Month: July 2024

Wednesday, July10, 2024

Quiet days yet busy in their own way. I have now made three different soups from my chicken stock. A laksa with chicken, a pho with chicken (photo last blog), and a Chinese soup with shrimp and tofu. Eating on the balcony is relaxing, much more so than on the coffee table.

And diet update – well, who knows. I start eating at noon and finish by 8. The mornings are the hardest. By 11am I am usually feeling quite woozy. This is expected. My other choice is to start at 11 and go till 7pm but that might be hard to do. After a week, if my blood sugar continues to not cooperate, I’ll know that’s the better plan. I’m mostly buddying with Krish as he does this, but maybe I’ll benefit.

I’ve flipped through way too much Netflix, Prime and Roki screens to find something to watch. I miss live TV but I don’t want to be one of these ‘I never watch TV’ people.

I went out briefly again yesterday to meet a friend, Esmeralda, who is visiting her old home of Toronto from Bologna. We ate in the Portuguese cafe where they served me a matcha latte, disappointedly from a sweetened (ugh) mix. This friend is one of the few I have that seems to drift through life, as I have, letting the waves carry you along while you make decisions based on the scenery and the weather. No forward plans, not really. I’m not sure this has served me.

She has talked for some years now about moving from Bologna and she’s now thinking perhaps the Azores (she’s from Macau so has a connection with Portugal) or Bolivia. I envy her the ability to even think about this. I talked to Krish about how the single woman I know are usually keen to have a relationship but, when it comes down to it, they love being able to make their own decisions, without conferring with anyone else. I’m a tolerant and cooperative person but this sounds perfect in some ways.

I went into the Dollarama to buy a paintbox and a sketchbook, partly to finish a birthday project for Krish (it’s TODAY!) and partly to have something more creative to do from the balcony than blow bubbles.

The weather was very warm and stiflingly humid.  In my haste to get back and cool off,  I forgot I promised to get cilantro to make mango salad and cold spicy tofu today.

Last night I took hours to watch a video on how to make a ‘paper dancing man’ – I watched it over and over, stopping it and cursing the large Pause button that covered my view of the instructional video, and I made about six, all of which failed. I wondered then worried about the state of my brain or at least the wiring that made it so impossible to translate what’s in front of me to an actual creation. How can I even pretend to be an artist when this is the case? I seem to manage really, but my dolls were the first thing that I could just create without getting tangled up in directions, left or right, purl or plain, up or down, which way to turn this, how will it look when I turn it inside out? This morning I got up and pretty much breezed through my final and acceptable version. Then I wrapped the little present, started on some applique tissue design on the outside and wrote the card with more applique hearts made from Post-Its. Needs must.

Why such trouble with the dancing man? What goes on during the journey from brain to hands? I shared the video with my brother and sister, over Messenger – as a test – could they do it to see how long it would take. My sister was characteristcally quiet and my brother (who I knew would spring to the task) left the chat and came back within about five minutes with a video of his creation. Well, damn! Anyway, here’s the video that shows you how. Want to try it?

Hurricane Beryl is passing through. The intemittent rain has been heavy, the sky has been mostly leaden.  There have been a couple of very windy periods with some huge rain.

We stayed indoors and even our plans to go out for dinner were foiled, so we will go out tomorrow instead. We planned where and when and that’s almost the entire battle around here. The plans were not foiled by the weather but rather the inability to choose where to go. This is far from new. It happens all the time. 

Krish went for food and I finished up the present wrapping, and made a bunch of salads for lunch, including the mango salad now that Krish had bought the cilantro. We ate on the balcony and somehow didn’t get wet.

I listened to more of The Giver of Stars and managed to nap. The book is good – it’s about an English woman who is living in Kentucky with a new husband who has never touched her. She gets hired into a new visiting library scheme in the Kentucky mountains and this will change her life – I’m already sure of it. Jojo Moyes manages to write love stories where the romance isn’t the only focus. Strangely, this is rare, and makes the story feel more real.

