i want

You should be doing what you love. -- Barbara Sher

Mentioned to a friend the other day, while trying to figure out how to help her past being blocked on something, that I'd started reading this again (for some reason, despite professing to scorn the things, I have a spookily large collection of self-help books and most of them sit by my bed). She said "to hell with THAT, I KNOW what I want, it's getting there that's the problem."

So I was thinking about it and reading the book and visiting the author's site (nb: eyestrain warning) and I realized I know what I want too. Well, some of it. It's vague. But you have to figure out what you want as the first step, even if it seems unattainable. So...

I want a townhouse or a ground floor apartment with a garden -- not a big one, just enough to grow a few plants and sit out in.
I want a dog.
I want to travel regularly and adventurously.
I want to be able to spend lots of time at the cottage.
I want to go camping.
I want a job where I don't feel like the rock and the hard place are coming after me, and where I feel like I'm helping people rather than corporations.
I want to go out West and visit raithen for Labour Day.

So there. Some things to work towards. At least the last is within my reach.

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Yay! Waiting for Frodo is back!

Now, time to get on with my day.

Sunday afternoon

E persuaded me to go to the Tam-Tam with her (I'm ashamed to say I've lived in this city off and on for 12 years and never been). Man, that was FUN. For non-Montrealers, it's basically a regular get-together for drummers, every Sunday during summer in Parc Mont-Royal under the monument... result, you have impressive bronze Victorian monument with personifications of all the provinces and giant angel at the top of the pillar, and lions, overlooking a teeming crowd of people drumming on hand drums and cowbells and I don't know what all. Vendors set up around 3 sides of the square. E took some pictures and we went and sat on a bench and people- and dog-watched (just before we left a man came by with 2 gorgeous Irish wolfhounds -- all three walked majestically past us, completely ignoring the tiny white dog that leapt out at them yapping "Come get me! I'll take you both on! How dare you walk past MY bench!"). Talked about plans, wishes, etc. We have formed a Pact -- I check up on her photography, she checks up on my CV.

Thinking that despite the new austerity measures I may have to go to the Claremont for dumplings. I have a craving.

Also, must track down The Indispensible Stringband, which I heard on the Vinyl Cafe this morning.

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Hmph. Claremont closed for staff barbecue, so I went to the Indian place, which is good but bloody expensive (and always more so than I anticipated, somehow). Then I napped. Woke up to a half-hearted thunderstorm -- sheet lightning, chest-of-drawers thunder, not much rain. Seems to have stopped now.

Still reading this -- I keep putting it down and picking it up again, a sign that it's not really grabbing me, but it's decent. I found it infuriating for the first 150 pages because each character would get about a 3-page scene and then we'd move on to somebody else, never to see the people already introduced again. But it's better now. I found it a bit smacking of tokenism in spots (we need an example of every possible type of person in this cast!). And I would personally have made the Manitoba farm family Ukrainian, but I suppose that might have confused the issue...

My American history isn't nearly solid enough to tell whether the alternate version is any good, however. Anyway. Going to putter a bit and go to bed properly.