ice cream for supper

Bonne fête, Annie & Dad! I hope you have a fabulous day and nothing but excitement for the future.

Adam stumbled across something très cool today - how to create your own miniature-looking pictures! Have a look at the ones he posted on his blog today. Very neat. Everyone (more or less) likes miniature things.

allsorts

I laughed when I saw how this turned out - Virgil looks so abashed. I'm sure his mental state was somewhere else in the far-off regions of kitty land, dreaming of strings to chase and real mice rather than the lame-o wind-up one we provide for his entertainment.

On another note entirely, I think I had a bit of a remarkable thought on my other blog, which doesn't really have a focus other than it's more of my thoughtful bits rather than the pictures and daily fun around here on this one. I've been thinking about art and what makes it different from anything else in life, and I think it has to do with how art connects people across space and time. I still have more thinking to do about it, but I think that's a good start. I just started reading a book called Socrates Cafe, which is very interesting so far and is spawning all kinds of other things in my mind. More to come, I'm sure.

cactus

Since I seem to be into taking plant pictures this week, I thought I'd throw this one out there. I have a love / hate relationship with Christmas cacti... I think they are beautiful and I love their blooms, but I seem to be unable to sustain one long enough to get to the blooming bit. Actually, I seem to be unable to even get the buds on a cactus to not fall off when I bring it home. At least there are some new leaves on this one, so that's promising.

quince update

Fool's gold

When I was a kid, I spent countless hours on the beach, playing with seaweed, looking for "washglass" as my sister and I called it, and skipping the best flat rocks I could find (shale works great if you don't cut your hand). Adam and I had a great time at the beach yesterday, mostly taking pictures. His are much better than mine. Anyway, he spotted this rock almost as soon as we stepped onto the beach - the hugest piece of fool's gold I have ever seen. I guess you really can't tell from the picture, but it's a good inch and a half in diameter. When I was a kid, I thought that someone went around to all of the beaches in the world and cut out little squares in rocks and filled them with fake gold, just for a joke. I guess I was wrong, but it would make a good joke.

Quince

The quince buds have started to open! I had never tried forcing branches in the winter before, but I think it's one of my new favourite things. That and these squares that I made up yesterday with chocolate chips, oatmeal, dried cranberries, walnuts, and everything else that I had leftovers of in the cupboard. I just melted a bit of margarine and some marshmallows, mixed in the stuff, and voila! Instant squares. No sugar, and very tasty.

Every morning when I wake up...

... there's a cat licking condensation off of the window.

Tiptoeing through the...

My thoughtful and hopelessly romantic husband bought me un-Valentine's tulips (my absolute favourite flowers!) the other day. This one is the only one that has opened so far; the others are waiting until they don't have so much competition, methinks.
Other flora-related news in this house - I'm forcing some quince branches, and a few of the leaves have opened, and it looks like some of the flowers are quite ready to burst. I planted some basil and rosemary, and they have both sprouted. An amaryllis is also on the go; just leaves so far, but they're definitely making progress. I can't wait for Spring!

braille blazing

After a bit of frowning, brow furrowing and lip chewing, I finally got the Braille Blazer successfully working in my little 'work' room at our house.
"At home?" you say. "Why not at the office?"
"Because," I reply. "It's too noisy for anyone in my building to work when it's embossing, since I have a wide open cubicle where nine other people can hear everything I do or say. People 'on the other side' thought I was popping corn in an air popper."
So now the process is as follows:
1. Scan document into office computer.
2. Proof and format in Duxbury at office.
3. Save to disk I hope desperately not to lose (memory stick as soon as they get some in)
4. Make sure disk arrives home safely.
5. Open document on laptop prone to freezing.
6. Emboss away and hope that no one phones, since the ringing would probably go unheard.

At least Virgil likes it being at home.

SNOW DAY!

What every teacher lives for. Not because I dislike my job, but in what other profession do you get surprise days off? All winter long it's like a weather lottery, and on days like today, my number is finally picked!

