Symphony Place farewell

Today's photos are from the Orkut Scrapbook Wars between me and Jeff Bohnhoff last May. Happy birthday, Jeff!

Took my new iTalk with iPod to my whistle lesson last night, and it worked like a charm. Got three tunes recorded for me to practise with, and the sound is much clearer than I expected. I was also having trouble learning a long roll, so used my digital camera to take a close-up mini-movie of my teacher's fingers as she demonstrated. I love technology. :-)



The sale of our condo closes today. We're turning in our keys, garage opener. I'm excited about finding a new place, of course, but I still can't help feel sad today; we had been living there over ten years, after all.

Some things I loved about the place:

- Bustling with action: people going to theatres and concerts. Lots of great restaurants in the area.

- Easy access to the PATH, the vast network of underground malls in Toronto.

- The security guards/concierges. We got to know each other over the years, joked around and chatted. I met some of their kids.

- The Unknown Guitarist, a fellow who regularly busks on the corner of Simcoe and King every summer, wearing a paper bag over his head.

- My office. It was small, but when I closed the door it turned into a my very private and personal cave-like haven and workspace.

- My desk, which was custom-made for the space.



- Super-convenient transportation. Easy to get on the Gardiner Expressway. Steps away from St. Andrew's subway station. Short walk from the Royal York, where I'd catch the airport shuttle.

- Being across from Roy Thompson Hall, where all kinds of interesting events would take place. We saw the Queen and the Pope across the street, for example, as well as more celebrities and musicians than I can name.

- Symphony Place (the name of our building) is small compared to most downtown high-rises, with only four units a floor. You got to know people, and it felt more like a community.

- Minutes' walk away from the lake. I loved running along the Harbourfront, watching the sailboats.

- Metro Square across the street, behind Roy Thompson Hall. I liked taking a book sometimes and sitting out on the grass in the sun, perhaps listen to one of the free concerts.



- Near lots of bookstores: Nicholas Hoare, for example, as well as David Mason Books, Chapters, Pages.

- The jacuzzi tub. I rarely used the water-jets, but I *love* soaking in a deep tub.

- Short walk to the Paramount movie complex, right beside Chapters.

- The way the late afternoon sunlight slanted across the far wall in our bedroom, changing the room into something exotic and mysterious.

- Checking the ducks' nest in the shallow pool beside Roy Thompson Hall every spring, as many others working in the area must have done as well. We were like little kids, pressing our faces against the glass, anxiously watching over those small egss, rejoicing when the fuzzy ducklings made an appearance, paddling in a line behind their parents.



- A few minutes' walk away from Metro Convention Centre, where I could check out all kinds of interesting shows and exhibits.

- The view from our window. Never got tired of it.

So I feel like an overly sentimental sap, sitting here with tears on my face and all the wonderful memories associated with our condo in Symphony Place. Just need to remind myself that although the place won't be ours anymore starting tomorrow, the memories will always be there.

And y'know, I'm looking forward to making some more with our new home, wherever that may be.

:-)

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iTalk

(Click image for bigger version.)

Hey, my sweetiepie of a husband brought me home several gifts yesterday for no reason:

-- A Moleskine music notebook. Yay, my first Moleskine! This will come in handy for transcribing tunes on the fly at Irish sessions, as well as songwriting inspirations.

-- An 8.5 x 11.75 inch 70-sheet Cambridge wirebound office pad notebook, wide-ruled. Jeff is as much of a stationery geek as I am, and I had been lusting after his Cambridge notebooks.

-- An iTalk recording thingy for my iPod! Very, very cool. I just plug it into the top of my iPod, and it's an instant recorder. Not studio sound quality, of course, but decent enough that I'll be able to record session tunes as well as Urban Tapestry practicestuff.

Many thanks to our friend Walter, who helped move stuff (yes, though most of our old condo is moved into a storage locker, there are still a few things left...hopefully we will be done today) as well as pretending to be my husband during a househunting expedition yesterday.

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moving, Stage 1

Quick note to let you all know that Jeff and I have temporarily moved into his mom's condo while we look for a house. Between moving, househunting, regular work and trying to get what's left in our old apartment ready for the movers to put into storage, it's been pretty stressful and hectic. Not surprisingly, my tendinitis is also a tad worse.

Many thanks to our friends Scott M. and Walter for helping move some stuff to Ginny's condo. Both had interesting conversations with my Talking Edna doll, though Scott's involved more entertaining epithets. Now he wants one of his own. :-)

We still only have dial-up access and only one phone line, so I won't be online as much until our DSL service kicks in (hopefully sooner than later!). Please don't send me photos or other bigger files for now, thanks.

