iPhone out of jail!

Ha! I liberted my iPhone. Broke it from its chains, unlocked it so I can use it with any cell phone provider, not only the cruel one who tied me up in the 3-year contract. Especially exciting is the fact that I can buy prepaid SIM card and not pay the outrageous data roaming charges my dear provider loads on me if I dare to use internet on my iPhone while abroad. As a bonus, I am typing this post using a Bluetooth wireless keyboard with my phone instead of the touch-keypad built into the system. You gotta love the endless possibilities of the device which is built to do so much more than we're stuck with if we blindly follow the rules.

"Serve It Cold", a podiobook

by Ronnie Blackwell
(downloaded from podiobooks.com)

A crime mystery story which, I just found out, you can enjoy for free on Google books - just click the picture for the link. However, I enjoyed the podcast dramatization by dancingcatstudios.com. The story has lively characters and the dramatization gave them distinctive voices with charming southern accent. The plot was a bit on the weak side, but all together I was really drawn into the story until the very end. Johnny C, a private detective, is hired by a college professor to follow his beautiful wife and collect evidence of her infidelity. That he does on the very next page, because she is not hiding her affair with the client's brother. Johnny C follows the couple to New Orleans, where we were given a whiff of the old French Quarter through a palette of colorful local characters. When Johnny C's client ends up shot dead in his house, things speed up a little, but not too much; things never get too fast in American South. Disappointingly, the conclusion doesn't conclude anything, as unlikely character becomes a prime suspect, but was let go for the lack of evidence, personal inconvenience she held for the local judge and the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous. Unconvincing, but because I managed to fall in love with the characters well before the ending, I'm inclined to forgive.

"Crucifixion and Other Fictions", a podiobook

by Mina Samuels
(Audiobook downloaded from podiobooks.com)

Yet unpublished collection of 13 short stories, read by the author. Skillfully woven tales well worth listening to. I hope they'll be published soon. Three of the stories are the 9-11 stories, but although the terrorists' attack on New York features as a life changing event for the main characters, it is not the focal point of the stories. Rather, they show snippets of ordinary life altered by those extraordinary circumstances.

Remaining ten stories are moments in lives of ordinary Americans, easy to identify with and well crafted. The common theme would be children, but only loosely, or maybe parenthood. In some stories children are yet unborn, in others they are only briefly mentioned adults, or a constantly crying newborn. The collection leaves the impression that the author was dealing with some children-related issues, whether it is pregnancy or some other development, it reflected in these stories.

A Christmas of Long Ago

Close to midnight on Christmas Eve people dusted off their best winter clothing; family walked to church slowly, dressed to the nines; kids behaved, holding hands with their belonging adults; the older men lifted their hats when passing a woman; women nodded back stiffly and gracefully. The crowd gathered in front of the neighborhood church. The breath of their chatter rose in small vapor-clouds into winter air. Watched from the side it looked like a comic book scene with empty speech-bubbles raising from their lips. Slowly, they funneled through the narrow door into the candlelit belly of the church rich with the aroma of incense. On their coats people brought their own scents of spiced cooked wine, oven-baked ham and cookies.

Throughout the service they all stood with their heads bowed and sang the hymns together. At the end they shared love with their neighbors by shaking their hands and women faking the kiss on each other's cheek by kissing the air. Young boys would try to strategically position themselves next to the girls and, though the kiss was traditionally shared by two women, they'd plant one on the girl's cheek, causing some healthy blushing. On occasion, although rarely, a girl would return the kiss, and both would move away with matching redness spread over their faces and ears.

After the service people returned to their homes in groups of a few families together, walking slower and talking louder. It was a festive night, once upon a time in the land and the time of my youth.

More Christmas bitchin'

Every year I complain about the Christmas songs overkill. This year it drove us so far that we stopped listening to our favorite radio station CHFI, because they declared themselves the "Toronto's official Christmas station," and for weeks play nothing but Christmas music.

