Christmas Plans

Lots of chatting on messenger these days. Christmas plans are heating up. I'm planning on descending on my daughter first in Vancouver, get my Indian visa and then go over to the Island and visit my brothers and sister-in-law over there before I head off across the Pacific. Sounds like both my daughter and one of my sons may make it there more or less the same time. Nobody ever wants to commit to dates to far in advance, but it sounds like fun so far. (Wonder if my brother will agree after another Irish family shindig!) Seems like I never see my kids in town anymore, we are always flying in from somewhere. West Jet fares to the coast are a lot cheaper and mega faster than the bus.

Have to start thinking of Christmas presents, luckily I have lots of options.

My hard drive was making growling noises earlier today. I had a ridiculous number of applications open and was really overworking it, but I still don't like that at all. I'm going to go down the street and buy another portable hard drive and copy an image of my operating system onto it. I had one the last time I went to India, found it very handy, but purse snatchers got it. This one I'll put in a pouch and carry it around my neck.

I'm also busily putting a lot of files up on my Google mail program. Nice to have backup you can get at from anywhere in the world

I got an email from a friend who had tried to leave a comment but it didn't work. I tried it out, worked for me but I saw where some things about the process could be a little confusing. I'm moderating comments because a nice person warned me that she had gotten some very nasty remarks on her blog when she had listed it in the same place I did, so I took her advise and put in a moderating function to head off anything offensive. No need to leave an email address unless you would like an answer, and I'll delete any that show up in the comments. If you have a blog of your own please feel welcome to leave a url and I'll come for a visit.

Katrina Rant

Watched a rare bit of television this summer. It was a movie in which cyclonic winds sucked super cooled air down from the troposphere and froze New York. In Alberta we have our local version of that almost every year. Happening right now. Alright, alright, so it only goes down to forty below, not sixty and freighters hardly ever get frozen in on the North Saskatchewan River and our coyotes look a whole lot better than those wolves in the movie. Those kind of temperatures are still deadly to unprotected human beings And we have way too many of those in this supposedly rich and developed country.

Calgary is doing the Katrina Disaster thing this weekend, putting people up in Stampede Grounds Concourse for the duration and local drop ins and homeless shelters are letting people sleep on the floors and the hallways in both Edmonton and Calgary. This is just not good enough Alberta!

There was a tiny tiny bit of space left in Edmonton Street News so I wrote a tiny tiny little rant in honour of the beastly weather.

I am on the homestretch of putting together the last bits of Edmonton Street News this month. Too bad it's so damn cold nobody can stand out there and sell it for more than fifteen twenty minutes at a time. I'm going to see if I can get this program to mount a pdf file after I get the thing finished.

Having a lot of fun playing around with the blogger program, seeing what it will let me get away with.

Well couldn't load pdfs directly, set up a second blog for the paper and put up jpegs of the pages, Pretty small but if you click on them twice they get a little bigger. Not really the solution I'm looking for but will have to do till I figure out something better.

It finally sinks in

It's winter. Every year I experience this period of denial. Maybe it will go away again. This year it snowed before Halloween. It has snowed before Halloween before and then melted and given us back a few precious more days of sun. No such luck this year. That Siberian high threw itself down across the prairies and winter settled down on that comfortable couch for the duration. I'm so glad I am heading for the sun in three more weeks.

Still so much to do. I brought back a bunch of Indian goodies last trip, want to sell enough to pay for my airfare in the future, this is my last freebie. It wasn't too sucessful a venture. I don't want the expense of a shop that I will not be in for six months a year. I got back too late to apply to sell at any of the large summer festivals. Too late also to get a table at the local downtown farmers maret.

There are problems with that also. I haven't owned a car for ten years and do not want to drive again much less pay for the feed and care of another automobile, so the logistics of getting boxes and bales across town every Saturday are formidable. Finally I have tried what I am good at, playing on the computer. Sold some stuff on Ebay, that works for me, except that Ebay fees are insane. So now I have spent the last couple of weeks photographing my goods to take the files to India with me and work up both applications for the big festival sales in January and my online store. My sublettor Ramu will be bringing his wife back from India in March. As fortune will have it, she does websites. So I am going to work up up a website while I am in India this time and employ her to mount it on a website. Always good to have a bit of a project to work on in the cool of the house during those long, warm dusty afternoons.

But first the photos. It's winter. I live in a basement suite with north facing windows. I have to wait for those rare moments when the sun breaks through the icefog, then gather up all my table lamps to get enough light on the subject to photograph anything. Little by little I'm chewing my way through it. Why not do it when the sun was out for fourteen, sixteen hours a day during the summer? Who knows, maybe just that vain hope that this year winter will not come.

I took this photo from my window to send to Ramu when he was in Singapore to warn him what he was coming back to.

The girl who drew horses

I went to a school reunion several years ago. When one lady heard my name she exclaimed, “I remember you. You are the girl who drew horses.”

I was a tall kid so I was always put at the back of the room so as not to interfere with anyone else's view of the blackboard. It wasn't until I was about twelve that teachers realized I was also very short sighted and had no idea what it was they were doing on the blackboard. Everything I had learned had been from oral information. Visually isolated from the rest of the class, and safe from observation in the back row, I entertained myself by drawing on the margins of my texts and exercises while I listened to the lessons. Horses, horses, always horses.

Never horses and riders. Just horses, leaping and soaring. Soaring out the window and galloping over the lawn and up, up front hooves neatly tucked up, over the school yard fence and away. “Theresa, can you tell us what is the Pythagoras's Theorem?” Oops, lost track there a bit.

I wonder now how much all those hours of visualizing leaping over barriers and cantering off into the unknown contributed to the life I am living now. I am heading off on my third trip to India the day before my birthday this year. It will be my sixty first birthday. I'm looking forward to spending it in an Air Singapore jet high above the Pacific.

My first trip I sent back photos and accounts of my adventure every month or so. I had planned to do it on the second trip but found myself getting bogged down in some depressive circumstances that I didn't really want to write about. But friends and relatives told me that they missed my stories and photos so I'm getting a bit more organized this time, setting up a blog and not limiting myself to travelogue type stuff. I wrote a lot of opinion pieces for Our Voice, a local street paper in Edmonton for a number of years so expect some of that stuff too.

The count down has started. Got my airplane ticket sitting on the nightstand. Consolidating and packing away my personal bits and pieces to leave my sublettor some breathing space. Cleaning up and throwing out, considering what to take with me this time.