Monthly Archives: March 2010

After purchasing a couple of fiction novels yesterday and bringing them home, I entered my office and looked at the double row of books on every shelf of my three bookshelves. “How many of these books have I actually read?” I mused to myself. The answer is, unfortunately, not enough.

I have known for a while that my collection of “to read” books has grown steadily over the past few years. I’m slightly addicted to buying books, especially from used book stores and bargain bins. (As I’ve learned, this is by no means an uncommon problem.) I can usually curtail my craving to purchase literature at the big chain bookstores by telling myself that those books are overpriced and being sold by an evil corporation – but I’m still powerless to resist the marked-down titles. (“$6.99 for William Shatner’s autobiography?! And there’s only one copy left!! I must have it!!!”)

I’ve got 45 books in the “to read” queue. That doesn’t count all the nonfiction and poetry books I also mean to peruse at some point in the hopefully near future.

It’s really easy to pretend that those unread tomes don’t exist, or at least exist in excusably smaller numbers, when they are tucked among the rest of my library. With a view to fix this, last night I dragged all those forgotten texts out of their hiding places and displayed them in plain view on my desk. By casting my eyes upon this stack every day, hopefully I will forgo purchasing any more books until I’ve reduced the pile by a significant amount – say, half. Or even a two-thirds. Yes, I’m being ambitious and more than a little unrealistic.

The problem is that while I will greedily devour many of these books, there are several others that will languish in their unread state for…well, probably forever. I have absolutely no desire to read Atlas Shrugged; I only own it because my roommate tried (and failed) to read it, and then forced ownership of the offending tome on me because he hated it so much he couldn’t even stand to have it on his shelves. Similarly, the prospect of forging through several Michael Crichton novels is vaguely unappetizing. (My mom had a box of books that were going to end up in a garage sale, and I always meant to read Jurassic Park…I don’t know why I grabbed the other ones.)

Wish me luck, then, as I attempt to curtail my book spending and increase my book reading. It’s going to be a hard battle.

When I started this blog a few months ago I halfheartedly slapped the name “MelSpace” on it. I hadn’t thought of a good name by the time I wanted to start blogging, so I just went with the first thing that popped in my head.

It’s a silly name, to be sure. I never intended it to be permanent, and now the time has come to re-christen this site with something more appropriate to its content, something more mature, something that doesn’t border on copyright infringement.

Thus is born a new name from the ashes of the old: CellarDoor.

***We now interrupt this post for a public service announcement: please update your bookmarks! I repeat, please update your bookmarks! Thank you. We now return to our regularly-scheduled posting.***

Obviously this name speaks to the wine side of the website. Obviously this site isn’t focused solely on wine. But cellars aren’t just for wine storage; they are also repositories of the miscellaneous junk collected over one’s lifetime. So it fits.

Of course I’m also well aware of the whole “most phonoaesthetically-pleasing phrase in the English language” side to the name – and not just because I was obsessed with Donnie Darko during my undergraduate years. (A phenomenon far from uncommon, I’ve learned.) Tolkien would be proud.

I have a confession to make: I’ve fallen in love with knitting.

Knitting has always been something that I wanted to learn, but didn’t seriously pursue until recently. Last Christmas I asked for some materials to get started, my brother-in-law complied, and after a few frustrating hours of reading how-to books and watching youtube videos, I managed to get the basics down.

I’ve since gone on to finish my very first project: a slipper! Observe its majestic beauty for yourself:

Ok, admittedly it was rather inexpertly executed. The ribbing is totally uneven and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when I sewed up the seams. Nonetheless, it is still a functional foot-warming device:

I’m also working on a big blanket. I actually started, scrapped (“frogged,” in knitting lingo) and re-started this project several times already. My first few attempts were more just to practice my skills, and I certainly learned some valuable lessons from them. Chief among those lessons is this: for god’s sake, take the time to wind your yarn into a ball.

Figuring that I’d be able to just pull the yarn from the skein without any great difficulty, I began knitting away – and realized all too quickly that if you don’t pull from the center you’re going to end up with a hopelessly tangled mess in a very short time. (In my defence, this particular skein didn’t have an end piece sticking out of the middle.) After spending far too many hours untangling snarl after snarl, I finally managed to wind it all up into a big ball. A BIG ball. Seriously, it’s like the Death Star of yarn balls:

Ok, it’s not even close to the size of the one that rampaged through the streets of San Francisco, but it’s still pretty big. (more…)

I recently joined the small legion of local writers who have ended up writing for both of Edmonton’s alt-weeklies at some point in their freelancing careers. Shortly after the anti-climatic demise of my two-year stint doing weekly wine columns for SEE Magazine, I was contacted by Vue Weekly. They were looking for someone to do feature wine articles for their Dish section. I figured it couldn’t hurt. (Ok, admittedly it was pretty cool to be approached like that. And I do, in fact, enjoy having a writing outlet with a readership higher than the dozen of you who happen to stumble on this site somewhat regularly.)

At present I don’t feel like getting into the politics of the situation; I made my opinion about my former publisher clear in this site’s inaugural post.

I will simply leave it at this: I’m going to do some writing for Vue now. Not every week, hopefully every month, but rest assured that you will see my name a few more times in Vue – and hey, they spelled my name correctly, right from the beginning!

As I was meandering through the pedway connecting the two sides of Edmonton City Centre this afternoon, I noticed a big display looming just in front of the Tim Horton’s. Intrigued, I walked over to check it out and discovered that it was a display of this year’s ACE (Advertising Club of Edmonton) Award entrants. This is a new location from last year, when the display graced the second level of Manulife Place. (I almost literally ran into last year’s display on my way to work one bleary morning.)

There were some good entries; I particularly enjoyed Calder Bateman’s “grizzly bears as terrorists” ads for the Alberta Wilderness Association’s Save the Grizzly Campaign.

As I neared the end of the display, another entrant jumped out at me – it was a poster featuring two bottles of wine! I really didn’t expect to see anything like that; after all, the ACE Awards are local, and Edmonton isn’t exactly an epicenter of winemaking.

A bit more research cleared up the mystery: Beeswing Limited, a local wine importing agency, commissioned these two labels. The labels were designed by Marie Hohner of Vision Creative Inc. They are the latest additions to Beeswing’s series of private label wines.

I find private labels a bit bemusing. The extra care and attention that goes into the packaging is nice; these Beeswing wine labels are certainly very aesthetically pleasing. In a world with so many bad wine labels, I absolutely love seeing the wine bottle become the canvas for some great pieces of visual art. That said, I have to wonder about the contents of these bottles, and can only hope that the same care and attention paid to the packaging is also transferred to the wine inside. Furthermore, I’m a bit of a stickler for knowing all the details available about the wines I drink – while private labels have to state the basics (country of origin, vintage, grape type), they certainly don’t provide much more. I find it a tad disconcerting not knowing who the parent winery is. Of course, many large wine companies have numerous brands of wine, and the parent company may not be listed on the label. However, while a quick internet search usually reveals everything about such wines, private labels are not so easily dissected.

That said, private labels certainly have their place in the wine world, especially those that are done tastefully. These Beeswing bottles would look great on tables at a wedding reception, for example. It was also very cool to see a wine-related addition to Edmonton’s local advertising community.