MezzoDiva the Operatic Knitaholic

2011-01-16T14:42:00.003-05:00

I'm confused. I keep thinking today is Monday and folks are in the office. My brain has been in perpetual motion for weeks, juggling tax prep, wills, legal jargon, mortgages, recalcitrant employers who owe me fees, meanwhile problem-solving a new pattern and developing new performance projects in my spare (!) time. How do I get the hamster off the wheel?

I might drop in here from time to time, but I do seem to have lost my blogging mojo (if I ever really had it). However, I still have quite a lot to say online and I'd love to share it with you and connect and find out what you are up to... If you're looking for me, you can find me on Facebook, over here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=796570093 and occasionally over here: Ramona Carmelly
at my other blog.

See ya round the webosphere!

Ciao for now!

2011-01-12T05:33:00.001-05:00

Please excuse the MezzoDiva's prolonged absence from this blog, as well as S&B/knit-nites and other activities not essential to life-support. We will resume more regular online programming shortly.

P.S. YES, there has in fact been KNITTING!

2010-03-16T18:31:00.004-04:00

Fairytales can come true, it can happen to you...

Whew! I've been out of communication for a while, haven't I? It's been a whirlwind since the new year, with my trip to New York and a Quintimacy concert and rehearsals and more rehearsals (and yet more rehearsals)...

It's my day off and I'm attending to all the domestic duties I've neglected while rehearsing for an upcoming production of Cendrillon, Massenet's sparkling rendition of the Cinderella fairy tale. I've scrubbed the kitchen sink and counters, the bathroom sink, the toilet, and hubby has filled the washing machine with hot water and vinegar to try and eliminate the residue it's leaving on the supposedly clean laundry. I'm about to head up to scour the shower tiles and tub. Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

I have been invited to return as a guest artist to my alma mater, the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music (one of the foremost musical training programs in Canada), to perform a leading role in the first opera to be presented in the new acoustically perfect and exquisitely designed Koerner Hall. If you're in the GTA, come hear this magical work performed by the bright new generation of up and coming singers with conductor Uri Mayer and the Royal Conservatory Orchestra, on Saturday, March 20 at 7:30 pm, Sunday, March 21 at 2:00 pm, Tuesday, March 23 at 11:00 am and Thursday, March 25 at 7:30 pm.

Cendrillon (Cinderella) by Jules Massenet (1842-1912) is a re-telling of the familiar story. The Cinderella theme may have originated in classical antiquity, with the story of Rhodopis by the Greek Historian Strabo. The tale was written down in China during the year 830 by Tuan Ch'eng Shih who referred to it then as an old story. Of the most commonly read versions, a somewhat barbaric one by the Brothers Grimm and a more refined one by the upper class seventeenth century French writer Charles Perrault, the composer and his librettist Henri Cain (1859-1937) chose the latter. Massenet's rendition is a wonderfully constructed piece of musical theatre, where the sublime romanticism of the forlorn lovers is juxtaposed against the ethereally magical scenes of the fairy godmother and the outrageous shenanigans of the step-mother and her daughters.

We are deep into dress rehearsals - and it’s so much FUN! I am playing the wicked step-mother, which works for me very well vocally and temperamentally. It's also the perfect balance (and antidote) to the darker material I've been working in for most of the last year and a half: several amazing V-day shows (The Vagina Monologues and Any One of Us) a brilliant but harrowing opera about the holocaust (And the Rat Laughed), and the intensity of the Wagner arias I worked up for a recent vocal competition in New York.

Side note: I'm a hybrid creature - something of a vocal chameleon, possibly a closet soprano, probably zwischen-fach: this means my voice doesn't fall neatly into a category or 'fach'. I have a fine higher register, as well as a rich lower one, and I am operatically well-suited to zwischen-fach repertoire (that is, actual soprano roles which are occasionally taken by mezzos and vice versa) as well as the Verdi and Wagner mezzo roles, which often require the same range as the soprano, but not the same tessitura. Here's an easy analogy: the elevator goes to all the same floors, but the approach to the penthouse is a little different and while we love to visit, we prefer not to live there! It seemed that everyone who heard me had their own opinion about my fach and for years I was subjected to a tug of war between those in the soprano camp and those cheering for the mezzo team. Temperamentally, though, I am definitely much better suited to the mezzo repertoire. These roles are only rarely the heroines; rather usually we play the spoilers - witches, bitches, hags and whores, with the occasional mother, good or bad, thrown in for variety. This makes for much more interesting character fodder for my taste - not to mention the inherent therapeutic cathartic potential ;)

Now, don't get me wrong. I love to sing profoundly dramatic rep (whether mezzo or soprano). I adore the great sweeping Verdi and Wagner roles for their vibrant or lush textures, as well as Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti for their fluidity and fioritura. Alas, Mozart and Puccini did not write much for the mezzo-soprano, though I had a blast in recent years singing Ciesca in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Marcellina in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro - both brilliant comedy shows with some very tight ensemble writing (in the Puccini, I even got to sing some fabulous High C's!). In addition, I am one of those freak singers who loves contemporary repertoire - passionately. But I have to admit that for stage work I wouldn't be bored doing comedy for the rest of my life. It’s ultimately the most gratifying for me.

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you...

Comedy is actually harder to do than the romantic or dramatic stuff. The timing and nuance of every action has to be so precise, in the exact musical place to be funny, and you have to play it all just as believably as drama. You don't get up and act funny. You have to be truly as committed to achieving your character's goal as you would be in a dramatic context. Good comedy comes out of good writing: the dialogue and the circumstances create incongruous scenarios and motivate absurd behaviour, and the less aware your character is of all that, the more hilarious the audience finds it all. Of course, there are physical expressions and actions that are funny, but they all have to come out of a genuine intention to get what your character wants in the scene.

Want to see a good example? Come to Cendrillon and I'll be happy to provide it!

Well, I'd better go finish my own chores then practise. Got places to go, people to sing with. Rehearsals to knit through.

2010-02-21T23:57:00.002-05:00

HELP for HAITI and the DRC
(reposted from earlier this month)

The Campanula and Hibiscus Sock patterns have been re-issued as HIBISCUS FOR HAITI and CAMPANULA FOR THE CONGO

In 2007 & 2008 the Campanula for the Cure and Hibiscus for Hope sock patterns, together with some very sore muscles, blistered feet and 60 km (twice) helped me raise some $13,500.00 for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer. As there continues to be interest in these patterns, I have reformatted the patterns and I'm offering them as incentives to knitters to donate to these two other worthy causes.

I have re-purposed Hibiscus to raise funds and support for Médecins Sans Frontières, whose efforts in Haiti have been in demand both before the catastrophic earthquake on January 12, 2010 and even more so since then.To obtain the HIBISCUS FOR HAITI pattern, simply make a donation in any amount to MSF at Donate to MSF's Emergency Relief Fund. Then notify me here or on Ravelry and I will send you the pattern.

MSF’s devotion to this calling, despite personal risk and losses, is truly heroic. MSF trauma centres were seriously damaged by the quake. Latest announcements confirm the quake killed 4 Haitian MSF staff; 4 others who’d recently worked with them also died; 6 are still missing. They just rolled up their sleeves and moved their treatment clinics to tents and mobile centres in the open. Their staff has a good sense of what’s going to be needed in the short term as well as how much the rehabilitation of emergency and other healthcare in the country will cost in the long term. As the worldwide generosity continues, donations to their Emergency Relief Fund give MSF the maximum flexibility to respond directly where it’s most needed in Haiti, while ensuring they can still act rapidly should another disaster strike.

Meanwhile the world is distracted from so many other areas where lives continue to be ravaged by unbelievable cruelty. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo it is more dangerous to be a woman or a child than a combatant, as women and girls remain targets for violence. Despite the supposed formal cease of hostilities, several armed groups still use sexual violence as a weapon of war. Physical and economic insecurity still characterize the lives of women and girls and the threat of and the use of violence are constants. Discrimination against women and girls underlies the violence perpetrated against them, and the current climate of impunity allows the many forms of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, to flourish. For more information, please see: MSF Top Ten Humanitarian Crises of 2009: DRC and V-DAY: Sexual Violence In the DRC

I have re-purposed Campanula to raise funds and support for the ongoing crisis of women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
To obtain the CAMPANULA FOR THE CONGO pattern, simply make a donation in any amount to V-day at Donate to V-Day. Then notify me here or on Ravelry and I will send you the pattern.

2010-01-25T12:22:00.001-05:00

Contrasts

I just returned from a whirlwind week of singing and fun in New York, where I participated in a vocal competition. I had the pleasure to reconnect with long-lost family and friends both new and old, I got to absorb some art and culture, and I went to a Broadway show - A Little Night Music.

Now, I am a very picky theatre-goer and I tend to hold very high standards as an audience member so pardon me while I simply GUSH: If you are in NYC you must (absolutely, unequivocally MUST) go to see A Little Night Music. It is magnificent! Brilliant in the seamlessness and economical simplicity of it's staging and beautifully crafted, nuanced and wonderful performances from everybody! It's at the Walter Kerr (on 48th St). Even if the only ticket you can get is expensive - it's worth it. It is as close to a perfect production as I have ever witnessed. If I did not have to come back rehearsals and performances of my own, I would have extended my stay over the weekend to see it another two or three times!

While I was away, in response to the horrific crisis in Haiti, I pledged to match dollar-for-dollar the money I spend on myself that week with a donation to Doctors without Borders and Haitian relief efforts - and I challenged everyone on my Facebook page to do the same! I had no secure internet connection while away, so the total will be donated now, and I have to say it's a whopper!

I am also instigating further efforts to raise funds and support for this cause as well as the ONGOING crisis of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where despite the supposed formal cease of hostilities, several armed groups still use sexual violence as a weapon of war. In the DRC it is more dangerous to be woman than a combatant as women and girls remain targets for violence. Physical and economic insecurity still characterize the lives of women and girls and the threat of and the use of violence are constants, discrimination against women and girls underlies the violence perpetrated against them, and the current climate of impunity allows the many forms of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, to flourish.

Some of you may also know me as MezzoDiva the Operatic Knitaholic, as well as the designer of the Campanula for the Cure and Hibiscus for Hope sock patterns, which together with some very sore muscles, blistered feet and 60 km (twice) helped me raise some $13,500.00 for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer in 2007 & 2008.

Well, if I can scrape together some time this week, I intend to reformat and re-release those patterns as Hibiscus for HAITI and Campanula for the CONGO. It may have to wait a few days, though as I just returned from an exciting but strenuous week of vocal endeavours in NYC, I am juggling assorted family crises and medical emergencies (my 90 year-old mother-in-law is due to be released from a 3 week stay in the hospital this week) and I just dove into rehearsals for an upcoming opera and for the Quintimacy concert next weekend.

With the agreement of the artists, all proceeds from Quintimacy's upcoming salon will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières, whose efforts in Haiti have been in demand both before the catastrophic earthquake> on January 12, 2010 and since then.

MSF's devotion to this calling, despite personal risk and losses, is truly heroic. MSF trauma centres were seriously damaged by the quake. Latest announcements confirm the quake killed 4 Haitian MSF staff; 4 others who'd recently worked with them also died; 6 are still missing. They just rolled up their sleeves and moved their treatment clinics to tents and mobile centres in the open. Their staff has a good sense of what's going to be needed in the short term as well as how much the rehabilitation of emergency and other healthcare in the country will cost in the long term. As the worldwide generosity continues, donations to their Emergency Relief Fund give MSF the maximum flexibility to respond directly where it’s most needed in Haiti, while ensuring they can still act rapidly should another disaster strike.

2010-01-19T09:58:00.003-05:00

I just checked the Yarn Harlot's page and see the Knitters without Borders total is soaring. Keep up the good work, fiberistas!

I'm in NYC for a week for a singing competition and to visit friends - and I hope to see a Broadway show. I've pledged to match dollar-for-dollar the money I spend on myself this WEEK with an equal donation to Doctors without Borders and to Haitian relief efforts. I'm looking forward to making one doozy of a donation on Friday (when I get home to a secure connection) - and I hereby challenge everyone who reads this to do similarly:

Pick a day or the weekend or more, and what ever you spend for yourself that day, make a matching donation. Even if it's just lunch at McDonalds, every little bit helps. Just enjoy yourself and pledge to donate an equal amount to a reliable aid organization. The go have some fun and don't hold back - it's for a good cause!

For my Canadian friends, a list of registered charities can be found here.

For US and international friends, check with your local authorities for a registered charity.

2010-01-01T10:53:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year!An open letter written December 31, 2009 but not posted until today due to technical difficulties.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Tonight we take a soul-cleansing breath, release what is past, appreciate what remains, and look forward with new wisdom to what comes next. As this interesting year draws to a close, I'm both grateful for all the life-lessons of 2009 and very glad they are past. Most of all, I am very excited about embarking upon a brand new year. The coming weeks and months are burgeoning with so much goodness, both new beginnings and seeds sewn coming to fruition - my only complaint is that there are still only 7 days in a week and 24 hours in each of them, and I do need to sleep and attend to the mundane necessities of life (and laundry) sometimes. Here are just a few highlights:

I have been invited to return to my alma mater as a guest artist, the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music (one of the foremost musical training programs in Canada), to perform a leading role in the first opera to be presented in the new acoustically perfect and exquisitely designed Koerner Hall. I look forward to start rehearsals for Le Cendrillon (Cinderella) by Massenet in the New Year, performances coming up in March 2010 with conductor Uri Mayer and the Royal Conservatory Orchestra.

I’m taking a brief hiatus from these rehearsals in mid-January for a trip to New York City to compete in the Liederkranz Foundation’s vocal competition (Wagner Division). Strange, but true: I have never been to New York (other than briefly crossing the tarmac at La Guardia while changing planes), so I am very excited about this trip and look forward to spending a few days after the competition seeing the sights and visiting with friends and family.

In the meantime, I am also preparing for a very special concert with Quintimacy on January 31st. Quintimacy, a Toronto-based group I co-founded in 2008 with musicologist Eleanor Johnston, composer Chad Martin and pianists Joseph Ferretti and Elaine Lau, has become very dear to me. We are dedicated to rebuilding a close working relationship between performers, composers and personal engagement with the audience through intimate salon-style performance of new, rare and beautiful piano, vocal and chamber works in settings which foster a sense of immediacy and connection. You can hear highlights from Quintimacy’s first season online at Instant Encore.

Titled "Expressionists in the Melting Pot," the first concert of our second season will trace the impact of historical events on music from the early 20th century in Vienna to the strange realities of the new world, after the escape or expulsion of many composers from the Nazi regime, in a program which includes music by Berg, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Korngold, Weill. As always with Quintimacy, our concert includes entertaining informative anecdotes mixed with the music and will be followed by a reception with the artists. After our almost excessively intimate event of last season had our guests rubbing shoulders, with many at our very knees sharing cushions on the floor, we are delighted to announce that we’re moving into the more spacious yet still intimate Gallery 345, a beautiful space of over 2,000 square feet with 12 foot wood ceilings and plaster and brick walls, designed and lit for the display of art.

I’m also preparing for other engagements later in the year, including a tour with my alter-ego, Emily. Canadian composer Jana Skarecky’s one-woman opera about Emily Carr, EMILY, THE WAY YOU ARE, with libretto by renowned Canadian poet Di Brandt, premiered on April 20, 2008. I had the profoundly gratifying experience of giving voice to this boldly visionary and nonconformist Canadian artist and writer, as well as to several key figures in her life - her sisters, a spurned suitor, art critics and the Group of Seven’s Lawren Harris. (This performance, with pianist Joseph Ferretti and members of The Talisker Players chamber ensemble under conductor Gary Kulesha, was presented at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, through the New Music in New Places program of the Canadian Music Centre, and may be heard online at the CMC archives.)

On top of all this, in response to continual requests by audiences at various concerts for a recording (and I am truly honoured and not a little surprised every time this occurs), I will be entering the studio this year to fulfill my promises and record a CD. To that end, I am preparing a sublime selection of vocal works by contemporary Canadian composers, including oeuvres by Chad Martin and Maria Case, as well as Alex Eddington, and Catherine Magowan and Ian McAndrew (Note to composers who may still be working on or dreaming about their compositions for this project - and you know who you are – start your engines!)

I also have several interesting teaching engagements later in the year in assorted eclectic places, including a personal project about which I am very passionate: developing an inter-disciplinary creativity workshop by applying the performance-related techniques I use with singing students in group master-classes and cross-pollinating from there, using the true inner voice to facilitate free authentic expression for artists in other media, such as painting/sculpture/fibre-arts/writing, and more.

I send you all blessings for this New Year and ever beyond: Don't wait for someone else to elevate you to your potential. Make your own magic in the Universe. Captain your journey. Risk something. Trust your power, and most importantly ... believe!

Wishing you and all your loved ones a wonderful holiday and a life filled with love and laughter, health and happiness, peace and prosperity, and many happy returns!

XO – Ramona

2009-12-15T09:32:00.001-05:00

Expressionists in the Melting Pot!
(Gustav Klimt, "Die Musik")
Quintimacy,
with special guest artist, soprano Kristin Mueller-Heaslip
Sunday January 31st, 2010 at 4 PM
Gallery 345 at 416.822.9781
345 Sorauren Ave, Toronto, ON

Tickets: $25 ($15 for seniors & students)

PROGRAMME*:
Berg: Sieben Fruehe Lieder and an excerpt from Lulu,
Scriabin: Prelude and Nocturne for Left Hand Alone,
Schoenberg: Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke
as well as lieder by Korngold, cabaret-theatre gems by Weill,
not to mention other treats (aural and gustatory).

Join us as we trace the impact of historical events on music and with the divergence from the more intimate and accessible music forms and performances in the early 20th century after the escape or expulsion of many composers from the Nazi regime. As always with Quintimacy, our concert will be followed by a brief reception and includes entertaining informative anecdotes mixed with the music.

For more information and reservations please see our Facebook page (under groups), or call Gallery 345.

Quintimacy is a Toronto-based group dedicated to rebuilding a close working relationship between composer, performer and audience through intimate salon-style performance of new, rare and beautiful solo and chamber works. It was founded by musicologist Eleanor Johnston, composer Chad Martin and performers Ramona Carmelly, Joseph Ferretti and Elaine Lau in 2008.

* programme subject to change

2009-12-06T00:01:00.002-05:00

Never again.

For personal reasons I've been away from the blog for much of the last few months, but today I feel compelled to write.

Last year on this day, a Saturday, I sang in the synagogue morning service, and as usual near the end I participated in the saying of the mourner's kaddish. Though not required of me because my parents and siblings are all still living, it's something that I choose to do whenever I am in a synagogue (or any house of worship), in memory of all the members of my family lost over the years, in the Holocaust and later, through natural causes and by other circumstances. I say the prayer for my grandparents and my great-aunt and great-uncle, my great-grandmother Rivka (for whom I was named and who often feels present in the periphery of my life, though she died long before I was born and I never met her). I say the prayer for my husband's father who died in 2003 and for whom I continue to feel a deep affection. And I say it in solidarity with all parts of the human community that are dealing with lost loved ones every day.

That day last year was particularly poignant though. I know because I made a note of it in my calendar. That day I said Kaddish for all the women who have been the focus of rage and violence, often from men, sometimes known to them and sometimes not.

On December 6 1989, Marc Lépine, stalked through classrooms corridors and a cafeteria at the École Polytechnique in Montreal armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, on a deliberate and premeditated murderous rampage targeting women. He proceeded to kill fourteen women as well as injure four men and ten women before turning the gun on himself. In his suicide note he blamed feminists for ruining his life and in letters to his friends released later in the press, he outlined his motivation for the attack as supposedly reasonable anger towards feminists for seeking social changes that "retain the advantages of being women [...] while trying to grab those of the men."

Fourteen bright young lives were snuffed out in under twenty minutes in a brutal act of misplaced rage and hostility. Fourteen vibrant and creative women lost their opportunity to live and love and laugh, to build a life and to contribute their gifts to society, just because they had the temerity to aspire to become something more and one man saw their fortitude as a threat to his own thwarted ambition and self-esteem.

* Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
* Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
* Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
* Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student.
* Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
* Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
* Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk, École Polytechnique's finance dept.
* Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
* Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
* Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
* Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
* Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
* Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
* Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.

A White Ribbon Campaign was launched in 1991 by a group of men in London, Ontario, in wake of the massacre, for the purpose of raising awareness about the prevalence of male violence against women and commemorative demonstrations are held each year on December 6 across the country in memory of these slain women; numerous memorials have been assembled and the day has been designated National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, a call to action against discrimination and acts of hate against women.

I pray that one day soon campaigns like these will have educated men and women everywhere to the point that the fourteen women named above can finally rest in peace.

2009-11-04T18:09:00.004-05:00

North American Premiere of Israeli Opera:
Nov. 5, 7 and 8

I have the privilege to be a member of an exceptional cast in the North American premiere (and first new production) of a brilliant contemporary opera, Tschok Shel Achbarosh, offered by Opera York in conjunction with Holocaust Education Week. Performed in Hebrew with English surtitles, the dramatic story explores the multi-generational power of memory in a highly theatrical and musically inspiring production. It is an exquisitely wrought meditation on the past, present and future of Holocaust memory after the survivors are gone in a society which increasingly seeks to divert and sanitize its emotional experience.

The opera tells the tale of a young Jewish girl whose parents entrust her to a family of farmers living in a remote Polish village towards the end of the war. She is hidden in a dark potato cellar for over a year, with little food and only a rat for company. When the girl's parents no longer send money, the farmer's wife takes the girl to the village priest and urges him to kill her. Instead, he hides the girl in his church at great personal risk and ultimately rebels against a creator who abandoned his children. In 1999, the girl has become a grandmother, living in Tel Aviv. She, at first unwillingly and then inevitably, recounts her tale to her 12-year-old granddaughter, who is interviewing granny for a school project. In the year 2099, in a society dedicated to eradicating unpleasant emotions and experiences, two anthropologists are resolved to uncover the origins of the widespread myth known as the "Girl and the Rat". It is they who excavate this memory from its burial place, and in so doing recover their own humanity.

And the Rat Laughed goes beyond the typical testimony of eye-witness experience to the core that remains, composed of deep-rooted emotions hidden in dark cellars of our minds, and explores the concepts of how we view memories, what history will look like in the future and how we are shaping it all the time. The production features Israeli soprano Einat Aronstein who originated the lead role in Israel, with a cast of Canadian performers including Melanie Gall, Andrew Tees, Dion Mazerolle, Adriana Albu, Angela Burns, Ramona Carmelly and Gerrit Theule. The opera by Ella Milch-Sheriff and Nava Semel, is based on the bestselling novel by Nava Semel. The opera has been performed in Israel, Poland, Romania and South Africa.

Though modern, the music is entirely accessible, in turns evocatively disharmonic and richly lyrical. The text is poetically layered and stirring. Together, they braid the complexly interwoven plots, times and themes into a cohesive whole. The musicality and emotional conviction of the cast under supremely sensitive musical and stage direction brings to fruition one of the most compelling pieces of music-theatre I have ever encountered either as a performer or as audience.

If you are in the GTA hope you will take the opportunity to join us for this extraordinary event.

Opera York in partnership with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto present the North American premiere of the Israeli Opera, And the Rat Laughed. The critically acclaimed opera tells the story of a child in hiding during the Holocaust. AND THE RAT LAUGHED
by Ella Milch-Sheriff and Nava Semel
Thursday Nov. 5 at 8 p.m.,
Saturday Nov. 7 at 8 p.m.,
Sunday Nov. 8 at 2 p.m.
Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts
10268 Yonge Street
Tickets $35-40-45. Student groups ticket price: $10
Box office: (905) 787 8811
or online at http://richmondhill.ticketwindow.ca/

Opera York, led by Artistic Director Geoffrey Butler, and featuring the Opera York Orchestra and Chorus, is in its 13th season. And The Rat Laughed is being performed in the company's new home the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts. The company runs a subscription series of two operas a season, serving York's diverse population. For more information about Opera York, go to www.operayork.com.

