Kelly's Weblog

Paul and I just got back from Stratford, where we had a wonderful overnight getaway while Grandma stayed in Toronto with Jamie. We slept in, saw three shows, had a fine time with Nancy and Jack, and ate a great dinner. Tomorrow we leave for a sailing weekend, so I'm scurrying to unpack and repack and organize things for Jamie and myself; I'll try to post details later about Pericles (excellent if a bit over the top), Taming of the Shrew (good, but Western theme didn't add a great deal), and No Exit (very good, though perhaps the performance was somewhat flat).

News flash: Jamie's two front teeth both broke through today. No wonder the boy has been fractious for a couple of days on and off!

Last swimming class at the 14th Street Y is today. He had a great time at last week's class, so I'm hoping today will be fun in spite of teeeeeeeeth. We might get a visit with cousin Jessica, who is in the home stretch of waiting for the arrival of her own little boy, today as well. And we have many errands: laundry and cleaning and a few things to pick up in shops, and packing for tomorrow's departure for Toronto.

My engagement ring came back yesterday from the Court Street jeweller's, Henna K, where I had taken it in about a month ago to have it re-set. I loved the original setting, which Paul chose for me, but because it was a high setting with claws, it was very scratchy and caught on everything - including my boy. So I was never able to wear it, which seemed a shame. I arranged to have it bezel-set, so it's completely smooth now and can even rub across Jamie's face without leaving a mark. And the brilliance of the stone is undiminished! It's like getting a brand new piece of jewellery; very exciting.

Just finished reading The Nanny Diaries; it's a very entertaining piece of social satire made quite disturbing by the more-than-suspicion that all of what transpires in the wealthy and dysfunctional fictional Park Avenue household really happens. Not, perhaps, all to the same four-year-old with the same indifferent and disengaged businessfather, the same brittle, plasticized and self-absorbed trophymother, and the same loving, committed, abused and unempowered nanny...but in devastating little pieces to many children up there on the Upper East Side of this fine city. The book was painfully funny; I quoted bits of it to Paul throughout the couple of days that I was reading it. At the end, though (and perhaps it's the new-mommyism in my life), what stayed with me was not the "funny" but the "painful". I wish I didn't have to think that there really were poor little nominally-privileged creatures in gilded cages of riding lessons and Lacoste and private schools with nobody to give them hugs and silly nicknames except the hired help. She is only allowed to provide what her charge desperately needs as long as her presence suits the parents' caprices...she can be replaced by a stranger overnight, and how often can a little person bear abandonment? I think underneath the lovely sarcasm and the sincerely funny characterizations, the book was a study in lonelinesses, and fundamentally a tragedy.

I just saw the cutest thing...Jamie was a very reluctant dragon this morning as regarded his naptime, but finally he was so tired that even dropping the toy he was holding was enough to set him off crying. So I put him in his crib with a pacifier, tried to tuck him down (though he popped up immediately), and left him there.

For a while, I heard his busy box going. Then there was a long period of silence, then a short little fuss, then nothing. Nothing...nothing...so I went to check. Poor little mite, he'd fallen asleep sitting up and had slumped forward into a corner of the crib, with his cheek on the bumper pad. He's flat out, and I'm not going to wake him; babies are still flexible enough not to get cricks in the neck. But I think this is a sign of things to come: the world is too interesting to surrender to sleep willingly; it will have to creep up behind him and catch him in the middle of what he's doing.

We've got a new carseat for the boy; the baby bucket was too small. After receiving a number of recommendations and doing some independent research, I had it narrowed down to two: the Britax (Marathon or Roundabout) and the Safeline Sit & Stroll. I went and looked at both, and wound up with the Sit & Stroll; the Roundabout was a close second and is a better-designed carseat, but the Sit & Stroll has a huge advantage for people without a car of their own who travel a lot: it has wheels. More specifically, it converts to a stroller very smoothly. The stroller won't stand up to the rigors of daily use, but for my regular NY-Toronto commute and also for vacation trips, it's going to be ideal. I really didn't know how I'd manage a seat the size and weight of the Britax Roundabout, two suitcases, a carry-on diaper bag, a stroller, a baby knapsack and Jamie at the airport on my own!

Jamie and I went out looking for a copy of Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince in French yesterday at our favourite bookstore on Court Street, Book Court. It's a great neighbourhood bookstore, with excellent selection and friendly people who actually know a lot about books -- they're encouraged to read the things, it would seem, and it makes a big difference to the reasonably well-versed consumer who doesn't want to have to spell "Saint-Exupery" for the person at the information desk! Anyway, the place was in moderate turmoil yesterday, because two of their large display windows were in the process of being taken over by a film crew preparing for a shoot.

