Follow-Up on Art

It's looking less and less likely that I will run over to the gym for a cardio session.  I need to get over to Jimmie Simpson around 12:30 and the weather is pretty miserable (cold rain), so I will be trying to figure out how to do this all by TTC.  Probably head down to Queen, and then after swimming just take the Queen streetcar downtown.  I'm hoping there is enough time to drop in at work and pick up more printing (only a few pages printed after all), then go up to St. Mike's and drop off DVDs, see the concert, go to Robarts and drop off the rest of the DVDs and do a bit of research, then maybe see about selling some stuff to BMV (though this will only happen if I do manage to make it to work), and then perhaps see Project Hail Mary.

I did decide not to bother with the TO Bach Festival pass.  While there is some modest price savings, that is only if you go to all 4 concerts.  I am definitely skipping one and probably a second one of motets.  But I would like to finish booking everything else today.  I am very tempted to buy tickets to Penderecki Quartet on May 21, but I remembered just in time that I have tickets to see Hillary Hahn on that date at Koerner Hall.  It's a bit of a waiting game, as her recovery is not going that well unfortunately, and she's cancelled a lot of concerts, and I expect she will probably cancel this one as well, but hasn't done it officially yet.  I'd probably slightly prefer the Penderecki Quartet, but I'll just wait and see how it plays out.  Also, I don't think they let you cancel concerts just on a whim or the worry that an artist will pull out.  (I'm still a bit annoyed that they rescheduled the Music of Golijov concert so that it overlapped with the Amici concert they are also presenting, but I ended up using the price of the ticket to a jazz concert coming up at Koerner Hall.)

As a brief overview, yesterday I biked downtown.  I stopped in at the BMV near Yonge-Dundas Square.  I was mostly looking for Howl's Moving Castle, though there are a couple of Criterions I am always looking for.  I suppose there is a small chance I would pick up Buñuel's Él, as the bonus features are really good.  (I have a DVD on hold at TPL, but this is fairly recent release and it will take quite some time to work my way up the queue.)  Anyway, I saw Breaking Bad on Blu-Ray, the complete seasons 1, 3 and 4, so I got those.  Why not.  If I do make it to the BMV on Bloor, I'll have to see if they have season 2 or 5.  I was almost out the door, when I saw an interesting Max Beckman and Paris book for only $15, so I got that as well.

I went over to the AGO right after that, though I didn't have much time and decided to skip the Paul McCartney photo exhibit.  I saw the Edna Taçon exhibit instead (where the Naoko Matsubara exhibit had been , and this was definitely more up my alley.  Her early works are quite similar to early Kandinsky, and her later works are akin to Klee with perhaps a touch of Miro.  I'll definitely want to check this out a few times, and it runs through late August.  I'm not quite sure I want to pay $45 for the catalogue, as nice as it is, but the library appears to have a few copies, so I will check one out and decide then.

Edna Taçon, Untitled, 1941

Edna Taçon, Ecstasy (Black Accent), 1944

 

Edna Taçon, Improvisation No. 2, 1946

Edna Taçon, Green Organization, 1943

I also had a chance to stop by the contemporary sculpture garden by Ranbir Sidhu and take some photos, as the previous batch was lost.

Then I ran over to Gagné Contemporary where they have a new show called Mona Lisa with Moustache, which only runs one more week.  I think this piece, which involves cut-outs and interesting shadow play, was perhaps the most interesting.

 

I had a bit more time so I ran upstairs to the Red Head Gallery as well.  Then I grabbed a banana chocolate loaf slice and walked back over to No Frills.  Since my bag was completely full, I actually went to work to drop some stuff off, then biked back to The Well and grabbed Thai food, but ate it at work.  I didn't have a lot of time, but I did update a few things.  I would have finished my time sheet, but I haven't been given some of the codes, which is very frustrating.

I went to the concert at Soundstreams.  I liked some of the pieces a fair bit, though there were just too many pieces (9 premieres in total), and the quartet went offstage to retune between many of them, so the concert lasted well over 2.5 hours!  In the end, it was a bit too much.

