The Seated View

I'm having some trouble with my new comment section sometimes not accepting comments. If this happens and you want to say something righthisveryinstant, email me at landers5 AT gmail DOT com. This weekend looks increasingly like I'm going to be spending it uninstalling Haloscan...

I can’t remember not being able to read. Although I have memories from an age where I know I couldn’t read, I don’t remember looking in books and not knowing the magic of letters making words making stories. My first day of school is still clear in my mind. The incapacitating nausea of excitement and nerves, the green A-line dress I wore, my parents’ beaming faces trying to persuade me how great this was and being glued to their sides, not at all sure I liked this strange place. Then our teacher asked how many of us could find our seat by reading the signs on each desk with our names on it. I was one of only two children who knew how to spell my name and it was at that moment I realized that reading was special. When I was 11 years old, in a hospital far from home and hating everything about it, I discovered that reading could be a refuge from an unbearable reality. I still have the book that got me through the first month in that place. The obsession was cemented. My m...

I have several questions, all related to yesterday's post, in which I perhaps a smidge too happy about the ease with which Haloscan installed. To wit: 1. Where did my old comments go? 2. Why does the blasted thing not display the accurate number of comments? 3. What is trackback and why would I want it? (this is mostly rhetorical - I vaguely know what it is and don't particularly see the point) 4. If I got this.... thing for the sake of easy access to commenters' email addresses, so I could actually reply to those peoeple who don't have blogs of their own and reply to people with blogs without having to go through 17 steps to do so, why on earth can I not access email addresses of commenters? I know I can't, because I did a test with my own name. I can find my webpage, I can make a link to the comment, I can freakin' trackback, but the reason I got this magical add-on? Nope. Can't find it. 5. Did you know it's possible, after an extended period of tim...

A while back I whinged about not having an email field in my comments and someone (sorry, I've forgotten who) suggested Haloscan , for my comment section. Naturally, I promptly checked it out, saw that it involved placing HTML code into my... er... thingy (I'm sure there's a much more professional-sounding - and less kinky - name for it, but I have a migraine and have decided not to think today) and equally promptly bookmarked the page and got outta there with the speed of light. To be done later when I felt up to spending a few hours tearing my hair out, because that's what I do when I mess with the template (oh! That's what it's called!). So given today's aforementioned vicious migraine, I naturally decided to go back to Haloscan and mess with code. I learned this from my father: if there's a choice between doing something the easy way and the hard way, make life difficult for yourself. Maybe it comes with having the attention span of a gnat. Doing th...

A second post in one day - and so soon after the first - rarely happens around here. Well, it's never happened around here. But I just discovered something that made me very happy. Rick Mercer has a blog ! I'm beyond excited. Immediately bookmarked it. He's just started and I can't wait to see more. Go read it. And then check out the clips on the Monday Report site. The man's funny. And so smart, I think I might want to marry him (and I mean that in a completely complimentary and non-stalkerish way).

One day , they're all buds, the next, they exploded into blooms.

I feel like a dog. Perhaps I should provide a wee preamble. I have asthma, which is triggered by all kinds of smells – perfume and cologne, scented products (lotion, soap, shampoo, etc.), cleaning products, flowers, you mention it. If it has a smell, I’m likely to start wheezing. Especially when my lungs have already been provoked by previous exposure to a trigger factor. Smog’s a big one, being in an elevator with someone who has marinated in scent, is another. This also makes me very sensitive to smells and brings us right back to why I feel like a dog. I imagine that if a dog could talk, it’d spend most of the time it wasn’t licking its naughty bits (which I do not, by the way), eating, barfing and sleeping (I do eat and sleep, though), asking people “do you smell that? Don’t tell me you can’t smell that?? It’s positively REEKING!”. I can see it now… all excitedly dancing about, nose in the air, sniffing away, yelping about the SMELL and becoming increasing...

