"eeeyong", I went, holding a tiny model spitfire as I ran through the schoolyard. The boys and girls made fun of me because my arm swung backwards and forwards as I ran. They said that an airoplane didn't fly backwards and forwards as it flew along. And, close to tears, I said it could. Fifty eight years ago. I'm still that little boy and old enough for women to offer me their seats on the bus. Huh.

Loin du Vietnam
When I was quite young I shared a T bar with a captain on leave from the war. If he would extend his tour of duty, his government would fly him anywhere in the world. He had skied in the US, but wondered what ski-ing in the Alps of Switzerland would be like. He was my age and too young to appreciate what his death might mean to those that loved him, or even access his chances in a real way. I used to think that the heaviest load for the survivors would be the consciousness of having killed so many. Alas, patriotism and notions of valour and bravery often mask that consciousness from the killers. What that war produced was a whole generation of wounded souls. Will the present "engagements" do the same?







Such a good picture from igoogle selection a few days ago

This http://www.geekbrief.tv/#menu is such fun, the girl is charming and watching it is addictive.

They give the kids free samples
because they know full well
that today's little innocent faces
will be tomorrow's clientele

The Rules:
Answer the questions using only one word.
Then tag four others.

1. Where is your cell phone? None
2. Your significant other? Wyf
3. Your hair? Balding
4. Your mother? England
5. Your father? Ashes
6. Your favorite thing? Bed
7. Your dream last night? Many
8. Your favorite drink? Caesar
9. Your dream/goal? Awareness
10. The room you’re in? Kitchen
11. Your hobby? Movies
12. Your fear? Fear
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Toronto
14. What you’re not? Short
15. Muffins? OK
16. One of your wish list items? grandchild
17. Where you grew up? London
18. The last thing you did? Pasted
19. What are you wearing? Jeans
20. Favorite gadget? Level
21. Your pets? Cat
22. Your computer? Samsung
23. Your mood? Cheerful
24. Missing someone? Brothers
25. Your car? None
26. Something you’re not wearing? Shoes
27. Favorite store? Sears
28. Like someone? Melinda
29. Your favorite colour? Orange
30. When is the last time you laughed? 2PM
31. Last time you cried? Traviata

I will tag, when I find out how to, Willow, Blog Princess, Cathy (the wyf) and one brother (the other is too grown up to play).

Can anyone point me too an interesting pro Republican site?

What are the differences between jewelry, jewelery, architechture and architecture? The OED is very sure, but bloggers and myself less so.

I love the different colors of lights shining on the buildings. Accident or design?

Awoof.
Google image labeler: almost as much fun as black box. Everyone in the world types faster than I can.

Very excited about doing the MP3 game on Saturday. No one very interested at work except my boss Chris G. Family not impressed either. I may have to do it alone.

thrilled that http://improveverywhere.com/ is here at last. Determined to participate.

Fell asleep at work this morning. I woke out of a very pleasant forgotten dream.

Have I shown this picture before?



Now, how do I get it into my side bar?

Recently I have been looking at "six sentences", but cannot post to it as I refuse to subscribe to the Microsoft default email. I've also had a lot of fun with the black box, which looks rather like "black Magic" chocolates and is almost as satisfying.

Six sentences off the top of my mind.

I don't know what I am going to write.
When I was a boy, I lived in my imagination.
Later, when I closed my eyes, I would watch images as they floated by.
Now that I am older, I sit on a train and wonder why other people are not glued to the windows.
Awareness is my ambition.
Mainly, this is who I am.

This has a dream like quality


Movement,but, if it is a time lapse, why is her head fixed?

All our cats loved to lie in boxes and constricted spaces, but never in the beds we bought for them

Lotus entertain you

Again Friday evening at last. Every day this week I have fallen asleep at work. Am I not sleeping enough at night, or is it the beta blockers?

A few days ago a woman in her mid twenties offered me her seat on the streetcar.

Determined to stretch our summer, I still wear shorts and sandals to work.

I am so much enjoying "His Dark Materials". It has been a long time since I last read fiction.

Speeding through "The Subtle Knife".

I love these buildings. I guess I'm stuck in the fifties.

The last one was voted as one of the ten worst buildings in America. I love the repetitive features and classical proportions, though.

9 boxes X 8 left out

Monday, Monday, so good to me.

I don't usually post pictures that have been photoshopped, but this one is so interesting, I could not resist. It seems to be the most humid day of the year here. My ubiquitous, (I love using that word), Fisherman's Friends have turned to mush. I rather like them that way. Last year's buzz word was "synchronicity", before that it was, "trope".

I've loved you for a long long time

I can't pretend I've not

I love to see you naked

In your body

And your thought

The weekend at last and I'm feeling better. Going to take our fat cat to the vet and William to his gem show. House crisis: we are out of coffee.

Thing to do when your sick:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk the books you LOVE.
Since I am partly dyslexic, any book I finished, I loved.
3)B I added the ones I saw as movies.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.~~~~This is my list:-----

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (saw 3 movies)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (saw 3 movies)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (saw 2 movies)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (saw 2 movies)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (saw the movie)
6 The Bible (Some of) (saw the movie)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (saw the movie)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (saw the movie)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Some of) (saw the movie)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (saw 2 movies)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (saw 2 movies)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (saw the movie)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (saw the movie)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (saw the movie)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (saw the movie)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (saw 2 movies)
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (saw the movie)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (saw the movie)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (saw 2 movies)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (saw 2 movies)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (saw the movie)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (saw the movie)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (saw the movie)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (saw the movie)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (saw the movie)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (saw the movie)
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (saw the movie)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (saw the movie)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (saw the movie)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (saw the movie)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (saw the movie)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (saw 2 movies)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (saw the movie)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (saw the movie)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (saw the movie)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (saw the movie)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (saw the movie)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (saw the movie)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Some of) (saw the movie)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (saw the movie)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (saw the movie)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (saw 2 movies)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (saw the movie)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (saw the movie)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (saw the movie)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (saw the movie)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (saw 3 movies)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (saw the movie)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (saw the movie)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Got more sick at work as the day unfolded. Came home with heavy feet and unseeing eyes. Ate, drank liquids and slept. Perhaps I will not work tomorrow. At least I've got a good book.

