June 25, 2007
Perfect Day
For me, today really was the best way to spend a day. After brunch, afternoon was spent lazing. I spent a good while reading in a hammock. I baked scones and served a tea party on the porch (with my own strawberry jam, which had successfully set!). We had a bbq tonight with Jennie and Curtis, with Stu-made burgers, my very favourite watermelon feta salad, and a green salad from the garden. Topped off with an ice cream cake. Dreams come true. I’m off to have a bath now, and so far twenty-eight is grand!
June 24, 2007
Assemblage
We get all celebratory come June, and today is my birthday. I made a project of keeping it quiet this year, which I thought would be somewhat mature of me and worthy of a woman of twenty-eight years. And so this weekend has been easy and sunshine, and full of the things we like best. We’re just back from brunch and are set for bbq tonight. And with all our celebrations, we’ve got a regular shrine going on at our house. A lovely assemblage of cards here, as well as the two splendid flower arrangements which were such a surprise. The tall, gorgeous wild one was courtesy of my sister, and the other in the magnificent vase was from Bronwyn. They’re not normally side by side, and it’s rather glorious to have flowers all around the house. In none floral news, I received so many lovely things (incl. a Miffy umbrella!), but one in particular I’ve got my nose stuck in. Stuart got me A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. But then that much goodness is certainly overwhelming, and I have to put it down for a breath every moment or two.
June 20, 2007
I've got a bucket of berries
We’ve been terribly busy around here of late, mostly with celebrating whether it be our anniversary, fathers, or my cousin’s upcoming nuptials. Last night Stu and I had dinner out at Kensington Kitchen, whose patio is entirely not overrated. We were in Peterborough for the weekend where fun was had, and we went strawberry picking with my dad on Sunday. Indeed, I had a bucket of berries and if all goes well (fingers crossed), by this time tomorrow I should have four tubs of jam. How exciting! I am obsessed with learning how to preserve, and one day I’ll have to tell you the story of of how Pickle Me This got its name. Among other stories to be told within the next few days. I’m bursting with them, but I just haven’t had the time. Things are promising to wind down soon, and this weekend we’ve got on nothing. Which is perfect.
Just finished reading Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland, and I’ll review it here tomorrow. A little poetic action, also reading It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst, and loving it– strikes me as early Nora Ephron in verse. And tonight, a page or two before I fall asleep, I will begin Making it Up by Penelope Lively, who I’ve never failed to love. I’m looking quite forward to that.
The garden is desperate for weeding.
May 27, 2007
Spins
While last weekend was splendidly slow, this one spun so fast that it is nearly finished just as soon as it began. Friday we spent devoted to gardening. The results as follows, so that we could have a backyard almost fit to sit in when Chris and Andrea came over for a bbq Saturday night. Big big burgers, super saladas, and a perfect peach pie. Fun was had, and continued right into today, as Britt, Jennie and Deep came for brunch. Delicacies included banana scones fresh from the oven, fresh fruit, pastries, and Stuart whipping up eggs and bacon on the grill. After we walked down to Trinity Bellwoods to let the dog play, and to snap obligatory photos of the three of us, an Abbey Road-inspired shot, and later Jennie checks out the Murdermobile, and lives to tell the tale. 
May 21, 2007
Turkey Lurkey
We’ve had such a boring long weekend– splendidly boring! The sun shone every day and I finished reading two books, and read the newspaper, and magazines, wrote most of a story, and blogged-a-rama. I spent a lot of time supine, we let the house get filthy, the hours ticked by so slowly. Though I imagine we might have managed as much fun as this away at a cottage up north, at least we never had to sit in traffic. Wonderful Kensington shop on Saturday and empanadas for lunch. Yesterday we went shopping for shoes, purses, wraps, shirts and ties from Bronwyn’s wedding. I also spent $160 on make-up, which I think qualifies me as an officially grown-up woman, or at least a very stupid girl. A kind of strange indulgence, considering how often I wear make-up, but I suppose then it will last a long time. And I won’t ruin Bronwyn’s wedding photos with sallowness. Finally, today we went to Riverdale Farm with Jennie– our inaugural trip of the 2007 season. I do love that place, and we had a very lovely afternoon.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
May 11, 2007
Friday morning
Zadie Smith has a short story in The New Yorker. They’re going on about novel first lines over at The Guardian Books Blog; I was pleased that my personal favourite was noted (“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”). And we’re away to Peterborough this weekend (the ultimate tourist destination). It’s a long weekend too, because we made it that way. Tra-la.
Oh, and log on now to Diggerland.com.
May 7, 2007
Park Life
It is hard to reconcile the inherent rubbishness of the world with weekends like this one. Oh weekends, you are the one thing that makes me pleased to be back in the workaday life. Though as a student/housewife every day was the weekend, that sort of took away the very point of it. And this weekend was extremely pointful. We went out for sushi and ice cream Friday night with Erica and Alex, which was splendid. Saturday we did our Kensington shop, which was a sweet summer dream. Saturday afternoon was a bike ride to High Park where we sprawled on our blanket all afternoon, ate strawberries, read books, and later I climbed a tree. The park was fullsville but the wonderful thing about parks is that we all share that wonderful space. It really was splendid, and nice to get the bikes out of the garage for the first time all season. Today Stuart was doing boyish things with other boyish types, and I was writing writing. The marvelous Natalie Bay came for supper, which was great. She’s just come back from Japan and brought us omiyage– pnis shaped cookies. I’d post a picture, but this is not that sort of blog.
I’m adjusting to my new life, and so reading/blogging have been slow of late. Though I’m working on two books at the moment: 28 Stories of Aids in Africa by Stephanie Nolen, and The Ladies Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (and there ain’t a better book for a summer’s day).