The windows were already largely hung with copies of a book called Duplex, author Alex Rose. In addition, there were two large placards of the sort that they print to promote new releases in display windows, with the author's picture and review excerpts. On the way in, I noted that the teaser on one of these read "The One Thing New Yorkers Will Kill For". Inside, there was a guy from the film crew removing dustjackets from a set of overprints of another hardcover book (which shall remain nameless) and replacing them with Duplex covers from a huge stack of custom-printed jackets. I had been wondering what book was actually inside that jacket; didn't figure it could be a real new book, especially with Ben Stiller's picture on the promo material as the author! I stopped to chat with the guy and his colleague, who was stringing things up in the windows; all they knew was that the film shared the name of the book and had been shot already. This evening's shoot was for touch-up material. I said the guy ought to keep the leftover book covers in case the film took off, and he agreed; said his friends were always telling him to keep bits of movie memorabilia like that and put them up on Ebay!

When I got home, I looked the movie up on the web and found it here. It stars Stiller, Drew Barrymore and Eileen Essel, is directed by Danny DeVito, and will be released in about a month. I'll be especially interested to see it - perhaps not until it's out on video, but nonetheless - because as I was leaving the bookstore (empty-handed; they were sold out of the French edition and only had the new English translation), I read some more of the stuff printed on their promotional placard, and caught the following: "truely thrilling".

Wonder if it will be visible on camera!?

Profile of James Edward Asten Golding
Nicknames: Jamie, Bump, Jamie-J, Cheery Chops, Accident Victim.
Likes: People food; people; bathtime; Raffi; new things to look at and experience. Also magazines, plastic bags, power cords, refrigerator doors.
Dislikes: Going to sleep; having diapers changed; having my face washed; teething; staying still for very long.
Languages: Bump; working on English.
Recent Achievements: Crawling. Sitting upright unassisted. Switching from sitting to crawling and back again without falling over. Pulling to stand, getting excited because I've done it, losing balance, bashing head and yelling.
Favourite Plaything: This week it's a tie between my Vtech Sing & Smile Pals and my black shoe with laces, size 4. The shoe may be slightly ahead because I can take it with me when I move around.
Mission: To boldly go. Destination unimportant (although the parts of any space I'm not supposed to be in are most appealing).
Probable Destination: Walking within the month, if effort can produce achievement!

I'm adding a guestbook to this page; you can access it at any time through the link on the left. Make your mark!

We've just emerged into the light; power was restored in our part of Brooklyn at almost exactly 8:00am.

It was an interesting afternoon and evening! I had been supposed to sing a service at St. Bart's - eve of the Dormition - and was called for 4:45, so I had made an arrangement with Paul that we would meet in the lobby of his building at 4:15. He would take Jamie and head home, and I would head up to Park and 50th. We got to his building at just after 4:00 and called up to him, and he said he'd be down in about 10 minutes. Before he made it down, however, the building went to emergency power and alarms started to go off. Unsure what was going on, I waited, and tried Paul on the cell phone. Got through once, and he said he'd wait 5 minutes for power to come back, then take the stairs down. The guy at the security desk then announced that the blackout was city-wide, and when I tried Paul on the cell again the circuits were jammed.

Shortly afterward, Paul reached the lobby via the stairs. Still not really clear on the scope of the blackout, I decided to try to make it out of the downtown area; I figured I'd be able to find a cab or a bus and get up to St. Bart's a little late, but still in time to be useful. Paul and Jamie were going to walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and across to home.

The state of the streets quickly started to resemble Canada Day on Parliament Hill. People were walking in the streets, blocking traffic; cars were gridlocked. As soon as I got oriented, I moved off the main streets and took smaller side streets north. A couple of times I passed people on stoops with battery-operated radios or people with car radios cranked and their windows open; as a sort of public service, these people were giving us access to the news. Moving uptown was very, very slow, and by the time I reached East 14th Street I had heard that the blackout stretched across multiple states and up into Canada. I was pretty sure things wouldn't be cleared up by nightfall. And it was 5:45; I'd been walking for well over an hour in the heat, and was still almost forty blocks from my destination. I began to wonder whether, if I did get up to St. Bart's, I'd make it home on foot by dark...and the service was to start at 6pm; I wouldn't arrive until at least 6:30. Decided to quit the heroics, and turned around.

