the cartoonist sees all

This horrible New Yorker cartoonist has been spying on me! How does he know? Though the thing is, I suspect I'm not alone in my guilty time-wasting ways. At least I don't have cats.

I rode my bike to the market this morning - it's January! So mild, very strange, not like winter at all. Mind you, it's also that I have this VERY WARM COAT, which makes all the difference, especially on the bike.

Today's excitement was actually making a sale, not of books or a manuscript, unfortunately, but of fur coats I've had for years - a vintage mink bought from the local shoemender, who always had interesting stuff hanging around his shop, and the other a sheared something or other bought by a friend at an estate sale. There's a pop up vintage clothing store now on Parliament Street, so I trundled up there with these heavy coats in a suitcase, and he bought them for the vast sum of $90. The world has now discovered the advantages of second hand and vintage, it seems; the store is full of the kind of stuff I've been buying for decades. I offloaded a ton for almost nothing before the renovation. Ah well. Making money, selling, any kind of business venture, is by definition a losing proposition for me.

Today I made a special trip to the framing shop on Parliament; Mohammed, a kind interesting man, does all my framing, and the other day wanted to discuss the murder in Iran, since he's Iranian. When he found out I'm a writer, he told me he wants to read books in English, could I lend him some? So today I took him a memoir by Kamal al Solaylee. How I love my 'hood.

My Anna is in mourning; an acquaintance, not a close friend but a guy whose wife and 3 young children she knew well, just died of an opioid overdose. She says 12 Canadians a day are dying from these vile drugs. And instead of fixing what needs fixing, we're being set up for WW3. Hard to get through the day, sometimes, for rage and grief at the stupidity of humankind.

But then again, on such a mild day, it's hard to be sad.