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Found this entry on another blog this morning. If anyone wants to see my RRHB’s new video, the one they made with the cell phones, take a look and let me know what you think!

And just for the record, my RRHB is the one on the right…

Shame on you Rona Ambrose, our ‘so-called’ Environment Minister. Isn’t it your job to make our responsibilities to the Kyoto Accord targets happen (link via Grist)? Isn’t that what our good tax dollars are paying you to do? Certainly not paying you to pass the buck and/or make pathetic excuses about needing more time. The whole point is that we have no time.

Here’s an idea. Use the big old brain you’ve got and think about some solutions. I mean, it can’t be that hard—Oprah had a whole show about it, and she’s only one woman. Get people to change their light bulbs. Get them to read the new Vanity Fair issue that’s on stands now. Subsidize Bullfrog so it’s more affordable for everyday people. Tax the sh*t out of SUVs. Just do something instead of sticking your finger up your ass and saying, “it can’t be done.”

Now there’s a message we want to be sending to our kids.

Last night I had such a hard time dealing with the idea of going back to work. Of course, this culminated in a lot of crying over other things, issues with my father, other family members, being grumpy with my RRHB for being away so long, and just the general tiredness of dealing with the disease and all of the various side effects of the prednisone.

The “prednisone crazies” are out in full force. My skin is breaking out and I’ve gained weight; as well, I’ve got some chest acne, pain in my left hip and a puffy face. On Saturday I went to get new glasses and was so frustrated with looking at my puffy face in the mirror I almost broke down in Lenscrafters. It’s funny, it’s not like black dog depression; I can realize that it’s the prednisone crazies, but that doesn’t stop the tears from falling freely.

The emotional roller coaster kept me awake for hours. This meant I was ironing the pants I wore today at 1:30AM. I was well prepared for today. I packed my purse and knapsack the night before, planned my breakfast (made a smoothie), organized all of my meds (the supplements I’m taking at lunch) and made a list of the things I was taking for lunch. As a result, when the alarm went off this morning, I didn’t feel panicked and frustrated, nor did I worry I was going to be late. In fact, it was a stressfree morning.

And that feeling carried on throughout the day. I had myself all in a panic about a meeting with HR this morning to talk about the sick leave. Not that could be helped, I mean, after all, the last time I went back to work after a sick leave I got fired by the Boss From Hell. But in the end, everyone was happy to see me. Everyone commented on how well I looked, how much they liked my snappy new haircut.

Most importantly, I made it through the whole day and I’m only semi-exhausted. I’m actually quite proud of myself.

Now, to the list…I didn’t do too badly. Here’s a wrap up:

1. Complete my own version of John Allemang’s Book A Day challenge. Follow with a Movie A Day challenge as well (the challenge here will be limiting myself to just one movie a day). I’m spending way, way too much time in front of the television.

I read 15 books since posting my list on March 22nd. Not quite one per day, but I didn’t do too badly. If you count it as a work week challenge, I did all right. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

2. Finish unpacking our boxes and transfer the unused contents to plastic storage bins that can go in the basement. This is so my RRHB (when he gets back from tour) can completely demolish the first floor. This is a selfish goal to some extent because I’m so sick of only living on one floor of the house that anything I can do to help the renovation along, I’m going to do.

This was too much for me. The boxes are too full and too heavy and I need my RRHB’s help. I did move some of the plastic boxes to the basement, so that’s a start. I’d count this one one third done.

3. Go through all my old writing and transfer as much as I can to the new computer. I bought a cute little clipboard from the Pottery Barn, just to hold up my pages!

I’ve started this too, it’s an ongoing process, one that’ll probably take me a few months to complete. I did, however, put all of my writing in one plastic bin, but I’ve got so much that I’ll need another one. I need to make a trip to Staples this week to buy some more storage containers. So, still working on this one too.

4. Create a menu plan for the next three weeks. Then go grocery shopping.

Yeah, didn’t do this at all—but I did do a lot of grocery shopping around the advice of the naturopath, which was kind of the point.

