Tudor Robins's Blog, page 6

One Less Car

We are a family of four. We own one car. We own ten bikes.

Ten.

It’s largely because we own ten bikes, that we’re able to own one car.

This is the latest addition to our bike roster:

I got this bicycle from Kunstadt Sports so that I could finally “retire” my 25-year-0ld Marin mountain bike to the island. This isn’t a particularly expensive bike – it’s my commuter bike, so I can’t have anyone liking it enough that they want to steal it – but it’s a delight to ride, and is made that much better by the toe clips and fenders I had installed when I bought it.

This bike makes me happy. Each of our ten bikes makes me happy.

I’m thinking about this quite a bit these days because of all the talk about how car ownership is changing, and because of the world endlessly warming, and – particularly – because this week has been a big bike commuting week around here.

My younger son is in basketball camp at Carleton University.

Carleton is 7.5 kilometres from our house. Give or take.

We discussed different ways he might get to camp. Driving to work with his dad, then taking the O-Train the rest of the way. Carpooling.

He wanted to cycle, so we’ve been cycling, and it’s heavenly.

I ride there with him, then back home, and at the end of the day I go back to meet him, and we cycle home together. That means this week he’s putting in 75K of cycling on top of spending every day sweating in a gym, and I’m adding 150K to my routine.

When I ride over to meet him in the afternoon, this is the first moment I get truly happy that I’m not driving:

 

This is a pedestrian overpass that spans a rather busy part of the Queensway.

 

Not only is it nice to be zipping along over all those brake lights, but there’s something magical about the bridge itself.

.

It kind of reminds me of the bird cage in Jurassic Park III …

After I cross the Queensway, I wind through quiet neighbourhoods, with wide, empty streets, until I get to Dow’s Lake.

 

I love the eclectic mix of canoes, kayaks, stand-up paddleboards, houseboats, and more that are always hanging around Dow’s Lake.

The next part of the ride is along the Arboretum paths, skirting the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Rideau Canal. The Arboretum is part of the Central Experimental Farm, a four square kilometre farm right in the middle of Ottawa, run by Agriculture Canada, and the site of frequent agricultural experiments (ah … that explains the name!).

Ottawa is a city of locks so, sure enough, soon I hit Hartwells Locks (the tall tower in the background is Dunton Tower at Carleton University – yes – we’re almost there!).

 

Then it’s just a quick-and-easy carry of the bike across the locks and I’m on campus. I would love to know how many bikes a day cross locks all over Ottawa. As you can see from the photo, it’s very much a one-at-a-time activity, so there’s an informal, unspoken, polite, agreement to take a my-turn, your-turn approach to crossing.

 

The last part of my ride is a quick zip through campus to get to the Ravens’ Nest – the beautiful, new, deliciously air-conditioned gym where my son’s lucky enough to be coached by members of  Carleton’s legendary Ravens basketball team (they’ve won seven straight Canadian university men’s basketball titles).

 

But, back to cycling –  clearly, we’re not the only people riding our bikes to / at Carleton. These are the bike racks outside the Phys Ed Centre.

 

Here’s what I’ll say about cycling / having one car. It’s great for all the obvious reasons: 1) It saves us a lot of money, 2) It’s good for our health, 3) It’s better for the environment. But there’s one big thing I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of selling to people.

It simplifies your life.

Honestly. You might think giving up a car would make your life more complicated but, in the absence of extenuating circumstances like having a mobility issue, or living very far out in the country, it actually makes things much, much simpler.

We still sometimes feel overscheduled, but we’re less overscheduled than a lot of people we know. We make choices knowing we only have one car to use. We don’t sign up for two activities on opposite ends of the city on the same night. There are limits to what we can accomplish with only one car, and we’ve learned to enjoy those limits. They mean we eat more dinners together, and we attend more events as a family, because we often don’t have the choice of going in different directions.

If you’ve ever wondered if you can give up your second (or third) car, I recommend trying it. You need to plan ahead a bit – start thinking like a one-car family before you become a one-car family. Who knows? You might find you like it. If so, make sure to report back!

Road Trip / Day Trip

Today I got to do two great things. I got to go to the Island, with my thirteen-year-old son.

I’ve realized I like hanging out with my kids because they’re a lot like me. They’re introverted, and they don’t need much to keep them entertained.

