Driving around, and thinking of Nana

I took the day off on August 7, and was reminded of my grandmother and great grandmother, who both worked “in service” in Britain for aristocratic families in the early parts of the last century. I don’t know what brought them to mind today, except that I was enjoying the freedom of having a day off and doing whatever I wanted.

My grandmother, who now lives with dementia in a nursing home but used to tell some great stories, worked in several different jobs before she moved to Canada, one of which was cleaning homes for which she would get a half day off each week. Her mother did the same thing, at a time when working in service meant she was not able to be home for her own daughter, meaning that my grandmother spent her formative years under the watchful glares of her own grandparents.

On this particular day, I went buzzing around feeling pretty lucky that I tuned up the car last month, filled it with petrol in the morning and headed toward the beach. I was in no particular hurry, and wasn’t really sure where I wanted to go, but I needed a stop at the post office and coffee beans.  I started with the post office, then drove down the highway toward Wolfville and the Just Us! Coffee museum, which is a favourite local business of mine. From there, I headed along the road a short distance and could see fog in the distance, signalling that the Bay of Fundy was socked in at least a bit. I decided to head toward Hall’s Harbour, partly because I have not been there in ages, partly because I knew there was a beach, and I remembered a gift shop with all kinds of bits and pieces that would be fun.

In the artist’s den I met one of the local artists, which I found very fun. She signed a couple of bookmarks for me, and I bought some of her greeting cards. I like to have some on hand to send to my grandmother from time to time. She loves the seascapes because they remind her of home. I hope they bring her some peace since she spends a lot of time with just her memories now, and some of them are not that reliable.  

Writing Dream

The other night I had the wildest dream I have had in a long time, and it felt as though it went on for hours. When I woke up in the morning, I was able to make a few notes so that I wouldn’t forget any of the important stuff. After supper that evening, and following a full day of writing on one of my paying projects, I returned to the ideas from the dream and fleshed them out in a rough outline of about 2200 words.

I wish I knew what had stimulated the dream, because I would certainly love to copy what happened and come up with a whole bunch more stories like this, but I am not really sure what it was that brought the ideas out so clearly. I just know that I have what seems to be the start of a great story, and I am enjoying playing with it and seeing how it unfolds.

Do you get super clear dreams that you can write down? What brings on such clear dreams for you? What other places do you get your ideas for writing? 

Oh Canada! Our Home and Native Land!

I have some great Canada day memories. Most of them take place surrounded by family and friends and especially when my kids were little. One of my earliest is a memory of eating cake at Storyland Valley Zoo, which was a tired zoo even in those days, but the kids really had a great time, and there was lots of birthday cake. This picture is of my mum and dad and my oldest, eating cake on Canada Day 1990. Youngest is in the stroller behind Mum.

Storyland Valley Zoo on Canada Day

There have been lots of parades too – the Whyte Avenue Silly Summer Parade in Edmonton, complete with red foam noses (it is, after all, a Silly Parade). Jasper’s Canada Day Parade, when my oldest got her finger squished in the door at McDonald’s but was consoled with chicken nuggets and sauce. The Halifax Tattoo on Canada Day, which finished up just after the fireworks were let off in the harbour.

One of my favourites was Canada’s 125^th birthday, when people entered a frenzied state of celebration and there were block parties all over. Even in our block! My mum made a huge slab cake, complete with flag on top, neighbours brought out platters and bowls of food. The Dad’s joined ranks on a green space between a row of back yards and the train tracks. They cut down swaths of grass to make way for three legged races and all kinds of kid oriented fun.

When my kids were older, my brother and his wife lived in a condo overlooking Edmonton’s beautiful river valley, and from their balcony, or the roof, was a front row view of the Canada Day fireworks with a backdrop of the legislature. Those were great events! Now we’re a little more spread out, and this year the family will celebrate in Alberta, Halifax and New York.

There were some very interesting stories on the radio in preparation for Canada Day. Debates in parliament from the 1950s, when the MP’s were debating  issues of Canadian culture, what it was like to be Canadian, and how to maintain a sense of Canadian identity in a world that they saw as threatening their predominantly anglo-centric view. The whole debate struck me as funny, because we continue to have these conversations today, and they continue to be emotional. Personally, I think that Canadian culture is perfect in the way that we celebrate and the beautiful tapestry of cultures that contribute to the Canadian fabric.