I will close by saying this is the very last day to catch Jeff Wall at MOCA.  I was tempted to go again.  Though I went at least twice, and maybe a third time.  I probably would have if the weather had been better or if I could have scored a free pass through the library or if it had extended one more week, since I would have bundled it with a trip west to see Shakespeare Bash'd at the Monarch Tavern.  Anyway, here are a few of my favourite photos from the show.  (I'll circle back and label them tonight, but I'm running late again...)

 

Detail from Insomnia

 

 

 

 

 

Come Through the Other Side of Disappointments

If I had gotten around to it, I'm sure I would have written about how disappointing I was in myself, letting one thing or another keep me from swimming.  It's certainly true that I don't push through to exercise as much as I used to, particularly when it is cold and/or I am wet.  (And I got hit with snow out of nowhere on the bike ride home on Monday.)  But things have generally taken a bit of a turn for the better at work, though I need to press one guy to see if he did the extra tasks I assigned him.  And I was really disappointed to hear that a few senior staff had been let go (though nothing like last year) and that the woman in charge of our Social Equity team had been let go, esp. as I was trying to do more work on the technical side of supporting equity analyses.  I think it is incredibly short-sighted and shows just how cowardly U.S. based companies are.  Sigh.

But the weather may have finally gotten to the point where boots are no longer necessary, and we probably won't have any snow that sticks.  Famous last words of course.  I was able to bike on Thurs., though it rained a fair bit Friday morning, so I was back on the TTC.  I'm making pretty decent progress on this mega-projects book for the review, though I've decided it just isn't a very good book, which is a shame of course.  I'm still only a bit further than 1/4 of the way through Ada, but I'll try to read another big chunk this weekend.

I don't have too many library books out, though I do need to get to Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls, right after I am finished with Ada.  In addition to the other books I have planned to read, I decided I should read Kathy Acker's Don Quixote (and probably before I get that much further with my play, which has Don Quixote and other fantastical dreamers as a running subplot).  I've certainly read excerpts of her works and probably some short stories, but I don't think I've ever read an entire novel, though I may just be forgetting.  She is certainly one of the most transgressive authors out there, along with the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller!  I think I would pair this with Coover's The Public Burning, and, while I hope my copy sitting in North Carolina, makes it here in time, I may just borrow a copy from Robarts.  This is all probably happening late April/early May.

I have sat down and watched several more Buñuel films, so between the Revue and TIFF (and Ann Arbor ages and ages ago) and home viewing, I have gone through the following:
1929     Un Chien Andalou
1930     L'Âge d'Or   
1953     Él
1961     Viridiana
1962     El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel)
1964     Le journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid) 
1965     Simón del Desierto  (Simon of the Desert)
1967     Belle de jour    
1972     Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)
1977     Cet obscur objet du désir  (That Obscure Object of Desire)

In addition to being influenced by The Exterminating Angel, I think Gilliam was clearly cribbing from The Obscure Object of Desire with all the explosions when he started work on Brazil (and also the radical openness/uncertainty at the end of Belle de Jour).

I think this is quite a good overview of Buñuel's work (up from only seeing Un Chien Andalou prior to this year!), though it looks like I can (and probably will) borrow the following from the library (though I am no longer in such a rush):
1969     La voie lactée  (The Milky Way)
1970     Tristana    
1974     Le fantôme de la liberté  (The Phantom of Liberty)

I won't write a lot about it, as I am already pretty late for the gym, but I am leaning towards ordering a Rita Letendre piece from a gallery in Montreal.  It's on the small side but surprisingly affordable.

Anyway, today I am off to the gym, will need to help my daughter with some math homework, and then I should have just enough time to get to 401 Richmond (and possibly the AGO).  Then I'll grab some Thai food at The Well, drop in at work to pick up some printing and then go over to a Soundstreams concert in the evening.

