I'm halfway through my 'incarceration' in Stegner House. The theory is that it takes 28 days to make (or break?) a habit. I'm ahead of it a bit because I am accustomed to being alone and doing for myself. My habit is already in place, so it's just a change of venue. Even so: strange kitchen; limited choice of food in the stores; different bugs (box elder bugs in the porch, resurrected by sunlight); new scenery (lovely views of the Cypress Hills); new people (not many because they've been trained to stay away, but they're friendly); and silence. I love the silence, but it takes getting used to. I guess I've become a city girl. I know, however, that when I return, noise is going to be hard to get used to. A few years ago I swapped my apartment for one in Reykjavik for two weeks. That worked out very well, and it was quiet. Even the language barrier was no obstacle because everyone in Iceland can speak some English and they go out of their way to help strangers. I think it helps to have a purpose in your (temporary) transplant. My advice to others and to myself has always been "Have a reason to get out of bed in the morning." I have a reason each day and that is what makes getting up in a strange place easy. Many travel writers warn that no matter where you go you can't escape from yourself. You take you with you, as if that were a bad thing. Sometimes that's the only thing you can count on and it's a huge advantage. You can start from Square One and not with one foot in a hole in the ground. Hey! Where did you/I go? I'm right here. Are you there?

Okay, so I missed yesterday. I was almost up and running, had the title and everything and then bogged down in my blog. It was going to be about Elias Canetti and I will get back to him another time, but I had to have my notes. I love his memoirs-cum-autobiography, four of them altogether. I have just two and one of them looks like a hedgehog with all the little post-it notes sticking out of it. Inside it's worse, with notes and underlines and comments all over the pages. I don't call that defacing a book, I call it making it mine. When I go to re-read, I follow my leads. Twice people have borrowed a book, different people, different books, and lost them. In each case they replaced the book but not my notes. Disaster. The book was no longer mine. I remember one book I read had such wide margins that there was tons of room for my notes - I ended up writing an entire play based on the notes, comprising both rebuttal and tangents. The book was The X-Generation by Douglas Coupland. The play is called Moon and Murna. It's had a staged reading at the AlumnaeTheatre in Toronto. I'm telling you all this because of Elias Canetti. In my copy of my favourite book of his, The Secret Heart of the Clock, there are not only underlines and notes, there are boxes and directives pointing out play and story possibilities. You can understand why I had to back off and wait till I had more time, plus the book in front of me to blog on. I think blogging is like tap-dancing, not that I know much about tap-dancing. I'm so old that my mother thought I looked like Shirley Temple (who?) when I was a little girl, and made me take tap-dancing lessons. I learned the basic Times Square, I think it's called, the basic step-shuffle-step and I can still do it to the tune of "The Good Ship Lollipop". I had more permanents before I was seven than any little head should bear. Well, as i was saying, I think that blogging is like tap-dancing. Lay the groundwork, plot the basic steps, and you can improvise forever. And a-one and a-two...