Sort of sad to go back to the old place and see it gradually emptying of the memories and personality it accumulated over the past ten years. Yes, I do realize it will be wonderful to move into our new place when we eventually find it, but right now I'm finding the experience bittersweet.

On a much more positive note, we're now steps away from the St. Lawrence Market and two floors away from a great fitness center (accessible to all residents). Guilty of a holiday season binge, I'm now dutifully keeping track of my eating and fitness habits through FitnessJournal.com, which also shows how far I've run and walked by tracking my virtual progress across a map of the U.S.

AND though you can't see properly in the photo at the top of the page, I have a fantastic view from my new (though temporary) office set-up. We are massively grateful to Ginny for allowing us to borrow her place for a while.

Househunting is much more interesting now that I've been through the experience of the seller. I'm immediately aware, for example, of what an effect clutter has on the first impression, the amount of light, etc. So far we've checked out some houses in the Sunnylea and north Toronto area, and are also hoping to look at houses along the Danforth and Bloor West proper (apparently listings are less frequent because the areas are smaller). Wish us luck.

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moving

We'll be losing broadband access within the next few days while our services switches to our new/temporary living space, so my online contact is going to be a bit flakey while I rely on dial-up access. Please hold off sending me big files until next week, thanks. Also, please note that our regular home phone number and address will no longer be valid after this weekend.

If you need to call, please use our cellphone numbers but be aware that since I only get 150 minutes/month on my phone and need to be more frugal with these minutes while we're living in limbo, I will likely not be able to chat long. If you need to mail me something during the next few months, please ask for my temporary snailmail address. Obviously I'm only going to be giving this info out to people I know. If you DON'T have an urgent need to snailmail, please do be patient and I will send you a change-of-address notice once Jeff and I settle in a permanent living residence.

I am SO glad that I went to GAfilk this past weekend; I feel much more mentally prepared for the coming chaos in the next couple of months. Even this morning as I was feeling semi-panicked at the amount of Stuff to Do in the next few days, I took a few minutes to browse through my GAfilk pics...and going through the memories of that wonderful weekend was like the fragrance of a soothing cup of herbal tea; I could feel the smile all through me, relaxing me.



Speaking of which...Today's photos are from GAfilk. As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, I've uploaded a selection of weekend photos to my Flickr GAfilk 2005 photo page. If you'd like to see a slideshow of my GAfilk 2005 photos, click here (your browser needs to support Java).

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cookies, Flickr, househunting

Today's photos are from the past week. Some from a gaming get-together at Reid & Luisa's during the holidays, for example, where Luisa showed me how to use a cookie press.

I love miniature food, as some of you already know, so these mini-cookies appealed to me a great deal. I've already decided I have to get my own and start experimenting with different types of flavours and colours. Not all my cookies turned out; I made mutant cookies out of the ones that didn't. Ironically, they got eaten first...go figure. :-)



There's something incredibly therapeutic about cookie-making, akin to fingerpainting and sculpture and Wacom artpad doodling. Luisa and I also had an interesting discussion about crafts in general, and I'm realizing that I have a strong preference for instant gratification crafts where you can see results in one sitting rather than having to wait for things to dry so you can paint them, or multi-stage crafts. Luisa has far more patience. :-)




I'm having a lot of fun uploading extra pics to my Flickr page, by the way; feel free to check them out. Be warned that some photos can only be seen by those in my Friends & Family lists, but most are public.

My only complaint about Flickr so far is that uploading is dead slow or near impossible at peak times; I think they've underestimated their popularity. BUT at least they keep users informed, and promise to improve service in the future.

Anyway, click on any Blatherphoto today for more info about the content, or to see a bigger version.



Thanks to Martin GK for pointing me in the direction of this User Friendly cartoon. Yes, I -so- identify. :-) Jeff and I are still working our way through the special features on the extended version of Return of the King, but I've already watched the new version twice.

Forgot to mention, by the way, that my sister's book was reviewed in Maclean's magazine recently. Here's a scan of the page, for those interested; I've added it to Ruth's Web site.



My posts over the next month are likely to be sporadic since Jeff and I have started packing for our move in a couple of weeks. As I've mentioned before, we'll be living in my mom-in-law's condo while we househunt, with most of our stuff in storage. The piano movers came to take away our baby grand yesterday; the apartment already looks so much emptier without it.



Only two days before I leave for GAfilk! Jeff's going to be looking at houses while I'm gone. We were going to visit what looked like a near-perfect house today, but it got sold before we could see it. :-(

Ah well, I just need to learn some patience and trust that our future dream house IS waiting out there; we just need to find it.

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