comfort zones

For larger version, see DebbieOhi.com.

Hung out with my friend Cathy yesterday; we saw Robots at the Paramount theatre, browsed Chapters, had dinner at the Hothouse Cafe. I found the movie entertaining and even touching in parts, though the humour was often a bit toilet-oriented for my tastes and I didn't like it as much as Shrek or Ice Age. Highlights for me: the little short before the movie featuring the Ice Age squirrel as well as the new Star Wars trailer. Ok, so I know I'm probably going to be let down yet again, but I still can't help but be excited. I'm so lame. :-)

Anyway, it turns out Cathy's employer is closing its Toronto office and has invited selected employees to move out to its Calgary office, offering to pay all moving and legal expenses. Cathy was one of the chosen few and has decided to accept the offer.

I admire her courage. She's lived in the Toronto area all her life, after all, and most of her friends and family are here. Though I'll miss her a great deal (she's known me longer than anyone except for family), I can't tell you how happy I am for her. She admits it was a hard decision but told me she couldn't pass up the opportunity, didn't want to spend the rest of her life wondering about what could have been. I'm going to use my frequent flyer points to go visit her in late October so she won't be celebrating her birthday alone.

Last night over dinner, we talked about comfort zones. Everyone has them, but Cathy and I both agree on the importance of forcing oneself to step outside them from time to time, to do things that challenge and push ourselves. It's tough to overcome the temptation to stay snugly with what's safe and familiar, or at least I find it so.

But I find it worth the effort. My attitude is that even if I fail, at least I know I tried. And if I succeed, then not only do I reap the benefits, but I'm also encouraged to push myself a little further next time. I'm VERY glad that I decided to check out the Irish session at the Tranzac, for example, despite my innate shyness and unfamiliarity with the people and venue. The initial terror was definitely worth it. :-)

Speaking of sessionstuff, here are a few tunes I've memorized recently: Butcher's March (now played after Paidin O'Raifearta's as a set at the Tranzac), Connaughtman's Rambles, Munster Buttermilk. Love these tune names. :-D Here's a list of about 30 tunes I've memorized so far since December, or can at least make a decent effort at joining others playing the tune. My goal is to know over a hundred tunes by the end of the year. Keeping those all polished enough to lead in a circle is another thing entirely, of course.

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office plans and babybabble

Thanks so much for the feedback and suggestions re: my office, everyone!

In answer to my question about the magnets, Michael Pereckas wrote:

"Magnets do not normally cause problems for equipment unless the magnets are extremely strong and very nearby or the equipment is more along the lines of a sensitive magnetometer than a PC. MRI scanner? Be careful. Refrigerator magnet? Don't worry. I used to run a mass spectrometer in the same small room that housed a seven-Tesla liquid-helium-filled superconducting magnet for an NMR spectrometer without any problems. Can you erase a hard disk with a refrigerator magnet? No. With a fancy rare-earth magnet? Maybe, but unless that magnet rather exotic and too powerful to play with safely, you'd have to disassemble the drive (which contains fancy and strong rare earth magnets very near the disk platters--if you see flat, curved, and strong magnets for sale cheap, they were salvaged from hard disk service) to do it, which will break it anyway."

From Dave Alway:

"Oh, here's something handy called 'Grip-a-Strip' that I've used to advantage in the past. If you want to look at another distributor, just Google 'Grip-a-Strip'."


From Joe:

"Ooooh shelves.

Our office has giant sheets of metal painted white so they are also whiteboards. That's where we brainstorm new ideas and display drawings - magnets holding up five or six giant size architectural / engineering blueprints.

I wouldn't put the whiteboard/metal in that narrow corridor - the whole point of such a board is to display stuff and in that corridor you can only view from close up. What about having the metal whiteboard on runners in front of the shelves on the wall opposite the door? Just imagine! That entire back wall one great big metal whiteboard! (Well five panels, each from desk/counter hieght to the ceiling anyway).

Slide one panel sideways, behind another, to get at the shelves or the window behind."

From Steve:

"Our home office has a two-foot-wide shelf/counter/desk running all the way around, with shelves both above and below it. The wide shelf is 0,5 in oak plywood, supported on shelf brackets and diagonal braces. I recommend Elfa two-slot shelf brackets, which are made of steel bent into a U shape and can support amazing loads without bending.

