kiraly

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s William S. and the Great Escape intending to read a chapter or two, and then accidentally gulped down the whole thing. William S. Bagget (he add the S after playing Ariel in a production of The Tempest last spring) and his siblings run away from their horrible family to live with their Aunt Fiona. As always, Snyder writes great little kids (even children’s authors often stumble on four-year-olds), and I loved the way that Shakespeare-obsessed William found ways to compare his everyday life to Shakespeare scenarios.

I also read Daphne du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Sir Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, which mostly about Sir Francis Bacon’s political and literary career, but features a few forays into not-quite-full-blown Baconian theories. Now du Maurier is not saying that Bacon wrote ALL of Shakespeare’s plays, but what if he talked the plays over with Shakespeare while he was writing them? What if he contributed some of the witty quotes during tavern arguments? What if maybe he actually DID write the plays that were never printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime…

Du Maurier doesn’t so much provide an argument for this as just say “Hey guys what if?”, but I find it delightful on the same level of “What if Audubon was secretly the escaped dauphin of France?” What if indeed! Don’t believe it for a second actually! But you shine on, you crazy diamond of an author.

What I’m Reading Now

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, the book on which Spirited Away is very (very) loosely based. Really enjoying this! Rationing it out a bit because I don’t want it to end… However the library does have Temple Alley Summer so I might move on to that.

What I Plan to Read Next

Going absolutely ham on the Christmas books this year. Besides the picture book Advent calendar, I’m planning Ruth Sawyer’s The Long Christmas (a collection of Christmas short stories), Tasha Tudor’s Forever Christmas (a book about Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s place), Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, and Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, although as I am 25th on the hold list for that last book it may have to wait for next year.

yuuago

Writing: I throw off a draft, put it aside, and then forget about it. It sits in my wip folder (either physical or digital) for years until I do something with it.

Knitting: I knit up a thing, put it aside, and then forget to block it. It sits in a bag in my closet for years until I remember that it's there and block it.

Drawing/painting: I do a thing, and then shove it in a folder and forget about it. Maybe months later I'll remember to scan it. Maybe not.

The similarities. They sure are a thing.

osprey_archer

I figured some of you would be interested in Newbery books with Jewish themes, so I’ve made a list. (As usual, it’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten some, since I’ve been reading this books for nigh on thirty years.)

1931: Agnes Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. A kindly older Jewish couple help matchmake our hero and heroine and also lend money to the king of Portugal for voyages of exploration. (The modern reader may have a low opinion of voyages of exploration, but in Hewes’ eyes these are very much a Good Thing.) The entire Jewish community gets kicked unjustly out of Portugal.

1941. Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree features not only a kindly Jewish shopkeeper but an extended musing on how Hungary was formed when everyone - Hungarian landowners, Jewish shopkeepers, some third group that I’m forgetting right now - came together as one. This is a building block toward the book’s central theme: not only are all the people of Hungary one, but in fact all human beings on this earth are one, and therefore can’t we stop tormenting each other with the horrors of war? (A cri de coeur in 1941.)

Then a trifecta of short story collections, written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and then translated into English: Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967), The Fearsome Inn (1968) (actually a short story made into a picture book), and When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969). Stories of eastern European Jewish life, often very funny or with a supernatural twist.

Then in 1970, the Newbery committee followed this up with Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie (Jewish life in the Lower East Side in the 1900s) AND Johanna Reiss’s hiding-from-the-Nazis memoir The Upstairs Room. Another Holocaust memoir followed in 1982: Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944.

2008: Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village is a series of poetic monologues told by different members of a medieval village, including a Jewish child.

2017: In Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, the narration rotates between the three magical children, one of whom is Jewish. (I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to plug Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies and Max in the Land of Lies, even though they’re not Newbery books. Yet. Max in the Land of Lies is eligible for 2026! Just putting that out there, Newbery committee!

Most recently, Ruth Behar’s 2025 Across So Many Seas is a generational saga of a Sephardic Jewish family, based loosely on Behar’s own family history. The story begins in the 1400s when the family is forced to leave Spain, then continues in the 1900s when a daughter of the family emigrates to Cuba for an arranged marriage. (Behar based this section on her own grandmother’s story, which she recounts in the afterword. The real story seems much more romantic than the tale Behar told to tell instead, which is such a strange choice.) Her daughter becomes a brigadista teaching peasants how to read until she emigrates to the US, and then her daughter vacations in Spain which the family was forced to flee so many generations before.

