Robynettely

We stayed at the Icelandair Natura, which was apparently the best possible choice. Like any normal people do, we flew into Keflavik airport and got a bus to the hotel. Unbeknownst to me, the Natura is right next to Reykjavik airport. Like right beside it. Every time Ed went out for a smoke he got to look at whatever had flown in. Reykjavik airport is a smaller airport that nevertheless had smaller corporate jets and the like coming in all the time. Over the course of the week we saw a MU2, a Beechcraft Starship (he told me he thought they were all recalled), and a turboprop DC3. This plane was parked there the whole time, harassing me: (you can't actually see the scantily-clad woman painted on near the front there, can you?)  There was a shrine to Bobby Fisher, and the boy was really into playing chess at the time (that seems to have died off this week, but will probably ramp up again next week, my theory is), so that was a hit, though he wasn’t really impres...

One of my (former) colleagues was being forced to come to Toronto, and she said whenever she goes to a place, she likes to do a couple of things: Go to a yoga class Visit an art museum There was an article in 99U about a woman who goes to the public pool everywhere she goes.  (Actually that was a link to this, I just discovered.) Oh, we did that, too, I just realized:   This was an outdoor geothermal heated pool (like a bathtub that didn't get cold) at the beach, a short walk from our hotel. Here's another angle of it.    You could sit in the pool and get all cozy warm (the day we went in it was 12 degrees celcius and drizzling) and then run down to the actual ocean, which was crazy cold. It was Iceland. How could we miss that? But I think my thing I do on every trip might be a visit to the graveyard. Is that too goth? It was so crazy green. There were a bunch of commonwealth graves from WWII.  This was just past the...

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and I generally have my phone, though anyone who knows me generally knows I’m not that great about taking it out. Usually it’s packed two layers deep in my messenger bag. Which explains maybe why I don’t have pictures from the start of any activity. Though once I’ve started taking photos, I’m pretty good. We went to Iceland. On my calendar, which I use for planning and budgeting and tracking bill payments and pretty much everything else, I had written a short list of the things I wanted to do: Volcano elevator Ponies Hot springs Glacier Elves Mid-Atlantic rift And then I was talking up my pending vacation, and one of my colleagues turned out to have gone to Iceland numerous times, partly for work but also because his grandmother was from there. He told me he was chatting about this to an Icelandic colleague, who said “who?” My coworker listed off a name or two, and the local said “wait a m...

Editing “Wind/Water/Salt ”. Typed up all that extra stuff I wrote. Did some tidying of word choices (I have a list of words to look for, like “started” and “Just” and “very” that I need to rethink every time I use them) and went through notes to find things that I could clean up before printing another draft. For example, I did the changes to the first page from the workshop back in April. And then I started the spreadsheet. The Spreadsheet doesn’t seem like writing or editing, and writing and editing are what progress my novel, right? So maybe that’s why I avoided doing it properly for so long. But at some point, you have to stop using the back of an envelope to list all 44 chapters, their POV, and a brief description, right? So I made an excel doc. The headings so far: ·          Chapter # ·          Description ·          POV (there are three to ch...

“The Private Patient” by PD James. There’s a shelf of paperbacks at my office, which I assume are for the taking because they come and go.   When PD James died last year I put her on my list of things to read, and this was on the shelf, so I took it (I put three books in its place, just in case, and it had been there a long time, so…) I’m familiar with Adam Dalgliesh, having watched lots of Mystery! On PBS. Nevertheless, the first chapter was a bit confusing, and then I was good to go. I loved how she described the same things from different characters’ perspectives. Description really is POV and character in her hands, so different from the omniscient in those Katherine Kurtz books. She was like 88 when this was published!  “The Whispering Muse” by Sjon. We were in the Kevlavik airport getting ready to go back to Toronto and trying to get rid of the last of our Icelandic currency, and this book used up every last krona . So obviously I was meant to have it. I read i...