The trails are stuttery because the clouds rolled in, off and on. But I’m quite enamoured with the colours that I ended up with. (And here I contemplated doing it up in black and white, to avoid the orange glow of the streetlights.)
Video:
So my friend Kevin called me up last night, just before supper time. “Are you gonna be at home for the next ten minutes?” he says. “I have a tasting we need to do.” Continue reading
This weekend my wife and I went up to Gimli with my mother for the 122nd annual Icelandic Festival. I hadn’t been to the festival in many years — it’s on a long weekend in summertime, so it tends to attract weddings, family reunions, and other events — but this year Mom called us up about a week and a half before the weekend and said, “Hey, you want to go?”
We said “Sure!”
Happy belated Canada Day, and also happy Fourth to the Americans.
Published, woo hoo!
I got a new watch from my wife for my birthday last month. It’s a great watch, and I like it rather a lot.
Today on my lunch break, for no other reason than “because I’m a nerd”, I punched my watch’s serial number into Google, expecting to find — I don’t know, maybe its incept date*. Nothing much, anyways.
Instead, I found a US Marshal forfeiture auction listing that included my watch.
That’s it in the bottom middle of the lot.
The things you learn.
[update] Apparently, the auction company in question “sells all the jewelry[etc.] seized and forfeited nationally for the U.S. Marshals Service.” So… do I have a drug dealer’s watch? Was it seized in a tax forteiture? The rather shallow mystery deepens a very little bit.
[2nd update] As it turns out, there’s no mystery here. What I took to be a unique serial number was apparently in fact a global product number. So it wasn’t my watch in the property auction; just a watch just like mine.
____
* See, there’s that nerd thing creeping in again.
My current WiP, Everything that Never Happened, is set mainly aboard a small 17th-century sailing vessel, a square-rigged ketch named the Mandalay. It’s not a coincidence that it’s a square-rigged ketch, just like the historical Nonsuch; ever since the first time I visited the Nonsuch gallery in the Manitoba Museum, I’ve been fascinated by the ship. I’m not a nautical type; I’ve spent my entire life on the prairies, and have seen ocean a total of three times. But something about the ship has always stuck in my mind, and I find myself constantly returning to it.
Maybe it’s just the name. I’m a sucker for a good name.
Anyways, sometime in February it occurred to me that, to really understand the Mandalay and her crew, I might be wise to learn more about the Nonsuch. I sent an email to someone at the Manitoba Museum, asking for any information they could give me, and also asking about tours. I received some information in the mail, a recommendation that I check out a book by Laird Rankin, who’s something of an expert on the Nonsuch, and an offer of a tour. To trim a long story to a short one, I went on a tour of the ship on Monday. Since the museum was closed, it was a quite private tour.
I spent three hours on and around the ship, asking questions of Robert, the museum’s resident Nonsuch expert. I learned a lot, and I took a lot of pictures. Some aspects of my story are greatly clarified for me now. Some of the things Robert told me will find their way quite directly into the novel.
And now I’ll get back to writing it…
Right now there’s hoarfrost on everything.