Edited to add:

landofnowhere pointed out that I forgot Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, which is both embarrassing and inexplicable because I read that approximately 500 times as a child, and have reread it at least twice as an adult.

And also E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday, but that one is much less embarrassing, as I read that book once and remember nothing except the fact that I didn't understand any of it. (And also during the quiz bowl at the end, the judges would allow posh to count as an acronym, but not tip. Why did this stick with me? The human mind is a mystery.)

yuuago

OH NO I was suddenly reminded of The Magnus Archives and suddenly I had a rush of feelings. I still really like it, even if the final season wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I should re-listen to it sometime.

I have at least one, maybe two, Michael-centric fics in my wip folder. (Or rather, they were both Sasha/Michael, I think.) I do hope I'll get to them at some point. Maybe that'll be a project to finish in the new year?

One of those fics is almost done. Actually, I can't remember why I didn't finish it. It's possible I was thinking that I might need a beta for it, but the subject was kind of niche and I wasn't sure where to look. And then I put it aside and forgot about it, maybe. (That's usually how it goes.) ...Will have to revisit it later and see what kind of state it's in. :Va

Something I had wanted to do, but never got around to doing, was writing some gen horror for this canon. Likely in the form of statements, but not necessarily. It's just, that's my favourite part of the thing, and it lends itself so well to that type of fanwork, and and and... Coming up with ideas is hard, but hopefully if I revisit it at some point I'll get some inspiration.

osprey_archer

It has been some time since I’ve given a hobby update! In the months since my previous post, you will be glad to know that I’ve kept cross-stitching.

In fact, I’ve been enjoying cross-stitching so much that I’ve finally managed to set up a morning tea routine: get up around 6:30, make tea, put one (1) chocolate-covered hobnob on my favorite little plate, and then cross-stitch till 7:15 when it’s time to get ready for work. Life is so much better when I get up in time for a gentle on-ramp to the morning, and yet until now I haven’t been able to convince myself to actually get out of bed in time.

I finished my Halloween cross-stitch in time for Halloween (want to find a better frame for it though), stitched a tremendously round little red Christmas bird as a break (amazing how fast you can cross stitch when the whole thing is just one color!), and am now working on a little Victorian Christmas tree which is for my ornament exchange with my friend Caitlin.

This little Christmas tree is WAY more involved than I expected, so I probably won’t finish my little cornucopia in time for Thanksgiving. But I have acquired the cornucopia pattern and will at any rate have it ready for NEXT year.

Other patterns on deck:

The absolutely adorable Puss in Boots from Veronique Enginger’s book of fairy tale cross stitch.

A Tiffany window inspired pattern of birds and bamboo and flowers from a book of Art Nouveau cross stitch. (I have the floss for this one but have been momentarily stymied in finding the right color fabric.)

And I’ve promised

troisoiseaux a Nevermore, garnished with ravens…

I’m also taking a two-part embroidery class. On Monday I started my jellyfish, and next Monday I will hopefully finish the jellyfish. The backing fabric is a dark navy blue so the tentacles are pink floss, and the top is going to be gold and turquoise and dark royal blue beads.

Book projects: since the previous post, I finished the Newbery project, and then just this weekend finished the Postcard Book project! (Jules Verne was the last Famous Author postcard from the set.) Which means that I COULD start the E. M. Forster readthrough...

But I’ve decided to hold off until after Christmas, because I just had a brilliant idea for a Christmas project: a picture book Advent calendar! I have MANY Christmas picture books on my list this year, so I’ll get them from the library, wrap them up in brown paper (or newspaper or whatever paper I have available), and then select a surprise book each night to read.

I probably won’t end up posting about most of them because I often don’t have a lot to say about picture books. Although maybe a weekly round-up with a line or two about each book?

At the moment I’m actually a bit short of books (I thought the list was AMPLY long, but some of the books are only available in the archives etc.), so I may have to poke around to find a few more. We shall see!

And of course I AM planning some December archive visits to enjoy those Christmas books! In fact, I believe I can schedule an archive visit next week (not for Christmas books of course; a firm believer in saving Christmas season till after Thanksgiving), as registration is at long last winding up. Perhaps it’s time to begin A. A. Milne’s The Princess and the Apple Tree.

yuuago

Me, thinking about writing while working out: Haha, what if I wrote something super artsy and pretentious just to take the piss.

Me, still thinking about writing while showering off: But what if you did it earnestly, though? What if.

To be fair, the last few times I did something artsy and pretentious and earnest I was very pleased with the results.

Hmm.

