There Is A Season, Turn, Turn, Turn

…If only it would turn into spring. We were hoping. We were holding out hope. But today it snowed for the fifth month in a row here in Toronto. I think Winnipeg is having better weather.

Turns out the world isn’t just mourning the death of the Pope, but the weather seems to be doing a pretty good job of it as well.

It’s interesting to see the world’s reaction to his death, considering, and I mean no ill-intent here, but the man’s been on death’s door for quite some time now, and it’s divine grace that he lasted this long. I mean, really.

Our house is still a project. The basement is full of crap, broken walls, broken toilets, a bathtub, insulation — oh, and the scariest thing ever, at some point before we moved in, mice had eaten almost entirely through the biggest power wire in the house. So, hurrah for fixer-uppers. I never thought I’d hate the house I bought, but right now, I’m hating it and so much more.

Did I mention the fact that it’s April. And it’s still SNOWING.

Oh, and I went to a really shitty seminar yesterday and that just put me in a pissy mood that seemed to continue all weekend.

One of Those Days…

Where all you want to do is be by yourself but your house is full of people and work won’t stop and you’re tired of the world going to hell in a handbasket.

Things to do:

1. Take the One Tonne Challenge.

It’s not that hard. But it is that hard.

2. Look what’s happening to our glaciers. That’s what useless driving and wasted energy is doing to the most beautiful places in Canada.

3. Use cold water to do your laundry. But you know, this begs the question that if it really doesn’t make a difference, why do we need cold-specific laundry detergent? Is it better for the environment? Is it cleaner, use less fossil fuels? If it’s always been more energy-efficient to use cold water, why are people just realizing it today?

4. Stop throwing away things. Use a broom, not a Swiffer. Buy a wooden cutting board, don’t throw them away. Re-use your baggies, invest in Tupperware, eat your leftovers…oh, I could go on but I’m feeling like I’m lecturing, and no one wants to hear some cranky girl nag the general public on some stupid blog that no one’s even reading.

#16 – Touching the Void

What an incredible story, as anyone who has seen the documentary knows, Touching the Void tells the tale of two men, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who summited the West Face of the 6344m Siula Grande in the Peruvian Alps.

During their descent, Simpson slipped, then fell, and broke his leg. Faced with the impossible, Yates began lowering his climbing partner down the mountain using their ropes. In extreme amounts of pain, Simpson’s almost down when he slips right over a crevasse. Faced with himself being dragged over the edge, Simon cuts the rope. And then suffers massive amounts of guilt for doing so, even though, truly, he didn’t have any choice.

Miraculously, Joe climbs out of the crevasse, crawls almost back to base camp, where Simon finds him, and ensures that he gets out of there safely, but barely alive.

I love stories about climbers, granted I’ve only ever read Into Thin Air, but I’ve watched numerous documentaries on Mount Everest and even interviewed Peter Hillary, and I’m consistently amazed at how much can go wrong. How people willingly know that much can go wrong but still push themselves to both the limits of their own bodies and the limits of the Earth, subject to all the whims and fancies of the weather, the elements, and the impossible battle with altitude.

Maybe because I know I could never climb a mountain. The closest I ever came was living in Banff and hiking to the top of Sulphur Mountain, which was incredible for me.

The documentary is good too, don’t get me wrong, but Simpson’s an amazing storyteller, and even if you’re not remotely interested in climbing or climbers or mountains or tragedy or, well, you get the picture, you should read this book anyway.

From Touching the Void:

“If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it’s not long before you’re conjuring, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious — a bit more dangerous.”

Isn’t that a solid observation for life in general, never mind risking life and limb to climb to the top of a mountain?

Everyday Life

I’m in the middle of two books, am back at work, and am experiencing the joys of everyday life — doing dishes, making dinner, cleaning the house. Maybe I shouldn’t complain so much about being sick.

Feeling better also means surfing the Internet, which can be good or can be bad, the labyrinth of sites all leading you different places. Here’s where I travelled today:

1. Do I think Leonard Cohen should win the Nobel Prize? Um, that’s a hard one to have an opinion about, I read and loved Beautiful Losers, but haven’t read any of his poetry, but do enjoy his music — but a Nobel Prize? It’s an interesting proposition. And that whole Buddhist monk thing he did, hot. Is that shallow of me?

Oh and some previous winners: Toni Morrison, J.M. Coeztee, Nadine Gordimer, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Samuel Beckett, shall I go on?

2. Does this woman not have a job? Who reads 4 books in a day, I could barely manage 4 books in a week. But still, quite the title, the competitive side of me would love to start a challenge where I, or someone I know, has a comparable amount of reviews on Amazon.ca.

3. Yay for writers! Maybe we can finally move away from the conception that online writers are hacks and content should always be free. Too bad it’s an American lawsuit…now I can’t charge all those crazy web sites and kids that stole various articles from the History Television site when I was writing it.

