Personal Smatterings

Launch of the Kitten Channel: We currently have just-weaned three kittens in the house, now named Lorenzo, Chinchilla, and Bailey. This isn’t a permanent thing. We never agreed to take the whole litter, but they all needed rescuing. Bailey will go to his forever home as soon as he’s seen a vet. It’s both a lot of work and a lot of fun. You’ve probably seen the cuteness. Here’s Renzo.

Getting them out of Etobicoke involved driving out there with the woman who’s been keeping an eye on them (and their feral mom) and then spending an hour trying to find and coax Bailey out from under an enormous patio deck. The crawlspace down there was filled with peculiar hoses, making him hard to spot–so there was a lot of lying on belly, hanging my head off the deck, and peering around upside-down while trying to keep my glasses from sliding off my face. I’ve bruised the area around my sternum as a result. It’s a small price to pay for adorable fluff-bundles.

Change is change:
Our move to Dua Central happened, unbelievably, just over three weeks ago. The house is nicely unpacked and in many ways it looks as though we’ve been there for years. I’m struggling to find and establish the bits and pieces of a daily routine, to make automatic a number of the things I do daily, the better to have space in my brain for more important things. It has been strangely tiring; after the events of the past thirteen months, I’m simply looking forward to getting to a place where I don’t feel dislocated.

Breathe and Stretch, Stretch and Breathe:
The move also brought another big change, in the form of another new yoga studio. Downward Dog was just a little too far to go now that we’re further northeast, and so Kelly and I are trying out classes at Yyoga, a Vancouver-based studio that’s physically close to hand. I never set out to be a connoisseur of yoga instructors, but it has been a real thing: go to class, try someone out, go again, and ponder where and how each class and teacher fits into the framework of my life. Then lather, rinse, repeat.

The goal here is to find a selection of folks I can happily take classes from three to four times a week.

We took six weeks off yoga starting in March, because of Texas and moving, and all sorts of tiny complaints were cropping up with my body. Now we’re back at it, many of those are now receding; my body is starting to feel as I expect it to… in a good way. It’s a powerful experience, a reminder that the yoga thing isn’t just for fun or relaxation. Delightful though it may be, it’s also mandatory at this point in my existence.

Material girls miss their coffee frother…

The Spartan Life: Now that we’ve been doing without all our worldly possessions since the 14th, I have begun to miss a few things:

–Roger the milk frother. Though I can nuke milk to the desired warmth for my tea-drinking, I prefer the touch of Roger. Also my veggie steamer and the strainer.
–Small tables and plant stands to put things on. Having everything sitting on the floor does get old.
–Oddly, more of all the things we actually have: I look forward to again having more than 2-3 forks, plates, dresses, and pairs of undies.

Seen through a footbridge, our friend the CN Tower. #yyz #toronto

Yoga with Live Music: Yesterday Kelly and I headed off to Downward Dog to try their 1/2 class. We had the idea that this class was pronounced “One Half” and was the halfway point between the (wonderful, awesome!) Beginner/prep classes we’ve been taking and Level One. Rumor has it that L1 is super-hard!

It turns out that 1/2 means “One Two”–it’s the halfway point between Level One and Two! From this I reached three epiphanies in rapid succession: OMG, OMG, I’m gonna die, followed by Holy Shit I survived that, man I am a Yoga Stud and, finally–after I looked up the class definitions and realized we were in something that might have been termed 1.5, Odds are good I could probably do actual Level One once a week.

Grief Makes You Dumb: A lot of my mental bandwidth is taken up with Grandma-related thoughts. Much of what’s left is getting antsy over the fact that I haven’t written any fiction since the 15th. The latter situation will get addressed tomorrow. So if you ask me for something in the near and get a less than useful response, like “Noodles!” just dumb down the question and try again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald makes you dumb too: The Great Gatsby was a very pretty disappointment. Everyone seemed emotionally flat except Tom Buchanan, and there’s no way to get behind him. Also, Toby Maguire may win the Me Award for simperiest narrator ever.

Sugar Sugar Yogi Yogi

A bit of random in this post: The new yoga studio looks like it’s going to work out. We’ve only gone twice, and we miss the little bits of meditate-y spiritual guidance we used to get at Open Door (we miss many things about Open Door) but the two classes at Downward Dog were the right mix of do-able and challenging. It’s not hot yoga, but the small studio there has some ventilation challenges. This is nice for me, as I like a warm room. It’s maybe less nice for K.

Speaking of nice, here are some baby robins I shot yesterday. It was a crummy day, in a way, with bad sandwiches and lots of jerking around from hither to yon, but I wandered into a community garden and scored bigtime.

Last Import-6

Toronto has wind! I am realizing that what passed in B.C. for wind was, you know, not.

Finally, we now have something to sleep on. The Sleep Country guys delivered our bed (the second one, the one we didn’t have to demand a refund on) yesterday, after Kelly paid them a $100 bribe to not drive off when they saw they’d have to wait their turn for the building loading dock.

In addition to lying OMG on a real mattress last night, we slept with artificial rain noise. Our bedroom is right near the stairwell, and what with both elevators being down it means every single person in the building has to tramp past us to get to their home. The building is largely unoccupied, but we needed some white noise. Snuffy recommended a program called Sleepmaker and we set it to play a heavy rainstorm with frequent swells of thunder all the night through.

My Novel II class is going well–I have about nine students now, and they’ve all got pretty intriguing books on the go. They’re disciplined, hardworking, and ask a lot of questions–a dream come true while I bounce through this transition.