Monday, August 15, 2016

Summer productivity

I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on myself.  It has been an extremely hot week, and I am only just recovering.  Sat. I got a late start, but I did run out (and had quite a rough transit experience -- in addition to the Danforth Line being down for maintenance, the Gerrard/College streetcar is being replaced by buses due to heavy maintenance on Bathurst St., so transit has just been a total pain).

I got fairly soaked in the rain on my way to the AGO.  I hung out there for about an hour, taking a few photos of the early Lawren Harris paintings and then looking at the Theaster Gates exhibit (not quite as interesting as I had hoped).  I saw that they had the Henry Moore room open again, which is nice.  There will be one more mid-sized gallery to hang modernist (?) works that are in conversation with the Moore's whatever that means.  I did see that they have hung Vuillard's The Widow's Visit, but nothing else from my list of paintings that should be taken out of storage.  The Vuillard is smaller than I remembered.  I try not to let myself get too upset over it, but there are several corner rooms and a few other rooms towards the front of the museum that frankly have a huge amount of wasted space, and I just can't believe they can't put more art on the walls.  I don't think the museum is run as well as it could be, and I think I've mentioned that in terms of the way it displays its permanent collection, it doesn't make the top 25 in my list of the world's greatest museums, though I will say that it has generally had very impressive special exhibits.

Anyway, I went up to Hot Doc Cinema and watched the Werner Herzog movie about the internet.  I think that probably merits its own post, so I'll try to get to that soon.  After the movie, I walked by Robarts.  Unfortunately, the library was closed, but I was able to drop off a book in the return slot, so it wasn't overdue.  I went down to work and found the 2014 taxes, though apparently the problem is with the 2015 taxes.  For some reason, they sent all correspondence to my old address, and I will have to track down what the issue is.  That should be a lot of fun.

Sunday, I managed to do some laundry, mow the lawn, trim a tree in the front yard and repair the doorknob to the upstairs bathroom.  I also tracked down a notebook with the Straying South scene that I still need to type up.  I came across a handful of poetry scraps and some old journals in random notebooks.  I think I should just scan all this and start pitching it, particularly those things I have already transcribed.  I still can't find a science fiction story called No More Robinsons.  Presumably this is downstairs somewhere.  On the other hand, I did turn up several pages of the novel that I didn't even remember writing out.  I simply can't remember if this other scene was written out or not, but I think not.  I have to get a lot more organized.  Maybe this is something that the kids could help with, if I could rely on them to do the scanning.

On top of all this, I did manage to do the last of the sanding for the downstairs deck.  I had basically thought I was going to do the staining Monday while the workmen are here, but the weather is just not cooperating at all, since you need to have a day or two for the deck to dry out and then ideally 3 days without rain after the stain is put on.  Really only the 24th looks feasible, and even then I might only manage to get one coat down in time.  So I'm not entirely sure what I will do.

At any rate, I pretty much dropped everything at 6 and headed to Union Station for the Tragically Hip concert.  (In the end, I did give in and bought a ticket off of StubHub, but I didn't want to jinx it in case it turned out to be a fake ticket.  I also wanted to get there early, since sometimes unscrupulous people try to sell the same ticket 2 or even 3 times, and being first gives you the best chance of getting in.  The ticket worked fine, and I got into the show.  I'll follow up with a short review of the show in the next post.)

So I probably shouldn't be too tough on myself.  I got a fair bit done over the weekend, though as usual, there are still quite a few things left to be done.

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