Tomorrow, I plan on swimming a bit longer (30+ laps) to make up for missing out last week, going to see a Mooredale concert at 3, and dropping off the Buñuel DVDs I have borrowed from Robarts.  I will see if it is feasible to catch Project Hail Mary at Carlton, but it isn't urgent.  But overall, it should be a slightly less frenetic weekend than usual, even though I am off to a late start, per usual...

Ciao!

Artistic Disappointments

It doesn't really upset me, as it doesn't affect me (and it isn't as disastrous a choice as Driving Miss Daisy or The Green Book) but I am disappointed that One Battle After Another won best picture.  I would really have liked to see The Secret Agent get it (which was then shut out of Best Foreign Film as well), though Sinners would have been an ok choice.  This year I saw a surprising number of Best Picture films.  In addition to OBAA and The Secret Agent, I also saw Hamnet and Marty Supreme.  And I did manage to see the animated short films.  I think The Girl Who Cried Pearls was probably the best of the bunch, but any of them (aside from this mawkish Christian fable about a bear and a pine tree) would have been fine.  There's no point in belabouring it, but the only thing I liked about OBAA was Benicio del Toro (and certainly not Sean Penn's (frankly cartoonish) role, which lurches into Jason territory as the (almost) unkillable monster).  Oh well.

The weekend was very mixed in terms of artistic positives and negatives.  I managed to get to the gym early on Sat. and then took the cat over to the vet.  Unfortunately, they want a follow-up visit and think the cone should stay on a few more days.  Sigh.  Then I had a fairly empty day, so I went around to a bunch of galleries.  I probably shouldn't have bothered with Corkin and Thomas Landry as nothing had changed.  I then dropped in at work and set off another long run (though I was extremely frustrated as the computer had crashed early into the Friday night run).  Then I went up to Yorkville and saw a few things there before going up to Davenport to Gallery Gevik.  I had sort of resolved in my mind to pick up one of the Letendre's that they had.  Little did I know that they had a Letendre show in Dec. and the pieces I was considering had sold.  (The newspapers do a terrible job in reporting on these smaller shows, and I generally don't check routinely, though after they moved from Yorkville I probably wouldn't have gone anyway, as it is pretty inconvenient to go except by bike.)  Then I asked about another piece I had considered purchasing, coming back a few times to look at it.  It also had sold.  I guess it was just not meant to be.  They do have some other Letendre pieces, though I wasn't crazy about the works on paper and the canvases were enormous and way outside my price range.  Too bad.

There is a Yorkville gallery that has a couple of Letendre works for sale, including this one.

They have another one I like a bit better, but probably not enough to buy it, so I may just wait and see if anything more to my taste comes on the market.  It's not like I have any open space anyway.

I had a bit of time, so I went to the original Bau-Xi gallery, though not the AGO.  Then I made it to 401 Richmond.  It was a few minutes before 5.  Red Head Gallery was basically shut up, and I was very disappointed that another gallery I had planned to see (and which is supposed to stay open until 6 on Sat.) was closed!  So I will have to try to hit 401 Richmond next Sat.  I think all in all, I probably should have skipped the detour to the Distillery and then I would have had enough time at 401 Richmond, but the real disappointment was the pieces I was interested in at Gevik were gone.

I saw The Herald at Buddies in Bad Times.  There were some elements in it that were interesting, but overall it didn't do a lot for me.  That's pretty typical for the experimental stuff that gets put up at Buddies.

Sun. there was a bit too much snow, but it didn't stick.  Still, I decided not to bike to the swimming pool, and I guess I'll try to go tonight and possibly Wed.  I was a bit delayed by the St. Patrick's Day parade but managed to make it to a Bach concert at Mazzolini Hall.  It was terrific.

Then I went back to work for a bit, though it was a fairly short trip before I had to head out for the cold read thing.  I think they really should have picked a different night.  There were few actors around, and I ended up reading some small roles.  The guy I had hoped to tackle the Frederick role in my Fringe piece decided to pull out.  I did get a bit of a lead on two other actors who might sign on and potentially a stage manager, though one with limited experience.  And I think next Sun. I should round up a few more, and then we'll see how many parts remain.  So on the whole, Sunday was a better day, artistically-speaking, and didn't have as many disappointments as Saturday held.

