Auteur : Martine

Some people will go through a lot to please their readers. Me? I just went to the bathroom with my digital camera and snapped this shot. (Why the bathroom? I used the mirrors as a guideline, and I have a very cool shower curtain, which you won’t get to see anyway.)

In case you haven’t noticed, this is a photo of a geek girl wearing glasses. I don’t know that I truly qualify as a geek, but my blog sure gets a lot of visits from people who look for « photos of geek girls wearing glasses » on Google and other search engines. The reason why anyone would be fond of this specific type of women is beyond me, but I figured hey, give the readers what they want. Those of you interested in pictures of me biting the head off a live chicken should know that I leave the cooking to my boyfriend, like geek girls often do (with a few amazing exceptions).

Speaking of search queries, while looking at my referrer logs, I came upon this site which gathers the most disturbing search requests leading to different blogs. The stuff you find there is pretty amazing. It does take all kinds of people, doesn’t it?

Lisa, the Kit Kat queen, has one more reason to come and visit from England during the holidays. Her favorite chocolate bar, the Orange Kit Kat, is finally here! I was paying my milk and orange juice at the d�panneur a few minutes ago, and a guy behind me was waiting to buy the new Kit Kat. Too bad the store was closing. I’ll go back tomorrow and give it a try.

Looks like there’s a real cult following for these chocolate bars. There are a lot of Web sites dedicated to the Kit Kat, and this one is even showing an orange PowerBook, I believe, getting friendly with the Orange Kit Kat. Nice match! Now THAT might be enough of a reason to switch.

I also found this info on some odd Nestl� Web site:

The chocolate crisp bar was made and originally launched in London and the South East of England in September 1935, and was called Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp. It only became ‘Kit Kat’ in 1937, two years before the Second World War.

Kit Kat was supposedly named after the Kit Kat club, an 18th Century Whig literary club. As the building had very low ceilings, it could only accommodate paintings which were wide and not very high. In the art world, these paintings were known as ‘kats’. It’s believed that Kit Kat derived its name from paintings, which had to be snapped off to fit into the rooms with the low ceilings.

Culture sometimes comes in very small and sugary packages…

So when are we going to see the Strawberry and yes, the Banana Kit Kat in Canada?

Interruptions

I am counting the days until November 30th, which will mark the end of a mad period of 4 months when I was buried under work, work, work. Starting at the end of the month, I will only have one full time job instead of two (not counting the short side jobs). I know I should not complain – I’m a freelancer, and work is good for freelancers, right? It’s just that some freelancers tend to be of the anxious type, and they sometimes take on too much work because they’re worried that the job offers will slow down. What if the money just stopped coming in?

Things will slow down though (yes, I WILL make it happen) but in the meantime, I’m compensating by buying books like crazy. The holiday period is always a big reading time for me and this year I want to start early! And more reading usually means more writing… which is good, because I have had a few fiction projects on the back burner for quite a few years now. One of my original intentions with this blog was to keep a kind of writer’s journal, but it hasn’t happened yet. Too many life changes in a short period of time. Too much work. Will the excuses ever end? Stay tuned…

Speaking of writer’s journal, last night, before I got to taste Amelio’s famous pizza, I finally found a copy of May Sarton’s « Journal of a solitude« , which I had been trying to find in local bookstores for months.

I love beginning to read a book, and I love book beginnings. The first few sentences are often the most powerful ones in a book. They contain its essence in a clear, elegant fashion. When I finish the last sentences of a book I really enjoyed, I usually go right back to the beginning and read the first paragraph again.

Here’s how « Journal of a solitude » starts:

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my « real » life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

I dream about owning a house with which I could have old conversations! I have never, in my entire life, lived in a house. Always apartments – too many of them in the last few years. I fear that I will not be able to seriously start a big writing project until I actually settle down in MY place and develop a relationship with it. But I know it’s silly and it could become yet another excuse.

Must start. Must set aside the time to do it. Only two more weeks, and that damn month of November will be over.