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puddlelilies.com / proofreading negates the immediacy of feeling

Month: April 2010

  • Recently read: Wolf Hall (finally; good) and Year of the Flood (also good). Reading these took a lot of time but is no excuse for neglecting my blog. Wolf Hall is thick and meaty and by the end I was almost able to get over the whole thing where almost every “he” written refers to the protagonist, no matter the subject immediately preceding– you know, how it’s supposed to work and how we’re taught. And I didn’t dislike that the author did this: it’s just new to me and I had to get used to it, is all.

    Year of the Flood is a Margaret Atwood-constructed novel, with charming poetry at the start of each section. This reminded me of Alias Grace, which is a novel I enjoy returning to. YotF, however, got a bit intense and stressful-survivory, e.g. The characters having to look after themselves after the end of civilization. I would have appreciated this on a more intellectual level, if I didn’t enjoy the subject very much, better if I wasn’t sick while reading it. On the entertainment level on which I read it, I was just scared and paranoid by the end.

  • I’m in Vancouver this weekend to watch “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat”, with Julie (“fashion Julie”). When she asked me to, she says, it wasn’t so much whether I wanted to go, it was to inform me of the dates and to find out when I would be able to go. That I would be attending was just assumed. This is pretty much how I saw it too.

    Getting here yesterday was pretty easy. Usually on the night before I travel I am excited or antsy, but Thursday night I conked out just after ten p.m., and slept right through, instead of waking up every hour, for example, worried that my alarm was still set. This could have been because I was catching a later ferry than the 9 and so didn’t have to get moving as quick. I actually got up pretty early for a day where I didn’t have to be somewhere by eight o’clock and had time enough for a hearty breakfast (scrambled egg, english muffin, breakfast burrito*).

    Food wasn’t a problem yesterday. As soon as I found Julie we headed downtown and stuffed ourselved with chicken tenders and fancy lemonade (not “fancy” as in “spiked” but mixed with sugary syrups and strawberries). And then we wasted some time at Starbucks, filling us up even more. So Full– and complainey about it too, for little while afterwards.

    I smiled through most of “Joseph.” As suspected, we knew all the words. I forgot about the children’s chorus! And when the brothers brought out their sheep, the sheep were stuffed versions of the counting sheep from the matress ads. And when Joseph was traveling to Egypt and they’re passing direction signs (e.g. Egypt this way, 250 km), one of the signs read “” and then there was a skiier traveling in the opposite direction of Joseph’s crew looking for directions.

    And OMG some creepy drunk guy clawed my upper arm during the bus ride home. This was after he had been nudging me and swearing (I think it was swearing: he was pretty drunk) and I had been ignoring him. “Please don’t touch me,” I suggested to him, which sounds a bit wussy as I type it here, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t scared or anything, just mildly annoyed (personal space, dude, also, don’t touch me.) We got off the bus right then because it was our stop and so I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. But ew.

    *this is a normal frozen burrito eaten at breakfst time

  • I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Out of town twice in two weeks, which is a lot for me. I’m to Vancouver this weekend to watch Joseph with Julie. (!) I’m just waiting, at this moment, for the ferry to dock so I can run run run and get a seat on the bus. It’s my favorite part. Also favorite is that I can buy a daypass for the bus at the giftshop on the ferry. Quite civilized.

  • If you were wondering, I was brave on Friday because I drove mum’s van to Nanaimo from Duncan.  This was brave because I don’t like driving, and then brave on another level down because I haven’t driven around Nanaimo very much.  Or at all.  Well, once in 1999 maybe.  And that I “don’t like” driving doesn’t really sound like a good excuse, as once I start I rather don’t mind.  It’s more that I become overly anxious when the prospect of driving is before me.  But this was a volunteer mission.  I visited Naomi to see her in a play.  And it all went well, since things I am anxious about usually turn out that way.  I even got to drive Naomi around in a helpful manner, to look at shoes.  I suppose, and I didn’t think of this until I got home and the whole adventure was over, I could have been More Helpful by taking her grocery shopping since she was out of food!  I’m alarmed I didn’t think of this actually, since when mum visits me with same van she almost always drives me to the supermarket.  Oh well.  Driving.

    That was Friday and Saturday that I drove.

    Today I finished reading “Makers” by Cory Doctorow.  Crazy.  I don’t want to give any of it away.  Or, you know, review it.

    I had a super-long weekend, extending to today, Tuesday.  I don’t think the five-days-off, two-days-on really works for me, though.  I almost forgot to go to dance tonight.

  • I almost remember, now, how letting a piece of writing “sit” for a few days makes it better.  I ignored my latest work just from Thursday and even just today (Monday) it doesn’t seem as sucky as I thought it was.  Just needed a little tweaking to make it tolerable, and now I’m going to ignore it for a couple more days.  And it’s so much easier to get rid of those precious paragraphs I thought were so great a few days ago.  It doesn’t fit?  It’s gone!  (Just from this version, of course, I’ll keep it in an earlier draft just in case.  I hate having twinges of memory about previously written stuff that is no longer to be found.  Granted, often I have just imagined that I wrote it down…)

    I got back from Duncan last night.  I took a day there after visiting Nanaimo due to train schedules.  Well, train “schedule” singular as it only runs once a day.  I took a long walk in the mud with my mum– that was through trees, and with the rain, there was a lot of mud.  Around behind the neighborhood through to a huge new development full of huge new houses.  Huge, puffy houses.  I am alternately disgusted that the trees are gone, and craving one of my own.  (These examples, however, were a little too huge.)

    I also read the Globe and Mail which makes for a pleasant day.

  • I’m in Nanaimo! Odd, yes, I suppose: it’s not my usual location. Odder still is that I drove here, despite not enjoying the driving experience at all, and despite not actually owning a vehicle. Hmm, you say to youself, Lindsie, what’s up? Well I’m here to watch Naomi perform in a play, which is important, and train and bus schedules being incredibly ackward, I had to take drastic measures and borrow my mum’s van.

    (How I got to Duncan in order to do this is another story.)

    But I’m here now and Naomi has a pretty dope pad set up. I’ll have a critical review* of the play once I’ve seen it, of course.

    *Probably not very critical.

  • I wrote a new song today:

    Elevator day! Elevator day!

    Today is… elevator day!

    I’m signing this song (in my head) because I have been taking the elevator today. Usually I take the stairs up to the fourth floor. It’s a good workout and saves electricity and etc. They pimp the stairs option a lot here*, “here” being the Health, and Healthy Living building. But the reason I like to take the stairs is because I get claustrophobic in an elevator with too many people in it. I also get motion sickness if the elevator stops more than once on its way.

    *They try to encourage us by having white boards with fun messages on them for us to read as we pass by. There’s also music sometimes. During the Olympics they were playing the Olympic soundtrack and I often felt like a champion as I climbed.

  • I got a free Starbucks last week for my birthday. I got a special coupon in the mail. I didn’t have time to get it on the actual day of my birthday, but it was just as tasty a few days later.

    It occurs to me this week, however, that whenever I get Starbucks it is free Starbucks. This is because I rarely go, and when I do I use the Starbucks cards I got as gifts or prizes or etc.

    It was fun, though, slapping that coupon down on the cashier’s counter. The cashier glared at me a little and did not offer me a birthday greeting.