Onset of Winter: Canada Edition

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s the hap…happiest season of all.”

You would expect that to be the soundtrack in my head this time of year, especially since I gushingly declared my love for winter a few years ago. “I love winter” , I said, “the colder it is - the more I like it”, I said, “winter is my favourite season”, I said. 

Well, I’m now facing the prospect of my fourth winter in a country that has one of the harshest winters in the inhabited world. Maybe I should reevaluate. 

Now, it is true that Montreal is by no means the coldest city in Canada and of my three winters here, I have spent one in balmy British Columbia. To give you an inkling of how balmy, consider this: so proud are the people in BC of their mild winters that even the universities there label their January to May term - the "Spring" term - while the rest of the country doesn’t even begin to see the snow abating until early May. They go from the "fall" term to the "spring" term and completely bypass winter - both literally and figuratively. So, by all accounts I have had it easy so far. 

But I’ve still seen middle of the day lows of -35C (with wind chill), I know now that a clear sunny day in winter is bitingly cold while an overcast day is actually bearable, I know now why freezing rain is so dangerous, I have experienced the breathlessness that comes with doing something so simple as walking 750 meters against the wind on an exposed street with freezing wind blowing in your face and I know what it feels like to have your toes and fingers frozen so completely that they hurt and continue to tingle for long after they’ve been warmed. Infact, it sometimes hurts more while warming up than when it was cold. 

After living through Montreal winters, I know enough to know that the balmy -1 to -3C that it usually was in my part of BC was actually ‘Canadian spring’. So the question remains - do I still love winter?

Yes, I do. I still do. Really. And let me show you why:

1. A strange calm seems to envelop the city and makes everything more beautiful

View of Montreal from across the frozen St. Lawrence river

The steps leading down from Mont-Royal - Montreal's central park.

2. Even the view outside your window defies you to be blasé about it

3. And the countryside is just magical.

A horse drawn carriage used by traditional cabana sucrès - sugar shacks - to collect maple sap

This is actually inside a protected park where animals choose to live but may come and go as they please. Deer do not roam the streets of Montreal. Yet.

 How can I not love this season that turns everything into this pretty, frozen wonderland.

Now excuse me while I go crank up the heat.

Blog 2.0

Yesterday I decided to revive my blog. I had been toying around with the idea of reviving this space for sometime now and the blog has not been very far from my thoughts for very long. But even though I have never been a regular or prolific blogger, it still surprised me to log in and find that I had actually let this space drift for five years!

Five years is a long time and apart from bringing home the realisation that I am quite definitively marching out of a phase of my life where I may be called 'young',  it got me thinking about what I have been up to all this while. I have become a graduate student - twice over and got married. Each year, as if on clockwork, I have moved cities, countries and continents and with each move have embarked upon a new, exciting phase of life. So I suppose, unsurprisingly, blogging has fallen by the wayside though I do wish I had kept blogging as it would have been an interesting window into a period of much change and excitement. But now that for the first time in five years I have the prospect of stability, it feels like a good time to come back to this space.

But the next question was whether to revive this blog or to start a new one. After all, presumably I have changed in these five years and a changed outlook requires a changed blog address. No? Well, not necessarily.

Though it is tempting to wipe the slate clean and start afresh, I do wish to retain my blogging focus on.. well... 'Poetry, Books and Other Things'. Also, I think it might be fun to take a look back after a while of coming back to blogging to see if I really have changed much and having a single space in which to make the comparison seems easier. But most importantly, retaining this space feels like coming back to an old friend and there is some comfort in that. I don't want to make a new friend just because I have lost touch a little bit. I just want to pick up the strings of an old friendship, say hello, know that I am welcome and pick up from where we'd left off.

So, shall we...

On Poetry

As regards poetry, I have always believed,

That I could’nt write, but could well read,

For to write words that would rhyme,

Was as alien to me as dance or mime.

Then I chanced upon Ogden Nash,

He, with his rhymes, nouns n verbs all mish mash,

And yet there always was a fine poem,

Child, adult or beast, it had some’fin for all of ‘em.

Here at last was simple poetry,

That had done so well. Yippee!!

So did that mean, there was a chance?

For poetry even from me, a simple dunce?

