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Accentuate the positive

January 24, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters
Songwriters: Johnny Mercer / Harold Arlen

The Girl was talking on the phone this morning to a dear friend (the same dear friend who lived with us for a while last year and now resides in Vancouver). As do many such conversations in these days much of the talk concerned the vicissitudes and restrictions of life under lock-down.

This is hardly surprising given the circumstances.

The Girl did – however – perhaps for the first time since this whole thing began (and I am referring here solely to the pandemic) venture the opinion that there was finally some light at the end of the tunnel (and that it was not an approaching… yada, yada, yada… hopefully the gentle reader will already have eagerly consumed this recent post!).

The point is that – to the ‘reasons to be cheerful’ outlined in that post can now be added another and perhaps even more important one – the Government of British Columbia has revealed its COVID-19 Immunization Plan.

Hoorah! Hoorah! and thrice… Hoorah!

If nothing else this finally gives a rough shape to how the pandemic will be rolled back and normal life given a chance to commence its revival. This is the broad sweep of things:

…and this is the phase into which we both fall:

Phase 3

Timeline: April to June 2021

  • People aged 79 to 60, in five year increments:
    • 79 to 75 (D1 April, D2 May)
    • 74 to 70 (D1 April/May, D2 May/June)
    • 69 to 65 (D1 May/June, D2 June/July)
    • 64 to 60 (D1 June, D2 July)

Now – this means that if all goes well we will have been fully immunized by the end of July. Further it perhaps means that by the time the nights start drawing in and it becomes infeasible to socialise in the open air – we might actually be able to do so once again in the old-fashioned way – indoors and round the dining table…

…and that is bloomin’ good news and reason enough to celebrate (safely)!

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Onward!

January 20, 2021 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached”.

Franz Kafka

I predicted in my recent ‘Review of the Year‘ post that this effort (a look ahead to the year just started) would either be dealt with in short order (there being nothing much to which to look forward) or really rather difficult to write.

We shall see which turns out to be the case…

Now – I could write a very simple list of things that we would like to achieve this year. It would look something like this:

  • To get to see family and friends – face to face!
  • To be able to entertain again
  • To dine out
  • To see some live theatre
  • To enjoy some live music
  • To attend a live sporting event (preferably Rugby!)
  • To be able to travel… anywhere!

I do realise, of course, that these objectives may well be very similar – with minor variations – for many, many people this year. In the spirit of making a proper effort, however, I will see if I can do a little better in terms of our particular situation.

Extremely blessed as we are financially with the relative security of our pensions (who would have ever thought to be able to write such a thing) and our on-going part-time jobs, the one positive side-effect of not being able to do any of the things on the list above is that we do not currently have any major outgoings. For this reason we have decided to invest a little further in renovations to our home.

Readers may recall that in the spring of 2017 we had our new deck built on the back of the house. In the winter of 2017/18 we tackled the greatest challenge, with the wholesale renovation of the main floor of the house. In 2020 we had the exterior redecorated.

All that remains is for us to do some upgrades and tidying up in our basement. Our main guest bedroom is down there and needs a proper bathroom in place of the lashed-together affair that it currently has. The small kitchenette needs remodeling and upgrading and the family room – that which we re-painted in 2019 – needs to have its purpose properly defined and to be re-jigged accordingly.  We are thinking that we may turn some of it into a small fitness room.

This is all currently in the planning stages with a view to being effected in the spring/summer.

As I say – we are both expecting to carry on working – at least part time. I am not teaching this term (too small an uptake) but may instead teach a condensed version of the course in the spring (summer) term. The Girl will continue three days a week at her volunteer agency and is still seeing clients with her other hat on. I too will continue to make and promote music with The Chanteuse – following whatever course that may take.

As things stand I don’t think we can look further ahead than this. Like everyone else – we wait and watch…

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Blue Monday

January 17, 2021 in Life as we know it | Permalink

The gentle reader will probably not need me to point out that tomorrow (for I write this missive on Sunday 17th January!) is known in some circles as ‘Blue Monday’… the most depressing day of the year!

