Imagination.

Six weeks into my sabbatical, the Question of the Day remains unchanged.

What do I want to do today?

First, I’ll have some toast. While seemingly everybody I know needs an hour or two before eating anything, I wake up excited to eat toast. I have access to oatmeal (instant and delayed), apples, yogurt, eggs, and a whole bunch of other unconventional breakfast foods, yet every morning, I feel in my heart — and stomach — that I want toast. Options concerning breakfast do not overwhelm me.

Toast moves me.

As soon as those two pieces of toast are inside of me, the day unleashes its torrent of options.

As a new employee of Paradise Planning, yes. Yes, I do.

I spent the morning decorating the Garbage Institute for Occult Studies. In the game, my boss is a pink sea otter named Lottie. Since the game is geared towards children, who generally have terrible taste in interior design, it is not difficult to please Lottie. She had no objections to my decision to place a gravestone in the middle of the classroom.

I’d designed a whole school before 9am: a nice warm-up for a day full of possibilities. I moved on to my crafting cabinet, where half-finished projects lay in neglect among brand-new supplies and materials still in their packaging, including a set of anodized crochet hooks and all the skeins required to conceive a mushroom child. I opted to pull out a project that was all but finished.

Half an hour later, the snorkelling kitty cross stitch I’d started last week was done. Forty or so hours preceded its completion, far longer than I’d anticipated. It was exemplary of a deceptively laborious project. I used an 18-count Aida cloth, and filling each square required four passes of the needle. On the first night I started this project, I hadn’t even finished the ears after four hours. Nevertheless, I persevered, passing my needle in and out of the cloth an estimated 19,000 times, stopping periodically to untangle the thread that invariably gets pulled into a knot at the back.

I still need to make a frame for it, but that’s a project for another day.

At noon, it was time to attend to my restless legs. I hadn’t logged any serious mileage outdoors since that trip out to Jordie Lunn bike park two Sundays ago. Since then, the trees have shed nearly all their decaying leaves, revealing landscapes rarely seen from the Lochside Trail during the warmer months.

I started the ride wearing full-finger gloves for the dexterity needed to sign to Alexa and Daniel who’d joined me, but I packed mittens just in case. I also meant to throw a packet of hand warmers in my pannier, but like the bag of bran muffins from the night I did the Hell of the South Island ride, I forgot them on the shelves in the gear room.

I decided I needed to stop to make the swap, just 10 minutes from our destination. My fingers were burning from the cold so badly that I could barely undo the buckles of my panniers to get the mittens out. I desperately mashed at the itty bitty fastener, struggling to break up the pair. How sorry I must’ve looked! Daniel took over and undid the clip with ease. Then Daniel and Alexa were subjected to further drama as I struggled to put them over my hands.

Once again, Daniel offered assistance. He held the left mitten open so that I could spear my icy digits inside. The change of handwear helped, but I still struggled to type my order at The Roost, where we had stopped for lunch. While we waited for our food, we admired the restaurant’s collection of wreaths and birdhouses. Alexa and Daniel were subject to vague sounds of a couple uncoupling at one of the neighbouring tables. We all opted for a side of fries with our meal, with Daniel and Alexa squeezing a paste of tomato, sugar, and vinegar on theirs. I doused mine in just vinegar.

“I don’t like it, but I see the appeal,” Alexa commented after sampling one of my tart, soggy fries.

My meal was otherwise a let down. $18 for vinegar-soaked fries and a wrap containing the tiniest bits of roasted yams? I guess The Roost is known for its bakery, and possibly, the curious selection of crafts for sale opposite the pie display case. The diamond painted knickknacks somehow went unnoticed by Alexa when we were there in June.

Based on my first visit to The Roost, back in June, I can confirm that their pies are very good. Their taste level for everything else, though, is questionable.

The Roost: Good Pies, Bad Eyes.

My renewed passion for reading has remained strong, even though I abandoned a book for the first time this year. I’m sorry, Dan Simmons, but your obsession with describing women’s pubic hair was too much for me to process. Yes, I enthusiastically devoured Miranda July’s imaginary conversations with her lover’s dick in All Fours. Yet, Simmons’ pube kink was too much. It wasn’t even an overt elaboration of a character’s pubes that made me bail on the story. It was nipples that made me nope out exactly halfway through the book.

“Her nipples, he could not help noticing, had risen in the brief blast of cold air that he had brought into the snow-house…”

This is an abuse of my imagination! The way most male authors write about sex gives me the ick. Do other women feel this way about male-authored sex scenes? It conjures the same discomfort I felt the times Dad tried to have candid discussions about sex with me. (Of all other information Dad could have given me access to, he chose that?)

I’m currently reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Last year, I read a non-fiction novel of his about the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack. This book, Underground, did not contain any sexual content.

With this novel, I have already come across the line,

“Her pubic hair was fine and sparse, like a delicate willow tree.”

From Wikipedia: Literary Review nominated one excerpt from the book for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Wish me luck.