I had been trying to reach Paul at home, and people outside of the city, on the cell phone on and off; circuits were still jammed, though I did get our answering machine once and left a message for Paul. He managed to reach me just as I was passing Houston; he and Jamie had crossed the bridge in a crowd of pedestrians, stopped for a watering-down in the park near Cadman Plaza, and had reached home at about 6:00.

At this point people were still stuck in elevators - thank goodness Paul hadn't come down immediately when I called him from the lobby, or it could have been him! - and subway tunnels - thank goodness Jamie and I were 10 minutes ahead of schedule, or it could have been a miserable few hours under the river! We had relatively little to complain about. I was relieved to know that the guys were safely home and that neither of them was dangerously dehydrated. Now all that remained was for me to get home too.

Continued to try Kemptville (though I think my parents were on the boat and well out of it!) and Toronto on the cell phone; about 10 minutes away from the Bridge I got through to Nancy and Jack, who were also in the dark in a shut-down city. It's amazing, as we said, how reliant we are on power! Nancy wasn't working; Jack joked that it took a power outage across the entire Eastern Seabord to get her to take a night off...and that it was probably my turning on the second air conditioner that afternoon in Brooklyn that had triggered the whole thing. We compared notes, and they filled me in on what they had heard - more than I had been able to glean from passing car radios - and then I reached the Bridge via one of the vehicle on-ramps, realized I was going to have to scale the barrier to get onto the pedestrian walkway or add another 15 minutes to my walk, and had to hang up so I'd have both hands for climbing. There's a picture of someone else doing this on the New York Times website. I'll post it in the Misc Photos gallery on the main site here in case anyone's interested.

It was hot hot hot on the bridge - no shade at all - and very crowded, so it took about twice the time it usually would to cross over. People were doing heartwarming things everywhere though: sharing their water, offering help to people with small kids or heavy burdens, and helping one another over the guardrails. Eventually I got across to the far side, where a self-appointed cheerleader was standing on one of the bridgeposts near the Cadman Plaza exit shouting "Welcome home, Brooklyn!" and eliciting whoops from the crowds. I jumped the barrier again and scooted off down the car exit at Cadman Plaza - another 15 or more minutes' time saving - and stopped in a very dark little convenience store near the park for some Gatorade. Even with that, I'd worked my way into a state of overheatedness and dehydration that required soaking wrists and temples in icy water when I got home to stave off ugly heat prostration. Paul and Jamie met me partway along Henry Street. The apartment temperature had reached equilibrium with the outside, and at least outdoors there was a breeze! Jamie was very cheery, and indeed behaved beautifully through the whole thing.

We were very glad of our deck and BBQ last night. The evening cooled nicely and was unusually still. We had candles and a couple of little flashlights that had come providentially as freebies in packages of batteries earlier in the week. And all of us slept. Just as Paul was bringing a pot of water to boil for tea (no power for the coffee grinder) this morning, and before we'd really started to discuss strategies for beating today's heat, the power came back. With a bit of A/C, power for coffee, and the internet, we're all set; Paul's working from home as the subways aren't running yet, and I'm going to wrap up this narrative and make some bacon and eggs.

Hope everyone else out there survived - or is surviving - the time of powerlessness!

I've hooked up with a mothers' group in Brooklyn, and today I met some of them at the Prospect Park Zoo for an outing with babies in tow. Jamie was fascinated, had a great time, and then came home and napped for almost three hours. So, I must confess, did I. He's asleep again now, well before 9pm. This is a very good thing! Last night he slept right through until 6am as well; I think he may be on his way out of a teething trough.

The only drawback was that it was really horribly hot. There are times when air conditioning is almost a necessity...either that, or regular immersion in very cold water! It took us about an hour to get our core temperature back down to something reasonable once we got home.

I found this mothers' group through Yahoo Groups, and I think it's going to be good for both of us. They plan regular playdates at individuals' homes and in public places such as Prospect Park, museums, the Botanical Gardens and the Zoo, and most of the babies are between 8 and 11 months old. The group started when the majority of its members were pregnant last summer; I think some of them met in yoga-for-expectant-mothers classes. Jamie will do well to get to know what it's like to be in the company of other little kids, as he mostly only knows grownup playmates at this point.

I'll be glad to have people to meet for baby-friendly outings; it will reduce the amount of time I spend on recreational shopping alone. It's not that I even want to shop very much, but on my own with Jamie in tow, I've been at a loss to find things to do that give him enough variety to keep him entertained, and being out in shops where there are changing things to look at and many people to see and talk to is certainly fun for him. The drawback is that being in stores often results in my finding something more that I "need"...a common hazard among materialist types!