I have problem with them advertising the station as official Christmas station. As far as I know, OFFICIAL means that someone has to give them the title, and I could swear that Toronto City Council never debated such thing. So, if it's officially not confirmed that they are the official station, than this is false claim, false representation and misleading of the public. Though, I'd forgive them all that if they'd only ease off on terrible re-re-re-renditions of always the same Christmas classics. It's alarming how uncreative the musicians have become, especially this year. But then, I guess there are only a few Christmas songs and there are so many so-called artists these days and each of them needs to record some sort of Christmas song. At the end the innocent listener pays the price.

Okay, after all this bitchin' I admit there's a Christmas song that makes me smile. It goes: "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas and only hippopotamus will do..."

Sadly, one of the mobile phone providers - Telus - is using the song for their Christmas commercials with a squeaky-clean hippo prancing about the pristine white space of the TV screen. It, of course, makes perfect sense, because every Canadian hippopotamus naturally has a need for a mobile phone, so she can call her hippo-mamma in Africa and complain about the snow and Canadian frigid winters.

Busy...

Ever since my online writing classes started I focused all the creative energy to it and there's nothing left for the blog. Besides, days leading to Christmas are always extremely busy at work with everyone doubling whatever they do, so they can take time off for the holidays. That means that I also have to satisfy double the amount of requests for recordings of different kind. It's been a busy week so far, but tomorrow should be a slow day and after tomorrow I won't care--that's when Meg and I start our two weeks vacation.

eReader

Once upon a time before the iPhone - though I'm not sure how we lived without it - I had a Palm PDA to organize my life. On that Palm was installed eReader, an application for reading ebooks. I amassed an impressive little library of ebooks and always had a few on the Palm for those idle moments before a meeting, or while waiting for Meg, or some such. Then, when we switched onto iPhones, those ebooks stayed on the Palm, gathering virtual digital dust, unused and unread. Until last Friday, when I discovered the eReader application for iPhone, which not only lets me read ebooks on it, but can also import the ebooks we bought for the Palm. So, my micro-sized book shelf is with me again, Hemingway's short stories, which I often re-read in search for style guidance or an inspiration, are back in my pocket, together with several other contemporary and classical volumes. What a treat for a biblioholic like me.

"The Dream Life of Sukhanov", a novel

by Olga Grushin

In mid-1980s Moscow Sukhanov is a 50-something-old Soviet aparatchik, who was once a promising painter, but sold his talent for more in-line job of an art critic and editor-in-chief of a Soviet's prominent art magazine. He is so unconscious in his role that he doesn't detect subtle changes in Soviet Union which is slowly opening up to the rest of the world. Subsequently, he loses his job and his family.

Throughout the book Sukhanov has flashes of memories from his childhood onward and he re-lives them almost like in a dream. The third person narration in those moments turns into the first person account of his thoughts, feelings and events from his past. As Sukhanov deteriorates, the book culminates somewhere between the memories, dreams, hallucinations and twisted reality.

The author, Olga Grushin, is a recent immigrant from Russia who lives in the USA. Her command of English language is astonishing. Although on a few occasions her descriptions seem almost too rich for the story she's telling, it is a captivating read.

Vertigo

I turn in my sleep to the right. Suddenly, the world starts spinning violently. My eyes snap open - the room around me whirls in mad circles from left to right. My stomach reacts and I can already feel the acid raising in my throat. I know this feeling. Desperately, I lurch to the left and lay flat on my back. The spinning slows down and finally the room regains its immobility. My breathing is shallow and fast, my stomach still sits in my throat.

How long has it been since the last episode of this? Six years? Seven, maybe? That time I ended up visiting a doctor. The old doctor who checked me up smiled when I described the symptoms. As a med student he wrote the paper on my disease. He told me the name of it, which I forgot as soon as I got better. It is, he explained, a virus which affects the center of balance in my inner ear. It can't be cured, but it isn't dangerous. At least, not dangerous as a disease, though it could put me in harms way if I, say, lose balance while crossing the street. He prescribed a series of exercises which consisted of sitting on the edge of the bed and dropping sideways into laying position first to one side, then to the other. Two weeks later, the vertigo disappeared.

