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Posts Tagged "Melanie Parish"
About a month ago I got a quote from a professional organizer on helping us in our home. The quote was a whopping $2400. We were surprised and when we looked around, we realized she was right. Somehow in the last 8 years of having kids and moving out of our house and then back into our house (we were on sabbatical and traveled), things stopped having a place. In that time, I have had 10 people working in my house, have had babies grow up and turn 8, have changed the use of almost every room, have had multiple clients here, and have closed a storefront, ending up with the leftovers of that business stashed here as well. My office was probably the worst room in the house. Now, I am not really a hoarder by nature, but there have been some lean financial times in my past and I have been hanging onto things because I knew they had value and I had paid a lot of money for them. But having a quote of $2400 gave me the incentive I needed to pare down. I have been doing some serious editing. I have gotten rid of a garbage can full of stuff, a recycle bin full of stuff and several boxes of freecycle stuff. I have done a great job. I feel proud and now everything has a place. I have been through everything except a file cabinet and 3 drawers and I will get to them this week. I have instituted a “Work in Progress” file where my ongoing projects are. It has several projects in it but I am looking forward to clearing those, too. It is a new system I am looking forward to working with. But I am left with 3 postcards from Graceland that I don’t know what to do with. I bought them 2 years ago when we went to Graceland. I bought them–Mel says I always buy postcards and never send them–but these are...
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Mel’s dad was in town and we were looking for something to do. He had heard about an amazing exhibit of Florentine Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and he took us out for the day. We had a great time! It was also a fun day for 8-year-old boys which was unexpected. I will try to share what made it great for them, too. We drove into Toronto, exited the Gardiner Expressway at Spadina, turned right on Dundas and parked in a parking garage. This allowed us to explore China Town and walk to the AGO a block away. We went to a Dim Sum restaurant that seemed to be for a Chinese clientele rather than a tourist crowd. They had a big sign out front that said “All Day Dim Sum.” It is 2 doors down from Rol Jui right next to a bank. I can see it on Google street view but it doesn’t seem to have an English sign. We sat down and food started arriving. This was one of the parts that made this day great for my 8-year-olds. They got to pick food off the carts and they loved it. They got to eat a lot of shrimp. We had dumplings and fried sashimi and a dish with duck and vegetables. We got a giant bowl of wonton soup to share and it was lovely. The dumplings were very tasty. The Sticky Rice was good. I loved eating family style and sharing all the bits. We finished off with sesame balls for dessert. The atmosphere was vibrant and alive. I have ordered Dim Sum before in restaurants but this was my first time in a Dim Sum restaurant. It was fantastic. Next we walked through Chinatown and looked at the many curios and foods on display as we made our way to the museum. We were on an adventure. The boys enjoyed the walking. The only glitch was the boys had tea at lunch and ended up a bit jacked...
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Some months ago I was at the store and a very well meaning clerk gave me a tip that changed my life–but it wasn’t for the better. She recommended a great product called Shiseido Facial Cotton. They are lovely, perfect cotton pads for make-up or swiping the face with toner. They were a great recommendation.
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I want to share myself through writing. I want the essence of who I am to sneak through the words and onto the page. Tiny bits of me tumbling through the letters and sentence structure to transmit a little bit of me to people who stop by to read what I have written. I want my voice to sing, I want my words to touch and inspire, I want my hands to touch the keys with love and transfer the emotion to the world that is in my heart.
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I was hanging out with a crazy Brit named George when I first had the idea of the bookii. I had been working on writing a book and was finding it incredibly 2 dimensional. I wanted multiple topics and more visual than I could accomplish in print. I wanted my reader to be able to explore my book rather than reading it one page after the other. In a conversation with George we were talking about an online technology called Prezi that allows you to explore deeper and is a more flexible presentation platform than Power Point. Somehow talking about that helped me start to visualize a dynamic memoir that had pictures and color and video and wasn’t bound by the boundaries of a printed book. Prezi didn’t end up being the medium, but the concept stuck with me. What makes it a bookii? Well, it is a book that you read electronically It is written by one author and instead of purchasing a book, you purchase an annual subscription to a bookii. My bookii is creative non-fiction–a lifestyle, but I hope there will be lots of bookiis that are both fiction and non-fiction combined. I imagine being able to read my favorite authors and about their characters while simultaneously being able to look up what they were thinking about when they were writing about it or what their inspirations were by exploring their bookii. The Crucible Bookii is my bookii. It is the world’s very first bookii. It is rich with interesting articles about the stories that make up my life. I hope you will become a member and share this journey with me as I create this interactive real-time memoir. Melanie shares how the bookii idea...
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