Holocaust Education Week is the largest Holocaust education event in the world. Running Nov. 1 to 11, it features more than 160 educational and cultural programs devoted to Holocaust remembrance and education. For more information, go to www.holocausteducationweek.com.

2009-04-26T09:33:00.001-04:00

Last summer I embarked on a new venture with a group of like-minded musicians and Quintimacy was born: a Toronto-based group dedicated to rebuilding a close working relationship between composer, performer and audience. We were concerned about the lack of intimate and accessible performances of special and sometimes rare selections from the scope of vocal and chamber music and, much like Mickey and Judy, we decided to just do something about it.

The concept of a return to an intimate salon-style of music presentation with conversation, proximity and artistic immediacy began generating a buzz among artists and music-lovers, performers and audiences, with our very warmly received debut event on November 16. "Conversation, Canapes and Cancions" featured seldom heard songs by Henri Duparc and Federico Mompou, as well as witty inventive pieces for toy piano (yes, toy piano) by our own Chad Martin. February's audience thrilled to "Ravel and other Pleasures" with Maurice Ravel’s spectacular Chansons Madécasses for voice, piano, cello and flute, framed by instrumental solo and chamber works in a scintillating and eclectic program of exotic, passionate and evocative style.

We close this season with mirrored poetic expressions of love on May 3, 2009, featuring Richard Wagner's lush and rapturous Wesendonck lieder as well as Franz Liszt’s transcription of Isolde’s Liebestod, and culminating in the premiere of a new commissioned song cycle by Quintimacy’s resident composer Chad Martin, "i will open petal by petal myself," setting love poems by the inimitable ee cummings. As always, informative discussion of the pieces will be offered during the performance as well as light refreshments to follow.

Come experience the salon-style and hear these gems performed in an intimate and accessible environment of camaraderie, with conversation, good company and complimentary refreshments. Then come back next season as we begin to explore the impact of socio-political events in the early 20th century, in particular the dissolution and evolution of the more intimate and accessible musical forms and performance styles, especially after the escape or expulsion of many composers from Europe during the growth of the Nazi regime in Germany and beyond.
Venue is a lovely private home, on Avenue Road near St Clair.
(for privacy, specific directions will be provided to guests upon reservation)

TICKETS: regular $25, students/seniors $15, artists/under-employed TBA - please inquire.
Seating is limited. Please book in advance c/o:
eleanormaraj@gmail.com -OR- mezzodiva@sympatico.ca

* all programmes are subject to change without notice.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Artists:

Dynamic and versatile mezzo-soprano Ramona Carmelly has captivated audiences in opera, cabaret, jazz, concert and theatre roles from the sublime to the ridiculous in more than a dozen languages, and the critics have raved: "Her performance was a lesson in how deft acting can overcome the limitations of opera on the concert stage," (Opera Canada) and "Ramona Carmelly, with her plush mezzo, was outstanding." (Globe & Mail). In recent years, Ramona was a finalist for the Christina & Louis Quilico Award from the Ontario Arts Foundation and won a coveted position in the Apprentice Artist program with Des Moines Metro Opera. Most recently Ramona was featured with the Talisker Players in the premiere of Emily, the Way You Are, a one-woman opera about Emily Carr composed expressly for her. Previous highlights include the Alto solo in Mahler's Third Symphony with conductor Richard Bradshaw and one of the first PEN-Canada concerts in memory of slain WSJ correspondent Daniel Pearl.

Joseph Ferretti has performed extensively throughout Europe, Canada and the USA as both soloist and collaborative artist. Recent series appearances include NUMUS, the Banff Centre for the Arts, COC's Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre, and Canadian Music Centre's New Music in New Places. Joseph frequently performs as a duo pianist with Elaine Lau. Their recording of music by Jack Behrens is featured on an album release by Capstone Records. Dr. Ferretti has been on the piano faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2003.

Elaine Lau has appeared as keyboardist and soloist with Canadian orchestras, and has been broadcast on CBC and Public Radio in the United States, performing Canadian works. A new music enthusiast, Elaine has had the opportunity to work with many composers. Recent appearances include performances with the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, and on the NUMUS and Canadian Opera Company's Piano Virtuoso concert series. As duo-pianist with Joseph Ferretti, she has performed across Canada and the USA. In 2007, she was invited to present at the CFMTA/MTNA/ RCM Collaborative Conference. Elaine has served on the piano faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2003.

2009-03-21T14:17:00.001-04:00

When shepherds have too much free time on their hands.
(No, not like THAT. Get your mind out of the gutter)
Light-Up Sheep Art - Watch more Funny Videos

2009-03-15T11:45:00.011-04:00

What is V-day?*

* contents borrowed liberally from notes posted on Facebook by Jason D. Riddle, as well as V-day Toronto and V-day*

If you are not in Toronto and want to know what your city is doing for V-DAY events go to: V-day

V-Day is an international UN theatre festival and a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues and related artistic works. All proceeds go to various charities that make a tremendous difference in our community and around the world.

Last weekend a group of very talented and dedicated men and women came together in a “A MEMORY, A MONOLOGUE, A RANT AND A PRAYER.” Commissioned by V-Day for the first Until The Violence Stops festival which took place in June 2006 in NYC, this is an unabashed and disturbingly beautiful look at violence against women and a shout out to the world to demand an end to it. Inspired, funny, poignant, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and this groundbreaking collection of diverse voices rising up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of brutality, neglect, exploitation or "just a little put-down", together creating a true and profound portrait of this issue's effect on every one of us.

The second show of V-day Toronto 2009 opened last night with the one that started it all, Eve Ensler’s ground-breaking masterpiece “The Vagina Monologues.” A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, this play is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Based on interviews with over 200 women about their memories and experiences of sexuality, this stunning phenomenon that has swept the globe gives us real women's deepest fantasies and fears through stories of intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual self-discovery, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at the female body, ponder the female mind, or think of womanhood in quite the same way again. It is witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise. And GUYS, have no fear: it’s not hard to sit through, it’s funny, heart-warming, powerful, moving and awe-inspiring. This is truly a show for everyone.

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES
more info at V-day Toronto
Saturday March 14, at 7:30 pm and Sunday March 15, at 5:30 pm
The Capitol Theatre

The third show “Any One of Us,” makes its Canadian premiere later this month. Written by female inmates through an outreach program to incarcerated women in major federal prisons, AOOU reveals the connection between women in prison and the violence in their lives that often leads them there. This play is powerful, life changing - and the cast is amazing! (I'm biased because I'm stage managing this one, but IMHO if you can see only one V-day event this year, this is the one you must see.)

ANY ONE OF US: WORDS FROM PRISON
more info at V-day Toronto
Saturday March 28, 8:00 pm and Sunday March 29, 5:30pm at The Workman Theatre

This year, 2009, the global spotlight for V-day International is the Congo. The UN recently declared The Democratic Republic of Congo to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman. “Voices of the Congo” is being developed right here in Toronto, but due to time constraints the show will be held in the fall of 2009. In the meantime, an educational teach-in called “Congo 101” provides a crucial opportunity to inform and educate ourselves and each other about the circumstances in this region and the western world’s tacit complicity in the brutal atrocities perpetrated against the women who live there.

CONGO 101: The V-Day Teach-In
more info at V-day Toronto
Sunday April 19, 10:30am and 1:30pm at the Centre for Social Innovation

The last event, “Strike a Chord, Not a Woman,” is an unplugged benefit concert with several prominent Toronto Musicians, all men, all promoting non-violence against women.

STRIKE A CHORD, NOT A WOMAN, Benefit Concert
more info at V-day Toronto
Sunday April 19, 6:30pm at Trinity-St. Paul's Centre

I don’t think there is a single person out there who has not been affected by the violence committed against women. For the guys who might think this event is not for them, just think about ALL the women in your lives, your mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, girlfriends, wives, friends and all the other women who have come into your life. There is no way violence against women has not affected you in some way or another. Come help us speak out against the violence, come out and support your mothers, your sisters your lovers, your friends and indeed all women world wide. Come out in solidarity and show your support, be a part of the solution. I guarantee that you will have a new outlook when you leave.

“We must not abide by the violence one miserable person lets loose on another.
We must Shout and Scream until it STOPS!” – from MMRP

“We were worried about vaginas” – from The Vagina Monologues

“I DARE you to be a man of substance” – from Any One of Us

A male actor in the MMRP cast said recently, “I am a Feminist. If you think about it, being a Feminist is the same as being a Humanist. You cannot have Humanity without that which makes Humanity special.”

2009-02-23T16:50:00.003-05:00

Help! I've fallen down and I can't get up.

Well, not literally. But my get-up-and-go got up and went and apparently it took my knit mojo with it.

I am not sick anymore, but my energy level has not bounced back and I am ALWAYS tired. I've been trying to recover and get ready for yesterday's concert (which went just wonderfully, thank you, if I do say so myself) and that's taken up the sum total of my attention, motivation and strength.

But it's a sorry knitter's state I'm in. When I look through the list of WIPs in my Ravelry notebook or pull things out of my mountain of projects to visit with them for a while, all the enthusiasm I can muster is a feeble: "meh."

Any suggestions would be welcome. What do you do when the knitting blues come down?

2009-02-14T08:52:00.008-05:00

Why we do what we do.
Art vs. Entertainment: the spirit, power, purpose and truth of music and art in our world.

The following is transcribed from the welcome address to parents of freshman, given by Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

'If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.'”

2009-02-12T20:07:00.004-05:00

Well, hello!
Nice to see you here, too. Thanks for all the good wishes.

There's an ancient chinese curse, possibly apocryphal, that says:

"May you live in interesting times;
May you come to the attention of those in authority;
May you find what you are looking for."

It seems apt because I just had a couple of very "interesting" weeks. It’s been rather like the perfect storm! So it’s entirely possible my body and mind decided to abdicate and flee reality by getting me checked into a hospital or sanitarium.

I sprained my ankle pretty badly on some ice a couple of weeks ago, so I was housebound for a while. Then just when I could safely get around again, I developed an infection and was put on a 2-week course of antibiotics. Meanwhile I’m stressed from swimming with sharks (aka the property developers who want to buy our house and build condos) and the shifty contract they put together that essentially would let them reclaim their deposit almost on a whim, and though I have a good lawyer, all the correspondence and wrangling back and forth can be tricky while having a fever and pain and therefore no concentration.

But the guano really hit the proverbial fan around here last week when our bedroom ceiling leaked and then crumbled by my side of the bed around midnight last Monday. We had to let it dry, which was not a speedy thing, given the wet sort of weather we've been having in the last week. This past Monday night, my handy neighbour came over and helped us put in a new piece of drywall. I suspect our 2004 roofer screwed up (or perhaps left a hole deliberately), but we can’t find him anymore - the company doesn't seem to exist. Anyway, there is no point in replacing the roof because the house will be demolished in ~ 18 months. We will just have to patch the roof a bit in the spring.

So, thanks to the stress and all the crap in the air from the wet building materials and the formerly squirrel-&-raccoon infested attic, I spent several days with bronchitis, as well as the awful side-effects from the antibiotics, which included GI spasms and a blood pressure spike.

I've had maybe half a nerve left, it was always getting trampled and poor Richard was continually caught in the crossfire. He has been amazing, taking very good care of me, not to mention being possibly more worried about my condition than I've been. But thanks to my health challenges, my temper's been hair-trigger for all of February so far (please don't poke the wounded bear), and he’s been walking around like a shell-shocked war veteran.

I kept feeling worse and worse, but I thought it was just a tenacious bug and I should soldier on until the end of the prescribed course of treatment. WRONG! I went back to the doctor yesterday and now we know that it was a case of the cure being worse than the disease: apparently, I am allergic to the antibiotics I was taking for 12 days!

Now that I've stopped taking the offending drugs and started popping Benadryl like candy, I feel much better already and should be absolutely fine after a couple of days. Whew!

It will be nice to sing again. I've missed singing. And knitting. And sleeping well. And thinking clearly...

2009-02-08T18:38:00.004-05:00

Haiku

stitches in fever
sick knitter's delirium
will ever be ripped

2009-02-05T13:20:00.006-05:00

Too sick to blog more now, but have to mention I REALLY want to go to this. Please, please, please, please, please...

2009-02-04T03:59:00.014-05:00

Introducing: QUINTIMACY!
a Toronto-based group dedicated to rebuilding a close working relationship between composer, performer and audience.
Please join mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly, composer Chad Martin, pianists Elaine Lau and Joseph Ferretti, with producer Eleanor Johnston and special guest artists for intimate performances of rare and wonderful selections from the repertoire of vocal and chamber music. Selections for this season include magnificent songs by Ravel, DuParc, Mompou, Rachmaninoff and Wagner, as well as the premiere of a new commissioned song cycle from resident composer Chad Martin, and much more.

Our season of soirees opened with the debut event, Conversation, Canapes and Cancions, on November 16, featuring seldom heard songs by Henri Duparc and Federico Mompou, as well as some witty new inventive pieces for toy piano by our own Chad Martin, was very warmly received. The concept of a return to an intimate salon-style of music presentation with conversation, proximity and artistic immediacy is making a bit of a buzz among performers and audiences.

For the next concert Ravel and other pleasures, on Sunday February 22, 2009, at 5 pm, we are planning another eclectic program featuring Ravel’s fabulous Chansons Madécasses for voice, piano, cello and flute, with special guests Shauna Basiuk (flute) and Liza McLellan (cello), as well as Ravel's piano duet La Valse (the single piano, 2 pianists version by Lucien Garban) and Ravel's whimsical Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose) Suite, and some special surprises. We hope to see many of you there!

And our program for spring, i will open petal by petal myself: love, poetry and song! on May 3, 2009 will be about love, poetry and song, featuring Wagner's lush and rapturous Wesendonck lieder and the exciting premiere of a newly-commissioned song cycle by resident composer Chad Martin,"i will open petal by petal myself", setting love poems of ee cummings. Don't miss this fabulous concert!

Come hear these gems performed in an intimate and accessible environment of camaraderie, with conversation, good company and complimentary refreshments. Then come back next season as we begin to explore the impact of socio-political events in the early 20th century, in particular the dissolution and/or evolution of the more intimate and accessible musical forms and performance styles, especially after the escape or expulsion of many composers from Europe during the growth of the Nazi regime in Germany and beyond.

for more information, please see Facebook: Quintimacy or click on one of the links above.

2009-02-03T07:33:00.002-05:00

Really?! REALLY?!!!

I am usually on owl hours, because I’m often up and rehearsing or performing at night and too high on adrenaline to sleep before 2 or 3 (A.M.), so for the most part, nothing is in my calendar before the crack of noon and the phones are usually off in the morning. In fact, I should probably be asleep now, for so MANY reasons, but I’m up and starting to juggle my to-do list before the crack of dawn which is the only reason I can take a minute to post this little rant so early.

I am swamped (almost literally), with no break in sight until mid-May, juggling prep for work (upcoming concerts, etc…), business and legal transactions (house) and several personal crises all requiring my immediate attention at once, and culminating in, most spectacularly: the crumbled collapse of the ceiling and flooding in my bedroom around midnight last night from water damage with the incredible amount of snow we've been getting and the freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw roller coaster of the local temperatures!

So I slept "al fresco" last night, listening to the slow repetitive residual drip while gazing through the new unplanned skylight in my bedroom, with the window open too (to vent any unwanted mold, dust, dirt, insulation material or other breathing-friendly crap) and the heat off (no sense heating the outdoors). Toronto temperature was -8 C last night, in case you're wondering, and it's not much warmer now. And - just to motivate me - it's going to -16 C tonight. So the bedroom ceiling is rather high on the priorities list right now.

I'll try and take a picture of it for you when I can function a little more, but I can’t even look at it right now or I'll start to hyperventilate.

Meanwhile, I'm in quite some pain and discomfort - it's got me too frazzled to knit, which is why I've been spending so much time on Ravelry, distracting myself with wishful queue enlargement beyond life expectancy. I'm under doctor’s orders to be doing nothing more than resting (LMAO), recovering from my infection (and the antibiotics with nasty side effects) and fever (which made it a little okay to sleep in a room with an open ceiling and window last night), with gastrointestinal muscle spasms when I'm not cramping from my period (and vice-versa), as well as recent injuries to my ankle and shoulder, and exhaustion from the peri-menopausal menorrhagia (BTW: shouldn't a Super-Plus tampon last longer than 2 hours?).

I did manage to get a few hours of drug-induced sleep (or was it coma?), but woke up coughing (surprise?). DH slept downstairs on the sofa (both to keep warm and to spare his asthmatic lungs from breathing in the debris and fumes) - which, of course, has totally screwed up his back.

So things are a little rocky at Casa MezzoDiva. The unrelenting weather, all the stuff on our to-do list (house, lawyers, MILs, work...), plus my illness, his anxiety and our mutual fatigue already had us both at DEFCON 1 with little concentration, hair-trigger irritability, and less than one nerve left between us - and that's before the potential swimming pool in the roof came crashing down. Let's just say we're not playing nicely and unless someone whisks away to a Caribbean island for a day, wipes our memory of the current situation, plies us with pina-coladas and mojitos, and fixes the roof and ceiling while we are somewhere else, oblivious and warm, I fear that one of us may not come out of this totally unscathed. It's a toss up as to which one.

Three things are becoming abundantly clear.
1. The universe is trying to tell me something.
2. I am clearly going to need much better drugs or I am going to have to take up medicinal alcoholism.
3. Despite the impossibility of finding a free uncommitted week before May, I will need a vacation soon - for medicinal purposes, as well as recovering any semblance of sanity.

2009-02-01T10:52:00.008-05:00

Ooops. I seem to have missed January somehow.

It’s been a quiet time for me. I haven’t been in touch with almost anybody. And I haven’t written a thing on my blog in a month. There was nothing to report, mind you, other than sleeping (hibernation) , a lot (A LOT) of reading, and very little in the way of knitting, just working through lots of of internal matters, personal evolution, processing baggage and such, mostly with good results, but taking time and energy. And honestly, I have scarcely knit a row or two, though I have wicked want-to-make-it-itis and many things are clamouring for me to cast them on right now.

This week I'm handling a lovely econo-sized multi-pack of minor illnesses and iritations, on a daily roller-coaster ride through mild discomfort to lots of pain:
(pardon me - TMI coming up - not a pity party, I just need to vent a little and get it out of system, so feel free to skim/skip):

1. sprained ankle (repeatedly freezing and thawing slush creates icy and uneven ground, makes the sidewalk terrain all twisty)

2. I'm in another perimenopausal period-from-hell (though glad it's here because I skipped the last two in November and December and that made January's return brutal, like a three-in-one!) Seriously - I am SO going to rewrite a satirical version of this number I enjoy being a girl and include all sort of fun things about when my cramps have cramps and I'm feeling cranky and bloated...

3. I have an infection (don't ask) requiring ginormous antibiotics (ugh)!

4. I am mildly hypertensive (mostly due to stress), trying to avoid further blood pressure problems by practising holistic approaches (nutrition and mediation), but I may have to go back on a "water pill" because I am at risk for chronic venous insufficiency. I am even more crazy about the idea of taking any long-term pharmaceutical medications than I am about the short course of antibiotics.

5. I've been fighting with my husband daily for the last two weeks or so (poor guy - just because I am a premenstrual bitch on wheels, doesn't mean he didn't screw up, but I could be handling it a lot better). Unfortunately I have maybe half a nerve left and he's stepping on it all the time because he's retired and always here. Also, I am struggling with the post-retirement realization that he's acting like he's on perpetual long-term holiday and there are things to be done that need our attention and I feel like I'm the only one here for that and it's driving me crazy. Seriously, I adore this man, I would take a bullet or step in front of a train for him. However in the game of day-to-day he's often part of the problem and rarely part the solution (though he's great in emergencies, he comes running when I holler for help). He is smart, funny, sweet and great with the TLC and affection. He may even be the reason I'm still here as a couple of bouts of clinical depression in my life have had me in despair and it's largely his love that drew me out. But he's seems oblivious to most of the daily responsibilities necessary to keeping a household from crumbling around our ears, and when he does help, he often disappears again as soon as the crisis part of the party is perceived to be over.

6. We had a long meeting with our new lawyer on Saturday (yesterday) morning, revising lots of very shady crap in the sale contract with the property development company that wants to buy our house and build condos. It's full of smoke and mirrors, trying to obfuscate the conditions all to their benefit and pull off some dirty maneuvers. Any clauses not directly copied from the standard real estate transactions books are legal drivel, not close to English or good legal form. It's all the kind of thing that makes me glad I didn't go into law after all (as I thought I might in junior high) because apparently this is fairly common practice these days and it makes me a little sick. Seriously, even our lawyer said he was amused and almost embarrassed by association with it and confirmed our view that anyone who'd sign that thing as it is written (without serious ammendments, as well as codification and clarification) is an idiot, as it's not worth the 8 pages of legal size paper on which it's printed.

7. We spent Saturday afternoon lunching and visiting with my 89.5 yo MIL - which is great because I adore her, but hard when I'm unwell. Still, I am glad we went. She's a fabulous old lady, feisty and independent, mobile without assistance and generally in remarkably good health. She's also funny and clever and interesting - and I want to be just like her when I grow up.

8. I did not go to the Shaw play yesterday afternoon, a local movie theatre showing of ~~the Shaw festival's~~ [correction:]the Stratford festival's production of Caesar and Cleopatra from 2008 (with Christopher Plummer!), similar to what they are doing with the opera broadcasts from the Met in the movie theatres. I REALLY wanted to go, but after the lawyer I was in so much pain, largely stress-induced, that I couldn't have sat through it.

So today, though I'd LOVE to play hooky and go hang out at one of my fave fibre-enabling venues, I really need to stay HOME to recuperate, putter around the house, to research some background info and practise music for my upcoming concerts and auditions, and get all (or maybe some of) my personal and household stuff done (like 4-5 loads of laundry) before my "date" this evening with a friend I haven't seen in years and the next busy week starts.

I'd so much rather be knitting/learning to ply or spin/inhaling new yarn fumes/visiting with all of the yarnies. I actually tried to trick myself into it last night, in spite of all the above, by making arrangements to go to the LYS with a friend – because I know how much I hate blowing people off when I've made arrangements with them. But I decided to bow to my better judgement this morning that fibre-frolicking was not going to happen. And thankfully she understands.

I realize that I have just posted a long whiny blog entry. And that I have nothing knitterly to show for January. Sorry. Hope I can get my act together and post some pix this spring, but it's not likely to be sooner than April or May because my schedule in the next few months is about to go ballistic - in a good way, but still...

2009-01-02T15:04:00.009-05:00

Inspired by Knitting Psycho’s knitting resolutions 2008 report
over here, I've decided to start my knit-blog year by setting some intentions for my own coming year. Mainly these consist of framing my knitting life with some more structure to help me combat the startitis/ADD that has me flitting from project to project like a demented moth and curtail the excessive and profligate acquisiton tendencies of the last couple of years.

You may want to sit down for this. If you know me, please consider strapping yourself in with a seat belt or applying whatever other safety precautions as you see fit. No beverages and food should be consumed while reading this post. The author assumes no responsibility whatsoever for any injuries acquired during (or in any way related to) the reading of this post. And don't please make me regret leaving the comments option on.

Here in no particular order are My Knitting Resolutions for 2009:

1. Make an executive sock decision or move along: post all my socks OTN to my list of Ravelry WIPs (hopefully sometime this weekend - right now I'm still busy adding the last of the mountain of sockyarn to my stash list). Either finish or frog all of the socks I currently have on the needles.

