Dance fools, dance!

Well, the die is cast. Our subscriptions for the 2007-2008 dance series have been finalized:

Series C - NAC Studio:

• Crystal Pite/Kidd Pivot: Lost Action
• Tedd Robinson/10 Gates Dancing Inc.: REDD
• Ballet de Lorraine: La Nuit des interprètes

Series B - NAC Theatre:

• Diavolo Dance Theater
• Ballet du Grand Théatre de Genève: Compelling Contemporary Choreography: Para-Dice, Selon désir, Loin
• Rosas: Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich
• Emanuel Gat Dance: The Rite of Spring, Winter Voyage
• Black Grace Akram Khan + The National Ballet of China

And a designer series (make up your own).

- from Series A - Southam Hall

• Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan: Wild Cursive
• Lizt Alfonso Danza Cub

- from the Canril Ballet Series - Southam Hall

• Royal Winnipeg Ballet: The Passion of Carmen
• Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo: Le Songe (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

One of the performances in Series A for next year is by 'Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal'. We went over the program and made our decisions in the NAC lobby (over the chocolate chip cookies that was the special reception for the end of season) immediately following a performance by "Les Grand Ballet" that left both of us significantly less than impressed (for the second time in a row with this company), and the thought of seeing them again at that particular point in time was very unpalatable. We also feel that the Series A selections are based more on what is most likely to appeal to the broadest audiences, and we have found that our preferences over the years have tended towards the less mainstream.

So we decided to mess around with our standard practice of A, B and C subscriptions. (Given our reasoning, I am still a bit stunned that I was able to talk almost-ex into a couple of classical ballet performances. The clincher was that whenever we have seen the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the quality of the dancing was blisteringly spectacular, and we can enjoy almost anything if the dancing is really, really good.)

Almost-ex's girlfriend will be joining us for Series B. I think almost-ex was a little leery of suggesting it, quite adorably so. I would really like her, I was told. And although we have only met a couple of times, I do like her, and I am really looking forward to having her there next year.

Humour saves

This week I finally ‘met’ someone who I will be working with over the next few weeks, maybe even months. I use quotes around met because I rarely get to meet my colleagues. I work from home (I live in Hull, Quebec—just across the river from Ottawa, Ontario) for a company based in New Brunswick. (I haven’t even ‘met’ my supervisor, even though I have been working with Lee for nearly 4 months.) I have met most of my Ottawa area colleagues, but very few others: employees of this company are scattered all over North America, from coast to coast, and as of early this year, overseas.

Working from home and conducting all of your business by phone and through email is not an easy thing. For all the fact that telecommuting has been touted as the way of the future since the early 80s, industry has been very slow in developing effective attitudes, strategies and policies for creating a environment where effective working relationships can be both built and maintained over long distances and across time zones (where some team members are going to bed just as others are getting up).

What invariably suffers from the fairly outdated management principles still in practice is the sense of community. There is no water cooler. No photocopier or coffee station. Developing and maintaining personal connections with the people you work ‘beside’ is not nearly as natural when you have never actually met as it is when you can meet face to face on an almost daily basis. The team building and moral boosting plans they come up with invariably require proximity: you must work at head office to participate in any of them, which leaves the remote workers (more than half of the company’s employees) feeling like second class citizens within the corporation. (I am still waiting for the company magnet, supposedly distributed to all employees, so that when the corporate ‘Secret Shopper’ visits my cubicle I will be eligible for the prize awarded for prominently displaying said magnet. I have totally given up on the ice cream gift certificate promised a year ago.)

Anyways, back to my ‘meeting’ a new colleague. Her name is Greshma, and she lives and works in Bangalore, India. And as best as I can tell, given that we have just 'met', she and I are going to get on like a house on fire.

We had our first ‘meeting’ this past Thursday morning; a conference call set up by Lee (who has just spent a few months over in India putting together the partnership project between my company and the India firm). The agenda was simply to introduce me and Greshma to each other and for the three of us to go over the work to be done over the next month while Lee is on vacation. The call lasted about 15 or 20 minutes and consisted of hellos, a review of some project highpoints, and Greshma and I saying how much we would miss Lee while he was gone. Not really much space for the kind of convivial conversation that would allow Greshma and me to become really acquainted. One of the final acts of this conversation was Greshma and I exchanging our Messenger ID’s.

The call ended, and the first thing I did was to check on the company’s virtual office site for any details about Greshma. I located her self description, and knew that I was totally in luck:

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

I was just reading this over when the Messenger window requesting authorization for Greshma appeared. I authorized, and within seconds we started chatting. About family, pets, food, philosophies of life, and a lot of stuff I no longer remember; about 20 minutes of very important trivialities. This is how you build a team: one relationship at a time.

The beginning of my day is the end of hers, and to open or close a day with a simple chat can go a long, long way towards building a personal relationship in the long-distance world of the telecommuter that no corporate exercise (like ‘Secret Shoppers’ visiting cubicles and handing out prizes, or ice cream socials) ever could ever accomplish. A Messenger (Yahoo, ICQ, whatever) chat can bridge the chasm of relationship building where face-to-face meetings are unlikely or even impossible. And, to mix my metaphors, humour is very often the grease on the skids.

“I would be sillier…” To read that Greshma felt silliness an important aspect of a good life instantly drew me to her: silliness is a specialty of mine. (I also do irreverence, but we can go into that another time.)

“I would take fewer things seriously.” That ties into a favorite quotation of mine. “Always take your work seriously. Never take yourself seriously.” (Dame Margot Fonteyn) I can take myself incredibly seriously at times, and I often have to make a concerted effort not to. The Fonteyn quote often helps me get back on track again.

I am very lucky. I have several colleagues (only two of whom I have met face-to-face) that have great senses of humour. Most don't get me, but at 50+ I cannot NOT be who I am.

Making a friend of a colleague over very long distances is ever-so-much easier if you joke together. (Good emoticons also help!)

I have been remiss ... and gardening

I should be ashamed of myself for not having written in the past couple of weeks, but I have been doing my level best, in most of my waking hours, to get my garden ready. The weather has been inordinately mild, and I really had to get onto it before the job became insurmountable. (Dandelions are aggressive little you-know-whats.)

I live in a rented townhouse, with a 12' x 24' patio and full south exposure. My garden is a container garden: various planters and pots of various sizes, and automatic watering system around the edges to drip irrigate the pots. Spring clean up of my garden is quite a bit of work.

My yard is right next to the parking lot for the complex I live in, and people seem to think that my yard is just a second dumpster for the complex. This year was better than most ... only 1 1/2 large green garbage bags of Macdonalds' wrappers, Big Gulps, newspapers, candy wrappers, cigarette butts and packs, and so on. Garbage detail went pretty quickly this year.

The next thing is to survey the damage that winter wrought. The watering system is tested for leaks, and any components that did not make it through the winter are replaced. The perennials and shrubs (a dwarf lilac and a Tulip Magnolia) are checked for winter die back. (I lost 3 perennials this year: my 2 Purple Cone flowers and a white Campanula. The jury is still out on the bulbs: Siberian Iris and Liatris.) Pots and other garden accoutrements that show damage are tossed. (This year I lost my arbour to advanced rot. It was, however, 12 years old, and did not owe me anything.)


My poor ex-arbour in happier days.


Step three is removing the plants that died over the winter and cleaning out the dandelions and plantain, and about 8 other types of weeds that I do not recognize, from the cracks between the pavers in the patio. (Another 2 green garbage bags to the dumpster.) Crack cleaning will be an unending duty until the fall as I will not use Round-up or other herbicides.

Now we start onto the actual planters and pots.

Weed and loosen the soil around the perennials and shrubs, and throw out any peanuts that I find burried. (There is an elderly couple down at the far end of my unit that keeps the local squirrels well supplied with peanuts from late August to early May. These squirrels have decided that my garden is a wonderful place to cache their nuts, and every spring I come across between 50 and 70 peanuts that are starting the thrown out roots.) Then, a new layer of mulch (water retention is an issue with container gardening).

All the pots that held annuals, or plants that did not survive the winter, and that were not damaged in the winter are dug out and the soil mixed with organic fertilizers and organic matter for moisture retention. This year I am adding a new item to the soil rebuilding: a very interesting polymer crystal, about the size of kosher salt grains, which will absorb water and release it when required. I saw it on a P. Allen Smith gardening program, and it sounded very interesting. I'll let you know how well it worked at the end of the season.

Now, off to the garden center. Replace any pots, perennials and anything else that did not make it, and load up on mulch. I have used cocoa husks as mulch for the past couple of years and it has been working very well for moisture retention and weed suppression: besides they release a subtle aroma of chocolate when the sun falls on it. I found a couple of nice terracotta planters to add to the design, but I have been totally unable to find a replacement for my arbour. (sob) Then supplement the perennials in the garden with annuals and some herbs.

