Joe and Gabrielle

I've seen two more movies.

Tuesday was Joe: super brilliant, super miserable, based on a novel by Larry Brown.

Nicolas Cage plays Joe, a guy with some issues... He tries hard not to get too pissed off at people, but every once in a while he sets his dog loose on a nuisance or puts a cop in his place. He has an iffy job; pays his underlings cash for the probably illegal work they do; drinks and smokes too much; but kinda has a heart of gold. He takes on a young worker with even more issues, but of a different sort: he has a violent, drunken daddy, a sister who suddenly stopped speaking for some reason, a useless mom. He, too, has a heart of gold. As they say, he's on the fence: is he going to turn bad or escape the crap and do something worthwhile?

There's a lot of just awful stuff that happens in this movie. I wouldn't have chosen it myself, and would be careful who I recommended it to. But it was perfectly cast and acted, the settings were wonderful, and it certainly did not get sentimental or preachy about anything.

That guy's head was in the way through the whole dang film

Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan, already an award-winning actor at age 17, and the director, David Gordon Green, were at the theatre for Q & A after the movie, which is always a great bonus. A woman in the audience said she thought the movie was about the failure of hyper-masculinity in a failed America, which the director disagreed with. I think she was bang-on, actually.

Today I got to the cinema at 8 am to see Gabrielle, a lovely, gentle movie about a woman with William's syndrome (which I had never heard of) who falls in love with another mentally challenged member of her choir. She wants to be independent, have her own apartment and her own boyfriend, like her sister does. She is pretty resourceful and so happy a lot of the time, but gets lost when she strays off the usual route and is terrified by the noise of a smoke alarm.



It's a nice, slow movie with a lot of music and singing, and (*spoiler alert*) a happy ending. The director answered questions afterward, and we learned that the actress who played Gabrielle indeed has William's syndrome, but the man who played Martin, her "chum," is a professional actor. And that really was Robert Charlebois.

I kind of hope tomorrow's movie doesn't have anything to do with mental illness, but I'm not holding my breath. It's called A Touch of Sin and promises to be violent and crazy.

The Dog

This is the movie I saw yesterday. It's a doc about the real-life story behind Dog Day Afternoon, and so much more.

 

Lucky for me, there are clips of Dog Day Afternoon on YouTube, so I wasn't going in complete ignorance, because I was 15 when it came out and I never got around to watching it when I got older.

This guy, who calls himself the Dog, did a few crazy things in his life, but his main accomplishment was screwing up a bank robbery so badly that someone made a movie about it, and that was his claim to fame all the rest of his life.

The whole story is wild. Nice wife and two children; gay sex in the army in Vietnam; the whole Greenwich Village scene in the late 60s and early 70s; marrying men long before gay marriage was an issue; bank robbery; prison; infamy; cancer....

I wouldn't have chosen this movie if I'd picked my own tickets at TIFF this year, but I'm glad I ended up with it. Today, Joe.

It's a new month

I have been knitting more and more. I will even have a couple of things to show you in the next few days.

I started a hat last September. I remember trying to knit it in the lineup at the film festival, but didn't get very far because of my tennis elbow. I worked on it last week and now just have to finish off the top and sew a few ends in.

I also started a Honey Cowl. I know, everyone is doing it! I was in the yarn shop with Elaine and she picked out some nice yarn, so she gets a new fall cowl. I've knit up one ball and have three more. I think I'll only need two, though... but it's hard to see what it will be like wrapped around one's neck when it is jammed on a circular needle. I aim to finish this in September.

I also have knit a row or two on a sock I started a million years ago. That, too, can be finished off this month, I believe.

I'm sorry I have no knitting pictures for you now, but here is our most successful weird perspective picture from our holiday last week:

She will just pluck him up there. See how very alarmed and worried he looks. Yeah, okay, we still have work to do on this idea, but we are improving!

Cyber-cousins at the Falls

Niagara Falls. What a weird town.

We have been for day trips a few times over the years, but this last weekend Arthur and I stayed overnight to have a visit with 3 other mom/kid duos. These were some of the E-mail Mommies and their kids, the Cyber-cousins. The moms and I have been e-mailing since 1996, when we were all pregnant! When I went to New York in 2007 I met up with some of them. At that time Helen wrote a super write-up of what this group is and means. I have known these women for 17 years, but met 2 of them for the first time this weekend, and another for the first time since about 1999.

