Hot and Cold

You're kidding, right?

On Wednesday afternoon the guys left, they had completed the job and left the place if not spotless at least tidy. I was so glad to see the last of them. Not that I found them unpleasant, just that I was glad to finally emerge from over six weeks of renovation and all that that entails. Bobby and I had a long conversation about single life, grandchildren, and retirement plans (he says he's going to get himself a motorcycle and tour Newfoundland). I had pizza and beer for supper. I laid Hapi's bed on the nice clean and reasonably empty basement floor and invited her to try it out.

She said, Are you kidding me? You want me to go down there?

She wouldn't go down, she slept outside that night. Thursday was delightful, I was so happy to finally have the place to myself. I decided not to tackle cleaning up the basement right away, instead I bought a few things for the bathroom, baked some bread, took Hapi for a long leisurely walk, and did some laundry. Just a nice boring day.

Late in the afternoon I ran a bath for myself in the brand new soaker tub. Earlier in the day I had turned up the hot water heater thermostat because the new tub is twice as big as the old one, so the water that comes out of the faucet is much hotter now. There was no cold water. Went down to the basement and opened the cold water shutoff valve that the guys had forgotten to turn back on. Now there was a little cold water, but only just a little. Not nearly enough to cool the now scalding hot water from the hot water tank. I ran as much cold water as I could but still the tub water was only just bearable. I learned that a very large tub of hot water takes a really long time to cool off and my body can adjust to a small tub of hot water but not to a very large tub of hot water. It was not a pleasant experience.

So after getting out of the tub (after a quick bath rather than a long leisurely soak) I called Bobby. He said the shutoff valve must be corroded and he'd come by on Friday to replace it. I had my writing group meeting on Friday morning so I hung around the house just long enough to let the guys in and then went off to the three-hour (usually) meeting. When I got home afterwards they were still there.

Uh-oh, I thought.

Bobby told me a long saga about trying to obtain a new shutoff valve, they had only just finished installing it.

He said, If you don't like swearing you better leave now.

After they installed the valve they tried the bathtub faucet. Still no cold water. Must be the cartridge he said.

So off they went in search of a new cartridge. I puttered around tidying things in the basement until they returned with the cartridge. Bobby installed it and turned on the faucet. Still no cold water. Now he was mad. He went down into the basement and peered into the closet where he could see the pipes under the bathtub, muttering to himself all the while. Not sure what he was saying, but apparently the next step was to tear out the ceiling below the tub and search for a kinked tube, something he really did not want to do. I was almost beside myself. Thursday had been so wonderful and Friday was turning into a nightmare.

Bobby decided it was time for a coffee and I seconded the motion. So the guys left for the local Timmy's and I made a quick lunch for myself and took Hapi for a walk. We were out for almost two hours. I was thoroughly stressed out about the guys being back in the basement and poor Hapi got a forced march as far out on the dykes as I could manage. Not too cold but very windy. She found some nice mud and waded into it up to her chest. Oh boy. Dyke mud is very stinky.

By the time we got home we were both exhausted and Bobby's truck was not in the driveway. There were small signs that they had been there (a screwdriver that had been in the bathroom was now in the kitchen) so I went straight to the bathroom and turned on the faucet. Lots of cold water! But no hot water!!

You have got to be kidding!!! I thought to myself.

I phoned Bobby and told him. He said he'd be back on Saturday to fix it. An easy fix he said.

Which is what he said when I called him on Thursday about the lack of cold water.

Basement Saga continued

Backyard visitor

Mid-February, no snow on the ground, no snow in the forecast. Every time it snows there's rain right afterward and the snow is washed away. Weird winter.

The guys are putting my basement back together again. It has been a long haul, they've been here for so long I feel like I should be charging them rent. Everything that could go wrong did.

Now I have a cold, I'm hoping it won't last too long. The guys figure they have one more day of work down there and then I can start putting things back where I want them, but with this cold I have no energy for it.

Hapi is quite discombobulated by the change in sleeping quarters. Usually she sleeps in the basement but she can't now so every night she has to decide whether to stay indoors upstairs or go outside. Usually she chooses to go outside. I don't mind, but it seems that all our rain is happening in the night and I know she doesn't like being in her doghouse in the rain because of the noise of the rain on the roof. And if I'm asleep I can't let her inside, so she goes out into the rain and finds the muddiest spot available to lie down in. By morning she is soaked and covered in mud, then she wants to come inside. All her white fur is brown now.

The last few days they've been cutting laminate flooring to fit back together again; the dust from that goes everywhere. There's no point cleaning it up until they're done, which I'm hoping is tomorrow. Then they're going to come upstairs and do some work on my bathroom. They think it will only take a couple of days, but I remember a month ago Bob thinking the basement job would just take a few days. You just never know what kind of disaster you're going to uncover when you start taking things apart.