4. Some fancy-schmancy dude is making it his personal ambition to debunk and cut apart Microsoft Word’s grammar check. But I do kind of agree it’s for writers who already understand the basics of grammar, but shouldn’t it be begging the question more so why kids aren’t be taught grammar anymore and are therefore looking to an automated program to just “fix” their problems? Enough complaining about Microsoft, start complaining about the education system. And while you’re at it, buy a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

5. What a lovely blog from writer Michael Winter. But the comments are kind of annoying. It’s one thing for the writer to write entries as such, poetic, flowing, lyrical, etc., but quite another for Joe Blow to feel like he can comment in the same fashion. Holy pretentious Batman.

Boredom or Death?

Lord, lord, I’m so bored. I’ve spent over a week inside with this damn bronchitis and never thought I’d be so happy to be going back to work. Actually, that’s a lie, because I was damn happy to get my new job after the truly awful experience of being fired by the Boss From Hell.

I’m too tired to read, too bored to watch television, too sick of Free Cell and haven’t the energy to write anything. Not. One. More. Word.

Happy Birthday Zesty

And may we have many more, rocking on chairs that support us both as we move into another year together. Remember all those years ago where I stood in the backyard wearing that ridiculous top Sariana gave me, flexing my muscles and showing off, saying, “This is going to be the best year of my life.”

I was so wrong. I have now decided for both of us that it will be the best year of our lives.

And I’m nothing if I’m not pyschic. You better watch your ass Warwick. I’m making predictions and you’d better cue up a psychic hotline for all the pissed off customers you’ll have when they see the power of the ragdoll and her immensely inflated ego, ahem, intellectual powers.

#15 The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

…I couldn’t put this book down. I read it in about two hours. It’s a young adult book about four friends who find a pair of magic pants; pants that give them strength, support and courage during the first summer they spend apart.

My life lesson today: don’t ever assume you’re too old to read kid’s books. Sometimes, they can surprise you, like your sweet, sweet nephew cuddling with you on the couch because you’re still sick at Easter dinner and feeling sorry for yourself.

The book makes me want to tell my girlfriends how much I love them; how much I’m looking forward to getting old with them; how much they inspire me and give me strength; they make me stronger than I could ever be standing alone in this crazy, fucked up world.

#14 – Saturday

The extraordinary success of McEwan’s last novel, Atonement, is already starting to be seen in the power of the sales of his latest, Saturday. They are two very different books, but with McEwan’s keen sense for detail and the ability to create almost a perfect story, in that the plot, characters and/or situation seem to entertwine without anything seeming awkward or out of place, Saturday seems more self-contained and close-knit, despite being essentially a family drama, like Atonement.

I loved Atonement. It was a brilliant, bittersweet novel about loss and regret; in Saturday McEwan doesn’t sweep the timespan, but rather keeps his focus on one, seemingly normal Saturday. Henry Perowne, successful neurosurgeon, wakes up early, heads to the window and sees a plane crash in the distance. This tragic event becomes an overarching symbol for the events of the day: the criminal asapect involved in the crash; the near-death experience for the pilots; and the absolute almost absurdity of watching a plane crash in downtown London.

A strange start to a strange, but yet somehow still absolutely normal Saturday. As Perowne goes through the motions of the morning, falling back asleep, having something for breakfast, preparing for his squash game, McEwan fills up the book with far-reaching and intimate details of the man’s life. How he met his wife, whom he loves to distraction; how his children will both be at dinner, one a poet living abroad in Paris, the other an upcoming blues musician.

It’s almost as if McEwan challenges the reader to find the mundane in this everyday life–that is until a minor traffic accident derails not only his perfect day, but it somehow comes back to haunt Perowne much later that night.

To say that it’s an excellent book would be a glossy adjective that doesn’t necessarily exploit the success of the novel. It’s almost Hemingway-esque, not in it’s prose, for McEwan writes long, luxurious sentence, but in structure. It’s a book obsessed with building a character and looking at the world from one day from his perspective, watching that perspective change, and then watching everything float back to normal, but with one of those moments, those ever-changing moments that affect your life forever, behind him.

I Miss You

There are so many things that I miss now that I’m not working for the Boss From Hell. It’s not a strange abusive situation, well maybe just a little bit. I miss the people I used to work with everyday. I miss working hard on something to see the results live that afternoon. I miss knowing about things and being in charge of things and I’m mad that she’s systematically getting rid of everyone who built the very structure she dares to rule from.

And things will never be the same again. That’s always a sobering thought, that you never realize how good things in your life actually are until it changes.

Renovation Continued…

The scariest thing the Rock and Roll boyfriend said to me this morning was, “We’re going to spend thousands and thousands just getting rid of the garbage.” Sniff, that’s even before new furniture, new kitchen appliances, new shelves to house all of my books–that’s just the trash.

The beginning of renovating sucks. Can we skip to the end? Someone call Debbie Travis and Mike Holmes. Can I be considered a charity because I’m bionic?