On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Tried to nail down some further resources for mental self-care.
Got a haircut.
Checked in with several friends.
Applied for a half-dozen jobs (so far today).
Did continuing battle with bigots in the comments sections of several articles hosted on iPolitics-dot-ca.
Got some shopping done.

A productive day. So far.

Ten weeks to go.

We've almost gotten a bit of everything this week in terms of local weather, although the snow seems to have been unenthusiastic about showing up. This being mid-March, perhaps we should not be surprised by that.

More later, as it's too early in the morning and not enough time before I leave for the office to chat much.

...and I've been checking job boards, listening to the Sunday Edition on Radio One, vacuuming the residence, getting milk and doing some other stuff like trying to polish off a practice pencil sketch of Daredevil.

I miss drawing regularly. I used to be able to say that I spent at least an hour of every day working with pencil or pen and putting something that made visual sense to paper. Now I go anywhere from a day to two weeks without that. There is something Wrong in this.

However, there's other things to do in the meantime. Today, it's the ByMUG meeting at Patty's in the Market.

Just so you know.

1. The Vietnamese alphabet font project's passed a milestone: all major glyphs roughed out. Now it looks like I'm going to need to nail down some additional detail in most of the glyphs.

2. The weather hereabouts is not exactly setting my heart on fire. Grey, wet, and unenthusiastic even in its snowfall or ice pellet precipitation.

3. Hoping that Marvel's Revolutionary War arc doesn't result in a Purging of UK-based characters. I find myself growing less fond of character purges as I age.

4. Left open for topics of your choosing.

The song may have been intended as a Québecois separatist anthem, but it still works for Canada as a whole. At least, for today. The wind chill around this town was pain enough this morning to walk to the local mall for grocery errands as it was.

Add in the winter storm warnings provided by Environment Canada for tonight, and I've more than enough grounds to keep as close to home as possible.

So...fiddling with the web and Adobe Illustrator and looking for the Vulcan equivalent of Microgramma Bold Extended this afternoon. I've got a wordmark here I'd like to translate, you see...


Apologies to the people at Bell and Boeing. Seemed like a fun idea at the time and still does.

I’ve been having one of those days. The kind of day where there’s this one tooth in the back that keeps acting up, no matter how much headache medication you throw at your nervous system to suppress the little nuisance.

Once one of those aches takes hold, your concentration is more than likely going to be shot as far as creative effort is concerned. It won’t even have to resemble anything close to an actual cavity.

No, really.

Not being sure that I want to go into much further detail – some people would consider details of dental care to be under the category of “too much information” – but whilst remaining firmly rooted, the annoying teeth still sent out the occasional pang. So, this recurring pang disrupts a number of things, including the writing of cover letters in e-mail form, as well as the writing of actual essays.

Such as this one, yes.

Such was not the case yesterday.

I went to Lowertown yesterday for a barbecue hosted by a friend of mine, and there was no such distraction then. There were other distractions provided by the food and the travel route itself, true. Starting with an inflatable scarlet gorilla on Slater Street at Telus Place. That was an attention-grabber.

Someone actually thought such a “mascot” was worth paying money for. It’s not the first such “mascot” any of us have ever seen, true enough. You can all name at least one example of similar oddities in your own experience.

The impression I got of the northeastern corner of Lowertown is a visually mixed one. Co-op housing side-by-side with relics dating back to the 19th Century, forty-year-old single-family houses left to rot boarded-up, right next to some of the best-kept yards in the city. Housing, next to lawyers’ offices, across the street from a paramedic post, itself kitty-corner across the intersection of King Edward and Murray from the Shepherds of Good Hope.

Lowertown is a proper hodgepodge, the kind of neighbourhood that Jane Jacobs would have been satisfied to see survive into the present, despite the efforts to take it apart in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The widening of King Edward would be the one fly in that particular ointment, of course. Originally, it was to be a sunken freeway splitting Lowertown in two in the name of “urban improvement”, but for the protests inspired by Toronto’s example. That widening of King Edward could have been characterized as a sort of revenge against the resistance to top-down “improvement” imposed by City Hall and developers determined to know better than the people who lived there up to that point.

Anyway, the barbecue was fun.

Owing to Christmas and Boxing Days, this work week is going to be truncated.

I've still got presents to draw for certain relatives. Owing to the family celebrating a combination of Gregorian and Julian calendar editions, though, I may yet have a little time to get that done well.

That, and some laundry chores.

More later...

I've yet to visit the Diefenbunker. It's on my bucket list.

That's how today's felt, weather issues notwithstanding. Which was a good reinforcement to last night's post-CAN-CON 2012 news and festivities at Colonnade Pizza's Centretown restaurant.

(More on that veiled good news likely to be forthcoming either on can_con_news or on our Facebook group in due course.)

Went out to the Geek Market at the Sportsplex and met up with several friends this morning, went back downtown to get caught up on stuff with the Writers Festival organizers, and right now I'm updating the job search diary.

Which is also a good balm for the soul, having found ads for jobs I'd like to do for a living this week...

Research at City Hall went well. So did writing workshop.

Tomorrow, there may be room for improvement.