I went to an amazing house concert over the weekend, a woman who sings Edith Piaf. She's very talented, plays multiple instruments and has a gorgeous voice. Her partner plays guitar and he is amazing as well. It was enthralling. The concert was at her mother's place. The couple now live in Montreal and they came back home for three Valentine's Day performances. I really hope their talents are rewarded.

Last night I went to a talk and slide show about the railway children of India. The mother of the singer went to India over Christmas to visit Father Abhi who works with the railway children of Varanasi. They have a centre there where they house some of them and arrange for them to go to school, also they help find adoptive families or reunite children with their lost families. Most of them are girls, their futures are not good. Father Abhi heads up an organization (DARE) that does this work and also he travels India and the world to drum up support.

There is a small network of groups in Nova Scotia, Belgium and one other place that I forget. When he needs money for his projects in India he tells the network. Usually it is something very specific, say a small bus or some piece of necessary equipment. Then the network raises the money and sends it to him. Sometimes it can take a couple of years to raise the money. It is complicated, there are rules governing how money can be sent overseas and also how money can be received by organizations in India. By being very specific they handle the complications. So my little town is part of that international network, to help the railway children. Of course it is just a drop in the bucket, but I guess every little drop helps.

The slides we watched were very colourful, the presenter was quite fascinated by the brightly painted trucks in India and also by all the dancing. The children are taught amazing dances and they love it. Father Abhi has all these paintings and statues of an Indian Jesus, he looks like a Hindu guru or a buddha. The Christmas celebrations were extremely colourful and full of dancing and coloured lights and flowers. It was beautiful and strange at the same time, Christmas celebrated in a Hindu way.

Thinking out loud at six in the morning

When I moved back to Nova Scotia in 2010 I bought back my old house. It happened to be on the market when I was looking for a place and, well, it was hard to resist. I knew the house had problems but I thought, "Better the devil you know..."

The main problem I foresaw was that the man who bought the house from me finished the basement. It had been an unfinished basement with water leaks, he fixed the leaks (or so he thought) and completely finished the area, putting in a full bathroom, a bedroom and a rec room. He also took out the old floor furnace and put in a full furnace with forced air venting into all of the upstairs rooms. He did a lot of work on that house, most of which I thought was a big improvement. But finishing that basement seemed to me kind of risky. I bought the place anyway, thinking that if it came to it I would tear out the work he did there.

As of last week, it has come to it.

This past year has definitely been my year to battle the element of water. I live in a province of weird geology and waterlogged soils, with as much water below ground as above, and plenty of it falling from the sky in one form or another. A building contractor once said to me that all of the houses on my street are really just little boats bobbing on an unseen river. Every time someone digs a hole in the ground, the river changes course, and there's always someone digging a hole in the ground.

Anyway, there was a soft spot in the laminate flooring in the rec room which I thought meant that there was a bit of rot in the subfloor due to the now-fixed water leak in the nearest basement wall. This past fall I found an excellent contractor who has done some work for me and I asked him if he could fix the soft spot. He said he could. He removed the laminate carefully so he could replace it after fixing whatever he found underneath and sure enough the subfloor was rotten, very rotten. He had a bad feeling about it and we discussed it, I gave him the go ahead to remove more laminate to see how far the problem went. In my heart I knew it was going to be bad, the time had finally come. So I was not as shocked as he had expected me to be, more resigned to the inevitable.

In a couple of days they had removed all of the floor in the rec room. They swabbed it down with bleach and said they'd come back when it was dry to rebuild the floor. That was three days ago and it is still not dry, in spite of fans and heaters. Bob the contractor came back yesterday to take a look and we discussed what to do next. I am sceptical about rebuilding, the thought of covering over that floor and not being able to see whether it is leaking or not scares me. Bob thinks he can fix it so it won't leak, he thinks it will be safe to rebuild. To that end he has saved as much as possible of the unrotten materials to reuse. But he also thinks there is more rot under the bathroom that will have to be dealt with.

Right now there is nothing to be done about that because all of the furniture and salvaged building materials are being store in there and the other two small rooms of the basement. He thinks the other two rooms are safe, it's just the bathroom that looks bad, and that can't be torn apart until all of the stuff stored in there (plus the bathroom fixtures and washer and dryer) are removed. But since there's no place to remove all that to, the bathroom will remain in place until the rec room is dealt with one way or another.

