It has been extremely brain-dead here at Chez Dua, for a bunch of reasons, and Kelly and I have, therefore, been watching a lot of films:

The Happening, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, was tragically dumb. Dumber than the dumb comedies that have been our other TV fare of late. Not even my true true love for John Leguizamo (and my slightly less true "Why aren't you your brother Donny? Jeez, but I just wish they'd put Boomtown back on the air") love for Mark Wahlberg could save this one.

The Forty Year Old Virgin, on the other hand, was pretty sweet. Not entirely without its cringe moments, but generally a sweet-tempered and funny movie, and I adored Catherine Keener, whose only other appearance in anything I've seen was as Harper Lee in Capote. I laughed, I went "Awwww!" But mostly this movie made me think it might be time to see Dan in Real Life again.

Finally, The Love Guru. Well, I was expecting it to be appalling. Sometimes low expectations are your friend. We won't be buying it or anything, but I will admit to laughing, and I did not incur cineloathing simply by watching it.

Tonight, for no change of pace at all, I plan to watch the Harper's Island finale. (Random User review: "The best thing on TV in ions!") Some of you may have hung in long enough to know why this has made me yearn to see Mountie on the Bounty again.

So... what do you watch when you can't muster a brainwave?

The Italian Cultural Center is far larger and more architecturally interesting than I ever guessed.
Our instructor, Domenico, is very well-organized, knowledgable, super-nice and he goes fast!
The mid-class coffee break is actually a trip to the center's cappucino bar, and it's a pop quiz in disguise because the baristos speak Italian to you.
Two of the women there are taking the class together. They seem like best buddies, but have only known each other since they ended up next to each other on a plane to Italy recently.
One of those two also met a guy named Giancarlo on the plane, and is taking the class so they can speak something other than the language of non-verbal love. Oooh, Giancarlo!
The receptionist was mistaken. Of course we both need our own copy of the textbook. I'd half-expected this and brought the means to buy it. Still! Part of me says Grr!

Um, that's all I remember. Because now it's brekkie day, and I have heavenly Turkish brekkie thoughts on my mind.

Moon is amazing. Sam Rockwell is amazing in it. We just went to a matinee with Ana and Superbass and it was so, so, SO worth it!

The East Vancouver Magic Necklace Fairy left a birdie pendant, which was laquered to a Scrabble letter ("I") in a tree for me yesterday. I love it, and will post a photo when I get a minute. I am officially considering it a sign from the universe that certain things are about to look up.

Finding the necklace made me think fondly of Manna from Brooklyn, the writer and treasure-hunter whom I apartment-swapped with this past holiday season.

Kelly and I ate at a place called Pepper Sisters, where the servers were cute and the food was spicy. It was perfectly lovely--not the best food ever but far from the worst, and they had a lavalamp:



Afterward, we checked into our massive room, with its massive king-sized bed, and filled our massive tub. We sat for quite a long time, talking about--among other things--childhood tub adventures and the water games we played with bubble bath. Somehow, this turned into a fascination with our spent bottle of hotel bubble bath:



Afterward, we dried off, read our lovely new books and turned in.
( One more shot of each )

When the Normandy Diner burned down a few years ago, Kelly and I went through a rather extensive process of seeking out a new place for our weekly Wednesday breakfast date. We didn't want to go just anywhere. We wanted somewhere within a few blocks of her office that served the traditional eggs and bacon options, didn't charge a mint for it and was open early enough for us to eat before we had to be at work. This was surprisingly hard to find--you'd think in Kits it would be easy, but no--and eventually we settled on Paul's Place Restaurant and Omelettery. It wasn't perfect, especially in the coffee department, but it fit the bill. And the wait staff were lovely, especially the beautiful and talented Marta Jaciubek of the band E.S.L.

Now, however, Kelly has an exciting new job in Yaletown, and the hunt for new brekkie options has officially begun.

Our first contender is the Cafe Vancouver, at 883 Hamilton Street. This blandly-named place is a Turkish cafe, and they make a brekkie that reminds me of the fabulous breakfasts we had at the hotel in Naxos where we stayed with Snuffy in 2001. For $6, I got a little platter with a boiled egg, some deitylike olives, sliced cucumbers and tomato, strawberries, two slices of ham and one of mozzarella, a little cube of delicious feta and two pieces of dry multigrain toast.