Hmm.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

It took me some time, but I’ve finished Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! I read the translation by Mendor T. Brunetti, which comes with an afterword which talks a bit about the history of Verne translations. Apparently the first guy who translated Verne into English didn’t understand a lot of the science, and either mistranslated or straight up cut it out, which gave Verne a very poor reputation among American science fiction fans for years until someone finally went back to the original French and said “Now wait a minute.” So the Brunetti translation is a corrective.

We also do NOT find out the specifics of Captain Nemo’s tragic backstory, although the afterword kindly explains that there were two different versions, one that Verne’s publisher axed for political reasons and one that was eventually published in The Mysterious Island. ( spoilers )

Tons of undersea details all the way through to the end, and a very interesting glimpse of 19th century science. Nemo and co. visit the South Pole by sailing the Nautilus under the ice shelf and then popping up in the polar sea, which reflects the popular scientific theory of the day.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall. This is the sequel to Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, a biography of the Bacon brothers which mostly focuses on Francis’s older brother Anthony the sickly spymaster. I found Golden Lads a bit of a slog (Anthony just spends so much time ill in bed), but The Winding Stair is zipping right along! Bacon has just befriended the king’s new favorite George Villiers, who seems a great improvement on the last favorite who awkwardly has just been found guilty of poisoning someone with an arsenic enema.

What I Plan to Read Next

My Unread Bookshelf book for this month is Gene Stratton Porter’s The Harvester. Every GSP book I’ve read has been absolutely deranged, so I’m excited to see where this book will take me.

yuuago

If I'd had more time, I would have arranged my schedule differently. But since I'm going home tomorrow, there were only so many ways that I could plan things. Today is a stat holiday, so hours were reduced and some things were closed.

Originally I'd planned to get up bright and early, take my computer to the Ayco cafe, and work on fic. But I was still feeling a little exhausted, so it ended up being a morning of relaxing and reading instead. (Though, I did work on fic a little this trip!) And part of the reason I wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere is because I was going to go somewhere specific that didn't open until noon: West Edmonton Mall.

You know, I think West Ed might be one of the circles of hell. Or more specifically, West Ed on a stat, with reduced hours. It's probably more tolerable at, say, 10 AM on a regular Tuesday morning. Anyway.

I have successfully: bought some Christmas presents (for dad, at Lammle's), obtained some new work clothes (at Winners), found a new pair of jeans (also Winners), and picked up some odds and ends for myself (seasonal shower gels from The Body Shop - the location in Fort Mac has closed). And I also appreciated the opportunity to go into some stores that we don't have locally, look at things that I had been thinking about getting, and decide that I didn't actually need them after all. But after a couple of hours of this, I'd had Quite Enough, thank you. Too many people, too many stores, too much everything! But that is the general West Edmonton Mall experience, I guess.

This evening is just going to be relaxing and doing nothing much. Maybe I'll finish one of the fics I was working on. Maybe not. I do have one almost ready to go, though.

I'm going home tomorrow, and I honestly wish I had another day or two here. There are a lot of small art galleries that I did not have time to visit! Plus I haven't had any opportunity to go geocaching! But it's very possible that I'll come back some time, perhaps for another concert, and that means there will be more for me to discover in the future.

osprey_archer

I haven’t made a ton of progress on my 2015 book list since I posted it… but I’ve read so many books on my 2016 list that I figured I’d better hurry up and post it before they were all gone. It’s just that so many of the 2016 books are shorter than the remaining books on the 2015 list!

But I’m getting to the long books on the 2016 list now, so that should slow me down.

~~Barbara Cooney - Basket Moon (Mary Lyn Ray)~~

~~Abbie Farwell Brown - The Curious Book of Birds~~ (I read this on Gutenberg on my phone, only near the end Gutenberg suddenly changed how it displayed on the phone so it was really irritating to read. I hope this isn’t permanent, or it’s going to seriously mess with my ability to read more Angela Brazil.)

Hampton Sides - either On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle or The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Has anyone read either?

Margaret Oliphant - still haven’t finished Kirsteen for my 2015 list! But for 2016, Phoebe Jr. or perhaps Salem Chapel?

Gene Stratton Porter - The Harvester

Elizabeth Wein - American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky (co-authored with Sherri L. Smith, author of Flygirls, super excited for this one)

~~Dorothy P Lathrop - The Colt from Moon Mountain~~

Enid Bagnold - National Velvet (might need to have an accompanying movie night?)

