This week has been a beautiful one with some big announcements from the city. For one, Ottawa’s green spaces are open again – I can’t wait to get back to them! This weekend we will also see the opening of garden centres and hardware stores as well, which is perfect for those of you who love to garden or want to take advantage of your own green space.

But we still have to keep those social distancing measures in place. They are working after all! Aside from making plans to go on beautiful walks and biking trails in our city, I’ve been keeping busy in my spare time with a lot of fun media. Check out what I’ve been up to with movies, music and more this week below!

[Watching]

• The Red Shoes

This week I watched the classic film, The Red Shoes. The film follows a young ballerina who is forced to choose between her dancing career and her love life after performing the beautiful and haunting ballet of The Red Shoes. The film was released in 1948 and stars Moira Shearer and Anton Walbrook.

It left me feeling all types of ways but mostly I was totally mesmerized by the long dance sequences and the use of colour and theatrics to tell a story in a unique and artful way. It demonstrated how human emotion can really take a toll when you make it to the top.

[Listening]

• The New Abnormal

This week I enjoyed The Strokes‘ new album, The New Abnormal. I’m a little late to the party – whoops! But it has been worth it. It has all the qualities I’ve known to love from them and it comes at the perfect time – nice warm, weather is upon us. And The Strokes offer perfect warm weather music!

[Reading]

• Harry Potter as read by celebs:

Have you ever wanted Harry Potter himself to read to you? Daniel Radcliffe, Dakota Fanning and Stephen Fry among many others will read chapters to you weekly. Read more about it here.

• Matt Berninger goes in detail on The National’s High Violet  

The National’s frontman, Matt Berninger did a deep dive on the band’s fifth studio album, High Violet in celebration of its 10th anniversary. The band was planning to play the entirety of the album at their Homecoming festival planned for May 8 and 9 but with the pandemic, had to cancel. This is about the closest we can get to that performance these days so I was very stoked to read this all the way through. You can read more here.

[Spending Time]

• Humans of New York:

This week I did a deep dive on the Humans of New York Instagram account. Brandon Stanton is known for walking the city streets and interviewing people as he goes. The stories are usually full of the feels but in most cases offer life lessons. With social distancing in place, he’s asked folks to send in their stories along with photos. He’s been posting these submissions to Instagram. I’ve shed many tears reading them this week but it was so worth it and so cathartic. Check them out here.

• Mother’s Day this Weekend:

And with Mother’s Day just around the corner, I spent a lot of time this week planning for how I’m going to celebrate my mom, my Granny and my grandmother. If you’re looking for ideas, Fatima put together an awesome selection here.

How have you been spending your time this week? Drop a comment below.