Tess

This why I love Thomas Hardy:

The gray half-tones of daybeak are not the grey half-tones of the day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive, in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

I decided to re-read one of my favourite books.

Do you ever read something and have to pause because it's so well written, or it touches your soul, or is such a good story you can't go on until you take a breather? I wish every book was like this. 

The first and only time I read this, I threw it across the room after I finished it. Seriously. If you've read the book (or any Thomas Hardy) you likely understand.

This is also why I love Thomas Hardy:

She thought of the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double-doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy, saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the oven on baking days......

 
My old friend C. who shares a love of Hardy used to wonder what the hell happened to him?! All of his characters are doomed from the start. He is the original Tom Waits and I love him with all my heart. 

T-Minus 41 Days....

I have a surgery date. It's September 3rd.

I'm having lower, upper and chin surgery. In other words: the works.

I'm nervous as hell. Especially after reading through the +/-50 pages my surgeon sent me....

I will be in the hospital for 2 nights if everything goes well. My jaw could be wired* shut for up to ten days. I will likely/possibly have lots of: nose bleeds**, drooling, bruising, weight loss, numbness, blood in my mouth, swelling, muscle spasms, ice packs and sad feelings.

I will have no: solid food***, good sleep, energy or coffee for a while.

My mom arrives the day after my surgery - I would be freaking out if she wasn't coming to take care of me for the first two weeks.

I have never had a nose bleed. (I know right?!) I've never gone more than a couple days without coffee. I'm scared about feeling nauseous with a jaw that's wired shut...I could go on.

There is a lot of good information to go through including smoothie recipes. I appreciate that. What I won't be doing is 'blending up cheeseburgers and pizza'.

I'm not on Fear Factor.



*Likely not wires but super strong elastics attached to my braces.
**Common with upper jaw surgery.
***Apparently I have to not only blend food up, but also strain with a fine mesh strainer until it's literally liquid. No seeds, fibres or anything that can get stuck in an incision.

House of Leaves

So I tried again. It didn't go well.

I was so excited to read this. It was supposed to be super creepy, I loved the idea of the story, it's written in a new an interesting way and it was raved about online.

There were a few moments of creep, but it wasn't enough to keep me engaged. The way the book is written is strange - which I was actually enjoying in the beginning. I liked the footnotes that went on for pages, or the nearly empty pages and meaningless references.

There are two stories going on at once. One was the creepy story about the house and the people who were living in it - this is the part I was getting into. The other was based on the guy who was writing the footnotes....

...and it was all about how he screwed lots of hot babes and went to work and had panic attacks.

Yeah.

Then the creepy story just got....boring. I closed the book, took it back to the library and found this great review on Good Reads. Here is a portion.

Well said.

Fox Quilt Complete

So cute!

This quilt came together without a hit- wait. There was a hitch. I didn't buy enough fabric to make the back just solid polka dots - which is what I wanted.

But the back turned out cute anyway.

Don't you love the obligatory husband-holding-up-quilt shots?
 
I have sewn almost all my quilts this way - with two top-stitches on either side of the seams and I like it but I'm sick of it. This photo is one of the more 'perfect' looking intersections too, not all of the quilt looks like this - oh not nearly!

I would love, love, love to make a hexagon quilt next, but I have no idea how. I also have strong suspicions that I don't have nearly enough patience. 

I should take a course.

Road Trip 2014

We just got back from our summer vacation - a road trip up island! We have lived here for six years now (wth??) and we thought it would be nice to actually explore the island.

We stayed in Parksville, Campbell River, Port McNeill and finally Courtney for a few days on the way home. We stopped in Ladysmith, Sayward, Telegraph Cove, Coombs, Alert Bay, Nanaimo, Gold River and Cumberland.

We hiked in the rain to see waterfalls, saw some great beaches, had lots of ice cream, soaked up too much sun, drank lots of wine, coffee and cocktails and chilled the hell out at the cottage.

Here's the cottage in Courtney. 