Three-quarters of us met at the hotel and wandered through a park to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. On the way the kids all took a zillion pictures of flowers. All doing the same thing, each in their own way. This was when Arthur first sighed that we should have brought the big camera. The fourth family joined us for lunch after battling traffic and we all had a good chat. It's weird... we all are quite familiar, though we'd never met. We end up having a lot more in common than just 16-year-olds.

After lunch, it was off to the Maid of the Mist. We have never done this before, but with only me and Arthur it seemed like half-price! And it was so cool, we will likely insist on doing it again one day with the whole family.

rainbow in the mist

Everyone gets a blue plastic poncho to keep them dry. This turns out to be necessary, in fact, as we did go into the spray! Here we are up close and personal with the American falls.

This is Maddie, who stayed drier than the rest of us. 

This is what she might see! Camera hidden under protective blue plastic!

Arthur, post boat ride, perhaps wondering what he has got himself into. Did I mention the three others his age were all girls?

Here we are: the slightly damp, accidentally colour-coordinated moms.

After our adventures, we had a bit of a chill-out in the hotel before setting off for dinner. The original plan was to go up the Skylon tower, get a great view and have a really expensive meal. But we figured that would be immoderate of us, so we went to Margaritaville! And perhaps indulged immoderately in teasing our children and making them accept pirate hats and balloon princess hats and swords and magic wands. They even got the crayons out after a while. 

The next morning people had to start on long drives home, long lines at the border and all that jazz, so things broke up around 11 am. I look forward to a meeting one day of all of us! There are about 20, including one in Australia and one in New Zealand. We'll have to do it soon before the kids start wandering off on their own! 

I'm not sure whether there was a morning train, but we had tickets on the 5:45 pm train, so we had a few hours to kill. 

I asked at the hotel how to get to Lundy's Lane and Drummond Street. Oh, the guy said, that will take maybe an hour to walk to! When he heard we were looking for a thrift shop though, he said we would come to one closer in if we just headed out on Lundy's Lane. So we trekked off through the touristy part of town, up the hill towards the 1812 battlefields and, we hoped, the thrift shop. The tourist centre is full of chain restaurants, "attractions" like Ripley's Believe it or Not and a wax museum, and hotels. We approached the area where the actual residents must spend time, but I still didn't see a bank or a grocery store. (I spent $4 to use an ATM in town!) We finally saw the shop the man in the hotel mentioned, after about half an hour, and noticed that it was exactly at Lundy's Lane and Drummond! Sheesh. 

I like to look at crockery and doodads in thrift shops but Arthur heads straight for the T-shirts. This time he found the holy grail of used T-shirts:

I got myself this cute little set (almost too cute and little; could be a challenge in the morning to get a spoon in the sugar bowl's wee opening) made in Occupied Japan. I love ceramic fruit and veg!

Finally we just diddled around town; we did some tasting in a hot sauce shop and then tried to get into the casino (no go; the bouncer kinda knew that Arthur was not 19) and eventually even walked to the train station. On our way we saw lots of old houses just waiting for someone to invest a load of money to fix them into nice B&Bs. And quite a few nice B&Bs, mostly full up. 

And a butterfly on a butterfly bush. 

It was great fun, really. Niagara Falls is a great place to go to look at a big waterfall, but after that, things get a bit weird. Eating and monsters will only entertain people for so long. Someone needs to come up with the next generation of amusements. But if you are with friends, even friends you have never met before, it is all good fun!

Sleepless Knights go to Niagara Falls

This past weekend Arthur and I went to Niagara Falls to meet some of his cyber-cousins. That is fodder for a whole different post, but this one is about our other travelling companions, the Sleepless Knights. 

We took the train from Toronto. It was okay. Arthur played games on his phone and the Knights just lounged around with a napkin. 

At last, Niagara Falls. We are waiting to go on the Maid of the Mist, and are looking across at the American falls. The knights did not actually get to look at the water thundering and pouring down beside us when we were on the boat because we didn't want them to get wet. They are an excitable lot at the best of times. 

After our boat trip, Arthur, the cousins, the e-mail mommies and I had dinner at Margaritaville. Sir Gawain would have loved it but he can not be trusted in a bar with fancy drinks and women on stilts, I believe.

We got the fancy hat, the lei, and the blue balloon sword (blown up and tied by the woman on stilts; ultimately left in the drawer of the hotel dresser to confuse future travellers) then got back to reading. 

