Strike A Pose!

My favourite Ginger co-worker just alerted me to a new yoga studio in our office neighbourhood. Trinity Yoga has opened its doors this week. Located at 65 Bellwoods Avenue, Unit 3, it is offering free yoga and pilates classes for the month of January! The fine print: they ask for a one-time $10 donation to The Redwood, an organization that helps victims of domestic violence; you have to register (but it's super easy); and you are limited to three classes per week. As far as fine print goes, not bad. They haven't yet announced what their rates will be after January but it is definitely worth checking out, what do you have to lose?


I am registered for a class this weekend and three next week. I need to get myself back in shape and I need some exercise. But I hate going to the gym. Loathe. It's fine once I'm there, but it's an ordeal to drag myself there and, no matter how well it goes, it will be an even bigger ordeal to drag myself back. This is a much better solution to the problem.

I think we all need exercise. But I also think you have to find the exercise that makes sense for you. You want whatever you do to be sustainable. It should enhance your life, not make you miserable. I would encourage you to look into what works for you. I'll be at Trinity!

Spreading Holiday Cheer On A Budget.

Apologies for the lack of activity today, I'm not feeling all that well. It's the cold that just won't go away (note to self: more than six-ish hours of sleep per night would probably make an enormous difference). Oh, and the day job. And the holidays, for which I am sadly unprepared...which leads me to what I do have to say today.

Having now lost my mind completely, I decided it would be a good idea to cross some items off my Christmas shopping list this past weekend. At the Eaton Centre. What was I thinking? Excellent question. Well, it appears I was very concerned with spreading the holiday cheer at bargain prices. Either that or there is no other time in my life between now and December 25 in which to get it all done. Regardless, I, along with approximately 8.73 million other people, ended up shopping the Eaton Centre this weekend. And, I have to say, despite the insane hordes of holiday shoppers, there were some beautiful things to be seen.

First, the Swarovski Christmas tree is up in the middle of the mall and impossible to miss. I should have taken a picture to post here (a task at which I failed all weekend), but you really have to see it in person to appreciate its glowing goodness. I am actually a big proponent of the more Charlie Brown-esque features of Christmas trees and, while beautiful, it isn't really my holiday tree ideal. But it is worth seeing and appreciating. And it does benefit charity, I believe. Although I'm not totally clear on how. My head is a little fuzzy.



Moving on, I elbowed my way through the masses at Indigo for the book lovers on my list (including me) only to discover that The Canadian Tenors were singing and signing. Now, I didn't go in for the signing, largely due to time constraints, but they sounded just as beautiful as they looked. They did a really lovely version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. They also have a new CD out and are performing tonight and tomorrow in Toronto.

As a side note, I found a really great book at Indigo that I've been meaning to read for a while: A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. If you are female and at all interested in finding alternate sources for monologues, this is one you should definitely check out. This is giving away trade secrets because I certainly intend to use it at my next audition. If you're not interested in these things, I still recommend it as a good read.

Finally, Christmas shopping on a budget is difficult (duh). Especially when you really do want to find nice things for people with more $$$ than you. But, unfortunately, part of being a "starving artist" is that you generally are not rolling in the dough. So, may I propose a few Christmas gift ideas that are particularly good under these scenarios, and especially for the kind of people who basically already have everything--like, say, The Photographer's parents. If anyone on your list enjoys cooking, check out Williams-Sonoma. They have neat kitchen gadgets that are fairly inexpensive as well as lots of really delicious sauces, drinks, etc. I highly recommend drink mixes that can be given with mugs--such as hot chocolate or mulling spices or anything of that nature. It is, after all, the spirit and intent that are most important...but you still want to give something nice that will be appreciated.


Another option is a nice framed picture, if you have a particularly good picture of the recipient or a place that is special to them...this is probably easier when your boyfriend is The Photographer. If all else fails, the picture frame itself will do. Pottery Barn has an excellent selection.

Finally, As a personal touch, I also include with all my gifts a Christmas ornament that in some way relates to the recipients' interests...Pottery Barn can also be good for those, amongst other places.


Happy holiday shopping! I hope you all manage to find some beauty in the insanity of it all, too. And I promise to be more put together tomorrow...

Morning Report.

Well, I'm one cappuccino in and still nowhere near awake. This is the kind of day it's going to be...I will have our little espresso machine working overtime. Actually, I spent these hours yesterday morning researching new espresso machines because our current model is so overworked. We need one with a higher capacity.