And then of course there is the small matter of money to pay for all this. The way I am looking at it is that eventually I will have to sell this house, I don't see it as my last permanent home. Having a basement in reasonably good shape is a good thing, the cost is an investment that will eventually pay off. Bob is a good person who does good work at reasonable prices, he has a lot of experience and I trust his judgement. I've had him do enough work for me that I trust him beyond simply doing a good job. So the timing of this disaster is not so bad, I at least am not scrambling to find someone to fix this problem and I did know that sooner or later this was coming.

Nevertheless it is not pleasant and I am losing sleep over it. I wish I could talk my brain into relaxing. I almost made it through this past night, but I woke at 4.00am with a severe leg cramp that forced me out of bed and that was the end of sleep for me.

What really worries me is exposure to mould, there is simply no way to close off the basement from the rest of the house until the job is completed. I owned and lived in a leaky condo out west and the exposure to mould caused a severe illness that lasted half a year, during which time I could not work or do much else; at its worst just getting from the bed to the toilet was a major effort. That scares me. The smell coming up from the basement scares me. The thought that this has been going on for years, probably since before I bought the house, and that I've been living over it all that time scares me. The fact that Bob's breathing changed within hours of setting foot in my basement scares me. Scares him too, he can't afford to get sick.

So sleeping is difficult.

Home again

Well, I'm back home. Had a great time, saw a lot of friends and family, learned a few things. I'm trying to hold onto those thoughts because around early September I came down with a cold and each flight thereafter (nine take-offs and landings in total, four after acquiring the cold) made things worse. I am still dealing with the consequences--a serious cough and deafness in one ear.

Also, I came home to a bit of a homeowner's nightmare: a sewage backup.

The house sitter said it happened earlier that day, but I think he only noticed it earlier that day. It was in the basement bathroom. I suspect he had no reason to go down there so he didn't until the day I was due home. He thought he'd do a laundry to cleanup for me and since the washing machine was in that bathroom he then discovered the mess. I got home around 4.30pm and it was fortunate that my plumber came out right away to deal with it. Cost a bunch though. The plumber says more work is needed and we are looking at bills in the thousands. In the meantime I can continue to use the water (and drains) with caution, but the pervasive smell is a bit off-putting.

The well-meaning house sitter attempted to use an air freshener whose odour I now have firmly linked in my mind with sewage. I guess the fact that my cold affects my sense of smell as well as my hearing is a small blessing.

The main purpose of the house sitter was to look after Hapi and that he did admirably. I knew he wasn't the cleanest guy around so I did expect to come home to a bit of a mess. I can't really blame him for the sewage backup, that is more due to tree roots than lack of cleanliness. Considering that I am paying the guy less than what it would have cost to put Hapi in a kennel and she was visibly happy with the care she received from him, I don't begrudge him the money, but it was quite depressing to come home to the sewage disaster.

He never mowed the lawn so it looks like a very healthy hayfield now, however he says he can get a guy to come in with a better lawnmower than I have to deal with it. Also he has a line on a dog groomer for Hapi who looks like she needs a serious trimming now. Her old groomer has retired and moved away so I am in the market for a new one. He spent a good amount of time brushing and combing her so her coat looks shaggy but decent.

My financial advisor lives on the west coast and while I was there I visited him for our annual in depth discussion of the state of the world and a brief synopsis of the state of my finances. It takes about three hours for the former (only slightly less if we're doing it by phone) and fifteen minutes for the latter. He suggested that I could loosen my purse strings and spend a little more on myself. I was allowing myself to think about a bathroom reno on the way home, but it never occurred to me that it meant I should clean up sewage. I might still do the reno, it depends entirely on how badly the tree has mangled my sewer connection.

I am all travelled out now, don't want to go anywhere or see anything. I'll write about my trip some other time. Overall it was great, and in light of the current situation I am clinging to the memories.

Limping along and happy returns

Twice this past week the hottest place in Canada has been right here. We're basking in it. It is definitely spring, we've had sun and warm weather for a week, flowers are up and grass is starting to turn green again. I wanted to do some planting today but a young woman digging in her garden down the street advised me not to, there's at least one more night of frost in the forecast.

Hapi has injured herself and is now confined to barracks. This has never happened to her before. On Tuesday I noticed she was limping slightly on our way home from the Reservoir Park (the picture above), I could only see it when she walked fast and I couldn't tell which leg she was favouring. The next day she seemed fine and we went to the ravine with a friend and her dog, there was still ice and snow in the woods there. Hapi ran around as if there was nothing wrong (perhaps showing off for the older male dog), but had a bit of difficulty jumping into the van for the trip home afterward. When we got home she was obviously in trouble, hesitating to jump down from the van and then obviously limping into the back yard. When I put her dinner out for her she was trying to figure out how to stand on three legs and eat at the same time. I thought she would have trouble getting down the basement steps that evening and might sleep on the main level instead, but she carefully manoeuvred down the steep steps to her basement bedroom. She hates sleeping upstairs!

