Greg coerced me to go out for a winter run last night despite all of my usual protests;  my running shoes always go in the closet the second the first snowflake hits the ground, and stay there till mid-spring. I’ve been on the treadmill downstairs a few times over the winter, but I was starting to feel the cobwebs creeping in and my joints getting rusty, and figured I ought to give Greg’s crazy outdoor thing a try.

Figuring out what to wear was hard. I put on my brother’s hand-me-down ridiculously orange pants (my “Cheeto” pants) and a blue windbreaker. I need to invest in some real winter running apparel if I’m going to do this again.

I had lots of visions beforehand of wiping out on salt and ice patches, but the streets were pretty clean and safe, and we did a 5K run in mostly well-lit areas. I found I was still in pretty good running shape, and the crisp cold air helped keep us from getting sweaty or overheated without being uncomfortable.

This morning my legs are okay, but my stabilization muscles all through my core and in my knees are feeling like they’ve been really worked hard (just from my paranoid tensing as I ran). Going up the 3 flights of stairs to my desk really took a lot out of me. I’m answering to the name “Limpy McShambler” for the rest of the day.

And I’m HUNGRY. It’s chocolate time!

Go big or go home! I had to go move the car after Natasha parked it outside, and discovered a palette of crisp even snow begging to be walked all over.

Apparently I’m the last person to read Elizabeth Hay’s “Late Nights on Air”, it’s already a #1 Canadian Bestseller and it picked up the 2007 Giller Prize. For the two of you who haven’t read it yet, I offer this glowing review.

Elizabeth Hay’s depiction of  life at Yellowknife’s remote CBC radio station is lyrical – her writing is incredibly beautiful, evocative and moving; it’s as close to poetry as prose can get. The characters are easy to slip into and out of, written full of passion and feeling and layers of motivation that make each one a fascinating study. Her writing is so fluid that most of the time I wasn’t even aware I was reading – I felt like I was experiencing their lives.

I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s a total standout in my recent reading pile, heads and above anything I’ve read in years. Completely deserving of the accolades. Natasha’s next on the reading list, but I think I’ll be putting my copy of the book into many people’s hands.

Extra kudos to Elizabeth Hay for being an Ottawa writer – fantastic that such a huge talent comes from our neck of the woods.

Natasha got me a fantastic birthday gift, but there’s a bit of a backstory behind it.

As a cool work perk, every now and then I get tickets to go see the Senators. The last set that came up were to see Philadelphia visiting, and on the way to the stadium in the car I kept going on and on to Greg how excited I was to see Sidney Crosby. Greg was at least polite about it enough not to say anything while I was puzzled, in our seats already, over why Sidney Crosby wasn’t on the player’s roster, and that’s when I realized… Philadelphia is not the same as Pittsburgh. I knew he played for the Penguins, I just experienced temporary insanity and got my cities mixed up.

Anyhow, it all works out in the end, because Natasha, taking pity on my downhearted retelling of my public sports-knowledge humilation, got me tickets to see Pittsburgh in March. Yay! Sidney Crosby actually plays on that team!

Anyone want to guess what this is? I think this will be a short-lived game, but I’m hoping the weird sea-creature-esque tendrils (I wasn’t expecting to see them!) throw some people off. To the first correct guesser goes a photo from the pile I’m putting together for a little show in February. (not of tendrils)

We parked the other night at the grocery store next to a spot that had a bit of trash in it, hopped out of the car (with our re-useable bags!) and went grocery shopping, but came back to a grisly scene. Unbeknown to us there was a full can of orange juice among the litter pile, and another car had rolled over it… BLAM! throwing orange juice up and down the entire driver’s side of my car. It must have been under a lot of pressure when it popped because it left sticky juice marks right from my back fender all the way to my headlight, with bits of pulp left under the door handle for me to discover.

This was all the more annoying, because I’d just come back from a car wash the day before. So I grabbed a bucket and washed the left side of my car by hand. It’s kindof neat to watch the car steam in the cold after you wipe it down with warm water. The lesson learned is that OJ is highly volatile and incredibly sticky. Exercise caution, juice drinkers!

One more flick to add to this flurry of reviews – while we were in Winnipeg last week we caught 2012, still playing (for only $2!)  at the cheapy theatres on McGillivray. Thank you Winnipeg, for your outrageously affordable movie houses.

As a connoisseur of disaster flicks, I can say that 2012 is an epic masterpiece boldly spreading destruction far and wide – brilliant. I don’t know if it’ll ever be topped. It took a special kind of absurd disaster movie making genius to come with the completely insane wanton destruction in this film. I applaud you, Roland Emmerich.

The acting and everything were surprisingly not bad, considering the gratuitous ultra-shallow plotline. My only beef is with the very end of the film, which feels tacked on: this family makes it through a hundred impossible escapes by the skin of their teeth only to finally spend 30 minutes trying to close a submarine door… anticlimactic.

