Metabloggage (Toronto Day 203)

imageI want to get back into a more regular habit of updating you all about things going on in my life, but Life has been thwarty. Much of what I might write here, if I could, would be storytelling about other people: “I did X with person Y, and they did this unusual thing, and I felt this way about it!”

I cannot help but think the answer is to get back into taking pictures. This all but stopped when I got into the busiest part of my teaching quarter, but I will take it up again as I move into the last weeks of Novel 1.

In the meantime, a few things you may or may not know:

Self-care: I took an Intro to Self Massage from David Bruni at Downward Dog Yoga Studio, and it was pretty damned glorious.

Entertainment: Kelly and I saw Eddie Izzard live at Massey Hall with a bunch of friends. It was our third time seeing him, and he was hysterically funny.

House Plants: Though we have in the past eschewed all holiday decorating, I bought a small Norfolk pine and hung some brass-colored holiday balls on it. It came with a red bird on a stick; I don’t know why. I then posted the photo on Instagram, as is my wont:

We also bought a string of LED lights for our deck.

I characterized this burst of seasonal activity to a friend, thusly: “For us, this is like normal people stepping up from the usual holiday decorating and going Full-on Martha.”

Anyway. A week or so after the sad little Chuckie Brown tree photo went out to the Intertubes, one of my favorite students sent our little red bird a mate. (The gold blob is the new bird.) You know who you are, and we thank you!

Latest cutest Instagrams, now with more cat…

Happy almost-the-weekend, everyone!

your app hereGoogle’s announcement that it was killing off its reader app caused me a few moments of pain on Wednesday, until I realized that what I love is not so much the Google part of the equation but the fact that it interfaces nicely with an app called Flipboard. And this is something it will cease to do when they kill the service, but it was a moment’s work to surf up a “best alternatives to Reader for iGadgets” article and from there find my way to Feedly, which seems like an awfully pretty and workable solution.

My needs are pretty modest, I must admit. I keep up with a few blogs, I browse Longreads, and I follow a few people who can be relied upon to post intelligent writing related links, some of which I forward to my students. (And, lately, I pin them for posterity.)

So, while I go make sure I know how to use Feedly and catch up with all my favorite stuff, here’s a little streamer with the latest Instagram posts.

[instapress userid=”AlyxDellamonica” piccount=”7″ size=”90″ effect=”fancybox”]