Larocque and Roll

Happy blur

After my pleasant weekend last week, I thought it would be hard to top. However, I didn’t count on the two days I had off in the middle of the week to just as great as the weekend. Granted, I didn’t do much of anything except read and knit and watch movies and take my bike out for a spin; yet there’s just as much fun in doing nothing as there is in keeping busy.

Friday was a bad day – one of those days where, from the time you get up until the time you call your mother so she can talk you off the bell tower in the evening, nothing goes the way it should. It was one day, and it’s over, and I never have to live it again (the events of Groundhog Day aside.)

Yesterday was fairly decent; what put it over the edge was going shopping after work. With someone else’s money [1].

So far, today has been pretty good. I finished the sixth Harry Potter book, and can now looking into somehow procuring a copy of the seventh book, either from the library or a family member [2]. As well, I completed another epic bike ride this morning, making it to the next major landmark on the trail, the watertower (basically, another 2km past where I stopped last time).

And now to go work on my sockapalooza sock, which has finally entered the home stretch. Woo!

[1] I was buying DVDs for the library, and Blockbuster was having a sale.
[2] That was a hint.

That’s more like it

After a longish week, I had high hopes for the weekend. And happily, everything went better than expected.

Saturday morning I biked down to the market with a fellow knitter and neighbour. After we got back, I turned right around and headed for the bike path along the waterfront – it was the best bike ride I’ve been on in a while.

I put handy circles around where I started and where I turned around to go home – the trail runs along a main road for a while before it hits the next dedicated bike path. My water was running low, it was getting close to noon and I didn’t want to run out of energy before I got home. On the way, though, I stopped and got an ice cream cone!

When I did get home, I did make the mango sorbet (tasty!) and did the three big chores I’ve been putting off for weeks – washing the basement floor, cutting the grass and weeding the garden along the side of the house. To be fair, I’d put off the weeding and grass cutting because it’s been raining for the better part of the month so far, so it’s not like I did it on purpose. I also finished watching “Freaks and Geeks” – it’s a surprisingly sensitive, funny and heartbreaking show. Too bad it only lasted one season.

Sunday was pretty great, too. I got groceries early, then ran to the theater to catch “Live Free of Die Hard” (geeky and action-y!). For dinner, I barbecued some salmon steaks, which were kind of boring on their own. Looking around to see what I had, I eventually threw together an improvised mango relish/chutney thing.

If my memory serves me correctly, it goes something like this: heat about 1 tbsp vegetable oil over medium heat, then sprinkle dried chilies into the pot and let brown a little – don’t burn them! Finely chop about a quarter of a medium onion and throw it in, and let cook until the onion is soft. Cut a 1 inch cube of fresh ginger into small chunks and add to onions and chilies. Finely chop up 1 mango into tiny cubes, and finely chop a quarter of a red pepper, and add it to everything else. Stir for a few minutes, then add the juices of 1 lemon and 1 lime, and roughly 1 tsp brown sugar. Cook, stirring continuously, until the mango is soft, then serve! As with everything else, add more or less ginger and chili depending on how hot you like it. I will say that it’s pretty tasty, and I’m planning the rest of my menu for the week around it.

And thus ended a pretty good weekend.

Good night and good riddance

Today has been terribly unfocused and unproductive, and it feels like I’m being thwarted at every opportunity. To say that I’ve been a cranky pants over the last day or so is a huge understatement – I’ve managed to maintain a reasonably pleasant demeanor when I’m around other people (which is most of the time), but in my head I’m snarling and snapping and swearing a blue streak. Normal conversation with people is well-nigh impossible because I’m so impatient that I’m liable to cut the person off and tell them to hurry up, or just walk away in the middle of a conversation. In fact, one of the summer students – the quiet one who’s going to library school in the fall – came into my “office” [1] and asked if I was okay. At which point I felt really bad and tried hard to be pleasant and cheerful to everyone, even to the individual who tried to bite my head off during a somewhat stressful transaction.

Happily, I have the weekend off to be anti-social and not leave the house at all. I have grass needing cutting, a garden to weed, and a basement floor to wash. Not to mention mango sorbet needing to be made. On the other hand, I’m feeling restless and edgy, like I need to get out of the house. Tomorrow morning is a perfect time to hit the bike path for a few kilometers, then hit the market and head home in time to do the yard work. That should take care of the restlessness, and then I can spend the rest of the weekend vegging out.