And now it came back to haunt me at 4 AM. I don't dare to turn on my side and my back is soon sore from laying still. It seems sleep is over for the night. Just as before, the spinning starts only when my head is tilted to the right. For the next few weeks I'll have an unpleasant reminder to keep it straight. I get out of the bed, carefully avoiding leaning to the right, and slowly dress for the run.

Snow Storm

5 AM. Snow storm, the first for this winter. Bad. Strong winds, wet heavy snow. Snowflakes freeze on the way down and turn into tiny projectiles whipped by the wind. They pelt my face, sting my eyes. I can barely see where I'm going. The wind gusts hit me in the face so hard that I can't breathe. It's a struggle. Every step is pushing against an invisible hand that pushes back into my chest, pulls at my jacket, pounds my head. The icy road is now covered with snow. Its wetness sucks my feet in, I'm running on a carpet too deep for comfort - just pulling the feet out for the next step is an effort. It's an all-out battle. I progress slowly, winning it step by step. The storm throws all its best tricks against me: the wind gusts blow the snow away, there's only a thin layer over ice in places. The pelting snowflakes keep my eyes half-closed. My foot lands on the barely concealed ice, I slip... but there's a pocket of deep snow right beside and my other foot plunges there. Balance regained, I'm saved and push onward.

Near the hospital someone moves on the sidewalk. A man with hands in the coat pockets, head hung low and shoulders high. From the whirling white mass blowing all around us I can't see the leash coming out of one of the pockets, nor the dog until they're so close I could touch them if I stretch my arm. The man looks at me, surprised. I can see his eyes dim in sympathy. I could feel almost imperceptible shake of head - he'd just seen a mad man running in this weather. I plod on, wondering which one of us is crazier.

Ice King

My eyes refused to open this morning, even though I woke up just before the alarm went off and tiptoed from the bedroom. Meg was breathing deeply, lost in one of her vivid dreams. As usually, I slowly descended the stairs to the basement, trying to keep the left ankle immobile, because it cracks loudly with every step. The dry cracks of the joint seem amplified in the dead quiet of the night. It always worries me that the noise will wake the sleeping queen.

In the basement I squeezed into my running tights, stretched and quietly went out. The cold air of the night pricked the exposed skin of my face with thousands of needles and finally jolted me awake. Right on time, as it turns out. When I stepped on the pavement, my feet slipped. Streets of the neighborhood were covered with a thin layer of ice. The sky was clear with stars and a slice of the moon shining brightly. I owned the road, feeling like a king. My kingly steps were very feminine - short and careful, like running over egg shells. But, for the first icy run of the season, it was uneventful and almost nice.

Writing School

I finally did it! I can't even remember when it was that I started fantasizing about writing, but I proved myself absolutely incapable of sitting down and doing it consistently. Since I can't get the desire out of my system, an action was needed to push me to write. I enrolled into Creative Writing online course and my classes start next Tuesday. Exciting! Watch out Hemingway, here I come!

Snow and Sushi

It snowed today. Luckily not enough to catch on, but enough to give us a quick preview of what's to come. The road was wet, people drove 40% slower than usually, which meant crawling through otherwise inept traffic even slower. To make matter worse, the wet roads froze during the evening commute. Quite a few cars slipped, then everyone slowed even more.

On the way home, Meg had craving for sushi. It's funny, whenever she craves food, it's always sushi. Since our usual sushi place really dropped in quality - we always order the same sushi mix and it comes in smaller and ever-shrinking portions, while price mysteriously stays the same - we are experimenting with new restaurants. Tonight was a lucky night, because we believe we finally found it: Gal's Sushi. A nice atmosphere, pleasant waiting staff, good sushi and reasonable price.

The crown on the evening was Meg's quickly baked load of vanilla crescents cookies, a walnutty buttery kind of sweet cookie coated in icing sugar. My cravings are much more diverse than Meg's, and cookies were the tonight's one.

Dim Sum Sunday

Sun and Jas from across the street joined us for a dim sum breakfast at our new favorite place, the Century Palace restaurant we discovered recently. Lots of good food. Their nine year old son nibbled a few pieces here and there, but was more interested in the Diaries of a Wimpy Kid (book) than the food.

