Thursday, or Thereabouts - April 21, 2016

Spring Thaw 2016 - An Escape to Write

It's a busy day - a good, busy day for me. I'm getting my stuff together to head off on a writing retreat. A weekend of open space, as structured or unstructured as I need; in the company of other writers or on my own, maybe even in my jammies; no meals to plan, prepare or clean up after; and all under the "care-full" wings of two very capable writers, Ruth Walker and Gwynn Scheltema.

from Spring Thaw 2012

I have a somewhat muted optimism about this escape to write. In past years I've taken full advantage of the "Extend Your Pen" option and luxuriated in five days of good company, good food and some really good writing. Due to hospital appointments, I've had to cut it down to just the weekend. Added to that, another infection has insinuated itself upon me.

BUT,  I'm going on this retreat! 

Have antibiotics - will travel!

The Clydesdales of Elmhirst's Resort

What do I want from this escape? I want to hang out with some great people, enjoy the camaraderie of fellow writers and soothing embrace of a lakeside cottage. The tedious cycle of urinary tract and kidney infections that have plagued me for too many months, has turned me into a recluse of sorts - too afraid of bladder or brain (thinking is somewhat fogged mid-infection) accidents to venture out. And YES, I want to write, to feel the joyful glide of fountain pen on crisp white paper.

It would be utterly glorious to come out pens blazing and papers filling but also perhaps a tad unreasonable, though not impossible...

SO I am going on this retreat!

Catch up with you all, later.

Cheers!

©2016 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - January 22, 2016

But it's FRIDAY!

Yes. Yes. Yes, I know. But some days the words don't form sentences. Some days the ideas fail to blossom. Some days the photos won't come together to make a story. And then are days when all three are no-shows. That's what happened yesterday.

I fussed and fumed, whined and whimpered, sighed and snorted. For five hours I struggled to make something work. Then I just gave up. Guilt rushed in to bolster the sense of defeat. Reason took a bit longer to show up - a bit too long in my opinion! - to rescue me from the gloom.  I mean seriously, how awful is it that I did not write a blogpost yesterday? Get a life woman!

I wasted half a day spinning my tires, churning up nothing but despair. For what earthly or even heavenly good? How clever was that? And lest you think that this is going to be nothing but a tedious tale of self-recrimination...

That was Yesterday!

And this is Today. This is FRIDAY!

Though a smidgen of guilt remains over yesterday's wasteland, immobility and its buddy frustration have left the building. Alleluia! And you know what? I've had a good week, minus the one small blot on the landscape.



My love and I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Surely I've not aged as much as Leia, Hans and Luke have? I'm more like Chewbacca - a little rough around the edges but ageless. Right?



Also this week I enjoyed a lovely lunch with friend, discovering new to us, Japanese restaurant. I got caught up on my correspondence (translation: I cleaned up my email). Then I had a kick-butt workout at the gym.  And, AND I did get two blogposts written!



A steaming cappuccino begins my day today. Sole Meuniere is on the menu for supper tonight...

"It was “perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley… I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth… The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvellously with the browned butter… It was a morsel of perfection… It was the most exciting meal of my life.” - from Julia Child's My Life in France

...with small rounds of boiled potato speckled with fresh parsley and a just to mix things up a little, a Thai Mango salad. Dessert? Well, Une Tarte aux Pommes of course. There is a fine bottle of Chardonnay from Thirty Bench Wine Makers chilling in the fridge.

And me? I'm just chillin' too.
Bon appetit!

©2016 April Hoeller

Monday Moanings - March 16, 2015

Can I get a note?

It’s little more than 36 hours until take off and I’m a tad frantic. The string on the tether ball marking the departure time is very short and my 'yet ToDo' list is very long. I've been very good and certainly much more thorough than in years past, yet the accumulation of scribbled post-it notes, scrawled lists and neat entries in the official travel prep booklet does not seem to be diminishing as planned. This was supposed to be the most organised departure ever. This was supposed to be the least stressful departure ever. And up until Saturday it was. But then the power went out!





The service interruption alarm on the household Internet router announced the loss of electricity at 4:30am, and it kept at it with a triplet of chirps every 30 seconds for a full hour until choked to death by loss of battery power. At first Hydro One told us the power would be restored by 7:30am. We went back sleep and awoke at 9am to no lights, no heat, no water. Worst of all NO COFFEE!

But the folks at Hydro One said all would be back by 11am and thanked us for our patience. Well it wasn't. The entire afternoon was clocked by missed then revised estimates for power restoration. The sun set. And within minutes back came the lights and the heat and water. But the day had been lost; a day that was stuffed full of things to do - laundry, vacuuming, cleaning and preparing two writing submissions.

I've done the laundry and I’ve tidied the house - sort of. There remains a slim chance of the vacuuming being done, but the window of opportunity for the writing work has slammed shut. Can I get a note from Hydro One, excusing my failure to complete the submissions?

