appreciating Ottawa

My hometown is gorgeous today.

Gloucester street regaled me with its tales, Somerset intrigued, the parks in the Glebe enticed. I've fallen back in love with this much maligned city as I scurried about doing errands and visiting friends.

Maybe the cause is my re-emergence outside after a nasty bout of strep, feeling better, the overcast slightly humid light, the green exploding everywhere after our recent days of rain and more rain.

Nonetheless, this city has recaptured my interest. On a day I am offered a job overseas ...

teehee

The bunny loved the scarf but did not know what to do with the sonic screwdriver.

.........

if I could make any noise I'd be laughing aloud at this comic. But I have laryngitis strep throat.

I guess I could breathe heavily, but that hurts my throat.

frisson-bookesque

"His writing is so immediate, so skillful, that it was never, at any point, possible for me to lean back and say, "oh, what a clever bit of writing," or "ah, what excellent characterization." Instead, my reactions were substantially more visceral, to the tune of "NO YOU EVIL MAN HOW COULD YOU!" or "AUGH! AUGH! YOU CAN'T KILL HIM!" I think that any book that makes you want to hold the author up against a wall by the neck and shake him – in a good way – is ultimately successful, and this one did that and more."

— from the store Perfect Books' online review of A Game of Thrones,

by George R.R. Martin

I've never read the book mentioned above but I am still laughing aloud at the reviewer's description. What a marvellous sensation! I pity anyone who has never felt such.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte was one of those books for me. Many know him for some books about some guy names Aristide; bah, I say. The Club Dumas ensorcelled me and I yelled at the author the entire way through the book while gleefully savouring each scene and twist. Most of the yelling came at the end. I think partially due to the book being over. Such a bittersweet time.

Someone made a dodgy film supposedly based on the book called the Ninth Gate with the now ubiquitous Johnny Depp (Is he still Johnny, or has he graduated from his 21 Jumnp Street days?); it is a pale shadow of the book. A nithling, really, in comparison.


.... Ya know, someone has my copy as I cannot find it anywhere. *ahem* Return it, whomever you are.

scaredy book

I stayed up all night Friday reading a book.

This is a very bad habit of mine (very very) but I argue that this time it was not my fault. The book was scary. Old childhood fears crept in — like that little men wearing hiking boots and carrying old-fashioned grappling gear would climb up the side of the bed and eventually try to climb me, stocking their picks and boots into my flesh as I slept. They'd do this because I was so HUGE to their smallness they were unable to comprehend I was a person and not just a mammoth mountain range ... should I not have revealed this puerile fear? The point is I could NOT go to sleep until things stopped being scary again.

The book, by the way, was not about little men but rather about a female vicar in England who, in this second of the series, becomes an inadvertant, inept exorcist. Obviously, I enjoyed it as it sucked me in enough to make the dark a bit more full. Shameful, really, to be so affected. I'm blaming only getting started during a witching hour of 2 a.m. as well ...

The first book The Wine of Angels was, as Pat of my favourite book store warned, a bit slow moving. Enjoyable, though, but despite not being the heartwarming book one expects (female vicar moves to charming small village from grotty London with teenaged daughter after being widowed - an easy vessel for the saccharine), still a bit trite. Midwinter of the Spirit has more plot and action. Though, thinking on it now, might be a bit thin on characterization.

But whatever.

If you're looking for some good lie-in-the-park-after-biking-all-over reading, these will do. Even without the getting sweaty part.

I've added links to the author's synopsis of each book, however, I'd recommend not reading them. If you are at all intrigued by the scant information given above, just go get the books. If you're my friend, I'll lend them (frankly, who else would you be??), but the book rules apply even for paperbacks. Muahahahahaha.

best line read today

"The kitchen smellt of sunshine and cinnamon ... "



I'm trying to convey a soft, gentle sigh here but * sigh* just does not do it justice. Think of an unconscious sigh, as soft as a gentle whisper of a soft breeze through leaves, and that's what I meant.

Reading: Blessed are the cheesemakers, by Sarah-Kate Lynch

sexy thangs

When I was about 18 and regaling my mother with some tale of a man with whom I was smitten (She asked, she's that kinda mom) she said something that struck me dumb:

She turned from doing whatever she was doing, looked straight at me and said: "Oh my god, you're attracted to his mind! ..... poor you."

