I'm having a bit of trouble adjusting...
Saturday was truly awful weather (cold and rainy), but because I dawdled a bit and because there is no good transit link between my house and Soulpepper, I had to bike it. That may well end up being the last time I bike this year, which would be unfortunate. But I really don't like cycling when it is cold, and it does not appear that it will warm up until spring. To make matters worse, they removed all the bicycle racks at the theatre to make space for a Christmas market. I was thoroughly pissed, though I did enjoy Chasse-Galerie. I might have enjoyed it slightly more last year at the Storefront, but I have to say, despite an audience that skewed really old, they seemed to get into it (even if they might not have gotten all the jokes, such as when an angelic visitor is trying to convince one of the ladies to become a "unicorn" in a menage-a-trois -- it would take too much explanation as to why this made any sense at all).
I have not made as much progress as I wanted on the play writing, though I have put all the notebooks together with the various bits that I have to type up. I had to spend a bit more time looking for tax receipts (on the positive side, the CRA has largely accepted my moving expenses from 2014, and with these last receipts, I should be in the clear). I also spent a fair bit of the weekend getting the spare room ready for my father-in-law, who arrives Tuesday.
And despite a fair bit of frustration of dealing with the bobbin, I actually managed to finish sewing up the last curtain for the study. I hope to get those hung tonight. (That actually might help keep a bit more warm air in the study, given how large the back window is.) I have plans to do more sewing including curtains for my daughter's room and perhaps some quilts (only the top layer -- I'll pay someone to do the long-arm sewing so that I don't mess that up). While I am hopeful this will go better with newer material (and better thread), there is no guarantee that it won't end up being just as frustrating. But I am not likely to do a lot of sewing until my father-in-law leaves and will try to focus more on the writing instead, so that I'll have a bit more to report on that front in the next post.
I've finally wrapped up a number of books, including several non-fiction books that kind of dragged. One of them, The 100 Mile City, has been dragged around for probably over a decade, and it turned out to be a bit of a let-down now that I have finally unboxed it and read it. I may focus a bit more on fiction, at least through January.
I have reordered my fiction list a little bit. I'm just starting Carol Shields's Unless and I'll probably have time to get through that, Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Butler's The Way of All Flesh. At that point, I'll jump ahead to David Foster Wallace's (unfinished) The Pale King and Kafka's The Castle, which is also unfinished in a sense. Then Vanity Fair. I may slip in one jazz era novel by Fitzgerald and then get back on track with Smollett's Humphrey Clinker and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. For the first half of 2017, I'll be sneaking in a few more Canadian novels to make the 10th Canadian Challenge particularly memorable, and then maybe from July onward I'll take a month or two and do nothing but work through a bunch of short stories (Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malamud, Angela Carter, T.C. Boyle, etc.). It's an intriguing concept, though I might get bored and give up. We'll see. It feels like a long way off now, but it really won't be all that long and I'll notice that summer is upon us. Perhaps that is just wishful thinking, since I am not exactly ready for winter to descend...
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