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I don’t know why I never thought to look this up on youtube before today, but there it was, in all it’s po-mo glory; Silverstein’s The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.  It’s one my all time favourite children’s books and even after doing a Lacanian reading and analysis of it, it’s not ruined for me.  Now I can share it with you:

I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

Huzzah!  I did it.  There’s, like, stuff & junk living at cushti.ca now.  Not much beyond the blog but i’m pretty proud of that for the moment.  Welcome to the new home.

I decided to maintain the blog through wordpress to ease the learning curve a little.  I knew that I wouldn’t get anything done if I had too much new going on and the fact that the new job has a learning curve of about 377 degrees I thought I’d err on the side of caution for the personal stuff.

I have to give special thanks to Nelson at hostpapa support who was not only apologetic but also extremely helpful in dealing with some of the glitches I’d come up against in their month of losing admin staff and server issues.  More props need to go out to bytesforall for creating an amazing, highly configurable theme & this dude who developed a lovely little twitter widget which slipped right into said theme like butter allowing me to dispense of the unsightly rss feed which was doing its job on the .com platform.  Oh, and to the mister, of course, for providing me with web hosting.  I’m also thankful to have had excuses to indulge my not-so-inner brush and font junkie.  Last night I dreamt of finding a way to administer them intra-venously.  For real.

So the other thing I have to talk to you about is poop.

Or a lack there of, as it were.  I’m playing hookie today in order to also play nurse to my still-stoned son who thought it apt to wolf down almost an entire bag of hot & spicy spitz sunflower seeds, shells & all.  This lead to an impacted bowel and a late-night trip to the emergency ward of the hospital for manual removal of the blockage with the help of a lot of morphine.  Needless to say a certain someone won’t be eating sunflower seeds any time soon.  Aren’t you glad I’m blogging again?

I’m sick today and sick really sucks in my world.  I don’t get sick often, the most poorly I feel is usually down to second day of menstruation ickiness which makes me wonder if I could sell my uterus on ebay.  It’s produced two lovely loin fruits, I don’t see why it can’t go to someone who really needs it rather than hanging out with me.  But I digress.  I believe I’ve caught whatever the daughter had last week.  It’s that kind of gut-wrenching, dehydrating, headache-inducing bug that I know will go away in a few hours with rest and soup but I go too long between viral bouts to really equip myself with the skills to deal with it and end up with a wonderful emotional cocktail comprised of 1 part frustration, 1 part discomfort, 1 part depression and 3 parts guilt.  I really don’t have a lot to share with you beyond that and I’m tired of whinging about it so I’ll leave you with one of my favourite bits of one of my favourite books because the mindless busy work of typing it out has made me somewhat happy.  Take some.  Enjoy:

But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.

“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.

“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.

“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.

“In real life.”

“I study.”

“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”

“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”

“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”

“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”

“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”

“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”

“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Casaubon.”

“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”

“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”

“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

“And that covers everybody?”

“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“Idealtypen.”

“Very good. You know German?”

“Enough for bibliographies.”

“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”

“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”

“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”

“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”

“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”

“Getting back to the lunatics.”

“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”

“All right. My round.”

“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”

“Let’s.”

“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”

“Yes, I know a few of those.”

“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”

“I do.”

“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon general!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”

“What about the morons?”

“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”

“Which they are.”

“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”

“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”

“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”

“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”

“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”

“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”

“A duel between morons.”

“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism.”

“We’re surrounded by morons.”

“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”

“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”

“My round.”

“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”

“That’s moronic thinking.”

“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”

“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”

“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”

“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”

“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moron-ism or not?”

“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”

“And what if you were a moron?”

“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”

“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”

“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”

“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”

“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

“Invariably?”

“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”

“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”

“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”

“What makes you trust me?”

“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”

A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”

“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”

“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”

Now go read the book.  It will change your life.

I’m sick today and sick really sucks in my world.  I don’t get sick often, the most poorly I feel is usually down to second day of menstruation ickiness which makes me wonder if I could sell my uterus on ebay.  It’s produced two lovely loin fruits, I don’t see why it can’t go to someone who really needs it rather than hanging out with me.  But I digress.  I believe I’ve caught whatever the daughter had last week.  It’s that kind of gut-wrenching, dehydrating, headache-inducing bug that I know will go away in a few hours with rest and soup but I go too long between viral bouts to really equip myself with the skills to deal with it and end up with a wonderful emotional cocktail comprised of 1 part frustration, 1 part discomfort, 1 part depression and 3 parts guilt.  I really don’t have a lot to share with you beyond that and I’m tired of whinging about it so I’ll leave you with one of my favourite bits of one of my favourite books because the mindless busy work of typing it out has made me somewhat happy.  Take some.  Enjoy:

But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.

“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.

“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.

“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.

“In real life.”

“I study.”

“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”

“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”

“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”

“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”

“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”

“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”

“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Casaubon.”