  Oh Canada! Happy birthday!

Nana Would Have Loved Facebook

As much as I lament facebook or Twitter at times, I actually enjoy them tremendously. I first got onto facebook so that I could keep in touch with my family who live so far away. Then I started connecting and meeting with people from school, through work, and people through the growing network. It’s like having tiny snapshots of people’s lives where we can jump into conversations, leave whenever we want, keep caught up on pictures and who’s doing what.

My grandmother, whom we call Nana, would have loved facebook if it’d been around before she started slowing down. She currently is held prisoner in a long term care facility (her term, not mine), and it’s impossible for her to go back home. (The staff there are excellent, she has lots of visits from family, but the fact that she is unable to do the things she used to frustrates her, and so she refers to herself as being a prisoner.)

When Nana moved to Canada from England after World War II, she would write her sisters, her mom, and her aunts. The letters were long, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and sometimes openly homesick. They were often long letters tucked carefully into envelopes that were then decorated with little pictures. Nana was a great housekeeper (an entirely different blog post), a terrific cook, and a sometimes frustrated war bride. She had moved from busy, civilised, family filled life to be in the middle of a growing prairie city where she was hugely alone. She was foreign. She was a stranger, even according to her new inlaws. I can just imagine how connected she would have felt if she had some kind of tool like facebook. How supported she might have felt instead of lonely. How loved she would have felt instead of lost. She would have been swapping pictures, making comments back and forth, chatting,  and having a tremendous time with access to social networks, just like I am now.

I would not be surprised to have seen her with a blog, too. She wrote a lot, and she wrote well.

Summer!

School’s nearly out for the summer. Students are wrapping up proms (graduations out west where I am from), getting started at their summer jobs, or simply preparing for loafing. Ah, loafing. When we were kids, loafing was something I looked forward to. It meant hours with a favourite book, uninterrupted by having to get to sleep.

When I was old enough, it meant getting more hours at work. And I worked a lot. Babysitting, house cleaning, working retail, and then joining the army. Squirrelling away those dollars so that I could spend them on jeans, music, and books. I still tend to do a lot of these things over the summer. My reading list is long and getting worked on, the iPod is up to date, and the summer jeans rolled up ready for paddling in the ocean.
I’m so glad that summer is here! What’re you looking forward to this summer?

Making time – and space – to write

One of the most helpful things I do to help get the writing onto the screen (or page), is to purposely focus on what the heck I’m doing. This has to do with mindfulness and being present, and it is extremely effective.

I live on a noisy thoroughfare (a major road that provides access to the highway), and if my windows are open, like they are today, the traffic gets really loud. It’s distracting. I often have the radio (CBC) on in the background, partly because I like to keep up with what’s happening outside in the world, and partly to muffle the traffic noise. When I feel my mind wandering too far and for too long at a time, I switch the radio off and put some music on. I have eclectic tastes in music, and can tailor my playlist to fit just about every mood.

I’ve learned some very helpful techniques from time management and productivity studies that really help me out. The first one, which I love, is to write with dual computer screens. This was simple to set up, when I ran a cable from my laptop to an old screen from my PC. This allows me to have research open on one screen, and my writing on the other. This is bit like having a table full of books, and stops me from having to flip back and forth just on one screen. If I am allowing myself to browse some kind of social networking site, sometimes I have that scrolling on one screen while I write on the other, but there are times when I simply shut the internet off and focus.

The second time management technique I learned was to better organize my electronic files so that I don’t lose all those “cool ideas” I come up with. I like OneNote and I am getting better at it. It lets me colour stuff in whatever hues I want, and then I can pack it up and take it with me (and the laptop) easily.

Sometimes I just need to make myself type words. I start out talking about nonsense, or transcribing something off the radio, a Ted Talk, or something equally hard. Once I get started, I’m off.

