I went outside.  The sky was grey and cut into pieces.

I saw someone's ink tracks and thought...

Here's hoping.

There were flowers, big and bright as cries.  And some tiny, whispers. Slippers for the little people. 

Vines hung down, spindly in the dirt.  I never went further than ten feet in my back alley.  

And goodbye, Lena

Thank you for the stormy weather..

Well my poor little computer is on its last legs.  I took it in to be repaired after my last post - they thought it was the fan but it turns out it needs a new logic board, which would be mucho dinero for a five year old computer, so it's not really worth it.  So in the end, I will see how much more life I can squeeze out of it. It works for now, but needs much babying with ice packs and frequent breaks.  But on to more important, alive things...It's really becoming spring now, and I'm so grateful for the sunshine

Mr. L and have been taking walks along the Lachine Canal, which runs through the whole southern end of the city and is just a few minutes from our house.  I often miss the countryside and the ocean of Cape Breton (where my father lives and where we plan to end up) and all the concrete and cars and litter in the city can get me feeling quite morose.  But walking along the canal is a great curative...the presence of water and wide-open space clears the cobwebs out.

The bouganvillea blooming in our living-room window also does wonders for my mood.  It's so impractical having a tropical plant in this climate, but my Grandmother  always used to talk about having them in Brazil, so we baby it along and every summer it rewards us with a few gorgeous flowers.

And speaking of tropical beauties, here is my sweet-but-fierce, miniature panther, dutifully guarding his favourite dollies...

I apologize for my long absence from blogging...the last update was such a lovely but frantic whirlwind, that I decided to take some time away from all things doll.  A huge thank you to everyone who adopted, visited and wrote about the Alice dolls!  All but the Pouting Alice doll were gone within an hour, which I was not expecting, especially given that I had made more than ever before this time around.  Some people have written feeling a little frustrated by the update process because they were unable to get the doll they wanted, so I'm sorry for any disappointment, but it really is the most efficient way I found to free more of my time to make dolls.  I'm working on an FAQ that will address some of these concerns. 

Since getting all the dolls shipped out, I've been catching up on other aspects of my life that had been sorely neglected.  I've been working on the second draft on my thesis/ novel, which is due in early April (gulp!) I've also been doing boring, normal yet very satisfying things like going for long walks and making dinner, a task that Mr. L had almost entirely taken over in the past several weeks while I sculpted, painted and sewed up a storm.   I even helped him with his job for a change, researching ghost ships, which my inner nerd thoroughly enjoyed.  It was so warm here for a few weeks, we were all lured into believing it was officially spring.  But then it got cold again.  And then it snowed.  But now it's warm again, and schizophrenic weather is infinitely better than relentless cold and grey.  Mr. l'Orange would like everyone to know that he's very happy to be going outside again...

...even if it snows...

Given that I've so thoroughly outed myself as a grown woman who plays with dolls, it probably won't come as a shock that where Christmas is concerned, I'm a 5'9 six-year-old.  Christmas lights are one of my very favourite things on earth, and my neighbourhood is all a-twinkle.  In the bougier parts of town where some of my friends live, the lights are lovely but decidedly tasteful.  Well down here in the PSC, people don't mess around with subtlety or lightness of touch.  So much the better, I say; there's no tree too tacky, no house too gaudy.  I want my lights in all the colours of the rainbow and bright, brighter, brightest!  Thank you, people of the PSC, for giving me a Griswald Christmas. Tonight Mr. L and I went for a chilly but cheerful walk around the neighbourhood after our swim at the local community centre; come see what we saw...
I don't know if it's a Québec thing, but before moving here, I'd never seen these very funny inflated Christmas creatures.  Some of them even play music:

Yes indeed, that's Santa in a helicopter up there in the upper left-hand corner.  But that's also him in his more traditional sleigh in the lower right, so old Santa values collide with modern Santa merely a block apart; the reindeer are beside themselves.