~~Robert McCloskey - Lentil~~

Ngaio Marsh - Tied Up in Tinsel (saving for the Christmas season)

~~Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Good Wolf~~

Elizabeth Enright - Then There Were Five

~~Katherine Milhous - A Book for Jennifer (Alice Dalgleish)~~

Emile Zola - I’ve read Germinal and Nana. Suggestions for my next foray?

~~D. E. Stevenson - Young Mrs. Savage~~

Sorche Nic Leodhas - Sea-Spell and Moor-Magic: Tales of the Western Isles (also super excited for this one!)

Maud Hart Lovelace - The Trees Kneel at Christmas (saving this for Christmas too obviously)

yuuago

Let's devote this entry to the entire reason I'm in Edmonton in the first place: to watch Sigur Rós perform live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra!

This is a band that I never thought I would ever have the chance to see, and I'm so glad that I happened to find out that they would be performing here and jumped on the chance to get a ticket. It'll likely be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so I made sure to appreciate it.

This year is the 20th anniversary of Takk.... I have vivid memories of going to the CD Plus in New Minas and seeing that album there, with the new releases. I'd heard the band's name before but never chanced to hear any of their music. But there was something about the way it was designed that was so compelling, so unusual, that I picked it up. And then after I got back to my dorm room, I gave it a listen and it completely blew my mind. I had never heard anything like it.

I've actually been out of the Sigur Rós loop for several years. When they went on hiatus and Jónsi did some solo work, my attention kind of wandered and I didn't pick them back up after that. So, I missed the work they did post-hiatus, and I was unaware of Átta, their newest release. But I have it now (having picked it up at Blackbyrd Myoozik on Whyte Ave this afternoon) and I'm looking forward to enjoying it properly when I get home.

Most of the titles in the concert were from Átta and Takk... - I've seen a review that compares the new album favourably to the old standby, and I would say I agree, if the work I heard to night is anything to go by.

I'm kind of struggling to put into words the experience of this concert. What can one even say? It was beautiful. It was everything I'd hoped it would be. Sigur Rós was awesome, the ESO was awesome, it was a really lovely concert. There's nothing I can add to that.

There was one issue in the second half - there was some issue with the sound and most of the microphones lost volume, and Jónsi's mic cut out completely. But the band kept playing, and the ESO kept playing, and Jónsi went over to the piano where the microphone was still sort-of partially working. And it was one of those songs where the music is quiet and slow, and gets more delicate toward the end, so between the dimming of the music, the half-working piano microphone, and the venue's good acoustics, we could hear the vocals surprisingly well. They finished the song without stopping at all and somehow, that makes it even more special - that they worked through this imperfection without skipping a beat and still sounded amazing regardless.

(Though it will not beat that moment at a concert several years ago where he apparently forgot the words and just kept on singing, all "Oh shit, I forgot the words, but I'm in France and nobody understands anyway")

One of the final songs was "Hoppípolla" - and it was just as wonderful as I had hoped. I've heard it again and again, and it never gets old.

I'm really glad that I made this trip and I got to see this concert. <3 It was just very very special.

osprey_archer

rachelmanija asked about the most peculiar Newberies. This list has a lot of overlap with my post about Nonsense in the Newberys, since nonsense books are by definition usually pretty peculiar, but also they’re peculiar on purpose which perhaps takes away some of the weirdness.

But the Newbery book that most sticks in my mind for sheer and possibly unintentional strangeness is Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle. I mentioned this book in the Nonsense post as perhaps nonsense-adjacent, but I’ve never made up my mind whether it’s meant to be or not.

It’s tonally very weird. Everything on a Waffle got a Newbery Honor in 2002, which was peak Grim Dead Relative era for the Newberys, and generally speaking these books are mired down with Grim Dead Relative Feelings. The protagonists grieve so hard that there’s no room for anything else in the story.

However, although Everything on a Waffle begins with our heroine losing her parents at sea, there is no Newbery Grieving Process. Our heroine is blithely convinced that her parents have merely been shipwrecked somewhere, and will return in good time, and meanwhile she’s enjoying life in her weird little town. There is, for instance, an award-winning restaurant where everything is served on a waffle, hence the title.

It’s been quite some time since I read the book, but what has stuck with me for years is the way that the heroine just keeps bopping along no matter what happens. It’s not that she’s Pollyanna-ish exactly. It’s more that she’s aware that she’s in some sort of picaresque tale and doesn’t take it too seriously when she comically loses appendages: a finger here, a toe there.

Eventually, social services decides that a competent guardian would do a better job keeping the child in one piece, and our heroine is removed from her kindly but inept relation and taken into care.