Natural wonders are all very fine, but a good book is such a treat.

The Sleepless Knights were delightful companions on this trip. They are good at travelling and questing and all that. Their adventures are actually much more entertaining than mine and the people/ creatures/ damned dead that they run into are worth getting to know, for sure.

(Disclaimer: I actually bought this book; and then I entered a contest and won some book-related stuff. Some years ago, I attended the wedding of the publisher, but he did not force, compel nor pay me to take the knights to Niagara Falls.)

Sunshine and revolution

This past summer I was hanging around the book sale at our street party when one of the neighbours appeared, not with yet another John Grisham novel to donate, but with two huge, enormous, gigantic, brilliantly coloured posters.

They were amazing, and the woman who was running the sale and I quickly each handed over ten bucks and took charge of our posters without bothering anyone else with the information that they even existed. All's fair in such situations, indeed.

Mine was a bit ripped on the bottom, and in my excitement to show Stephen, I quickly unrolled it and ripped it even more. It is on crappy, cheap, old paper. There are traces on the back of paint from the printing process.

Can you guess who these happy people are? The happy handsome dudes, the happy guitarist and the happy astronaut? Is he really an astronaut, one wonders, or maybe a deep-sea diver?

They are all working happily together with these guys, Fidel and Che.

Enjoying the sunshine and the music and the bounty of the land and all that stuff, in poster-paint colours, in Cuba.

I think the guy below Che is Raul Castro. You can see an old picture of him here. At first we wondered why Shakespeare was on a Cuban poster.

My neighbour said she brought a few of these back from Cuba in the 1970s and these two were the last of her stash. I am so glad she figured it was time to pass them on.

I looked into framing this. It is about 3 feet by 5, so a piece of glass to cover it would be horribly heavy and atrociously expensive. I hemmed and hawed about it for some time, but finally just stuck it up with pins. I'm sure it has suffered graver troubles in its time. One day I will treat it properly. And now it makes me smile whenever I see it!

Saturday sky

I've been meaning to get back in the habit

 of a Saturday sky picture for ages. 

Tonight's sunset was just what I needed.

Finished! Finished something!

I knit a hat! I even sewed the ends in and everything, and it is done!
I asked Arthur to model it and he put it on his knee.

The brown is some handspun I got in exchange for a bunch of magazines, and the creamy colour and green is old stash, wool with a bit of viscose. Pattern (what? Mary used a pattern for a hat? Well, sorta) is the Basic Bulky Man Hat, but I didn't do the 4-point decreases at the top. Just the usual 8 decreases around a few times, down to 4 stitches to make a teeny i-cord bump.

It's so delightful to wear a double-thick wool hat in August.

Great leaves I have seen

While Elaine is off learning archery and whatever, the rest of us went to the Allen Gardens greenhouses to see Toronto's very own blooming agave plant. It appears to have been at its finest a few days before we went, but it is still a thing you don't see every day!

poking out through the roof

They had to cut a hole in the roof to let the spike out, some months ago. It was just a spike for a while, then flowered, and now, as I understand it, the whole plant will die.

This is what it looks like from the inside.

I'm pretty sure that we have never been to this site before, although we found plenty to look at when we got there. I'm also pretty sure that it is not generally so crowded as we found it. The miracle of a blooming agave seemed to be quite the draw.

Here's a taste of what we've been missing all these years.

polka dots

frizzy!

gorgeous colouring

oh, more gorgeous colours! 

spiky leaves growing straight out

your basic stripes

why does it do that?

We'll be back. I suspect there's a time when lots of their cactuses are in bloom, and I suspect it will be a nice spot to go for stroll indoors in January.

And she's off

We put Elaine on the bus for camp this week. Before, she has gone to a Monday-to-Friday camp on Toronto Island, which is familiar, close to home and not too long a time. Now she is off in the wild woods of Ontario for two weeks. With kids who have been going to this camp for years. And so on.

We spent days and days accumulating all the stuff -- sleeping bag for the canoe trip (!); white shirt for Shabbat dinner (yeah, we are not Jewish, but the camp mainly is); beach towels and shower towels and rainboots and water shoes, all of which had to be labelled. I wish I'd taken pictures of the heaps of clothing piled up around here.

I got to use my iron to put the labels on -- that was a pretty rare thing!

And this was the last we saw of her.