The basic idea came from my parents' home office, which used ordinary kitchen cabinetry for the counter and base."

I also got some useful tips from my friend Walter, whom I chatted with last night at an outing to celebrate Vartan's 40th birthday. Walter had printed out my office layout that I had posted in Blatherings and Flickr yesterday afternoon, made some useful suggestions about how I might be able to get more space.

Last night I met John's and Mary's two-and-a-half month old daughter for the first time. I walked around the restaurant with her for a bit, holding her in my arms as she gazed around at the lights and colours with great interest.

Then at one point, her glance happened to wander to my face. She proceeded to stare up at me with seriousness, as if caught by surprise ("Hey, who's this STRANGER holding me?!?") and deciding whether or not to start screaming. I waited nervously, babbled at her about nothing in particular...and suddenly a big smile spread across her face.

Oh lordy, how that little smile made me melt.

Good thing she couldn't talk yet, because she could have asked me for anything at that moment and I would have said yes. I sang the Hockey Monkey song at her (very quietly, so I wouldn't be kicked out of the restaurant) and she stared at me, fascinated, her mouth making small motions as if she was trying to copy me.

I love babies. This confuses people who know about Jeff's and my decision not have children, of course, and I guess I can't blame them. But I do find babies' whole tabula rasa state immensely fascinating, and I go disgustingly cooey before the power of those tiny fingers, chubby cheeks, smiles and gurgles.

Until they need to be changed, of course, at which point I happily pass them back to their parents.

:-)

Speaking of happiness, by the way, WE GET TO SEE OUR NEW HOUSE TODAY!

(pause for a Snoopy joydance here)

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new office plans

I was excited to discover the Wandering Moleskine Project only to discover that it's been booked solid. :-( The founder told me there may be a new project starting up this fall, though, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Or maybe I'll have to start up my own.

As you may have noticed, I've updated the header to this page. I was bored of the old one, and now that I've constructed the new one in Corel Painter layers, it means I can play around with different themes, depending on my whim.

Finally got paid for a couple articles I did last year for a particular publication I likely won't want to write for again, also got a go-ahead on one of my article queries, sent out a couple more. Even got in my daily 1000 words of novel-writing yesterday. May not seem like a lot to some of you, but it's a heckuva lot more than I've been able to do lately because of tendinitis woes. Things are getting better, all around.

AND WE GET TO SEE THE NEW HOUSE AGAIN TOMORROW! It's one of our two official visits, according to our purchase agreement. Several contractors will be coming by to give estimates on renovations, but we'll also be doing some more measuring and planning.

The image above is a rough layout of my future basement office, which is twice as big as my old one. The walls marked "*" are the ones I'm currently brainstorming about. Thanks to Bryan Fullerton for sending me this marker board wall post. My ideas so far:

- Giant corkboard on one or both walls. Good for pinning up pictures, photos, doodles, quotes, etc.

- Giant sheet of metal I could use for magnets of all sorts, including fridge poetry. Not sure about the effect of all kinds of magnets on anyone carrying sensitive electrical equipment through the hallway. Anyone out there a magnet expert?

- Giant whiteboard. Not as keen on this since they tend to get messy over time, and I'd have to limit myself to whiteboard markers.

I've mostly given up on the wall mural painting idea, mainly because of the cost but also because of my lack of practical knowledge about surface prep, etc. Plus it's more of a hassle to change when I get bored with a particular image.

Anyway, suggestions and comments welcome.

And last but not least, don't forget to check out the spankin' new Web site from Graham Leathers and Peter Rempel, Stingertoons. Content includes funny stuff from Gray, comics, performance info, a trivia quiz, and a lesson on constructing Celtic knotwork.

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sick survey

I've been sick the past few days. I was actually sick with a fever the day we did some recording at Allison's earlier this week, but I knew we only had the one day opportunity so loaded up on cold medication to get through the session. Today's the first day I've felt half-human.

A survey: What kind of sick person are you? Do you like being pampered? Left alone? Do you tend to ignore your symptoms and keep working until you're REALLY sick? Or are you good about taking care of yourself?