2. Similarly, catalogue and either finish or frog everything else on the needles (I appreciate Knitting Psycho's assertion that blankets don't count, but I haven't got any started right now, so I can't use that loophole).

BTW - My projects and my stash are hoping for a photo shoot sometime over the next few months, but let’s keep it quiet - I don’t want them to get too excited about the possibility.

3. Practise two-handed colour-work and complete at least one small stranded project.

4. Start and finish one moderate/large lace project, like a shawl or wrap, but not necessarily in laceweight yarn.

5. Knit/complete at least one pair of socks in each month of 2009 (and those currently OTN do so count - see item #1).

6. When I get a yen for a new project, shop in the stash first. Then go back and look there again. And again, if necessary. If there isn't "the right yarn" in there for the coveted new project, consider starting a different one instead inspired by and drawing from these visits with my stash.

7. Knit as many sweaters’ worth of yarn from my stash as possible.

8. Relearn crochet and add new techniques.

9. Learn to spin on my drop spindle. Caveat - no matter how tempting, do not even begin to think about buying a wheel until we move in 2010, because in this house it would have to live in the one and only bathroom.

10. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Okay, I admit it. I am helpless in the face of fibre fumes and therefore some fibre acquisition will occur. Also, I don't like the economic repercussions of total cold-turkey abstention for either LYS owners and indie fibre artisans. I will therefore limit my spending to discrete and well-considered purchases supporting local and regional indie spinners/dyers and local small-scale purveyors of string, as well as the occasional friendly destash/swap.

Okay. I need to go lie down now. Hold me.

2008-12-31T18:58:00.008-05:00

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes ~ and ships ~ and sealing wax ~ of cabbages ~ and kings ~ and why the sea is boiling hot ~ and whether pigs have wings." ~ Lewis Carrol -aka- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January, 1832 – 14 January, 1898)
(psst: go check out Joel Birenbaum's Lewis Carrol page!)

Inspired by Lewis Carrol's Walrus, I'm choosing to end my blog-year tonight by sharing a few proverbs, aphorisms and other quotes that have developed a special meaning for me in the last year. Feel free to pass them on - I didn't make them up. And please tell me what some of your favourites are.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a "profoundly sick society." ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti (11 May, 1895 – 17 February, 1986)

"I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out."
~ Paul Newman (26 January 1925 – 26 September 2008)

"It's too hard, and life is too short, to spend time doing something because someone else has said it is important. You must feel the thing, yourself."
~ Isidor I. Rabi (29 July 1898 – 11 January 1988; Nobel Prize in Physics 1944)

"Just because you're good at something doesn't mean it's a strength. If what you're doing completes you, it's a strength. If it depletes you, it's actually a weakness. Find something you are passionate about."
~ Marcus Buckingham

"In hell, people sit around large pots of bubbling, delicious food.They're all starving, though, because their only chopsticks are three feet long, and you can't feed yourself with three foot long chopsticks. In heaven, people also sit around large pots of bubbling, delicious food. They've also been given three foot long chopsticks. But in heaven, people are all well fed. The difference, is in hell, people try to feed themselves. In heaven, they feed each other."
~ Vietnamese parable

"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room."
~ Dame Anita Perella Roddick, DBE (23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007)

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try"
~ Beverly Sills (25 May 1929 – 2 July 2007)

"Fall down seven times. Get up eight."
~ Japanese proverb

"The music is the message and the message is:
fight for change, fight for inclusiveness, fight for compassion, fight for self-empowerment, fight for intelligence and ecstatic release, but don't forget the joy of the life you're fighting for."
~ Mr. Something Something (listen at www.mrsomethingsomething.com

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
~ Anne Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945)

"You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In-Between.
You've got to spread joy (up) to the maximum, bring gloom (down) to the minimum,
have faith or pandemonium liable to walk upon the scene..."
~ Johnny Mercer & Harold Arlen

"Half Full? Half Empty? You decide!... an empowering interpretation is just as valid as a disempowering one. You get to decide what impact life has on you. Make it positive."
~ Real Simple magazine, March 2007

"Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one!"
~ Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955)
and, for the knitterly inclined:
(and if you're not yet one of us, rest assured that we WILL ultimately bring you over to the string side)
"Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crisis." Elizabeth Zimmermann (9 August, 1910 – 30 November, 1999)

2008-12-26T09:18:00.013-05:00

An apple a day.
We can all count the seeds in an apple. But what kind of a world can we reap if instead we count the apples in a seed?

After stuffing myself silly yesterday, I'm starting fresh today (pardon the pun) by pledging to eat an apple a day for the next week and into the new year.

We got home last night from a terrific family dinner to find the annual huge pile of newspaper flyers advertising boxing day deals and door-crasher specials for just about any consumer good imaginable. Now, I am all for stimulating the economy and I have a healthy appreciation for a good sale (especially if it's on items that we genuinely need). But really, after being blessed by the generousity of friends and family this Hannukah and Xmas and throughout the year, it's fairly safe to say that I don't really NEED any more yarn, bath products, clothing, jewelry, or whatever. Possibly ever in this lifetime.

So I am feeling rather blessed and I want to spread it around a bit. This morning, instead of planning to hit the streets and the stores, I donated a little extra cash to Doctors without Borders and some to the The Tso Pema Medical Emergency Fund

This Boxing Day, consider donating to a worthy cause instead of (or as well as) shopping. And if you are feeling the economic pinch and you cannot donate money, then consider doing a kind deed for someone - it can be as simple and uncomplicated as a kind word, a phone call, or shoveling someone's driveway, to something on a grand scale, like doing some research today and pledging one day a month to building homes for people who need them or sorting and stocking at a food bank. For that matter, if you can, then why not do both - donate the funds and donate your time, effort and good will.

Do it openly or do it anonymously, whatever makes you feel best. Then sit back, have an apple or a cup of tea, and bask in the glow of collective Karma generated by all the small and grand acts of human kindness and generosity. And maybe it will inspire you to cultivate this habit in the coming year and all the days of your life. Each seed you plant grows a new tree and lots of apples for years to come. If everyone would help someone else in any little (or big) way, what a wonderful world it would be.

An apple a day, indeed!

2008-12-25T23:48:00.000-05:00

RIP authentic and original diva, Eartha Kitt.
Inimitable epitome of elegance and sensuality.
Nobody compares and now no one ever will.

2008-12-24T11:18:00.005-05:00

Happy ChrismaHannuKwanzaaDiwalEid-mas!

I get the most wonderful emails forwarded c/o my Mom. Often she sends hysterically funny and outrageous jokes that have my husband and me rolling in the floor holding our sides as tears run down our cheeks from uncontrollable laughter. The best dirty jokes I ever receive are from her! And she sends beautiful power-point presentations from all over the world.

Once in a while she sends a stirring and heart-melting story that has me weeping at my computer. I found one of these this morning when I came down for some tea and checked my email while I waited for the kettle to boil. I have no info regarding the source of this lovely story, but I just had to share it with you. It is not known who replied, but there is a kind and beautiful soul working in the dead letter office of the US postal service.

Best wishes for a lovely holiday season and a new year filled with love and laughter, health and happiness, peace and prosperity, and many happy returns.
XO - MezzoDiva

GOD'S RESPONSE

Our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month. The day after she died, my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her. I told her that I thought we could so she dictated these words:

Dear God,
Will you please take care of my dog? She died yesterday and is with you in heaven. I miss her very much. I am happy that you let me have her as my dog even though she got sick.
I hope you will play with her. She likes to play with balls and to swim. I am sending a picture of her so when you see her You will know that she is my dog. I really miss her.
Love, Meredith

We put the letter in an envelope with a picture of Abbey and Meredith and addressed it to God/Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Meredith pasted several stamps on the front of the envelope because she said it would take lots of stamps to get the letter all the way to heaven. That afternoon she dropped it into the letter box at the post office. A few days later, she asked if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had.

Yesterday, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch addressed, 'To Meredith' in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers called, 'When a Pet Dies.' Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God in its opened envelope. On the opposite page was the picture of Abbey & Meredith and this note:

Dear Meredith,
Abbey arrived safely in heaven.
Having the picture was a big help. I recognized Abbey right away.
Abbey isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me just like it stays in your heart. Abbey loved being your dog. Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets to keep your picture in, so I am sending it back to you in this little book for you to keep and have something to remember Abbey by..
Thank you for the beautiful letter and thank your mother for helping you write it and sending it to me. What a wonderful mother you have. I picked her especially for you.
I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much.
By the way, I'm easy to find, I am wherever there is love.
Love,
God

2008-12-21T09:09:00.007-05:00

The Purple Purl is having their Pre-Boxing-Day Boxing Day Sale today! The regular line-up is at least 20% off and several fabulous favourites will have extra festive pricing. Also, they’re planning door crasher sales!

I am afraid the prospects don't look too good for me leaving the local premises today. With snowmaggedon-smack-down III playing out on my extra wide-screen view-screen to the outdoors, I'm suddenly very eager to hibernate and knit at home while I cheerfully contemplate poking (with my size 3 nickel DPNs) the idiot who left his van in front of our house again so the snowplow will have to plow us in completely as it detours around his car.

So I will not be going out there to molesting any merino at the Purl today. Sigh... It's probably just as well. I have already had a few too many fibre-related plastic-accidents recently and I would be helpless in the face of all that string on sale.

2008-12-20T23:34:00.002-05:00

Snowmaggedon: It’s beginning to look a lot like Xmas!

I really must get a T-shirt that says something like “I survived Snowmaggedon 2008.” I simply love the term Snowmaggedon, so aptly coined to describe the weather we’re getting this late December 2008, just in time for Chrisma-Hannu-Kwaanza-Diwali-mas, as four major snowstorms hit southern Ontario in the span of a week! The first arrived Tuesday Dec. 16, the second was yesterday, Friday Dec. 17, with the third is due overnight and tomorrow, Sunday Dec. 21, and the fourth due next Tuesday, Dec. 23.

Honey – uncover the sled and hitch up the huskies. We’re socked in for the holidays!

Ahhhh... Perfect knitting weather! Don’t you agree?

2008-12-17T09:33:00.008-05:00

Anticipation
Is it ready now?...

How about now?
Now?
tap tap tap...

2008-12-11T09:30:00.011-05:00

Moving along, but nothing to see.

"The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists." ~ Charles Dickens

I must admit to being in a creative (or rather a creating) slump right now and sadly it's even affecting my knitting. The fall has been a roller coaster, professionally and personally. Extreme highs, sudden plunges, inexorable climbs back up... lather, rinse & repeat. There have been some valuable life lessons and the occasional existential pop-quiz. It's all (well, mostly) been good (or ended well). I was never bored. But I do feel rather wrung out - like all my get up and go just got up and went (if you see it, please send it home).

I need to putter around the house and take long walks, to rest and think and mostly just to be.

I am knitting, but not much and I can't seem to concentrate on any project for more than a few minutes and a few rows here or there. However, I am getting a lot of pleasure from reading about knitting, contemplating knitting, admiring other knitters' projects, trolling Ravelry and Etsy and planning, scheming and dreaming about what I would be knitting and wearing right away if and when I break out of this temporary insanity (BTW - have you seen the new cardigans and pullovers and mitts and neckwarmers and ... well, everything at Knitty for Winter 2008? Go. Now. Really. I'll wait.)

If you're on Ravelry and have seen my profile there then you know two things about me:

1. I am completely unapologetic about the size of my stash (which by the way is not nearly completely catalogued yet - that ain't the half of it, baby!) though I admit I could (and should) probably stop as I will never ever (EVER) run out of yarn to play with, even if I live to be a hundred and twenty and knit all day every day for the rest of my life. I have recently endeavoured to radically restrain, if not totally stop, the procurement of additional stringy stuff in the interests of: (a) financial solvency, (b) marital congeniality, and (c) a healthy fear of seeing my house actually explode from the surfeit of contents.

2. I am an incorrigible magpie (see item 1. above - oooh, look... Shiny!) and enjoy collecting clever crafty ideas, growing my project queue to fantasmagorical size, with proportional pattern acquisition, and a concurrent affliction with startitis with complete abandon. I just love the adoption and planning of a new project with all the pleasure and promise of new hours of contented or challenging stitches and colour and texture. Too many WIPs? Never! Queue amassed beyond life expectancy? Absolutely! Regrets? None.

What do you do when you're in a knitting slump?

2008-12-07T16:44:00.003-05:00

We interrupt this blog-less vacation to bring you the following notice:

The Paper Place is GIVING AWAY the ultimate Chiyogami sample pack, an 8.5x11” sheet of every Chiyogami paper we offer in their online store (637 patterns in total, retail value $1911.00). All tied up with a pretty red bow.

GULP.
That's a mother-load of exquisite decorative paper, people!

Okay.

I need more material things to play with and make a mess here in the 3-D house of stuff like a need a... but this is SO BEAUTIFUL! And I actually just got interested in decoupage...

Note to self: the new house we get (yes, I am looking) will totally have a self-contained craft studio!

What would you do with a win-fall like this?

2008-11-11T08:44:00.005-05:00

Poppy Facts from Veteran Affair Canada

During the Napoleonic Wars, the poppy drew attention as the mysterious flower that bloomed over the graves of fallen soldiers.

In the 20th Century, the poppy again was widely noticed after soils in France and Belgium became rich in lime from rubble during the First World War. The little red flowers flourished around the graves of the war dead as they had 100 years earlier.

In 1915, Guelph, Ontario native John McCrae, a doctor serving with the Canadian Forces Artillery, recorded this phenomenon in his famous poem In Flanders Fields.

Two days before the Armistice, Moina Michael, an American woman from Athens, Georgia, read the McCrae poem and was inspired to wear a poppy year-round in memory of the war dead.

In 1920, Madame E. Guérin of France visited the United States and happened to meet Miss Michael at the YMCA at Columbia University, where the latter was a volunteer. Madame Guérin then resolved to sell handmade poppies around Armistice Day to raise money for poor children in the war-torn areas of Europe.

In 1921, Field-Marshall Earl Haig, the former Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France and Belgium and the principal founder of the British Legion, was sold on Madame Guérin's fundraising idea and approved organization of the British Poppy Day Appeal by the Legion to raise money for poor and disabled veterans.

The same year, Madame Guérin visited Canada, and convinced the Great War Veterans Association (predecessor to the Royal Canadian Legion) to similarly adopt the poppy as a symbol of remembrance in aid of fundraising.

Today, the Poppy Campaign is one of the Royal Canadian Legion's most important programs. The money raised from poppy sales provides direct assistance for ex-service people in financial distress, as well as funding for medical appliances and research, home services, care facilities, and numerous other purposes.

2008-11-09T15:56:00.012-05:00

A new intimate concert series.

If you are or will be in the GTA (greater Toronto area)
Please join us for a season of soirees opening with
Conversation, Canapes & Canción!

Come hear mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly, with pianists Elaine Lau and Joseph Ferretti, composer Chad Martin, producer Eleanor Johnston and special guest artists for intimate performances of rare and wonderful selections from the repertoire of vocal and chamber music. Selections for this season include magnificent songs by Ravel, DuParc, Mompou, Rachmaninoff and Wagner, as well as the premiere of a new commissioned song cycle from Chad Martin, and much more.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 16, 5:00 pm programme
features: the lush and lively Cançons Becquerianas by Federico Mompou and selected gems from the mélodies of Henri Duparc, as well as whimsical new compositions for toy-piano by resident composer Chad Martin.*

Informative discussion of the pieces will be offered during the performance and light refreshments will be provided to follow.

Venue is the lovely home of Dr. Bill Johnston, on Avenue Road near St Clair. (for privacy, specific directions will be provided to guests upon reservation)

*programme subject to change without notice.

Seating is limited so please book in advance c/o:
eleanormaraj@gmail.com or mezzodiva@sympatico.ca

About the Artists:
Dynamic and versatile mezzo-soprano Ramona Carmelly has captivated audiences in opera, cabaret, jazz, concert and theatre roles from the sublime to the ridiculous in more than a dozen languages, and the critics have raved: "Her performance was a lesson in how deft acting can overcome the limitations of opera on the concert stage," (Opera Canada) and "Ramona Carmelly, with her plush mezzo, was outstanding." (Globe & Mail). In recent years, Ramona was a finalist in the Christina and Louis Quilico vocal competition and won a coveted position in the Apprentice Artist program with Des Moines Metro Opera. Most recently Ramona was featured with the Talisker Players in the premiere of Emily, the Way You Are, a one-woman opera about Emily Carr composed expressly for her. Previous highlights include the Alto solo in Mahler's Third Symphony with conductor Richard Bradshaw and one of the first PEN-Canada concerts in memory of slain WSJ correspondent Daniel Pearl.

Joseph Ferretti has performed extensively throughout Europe, Canada and the USA as both soloist and collaborative artist. Recent series appearances include NUMUS, the Banff Centre for the Arts, COC's Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre, and Canadian Music Centre's New Music in New Places. Joseph frequently performs as a duo pianist with Elaine Lau. Their recording of music by Jack Behrens is featured on an album release by Capstone Records. Dr. Ferretti has been on the piano faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2003.

Elaine Lau has appeared as keyboardist and soloist with Canadian orchestras, and has been broadcast on CBC and Public Radio in the United States, performing Canadian works. A new music enthusiast, Elaine has had the opportunity to work with many composers. Recent appearances include performances with the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, and on the NUMUS and Canadian Opera Company's Piano Virtuoso concert series. As duo-pianist with Joseph Ferretti, she has performed across Canada and the USA. In 2007, she was invited to present at the CFMTA/MTNA/ RCM Collaborative Conference. Elaine has served on the piano faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2003.

2008-10-25T08:07:00.010-04:00

I am too busy to blog, but I'm writing quickly to invite you to attend one of the most important shows I have encountered.
As some of you know, I was recently asked to assist with a production of The Vagina Monologues and I leapt at the chance.
I am honoured and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to V-Day’s quest to eradicate violence against women and to assist them in raising funds for Street Haven. I am humbled by the talents and commitment of the remarkable cast and of V-Day Toronto Producer/Director Tanisha Taitt, who was honoured by V-Day Founder Eve Ensler in March 2008 for her dedication to social change and creative excellence.

Eve Ensler's THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is a smart, moving and hilarious look at female sexuality in all its facets. It inspired V-Day, a dynamic international grassroots movement with the goal of ending violence against women. V-Day is now active in 90 countries around the world. In a phenomenon that has swept the globe, the play has been translated and performed in 24 languages. Often imitated but never duplicated, Eve Ensler's award-winning masterpiece gives voice to women's deepest fantasies and fears through stories of intimacy, vulnerability and sexual self-discovery. Come and see what two standing ovations were about... you'll be glad you did.

If you are in the GTA (general Toronto area), I hope you can join us for this important event.
Best Regards, the MezzoDiva

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES
The 10th Anniversary, Revisited
SAT. OCT. 25TH at 7 PM (Saturday's show is ASL interpreted) & SUN. OCT. 26TH at 5 pm
Location: The Workman Theatre, 1001 Queen St. West
Tickets $22.50 Adults, $18.50 Students
General Admission seating.
Proceeds to Street Haven at the Crossroads (www.streethaven.com).
Produced by Ashley Ballantyne, Daphne Simone, Jill Andrew & Tanisha Taitt.
With special musical guest Theresa Sokyrka.

2008-10-05T12:37:00.005-04:00

P4O

2008-09-29T13:48:00.010-04:00

Just a few thoughts about why Stephen Harper will not be getting my vote

1. Harper’s frightening complacency and wilful ignorance about the environment and the immediate (soon-to-be irreversible) state of emergency. I can’t express it better than Mary-Margaret Jones, who has also gathered links to other significant resources about this issue: First time that I’ve been scared

2. Harper’s blatantly ignorant dismissal of the wide socioeconomic and cultural benefits of the arts. I will refer you to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s thoughtful and eloquent response, Dear Mr. Harper, as well as Margaret Atwood's rebuttal to Harper's pithy remarks, To be creative is, in fact, Canadian.

3. The Conservative policies of withdrawing support for social programs and institutions, and wantonly withholding the federal payments to provinces and to municipalities which are needed to support education and health care and transportation, to repair our crumbling urban infrastructures and to maintain all the standards by which Canada was known in my youth as one of the very best countries in the world in which to live.

But that’s okay, because the Conservatives are returning all this to Canadians in the form of tax cuts to individuals and to corporations. In the former case, these are often measly amounts compared to the wider social costs of losing those programs (and disproportionately given to those who need it the least rather than to those would benefit most from keeping the programs). In the latter case, supporting socioeconomic and legal structures that assign to corporations the rights which should belong to (human) persons, providing protections far greater than those given to persons, while simultaneously eroding those of the individual.

This October, I will be voting. Unfortunately that might mean that I will choose to vote defensively – by casting my ballot for the candidate most likely to prevent a Conservative victory in my riding.

Or perhaps I will throw such cautions to the wind and vote with my conscience for the candidate/party I believe could bring the most beneficial change to our society if given the opportunity, in the vain hope that even if my candidate doesn’t ultimately win a seat, the numbers will still demonstrate my beliefs about how my country should and could be run.

I won't presume to tell others how to vote. Whatever you believe in your heart will be best for your country and the world we live in, however you intend to cast your ballot, this October in Canada (and this November in the U.S.): please go and VOTE. As knitters, we have learned how doing one small and simple thing over and over again is a powerful engine for creating something good; the cumulative effect of many people doing one small simple thing is a powerful engine for change in society. But it only works if we do it.

2008-09-29T02:55:00.000-04:00

Did ya miss me? I missed you.

I married my best friend of 25 years on August 31st, which was (and is) great, but September has been a hectic and upsetting month as I've been handling successive health crises for my MIL and my Father, myself and then my husband. All that came hard on the heels of wedding planning and preparation (which had us already tired, though happily so), and since then I've been living in a nearly perpetual state of concern and fatigue. My nerves have been so frazzled that I could hardly knit. I lost my appetite and often forgot to eat until my DH would appear in the kitchen at whatever hour of the evening on a quest for sustenance.

I didn't want to post anything more about it here because I was afraid of turning this blog into a depressing and whiny place. As for knitting content: I have been somewhat soothed by wallowing in Ravelry and accumulating a monumental electronic wish/to-do list of projects, but I have nothing more to show for it than a few swatches and some lame attempts to tame the wild jungle that is my stash.

Well, everyone is finally healthy (or at least on the mend, or doing a reasonable facsilmile of such), and my nerves are improving now that I don't have to worry about everyone. But we could definitely use a real honeymoon - even just a few days to relax together, to enjoy each other's presence and get away from our worries. The timing isn't conducive to doing that, because now 'tis the season to be Jewish and I am swamped with synagogue as well as a couple of other singing commitments. But once the high holidays are over and the treadmill that is my schedule slows down, I am definitely going to find a way to use some of the lovely gift certificates we received for hotels, restaurants, and spas.

I'd LOVE to attend Rhinebeck in mid-October, but it's not in the cards for this year. That's probably just as well, as my stash is threatening to explode anyway and there are other budgetary priorities at the moment, like utilities, which I would be much too likely to forget in favour of all the yarny goodness. Let's face it, I am powerless when faced with fibre fumes. Dazzled by colour and seduced by texture, I would easily succumb to the lure of plastic spending, which would be fiscally and spatially disastrous. So I won't even try to find a way to get to NYS&W this year. Still, I can start planning now for next year :) And in the meantime, to soothe my cravings for fibery fun and my Rhinebeck regrets, I'd LOVE to arrange to meet with some knitterly friends (in person or online) for a cup of tea (or something stronger) and a good long yarn...

P.S. And I should be receiving some lovely wedding pix next weekend, which I promise to share with you.

2008-09-09T23:15:00.002-04:00

MezzoDiva is on the Benylin with codeine, Robaxacet and Advil diet. Seriously, though, I am briefly functional in between doses and though I'd post a little update here.