“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”

“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”

“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

“And that covers everybody?”

“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“Idealtypen.”

“Very good. You know German?”

“Enough for bibliographies.”

“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”

“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”

“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”

“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”

“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”

“Getting back to the lunatics.”

“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”

“All right. My round.”

“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”

“Let’s.”

“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”

“Yes, I know a few of those.”

“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”

“I do.”

“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon general!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”

“What about the morons?”

“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”

“Which they are.”

“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”

“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”

“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”

“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”

“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”

“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”

“A duel between morons.”

“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism.”

“We’re surrounded by morons.”

“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”

“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”

“My round.”

“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”

“That’s moronic thinking.”

“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”

“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”

“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”

“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”

“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moron-ism or not?”

“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”

“And what if you were a moron?”

“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”

“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”

“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”

“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”

“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

“Invariably?”

“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”

“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”

“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”

“What makes you trust me?”

“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”

A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”

“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”

“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”

Now go read the book.  It will change your life.

I don’t know about any of you but I’m still sat here in my pyjamas, sipping a manhattan and brimming with smugness for having done almost nothing productive today.  I did do laundry, but I was still on auto-pilot so it hasn’t registered in the productivity scale.

The weekend was highlighted by a crash visit from my Megan who was going stir-crazy in her rural digs and so hitch-hiked in for some mindless entertainment chez nous.  After a brief lecture directed at my loin fruits about the perils of hitch-hiking we most definitely came through on the mindless entertainment part & much wine, food, guitar hero and general joyful conviviality was had by all (except the wine bit for the sprogs – I made them chai and shiley temples).

Today the son indulged us with his waffle-making skills & I created a lovely apple stew to go with them.  Perfect for a lazy Sunday 14:00h brunch.

I can’t share the buttermilk waffle recipe as that’s the son’s secret, but here’s how to make the stew:

What you need:

7 apples

1/2 stick of butter

2 cardamom pods lightly crushed

4 cloves

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/5 cups sweet vermouth

10 dashes of Angostura bitters

Peel and roughly chop the apples into bite-sized bits.  In a medium sauce pan melt the butter then add the spices and the apples.  Cook and stir until the apples become somewhat fork tender.  Add the vermouth and cook and stir over low heat until it thickens.  Try to time this with the finish time of the waffles.  If you miss just add a little more vermouth to loosen it up again.  Serve over hot waffles & vanilla ice cream and top the lot of it with loads of freshly ground pepper.

I hope you all had as lovely a weekend.

I could read Andrea’s blog for the eye candy alone.  She’s an amazing artist and gifted writer.  I love her language of colour and composition but I totally crush on it because of posts like this one.

How cool (and brave) of her to post about her process?  I’m a complete chickenshit when it comes to sharing anything unfinished, which is why it all stays nicely hidden in my studio behind a closed door.  The thought of playing mentor to the masses boggles my mind, but she’s gracious enough to do it.  Go check her out.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who gets excited about it either.  I always look forward to National Geographic’s
Best Science Images
of the year.  The one above amuses me to no end.  Go check them out.

I completely forgot that Corine tagged in her post about what was learned in Ohate.  I suck.  Yes I do.

It’s kind of an overwhelming topic at this juncture as ’08 has brought many changes in circumstances my way after having quit my job as a corporate whore in late ’07, settling in to living with the mister, a child going into his teens and developing an intimate relationship with Sick Kids Hospital as the result of an injury my daughter sustained.  I also have that annoying habit of learning from other people’s experience.  I learned a lot, but I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.

– You know that whole me being lucky with money thing that you’re all giving me the gears for?  Yeah, I learned that’s pretty much true.

– It’s really healthier for all of humanity to keep my standards non-negotiable.

– I’ve got an amazingly supportive group of friends.

– I can’t be friends with everyone.

– I relearned how to let shit go.

– Leaving a bad job is like leaving a bad relationship.  All those steps of grieving and everything.  True story.

– My kids have picked up a lot of my bad habits but some good ones too.

– I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way.

– Walking around with your heart on one sleeve and your vulnerabilities on the other can be exhausting but so worth it.

– My sense of reciprocity is skewed.

– I really am a quick study.

– I will never grow out of the desire to take on my children’s pain.

– Canada has been wearing blinders for far too long and we were not prepared for the shock of reintroduction to daylight.

– I finally got that damned shoe-tying thing down too.

Just a quick blurb to let all y’all know that I’ve survived the weekend.  The focus fair holiday arts & craft show was a brilliant event.  The collective did a fabulous job of pulling it all together, getting the word out and keeping it all ticking.  Vendor turnout could not have been better if everyone was hand picked by Martha.  We had such a great array of talent and personalities it’s no wonder we got the traffic we did.  Using The Spill was a stroke of genius and I’m so grateful to Dave for lending us the space.  This kind of cooperative spirit is what makes me happy to be part of this community.

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