hawk is a good omen

hawk
Originally uploaded by the.minouette

What a lovely Sunday... despite the cramped quarters and slowness of service... I loved seeing and , , and for brunch today! It has been too long since we all got together.

After brunch b & b went to run errands while the rest of us bided our time until Cupcake Camp, by going to the Carrot Common. Now, I have nice organics soaps and tea, a belly full of cupcakes. When R and F drove me home we saw two hawks in the park across the street. I managed to get two photos of one of the hawks. They are so impressive, even after spending years on a property on Vancouver Island on which bald eagles nested and barn owls were common. Great raptors in this city; I watch the peregrine falcons at work and hawks at home.

Now I am waiting for the DJ to drive me to Moms for dinner, as if I need an more food.






Thanks women!

Re. dairy:

Always fresh and sweet is the way to go.

Happy Birthday Reynardin!

Hoping you may find yourself a happy, health and very prosperous fox this year!


(image of fox with duck purchased in the castle district of Budapest, Hungary by the Curious Expeditions)

Dendrites

Dendrites, tree-like advance patterns of crystal growth, in stead of actual trees, are the view out my window this morning.

From the Greek δένδρον déndron, “tree”...

The beauty of physics is the underlining patterns.

vocabulary charity and things one finds in cyberspace

Like words? Feed the world. You can take a few minutes and test your English vocabulary at this site. For each correct response they donate 10 grains of rice. If you keep playing, the difficulty increases, but you can always reset the counter to the beginning. I find it strangely addictive. Also, I am intrigued how often you can guess words you've never previously encountered.

On an unrelated note, I've decided to blog about art, illustration, design, fashion, cabinets of curiosity, and assorted random things I find and enjoy over at Magpie & Whiskeyjack. This blog is a near mirror of minouette but a little more focused.

I is for iguana, and insect, and indigo

This is the latest panel in my alphabet quilt-in-progress. It is a hand-block printed iguana in green ink on an old (though high thread count) cotton shirt in gray. The 'I' is printed with a vintage letterpress block. The insects were screenprinted by Smoking Lily - they sell scraps of fabric with prints they don't use in their clothing line. The insects in blue (on tee shirt material) are reverse appliqued onto the black fabric with one white fly.

What do you think? Maybe 2009 will be the year and I will actually finish this quilt.

I need to finish the 'N' and 'O' panels, which are in progress. I have to start 'Q', 'U', 'V', 'X', 'Y' and 'Z'. Then the actual quilting process can begin.

With a face like a mirror and frozen toes...

treecozy8
Originally uploaded by tanisalexis

I tried to get out of here yesterday afternoon to go renew my passport, to no avail. N keep calling and the visiting Taiwanese student kept asking me questions (actually, I really like teaching, but sometimes you just want to leave). LR asked if passports weren't by appointment - which says something about the relative scale of our home nations, and made me smile at the thought. So first thing this morning I took the King streetcar down Roncesvalles, across King to Victoria and went to the Passport Office. It's -14C but it feels a lot colder today. I had to squint at the signs because my glasses fogged up. You must wait in line to be pre-screened and receive a number in order to really wait. Unlike most people, I passed the pre-screening quickly- having done this several times and being able to follow written instructions. I even (of course) had a book to read for my wait. Last time I renewed my passport was in Victoria- where I wanted to hit the belligerent man in front of me, bellyaching about having to line up for 15 whole minutes.* When my number came up, the lady fretted about my photos. She told me in a barely audible voice with a thick Russian accent that the highlight on my face made it look like someone had severed my ear - how charming - and that there was a shadow under my chin! She was good at her job though; she managed to be personable and make me feel like the copy shop had done me wrong, rather than Passport Canada. She gave me a special pass so that when I returned I would not have to wait again. I asked her where was the nearest location I could get new photos and, though she told me, she insisted that I should take the passport photo rejection form and demand my money back from the copy shop.

I walked back down Victoria St to the photo shop and waited my turn for photos. The man said it would be 15 minutes, so I went for a walk and did my banking before returning. When I returned later he said there was a highlight on my face and he would have to take another photo. They had taken three photos before satisfied at the copy shop, so by now I am feeling freakishly pale and reflective. He said they were really fussy about highlights, and I couldn't argue, so I had to wait a further 10 minutes. When I got back to the Passport Office, the man at the front of the pre-screening line glared at me, but was too non-confrontational and Canadian to suggest I was jumping the queue, which would at least have allowed me the opportunity to prove him wrong. However, now I had so many forms I was showing the wrong one to the Commissionaire (who was understandably bewildered with my "photo rejection form" in lieu of my get out of jail free no waiting form). I had to search through my entire purse before I found it, piling random bills, scraps of papers, a screw driver set and assorted oddities into my hat. By the time I got out of there, I was pretty cross, having spent three hours on a simple errand.

I walked by the Dundas Square and was confused by the crowds. There were maybe 150 people there, in the cold, watching the US presidential inauguration on the big screen. I can understand watching, but I couldn't understand watching out-of-doors. Here at work, people are listening on the radio.