After dim sum, Sun and Jas came by for a new specialty coffee I made - the California coffee: whiskey, strong coffee, ice cream and whipped cream. Sinful, but so yummy.

While sipping coffee they couldn't stop admiring Meg's incomplete painting on the easel in the living room. I was hoping that Meg would get motivated to continue painting from so much praise, but she took it in stride and curled with the book instead.

Ernie's new (old) house

A socially active weekend: we were invited to visit Ernie, a friend photographer who recently bought a house just a short distance from the lake. For Torontonians "the lake" is always lake Ontario. Other, smaller lakes are not worth mentioning.

Ernie's house is at the opposite part of town from us, it took about an hour to get there even on a not-so-busy Saturday afternoon. As we approached Lake Shore Blvd in Etobicoke, the houses turned smaller, darker and in different stages of neglect. Some shady types loitered on the corner in baggy clothes which showed different stages of decomposition. They didn't look to me like a friendly neighborhood gang one would like to hang out with. Ernie's house was a narrow brick bungalow in the middle of the street. It's fairly deep and ends in a long backyard with a tipsy, half-rotten wooden garage which looks like it could collapse onto itself if someone as much as sneezes near it. Ernie is smart enough not to keep anything in it, especially not his new Honda. To reach the backyard there's a driveway Ernie shares with the neighbor. The rest of the yard sports a tree stump, a dying tree right in front of the house and a fairly healthy tree behind the tilted garage.

Inside the house is not as bad in terms of structural neglect. The problem inside is - Ernie. He is a self-proclaimed slob, and lives up to that well-deserved reputation. Nothing in the house is in its place, nothing even has its place. A glass dining table is surrounded by leather chairs which are in disarray: three are crammed at the narrow edge of the table, other three widely spaced around the other end, one to each side. Under the glass surface, right in the center of the table lays a glass bowl full of metallic sand. Bursting with pride, Ernie rolls a fist-sized magnet ball over the glass surface. When it rolls above the sand bowl, the ball stops abruptly, pulling the send to it through the glass. Some of the sand sips on the floor. That explains fine grains crunching under our feet. When the magnet ball drops under the table and is immediately covered with fine blackish sand, Ernie picks it up and rolls it again on the table top over the plate. And that explains how the sand got on the table, where Ernie now serves the food.

After the meal of croissants with goat cheese, fried onions and peppers, which Ernie calls breakfast even though it's 2 PM - his first meal of the day - we have drinks in the front part of the long room which is the dining and living room combined. A sofa and two comfy leather chairs are facing the bay window. The sofa, which stretches across the length of the narrow room almost from wall to wall, effectively separates the sitting area from the carnage of leftover food and drinks we just left on the dining table. To the left is a small kitchen with cabinets dating approximately from pre-WW1 era, which Ernie managed to mess up so it looks like a storage room with kitchen cabinets along the outer wall. By the wall opposite to the cabinets there's food mixed with laundry, dishes among the magazines and other papers, all spread over the many shelves of an IKEA wall shelf suited more for a laundry room than a kitchen, with its metal frame and raw wooden shelves. Back through the living room, behind the dining area is a tiny triangular hall which three sides open to a bathroom and two tiny bedrooms. One of the bedrooms actually serves as such, with Ernie's unmade bed and clutter of socks, underwear and other clothing items which, along with newspapers, books and magazines lay crumpled on the floor. The other room is filled with cardboard boxes in many stages of unpacking and items which were previously in those boxes now are everywhere on the floor. Both bedrooms have windows looking on the backyard with its leaning garage.

After drinks, Ernie takes us for a walk through his dilapidated neighborhood. I admit, the vicinity of the lake is a nice thing, but would never change my neighborhood which looks like from a Victorian-era postcard, for Ernie's. He can keep the nearness of the lake or the downtown for all I care. Of course, I don't tell him all that. Hypocrite that I am, I congratulate him on his house (which costs him more than our house for a third of the size!) and the neighborhood he is so obviously falling in love with. Finally back home, I feel like running through our house in celebration of all the space Ernie will never have.