7. Research yoga classes for the diseased. Do such things exist?
8. Clean the downstairs hallway. Part of #2.

Done and done!

9. Get our taxes organized. Take everything to an accountant.

I have the name of a good accountant, but I haven’t done any organizing yet. Another project for this week. Will keep you posted.

11. Clean out the car (see #10).

Didn’t have the energy for this either. Fingers crossed it gets done this weekend.

13. Write each day (and not just on the blog).

I did this! Done and done!

15. Write all of my non-wedding thank you notes.

Still on the list.

16. See the eye doctor (appointment made), family doctor (appointment made), naturopath (appointment made) and osteopath (appointment not made yet…). This is all in the goal of spending the next 2.5 weeks getting as well as I humanly can get in the time I’ve got to myself.

Done and done!

All in all, not too shabby, I think, not too shabby—good effort!

Blankets, Craig Thompson’s , illustrated novel completes my Book A Day challenge (for now). I’m going to give it a couple of days (with working) to see if I can maintain the same pace, but I doubt it.

I choose an easy one, a graphic novel, but having never read one before, I didn’t quite know what to expect. It’s a sweet tale of the author growing up, falling in love and questioning his Christian faith, told in a balance of words and pictures. I’m consistently amazed at the ability of graphic novel authors to a) achieve a tone with such a small amount of words and b) tell such wonderful stories in their pictures.

As I was awake with nerves and whatnot last night until after 2 AM, it was an easy book to read in order to try and calm down, and that so much of it was inspired by different parts of scripture (in how he’s learning about his faith, testing his faith, finally coming to terms with how he approaches his faith), meant it sort of calmed me down too.

The love story makes up most of the middle section of the book and it’s easy to see how the author fell in love with his heroine. She’s quite remarkable and led one hell of a hard life. This book makes me want to read more graphic novels, but I wouldn’t even know where to start.

David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green is the kind of book you just devour. It’s a year in the life of Jason Taylor, a thirteen-year-old boy who lives in Black Swan Green (a small village in Worcestershire), who stammers, has a wicked imagination, writes poetry and suffers at the hand of adolescence. Told in a sweeping stream of consciousness narrative, the book totally brings you into the mind of a boy that age, and it’s pitch perfect.

To an extent, the book reminded me a bit of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but maybe only because both Mitchell and Haddon use similar narrative styles. Ripe with details about what it’s like to be a kid, the book oozes adolescence, which brought me right back to grade eight and left me standing around George’s (can’t remember his last name) living room listening to Duran Duran and flirting over X-Men comics.

It’s an impressive novel. Truly. Which, of course, means that now I’m going to have to read Cloud Atlas.

I had picked up Ami McKay’s The Birth House a while ago, read the prologue and decided that it might not be the book for me (I thought the prose might be just a tad overwrought). But after hearing such good things about the book from, well, just about everywhere, happily, I gave it another chance and ended up quite enjoying the novel.

The book tells the story of Dora Rare, the only woman born in generations of boys, who grows up in Scots Bay, Nova Scotia around the time of the First World War. Taken under the wing of Miss B., a local legendary healer, Dora becomes a midwife. Much of the conflict in the book revolves around the arrival of a Dr. Gilbert Thomas, an obstetrician determined to take the ‘pain’ out of birth at his new hospital, and an almost metaphorical battle of the sexes erupts as the women hold on to their own traditions.

It’s almost a folkart piece of fiction, with newspaper clippings, letters, journal entries and remedies intertwined with the story itself. McKay’s voice, as Joan Clark points out on the cover, is “fresh as a loaf of bread,” and I’d have to agree.

So it looks like I’m getting to finish a book every other day, slightly off my original goals, but I’m doing all right. My wish is to make it to 30 or so before I have to back to work on Monday!

I’m not sure if I’ve fully digested my thoughts about Brokeback Mountain. It’s hard to separate what I think from all of the hype surrounding the movie, especially the controversy it caused on Oscar night when it didn’t win the coveted Best Picture trophy. In all honesty, it’s a touching, luscious film, a true love story that compliments the gorgeous scenery and sparcity of dialogue. But Jewel aside, I might have to say that I liked Ride with the Devil better (please don’t throw anything at me), but I can’t really put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because I like Tobey’s brooding slightly better than Jake Gyllenhaal’s, but who knows. In the end, it’s kind of irrelevant anyway.

