A few months ago Tyler played a gig at the Brookstreet hotel in Kanata and was spotted by a real estate agent named Carol.  She told him that she often held house concerts, at her home, and asked if he’d like to play at one.  It’s hard to pass up an opportunity to play original songs with the trio, and so on Friday evening I found myself walking into Carol’s beautiful home in Bridlewood, along with Tyler, my mom, and an armload of CDs for sale.

Carol welcomed us warmly and the guys went to setup their equipment – Steph on drums, and Garney on bass.  Tyler had set his keyboard up earlier in the day, and was soon busy chatting with our hosts, some new friends, and an old high school classmate.  There was a great amount of food, brought in and set up potluck style: everything from chicken to fried potato wedges with guacamole, deviled eggs, even california rolls.  Everyone helped themselves to a plate, mingled for awhile, and then we all ushered down the stairs into the snug basement filled with chairs and couches.

Carol introduced the band, and Tyler started out by playing a few of his older tunes off his CD, Characters, from 2009, and talked a bit about the ideas behind the songs.  He also played a funny song he wrote recently called the Bouncer, which came out of an incident at Fat Tuesdays where Tyler mistakenly got mad at a guy dressed all in black that was standing with his arms crossed but wasn’t doing his job (and it turned out he was just a patron at the bar – not the bouncer at all).  It was a great start: everyone was sitting, watching and listening. They were interested too, and not even one person had a distracted eye on their cell phone, everyone was enthralled, actually paying attention, and enjoying Tyler’s music.  It was amazing!

After about an hour, they took a break and filtered upstairs for dessert.  I hung around a box of CDs and made a few sales, chit chatting with people and loving how much they had liked the first set.  I was so proud of the guys and very happy that they were getting a great reception from a fully attentive audience.

The second set went just as well, with a few more jokes thrown in, including an anecdote from the infamous 30th birthday party and hair on fire incident, and with the audience asking questions and bantering a bit too.  Tyler played quite a few new songs that he’ll be recording for his next CD over the next month or so, and it was nice for him to be able to try them out and see which ones made an impact on people.  He also got out his guitar and played a few songs on it (which he rarely does).

All in all, it was really successful and I had no idea that listening to songs in someone’s basement on a Friday night could be so intimate and inspiring. Carol puts on house concerts about every 6 weeks, and I’ll probably go back myself sometime to support another local artist.

I’ve never been a huge Valentine’s day gal. I love flowers and chocolate as much as the next person but concentrating it all in one day, making it all about gifts, is just not my thing. However, this year, for this first time in the six years we have been together, Tyler didn’t have a gig because of some last minute change in plans. So I thought, maybe we should do something to celebrate for a change! We didn’t really have a plan though and when today arrived, I was a sniffly, drippy mess starting a cold. After a long day of working and sipping tea, I just crawled into bed and dozed and read for a couple of hours.

Then I decided I could get it together long enough to go out for dinner after all, and even though there were no roses or candlelight, it was just right. We headed down to Bronson and Somerset to the Yang Sheng, our favourite chinese restaurant that’s open til midnight. They serve great food that is like the stuff we got used to when we were in China in 2010: eggplant in garlic sauce, hot and soup soup dotted with bamboo shoots and mushrooms, steamed rice noodles with pork. It’s small, dimly light, with green formica tables and laminated menus, but the food is outstanding and we had a great time. It was probably better that way – just a normal night out with my best friend.

Hope you were able to enjoy all the love in your life!

I love my Kobo and I tend to buy a lot of books online (both for my e-reader, or just to ship them to my house because it’s cheaper). However I recently finished a book that I liked so much I decided on a whim to head out to Chapters and get another one by the same author. I couldn’t help it – it was the kind of book that I kept picking up at any spare moment to be captivated by the vivid descriptions, rich characters, and fairy tale mystique.

My mom works at our local library and brought me home a tattered copy of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. She mentioned that they had had a lot of copies of it – this is typical of a super popular book like the Harry Potter ones, or the Da Vinci code. The library gets extra copies and loans them out as express reads, so you can take them right away for 24 hours rather than waiting for your book to come in and then get it for the usual 3 weeks.

This copy was pretty well worn out, and the book isn’t flying off the shelves as quickly now, so I got ahold of it. And couldn’t put it down. It’s like a girly thriller, somewhat romanticized, written from several points of view and the stories span across a century to intertwine into one. I didn’t totally identify with the Nell character at first (she was adopted at the age of 4 after accidentally making her way to Australia on a boat, was devastated and determined to trace her roots when she found this out at the age of twenty-one) but she grew on me, and the other main characters were interesting right away. After Nell passed away, her granddaughter is left to unravel the bequest left to her – a cottage in the lonely London countryside. Reeling over her own losses, piecing together the threads of her ancestors past bring Cassandra some closure and insight into her future.

I liked that the book was long, and the pace sped up and slowed down, but always kept me engrossed. It reminded me a bit of the style of Daphne Du Maurier, who wrote one of my all-time favourite books, Rebecca. I also really loved the incredible descriptions and fairy tale imagery punctuating the narrative. Here’s a paragraph talking about an old man in a bookshop for example:

“He was a scribble of a man. Frail and fine and stooped from a knot in the centre of his knobbed back. Beige slacks with grease spots clung to the marbles of his knees, twiglike ankles rose stoically form oversized shoes, and tufts of white floss sprouted from various fertile spots on an otherwise smooth scalp. He looked like a character from a children’s story. A fairy story.”

And one describing the a coastal road leading to the village in London:

“Tiny white cottages clung like barnacles to the rocky cove, and red and blue fishing boats dotted the denim harbor, bobbing on the swell as the gulls swooped and spiraled above the hauls. The air, even at this height, was laden with salt licked from the sea’s surface.”

Going to Chapters in itself is almost a bit too much for me. Lots of women are into fashion and enjoy window shopping in malls and cute clothing stores – for me, it’s books. Dorky, I know…but I can’t go to Chapters and just buy the book I’m looking for. I have to linger over the paperbacks on sale, check out the cookbooks, and browse over recent biographies, trying to convince myself that it’ a bargain and I need it. Did you know there was a cookbook on lobster – only lobster? Or that there is a book called “The Tattooed Girl” that digs into the fourth, never finished book of Stieg Larsson, the author of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series?

I restrained myself pretty well this time. I went in for a Kate Morton book, and walked out with, well, two – both of her other books. I’m excited to start reading!