sun!

Another power outage yesterday afternoon, a couple hours after I posted my previous Blathering...this one affected all of Huntsville as well as the surrounding area. Apparently some people got temporarily stranded in the town since gas pumps weren't working.

But even more significantly, our local ISP wasn't working, which meant I couldn't get online!

I coped with this catastrophe by engaging in activities which didn't require online access like reading (print text, not electronic!), napping, and actually enjoying the outdoors. I made toast in the fireplace by sticking a piece of bread onto a barbecue skewer and holding it over the coals. It got slightly singed, but I swear it tasted better than regular toast.





Sunny and somewhat warmer today, plus the power's back on! The sunny part is, unbelieveably, more important than the electric power.

It's funny, really. I know that if I put myself in the right mindset (like on the Nahanni trip, or even on a regular canoe or hiking trip), I don't mind being cold and wet for extended periods of time. When you're in an environment where you're used to certain luxuries, however, your mind gets somewhat more truculent (yay, I finally get to use the word truculent in a Blathering!).

The combination of the power outage and lack of sun made it pretty much impossible to ever get completely warm. A novelty at first, but then it gradually gets somewhat wearing.

But there's sun today! Amazing how cheering a bit of sunlight can be. I'm sitting at the dining room table in the boathouse right now. Jeff's still sleeping and JBR's still up in his cabin, so I've got the whole place to myself. I was up at 6:30 this morning, lit a fire, started some hot water for tea and porridge, then (insert shuddering sigh of ecstasy here) picked up my e-mail.





Last night, JBR, Jeff and I went over to Bob Clappison's cottage to check out the night sky on a telescope kindly loaned to us by Karen Yule. We saw Jupiter's stripes and three of its moons, a blindingly bright Venus, orangey-red Mars. We weren't able to identify any other planets, sadly. The Clappison cottage looked cozy with electric lights powered by their emergency generator.

Hey, Jeff just woke up. Wow, and it's not even 9 am!

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Me in the boathouse.
	Jeff on the telescope last night.
	My breakfast this morning. Quaker's Instant Oatmeal, Peaches and Cream.

cottage

[Condolences to the family of Bruce Pelz, who passed away yesterday. :-( Please see Dave's posting in Blatherchat or this Web page for more information]

So I'm typing this in the corner of the boathouse at the cottage, clad in fleece tights, t-shirt, two fleece sweaters, thick socks, hiking boots, huddled as close to the electric heater in the corner as I can get. Jeff is sitting across from me at the dining room table, also on his laptop.

We are both online at the same time, thanks to the AirPort hub that Jeff set up. No more tangled phone wires! I can be sitting on the deck and surfing the Web at the same time! Not that I'd want to right now...it's pretty blustery out there.

So blustery last night, in fact, that a power line was knocked down somewhere. The power went out in the middle of our dinner (barbecued steaks with blue cheese, and salad), and didn't come on until about 4:30 this morning. It was my turn to clean up, so I warmed up some cleaning water on the woodstove and rinsed everything off, stacked it, washed it more thoroughly this morning when I had access to real hot water.





It's snowing outside. What the heck happened to spring? This morning we even had a brief bout of hail. Jeff and I both seem to have caught some bug. I plan to do a lot of productive napping this weekend to try to get rid of it.

Despite the AirPort, I still have only regular telephone dial-up access from the cottage, so please don't send me big files while I'm here, thanks.

Heard from my tax lawyer. The CCRA wants some more docs, so looks like I'll have to do more digging through paperwork next week.

I've renewed waitingforfrodo.com and debbieohi.com. I brought my Wacom artpad to the cottage, and hope to do some updates to both cartoons while I'm here.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Jeff wearing his headlamp as he calls Ontario Hydro.
	Cora experiencing her first power outage.
	Jeff using my laptop to test the limits of the AirPort range.

crafty

The picture above is of a badge holder worn by Kathleen Sloan at FilKONtario a while back (you can click on the photo for a larger version). She made it herself; I'm amazed at this woman's beadwork. I always try bidding on Kathleen's beaded stuff at Interfilk auctions, but the price always shoots way above my price range.

