Sunday 21 September 2008
We are engaged; handmade is the way to my heart
Above: the ring, made by Sean, my sweetheart of nine years and given to me one week ago, on the beach at Ashbridges Bay, at midnight, while the remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped by.
The awesome Michele, who counts metalworking among her many talents, had invited him by her studio to learn some of the craft and create a piece of jewellery that day. Acting on a deep impulse he decided to make this for me - knowing that even though I never wear jewellery, I’m a big DIY nerd, and if there was one thing I’d never want to take off, it would be something made by his own hands. He made me a freaking ring. For about three days I couldn’t look down at it without starting to cry again.
It was pitch black. We had to use the light from my cel phone to see it. We sat with the hot winds buffeting us, eating pretzels and watching birds fly backwards. And then we got caught in a sudden downpour as we pedalled up Woodbine*, and ate terrible
breakfast sandwiches Brekwiches at an all-night coffee shop. I spent equal time crying and laughing my head off.
The long and the short of it: we are engaged. Life just got a bit stranger and much more wonderful.
* Oh, did I mention? We got bikes a few weeks ago. It’s been great, and the wounds from our respective first accidents are almost healed!
Tuesday 5 December 2006
After a few weeks of non-stop construction at the new office, and every other kind of work at the old office, Sean and I took a sanity-mending holiday-in-town this weekend. I realized not long ago that these days we mostly see each other at work these days - I mean, at least we do get to see one another during the day, which I’m grateful for, but we’re seldom at our best.
Among other things, we caught up on some movie watching. Highlights: part one of a PBS series from the ‘80s about Joseph Campbell, which Sean’s mom sent him as a birthday present. Also Triplets of Belleville, which was loopy fun. I could have done without the, uh, frog scenes, but I’ll forgive those for the scenes of crazy old ladies (the Kickass Granny is one of my personal favorite archetypes) playing music on very do-it-yourself instruments…
Saturday dinner was at the Pomegranate, a lovely Persian restaurant on College St, and the food was beyond wonderful. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. Really.
Sunday afternoon we trooped back to our office-to-be to do more drywalling and mudding. It’s turned out to be one hell of a project, this. But it’s going to rock.
And this evening J and I did some more planning for our upcoming CD, and tried out some new arrangement ideas. And I got back on the Song-a-day wagon:
Signals (1’13”)
I had iTunes pick out some tracks at random for inspiration. One was basically a bunch of random beeping by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, similar to what ended up in today’s song, and also echoed in the “signals” theme in the lyrics. The other was a folky tune by a friend of mine. The resulting song is rather similar to “Margins”, another Song-a-day from this past summer… they’d graft very neatly together.
