Just some stuff.

Notoriously hard to photograph but caught her here:

 

Val joined me: we’re both 50 now.

 

 

Favourite guitar piece right now: Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind. I brought the song to my guitar teacher, Robert, a while ago after thinking back to Kurt Browning’s skate from Stars on Ice 2019.

 

A new flavour combo for me: avocado and smoked tofu on a pita. I ate the evidence before I thought of taking a photo.

 

Picard is turning out to be absolutely amazing – interesting storyline with room for old favourites. I have cried every single episode.

 

After finally finishing Mary Beard’s highly detailed The Fires of Vesuvius about daily life in Roman Pompeii, I switched gears, accidentally, into some Canadian history/memoire with Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto. Reading it on the subway was difficult at times because I had to hold back tears. Sakamoto’s grandparents’ WWII stories provide the subject matter; one side of his family experienced extreme persecution as Japanese Canadians being forced to leave their lives in Vancouver to labour on beet farms in Alberta, while his grandfather on the other side was a Canadian soldier and prisoner of war defending Hong Kong against the Japanese. And then I picked up Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, a novel depicting the lives of children in a Chinese family in Vancouver in the 1930s and 40s. Again, near crying on the subway. It’s rare for me to read a novel. Wayson Choy died in April 2019.