The only trouble with snow days (I'm not complaining) is that I get so excited when I hear the announcement that I can't go back to sleep. That's why it's 6:46am and here I am at the computer. I thought that schools might be closed, so I had been waking up on and off since 5:00, probably driving Adam crazy. I thought it would be best for everyone if I just got up.

Now to figure out how to best spend my day...

Winter wonderland

We're in the middle of a lovely blizzard-y day in NS, and I have some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies in the oven. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com, my favourite recipe site. It's a cookie with perfect texture, and they are SO good cold.

Things that people generally don't know exist (meaning I didn't) but that make things easier when you do:

1. When using Mozilla Firefox, if you press Ctrl+F, a cute little 'find' bar appears at the bottom of the screen. Type in what you're looking for on the page, and it takes you there.

2. In WordPerfect, when making invitations or other fun paper things, click on format, paragrah, drop cap, and you can get a giant first letter for your paragraph, a la first paragraph of a chapter.

3. When using the braille blazer to emboss documents, press F4 at the top of the document and it widens the margin so you can easily hole punch or bind the pages. (I learned this one today!)

Freshly groomed

What a face! He's certainly not a talking beast, but he is entertaining.

Valuable

I want to do something valuable with my time and my life and my professional training. I've been thinking about some schools for students who are blind overseas which would like volunteers. I would love to be able to see another part of the world and how things work there - I just feel very ignorant about the whole thing. And the last thing on earth I would want to do is to think that I somehow have all of this magic information that is better than anything they have. I have to give it lots of thought and figure out how I would really like to go about things. I suppose that realizing my ignorance is a good first step.

I've heard it many times: "Oh, you teach blind kids... that's nice. Must be very rewarding." And it is, but they're still kids. They can still drive you crazy, and there aren't a whole lot of days when I feel as though I'm changing the world. Especially today, I guess. Not that I think going somewhere else will change the world, but it will change the way I see it.

from the end of chapter 34, East of Eden

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."

East of Eden

I was sitting on the couch with the cat purring at my shoulder and occasionally twitching his whiskers in his sleep as I continued reading in John Steinbeck's East of Eden just now. I haven't finished the book yet, but am so overwhelmed by the magnitude of it and a sense of not having all the knowledge to be able to understand it or wrap my mind around it that I had to write something. There are only a few things that have given me the same sense of going beyond the temporal (these are the ones that sort of fit in this group):

- Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) by the Arcade Fire
- (possibly)) Your Ex-Lover is Dead by Stars, (click on 'Set Yourself on Fire' and 'Your Ex-lover is Dead'). I actually thought I was sick of the song after only hearing part of it several times. And that was only this afternoon. It's been in my thoughts ever since.
- Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X in particular
- New Year's Eve 2006
- Instances where Ernest Buckler and/or John Steinbeck capture something so exactly that it makes you draw your breath sharply and read it over and over and wonder how it was possible to put that in those particular and perfect words.

I think what makes these things so... big, is that they encompass so much of what it is to be human and to love and suffer and wonder about life and death and it's expressed beautifully and, well, perfectly. Perhaps a sense of knowing that I'll probably never be able to express things in such a clear, concise, and exact way is what makes them so... big. These things give me the sense that everything fits together in the grand scheme and for that brief moment it almost makes sense.

Barnacles

I've always been interested in barnacles. Maybe because they look so alien. They feel like shell, and the little bits in the middle move. They appear under boats, on rocks, sometimes on lobsters and other sea creatures.

Happy husband

A happy (and freezing!) husband.

Weird wharf

This is one of the strangest things in Yarmouth, I'm pretty sure. We didn't even know it was here until Melissa brought it to our attention! So we went out today in the freezing bitter wind to take some pictures. Apparently, it is what it looks like - a big section of boat hull with a wharf built through it. Odd, yet interesting!

Tear's whiskers

It's all about the cat

Beth, I thought you would like this mid-air shot of Virgil catching the string!