I spent the weekend in Stuttgart, Germany.

Hooray: It’s possible to have such experiences.

Boo: It was for a funeral.

At least I got to hear my husband speaking German all weekend. He really is fluent in the language (and in French, and Japanese). It’s fun to admire the abilities of people you loved anyway.

I didn’t know the person who died — a friend of Craig’s — but in the same way that we learn to draw a chair properly by sketching the “negative space” around it, by the end of the weekend, after spending time with his siblings and partner, hearing stories about him, I felt like he was a friend I knew and cared for. That, Craig said, is why he wanted me to go.

He was perfectly willing for me to stay home, but after he’d booked his travel I had one of those nagging feelings, something I’ve recognised from an early age, that says “You know what you should do here.” And that should is not enculturated guilt, it’s part of me that points out the path that will lead me to be the person I could be, someone bigger or more, whereas I’m totally free to opt for the other path, but there’ll be a sacrifice inherent in the choice.

In this case, I didn’t want to go to the expense and hassle of travelling right after getting home from a month abroad. And I don’t speak German. And I’d never met this friend of Craig’s. Still, I thought about how I want our relationship to be, and I knew that I was supposed to be with my husband as he went through this difficult experience, even if there was no other reason for me to be there and nothing I could really do there.

The instinct was right. Seeing how he was moved by the funeral and the events around it, I can’t imagine having stayed home just for the convenience of it. And, yeah, there’s a pointless emotional cost to discovering someone quite amazing whom I’ll never know and then in the same instant having to grieve for him. But I’m glad I went. We also had some enjoyable moments with Daniel, another of this person’s friends who travelled with us and stayed in the same hotel, and Stuttgart, like so many European cities, had a compelling life to its streets and some beautiful buildings.

Now I’m back home, and, sure enough, all the stuff I wanted to do could wait just fine.

I stumbled across a word that made me laugh uncomfortably: orthorexia: a fixation with healthy eating.

Ahem.

My soy milk maker arrived today. I tried it out; the stuff it produces is great — and with no weird gums or sugars in it. Best of all, there’ll be no more of those stupid, bloody, burping, dribbling, wasteful Tetrapaks in my house!

Plus you can make tofu with the milk, too. (I can hear you calling it out: “Yay, tofu!”)

A side dish with our dinner tonight will be some sweet potato cakes made with leftover “okara”, or soy bean mash. (I’m not sure if I’ll tell Craig about that or not.)

The only hitch is that, not really thinking clearly about my metric measurements, I ordered five kilograms of soybeans in anticipation of getting this thing. It turns out that five kilograms is quite a lot. In fact, I probably won’t be buying any more beans for, oh, a year or two.

Still, that sure beats running out of the stuff every week and having our bin fill up with those stupid containers!

And here’s the math:

1 litre Tetrapak of soy milk: £1.49

5 kilograms of soy beans: £5

Grams of soaked soy beans needed to produce 1.5 litres of milk: 35

Yield from 5kg of soy beans: 140 litres

In about a year, the machine will pay for itself. The soy beans”¦ well, that’s just stupid-cheap compared to paying for commercial soy milk, which has additives in it to make it more ‘pleasing’.

So, yeah, cooking is becoming a bit of an obsession with me. I guess it goes with the creative DIY ethic, along with my inclination to see conspiracies when it comes to corporations having a hand in the stuff of our daily lives. There is a lot of crap out there being sold under the guise of “food.”

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I’m enjoying this “back to school” approach to my projects lately. Because there are far more of them I want to work on than is reasonable, and my mind was fainting every time I tried to approach the pile of books I want to read, learn, and do exercises from, I made these little sheets (cf: the previous post) and am using them like bowling score cards, putting a stroke, a half-stroke, then a final stroke through the little boxes as I work on each project.

Hey, whatever works, right?

Tonight I made a batch of raw chocolate, which turned out even better than the first time (meaning I didn’t spill it all over the kitchen). It’s made with “non-Dutch” — that is, uncooked — cocoa powder, vanilla, cocoa solids, and agave syrup.

There was a little bit left over, so I put some in a bowl, and Craig and I dipped strawberries into that, then I made the rest into caffe mochas (decaf at this hour!).

It was one of those moments that made me think, “Should the end-times come and we find ourselves living on the plains somewhere, foraging for food and running from hillbilly cannibals, we’re going to look back at this time and say ‘We had it made then’.” (Yeah, my thoughts run into quotes within quotes.)

Before that was the maiden voyage of a new device for our home called a “spiraliser”, which I learned about from a recipe book in a Charlottetown shop. It’s a kind of crank-handle lathe that makes pasta out of vegetables.

I haven’t minded not eating wheat for the past two months, except that it’s meant:
a) No sandwiches, the default on-the-go food, and
b) No pasta.