[1] Not so much an office as a desk around the corner from the main area, with a cubicle wall which doesn’t make it to the ceiling, a desk groaning under the weight of the papers needing filing and the journals needing reading, boxes upon boxes upon bags of donated videos and a filing cabinet topped by a colossal pile of audio book and video catalogues which constantly threaten to fall on the next person who comes around the corner too quickly. Wait – where was I going with this?

Five

1. Move Your Feet – Junior Senior

This is Carl at two months. It is quite possibly the most adorable picture I’ve ever seen. Look at it and try not to say “awwww!”

Thanks to my sister who took and sent me this picture, never expecting that I’d use it and exploit it in such a manner. I’m a bad auntie, I know.

2. Balloon – Royal Wood

This is my new set of wheels. I ride it to work and around. Tonight I went on a bike ride down to Main Street, then down to the waterfront, where there’s a bitchin’ bike trail along the lake. I didn’t get very far because I didn’t have any water or a wallet, and I’m going out tonight.

3. Sanssouci – Rufus Wainwright

Finally! A picture of the jam made on the long weekend! It’s strawberry, which is my favourite, although the jar in front is raspberry, courtesy of my sister. She’s got quite a few bushes beside her house, and there was enough to make a batch of jam and thensome.

4. Sunday Morning – K-OS

One sock down, one to go. There’s three weeks left, and I’m a little over halfway finished the foot on the second sock. It’s going much faster now that I know what I’m doing. with the pattern.

5. Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon

The first pea plants are huge, and there are now a dozen pods on the plant. Not wanting any to go to waste, I’ve already snacked on the few which were fat and ripe, and there are plenty left. There are also ten more plants from seeds I planted in June, all in their own individual pots.

Now I’m all nostalgic

The other day I wrote about it being summer (officially) now, and since then I started reflecting on all the memorable books I’d read (or tried to read) during summers past. Part of me wants to go back and reread a lot of them, and another part of me knows that I’ll never be able to recapture whatever it was that made it so memorable. And yet another part of me (I am large and I contain multitudes) bitch slaps the second part and tells it to stop being such a negative, whiny twerp.

The summer I was 8, I hid in the family camper and read Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. From that point on, I was hopelessly hooked on the whole Fantasy genre.

The summer I was 12, I broke my leg and spent the better part of July and August in a cast. I’d been reading The Hobbit at the time, and the worst part of the hospital stay was not having anything to read while I was there. Because I didn’t have anything else to do, I read the whole Lord of the Rings series, and loved it. I started The Simarilion, and was getting bored when the cast finally came off.

I can’t remember how old I was the summer I read The Thornbirds (probably not old enough) and then moved on to other Collen McCullough books. I know I was on vacation at my grandparent’s in New Brunswick, and that I wasn’t really old enough to understand what was going on. I just remember that they were incredibly detailed and full of historical details.

Also while I was in NB one summer, I’d picked up The Handmaid’s Tale at a bookstore in Halifax (we started in Nova Scotia, and made our way north.) I know I was 16 at the time, and was intrigued by the book. For a long time, it was the only Margaret Atwood book I liked until I read Wilderness Tips, which is a collection of short stories about the great outdoors.

Then there were the summers between the end of high school and the start of grad school where I found new authors that I grew to love – Elizabeth Peters, Laurie R. King, Dorothy R. Sayers, Spider Robinson, Diane Mott Davidson, Piers Anthony (who I now despise because he is a dirty old man), Laurence Sanders.

There have been a couple of summers where I tried to get past the first book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s [1] Lord Foul’s Bane series. I tried three times, and couldn’t – the protagonist is so bitter and unlikeable (and a whiny bitch to boot) that I don’t even try anymore.

The summer between first and second year of library school, I had three separate memorable reading experiences. The first came on the last day of class, when I’d handed in my last assignment and had no exams left; a friend had loaned me the first three Harry Potter books (Harry Potter was just starting to get big then, but we hadn’t noticed) and I ran home from the library to start reading them. I had a migraine, and I intended to read until it got too bad, but I stopped noticing after the first 100 pages. Finally, at midnight, I finished the second book [2], put it down, and said, “wow.”