I admire those (like Kathleen, Allison, and Michelle Bottorff who made the beaded UT figures I mentioned earlier) who have the skill and patience to do crafts like this.

The last piece of needlework I did was the blanket I started crocheting for Sara when I heard that Ruth was pregnant for the first time. I guess I must have been so overwhelmed by astonishment that I was going to be an aunt that my enthusiasm overcame all rational thought.

By the time I realized what I had gotten myself into (i.e. about five stitches into the project), it was too late to back out...Ruth was all excited about the blanket. It seemed to take me ages to crochet that thing; I took it everywhere with me, even when we went winter cottaging with Ruth and Kaarel.

It was kind of fun working on it at first. Part of me could see the appeal of a longterm project like that; you were never at a loss about what to do with your hands, you could multitask while watching television, it was kind of cool to see the final product slowly emerge over time. But wow, emphasis on the "slowly"!

My blanket ended more the size of an over-sized handkerchief than a real child's blanket, but Ruth was thrilled with it, just the same. I even found a "Made with love from your aunt" label to sew into the corner. It's not the greatest piece of crochetwork and some of the stitches are bunched and crooked, but it was definitely a work of love. :-)

I had originally planned to sew one for all my other nieces and nephews, but that pipe dream went out the window pretty fast (i.e. halfway through Sara's blanket).

So now I'm just waiting for the day when Sara and Annie are digging through old boxes and come across the blanket, and Ruth explains that their Auntie Debbie crocheted a blanket for Sara and not Annie. Maybe the ensuing guilt will spur me to pick up my crochet needles again. Or maybe by the time my nephew/nieces start having kids, the memories of my first blanket experience will have faded enough that I'll start thinking, "Hey, that wasn't so bad. Maybe it's time to try crocheting again..."

Or maybe I'll just buy them some nice obnoxious percussion toys instead. :-)





Saw "Fiddler on the Roof" last night for the first time (thanks to Luisa for lending me the video!). I can't believe I didn't see this movie before! It was wonderful!! Really enjoyed the music, the romance, the characters. Somewhat darker than I expected; some of the scenes deals with anti-Semitism because of the setting of a Jewish village in Czarist Russia...but that just made me enjoy the film more.

I was surprised to Michael Glaser in the movie; I kept expecting Hutch to appear. Topol and Rosalind Harris were great.

Jeff would have hated this movie. :-)

I keep forgetting to post the URL to my new column on Writing-World.com, "Press Kit: The Author's Guide To Self-Promotion". Do check it out if you have a chance.

Going to the cottage today, yay! I'll be going up with JBR.

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Today's Blatherpics:

Today's pics are from FilKONtario a while back.

	The gorgeous beaded badge holder that Kathleen made. Click on the picture at the top of the page to see a larger version.
	Jodi and Allison.
	Eric and Dave comfort me as I wait in the lobby of the FKO hotel, unable to find Allison and Jodi on the last day of the convention so I could say good-bye to them. Photo by Ju.

passport

Ruth and ScottM came over last night to watch Manhattan on our DVD player. We ordered in Swiss Chalet, and Scott brought over something called halvah for dessert, which is a Middle Eastern confection made from sesame seeds and honey. Fun movie. Yummy halvah.

I went running just before they arrived, out to Coronation Park and back. It felt like a tougher run than usual even though I've done the distance before, possibly because it was warmer. Or maybe it was all the popcorn I ate with Ruth the night before (she came over Monday night to hang out :-)). Should be interesting to see how much tougher the run is in the full summer heat!

In any case, I've decided to stick to my current running distance for the next couple weeks instead of continuing to push it further every time. According to my pedometer, it's about a 3.5 mile route, and I do it in about an hour (walking at the beginning and at the end for warm-up and cool-down, some stretching, running in the middle). I'm still the slowest runner in the world, but that suits me fine. So far, this running experience hasn't been anything like my first foray into running ten years ago (when I quit after only a few weeks because of knee pains).

I applied for a passport renewal this morning since my passport expires next month. The passport application process has changed somewhat since I last renewed, obviously because of the Sept.11 attacks. The application is longer, for instance, and it takes a minimum of two weeks to get your new passport instead of same-day processing. I'll be picking mine up the day before I leave for Marcon.

