poll: tearjerker movies?

Both Jeff and I had a wonderful unproductive day yesterday, and I successfully met all my objectives: napped, played the harp, took a bubble bath, etc.

I also updated My Life In A Nutshell (my semi-autobiographical comic) as well as converting it to Movable Type. I'm anxious to get my comic self moved from her corporate life back to freelancing in Toronto so I can get the storyline caught up to my current life. Doing the comic in a dot-com environment was fun and good therapy for a while, but I confess I've lost interest in rehashing all that (probably a good sign) and want to move onto other topics.

I've been practising the harp in prep for playing at Larkin's and Rick's wedding, and I've also been working on a song to perform with my other sister-in-law (whose name is also Debbie :-)) at the wedding ceremony (which inspired me to ask that love song poll question).



Jeff and I watched One Night At McCool's last night, which we both enjoyed more than we expected. I was so used to seeing Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movie, though, that it was bizarre to see her trampy character in the McCool's movie. Thanks to Scott for lending the movie! We still have Blade and Magnolia to watch. Several friends have warned me to have kleenex handy when watching Magnolia.

Which brings me to my next poll question:

Do you cry at movies? What are your favourite tearjerker movies?

Do you feel self-conscious about crying at movies? Are you aware when the movie producers are manipulating your emotions? What kinds of things make you cry at movies? Or television shows? Do you ever cry during tv commercials (I am ashamed to admit I do)? If so, which ones?

Please answer in Blatherchat.

A belated happy birthday to Dave Weingart, who turned 40 on March 1st!

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Luis Garcia (when he was part of Ookla The Mok) about to record his "Teenybopper Love" part at Allison's.
	Scott Snyder and Paul Kwinn at some convention holding samples of Scott's home-brewed "Paul Kwinn No-Ose Ale" (I think that's what it was called).
	I took this photo of some filk friends years ago. From left to right: Adam English, Luis Garcia, Beckett Gladney, Jodi, Allison, Paul Kwinn, Mark Osier. I had told everyone to make a weird face.

skating

Busy day yesterday.

My dad's feeling much better so asked if he could be driven home (thanks for the good thoughts, everyone!). He has more tests this week; we're keeping our fingers crossed. After driving him back out to Bramalea, Jeff and I drove back to Toronto to visit with Alison and JeffL, or rather to meet their one month old son, Kye. Kye's a sweetie, and let me hold him without screaming. In fact, JeffL taught me how to stick my little finger into Kye's mouth (after I had washed my hands, of course) to soothe him when he got cranky.

At first it was really bizarre, this tiny baby sucking on my little finger as if his life depended on it (and as JeffL predicted, Kye stopped whimpering immediately). And wow, powerful sucking reflexes for such a wee guy! And then it went from bizarre to cute, though I did feel sorry for Kye...he wasn't going to get any satisfaction out of my finger no matter how hard he sucked, after all. But it seemed to do the trick, and he dozed off in my arms. Awwww....

Next we dropped by Andy's and Christine's place briefly to drop off some cables that Andy needed. Christine has been going through a very rough time recently, undergoing chemotherapy and radiation cancer treatments. The follow-up appointment she had on Tuesday seems hopeful (i.e. it looks like the tumour is gone), but we're waiting for the MRI test results.





We went skating with Annie, Sara and Kaarel after that, in a Forest Hill indoor arena. The original plan had been to go skiing, but the weather forecast had been gloomy, so we opted for skating instead. The rink was smoother and therefore more slippery than the one at Deerhurst, so I spent the first bit clinging to the sides of the rink, just as I had when I was a little kid.

Encouraged by Sara, however (and the fact that she kept pushing me from behind, see photo below), I started loosening up and started to have some fun skating around. Sara and Annie both love skating. Sara's starting to experiment with more difficult moves, while Annie's still content with shuffling across the ice without falling down. I was surprised by how well Jeff skated; I'd forgotten he used to play hockey a lot...like our skiing experience, he tended to spend most of his time moving backwards so he could coach Sara. :-)

After skating, Jeff and I went to Fune for Bryan Fullerton's birthday dinner. I had what's become my "usual"...edamame, shiitake mushrooms, steamed rice, salmon sashimi, tobiko with quail's egg. Yum. The others went to play pool afterwards, but by this time I was so burned out I needed to go home and crash.

Today is a much-needed "veg at home" day. I plan to do a lot of highly productive napping, reading, snoozing, with possible interludes of harp-playing and songwriting. And a really long bath with lots of bubbles. <happy sigh>





Hey, I turn 40 this month! My birthday's on March 29th (so is Katy Dröge's, as I recall).