But then, I began to wonder,

If I hadn’t made a blunder,

What if, and not vise-verse,

But ‘Ogden Nash’ had made the verse?

And then, for me there was no hope,

And all I could do was sit and mope.

Changes

I was just revisiting my blog today.. you know, getting familiar with what I should already have been familiar with. And I discovered this old post of mine. Made me sigh to think that there used to be a time when I used to have readers…:) The post also made me want to make some changes to my blog.. try out the new ‘template designer’ by blogger and generally play around with my blog. So I have spent a pleasant hour and a half painstakingly customising a template and just when it was about perfect, changing it into this off-the-shelf minimalistic version. Somehow I think I like this better now. I have also updated my ‘currently reading’ and ‘recently read’ columns, and have trimmed my blogroll too. Hah!! I have also removed a few redundant features and have basically cleaned out my blog. So, please, oh please dear imaginary reader mine, do stroll around this new version of my blog, and murmur appreciatively to yourself…

Blogrolls

I almost started by apologising for the long hiatus from blogging. But then I figured - who am I kidding, this is more for personal satisfaction than for an actual readership. None exists anymore anyway. This realisation has given me the freedon therefore to post on the most inane of subjects. Blogrolls.

I was recently deleted from a blogroll because the owner of that particular blogroll likes to keep his blogroll short. (Ok, this entire post is actually so that I could put that sentence in!) I was most inconvenienced due to this newest obsession of his. See, I like to keep my blogroll short too. That is why, my blogroll is never an accurate account of all the blogs I follow. Actually, it is not even necessary that I follow the blogs appearing on my blogroll. Mostly, I use my blogroll as the shortest route to access the blogs that I do follow. i.e. I use my blogroll essentially to access other people's blogrolls.

So now you see why a trimming of the blogrolls by a person on my blogroll would greatly inconvenience me? Especially since I do not make any attempt to pagemark / bookmark the blogs I like or even remember their url nor do I know how to effectively use web history etc.? So here is an appeal to all on my blogroll - please do spare a thought for your readers - do not detrimentally tamper with your blogrolls. Additions will always be welcome ofcourse! :)

Updates on Blog

This is a post meant to show off (or maybe draw attention to things which might fetch brickbats). Anyway this is what I have been up to on the blog front in the few days that I have been at home. I have added: -

1. My own Blog roll - finally!
2. Rearranged the list of other blogs I visit so that it looks like a left-justified pyramid - this is because I liked the way the 'Reluctant Rebel' had done it!
3. A slide show of some samples of my pathetic attempts at photography - This is why I love digicams- they let everybody attempt fancy photography without wasting the 'reel'. :-)
4. An application which should show us all the 'Endangered Animal of the Day' - I liked this. Period.
5. An application which should give us one bit of completely useless information per day - Hopefully this should keep the four people who read this blog interested even during my inevitable and long absences - i.e. if they even notice the absences.. :-)
6. Two lists - one which tells you the books that I have recently read - i.e comparatively recent; and the other which tells you the books that I am currently reading. Note of caution - this list may not change all that quickly if the rate at which I am currently reading books, continues!
7. And the list of my 'followers' as Blogger calls it. Though why I chose to make the fact that this blog is not widely read, public, I do not know. Maybe it is simply a way of saying thank you to the kind soul.

That's it. this post was also a way of masking (unsuccessfully) the fact that I have nothing substantial to write about. So till I do, Cya.

Changes

Hmm... so i've changed the name of my blog (for those who don't know.. the earlier name was - "There are books and there are BOOKS")... since I was anyway not sticking to the blog name and the stated purpose... I thought it might be slightly less embarrassing to change the name itself! Also, this name serves to accomodate my indecisive self ... hence the 'other things'. :-)

A 'Bookie's' Dilemna.....

A strange problem seems to have assailed me these days. Though my hunger to read more and more books has not diminished, my reading speed seems to have come down considerably. This has meant that along with the other things that I have to fit into the mandatorily allotted 24 hours, (most notably eating, sleeping and pursuing legal studies), I barely get anytime at all to devote to reading. I am also afraid that the laziness which has been creeping up stealthily on me for the past 3 1/2 years has finally caught up even with my book-reading habit. I had a good mind to blame the complex legal language that we are forced to 'interpret' and 'reinterpret', as the reason for all these ills. The only thing that deterred me from doing so was the 'sudden' realisation that this peculiar illness does not seem to have striken my fellow law school-ites at all. They are still busy devouring all the books that they can get their hands on. To top it all off, a subsidiary illness that has befallen me is the leave-books-half-read illness. This illness, let me warn you it is an extremely irritating, guilt inducing and depressing sort of illness with no known cure except a cast iron willpower.