This little selection of mix-and-match, eat-with-your-fingers bliss may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's practically a poster plate for what I like in an opulent breakfast these days. The only thing really different from what we got in Greece was that the hotel in Naxos also provided full-fat goat's milk yogurt with honey.

Cafe Vancouver doesn't do eggs-bacon-hashbrowns-toast, but that's become less important to me over the past couple of years. However, we did notice a place called Rosie's on Robson (which is apparently a disguised Elephant and Castle) which is open early and which will certainly have the more traditional fare.

Afterward, we explored Yaletown a little, inevitably ending up at the Urban Fare, and I got a peek at Kelly's new desk and met a couple of her co-workers. Then I walked along False Creek to Main Street Station and Skytrained home. I am thinking of making a weekly library run on Wednesdays after brekkie, but this being a holiday, VPL was closed.

I spent the morning writing and teaching, and now I'm off to the choir picnic. Happy Canada Day, everyone!

After visiting the heavenly, heavenly Vista D'Oro Farms, Kelly and I actually went to the Fraser Valley Wine Association event, our pretext for the amble to the Fort Langley area. We arrived right on time. This usually means we're the first people there. Not this time. A small mob was working its way around a ring of restauranteurs and wineries who'd set up displays around the perimeter of a longish tent. There were freebie offerings to cruise and the Jesse Burch Band was playing "Summertime," which caught my ear because VLGC just sang it in our recent concert. Their arrangement was very different, and yet entirely wonderful.

This would be Jesse Burch.

I was expecting this event to be wall-to-wall hors d'oeuvres, but there were maybe six or eight restaurants there, and the offerings were all lovely and in no way too much. We had some nibbles--the best, excluding desserty things, was a creamed salmon on cracker. We listened to the band, watched the crowd of foodies grow, and grow, and grow, photographed the one thing that looked potentially interesting...



... and were about to leave when we realized the whole shebang was being hosted on the grounds of an open show home: The High Point Estates Equestrian Community. And that said show home mansion was open for us to ogle.

What can one say about an 8,500 square foot house? That's more square footage than all the places I've lived in my life combined. Seriously. The master bedroom looked bigger than my apartment. Actually, the bathroom in the master bedroom was almost bigger than our apartment. This place was so posh that we wore ourselves out looking at the first floor, and didn't even bother to go upstairs. The kitchen... well, it was to weep. The gas stove! I'd still prefer to move into the sweet thirteen-year-old Vista D'Oro farmhouse, but I will note that if any of you finds a couple million bucks caught in the couch this week while cleaning, this development was built with some eco-responsibility, particularly with regard to not entirely disrupting the flow of rainwater through the region. Of course, to commute anywhere decent from its location on practically the border, you'll have to burn more than enough gas to offset any carbon karma you earn.

8,500 square feet! Crazy!

We came, we saw, and then we headed for the border, where there was no wait at all, and then hit Fred Meyer, for Luna Bars, and Village Books, for history books. I bought MIRAGE: NAPOLEON'S SCIENTISTS AND THE UNVEILING OF EGYPT and THROES OF DEMOCRACY: THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ERA 1829-1877.

And then we went to our hotel! More on that in part four...

After Domaine de Chaberton we went to Vista D'Oro Farms. In some ways, just another winery. In others--totally where I want to move to! The farmhouse was beautiful, the landscaping was opulent and gorgeous, they have three big chestnut trees and a baby apple orchard. And they have other amenities too, both of whom let us pet them:





( bee and apple )

Kelly and I took it very easy on Saturday morning, moseying out to get the car after a slow wakeup and a little writing session. The Fraser Valley wine event wasn't until 2:00 p.m., but I wanted to visit a few of the area vineyards, specifically because every time we've driven out East to go on a difficult family journey we've seen the sign saying "Wine here! Wine often!" and wished, aloud, that we were going there instead.

So we drove to the above winery, which is also home to a reputedly fabulous restaurant, the Bacchus Bistro. We didn't eat there, but we did prowl around the actual vineyard:



One high point was seeing barn swallows going in and out of the barn, almost certainly feeding young. Barn swallows! In a barn! Okay, weird things amuse me.

Here's Bacchus of the Bacchus Bistro, engaged in a behavior recommended to those who are tasting and driving.