It will also hardly be necessary for me to enumerate the more obvious reasons why this year in particular this January day already has a head start – even before taking into account the financial pressures of the festive season just passed – the generally grim weather throughout the northern hemisphere – the dis-incentives to indulge in exercise or to get out and about – the premature failure to keep up with any of the New Year’s resolutions that one was careless enough to make – the glacial pace with which the days grow longer – the seemingly endless wait for spring…

As suggested – I have not even mentioned the pandemic – the disturbing political situations in all too many places – the dismal fallout of Bre*it!

…and so on…

…and so on…

Is it any wonder that many of us find ourselves feeling a little – er… blue!

So – let us consider one or two cheerier things to raise our spirits a little:

  • The beginning of the end for the Orange One! (To be followed – one hopes – shortly afterwards by the end of the end!). I have fingers, toes, eyes – everything crossed that all goes smoothly and without drama this Wednesday.
  • The (various) vaccines! Yes – it will take a while but hope is so much better than despair and there are indications that the light at the end of the tunnel is not – after all – an oncoming train!
  • Snowdrops and buds on trees. Yes – they are already starting to appear. Nature is brilliant and just doesn’t do gloom. There’s a good example for us…
  • Technology! Yes – I know that there is much that needs to be done to sort out the inbalances and perversions that the major tech companies have – through their greed – allowed to become endemic… but this technology is currently keeping us in touch with each other and relatively sane. Two cheers for that!

OK – enough of that. In my next post I will look forward to the year ahead – something I have been putting off…

 

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Into the wild

January 13, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Well – I think that I can now officially report that the new Anam Danu album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – has been officially released into the wild!

You can – should you be willing to give it a listen – find it at many of the usual online outlets – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Bandcamp et al – whence it can be streamed, downloaded or purchased in the usual manner.

The best way to locate it is to visit the Anam Danu website at:

https://anamdanu.com

…where you will find information about the album and appropriate links to a number of the most common digital music sites.

We are awaiting physical CDs (wrapped in Martin Springett’s gorgeous artwork) to arrive from our supplier. For those who are sufficiently old-fashioned (like me!) that they prefer a physical object do let me know and I will happily send you a copy. It will be winging its way from the west coast of Canada, however, and if Canada Post’s recent Christmas performance was anything to go by I would advise hunkering down and settling in for a significant wait. Still, with lock-downs abounding around the world, what else do you have to do?

If you do have a listen – and like anything that you hear – we would be most grateful if you were to do us a huge favour by recommending it to someone else.

Thank you in advance. Enjoy!

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The excellent gift

January 11, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value”.

Charles Dudley Warner

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

Even those gentle readers who have been following these jottings since the get-go would be forgiven for not recalling the various pieces that I posted way back in 2012 concerning my search for – and subsequent purchase of – my first serious(ish) camera – the much appreciated little Fuji x10. This diminutive camera is getting a bit long in the tooth these days and – though I still use it regularly – it has on many occasions been usurped by the sheer convenience of the camera on whatever is my current cell phone. The choice has, of course, been hugely facilitated by the frankly amazing improvements in such phone cameras over the last decade.

I have, however, from time to time mulled over the prospect of upgrading to a better camera – not least on the several occasions during this last year on which The Girl asked me if I had ever contemplated so doing.

“Certainly…” – I reassured her – “but it isn’t something that is on my personal radar at the moment“. Too many other things on which to  focus.

The Girl – however – just loves to surprise me, particularly when she can do so to spectacularly dramatic effect. We had mutually agreed this year that our Christmas gift giving to each other would be restrained to the point of being positively abstemious. The impact was all the greater then – when after the expected exchange had been apparently completed – she completely stunned me by presenting me with a beautiful, shiny new camera.

Ladies and gentlemen – the Olympus OM-D E-M5 mk ii – complete with an Olympus 14-150mm telephoto lens!

For those interested in such things the OM-D E-M5 is a Micro Four Thirds compact mirror-less interchangeable lens camera. It has many of the features of a full DSLR but is smaller and lighter and considerably easier to carry when traveling. From my point of view it has the great benefit of having an electronic viewfinder (I wrote in my original postings on the x10 about my preference for the old-fashioned way of framing images).

