Welcome to a regular edition of the random things that comprise a week… outings with friends, errands, and other dailyness…

Cinnamoon - a new bakery downtown

A friend and I went to the newly opened Cinnamoon bakery on Albert street… the street with old Exchange District charm at one end, and graffitied dereliction at the other. People huddled on a stoop as the forecast fulfilled rain; others walked with brazen nonchalance, gaze up, hair down. The pale mauve colour inside matched storm cloud greys. The decor was ordered and still as leafy-green elms swung their branches around outside and the new awnings crisply fluttered. I wasn’t the ideal customer, looking for free wifi to pay for parking, and maybe wanting the trompe-l’oeil egg-on-toast to surpass what it was meant to fake was asking for too much. There were better, more ideal customers… young people who came in little lanyard-wearing troops, with smiles on their faces, excited to collectively buy pastries that shimmered with dewey cake-sweat under glass. Loose-leaf tea is listed for 7$. On the socials, everything at Cinnamoon is 10 out of 10.

For fun

A friend suggested lunch at the Lily Stone Café in Rosenort. It’s a small town directly West of Aubigny that was a regular destination for farm-related errands for my father-in-law. Lily Stone Café is one of three businesses including The Rolly Stone restaurant and Lily Stone Gardens. A nice discovery! (Website here)

This is Enzo when his upper lip gets caught on his teeth. My daughter and I think it’s so cute!

Can you spot Christian prepping the garage fascia for paint?

Baking

With the maintenance of sourdough starter, comes an accumulation of discard, and incorporating into rotation recipes that make delicious use of it has been a fun exercise. This week, besides crackers, I made these Sourdough Discard Cookies (recipe here) which feel like an indulgence given their use of cocoa and chips and the recent prices for chocolate. The cookies have a nice soft texture and brownie-like flavour.

Enjoying

Just another argument supporting a love of reading: “The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer” by T. R. Napper (Here, via)
Since Stitcher ceased to exist in 2023, I’d been using the default podcast app from Apple. With only one redeeming quality - the transcription - for its otherwise frustrating user-experience, I’ve been happy to find an alternative called Castro (website here https://castro.fm/ ). Using Castro has been like getting to a beach-side destination, throwing open the windows and realizing it is only a short walk till you can feel waves lapping at your feet.

I recently went to Toad Hall downtown for gifts and came across this book, titled The Right Word. Decorated with awards, I was nonetheless drawn in by the collage-style illustrations that told the (true!) story alongside the text. (A peek at the book here.) It was the kind of book I felt I would appreciate more than my young recipients, so after sitting and reading through, I left it behind in search of other fun things. Melissa Sweet, the illustrator, has a really nice website. I liked the Q&A page here.

Sometimes it’s nice to clap on a set of noise-cancelling headphones and get lost in a bit of music. Most recently, most dreamily, Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely.
I like it when The Daily takes a detour into art and culture, as it did for the Bayeux Tapestry. To complement it, I liked watching Deep Down History’s overview of the story on Youtube (here).

Walking the dog

This dying season has its spots of beauty… red berries, droplets collected on long stems of grass…

And wooly bears! Normally, I find them on the ground and avoid stepping on them, but this one was nicely posed on a weed…

Happy Sunday!

What does summer look like here? It looks like a new coat of paint on our house, and a coat of stain on the fence…

It’s the dog sitting in regal elegance on one of the folding chairs left strewn about between family gatherings…

It’s a round of go-karts and bumper boats on a bright sunny day.

Fun signs…

Leisurely cart returns and noticing the sparrows that have elected to preen their feathers there…

It’s tomatoes ripening on thick green stems.

A day at the beach…

Reading List: Searches and Seizures by Stanley Elkin

Elkin’s writing is described, on the wikipedia page (here) dedicated to his biography, this way:

Characters and especially prose style take full precedence over plot. His language is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter.

And indeed, it seems fitting that the son of a costume-jewelry salesman should bedeck his stories in lavish frivolity. I would have the impression, at the end of a story, of having spent time not getting anywhere. So why does Francine Prose like this author? For good sentences. She writes:

It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. These are works you can turn to whenever you feel that your own style is getting a little slack or lazy or vague. (Reading Like a Writer, p 47.)

It’s appropriate that a passage I liked captures the end-of summer feeling creeping up on us right now…

[The pool was] thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers - some of them actually on vacation - who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.
Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations. (“The Condominium,” p 282.)

By contrast…

I read this book in less than a week.

Luke Burgis (here) on Conversations with Tyler said “we might be entering an age where we can actually learn more about what it means to be human than less, and that might lead to a renaissance in the humanities, for instance. I think AI is performing a kind of via negativa on the human person, maybe even the human soul, and helping us discover who we are. And to me, that’s very exciting.” I also think it’s exciting! And in that vein is Alexandre Dianine-Havard, reaffirming the existence of the soul, the values and virtues that make life fulfilling.

Cooking

I gathered all our favourite recipes celebrating corn (here) and then tried a new recipe by Pierce Abernathy (Instagram) called “Corn Compound Butter”. It’s very popular right now. It’s been mentioned on three different Substack newsletters (one, two, three)!

A still life… the counter as I was preparing Corn Chowder this week.

Enjoying

This sentence by Elle Kamihira (here): “And mostly my mother stepped in to close the gap between his imagination and the inevitable work it took to achieve anything.” Via Curious About Everything

I like thoughtful tributes made to Dolly Parton, subsequent her death. This I relate to: “…if I write about things that bother me then they don’t bother me anymore.” Via Hanif Abdurraqib (on Instagram).

And how about this encouragement to write by hand? (here)

And to conclude…

A view of the Red River at golden hour…

Happy Sunday!