Trees... Water... Sunlight... Food

Celebrate Reading! Advocate Literacy!

You can do it all outdoors and shamelessly too, at this year's Word on the Street festival!

It's all relative... but emu oil does wonders for me

So my fossil made me feel young, once we'd figured out how old it was.

What makes my fossil feel young?

Very cool news like this!

14.38%... and counting

The time has come to make some changes. It's not just about losing weight (or what I prefer to call "weight normalization"), but my weight loss will be what I concentrate on, here on the blog.

I've decided to track my progress on my blog as it is official and *out there*!!

I'll be tracking my progress using the percentage of the weight I have to lose, as opposed to talking about pounds, which would be way too embarrassing.

I had already started losing some weight this summer, and that has brought me down to this achievement so far: 14.38% of the weight I need to lose. Pretty good stuff! But this has been slow going and today I kick start the program. I have so much support so I am very lucky in this respect and have, at this moment, oodles of will power.

Tips, insights, and your own discoveries or progress are welcome!

Watch this space...

Arrrrr... We be Never Forgettin'

(Arrrr... Dreade Pirate Captain BPG and her trusty mate Bruce the Bat were travelling dangerous foreign waters, but they were still a-rememberin' to be celebratin' International Talk-like-a-Pirate day, September 19, AKA yesterday!)

"Shiver me timbers, we boarded the Duty Free, a-howlin' like banshees, and came away with some fine swag and a bottle o' rum for the wee matey. It be a fine day to be sure, and a good one to return to home port where we be now sharpenin' our cutlasses, downloadin' our piccies, admirin' our souvenirs and a-givin' thanks that we avoided Davey Jones's locker one more time!"

Hey...

If you know me, you know that one of my favourite sayings is "Well, it's better than a slap in the head with a wet fish."

So, imagine my gobsmackedness when I read this news piece:

******

Fish flies out of lake, breaks Arkansas teen's jaw
By The Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas - It's a fishing tale that packs a wallop so strong it broke the jaw of a southeastern Arkansas teen and covered him in fish blood and guts.

Seth Russell, 15, of Crossett, was cruising Lake Chicot on a large inner tube towed by a boat when a Silver Asian carp leaped from the water and smacked him in the face.

Seth was knocked unconscious.

The teen had oral surgery to wire several teeth together and has back pain doctors attribute to whiplash from the high-speed collision.

He's not the only one who's had a run-in with the "flying" Silver Asian carp.

Carole Engle, director of aquaculture and the fisheries centre at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, says the fish do not fly but they are good jumpers and over the last year, she has had some calls about them causing injuries on Lake Chicot.

"Their jumping behaviour is a problem and their population appears to be growing there," Engle said.

Silver Asian carp were first imported to the United States in the 1970s. Catfish farmers brought them in to remove algae and other suspended matter from their ponds. The Environmental Protection Agency started a program allowing cities to use the fish to help clean the water in sewer-treatment plant ponds.

Seth's mother, Linda Russell, said: "He doesn't remember anything at all."

"He was laughing and the next thing he remembers, he is waking in a hospital."

******

I'm off on vacation for the next 11 days. I shall look forward to catching up with you all after that!

Blog Princess G Flips!

To celebrate Rock Flipping Day 2008, as first discovered by BPG at Osage + Orange, here are my activities:

I went down to the old railway track, the only rough bit of land around here:



I found my rock!

I flipped it carefully:

There were a whack of ants, all carrying bits and pieces back and forth, doing their anty thing:

The picture doesn't do them justice. I replaced the rock very carefully afterwards. Watching the ants brought to mind that fine and disturbing film, Angels and Insects (1995), based on the A.S. Byatt novel, with the wonderful Mark Rylance in the lead role. I saw it at the Carleton Cinema when it first came out. After the movie my friend and I walked and walked; we had to, to let it all settle in our minds. It was so good to walk and talk and discuss such a riveting and thought-provoking work. I read the book after, but weirdly enough, I can't remember much about it, although Possession stays with me always.

Quote of the Day

"... witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough."

From The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, 2008.

Quote of the Day

"It's a startling thing to be brought to life twice, and both times in Warsaw [Vermont]."

Carole Lombard as Hazel Flagg in Nothing Sacred (1937).

Life Just Got a Little More Scintillating...

Well... Christmas is less than four months away. But BPG is on the case and two scarves are already nearly finished, just two more after that.

The colours are what draw me in, and the softer the yarn, the better. But I've also been donated a large ball of very coarse, pure wool yarn that I am going to use to make more little cat blankets for the Humane Society. They need all of those that they can get, and, in my experience, cats love a real wool bed.

Bet you didn't anticipate such an exciting post, eh?

Quote of the Day

"What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he were to say simply, 'I'm back', or, 'It is I', might she feel able to call him in return by that second person singular, that tu which was reserved for children, lover and gods? And what would that mean? That he was like her child, or godlike, or simply the lover of whom she too had dreamed, whom she had dreamed into being just as eagerly as he had dreamed her? Might that little word, that tu turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? 'I,' he practiced under his breath. Here 'I' am. 'I' love you. Come to 'me'.

From The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, 2008.

In a World... without Don Lafontaine

I was very sad to hear of the death of Don Lafontaine, otherwise known as The Voice.

You know the one... with those incredibly basso tones, he provided the voice-overs for almost every mainstream Hollywood movie trailer for the last 30 or so years.

"In a world..."

"He was a man... she was a woman..."

"In a time..."

There was a point in my 20s when I found his style irritating. But with age came a great appreciation of irony and I got a certain kick from hearing his sonorous tones. There are some great clips of him on YouTube, including an interesting featurette on Good Morning America and a sweet spoof of himself on a Geico ad.

Hitting the Trail

Heading off on our long walk today, my mother referred to the Martin Goodman Trail as the Benny Goodman Trail. It works either way. She's a great trail companion!

What we saw:

Pretty flowers...

Big trees with great bark! (Lots of hugging today.)

I think we were on what must have been farmland at one point. We saw pears...

... and rosehips...

More trees and an almost painfully-blue sky:

... and of course, the CN Tower. Hard NOT to see the world's tallest free-standing structure (till 2007), no matter where you are in Toronto: