'Be good, Santa's watching!'

The three older Ms, taking heed of the sign and hamming things up in their naturally hammy way. What do you expect from a 10, 11, and 12 year old?

Still working through the England and Vancouver trips photos between the client photos. My eyes are tired from the heavy-duty photo editing but they’re holding up, and I’ve been been fortifying my system against the onslaught of viruses with Cold FX and vitamin C — the ol’ body is also holding up! But barely… Go immune system!

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Thanks to pneumonia and the side-effects of antibiotics, I took a record low number of photos on this recent trip to Vancouver. Although the medications helped my lungs and bronchial passages, what I didn’t expect was how much it demotivated me to take photos or even propel myself out of my sick chair. I was like a sack of potatoes — a sad sack of Yukon Golds — gasping for breath and waiting for a mash. I didn’t know what to do with myself, the camera felt like it weighed a ton (it does, but that didn’t stop me before) and even picking it up seemed like a chore.

I never thought I’d say those words! Clearly, I was unwell! It is the strangest feeling to be trapped inside a body that won’t cooperate, to fight for enough breath to say just one sentence and have it come out so weakly that I needed to repeat myself. The medications worked well enough that I was fooled into thinking I was myself, but after a couple of days I could’ve sworn I was someone else — someone with only vague thoughts of photography. Was it the illness or the antibiotics talking?

It’s time to post some photos, even if just to prove to myself that I didn’t lug all my equipment to Vancouver for nothing. The photo above was taken at Mt. Seymour in North Vancouver, which is a Christmas sledding tradition for the kids if the weather cooperates and dumps enough snow, which it did — in spades. My father took the twins swimming by request (they didn’t want to go sledding), and the three older Ms went up the mountain with the three of us. It was one of those instances of “be careful what you wish for” because we didn’t see a speck of snow until we reached the top of the mountain, and when we arrived up there, it was whiteout conditions.

Maddy created some one-of-a-kind bracelets, manufactured in her little bracelet factory, and I showed her how to display her product line:

The big hit, present-wise, was Melissa’s remote control helicopter:

All the kids wanted a crack at it, and I was surprised it lasted more than a day considering all the delicate moving parts. One too many crashes took its toll on Day 2, which was immensely disappointing for Melissa but there were other things to play with, such as the newly-gifted Wii and Wii Sports for the family. Oh, the fights that ensued…

Finally, a photo of my father, who will be 74 years old this spring.

Decided to upload a smilier picture of him, since he’s more like this:

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Miss Maddy at Earls Cove (Sunshine Coast, BC). The top shot is mine, the bottom shot is Allan‘s.

Madeleine is now eight and a half years old, and is the middle child, like me. There are all sorts of theories about a supposed middle child syndrome, for being the middle of three (I couldn’t seem to find an example of being the middle of five), and also for when the middle children become adults. There are also those who don’t believe this syndrome exists. I think a few of the characteristics ring quite true (articles say the middle children turn out to be quite creative), but I don’t know if there is really a behaviour pattern between the middle children I know.

In any case, it is interesting to watch happy-go-lucky Maddy grow up and show her personality in front of a camera. She is such a character!

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I love getting stuff from the Ms (my nieces and nephew), whether it’s a drawing or two or three or four — usually five. Today it was a Christmas card that smelled like gingerbread and some magnets of the kids’ school pictures. Melissa, who’s now 10 (!), phoned me and we talked about our cats and how crazy they are. What a cute conversation, filled with grown-up-sounding words from Melissa like “cautiously” — oooh, adverb! — and lots of giggles.

The wrapped gift wasn’t part of the mail, though, it was from a Christmas party I attended this evening, hosted by the agency that found me the part-time job at The Firm. I wasn’t feeling 100%, but I wanted to introduce a couple of friends to the agency, and thank the consultant for helping me land this position. It’s a perfect fit and I’m very grateful to her for the matchmaking! If you live in Toronto and are searching for a personnel agency to represent you, send me a gmail [gailatlarge] and I’ll put you in touch with her, she’s great!

Oh, and it’s time for some music, like I promised:

I’ve featured the Quebec band The Lost Finger before, but they deserve more exposure. I’d love to see them live — their live performance looks like a lot of fun! Check them out in Madrid, playing the ’80s tune “Fresh”:

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A bunch of my favourite M2 pictures:

Two years old, at Laity Farm in Mapleridge, BC.

Nearly seven, at Mace’s on the Sunshine Coast, BC.

Aged seven and a half, with Kermit in BC, Spring 2008.

And my favourite cameraphone photos of us back in 2007 just before his seventh birthday:

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My blog is seven years old today! The above is a cameraphone pic of a cake I shot in New York City, December 20, 2006. It’s very “Gail at Large”, wouldn’t you say?

This blog has benefited me in many ways, not the least of which has been to connect me with many interesting people who I’d never have met otherwise. A recent example of this is from my Ottawa road trip the other weekend when I met up with two well-travelled people through totally different channels: Zhu, a multilingual expat blogger from France, and Lisa, an Ottawa native who was referred to my blog by someone else and works in the aviation industry. Who knew when I started writing in this space that in seven years it would morph from a working university student blogspot-templated rant to a mostly pictorial account of my ever-evolving life filled with cameras, airplanes, cats, code-tweaking, and blurry cameraphone shots of food? Certainly not me!

Speaking of travel, I got a very cute postcard today from my nephew, I’ll scan it after I get home later… which I’m sharing with you because it brought a big smile to my face and if it doesn’t bring one to yours I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (auntie?):

Aww, poor Kermit, he’s probably got heatstroke!

Michael and I had a funny conversation on the phone a couple of days before their road trip. (Bear in mind he’s a little over a month away from turning nine years old.) Here’s a snippet:

Me: “Have all my postcards arrived yet?”
Michael: “We got one from Bra… Brats… Brat-sylvia.”
Me (chuckling): “You mean Bra-ti-sla-va. Do you know where that is?”
Michael: “No. Where is it?”
Me: “Slovakia. Do you know where Austria is?”
Michael: “That’s where Beethoven is from. But I don’t know where Austria is. I’m only in Grade 3, Auntie Gail, Geography is in Grade 5.”

Earlier in July, when I phoned Melissa for her 10th birthday, she told me they got my postcard from Rome.

Me: “Do you know where Rome is?”
Melissa: “I’ve heard of it.”
Me: “Have you heard of the Pope?”
Melissa: “Yes, he lives at church.”

Maddy (nearly eight) was too busy plotting world dominance playing to stop and talk to me. The twins (age five) are talking like crazy and say funny things, but they don’t like to talk on the phone… yet, anyway. Once they do, I’ll be sure to post the gems.

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The 3Ms Sing Happy Birthday from Gail Edwin-Fielding on Vimeo.

July 2004 — it was their mama’s birthday. I love the hiccough partway through.

Melissa just turned 5, Michael was 3, Maddy was 2.

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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust

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My original plan was to snooze through my red-eye flight, but when I clicked through the list on the entertainment selection screen I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to catch Slumdog Millionaire (you might have heard of it?) and Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky — two movies I wanted to see, anyway. I was a bit skeptical of Slumdog as I don’t buy into hype or buzz, but it was captivating and right up my anthropology alley… I also like Danny Boyle’s early work (Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, specifically).

It is a rather sad state of affairs lately that the majority of my film-watching happens on airplanes, but I can squeeze in four during my Toronto/Vancouver journeys so I put on the headphones and forfeit sleep.

Forfeiting the sleep, however, has its consequences in the form of broken English and limited brain power the whole day after I deplane, so I’ll keep this short while I continue to plow through my backlogged TO-DO list and tackle the easier stuff first — like backing up all my trip photos (1,000+ in less than two weeks). The cutie-pie in the picture is Maribeth on our birthday outing. She’s tiny with a wee voice but she has a big personality.

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I took all the kids to Science World on Saturday, and we had a grand ol’ time like we always do at “The Big Ball of Science”. Melissa really outdid herself in the Contraption Room and built a bell tower all by herself. Check it out:

I have loads more photos from Science World, but I’ll upload them later…

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