The excellence of this gift does indeed lie in its appropriateness and The Girl – being who she is (excellent herself!) – does not do things by halves. She had spent a full three days online researching suitable cameras for me before venturing out to consult several of Victoria’s oldest established photographic outlets. Having finally found an ‘expert’ (hooray!) whose opinion she felt she could trust she made her decision – based on the sort of images that she knows I like to take.

Let us look a little more closely at those two images at the top of this post (you may wish to click on them to get the full effect):

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

These snaps of Mount Baker were taken from the same spot on our deck. The first I posted in the fall of last year. It was taken on full zoom and then cropped out of the resultant image – thus being enlarged further but with concomitant loss of detail. The second is the compete image – taken on the OM-D – at about 90% zoom.

I think that – considering the scale of the land in which we live – the gentle reader will be able easily to discern the benefits of having access to such a splendid device… once I have finished learning how to use it, of course!

Kudos to The Girl for having – as the aphorism goes – “knocked it out of the park!“.

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Connecting the dots

January 7, 2021 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”.

Steve Jobs

Yes – it’s that time of year again. Time to look back at the good intentions that I enumerated in the equivalent post last January – ahead of the first year of the new decade – and to determine just how well or how badly we did in our efforts to accomplish them.

Now – I hardly need to point out that 2020 did not turn out the way that it was expected to – for anyone… so, when I look down last year’s list I really don’t expect very much to appear in the ‘tick-done’ column.

The first point of business on last year’s list was actually a reference to the fact that we were – at that point – pleased to be playing host to a very long-time friend (particularly of The Girl’s – they having done some of their growing up together in Kamloops) who had been in urgent need of somewhere to live. It was truly a delight to have her with us, as she was until well into the summer. She is now working in Vancouver and we are delighted that she found considerably better fortune as the year progressed.

I mentioned that I was teaching a new course – an introduction to Computer Science – about which I had been quite nervous. As things turned out it went a lot better than I had expected and I found myself rather enjoying it – in spite of the fact that the shutdown with which we were inflicted in March resulted in my having to teach the last three weeks of the course online. I taught again in the autumn – this time entirely online – for upwards of thirty environmental science students whom I never met face to face. Strange times.

I also mentioned last January that we were going to run away for a week in February to Mexico. This we did – and had a lovely re-charging break there – though the COVID-19 lock-down undid a fair bit of the good work that had been done shortly afterwards.

The pandemic has disrupted so many lives – in some cases, of course, tragically – and The Girl and I feel particularly blessed in that we have been affected way less than have many others. We are very fortunate in that our property here on the peninsula affords us a very benign environment in which to be locked-down. I found teaching online to be less of a challenge than I expected, though it did take a fair bit of work in terms of preparation. The Girl works pretty much exclusively from home and that works reasonably well also. She thought at one point that her new business would have to go into hibernation whilst the pandemic lasted, but meeting clients in video-conferences has proved more effective than she expected it to – and she has found herself with rather more work than she anticipated.

I professed the hope, in last year’s missive, that I might get the opportunity to do some more music-making with The Chanteuse. As regular readers will be aware, things turned out to be considerably better than we feared might be the case – and we contrived to record a whole new album purely working online. I will post more news on that front in just a few days from now.

Naturally all travel plans (post-Mexico) went out of the window, something that we don’t expect to see changing anytime soon.

I rather suspect that the companion post to this one – in which I look forward to the year ahead – will be considerably harder to write and probably also considerably shorter, as it is very difficult to tell how things are going to pan out over the coming months.

I will, however, do the best that I can.

 

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Here comes the rain again

January 3, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion

Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart

First things first… The Imperceptible Immigrant and the Kickass Canada Girl wish you all a (slightly belated) Happy New Year.

This Christmas period was always going to be an odd one, given that the necessary response to the pandemic was to curtail much habitual yuletide activity. We attended no gatherings of friends or family – we went to no Christmas-tide theatrical or musical events – we entertained no gatherings of like-minded souls for Christmas feasting.

In the circumstances perhaps the only Christmas-related activities in which we might have been expected to engage would have been the bracing and frequently blustery walks that we use at this time of year to help us counteract the expected surfeit of good cheer (too much food and drink!). Regular readers may recall that I normally take a camera with me on such jaunts – the resultant snaps featuring routinely within these postings.