I have to turn off my social media and email programs. The little numbers, bings, rolling messages are also distracting, and I’ve wasted many an hour just looking at stuff that I later wish I hadn’t bothered. I’ve also unsubscribed to just about every email list that I have ever enrolled in. I bookmark sites that I want to go to, and I’ll visit them on my schedule rather than having them come into my email. I only belong to a very few select lists.

Do you have favourite time saving techniques you use, that make it easier to get the work done that you want to do? Please share them here. 

Procrastinating

Do you deliberately do things that stop you from doing the things you ought to be doing? I do. I clean my office. I clean the apartment. I do laundry. I make coffee. Or tea. Or breakfast. Given the right impetus, I’ll even go shopping.

Why do I procrastinate so? Sometimes, it’s because I am struggling for the IDEA. That brilliant thing that I am percolating. Other times I feel like the coffee has not kicked in, and I am swimming around a periphery of ideas. These too are procrastination, just restated.

One thing I have discovered, however, is that movement helps me to think. Getting away from the computer actually helps me to generate more than I can by sitting and thinking. When I am bopping back and forth between other tasks, ideas flow. I have to keep a pen and paper handy so that I can jot as I go. When I sit at the computer all day, whether I am in my comfy den or in some other typical writing place, I experience a tangible ebb to my energy levels. They dip, my excitement about having time for some creative writing dips, and I might as well have just kept on walking, because the writing isn’t coming.

Do you break up writing with other tasks that fuel your tank? What kinds of things are you doing?

Salad in the hand

Will do this again for sure!

Time to get things moving on the blog, and I figured that food was a great introduction. I got a copy of Glam, that airbrushed freebie magazine that Shopper’s Drug Mart sends to Shopper’s Optimum members before the postal strike, and couldn’t wait to try this.

I modified the recipe to suit our tastes, and it turned out fabulous! Kind of like eating salad out of your hand instead of having to eat it off a fork. You just need a little bit of preparation time, because it doesn’t stop after just the slicing and dicing; there is some soaking and rolling involved.

Salad Rolls

The recipe calls for Tamarind Dipping Sauce, but I couldn’t find Tamarind today, so I picked up a jar of Orange Ginger Dipping Sauce at Sobeys. It’s really tasty, although I will try this after a visit to a good Asian grocer.

3 Tbsp of Tamarind Paste
4 Tbsp warm water
2 Tbsp fish sauce
3 Tbsp honey

Salad Rolls

1 cup carrot, peeled and sliced into matchstick sized slices
1 cup daikon, sliced into matchstick slices (couldn’t find this today either)
1/2 English cucumber, sliced as above
1 tsp sesame oil
Juice from one lime
24 small rice paper rounds (I think the ones I found were big, but they worked – in the import aisle)
24 Boston Lettuce leaves (around 1 head) – I used Romaine
1 mango sliced as above
2 cups shredded chicken (I picked up a pre-cooked one at Sobeys)
24 springs of cilantro
24 mint leaves

1. Mix all the sauce ingredients until well combined, and set aside while preparing the rest of the meal.
2. Place carrot, daikon, and cucumber in a dish. Add sesame oil and lime juice, toss gently and completely.
3. Fill a pie plate with warm water. Submerge rice paper disk at a time and soak according to package directions (20-45 seconds) or until softened; remove and place on a damp tea towel to ease your preparation. Place 1 lettuce leaf, 1/4 cup of vegetable mix, some mango, a Tbsp of chicken, sprig of cilantro, and a mint leaf along bottom half of the disk, and at each side (I actually managed to lay most of it on the lettuce leaf). Fold bottom edge up over the filling and roll from side to side as tightly as possible.
4. Place prepared rolls on a wet tea towel, and cover with another wet towel as you prepare the rest. You can wrap these and refrigerate for up to three hours, but don’t be surprised if some of the disks tear a little.

Notes:
This would also be tasty with cooked cold shrimp and wasabi instead of the chicken.

The writer’s edge

People write for lots of reasons. My first foray into writing for other people to read took place in grade six, when Mr. Burrows asked me if I could ghost write something for the class. At first I had no idea what he meant (ghosts don’t normally write, do they?), but as he explained what he needed, something went off inside that resonated deep within me. I have been writing regularly ever since.