It has been raining for days and days. My hair is frizzing, everything in the house feels damp and I take back anything bad I ever said about the unrelenting heat of summer. In between thunderstorms I prowl the garden and bemoan all the flattened plants while shaking my fist at the sky. So here are some pictures from before everything was pounded into the ground:
After several hours this morning, fueled by coffee and determination not to be bested by a piece of software, I think I have managed to figure my way around the photo editing software that was giving me such fits. Ten points for the technologically challenged!
Our garden is starting to show signs of life, and I find these flowers very gratifying because I planted them myself. And they actually came back. Very exciting stuff. (Technically I didn’t plant the violets myself, but I did move them from the lawn where they insist on growing and into the flowerbeds, so I am counting them.)
I am pretty impressed the violets came back at all, since they were completely eaten by the groundhog we had last year. The groundhog was super cute and roly poly until he started munching on the plants. At that point his status was downgraded from adorable wildlife to dastardly vermin. The groundhog was apparently displaced by our new neighbour, Mr. Skunk. I can’t decide if is an improvement or not. The skunk doesn’t eat the plants, but every time I see it I have a small seizure and retreat back to the house. This makes scheduling time to work in the yard a little awkward.
I feel somewhat ashamed by my reflexive fear of a very small woodland creature, but I have visions of having to bathe in tomato juice while being ostracized by my loved ones and sent to sleep out on the porch. I am pretty sure that would be a story that would make it into the family lore, brought out at dinner parties and family gatherings. I do enough embarrassing things all on my own without adding “that time she was sprayed by a skunk” to the list.
It has been said that Canadians are preoccupied with the weather. I can’t really disagree with that statement, although it suggests that Canadians might be suffering with a case of “just a little bit boring”. Really though, how can we not constantly talk about the weather when it insists on being so damn capricious? Yesterday I was out shoveling snow in the rain. Shoveling snow is bad enough without the insult of rain hurling down on you. It is made even more awful by the memories of last year’s early spring, when March was sunny and warm and I was watching my flowers start to bloom. Flowers! Blooming! All I have this year is six foot tall snowbanks and a vague idea of where our backyard used to be.
All this cold and grey has gotten to my brain and culminated in a total break with reality last week at the grocery store. Where I bought berries. In March. At the grocery store. Funny enough, berries, trucked to Canada at this time of year taste like plastic. I knew they would taste awful when I bought them, but I was so desperate for a hint of warm weather I went ahead and put them in my cart. Then I brought them home, where I tasted one and was violently thrust back to reality.
The berries sat in my (brand new!) refrigerator for a week, when I decided they needed fixing to make them edible. So now they are jam:
If you were ever wondering, even the worst berries make really good jam.
- Teagan has recovered from her unfortunate pox and returned to school last Friday. After six days of intensive cleaning the house is almost put back to rights. Even so, I have a feeling I will be finding Littlest Pet Shop animals tucked in random corners of our home for months to come.
- It is cold outside. Stupidly cold. I know it is only the beginning of March and they don’t call Canada the “frozen north” for nothing, but come on. I am completely done with winter and it can go now.
- In an effort to move spring along, I have pulled out my gardening books and have started making little charts and diagrams of where I want to plant things. This is what we call “wishful gardening” as this is a picture taken Monday morning while standing in our backyard and gently weeping:
- I haven’t finished the February socks. Actually, I haven’t even started the February socks. That is because I am still working on the January socks. Still. And quite possibly forever. They are the black holes of the sock universe. I keep knitting and knitting and yet no visible progress has been made.
- I am pretty sure that the lack of progress on the socks is punishment for having strayed and spent a weekend knitting a pair of these felted slippers . I betrayed the socks and now they are angry, that is the only explanation. The fact that I abandoned the slippers before seaming and felting them doesn’t seem to have mollified the angry socks AT ALL.
- There is a brand new refrigerator being delivered tomorrow and I am SO EXCITED. An all caps kind of excited even. If anyone had told me at sixteen that the delivery of new appliances was going to cause me to break out into a happy dance at thirty-six I would have asked them to kill me and spare me the agony of becoming that boring.
There are big things happening around here – big, messy things that keep me from my keyboard and instead hip deep in dust and debris. But, thanks to a tremendous amount of help from my Dad and Stepfather – slowly, ever so slowly, we have been transforming a room that started out like this:
The above photo was taken with a cellphone, so it doesn’t capture the true scope of the awful. The chocolate brown – that is the nice word for the colour – paint was applied without any sort of care, possibly in the dark, with a spray gun. It was splashed all over the trim, the ceilings, and the baseboards. Plus, it was brown. Dark brown. Not some chic Martha Stewart “Mocha” or “Pinon Seed”. Just brown. The floor was beige vinyl tile, complete with burn marks. The yellowed ceiling may have been white at one point. The window frame and doors were cracked and peeling.
After ripping up the floor, we ended up with this:
It is amazing how many different types flooring you can have in one tiny room.
After a new hardwood floor, a bucket of spackling compound, loads of sandpaper, and several cans of paint, it looks like this:
And this:
Between all that, I still managed to find a little time for knitting:
This past Saturday we bought some fish for the aquarium we had moved into Teagan’s bedroom. We put the fish in the tank – five in all – admired them as they happily swam around in circles and went on with our day. The next morning I was surprised to find that there were several more fish in the tank than we had started with the day before.
