getting a table

Just received another note from a blogee called Rose who, like Lynn, couldn't respond to a post. Luckily my dear friend Chris is coming from Vancouver on Monday to stay for a week. Like our mutual friend Bruce, Chris is a geek of the highest order. I hope he'll take a look and maybe fix some of the bugs. My blog needs a good facelift anyway; there's lots more stuff to add. The blogee, whom I don't know, wrote:

Once again, cannot overcome the technical hurdles to comment on your most recent post about your class dinner. Thought I'd finally been able to log in but nooooo. Below is the comment I attempted to post till my weary fingers failed -

Trying to understand why these blog posts always find me sayng, 'yes, o yes!' and responding. They are always accessible and ready to be jumped into, roomy with take-off points. I had just been mini-essaying my husband on the need for us to sit facing each other when we 'talk,' though for years it's been side by side chairs, facing the fireplace. Something about eye contact and conviviality. That does it! This Christmas I'm getting a table.

Love "roomy with take-off points." Many thanks. I wish you joy at your festive board, eye to eye with your husband.

Those who've been following my financial woes - are there no boundaries in this blog, girl? - will be happy to hear that I've rented both the downstairs flat and the upstairs room until the summer. A very nice guy who's in town only 2 or 3 nights a week, a friend of a student, has rented up, and a very nice quiet young woman down. Plus I have two new clients for writing coaching - so there will be Christmas on Sackville Street after all. Except that I've just noticed some tiles looking pretty banged up on the roof, and have called my roofer ... so we may be cancelling the festivities once more.

It was bitterly cold last night, but Alissa York and I found a pub on the Danforth and talked about writing and teaching and teaching writing over red wine and French fries for a few hours. Bliss. Alissa is a fellow teacher at U of T and a brilliant novelist, whose last book, Effigy, was nominated for a Giller award. She writes fiction. This means that she delves deep and invents a planet and all its people and everything that happens there.

I marvel at this. Effigy was extraordinarily inventive, about Mormons in Utah the last century - how did she come up with those ideas, especially as someone who's never been to Utah, is not a Mormon and is writing more than a hundred years later? She did because that's her job. She's what I think of as a real writer - someone who spends countless disciplined hours getting the words out and down. She said that sometimes it literally feels as if she's dragging herself by the hair, pulling out the pages. She does not get up every seven minutes to answer the phone or check her email, unlike some people I could name. Ah well. That is why she has just finished a new novel which will come out next fall, whereas my memoir is a work-in-progress bunch of bits. Still, she was very nice about my book. My one book.

Our conversation was roomy with take-off points.