I am in the process of setting up a fall reading for INDIGO SPRINGS at VPL. It looks like it'll happen on Thursday, October 29th and I'll be reading along with writer DD Barant, whose DYING BITES will be out this July. Once I have it nailed down, of course, I'll officially invite you all to come!

This is my first time doing book promotion and it's exciting and a little daunting. I'm very pleased and proud to finally be one of those folks on the Library's reading roster.

I also posted to the INDIGO SPRINGS blog today, for those of you following the signs and portents.

Kelly reminded me that I should post a pic of my pretty, newly-arrived galley. Around Chez Dua, these things generally get photographed in a clinch with some girlflesh, but until I have models handy, here's a galley in the garden.

If you are too, check out "The House That George Built," on Tor.com.

Speaking of fannishness: The first TV show I loved with a true fannish love was CHARLIE'S ANGELS. I had a big crush on Kate Jackson, and lived for each episode. I collected the bubble gum cards and the tie-in novels. My friends and I ran around the schoolyard pretending to be Angels and pointing imaginary guns at everything in our path.

How about you--what was your first TV love?

I'm featured this week on the Wax Poetic blog--Co-Op Radio's Wax Poetic is apparently B.C.'s longest running poetry radio show, and I'm going to be on the show on July 8th, at 2:00 p.m. This came about because I met Commercial Drive-Live! blogger Steven Duncan, who is one of the show's hosts, when AVWC was singing holiday carols on the Drive a couple years back.

Anyway, the Wax Poetic entry has a bio, photo, and a link to that first chapter of INDIGO SPRINGS.

In other news, Kelly and I took cleavage photos of Jay Lake's GREEN last night, and Facebook now knows that my name is AlyxDellamonica.

Kelly and I have been faithfully watching Harper's Island, of all things. (I invariably want to call it Harper's Ferry, which only shows that I've spent too much time reading about a certain civil war.)

The premise of this thirteen episode mini-series is that a whole bunch of fundamentally unlikeable people and a trio of relatively nice ones go to a remote-ish island for a wedding. There a Jason-esque serial killer, who may or may not be undead, is picking them off episode by episode.

This is a fantastic use for self-centered soap opera people, in my opinion. Set 'em up, knock 'em down, and explore the limits of primetime gore while you're at it. It's got all the depth of a recently fixed pothole and I'm enjoying it immensely. Highly realistic death scenes involving harpoons are featured. As doomed-to-fail TV experiments go, it is almost as satisfying as Clash of the Choirs, though probably less rewatchable.

Meanwhile, as part of the current workload, I'm reading a book of American Literary short shorts.

And OMG. Two to five page stories, mostly sensitive portraits of women who hate their husbands, and men who hate their wives, and adulterers and cancer victims and in one case fighting spouses who tear their baby in half. Real deep slice of life stuff, with huge artistic merit™. And I'm hating it. There's so little variety here; it's all bitterness and gall. I'm halfway through the book and I've found one thing, ONE!, with a little humor and joie de vivre. I'm in serious danger of coming over all misanthropic.

Give me harpoons any day.

(Cheery, bright well-written genre short-short recommendations wouldn't go amiss either.)

On the brighter side, Kelly took some very cute photos of me yesterday.
( Cute, with random media quotes! )

Jay is having a virtual book launch on his blog, and there's a photo contest too.

Kelly and I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery's current travelling exhibit, Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art, a couple of weekends ago. They had one Vermeer and one Rembrandt, but the piece I fell in love with was Willem Claesz Heda's Still Life with Oysters. As usual, the web pic here doesn't do it justice--it's big, and almost photographically perfect, and so three dimensional you feel as though you could reach right into it.

Weather: I am enjoying the heat. Yes, it brings with it some major comfort and sleep issues, and our cats and home electronics are gasping. I do sympathize with everyone who's miserable and I won't mourn when it cools off. But right now it's bright and toasty out and I wanted a break from rain. Maybe if K and I can get up some energy there will even be beaching soon.

Fiction: I have been spending my fiction-writing time this week on a grant proposal for my next literary novel, tentatively titled Daughters of Zeus, which I plan to write in November. Want to Nano with me? There's still lots of time to think and plan.

