The Sketchbook Project: Art on the Go

The Sketchbook Project trailer

This past Sunday Sarah and I met up with our friend Susan to check out a really cool concept: The Sketchbook Project. On their website, they describe the endeavour thusly: "The Sketchbook Project is a global, crowd-sourced art project and interactive, traveling exhibition of handmade books." This greatly intrigued us so we headed down to the Distillery District on that stunningly beautiful June afternoon to see if it was as much fun as it sounded. If not, we'd get to spend time with a good friend basking in the spring sunshine and walking around this very interesting area of Toronto. With any luck, maybe there'd be beer in our future! (Spoiler alert: there was! How could there not be?)

So, Here's the Thing.....

I've been asked a couple of times recently if I've lost the impulse to do this blog—or, really, any other writing for that matter—and the question is a perfectly valid and simple one. The answer, to be blunt, is no. No, I have not lost the impulse to post here or elsewhere, although it would be a lot easier if that was the case. I could just say, "gee, that was fun while it lasted," and be done with it. But the truth is lot more difficult.


You see, how it works is this: I want to post every single day and most of the time I actually know exactly what I want to post about. However, the depression and accompanying social anxiety is so strong that it's practically crippling. Take my most recent post, for example—the one that broke a long period of darkness on this blog. I originally wrote all of that as a Facebook entry that day and it took a great deal of willpower to convince myself to turn it into a blog post instead. Facebook is much, much safer; I don't feel like I owe anybody anything over there and I can even control the specific audience that can see what I write (for example, that post about the Blue Jays would have only gone out to a select few people on my "Sports" list). I read it over before I hit "enter" on Facebook and decided it was so long and passionate that it deserved to be a blog post instead. And still, I wavered. Would this be an "appropriate" piece to break the silence? Would anybody read it? Would it be "worthy" to go up alongside my older postings? In a burst of inner strength, I went ahead and posted it anyhow—and then walked away from the computer immediately so I wouldn't change my mind.

The Boys Are Back in Town....

Some random musings about the issues I see with the Jays after their first game last night, in no particular order:


J.P. Arencibia is not a very good defensive catcher, even when the pitcher throws straight fastballs. Last night he was charged with "only" three passed balls (a wild pitch was inexplicably charged to R.A. Dickey as well) but I'd have had to remove my shoes to count the number of pitches he flat-out missed on all of my digits. It was discomfiting, to say the least.



The "new-look Jays" had quite a few "old-look problems", but one manifested itself very early as Jose Reyes reached base on a walk leading off the first inning and promptly made a Little League level baserunning error. He took off for second on a line drive by Melky Cabrera which was hit right at the shortstop and was **easily** doubled off of first base. Any runner worth his salt knows you freeze or take a step back to the bag on a line drive through the infield. Since the next two batters reached base as well, this was very costly.

Ode on an Earworm

Kansas in their heyday

Late in the afternoon yesterday I realized that, for no readily apparent reason, I had for hours been humming Carry on Wayward Son by Kansas (contrary to what you might think, the word "My" does not appear in the title). Not the whole song, either: just the melody of the verses and not so much that of the more famous chorus. It was lodged in my brain so deeply I don't think a full frontal lobotomy could have excised it. It was such a bizarre choice of music—not that any earworm can ever truly be a "choice"—to be stuck in my head that I turned it into a sort of "Twenty Questions" with Sarah to see if she could guess what song was tormenting me. (She could not.) It wasn't until much later last night, after we had returned home from watching our friends' daughter's ringette game in Richmond Hill, that I found myself sitting at the computer, playing a recently downloaded game (Bejewelled 3) from Big Fish Games, when suddenly the light went on. The game has one of those looping, shifting kinds of electronic soundtracks that play in the background, the kind where the music is repetitive but not too repetitive so it doesn't become annoying. At one point I started whistling along with a sixteen-bar phrase that seemed to pop up every several minutes and it struck me that what I was whistling was....you guessed it: Stairway to Heaven. Ha ha! No, of course it was the opening verse of Carry on..., for even though that wasn't the exact song playing behind the game, eight of the sixteen bars were close enough that they put the whole My Sweet Lord/He's So Fine plagiarism case to shame. Once I had solved the "mystery" of why the song was stuck in my noodle, of course the spell was broken and I immediately stopped humming it to myself. Ha ha, again! As you can imagine, it's still rattling around in there today. I can't remember what time I ate lunch, but I know all the words and syncopated rhythm changes to that song inherently. There really should be a way to harness that power for good and not for evil.

Welcome Back, Inukshuk!

Inukshuk patrolling familiar ground

Yesterday I headed to the Zoo again, this time to attend a class on how to use the AEDs (Automated External Difibrillators) on site. It was a very short class, running from only 9:30 to 10:30—at which point the Tuesday Volunteers practically ran us over trying to set up the room for their pot luck lunch, but that's another story—so once it was over I had plenty of time to take advantage of the mild temperatures and occasional brilliant sunshine and walk around a little bit. I was especially interested in making my way to the Tundra Trek and specifically the polar bear exhibit, because last Thursday night—just in time for the "big storm"—an old friend returned: Inukshuk, father of Hudson. He's been off in Cochrane at their Polar Bear Habitat since last October (because Aurora was pregnant with three cubs that, sadly, didn't survive) and will be returning there at the end of March. He's back here purely for "stud duties"; a pretty good gig if you can get it! The keepers have their fingers crossed that he might actually "hit the jackpot" with both of the sister bears currently at the Toronto Zoo, Aurora and Nikita, the latter of whom has never been pregnant. It would be pretty special indeed to have more than one "Hudson" roaming around come the fall, but a lot has to go right for that to happen. Inukshuk won't really care either way: his job is done once he gets back on the plane for Cochrane.