Nikki Tate's Blog, page 2
June 26, 2018
Final Week (Reboot365-7)
We are fast coming up to opening night… and that means rehearsals come rain or shine.
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Given we will be performing in the park, we can’t be put off by a sudden drop in temperature, howling winds and bucket-loads of precipitation.
We are in the mountains, so wait a few minutes and the weather changes.
The sun came out for a bit and it was every man, woman and child for him/herself… So many great brawls! My admiration for our fight choreographer, Anastasia St. Amand knows no bounds… I want to write a play full of ugly fights just so I can have an excuse to work with her again!
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Plenty of people in town have wandered past and enjoyed watching bits and pieces of rehearsals, but there’s just as much going on behind the scenes. The mask-making project is racing along (suddenly the first show seems really, really close), costumes are being stitched, props made, sets built… It is always so cool and so nerve-wracking to see shows come together. Just when it seems an impossible feat to pull off – yikes! There’s an audience out there and somehow the show happens!!
Check out the Pine Tree Players website for details and if you are anywhere near here… come see The Apple Kingdom (matiné) and Romeo and Juliet (evening) performance starting July 4…
June 25, 2018
reboot365-6
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Choo-choo-choose your own adventure day! Too cold, too wet, and too tired to do anything more than post this photo I took the other day when I was in Banff and the train roared past me…
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Train in the Snow at Argenteuil, by Claude Monet – 1875
June 24, 2018
The Death of Me… (Reboot365-5)
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By the time you get to the end of Romeo and Juliet there are bodies everywhere… There’s Paris, for example… about to be discovered in the dark by the Friar. Come to the Canmore Summer theatre Festival (coming up SOOOOOON!!!) to see who else winds up sprawled across the grass…
Here, though, in my world (which has shrunk to the dimensions of my computer keyboard), I’ve been obsessing about death. Still. Again. I’m deep into revisions of my book about medically-assisted dying and oh, my – it isn’t getting any easier. The subject matter, or being a writer.
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Mountain Graveyard, by Kurt Schwitters, 1919
How is it possible that I can get to this point in a manuscript after so many years of writing books and still feel that I should perhaps be looking for other work? But it happens with every manuscript – I get to a point where I completely lose perspective and think that the whole project is worthless. It’s more boring than anything ever written by anyone – the subject is boring. My opinions are boring. Death is boring. Life is boring. Being a writer is definitely boring. Everyone in the book is boring because – guess what – they all die!
Sigh. This is the point in my day where I push back from my desk and throw in the towel. There is no point in flogging this sorry horse to… yeah, death any longer.
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Thanks, Picasso. I can always count on you to have painted something appropriate to my bleaker moods. This is “Minotaur With Dead Horse in front of a Cave Facing a Girl in Veil” by Pablo Picasso, 1936
June 23, 2018
Mountain Trivia (Reboot365-4)
Did you know that more than half of humanity depends on mountains for water? (This fact comes from this article on The Telegraph website).
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At this time of year we have plenty of both mountains and water…
Why am I thinking about water (where it comes from and where it goes)? It so happens that my ghost walkers last night wanted to know about Banff’s water supply and sewage system, not something I had come prepared to talk about (ghosts neither drink nor pee).
I figured there had to be some kind of waste-water treatment going on (there’s no way all those hotels have some funky septic system under Banff Avenue) and, sure enough, Banff has a pretty skookum system. Because the town is in a National Park, they are pretty particular about what they consider to be a clean end product. Here’s a list of what Banff suggests you do NOT flush down the toilet. I’d say it’s a pretty good list for all of us to keep in mind.
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I try not to forget how lucky I am to be able to enjoy a glass of good, clean water whenever I’m thirsty.
On the incoming end, Banff’s (quite delicious) drinking water comes from very deep underground wells. It’s pumped up to a reservoir on Tunnel Moutain and given a bit of chlorine treatment before trickling back down into the townsite and into drinking glasses and refillable water bottles all over town.
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The Town of Banff provides filling stations so you can tank up with great Banff water free of charge.
Here in Canmore, there’s a rather ambitious action plan in place that hopes to reduce per capita water consumption by 50% by 2035 (from 200 rates). I love drinking the water here (tasty!) and I enjoy long showers… I guess I will have some work to do if I am going to do my part.
Do you have any great water conservation tips to share? I might as well start now…
June 22, 2018
Useless Factoid 2 (Reboot365-3)
One of the things I chat about on the ghost walk in Banff (just got in from doing one this evening) is where I might like to haunt should I come back (the Harmon Residence in Banff – a house I LOVED as a kid and which haunts my dreams to this day…)
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Hey! Come back here with Walter!!!!!
And that made me wonder about other people coming back somewhere, after… or wanting to come back as something… which is how I stumbled on this gem.
Did you know that Walter Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee, had his cremated ashes baked into a Frisbee after he died? One would hope he is well identified so someone doesn’t accidentally send him sailing off a cliff or out to sea…
June 21, 2018
Useless Factoid (Reboot 365-2)
Did you know that when dogs squat to do their business, they align themselves in a north-south (or, south-north) direction? (Don’t believe me? Read this…)
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I wish now I’d paid more attention each time we took Sparty ashore to take care of business…
May this inspire you to pull out the compass on your phone and line yourself up accordingly before you stop to scoop… I need to know how many of your dogs follow this rule of earthly magnetism…
June 20, 2018
O, Life (Reboot365-1)
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Aaaaaand… it’s full-on summer! (the view from the bridge on my way to rehearsal the other morning).