So on Thursday as she hobbled back upstairs in the morning I decided she couldn't go walking again until the limp was gone. I massaged the leg she was favouring but could not see anything obvious and she didn't have any tender spots. She enjoyed the massage though. I found out in the process that her toes are webbed, I never knew that before! I guess it helps for walking on snow. So I don't know what the problem is or where, and I am reluctant to give her anything for pain because I don't want her running around making it worse. Just keep an eye on it I guess.

Two years ago an American couple who had moved here and gotten permanent resident status decided to move back to the USA. They had been here for a few years and had a lot of friends here, they are very nice people who make friends easily. But for a bunch of reasons they thought it made sense to go back. They still owned a house in the US and all their family was there. They sold their house here and moved back, but kept in touch and visited several times after they left the country. They're visiting now. House hunting. After two years they admit their mistake and are putting the US house up for sale. Going back "home" (well, at the time they thought it was) turned out as the old saying goes: you can't go back home again. They were used to the great social life and numerous friends they had here and going back just wasn't the same. No friends, no social life. Their family is scattered so it didn't really help that they were in the same country. Everyone who knows them here is delighted that they are coming back. They thought we would laugh at them. Well we are, but we are happy they are back too.

Winter chez moi

My garden put to bed for the winter...

…only the kale insists on staying up.

It's a dog life

Busy busy busy! That's my excuse here. Since the last post I have had family visitors, finished the fence, gone to PEI twice, and now have Sam and his two dogs Hapi and Hiro in residence.

The dogs are huge, hairy, smelly and do not play well with others. While Dobby the boxer and the Toronto branch of the family were here we had three major dog fights where Hapi and Hiro ganged up on Dobby and had him yelping in distress. Dobby is a big dog, 80 lbs big, but Hapi and Hiro dwarf him.

I was really happy to have Dobby here, he was glad to see me and I enjoy his affectionate nature. He is not hairy and not smelly. Seeing him take a beating from Hapi and Hiro did not sit well. I am sure he was very glad to leave here and get back home to his less aggressive dogpark buddies. He had war scars to show off.

Sam thinks that given time the three dogs would have worked things out and grown to be more friendly with each other. I think he may be right but Dobby was being seriously traumatized by the process. He did have a very good vacation in PEI though.

Taking Hapi and Hiro for walks is difficult, I cannot control the two of them alone and they are aggressive toward other dogs. I would like to be able to let them off the leash but there are no places around here that I can be assured that we will not encounter other dogs. I got haltis for them but as fast as I get them on the dogs the first dog has its halti off. I tried walking them separately but Hiro howls continuously when he is alone.

My current strategy is to get them used to short separate walks wearing the halti. Sam says he notices that after a couple of days of that he already notices that Hiro is more controllable on the leash. But I don't really know what to do about their aggression toward other dogs. I wonder if they were permanently separated whether they would be less confident and less aggressive, but Sam doesn't think it will make a difference.

Wilfred delivered two cords of wood to me and we shared a bit of Harbour gossip and chatted about the dogs. He suggested electronic collars for them. That might help, but I wonder if it would make any difference through their thick fur. Also I hate the idea of electric shocks. I suppose though that it might be better than the alternatives.

Sam and I are used to living alone, sharing this house is not easy. Not only are we trying to adjust to shared living accommodations but he is adjusting to a new job that he doesn't particularly like so far. He thought it would be better than it is turning out to be.

I went to Prince Edward Island the first time to visit Isaac and Gretel at the cottage they had the use of while on vacation. Gretel's parents live in PEI and her aunt purchased the cottage a couple of summers ago for the use of all of the family. Her Dad made some extensions on the cottage, three added bedrooms and a screened in deck. He operates a wood mill and was able to use mostly wood that he had milled himself.

The cottage is set in the woods a short walk from a sandy beach, you can't see the ocean but you can hear it. Mornings we would walk with Dobby and the kids along the beach, later in the day we would go swimming there. Gretel's stepmom organized a paddle trip down a local river one sunny afternoon, I brought my kayak along for that.

We all returned to Nova Scotia after a couple of days, meeting Sam and his dogs in Truro as he drove from his home in BC. Thanks to the wonders of cell phone texting, we were able to connect at a gas station and drive the rest of the way to my house together. It was a hectic short family visit with four adults, three giant dogs and two kids.

