"Why hadn't I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade? What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?"

- Nora Ephron 


"Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

- Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron: May 19, 1941 - June 26, 2012

 "You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday," she says. "If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it."

The great journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron has passed away.

Here is the New York Times announcement, and here is a great interview with NPR.

Beautiful hot days out in Hemmingford, QC: reading and napping for hours on a blanket in the shade, drinking Cinzano with lemon balm and lavender, walking with the dogs, jumping in the sprinkler, picking vegetables and herbs from the garden, making suppers of corn on the cob, wild game sausage and salads, and being together, talking, laughing, with everything around us and in us lush, open, resplendent, full of colour.

The new Lower Dens record came out in May.

 

This nine pound charcoal grey guy needs a happy home and person who will adore him. Please contact me if you're interested and pass the word along. I've named him Pokey. He's at least 8-years-old... a very sweethearted gem in good health.

The Archduchess Isabella's Procession Through Brussels by Flemish Baroque painter Antoon Sallaert (1585-1650).

The Procession of 1615 and The Procession in honor of Lady Sablon, 1616 by Denijs van Alsloot. The lower painting measures 130 x 380cm and depicts Ommegang (translated as "walk around"), a traditional Belgian pageant celebrated by guilds and religious orders of Brussels each July. 

a lovely long boozy breakfast last weekend: cajun bloody mary's and soufflé.

 

 

"Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing."

— Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and Other Stories

 

Her Deepness

Oceanographer Sylvia Earle, Her Deepness, has done something no one else has — walked solo on the bottom of the sea, under a quarter mile of water. In a conversation with Krista Tippett she talks about what she saw and what she has learned about the giant, living blue.

lower photo: Sylvia with her Mother, Alice and her daughter Gale Mead.

an image from last week, in Montréal (+ snitched from N.'s facebook page). Here is a video that says it.

breakfast

chard from the garden, tomatoes and eggs from the market, and Crystal hot sauce.

Crise sociale

Le long souffle du printemps érable. illustration by Christian Tiffet.

Abbey Lincoln

Make Your Own Gloves by Emlyn Jones.

from the Musée McCord library.