It's snowing - again!

It's snowing again....how many days yet will that thought cross my mind? Being from the coast of BC, I'm not used to thinking like that. But one good thing about it is, it gives me a good reason to not feel bad about being stuck in the house doing reno work when I would rather be outside in the sunshine, pulling weeds, moving plants, planning the next garden project. It does seem, for today anyway, that to be inside is a much more comfortable place to be.

I thought you might be curious to see how things are going indoors so I've posted some photos here. The first couple are obviously "before" pictures. The dining room and living room have been my workshop for months which means the whole house is full of dust and sawdust. But I'm hoping that 8 weeks from now, the saws will be outside in the barn because it'll all be done in here. You can see how the kitchen looked in mid-demolition of the fake brick wall. And while having the bricks gone lightens things up considerably, the old plaster walls underneath are trashed so we will follow the advice of a B&B owner where we stayed on one of our trips and hide the evidence of too many decades by installing beadboard. And as you can sort of make out be the next couple of pictures (where the beadboard is visible) it does look a lot nicer.

And there I am, doing one of the things that makes me smile. Hammer and nails and level in hand and I am content. Although I will be more content when all of this is done and I'm out in the garden, in the sunshine, pulling weeds,......

Bluegrass - Must be Frozen!

Last night was so cold but we had been planning a night out so the temperature really didn't matter. Just before we were going to leave, I went out to put Ambra and Sierra in and when I came back to the house, Don suggested that since we only had to go a kilometre, why didn't we walk. It might not have been windy and snowing, but I nixed that idea immediately. Tooooooo darn cold. So we drove the kilometre, parked the car and walked across the street to the Capital Theatre for an evening of bluegrass music by a local band called Mountain Rush.

The theatre, like everything else in Oxford is old and worn, but cared for nonetheless. Teeny, tiny foyer with hardly enough room for more than five people at a time, but I suppose when you barely seat 130 on the lower level and maybe 60 in the balcony, you don't really need a whole lot of room at the front door. The rows of seats are bolted to a wooden floor and their frames reminded me of the wrought iron legs of the old Singer sewing machines. As we sat waiting for the concert to begin, all around us, people who'd probably known each other since birth, chatted and caught each other up on how life was treating them.

The walls and the ceiling were covered with pressed tin panels, fleur-de-lis on the walls and a different pattern on the ceiling. The stage was small and I wondered what kind of acts might have been performed there over the many years that this little building had been standing. I wonder if anyone has ever kept any kind of history? A man in the most embroidered jacket I have ever seen, cruised through the crowd, selling 50/50 tickets. And the gentleman who was the host for the evening chatted generally with the crowd, every so often, mentioning the guy with the wonder jacket. It was so folksy, that it was surreal.

Then two members of the band came on stage, accompanied by a little girl, thirteen years old, and she was the featured singer for the evening and I gotta say, she had quite a voice for a kid. So good! Then the rest of the band joined them, and all in all, we were treated to two hours of bluegrass oldies, and some newies (is that a legitimate word?) I really enjoyed the evening.

When the concert was done, we all grabbed our coats and headed out into the dark night. Cold, cold, cold....but a short ride back to the house and as we got out of the car, we looked up into the black sky and saw the stars twinkling so clear and bright. It was beautiful, and then we hurried into the house to stoke the fire. We had a good day, and the evening was a great capper to it.

Have you ever gotten just the perfect haircut? No matter what you do, it always looks great. Ruffle up your hair, scratch your head, go out in the wind - no problemo, it looks great! I love those haircuts. I always wish the hair could just quit growing right there. Not that the cost of getting the haircut is the issue, more that the next one will probably not be as perfect.

Life can be like that, sometimes you just wish nothing would change, it's all too perfect the way it is. But life doesn't stay the same, it moves and flexes, and changes. But maybe that is a good thing. The only way to get to the perfect haircut, is to go through the lousy ones. It's the contrast that makes the perfection visible.

Ice rinks and gardens

Nova Scotia is one big ice skating rink! That's what happens when you get a night of heavy rain in February and then the next day the temperature goes back down to normal (for this time of year that is). Some yards that I've driven by look like the house is sitting in the middle of a big, glistening, white porcelain plate. Seeing as how this is our first winter here, we're figuring out what needs to be corrected for next winter, but isn't that always the way it goes. In computer lingo, the learning curve!

I've been busy today, scraping old wallpaper border off the living room walls. And I baked bread today, and painted a little shelf that I made for my art room, and washed dishes. Just a day of puttering around the house. After I finish here, I may go and scrape a bit more of the border off. Or maybe not, I'm feeling a wee bit like I want to just quit for the afternoon. Problem is that I have a hard time sitting still and doing nothing.

Maybe I will plan my garden. This is the time of year that you normally do that isn't it? I don't think it will be very big to start, and I can enlarge it if I have a mind to, later in the year. I know that asparagus grows here because I found where a couple spears growing wild up on the hill. So I will definitely have a patch of it. Can you imagine how nice homegrown asparagus would taste. Tender and slightly steamed. Yes, a definite must for my garden. Garden centres abound in BC in the lower mainland, but here they are few and far between. I may be forced to do lots of my garden shopping at Canadian Tire of all places. But I think I will try and hold off on buying a lot of shrubs from them til the end of July because they put all of that on sale at that point. Then I will go crazy and buy, buy, buy. I love shopping for plants! One of my favourite things.

What Makes You Smile?