Unbeknownst to me Sam was expecting me to dogsit for three days while he went to a wedding in Cape Breton. I had previously agreed with Isaac and Gretel to take their oldest son Tristan back to PEI to spend a couple of weeks on his grandparents farm there, so the dogsitting job was not a welcome kink in my plans. We settled on my dogsitting for one day and putting the dogs in a kennel for the remainder of the time at Sam's expense.

The dogsitting day turned out to be a rainday in which we all stayed indoors. Isaac gave me access to his Netflix account so Tristan and I watched movies all day while the dogs moped.

My second trip to PEI was fun, this time I took my bike with the intention of doing some cycling on the Confederation Trail (aka Tip-to-Tip Trail). When the trains were retired on the island the provincial government turned the train tracks into a hiking and biking trail from one end of the island to the other, hundreds of kilometers of flat, gravelled trails through farms, woodlands, marshes, bogs, barrens and small towns. Lots of little B&Bs and cafes have sprung up along the trail, along with bike and canoe rental places, information rest stops, craft and gift shops and so forth. Really quite delightful.

The towns are close enough by that you can easily bike from one to the next in an hour or so, depending on speed. I planned only to bike the part of the trail in the vicinity of the cottage and the farm, but I saw lots of bikes loaded up with gear for longer trips. People from all over, I chatted with a man from Minnesota and a couple from the UK.

My first day of biking I planned to do a bit of grocery shopping and stop at the river we had previously paddled for a swim. The second day was cooler and windier, I biked another section of the trail that bordered the Gulf shore (Gulf of St. Laurence).

On the one rainy day of my PEI stay, Gretel's stepmom came over with Tristan and three neighbour boys to play a board game with me. On my last day there Fiona the boxer (Dobby's sister, living at the farm) had nine puppies to the great delight of the four boys. One of them described how one of the pups was born in a 'plastic bag' which Fiona licked off. They wondered about the logistics of eight nipples and nine pups.

Just before leaving the island I dropped by to see Fiona and her litter, she looked kind of shocked. Perhaps I am just projecting, but that's how I would feel in her place.

Now I am playing catch-up, taking care of all the stuff that was neglected while visiting PEI and with family. Two days spent weeding, harvesting and replanting my garden, some time working with the dogs, and catching up with neglected friends.

I stopped by the hardware store to pick up a new composter I had ordered, the fellow at the customer service desk asked me what I was up to now: every time I came in I was working on some project or another. I told him I had a list, I was making my way through it. He carried the composter out to the truck and I had to let the two dogs out of the back in order to get the composter in. I managed to shove the dogs back in after the composter. Hapi likes getting into vehicles, Hiro does not so he takes some coaxing and shoving.

I am thinking that I will probably keep one of the dogs, Hapi, and send the other one home with Sam. However Sam is now talking about going to college here, meaning that he might end up staying for several years. As things stand at the moment, I do not think having him live in my basement is realistic for either of us but I do not know where he can rent an affordable place for him and Hiro. Until we work that one out I am focussing on halti-training Hiro and somehow getting the two of them to either adjust to separation or be less aggressive with other dogs, or both.

My home is full of dog hair and dog smell. As luck would have it my own sense of smell has deteriorated with age so the smell is not so irksome as it might be, but I know that visitors react to it. The dogs have recently been groomed but you'd never know it, their fur is so thick!

The dogs poop in the back yard which attracts flies, I try to clean up the messes as quickly as possible but the dogs prefer to spend the night sleeping outdoors which means that in the morning the yard is full of flies. Sam says if I got into a regular dogwalking routine they wouldn't poop in the yard, but with all the problems of walking two giant aggressive dogs, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

The list of stuff to be done before winter is full. The firewood has been delivered and needs to be stacked. Places for stacking need to be cleared of other things which in turn need to be stored somewhere yet to be determined. The dogs need rain shelter other than my tiny living room. The kitchen faucet needs to be replaced. The decks need painting or something. The usual lawn mowing and gardening tasks. Several trees need pruning. I need to build four new garden frames for next year. The basement is a mess...

I got to two plays, Beowulf and Driving Miss Daisy, and hope to get to The Vigil and Shakespeare in the Park (Halifax). I managed to get to the Kempt Shore Music Festival and I have a ticket for the Deep Roots Festival, but I missed Stanfest and will (have already?) miss the Lunenburg Folk. Next year. One weekend planned this month at a friend's cottage with a bunch of women friends, the Labour Day weekend planned with a visit from an old Ottawa friend, a weaving workshop in September and hopefully a kayak camping trip in October and somehow a weekend at Milford Lakes Lodge (I have a Groupon I need to use there).

My life has just become a busy round of projects, culture and socializing, I kind of miss the old days of reading and knitting and long walks alone. The fact that my posting here has become so sporadic and that I am not getting near as many photos in is kind of indicative. No doubt this shall pass, but I do wonder when.