I haven't found my wedding ring yet, but I haven't been able to do more than a cursory search. I need the time and energy to look meticulously through all the wedding gift packages and through the clothes piles and laundry hampers, and both have been in short supply.

After walking in the cold pouring rain all day Sunday with my immune system somewhat compromised by this extreme exertion following the stress of the last couple of weeks (wedding & MIL) I came down with a nasty little chest cold. I probably caught it from sharing high-fives with several hundred strangers including numerous children along the route. (Next year I'll do like the doctors and wear light gloves). I have no blisters this year and thankfully lost no toenails (unlike the two that just grew back after last year), but I’m raw and chaffing in places I didn’t know could meet!

I was doing a great imitation of the octogenarian shuffle yesterday. I went for a slow 1.5 mile "stroll" late in the afternoon to take the edge off (its a “hair of the dog” sort of thing) and it hurt but it helped. As we left the house, I looked up and threatened the already cloudy sky to zip it until after I got home or I’d come up there and wreak my own brand of personal retribution. It seems the storm front took my warning to heart as not a drop fell until I was safely home, and then it poured most of the night.

I'm feeling more of the fatigue today, but less of the pain. A couple of days' rest, lots of ginger tea with honey, chicken soup and the contents of a small bottle of Benyllin with codeine should do the trick and I'll be fit as a fiddle soon. I'm sleeping a lot and when awake I'm enjoying the Blue Jays' winning streak.

Meanwhile, (a) my MIL is doing much better; (b) I just raised well over $8250 this year and I already received my first donation for the 2009 WEBC, and (c) I just have a good feeling that once I can do a proper search the ring will turn up, so on the whole I am not too unhappy about it.

2008-09-07T20:41:00.007-04:00

Despite the inevitable side-effects of walking an absurd distance all day in the pouring rain, MezzoDiva regrets nothing. She is now home, clean, dry, fed, and very happy to be crawling into her bed (emphasis on the "crawling" part). When every little movement no longer hurts, there may be a rather more extensive report on MezzoDiva's exploits and the events of this year's WEBC.

Meanwhile, please note: Knitters 4 Knockers will be walking again September 11-13, 2009, in the 7th annual Toronto WEBC. Join us! More info coming soon.

2008-09-04T09:42:00.008-04:00

How I spent my "honeymoon".

Well, as previously reported, my nearly 89 year-old MIL was absent from the wedding. She fell ill Sunday morning just before the wedding and after a night of increasing headaches and a very heavy-headed sensation, vertigo, nausea and vomiting, she called about an hour before the wedding to say she couldn't be there.

We thought perhaps she was over-excited about the wedding or she ate something off, but not so. Monday morning she called an ambulance to go to the Emergency room. My brother-in-law met her there and kept us informed by phone throughout the day (because adding our bodies to the crowds already at the Emerg was not a good idea), where after a wait of several hours, they did some tests and then sent her home with some prescriptions, as there was no point admitting her.

She was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a middle ear syndrome where there is excess endolymphatic fluid and it crystallizes and when the fluid and crystals shift it sends mixed signals to the balance receptors. It presents with all those symptoms (above), as well as vision problems and hearing loss (in the affected ear), both of which she has had for some time.

They also did a CAT scan and discovered a foreign mass in her brain, but apparently it’s thought to be a benign tumour (there’s no heat signature which would indicate growth or malignancy) and as it seems to have been there for a long time and it’s not growing (in fact it’s probably calcified and just sitting there being different), they say it's safer to leave it in than to subject an 89-year-old little woman to brain surgery.

She is recovering slowly, some meds seem to be having effect on the symptoms (there’s no cure, treatment is symptom-focussed), but clearly she could not be left alone in her apartment. My sister-in-law stayed with her Monday night, then we went over mid-day on Tuesday and stayed overnight and through yesterday, when we had to leave for a meeting in the evening. We went back later that night to help her with her laundry and then came home to our place to try and get a good night’s rest, as it seemed she could manage for the night. She's very self-sufficient, fiercely independent and likes her privacy. We (or smebody) will probably go back later today and we'll all make further plans one day at a time as we monitor her recovery.

Meanwhile, I am trying to get psyched up for the WEBC. I need to take some time today to check the weather forecasts and find (figure out) what I will wear, and probably do some laundry. I also need put together in a knapsack or large fanny pack various things that I will need while walking: sunscreen, lipbalm, a hat and a bandana, sunglasses, extra socks, a portable rain poncho, bodyglide, vaseline, adhesive moleskin, cornstarch/baby powder, deodorant, moist toilettes, blister pads, bandaids, flip flops for when we reach "camp" at the end of day one, advil, purel, a couple of small bottles to refill frequently as I'm on the route (one for gatorade and one for water), my cell phone, my ID, some money, some super-plus tampons, extra underwear...

Oh, yeah, that's a thrill! Assuming my calculations are correct, and they usually are, I'll be extremely hormonally challenged on those two days. I just hope that the spirit around me is as infectious as I recall from last year and my determination will help me forget that those are the two rather heavy days I usually want to spend horizontally with some good chocolate, a heating pad, my knitting and the remote control.

Honestly, though, I can't focus on all the prep much. I am totally exhausted already and I haven't even begun to walk.

Don't get me wrong, I am not feeling sorry for myself. I've had a wonderful (and horrible) week, between the whirlwind of prep for the wedding, the day itself, and then taking care of my MIL, whose company I quite enjoy (which, parenthetically, makes for some tension with my mother, whose company I do not).

It's just that I haven't had a really decent night's sleep in about a week, I'm sure I have PMS (I have one nerve left and people are taking turns stepping on it, though my snappy mood could just as easily be due to fatigue). I am too worried about my MIL and my husband, as well as my father (who sees his cardiologist today, and we won't even get into all that here, okay?), and my mother, who feels emotionally neglected and left out, to really be thinking of me.

On top of that, it's been 4 days since I lost the wedding band and though I know it's probably only playing hide and seek somewhere here, I haven't even had a single chance to look for it yet. Nor have I picked up my lovely flowers. We left them at the restaurant with plans to return for them the very next day... (I'm hoping they're still alive). It’s a gold ring that Richard has owned for 36 years and which we used for the ceremony, as the ring he gives to me has to belong solely to him – a requirement of the ceremonial tradition - and I've worn my others with the small diamonds for several years, so there's no arguing that they are mine. After the wedding, I was going to have it resized for him to wear as his wedding band.

It's a long story, but I was so tired (and bemusedly elated) that I have no idea when it left my hand. I noticed it missing from my hand shortly after 5 pm when I got changed right after the wedding. We had just gotten home from the wedding, happy but exhausted, and the last half hour or so was a total blur. It's possible I gave it to him; I know I tried to. I asked him to take it twice as the afternoon wore on, because I was tired and afraid it would fall off, but he claims to have turned me down both times. Honestly, we were both so tired by the end that we can't remember. In the pictures I have seen, It's still on my hand just at the end before we started packing up. So it might be somewhere at the restaurant (I called the same day 6:00 pm, they’ll keep looking). And it might be in my bedroom in the great pile of clothes where I went digging for something more comfortable to wear.

I actually prayed a little about it that night (in my own undefined quasi-pagan Buddhist-Jewish way). I got up the next morning at 6:30 AM after only 3 hours of sleep and had a tremendous urge to go out and look on the street between our place and the restaurant (about three city blocks). I spent the next 45 minutes walking carefully up and down thesidewalk, hoping to catch a glint of gold as the sun was rising... but no luck.

And then it all was put into perspective by our concern for our loved ones. So really, what does a gold ring matter in the scheme of things?

2008-09-01T13:37:00.000-04:00

It was a terrific day. The wedding was a lot of fun, everyone said it was wacky and delightful, totally appropriate to us as a couple. I'm waiting to get some pix from guests and then I'll post some.

The food was great, the prosecco was chilled to almost the right temperature, my dress was a huge hit (amazing, because it's second hand and was just left for me in a bag at my LYS by a woman I barely know and haven't seen since - Thank you, Arlene!). There were elegant flowers (white and green gladiolas, green spider mums, and these red branches -I don't know what they are - in a lovely tall arrangement) and fun flowers (hot pepper plants in a lovely tin planter). There was even peace in the family (a miraculous event - you have NO idea - truly).

All in all, a wonderful day that was marred only by two things:

1. I seem to have misplaced the wedding band right after the wedding. I was so tired I have no idea when it left my hand. It might be somewhere in my bedroom in a huge pile of clothes where I was rummaging for something clean for both my unofficial matron-of-honour/mistress-of-ceremonies and me to change into right after the wedding. Or it's at the restaurant where it fell off while I was packing up all the gifts and wedding props and things I needed to clear out of there.

2. My MIL was absent. She fell ill yesterday morning and after a day of headaches, nausea and vomitting, this morning she called an ambulance to go to the Emergency room. My brother-in-law is with her and keeping us informed by phone because adding our bodies to the crowds already at the Emerg is not a good idea. No confirmed diagnosis yet, still doing some tests, but it sounds like they don't plan to admit her, just do more tests and send her home. Then we can go visit her and regale her with tales of our wonderful wedding.

2008-08-31T04:48:00.000-04:00

How I spent my summer vacation.

First of all: THANK YOU!!!

I am totally and completely overwhelmed. Gobsmacked.

The response to the Hibiscus for Hope pattern and the Knitters for Knockers 2008 campaign to raise funds for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer has been outstanding, beyond anything I could have predicted. Close to 400 people have donated so far this year, bringing the total funds raised to well over $7800.

(Happy dance! Do it with me!)

Together we are proving the Yarn Harlot’s observation about knitters and charity: knitters (maybe all hand-crafters) are superdonors, giving a lot or a little, but giving often, perhaps because we are uniquely aware of the power of doing one small thing over and over and over again. The total funds raised from Hibiscus for the WEBC continues to grow steadily, mostly through the cumulative effect of small contributions, reinforcing that kernel of knitter’s wisdom.

I'll repeat it here, because despite our society and mass-media's political and marketing-driven attempts to convince of our powerlessness WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE! Each and every one of us. Never let them make you feel impotent. Never doubt that doing even one small simple thing over and over again is a very powerful engine for change in the world as it is in a knitted project.

I am deeply moved and profoundly empowered by this whole endeavour. And what better way to celebrate than by immediately whipping up another sexy new sock pattern for some more worthwhile goodhearted fundraising!

Okay, then! I am raring to go, got my metaphorical sleeves rolled up and my creative thinking-cap on again, fiddling with the yarn and the sticks, making with the knitting and ------ Eeeek!
Insert sound of screeching car tires and scary music, followed by sudden silence here.

still silent

more silence

silence becoming uncomfortable

pause for station identification

silence beginning to wear thin now

why am I still reading this?

is she ever going to get to the point?

A funny thing happened on the way to this next new pattern I was whipping up for you. I gradually became aware that no matter how hard I tried to devote myself to this wonderful new invention, there were other rather pressing matters that kept intruding on my thoughts. I got sideswiped by a handful of converging necessary activities that required my focus and attention and, well, it made for a not-very-conducive-to-new-design mindspace.

You see, I am getting married. Today, as matter of fact! Yes, I know – you thought I was already married and technically I suppose it’s arguable.

I have been living with my best friend, dearest love, companion, confidant, and champion for 25 years now (please – don’t do the math – I was ~~a toddler… okay, a child… adolescent~~… well, I was finished high school. Just.) We wanted to do something special to mark our 25th (wow - I really don't feel old enough to be having a 25th anniversary!) and we decided to “make it official”. We then decided to throw a combination anniversary-party and wedding and chose this weekend, August 31st, as the date is special for us.

It is going to be a very casual event (as fits our lifestyle) with a brief Jewish ceremony (to satisfy the yearnings of my Hebrew-school education and upbringing. I’m not very observant, but oh, baby – I just love a man in a yarmulka!).

I was actually thinking of doing a pot-luck wedding in the park, but that was getting complicated (check the municipal regulations: you can’t have a wedding in the park. WTF?) . Anyway, since the weather is crazy and unpredictable this summer, we decided to make it a small low-key party at our fave local Thai restaurant.

We are having some 45 loved ones gather to share the joy with us at our favourite little restaurant, where my beloved and I will stand under a Chuppah (borrowed from good friends and held by our families) to say the appropriate blessings in both Hebrew and in English (to fulfill the requirements of traditional Kiddushin and Nissuin and so that everyone present can follow), after which all of us will enjoy a Thai lunch buffet (in keeping with the long tradition of Jewish celebrations with Asian cuisines. Really. It's true. There are folks with a standing reservation at China House every year that goes back three generations for possibly the most important meal in Jewish culture: breaking the fast after Yom Kippur ).

Despite the casual nature of our little shindig, it took some serious planning and arranging and running around to get things (from AWOL divorce certificates - his - to clothes, flowers, cake and wine, and ceremonial props), not to mention devising a scheme for the ceremony that works for all concerned.

And then there was the juggling of families and friends. Not just the guest list, but individuals who felt this would be a really good time to vent their frustrations over their own unmet familial fantasies and their judgemental agendas regarding everything about how we choose to live our lives.

In the meantime I was also trying to unclutter my life and house, do all the prep for 4 years of overdue tax returns, and one more little thing... Let me see... What was that?... oh, yeah: training for the 60-km walk that’s coming up next weekend.

But I digress. Why am I awake and blogging in the middle of the night the day before my wedding? Well, I'll get to that soon. Please bear with me.

So..., back to the socks. I have lots of great conceptual ideas for the new socks, and combining some lovely motif-work with new construction ideas again (because I just like to learn new ways of doing things and when something is fun I like to share it). But it’s all in the trying this and trying that, with the charting, and the crunching of numbers, and the trying again another way stage. So far I have a sweet new toe inspiration which I am fairly certain will stick around. It's a lovely toe, but let's move along because there's nothing else to see yet.

In the meantime, I have repurposed the pattern for the 2007 Campanula for the Cure sock (last year’s WEBC fundraising pattern) to aid this new cause I am championing, because:

(a) I notice that a lot of folks who didn’t see it last year seem to be interested in the Campanula pattern (that’s really flattering, and it makes me want to do more and more designing for you). Though there are only some 28 (lovely) instances of Campanula socks listed on Ravelry, last year more than 175 knitters found the pattern through word of mouth and eagerly donated to get it, and many folks have faved &/or queued the Campanula socks recently as a side-effect of the Hibiscus for Hope phenomenon.

And (b) there’s a cause that I feel very strongly about and I think we can help.

The beneficiary of all proceeds from the repurposed Campanula pattern (and from the forthcoming pattern) will be the brave and beautiful Tish.

Tish is at the end of an amazing (140+ lbs!) weight-loss journey that began last summer with gastric bypass surgery.

Now she requires extensive and expensive reconstructive surgeries to tighten and trim some of the leftover bits. It's a so-called "cosmetic" cleanup of all the hanging skin and residual leftovers that are a side effect of extreme weight loss and (in my not-so-humble opinion) it is not cosmetic at all. It is totally necessary to her quality of life, but unfortunately it’s not covered by Ontario’s much vaunted health care system.

Okay, that's not strictly true. Though our provincial medical plan would pay for a crude tug-slice-&-sew version of the procedure that leaves some very unsightly scars (I’ve seen the results on other folks), they will not contribute that equivalent or any portion of the costs to getting it done properly. Nope. That would be too much like right.

(Can you tell I am just a little bit angry about this?)

Tish needs to raise an astounding $31,000 for reconstructive surgery.

(That number makes me break out in a cold sweat.)

Frankly after all her hard work, determination, self-discovery and hardship, Tish really deserves to have these procedures done well and to feel good about herself afterwards! So several friends and knitters are banding together to initiate our own fundraising venture to help defray some of the costs. We’ll be offering some Tish-inspired patterns as incentive for donations to her surgery fund.

Of course you don’t have to wait until the patterns are up. Please go over to visit Tish and read about her phenomenal journey over the last year or so. She is one of the most authentic and honest people I have ever met and she has been blogging about her remarkable experiences since last summer. Really. Go. Read. Scroll down and go back in time and read all she has posted about this entire chapter in her life. Then click and donate whatever you can to help.

2008-08-21T23:41:00.003-04:00

From my Facebook status, updated early this week:

Ramona is trying to plan a wedding, train for a 60-km walk, unclutter her life, and do 4 years of tax returns, all in the next two weeks.

2008-08-18T16:11:00.003-04:00

Local Air Temperature: 29C = 84F
Humidex (feels like): 36C = 97F
Too. Hot. To. Knit.

2008-08-10T11:44:00.004-04:00

For Hibiscus Hopefuls

There seems to be a little confusion about how to get the pattern. To get your very own copy of the Hibiscus for Hope sock pattern, all you have to do is sponsor me for the 2008 Weekend to End Breast Cancer, supporting the Princess Margaret Hospital, Canada's leading centre for cancer treatment and a world leader in cancer research.

Here’s the link to my personal page at the WEBC - you should be able to sponsor me directly there. You can also go to the main site for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer, then click on Toronto, then click on Sponsor a Participant, and enter my name: Ramona Carmelly.

It will ask for your name and credit card number and other details. Please put HIBISCUS in the comments (though in the last few days I’m assuming every sponsor has come looking for the sock pattern via the grace of the Yarn Harlot and I’m sending it anyway).

The WEBC site will send me a notification that I’ve received a new donation and I follow it back to get the name and email of the donor.

2008-08-09T09:50:00.004-04:00

Are you sitting down? Good.
Because I have a shocking confession to make:
It's my pattern, but it's not originally my design.

(Gasp!)

I was fiddling with ideas for the pattern off and on since mid-winter, but to no satisfaction. Though I unwittingly managed to reinvent any number of lovely sock patterns that are out and about these days (aaargh!), I just wasn't able to make any of my original inspirations comply with my requirements for a new pattern that would: keep the basic construction of the sock fairly simple so that sock-neophytes won’t be scared off, but hopefully introduce some new structural ideas to a few people in a simple and fun way, while letting an intriguing but still easy to accomplish lace do most of the talking so that sock-experts will want to play too.

I did give it several valiant tries, but frankly in recent months all my creative juices were flowing in musical directions, all my brain cells were otherwise occupied and in overdrive (preparing for the then-upcoming opera performances) so that all I could do competently with sticks and string was knit rounds and rounds of mindless stockinette. Even the simplest short-row toe was truly a challenge because my brain was just too full.

Meanwhile, way back in Januray I came across That Logan Chick's gorgeous Agatha shawl on Etsy, and I fell hard. I was completely enthralled. I immediately ordered the pattern (as well as a couple of her beautiful beaded shawl pins). Though unable to commit to a shawl project at the time, I was nevertheless besotted, completely under the spell of that pattern, unable to stop dreaming about it, scribbling its name lovingly in the margins of my opera scores, sketching its motif in my diary...

In late spring, as I wrestled with the umpteenth idea for my 2008 Knitters for Knockers sock, I started tinkering with ideas for using the Agatha shawl motif in a sock and couldn’t think in any other direction. After much frustration (and the near demolition of a perfectly lovely skein of Fleece Artist sock yarn from frequent ripping and reknitting and ripping and reknitting...) it occurred to me that really I was (oh, fer heaven's sake, again?!) trying to reinvent and codify something that had already been created beautifully by someone else - and I love her version of it so much that I could never be content with any poor imitation I would make.

I wisely decided to put it aside and sleep on it.

I woke up the next day and realized I'd been operating under a false assumption. I mistakenly believed that because it’s my fundraising program, I have to be the sole designer (pardon the pun) for this endeavour. Of course my ego was egging me on, whispering insidiously that I had to come up with something brilliant and beautiful like last year's pattern Campanula for the Cure and I had to do it all by myself.

Well, I'd been reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle lately. Somehow, his words of wisdom afforded me just enough detachment to see through the egoic trap of my non-existent dilemna. Aknowledging the simple yet profound error in my thinking was quite liberating! (Though I am still sheepishly succumbing to an ego-driven desire to state that I bought the book last year, before the big Oprah-induced phenomenon, but I had a few other books on the night-table ahead of it and I only got around to reading it this spring).

I promptly sat down at my computer and sent an email to Rebecca, the brilliant creator of that shawl I love so much, asking her to be my guest designer for the Knitters for Knockers 2008 campaign and I'm thrilled to report she was happy to oblige! Rebecca not only generously allowed me to borrow the motif, she pointed me to her own prototype Hibiscus sock AND graciously sent me her notes (for a size 11 sock - gulp!) and all her charts.

I must admit the road from there to a clear instructive pattern for public consumption that would allow most sock knitters to make their own was still a long and occasionally arduous one as the conceptual steps were easy to imagine but a lot harder to articulate. But now that it’s done, tested and vetted by my faithful team of experts, and revised and edited to within an inch of its life and mine, I am SO proud to reveal it to you in all its glory.

I know I am biased, but it's a beautiful sock pattern and I hope you'll love it as much as I do. If you're intrigued, please sponsor me now for the 2008 Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer. I'll send you the pattern as soon as I get notice of your donation. Or, better yet, go check out Knitters for Knockers, and join us for for this profoundly empowering life-altering experience.

2008-07-30T17:07:00.003-04:00

Hi, Shelda - I hope you read this. I cannot email you because, as I've said before, I don't have an email address for you. I'm sorry you are having trouble emailing to me. My email is easy to find on my profile: just go to ABOUT ME and click on VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE. To the left, under CONTACT, it says EMAIL. Click there to send me an email privately.

Or send me your email address via the comments here. If you are concerned about privacy, you can still leave me your email address in the comments, because I moderate all my comments before they are posted so I can receive it without posting the comment with your email address here.

To answer your questions: Yes - you can send a donation by mail. If you go to the WEBC website, on my personal page below the list of amounts under "donate here" you will see a pink small-print link that says "To print out a donation form, click here." Just print the form and mail it in with your donation. When the donation arrives and is recorded by the WEBC, they will notify me and I will send you the HIBISCUS pattern.

And, yes, the CAMPANULA pattern is still available. I have repurposed the Campanula pattern for my friend Tish and her surgery fund. Please go to her blog to obtain the pattern.

2008-07-25T12:13:00.000-04:00

Introducing the new sock pattern:
“Hibiscus for Hope”
an elegant sock inspired by ThatLoganChick’s Agatha shawl
Starting from a toe-up construction (magic loop or 2 circular needles recommended), the sinuous lace motif (a variant of a lace design found in Leili Riemann’s Pitsilised Koekirjad) begins from a point somewhat above the toe-box, expands across the instep and ultimately wraps gracefully around the ankles after the heel to meet itself in the back and continue up around the leg. The comfortable arch-hugging heel combines the under-heel gusset increases from Cat Bordhi’s Riverbed architecture with Wendy Johnson’s short-rowed heels to accommodate a high or wide instep.

A few tantalizing images from my intrepid testknitters

To get the pattern, all you have to do is sponsor me for the upcoming 2008 Weekend to End Breast Cancer, and put HIBISCUS in the message.

Crazy4Dyeing Etsy Shop Announcement: 15% of sales of Crazy4Dyeing yarn destined for Hibiscus for Hope socks will be donated to Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer to sponsor the designer of the pattern walking 60-km over two days. Please make a comment when you check out that you’ll be making these socks.
Knitters for Knockers:
knitting together to make cancer history!
(note: this entry post-dated to make it sticky)

2008-07-21T23:26:00.002-04:00

Sneak Peek!

As many of you know, last year I designed a pretty lace sock pattern, Campanula for the Cure, and offered it as incentive to my sponsors for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer. World world-wide knitters responded generously, both by supporting my efforts in the 60-km walk and by donating and helping me raise nearly $4600 for the fight to eradicate Breast Cancer.