The second incident came a few weeks later. The same friend who loaned me the Harry Potter books suggested I might want to try Guy Gavriel Kay, specifically the Fionavar Tapestry. It’s three books, and they form the mythical/historical/semi-religious basis for a lot of his other books. I had never been so emotionally moved by a book until that point – there was one point during the story where I had to stop reading, put the book down, and walk away because I was so upset.[3] So, thanks Stuart – you got two thumbs way up for your recommendations that summer!

The third incident came later in the summer, at the Spring Garden branch of the library. Browsing through the new arrivals, a page was shelving books and asked if I was looking for something. I wasn’t really – I read all the Kay’s the library had and was waiting for others to arrive from other branches. He handed me a book and said, “Here – try this guy. He writes comic books, but this is a really good novel.” Since that day, I’ve wished a million blessings on that kid’s head because I don’t know how I would have found Neil Gaiman otherwise. Neverwhere was the first book I’d ever read from cover to cover two times in a row, and I can’t wait until the movie for Stardust comes out.

The last few summers haven’t seen anything really memorable, maybe because the summer doesn’t have the same meaning as it used to – a break between school years. Whatever I’m doing in the summer, I’ll still be doing it in the fall, the winter and next spring, so there’s not an urgency to get a lot of reading in while I can, before I have to start reading for classes again. I haven’t really taken any vacation time during the summer, and I’m not planning to in the foreseeable future [4]. This just means that there isn’t a chunk of time I get to sit around and do nothing but read. Which is what I plan on doing this weekend, because it’s going to rain anyways.

On that note, here’s what I read in June:

~ Fiona Patton, The Granite Shield and The Stone Prince (both 6). Nothing special, but lots of detail.
~ Anthony Bidulka, Flight of Aquavit (6). A nice, easy read – predictable, yet palatable.
~ Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job (8). For book club; even though I read it this past October, it was still pretty funny.
~ Adriana Trigiani, Rococo (4). I can’t tell you what posessed me to read this, let alone finish it. It wasn’t offensively bad or terribly written, it just didn’t interest me.
~ Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother (9). Loved this book! The family all meant well, and just had trouble expressing it.
~ Brad Smtih, Big Man Coming Down the Road (8.5). I liked the fact I recognized a lot of the geography, and a specific incident alluded to in the story. Oh, and it’s a great modern western – y’all should read it!

[1] It seems like a lot of the authors I like have the middle initial R. I wonder if there’s a reason…
[2] Have I ever mentioned I read fast? Like, 100 pages an hour on average, remembering most of what I read. And yes, I’m bragging.
[3] And no, I won’t tell you why. Go read the book yourself!
[4] I know – gasp! People keep asking my why, and I just tell them it’s because it’s hot, I don’t have air conditioning, so I’d rather be inside where it is. Plus, I’d rather take time off in the fall, when everyone is back from their summer vacations.

Summer’s here

The schools up here let out last week, which means summer has officially arrived. It’s been *mumblemumble* years since I sat in a classroom on the last day of school in June, feeling giddy with anticipation about the last few minutes of class and the last bus ride home until September. My desk (or locker) would be cleaned out, and my friends and I would be practically levitating out of our chairs because we were so wound up and excited about the summer.

Those days have long passed, but I still get a thrill out of watching the calendar and counting the days left until the schools empty out for the summer. Granted, I watch for a completely different reason (we’re busy all day long instead of during the immediate few hours after school), but I can appreciate what the kids are feeling.

This year was my mom’s last year of teaching, as she retired at the end of this past school year. She taught grade 1 at a school she’d been at for almost 25 years, and had seen lots of changes there (some for the better, some for the worse). In all, she’s been teaching for over 36 years, so she deserves a break!

On the weekend, my parents and youngest sister came down, and we hung out for a few days. The most ambitious things we did were buying a barbecue and making strawberry jam [1]. Sadly, they left yesterday morning, so I’m all alone again. Sniff.

As for what my plans for the rest of the summer are, I don’t have many beyond reading, knitting and sleeping. I don’t have any vacations or get-aways planned, but I make take a few days off here and there.

[1] Here’s where, if I’d been truly ambitious, I’d have inserted a picture of the jars of jam. However, I’m too tired to go downstairs and do that now, so you’ll have to imagine it. There are six jars, in case you need somewhere to start.