TWENTY BABIES TODAY!!!!

You can see eight of the little babies born today in this rather blurry shot. They are TINY so I am on huge magnification here.

One of my bursting female guppies had over twenty  babies today. I tore to my small tank and tore out some plants and dumped them to float in my big tank to give them somewhere to hide. The babies like the water at the top of the tank and that is where I floated the the plants. So far, most of them are surviving. I am feeling the tank often to keep the fish from eating the babies

Costin, the aquarium consultant I engaged is rockin'. He sent me emails with videos and photographs of samples of his work for me to react to and he got an idea of my tastes, then he called me from Aquariums West where I get all my fish and supplies. He was buying all the stuff he needs to create the kind of environment I want in my tank. I am so excited.

Tomorrow afternoon, my tank, the stand and the carbon dioxide tanks arrive. I have prepared a space. Then on Tuesday, Costin comes to set everything up. He'll be helping me get the bacterial cycle started in the new tank.

Something's Fishy

Okay, okay…. I have a bit of a problem. I am a piscineophile, an aquarist, a fin man. First I got a 12-gallon tank and then, about a month later, I got a second tank. The second one is only six gallons and it was designed to be the maternity ward/sick bay but the 12-gallon tank is where the best breeding is going on.

I've had them a few months now and I can hardly wait for every morning when I turn on the lights to see all my little fishy buddies. We have gotten used to each other and they get all excited knowing I am going to feed them. My Beta is amazing. He practically leaps out of the tank to get the food. He is curious and brave and I love him. His name is Liberace. (No other ones have names. Don't worry!)

Well yesterday I bought a 60-gallon tank. Not only that, I hired a professional aquarist to design the interior and install a carbon monoxide system so that my new tank can really be a stupendous growing medium. I am as fond of the plants as the fish. I am super excited. Costin, the aquarist, is coming here on Tuesday to get me started.

It is like being a kid again and having a hobby. I haven't had anything like a hobby for half a century.

This morning a mother fish had a lot of babies so I ripped out some plants out of my small tank to dump into the large tank to give the new babies more places to hide. And more are imminent and I have found it thrilling to watch them grow and the colour start to come in. Only then can I tell who had the babies — sometimes. I just love this hobby!

Summer in Fall

There's been virtually no rain for three weeks and it's October. Too much of the wonderful weather was in fog, but now that the fog is gone, we've  had spectacular sunshine. Yesterday was so warm, I was in a t-shirt; today was as sunny buy much cooler. Today I needed a coat and I kept it done up.

Yesterday was a brief walk. My first short-distance walk since my left leg started acting up. It went okay and I could not stop being amazed at the temperature. Today, on impulse, my friends John and Bunny called me up and we went to the Pitt Addington Marsh Wildlife Management Area at Pitt Lake.

The area is stunning just like the Reifle refuge; you feel like you are hundreds of miles from the city there. I loved it.

Yesterday, going over the Cambie Street bridge.

 The blueberry bushes are on fire right now near Pitt River.

 The Pitt Addington Area.

An egret?

 A Trumpeter Swan.

The mashslands have an eerie beauty.

Walking the berm.

Not the colours of the East, but still beautiful.

Dacquoise: Eight out of Ten

I am satisfied but not proud. I haven't tasted one yet. This is not what I envisioned. I need to do work on the butter cream. I wanted a different outside surface and to use a butter cream, but I used whipping cream for the outer layer.

They're good. Sweet, but not too sweet and the lemon taste is subtle. The aftertaste is good but I'll be making changes. Next time, I think I'll make some lemon custard in which to nest it.

It's okay; not great.
Presentations: Seven out of ten.
Taste: Six? I'll ask my friends at dinner. A reconsideration: Eight!

Dacquoise Day Part One

Vingt petites dacquises dans le four

Another stunningly sunny day, and today is a free day with no PAL meetings, no marking (its all done) and no dates with friends. It's a perfect day to bake and try my first walk since my injury on September 18th.

Friend and kitchen mentor, Bunny, gave me a bunch of recipes for dacquiose because I had swooned over a pastry we once had together called "lemon dacquoise" that were gorgeous and delicious. But the recipe calls for a kind of pancake to be made and other recipes I found on line to the same, adding butter creams between layers and over the top to make dacquoise cakes. But I do not like hard meringue cakes; they are impossible to cut cleanly. Besides, what I enjoyed had been a single-serving pastry.

Dacquoise is not a form, it refers to either almond or hazelnut meringue that is credited as originating in the town of Dax, France. So I have decided to make individual pastries using one layer of hazelnut meringue on the bottom, then lemon butter cream between it and an almond meringue layer. I hope to then cover the whole thing in more lemon butter cream, sprinkle them with chopped hazelnuts and top each one off with a twist of sugared lemon rind.

BUSY! Day

Proposed new Presentation House Gallery.

I am exhausted and the day is not over...

1. Teaching from 9:30 to 12:30. It was a good class. My new lesson plans are much better than the old ones. When I went to work, it was low fog. An hour later a glorious sunny day broke out. It is our 19th day without rain in October!
2. Rush home by cab to meet Laurence, daughter of the most delicious woman in the world, my friend Sylvie. Laurence is 20 and here for a conference. I took her to an Asian lunch that she really liked and then I got a co-op car and we drove around looking at the city. She is a delight.
3. Friend Dana sent me a link to an article about Presentation House Art Gallery's plans for a beautiful new building on the waterfront. The article references my work: establishing the photography mandate and several shows. It makes me happy and proud that an idea of mine has such legs.
4. More proof I am old: I found an iPhone on the way home from teaching today. I didn't know what to do and in the meantime, its owner was getting text message after text message. So when I got home, I knocked on my handsome young neighbour's door (I use any excuse) and he answered the incoming textures and took over the job of returning to the owner.
5. One of these days the phone is going to ring or an email is going to arrive saying either: We want to produce your play, or not. With you in it (or not). This is going to happen to me twice soon. I wait; I am busy, thank God.
6. Next up: I go to dinner with friend, Dianne. This old man hasn't had this busy a day in a long time.

Shock

Honestly: Sometimes I think I am the happiest retired person alive. I do not take this blessed state of being retired for granted. It is a privilege to live as one wants without financial anxiety. "Inheritance" is one of my favourite words. Back pain aside, I live in a state of bliss and have for some time.

So I was shocked this morning to hear from my friends who warehouse my books in an attic of their warehouse that I had only 180 books left. I don't sell a lot of books. Artist Survival Skills (a textbook for visual artists) came out in 2008, but 4,820 have sold since then. This afternoon, because it is just before Christmas, another order for 90 books came in. Now I have 90 left.

Suddenly my tranquility is gone. I spent a fair bit of time today talking with my book sales agent and the biggest seller to see what I should do and now I have a massive project ahead of me: I have to revise and expand the book to create a "new and improved" version. I am not feeling retired any more.