To Whom it may concern;
Please excuse April's inability to complete your writing requirements. Spring runoff of salt laden snow (fault of the Roads Department, not us!) corroded our equipment. The resulting pole fires and a few exploding transformers interrupted electrical service for fifteen hours.
We are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. 

I'm disappointed, but not devastated - there's no time to wallow in missed opportunities this week. The house-sitters move in tomorrow and will have to be fully briefed, not just by me but also by Sophie the resident canine. She will want them to know the 'correct' meal and treat schedule, which is not the one mommy wrote out. I know that she will pine for us just a little; mope around for a week or so but then motor on.  I will miss her morning greeting, a cold wet nose nudging my cheek accompanied by a little whine, “Mommy, are you in there?”



My love and I will be far away on another adventure, where it will be warm and wonderful. I will not be posting on this blog, no “Monday Moanings” or “Thursday, or Thereabouts”, until sometime after April 8. Look for me then.

In the mean time, hold the fort while I'm gone, and take care of each other.


©2015 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - February 5, 2015

Passport to Paradise




There may be ink in the fountain pen, but there's nothing flowing onto the page, save for half a dozen incomplete sentences scrambling to grab some energy and a few doodles just for decoration. I am not feeling the joy of writing today. It happens.








Well hang it all, let's go look at some flowers. I know you've seen many if not all of these before, but what's not to like about flowers?



Especially when the sky is blue, the sun is shining and it's MINUS 12°C outside (balmy compared to the -20 I woke up to this morning).


Now while you are off smelling the roses and basking in the tropical delights of paradise in pictures, I'm heading into the city to pick up my renewed passport.

Enjoy!

(It's 30C in Puerto Ayora today...)

aaaaahhhhhhhhhh

©2015 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - July 24, 2014

Much Ado About Nothing




Well that's the kind of day I'm having. I've spent much of the morning fretting about what to write here today. Every one of my grand, and not so grand ideas, has petered out after two sentences, lost energy, disintegrated into a pile of randomly generated grey words. And I am not enjoying this.






Yee gads! What's a writer to do? I could wait a bit, until later this afternoon, to see if pen and brain want to talk to each other or perhaps even hold my write hand and dance words across a page, but my time this afternoon is booked with other things. So it's now or not today.

I am spinning my tires, going round and round and succeeding in generating only heat and smoke - no light at the end of the tunnel.




So I'll leave you today with, well frankly not much, but at least I hope a smile.

from my collection of Cocktail Napkins

Enjoy this day where ever you be.

©2014 April Hoeller

Monday Moanings - June 23, 2014

Cranky in Spandex





Nearly three hours and not a single idea for this post has crawled across the finish line. Every single one of
them, four now, has disintegrated, run out of words or fallen into boredom and not one of them has made beyond a second paragraph. I'm fit to be tied. I have other things to do and the clock is ticking!





I'm blaming this all on the gym. It's been weeks since I stuffed myself into the uni-boob sports bra, eons since my toes got stuck in the narrow legs of my workout pants. But today, rising guilt encountered an opportunity for relief - my love had a dentist appointment and there were errands to do in town. And that's how I bucked my trend and went to the gym this morning. I had a great 30 minutes session of of heart pounding, sweat streaming cardio with upper body circuit. It felt amazing!

photo courtesy of Stouffville Joint Venture Fitness & Physio

I like the gym. I like the people that I meet there. But 2014 has so far proved to be a challenge to my gym  routine. With the exception of the month that I was out of the country and then the two plus weeks it took me to recover from that adventure, the list of excuses for my poor attendance falls into two categories: weather - snowstorms, ice storms, thunderstorms, and deluges - and whining, often white washed with a skim coat of virtue -
It's Monday, or Thursday and I have to write my blog, or I'm staying home to work on my book.


Today, the gym plus errands in town ate up the morning, so here I sit cranky in spandex at nearly four in the afternoon.

Is it nap time yet?

©2014 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - January 30, 2014

Write On!

I wanted a diagnosis. I wanted to know what was distoring my central vision. I've wanted to know this since October 31/13 when the greasy smear first appeared down the centre of my visual field. I wanted it to go away. Yesterday I got my answer. Yesterday my love and I made the trek down to the city, to St. Michael's Hospital to see a neuro-opthalmologist.

The information sheet warned, in caps no less, that "Due to the complexity of care for our patients, the waiting time will be 3 to 4 hours."  So it was with books and writing tools, tablets and smartphones that we settled into the waiting room. No matter how I planned for this, no matter how much stuff I brought to while away the time, to distract me from the tension and the tedium, waiting in a big city hospital to be seen by a big gun specialist was still nerve-racking, a delicate balance between fight and flight accompanied by the constant chatter of the optimist and the pessimist in my head bantering on about the best outcome and worst case scenario. I studied my surroundings - hospital green walls, salmon marbled vinyl flooring, bad artwork on the walls, umpteen notices about infection control, two identical poems about miraculous hands which I couldn't see well enough to read, and a big poster about patient's expectations of a great hospital. I wrote a little (you're reading it now) and the first hour passed.