Anyway, I babysat far too late last night--although it was lucrative, $$$ plus a can of Pringles. Bonus. And have now dragged myself into work via TTC. The morning has not, however, been a total waste. I finally discovered the RSS feed for Department of Culture. I enjoy visiting actual websites, but sometimes I forget. So I add them on Google Reader, which is my latest obsession, clearly. Although it's kind of boring today.

In other blogosphere news, and another without a feed, which is incredibly disappointing...Elyse Sewell's journal is featured this month on LiveJournal (yes, I used to have one of those, which is how I know, but I no longer play that game so let's drop it). She placed third in the first season of America's Next Top Model. I didn't watch. Now she is based out of Hong Kong and girlfriend is pretty hilarious. And she has some fairly excellent adventures. Plus, she posts lots of crazy pictures. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Enough to check it independent of my Google Reader. I know, big step.

It has also inspired me to take more wacky pictures of my everyday life, although Toronto may be less exciting than Hong Kong in that, well, it's Toronto. And not at all foreign to me. Most of the time. But we shall see. So that's the new life initiative. The Plurius Pictureus Initiative.

And now off to the Prague as it is lunchtime. Delicious, by the way. And big portions for small dollars. Plus, excellent/quick service.

Talk is cheap. Apparently, so is reading.

Well, it's good to know that someone out there is still making money. And that it isn't even necessarily an evil empire. It might actually be artists. Authors, specifically. Apparently, the publishing industry has proven to be fairly recessive-proof thus far, at least in Canada (and knock on wood). Basically, due to many factors that I don't claim to fully understand, buying books in Canada at the moment is a bargain. If you would like all the technical details as to why that is, you can click here for the article in the Star. My only disclaimer is that I don't particularly recommend their featured author, Wally Lamb. I thought She's Come Undone was pretentious and condescending. Although I Know This Much Is True wasn't a bad read. Basically, his latest, The Hour I First Believed, could go either way, but I won't be picking it up anytime soon.



I'm not sure I will ever understand how it is that some people don't like to read (and celebrity magazines really don't count as reading). And I am certain I will never understand artists who don't like to read--books can provide a whole other world of ideas, characters, inspiration...not to mention how wonderful it is to jump on the bandwagon and pursue something before it becomes a movie. Plus, on occasion, you can find good audition monologue material in books. Frequently it requires tweaking, but it is still technically a published work. I think, as an artist, reading is part of your job. Fortunately, right now, the economy is making that part of your job easier. And if you still can't afford the investment, there is an even more inexpensive option--get a library card. Read books, newspapers, plays, and even, okay, the occasional celebrity mag. It's all character building, artist building material.

And the non-fiction is just as important. I recently finished reading Canadians by Roy MacGregor and thoroughly enjoyed it. He has some great insights into our national character and into what makes us tick. And I was surprised at how much of it I see in myself, given that I spent the latter half of my childhood in the U.S. Apparently the stamp of Canada on my self is indelible. And that is just fine with me. I also enjoyed, as much as one can, I think, General Dallaire's account of his time with UNAMIR during the Rwandan genocide in Shake Hands With the Devil (which has since become a motion picture and even spawned a documentary and movement called Not On Our Watch). This constitutes the general education requirement of being an artist, I think.

As for fiction, I just finished Brave New World by Alduous Huxley, a classic that I, for some reason, was not actually forced to read in high school. But it's definitely relevant to our times and certainly asks questions of the imagination. I also recently read Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, a great Canadian author and playwright (Goodnight Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet)), which I highly recommend to anyone, but especially to the women of the artistic world. I find her writing of women to be extremely interesting. And, if you do like Roy MacGregor, who is a journalist for the Globe and Mail, by the way, his fiction is worth checking out, too--Canoe Lake is his tale of events leading up to Tom Thomson's death in our own Algonquin Park.

Those are just my recent reads. If you would like more suggestions, check out your local bookstore. Or, if you're interested in exploring the landscape of Canadian authors, check out Noah Richler's tome This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. It is a bit of a slow read, but entirely worthwhile. Failing that, his website gets right to the goods on the who's who and where they locate, geographically speaking.

Happy recession reading!

Yummy.

I am (sort of) patiently waiting for 5:00 when we celebrate my co-worker's birthday so I can devour this chocolate truffle cake from Dufflet. If you live in Toronto and have a sweet tooth you absolutely have to check them out. The cakes are a bit expensive, but the tarts are a pretty good size and reasonably priced. Everything is delicious; you really can't go wrong.