Finally, the furniture brought up from the basement, reassembled and prepped for the summer. This is the stage I am at now ... and with luck I will be finished this weekend.

Rambling

Yesterday was a very full day.

I trashed somebody's document by accident (it is hard to not mess things up when the instructions and processes published and maintained by the company are wrong, out of date or incorrect).

I called the tech support people, and while waiting for the return call got a phone call from the security company for my sister's house that the alarm had gone off (about 15 minutes at top speed away). So, a mad dash up to Chelsea to make sure that nothing horrible had happened. Nothing had, but there are mysteries to be resolved. (So much for my plans to get on with my garden today.)

I had a long talk with my bank. As you know from an earlier post, I had deposited a substantial cheque to my account about a week ago, and then hit a shopping groove. I wasn't worried about the funds: it was a Government of Canada cheque. Then I discovered that my rent cheque had been bounced back (first time ever), because the branch where I made the deposit placed a hold on the cheque.

When I moved to Gatineau Quebec from Kingston Ontario I was going to transfer my accounts to the branch of my bank closest to me. I decided not to, for any number of reasons (mostly because they often outright lied to me about what could or could not be done--and I knew that because I had worked for this bank on and off since I was 18), and because in the age of electronic banking, it was not as necessary as it had been 50 years ago, when passbooks and statements were still all generated by hand.

The banker I talked to (same bank, Ottawa Ontario side of the river) about this return of my rent cheque said that this was a not atypical behaviour from the Quebec-side branches. A large percentage of the accounts they held were moved over to Ontario around the time of the last referendum, and these branches are starting to resort to bullying clients by making it impossible for them to do any business with the branch until all that client's accounts have been moved to that branch. (This explained a lot of the garbage I have been through with the Quebec branch I have been dealing with for over 11 years.)

Last night was the last in our dance series for the season: Les Grande Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. Both the almost-ex and I were really looking forward to this (and not only because of the cookies reception for the entire audience that was to be held following the performance). Past shows of theirs had been great. Last night's was a disappointment: the choreography was OK, the music (Shostakovitch Suite No. 2 for Jazz Orchestra) for TooT was marvellous and the piece was mildy amusing, but the dancing was sloppy. Not what we had come to expect from this group. The second part of the program, Noces, had deeply annoying music and was essentially uninspiring. The audience was incredibly moderate in their reactions to both, and got 'bullied' into applauding more than they wanted to by the guy manning the stage lighting and the obviously formula curtain call routines the troupe had. (At one point it was kind of sad: the dancers knew that the audience did not want to clap any more, and they were almost all off the stage when the lights that had dimmed were turned up and the company was sent back out to finish the curtain call routine. I felt kinda sorry for them.)

While we were eating our cookies afterwards, we started talking about our subscriptions for next year. For the past couple of years we had been finding the series A events (which are presented in the premier venue, Southam Hall) very hit and miss. Some were spectacular (Alvin Aliley American Dance Theatre, The Forsythe Company), others (like La La La and Les Grand Ballet this year and a Belgian company Rosas from a couple of years ago) ranged from OK to boring/icky. The presentations in the smaller Theatre have been more uniformly engaging.

Our theory is that the A series bookings for Southam Hall are those most likely to attract a broad audience (over groups that would appeal more to the modern dance aficionados, like the B and C series); a triumph of brand recognition over substance. We are thinking of being a little more selective about which A series performances we get with the subscriptions (an idea prompted by the presence of Les Grand Ballet on next season's A series schedule). I even managed to get the almost-ex seriously considering a couple of classical ballet performances from the CANRIL Ballet series: Royal Winnipeg Ballet The Passion of Carmen and Les Ballet de Monte-Carlo - Monaco Le Songe (A Midsummer Night's Dream). We finished our cookies, and decided to think on for a bit before we made our decisions.

Chefs and Cooks on the Internet

Back when I was cooking professionally (actually, even before then, when I was studying cooking) my husband gave me his old computer and we shortly thereafter got connected to a local ISP. While poking around on the very young Internet, I discovered a newly formed listserve for food professionals. It was very early days for the list. I lurked and just read for some while, fascinated just to follow the discussions.