But then! Her parents reappear! Our heroine was right all along. They were alive, they have been rescued, and the family is whole again, minus of course a few of the heroine’s fingers and toes.

Simply a strange book! Very peculiar! It isn’t really a nonsense book, because unlike the true nonsense books there’s nothing technically impossible happening. But it all seems so improbable that it has something of that dream-like nonsense book feeling anyway.

yuuago

So! Today was Museum Adventures.

I went to the Royal Alberta Museum. I was not prepared for how huge it was! Took quite a while for me to go through. A lot of the general concept behind the human history exhibits was familiar with me, so I tried to go in approaching it as if I were someone unfamiliar with Alberta. That made me look at things from another angle and, I think, appreciate it more.

The highlight of the RAM trip was the Bug Gallery, though. It's basically a zoo with living insects and arachnids. They have a wide variety of types; mostly invertebrates from outside Alberta, but some locals as well. I was able to get some neat photos that I might (hopefully) be able to use as reference for some more insect drawings.

Royal Alberta Museum took up several hours of the day, and might have taken up more at another time, except that there currently isn't anything in the Feature Gallery.

And after that I went to the Art Gallery of Alberta. It's much smaller than the RAM, but still well worth a look. My favourite of the current exhibits was Shift, with work by Marie Lannoo and Katie Ohe. Lannoo does paintings and sculpture showing complex light and gradients; Ohe's work is metalic kinetic sculptures that move in a very mesmerizing way. Very interesting experience; the sort of art where I'm like "I don't know if I get this but I really enjoy looking at it".

So, after spending around ~5 hours walking around museums all day, I went back to my hotel and faceplanted, only dragging myself out long enough to go get some ramen at Misoya. And it happened to be very good ramen. Ramen bars tend to be one of my favourites if I get exhausted while traveling - limited menus mean that the decision making will be easy, and it's definitely something that I will want to eat.

yuuago

So! Today I went out and did some things. I was very tired for most of the day as I slept rather poorly. The fire alarm went off at around 4 AM; it was a false alarm, and rang for 5 seconds or so and then turned off. I didn't actually know it was a false alarm until I came down in the morning and heard the person at the front desk discussing it with someone, but at the time I figured, if it was a real emergency, it would have kept ringing. Anyway.

Went down to Acquired Taste Tea and picked up enough tea to last me, like, a year. Why have it shipped when I can buy it (and smell it) in person? They do have a pretty big variety and I ended up also picking up a few things that I hadn't had on my (long) list.

Getting there required taking the transit. I took an unfamiliar bus and survived, hooray. After a day of using it (for this and a few other things) I would say that so far I find Edmonton's public transit rather good, provided you're a tourist going to stuff on major bus routes.

Then in the afternoon, I went to the Rocky Mountain Food & Wine Festival. I've never been to this kind of event before, but when I found out that it as going on during the time I'd be here, I figured eh, why not! The emphasis is on the wine, rather than the food, but there was definitely plenty of munchies to try, which is good as I hadn't had lunch. I opted for the entry pass where you pay extra to receive a certain number of tickets to use on sampling, and I'm glad I did, because it took the "how much will I need?" question out of the equation, and the amount that I received was plenty.

There was a large selection of Canadian wineries there, but also a lot of international vendors, and I took the opportunity to sample some works from Romania and Moldova, as I've never tried anything from those regions. I can now say that Transylvanian whites are quite nice and the Moldovan sparkling blackcurrant wine I tried was fucking awesome.

For the Italian offers, I sampled some Zenato Valpolicella DOC, which is produced near Verona. The wine is a flavourful dry red adjacent to Amarone (one of my favourite kinds) and tastes very similar, but not as deep as Amarone. Unfortunately this wine itself was not possible to purchase at the festival; there are some places in Edmonton that I can get it, but not anywhere near where I had planned to go. Will think about it, though, as I liked it a lot and I know my mother would enjoy it too.

The highlight of the festival, though, was going to a seminar about sake. I've never tried sake before, so it was nice to learn a little about the history of it, how it's used in a culinary context, and taste some of it. It tastes very fresh and light! I really enjoyed it! Will have to explore this further. We tried both a modern clear kind, and a traditional variety, which is cloudy. Both were by Nakano.

It was an interesting experience and I'm glad I decided to try something new, but I don't know if I would go to an event quite like this again. I don't actually know much about wine; for the most part I just drink whatever my mom gives me, 'cause she makes it as a hobby. There were too many choices, and of course the festival was very busy, so I found the overall experience overwhelming. But I did really enjoy the sake seminar, so I think I might seek out some kind of small experience like that in the future, where it's more guided and focused on learning the history of the drink and how to appreciate it and so on.