My older son is in Nova Scotia for the week at CJ’17 – and I can’t wait to hear about his adventures – so in the meantime it was the younger one and me, and I knew he’d be excited to ride in this baby:

Which he was. This is our beauty of a rental cargo van, which we used to carry two new paddleboards to the Island. For the last couple of years my husband and I haven’t bought each other anniversary gifts – we just buy stand-up paddleboards (which, I totally admit, I used to think were a silly trend, and now I think are THE BOMB). There were other things to bring, too. Enough to justify renting the truck for the day.

I’m glad my son enjoyed riding in it, because I didn’t love driving it. The upside was the great views on the ferry – no need to climb to the upper deck:

Heading to the Island.

 

And back to Kingston.

It could have been a boring day – maybe it was a boring day. We drove in the rain (because this summer in Ottawa has been all about the rain), and we listened to CBC Radio One, which featured a series of long radio pieces which were mostly fascinating, except for the one on the state of Canadian publishing which was whiny and cringe-inducing. However, the good ones were an episode of The Disruptors on how sport can change / save lives, and a story about coming out as gay for Canadian South Asians. I recommend both if you’re looking for something interesting to listen to.

We unloaded the items from the big van, had lunch with my parents, then drove back for a long wait in the ferry line because we had to return the van by a certain time and didn’t want to miss the ferry. While we were in line we walked around one tiny block in Marysville (the town on Wolfe Island) and just in one, small, block, these are things I saw:

This is the street we walked down (water at the end). Such a simple, quiet place to live.

 

This shed / barn / garage is being spruced up.

 

A close-up of those lilies …

 

Even the telephone poles are picturesque.

 

A view across to the house on the next block – uncrowded living.

 

Honestly, that was it. Just a simple, quiet, day. I could have taken fifty more pictures of things I love about Marysville alone. I suppose it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I, personally, never get tired of looking at it.

Weird Hook Thing

This has become known, in our house, as the “weird hook thing” – do I really need to explain why? Although, you may be wondering why we don’t call it “ugly hook thing …”

We moved into our house in 2000 which doesn’t seem like long ago, because – you know it was this century – until you do the math.

This hook was in our house when we moved in and, based on its general state (and the state of the ceiling around it – because, yes, it hangs from the ceiling) I would say it was there for a long, long time before we moved in.

Let’s talk, for a minute, about the fact that it hangs from the ceiling. I always picture this hook holding a macramé hanger and a spider plant or a fern that’s seen better days. Something like this:

 

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ginapina/

 

I must make clear, this is a Creative Commons image – this is not a picture from our house! This is somebody’s style, but it’s not ours. The hook is not our style.

Yet it remains in our house 17 years into our ownership of it.

Until this summer. This summer we’re doing a major bedroom shuffle. Our 6’3″ and 6’1″ sons are getting bigger rooms, where they can have bigger beds. The hook is in the room our 15-year-old is moving into.

So it’s coming down. Finally.

We have done some MAJOR work on this house – not as major as a lot of the work in our neighbourhood, but certainly involving what, for us, was a big budget along with quite a bit of dust, and the occasional curse – yet this hook has survived.

In fact, we had the truly horrible, throwback bathroom gutted before we fully moved in. This was because my husband warned me, “If we leave it, we’ll get used to it and we won’t see it anymore.”

This has happened with the hook. We don’t like it, but we’ve stopped seeing it.

Until my son walked into his new room and said, “What’s up with this weird hook thing?” He saw it because it was in his new turf.

So, out it’s going, and it’s crucial to get it out now, while he’s still seeing it. Otherwise we’ll be getting ready to put this house on the market years from now and our real estate agent will ask, “What’s up with this weird hook thing?”

Come on, now, I know we’re not the only ones with something in our house that’s become part of the scenery even though we truly despise it. What’s your “weird hook thing” equivalent? We want to know!

Welcome … Always Welcome

 

As I type this, the sound of girls’ voices singing drifts up the stairs. Every now and then I hear my son’s deeper voice.

It’s after 10:00 p.m. on Saturday night, and we didn’t plan for my son to have friends over. But they drifted by our house, with vague plans to maybe go on somewhere else, and since they’d walked over he invited them in for a drink of water, and they stayed.

Once it seemed like they might stay a while, I offered them cookies, which they ate. Then I offered them soft drinks, which they drank.

I was planning to spend the evening in the living room, watching Netflix and catching up on a sewing project, but instead I came up to my office so my son and his friends could hang out and chat downstairs with some privacy.

It’s important to me that they’re here. It’s important that he likes bringing them here, and that they like coming.

We don’t have a big house, or a fancy house, and we don’t, and never would, offer them alcohol, but they still come and seem to like coming. Which kind of flies in the face of the idea that teenagers want to be entertained all the time, and presented with stuff to do, and that they won’t hang out anywhere they can’t drink.