Planning Ahead (Mid March 2026)

I went from having a fairly open couple of weeks in mid-March to cramming in a bunch of things and will be out most of the time until April.  Even April is starting to get busy, as I saw several nights that I might stop by Hirut if nothing else is going on.  I do hope that most of these nights I can just bike over, assuming that the weather holds and we don't get any significant snow.  The Rex hasn't even posted its shows for April, and there will surely be a few things I want to see there.

Anyway, I found out from a blurb in The Star that Assembly Theatre hosts a George F. Walker play called Syndrome.  This appears to be a world premiere.  (I think Walker has retired his blog and now seems to focus on Substack, so it's harder for me to keep track of his productions.)  It is another play about the crisis in urban education.  This one appears to be written for teens, so may pull back a little from some of the nihilism of his darker pieces, though several of his recent pieces have ended on an upbeat note.  Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing it (and not finding out that I just missed it, as happened to me a few times).  It runs through this week at Assembly Theatre, with more info here.  Assembly has another play happening in late March into very early April called Anywhere, which was a big Fringe hit in 2018.  I don't remember seeing this, though I might have.  2018 was the year I put on my own play at the Fringe (Final Exam), and while I did see quite a few shows that summer at Fringe, my attention was on getting my work up and running.  Anyway, Leroy Street Theatre is involved and Cass Van Wyck is directing (she actually played one of the roles during the Fringe run, making me think I didn't go, as I probably would have remembered seeing her).  So I think I will go.  The actors are actually alternating roles, which is an interesting idea.  I guess if I love it, I might try to see it with the roles reversed, but I somehow doubt I'll have the time.

Thurs. I am off to see the puppets of Little Willy at Canadian Stage.  This has been on the books (my books) for some time.*  If the show is extremely short (apparently there is a lot of improvisation and it can run from 45 minutes to nearly 2 hours!), then I will be tempted to go to Bad Dog for a comedy show that's part of Sketch Fest, though I suspect I won't, esp. as it means backtracking significantly.  I am debating between two different comedy sketch shows for Friday night, both over at the Theatre Centre.  I wish they had the schedule set up so I could do both, but that just doesn't seem to be the case.  I have not booked that as of yet.

Sat. I have to bring my kitten back to the vet for a quick look to see if all went well from her surgery.  (I had her spayed.  She seems to be recovering quite well.  Surprisingly, she has been much more affectionate lately, often trying to sleep next to me when I am crashing on the couch.  Just like her brother, she managed to knock her cone off.  I'm glad that will be coming off for good on Sat., as I can put the covers back on the litter box.)  I have to figure out where I will fit in the gym or swimming, though I am leaning towards going to the gym early on Sat., but I will actually have to commit to getting over on time, and then swimming at Jimmie Simpson on Sunday around noon.  (This will work out reasonably well if I can bike, but I see they are forecasting possible snow on Sunday, which would really throw a wrench in those plans.)  I don't have a lot planned for the afternoon, but I would like to try to get to some of the art galleries like 401 Richmond and then one or two in Yorkville.  I am off to see The Herald at Buddies in the evening, which looks like it should be pretty wild.

Interestingly, I overlooked the fact that had a Bach concert scheduled at Koerner Hall for Sunday, and then overbooked myself with Imm-Permanent Resident at Factory.  (I think this was something I had tried to see at Theatre Centre on an earlier run, but it should be a bit more polished now.)  They were gracious enough to move the ticket to next Thurs., so that week is starting to fill up a bit now...  Then I will need to head over to Dovercourt for the Warm Reading event.  (I have the next chunk of my play going up in April, but I will use the time this Sunday to try to finish casting!)