There was slight movie of the week feeling about the film, which I normally enjoy; it mainly came up in terms of how much the characters had to age, and it’s hard, when they’re all so young to begin with, that I didn’t find it believable (Anne Hathaway’s wigs, ouch). The performances were exceptional, and I remember reading an article way back in the day about Leaving Las Vegas, about how the Oscar should go to career-worthy performances, performances of a lifetime (the writer was talking about Elisabeth Shue), and I kind of think that refers to Heath Ledger in this film.

All in all, I loved Annie Proulx’s short story and I loved the aching feeling throughout the film of how love tortures as much as it fulfills. And I can’t help thinking that it’s a groundbreaking film simply in how it approaches the idea of a love story, honest and real, without making any judgments. I think that’s totally liberating, if that’s okay for me to say.

But was it better than Crash? Absolutely.

Oh, and Randy Quaid? With your, um, seven or eight lines of dialogue, and one or two scenes with a horse, shut the hell up.

So it seems that every time I see a doctor these days, it results in more tests and more appointments. It’s the health challenge that’s for sure. Yesterday, I saw the eye doctor, which completes my round of health-related visits for now, and knocks #16 off the list. I’ve still got to see the osteopath, but that’s only because he didn’t have any appointments for the time I had off.

Annnywaaay, apparently, the prednisone is causing me to have abnormal eye pressure. In short, it was normal the last time I saw the eye doctor and totally abnormal now, which means I’ve got to go get a visual field test done. Then, I need to see the eye doctor again in three months to be sure that once they’ve weaned me off the prednisone that my eye pressure returns to normal. Or else? Well, I could end up having some sort of permanent optic nerve damage. Fun wow!

I also got my prescription for health from the naturopath yesterday. It’s a lot of supplements for the next three months, which I hate because I’m sick, sick, sick to death of taking pills. I’ve also got an immune stabilizing tincture to take and a homeopathic remedy that I do once a week for six weeks. It’s pretty crazy, actually.

So I’m ready for work on Monday (really?), I’ll have new glasses (if I can get them tomorrow), a new haircut, some new clothes, lots of good remedies for rest and stuff, and a whole health plan to finally kick the ass of the disease instead of the other way around.

In the end, I’m thankful for the time off, so I guess it was good that my blood went missing, but I’m even happier that I’m feeling better because it simply couldn’t have gone on like that forever.

Truman Capote’s masterpiece has most certainly held the test of time. In stark contrast to the solipsism of the film, where Capote’s own obsession with the story of the Clutter murders in Kansas in the late 1950s almost drove him to utter madness (at least that was my impression), In Cold Blood remarkably and deftly tells the tale with an omniscient third person voice that remains almost authorless.

Of course, Capote’s long-winded, aptly rich prose remains his own, but the idea of the “nonfiction novel” so cherished as a new format in the film, demands a point of view that approaches journalism, but it doesn’t necessarily step into Good Night, Good Luck territory (“we report the news, we don’t make the news”).

That’s the greatest achievement of the book I think, of how Capote manages to truly and precisely tell the story, make it his own, but be absolutely clear in his distanced point of view. The book would not have succeeded had Capote’s own neurosis, his obsession with Perry Smith, or his quest for greatness been anywhere near the story. And I guess that’s why the film marks such a diversion from the pure voice of the book.

I think that’s what amazed me most of all on my second reading of the book, how different the film presents Capote vs. how in control of the narrative he remains all through the book. I loved it the first time I read it almost ten years ago; I loved it again now.

I’ve fallen behind…I’m in the middle of In Cold Blood and it’s a dense book that’s taking me some time to read. I became kind of obsessed with re-reading the book after seeing Capote. But I should be done today. I’ve got lots of time on the streetcar this morning heading off to see the naturopath once more before I go back to work on Monday.