The latter wiped out the quickest, ‘can’t be arsed‘ category of dinners. But tonight I think I got all that back. I twisted a marrow through this little plastic torture device and got perfectly serviceable pasta! Hooray!

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Oh yeah, the rhino’s head on the table: I haven’t blogged in a month.

I was in Canada, getting my batteries recharged at my client’s headquarters.

I had a weekend away visiting my friend Kirsten and went canoeing.

Then Craig and I got away to stay with his relatives at their cottage in Algonquin Park.

And, finally, we went to Prince Edward Island to spend time with my folks.

Now I’m back in this little town we’re calling home, feeling a little displaced, but buoyed up by all the happy relationships and meaningful work in Canada, the breathtaking sights of this quirky old borough, and a literal stack of books I’ve brought back with me — so many projects and ideas to explore that I had to lay out a little curriculum for myself so I can begin to approach it all.

I meant to write and paint about it all while I was away, but I was too busy living to be documenting. The trouble with that, though, is that the longer you’re not doing something, the more daunting it is to get back to it. So here I am, back.

It’s hot and humid in Toronto today — probably double the temperature in Wick — yet I’m really enjoying it here. The part of my brain that thrives on input is being well-fed, not to mention all the loving, appreciative, sharp people I’m getting to spend time with around my client’s office.

My editor and I spent the weekend together, going hither and yon, having “deep-and-meaningfuls” the whole while.

Most fun is that summertime feeling. Summer is supposed to feel different, special, set apart, a reward for enduring the other seasons. I keep flashing back to fond memories of springy screen doors at summer camp, family trips in the trailer (that would be “caravan” in the UK), and the endless suburban days of school break, playing on the scorched grass around our bungalow, padding barefoot across the melty black asphalt of our street, or collecting jars of fetid water with bug larvae in it from behind the Mac’s Milk convenience store.

Much as I love my life in Wick, it’s fun to get my own grown-up kind of summer break.

I kind of like missing my husband. I hate that we’re apart till he gets here at the end of the month, but missing him is a strange way of enjoying the fact that I have him in my life at all.

Interview with performance artist, fine artist, and creativity coach Lisa Pijuan-Nomura about the creative process, and how writers and other artists can keep their work moving and growing.

The internet needs another meal description like it needs pictures of cats. Nevertheless, I’ve become a bit obsessed with food lately.

It started with making radical changes to my diet because of the Dr Gundry book. I dropped all my excess weight — about 10 pounds — with no effort other than eating well (the best, I think, I have in my life, which is a good feeling).

Yet I had a flare-up of a background condition, so I realised this investigation wasn’t finished: About nine years ago, a platoon of doctors shrugged their shoulders and told me, “You’ll be itchy forever. Live with it.” That’s been just as fun as it sounds.

But now I’ve discovered a very, very simple explanation for it, thanks to a food intolerance test I took. Two minutes of Googling made the connection between the test result (yeast sensitivity) and my condition.

…Which leads me to wonder what the hell these specialists are for — probing, scratching, scanning, and leeching me for six months without once being even slightly curious about the effect of diet.

Whatever. I’m just relieved to finally have an answer, and to be able to do something about it. Of course, that something involves an even stricter diet for the next little while, though thankfully I’ve already made the most difficult changes (no grains, no sugar).

There are lots of crackpot theories, extreme diets, and costly pills being foisted on the net, but thankfully I’ve found one website that’s a great storehouse of sensible information and recipes that don’t conflict with my values or with Dr Gundry’s advice.

One happy side-effect I experienced from the very start of fixing my diet is that my insomnia went away. That had been a major plague on my life — lying awake at all hours, doing “sleep math” in my head about how little time I had left to rest — and now I sleep like a baby.

So this morning I woke up comfortably rested, lazed as long as I could, then got up at 6:30am.

With the extra time, I baked!

This morning I decided to try using my water-brushes to watercolour (learning to watercolour is something I’ve had on my “Someday” list for a while). As with inking in lines, I’ve always liked the look of watercolour but never found my own way into it. Until today.

The guy at the indie book fair had a bunch of water-brushes pre-loaded with colour, so I went a-Googling this morning to learn about that, prepared to buy a bunch more brushes to load with a basic range of hues, but instead I saw lots of examples of people using one brush and a tray of paints.

My God, what fun! The brush-pen gave me the control I’d always missed in a brush, plus it just cleans itself if you stroke it on a piece of paper, which I did until I saw a box set that contained a sponge. I had a sponge, tried it, and whaddya know? It works even faster.