I remember stopping mid-swoon, gobsmacked. Not because her words meant so much in that instant — they seemed silly to me since, duh, what else would make a man hot — but the utter genuine vehemence in her delivery arrested me.

Over the years and many, many men I've come to understand why she pitied me so. It would be far easier if I were attracted to mere body parts; if I could, like some friends, see a guy with a nice ass and think "I'd hit that," or partake in some of the hotties with blank eyes who hit on me. Much easier because there are far more attractive men out there than devastatingly-smart, perceptive ones. (Though it seems I've managed to "hit" a few — but that is a tale left private, methinks.)

Instead, I am stuck with what I dubbed years ago The Keanu Reeves Effect. This is where the attractive-ness quotient of a man is related directly to his intelligence. (This was bourne from a belief that, though Mr. Reeves is perhaps the most perfectly stunning male specimen physically, he does nothing really for me because of a certain perception of ... ahem ... idiocy therein. Empty eyes, if you will. I have learnt since, from a friend's friend who worked on a movie with him, that he is actually quite astute and charming. So the term for the Effect remains mostly due to overuse but I am now more and more intrigued to have lunch with the dark-haired man. If he showed up at my door with a proposition I'd probably accept. At least for lunch.)

However! Despite my exhibiting this Effect, there are a few things I do find utterly disarming and delicious about men, physically.

This post is dedicated to one such characteristic: hands.

Men's hands are delicious. They are — or rather, those I like are — different from women's. Now, I do not have small dainty hands at all, however when compared with a man's there is a marked difference (despite my having inherited my father's big palms and keeping my nails short).

A man's hand has more pronounced joints, more visible sinews, broadness at the knuckles, a kind of latent competency therein. Broadish, strong, long fingers with some sort of aesthetic shape are, frankly, utterly arousing. What, one thinks, could be done with those?


..... excuse me for a sec.

Nick Drake kinda day

but in a splendidly connected and sensual, over morose, way. I'm reading a book that has me feeling and dwelling on welsh poets and Nick, oh Nick Nick Nick.


Saturday sun came early one morning
In a sky so clear and blue
Saturday sun came without warning
So no one knew what to do.
Saturday sun brought people and faces
That didn't seem much in their day
But when I remember those people and places
They were really too good in their way.
In their way
In their way
Saturday sun won't come and see me today.

Think about stories with reason and rhyme
Circling through your brain.
And think about people in their season and time
Returning again and again
And again
And again
And Saturday's sun has turned to Sunday's rain.

So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun
And wept for a day gone by.

Fascinating, that.

A friend has subscribed me to a word-a-day from wordsmith.org and I am, to my friend, eternally grateful for such.

For this word-a-day email delivery far surpasses all others and in the three days since I've had receipt of these definitions I have been delighted, edified and charmed by the new additions to my vocabulary.

For instance, today I have learnt there is a word for my common usage (to the irritation of some) of such sentences as "Fascinating, that."

To whit:

brachylogy (bra-KIL-uh-jee) noun
Conciseness of diction or an instance of such.
[From Medieval Latin brachylogia, from Greek brakhulogi, brakhu-, brachy- (short) + -logy, from logos (word).] — words at wordsmith.org
"The term for the omission of words that are intended to be 'understood' by the reader is ellipsis. Its extreme or irregular form has a name in Greek rhetoric: brachylogy, relying on the listener to supply the missing words, much as I relied on the reader to put a verb in the sentence fragment 'A profound question, that.' " — William Safire; Microwave of the Future; The New York Times; Oct 7, 1990.

This week wordsmith.org continues to offer words relating to words. Ahhhh, the delight!

bloody *^#*&@!^*?! weight!

fuck fucking fuck fuck
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
FUUUUUUCK!



!!




GAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!!!!!








*snarl*

silly insomnia

Your Star Wars Name: Kiren Keott

Your Star Wars Title: Nnagin of Sral


am I the only one who finds this v e r y amusing?

*snark*

"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong." — The Passenger to Teheran, Vita Sackville-West