WWMD and why I'm here

I first came to Nova Scotia in early September or late August, 1973. My husband and I drove here from Toronto with our two kids in a red Dodge van. A bit of a long story as to why, but basically we were following friends from Vancouver who had moved here the previous year. I remember though, as we crossed the border from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia, the distinct feeling of having come home. I had never been to Nova Scotia before, knew next to nothing about it.

In 2005 I was living in New Westminster BC, just outside of Vancouver. I was out walking along the Quay one day, thinking about this that and t'other thing while enjoying the scenery along the Fraser River there, and the question popped into my mind, Where did I want to die?

I know, odd thing to be thinking of for no good reason. My excuse is that one of the people I hung out with in New West was a geriatric social worker and she was constantly reminding us that we should be thinking about and planning for our old age. So perhaps that question was her fault.

In any case, the answer was immediate: Nova Scotia. And the next thought was, Well, I guess I'd better get on it because you just never know when things might happen, and New Westminster is about as far away from Nova Scotia as you can get and still be in the same country.

It took a bit of doing, I had a condo to sell and also wanted to spend some time living in Toronto, my birthplace and now home to one of my sons. So five years later, I bought my old home in Nova Scotia back. What brought me back is probably the same thing that brought me here the first time, old friends.

There's something about that time in your life, the first years of adulthood. The connections you make, the things you do, the places you go, the music you listen to. A certain vividness that outlasts all else. Those first years in Nova Scotia were hardly idyllic, involving as it did the breakdown of my brief marriage and the loss of a son. But they were formative. And like it or not I was part of a community of heads/freaks/hippies/back-to-the-landers going through similarly intense experiences. A lot happened.

I left Nova Scotia in 1985 kind of burned out on the whole thing and more than ready to start over anywhere but here. Arriving in the Big City of Ottawa I was delighted to be in a place where I knew no one and nobody knew me. I can't say that delight lasted, but it was certainly refreshing at the time.

I don't know when Midge arrived in Nova Scotia, it was certainly before I left because when I met her in 2008? 2009? she remembered me from those days. I really only knew her a short time but she was someone I would have liked to have spent more time with, an interesting and fun person to be around. On June 20 she died of cancer at age 57, at home surrounded by family. Last night was her Celebration of Life.

In the last weeks of Midge's life her many many friends came together to support her family with whatever was needed. She helped plan her Celebration, suggesting music and general conduct (wine, beer, catered food and bright clothing) and stipulating no g-words. I'm guessing over 200 people came. Local musicians played some of her favourite tunes, including Loreena McKennit's Beltaine Fire. There were a couple of community songs for all of us to sing along. Family members and a couple of close friends spoke a few words describing her impact in their lives. In particular Midge's strong common sensical ethics were referenced, and WWMD (What Would Midge Do) repeated several times.

For the first part of the Celebration were seated in a half-moon facing a small table with three small boxes, Midge's ashes, on it. One for Dorset, her birth home and still the homeplace of her birth family, one for Blomidon so that all of her Nova Scotia family can look out on Cape Blomidon and know that she is there, and one for her daughter to take to Black Rock where they lived as a family and grew up there.

The second part of the Celebration was the mingling with food and drinks to remember and reconnect. I looked out and saw many many faces of friends and acquaintances, some of whom I could not remember names for, but all part of that community I grew up in. This is what I came home for, this is where I belong, like it or not.

A few days before Lin and I were out shopping and we picked up Sympathy cards at one store we were in. Lin said she always bought them in threes, one for now and two to save because we are at that stage in life now when Sympathy cards may come in handy. As we left the Celebration Lin's husband waved at someone else that was leaving and hollered out, See you at the next funeral! Lin made noises to hush him, Don't say that!

But I guess it's true. We're almost through the weddings of our kids, we're into the births of our grandkids and the deaths of our parents and friends. It's all downhill from here. It's good not to go alone.

The to-do list

I have spent several days already poking around in my backyard to see what's there and what I want to do with it. The previous owner did a lot of planting and then left it for a few years before I came along. So some stuff has probably disappeared, other things are outrageously overgrown, and still more has survived and spread amazingly. There are some mysterious bits as well, odd placement of rocks that weren't there before.

There are tonnes and tonnes of tulips and various other spring bulb-type flowers. Some of which I can identify---crocuses and hyacinth---and others I recognize but don't know the names of. Lots of hosta too. I am not much of a flower gardener, I don't have an easy familiarity with the flower world. And not much of a vegetable gardener either, I have not had access to a good-sized bit of land in a very long time. In fact not since I last lived here 25 years ago.

