Once Upon a Bookshelf

I’ve found the Logo Lounge books and website to be one of my favourite resources when doing logo work. Catharine Fishel, one of the co-authors of the books and an editor for LogoLounge.com, also wrote How to Grow as a Graphic Designer.

Each chapter in this book (and they are all quite short - only a few pages each) talks about a different Graphic Designer and works in a bit of advice that the designer is giving. A lot of the advice this book presents could be applied to any career, really. What I really did like about how this book was presented was that it took people from so many different areas of expertise in the Graphic Design field. Fishel also made it feel like you were sitting down with the Graphic Designer the chapter is about and having a conversation with them, instead of writing the book so it was just spouting out advice at you.

Of course, there were chapters I enjoyed better and got more out of than others. The ones that stick out particularly in my mind are those about Diti Katona of Concrete, Noreen Morioka of AdamsMorioka, Michael Bierut of Pentagram and Terry Marks of Terry Marks Design.

I probably would have retained more of what it said if I had only read a small bit at a time, but it’s arranged in an easy to navigate way so that if I need to go back at some point in time, I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for easily. Even now, after reading through it so quickly and not getting as much from it as I probably could have, I’ve put some of the advice it has given to good use - mainly making a list of goals and where I want to be a few years from now. Hopefully, I will have the motivation to actually work towards these goals.

This is my fifth book for the Canadian Book Challenge, and I have to say that this is one of the more enjoyable of Montgomery’s short story collections, in my opinion. It almost seems more Montgomery-ish than other collections, since all the stories take place close to a large body of water. And while they all had different aspects of the sea, it was almost as if you could smell the sea permeating from the pages of each story while reading it.

As to be expected from her short story collections, there were stories that had aspects that were oh-so-familiar to an Anne fan. “The Life-Book of Uncle Jesse” was rewritten into Anne’s House of Dreams, and Uncle Jesse is renamed to Uncle Jim. The story was as heartbreaking here as it was in House of Dreams.

“A Soul That Was Not at Home” was the story of a boy named Paul who told stories of the rock people. While he is not quite the same Paul from Anne of Avonlea, his stories of the rock people are. In this version of the story, Paul is an orphan who has the opportunity to be adopted by a rich woman, except that would mean he would have to leave the sea and his rock people.

Lastly, “Four Winds” tells the story of a minister who is in love with Lynde Oliver… and Lynde happens to be in a situation very similar to Leslie Moore in Anne’s House of Dreams. (Don’t want to spoil it for those who don’t know.) Mind you, she also has a very Emily-ish episode where she has to be rescued because she fell over the cliff trying to gather flowers.

I don’t think there was a story in here I didn’t enjoy. Even “The Waking of Helen”, whose ending was so unexpected was thoroughly enjoyable.

Last night my mom and I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Buble in concert (again). We saw him the first time he came to town, after the release of It’s Time and Buble is one of those musicians that I plan on seeing over and over and over again whenever I get the chance. That is how good he is in concert.

Our seats were closer to the stage this time than last, which was awesome. We were on the floor, about half way up the arena, and in the first row of a section - so there was no one directly in front of us. Which is great considering my mom and I usually have the luck of having a really tall person sitting immediately in front of us.

Naturally 7 was the opening act, and they were phenomenal. I’ve never seen an opening act get a standing ovation at a concert before, but they did. They call their style of music “vocal play” or something along those lines. They’re kind of a cappella, except they even make the sounds of instruments with their voices. So it sounded like they were playing the drums, guitars, harmonica, violin, and all the like, except it was just their voices. It was crazy. Insane. Amazing. The audience all seemed to love them, and they were so much fun. I’m definitely going to be getting on of their CDs in the future, and I’d highly recommend to anyone to have a listen.

As for Michael - he was amazing, as was expected. I think what I love most about seeing him in concert is the fact that he’s not just a musician - he’s an entertainer. I laughed more last night than I have in a long time, and almost prefer listening to him talk between sets than actually watching him sing. The way he interacts with the crowd is one of the best parts about seeing him live.

Various highlights of the show:

• He opened with my favourite song off the Call Me Irresponsible CD - I’m Your Man.
• He randomly sang about hockey a lot.
• After performing Everything, Buble decided there wasn’t enough testosterone in the show. . . and then proceeded to sing YMCA.
• Closed the show with Song For You, and sang the part after the instrumental solo without a microphone and we could still hear him almost perfectly.

So yeah, I’m going to be in a bit of a fangirl daze for the rest of the week, but it is totally worth it. Cannot wait until the next time he comes around on tour and I get to see him again.

Siblings Tony and Tia have always known that they weren’t normal human beings, even though neither could remember where exactly they came from. They’ve always had to hide their “special powers” – they can communicate telepathically, Tony can manipulate things with telekinesis, and Tia can unlock doors and communicate with animals.

When their guardian suddenly dies, Tony and Tia are shipped off to an orphanage, where they meet a man who claims to be their uncle and have legal guardianship over them. Both kids know that not only is this man not related to them in any way, but also that he only wants to harm them. In order to avoid this and in order to discover exactly who they are, they escape from the orphanage one night and begin a dangerous journey to Witch Mountain, following clues that Tia had just discovered that their real uncle left them.

I vaguely remember watching and enjoying the Escape to Witch Mountain movies when I was a kid; hearing that Disney was going to make a third remake of the adaptation of the book spurned me on to mooch and read this book. It was a cute book, though at times it seemed a little too convenient how Tia and Tony would suddenly remember something about themselves at the exact right point in time to help them out of a bad situation. I suppose, however, that for the age group this was written for, that it was the best way to go about learning about the kids and where they came from.

The novel starts with Tony and Tia only knowing that they aren’t like anyone else on earth and that they probably come from another world:

For a moment, as he stood there, he wondered again about the world they had come from, and if they would ever find it. In what direction it lay, or how one got there, he hadn’t the slightest idea.

“Maybe,” Tia had once said, “all we have to do is climb a certain stairway, or go around a strange corner – and there it’ll be.”

“Just like that,” he’d said, laughing.

“Why not?” she’d insisted. “We know the kind of place it is. It’s full of magic and music – for that’s the only kind of place we could have come from. So why wouldn’t we have to find it sort of magically?”

Maybe it didn’t exactly make sense, the way Tia had put it, but he was sure of one thing. Considering how unlike other people they were, it was the only kind of world they could have come from – so it must be somewhere.

By the end of the novel, they have remembered their journey from Hungary to America when the spaceship that took them to earth in the first place crashed, why they were trying to get to America and what happened to the planet they came from, and people who helped and trying to hurt them when they first came to earth. So it just came across as slightly too convenient.

That said, however, it was a fun book. Cute, and definitely something I would’ve loved reading when I was quite a bit younger.

One of my Christmas gifts from my parents this year was a lovely new duvet for my bed. (Click on the thumbnail to see a full-sized image.) As it was coverless, I spent this past weekend making my very first duvet cover for it!

I have to say that I’m very happy with how it turned out - only thing I don’t like about it was the fact that you can totally see the zipper because Walmart didn’t have any darker brown ones, and the neutral was the closest to what I was looking for. It was also my first time doing anything with zippers, and I totally broke a couple of needles on my sewing machine. Whoops!

I’m excited about it, really. In the next couple of months when I have some free time, I’m going to make myself a matching bed skirt, and possibly an accent pillow in the yellowish material. Then I’m thinking about getting something from blik for the walls when all of the sewing is all finished. How fun! My room is starting to look “grown up!” (Shock!)