The heat is on!

    John finished installing the heat pumps, and a few days ago our new heat system started working, in time for Christmas!  I have to leave my door open most of the time so the heat will get in my room, which is hard to get used to.  I keep waiting for someone to say "Were you born on a raft?"

    Last week I led the book club discussion on Kidnapped.  We had a cookie exchange and I brought gingerbread which I'd baked.  But it was a bit of a disaster:  it stuck to the bottom of the pan and fell to pieces!  But the others didn't seem to mind.  Next month we'll discuss Educated, Tara Westover's memoir of going from a homeschooled upbringing by survivalist parents to a Ph.D. at Cambridge.

    Next month my history discussion will be about Ethiopia, so I'll be reading a book of Ethiopian history by Saheed A. Adejumobi. (I finished that book on the Republic of China in time to return it on the day it was due!)

    Stephen printed a booklet of some of the memoir group's pieces and I bought two copies. (I contributed pieces on my Toronto home, cartoons, the autism spectrum and bereavement.)

    I'm optimistic about my Meetup for people over 60.  I've straightened out my stripe.com account and I'm starting to attract people from stitch.net .  I intend to get the reading out loud group going in the new year--some people have expressed interest.  

    I'm approaching Level 4000 in Candy Crush Saga and Level 100 in Empire City!

    I've ordered new pajamas online, and I'm about to order new winter boots. (My old ones are leaky and the soles got so wet that whenever I use them they leave my socks wet too.) I'd have ordered them already, but I'm a bit of a procrastinator these days.

Netflix

    We've been watching some interesting series on Netflix.  There's Death by Lightning, about U.S. Gilded Age president John Garfield and the lunatic who assassinated him.  We've started watching a new version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. (Those Italians have some great faces!)

    And there's an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' "magical realist" novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I was prepared for disappointment because I loved the book so much, but it's actually a worthy adaptation, visually imaginative and well-cast.  It's just the first half of the book, so I imagine they'll do the second half next year or so.

    Meetup restored the members of my 60+ group, so I've started doing the Saturday lunches again.  I tried to start a walking event on Wednesday afternoons, but it's too cold for that. (I'll try it again in the spring.)

    I went to another stitch.com lunch at Dimpfelmeier's Bakery in Etobicoke.  On the way out there the subway was closed west of Jane Station, so I had to take a shuttle bus and was half an hour late.  But it could have been worse--on the way back it was closed west of Ossington Station so I had an even longer shuttle bus ride!

    Read Clare Chambers' Small Pleasures for my book club, and we had an interesting discussion.  It's about a lady reporter in 1950s London investigating claims of a virgin birth, but it proved better than I expected.  Next month we'll discuss Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and I'll lead the discussion! (I read it when I was 11...) My History Meetup will be discussing Chiang Kai-Shek, so I'm reading Xavier Paules' The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949.

    John P. and I saw Blue Moon at the Varsity few weeks ago, with Ethan Hawke in rare form as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart.  The other week we saw Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein at the Scotiabank.  It's vivid but gets a bit too talky in the second half: the overly articulate creature is a flaw that goes back to the book... (This week my historical movie watch party is showing Ken Russell's Gothic about how the story got written.) Next Tuesday we'll be seeing Nuremberg.

    Our new heat pumps aren't installed yet, and it snowed last night.  But I can make do with my electric heater for a while longer!