A friend has been helping me poke around, she is a frustrated gardener living in an apartment in the next town. She keeps gardening tools in her car trunk, in case she happens upon a gardening opportunity. Right now I am one of her gardening opportunities. She has identified some of the plants and tried to tackle pruning various shrubs.

Another friend has offered me a sustainable source of free horse manure and a book on Lasagna Gardening. She suggests that rather than dig up my backyard that I simply lay down cardboard and spread some of her horse manure on top with various other things to create a garden without digging. The avoidance of digging sounds good to me.

But to start a garden I have to build some frames to hold all this manure and figure out best locations for these frames that will get the most sunlight. I have too many trees strategically placed to block the sunshine and don't care to cut them down. The local sawmill is closed this weekend so I have to wait until after the Easter holiday to get the lumber to build the frames.

Then I have to get containers to hold the horse manure in my truck. My friend suggests plastic tubs from Home Depot, but another friend insists that I should not buy tubs but rather get ahold of free plastic pails with lids. However she cannot suggest a good source for free plastic pails. Then she suggests feed bags from the farm where I buy eggs. She is all about free stuff. Meanwhile I am thinking that tracking down all this free stuff will take so much time, I just want to get the garden started.

While my son was visiting here the other week he pointed out that the basement toilet seal needs replacing. He said it was a fairly simple job but messy. I dutifully went off to the hardware store and bought the stuff I'd need to do the job but have put off doing it because of aforesaid messiness.

A couple of months ago I bought a new faucet for the kitchen sink, and initially had it sitting in a prominent location as a reminder to actually install it, but after a month I finally moved it to a shelf behind the furnace in the basement because I obviously was ignoring it anyway. One of these days the existing faucet will give out altogether and then maybe I'll be motivated to install the new one.

My free-stuff friend told me when I first moved in that I needed a gate on the basement stairs so that she wouldn't fall down them (she's blind). I have designed a gate and bought the lumber and cut it up but not yet assembled or installed it. Not being blind I don't fall down the stairs, and I stand in the way when my friend is visiting.

I visited a local weaver and she showed me around her studio and introduced me to her sheep, she proposed a deal to get me started weaving on my loom which I am very interested in but so far I have not acted on it.

I have a banjo under my bed that I want to learn to play and yet another friend pointed out that a very able banjo teacher lives just across the street from me. I have not contacted him.

Are you starting to get the picture? I have all these things I need or want to do and none of them are getting done! For no good reason other than laziness, procrastination and not knowing where to start.

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg, the most blatant unstarted projects. I can list off at least a half-dozen other projects without thinking, and probably a dozen more if you give me a little time to think about it. I try to list things but my lists are always incomplete, and often I only remember the stuff that I need to do when I can least do them, or even round up pen and paper to write them down.

People ask me how it feels to be back in the house that I sold so many years ago. I shrug my shoulders and say it doesn't feel like anything. I guess this house is so familiar to me that I don't have any unusual feelings about being here so what can I say? It doesn't feel odd or right or anything at all.

I think the closest I can come to identifying what it feels like is that I lived here, I went away and travelled a bit, and then I came back. I'd like to think I am here for good now, but I have learned never to say never. I might never leave again, or not.

But I must say that this is the first spring in a very long time that I have not felt a sustained deep and irresistable urge to be on the road. I get flashes of it occasionally, but nothing to get me planning for it.

I almost feel like writing emails of apology to farflung friends that I won't be visiting any time soon, except that this is one more thing to add to the list above and is being treated in much the same way.

I remember that when I left this place I was lonely and frustrated, I couldn't wait to go someplace different and start over. Loneliness continued to be a constant issue, it was always hard to create a social life for myself. I lived in several different cities over the years and came up with a rule of thumb that it generally took two years to create a social life that worked for me.

Returning here has been quite shocking in that my rule of thumb has been trashed, it is as if my social life hit the ground running. I can't keep up with it. Half the reason I don't do all the things I talk about doing is because I am wallowing in movies and concerts and dinners out and trips to the city with friends, not to mention choir and yoga. I crave downtime, and when I get it I feel guilty that I am not taking care of all the things I should be taking care of.

I started this blog living in Toronto and ironically one of my first postings was "So, having no social life I read" (also, "My so-called social life" and "January blues"). I did quite a bit of writing then. Ah those were the days...

Now I am lucky if I get to it every couple of weeks. Faced with the choice of writing a blog post or writing the damn list of things that I should be doing, the list wins. Not that it does me any good. Too many friends, too much music, too much fun.

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Things I have accomplished this week: hung some pictures on the walls, assembled and setup a composter and transferred winter's accumulation of compost into it, got the computer fixed (thanks Kurt!!!).