This year – sadly – there have been no such expeditions. Not – I should hasten to add – for COVID-19 related reasons, but quite simply because for the last week (and more) it has not stopped raining…

…and raining – on occasion – in what can only be described as a biblical manner. Well – we do live on the we(s)t coast of Canada!

Bah!

Oh well – one really mustn’t grumble (no – really one mustn’t!). Things could be much, much worse – and at least we get to sleep in, cuddle up in front of the fire and watch old films and satirical reviews of the year (laugh? I nearly… er – didn’t!).

So – that’s all good then…

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Illustrating the story – 2

December 27, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Having described in my last post how we came to be lucky enough to have Martin Springett designing for us the cover of our new album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – this post demonstrates how Martin’s design evolved from the draft pencil drawing to the finished artwork.

Martin was generous enough to keep us informed throughout the process and watching the eventual artwork slowly emerge was a fascinating and valuable lesson.

From the draft Martin drew the final outline of cover in a larger form:

He then started to fill in the detailed shading – still working only in monochrome:


…until the final form was complete:


The image was then digitised and coloured on the computer. Doing so has the significant advantage that different colour values can be tried before the final version is settled upon. Martin also added the titling and borders to turn the wonderful image of the Goddess into a CD cover.

 

At this point the artwork was sent to us – in digital form – so that we could submit it to our chosen Digital Music distributor and to work it up into a cover for physical CDs:


Martin is in a position to be able to choose from whom he accepts commissions and we are greatly honoured that agreed to design and create our album artwork for us. Do check out Martin’s splendid website – as well as that of his band – The Gardening Club.

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Illustrating the story – 1

December 26, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“Album covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story”.

Peter Blake

The fabulous cover for our new CD – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” was created for us by Toronto-based musician and artist – Martin Springett.

That we ended up with such an excellent and fitting cover is entirely down to the Chanteuse. She describes how it came about:

“How I was connected with Martin is through a friend and work colleague of my husband’s named Joan Steacy.  Joan is an award-winning graphic novelist and instructor at Camosun College’s Comic and Graphic Arts program.  Joan was over one day and I had her listen to a track from the new ‘Anam Danu’ album.  She said the music reminded her of her friend Martin’s music, and then she explained that he was also fabulous graphic artist who had done album covers for his band, and other bands, as well as being a children’s book illustrator“.

The Chanteuse investigated Martin’s website and found that the style of his artwork fitted with thoughts that she already had in mind for the CD cover. Joan put the Chanteuse in touch with Martin – she called him and introduced us and asked if he might be prepared to take on a commission for us. Having listened to some of the tracks from our first release – “Winds of Change” – Martin most kindly and generously agreed to take on the project.

Martin and the Chanteuse engaged in an email exchange to determine the elements that the cover should include. Martin sent her examples of previous works in similar styles to those that they were discussing and the Chanteuse sent him images of Celtic designs that she had sourced.

Common ground having been agreed upon, Martin quickly came up with some initial ideas as to the form that the cover might eventually take. These lovely drawings show how it rapidly evolved. (Note that we had clearly at that point not settled on a final title for the album!).

 

 

 

Martin wrote of making the figure “more lively“; of creating “a big gesture that would flow across the square shape“. This is what he came up with:

 

We loved it and immediately gave it the thumbs up. We loved the flow and movement of the Goddess herself – we loved the elements of the circle of life that have been incorporated and we loved the way that Martin had pulled into the image ideas and themes that we had addressed in the songs on the album.

We eagerly anticipating seeing the finished cover. The process by which Martin turned his draft into the finished artwork will be the subject of my next post.

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It’s Christmas, Jim…

December 25, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

…but not as we know it!

(Parodying a line that was never actually in Star Trek!)

There is no getting away from the fact that this is a Christmas unlike any that we have known. In fact, unless one is old enough to remember the Second World War it is highly unlikely that such a level of disruption to the normal cycle of celebration will have been experienced before. None the less, we will persevere – because that is what we do. And come next year – when much has returned to a state considerably closer to the ‘old normal’ – we may find it difficult to recall just how weird this one was.

In the meantime…

…to friends, acquaintances and gentle readers…

…from the Kickass Canada Girl and the Imperceptible Immigrant…

we wish you a safe and peaceful Christmas and a Happy Hogmany!

Sláinte!

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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