Well, I am just crazy enough to do it all over again! And yes, I will be offering a new sock pattern as incentive to my sponsors. I know several of you have been ~~snooping~~ ~~nagging~~ ~~chomping at the bit~~ waiting eagerly for the new pattern coming with my 2008 fundraising campaign, so I decided you deserve a sneak peek! Sigh. Just look at those lines, those curves... Soooo pretty.

If you're intrigued by this sneak peek, please go ahead and sponsor me now for the 2008 Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer. I'll send you the pattern as soon as it's been tested, tech-edited and made ready for public consumption. Or, better yet, go check out Knitters for Knockers, and join us for for this profoundly empowering life-altering experience.

2008-06-15T15:00:00.022-04:00

My WWKIP ~~day~~ weekend actually started on Friday night, when I participated in the ~~yarn-tasting~~ Knitty Roundtable Friday night at The Purple Purl and got to ~~play with~~ swatch, preview and appreciatively review several interesting new yarn offerings. I am now officially in love with three new yarns and will have to struggle to avoid a major acquisition splurge in the near future.

On Saturday afternoon I wandered downtown to Lettuce Knit for their WWKIP event. For those of you who ~~have been living under a rock or something~~ may not have heard: it was the Yarn Harlot’s birthday on Saturday, so she and Rachel H naturally conspired to hatch a fabulous plan whereby they arranged for teh fabulous Franklin to come up to Toronto for the weekend and take a few photos of the local knitterati and the hoi poloi for his 1000 Knitters Project.

I am now totally smitten with Franklin, who is (impossibly yet truly) even more charming, sweet and funny in person than he is on his blog. I got to knit a few rows on the community scarf (I threw in a little bit of K2P2 checkerboard for variety), and chatted with him for a few minutes as he snapped pictures of my sweaty and minimally clad self (it was another sweltering humid day here in The Big Smoke). My only regret was that the inimitable Dolores was nowhere to be seen, although given the steamy weather I expect she hauled her wooly self across to one of the local watering holes to wet her whistle and ~~assault~~ ~~harrass~~ ~~grope~~ flirt with some local hotties.

All in all, I have to say I’m lucky to live in Toronto - it seems to have become something of a world-wide knitters Mecca. Numerous folks ~~made the pilgrimage~~ converged on Toronto via plane, train and automobile from some far-flung reaches of the continent to participate in this happy event, and I am happy to say I made more than a few new friends, including sweet 5-yr-old Rachel (seen here on the plane home, already flashing the kryptonite-green nail polish I had to give her earlier that day because it matched the dress she was wearing when we met) and her equally sweet mom, blogless? Laura, both of whom will appear knitting om the incredible community scarf in the 1000 Knitters project.

Many thanks to the Yarn Harlot who has now joined the ranks of the fabulous 40s (Happy Birthday, Stephanie! Way to throw a best-ever-knitter's-birthday-bash!) and to the uber-organized Rachel H (stalwart "sidekick" and handler extraordinaire, unflappable wielder of the awesome clipboard-of-power) for arranging Franklin's trip and for working your arses off all day wrangling the throngs of knitters and keeping this ginormous photo-op running smoothly.

Today (Sunday) I was planning to complete the trifecta by dropping in to visit with one of my favourite people, Haley at Knitomatic . But to my dismay when I picked up my email last night I got the newsflash stating that as of this very weekend they are on summer hours, which means they'll be closed on Sundays and Mondays until the fall. :( Oh, boo! Way to mess with my WWKIP weekend agenda, H!

Still, all in all perhaps it's not such a bad thing that I am not out and about today. It's rather difficult to knit in a hailstorm. Yup - that's right. Hail. Today has already provided a lovely demonstration of the full range of fickle weather possibilities offered by a Toronto summer. And it's only 3 pm. I wouldn't be surprised to see tornadic twisters or maybe a sudden temperature drop with sleet before dark. Stranger things have been known.

P.S. Carol commented:
On the bright side, the weather isn't boring!
Please! Bore me for a while. So far this spring/summer has been a little too "interesting" for my taste. I was building an ark this afternoon (it seemed prudent), but the hail stones blew it to smithereens.

2008-06-04T11:44:00.019-04:00

Surfacing.Are you there, Blog? It's me, MezzoDiva.

Just wanted to surface and say I am still here, I'm okay, moseying along, learning to live in and appreciate the Now.

I have been blogging very sporadically this year. It's often tough to find the words to articulate the deep emotional and spiritual currents through which I am moving and which are moving through me.

It's all good (though sometimes it's tough slogging) and I'll definitely have a lot more to say about it when I'm ready.

In the meantime, most of my knitting content is and/or will be on Ravelry, at least until I get back into blogging about it.

2008-05-28T07:45:00.015-04:00

Knitters for Knockers!
Here we go!
The 6th annual Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer benefiting Princess Margaret Hospital is September 5-7, 2008, and KNITTERS for KNOCKERS will be there!

Everyone is welcome to join our team: We'll take Knitters and Crocheters, Weavers and Spinners, Cross-Stitchers and Quilters… even persons who are not (yet) Fibre-Fanatical (though we can’t promise not to attempt to lure you over to the String Side).

Take a deep breath - and just do it! You will amaze yourself. It may seem that $2000 is a lot of money to raise and that 60-km over two days is a long distance to walk, but believe me: if I can do it (I did last year), so can you! You CAN make a difference.

The Weekend to End Breast Cancer has a tremendous support system in place to help with fundraising and with training. Last year, my first time, I raised an astonishing $4587 through a knitterly campaign. And we will work as a team to train for the walk and to help each member raise the funds and prepare for this life-changing experience.

As we train in the coming months, we’ll set up a flexible buddy system so that faster walkers can go at their pace and slower ones at theirs, but everybody will have someone walking with them throughout training and the WEBC walk for company and safety.

And of course we’ll be planning some extended training-walk/yarn-crawls (with reasonable breaks/pauses for fibre-refreshment) through downtown Toronto, East to the Beaches, and the West end :)

Let's work together to make Cancer history!

2008-04-29T09:16:00.026-04:00

Inexcuseable Knitter Behaviour.

Mine, that is. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

I must fess up. It's all my fault. I really blew it - big time. I totally shafted someone, a lovely and generous knitter, and I must remedy this situation ASAP.

Remember these from last fall? These are the toe-up modified Pomatomus socks I made for my fall 2007 Hogwarts Sock Swap partner, Ellie.

I was extremely late in getting this package out in the mail. All the swaps were supposed to be done by Hallowe'en. For numerous reasons, some good and some not, my package to Ellie containing the socks I made for her, some yarns and an assortment of knitterly trinkets, was eventually sent a couple of days after Xmas (in the hope of avoiding the holiday crush). With the insanity of the holiday season and potential delays for cross-border posting, it was possible for it to take a few weeks to arrive.

She never received it.

(Pause for deep breathing. Breathe in the white light. Breathe out the &^%$#@!…)

DAMN, I really loved the socks I made for her! I used 2 skeins of my favourite colourway of Koigu and carefully customized the Pomatomus pattern for her size and specifications. They were gorgeous, even if I do (not-so-humbly) say so myself. They were ogled on Ravelry. They were jealously coveted by acquaintances. I just hate that they were lost somewhere in postal purgatory limbo.

We figured the socks and goodies were MIA (though hopefully only temporarily - wishful thinking) and I moved on to Plan B: I was going to send her another box of goodies ASAP with a pair of socks to follow (because I had none ready to go). In the meantime, I immediately ordered something special from Cafe Press (a cute trio of knitter/dyer mugs) and had it shipped directly to her. And - in what I mistakenly thought was a sign that the swap gods were smiling on us for a change - I even came across a couple of skeins of Koigu very similar to the ones I originally used (I lost the original ball bands so I can't be sure what they were) and I started knitting a new pair of socks for her as fast as I could in the hope of sending them in early spring.

Insert screeching tires and skid marks here.

And here's where I blew it big time: I never sent the rest of the replacement package or the replacement socks. In fact I haven't been able to finish those socks - they're just not working for some reason and I can't get them right. They are seriously messing with my knit mojo. I do still have a collection of crafty and luxurious treats just waiting to be sent out to her, but I became totally demoralized by the lack of cooperation from the socks and I didn't send any of it yet.

If you've been following the saga of MezzoDiva in recent months, you know I had a crazy few months last fall and winter, with seismic emotional upheaval and minor/medium health issues, interspersed with some rather monumental professional obligations. But there's just no excuse for letting down my swap partner like this and I feel like a heel. A poorly-shaped excuse for a heel.

I am so sorry about this! Clearly the swap-deities were saying I shouldn’t join anything like this for a while (don’t worry - I haven’t since last summer). But Ellie shouldn’t be the unlucky recipient of my recent swapping karma. Especially since her gift to me was so thoughtful and fabulous! (I really have to get some pictures up for you to see - I just felt too guilty to do it).

So, enough wailing and wringing of hands. Here's my sworn commitment to make good on all this, out here for all to see:

I have (finally) finished the second sock of the lovely lime green Campanulas, (the first of which is pictured here in partial completion last fall). I just have to sew in the ends (with my newly acquired Cibis - my old ones ran away from home along with my favourite cable needles sometime over the fall/winter) and then I'll block them. They were going to be mine, but I can't in good conscience let Ellie wait any longer. So these will be mailed by next weekend, along with the rest of the loot I have for her.

BTW - Ellie's also an incredibly amazing indie dyer. Really, you have to get some of her sock yarn (And no, that's not my guilt talking. Her stuff is gorgeous! I've bought 12 skeins in some phenomenal colourways over the last year, and I also joined her Crazy4Seasons Sock Club. Go check it out!)

2008-04-20T20:33:00.001-04:00

Emily Carr, Self-Portrait (oil on paper), 1938-9
I think she liked it.
Please excuse me now while I go fall down somewhere soft for maybe a week or so.

2008-04-20T07:21:00.007-04:00

Emily Carr, "The Mountain" (oil), 1933
Here we go...

We're approaching the summit.

It's been a helluva climb so far. Just a little farther.

2008-04-19T22:51:00.004-04:00

Emily Carr, "Forest, British Columbia" (oil), 1932
I wish I was here. And in a way, I am.

Today was both wonderful and grueling.

We had the dress rehearsal in the gallery this morning and it was marvelous. This piece really has magic in it and it is even more magical in this perfect venue. If you can find a way to get to the McMichael Gallery tomorrow between 1:30pm and 3:30pm, I think you should go. And I'm not just saying that because it's my show.

We grabbed some lunch at the gallery cafe and I talked with the composer, the librettist, the pianist and his wife for a while. Then I got back to town and spent the afternoon getting a new cell phone (because mine always choose the most inopportune time to croak, in the middle of an important gig or when I'm travelling for auditions, when I have no spare time to go get a new one but I absolutely can't afford to be unreachable).

After that I went hunting for a dress to wear tomorrow because I’m retaining so much fluid none of my planned potential outfits will fit (they were fine just over a week ago). My feet and ankles look like they’re about to burst and I think I’ve gained a bra cup size, not to mention my puffy arms and face. Sheesh! I think it's a BP spike as a side effect of the antibiotics or some combo of them with the other things I'm taking. My BP was okay earlier in the week when I went to have my ears checked and got the prescription, but I’m sure it’s not so great now – and of course I was on my feet all day today which doesn't help.

In the interest of offloading the potential camel-collapsing straw, I decided it is prudent to take tomorrow morning off and not go to my synagogue gig as I had planned. The necessary folks were notified. I'm sure God will forgive me.

So in about 15 hours I'll be offering my voice to Emily and hoping she will share with me some of her vibrant spirit, her indomitable will, and her gift for expression so I can share with the audience my increasing admiration of her.

2008-04-15T10:26:00.019-04:00

Emily Carr, "Old Tree at Dusk" (oil), 1936
Well, that went well! Monday night's rehearsal was good, but very intense. I still have some work to do this week to tidy things up in a couple of places, but I got through the whole thing fairly comfortably and that's a great relief.

I can laugh now, remembering what a nervous wreck I was when we did the partial preview with piano accompaniment last fall. It's great that we did that because it cracked the code for me. I became familiar with this composer's idiom, her own musical language.

Each composer has their own style, their preferred scheme of meters, rhythms, harmonic progressions, and melodies (or, sometimes, lack thereof). Once you crack it, it's like you've learned to speak their particular dialect and learning their work in future becomes much easier. I found the piece difficult to learn last fall, so much so that the composer built a lot of doubling into the chamber ensemble score, with the oboe or viola or piano often playing my line as I'm singing it. But we found that to be largely dispensible last night so she's taking a lot of it out now. It's okay - she says she's glad because it's always easier to take something out than it is to put it in at the last minute.

What a whirlwind! I can't believe we got through the whole score in a 2-hour rehearsal (union musicians), and with only minor bumps in the road - amazing, especially since everyone got their parts from the composer just in the last few days.

Still, it was INTENSE! It's incredible how much energy this work takes. People who aren't in the arts (or don't have someone close to them in the arts) often think we are all a bunch of lazy slackers who work a few measly hours here and there and then take extended naps and personal time. This society has some false underlying moral standard that says you have to be busy as a beaver for 8-14 hours every day, and if you're not you clearly have poor work ethics. It's so insidious that I even have to remind myself on days like this that I'm not slacking, I've just worked my @$$ off and I'm too f^#*ing tired to see straight or safely chew gum.

I'm making a pot of tea and then probably going back to bed for a couple of hours. Then I'm going to the doctor to have my ear checked out and probably get some antibiotics (blech!). I had some sinus problems and itchy runny eyes late last week, probably allergic not viral, but with the all excess fluid build up I developed an ear infection on Sunday night. Fortunately, both the nose and throat are fine, so my singing wasn't compromised (Whew!).

It was very painful for about 24 hours, and especially last night with all the loud noise both inside my head (when singing) and outside it: oboe, horn, viola, cello, piano, and lots of percussion rehearsing in a smallish studio makes for some serious loudness. I took Advil to get through the rehearsal and it helped a bit. Then, blessedly, the pain eased a lot last night around midnight while I was waiting for the adrenaline to dissipate. There's still pressure and a blocked feeling there so I want to have it checked out

If I feel well after seeing the doctor I'm going to treat myself to a visit to the SnB at The Purple Purl. I need to inhale some fiber fumes and be around warm and fuzzy string-loving people today. I'll try to keep the acquisition to a minimum (though I do get one day off month, I might want to save it for the DKC frolic later in April).

2008-04-12T16:44:00.011-04:00

Emily Carr, "Blue Sky" (oil), 1936
Helloooooooooo!!!! Is this thing on????

Sorry (again) for the prolonged absence. I know I've been a bad blogger. There's been so much going on around here and I promise I will get around to telling all about it but it will probably have to wait until after April 20th 'cuz I'm just a little busy until then preparing for the WORLD PREMIERE OF AN OPERA THAT WAS WRITTEN FOR ME!!!!!

If you're in the Greater Toronto Area or anywhere in Southern Ontario, I am cordially inviting you to come: EMILY, THE WAY YOU ARE by Jana Skarecky and Di Brandt, a one-woman opera exploring the life and work of Emily Carr, will be premiered on SUNDAY, APRIL 20, 2008 at 1:30 p.m. at the McMichael Gallery Canadian Art Collection, in Kleinberg.

A bold visionary who articulated much of the imagery by which Canada knows itself, Emily Carr was a woman of exceptional courage who defied the conventions of her upbringing as she struggled to define herself and her country. Born into the strict confines of Victorian society in western Canada in 1871, her quest for independence and artistic truth took her from the studios of Paris to remote native villages deep inside the west coast forests on a lifetime journey of mythic proportions. The two great themes of her work were the native culture of the Pacific coast, and the power of nature expressed in images of rain-forests and seascapes.

Presenting Emily Carr’s story at the McMichael Gallery which has long been home to some of her art work highlights the connection between her achievements as a visual artist, her writings, and the inner drama of her life.

The concert, part of the Canadian Music Centre’s “New Music in New Places” program, will feature The Talisker Players chamber ensemble with conductor Gary Kulesha will include other music by composer Jana Skarecky performed by pianist Joseph Ferretti, as well as poetry and prose by Di Brandt and by Emily Carr. The concert is free with gallery admission (adult $15, student/senior $12, family $30).

This is an incredibly wonderful opportunity and artistically very exciting: I get to create a new role that's been written with me in mind and has never been performed before! It's been in the works for a couple of years now, but even after all this time I'm still a bit stunned when I stop and think about it: Dudes, they actually wrote this for ME.

GULP.

Really, I'm fine. I just need a minute. And maybe a shot of Scotch.

Okay, I'm just going to go breathe into this paper bag for a couple of minutes...

...

No, really - don't go - I'm still here!

So, um,... I need to admit this whole thing is a wee tiny bit nerve-wracking. Lest you think it's ALL sunshine and roses (and believe me I am NOT complaining at all, just releasing some anxiety), here's how it's going: I just received the last section of the score TODAY (emailed from the composer at 4:00 am this morning), I have a rehearsal TONIGHT with the pianist, and then with the chamber orchestra and conductor on Monday, which is the only rehearsal before the “dress” rehearsal and the performance next weekend.

No pressure.

Actually, I think I am amazingly calm under the circumstances. I really should be running naked through the house (or street) babbling obscenities or rocking in the corner and winding and unwinding the same poor overworked skein over and over again while drooling silently, but alas I haven’t got time for my nervous breakdown right now.

Whew. Okay. I just needed to get that out of my system. I'm feeling MUCH better now. Thanks.

2008-03-25T19:24:00.009-04:00

Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Is there something wrong with the fact that when the firemen knocked on our door this afternoon and requested that we evacuate the premises due to the intense smoke billowing from the house fire three doors over (a mere 45 feet away in a row house attached to ours), the most pressing worry that came to my mind was "what project should I bring with me?"

In defense of my claim to sanity, though I briefly considered the problem of how to rescue all the yarn in the house, I quickly dismissed that notion as impossible and calmly focussed on getting my husband and myself and the teddy bear (who is something of a surrogate child to both of us) safely out of the house, bringing only my purse with my wallet and cellphone in it, the phone's battery charger in case that phone became our primary means of communication for a while, and yes, my knitting bag with a couple of socks-in-progress and half a dozen balls of chunky wool and bulky alpaca, both of which are in the process of deciding what they want to become. I have my priorities straight.

Addendum: The cause of the blaze hasn't been established. The fire was quickly subdued by the capable actions of fire personnel, with damage to only the one house at the end of our row. Tragically, there was one fatality, most likely due to smoke inhalation. We lost a neighbour, a woman in her sixties whom I did not know, though another neighbour has said he knows her son. I feel oddly sad in a surreal sort of way. She died less than fifty feet away from me. I wish I had known her.

2008-03-20T12:07:00.016-04:00

Then one little push, bang goes the door, clang!
Then the wicked witch will be done to a T!
Hi, there. I'm back! Sorry I’ve been out of communication. Whew! Two shows in one day yesterday and insane prep leading up. I’ve got a massive hangover today from the post-show adrenaline crash - and we even didn’t go out and party after the show (the usual opening night m.o.).

Oh, the shows? They went splendidly, thank you! I'm happy to report that both shows were a resounding success and went off with only the usual sort of minor deviations from the plan that are part of every live performance - the ones that only those onstage and backstage know about and adjust accordingly, while the audience is sublimely unaware.

But enough about that. I bring you some knitting news. And some pictures!

Woah... deep breaths. In and out. Nice and slow. Feel better, now? Good. (Sheesh!) I know it's been a while. Give me a break. I had some things going on, you know. Can we proceed, or do you need another minute to collect yourself? Okay.

When I had a spare few minutes off-stage during rehearsals, I was working on a little forensic and reconstructive knitting for a friend. Lynne, aka Dollymop (formerly known as geekzilla) had managed to knit up a gorgeous version of Rogue just past the arms when she decided that she would not be able to live with the little mistake in one of the side cables. Here's how it was supposed to look - the good cable: Unfortunately, the offending curlicue was down in the 12th row of the body, a very long way down the mountain Lynne had just finished climbing up row by row, so when she called out a knitting 911, I offered my services to give this poor little malformed cable a makeover. I am happy to report that sweater surgery is almost done!

The initial deconstruction went smoothly: I put the rest of the body onto some waste yarn, isolated the cable panel and frogged it back down below the glitch. Then I reknit the whole first chart, so it's now about halfway back up to the top. I’m bringing it to SnB tonight. Figure I can keep going up the narrow cable part, or pass it on to her and let her finish it herself to share in the satisfaction of hands-on participation in the recovery.

Often, when performing this delicate cosmetic procedure, the undoing lets slack creep in and the other parts start to sag progressively more and more away from the section being reworked. It's a slippery slope. Each row above the bottom of the frogged part can add a little more slack, so if you've ripped back down a long way and you reknit it, by the time you reach the top there's a lot more yarn there and the result looks much looser than the rest of the garment. You have to give it all a mini-stretch to equalize the yarn distribution into the safe sections after every two or three rows when knitting back up. You can also tweak the stitches around the reworked part with a crochet hook to make it all look smooth and seamless. That’s really the part that can be been the biggest pain in the @$$ when doing this kind of sweater surgery.

And the great news is that there was very little slippage from the unravelling! The yarn she's using is just slightly felty when you knit it up, effectively velcro-ing itself in place, which made the frogging procedure a bit delicate, as I had to gently unpick some of the stitches from the row below, especially at the edges of the cable panel. But it kept the rest of the garment from spreading away from the frogged section. As long as I work the cable panel back up just a little loosely, I'm not introducing much slack into the reworked section, and it's going smoothly and quickly.

BTW - the yarn is Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair and it's fabulous! I have to get me some of this stuff as soon as I’m off my yarn diet. I’ve been reading about it on Knitter’s Review and it’s brilliant! It'll have me drooling over it all summer, waiting to whip some up into some delicious fall/winter woolly goodness!

2008-03-16T10:34:00.020-04:00

Witch Hazel, from "Bewitched Bunny"
(Looney Tunes, dir. Chuck Jones, 1954)

Just in case you were worried, I am still here and doing fine. I'm just totally swamped right now with prep for the coming show and haven't the spare brain cells or the time to blog about anything.

Rehearsals for Hansel and Gretel are going very well! I'm doing two roles: the Mother and the Witch and I finally got my music learned properly (Whew!), with reassurances from the cast that everyone else they know who's sung the Witch struggled with it too. And now that I know the role, I am having a lot of fun with it!

This weekend is crunch time with costume fittings and music rehearsals yesterday, final staging and a run-through today, and the dress rehearsal tomorrow. I'll recoup vocally on Tuesday (it's a big Wagnerian honker - well, my parts are, anyway, the others are sweet) and just mentally review everything. Then I have two shows on Wednesday. On Thursday I expect to be vertically challenged (post-show-itis), but I hope to crawl out to SnB in the evening.

Meanwhile - because I haven't enough to deal with right now - my bedroom ceiling is cracked, crumbling and leaking snowmelt (right by my side of the bed, of course) because of an ice dam that's built up in my neighbour's eavestrough. Sheesh! But I refuse to let it get me down - I have a choice: either cope or don't. I choose to cope (because the alternative is to sit in a puddle, sulking, while I wait for my house to fall down around me).

It’s all seriously cramping my knitting and designing time (though I can sneak in a few rows while some other scenes are running without me). And the great decluttering and organizing has screeched to a halt, but that's temporary.

I owe several of you a shout-out for various reasons (you know who you are) and I apologize for the delay. I hope to get back to knitting and blogging and correspondence late next week or by the weekend...

2008-03-03T04:34:00.023-05:00

"The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well."
Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Pardon my recent absence. February 2008 has been an adventure. I've been spelunking in my psyche, and if I had been able to make myself blog about it during the experience, I believe I would have started with something like, "Help! I've fallen down and I can't get up." Metaphorically speaking, that is.

