Wake Up!

Attentive subscribers know I missed a deadline last week. My excuse is I was away from my computer and couldn't figure out how to post from my iPad - which travels with me wherever I go (in last week's case, Victoria, BC) so that I am never without distraction.

It's a long trip to the west coast, so I also brought along a book - called  Good Prose - to beguile any parts of the journey where I had to wait and my iPad's battery was dead.

If you've already clicked on the link above, you know the two people who wrote Good Prose are long-experienced, well-respected, award-winning author/editors who have managed to do for a living what I do for a hobby. Lucky them.

And here goes.

I travelled to Victoria with one of my sisters to be with another sister who had gotten a scary diagnosis and had to undergo surgery. Turns out everything may have been caught in time, so we all breathed a sigh of relief and set about simply enjoying being with one another. We don't do that too often these days and my sister asked if health emergencies were what it took to lure us to the west coast for a visit.

"You could just try calling next time," I said.

But it's true. These sad things - illness, death, disaster - in life are often the thing it takes to bring people together. 

For example, we watched The Amazing Race (first episode of the season) on Sunday night and met, among the fresh-minted contestants, the father-son team who, after each had a run-in with cancer, discovered life was short. They said they felt they'd received a wake up call and the next natural step, obviously, was to sign up to be on TV.

I asked my sister if she thought she'd be doing anything like that. She didn't think so.

In a quite related incident, I was coming home from my usual Saturday shopping yesterday morning and was at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton (incorrectly identified in previous posts as the corner of Jarvis and College) where absolutely everything happens to me. 

I was paying very close attention to the two men walking a short distance ahead. One of them - I was trying to figure out which - was leaving in his wake a trail of sweet-smelling tobacco smoke. Because my brain cannot leave these mysterious details alone, I was trying to identify which of them was smoking and what they were smoking - a pipe, a cigarillo, what. 

Completely focused on the two people ahead of me, I was about halfway past the Lutheran church on the south east corner of the intersection when

WHOOOMP

a mass of half-melted snow and ice from the roof of the church let loose from the tiles and hit me on the head, shoulders and back. 

Far more startled than hurt by the teeny urban avalanche, I let out a holler. That and the sound of the falling snow made both of the men I'd been following turn instantly. With looks of unfaked concern on their faces they came to help me.

I said that I was OK. The one fellow, the one closest to me, and my leading smoking suspect, wondered where the fall of snow had come from.

"From the roof of the church," I said, and then a joke occurred to me: "From GOD!"

They both laughed and the probably-not-the-smoker one said, "you should buy a lottery ticket."

Or maybe sign up for a reality show. 

Here's a picture of my sister taking a picture of her sisters.

Have a great week!

Karen

Muffled

From late Thursday night to Friday evening, Toronto, along with other big cities in this part of the planet like Boston and Jersey City experienced what we called in my youth a day or two of heavy snow.  

At about 6 a.m. on Friday morning I looked out the third floor window and saw four centimetres of snow on the balcony furniture. I expressed some disappointment to Bruce for nature's paltry showing so far.  An hour and forty minutes later, there were easily twenty centimetres. I was impressed then.

And all those gigatonnes of snow fell without a sound.

The storm inconvenienced or at least provided a pretext to be late for many thousands of commuters. 

The morning after the storm, the sky was perfectly clear and the sun brilliant on
the fallen snow, passing cars and busy snow plows.

I enjoyed my walk to work, trudging through two feet of unmarked snow in the Allan Gardens. I passed just a few other pedestrians. We all had stupid grins on our faces, like this was the most fun we'd had since we'd forgotten when. 

The fresh snow records how the Allan Gardens have no square inch left untrod.

When I got to work, there was exactly one other person on the floor with me. We usually have close to sixty. 

If you look closely at the painting behind the bench you can see the markes where winds from hurricane Sandy lifted the panels clear of the construction hording around the big sewer excavation and slammed them into the bench. 

As the morning progressed I received updates from staff, some stranded, or still waiting for cabs, or resigned to work at home. Most made it in one way or another. 

It's just an accident of fallen snow sculpted by blowing winds,
but it looks like three stalwarts sat out the storm on the bench.

The snow kept falling. At noon Bruce e-mailed me and told me his office was closing for the day. I, on the other hand, braved a trip on the subway to St. Clair Avenue West where I was scheduled to make a presentation after lunch.

Garbage pick up was undeterred by the storm.

I did make one concession to the weather. Because I am vain, I worry about hat hair. I have been known to wander out bare-headed in the worst weather imaginable. Not this time. 

More proof of human habitation.

The snow was supposed to have tapered off by one in the afternoon, but fell steadily to early evening, by which time I was back home, whiling away my precious life playing stupid games on my iPad, enjoying our gas fireplace and waiting for Friday night's chicken wings to finish cooking.

Life is good.

Have a great week!

Karen

Insert Something

It's been a hectic past couple of weeks. One of my staff has been away on medical leave. You just don't know how much you rely on someone until they wink out on you for a while.

The rest of us have been coping with a bureaucrat's kind of triage where we address the greatest part of the worst and hope for a break in the combat to deal with the rest. 

For example, my boss and I were under the gun to prepare some last minute speaking notes for my boss' boss. We had to put words on the page that were at once crystal clear, technically correct, persuasive as heck and illustrated with pie charts.

So, I got the pie charts from my staff and conferred with them on the technical accuracy of the statements. And we smacked together some prose that to us was both masterfully clear and compelling. Plus we did it in a half an hour or so. 

Proud of our efforts, I e-mailed the work to my boss... who had been called away suddenly and would not be able to review the notes before the end of the day. So much for the heroism of a public servant.

But, later that night while I was making dinner, Bruce called to me and said my infernal device (my Blackberry) had buzzed. My boss had stayed late, reviewed the work and, his e-mail said, had made some revisions that he wanted me to check first thing the next morning. 

I opened the message at my desk around 8 a.m. the following day. This is what I read (note that the actual text has been cleverly disguised so as to honour my oaths of confidentiality and loyalty to the Crown; my boss' changes are highlighted and are just as he wrote them):

"The National Ice Cream Factory Working Group (NICFWG) has been created by the Canadian Council of Ice Cream Ministers to deliver on their direction to insert something. In keeping with this direction, a special workshop has been convened by federal and provincial staff to insert something else."

I laughed so hard I had to go to the bathroom.

Insert photo here.

And have a great week!

Karen