Therefore, I have decided on a new-and-early new year's resolution:
1. Read all the books you want to,
2. Finish them all,
3. Do not let the ignominy of having to return books to the library - unread after having gotten it re-issued fall on you,
4. Also if possible, avoid having to reissue books from the library. Finish it within the original three days.

These resolutions, if at all I keep them, (i'll write a post on the fate of most of my new year resolutions another day) ought to bring me slowly back to my old self. So... wish me luck!!!

Blogging......

Well..... I just realised that this blog has already deviated from its stated objective. This was intended to be mostly a Book review blog.. though 'other things too could find their way here from time to time'. Well........ if the pattern of my posting-so-far continues.... the blog will become an 'other-things' blog and BOOKS will then have to try and find their way here from time to time.... :-)

But with this realisation has come another one, namely, that it is not easy to write. I fully intended (and still do) to try and keep this blog as updated as possible. But that [to my shock and disbelief :-)] meant that I had to keep posting. Now THAT was a bit of a problem. Though I am not a complete novice at the art of putting pen to paper but I have never written on a public forum before and I find that it is a completely different ball game altogether. It comes with its own set of problems. The most notable being:

1. A blog, especially an unadvertised one, (even among the writer's friends circle) which hopes to attract readers solely by the merit of the writing, needs to be interesting. However, even though my vain self might find my own writing interesting, it need not always pass the test with the myriad readers. Therefore.......

2. A blogger needs to be honest, to himself and to his readers. Now, that again, I have a problem with. Not that I am a cheat or a liar!!!!!! Just that I find it impossible to lay down my private thoughts on a public forum. I had thought that those 'thoughts' would be limited to my thoughts and experiences in my 'life' alone. Therefore, since I wanted to experiment with blogging and still protect my privacy, I chose the one thing I truly love - reading books - and decided to blog on that. Now I find, that to lay down my thoughts and opinions on the various books that I read, and especially the ones I really like, is just as difficult. I realised that I regard my opinions on books and the reasons why I like some and dislike others, as private too. A lot of people may not agree with this assessment but I believe that the same book may connect with different people in different ways and it is not always easy to express this connection.

3. Also, another reason why I have told almost nobody about this blog is because I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether the writing is good enough. I don't care what the wider world thinks about me. I don't care... at least not too much.... about what other anonymous bloggers will think about my blog and the writing in it. It too matters, but only to serve as an impersonal feedback, which may be used to improve the blog. However, I do care, deeply, what people I care about, think of this blog. I care for their opinion. It would therefore not be nice, for this blog to be dismissed (however kindly or subtly) by them as being a not-nice blog.

Call it what you want - inferiority complex (?), inability to rise above the trap of other people's conceptions, insecurity, immaturity, not having confidence in oneself, fear, cowardice, humility (?), false modesty............... the list can go on. But this is true of me.. whether I like it or not. I am also reasonably certain that these issues cannot be peculiar to me alone. I, therefore, have a new-found respect for the blog space and for those bloggers who are able, easily, succinctly and interestingly, to put their point across.

I have been more honest in this post (on a public forum!!!!!) than I probably intended to be when I started writing this post. The confidence must be from knowing the fact that not many know about this blog (3 on last count. 2 - only guess and 1 - knows) and the one who knows has most probably forgotten or at the very least will be too busy to come read it. :-)

First Post!!!!!

Well, hello everybody!!!! Let me start by introducing my blog:

1. This blog is intended to primarily be a book review blog, however other kinds of posts too may find their way here from time to time.


2. This blog does not purport to be any scholarly review of any pathbreaking books... it is simply my opinion of the books I read.


3. These books may be widely-read-long-ago-by-everybody-and-anybody books or relatively lesser read books. I read what catches my fancy at that point of time.


4. I am an inherently lazy person and therefore the posts may be few and far in between.

I do hope you will find this blog tolerable!!!