Countdown to magazine delivery...

...and feeling restless as a cat. I started typing this blog 50 minutes ago, but keep jumping up to have brief, cryptic exchanges with the Circulation Manager about "running the 429s" and "sending another Art & Chocolate email" (which means seeing how many reader subscriptions lapsed with the Fall issue, and contacting them about our Jean-Claude Roy and Newfoundland Chocolate Company promotions, respectively.) And I wandered away from the desk four times during the writing of that sentence.

(Image: regmedia.co.uk.)

One Craft Fair Down, Two To Go

An intense four days at the Convention Centre in downtown St. John's, where we set ourselves up with sub cards and receipt books and magazines and calendars and of course our subscription prize of Jean-Claude Roy's gorgeous landscape, St. George's (2007). It was an eye-catcher and a conversation starter. One man's astute assessment: "I've see him on TV, painting. He just slaps it down, but it all comes out right in the end, God bless him."
Tomorrow sees me out of the office and away from this computer - though I'll be taping an interview with CBC's Ted Blades @ On the Go - but I'll manage one more post before we embark on our drive to to Corner Brook Craft Fair. After that, the next time we talk it will be mail-out day, woohoo!

One thing about having children, it makes you note the passage of time. When I walk to work I pass through all the parents escorting their kids to Bishop Feild school, just around the corner from our house. It wasn't so long ago that I, too, was a Bishop Feild parent, an experience I enjoyed so much that I completely understood a friend's decision to have a third child partly so she could keep on being a Bishop Feild parent that much longer. But the thing is, although it feels like it wasn't that long ago that my daughter went there...actually it kinda was. More than four years. I'm a Holy Heart parent now, an entirely different experience. I've shifted from intensive volunteering (two mornings in the library, theatre sports with the Grade 5s, organizing the Bishop Feild Talent Show - and, believe me, when you can organize the Bishop Feild Talent Show, you can organize anything) to being not even completely sure who my daughter's homeroom teacher is. (They have homeroom in high school, right?) Some old habits die hard though. I still have a terrible tendency to speak for my daughter, though she's standing right beside me and fully capable of expressing any thoughts she might like to air. It's like I'm her attorney: I'm sorry, my daughter does not wish to comment on the strawberry-banana yogurt at this time. She may issue a statement on the peach cups later.
Please note: we're at the NLCDA Craft Fair from tomorrow until Sunday - love to chat with any NQ readers who happen by! But I'll miss a blog or two...catch up with you soon.

(Image: photobucket.com.)

Great Expectations Launch @ Sweet Relic

Tomorrow evening 5:30-7pm. Sweet Relic is a nice spot (at the foot of Signal Hill) and the book is a wonderful read - true birth stories for 24 contributors, and isn't that one sweet cover? We have a review in the upcoming issue...but, why be coy, we'll just come right out and say it is a super collection.

And we're face and eyes into the final proofing now, with a magnifying glass and a fine tooth comb...a compass and an encyclopedia...no stones unturned etc.

(Image: moonbattery.com.)

Silvern Voices Tuning Rills

Walking into work early on a cold, windless November morning, a few notches above dawn, the brake lights on cars still making small neon punch holes in the day, everything is...silvern. Which is not exactly as it plays out in the Ode to Newfoundland, not that I know how to tune any rills, or could be trusted to recognize such an activity. But the word seems apt for that mother-of-pearl cast and silver slant of early winter light that keep the sky, and the world, a nice way from dingy.
(Image: newsimg.bbc.)

Angels in America

I must be the last person to make this find, but in the past week I've read Tony Kushner's original script and watched the HBO special. I can't stop talking (somewhat incoherently) about it: the confident theatricality, the sensibility of the text, and the wonderful, fantastic, all-powerful and sweetly-pining angels.

(Image: wordpress.com.)

101.3 Cover

Always an exciting decision - we think we're close - here's a teaser -
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101.3 coming together

Our columnists are filing, our regular content of Archival Notes and Aspects is all ship-shape and Bristol fashion, we've gathered some fab visuals...only gap remaining, as I suddenly realized walking home through that incredible fog yesterday evening, is the editorial. Which is composed of course by me. So that's on my to-do list for today.

(Image: changinglibrarian.blogspot.com.)

Have you heard of slate.com? It's a daily online fix for me. One reason is their slide shows - on Hopper, Maus, visual artists who work from scientific formalities. The current exhibit concerns Joan Miro (should be an accent in there, obviously, excuse the inadequate keyboard) - you should check it out. (It's free.)

(Image: Singing Fish, weblo.com.)

Copy Deadline 101.3...

...as of tomorrow. Got some great, great stuff coming together. Solid piece from Michael Deal about Newfoundland pilots in WWI. Hilarious riff from Berni Stapleton on the current state of airline comfort and passenger services ( something like the joke about Air Canada's apparent new slogan: We're not happy until you're not happy!). Nice batch of reviews including Great Expectations, a must-read for new parents, old parents, anyone thinking of becoming a parent. A ton of great artwork, including illustrations from Newtopia, and all kinds of drawings and photos of bi-planes, jet planes, even, courtesy of Derek Pelley's essay, Are-You-Out-Of-Your-Vulcan-Mind planes.

(Image: wordpress.)

In this day and age few things are more frustrating than having problems with your email. Hotmail has upgraded, again, they are always doing this, I don't know why, and now my sweet little laptop goes bonkers when I try to access it. So if I'm working at home in the evening and I try and send an edit to somebody, I have to send it and then phone that person to make sure it arrived, tres humiliating and exactly the opposite of what the email experience should be! Sigh. Well, never mind, it's a good morning, nice golden autumn sunshine spilling across a new world order, which was a pretty good band, too, now that I think of it.

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Dear America,

Peace out.

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Spent the weekend doing laundry at Mighty White's (where one staff member had returned from a family wedding on the Northern Peninsula and the day had been so windy they couldn't go outside for photos as all hands would have been blown around like wet autumn leaves) and reading Kate Atkinson, can't recommend her enough, just galloping through her novels and stories...

(Image: fantasticfiction.co.uk.)