I think – I hope – they come because they can tell we genuinely like having them here. I hope they feel welcome.

Because if they’re here after dark on a Saturday night there are so many other, worse places that they’re not. That my son’s not. And that’s so, so important.

I always tell all of them they’re welcome here any time. If it’s the first time they’ve been here, I say “Now you know where our house is – you are always welcome.”

If it truly takes a village to raise a child, I want these kids to know this is a place they can come if they’re ever in any kind of need.

And, sure, when they show up, sometimes offering them cookies means I’ll have to bake a whole new batch the next morning. And, sometimes, they get the last cold drink out of the fridge.

But I always think of it this way – what if this is the cookie that makes the kid feel welcome, that makes them decide to come here, and be safe, instead of going somewhere else?

If that cookie, or that drink, or having the free run of our living room on a Saturday night, makes them happy and secure, then it’s worth it every time.

And they have beautiful singing voices, so that’s an added bonus!

Myth-Busting

I’ve been contemplating today’s blog post. I have a couple of ideas, but they’re kind of long, and I don’t have much time (since I’m full-steam-ahead trying to finish Book Two of the Stonegate Series), so I was just going to write a kind of quick-and-dirty post, and then a Goodreads gift fell into my lap.

I wrestled with the decision of leaving the world of traditional publishing a long time ago. Objects in Mirror was traditionally published in June 2013, and I indie-pubbed Appaloosa Summer in June 2014 – so it was around Christmas 2013 that I really took a long time, and thought hard and decided to go it on my own.

For me, I’ve almost forgotten there’s another way to publish.

But some people … well, for some people traditional publishing is still where it’s at. Which, for them, is fine. As long as they’re informed. As long as they’re not operating on myths.

If you want to hear more about what I call the myths of mainstream publishing, there’s a whole (long!) podcast here which you can listen to here (scroll down – it’s under the audiobook podcast).

If you follow this link, you’ll see I address three main myths – 1) the myth of choice, 2) the myth of support, and 3) the myth of quality.

The review I read today, from a new reader on Goodreads busted the myth of quality right open. Here’s what she said about Appaloosa Summer:

It was such a beautiful book, and having bought a lot of new books that have been frustrating to actually read because the quality was so low (looking at you, OUTLANDER paperback Diana gabaldon-shame on you!Pages as thin as a bible), I was surprised and so happy with the pages, the size of print, the cover is stunning and in my head I was thinking, yes all three on my bookshelf please!

But … no … how can that be possible? Diana Gabaldon’s books are published by Delacorte Press – an imprint of Penguin Random House – their quality must be better than a lowly indie-pubbed book … right? Well, one reader doesn’t think so.

Further on the quality myth, and debunking another big myth – and this is an important one, so I’m bolding it – readers don’t care who published a book, she went on to write:

The book’s publishers have done a super job as the book was such a pleasure to read from a quality perspective that I would have bought another even if the content had not been so amazing! No headaches due to the font size and spacing, and no accidental page turns due to the quality paper. Wonderful. Five star book! Thank you Tudor!

This reader doesn’t know that when she thanks me, she’s also thanking “the book’s publishers” – and that’s fine. Why should she care? Other than, obviously, this is somebody who takes quality seriously and she thinks the publisher of a book should also take quality seriously, and is bothered when they don’t. And, as the publisher of my own books, I do take quality seriously.

I wasn’t surprised to hear my book’s quality held up to (or surpassed) that of traditional presses. Ingram, CreateSpace, and other services do make beautiful products and I take pains to ensure the files I send them are truly print-ready. There’s no reason why an indie-pubbed book can’t be as beautiful, or far more beautiful than any book on the market.

But it is nice when a reader notices, even nicer when she takes the time to acknowledge it in writing, and fantastic when it puts one more nail in the “quality” myth when it comes to indie vs. trad-pubbing.

Island Series Boxed Set

This is going to be a thing – the first three books of the Island Series offered together at a reduced price – but I have a tough decision to make about what cover I want to use.

If you have a couple of seconds, I’d love it if you’d place a quick vote for your preferred option.

Of course, any thoughts, comments, feedback, etc. are welcome!

Ottawa Traffic …

I came upon this traffic jam during my morning run.

 

It can be hard to get around in Ottawa this time of year.

 

 

These guys are everywhere.

 

 

It’s a never-ending stream – and once they get to the water side, they decide to come back to the grass side. On my way back there was a mom (a human mom!) sitting with her son and they were just watching and laughing at the goslings and the pedestrians and cyclists all dodging each other.