For years I’ve used Tria Letraset markers, loving the vivid colours they produce, which was such a leap from the crap markers I’d used as a kid. I first learned of them through a man who did rough, cartoony product mock-ups for a pharmaceutical advertising agency I worked for in Canada. (I had a dream yesterday morning about working again under the genius dragon-lady wife of the entrepreneurial couple who owned the firm — boy, could they have used Strategic Coach!) I bought the markers then, back in the mid-Nineties, and have used them steadily since without them drying up yet.

This watercolour brushing, though, let me create highlights and shadows and washes in a way I could never achieve with the markers — and wanted to. It’s so much fun, I could do this all day.

Er, except I have case studies to write.

I’m excited about this because it’s pure fun to do, but it also opens up the possibility of doing an artist’s book journal-type thingy — an idea that’s intrigued me for some time, especially after I read the beautiful, life-affirming, and inviting How to Make a Journal of Your Life, by Dan Price.

So, would you like my watercolour coloured pencils? I hate to have things lying around that I’m not using which somebody else could benefit from. If you want to send me a quid or two for shipping that’d be nice (if you live particularly far away), but if you can’t afford that, just make something with them and show me!

I started drawing cartoons when I was in single-digits. In recent years, I only get around to it when it’s somebody’s birthday and I want to doodle something and make a card of it, but… I dunno. I kind of feel like doing it again.

When I was at the alternative press fair in London, there was a guy at a table behind mine who doodled all day long in a sketchbook. (I ended up buying his book, because his style is just so full of joy it leaps off the page.) He coloured in his sketches using wash pens, and I loved the easy, even look that produced.

I have a few of those pens, which I’d tried filling with water to deliberately wash the ink out of a line-drawing, turning it into shading, like I’d seen someone or another do on one of the hundred “sketches in a Moleskine” photo galleries. I didn’t have much success with that because, well, I don’t know what kind of paper to use anymore, so the drawings kept ending up as Rorschach blots.

Searching around for good drawing pens yesterday (“best pen for cartooning”), I encountered repeated mentions of inking with a brush. Now, I’ve been reading about that since childhood, but I just never ‘got’ brushwork — I think because I like to be really controlled with my lines.

Well, today I filled one of my wash-brushes with very black drawing ink and lost control.

You know what? It was fun. And now I understand the beauty of the variable line — a look that, ironically, I’ve been trying to reproduce with felt-tips for years.

Lord, it was fun to draw this evening just for the hell of it! I feel ten again.

I think I’ve been lost in being a business. Maybe I just want to have a job and not have to do anything extra in my spare time except create things for fun. I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying to people that they should do this whole while, but I’ve still been buying into that line that we have to produce things and sell them in vast numbers to count.

To hell with that.

It’s a fortnight since I scuttled my Facebook account, and I’m not really noticing it — except perhaps for:

• a pleasant quietude
• one less time-waster to log into when I should be doing other things
• I’m writing more genuine, present-minded correspondence in which the poetic part of my mind peeks out of the woods because it hasn’t been shotgunned all to hell by distractions.

There have been a couple of occasions when I realised I wasn’t able to contact somebody anymore. Oops! Ah well: I guess we weren’t really in touch.

In our talk yesterday, my editor essentially invited me to reinvent my work however I need to and said she’d support that. It’s a bit like with the novel: I don’t want to have to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it — if that makes any sense.

Still, though, it does have me asking some big questions, like “If the issue is not having any audience for my novels, what if I wrote something else entirely?” So, rather than fiction for the next little while, what if I wrote more journalistic, feature-type pieces? Not specifically newsy, factual ones — that doesn’t interest me — but pieces that allowed room for description and exploration — closer, perhaps, to the journal-writing I started out with.

I dunno. It’s just a thought at this point. I don’t want to abandon novels entirely, but it would feel really good to get back to raw writing without filtering it through made-up story, particularly when the fiction element seems to be what’s getting in the way of growing my audience.

Again, I dunno.

Of course, the ideal would be to have so much free time that I could do it all. But I’m kind of liking the idea for now of getting to write about everything around me without having to put that observation all aside and come up with a book about other things — which takes a year or two.

Oh no! Ever since I first visited Carbisdale Castle, it’s been my ideal of a place to run away to for a writing retreat. Thinking I might go there next weekend, I did a wee search and discovered that it was badly damaged by last winter’s extreme weather, and it’s closed indefinitely for repairs. Drat!

I’ve no desire to get away from my fella, but I do know that I work best when I’ve got long stretches of uninterrupted time, so I’d still like to do this soon.

My issue with official “writer’s retreat” locations is that there’s something quaintly precious like the chocolatey smell of old book pages about the idea, and with that tends to come a foolishly inflated price-tag.

Any other suggestions?

I’d love to bring my typewriter somewhere with me, though I realise that means I should really go somewhere where that wouldn’t bug other people!