TRH Does Vancouver

Damn time change on the west coast!

I am really enjoying my vacation. Despite the truly crappy weather (Hannah told me yesterday that I flew in during a tsunami warning), Vancouver has been great. Went to see the Emily Carr exhibit, shopped a bit on Robson Street, had a great breakfast in Kitsilano, went to see a screening of “Fast Food Nation,” and am enjoying the blissful Pan Pacific Hotel at this very moment.

More details to follow when I’m back and not blogging from my crackberry.

The Slow Movement

Over the past few Saturdays, I’ve been taking Restorative Yoga class at the Liberty Movement Studio in Liberty Village. The space is gorgeous and the teacher awesome but I wasn’t expecting it to be so utterly relaxing. I’ve always been a smash-up and down kind of exercise-doer, from the early days of dance classes to crazy-ass aerobics to biking like a maniac, so the idea of slow movements for the benefit of my health never really occurred to me, like ever. To me, exercise has always meant lots of sweating, moving and high kicks.

But that’s not always the case. The benefits of restorative yoga include the highly important act of resting the brain. True rest, something where my mind isn’t going a mile a minute and I’m not bouncing from topic to topic, isn’t something I’ve ever done before. And considering my disease is completely stress related the idea of quieting my mind is an important one.

And it’s strange that restorative yoga, where you hold supported poses for long periods of time, makes me far more tired than my pilates class does; it makes me so relaxed that I actually rest, something I most certainly do not do enough of in my real, hectic life.

Weekend Update

What a crazy busy weekend! It’s always fun when that happens. It was Remembrance Day. The holiday always makes me think of my grandmother, a war bride, my grandfather, a World War II vet, and my great-grandfather, who fought in the First World War.

I guess it was kind of fitting that I went to see the psychic/clairvoyant on Remembrance Day, considering the person that came through the most was my maternal grandmother, my Nanny, who came from London when she was a young married woman to make her life in Canada. The whole reading was totally surreal: apparently, I’m a ‘diamond’ soul, have got angels around me, and, um, the grandmother of God, one St. Anne, sits with my dead relatives watching over them and me.

Yeah, that kind of totally freaked me out, especially considering that the psychic knew nothing about me or even my name before I walked in the room. Oh, and on top of all that, I was born on St. Anne’s Day, as my father-in-law is always telling me. But the cutest part of the reading? The psychic telling me that my grandmother thinks my RRHB has a cute butt. I mean, he does, but really?

It’s hard to know what to believe and what not to believe but when you’ve been without your mom and your grandmother for so long, maybe even just the little reassurance that they’re there, somewhere, is a good thing. Then, I went to restorative yoga, which I’ll explain in the next post.

After all of that spiritual stuff, I collapsed on the couch and watched TV before falling asleep at 9:42 PM. Why was I so tired? Oh, because I stayed out too late after going to see a reading on Friday night. Kevin Patterson (Consumption), Robert J. Wiersema (Before I Wake) and Giles Blunt (By the Time You Read This): all three men gave excellent readings in the Hart House Library at U of T. All three books are now on my ‘to read’ pile (after ordering them), and I have to say that Patterson totally gets the über-hot author award. Wow! Smoking! AND, he eats caribou eyeballs. Fascinating.

Then, on Sunday I went for brunch with a friend who is spending her first year teaching. She’s got a grade 3/4 split class and has been reading my abridged version of Frankenstein. Apparently, the kids are quite upset about the ending that I wrote (they found it unsatisfactory) and are going to be writing me some letters about what they think happens to the monster. Oh, and I’ve also been asked to reply to them, which I am more than willing to do. How fun is that?

Aphra Behn

Is it strange to say that a 17th century woman is one of my heroes? That my goal has always been, just like Behn, to be a woman who makes a living by her pen. And these past few weeks something has actually been happening on that front. A royalty cheque arrived for the first three of my Classic Starts (Little Women, Frankenstein and Robinson Crusoe), and yesterday a cheque arrived from Taddle Creek for my poem “April” that appeared in their last issue.

Getting paid for poetry is awesome. Getting paid for writing I did five years ago is also kind of thrilling. But being able to pay for my Humber course without going into debt? Awesome.

Now That It’s On Your Mind

Do something about it. Ipsos-Reid tells us that Canadians are now more concerned about the environment than any other social issue. It tops the list, with health care (natch) and international war/conflict coming up next. Do you think Harper will listen?

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, here’s a top 10 list from George Monbiot, the author of Heat:

1. Cut your flights. Nothing else you do causes so much climate change in so short a time.

2. Think hard before you pick up your car keys. On average, 40% of the journeys made by car could be made by other means – on foot, by bicycle or on public transport.

3. Organise a “walking bus” to take the children to school.

4. Ask your boss to devise a “workplace travel plan” which rewards people for leaving their cars at home.

5. Switch over to a supplier of renewable electricity. You don’t have to erect your own wind turbine, but you can buy your power from someone who has.

6. Ask a builder to give you an estimate for bringing your home up to R2000 standards.

7. Ditch your air conditioner.

8. Turn down your thermostat: 18 degrees is as warm as your house ever needs to be. You just have to get used to it.

9. Make sure every bulb in your house is a compact fluorescent or LED.

10. Do NOT buy a plasma TV: they use 5 times as much energy as other models.

How am I faring? Not too well I’m afraid. We’re trying to keep the heat down, we’ve switched a lot of our lightbulbs, we don’t own a plasma tv, we rarely (read three times last summer) turn on the air conditioning, and we’re going to do as much environmentally friendly renovating as we can possibly afford when my RRHB starts fixing the house up full-time in January, but I’m going to Vancouver next week (flying) and drive to work most days. We’ve also been thinking about switching to Bullfrog, but it’s so expensive. I know, I shouldn’t complain.

Hence the goal to buy most of our Christmas presents in the form of hand-made gifts, donations to charities and stuff from the Red campaign.

Reader’s Block

So the cold mutated into a bad sinus infection, which laid me up for another, truly non-eventful, weekend. But the worst part of it? I’m totally and utterly unable to read. I can’t concentrate and even looking at a page (or a computer screen) hurts my eyes (it does not, however, stop me from lying on the couch, collecting dust, and watching hour after hour of television).

I’ve been reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer for the past four weeks. I’m on page 154. Other books I can’t seem to crack are Marie Antoinette: The Journey, The Communist’s Daughter by Dennis Bock, and about 17 others sitting on my night table. I should be starting a November challenge, I like Sassy Monkey’s idea of doing one ‘from the stacks,’ but I am also attracted to the idea (c/o Kailana) of reading war-inspired or themed books because of Remembrance Day, but considering I haven’t finished a single challenge yet (I came close with the RIP one for October), I might simply have my goal for this month to “get over my reader’s block” and actually finish a damn book.

Tomorrow is another day: tomorrow I will decide upon a challenge. Tomorrow, I hope, I will be feeling better.