Author Archives: Autumn

A Wrinkle In Geography

Just remembered something nifty that tilted my world a bit this weekend.

NDG is currently the playground of a film crew shooting a movie called Wicker Park, as you well know if you’re an NDG resident and have been rerouted, or have been forced to find somewhere else to park because your street has been taken up by Star Suites and generators and eighteen-wheeler rigs stuffed full of equipment. On Friday around five PM, my husband drove me over to the Royal Bank on the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston so I could cash a cheque and put gas in the car.

Except it wasn’t the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston when we got there. It was the corner of two other streets. There was a US Postal box on the corner, and a City of Chicago trash bin, and a bunch of US newspaper boxes strewn about. That little triangular park had a new “Keep Chicago’s Parks Clean” sign up. And my bank wasn’t my bank. It had a huge green sign both out front and over the door, and it certainly didn’t say Royal Bank; it had a series of initials instead in gold lettering.

It certainly felt odd to walk up those steps and go inside. It was as if I had crossed some odd teleportation line, or passed through a twist in earth energy between my new apartment and the bank, and landed in Chicago. (Except Chicago is currently experiencing much nicer weather at nine degrees Celcius, as opposed to our minus ten. It’s March tenth; it’s more than time for spring. Damn groundhogs.) Anyways, it makes you wonder if there’s something odd about Sherbrooke Street – if you drive east along it from Cavendish to Hingston, you get Montreal; but if you drive west along it from Decarie at just the precise time on a Friday afternoon, you inexplicably end up in Chicago.

Fanciful, perhaps. Do remember that I worked in a F/SF bookstore for four years, though.

I Call A Do-Over

Well. Wasn’t that not fun.

You know, I really, really don’t want to go into detail, but that was the worst move I’ve ever been involved in. Being ill and missing three key people from our standard moving team which resulted in not all our stuff getting here was a large part of it, but the icing on the cake was having our phone line at the old place disconnected before 7 AM on March 1, and not having a phone line at all in the new place until 11 AM on March 4. Yes, that’s today. Gods bless the cheerful, accomplished and all-round-nice-guy Gilles Lavallee who came to double-check on the wiring after the first Bell technician came by yesterday and pronounced our entire apartment’s phone wiring dead, with the necessity of installing completely new wiring from the bottom up. Gilles found the sole live wire in the whole nest of ancient phone wires and reconnected us to the world.

I relapsed into bed with coughing and fever yesterday afternoon, and that’s where I’m headed again right after I take a warm bath. For those who are curious, having seen the three square feet we had to move around in here immediately post-move on Saturday afternoon, the place is three-quarters unpacked. Yes, I am a goddess. (Okay, the drive to restore order to my life probably contributed to my collapse again yesterday, but damn it, at least I have living space now.) This is officially a beautiful apartment. It will be even more beautiful without the pile of boxes in the dining room/office area, and when I have somewhere to put knives, forks, and spoons in the kitchen.

Okay. We’re here. That’s all I really needed to tell you. And that we didn’t have a phone for three days, so it’s not that we were ignoring you, we just, well, didn’t hear the phone ring. Not being connected and all.

Sigh. I’m going to take that bath now. And a handful of Advil, because I’m out of my wonder syrup that lets me sleep and not have a headache and stop coughing.

Insomnia: Good For Catching Up On Reading

One thing that insomnia and being so sick for the past week has given me is lots of time to read. I finally finished The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell; I also finally finished Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Both are excellent books, they just took me a lot longer to read than I expected. Both were loans from other people, too, so I really felt bad. Both were really densely written, which contributed to the long read. Perdido Street Station was nasty and dark and so damn well written that I will willingly plunge into The Scar once winter is officially over and I no longer feel like brooding, moping, or otherwise indulging in winter-connected depression. (There should be a warning label on Mieville’s books that reads, ‘Caution – Do Not Read During SAD Season If You Are Prone To Moodiness’.) As for Cornwell, I really, really have to be in a particular mood to read his work: namely, in a mood to appreciate logic and war maneuvers while simultaneously being actively interested in Arthurian characters. That’s a rather rare mood for me.