I have written on and off about my new Fringe play.  I did a pretty substantial rewrite, collapsing two couples into just one, collapsing this down to 4 scenes (from 8 or so) and elevating one character to be a second focal point.  In general, the feedback has been good.  While it can definitely still be improved, I feel that this is now something that actors can sign on for without any reservations, which helps me in recruiting the rest of the cast and a stage manager, though I am also hoping the director can help a bit with that...)  Interestingly, there is an opportunity to have a script developed by the Coal Mine team, but they only want scripts with 5 actors, and most of what I write nowadays is 7+ parts, so not economical at all!  I'm debating doing a deep rewrite on a piece that I wrote back in Chicago called Corporate Codes of Conduct (or sometime Corporate Codes of Contact), but I always really wanted to call it Yellow Fever Dream, though I didn't dare.  This is after the second half of the play where the main character is sick and his new Asian girlfriend (that he met through work, as one does, naturally, despite it being against company policy) keeps dropping by.  The first half was supposedly all this clever stuff about code-breaking and cryptography, heavily inspired by Stoppard's Arcadia.  I think the only way this would work would be to start from him being sick in bed (the way the 2nd act started) and then take anything that actually worked from the first act and have it be these distorted flashbacks.  I think this would make it much closer to Miller's Broken Glass, though maybe I am confusing this with a completely different Miller play, After the Fall.  (It looks like there is a revival of Broken Glass going on in London right now, but I managed to see this in North York in 2017, though clearly my memory is a bit spotty.  I saw Eclipse Theatre doing After the Fall in Chicago even earlier than that, though I seem to not have scanned my program sadly...)  I don't really have the time to rework this (with a deadline in early April), but it is a bit of an interesting challenge, so I'll probably at least make the attempt.  Famous last words...

I may have mentioned that I did finish up Faulkner's The Wild Palms.  It was overall pretty good with a strong focus on people just trying to get by, buffeted by much larger societal forces.  Almost none of the plot about the young couple makes sense in a society where abortion is legal (though we will now start getting a bunch of tragic novels about life for women in post-Roe America due to the contemptible Supreme Court justices).  Tess Slesinger's novel, The Unpossessed, came out in 1934, beating Faulkner's The Wild Palms slightly to the punch (1939) in terms of being an early and somewhat daring novel in tackling abortion when it was not legal in the US.  I'm actually a bit surprised that I hadn't heard more about this aspect of The Wild Palms, though I suppose I wasn't really searching for anything along those lines.  I did finally watch Varda's La Pointe Courte, which was inspired by The Wild Palms, though mostly in terms of its formal structure and not much about its story line.  I'm now sort of in the final stretches of reading all the core Faulkner.  I probably will skip his first novels, as well as Pylon, but later this year I will probably read Sanctuary and the follow-up Requiem for a Nun.  At that point, I would only have The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion left to go, and I may aim for 2027 to read the Snopes Trilogy.

I'm trying to watch a few Bunuel films before I need to get them back to the library.  Interestingly, I ordered a copy of Diary of a Chambermaid, and the copy I got was from the VPL collection.  I double-checked that this was not supposed to be in circulation.  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find this copy.**  It's not with the French or the Spanish DVDs on the shelves.  This isn't one of the ones I had pulled out to watch (and are currently MIA).  I think what I probably should do is just pull down all the books in front of the DVDs, and take photos so that I can keep track of which DVDs I have (and start working my way slowly through them, as it is absurd that I own this huge film library and watch so little of it).  As it happens, I saw Diary of a Chambermaid at TIFF, so I don't need to watch it immediately, but I want to know where it is in case I want to watch it a second time.  I need to watch the other Bunuel films I have borrowed before Sun. when I will be returning everything to Robarts (and possibly donating a few DVDs by Chabrol, Rohmer and Godard (the last one was support to replace a damaged DVD in the TPL system, but they stupidly will not accept it and all donations go into their book sale)).

