We went out for a potluck dinner last night to see our friends Lena and Jeremy and their great kids Sylvie and Clea. (Their daughters are named after Lawrence Durrell characters, which, like, is there a faster way to my heart? I think not.) Papa made hummus, baby was fine and dandy but increasingly shy.
Amita's been changing in so many ways. Like, she developed her pincer grasp about a month ago -- she can pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and forefinger. Now, she wants to pincer grasp everything -- walls, books, pictures in the newspaper, the cat, Mama's nose, Papa's glasses. I guess if you've got a pincer grasp, everything in the world looks like a Cheerio. I just hope she doesn't do an Icarus and pincer-grasp the Sun itself.
My big mouth
So, Maj and I are going to the Mesh Conference ("Canada's Web 2.0 conference") in Toronto next week. I'm having increasingly mixed feelings about the matter. Although I think people's hearts are in the right place, I'm not too happy with the fact that there's no French content on the Web site nor planned for the sessions. How can you have "Canada's" conference if you don't have both language communities represented?
I'm guessing that by "Canada's" the organizers actually mean "Toronto's", since the terms are interchangeable in the GTA-mindset. Or whatever. I think there's a huge opportunity wasted -- Montreal's Web scene is really vibrant, but largely francophone, so invisible to this kind of conference. And Canada, surprising as it may seem, actually goes a little farther east than Ajax and west of Brampton. Shocking, I know!
Anyways, I also noticed that there wasn't a Creative Commons event planned. I asked on the CC-Canada mailing list, and it looks like there's nothing going on. So I'm going to try to pull together a CC Salon in the TO next week, just to make the traveling situation more interesting. More info soon!
Other weeks
Our friends Jeff and Anne-Marie are getting married in two weeks. We're pretty proud of this fact -- not only that these are two good friends who are tying the knot, but also because they had their first "date" at our wedding 1-1/2 years ago.
Anne-Marie and our friend Lucinda came over to plan food this afternoon. We talked about all kinds of dishes -- roast vegetables, trout, sausages, portobello mushrooms -- and eventually narrowed some stuff down. The fact that A-M and L brought some Oka cheese, vinho verde, calmar (calamari) and strawberries probably helped the thinking process a lot. I'm on the hook for a couple of tubs of my Pappou's trademark hummus -- garlicky and oily and lots of tomatoes and pita. Seems like a pretty good deal.
Jeff swung by later in the evening -- he'd been busy with his French tutor, translating his vows into French for their bilingual wedding -- and when I told them we were going to Toronto next weekend, they answered, "Ewww. Why?" Old rivalries die hard, I guess. When I asked if there were any good bars near U of T, they said, flatly, "No." This might be harder than I thought.