Learned a few new tunes: Maggie in the Woods, Rakes of Mallow, Harvest Home. Here's a list of tunes I've learned so far. Discovered that the Tranzac version of Miss McLeod's Reel is different from the one I learned from my 121 Session Tunes book, so have to relearn that one. Also received an update from the Tranzac mailing list letting us know that we'll be learning The Butcher's March and Sixpenny Money at the next session, along with the sheet music for those songs.

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inspections, real estate goddesses and gingko trees

I'm pleased to report that the house inspection went fine and we signed the final papers yesterday afternoon. We take possession near the end of the May, though it sounds as if there's a chance we may get it earlier; the owner is going to let us know.

Many thanks to Walter for coming along on the house inspection so we could get his expert opinion as well. My sister was there for the first bit and got to meet our real estate agent as well as the owner.

Speaking of real estate agents, I must sing praises of our wonderful agent, Kathy Gordon of ReMax, whom we found through Parki. Kathy is Goddess of Real Estate Agents as far as both Jeff and I are concerned. She never pressured us, remained incredibly patient despite our indecision on the type and location of house prefs, was always cheerful and in good humour, worked incredibly hard for us.

Our friend Walter.

One thing I really appreciated was the fact that Kathy would point out the good AND bad points of a house when we were looking at it, warning us about potential problems. As a result, Jeff and I learned a lot about buying houses at the same time that Kathy was learning more about what we liked and didn't like even when we weren't really sure ourselves, or at least not enough to properly articulate it to her.

Kathy's unflagging sense of humour also kept our spirits up and helped take the edge off what could sometimes be a highly frustrating process. And she uses e-mail! And has a Blackberry! Much better than playing phone tag.

I would recommend her services without hesitation.

While Jeff, Walter and Roger (the house inspector) went around the house examining and poking, I measured things, like the dimensions of my future office so I could start planning the layout. We're going to raise the floor a bit to make it warmer, fill in the spaces between the ceiling joists to keep cold air from coming in, etc. I want to cover the wall space with as many bookshelves as I can.

The photo below is meant to be a "before" picture. I'll take another one six months from now. :-)

My future office!

I'm pretty excited about planning my new office, which is going to be twice as big as my old one. Right now I'm intending to make one half (the half in the photo) my writing office. The other half will be for music; I can set up my keyboard, guitarstuff. Depending on how stable the temperature ends up being in the basement, I may opt to store my harp upstairs. I'm also hoping to put a rolling storage cabinet setup in the middle of the room that also doubles as a craft/layout table. Depends if there's enough space.

I chatted a bit with the owner, who was in the house during the inspection. She is a wonderful older woman who has obviously put a lot of work and love into her house; both Jeff and I really liked her, and hope to keep in touch even after we move in.

One of the things we talked about was her garden, which was designed by Zone Six. I've posted part of the garden map at the top of the page. Here's a list of some of the plants in the original design.



Holy cow. Talk about pressure...though I enjoyed gardening when Jeff and I lived out in the country many years ago, I was never very good at it. But I'm determined to learn more. There's a Japanese maple! A dwarf lilac! (I *love* lilac) Honeysuckle! A gingko tree!

I'm pretty excited about seeing the garden after spring, when the snow isn't covering everything. And we'll have a deck! Which means we can sit outdoors on our own property! For longtime condo types with no balcony, this is going to be a welcome change. Hey, and we can get a barbecue! Yes, I know we have the Ridpath cottage, but this is going to be our very own place.



Some of you have asked why Jeff and I didn't get a bigger house, one with a guest room. Yes, it was something we were hoping for. But with the cost of houses the way they are, we found that we had to make compromises. Having a guest room wasn't as important to us as, for example, living in an area where I was able to access the TTC without too much hassle. We almost put in an offer on a townhouse with a guest room out in the West end, but it would have meant adding nearly 45 minutes to my travel time to Urban Tapestry practices, and would be at the opposite end of the city from most of our friends and family.



Other priorities included finding a place that was within walkable distance to a grocery store, coffeeshops, bookstores. A bigger home office for me. A quieter area than our old place, which was subject to nightclub noise in the evenings and on weekends. And if at all possible, a detached house rather than semi-detached.

In the end, we got most of what we wanted. Jeff and I love both the house and the neighbourhood, and I have no idea how I'm going to stand the anticipation before being able to move in:

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