I have to say it's one of my favourite places we've stayed at yet. It's on a working farm/apiary. There is a huge private yard that we had all to ourselves and the cottage is gorgeous. Our host also made us fresh bread and jam and even stocked the fridge with butter for the bread. I'm now on the hunt for her recipe, I might to go straight to the source if I can't duplicate it.

Another highlight was Alert Bay. When we first arrived I wasn't sure what to make of it.

We walked around the boardwalk then went to the U'mista Cultural Society - which was amazing. We saw all the totem poles on the island and ended up hanging out with some locals back on the boardwalk. It's the friendliest place I've ever visited.

The Quatuwas Festival had been through the night before so the town was way busier than usual. It's too bad we missed it by one day because their celebrations were open to everyone.

We also stopped in Telegraph Cove which was worth the detour. They have a whale museum there that's really interesting. The scenery is gorgeous and the stop isn't too tourist-y. Yet.

We watched an otter haul her baby out of the water and flounder around on the dock for a few minutes, it was way too much for me to handle.

When we decided to take this trip, Brad mapped out all the bookstores we could stop at along the way. He had them written down before we had places to stay figured out.

To summarize our trip, remember this post from early March? Yeah, I've added these books to the heap.*

We visited eight bookstores in total. Seven of them were used books. I had two books I wanted more than any others and now I can say they aren't in any of the bookstores on the island.**


*Please ignore Skeleton Crew, it was bought for sentimental reasons.
**Although we did miss the store in Qualicum Beach...

Sketch Pad

I've decided I'm going to start drawing and sketching again. I even went out a bought a new book and markers/pens. I need a good pencil though, all I have are clicky pencils.

It all started with the Vancouver Draw Down. My old company was really involved and for the week it was on they sent us emails every day to inspire us. For example one day the challenge was to make a scary monster using the first letter of your name.

When I was a kid I used to draw all the time. I remember my cousin and I would draw women's fashions. I used to draw Garfield and other cartoons, which I enjoyed the most. I even used to sketch real objects - whatever was in front of me.

I'm certainly not the greatest artist, but there is nothing wrong with trying. You never know where it will take you. What is it i see on Pinterest all the time? Create something today even if it sucks!

New Reading Genre Fail

I want to branch into another reading genre and I'm having a lot of trouble. Remember when I tried this a couple years ago and failed?

I want to read a creepy book. No vampires, zombies, werewolves or witches. No Stephen King. No Dean Koontz. No crime novels, psychopaths, mental hospitals and absolutely no gore or torture.

I want to be creeped out, I want to feel like somebody is watching me or I hear a noise in the corner. I want a book that will give me the heebies.

So I started my research. I hit GoodReads lists and soon discovered they are over populated by Stephen King and teen reads like Twilight. I switched to Google and found lists that had a lot of short stories, too much gore or violence and again - Stephen King. 

I even desperately typed 'Books like the movie Paranormal Activity' and came up dry.

I've read two books that I thought might work but ended up sounding more like screenplays for formulated Hollywood made-for-tv movies.

Is there really nothing out there that meets my criteria?!

One book that showed up in my searches a lot was House of Leaves.

The synopsis is perfect. I saw it in a book store and it's interesting because a lot of pages are mostly blank or filled with text crossing over itself or strange photos. This one intrigues me the most so far. I have a hold on it at the library.

The only other book that sounded remotely interesting was The Haunting of Hill House.

I'm hesitating to the point of not reading it because I feel like Hollywood has ruined it for me forever. Maybe if I find a good used copy I'll buy it. Not on my radar at the moment.

I've spent hours going through lists, combing Good Reads, Google and Kobo and asking friends for recommendations. I found a woman on Good Reads who reads a lot of horror and started coming through her books. I started to think that maybe I could rely on her reports when I saw she had given this book 4 stars.

Exasperated, I closed the window.