It was a fascinating place for a newbie to the industry to be, and some of the discussion was rather heady: great discussions on kitchen and personnel management, resolving problems (like the cracking cheesecakes that was making me crazy), sharing tips and sources for equipment, pointers to articles and news stories that affected food producers and purveyors, or bone-chilling stories about a newer set of yet lower standards for foods to served in schools to our children. There was a lot about behaviour in kitchen (was the arrogant chefs who abused all around him becoming more of a cliché than a reality?), food safety, pricing, tipping, salaries.

One list member runs a placement agency for food professionals, and her insights were wonderful and helpful, and her semi-regular posts of resumes (names deleted to protect) from new CIA or some other culinary institute graduates with grandiose expectations, appalling grammar and more 'what not to say if you want a job' items in their resumes than any of us could possibly imagine. (And the covering letters were even worse.)

I eventually graduated to contributing to the discussions. At times people would get shirty. In the early days of the list, we had some real knock-down-drag-out flame wars over some highly volatile topics like food irradiation, transgenic food plants and milk. The list owner eventually had to set up 'rules of conduct' and a rota of volunteer 'moderators' was established. The list required authorization to join once the housewives wanting a new recipe for jello-mould salads with carrots had finally found us.

During the busy seasons (harvest time for the farmers, Christmas for almost everybody), postings were few and far between. In the slower seasons, there were often more than I had time to read. Shortly after my business was well in hand I was asked to be one of the chocolate experts in an 'ask the expert' section of a San Francisco newspaper's bulletin board. I made some friends on the list, and lost some too (rest well, Pastorio).

I am still a member of the list, although I no longer cook professionally (MS and the attendant stamina issues made continuing in that line of work impossible). I don't read everything that comes through the list, but I read a lot of it, and I find out about things I did not even know existed, get annoyed at the latest thing some government or the WTO is doing to our food, or discover an approach to handling something that I had never considered. Unless they kick me off, I will stick around. I get a lot of really cool stuff from that list.


See The fall and rise of good bread featuring 2 articles by a favourite writer of mine from my chef's list, David Auerbach (the man who saved my beans cooking). He has other articles there too. Check the archives.

Menopausal mind-funk

I have had a heck of a time concentrating for the past 48 or so hours (not helped by virtually no sleep at all for two nights due to constant waking with hot flashes).

I can think clearly (if somewhat laterally) most of the time, but for the past couple of days I keep reading the same sentence or paragraph over and over again, and cannot make any sense of it, mostly from a complete inability to concentrate for more than 3 seconds on anything. My mind keeps wandering all over the map, and to the most irrelevant and unrelated things.

"You really have to get to work on that garden." "The chicken soup you made yesterday was good...but you needed bread with it. Pity the noodles have soaked up the remaining broth in the soup...it would have made a good lunch." "I wonder how Dad is doing visiting Donna in Italy." "Did I take my shot this morning?" "I really should get myself a kitten. The house is lonely without a cat around."

And so on, and so on ...

All of it is a constant distraction to whatever task is at hand. I am not even going to admit how long it actually took me to get the vegetables ready for the soup, but it was well over 10 times as long as it should have taken. I would notice something on the coffee counter, and stop the chopping to go and clean it. And then would chop two mushrooms more before deciding I needed something from my office (no idea what or why), would go upstairs for it, and forget what it was by the time I reached the top, only to have the idea pop back up the minute I started the chopping again. It has been like that since mid-Monday, and I am truly getting nowhere fast. At the best of times I distract incredibly easily, which drives my sister Donna quite nuts, but these past couple of days seen my distractibility quotient rise to an entirely new level.

There is a set of funny 'prayers' for the Myers-Briggs personality types that a friend found once and passed over to me. I am Myers-Briggs type ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving), and the prayer for my type is "God, help me to keep my mind on one th--Oh, Look...a bird!--ing at a time." That is so-o-o Me, except that I rarely return to the original thought!

Sometimes I can focus quite intently, to the exclusion of everything around me. (When I was renting the second kitchen at a restaurant in Kingston for my small business, the restaurant's head chef used to climb very quietly up the stairs, stand right behind me and, after making sure I didn't have a knife or anything else dangerous in my hand, say 'boo!' right into my ear. I was always caught totally off guard and would jump clear out of my skin. He never tired of that game, saying that he liked my 'finely-tuned flight response'.)

I have a bunch of banked overtime at work, and I am thinking that rather than sit here and try to accomplish things when I am in this state that I should go through all the busy-work I have to do--which should take about half an hour--and then use up some of that banked time getting distracted from household chores rather than my job.