And then in the evening I went to a concert! It was a performance of soprano, harpsichord, and baroque cello, organized by Early Music Alberta. The music was mostly 17th century - Claudio Monteverdi, Filippo Amadei, Allessandro & Domenico Scarlatti, and so on. It was VERY wonderful and I'm so glad that I went, even though I was very tired because it had been a long day.

It turns out that the Early Music Concert was part of a wider group of events; I missed the earlier ones (performances by various amateur ensembles, and also a Renaissance dance lesson) which is kind of a bummer, but at least I made it to the final concert. Honestly up until very recently I wasn't aware that there was an organization in Edmonton focused on early music; I was aware of one in Victoria but had no idea that there was one closer to home. I'll have to keep an eye on their schedules for the future.

So! That was a very busy day! But I had an interesting time. Hopefully tonight will not have any Surprise Interrupted Sleep in store for me.

yuuago

I have successfully arrived in Edmonton. This is the first time I've taken an intercity bus between Fort Mac and the provincial capital, and let me tell you, it's a much better experience than flying in general. Is it a 5 hour ride? Yeah, sure. Is it much more comfortable and low-stress than flying is? Definitely. And like... let's be real, when it comes to flying, by the time you're finished faffing around with checking in, waiting, sitting on your ass, planing, deplaning, and then getting transportation from the airport to wherever it is you're going, it's practically been 5 hours anyway. So.

Plus, like, I'm not going to say that being forced to sit and do nothing much for 5 hours fixed me, but it didn't... not... fix me. I think I might have needed a break from constantly Doing Things. (I mostly read a book; it was a very good book. Which I will hopefully write something about later.)

As I've mentioned before (I think I mentioned, anyway) I've never actually been to Edmonton. So, this'll be some new discoveries, hooray.

So far I have done the following:

+ Successfully picked up a 5-day ARC card/bus pass. Taking public transportation in a city unfamiliar to me is always very stressful, but I fully intend to get my money's worth out of this because honestly, November isn't the best time of year to be walking 20-40 minutes to get somewhere. Right now it's very sloppy and wet and eugh outside.

+ Found an excellent bookstore. And bought some books that I really didn't need, whoops. And passed up on still more that I do want to read but figured I should exercise some restraint. If you ever happen to be in Edmonton, do check out Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue, it's lovely. And also it has a decently-sized LGBT2QA section. I actually just missed a book launch that they hosted the other day for Cruising the Downtown: Celebrating Edmonton's Queer History by The Edmonton Queer History Project (Book details). I was thinking about buying that one, but now that I consider it a better idea would be to ask the Fort Mac library to add it to their collection - I think there are some other people who'd like to read it too.

+ Found an excellent place to get coffee, which I badly needed (Ayco Cafe on Jasper). After that bus trip I was pretty ravenous and caffeine-deprived. It has lots of seating and the food is delicious but it's also quiet, or at least the vibe is low-key and chill when I happened to be there. I really wish we had this sort of place in Fort Mac - every cafe in town is so stressfully busy and loud and obnoxious that I just plain can't do the whole "coffee and chill and write" thing I used to do, and it makes me sad.

+ Successfully found somewhere to eat. Much like using transit that I'm unfamiliar with, going to restaurants I haven't been to before activates my anxiety like whoa. It can make going to new cities kind of stressful. So I'm really pleased with myself for kicking anxiety to the curb and stepping foot into a pub near my hotel rather than picking up something microwavable from the nearest Shoppers. Much like everything else, now that I've done it once, it'll be easier (ish) to do it a second time. Funny how that goes.

+ I have made a schedule and, while I do have some flexibility, I'm mostly going to stick to it. I'm here to see Sigur Ros on Monday, but since Edmonton is a pretty big city, there is a ton of stuff to do, and I fully plan to take advantage of that. My family seems to be under the impression that I'm going to be spending most of my time shopping, but that is Not The Case.

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Reading

Wednesday Reading Meme

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Newbery Books with Jewish Themes

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State of the Hobbies, Mark 2

I am home now By The Way

Wednesday Reading Meme

Edmonton adventures 05

Revisiting My 2016 Reading List

Edmonton adventures 04 - Sigur Rós @ Winspear Centre

Most Peculiar Newberys

Edmonton adventures 03

Edmonton adventures 02

Edmonton adventures 01

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October 2024

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