I also read an advance copy of Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K Hamilton that’s been sitting on my shelf since, um, mid 2000 or something. Anyway, it’s highly ironic that it was an advance copy, because not only has the book itself been released in hardcover in the meantime, but also in paperback, and the sequel was released in hardcover with its paperback publication imminent, as well. (March 4, as a matter of fact, so if nothing in my collection appeals to me when I start hunting for something new to read, I know what I’ll be buying.)

I picked up Dianne Day’s Strange Files of Fremont Jones Wednesday night when I was wide awake, and it was good. So’s the sequel, Fire and Fog, which I finished today while taking a break from packing. Nice little historical crime books, with your standard independent female protagonist. I have a third in my possession, but like other crime series that my mother sends to me once she’s read them, it appears to be missing a few books in-between. Mum picks some up at the shop and reads others through the library, so when I get the series they often look a bit like Swiss cheese – you know, volume 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8. Insisting on reading books in sequence is one of those delightful character traits that make me so lovable, so I’ll be hunting through second-hand shops for these ones. (A day’s read contained within a light crime novel is not worth the $10 purchased new, in my not-so-humble opinion. And it’s my blog, after all, so my opinion doesn’t have to be concerned about humilty, now, does it.)

I have an entire box devoted to Books Which I Have Not Yet Read, so I don’t have to go hunting once we’re in the new apartment. So very clever of me. Probably pointless, though, since as I unpack I look through my books, and I will likely find dozens I suddenly must re-read immediately.

Apparently it’s gearing up to be a lovely day tomorrow, with a high of +2 degrees. That’s reassuring.

Scattershot

More useful inbox spam: Lose 32 pounds by Easter! If I lose 32 pounds I will be dead.

The main problem with moving (because of course there are several) is that there are never enough boxes. I fervently believe that it’s one of those dark SF equations at work. Neil Gaiman should write something about this. No, really – it sounds like one of those mildly annoying things that the protagonist of a dark fantasy novel encounters as s/he prepares to move out of an equally dark house with A Presence. Protagonist gets boxes, packs, needs more boxes; calculates, gets more boxes, and falls short yet again. The pattern is repeated as an (apparently) minor amusing recurrance, and not until the end of the novel does the reader realise that The Lack Of Boxes Is Significant!

Sleep update: I didn’t Wednesday night. Did last night, thanks to the joys of drugs enabling me to (a) sleep, and (b) breathe while doing it. All bow to the pharmacists, architects of my preserved sanity. Somewhere around four AM on Wednesday night (Thursday morning?) I began to understand why sleep deprivation works as a method of torture. You literally don’t have a chance to download. No blessed darkness descends to make it all go away for a while. It’s reality, 24/7. And even if your reality is nice and humdrum, it loses all appeal at 4 AM after a total of six hours sleep over four days.

It occurs to me that for the first time in quite a while, I’m hungry. Really hungry. Hmm.

Today, more packing, and I have to take the delicate stuff over to the new place – cello, viola, bodhran, harp, stuff like that. While I’m there I think I’ll unpack what I can and bring boxes back. It’s nice to feel well enough to plan things like this, although you can be darned sure I’ll stop the moment I start feeling wobbly.

Twilight Zone Wednesdays

Sigh.

I’m starting to doubt my sanity. Person after person has asked me if I’m preparing for a book discussion being held on Wednesday night.

It’s nice to be loved. However, I’ve been doing something every Wednesday night for almost two years now. It’s that thing called orchestra. “Nope,” I say when invited to Wednesday events, “no can do – that music thing, you know.”

Except now I’m beginning to feel vaguely Twilight Zone-like. Maybe dimensions have warped, and timelines have crossed, and in this timeline, my orchestra never existed, which would explain why I’m the only one who remembers it.

I’d be more worried if I wasn’t working on a press release announcing the orchestra’s new conductor, and receiving regular e-mails and calls about it. So orchestra exists in at least some other minds.

It’s rather amusing, actually. Maybe aliens have descended and have wiped selected memory banks. Or maybe I should just be more vocal about my extracurricular activities. You know – share openly with confident, voluable enthusiasm. Enough of this self-effacing shyness! I’m a cellist with the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and we rehearse every Wednesday night!

Surprised?

Never mind.