Then I thought about this amazing guy who works in Russel's Books. He knows every author anyone asks him about, is super friendly and obviously enjoys reading a lot. I thought I'd go down there and ask him.

He wasn't working when I went in yesterday so I asked another girl for her advice. She had no idea about good horror books but said he was talking about 'Let the Right One In' the other day. We looked on his Staff Picks shelf and it was on there so I bought it.

It's vampires, but I remembered it from my searches as a possibility. Any recommendations?

Neptune Quilt I

I've made six quilts so far. The first one I made was for my parents and it nearly killed me. I didn't make another one for over a year. Likely because it was my first one so I was learning, made lots of mistakes and french knotted it rather than machine quilting.

The other five have been for my nephews or friends who were having babies. They were usually smaller so went a bit faster and now I feel like I've arrived. Yesterday I finished one off from piecing the back to completion in one afternoon - that's fast compared to when I started.

So where the hell is my quilt?!

This is a record, even for me. I've had this fabric for four years now. I needed one more coordinating fabric to make  a quilt big enough for us to snuggle under, so it was daunting. I finally went to the best local fabric shop around here and found the perfect fabric without even trying very hard.

See the fabric with the big hexes on the lower left? That's the one I found. It's the right colour (which was what I thought would be hardest to match) and it even has hexes that match the smaller ones in the two fabrics on the right.

I have a quarter of the front sewn, now I'll have to figure out what to do with the back - it's going to be a patchwork overload and all over the place because I have lots of smaller pieces and a few bigger pieces to work with. That's the nature of quilting right?! 

So lots of good movies and sewing is in my future for the next couple days. Tomorrow I think I'll have a Pride and Prejudice marathon. Today I might do a Columbo marathon combined with an 80's music playlist.

Progress

I've been feeling a bit frustrated with what I thought was the lack of progress on my upper teeth. So I did a comparison this morning. I've had the upper braces for 6 months now, can you believe it's been that long?!

Holy crap! Other than the obvious need for whitening my teeth look WAY better now!*

A few weeks ago I threw my head back laughing and right away, Brad got all serious and said, 'Uh....you have perfect teeth now?!' It's really subtle the way my teeth have moved, but actually you can really tell when you look at them from below too - they are a perfect U-shape.

My bottom teeth are still pretty junky and I won't torture you with pictures. I've only had those braces for two months.

You should see the size of the wire I'm wearing on my top teeth now. It's thick and it's also shaped like a square in profile, rather than circular. They have to jam it in pretty hard when they're installing it. Good times.

The girls in my ortho's office always try to talk me into coloured elastics and I'm actually really tempted because I love the idea of it. If I was 16 I'd be all over it. I tried white elastics on the bottoms and I hated them. They actually didn't stain or fade either, it wasn't that. I felt like they drew more attention. I tried light pink for 10 seconds before I had her take them off. The latest suggestion was a metallic dark purple.

My orthodontist goes beyond trying to talk me into it - he flat out makes fun of me for choosing the grey elastics every time.


*You can't whiten your teeth when you're wearing braces - duh.

Aliens

I'm going to raise the testosterone level on this blog for a moment.

I likely have less than ten Hollywood movies I would say are completely amazing. This is definitely one of them.

Everything is so finely tuned in this movie from the music to the the tension build-up with the motion sensors. The character development (who doesn't love Husdon and his whining), the aliens themselves, the sound effects and even the spaceship that looks like a giant gun.

What I really noticed this time was the strong women characters. Ripley - I mean, she has to be one of the best female heroes ever. When she's taping the guns together and riding down the elevator to get Newt, I mean come on.

Vasquez - she is so kick ass and tough - one of the best female roles ever.

I even dig the pilot.

The killer, slimy, heaving breathing, egg laying, giant alien queen at the end - she's a female too right?! 

We were standing on site the other day next to a freight elevator and suddenly the doors opened up. I watched it opening and thought to myself "That is creepy. The queen mother is going to come out any second!" The guy next to me says, "That thing always reminds me of the elevator in Aliens."