My brother-in-law Kaarel had a funny age anecdote recently. Apparently he was with Annie and Sara, and Annie kept saying something over and over again. He told Annie that she sounded like a broken record, and Sara asked, "What's a record?"

:-)

Other news and updates:

The next version of Movable Type will be released very soon, yay!

My second Muse's Muse column is up now ("Songwriting Music Theory 101"). Topic: The Musical Staff.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Sara and Annie at the skating rink.
	Alison and Kye.
	Sara pushing me from behind on the skating rink.
	At Bryan Fullerton's birthday dinner.

jeffb leaves

I've added a search capability to Blatherings, if you haven't noticed already. Feel free to test it out! You can find the search input field in the left-hand navigation column; it will search in all years except for 1999. I've moved over all my archives to Movable Type except for 1999; hope to finish that by the end of this weekend.

JeffB left early this morning to head back to California. We had fun hanging out yesterday. Activities included:

- Lounging about at the apartment in the morning and doing some musicstuff. JeffB and I are going to collaborate on a song, which will be fun.

- Visiting Steve's Music on Queen Street. Snooped around the recording equipment area, and I picked Jeff's brain about home recording equipment. The people at Steve's seemed to like Jeff a lot, and were impressed that he worked at eMagic (hey, I forgot to mention that JeffB gave me a very cool eMagic laptop case!). I picked up some new guitar strings (D'Addario Phosphor Bronze X-Light).

- Dropped by several shops along Queen Street including Acme Surplus. Acme is an amazing store with bins full of objects that lean towards electronics but also include (at least yesterday; the contents tend to change over time) things like mini disco balls on chains with clips, glass tubing, surgical masks, keyboards, sheets of coloured plastic, empty padded jewellry cases, night lights, condom holders, harmony balls, glass petri dishes.





- Browsed Pages and Chapters bookstores.

- Had lunch at Milestones. Both of us had my favourite meal there, Maple Cider Salmon Salad. I should probably order something else eventually at that restaurant, but I love their salmon salad so much that it seems pointless to try anything else.

- Walked to Yonge Street and checked out HMV. JeffB bought a CD for Jeff and me: Emmylou Harris's "Wrecking Ball". Thank you, Jeff!! :-)

- Snow! Lots of Toronto snow fell yesterday, will enhanced JeffB's Canadian experience, I'm sure.

- Hanging out with Jodi and Allison in Richmond Hill. We went to the Pickle Barrel then back to Allison's place. Lots of musicstuff and talking...we all had a ton of fun :-). We played all our new stuff for JeffB that he hadn't heard before, and he played a bunch of gorgeous instrumental stuff. Allison also played us a Great Big Sea song she thought we could learn for FilKONtario...she's asked me to learn some pennywhistle for it, which will be a ton of fun.





- After UT practice, JeffB and I headed back home. I was dead tired so ended up falling asleep on the couch while JeffB and Jeff did musicstuff (my Jeff actually played on the guitar! first time in a LOOONG time) and talked. Eventually I staggered off to bed.

Jeff and I really enjoyed JeffB's visit, and we're hoping that Maya can make the trek out here sometime so the four of us can hang out (or maybe we'll be able to make it out there someday).

My dad seems to be doing ok (largely due to the expert care of Sara and Annie, I'm sure :-)). He's coming to stay with us for a couple of days starting tomorrow.

I have an cartoon illustration plus a 1000-wd article to write and submit today, so I'd better stop Blathering and get to work. :-)

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Jeff Bohnhoff playing Gwyneth Paltrow.
	Jeff and Jeff talking.
	Jeff at our Urban Tapestry practice at Allison's place last night.

jeff bohnhoff visit

My Dad's at my sister's, and is doing well. Sara and Annie are getting a kick out of taking care of their Grandpa. When Jeff and I dropped him off at my sister's yesterday, Annie immediately went into professional nursemode and got a kleenex box and a wastepaper basket, positioning them carefully near my Dad. The wastepaper basket was in case he had to throw up. :-) Ruth reports that he slept much of yesterday.

Jeff Bohnhoff is here! JeffB, Jeff and I had dinner at Babur, an Indian place on Queen Street. I knew my Jeff would like JeffB, but I didn't realize how much of a tech-head JeffB is; he and I usually only talked in a filk/music context. I was highly amused last night; it was clear to me that I could have walked away during part of last night's the conversation and the two Jeffs would barely notice. :-)

After dinner, JeffB did some guitarstuff, yay! He is one of the most amazing guitarists I know, and I could listen to him play for hours. My Jeff was doing phone tech support for his Mom; after he got off the phone, we watched the Toronto episode of the Simpsons (which our friend Ray had kindly taped for us). I find it funny that so much media hype was made of this episode even though Toronto was only mentioned in the last five minutes or so. But the Toronto- and Canadian- jokes were pretty funny. I crashed immediately afterwards (didn't get much sleep the previous night, after all); the Jeffs stayed up for a while longer talking.

