On New Year’s Eve 2011, I was frantically trying to finish reading this memoir. Since I worked until after 9 p.m. on the 31st, I wasn’t finishing it before midnight Atlantic Standard Time but I definitely did before midnight in the Pacific time zone! And then, as you can see, blogging about it took even longer….
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Unbearable Lightness is Porta de Rossi’s 2010 memoir of the dark and difficult events of 1998 and 1999 when she joined the cast of Ally McBeal. It has been sitting on my e-reader (i.e., iPhone) …

Yikes, so we closed November 2011 and my NaNoWriMo word count is 27,638, half of a fairly short 50K-word novel. I outlined quite a bit ahead but life happened. For full disclosure, I actually wrote seven days’ worth in October (!) because I knew I would be in New York 1-7 November and only wrote 8 days in November proper. :o
My very first gap in writing started on 11/11/11, the day I went from unemployed with no prospects to unemployed with future employment. Then there was the scramble to get …

When I visit a reasonably large city, I’ll raid the tourist shops searching for two souvenir items in particular both with the city’s subway system map screen on them: a shot glass and an umbrella. I suppose I don’t need too many umbrellas so I’m open to other paraphernalia that is useful like notepads and bookmarks. In recent history, I have been to London, Hong Kong, Beijing, and New York and only been successful in London. I like my subway merchandise to look official and not screened on crooked in someon’s …

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My iPhone 3GS has been sliding down a steep slope of decline in the summer. We blame it on me throwing it in frustration over the summer months, onto my bed, couch, fleshy parts of NPY’s body…. Something started to rattle inside and the battery would drain with lightening speed such that I barely dared to start any apps if I was not plugged in. Also, when I had anywhere between 30-50% battery left, and especially if I was running a nonnative/intensive app, the phone would crash/shut …

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Got the pattern on Sunday. Getting the fabric tomorrow. Party’s on Saturday. At first I thought I would learn how to operate a sewing machine and make it but it looks like Lil Sis will burn the midnight oil and do it in the next few days because she’s awesome.
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This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been …

It’s not really a secret that I wanted to be a cheerleader. But one major factor was not attending public school. My school didn’t even have a dance team. So, I’ll pass and probably be that mother who tries to live vicariously through her daughter!
The title, Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, was so familiar to me because I watched all the episodes of the CW series, Hellcats, and Cheer! was always acknowledged in the opening credits as the basis of the series. One day, I was browsing around …

A few months ago, I was searching for direction and for about 48 hours, I thought I would complete an Editing Certificate from Simon Fraser University and registered to attend a session to obtain more information about the certificate. I saw amongst the other sessions one featuring Terry Fallis, author of Canada Reads 2011 winner The Best Laid Plans, and registered.
The seminar rolled around last night and I was in two minds about going–spend 90 minutes learning more about a passion or enjoy one of very numbered nice Vancouver summer …

I first heard about Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story (SSTLS) through Spark, the CBC technology podcast (abbreviated interview in Episode 120, full 20-minute interview) and hopped onto the library website to place a hold on it. My interest waned and I didn’t pick it up until I recently saw it again at the library’s Central Branch as a Fast Read (finish in 7 days or else!). I want to procrastinate from some real world stuff, so this time was as good as any. Further, I had recently …

Although Sense & Sensibility as a Marvel comic came out on November 17, 2010, I do not darken the doorways of comic book stores and only learned about it in April 2011 from an LJC blog entry. I tremulously entered a comic book store one day and saw there were Female Force comics of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Martha Stewart, to name a few, and no Jane Austen. It was much more comfortable to surf the bookstore from home!
I decided upon Sense & Sensibility because I do not have …

I started reading Angela Tung’s blog many years ago, drawn in by stories of her single life in New York City with a good communications job at a big pharma company. Searching back through GMail, I learned she commented on my blog for the first time in October 2006–I hadn’t realized it has been that long! I’m 100% sure her Internet handle at the time was a big hook for me and then her writing, her sardonic way of relating her life kept her blog amongst my most anticipated reads …