Naturally, I'm also still thinking about Indigo Springs stuff. One thing I'd like to do with the blog is post stories about people who might get enfolded in the mystical outbreak. If you might be interested in joining a cult, getting contaminated in a alchemical spill, going missing in the disaster or being transformed into a magic-user or an animal, let me know. It'd be a reciprocal thing, obviously, with cross-links to your blogs and other sites related to you, you, you and whatever you might have going on this summer.

Many of you have read the first chapter of the book and written to say nice things--thank you all so much!

What else? Music! VLGC's June 20th concert, Here Comes the Sun, is now only a few weeks away. Badger has informally called this 'the optimism concert' because it's not just about summer and fun, but also about hope, light, and the progress of human rights.

We're really on top of the music, too; it's going to be a great evening. Please do come if you can, local peeps. I guarantee fun.

I'm proud to announce that the first chapter of my novel is up on on my website, www.alyxdellamonica.com, and here's a taste:

"You're going to fall in love today." It is the first thing Astrid Lethewood says to me. A heartbeat later Patience joins us in the foyer and I nearly believe her.

I've seen Patience--on TV, on security feeds--but nothing has prepared me for meeting a demi-goddess. My brain seizes up, my hands get damp and my mouth dries. I smell popcorn, hear the distant music of a carousel. A tingle of arousal threatens to embarrass me but that, at least, I am ready for. My jacket, folded over one arm, hangs discreetly over my groin.

INDIGO SPRINGS also has its own blog, which will serve as an online home for any and all things relating to the mystical catastrophe that unfolds over the course of the book. There's not much there at the moment, but it's my hope that as we get closer to the November launch of the book from Tor Books that many of you will drop in and join the fun. (Edited to add: Snuffy suggested an LJ feed, so here it is.)

(BTW, You can now pre-order from Amazon in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Canada. It ships October 27th).

I got these on Mother's Day when Barb and I went to the Nitobe Memorial Garden...

As of today I still have a few slots available in "Creating Universes, Building Worlds", an online class offered by the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. The class starts June 24th and will run for ten weeks, during which time students will read a number of stories, do some writing exercises, and workshop a short story written in one of the speculative fiction genres.

( Course description )

If anyone knows of an aspiring writer who may be interested, here's the link for registration. For those wondering about other classes, I expect to be offering "True and Vivid Writing" in the fall.

Hey, local peeps--here's the poster for our fabulous upcoming concert... to which you are all officially invited.

From THE PRIVATE PATIENT, by P.D. James:

He knew it was regarded as one of the loveliest Tudor manor houses in England and now it was before him in its perfection of form, its confident reconciliation of grace and strength; a house built for certainties, for birth, death and rites of passage, by men who knew what they believed and what they were doing. A house grounded in history, enduring. There was no grass or garden and no statuary in front of the Manor. It presented itself unadorned, its dignity needing no embellishment. He was seeing it at its best. The white morning glare of wintry sunlight had softened, burnishing the trunks of the beech trees and bathhing the stones of the manor in a silvery glow, so that for a moment in the stillness it seemed to quiver and become as insubstantial as a vision. The daylight would soon fade; it was the month of the winter solstice.

The above passage is quite pretty, though I might have cut the fourth sentence, which feels like it's redundant.

I had just about lost interest in the Adam Dagliesh mysteries when the character of Kate Miskin came on the scene. Kate reeled me in again, but THE PRIVATE PATIENT was so disappointing that I'm not sure I'll ever pick up another. The beginning is promising, but it doesn't end so much as fizzle out; I'm not sure I've ever read something that seemed, so much, as if the author herself had lost interest partway through. This is a tired book, with pretty prose but weary and passionless characters.

So here's a loaded question: have any of your favorite authors disappointed you lately?

Pretty pretty Breklor, banging his drum at Britannia...

This week I:

--Got a royalty statement for my book, even though it doesn't come out until November.
--Brought a Telus employee to the brink of tears because she desperately wanted to save me $10 a month (which I eventually permitted) by restoring our voicemail (which I did not). ("I will only accept this package if you find me a phone feature that requires nothing from me and does not affect my life.")
--Received and approved the design proofs for INDIGO SPRINGS.
--Wrote some stuff.
--Bought a WiiFit and worked out twice so far. It will surprise none of you to learn that my WiiFit age is lower when I have not had wine.
--Um, had wine.
--Wrote an article on why I'm actually kinda into Dollhouse, despite its flaws.

What did you do this week?

Here's a crow...