Progress, bit by bit

Bit by bit, that's how things get done. This weekend I framed and hung a bunch of pictures on a previously blank wall:

I also put up a mirror that has been sitting in our powder room for weeks!

A bunch of furniture we’d purchased over the holidays was delivered (now we have CHAIRS around our dining room table! AND a coffee table which isn’t just the piano bench dragged back and forth between piano and couch). Tables might not sound thrilling, but they really are when you’ve gone without for six months.

We also had the opportunity to go see the Habs playing the Blackhawks…

and the Habs won!

Am I lucky or what?

There were a few projects I didn’t get to, but headway was made on a few: curtains and curtain rod purchased for our bedroom, if not yet installed, and a story outlined – if not yet finished. I also dug into The Little Friend (Donna Tartt's second novel) and watched a little TV but not too much (Girls is back!). And here's another great link about why reading novels is good for you...(it boosts brain function for days). All the more reason to carve out some reading time in your week if you're not doing this already!

Canada AM's Favourite Books of 2013!

I'm grateful to my mom and friends on Facebook for pointing this out to me -- Bone & Bread was mentioned as one of Canada AM's Favourite Books of 2013! Books producer Katie Jamieson discussed it on the show the other morning along with some other amazing titles. (Did you know they featured 144 books on the show this year?!) My mom is visiting family in Nova Scotia at the moment and saw the segment as it aired and called to leave me a very nice message (my phone was off because I was still asleep!), and if I'm not mistaken she sounded a little choked up. Awww. Thanks so much, Canada AM, for facilitating some spontaneous parental pride! 

If you follow the link below, you can watch the clip and see all the featured books (Bone & Bread is mentioned first, if you want to hear what they say about it):

http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/video?binId=1.1195618

           

It's not the first video that will start playing, but you can select it from the available clips in the library underneath.

A banner day

Yesterday really was a banner day (and I've just realized the banner photo on this blog is of...a banner...one of the many, many bunting banners I sewed for my wedding day).  

Most thrilling for me is to have been (I think...this has been a long ongoing process of weeks and weeks...and I really hope I'm not jinxing it) chosen as one of the soloists in my upcoming choir concert.  Singing is my other love besides writing, and while I usually describe it as my only other talent, it is definitely something I have had to work hard at in terms of not choking during auditions.  Nervousness seems to attack my stomach and my vocal chords in equal measure in such instances, even though it doesn't seem to be an issue in actual performances.  Anyway, I am dance-around-the-apartment excited because I have literally been trying out for years and because this semester we are doing medleys from both of my favourite musicals from when I was younger: The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables.  

Also totally thrilling: my author copy of my novel arrived, and it looks amazing!

I love how thick it is (448 pages).  

I also found out about and contributed to The Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter project.  Veronica is one of my very favourite television shows of all time, and it is really looking as though this movie is going to happen.  (Insert an excited fan-girl squee to drown out all others.)

I also changed departments at my day job, and yesterday was my last day in my old office.  It was a very busy early half of the week trying to finish everything up.  Yesterday, we had lunch together and my coworkers gave me a very sweet card and a gift card to Paragraphe Bookstore (!), which I am carrying around like a magic ticket, trying to imagine what I will use it for, especially since I am totally spoiled by how many books I have been buying lately.

And....today was my first day in my new department, which is really my old department because I worked there for three years before as a casual employee.  I left five years ago, which is a terrifying thought because it really doesn't feel that long.  And not much seems to have changed. I mean that literally, because when I went to look for a notebook to start taking down phone messages, I reached for a spiral one shelved on the desk and it was my notebook, one I must have accidentally left behind, almost entirely full except for four pages.  

I'm so happy to be back among old friends, and so happy to be reunited with this amazing view of Mount Royal:

And just one week from today is my first Bone and Bread-related event, its book launch in Toronto at Type Books!  

nostalgia lane: CBC's The Challengers

Does anyone remember the CBC tv-movie The Challengers?  It first aired in 1990.   It’s the story of 11-year-old Mackie, who moves to a new town with her mother after the death of her father.

To be fair, to like this movie, it probably helps if you were also an 11-year-old Canadian girl when it came out. 

To fit in with a group of boys, Mackie pretends to be a boy.   The boys are in a club called the Challengers where they wear studded denim vests and wristbands and ride around on BMX bikes and are also in a band.  Mackie (played by Gemma Zamprogna, who went on to play Felicity on Road to Avonlea), tucks her hair under a cap, calls herself Mac, and joins the Challengers and plays keyboards.   She also has a friend named Jenny with whom she does fun “girl” things like make up a dance routine to perform.  However, her dual-gendered identity presents some problems, both scheduling-wise and for Mackie’s mother….and for everybody else when they find out during a Challengers performance. 

It was on The Movie Network the other night, and we caught the end of it.  My husband kept trying to guess where it was filmed (“It looks like it’s somewhere out west…”) while I kept insisting it had to be filmed near Toronto because…I don’t know…I just assumed everything ever made before a certain date was filmed near Toronto, which now that I think about it is a pretty baseless assumption.  Anyway, it turns out it was filmed in Stonewall, Manitoba!  I’ve never been there, but it’s about 25 km north of Winnipeg.  I can only imagine the double amazingness if you were an 11-year-old girl from Stonewall when this movie came out.

There is a sad lack of stills available online from this movie.  I want to show you some moments from the montage at the end, set to the Challengers performance of a song I remember thinking was really awesome, where Mackie AND her girl-best-friend Jenny are both Challengers along with the boys.  They both play and sing in the band, ride everywhere on their spray-painted bikes, and eat French fries with chopsticks at a diner.  God, is it any wonder I wanted to be a Challenger, too?  

Oh wait, YouTube!  Here you go:

The awesome song I remember at the end of the movie is actually by Vangelis.  Though the sound quality had warped and flattened on the version they were airing on TMN and sounded truly awful.  I had a moment where I wondered whether my taped-off-of-TV version, which, yes, I'm afraid I still have somewhere, might actually be better (Dear TMN, please find the enclosed, hand-labelled VHS)…until I remembered it still has all the commercials in it.)   

Does anyone else remember this movie?