etc.

Results…: “
You’re not Coffee, you’re Tea!

What Kind of Coffee are You?
brought to you by Quizilla” i do a lot of these quizzes and I hardly ever (never) post the results. this i had to post because it’s hilarious how true it is!

if i had the ability to burn CDs (in-house), i’d take part in this CD swap. sign-ups close July 9th.

Here’s what I’m thinking: I’m thinking it would be really nice if there was a Swappingtons for yarn. If you haven’t used Swappingtons (brought to you by the same good people who gave us Diaryland and NotifyList), it’s an online trading space where you register, list all the books/CDs/DVDs/Games you’d like to swap, assign a point value to each item, and other registered users make you offers on your items. You get points by sending stuff out and you use your points to make offers and receive items back. I’m thinking a Swappingtons for yarn would be a very good thing. If such a beast already exists, tell us about it, would you?

And, as you can see, I’ve already tired of all those lines and cubes. I was kidding myself when I thought I could live with a visually-structured/stimulating Web space. You know it.

look! it’s a coffee shop/yarn store in Portland. why is this important? because it’s a silly little dream of mine to one day open a tea shop/yarn store/bookstore and it’s nice to see this sort of multi-venture in action (albeit proffering the wrong beverage).

The mister got his hands on a couple of advanced-screening passes for this film, so we saw it before all the hype and critical-acclaim poured in. And I’m glad we did, because if we didn’t, I might have suffered over-inflated expectations, as I often do. I loved this film. Much more than the first, which I thought suffered terribly from Kirsten Dunst’s over-wrought performance and overall whinyness. It’s a wonderful story (thanks, Michael Chabon. Oh I know there were others, but my thanks go to Mike), great human appeal, excellent action sequences, and even the promise of more. I’ll probably see it again before it leaves the cinemas.

Feast of St. Irenaeus today. Born 125, died 202, credited with bringing the faith to the unenlightened and righting the wrongs of gnosticism, lived in Asia minor, remains destroyed by Calvinists in 1562, no relics remain.

Today has been a day of minor victories. I finished going through the proofs for the little 2-page article due on Wednesday, successfully filling in all manner of minor errors and completing incomplete citations (which, I swear, were in the document when I sent it to the editors, but evaporated somewhere in the cyber-ether between my outbox and their inbox). I also typed this very domain name, in full, no backspaces, all in one go, without looking down. You see, I never did learn to type the way one is supposed to type, you know A-S-D-F-G-F and all that. When the typing lessons came around in school (did they come around? I can’t actually remember), I balked at the notion, because why would I ever need proper keyboarding skills? Then when keyboards became a staple of daily life (school, work, otherwise), I garbled together a little typing system that I became comfortable with and has stayed with me ever since, essentially wrecking all likelihood of ever successfully learning the proper way to type through countless online tutorials and cutesy Windows games. I gave up trying about 6 years ago when I realized that my own slapdash schema was serving me well, I could type pretty speedily and I rarely needed to look down at the keyboard anymore. There is always, however, the rare word or phrase that causes me to sweep my eyes over my keyboard, and this domain name has always been one of them (something about the hyphen, perhaps), until today, that is, when I typed it in full with nary a glance away from my monitor. Minor victories deserve celebration, if in the most minor of ways.

Out of the blue, I find myself with a little list of writing/speaking/teaching commitments. This is that list, with due dates:

• proofs on article – June 30
• workshop description – July 4
• talk on fiction, fantasy & the Middle Ages – July 14
• 2 book reviews – July 15
• short article – September 15
• online workshop – begins October 14

.

It’s not a particularly formidable list, but the fact that I haven’t done a substantial amount of work on any single item has me feeling a bit angst-ridden. I’ve reached a certain comfort level with being a last-minute worker, but I willingly admit that so many converging (and approaching) deadlines set my stomach aflutter.

A much more interesting list is the list of things I’ve done over the past week. This is that list:

• spent a goodly amount of relax-time on our new deck.
• enjoyed the first annual Vintagefest, a festival of all things vintage in our neighbourhood. Antique dealers and junkists set out tables on Queen Street to showcase their wares, proud car-owners had an excuse to line-up their 50s chevys on the street, and we even sat through a delightfully amateur fashion show for, what else, vintage clothing. I love neighbourhood festivals.
• went to the library twice and walked away with three books each time. Not interesting in and of itself but it did call to mind what an inefficient and ambitious book-browser I am, which in turn reminded me of why I really need to carry my lists of to-reads with me at all times.
• had drinks and supper with an old friend who I haven’t seen in 11 years, and her husband. I enjoy old friends (and their husbands).
• finished knitting a bucket hat for my mum (Mission Falls 1824 Cotton in Maize #209, the yellow yarn pictured here).

A little film that I caught on TMN the other day and boy, am I glad I did. It’s based on the true story of “the largest one-man bank fraud in Canadian history” and Philip Seymour Hoffman proves yet again that there isn’t a character he can’t play. Dan Mahowny was a branch manager in one of Canada’s top 5 banks in the late 1970s/early 1980s and, by all accounts, he was an industrious worker and an exemplary banker, only he had a little gambling problem that no one knew about. He used his position to creatively embezzle funds from various big-credit accounts and even managed to set up a few for imaginary customers. The film portrays Mahowny in a very sympathetic light, playing up his illness more than the fraud he managed to get away with for so long. Philip Seymour Hoffman has made his way on to my top-5 list.

It’s a real wonder that it took me so long to see this film, given that the first two T films are amongst my favourite in this ever-popular genre. I’d heard mediocre things about the movie, but I enjoyed it so much that I watched it twice in 2 days. It’s got some good action sequences, and characters that I’m happy I’ll see again (T4?), but the one big negative for me was the leather-suited, tight-bodied, girl-villain terminator that was all facade and no substance (she must have had about 2 lines in the film). I’d like a more formidable bad-terminator next time, please.

Look, pictures! Of yarn-flavoured garage sale haul, some other recent yarn purchases, and of our adorable nephew. Also, I just finished seaming the poncho and am unsure of whether to fringe it or not, given that it’s a lot bigger (& longer) than I thought it would be. Pictures of that soon too, once the mister gets home and agrees to photograph me in it.