The confluence of my ambitious agenda to reclaim my life on numerous fronts simultaneously combined with a biochemical tendency for depression and anxiety to raise a little too much emotional baggage for me to process all at once. Actively engaged in decluttering my life, eager to eliminate excesses both in my home and my body, thoughtfully untangling my relationships, and particularly trying to practise a new paradigm for a healthy and authentic relationship with my mother, all had me rather abruptly facing many of my personal demons at once. I was stirring up a lot of feelings, sadness for some lost dreams, old suffering and regrets that I need to own and grieve. At some point, I slipped a little too far and I became profoundly mired in my misery for most of the month of February.

With perhaps less than ideal coincidence, in the time leading up to this my doctor and I were discussing possibly changing my medication and I was being weaned off my current SNRI to facilitate the transition. I just happened to be on the lowest possible dose of antidepressant/anxiolitic medication at a time when I probably needed a wee bit more in the way of biochemical support to sustain the emotional clarity that would allow me to dig myself out of the emotional morass. All this left me in the centre of a perfect storm of depression, and it's taken me a while to regain my balance and then get my act together to fulfill all the obligations I dropped while I was down the rabbit-hole and then climbing back out.

It was a bit like an internal spring-cleaning: I was forced to look deep into the corners of my psyche, under the old appliances and furniture of my inner house, and finding lots of painful emotional residue, old lingering hurts that needed to finally come up and out. It doesn't require a degree in psych to see the connections between the hoarding of excess possessions and of excess body mass and the hoarding of emotional baggage, old habits and patterns of behaviour. Letting go is letting go, and once begun it's rather frightening, because there is an emotional investment associated with all the stuff we hold onto. It all once had and still has meaning and purpose, and though they may not serve us well any longer, they are familiar. The status quo is comforting, even when it doesn't work for us anymore.

When this happens, the only way through - is through.

I spent many days wallowing in the mire, with intermittent breakthroughs when I was actually able to let some of the pain out and cry. In between, I had occasional periods of energy and positive impulse to tackle a handful of small self-care activities: I cleaned my desk around the computer, repacked and stacked the collapsing yarn avalanche, cleaned out the science experiments in the back of my fridge, dug through my closets and my kitchen for more things to donate or discard,...

But often I felt paralyzed, waiting for the part of me that's still so scared of all the associated feelings to let some more of them come all the way up and out. All I wanted to do was sleep, read, and (sometimes) watch TV and I had very little appetite. It was very hard to function and to get anything done, especially if it had a deadline. It felt like I was stuck between gears.

I have to confess to one particular blunder of which I am not proud, though I believe I handled it fairly well once the initial damage was done.

I was supposed to have an important rehearsal one Sunday afternoon mid-month. However, I couldn't make myself even begin learning the music for those scenes until the day before, Saturday. I gave it a good effort, but eventually realized there was just no way I could prepare the material in time for the next day. After a few deep breaths I decided the best thing to do was admit the truth and face the immediate problem head on. So I called the director on Saturday night to let her know that due to my recent emotional distress I was not going to be ready, so at least we could discuss how to salvage the rehearsal, maybe rearrange the schedule to do other scenes which I could be ready to rehearse on that day.

I am lucky that I have worked with this director twice in the past, so she knows my work and that I am a competent and conscientious colleague. I am lucky that she is the sort of person to whom I could confess my blunder without losing all professional credibility. I am also certain that someone or something was looking out for me, because fortuitously she was in the process of deciding to cancel the next day’s rehearsal due to the forecast warnings of freezing rain and hazardous driving conditions. Hence, I had a reprieve. And procrastination to that extreme is not something I can allow myself to do again in a professional situation.

Depression and creative endeavours are antithetical, because the depressed state is really one of fear: fear to face the authentic feelings below the depressed surface, the depth of sadness and pain that is struggling to come out which was originally deemed too overwhelming to permit myself to feel. The true creative process by its nature opens cracks in that protective shield and subjects the artist to whatever is coming through. Usually, that is tolerable, if the intensity and/or quality of emotion is manageable, whether positive or negative. But when the damn bursts, like mine did in February, it is terrifying and depression is a handy way to avoid feeling too much all at once. It's a coping mechanism, if not a very good one.

While deep in the personal muck, I was not up for creating anything - musically or otherwise. I scarcely even knit anything, nothing more than a few rows of a plain sock in the whole month (it has since been frogged). That’s not good, because knitting is usually a great source of comfort, providing solace and meditative space when I need them. Furthermore, I was in the process of a couple of personal design projects and also committed to developing two new sock patterns for fundraising activities, one for a friend who will need extensive reconstructive surgery which is not covered by our provincial medical plan, and another to offer as incentive to my sponsors for the 2008 Weekend to End Breast Cancer.

I am so very grateful that even while I was going through the worst of this, I had wonderful support from my friends and my therapist. DH was and still is terrific - holding me whenever I need it, reassuring me that I am safe and valued and loved. Friends were open to listen and let me cry. When I am "in here" it helps to know that caring folks and friends are out there. And I'm relieved that I could open up to my director about how I'd been struggling lately without being judged, that I could be my authentic self in the moment and I didn't have to armour-up or choose to pretend that I was fine on the outside, while silently screaming in anguish on the inside.

Meanwhile, I'm working with my therapist on exercises to help me loosen and adjust the valve on all the residual sadness and pain that still needs to come out, but in a manageable way so I can get more done and get back into living a more balanced life. I am who I am and I firmly believe that no matter what has come before to get me here, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, poised on the brink of the rest of my life, and whatever I make of that is up to me.

P.S. I am delighted to report that I had a terrific rehearsal yesterday!

Also, my knit-mojo is back - just in time to squeeze in a last winter project or two before I start some cheery spring knitting.

2008-02-05T20:10:00.001-05:00

"That's all your house is. It's a place to keep your stuff while you go out there and get more stuff." - George Carlin

I gave away some of my stuff yesterday.

Specifically, I spent about an hour and a half spelunking in my closet (ie: digging through the monumental pile of clothing that cannot even get anywhere near, let alone into, my closet), looking for things to give to a friend who needs some clothes to make her life more comfortable for the next few months. This woman is bravely in the middle of an astounding journey of body recovery. Due to the rapidity of her weight loss since having a gastric bypass last spring, she is not any one size for more than a couple or a few weeks, so it makes no sense for her to be repeatedly buying and discarding new or even second hand clothes. Thus we went shopping in my closet, which as I have mentioned before, contains a full spectrum of garments in sizes from 14 to 24.

My friend is very intuitively astute and, when we had finished in the ladies apparel department, she looked me straight in the eyes and asked what she could now do for me. Once I paused from the scramble of activity, coughed up the dust and took a real breath, I realized that I was a bit of a mess emotionally. There was so much more than just an episode of closet-organization/clutter-management/home-reclamation happening here. This was bringing up a lot of baggage, and not the physical kind.

It's no surprise that I have a lot of sadness and pain tied up in my possessions and my clothes in particular. There's everything in here from body issues (when I will be that size again...) and self-esteem, to past vocational aspirations and missed opportunities attached to all the stuff I have hoarded over the years, which is precisely why it's taken me a long time to be able to let go of it.

So I did a walking meditation yesterday about all the stuff that is coming up about all my stuff. And I feel a lot of sadness and wistful longing which are welcome, as well as leftovers of old guilt and shame that need to be released. A lot of the feelings are still more in the nature of amorphous emotional residue that I am not yet ready to articulate. But the one most surprising thing that keeps coming back to me is that while I am upset, I am not really as upset as I thought I "should" be. This is not as hard as I expected it to be. In a nutshell, I am FINALLY really ready to let go of the false lingering hopes and stagnant unfulfilled dreams that all the extraneous stuff represents.

Those dreams and hopes are gone - though many of them have been reframed into new ones that are perhaps superficially identical but fundamentally healthier in motives. And I am not grieving the lost hopes - I see now that they were never real, but came from an unconscious place that wasn't my true self. However, I am mourning the lost years, the uncounted and unaccounted time which I spent less than truly conscious, and especially the vital passion wasted during those periods.

I do believe and honour the truth that those years weren't wasted. I am precisely where I am supposed to be in my life right now, in a perfect place from which to accept what was, be with what is, and move to what I want my life to be.

I'll have to continue the work in fits and starts, every few days a little more, another corner or section or a couple of bags full. It's rather too overwhelming to do everyday, and also I have the small matter of work coming up, so my days really need to be spent studying my music and preparing for upcoming rehearsals and auditions.

And as I proceed through the whirlwind I have chosen to embrace, I need to remember through all of this to give myself the time and the space and the TLC to reflect and heal, while gently and persistently continuing to purge the excesses, and feeling the associated emotions that rise up as all the accumulated things pass through my hands and my life one last time.

2008-02-02T12:55:00.000-05:00

Acme Tornado Kit, from "Whoa, Be-Gone"
(Merrie Melodies, dir. Chuck Jones, 1958)

My 2008 kicked off with rather a lot of upheaval (*cough* - understatement) in numerous areas of my life. Though it seems excessive to set off on so many changes all at once (and it was a little overwhelming), I really felt I had to go with the impulse to initiate sweeping changes. I am highly motivated to reinvent or renovate my life in almost every way possible:

Housekeeping & domestic repairs: organization and cleaning and more décor plans, elimination of clutter and excess stuff, continuing the epic saga of our bathroom repairs (now the tub enamel is worn through in a few spots so I need to decide whether to have it re-enameled, get a liner put in, or replace it with a nice deep soaker tub - that's my dream choice, if I can afford it), building a wall of kitchen cubbyholes to use as a pantry and for small/medium appliance stations, and better yard maintenance.

Social and family life: reestablishing contacts with friends and family, even planning to entertain at home (and not just in the summer when the backyard is our living/dining room). And as for family - I am attempting to build a modicum of sanity and stability into my on-again/off-again relationship with my Mother (we are going for "couples-counselling" together!). I am also working at building a connection with my half-sisters who haven't really been a part of my life in the past (excepting a brief period when they were very young and I attempted to connect with my father and his family).

Health management: cooking more from scratch and eating healthy foods close to their natural state, detoxing some excess heavy metals, getting my blood sugar levels and blood pressure off the risky borderline, planned R&R and fun playful exercise, adding new activities and building them into my routine, as well as more scheduled training for next September's 60 km walk -- The 2008 Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer.

Yes - I am revving up to walk another 60 km to support the fight against Breast Cancer. And yes, I will be offering a new sock pattern (just as soon as I (a) finalize the design and (b) get my intrepid test-knitters/tech-editors to sign off on it). But you can go ahead and sponsor me now for 2008 if you want to beat the crowds. Or, better yet, go check out Knitters for Knockers, then click here to join us for for this profoundly empowering life-altering experience. Let's work together to make cancer history!

Creative pursuits outside of my career: more knitting, returning to assorted arts and crafts I used to practise (sketching and drawing, prints, acrylic and oil painting, ceramics), even gardening. (Yes, I said Gardening. Stop laughing. I might actually be good at it one day, and until then I could at least try to not kill ALL the plants this year.)

On the professional front: I will shortly start rehearsals for a production of Hansel and Gretel - it’s so much fun! I am playing both the Mother and the Witch (insert joke here: my favourite so far is "how can you tell...?), both of which work for me very well vocally and temperamentally (not to mention the obvious inherent therapeutic and cathartic potential. Can you say "Table for 2, Herr Doctor Freud?"). And I am receiving weekly addenda to the existing score for my opera Emily, the way you are (hoping it is all finished in time for me to really polish the performance for the premiere in April).

And there has been KNITTING (gasp!).

My biggest project at the moment is probably a knock-off of a terrific Old-Navy cardi-vest (no pictures yet - I'll try to get some for you soon). I am rather fond of "Re-inventing the Wool;" i.e., visually deconstructing interesting knits and other garments and figuring out how to make them for myself, an extension of something I have often had to do by sizing things up since until very recently most cute patterns didn't come in my size.

Last fall I was visiting with JenniferC and Miko (aka Purplicious) at The Purple Purl. I admired the construction of this terrific short-sleeved open/wrap-front vest-cardi Miko was wearing and naturally assumed it was a personal hand-knit creation, but when I inquired about the pattern I was disappointed to learn that it was a store-bought number from Old-Navy. So, of course, I proceeded to rip it off her body right there and then, and began madly measuring and drawing and scribbling with a plan to reconstruct one (or a few) for my very own. A few weeks later, after much contemplation of structure, form, and strategy (even some origami paper experiments), I FINALLY began to knit and I am happily reinventing a design and pattern. More on this soon.

2008-01-05T19:47:00.000-05:00

Please stand by.
We are NOT experiencing
technical difficulties.
Please note that MezzoDiva is taking a sabbatical from blogging while she launches various and sundry therapeutic activities, recuperative endeavours and positive life-altering campaigns, to some of which she has previously alluded here in exhaustive and possibly excessive detail.

Intermittent guerilla acts of blogging may (or may not) occur in this venue in the meantime, in accordance to the whims and/or articulative competency of the subject. MezzoDiva will continue to post sporadically at her Performance Blog and on Ravelry for your further amusement. ("I'm here all week. Try the veal!").

Semi-regular knit-blogging activities OR a notice regarding further knitblog absence can be expected to appear here on or around Groundhog Day.

2007-12-31T20:23:00.001-05:00

Wishing everyone a
happy, heathy, prosperous
and fibre-filled New Year!

2007-12-30T12:50:00.000-05:00

On the cusp of transition.

I don’t believe in New Years “Resolutions” as such, but it tends to be a season for reflection and I have been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, reviewing the past year(s), as well as setting/renewing goals and - probably most important of all - figuring out what I need to make of my day-to-day life in order to achieve those goals.

My agenda for the new year (and the rest of my life) consists largely of reclaiming my home and my body, detoxing and purging the excesses and the toxins from both, so that I can have more optimal conditions from which to actively (not aggressively, but avidly) pursue the musical career I want and deserve. For that I need my home and my body to work for me (not against me), to provide the environment and vitality in which I can focus my efforts on career-building: a return to regular coaching and role preparation (esp. for the big Emily Carr premiere in April), arranging and performing as many cross-Canada auditions as I can find, and getting all the details ready for the big NYC opera competition I want to do next winter (aside from the musical prep, I need to get a new passport, get visas if necessary, etc…). And if I am able to teach from my house (even for just a few hours a week) I can supplement what I get from the synagogue gigs and concerts/shows, and that income would be very welcome as the financial investment in coaching and travel will be big.

So getting my home in order is already underway. It's as if the bathroom emergency was the cork in a bottle and since then DH and I have been slowly but steadily purging stuff that's obsolete or delinquent on its rent and organizing the stuff which earns its keep, and serendipitously finding storage solutions that have eluded us for decades! (Goethe was right)

Still, this is a very big endeavour and daunting on our own. (DH is very helpful but, well, let’s just say it’s not his forte and leave it at that - ignoring for the moment his very own 3-D room of "stuff").

It's not easy. I’ve done it for friends (some of whom make me look like the queen of neat) and it’s one of those things that’s so much easier to do for someone else. When it’s your (my/our) own stuff it can be overwhelming. But my wonderful friends have offered to help and that's terrific. I’m not in need of an “intervention” (please don't call Peter Walsh). I’ve already begun to do it. But help will be most welcome.

Meanwhile, I am working on the stash. The mad recent cataloguing of my personal SABLE on Ravelry will make it much easier to either use the stuff (assigning it a pattern from my queue or finding one from the gazillions there) or divest myself of it(if it no longer makes feel me warm and fuzzy - pardon the pun).

And I am setting new firm rules for acquisition – ie: no new stringy stuff until I finish at least one large-scale project (headbands/hats/scarves/mitts do not count) AND absolutely no new project-sized purchases until I finish several large-scale projects (an extra ball or a few of whatever is needed to complete a project is permissible, but ONLY once that project is well underway and thus it won’t become stash).

2007-12-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

Weighty issues.

Tish came to SnB on Thursday and the discussion turned to her remarkable experiences with GBPS and recovery. Hearing her talk about it and mirror so much of my own experience with food and weight was exactly what I needed at the exact right time. I am deeply moved by her struggle, both for her sake and for mine.

These issues are right on the front-burner for me too right now and it is tough to deal with them “alone”. I know my friends all support me and I am truly not ashamed of my body or my weight, but I do feel lonely about it: I am alone dealing with my body and what I need to do about it, and though we all have our own body issues and assorted related syndromes, nobody in my circle of friends is in a similar condition. I have acquaintances who are women of larger sizes (some knitters, some in singing circles) but not one of my close friends is actively dealing with this right now.

Don't get me wrong - I don't expect or even want to be what anyone would refer to as a skinny or svelte. I am not biologically destined to be a slender sylph in this life. I will always be a bodacious babe, and I am just fine with that - very good, in fact. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a zaftig woman of surprisingly good health so far, despite having spent 40-something mostly sedentary years on this earth (except for that brief period of relative fitness from 2000-02, achieved by somewhat obsessive means). Due to my varying Rubenesque proportions, I have a rotating wardrobe in every size from 14 to 26. I love myself and my body at all those sizes, though to be completely honest I have to admit that I am most comfortable in my skin somewhere in the middle, around sizes 16/18.

I am also politically motivated to combat the zeitgeist of fat phobia - the last permissible bigotry. With the onslaught of reality shows and "helpful" talk shows, from the fashion industry to news reports of the latest studies on obesity, it is very easy to become caught up in the media frenzy and buy into the myths of fat vilification. The word itself, "fat", has become overloaded with anxiety and negative values. It has taken on disproportional connotations of shame and mortification, and no longer functions as noun or adjective, but is used almost as a swear word. Women in particular are bombarded with the message that if we are fat, then we are physical, emotional and spiritual cripples and I refuse to participate in or perpetuate that mythology. We owe it to ourselves and our daughters to combat the tyranny of our fat phobic society and how it targets and denigrates women.

But, politics and social issues aside, I do want to live a long and healthy life. I want to enjoy my body in all forms of physical expression and I want it to work for me as I pursue my other goals in life. I am currently about 40 lbs lighter than Tish was when she had her surgery, and I am grateful that my health hasn’t yet gone too far down the river. But it is sending up lots of flares (my blood pressure spikes last spring and summer, I’m prone to infection, etc.) and I am paying attention because I refuse to let it get dangerous and inaction now guarantees it will get worse. I am definitely not going the surgical route (despite my mother’s urging and offers to pay for everything a few years ago).

I have vowed that I am never going to diet again. Yo-yo dieting and the inevitable deprivation/obsession mindset it creates are how I got up to this size in the first place! Instead, I am determined to take better care of my health and to eat a fairly well-balanced selection of foods, mostly from the healthier ends of the dietary spectrum. I have already revamped a lot of my home cooking and I’m back on the exercise wagon I tumbled off when I was sick in October.

Still, I recognize that I need an emotional support system especially for this process, over and above what I get from DH and my excellent therapist, and I’m not going to go to a program (One day I’ll share more about my history with some supposedly helpful weight-related programs, but for now suffice to say that I have learned that they are not for me). And it is hard for me to reach out for support about this - or most things, actually. I am usually the one providing the shoulder for others, and though I do share my story with people openly, I tend not to let the feelings really come out (except for my husband and my shrink). I need to learn to reach out more because if left to my own devices I will just internalize all the issues that come up, especially those about weight and food and all the associated baggage.

So (deep breath), here goes: I would be very grateful for any and all support and encouragement, and especially now while I get used to actually asking for help if you check in on me once in a while (here, by email or by phone) I’ll be grateful.

And on that note I need to go defrost the fish and clean some vegetables for dinner.

2007-12-26T07:24:00.000-05:00

Deck the halls with Malabrigo!
Fa la la la la, La la la la!

I'm revelling in Ravelry, frolicking in the fibre and celebrating my stash. In the last few days many (MANY) blissful hours have been frittered away cataloguing my valiant attempt to accumulate a respectable SABLE (I've got about half of it entered, but almost no photos yet), as well as exploring my options in the pattern galleries and setting goals for future projects well into the new year and beyond. Okay, so I actually have enough in the queue to get through the century. If these clever people would please press pause on all the new and nifty patterns for a while, maybe I could catch up. (Heh, heh. Heaven forfend!).

O.M.G. this place is wonderful! It feels so good to sort and organize my copious collection of string stuff and finally get an honest accounting of what's actually in there. And I am very excited by the ease with which I can cross-reference between the stash, my library, and my immense wishlist of (*cough!*) imminent and future projects.

There's not much to show for knitting around here. Lately I've been swatching and scheming and scribbling notes, and doing a lot of origami to help me visualize some design ideas that are rattling around in my head.

Still I do have one little FO from earlier in the fall. These are some super simple hand/arm-warmers I whipped up for Stella recently. MezzoDiva's simple fingerless mitts with a twist:

These are very simple 2x2 Ribbed arm/handwarmers with a cable twist at the thumbhole to reinforce the opening. Twilleys of Stamford Freedom Spirit, Blue/Gold multi on 3.5mm needles (I find magic loop best, but if you like juggling DPNs go for it!) Here's the recipe:

Using needles a little smaller than typically called for by the yarn-band (to create a nice dense and warm fabric), cast on a multiple of 4 stitches (about 1.5 times the number you would use for a simple stockinette mitt; e.g: in a DK weight I'd cast on 36-40sts, 36 x1.5= 54, so these were made on 56 stitches which is the next number that's a multiple of 4) and join to work in the round. Work a 2X2 ribbed tube (in the round) until you reach the desired length before the thumbhole, ending with the two stitches of a purl column.

Do a cable twist (to reinforce the opening at the thumbhole) as follows: Slip the next FOUR stitches to a cable or spare double-pointed needle and hold them in back. Knit the next TWO stitches, then purl the next TWO (formerly knitted) stitches and knit the last TWO stitches (formerly purled) from the holder.

Work another round, but the next time you get to this cabled bit, knit the first two stitches (which were crossed over on the previous round and then work only the next purl stitch. Now TURN YOUR WORK and continue working flat (back and forth, instead of in the round) for about 1.5 inches, working the stitches as they appear to continue the 2X2 ribbing.

The purl stitches between the crossed-over twist will become selvedge stitches, finishing the edges of the thumbhole nicely.

When the thumbhole is long enough that if you pinch the edges together they form a slightly snug fit around the thumb, rejoin the edges to work in the round and do another cable twist (as above) to reinforce it at the top. Then continue in the round for as long as you need and cast off.

Voila!

2007-12-24T07:36:00.001-05:00

Oy to the world!

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have ~~sinned~~ been remiss. It's been 25 days since my last ~~confession~~ er, blog posting.

'Tis the season to find that time keeps getting away from me without me having a clue where it went or what I did. It's really all a blur. I'm still not sure how I managed to miss SnB last week. I had plans to go and then...? I never even made the annual batch of Potato Latkes promised for the DH every Hannukah. (I owe you some, my love!)

Still, it has been a good several weeks with some ups and some downs: reconnecting with "real" life after the last of my fall gigs were done, reclaiming the house from the fallout of bathroom-and-kitchen madness, and a minor medical issue that could have been much (MUCH) worse. But where has all the time gone? I am stumped. Sigh. If you find where my time has gone, please do write and let me know.

I hope to have a nice long blog about it all, if I can figure out WTH I've been up to! (And my sincere apologies to the grammar police for ending the previous sentence with a preposition)

I've (finally) come to terms with the notion that I can whole-heartedly enjoy Xmas as a winter festival of light returning from the dark. This is the first year I've been able to really get into the seasonal spirit without feeling even a bit guilty for somehow betraying my own cultural/religious roots: Fa la la la la - Oy, vey, let's make merry! Most of our seasonal traditions go back much farther than any Judeo-Christian appropriation of the rituals, and all northern hemisphere cultures have our own variation of the same holidays, so let's hunker in together and celebrate the return of light.