Workday at home after rough night with twenty five minutes of chest and mouth pain. I am beginning to wonder if it is brought on by stress. Medically, angina and sleep apnea have been ruled out. I can't see my doctor until next week.

I took a bath in Matthew's enormous bathroom. As we said when we first saw it, this is a kooky house. The master bedroom has a cramped bathroom, despite the odd presence of a bidet, and the doorless upstairs room has a giant bathroom with a shower, toilet, basin and a bath big enough for two. There is no washroom on the main floor, but there is a tiny toilet and basin room in the basement. Here we have a house with no view, but much daylight and clever sunken ceiling lights for the evenings and for the coming winter months. We have not fully unpacked yet. We are half moved in. We love it.

Since there are two living rooms, we have room for all three sons and much more room for everyone than we had downtown.

I'd like to spend about half an hour here all alone. 5000 years ago the area now covered by the Sahara was one of very fertile vegetation. What happened to the peoples who must have lived there then? If I was there for any length of time, would I be driven mad by insects?. I'll just imagine I could go there without insects and with friendly air conditioning after half an hour. Would my feet burn if I was in my flip-flops? The image reminded me that I dreamed last night of Sarah, my friend from university. I woke up and realised with sadness that I would never talk to her again as she died about ten years ago.

Our cat is huge, but not quite this big.



Of all the Google image cats she looks most like this one. In fact, hold on, I might have a picture of her.

In fact, I have three.
.
Yes, that's her work on the armchair.


She looks evil, but she is really very cute.


And she has the softest fur of any cat I have ever known. The thing is she barely tolerates us petting her, unless she is hungry, which is fortunately often. Then, like all cats, she will lie on my book, scratch at my newspaper, or walk up and down on these keys as I try to type. I think we love her the more since she is so disdainful of our affection.

Spent most of the day yesterday driving around with William. Great fun, although he kept apologising as each search turned out to be futile. We will return to the gem show next week end.

We had dropped Cathy off at the Distillery District. She and her best friend went to a play and later when we picked Cathy up and I went off to meet my best friend at an excellent independent place called the Coffee Bean. We ate felafel at what is considered to be the best place in town and went to a rather disappointing film festival at The Bloor.

I returned by train, somewhat perplexed to find that I had to wait an hour for the last train. Still, I had my book and time to explore the grand station. Some years ago I went into that same great hall and figured where the other termini were across Canada, but there was one I did not recognise and I determined to find out where this mysterious place was. Well yesterday I looked again at all the names carved high up in stone. I knew them all and could not remember which of them had seemed exotic twenty years ago. Perhaps, I reflected, I have truly become Canadian.

Got back very late. The evening had turned cold and today it has rained all morning. Cathy says the plants needed it.

Woody Allen films on Bravo. Matthew was enchanted by Mighty Aphrodite.

Took SS back to hospital. Praying for myself for a change. Actually protection mantras work both ways.

Morning meeting very long. Some people wanted to send a troublesome client back to another program. After some argument, without thinking, I mumbled something like,"But he's our client, it's our job to take care of him". B of B laughed and said, "What did you say? Can you say it louder please". Well I did and you can imagine how popular THAT made me. In the end I had to leave the meeting to do the regular ten o'clock service. That B of B is liking me too much.

I was looking for an image of a hypodermic needle as today we had to deal with a possible, I say possible because we couldn't find out what was ailing Mr L, although something plainly was, a possible heroin overdose. It was more strange than disquieting for me to stand there hoping the man would not nod off into a coma and death. He was OK and they got him to the hospital quickly.

Anyway this needle is infinitesimally small and it was sharpened by men, or women, or both. The developing nano world is getting to be far more impressive than the mega one.

I took SS to hospital today. Not quite as frantic as scene herewith.



In fact, I fell asleep while he was in with the doctor. With all his tests, we were away four hours.

Again 16X8 boxes left out for recycling.

Weight still falling.

I thought this was Edward Hopper. It is a photograph.

When I was a child, I would steal into the larder and help myself to a spoonful of this nectar of the Gods. Later I would mix it into tinned rice pudding. My mother insisted so much on healthy foods, that, for years, I avoided salads and am still very suspicious of fresh fruit. Raspberries excepted.

Drove into the city twice to help David move out of his place. He was quite sad to leave it. Fabulous view of downtown, but, with ultra thin walls, he could hear what his neighbours on either side were saying.



Cathy broke down and bought her first cell phone. This morning it is already lost as she did not set the ring tone. Someone moved it and we have no way of finding it, beyond determined search and chance.



I hope David does not stay long as his natural voice is very loud and the downstairs areas very noisy, being tile and bare floorboards. I had to thump on our bedroom floor at three in the morning as in the old days.



Lovely three days off, sleeping in till noon and doing what I please most of the days as the others were all out or asleep. As usual, Labour Day turns out to be "far niente" day.

Why is it that Googling "sleeping" and "indolence" produces images almost exclusively of women? Lovely as they are.