Saturday, May 28, 2005

A busy month

It's been an incredibly busy month, which started with a trip to Victoria the day after the BC Book Prize gala awards ceremony. I had a meeting at Government House with a committee the Honourable Iona Campagnolo has set up to oversee the publication of a book she has directed to be written about Government House. Sono Nis is one of four BC publishers the committee has selected to interview and my fingers are crossed that we'll be selected to publish it. The committee gave me a tour of the inside of Government House and also of the beautiful gardens and some of the outbuildings. Some of the rooms inside Government House are very grand and elegant and others, such as the suite Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip stay in, seem quite drab by today's standards. I enjoyed the tour immensely.

While in Victoria I also visited Sylvia Olsen and met Joan Larson, the artist we've commissioned for Sylvia's picture book, Yetsa's Sweater [tentative publication date: October 2006]. Joan also did the cover art for our book, The Secret Pony. Yetsa's Sweater is about six-year old Yetsa who visits her grandmother every Saturday and helps get the wool ready for her grandmother to knit Cowichan Indian sweaters. Sylvia's granddaughter, Yetsa, is posing as herself for the book, and Sylvia's neighbour May, who knits Cowichan Indian sweaters, is posing as Yetsa's grandmother. Joan Larson has taken lots of pictures of May and Yetsa going through the entire process of washing, drying, carding, and spinning the wool, and then finally knitting a sweater. May and Yetsa are naturals and were not the least bit inhibited by the camera. I asked May if her grandmother taught her to knit and she told me her father taught her. She said he worked very hard as a logger and when he came home from work he had a brief rest before dinner and then worked on his knitting every evening, except Fridays, when he would get drunk. He kept his knitting in a special box with a lid covering it, otherwise he believed spirits would surround his knitting and it wouldn't get finished. May is the star of a NFB documentary based on Sylvia's thesis: The Story of the Coast Salish Knitters.

I also visited my holistic dentist in Victoria to have my remaining silver-mercury amalgam fillings safely removed and replaced with white porcelain. It was a breeze compared to my visit three weeks earlier, when I'd had the fillings in the left side of my mouth replaced. It had turned into a gruelling five hour procedure and the dentist said he needed a holiday afterwards. This time I came home with a terrible cold, probably as a result of my immune system being overtaxed.

Back at home, Jim and I had to work like crazy to get our fall catalogue off to the printers before our trip to Winnipeg to visit his mom and dad, and his sister and her husband. Both of our connecting flights to Winnipeg were delayed, one for mechanical reasons and the other because our pilot was drafted to another flight. We finally arrived at Jim's sister's at 2 a.m. -- an 18-hour trip. We had a great visit with Jim's family and even managed to squeak in a visit to Winnipeg's superb bookstore, McNally Robinson. I could have spent the entire day there.