Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

On Going Home

There’s something odd about going home for the holiday season as an adult. Sure, my parents now live in a different province, in a house that features in absolutely zero of my childhood memories, but there’s more to it. My parents seem to look forward to having us here, but sometimes I wonder why. I arrive with laundry to do, change their radio stations, have classical music on all the time, and light candles. I either sleep at odd times, or hide in a corner with a book, or go out to roam Oakville (they have a remarkable invention here called parking lots, making shopping a much less harrowing experience).

I look forward to coming here. There’s something terribly comforting about having familiar meals served to you by your mother. Sometimes they’re new meals instead, which I look forward to discovering just as much because my mother is a fabulous cook. Last night we had slow-cooked lamb shanks with polenta, which was divine. Some things are best left to discovering as an adult. Had my mother served me polenta as a child, I would have pushed it around my plate until it got stone cold and even less appealing, tasted a speck and decided it was too much like oatmeal, which I hated. (I’m still not fond of oatmeal; it’s something about the texture. Thin or thick, I just really have to be in the mood, and it needs plenty of salt.)

For the second year in a row, my parents haven’t put up the Christmas tree; they put white fairy lights on their six-foot-tall silk fig in the corner and gather gifts underneath it instead. I don’t have any seasonal decorations up at home, either, which might have contributed to my lack of holiday cheer. Christmas seems to have arrived awfully quickly, something like all that snow at home.

The drive down was a breeze. The three feet of snow that the Montreal city crews are ignoring gradually vanished as we drove west, disappearing completely by a half-hour past Cornwall. I’ve been going about in my cardigan over a t-shirt outside here. Last night I woke up to the sound of rain hitting the roof and the window. I had forgotten how much I love that sound.

Tonight after dinner we have a date with some popcorn and The Return of the King; tomorrow we pick up our borrowed printer and do the official seasonal dinner and the ritual opening of gifts. For the rest of this afternoon, though, I think it’s going to be dozing with a book and perhaps a Maine Coone cat.

Go Me

I’ve had an excellent weekend all around: teaching, gathering with friends, ritual, and so forth. Artistically I have triumphed, but you’ll hear about all of that when I have visual proof for you. Not only have I triumphed, I’ve indirectly created the potential for future fun gifts, which is just fine with me.

And, as the cherry on top of the whole weekend, I have a gently used laserjet printer waiting for me in Oakville. Hurrah!

kill kill kill…

Foiled. Foiled, foiled, foiled, gods damn this ruddy printer.

It can join the computer Skippy intends to launch out a window as soon as he has a complete operative system. It will be incredibly therapeutic to throw it and watch it smash into a jillion pieces on the pavement below. It will be just as useful as a pile of bits as it is now, whole, silent, unmoving, and entirely a waste of space.

I’m now officially in the market for a new printer.

Slowly But Surely

Ah, the first cold I’ve had in months. I so have not missed being sick. The general ache, the out-of-it feeling due to the sinus pressure, the boxes and boxes of tissue….

Thursday night I had a dynamic pair of students in a workshop, which was an enjoyable switch from the usual silent note-taking type. Friday night I got to make a flying visit to the first Montreal NaNo coffee gathering and met some terrific new people while re-acquainting myself with terrific people I’d met last year. And, as a result of a highly amusing misunderstanding, I have resolved that my story will have a psychic ferret involved in it somewhere (you just had to be there). (And I called Tal insane. Ah, well. There’s a reason we’re related by choice.)

It was a lovely Thanksgiving weekend (apart from the cold, of course, which ensured that I couldn’t taste my in-laws’ wonderful harvest feast to the degree it deserved), with a nice gift at the end: Salem, my favourite local cat-who-is-not-mine, ate about 30 ccs of food after refusing to eat for a period of days. Sure, it took three of us to hold her (including one and a half animal techs), but she ate; she even ate willingly after being force-fed a bit of it. Then I got to cuddle a corn snake while I watched the new trailers for Matrix Revolutions and The Return of the King.

This afternoon is a legal presence at the Palais de Justice (no worries, it’s all good), and then an intimate get-together at Hurley’s to celebrate a few different milestones achieved over the past three months.

(Palais de Justice, for our non-Quebec-resident readership, is the fancy French term for the city courthouse. It does not, in fact, have anything to do with a superhero team. More’s the pity.)

Slowly but surely, I’m getting my mind back into the writing mode. I managed to get my printer working again (using the popular kick-it-hard method combined with replacing an ink cartridge) and printed out the existing copy of two half-finished stories, then took them to the Second Cup with me Friday afternoon to edit and add to them. Re-reading work that I haven’t touched in months is a remarkably good carrot to use when I’m stuck; it’s often better than I remember it being. Must stop drinking lattes and mochas while doing it, though. Herbal tea all the way!

Briefly

Despite my quiet monitor, dual hard drives and new cordless ergonomic keyboard, I’m still having anti-computer issues, so here’s a summary of Life in General:

Regarding that ergo keyboard: things are just a bit off, and I keep hitting odd buttons, which creates situations where I have to go back and delete or re-type. My arms and shoulders are happy, though.

I think the US publisher still hasn’t received my press packet and NDA. I’m mildly stressed, and I can’t locate the tracking tag that the post office gave me. My desk has been cleaned a couple of times, new equipment has been installed, and the apartment has been thrown into turmoil twice over the last week for various reasons, so it could be anywhere (except the places I’ve looked, apparently), or even thrown out.

My doctor is so pleased with how things are going that I no longer have to see her monthly. We’re down to quarterly.

For some reason, now that the weather is tolerable, my allergies are hitting hard and fast. Thank the gods for Reactin.

The Kim Possible DVD contains four episodes only. Fortunately they were all episodes I hadn’t seen, so I loved it from start to finish. I’ve enjoyed later episodes from the first season more, though.

The new electric baseboard heaters were finally installed yesterday. The wire they used is bright red, to indicate that it’s a live wire. The landlady wanted the cheapest and fastest labour possible, so the wire is just stapled to the ceiling as opposed to set behind baseboards or fished through the ceiling. It looks terrible, and the electrician agrees. We call them our apartment go-fast stripes.

First classes of all three sessions went well over the weekend. It feels like we’re right back in the swing of things, as if we never had a summer break.

I found two second-hand books I’d been looking for. Hurrah!

Enough!