Apparently one little fish was very pregnant and gave birth sometime after we moved them to their new home. So now we have several baby fish swimming about like cute little grains of rice. Rice with eyes. This was a nice surprise, really. It is a learning opportunity for the six year old in the house, with very little effort needed by me. The whole life cycle playing out in our fish tank is very grand indeed. Everyone likes and admires the tiny little fishies, although maybe not so much as me.
That would be the only downside to this whole adventure. I can be… obsessive at times, shall we say? These tiny little creatures have sent me into a compulsive frenzy as I stare into the fish tank for hours a day trying to figure out exactly how many there are and make sure they all make it into adulthood. If sheer will alone can keep these things alive, they will be the healthiest fish ever found in a home aquarium.
I count them. Then count them again. And again. (All this counting is hindered by the fact they are very, very, small and they move around.) I note which ones have spots and which are a solid orange. I check the filter daily to make sure none have become trapped. I worry that the adults in the tank will become peckish and turn on their own kind for an afternoon snack. I am often found encouraging the other members of the family to come and look at how very cute and small and so cute they are.
I might need an intervention. Does A&E do a show for this?
I was going to post about my weekend trip to Toronto, and show off all the goodies (both of the yarn and shoe variety) I brought home with me, but a certain six year old was taking pictures today and now I can’t find my camera. Which worries me a little, because if it should fall into the wrong hands I am pretty sure among all the snaps of her Polly Pockets and Webkinz there is a really unflattering picture looking straight up my left nostril.
My little darling has been home the past few days, having a little break from the rigors of summer camp before school starts. I had thought to tackle the exciting “school supplies extravaganza” this week, but I have yet to receive a letter requesting that I fork over a mortgage payment for a mountain of glue sticks, pencils, safety scissors and three pronged folders with pockets in puce, ecru, and chartreuse – in the elusive 9 1/2″ x 11″ size, not the 8 1/2″ x 11″ size carried by every store on the planet. In fact, I am so entirely in the dark this year that not only do I not know what classroom she will be in, I am not sure what time school even starts.
In a week and a half.
Our school system is adopting a “staggered busing” timetable this year, where all the school will be able to share buses by changing the times school starts and ends. Our school day used to begin at 9:00 am and end at 3:10. I received a letter from her after school program saying that the school day would be changing to 8:20 am to 2:45 pm. The school website has a posting from earlier in the summer that says the day will be from 8:05 am to 2:20 pm. Of course no one is answering the phone at the school. They are probably all hiding under their desks wishing the phone would just stop ringing, already.
The weather hasn’t been as warm as I had hoped, so instead of lounging around the beach this week as planned we have been doing that exciting thing called “making your own fun”. We have spent her allowance on Webkinz products and a new book, we have visited the museum, the library, the farmer’s market, the ice cream shack and the drug store – where we spent a good forty-five minutes sniffing different body washes whilst trying to decide between the “refreshing pomegranate splash” and “sparkling grapefruit sugar” scents. These decisions can’t be rushed. We have read books, played on the computer, weeded the garden, splashed in the kiddie pool, played the “zoo game” (the rules of which I am still not entirely clear). We have made a treasure chest from a cereal box, a vase from a salsa jar and a frog puppet out of a paper lunch bag. I even started teaching her how to knit and I am keeping the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies in emergency reserve. It’s only Wednesday and if the weather doesn’t perk up soon, things could get ugly around here. It is supposed to rain tomorrow, so I have pulled out the big guns.
I have arranged a play date. From 11am ’til they want to kill each other or dinner time. Whichever comes first.
Yesterday afternoon I took a trip to Whitehouse Perennials with my Mom and Stepfather. I had never visited before, and it was an incredible experience. Whitehouse is an amazing place, with so many plants. Rolling fields of plants, winding paths bordered with plants, shaded oases of plants – plants, plants, PLANTS! It is beautiful and awe inspiring. Trying to choose some to bring home, though – that proved to be more difficult. How are you supposed to choose only one or two daylilies out of a field of over a thousand? After much deliberation I managed to pick out two daylilies and a giant hosta.
Some photos:
We decided to change ISP’s when the year of internet connectivity we paid for ran out at the end of June, so we spent almost TWO WHOLE WEEKS without internet. Shocking! We were back in cyberspace a few days ago, but by then I was completely immersed in my “I don’t have the internet to distract me, so what crazy project can I start” project.
This past weekend I was alone. Completely alone. Mr. Man was away for the weekend, and Sweetpea was at her father’s house. I could have spent the weekend sock knitting, drinking margaritas and letting the t.v. show me how to successfully flip a house with nothing but plucky determination and an HGTV camera crew.
Oh, I could have.
Friday evening I settled into the couch with my latest sock in progress (the pattern: Monkey, by Cookie A. – the yarn: Paton’s Stretch Socks in Plum.) Within an hour I could no longer stand the sight of the living room, with it’s mismatched walls painted in several different shades of Silly Putty. By approximately 9:00 pm on Friday night – one hour and thirty minutes into my restful weekend of solitude – I had set aside my sock knitting and started my plan of action. I would paint the living room! It would be great!
By 10:00 pm on Saturday night, after fifteen hours of prepping, plastering and sanding, great wasn’t so much the word I was looking for. Another twelve hours of painting on Sunday left me feeling accomplished – and really, really tired.
This never would have happened if I had access to Twitter.