At last that baby is asleep! He's fighting it very very hard just now, but he was so obviously exhausted that I had to let him lie in bed and work himself up to a really good cry before he could come down enough to get to sleep. I feel mean, but he wakes up from one of his sound sleeps so sunny that there's no question that it's what he needs.

I've got a huge reading list! Just finished Thackeray: Vanity Fair, which is a good travel book if you can get it in electronic format. I expect that the print version weighs about 30 pounds. I should have tried to give an opinion of that book about halfway through; at the end, my strongest impression is that it moralizes and is stupefyingly long, but something kept me reading it... Now I've moved on to Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo. Haven't read it in a long time, but I know it's all going to end in tears. The translation I'm reading came through the Memoware.com website, which has Palm document reader-ready files of a variety of types.

I'm a big fan of the ebook. Memoware is great; the Project Gutenberg texts are also pretty good, usually, and they have a help file to assist in creating ebooks from their vanilla text files. Still haven't ever purchased an ebook, but may get there...when I finally run out of bookcase space in all the houses in which I can store stuff!

Anyway, I've got Pericles and S. Gilbert's translation of Sartre's No Exit to read before we go to Stratford at the end of August; we're seeing both of those plays and also Taming of the Shrew, which I may glance at in ebook format but don't really need to re-read. Then I've got Godwin's Evensong, the Mark Steyn book Bruce Patterson gave us for Christmas, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then & Now, which has been out on loan basically ever since we received it; Carol Shields' Unless; and The Nanny Diaries for light entertainment. That ought to keep me out of trouble for at least a couple of weeks.

I'm planning to take Jamie to Toronto the week of August 25, no later than the Wednesday; my mother is going to keep him overnight Thursday to Friday while Paul and I are at Stratford, and then we're all going down to my father's boat for a sailing weekend. For Paul's sake, I hope there's wind; for my own part, I'd as soon have it calm, but I have my very own Sea Bands now, so bring on the waves. (Famous last words...)

Then in early September I'm having that little surgical procedure I mentioned a while back. It's nothing major; local anaesthetic, and I walk out when it's finished. But it's by way of being a small ouch to eliminate a big ouch, so I'm quite hopeful about the whole thing. Not, you understand, exactly enthusiastic... I should, however, be completely recovered in a couple of days' time: in plenty of time for the Aradia Ensemble's Vivaldi project, which begins on September 8 (performance September 13 at the Glenn Gould Studio).

Done! It's taken an inordinate amount of time - lots of weeding through of material to do before I could post - but the updates to Jamie's website are complete. There are some really cute photos there. One absolute favourite is the little sleeping body under the music note blanket. And don't miss the videos!

He's teething again, and is showing signs of having a wakeful patch, so I'd better sleep while the sleeping is good.

Come to think of it, sleeping is always good. Just not always possible!

It's good to be back with Paul in Brooklyn, though getting here was a bit more of an odyssey than I had expected. More about that later. I'm hoping to do the updates to Jamie's website tonight; I have over 100 new pictures and about a dozen videos to post, from Mama Jane's visit, Elora with Grandpa Chris and Mrs. Scott, the PEI trip, meeting cousin Ryan in Nova Scotia, and coming home again. There's so much to put up that I'm afraid I've been a bit daunted by the task and have been putting it off, but I'll get to it before bed tonight - I promise!

Right now, however, I have a hungry boy who is not going to be distracted by Raffi for much longer. I'm off!

I'm doing a little Blogger demo for my friend Alexa Wing, who is leaving for Germany soon; I think it would be great if she used Blogger to post a travel-log we could check to see what was up with her in real time! We'll see...

It's been a very busy week. Exultate had a great time at the Indian River Festival, and Jamie had a great time with his Grandma, my mother, who came to meet us so that I would be free to rehearse and perform. I had been worried that Jamie might act up a bit, being left so much, especially three bedtimes in a row, but I could have saved my energy. He was fine; Grandma gave him a lovely time and he thought he'd died and gone to heaven with so much space to crawl about in, gardens to explore and his godmother Nancy in the unit next door!

My plans had been to come back to Toronto with the majority of the members of the choir yesterday, but Mum was driving back to my aunt Verne's in Nova Scotia, and I suddenly started to think that changing my travel plans and having a couple more days of clean East Coast air and slow living wasn't a bad idea. After a number of hoops to jump through, I got both my CanJet and Air Canada reservations altered, and yesterday Jamie and I drove through Halifax to the house near Lunenburg -- or is it Lunenberg? I think the former. Anyway, my grandparents are staying there just now, and everyone was pleased to see, or delighted to meet, the boy.

Speaking of the boy, he's decided he's not napping. Must go.