I was looking at someone elses blog this morning and the first sentence of it made me pause, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized something. I think that we all hurry through our lives, getting things done, ocassionally noticing something in passing, but how often do we stop to dwell on the things that make us smile? Perhaps even make a list of the things that make us smile. Taken individually, it always seems like those moments are too far apart and too few. The mistake is in taking them only on an individual basis. That life is the sum of its parts is too true.

So I thought that it might be interesting to you, if I were to share those things that make me smile. You might find similarities, shared delights, or they might inspire you to make your own list.

I like the feeling of fresh, clean sheets that are tightly stretched on the bed. They don't have to be warm from the drier, just taught and unwrinkled.....it makes me wiggle my toes and twist and turn just so that I can get the full fresh sheet experience. I like it when I pick Diesel up when he has been in a very sound sleep and I hold him on his back and he lazily stretches out as long as he can go, all the while looking up at me with sleepy eyes and the tip of his tongue poking out at me. I like it when I'm feeling tired, and in passing in the kitchen, I get a hug from Don and we just stand there for a moment, with my head nestled in under his chin. I like it when I'm digging up a new flower bed and pulling out the weeds and making it all tidy and ready for the new plants that I just bought at the nursery. I like walking through the nursery and picking out first this plant, and then another and another.....

I like it when I'm walking Sierra out to the paddock in the morning and I have her halter in my hand, and beside my face, is her whiskery nose and her lovely brown Arab eyes, right there, looking at me. I like the way her slender legs are shaped - they seem so delicate to hold up all that weight. I love it when Kim and Holly call and we connect like we do, I like it that they are my friends! I like sawing wood and hammering and making things to make our home cozier. I like it when my bread comes out of the oven and they are starting to be consistently good, no more inner caverns, or flat bricks that would hurt my foot if it were to slip from my fingers.

I like it when I get a closet tidied and organized after a long while of it being a chaotic cavern that needs to have the door closed on it. I will go back for days, just to open the door and stand and admire the order and pat myself on the back for having done such a good job. I really like using caulking to fill in cracks and crevices around doorways and baseboards before I paint. It makes everything look so much more solid and finished and like it is better quality than it really is. I like the feeling of hot, soapy dishwater on my hands, and I like the gradual change from messy kitchen counter, to tidy and clean.

There are so many things and these are only some that make me smile as I go about my day. Sometimes it is too easy to get caught up in life, taking care of business. We forget to realize just how many special things there are that make it all worthwhile. Sometimes, it's good to make a list...

One More Lesson Learned.

Are you wondering why my vacuum is sitting on the porch? No, I wasn't cleaning off the sawdust that I track in from the barn everyday. And I wasn't showing off my spiffy apple green machine to all the neighbors driving by. The one problem with having a woodstove in the family room is the amount of wood bits and bark that winds up spread around the room. Add to that, the collection of sawdust that always seems to get caught in the bottom edges of my jeans until I sit down on the couch. At that point it lets go and after a while it begins looking like I have the whole sawdust pile on the carpet.

I've been very busy lately, trying to juggle the improvements on our house and the house on Stanley Street. As a result, the family room was beginning to look a bit neglected, a little untidy. Finally a moment when I could drag my spiffy green machine out and suck up all that mess. It was looking so nice, and then suddenly Don, who's been sitting on the couch behind me, quietly staring at his computer, is leaping up and shouting, well, I don't know what he was shouting, but he was making a lot of noise.
And as I turned around to see what all the fuss was about, I saw the yellow smoke billowing out of my vacuum. Oh yeah, I remember now what Don was shouting...."stop it,stop it!!!" He's always the one making a fuss and standing there as if frozen in his tracks. I just grabbed the whole vacuum and hauled it out to the porch still flooding the yard now with the horrible stinking smoke.

In my enthusiasm for cleaning, I must have picked up a small ember from the area around the stove and the wind inside the vacuum fanned it and set the debris in the bag alight! Exciting, eh? What I have learned from this? Well, let me see, I think I've learned that keeping the vacuum away from the little front shelf of the stove is a good idea. I think from now on I'll sweep it off into the ash bucket instead.

We've had 1/2 a year of interesting learning experiences and I think that next winter will be a little easier. We'll have all our winter wood in the basement before the first snow falls, the horse shelter "floor" will have been lifted with the addition of some gravel mix and swales dug around to to prevent the formation of a skating rink in there, and we'll have curtains (heavy, thick ones) on all the windows to retain the heat in our house. But it's all good, we're having a good time in the school of life!

Warrior for Feathered Friends...

I am a proud mama tonight! Holly was going to the gym in Whistler and she became aware of a restaurant in the hotel next door to where Sean works, where they had recently added fois gras to the menu. Now for those of you who don't know, fois gras is French for fatty liver. To achieve this, ducks are immobilized and force fed three times per day, four pounds each time. This is the equivelant of you eating 44 pounds of pasta each day. This feeding is managed by jamming a metal pipe down the birds throat and pumping the food in. In a very short time, the young birds can no longer walk, and their liver is grossly enlarged and diseased. Eleven countries around the world have actually banned production of this product because of its extreme cruelty.

So after sitting and thinking about it for 10 or 15 minutes, and becoming more upset as each moment passed, Holly summoned up her courage and went looking for the manager. When she was finally speaking to him, she told him how upset she was by their new addition and that she and her husband would be boycotting the restaurant and encouraging their friends and associates to stay away as well until such time as this item was removed. She said her heart was just pounding but she had to do it. She took a stand against something that she is against and lived to tell the tale. Applause, applause.... thank you, thank you.

Who knows if this restaurant will remove it, they may or may not. But if no one ever said anything, no good thing would ever happen, and bad things would go on and on. We're very proud of you Holly!