I thought about stopping at the copy shop to demand my money back, but by the time I got there I was frozen, hungry and just wanted to be done with this expedition.

When I got to my office, I found my friend Tanis' tree cozy project which cheered me up immensely. In Vancouver, "Granville Street is currently undergoing a redesign. If you've wandered through the area recently you'll notice that the trees that lined Granville Street between Drake and Cordova Streets are now shoulder-high stumps.

The planting of new trees is scheduled to be complete by the end of 2009.
In the meantime, it's January, and those stumps look pretty miserable.
What say we decorate them?"

tree cozy 12
Originally uploaded by tanisalexis

Check it out here and here. Mmmm... street art and trees. Nice. I am quite heartened that someone loves the tree stumps. I love finding unexpected guerrilla urban art; I love that someone cares about the tree stumps. I suspect these trees, like the tiny Chinese vocalist, are simply deemed not sexy enough for the Olympics; but Tanis and her fellow artists love the stumps. The one illustrated is wrapped in a gorgeous piece of textile art.



*Victorians; lovely, friendly people, strangely insensible to living in Canadian paradise, and fond of bitching about Toronto. Occasionally you just want to pelt them with non-existent snowballs.

Reading is sexy XV

(image: Léopold Batut (1856-1902) Jeune femme au livre. via Guada chi legge)

1. The Radiant City Lauren B. Davis. This is an amazing, though sporadically gut-wretching book. A Canadian journalist, Matthew Bowles, a world-weary war correspondant, recuperates in Paris, after being shot in Gaza. He does not like being the news. This is a man with PTSD, though his depression, of course, has much deeper routes. He re-connects with a war photographer and sometime mercenary Jack, and his friend former NYC cop Anthony (whose career ended when he was hit with a table). Slowly, he is adopted by the Lebanese family who run the cafe across the street from his apartment; mother Saida, shy about her acid-burned neck, frustrated teenage son Joseph, Saida's brother who dreams of a life where he will be more than an outsider, a refugee, and their father. This is a novel of outsiders, and of bridging the gap. The characters seem full and real. Paris itself is a character- and is alive. This book is a real accomplishment- it left me shaken, though there is hope. I am particularly impressed by how she made this rather macho, male-dominated world of war correspondents real- she gets in their skin. Read it.

2. The Disheveled Dictionary Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Apparently, I now read dictionaries. This was fun. Her irreverent and rococco definitions are something else.
coruscation a gleam, glint, sparkle, glitter. Before getting the sack for making a crack about "Molotovian cocktail hours," the captain's recreation and refection officer vouchsafed to the refugees from Bosoxia shipboard romance against nacreous nightscapes, which included pelagic acrobats amidst phosphorescent coruscations glancing off the surface of the sea."

3. Playing Sardines Michèle Roberts. This is a book of short stories. They are clever, but hard to summarize. They are mainly about women, looking for things in the wrong place. And food. Fairy tales and families, Mary and occasionally, obsessions. An enjoyable read.

4. Of Love and Other Demons Gabriel García Márquez. This is a beautiful short work of fiction. I would have read it for the image of the snowing paper cranes on orange trees alone. It tells the story of an eighteenth century young 12 year old girl, Sierva María, the neglected daughter of the less-than-sharp Marquis and his manipulative wife (whose let herself go to her cacao, honey - not to mention adulterous sex - addictions), abandoned to be raised amongst their slaves, who one day is bit by a rabid dog. Five months later superstition wins and her life is ravaged by her "treatment" and her response to the alleged evidence of rabies. The "medicine" is so primitive and painful her response is viewed as evidence of rabies. Ultimately, she is entrusted by her father to a convent, when the Church decides that rabies (which she does not have) is in fact a mere smoke screen for the demon possessing her. Having been raised by the slaves, and being fluent in African languages and religions, her behavious is taken as evidence against her. The Bishop assigns Father Cayetano Delura, to her case. Surprisingly, this is a love story, a story of superstition, human stupidity, ignorance, books, beauty and tragedy.

5. A House Called Brazil Audrey Schulman. This one was usual. Our narrator, remembers the period of her life 20 years previous, in 1970 at age 19, when her called her daily from an unknown location, to tell her all the tales of her ancestors. Her mother left her when she was 14 and she had been living on the family farm in rural Ontario by herself since then- going to boarding school, forging her mother's signature as needed, generally carrying on. The way she copes with this abandonment is touching. The stories of her ancestors are staggering; there are saints and murderers, lovers and thieves, cigar-smoking grandmother entrepreneurs, and hundreds of them living in a house called Brazil in Ft. Lauderdale. This is quite the read- I recommend it.

6. The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman - I bought this book because of the rave review by Zadie Smith and the cover by Marcel Dzama. So far, so good...

Who mixes Mr. Brown with Panic in Detroit...

Thinking of books, Gorey-lovers should go here.