I like living in a city where this is the type of traffic encountered on a major route into downtown (this path runs East-West along the Ottawa River, linking the far west end – Kanata – with Parliament Hill and beyond, and many people use it to commute to work, year-round).

The other very Ottawa thing about my morning run is, as I was pausing to take these photos I ran into my son’s homeroom teacher cycling into school. We had an informal parent-teacher conference by the river and went our separate ways. That’s Ottawa – that’s totally normal – you see people you know all the time, everywhere. I have no idea how people get away with having affairs and otherwise misbehaving in Ottawa because somebody you know will see you – or they’ll run into somebody who knows you through their sister’s dentist’s brother-in-law – that’s just how it goes. And that, too, I kind of like.

One of the things I talked about with my son’s teacher is Mr. D – and that’s a post for the near future. Mr. D, and our family watching of it, and what else we watch as a family … stay tuned!

 

The Quest for Grey Hair

My goal …

The other day I had a conversation with my neighbour. One of those not-very-deep-or-meaningful conversations – I was passing her house at the end of my run and she said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you I like your haircut.”

To which I said thank you, and explained I’m not 100 per cent sure of the haircut, but it’s a means to an end because I’m trying to grow my hair out to its natural colour, hence the need to cut off the coloured ends.

She said, “Oh, I’ve been thinking of doing that but I’m not sure about the grey.”

We compared grey clusters, and I told her I’d let her know how it goes, and I went home and didn’t think  much more about the conversation.

Until a few days later when I found out she has cancer.

Ho-ly kick to the gut. First of all I felt stupid that the last conversation I had with her was about hair. Really? Hair?

But then I started thinking about it. About the grey hair. About what it means.

I’ve decided growing out my grey hair is more important than ever, and I’ve also decided I want grey hair for my neighbour. Lots and lots of it.

I want to have grey hair this summer when I sit by the edge of the water with my husband and watch my sons paddleboard on the bay.

I want to have grey hair next year at my younger son’s grade eight graduation.

I want to have grey hair I can braid, or put in a ponytail for all the half-marathons I’ll run for the rest of my life.

I wonder how grey my hair will be by the time each of my sons starts, then finishes university?

I think of how every body who meets me after a certain point in my life will only ever know me as somebody with grey hair – I think that includes any grandchildren I might be lucky enough to have in the future – and I’m good with that.

I want all these milestones for my neighbour, with all her three kids. She is a beautiful person anyway, and I want her to have beautiful, grey hair as she goes to every school event, and celebrates lots of anniversaries with her husband, and does many things with her many friends.

Or, of course, if she gets through her treatment and all she wants in the world is a head of platinum blonde hair, with pink-dipped ends, I wish that for her too.

I definitely wish her the choice, though.

For me the choice, right now, is grey hair.

It’s coming. Slowly. What I’m seeing so far, I already like.

And in a world where fewer and fewer things are left to the unknown, I kind of like not knowing exactly what my hair will look like in a year, or five, or ten – just leaving it up to nature.

Surprise me!

 

Spring on Wolfe Island

 

Warning / note / advisory – this is a boring post. And – ha! – I don’t mean the post in the above picture. I mean this blog post is not full of adventure, not exciting … it’s just a snapshot of what things are like at this time of year on our patch of Wolfe Island.

 

This is the path through the hayfield that leads from “the cottage” to “the house.”

 

It was a busy weekend – we had a bathroom to paint, and there was a sailboat, tied down under about three feet of crazy high St. Lawrence water, that we had to rescue. But just before dinner on Saturday, the greens and blues made me say, “Let’s go for a walk!” and I brought my camera. All these photos are things we can see from our driveway.

 

 

See the wind turbines in the background of the above photo? There are 86 or 87 of them (I always forget the exact number). There are lots of farmers on Wolfe Island, and many of them have diversified their incomes by having wind turbines or solar panels on their land.

 

 

We have to! These are our solar panels. They feed into the grid and Ontario Hydro pays for the energy they generate. When our contract is up with Hydro, we may use them to power our homes. The only problem? These two panels generate about enough electricity for four homes. We don’t have four homes to power!

 

 

The above photo provides a better view of the panels as trackers – that is to say, they’re not fixed; they track the sun. They’re moving all day, always seeking out the strongest of the sun’s rays. This makes them much more efficient than fixed panels. And, when it’s too windy, or when the sun goes down, they tabletop. So if we look out and the panels are flat, we know either it’s really windy, or so grey they can’t find any sun, or both!