Apparently, there is a threshold of busy-ness which, once crossed, makes it tough to meet the blog-a-day challenge. I hit that a few days ago after… let’s see, 30 (for my April challenge) plus 44 (in my blogging every day for a year project) days. Not a bad streak, really, but long enough to hurt when I managed to get home and to bed late enough one night only to realize that it was after midnight and I had totally forgotten to blog. I threw up my hands, heaved a deep sigh and said, ‘Never mind.’
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One of my favourite parts in our production of Romeo and Juliet is when the ethereal maids are humming, in harmony, The Sound of Silence. Bring tissues!! (A Woman Weeping by Rembrandt, 1644)
I was up early the next morning to continue on a writing project and considered posting a photo and back-dating the entry (cheater!!) and couldn’t quite bring myself to be so deceitful. Then, I was going to just post and stats be damned, but I couldn’t decide how to number the next post…
Anyway, enough time has passed that I now feel I can clear the slate and just suck it up and start again.
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With plants like this around (and they are all over the place, apparently…) there’s no need to slow down to smell the flowers. These puppies exude an exquisite scent so intense I smell it as I whiz by on my bike. With the hot weather here now, the wee flowers are fading (along with their perfume). Can anyone tell me what this bush is called?
Not that life has slowed down, mind you (that was another consideration – wait until I actually have time to embark upon such a project). Much as I live in a fantasy world that has me sitting with my feet up somewhere balmy, but breezy, preferably with a sailboat under my backside, the reality is I always have lots of balls in the air. I’m picking this blog ball up and tossing it back in the mix.
How to Hit a Kid with a Chair
(Fight choreography – we have a gorgeous brawl in Romeo and Juliet, but wow – it’s complicated to get all the moving parts right without hurting anyone. Anastasia, our fight choreographer is amazing!!)
I warn you. though, that there may not be too much meaty content for another 3 weeks or so until our Canmore Summer Theatre Festival performances are done and the edits to the current draft of the medical assistance in dying book are back off my plate. Sorry, you might be looking at more photos than usual…
June 15, 2018
Oh, the Merman!! (44/365)
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He’s still there at the Banff Indian Trading Post!!!!! Just got home after leading a Ghost Walk in Banff, which followed a full day of writing and editing. Half fish, half human, this little dude haunts my childhood memories and today when I popped in to say hello he transported me back across the decades to the first time I saw him so long ago…
No doubt he will now follow me into the world of dreams…
June 14, 2018
Photos Only for a Few Days (43/365)
A LOT going on here at the moment – so much, in fact, I forgot an important birthday today!!!! SORRY!!!!!!!!!
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Raindrops on roses…
For the next week or so, I will likely be reduced to posting a photo and perhaps a piece of somehow related artwork but without much writing to go along with it. Sorry about that, but you know – life can get in the way of blogging sometimes. (Two apologies in as many paragraphs – how very Canadian!)
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… whiskers on kittens… (Girl with a Kitten, by Lucian Freud, 1947)
The last time I forgot a birthday, btw, was the terrible year I forgot my only child’s birthday. That was bad. She reminded me in the horse paddock while I was making her help muck out. She was not amused. Horse manure removal and sacred birthdays do not, apparently, mix. A couple of decades (almost) later, she is still not amused and reminds me of this black incident when I dare to say anything along the lines of, ‘hey, I wasn’t the worst mother in the world…’ And then she counters with, ‘what kind of mother forgets her only kid’s birthday?’ Not that it would be any less awful if I had forgotten one of six children’s birthday – then, I can just imagine, there would have been accusations of favoritism. “I knew you never loved me as much as the others.”
June 13, 2018
We Know Better Now (42/365)
A very long, very busy day again – so today I’ve gone into the archives for a couple of quick photos in the ‘hm, good thing we don’t do this any more’ department.
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Back in the day, feeding wildlife was a thing… I think I even read recently (can’t think now where) that long ago people came to Banff to feed the bears! That seems like an eminently stupid thing to do, but then, when I look at us (that’s me and my brother, Peter) feeding the bighorn sheep, that wasn’t too smart either.
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There’s a dramatic painting by Charles M. Russell, c. 1904 called Big Horn Sheep… It’s the males that have the full-on horn curl going on.
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This Big Horn buck is mounted and hung at Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria. I’m not sure of the stats regarding trophy hunting and how popular it is then versus now, but I can’t say I understand why anyone would hunt just for sport. I’m not opposed for hunting for meat as long as one does so in season and following proper game management protocols but as a source of decorations? Um. No.
And, yes, probably somewhat less dangerous but also not a good idea is the chipmunk-feeding craze we enjoyed as kids. I loved the feel of their tiny, delicate claws every so gently scratching the palm of my hand as they would take an offered peanut. They were pretty brazen (I think this one was on the top of Sulphur Mountain) and would sit back on their haunches, cheeks bulging and enjoy their feast.
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These days I have quite a different relationship with the little monsters. They know when climbers are busy belaying and can’t chase them off, so they blithely crawl all over our packs, chew holes in food bags, and generally make a menace of themselves while we are distracted.
They are still cute, yes, but I have a lot less patience with them now and have no patience whatsoever with people who feed them and make the problem worse.
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There’s a dramatic painting by Charles M. Russell, c. 1904 called Big Horn Sheep… It’s the males that have the full-on horn curl going on.
And that, as they say, is all she wrote…
Anybody else want to confess they used to feed the animals? As in, a long time ago before we knew better? I think there’s a statute of limitations on such misdemeanors (though today, there’s also a hefty fine). If you are a current offender, perhaps best you keep your head down and stay quiet.
