggler, a pony, a dance troupe, Ian McKellan and someone to wash your windows and they’d be all: “Sure! Can we do anything else for you?”

Drama over drama aside, the anniversary staycation is coming along nicely. We had a stunning meal out Wednesday night, and we’re going back to AGO this morning to take in the Guggenheim exhibit again. Tonight is the stand-up comedienne, tomorrow the matinee, and after that I’m doing a photo shoot at the aquarium with the Instagram crowd.

As for Sunday, we’re going to the Royal Ontario Museum with one of our oldest friends and then hanging out with her all day. To cherry that sundae, we’re going to book a spa thing for Monday: it’s a “taking the waters” type bath circuit at Body Blitz.

Toronto, day 104, Shallow Blather of Shopping

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There’s a bit of a shorthand developing here as Kelly and I figure out where we’re getting the things we consider necessary. The phrase “the new” crops up: the godlike Forno Cultura bakery is ‘the new Fratelli‘s’. We still need a new Grotto Del Formaggio–there are cheese shops in the Kensington Market, but I haven’t fallen in love with any of them.

About half a click from our front door on Woodland Drive was a store called Wonderbucks. It had high-end dollar store stuff, a bit of furniture, and a resident cat, Morgan:
Morgan, resident cat at Wonderbucks, on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.

So far, the niche formerly filled by Wonderbucks has been filled by HomeSense, Winners, and a franchise dollar store. None of which is as satisfactory.

The new ‘place with a resident cat’ is Brava, a dress store on Queen that stocks the Desigual dresses I fell in love with in Italy. Brava, interestingly, is not the new Angel Vancouver. On the downside, their salespeople are a bit too pushy. On the upside–very much on the upside!–they have beautiful things that fit Kelly. You will die from the adorbs when you see the latest dress.

The wonderful Jackie at Angel, meanwhile, has found another line of gorgeous colorful dresses from Spain. They are called Smash! Wear, a generic enough term that I haven’t been able to search up a store here in Toronto that carries them.

I suppose the obvious lesson here, if I were to draw one, would be that retail opportunities are eminently replaceable when one lunges across the country, whereas one’s wonderful peeps are not. Rest assured, beloved Vancouver friends, you are missed. I probably don’t say this enough.

Catworld Revision Project #8 – Feliocentric Units of Measurement

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Okay Canada, the feline overlords know you freaked out when you half-assed went metric back in the Seventies. However, it’s time you and the world took on standardized units of measurement.

The Cat of Ironhorse Ranch cares deeply about this:
Alberta08

Here are the units:

Distance is henceforth to be measured in: claws, paws, tails, short pounces, long springs, and unacceptables.

(Any distance sufficiently far as to require transport in a car = 1 unacceptable.)

Volume – Crumbs, kibbles, mouthfuls, gulps, hairballs, dust bunnies, kittens, cats, unreasonably large.

Time – Yowls. As catkind lives in the present, one unit of temporal measurement should do. One yowl is the unit of time that should pass between a cat’s making its wishes known and having them executed by the nearest available ape. (All other measurements are irrelevant.)

Also on the subject of time: nap-interrupting clocks that scare the crap out of us by periodically going “BONG” are totally banned. What is wrong with you apes that you think this is okay?

The above examples are not meant to cover everything, but should give you a decent idea of what’s required here. Strike a committee, work out the other measurements, and get it done. We make the proclamations. Logistics are, naturally, your problem.

Catworld Revision Project #7 – While You Were Sleeping

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Don’t get me wrong. I looove While You Were Sleeping. We saw it four or six times in the theater, during an incredibly broke spring while we were saving so I could go to Clarion West. But while catkind is included in this movie, they are something of an afterthought, and our feline overlords consider this to be, frankly, more insulting than if they had been excluded entirely.

Here’s the preview, wherein Sandra Bullock talks about going home to a cat as though it’s not enough:

Note, too, that Fluffy is left alone in the home of a coma patient who isn’t even their primary underbeing, for well over a week!

Thistle says: Shape Up, Humans!
Photos of Mouse and Thistle

Obviously the unnamed cat (unnamed!!) in Sandra Bullock’s apartment and Fluffy both need star billing in this picture. A good start might be to have Bill Pullman’s character take Fluffy home to his mancave. Both romantic leads should have the cats with them in subsequent scenes, except possibly the one where they get to falling down on ice. Pullman should probably live in Sandra’s building so that Fluffy only has to endure one car ride. Maybe instead of building chairs he should construct cat trees.

Alternately, Joe Junior could take on Fluffy, in which case the romantic outcome for the humans may have to change a bit. Your script treatments and suggested edits can be submitted here.