 

 

The field across the road from our driveway a) has the most beautiful oak tree imaginable in it and b) has been, in past years, planted with soy, then with corn. It looks like this year it will be fallow.

 

 

A better view of that oak tree.

 

 

 

I even found the dandelions pretty last weekend!

The island will be beautiful all summer, and all year, but the colours will never be so lush as they are now, when there’s been lots of (too much?) water, and everything is growing.

Reading Habits

 

My reading habits have changed considerably over the last few years – how about yours?

Here are the main ways I’ve changed:

1) I much (much) prefer reading on my Kindle. Much. For one thing, I mostly read while I eat lunch – it’s how I get in five decent half-hour reading sessions a week – and it’s really, supremely, awkward to hold print books and eat. The Kindle has spoiled me.

2) I use OverDrive a LOT. I actually love the ease of finding and downloading books from the Ottawa Public Library using the OverDrive App on my Kindle Fire. I love how they return automatically – no late fees! I also love the reading interface. One thing I don’t like as much about pure Kindle books is they show you a percentage of the whole book read. OverDrive tells you how many pages you have left in your chapter. Very handy when deciding whether to start a new chapter!

 

3) I rarely – almost never – buy traditionally published books. I’ll buy indie-pubbed books from some of my favourite authors – Natalie Keller Reinert, Mara Dabrishus, Kim Ablon Whitney, Maggie Dana, Kate Lattey, etc. … but I check trad-pubbed books out of the library.

4) I read lots of series. When I find an author I like, the OverDrive app makes it super easy to search for all the books in the series, put holds on them, and wait for the email telling me I can download them. So easy …

Twice, recently, I’ve contemplated buying a traditionally published book. This is what happened:

Situation One:

I had read all 17 books in this author’s series in less than a year and I was really, really enjoying them. The author had a brand new book out – with something like 48 people ahead of me in the hold line at the library – so I thought I’d maybe buy Book 18 to take on a family trip. I figured the eBook would cost around $10, but I thought I’d already read all the others through the library, and it was for a specific trip, so OK.

I went to Amazon, found the new book, and the eBook was $17.99. No, that’s not a typo – it wasn’t $7.99, it was $17.99. The paperback was $16.30. So it was $1.69 MORE for a digital file I would have the licence to, but not really own.

I will NOT pay $17.99 for an eBook …

Now, I was a fan of this author, but being his fan had not rendered me completely senseless. To be perfectly honest, I believe pricing like that is actually insulting to readers. It’s like publishers saying “This is what we think of you – we think you’re pretty dumb.” Although this author has another, parallel series, I haven’t started reading it. I’ve moved on.

Situation Two:

I moved on to another trad-pubbed author I quite liked. For similar reasons to above, I thought I’d give it another try and maybe buy her book. I went to the Kindle store, and it was $8.99, which is close to my all-time limit of $9.99 but just within it. I figured I’d already read one of her books from the library, and got the other on Kindle for about $2, so the overall cost of three books averaged out was reasonable.

I bought the book.

A few pages in, I realized I’d read this book before. Which was a bit disappointing. However, her books were well-written, it was a mystery and I couldn’t remember the details of the plot, so I decided to keep it.

I powered down my Kindle, and the next time I powered it up I got a warning message that the brand-new book, that I had fully paid for and downloaded directly from the Kindle store to my Kindle was DRM-protected and I would have to jump through multiple hoops to be able to read it.

I don’t take kindly to having my eBooks locked up.

Um, yeah, it took me two seconds to decide to return it. What a joke. Bad enough that DRM catches innocent people when they do something perfectly legal like try to read a book (which they paid for) on a different device (which they own), but this was the 100 per cent most straightforward way in the world to buy and read a book and the publisher was putting all kinds of roadblocks in my way.

I find it hard sometimes to understand which century publishers think they’re operating in. It’s so simple to get pricing and DRM right, that I can only conclude they don’t want to.

Just as an aside, if you’re not familiar with this 1) Pricing – when you upload a book, Amazon will provide a recommended price at which you will get the most sales and make the most royalties. It’s in Amazon’s best interests to get this right, as they only make money when your books sell. And, just for reference, they do NOT recommend $17.99 for mystery novels. 2) DRM – couldn’t be simpler. When you upload a book, Amazon asks you if you want to impose DRM on it, or not. If you care about your readers, you’ll choose NOT.

There – done – two problems solved and many more sales that publishers would be making to people like me.

The advice is free – although probably I should quadruple that amount to play the publishers at their own game.

What are your book-reading / book-buying habits these days?