Wednesday
September 19, 2001

Long Hours and Cherished Company

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Here are a few of my favorite online haunts:

REALTOR.ca
[This is the site I visit to fantasize about living in Toronto again, which is almost every single day during the winter]

Jonathan Cainer's Zodiac Forecasts
[This is where I visit in the morning, when I need a positive spin on things past, present and future.]

Living Local
[This is where I go to see what Canadians are up to, sometimes I even buy things from the businesses listed there.]

Environment Canada Weather
[This is the site I visit every morning, and before every road trip during the winter]

The day is quiet, so very quiet. Finally the patter of softly falling rain reaches my ears through the open window at my side. I look up and out, to see green leaves fluttering in the wind against a steel gray sky. I rise and stand at the window to watch the rain soak invisibly into the parched earth of the garden.

It is the season when Attila leaves before light and arrives home at dark, tired and looking forward to his few hours of sleep. We chat in those few dark hours of contact, and take comfort in mutual presence.

The last week has passed in a blur.

The day of the attack on the US, my neighbor, J, called at 8:50 A.M. to insist that I turn on the television set. Magarac must be close to ninety years old, grew up in Europe, and spent time in refugee camps during WW2. He is no stranger to upheaval, to sudden brutal death. I was honored by his gesture of community.

The television set stayed tuned into the news until the official mourning ceremony at Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday. I listened carefully to what the various officials were saying and to the stories of those who suffered. I bore witness to world events.

Then the television set was switched off and I have relied totally on Attila to alert me to breaking news headlines. I have chosen to continue listening to the public addresses of leaders in the United States and Canada. I have totally rejected the febrile analysis offered by the media.

Attila often listens to the radio in the course of his day, and is quite good at relaying to me the highlights of the day's news. If something seems truly informative, I seek out further details on the Internet.

On the Thursday after the attack I received news that a loved one, only thirty-seven years old, has developed cancer and after surgery is facing "aggressive" chemo and radiation therapy.

On Friday my candle burned for the victims of the attack on the US. At the same time I burned a candle for this young woman and her three small children who had already suffered so many years of violence and fear at the hands of a man who should have loved them.

Today is quiet, so very quiet.

While the world turns, I have made myself busy in the kitchen. I visited a farmer's market with Auntie Mame and Mike on Saturday and came home with armloads of fresh basil, plums, heads of garlic, jalapeno peppers, and a huge melon.

Sunday was spent making the winters supply of Pesto. I have always used my food processor, purchased almost thirty years ago, to prepare foods that require a great deal of chopping. The food processor bowl recently cracked, with old age I suppose. I faced a daunting task of hand-chopping sixteen cups of basil, 4 heads of garlic, and two cups of pine nuts. In a determined attempt to avoid many hours of labor, I coaxed the cracked bowl onto the machine base and got it going. It kept going until all the Pesto was spooned into containers and whisked away to the freezer. The bowl was very difficult to remove from the base and so will be retired.

I called a few places to price a new food processor bowl, but none stocked such an item. This food processor is considered a "commercial" model and the bowl had to be specially ordered.

I grew up on a farm; the kind where people worked hard for not very much money and always had a garden and produce to put down for the winter. From the time I was very young I helped with picking and peeling and slicing. We canned and canned through the fall in those early years, later we relied more on a huge chest freezer. There were no convenience stores; there were no pre-prepared or packaged foods. It was a lot of work, and I loved it.

My first experience at university was in food sciences. I went on to teach food preparation to children in the public school system. With an income, an interest, and a love of food preparation, I purchased the biggest, most powerful counter food processor I could find. I am surprised to find that it is still the biggest and most powerful of its kind and that after thirty years the parts are still available. At least I think they are, my order was taken although the parts have not yet arrived.

On the same theme, my bread machine pan is starting to disintegrate, after more than five years of continuous use. When I purchased this machine it was not available for sale in Canada. After careful investigation, I bought this model from a private distributor in Florida and had it shipped at some expense to Canada. Since its arrival Attila and I have enjoyed fresh baked bread, usually four to six loaves per week.

I reached the head office in the US by telephone (toll free) and after a pleasant chat with the customer service rep, was referred to a Canadian company that now sells and services these bread machines. The call to the Canadian company was also toll free; the parts I need were in stock and are now on the way.

In both cases, it might have been cheaper in the long term to just buy newer model machines to replace those I own. But I like my machines; I understand them.

I have always appreciated the familiar.

I am happy to announce that I am officially growing old disgracefully and in very good compnay indeed! I have joined the Autumn Leaves journal burb and would like to thank Bonnie Blayney and John Bailey for such a fine contribution to the web community.



Top of Page
RECIPES :: Cast

Worldly DistractionsMorning Glory Bloom
A brief bloom meeting the dawn
on September 11, 2001.



By the Easy Chair
We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates



Quote
"No human action can be one-hundred-percent predictable. The future just isn't there, to be predicted."
from We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates



Weather
16:18 AM DST
Temp: 18` C
Humidity: 66%
Wind: SE 24 km/h
Barometric:101.0 kPa

Sunrise 7:08 AM DST
Sunset 7:27 PM DST
 

Page by Page: A Woman's Journal
Photography
Poetry
by Maggie Turner

Canadian Maggie Turner writes and publishes poetry, photography, and a personal journal online. Her work reflects the current way of life in Canada, embracing Canada's past, present, and future in a unique portrayal of everyday life. Maggie's voice is one of the many that actively depict the rich diversity of Canadian culture.

Photography: "a term which comes from the Greek words photos (light) and graphos (drawing). A photograph is made with a camera by exposing film to light in order to create a negative. The negative is then used in the darkroom to print a photograph (positive) onto light-sensitive paper.
Source: University of Arizona Glossary

Poetry: "a form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject. To read a great poem is to bring out the perfect marriage of its sound and thought in a silent or voiced performance. At least from the time of Aristotle's Poetics, drama was conceived of as a species of poetry."
Source: Creative Studios

Journal: " "Though a journal may be many things - a treasury, a storehouse, a jewelry box, a laboratory, a drafting board, a collector's cabinet, a snapshot album, a history, a travelogue..., a letter to oneself - it has some definable characteristics. It is a record, an entry-book, kept regularly, though not necessarily daily.... Some (entries) will be nearly illegible, written in the dark in the middle of the night.... Not only is it a record for oneself, but of oneself. Every memorable journal, any successful journal, is honest. Nothing sham, phony, false...." (Dorothy Lambert from Ken Macrorie's book, Writing to be Read )
A journal is a way to keep track of your thoughts about what you read... as well as what you did on any given day."
Source: Journal Writing

A Blog is an online journal created by server side software, often hosted by a commercial interest.

"The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[4] on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.[5][6][7] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging


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