I did manage to finish the Winterson book but wasn't that impressed by it.  Then I moved on to Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor.  This is perhaps the most playful Nabokov novel I have read, heavily inspired by Joyce's Ulysses.  The early Russian novels have largely left me cold, and I didn't think Pnin was nearly as hilarious as a lot of people do.  (The same is definitely true for Amis's Lucky Jim, which I didn't like at all!)  I could sort of appreciate Lolita but didn't love it, for sure.  But I really am digging Ada.  It's quite quirky that this is set in an alternative universe where Russian influence over Alaska and the Yukon and perhaps even further south is unbroken.  I have no idea if Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union was directly inspired by Ada, but certainly Chabon is an admirer of Nabokov, so quite possibly this is where the seeds were planted.  My march through Nabokov has been fairly slow, but the fact that this novel is on my wavelength gives me a bit more push to keep going.  Given that Transparent Things is very short and seems very much in the same vein as Ada, I think I will try to read it in the very near future.  I probably am just going to skip Glory.  I'm a bit torn between going back to his first "English" novels or just going to Pale Fire, which is probably the most "important" of the novels that I haven't read.  I'm not sure I ever will reread Lolita, but I might in my 70s, and, if so, I will read The Enchanter first (which was a "warm up" to Lolita and which has the benefit of being fairly short).  I'm going to skip Look at the Harlequins!  I suppose there is a reasonable chance I'll try to read his memoir, Speak, Memory someday, but it is quite a low priority.

Anyway, my immediate reading looks like this: alternating between Ada and this book on mega-projects which I promised to review for an academic journal, when I hit Part 2 of Ada, I will take a detour and read Shulz's The Street of Crocodiles, then finish up Ada, Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls (which will probably be overdue from the library by then and I can't renew it any more), O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Shteyngart's Vera or Faith, Nabokov's Transparent Things, Sorokin's The Queue, Offill's Weather, Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and Reva's Endling.  Even this is probably planning out too far (esp. as my reading time on the TTC will be drastically cut by then), but it's good to have a bit of a plan, even if I do depart from it frequently.  For instance, if I decide to skim Miller's After the Fall and Broken Glass for good measure...

So that's what I expect to get up to in the next while... 

Edit (03/13): So glad I didn't change my ticket to Little Willy.*  I was worried about being in the front row and having to crane my neck up, but the stage was eye level and I had a really close look at the puppets to the point I could see the strings and when they even got tangled!  But it was a long show (2.5 hours with no break, and there was a talk back after that.)  Anyway, I had been low-key planning on watching the Oscar Nominees in the Animation category, and I guess I just missed out on seeing the slate at Paradise and the Revue.  It turns out it is playing Sat. evening and Sun. morning at The Fox, though I have conflicts with both dates.  Then I turned to TIFF, and they are showing the animations at 5:45, so I can slip in just after work.  (I've checked, and there are tons of tickets left, which is often a problem at TIFF.)  I'll probably just hit No Frills and come home, but if the timing works out, I might see something at the Toronto Sketch Fest, though I'll be on the streetcar, not biking, as it is probably going to snow today and early next week.  Nooooo!

* I briefly looked into switching Little Willy to next week and going to see Tafelmusik's program of Bach cantatas.  (And indeed I had a free ticket to a different Bach cantata program put on by the Toronto Consort, but had to give it back because it conflicted with Warm Reads.)  But it ultimately seemed to much of a hassle, and I find that I just don't care that much for cantatas.  I am possibly going to go to one cantata concert at the Toronto Bach Festival, but that is probably more than enough.

** I finally tracked this down.  Yea!  One small win against entropy...

Spring Thaw

It's way too early to say that winter is over, and we could well get another cold snap and perhaps even some sleet or snow.  (Please no more!)

But it was really nice out Sunday as well as Monday.  I was able to go out biking with no problems (I mean aside from the fact that the chain was still pretty rusty even after applying chain oil) and the derailleur is acting up a bit.  The roads were clear and even the bike paths with only a few exceptions were fine.  On Sunday, I actually biked to Jimmie Simpson.  I got there at 1:50, and the pool closed at 2:30, but I powered through 21 laps, which I thought was pretty good overall.  