But I think this house takes the Griswald gold medal; I try to walk past it at least once a day because it makes me so happy. It faces a lovely little park where even the streetlamps look like oversized Christmas lights:

Well, I'm off to watch Julie & Julia with Mr. L, a movie about which I'm a little too excited and only slightly bitter.  Excited because I found the book immensely entertaining and bitter because when I was living in the woods in Maine and home alone all day, I took some Julia Child cookbooks out from the library and made all sorts of absurd-yet-delicious things like puff pastry amuse-bouches and raspberries in little chocolate bowls (made by pouring melted chocolate over inflated balloons, then popping them - I kid you not).  But did I think of writing a blog about it, then getting a book deal, then selling the movie rights then rolling around in my suitcases of money?  Nooooo. I did not.  But that was the year I started making dolls, so I'm grateful for that.  I'm sure someday very soon, the charming and beautiful Amy Adams will play me in a movie about my life as a doll-maker and Meryl Streep will play Mr. L..   Erm wait, no - that's not quite right.  Clive Owen will play Mr. L and Meryl will play my alter ego and then the entire cast and I will roll around in our suitcases of cash.

Perfect.

Thank you so much to all who have left comments recently about the new dolls for this month's update; I've dropped the ball and haven't had time to reply to any  left in the past week or so, but I read them all and appreciate them so much.  The update went swimmingly and I'm delighted anew each time that people actually remember and attend and adopt and it's just so fun for all of us. (The dolls and me, that is - not me and all my other personalities.  Although maybe they amount to the same thing?  And even Mr. Lovely gets swept in the fun...)

Also, it occurred to me the other day that many of the new girls have short hair, which is relatively new for me, and that maybe this was an instance of art imitating life. Or maybe just me imitating me, because I recently got my hair cut short for the first time since I was eleven, when my grandmother took me to see her favourite hairdresser at the stripmall across the street from her apartment building.  Now, had I been a few years older and had already been saturated by the forthcoming adolescent cynicism and snobbery, the fact that this was the preferred stylist of a seventy-year-old woman AND the fact that she worked out of a suburban mall might have tipped me off that I was not going to walk out of there the as the diminuitive fashionista I imagined myself to be.  But at that tender age, I was so excited to be going to a real hairdresser, I went like a lamb to the slaughter, earnestly  bearing my photo of Olivia Newton John circa Let's Get Physical and said, 'Make me look like this'. 

But no, gentle reader, you guess correctly: I did not come out looking like Olivia.  I came out looking a little like Andy Gibb, only less feminine.  I came out with shortish, feathered mullet and in equally short order, I was mistaken for a boy.  So traumatized was I by that haircut, I swore never again.  But after I broke my knee this summer and realized I'd be washing my hair in the sink for a month, I rediscovered a small, brave place inside me.  I'd also recently  been crushing out a little on Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica circa season 1 (I think nerds everywhere will agree, she's so fracking hot!) and wondered if I could pull it off.

Finally, Mr. Lovely assured me there's no way I could, at this point in my life, be mistaken for a boy, so he chopped those locks off.  And I'll be damned if he isn't a million times better with a pair of scissors than that butcher in the mall, not to mention the stylists at many high-priced chichi-poopoo salons I've dropped over $100 in (back in the days when I actually spent money on haircuts - never again!)  So, there you have it - a happy ending to sad hair story.  Short is cute and easy and I might never go back...

In other news, Mr. Lovely and I took a beautiful walk along the canal today and saw a beaver, which was very odd, as we had just been talking about beaver dams (an unusual topic in itself) when a nice man with his dog pointed and said "un castor" and there he was, chewing away on a scrap of wood with his giant chompers.  Very unexpected when one lives in an a teeming metropolis, so we urged him to make haste and find a safe place for the winter.  Then, almost as exciting, I found the motherload of eye candy, issue nine of Lula at the newsstand in the market after I'd all but given up hope.  I'd even tried to order it from a place in NYC, and after three weeks they refunded my money and said they wouldn't be getting a second shipment after all.  Sigh.  It's all the soft-lit, cotton candy, fashiony goodness I hoped it would be. 

Well, I just got the cats high on catnip, and it's shaping up to be a pretty exciting evening here chez Faber, so I must dash.  Tata for now!