Wishing you all a belated Happy Hannukah &/or Merry Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali/Deepavali, Yalda, Dong Zhi - just celebrate Winter-Solstice Festival(s) of your choice. I've decided to enjoy them all!

(And if I've left anyone out - it's not intentional, please forgive me and let me know about it so I can learn more about your culture's seasonal celebrations.)

BTW, there has been knitting. Lots and LOTS of knitting, but most of it is swatching and pattern drafting and there are no pictures of any interest yet, but stay tuned in the New Year. There WILL be goodies to see and goodies to share!

2007-11-28T11:57:00.000-05:00

Reno Redux - or - Welcome to my Nightmare.
Pardon my mood. I am not a very happy camper right now and not fit for human company. I have one lonely and frayed nerve left. Please don't step on it if you want to live.

I am shell-shocked and feeling rather violated after three days of demolition and reconstruction in my house. There are clouds of dust and a mud trail from the front door up the carpeted stairs to the bathroom and back, accompanied by a continual sound-track of loud banging, crashing ceramics and screeching power tools. They’ve been ripping out my kitchen ceiling and my shower tiles (the bathroom is above the kitchen), repairing the ceiling and walls and retiling the shower.

The whole tiled shower wall was crumbling and the kitchen ceiling was caving in below it. There was horrendous water damage because there was no water barrier behind the tiles, just regular drywall, so the three walls around the tub and shower were completely rotten - like compost - disgusting.

The kitchen walls and ceiling have been peeling for years and we haven't done much about them because the bathroom had to be fixed first and then the kitchen ceiling and walls, or we'd just have to do it all again as water damage from upstairs trickled down. ~~Blogger is not permitting me to load the pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it.~~

Basically, it means we have no shower for the week and during the day we have very little access to the one and only toilet in the house. Since we both are home during the day, this is not the best scenario. We are using my very gracious neighbour’s bathroom occasionally (often) this week, but it's still been a pain in the - well, you know. The house is filthy and covered in dust and grit and, despite some daily attempts to clean up, it really isn't going to get better until after the work is completed.

DH does not handle these things well - he hates having his personal space invaded and he hates to be left alone with workers in the house. I’m not particularly enjoying the process either, but it’s necessary and I am definitely looking forward to the results. Because then we can (finally) continue with scraping off the rest of the peeling paint in the house and refinishing the walls and painting the kitchen, and building a pantry and organizing the cupboards, etc., etc... and ultimately reclaiming the various spaces in our house that have become permanent staging areas for the interim storage of our stuff (gradually over the next many months – give us a break! We’ll need to recover from this part first).

This renovation is NOT about aesthetics, but I am allowing myself to ponder the colour scheme. The new shower area will be white tile (instead of the 80's "dusty rose"). I'll probably do more white and maybe a medium french blue in the kitchen, to go with the blue-&-white mottled Italian floor tiles (we did the floor in 2000, then stopped).
The good news is I am falling in love with my cute little house all over again. It may lack some space, but the individual rooms are a good size for this sort of house and with some TLC it will be quite charming... eventually.

Oh, yeah... I have been knitting. The condition of my home (and my nerves) are not conducive to any project work, so I've been scheming about some new design ideas and knitting swatches. Lots and lots of swatches. But there's nothing to show and tell yet.

2007-11-27T08:33:00.000-05:00

I saw this quiz on Rochelle's blog and I had to try it right away:
Which Superhero are you?

You are Wonder Woman
You are a beautiful princess with great strength of character.

Your results:
Wonder Woman 80%
Superman 80%
Spider-Man 75%
Green Lantern 75%
Supergirl 70%
The Flash 60%
Robin 60%
Batman 55%
Iron Man 50%
Hulk 40%
Catwoman 30%

Hey!!! Cut that out. Stop laughing! Yes, I mean you!...
Okay, get it out of your system if you must.

Sheesh.

See there where it says it's a superhero PERSONALITY test. Nobody said anything about the physique.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

2007-11-22T14:15:00.000-05:00

So. Far. Behind.

To everybody who is waiting for a swap-package/contest-prize/blog-post/reply acknowledging your existence/query/
magnanimity (and perhaps a word or two about my knitting) - please please PLEASE accept my heartfelt humblest apologies and assurances that it's all still underway or on the way.

I am having a little trouble (*ahem* - understatement) digging out from the (literal and figurative) avalanche of obligations and the piles of debris (not to mention the basic life-supporting chores) that were dropped when I was sick and then compounded by the recent spate of concerts.

Soon, my friends. Soon.

2007-11-11T16:50:00.000-05:00

Wow! Last night was intense. Terrific. A TKO - for the audience and for me! So I am happy, but hibernatory. I slept until 1:30 p.m. and my greatest ambition for the rest of the day is to sit in front of the TV and knit until my next nap... I hear my sofa calling me.
Three down - one to go. I get my life back after this week!

2007-11-10T10:55:00.000-05:00

Announcement:(with my apologies for the very late notice)
If you are in the GTA and happen to be free tonight, I'd love to see you here! (psst: bring your knitting - and any Campanula socks you have made or are making)
You are invited to a 50th-Birthday Concert of
Compositions and Paintings by Jana Skarecky
Saturday, November 10, 2007, 8 p.m.
at Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave., Toronto
(in Yorkville, just north of Bloor, east of University)
Admission $15
featuring a preview of voice-&-piano excerpts from her one-woman opera (a work-in-progress, with libretto by poet Di Brandt) about Emily Carr (with libretto by poet Di Brandt), Emily, the Way You Are, sung by Ramona Carmelly, with a cameo as “The Child Emily” by Juliana Colwell.

concert approximately 1 hour, to be followed by refreshments and a birthday party for the composer (cards only please!)

* EMILY, THE WAY YOU ARE, a new lyrical portrait of the boldly nonconformist visionary Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr, will premiere on Sunday April 20, 2008, at 1:30 p.m., with mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly and The Talisker Players chamber ensemble at the McMichael Gallery Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario through the Canadian Music Centre's New Music in New Places program.

2007-11-04T14:08:00.000-05:00

Lest we forget.

I have mentioned before that I used to keep Brunnhilde in my wallet. I found her in a newspaper many years ago. Sorry, I don't recall where, or who the cartoonist is - the series title was "Bent Offerings". She reminds me how very much I love what I'm doing.

Last night I sang a fun and frivolous program at a gala fundraiser celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hospice Thornhill. This is a very worthy, underfunded and underassisted thread of the social fabric. Our society is so deeply afraid of the whole idea of death that we go to great lengths in our denial, shunning this ubiquitous fact of life (which is, to the best of my knowledge, still a terminal condition) to the extent that in our haste to forget our own potential demise, precious little attention is paid to the needs of both the dying and those whose loved ones are dying. Except, that is, for the wonderful work and programs offered by hospices, their caregivers and volunteers. I was honoured to be a part of this wonderful event and I believe a lot of money was raised for this cause (I hope to find out later in the week).

I have two more concerts coming up whose subjects bear remembering (well, three actually, but one is a partially repeated program). One program for Holocaust Education Week is tomorrow night, then there's a concert with a preview of a lot of material from the Emily Carr project next Saturday, and another Holocaust Education program is early the next week. Both the Holocaust programs and the Emily Carr work contain vast amounts of contemporary music which is either brand new (composed for this event) or recent (mid-late 20th Century) and thus it's a lot new repertoire for me. I usually love this stuff - in one case, I actually chose the rep, so it's a self-inflicted challenge and I can't (shouldn't) complain! However, please induge me briefly - I need to get this out of my system.

It wouldn't be a problem, but I hadn't planned for a rather extended interruption in my learning curve (insert sound-effects of a major glitch here). I caught the nastiest flu and was out of commission from the last week of September for almost a month. Even after the first couple of weeks, when the worst of it was over and I slowly started to get better, I had absolutely no ability to focus, no concentration and no energy. About all I could do was sleep 14-16 hours a day to recover and watch a little TV when I was too tired to read. That whole missing month was supposed to be learning and practicing time, and I got nothing done. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Heck, I couldn't even knit a straight line, let alone grasp complicated new music.

For the past two weeks, with a few almost comically unpredictable lapses due to my lingering post-flu diminished stamina, I have been desperately scrambling to learn and rehearse all this new repertoire, dashing around the city and meeting with pianists, and altogether feeling quite pathetically overwhelmed by everything (except the aforementioned Thornhill Hospice gala, which was almost too much fun, comprised as it was of silly and fabulous musical theatre, some cabaret songs and "popera"). Adding insult to injury, all this frantic preparation for my current spate of musical engagements is even getting in the way of my knitting, the usual pressure valve and comforting soother of my frazzled soul (well, except for one day when I couldn't take it anymore and I played hookie to go and sit with Haley at Knitomatic and blissfully knit the day away).

So I decided to invite Brunnhilde back to visit here again. Because there's one thing I need to keep in mind when the going gets tough: No matter how difficult, hectic or stressful my musical life gets from time to time (and boy, it does!), I have to always remember that I am blessed to be doing something I love with my life and to be able to share it with others in meaningful ways.

P.S. for those folks seeking a summary of stitches: please stand by. There will be knitting content here eventually, sometime after the middle of the month. I hope. And if we can get the new camera battery to work, there might even be pictures!

2007-10-23T09:20:00.000-04:00

I am enjoying the lovely fall weather so much - it is such terrific inspiration to knit wonderful wooly things!

I have been at a loss regarding what to do with a horded stash of beautiful Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran yarn in Wild Plum (410).
I picked up a whole bag (ten huge balls) of this stuff on major discount last winter (because it was a discontinued yarn). That's a veritable wealth of wool! At 175 yds per 100g ball, I have 1750 yards of luscious purpley tweed with flecks of green, pink and rust.

According to Yarndex, its jewel shades provide the perfect background for the small heathered, contrasting nubs in the tweedy effect. Its weight and texture also highlight cables and textured designs extremely well... As a singles contruction, it will break fairly easily if you pull at it, and it's a little rough to knit with, but it does make a nice sturdy garment. It also softens up nicely when washed.

Nothing seemed quite right for it, then a couple of days ago I was delving in the archives at Knitty and came across Ester from Spring 2007. Oddly, this design intrigued me when it came out, but as it was spring, my fancy turned more to other lighter fare in anticipation of summer and frankly I totally forgot about it.

Well, lo and behold, the yarn called for in Ester is Rowan's Scottish Tweed Aran, which is mighty similar to my Yorkshire Tweed Aran, and so off I went swatching merrily, and my swatch accidentally became this. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.. I am getting a good gauge match with the pattern's called for 4.5 mm needles. This is a very very fast knit and I was just zooming along here until the day before yesterday. I am just about to cast on at both sides for the upper part of the body - which will of course take longer as it is a lot wider. I am sort of stuck though, trying to decide which size to make it. For the width I cast on originally, there are three possible sizes and I'm not certain which one will work best for my personal body shape.

Given the interesting construction of this garment, I have an intuitive hunch that it's not just about size, but also about shape - and I want this to be both comfortable and flattering (is there anything as disheartening as whipping up a lovely sweater for yourself only to find that while it does indeed fit, it is not really fitting?). I think a visit to both Ravelry and the Ester KAL are in order to visit with others have made this up. Hopefully there will be some other Rubenesque figures for me to see how this thing shapes up.

2007-10-18T17:56:00.000-04:00

Don't pay the Ransom! I escaped!

No, really, I wasn't really kidnapped. I've just been hostage to the lingering effects of the nasty flu that had me dazed, confused and vertically challenged (and from which I am still slowly recovering three and a half weeks later - ugh). Now I am SWAMPED with all the work that got delayed and piled up while I was sick. I have FOUR concerts coming up in early November and a load of NEW music to learn for them, lots of it contemporary artsy stuff, which is both rhythmically and melodically difficult to grasp. AAACK!!!

But don't feel sorry for me. I'm just thankful that my debilitating month-long bout with respiratory histrionics had the decency to situate itself in a period between important artistic engagements and not during the height of my upcoming concert season. All in all, if it had to come, this was a very considerate time for it to choose. Now let's all go and send some lovin' to the Yarn Harlot who is battling the mother of all colds as she heads out for speaking engagements in New Jersey and the annual pilgrimage to Rhinebeck. I feel her pain. Go on. Really. I'll wait here.

So I have done very little knitting since beginning to recover and I still haven't entered anything on Ravelry, though I accepted my personal invitation three whole weeks ago: I am MezzoDiva over there too, but there's nothing to see yet. I am alternately looking forward to and dreading cataloguing my overwhelming stash, among other things. It's very likely I will find more than a few things that will need to be destashed to a loving home... Sigh. So much yarn, so little time to knit.

And blogging has been, well, not so much on the to-do list either for the last few weeks. Heck - I haven't even had the time or energy to post my personal agenda for Socktoberfest 2007. So without further ado, here are my intentions for this wonderful month-long celebration of these amazingly addictive accessories that we make to provide warmth, style and comfort for our feet and the feet of those we love:

- Make a pair of sock that are for ME - and actually keep them this time. (What a concept!)

- Finish the Ravenclaw socks and gather all the extra goodies and mail out the package to my Hogwarts Sock Swap pal.

- Finish the pink socks for my friend Stella (these requested and promised a year ago - sheesh!)

- Develop a sequel to my surprisingly successful Campanula for the Cure campaign, ie: formulate a NEW sock design as a fundraiser for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer 2008 (because I am inexplicably insane enough to do it all again).

- Knit a pair of socks from the cuff down (for the first time ever)and graft the toes (because I really should do this at least once as an exercise). Hmmm... Okay - what with the current time constraints, this one might be a post-Socktoberfest project. But I'm stating it here anyway just to affirm my plan to do this in the not-too-distant future.
Okay. Now for the progress reports:

I did manage to finish a Campanula sock that I am making (gasp!) for myself. No, you can't have them. That's right. You heard me. These are MINE! Just keep your hands where I can see them and step slowly away from the Campanulas, Ma'am. Nice and easy... In the 15 or so months since I began knitting socks, I have made numerous pairs and I still have none just for me. So indulge me.

This was photographed by the marvelous Marla early last night at Knitomatic SnB (which I attended for the first time in a month, and got to see the lovely Lisa who is here visiting from her temporary work posting in Calgary and is the model for the other socks, pictured below). I completed another half pattern repeat and the twisted ribbing for the cuff last night, so all I need to do now is cast off and make another one. Despite photographic evidence to the contrary, it's actually a perfect fit. It's modelled here by the lovely Shelna whose feet are a half size longer and whose ankles and calves are much slimmer than mine are.

And here's the first of the socks I am making for the stellar Stella:

They are Cookie A's Pomatomus pattern, but worked from the toe up with short row tows and heels, and modifications including some gussett increases to compensate for the narrower gauge yarn on size ) (2 mm) needles. This is Regia 4-ply in a brilliant hot pink. Stella is a very outgoing and fun lady, and she requested pink, so she is getting PINK! If she wears these while biking at night she can probably skip the reflective gear.

Ahem: Warning! Spoiler Alert for Patonga Finnegan: If you don't want to see your forthcoming socks, please skip the rest of this post!

I also have a lovely (if I do say so myself) completed pair of Pomatomus to show you. My Hogwarts Sock Swap2 pal, Patonga Finnigan, is in Ravenclaw, so her house colors are blue and bronze (book) or blue and silver (movies), and though she expressed a slight preference for the movie colours, I just had to make these for her. This is a Koigu KPPPM multi (I lost the ball-band so I don't know the number) and I haven't seen anything else like it. With its interplay of blues with bronze, purple and teal and a hint of green, it is possibly the most beautiful colourway I have ever seen - and that's high praise indeed from a self-confessed Koigu addict.I must admit these were a challenge. I almost considered taking a remedial sock-spells elective, but it wouldn’t fit in my class schedule (I would have to drop potions because, unlike Hermione, I can’t be in two classes at the same time).

It wasn't that the pattern gave me trouble. Not at all. The sock spell worked almost too perfectly on the first sock. Then for some inexplicable reason, while whipping up the second sock my wand tension seemed to change dramatically. First it was much too loose and I actually ran out of yarn before the cuff, so I had to rip it back and start over. Then I must have overcompensated and held my wand much too tightly: I couldn’t even get the completed sock onto my foot (and since we are of a similar size I knew she wouldn’t either)... back to the pond.

Ultimately, after several attempts to adjust my wand tension, I believe I finally got it right. They fit me, so I think they will fit her nicely. Now I'm just waiting to receive a couple of things for her package (the muggle mail is SO unreliable), and then they'll be off to Patonga c/o her muggle alter-ego, Ellie) by Express Owl.

BTW - Ellie has a new Etsy shop for her fabulous hand dyed yarns. Go take a look. I bought some recently and it's absolutely gorgeous (and delivery was super speedy).

2007-09-30T06:41:00.001-04:00

Well, I must say it's good to be back here in Blogland. I've missed you guys, though I have peaked in on occasion to see some lovely new Campanulas completed! I apologize for my prolonged absence, but it's been a heck of a ride here at casa MezzoDiva for the last three weeks.

First of all. I recovered very nicely, after the 2007 Weekend to End Breast Cancer, thank you! I was extremely stiff and sore for a couple of days, then I visited my friend Julie and she helped me do some assisted stretching (you can go further and therefore deeper with someone providing a little active resistance) and the next day I had a terrific massage (also with Julie - she's a R.M.T and she's great! If you're in the GTA, call her and book one and you'll know what I mean: 416-781-9355). After that I was pretty much okay.

I finally lost that one toenail. It stayed on for almost two weeks, long enough for the blistered skin underneath it to heal completely, then one day when I cleaned it and changed the bandaid it just popped right off. There's this cute little toenail-shaped area of bare skin where it was, soft normal skin and just a little tender. I am told the nail will now start to grow back. The wierdest thing is that I am wearing this fabulously navy blue nail polish, and now there's one blatantly bare toe. Maybe I should have gone with a subtler pedicure after the walk, but I was feeling powerful and that bold inky blue just spoke to me right then and I am wearing my bare toe with pride!

At the end of the following week (for those of you who don't follow the Jewish calendar) we began to celebrate the High Holidays: Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the holiest days in the Jewish Year, and that had me hopping busy with preparations and my synagogue gig (professional chamber choir). Sorry, but I just have to digress here and offer one of my favourite (albeit lame) jokes:

According to the Jewish Calendar, this year is 5768.
According to the Chinese calendar, this year is 4705.
That means for 1,063 years we went without Chinese Food.
Those were known as the Dark Ages.

In the following days I had to start catching up with everything that slid off my to-do list in the late summer. Confession: I would blame it on the WEBC, and it's true that I was rather pre-occuppied with that as it loomed closer, but to be honest things are always a bit lax around here in late summer. Maybe I never out grew the back-to-school anticipation, but I always slack off a bit in August (and that's what August is supposed to be like, isn't it?).

And though I didn't come down with that threatening chest cold right after the walk, I have a real nasty one now (sinus & chest) - I've been coughing up a lung for six days and my throat is so torn up I can't sing a note (as you might have guessed by now, the MezzoDiva moniker is for real - it's what I do - so this is not a trivial thing). Happily, I finally feel like I will be getting better from today on. Well, I should be vocally safe by mid-week, at least. I really hope so because I have an important rehearsal on Thursday and I'd like to get some practising in before then.

How sick was I? Well, let's just say that ALL the knitting I attempted in the last week, including a couple of things begun before I got sick, has now been reviewed, appropriately ridiculed and frogged. I even finally received my own long-awaited and coveted Ravelry invitation (!) and all I could manage was to log in and lurk apathetically for about five minutes.

So I have no knitting news to report and nothing to show off to you here. But I'm back!

2007-09-15T10:52:00.000-04:00

The fight continues: 60 more in 2008

Congratulations! You did it! WOW! You stepped up and out on the street and made a real difference in the fight to end breast cancer. You were an invaluable part of the family of 5,521 participants who raised $17.3 million to support breast cancer research, clinical enhancements and continuation of the Survivorship program at Princess Margaret Hospital.

The Weekend to End Breast Cancer was a huge success for the fifth year in a row - thanks to dedicated people just like you. On behalf of the doctors, researchers, Board of Directors and other staff of Princess Margaret Hospital and The Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research, we deeply appreciate YOU for making The Weekend such a spectacular success. Because you committed to supporting breast cancer research, thousands of women and men throughout Toronto and Ontario will directly benefit from advancements like the rapid diagnosis pilot program, interoperative radiation clinical trial, the Breast Cancer Survivorship program and leading edge research done at The Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research at PMH lead by Dr. Tak Mak and his research team.

Of course, the fight does not end here. The funds our participants have helped raise over the last five years are phenomenal, but cancer is not a five-year problem. Research and cancer breakthroughs take time and money to support and realize The Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation has long term goals that require long term funding so we hope you've signed up to keep fighting cancer in 2008! If you have friends who'd like to join you, please invite them to come on out for this amazing journey.

For a limited time, everyone can register for just $25. Make next year the next leg of this wonderful tradition in our community. Tell your friends and family to register for The 2008 Weekend to End Breast Cancer benefiting Princess Margaret Hospital!

Congratulations and thank you so very much for your important contribution to this record-breaking walk! You've made our community very proud.

Visit here for the news release about The Weekend.

Sincerely,

Paul Alofs
President & CEO
Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation

2007-09-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

DH posted at I Think: It is time to put aside a few minutes to remember the innocents who were executed on this day in 2001 for the crime of being American, without trial or evidence or representation by counsel. My condolences to the families and friends of these victims, and to the world that has suffered the ongoing consequences of these crimes against humanity.

I couldn't say it any better.

At 5:30 am on Sunday, on my way to Day Two of the recent WEBC, I had the most amazing conversation with a cab driver. He asked me what all these people were doing and why and I explained to him that we were raising money and awareness to combat this scourge that is cancer. We discussed the Weekend and the PMH foundation and recent/imminent breakthroughs in research and treatment. We discussed the sad state of the world, the ubiquitous wars official and unofficial, and our society's all too pervasive culture of impotence, the prevailing impression cultivated by our conglomerate driven economic-political machine, that as individuals most of us are unable to make a difference, so we might as well just slog along as cogs in the system and try to buy ourselves as much consumer-happiness as we can grab to soothe our frustration, but without rocking the boat too much, and please - leave the world-altering decisions and actions to the big boys.

The driver asked many questions about what I was doing and after I told him how deeply moved I was to be a part of this endeavour, how incredibly empowering it was to contribute in even my small way to making this world a better place, he responded in the most profoundly thoughtful, and uncannily appropriate way. He said: "What a world could we make if instead of violence and hatred, all that anger and passion could be channelled into healing and helpful directions, to curing diseases and feeding the hungry and consoling the desolate."

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
(16 December 1901 – 15 November 1978)

2007-09-10T11:54:00.000-04:00

Thank you for supporting me and the 2007 Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer. When the going got tough, your support kept me going.

This was an amazing experience! I am overwhelmed with emotion, spiritually soaring high and I really don't care that I hurt like hell, though I am hysterically amused by my attempts to climb 14 stairs to shower the previous two nights. DH threatened to video-cam my pathetic crawl up the stairs, but I said that if he did I would leave him - once I could move again.

Despite a brutal hill climb in High Park early on day one (staying there 2/3 of the way up was tempting, but not an option), minor heat stroke and sunburn (you know you’re too hot when the Gatorade actually tastes good!), and walking in the cold rain with a minor chest cold (got some hot herbal tea with honey from Starbucks en route), surprisingly few and minor blisters with potential imminent loss of one toenail (there's a blister under it), other body parts chaffing in places I cannot speak of, and every single muscle and joint aching and stiff with possible exception of one beside my right eyebrow… I am so incredibly glad that I did this I cannot describe the depth of my feelings.

I definitely did NOT do the whole 60km.