Natasha and I took my very awesome god-daughter out to see Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 this afternoon, which was a lot of fun. Sortof disappointed that they didn’t sing more, but the story was cute and made a weird sort of “chipmunks go to highschool” sense even though I never saw the first one.

I have to admit, I was a huge fan of the cartoon when I was a kid, so it was a big thrill to see the Chipettes brought to life. Holy obscure 80’s reference, batman!

You could tell the VFX studio had all the wrinkles ironed out of making CG talking chipmunks – the characters looked great and the lipsynch was right on. Lots of emotional range in their little chipmunk faces, and excellent over-the-top dance routine flourishes that would make Beyonce blush. Amazing cast, too – the Chipettes include Amy Poehler and Anna Farris, who I think are both really funny (although completely wasted in roles that crank their voices up 12 octaves).

No really, I actually liked it. Quit looking at me like that!

Every time I saw the cover to Gregory Maguire’s sequel to Wicked, “Son of a Witch”, I’d start hearing the cowbells and baseline to Nazareth’s ‘Hair of the Dog‘. That’s about the only pleasure I got out of reading this 300+ page piece of dreck. While “Wicked” was the brilliant story of the Wicked Witch of the West’s freedom-fighter efforts to protect the rights of Ozlanders from the tyrant Wizard, “Son of a Witch” is the story of her (possible?) son … who does nothing of consequence, and then laments about it.

I have a litany of problems with this book, but I’ll keep this list to 3:

1) Liir, the protagonist (?) does nothing in 300 pages. The author paints Liir as a neutral party – left to his own devices to decide if he’s good or bad. But Liir’s reticence to do anything or help anybody was only interesting in it’s ability to make the book completely boring. The few clearly-defined aspects of his character are inconsistently adhered to. He’s neglected and uneducated, but can apparently read and speak multiple languages. At one point he willingly ends up in the employ of the soldier that kidnapped his childhood love. He has a flying broom but walks everywhere. He desperately wants to save Nor, but can’t be bothered to actually find her.

2) Things are happening in Oz, and the author goes into hyperfocused long boring political and theological detail, but then Liir takes off for four years and someone new has overthrown the government or something – he never sticks around long enough in one place for us to find out. I can’t help but think that we were supposed to make some allegorical connection to current events or something, (the ‘Library Journal’ review, on the front page, claims this book is ‘political satire’) but I don’t get it.

3) The author clearly wrote this book with a well-worn thesaurus next to him. While 99% of the book is written in plain English, at least once per page there’s an obscure word thrown in sideways without any context to it’s meaning. A few $6 words that stood out just by leafing through:

• retractional pluperfect subjunctive
• propitiation
• pogroms
• pollarded
• epibolically

While I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the meaning of a word (I just came from reading a book thick with Patois), I just gave up after a while – the details were so pointless and the story so boring I just wanted to be on with it.

I was listening to Q on CBC late one night as Natasha and I often do while getting ready for bed, and there was a panel of people (who I thought were “Canada Reads” panelists) discussing books. One panelist, with only a few seconds to pitch “The Book of Night Women” by James Marlon, described it as “A book about Jamaican slave women who form a secret society to foment a revolution. There’s lots of intrigue and darkness and violence.” Which sounded like something I normally would never read, so I immediately gravitated towards it.

It turns out that I was hallucinating or something, because after I bought the book I couldn’t find any record of who said that, it’s -not- part of Canada Reads, and in fact there was no literature panel on Q the week I believe I heard it. I think dark Obeah magic made me buy it and read it. Which is fantastic, because it’s an excellent story.

I won’t go into much further detail about the plot, because that one line will hopefully grab you as it grabbed me. But there are two really important observations I want to make about this book:

1) The book is narrated in a really thick but setting-appropriate Jamaican Patois. The first few chapters I thought my brain was going to melt out of my head, working harder to interpret than understand. Towards the midway point I was reading it pretty fluently, but expect to slog slowly through all the “Lawd, pickney, de cow cain’t milk sheself!“. It adds a fantastic depth and richness to the story, but it’s hard to read. Language-wise it may also be interesting to note that they drop the N-bomb every second sentence, which is used entirely in proper context, but still made me squeamish.

2) The life of a slave, as presented in this book, is every bit (and more) tragic, merciless, debasing and brutal as you can imagine. I expected it to be pretty bleak, but the author goes to great lengths to expose you to cruelty, torture and savagery. It’s not for the faint of heart. The more terribly they’re abused, though, the more savoury their plan for revenge becomes. I don’t know: were all plantation owners insanely violent short-tempered sociopaths? This guy’s really a piece of work.

Really happy that I picked this book up – it’s a real page-turner, and it’s given me a lot of insight into a setting I knew very little about, and inspired me to follow up with some research into the real-life history of the period.