At least, we imagined we could see the shapes of her and her friend behind the big window of the bus! (You really have to click this to see that it is a cool reflection and not just a mistake, I think.)


She'll be back, all tanned and happy, in no time, I am sure. 

Some knitting

When I don't blog for ages, but continue to write sparkling prose in my head, I have trouble getting back into the blog mindset. Do I try to retrieve those brilliant paragraphs composed in the grocery store? Actually, this past month most of my masterpieces were thought up as I was cycling home from Booty Camp.

Oh, look, now I must explain Booty Camp, although I hopefully titled this post "Some Knitting."

At the end of May I went to the fun fair at the kids' old elementary school. They are both finished with it now, but it is down the street and there is always something fun at the silent auction table. I bid on two things: an hour with a personal trainer and 4 weeks/8 classes of Booty Camp. I got outbid on the trainer, but got my fitness classes.

As soon as I'd won, I wondered what the heck I'd been thinking! Surely everyone would be 25 and I'd just be the fat, old lady in the back row, probably injuring myself. Well, as it turned out, everyone was 25, but I managed to hold my own, and since I am a wee bit wise as well as old, I modified things to suit me better and didn't end up injuring myself at all. (Sore quads the next day doesn't really count as an injury, does it?) I also am somewhat proud to say that I rode my bike there and back, a 7 km round trip.

It was not like the aerobics classes I did in the late 80s and not at all like the pregnant-lady exercises I did 14 years ago! One night I did 170 squats and 70 push-ups. Really. (Okay, maybe not all 70 push-ups, but all 170 squats!) One night we did a "pyramid" of 10 of one exercise, 20 of another, 30 somethings, 40 somethings and 50 jumps with a jumprope. (I meant to take a camera-phone pic of the board where the evil genius who ran the class wrote it all out, but was half-dead at the end and forgot.) It's called a pyramid because after you get up to 50, you run to the corner, come back and then do the 50 jumps, 40, 30, 20, 10... Lots of lunges, squats, push-ups, hateful things called burpees -- these were the things I most heavily modified!

Anyways, after a month of that I know I can do it, but also that I'm unlikely to do a push-up just for fun on my own. I'd rather do something during the day, instead of rushing off after dinner, and I need a more moderate class -- after Tuesday's class, I didn't want to do much Wednesday, and after Thursday's I was stiff all Friday!

So I spent most of June thinking about my glutes.

I did also get a bit of knitting in. I was trying hard to stay monogamous to my shawl fringe, but aside from the occasional thrill of changing balls of yarn, it is so boring and uninspiring.

I once got a bunch of Vogue Knitting magazines from a friend, but had to pass them on again because her cats had been all over them and my ogling was hampered by itchy watery eyes! I traded them to a woman here in town for some of her handspun, and decided to knit up a very warm hat, holding the handspun wool together with some wool/viscose I had lying around. I've been knitting carefully and trying not to strain my elbow and arm, so it's taken me days and days!

Now, I could show you a picture of a half-knitted hat, but the cables are upstairs and the computer is downstairs and it's all just too complicated right now, so you'll just have to imagine. And hope that in a few days, I can show you an actual hat!

Not quite the way I planned

Tomorrow, Elaine's school is having an evening affair, with an art show, silent auction and a cake raffle. So, I am making a cake.

There's always the problem: what to put the cake on? A regular plate will not come back to me, so I looked at plastic picnic plates I wouldn't mind getting rid of, but they were not big enough to contain my brilliant idea -- my brilliant idea was to recreate something like this. (I should have read that page before embarking on this, I can tell you right now. )

The plate problem was solved by the old Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is an election sign, heavy-duty corrugated plastic. These things are light and strong and perfect for making plates out of, or even houses. Their only flaw is that it is not easy to cut them in any sort of curve. So, a square plate.

Wrap it in tin foil, and we're all set.

Assemble your sugar-bomb toppings: store-bought icing, Maltesers, Buttons, Kit Kats.

Here was my first clue that this was not quite the same as that previous cake. I only made a single layer, and the Kit Kats were too tall!  I did experiment with cutting them, but decided that was a bit too labour intensive for me today, so I ditched the Kit Kats idea. (Note to self: hide them before the kids get home from school!)

I just swooped the candies around on top, and arranged some artfully around the outside.

Would you bid on this cake?

 

A few leftovers that can be easily dealt with, and we are set and ready to go!