JeffB and I are going up to Richmond Hill tonight to see Allison and Jodi. We haven't decided what we're going to do today...probably a mixture of some sightseeing, musicstuff and just generally hanging out. Maybe even collaborate on a song (we started talking about it last night; I'm excited about this!).

Guest Blather: Jeff Bohnhoff

Well, here I am at Jeff and Debbie's place in Toronto. They have the most incredible apartment downtown, within walking distance of anything you might want to do. Debbie and I have spoken in the past about their place, but I didn't realize how cool it was until I saw it for myself.

As always, Debbie has been a fantastic host ( a hilarious combination of attentiveness and total angst that she's somehow failing to be a good host). If I try to lift a finger to help, I have to battle with her to let me do it. It's quite fun actually :-).

Tonight we're going to an Urban Tapestry rehearsal. I'm really looking forward to it. Those of you who know Debbie in the filk music community know how wonderful they are. The rest of you would be doing yourselves a favor by getting their CD "Myths and Urban Legends". It has some very touchingly beautiful songs, and lots of really funny material. Debbie will be very embarassed that I said this, but too bad, she told me I could write whatever I want.

I've really enjoyed meeting her Jeff. In one sense I've felt like I know him from reading Blatherings, but in person it's been fun talking with him. I realize how similar we are in many ways. We both have ferociously multi-talented wives who are both writers and musicians. We both have jobs in the tech industry, but in school studied other subjects (he has a Masters in philosophy, I have a degree in anthropology). We like a lot of the same music, and seem to have the same sense of humor. I wish that we didn't live so far apart :-(.

I fly home early tomorrow (which is good, it's been a long business trip). I do wish I could spend a bit more time seeing Toronto. I think Maya and I will have to come back for a purely social visit soon.

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Today's Blatherpic:

JeffB playing my guitar. With any luck, some of his guitar playing skills will be left behind for me!

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hospital again

(Augh! Apologies for the too-wide formatting of my archived individual entries. I haven't been able to figure out what's causing that yet and haven't much time until the end of the week. If anyone sees the problem, please do let me know, thanks!)

Well, we're back to "wait and see" mode again with my Dad. As I mentioned in an earlier Blatherings today, we ended up in the emergency ward of the Peel Memorial Hospital again last night. This time, however, he ended up in the waiting room most of the time because the preliminary triage assessment didn't warrant immediate attention.

While I understand this, it was also tough watching my Dad feel so ill, barely able to walk on his own because of the nausea, and have to wait in an uncomfortable hospital waiting room for over six hours, holding a plastic bed pan in his lap in case he needed to throw up. My understanding is that he would have been seen sooner except that there were so many emergency admissions last night that they eventually had to see him in the "holding area" rather than give him a temporary cot in the regular emergency unit.

About 2 a.m., he was able to lie down across several chairs, with a coat cushioning his head. I watched over him and our stuff, trying to stay awake. Jeff stayed around until about 2, but then I forced him to go home and get some sleep because I didn't want to worry about him dozing off on the drive home.

By the time my Dad was examined by a doctor at around 3 a.m., he and I were both bone-weary. The doctor (who also looked pretty tired) said that my dad was better off going home for a few hours and coming back for a specialist appointment than being checked into the hospital. We took a cab back to Dad's house, and we both crashed almost immediately. I slept in Jim's old room.

Jeff came to pick us up at the hospital after Dad's appointment the next day, drove Dad to his house to pack, then we dropped him off at my sister's, where he'll be staying for a few days. The current plan is for Dad to come here on Friday. We didn't learn anything new at the specialist appointment this morning, but several tests did get moved up in schedule, including a liver ultrasound scan.

Things are stable enough that I called Jeff Bohnhoff and told him to feel free to come over, though I might be pretty braindead tonight. We're getting together with Allison and Jodi tomorrow.

Really looking forward to seeing Jeff! Hopefully I can get him to do a Guest Blathering tomorrow.

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Today's Blatherpic is a photo I took during the birthday party we had for Annie on Sunday night, before we got the call from my Dad. This is Barbie's companion, Ken. Boy, has Ken ever changed since my Ken days. Note the trendy haircut, the Backstreet Boy look.