Tour of the new-old place

1. The back door, in the kitchen. Immediately to the right in this photo is the stairway down to the basement.



2. The left hand side of the kitchen counter...



3. ...and the right hand side.



4. Looking from the kitchen toward the living room.



5. The front door and vestibule, to the right of the dining table in the photo above. The floor in the vestibule is uninsulated so I keep the inner door closed.



6. Big rocking armchair chair (that doesn't really rock so it's safe to put a mug of coffee on the wooden arms) and couch on the left facing toward the kitchen.



7. Woodstove and desk on the right.



8. View from living room toward the kitchen.



9. Sunset on the living room wall above the couch.



10. Standing between living room and kitchen, looking down the hallway toward the bathroom, loomroom (on the left) and bedroom (on the right).



11. Standing at the other end of the hallway, looking toward the kitchen (on the left) and the living room (on the right). That door on the right is a closet, but when I used to live here before it was the door to the stairway to the basement. I keep walking into that closet when I want to go downstairs.



12. Loom and computer desk in the loomroom...



13. There's no closet in my bedroom because it isn't really intended to be a bedroom. The loomroom is supposed to be the master bedroom so it has the closet.



14. Across the hall from the loomroom, looking into my bedroom.



I haven't done much with the basement yet, and I haven't put up pictures yet either. Lots of time for that.

Birdfeeder and fishbowl

It's kind of a dull grey day, it snowed briefly this morning but not enough to stick.

The bird feeder is going great guns though. Today I've seen the usual jays, chickadees and juncoes, but also nuthatches and a flicker. They're too skittish to photograph though, as soon as I approach the window with my camera they're gone. I love seeing them all though.

Right in front of my house is a streetlight that sways in the wind. It is half full of water. It's kind of funny seeing that little pool of water suspended over the street, especially at night when the light is on. I imagine creatures living in the water, like a little goldfish bowl suspended over the street.

I wonder if it will freeze in the cold weather.

Home decorating

Spent the weekend putting up pictures. I probably overdid it, my place is now looking a little cluttered with pictures. But it was fun. A lot of them are pictures I have had in storage for over 15 years, since I last left Ontario.

I have some calendar pictures of flowers, close-ups from Kew Gardens, that I put on the kitchen cupboards.

I was looking at them and realizing that I never put them up in my place in BC because there really are only a couple of months, if that, when you can't see flowers blooming outdoors. Frequently there are winter pansies and primulas growing through the winter, and crocuses are up by February.

But in Ontario there is a long period of no flowers, more than half the year. So having pictures of them on the walls is uplifting.

Gretel also noted that the pictures of yellow flowers on the green cupboards helped link the green of the cupboards to the yellow walls, making them less starkly contrasting. She never liked those green cupboards.

In the stairway I put up some posters that are sort of odd. They are from a calendar probably dating from the early 70s, that my Dad would have brought home when he worked as an estimator for a printing company.

For example a floral print shirt being put through a meat grinder with real flowers coming out of the business end, or making a green polka dot shirt using a can of peas and a rolling pin.

I have eight of them in the stairway and the kids come up the stairs very slowly, staring at each picture. They both are quite fascinated by them.

The plaster in my apartment is quite old, mostly old-fashioned lathe and plaster. This makes it harder to put thumbtacks in it so for posters I had to use tape. Gretel recommended painter's tape which holds well without damaging the paint when you want to remove it.

But I have one wall that I am sure is not plaster at all but concrete, I cannot even hammer a nail into it! I'm going to have to drill holes to put up a couple of framed prints.

<-- the concrete wall...

Going through old prints and photos inspired a huge amount of nostalgia. I have a stack of old letters and postcards that completely sucked me in for over an hour. I was thinking of making a kind of collage of some of the postcards, but given how cluttered everything is starting to look, I have no idea where I'd put it so maybe that's an idea best left alone.

While I was going through old postcards and letters from my desk I pulled out my old camera and Isaac happened to be visiting at the time and was interested in it since it is very similar to the camera that he is in the process of selling. His and Gretel's camera for sale is a Canon AE-1 and mine is a Canon AE-1 Program. Turns out he has a flash attachment that will work on my camera. He said he was going to include it with the camera for sale but if I could use it I could have it. We tried playing around with the different lenses on my camera and his new camera, a Canon EOS Rebel (it's digital).

I used his telephoto lens on my camera and took a few pictures, it will be interesting to see how they turn out. The AE-1 is a film camera of course so I have to wait till the film roll is used up before I can see the pictures. Unfortunately the film in the camera is quite old, there is at least one picture in there that I know I took in 2003. Be interesting to see if anything turns out!