Just after 10am, my name was called. The doc spent the next 40 minutes asking questions and doing tests. No fault found. Then the eye drops went in and I was shuttled back out into the waiting room. Of course due to the drops, my eyesight became even worse over the next 40 minutes. Those green walls became a sea of blurriness and the wall art some nondescript flotsam and jetsam. Again I was summoned back to see the doc. One look with an opthalmascope into those huge dark pools that my eyes had become, and she announced the diagnosis: an epiretinal membrane in the macular area of both eyes. You can read all about it on the Canadian Opthalmological Society website.





I have half of what I wanted and it's neither as good as my optimist nor as bad as the pessimist. But it's not going to go away. I am stuck with this distortion and though it may get worse over time, I won't lose my sight entirely. When it does get really bad there is a surgical procedure that can remove the membrane, with some risks; all surgery has risks. While I wait to see a retinal specialist who will monitor my eyes for some time to come, life goes on. There is a Chinese New Year dinner to prepare. I've got most of the ingredients and the rest I'll pick up today. Tomorrow after a luxurious massage and a haircut, I'll get cooking.

Write on, I say, Write On!

© creativenature.nl - Fotolia.com

©2014 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - November 7, 2013

Return of the Aura

Canterbury Cathedral (deliberate blur)

I re-discovered her late last Thursday afternoon, Halloween of all days, hanging out in an article about the tracking of infectious diseases. I cast my eyes upon a page in the U of T Magazine, and there she was; a vague patch of blurriness resembling a smear of Vaseline across the text, a bit wavy, like a heat shimmer. I looked away from the page and she seemed to vanish. I looked back to the page and she waved back at me, taunting me, annoying me and yes, scaring me just a little. Okay, maybe it was a bit more than a little. I checked my blood pressure (118/75) and my blood sugar (4.9). I checked one eye and then the other - her smear campaign was clearly an equal opportunity employer who enjoyed being smack dab in the centre of my view. I smiled in a mirror and stuck my tongue out. I checked that my health card was in my wallet. 

I turned around to my desktop to have a wee chat with Dr. Google. Migraine aura without the headache you say? I haven't had a visual display of wavy lines and shimmers preceding a migraine since my early twenties and now I had one but no blinding headache? Well it's never a good thing to leave diagnosis entirely to the Internet school of medicine, so by Tuesday, with no clearing in sight and a hypersensitivity to light and sound, I headed off to my eye doc. No fault found. A thorough exam including retinal scan came up with a diagnosis of ocular migraine. 

So I'm left with my aura. I've tried to make friends with her, but really I'd just like her to leave, NOW. She's playing havoc with my NaNoWriMo project, but on the upside my inner critic can't be bothered reading over blurry writing and so is unemployed. Bonus! And I'm pretending to be on a cruise where Internet is prohibitively expensive and often very slow. Three fifteen minute sessions a day limits my time in front of a flickering screen. It's a quiet softly lit space with a pen and stacks of paper. What's not to like?

(NaNoWriMo Update: I have fallen a tad behind. 3947/6000)

©2013 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - October 17, 2013

Sophie's Choice

It's been a stunning Autumn so far. Many, many days of sunshine and warm temperatures lure me outside to meander through the forest and revel in the splendour of it all. I confess that I "left undone those things which I ought to have done" and fallen for Autumn's siren call - again, and again, and again. Woe is me.

Every morning all the "oughts" and "shoulds" line up to wag fingers of condemnation at me as they hector, "Today, today you must go to the gym. Today you must work."

Every morning I drink in remorse along with my cappuccino and I resolve to do better, to resist the temptation of the world outside my door, to get to the gym, then get back home to nail my backside to the chair and get to work on my book. But then the great day star rises above the trees, drenching my writing space in light. The world outside sparkles and Autumn quickens her step. I cap my pen, turn from the page for just a moment...




Our faithful canine Sophie stirs at my feet, stands and stretches then rests her chin on my lap. Her mismatched eyes - one blue,one brown - are as seductive as the season, "Let's go for a walk, mummy. Pleeeeeze." And I am undone. Camera and dog treats at the ready, we make good our escape into the forest.

Sophie wanted to go all the way to the stream yesterday, way at the far east end of the trail, a good 3 mile hike round trip. In fact when I tried to take the more usual path, she simply sat down and would not budge until I caved in. There had been quite a lot of rain overnight so the ground was soft and glistening. It was grand. And it was after all, Sophie's choice.

Text & photos ©2013 April Hoeller