The 4-Hour Workweek

by Tim Ferriss

Musings and wild ideas caused by the book

I got this audiobook as a free download on Audible.com. I've heard about it before and thought it a scam. But, since it was a freebie, I put it on my iPhone with intention to give it one quick listen during the commute from work. There's nothing better to do while driving anyway.

Now that I gave all the possible excuses for listening to a book of such sort, I can admit that it made me think. I don't know if, with my set of skills, I can really find a business model that could be so automated as to allow me to work no more than 4 hours a week, although the way it is explained, it doesn't seem a complete rubbish, nor completely impossible. It did, however, make me re-evaluate my job, and follow the advice to empower co-workers enough to remove the requirement for my permanent presence in the office. It's a fine balancing act and a pretty slow process, especially because my company insists that everyone shows up at work every day. There are some exceptions, though. I already got a remote access to our network, so I can work after hours if needed (that was my explanation). But it also enables me to work from home, instead of commuting to the office. I suggested to work from home one day a week, but my superior didn't think it was a good idea. I decided to give it a try anyway. One of the things this book suggests is "don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness". In other words, do your thing and, if they scold you, ask for forgiveness, or prove them wrong, but don't give them a chance to refuse you by asking in advance. Today I took half a day off, but I was on email, proving I can work even if I'm not in the office. If no one noticed my absence, I'll test it with a whole day soon.

Another thing the book preaches is taking "mini retirements". Author suggests traveling to a destination of my choice, or rather moving there temporarily. It's quite an unorthodox concept, but when I think of it, not at all undoable. It requires having guts to do it. If I convince the bosses that I can work remotely, great, if not, I would need to quit my job, rent out our house, sell unnecessary stuff and we could go. In many countries around the world we can rent much cheaper than what we'd pay in Toronto. Additionally, we could find an easy part-time gig to supplement our income from the rent of the house; we could give English lessons, or freelance for some western media, or teach something else. Best of all, we could stay in an exotic location for months. If we get tired of it, we could move to another location or go back to Canada.

The only problem I see with this concept is - if we don't have a business to sustain our globetrotting, going home to Canada may prove too expensive. Finding a job will be next to impossible for people our age. We could be forced to stay in permanent exile. So, before we start discussing the mini-retirement scheme, I'd like to work out the additional source of income, something that can be done remotely.

Winning books on Twitter

I subscribed to Twitter micromessaging service to promote my own podcast, and in the meantime I use it to get updates from news outlets and book publishers and authors. So it happened that I caught CBC's tweet in which they call us to review in 140 characters a book we read for a chance to win books from the CBC Book Club. I reviewed "Next" by Michael Crichton - it was a much shorter review than the one below - and won! The books I'm getting are "Good Food for All" and "The Fourth Part of the World".

"Next", a novel

by Michael Crichton

In true Crichton-esque style, this is one part education in genetic research and practices, and one part warning about the things that have gone or may go wrong. As usually, it all ends with the author's note which summarize his fears and points out how much wrong has already been done by gene patenting practice.

In a court case in the book, a judge rules that the genetic research company which bought cell tissue from a cancer survivor, OWNS the cells. That leads to the absurd situation in which the genetic company loses the sample cells, then pursues the donor to replace what's loss, since the cells are ruled their property. Even more bizarre, when they can't find the original patient, they pursue his daughter and grandson, who are "in possession of stolen property", i.e. they inherited grandfather's cells. Spooky.

Sadly, such unexpected twists are few and far between. Mostly we are bombarded with weird cases of genetic research, patenting and scandalous experiments on wildlife. There are too many storylines, few of which never come to conclusion, and few others never intersect. The main characters, human and animal, are so numerous, they are hard to follow. There are hybrids - and I'm not talking about cars, but rather products of crosses between human and animal DNAs. The ones I can't quite swallow are the talking orangutan and chimp. A shorter, more focused and more action-packed story would, to my opinion, better emphasize the author's concerns.