My gift was a success – as predicted, the wrapping was the biggest success. So I’m going to try to draw and paint more. Little things and maybe more paper crafts. They feel disposable, a bonus these days.

I think about my discarded arts and crafts supplies, though. I’m pleased I was able to pass them along to someone in Hackney, but sometimes I look over to see them here and they’re gone. I took a lot of pleasure in gathering those things – the fabrics, from donations, from remnants in the fabric store in Stoke Newington, cut from old clothes found in charity shops. Then there was the lace, the buttons, the beads and brooches, the felt, the embroidery threads, colourful and some metallic. The pipe cleaners and glue gun and fake flowers to pull apart to make skirts for the little Day of the Dead and the Christmas peg dolls. The paints and the pencils and who knows what else. It will be a challenge to collect a new box or three. Looking forward to that.

Meanwhile, it’s Toronto, it’s Parkdale, it’s Hurricane Beryl leftovers and it’s Krishna’s birthday and it’s been a pretty good day.

Monday, 8 July, 2024

(Does that sound Dickensian? Bronteish? Not sure.)

At any rate, I went out for a short while today, just ordinary errand running, and it occurred to me that I’m waiting for something big to post here. Maybe that’s not necessary and it means weeks go by where ‘nothing big’ happens or things seem bleak and I can’t bring myself to put it into writing – it might feel too real or put people off, but it’s still my life and I can’t really imagine a day when I don’t see or do something that makes the day easier. So here we go, me deciding to blog no matter what, when I want, and…have I said this before?

Today I felt determined and made a To Do list. I had little work and a full day ahead, a day that promised to be very hot with the usual humidity so I didn’t have or want to commit to very much.

We are in a loft condo. When we took the place we saw it as a one-month stop gap. When we moved in, we were not at all happy but that balcony and shower sold me in the end and after a month our landlord gave it to us off of Airbnb – always a plus.

There are two bedrooms – one is empty and we are storing things there. There are two bathrooms – one with a tub, which has become Krish’s and the other (en suite) is quite far the nicest walk-in shower I’ve had anywhere and that’s mine. The kitchen and living room are open-plan. The kitchen is small. but there’s an island at least or there’d be no counter space at all. The living room is narrow and is saved by  French floor-to-ceiling doors leading to the balcony spanning the living room space. There are no curtains and it opens the space and the view. And I like the view – in this immediate area it’s all houses and nothing tall (except this building at seven floors) and the trees are higher than the houses, so from up here there are trees in every direction. There are birds and my birdsong app says they are  mostly sparrows and cardinals. I haven’t seen the latter yet. Krish has shown me hawks (two circling each other at times) in the sky. They never land.

We are back in Parkdale again, this time a bit further east (closer to downtown by three or four streetcar stops). I like this area better than the first. We have a greengrocer, a five-minute walk away, something that other places have lacked. And Krish has easier access to all the supermarkets he likes to visit. So all in all, despite a bit of a rough landing in this place, we’ve found it works well. If only the streetcars weren’t in such a mess, but that’s another story.

I walked along the street opposite, admiring the overgrown gardens, to the next main road.  It was a hot 30-degree, 55% humidity day. First a visit to the post office where I was delighted to find no queue. Next a visit to the greengrocer – an Alphonso mango, three limes, and two Ontario pickling cucumbers for a salad. Krish and I are trying to stay within a fasting period. We’ll see how it goes.

I folded clothes, filed papers, worked an hour, sent in my timesheet to be paid in a couple of weeks, and listened to the final 90 minutes of my audiobook  House by Christina Lauren. A very odd book – boy meets girl, boy lives in a house that’s ‘alive’ – it takes care of him and always has, until he meets girl and jealousy takes over and tries to entrap him and kill her. Yes, that’s odd but interesting. All done. And now I start Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, my new favourite author.