This is my dad, or as I (mostly) called him, far. Today is his birthday. My father was a pretty complex man. He was fiercely intelligent, generous, funny, quick-witted, proud, stubborn, had a wicked temper and a severe case of verbal diarrhea. With the exception of the last few years of his life, most of my memories of far involve him talking. He had an incredible ability to use words and could verbally run circles around anyone. He could persuade you that you were wrong, even when he wasn’t right. Far was not always easy to love, but he was never, ever boring. There was a time when I thought he knew everything. Later I realized that although he did know an awful lot, he had mastered the ability to state his opinions with such certainty and confidence that you couldn’t help but believe he was stating facts. He taught us the debate game. About playing with an idea, an abstract concept and pushing it as far as it could go. He taught us how mental gymnastics is o...

Stephanie said to pick one and hate it more . I picked, but not exactly in the way she’d intended: I hate weather extremes. (Well, I have a sick obsession with watching anything about extreme weather on TV, which is also why I’ve seen Twister about 5 times and why I wrote down the opening day of The Day After Tomorrow in my calendar and saw it on opening day, but in real life? Not thrilled with it. Except thunderstorms) I hate that one month during the winter where being outside will cause various appendages to fall off, hitting the icy street with an audible ‘clink’. I hate that time during the summer where it’s too hot to be outside and yet inside, even though the A/C is on, your sheets are clammy (at least they’re cold-clammy, not hot-clammy). I hate not being able to breathe freely, either because the cold’s so bad it takes your breath away or it’s so smoggy, you can taste the air. Gotta admit though… that thunderstorm we had last night was rather incredible. A little ...

Too busy trying to breathe to blog. There's something deeply wrong with being able to see the air.

The forecast for the next several days are temps in the mid-30s, with a humidex of around 40 degrees Celcius. For the Americans around us, that means it'll feel like it's a damp 104. Whoever invented airconditioning should be sainted.

No wonder I’ve been gallivanting about, taking pictures of trees and waxing poetic. I’m avoiding something. Namely, spending too much time in my apartment. My place is an absolute tip. I love British slang, in this case because it exactly describes the state of my home: it looks like someone tipped a dumpster in here. My desk is buried under stuff, I’ve treated the dining table as a horizontal filing area for a longer than I’m comfortable admitting, my old computer is standing in a corner, waiting to go to its new home (this weekend, yay!), a pile of summer clothes are airing out after 7 months in a box, the couch is half-buried under miscellaneous artifacts and there are about 47 magazines lying about in various stages of read-ness. If something horrible should happen to me and CSI: Toronto came in to investigate, they’d probably get lost in here. I keep intending to Do Something about it all, have even devised a clever bit of subterfuge to slowly erode the dominion...

The first time I saw a honey locust , I was gobsmacked by its elegant beauty. The leaves made of light and air, glowing against the starkness of the contortionist branches. It makes me think of enchanted sprites, treed by day, dancing in the moonlight when the world's asleep.

To start things off, I got my summer clothes out of storage (helped/hindered by The Supervisor) and then I took a trip to Europe, without leaving the city. First, I went to Greece. Well, it was actually a fountain, but it could pass for the Aegean Sea and I was eating souvlaki. The next stop was the Parisian Street Fair on King Street East, which turned out to be really fancy design and decor shop language for "sidewalk sale". Despite the snob-factor, we happened upon what must have been the best bargain of the event and Michele bought a beautiful old chair for the staggering sum of $5. We decided to shamelessly plagiarize Stephanie and "show the chair a good time". Here it visits a French restaurant , although "visit" might be too strong a word for something that was essentially "two grown women making spectacles of themselves on the sidewalk in front of a French restaurant": This naturally reminded everyone - the chair included - ...

I was reading a book in the park, enjoying the obvious: reading a book in the park after months’ worth of freezing various appendages off just thinking about being outside. I’ve found a place next to some wooden benches and a picnic table that smells divine when baked by the sun – brought me right back to cottage vacations when I was a child. The company my father worked for owned cottages in various areas of Denmark and every couple of years or so, we’d get the opportunity to rent one for two weeks. We preferred the one in Djursland – it was far away from our home near Copenhagen , beautiful and my father’s family came from that area. The “far away” aspect meant a long drive (during which I often got carsick), a ferry and another (shorter) drive. The cottage was traditional, small, one level, made of wood that had been treated with something that stained it a dark colour – I assume to weatherproof it. It lay back from the road a bit on a large, rarely mown lot s...