I then biked to work.  In general, King was fine in terms of potholes in the outer lane (where bicycles are relegated) except for right at the BikeShare station at Church and King, where the pavement is in terrible shape.  I didn't have a lot of time, but I dropped off some food and did a bit of work, then I biked up to Carlton to see The Bride!, which I enjoyed, aside from the ghost of Mary Shelley.  It really is a total mash-up of Bride of Frankenstein and Bonnie and Clyde.

I got home and tried to power through Winterson's One Aladdin Two Lamps, which was overdue and I couldn't renew it.  I did finish it on Monday.  In fact, I could have biked to work but decided that 1) I wanted a tune-up before cycling in weekday traffic and 2) I could use the time on the TTC to finish the book.  I am already thinking ahead to how I really want to avoid taking the TTC as much as possible, but this will cut deeply into my reading time.  I generally sided with the NY Times reviewer who didn't care much for the book, as it mixes very short summaries of various tales from 1001 Nights with all kinds of philosophical observations loosely tied to the tales.  It really wasn't well organized, ostensibly by design.

Anyway, the bike is in the shop, and I should be able to pick it up on Thurs. in the late morning and probably ride in to work (and then stop off at Canadian Stage on the way home to see Little Willy).

So I have two more days (at least) on the TTC, but as I said, the weather has been really nice, so waiting outside on the bus isn't nearly as painful as it was in Jan. and Feb.

  

Bookcase Diversion

I think I had mentioned that Toby had jumped on one of the bookcase shelves and broke it.  I suppose way back in the day I installed this incorrectly, though I am not 100% sure that this wasn't actually a manufacturing defect (with the shelf support upside down).

It doesn't really matter whose fault it was (although most of the blame goes to the cat), but I couldn't leave it like that.  The bookcases showed up in two boxes, and I set aside time this weekend to assemble them.  

The white stripe to the left is where there was an odd triangular shelf.  I had to remove that because the two bookcases side by side will be slightly wider than the original bookcase.

On Sat. I did get the shelf down (as in the photo) and even did some painting.  I managed to get one of the bookcases started by Sat. evening and then finished it up on Sunday.  One thing I did this time, which I almost never do is install the anti-tip hardware that anchors it to the wall, in case the cats try to jump up again!

 

I really had planned to finish the second one on Sunday, but really didn't feel that well.  I was getting some strange sort of vertigo and was dizzy when I stood up; I actually swayed and nearly fell over once or twice while walking!  That was very disconcerting, and I decided I just needed to go to bed.

Part Two:

I feel much better, and I managed to get most of the books onto the shelves.  (The objet d'art on the top is by Vancouver artist Vanessa Lam.)

I should definitely be able to get the other bookcase up tonight.  I have no idea if they will be as sturdy as advertised, but the span is considerably shorter, which should help.  One bonus feature is that I can use quite a bit more of the poetry shelf on the wall to the left.  I think between that and saving the top shelf of the second bookcase for poetry, I should be able to get this in decent shape.  (Right now there are poetry collections stacked all over the place!)

One of the more surprising things is that I banged the broken shelf back into place.  The boards were a bit bowed, but it was still a mostly functional bookcase if used more for display of a few books and vases and seashells and whatever else Ikea thinks should be on bookcases aside from books!  We left it outside with a sign saying Free on it.  I fully expected we would have to hang onto it until big trash day, but it was gone within 24 hours.  I hope its next owner appreciates it and can use it for a few years.  I'm pretty glad we managed to keep it out of the trash.  That was certainly unexpected.

Part Three:

It definitely was a big push, but I managed to get the second bookcase together by midnight and then got the last of the books out of the hallway.  It will definitely take a while to get this properly sorted, but I actually have slightly more space for books now, and I just have to hope that they hold up for a few years.

 

Even the poetry shelf is more functional now, though it badly needs to be reorganized.  I've managed to get through a considerable amount of poetry in Jan. and Feb., and the piles in the living room are manageable.  There are several large piles of books in the back room that I will have to start tackling in the next tranche of reading.