When I arrived 20 minutes before the passport office opened this morning, there was already a big line-up ahead of me. I came prepared with my MP3 player (loaded with a mixture of Ron Hawkins, Hawksley Workman, and XTC) and a book (Animist by Eve Forward, a gift from Michelle).

I hate being stuck in a line-up with nothing to do. In fact, I think I'm going to add this to my list of Official Peeves on my personal homepage. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that once the office opened at 8 am, I only had to wait about fifteen minutes before it was my turn.

I have to admit that I breathed a sigh of relief when the woman behind the counter stamped my documents after checking them; I haven't had much luck with bureaucracy lately. Hopefully the CCRA will be as satisfied with my audit documents as well. :-)

Today's Blatherpic:

The photo at the top of today's Blathering is of doll that my father brought from Japan for Sara or Annie. She even had real cotton underwear (yes, I looked)!

birthday

It's my Mom's birthday today; she would have been 65. It's hard to imagine her being that age (she died from cancer thirteen years ago). In my mind's eye, I imagine her being exactly the same, just with a little more grey in her hair.

I wonder if Mom ever felt ripped off, having her birthday and Mother's Day (which is this Sunday) so close together? We didn't really appreciate her back then; she did all the housecleaning and cooking for the family, except for those rare special occasions. like her birthday and Mother's Day, when she got to sit back and watch us making a huge fuss over something she did on a daily basis.

For the first few years after Mom died, my strongest memories of her were the images I remembered from the hospital, of her lying in her blue hospital gown, mouth half-open, eyes open but staring into space.

I remember how once, when I thought she had been lost in her own morphine-induced dream world for weeks, I had whispered in her ear just for the heck of it, "Mom, can you hear me? If you can hear me, blink your eyes". We had all been taking turns sitting by her side reading to her, talking to her, staring out the hospital window at the snow.

We had a ghetto blaster softly playing Mom's favourite music; someone had told us that the hearing is the last thing to go in cases like my Mom's, but I had strong doubts that my Mom was aware of anything in those last weeks.

Which was why I was so shocked when, in response to my question, my Mom deliberately blinked her eyes once. Not just blinked, but squeezed them shut very hard and then opened them wide again, as if to make very sure that I couldn't mistake it for a coincidence.

And then I was horrified, struck by the realization that my Mom had probably been aware of everything that had been going on around her this entire time these past weeks, aware of the pain in her body and of the fluids building up in her lungs as she struggled to keep breathing, aware that she was dying.





I talked to her a lot more after that, but she never responded to anything else again. Just that one blink, and that was it. I had nightmares a lot back then and after she died, mainly focussed on that one acknowledgement of awareness, that last heartbreaking attempt to communicate ("I'm still here!") before she finally faded away.

It's a strange experience for me as I browse through old family albums, seeing Mom as a young girl. At my age, Mom had already moved away from her home country to marry someone she had never met and had had three children.

It took many years, but my happier memories of Mom have came back, memories of how she sounded when she laughed, how comforting her cool hand was on my forehead when I was sick, how she used to tell me stories from Japan. I want to remember her the way she would have wanted to be remembered.

If Mom was alive today, I would have liked to take her out to lunch, maybe to Fune, and ask her all the questions I've been wondering about as an adult: What was her childhood in Japan like? What was it like coming here? Had she been happy? Did she harbour secret regrets? I just wish I had grown up enough before she died to get to know her better, if that makes any sense at all.

(Today's entry is part of an On Display collab. Topic: "Moving on/moving away".)

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My audit paper-digging is going pretty well, considering how innately disorganized I am and the fact that I handed over most Inkspot-related papers to Xlibris when they acquired Inkspot. I'm also grateful to old Inkspot helpers who still had their invoices from that time!

I'm really missing my writing. :-(

Hopefully the papers I drop off at my tax lawyer's later this week will be enough to make the CCRA happy, and I can get on with my life.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Mom cooking in the kitchen when I was five months old.
	Ruth, me and Jim.
	Sara demonstrating her climbing abilities on Sunday. She can climb pretty much anything these days. (That's Andy in the background)