Some people do the whole 60km. Many people don't, and even experienced veterans of several previous years sometimes call a halt. I don't know precisely how far I went, but I estimate a total of about 45km. On day one I probably covered about 25km. We started with opening ceremonies shortly after dawn, leaving the CNE grounds by 7:15am. I was feeling pretty good until around 3:30pm I was overcome by extreme heat and my blood pressure was spiking (it crept up through the day, was up to 132/89 mid-day, 138/96 mid-afternoon…), so discretion being the better part of valour, I called it a day shortly before 4pm and got swept to the camp.

There are numerous bike patrols and sweep vans with crews that travel back and forth along the route cheering on the walkers and offering support and water refills and blister care, and if you need a break (or if you fall to far back at the end of either day), they will take you to the next pit-stop (or all the way to camp) where there are snacks and/or meals and water and Gatorade and toilets (incredibly good portables) as well as medical personnel, and all kinds of assistance and support.

On day two I probably did another 20km. I woke up around 4:30am with a cough and fighting a chest cold (but surprisingly limber after the first day, though tired). I suspect the extreme exertion of day one undermined my immunity, as I have noticed that in the past after some extreme bike rides or overdoing other workouts. Nevertheless, I was doing okay once I got warmed up and moving. I twisted my right knee mid-morning and went about another 5km unable to keep it in alignment, then I decided not to risk damaging it further and got swept about 2km to the lunch stop.

After lunch it was hard to get moving, but some bandages and stretching banished the blisters and stiffness and I started to feel pretty good. I actually surprised myself by almost finishing the last 14km, but I completely lost it at the last pit stop just south of the CN tower with 3km to go. I was suddenly unable to even cross about a one block distance to the refreshments tent to replenish my water bottle and I just sank onto the bench and wept. I got swept over to outside the Exhibition grounds and walked one last km in from the Princess Gates and through the closing site and the ceremonies.

The 2007 WEBC is over, but the fight continues.

This year, 5,521 walkers, the largest number in the event’s five year history, and several hundred wonderful volunteer crew and support people, participated AND raised more than $17.3 million for breast cancer research and care! The 6th annual Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer benefiting Princess Margaret Hospital is already planned for Sept. 5-7, 2008.

I have already registered for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer 2008 AND I am starting a team: "Knitters for Knockers!" Everyone is welcome: knitters and crocheters, weavers and spinners, and even those who are not fibre-fanatical (though we can’t promise not to attempt to lure you over to the yarn side). As we train through the year, we’ll probably set up a flexible buddy system so that faster walkers can go at their pace and slower ones at theirs, but everybody will have someone with them throughout training and the walk for both company and safety. I'll definitely be planning some extended yarn-crawls… downtown like last time but then also to the beaches, etc.

60 more in 2008!!!
If you want to join us in 2008, let me know!

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
-- Anne Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945)

2007-09-08T21:00:00.000-04:00

Day one is over. Please shoot me now.

Just crawled in the door fresh as day old fish.
Must now attempt to climb 14 stairs to shower.
Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow …

Vow that next house will have full bath on main floor.
Too tired to write more now.
Love to you all.

XO – MezzoDiva

P.S. I have already registered for NEXT year :0
And I am starting a team: Knitters for Knockers!
If you want to join us in 2008, let me know!

2007-09-07T23:59:00.000-04:00

Campanula for the Cure KAL!

(Don't worry! It's still summer, at least here in the northern hemisphere. I just fudged the date on this post - it was the only way to keep it sticky at the top in Blogger for a couple of months. For more recent posts, please scroll down.)

In the interest of raising awareness for this foot-related fundraiser (a sock pattern to sponsor a 60-km walkathon to help conquer cancer), I’ve started a Campanula for the Cure KAL!
Click here to be redirected to the post with details for the KAL about this sock pattern designed for the fight against cancer!

P.S. If you miss me here and you're wondering where I am this summer - please come visit the Campanula KAL. It's taking up a wee bit more of my time than expected. I hope to resume more regular knitting and blogging activities after Sept. 10th.

2007-09-06T17:12:00.000-04:00

Walking my socks off!

The Weekend to End Breast Cancer 60-km walk is this weekend.

My training sucks lately. Really - I did a grand total of 15 miles in August. Ugh! That’s less than half of my mileage from way back in January, when we had snow and wind-chill feeling like -30C. But the extreme heat waves and humidity absolutely derailed my summer training plans. And in this last week we’re supposed to cut back and not do much. Hmmm... how do you cut back from zero?

I was really starting to panic about it last week, but after several days of growing apprehension, I examined the anxiety and realized it was simply fear of pain. Once I accepted the fact that I will experience some pain, probably during and definitely after the event, and that's okay, I will get through it, my anxiety level dropped significantly.

At least I can be happy that I covered well over 200 miles since mid-winter! I figure that I walked all day several days in a row when I was singing & traveling in Italy (1999) and I didn't train for all that walking. This can't be a lot worse.

Whatever happens to me this weekend, it's nothing compared to what hundreds of thousands of women face every year. And increasing numbers of men are being diagnosed with this disease as well. I am walking to show my solidarity with these men and women, to help raise awareness and to support the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation.

So I am going for it. I'm just going to go and have fun sharing this experience with a few thousand like-minded persons. What's not to love?

I'll be in touch early next week - once I can move again.

P.S. If you will be in the GTA September 8-9, please come out to cheer me along the way. Though the location of Opening Ceremonies, Camp, and Closing Ceremonies will be announced well in advance of The Weekend to End Breast Cancer, the route will not be pre-announced. This is strictly a safety precaution as the route may have to change at the last minute due to traffic signal failures, broken water mains, or any other unforseen issues. Therefore, we do not announce the route.

There are however several cheering stations along the way where your friends and family can come and support you along the route of The Weekend to End Breast Cancer® benefiting Princess Margaret Hospital! Tell them to bring their BIG signs, smiling faces and happy cheers to the following sites:

DAY ONE: Saturday, September 8, 2007
Lambton Park: 9 am - 12 pm
4100 Dundas Street West. Street parking.

Rosethorn Junior School: 11 am - 2 pm
2 Remington Drive, SW corner at Rathburn Road.

Elm Park: 1 - 5 pm
SW corner of King and Elm Streets. Street parking.

CAMP: 4:30 pm - Downsview Park, 75 Carl Hall Road.

DAY TWO: Sunday, September 9, 2007
John Ross Robertson Elementary School: 9:30 - 11:30 am
130 Glengrove Avenue West, NE corner at Rosewell Ave.

Nesbitt Park: 12 - 3 pm
just south of Bayview Avenue. Street parking.

CLOSING CEREMONIES: Halls A & B, Direct Energy Centre Exhibition Grounds 4:30 pm
The ceremonies start at 4:30 pm, but feel free to come cheer the Walkers at anytime between 1:30 pm and 4 pm.

Note: These locations may change without notice if the route changes due to last minute detours.

2007-09-05T06:32:00.000-04:00

The plot thickens...

Posted by: "Noreens Knit*che"
Mon Sep 3, 2007 6:29 am (PST)
"Ramona Carmelly" Spun a FINE Yarn in the below message:
To: ContinentalKnitters@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 7:58 AM
Subject: New Sock Pattern to help Conquer Cancer!
Ramona, Today IS Ad day, so don't worry, you're not being yelled at, however, in the future, please remember to prefix your subject with AD: Thanks, Noreen, List-Mom... who is going over to have a peek as soon as the coffee's done...

Ramona!!!
This (above) is the only reference I have ever made to Ramona's posting, and wonder who is playing games, posting in my name and supposedly visiting blogs. I've been away on our first vacation in four years (since DH's cancer, no less!) and was not even online August 31, Sept. 1, or Sept. 2. Evidently someone, perhaps cyber gremlins, is having fun at my expense. Ramona, I agree with your cause, I only mentioned ONCE, back in JULY about 'ad' day, (see above), and although it wasn't me who flamed you, I apologize for the little houligans who think this is fun and funny... Noreen

THANKS, NOREEN! And to everyone for being supportive, too! I appreciate all the kind words.

2007-09-02T17:15:00.001-04:00

Patience is a Virtue. Forgiveness is Divine.

As posted to the Continental Knitters Yahoo Group:

Please accept my apology for posting this without the requisite AD preface. If anyone was truly offended, I am very sorry.

In my defense:

1. This was not a deliberate flouting of the rules. I was in the act of placing the "AD" preface (as well as another modification I wanted in the body of the message), but as I was composing the title, I pressed the "Enter" key instead of "Shift" key and the message was sent before I could complete editing.

2. I immediately attempted to retrieve the posting, but it didn't show up on the group site for quite a long time after this occurred. I was going to delete it as soon as it showed up, but I simply couldn't wait around any longer at the time. Then, to be honest, I then went on with my busy life and forgot to follow up on this.

3. I was rather hoping for some understanding, especially given that I am doing a tremendous amount of work and incurring personal costs for absolutely no personal gain. At no time do I see any of the funds donated, it all goes directly to the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation. Furthermore I am providing a fun KAL and support to many knitters, as well as prizes which mostly come out of my own pocket. So please note, I am not soliciting customers for personal profit, but rather seeking like-minded knitters who want to join me and the 175 members of this KAL in knitting a lovely sock AND fighting cancer.

4. In fact, while I was composing this apology, I received another message from Noreen, to the effect that the group is STILL waiting for my apology. I received the first notice at 4:12pm, and this second notification at 4:27pm. I find this degree of impatience somewhat disturbing. If I hadn't happened to be both at my computer and online at the time, my IMMEDIATE apology might have come hours later, and still have been an immediate response.

Nevertheless, I had no desire to flout the rules of the group and therefore I sincerely apologize for that misdemeanor on my part.

Knitterly Regards,
Ramona Carmelly -aka- MezzoDiva the Operatic Knitaholic
designer & moderator: Campanula for the Cure KAL

From: Noreen's [mailto:noreply-comment@...]
Sent: September 2, 2007 4:12 PM
To: ramona.carmelly@...
Subject: [Sock it to me!] New comment
Noreen's has left a new comment on your post "Campanula for the Cure KAL!":
Ramona, your posting of same in the continental knitters yahell group was totally uncalled for, esp. inthat you blatantly disregarded the extremely simple rule of posting said as it obviously is, and AD or ADVERT.
The group is waiting for an apology.
The YarnWright

From: Noreen's [mailto:noreply-comment@...]
Sent: September 2, 2007 4:23 PM
To: mezzodiva@...
Subject: [CAMPANULA for the CURE knit-along]
Noreen's has left a new comment on your post "Welcome to our Campanula for the Cure KAL":
Continental Knitters yahellgroup is still waiting for your apology,
Ramona!
The YarnWright

2007-08-31T12:46:00.000-04:00

As seen on a couple of my groups.
Finally - a rational explanation for my yarn-addiction.

A recent study indicated, that Yarn and thread gives off certain Pheromones that actually hypnotize women and cause them to purchase unreasonable amounts.

When stored in large quantities, in enclosed spaces, the Pheromones (in the yarn), cause memory loss and induce the nesting syndrome, (similar to the one squirrels save, before the onset of winter, i.e. the storing of food), therefore perpetuating their species and not having a population loss due to their kind being cut into pieces and mixed with others.

Sound tests have also revealed, that these yarns, emit a very high-pitched sound, heard only by a select few, a breed of women known as "loomers." When played backwards on an LP, the sounds are heard as chants, "buy me, loom me, and wind me into a ball".

In order to overcome the so called "feeding frenzy effect," that these yarns cause, one must wear a face mask when entering a storage facility and use ear plugs, to avoid being pulled into their grip. (One must laugh, however, at the sight of customers in a yarn store, with WW2 army gas masks and headphones!). Studies have also indicated, that aliens have inhabited the earth, helping to spread the effects, that these yarns have on the human population. They are called "YARN STORE CLERKS".

It's also been experienced, that these same Pheromones, cause a pathological need to hide these yarn purchases when taken home (or at least blend them into the existing stash.) When asked by a significant other if the yarn is new, the reply is, "Oh, I've had it for awhile."

Author Unknown

Addendum: What then would be the rationale for those of us who are, as one fiber-wag coined so aptly, "fiber cyber-shoppers"?
I am equally weak before the mesmeric effects of online fiber... just imagining the soft and squooshy yarn in my hands and seeing all the pretty pretty colours... oh, baby!... yes! Yes! YES!

2007-08-19T16:07:00.000-04:00

I just had a makeover
What do you think of my new look?
I tried to be honest - it was just too svelte and that's not me.

They could offer a greater variety of bodytypes in the Simpsonize options. I had to download it and then widen it using Photoshop because the only zaftig bodytype it gave me was totally wrong.

I think it's a pretty good likeness. I might have to change the eyes, though. They're a bit too much like a deer caught in traffic.

2007-08-17T23:03:00.000-04:00

OMG.
Gasp!
OMG.OMG.OMG!!!!
Yippee!
I feel just like Sally Field at the Oscars.

2007-08-16T14:34:00.000-04:00

Campanula's Day Out - Knitting in Public for the Cure!

My Campanulas came to Stitch 'n Pitch last night! Several hundred knitters came together at the ballpark here to cheer on the Toronto Blue Jays as they hosted the L.A. Angels. Several hundred SnP-ers received goodie-bags with loot from local and national purveyors of fiber goodness and paraphernalia, and tucked into each tote bag along with the loot was a notice about Campanula for the Cure and our KAL.

It's 2 to 1 for Toronto in the bottom of the 8th, with the Blue Jays at bat, and Darren Oliver in to pitch for the Angels. Frank Thomas singles to left, Troy Glaus walks: Runners on first and second with none out, Aaron Hill is up. Here's Campanula cheering on Aaron Hill:
Oh! Hill pops out to second: Runners on first and second with one out. Gregg Zaun flies out to center: Runners on first and second and with two outs and John McDonald grounds out third to first to end the inning. Jeremy Accardo starts the 9th inning for the Blue Jays, and after a giving up a single to Garret Anderson, gets Gary Matthews to line out to first, the Jays turn a double play and Anderson's out at first: None on with two outs and Casey Kotchman due up. Kotchman grounds out second to first to end the game. Final: LA Angels 1, Toronto 2.

2007-08-15T12:50:00.000-04:00

Take me out to the ball game!Stitch-'n-Pitch, Toronto: Wed. August 15, 2007, 7pm

Stitch-'n-Pitch brings together two of my favourite pastimes — baseball and the needle Arts - ah, bliss!

The Toronto Blue Jays are holding their inaugural Stitch-n'-Pitch event TODAY Wednesday August 15. Come to a ball game and knit, crochet, embroider, cross-stitch and needlepoint. Sit among friends, family and fibre-arts enthusiasts and cheer on your Toronto Blue Jays as they take on the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

All Stitch 'n Pitchers who order tickets in advance will receive a commemorative Blue Jays tote bag full of fibre freebies. Tickets are available at a special discounted price of $20 (regularly $26).

DH and I will be there. Hope to see you there.
Knit One, Purl Two - and Play Ball!

2007-08-11T05:44:00.000-04:00

MezzoDiva has left the building.

My campanulas and I are taking a little road-trip! (Well, they're not really mine - they're my current CIPs for a friend (I'm still waiting for MY yarn to arrive).

MezzoDiva is going out-of-town for a couple of days to sing at a wedding, so I might be incommunicado until Sunday night. Have a wonderful weekend!

2007-08-10T02:16:00.000-04:00

I know, I know. There has been precious little knitting content over here at my blog.

I have had a few things to attend to - and YES, some of them have involved actual knitting. I will post about it all soon. I promise!

Meanwhile I leave you with this:

I saw this while visiting over at Rochelle's blog and of course I had to try it for myself.

Your Life Path Number is 11

Your purpose in life is to inspire others. Your amazing energy draws people to you, and you give them great insight in return. You hold a great amount of power over others, without even trying. You have the makings of an inventor, artist, religious leader, or prophet.

In love, you are sensitive and passionate. You connect with your partner on a very deep level.

You have great abilities, but you are often way too critical of yourself. You don't fit in - and instead of celebrating your differences, you dwell on them. You have high expectations of yourself. But sometimes you set them too high and don't achieve anything.

What Is Your Life Path Number?

I really needn't have bothered. I should just have taken it for granted it would be the same as hers. Yup. We really were separated at birth. A few years apart, maybe, but what's a few years in the grand scheme of things anyway?

2007-08-08T00:50:00.000-04:00

The Kidnapped Can Opener
You REALLY have to see THIS.

2007-07-25T12:54:00.000-04:00

You Are the Thumb

You're unique and flexible. And you defy any category.
Mentally strong and agile, you do things your own way. And you do them well.
You are a natural leader... but also truly a loner. You inspire many but connect with few.

You get along well with: The Middle Finger

Stay away from: The Pinky

What Finger Are You?

Anyone surprised?...

Well, you clearly haven't been paying attention.

2007-07-24T01:29:00.000-04:00

Hogwarts Sock Swap 2

My alter-ego, Cassandra Kettleburn, has been accepted into first year at Hogwarts!

1. What Hogwarts house have you been sorted into? Hufflepuff
2. Shoe size? 8.5
3. Foot Length? 9.5
4. Foot Circumference? 9.5
5. List your three favorite double-point needle brands, including size and length.
a. Addi circulars, sizes 0 and 1, length 32 in.
b. Knitpicks circulars, 2.0 cm and 2.5 cm, length 32 in.
c. ?
6. Would you like to try a new brand needle? If so, which brand? Size? Length?
Knitpicks circulars, 2.25 cm and 2.75 cm, length 32 in.
7. If you are a RAVENCLAW, do you prefer the colors in the film or the book?
Do you have a strong preference? NA – not in Ravenclaw
8. Allergies? Do you have any? Will your knitting be exposed to smoke or animals?
Allergic to smoke and cats – my knitting will not be exposed to either
9. Are you an international participant (outside US)? Yes - Canada
10. Are you willing to have an international Hogwarts Sock Pal? Yes

Said Hufflepuff, "I'll teach the lot, and treat them just the same."
A well-known member was Cedric Digory, who represented Hogwarts in the most recent Triwizard Tournament. Hufflepuff students are known to be friendly, fair-minded, modest, and hard-working. Hmmmm... I think I need to work on the modest part, but the rest seems to fit.

2007-07-16T17:15:00.001-04:00

This arrived in my inbox recently and I think it's worth remembering and reminding each other. Rather than pass it along to clog everyone's inbox, I am posting it here.

ONE FLAW IN WOMEN

Women have strengths that amaze men.
They bear hardships and they carry burdens,
but they hold happiness, love and joy.
They smile when they want to scream.
They sing when they want to cry.
They cry when they are happy
and laugh when they are nervous.
They fight for what they believe in.
They stand up to injustice.
They don't take "no" for an answer
when they believe there is a better solution.
They go without so their family can have.
They go to the doctor with a frightened friend.
They love unconditionally.
They cry when their children excel
and cheer when their friends get awards.
They are happy when they hear about
a birth or a wedding.
Their hearts break when a friend dies.
They grieve at the loss of a family member,
yet they are strong when they
think there is no strength left.
They know that a hug and a kiss
can heal a broken heart.
Women come in all shapes, sizes and colors.
They'll drive, fly, walk, run or e-mail you
to show how much they care about you.
The heart of a woman is what makes the world keep turning.
They bring joy, hope and love.
They have the compassion and ideas.
They give moral support to
their family and friends.
Women have vital things to say
and everything to give.

However,
if there is one flaw in women,
it is that THEY FORGET THEIR WORTH.

Please pass this along to all your women friends
and relatives to remind them just how amazing they are.

2007-07-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

CAMPANULA for the CURE!

I decided to self-publish my Campanula sock pattern (pictured above) and offer it here as a charitable fundraiser: To get the pattern, all you have to do is CLICK HERE and SPONSOR ME for the 2007 Weekend to End Breast Cancer.

During one amazing weekend, thousands of women and men are joining forces Toronto to walk 60 kilometres through the neighbourhoods of Toronto to benefit the Princess Margaret Hospital, one of North America’s leading centers for cancer treatment and research, in a bold display of our commitment to end this heartbreaking disease for good.

Donate any amount you choose! Don't be shy. Even $10 or $20 will make a difference - it all adds up! As the Yarn Harlot so keenly observed in her phenomenal May 25 Toronto appearance: knitters (maybe all hand-crafters) are superdonors, giving a lot or a little, but giving often, perhaps because we are uniquely aware of the power of doing one small simple thing over and over and over... Of course, if you are able and inclined to donate more, please do. The cause is worthy and 100% of all donations go directly to Princess Margaret Hospital.

Just put "CAMPANULA" in the message line or leave me a comment here. You can either use the donation form available as a download from my WEBC sponsorship page and send it in with a cheque, or you can securely donate online through the WEBC site. The WEBC site will inform me of your donation and I will email a PDF version of the pattern to you ASAP! (if you need another format, just let me know)

These were knitted toe-up with a provisional cast on, short-row toes and short-row heels. But they will easily translate to other methods, though this lace works best from the bottom up. Toe Up socks and short rows are very easy and once you do them you’ll wonder what took so long. The first time is a bit of a leap of faith, but just follow the directions and they’ll work. However, as I do not explain these techniques in the campanula pattern, my suggestion is that you first make up a pair of plain ones by following Wendy Johnson’s fabulous instructions. Some familiarity with lace would be helpful, but it's not a hard lace to knit, a simple variation on dayflower lace done in the round.

The magnificent magenta originals (pictured above) were made from 2 skeins of Koigu (KPM #1170). The one below was made with Knitpicks Gloss (Concord Grape). Note that for this lace pattern, solid colours are best. A subtly variegated tone-on-tone colour-way would be okay, but too much colour striation will distract from the lace.

And if you happen to be visiting here, please pass it on. Let's make it like that shampoo commercial: you tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on and so on and...

P.S. Have no fear: the pattern has been tested by several sock-knitters, some adept and some new, and corrected/revised to incorporate their feedback! (Thanks again guys.)

2007-07-06T19:37:00.000-04:00

Hi, my name is MezzoDiva and I am a lapsed knit-blogger. It's been a month since my last blog posting and so much has happened, but I just haven't been in the frame of mind to blog about any of it.

In the last month, though, my knitting has been sporadic and mostly uninspiring: lots of aborted ideas, false starts and swatching and ripping. I was just not satisfied with it. It wasn't even soothing the frustrations of recent weeks, but rather adding to them instead.

I did almost finish my second pomatomus sock which has been languishing since the end of May, then I ran out of yarn just before I got to the ribbing on the cuff! I'm pretty sure I was just knitting a lot looser on the ankle and leg on the second sock, so I've ripped back to just past the heel and now I'm reknitting it and tightening up my stitches every couple of rows.

While pondering how to renew my knitting mojo I was lurking around and inspired by all the lovely shawls and stoles (and by Rochelle - I will blame you when it goes snafu)I just took the plunge this afternoon and signed up for Mystery Stole 3. I'm a late joiner - sign ups close tonight and many participants have already finished the second clue (which came out yesterday - sheesh!). Though I am a shawl/stole virgin, I really love lace patterns and have done lace socks and tops. But I am game for this adventure and suddenly I am feeling fibre-frisky again!

Now I am considering several laceweight options from my stash: There's the Purple Misti Alpaca - I have 2 skeins (437.5 yards each, so that's probably enough). I have one gorgeous skein of Midnight-Rainbow(aka Harlot’s Peacock) merino-silk (950 yards) from Perchance to Knit and also lots of a beautiful deep emerald green recycled merino from The Twice Sheared Sheep (on eBay). Decisions, decisions... And should I take the plunge and try the beads too?

I also went over to Annie Modesitt's place and got myself a copy of her fabulousRed Carpet Convertible pattern. You should go visit, read the story, and make a donation.

Well, clearly my interest in knitting has been sparked again!