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.