Chowder supper

In a few days I leave for my kayaking trip. Also I signed up for a weaving course in the city which started this past week but I didn't go to the first class. My next class is scheduled for the night before I leave for the kayaking. I took this course once before and I know that the first class is mostly just talking about what we are going to do so I figured I could skip it, but the next class is when we actually start our projects so I can't skip that. I have prep work for that class, which is to wind a warp for my project. And also prep work for the kayak trip: I am responsible for two meals and of course all my gear. So I will be very busy the next few days.

I did take time to go for a chowder supper in the Harbour though. It was a terribly stormy night and I almost didn't go but I am glad I did. The folks in the Harbour were doing the supper as a fundraiser to pay for renovations on the community hall. A number of years ago the United Church closed the local Harbour church and gifted the church, the cemetery and the tiny parish hall to the community, with a small sum of money for repairs. That money has long since been spent but the need for repairs and upgrades continues. This particular fundraiser is to help pay for the recent addition of plumbing: a bathroom and a kitchen sink and hot water tank in a small addition to the hall.

While at the supper someone emerged from the bathroom saying, "My first flush!" We all took turns washing dishes at the brand new sink with the window looking out over the Bay of Fundy. The parking lot was blocked off due to extreme mud so everyone was parked on the road. One of the fellows told me about the outdoor faucet for anyone to use for drinking water. They got money from an organization that funds community emergency infrastructure to do that and it helped pay for the indoor plumbing. A win-win for the community.

The church is maintained as well, it is used for music concerts. A great little venue that local musicians are happy to play in.

The chowder supper raised over $600.00 and I had a good time talking to people I haven't seen in a while. I washed a few dishes but didn't try the new toilet; I wished I had though by the time I got home.

Sunday August 9, 1998 - Nova Scotia

Wolfville - sunny and hot.

Fritz went up the North Mountain to Baxter's Harbour with his friend James. Later Carolyn and I did the same thing. We stopped at their house in the Harbour for water and conversation, and then walked to Mike and Ruth's, the clearing where my old house used to be, and the old garden house. We looked at herbs in the garden out front. It was a really nice day, way too hot in the Valley and some warm in the Harbour. For local farmers this weather is too hot and dry.

Fritz and James left before we did and were going to start a chicken barbecue back at the house in town. Carolyn and I got home later and Fritz had made vegetable and potato salads. Kurt (their son) started the barbecue and I did the chicken. Careolyn rented a movie, Good Will Hunting, which eventually she and I watched. James went home and Fritz went back to the Harbour to watch the sun set with their daughter Erica.

It was nice being on the land in the Harbour, frustrating not remembering plant names. My old house location looks very bare, even the birches that were around the house are gone. The fire took it all. The house burned down five years ago but I had not lived there in a very long time, so the feelings of loss are long since abated. It's too bad but oh well.

Friday August 7, 1998 - Nova Scotia

On a PEI clay road

Wolfville - sunny and warm.

Today was a kind of mixed up day. Cindy had to go to town in the morning and no one knew when Karl would arrive home. As it turned out Karl couldn't get in until late so Cindy decided to come home instead of waiting for him in Charlottetown. Cindy's oldest son Justin had left two trout on the counter for me. Nicholas showed me how to clean them, he did one and I did the other. Later Justin woke up and I asked him about fish flies and so forth (he makes his own). He said there were lots of fish and he really "hammered" them, but only caught two little ones. After looking in cookbooks, which weren't much help, I finally floured and fried them with lemon juice. After picking out the backbone and ribs they weren't bad.

Harris church

Another church

PEI potato field

When Cindy got home we went through her garden and she picked some stuff for me, cucumbers, cabbage, beets and broccoli. I eventually packed up and left the farm around 3.00 pm. I didn't take the ferry because there were line-ups for that, instead I took the coast road to the bridge and got there around 5.00 pm. I took a few photos of churches and red clay roads along the way.

Across the bridge there was a short trip through New Brunswick to the border of Nova Scotia. In Nova Scotia I took the coast road through Spring Hill, Parrsboro and Bass River (where they make Bass River chairs) because I had never been in that part of the province before. In Parrsboro there was a little geological/dinosaur museum and the Kipawo, the old steamship that used to run through the Minas Basin between Kingsport, Parrsboro and Wolfville (Ki-Pa-Wo). Jack Sheriff of Wolfville mounted a big fundraising campaign to bring the old boat back to Wolfville; he envisaged using it as a kind of floating theatre in the tiny Wolfville Harbour. However, one thing and another, it ended up in Parrsboro. It looked terrible, all covered up in tarps, but apparently they are using it for theatrical productions.

Just outside of Truro I called Fritz and Carolyn who I will be staying with and they recommended coming through the Rawden Hills, Highway 236 via Maitland and Kennetcook. Which I did, arriving in Wolfville around 10.30 pm. Fritz stayed up a bit after I arrived there, Carolyn and I were up till 2.00 am.

More Baxter's Harbour photos

More photos of our walk on Paddy's beach over at the Baxter's Harbour blog. In particular a fabulous photo of Hapi.

Beachcomber asked me to post some of my photos on that blog, but as you will see her photos are so much better than mine that I feel quite inferior in that regard. She has an amazing talent for photography, not to mention a way better camera than mine.

Dog walk on the beach

Went for a walk on Paddy's Beach in the Harbour with beachcomber, who by the way won picture of the month over at Saltscapes Magazine. Not as warm as Thursday butstill sunny and bright. All the snow is gone but as you can see in one or two of these pics there is still a bit of ice.

Phoebe and Hapi chased each other around while Sheila and I clicked away with our cameras. She's expecting me to post some of my photos over at the Baxter's Harbour blog, but she is a way better picture-taker than I am so I think I will just post mine here.

We had a bit of a race with the tide, we knew it was coming in and parts of the beach disappear altogether at high tide so we had to be mindful of that. We timed it perfectly, with a foot or two of beach still left when we headed back.

The Harbour

Beachcomber photographing Hapi

The Harbour waterfall

Rock "drawings"

Beachcomber at work

Paddy's beach

Frozen waterfall

Waves on the cliff

...and the snow geese are flying

I saw snow geese the other day, another sign of spring. They say spring here is 2-3 weeks early. They've started sugaring off already. And all the snow around my place melted yesterday, I see bulbs sprouting. Somehow they got dug up last year and are sitting on the ground surface, not sure what they are yet but they're too big for crocuses or snowdrops.

I went to the Harbour because it was such a gorgeous day, sunny and warm. Ruth is off work for a week after surgery (good news surgery) and Nancy had the day off too (she does shiftwork). We sat on Nancy's deck, Val came by and we walked the dogs. Val's dog Phoebe narrowly missed getting a snout full of quills when she discovered a porcupine under a tree. The porcupine slowly climbed up the tree and I desperately started calling Hapi because she was off in the woods somewhere and I did not want her discovering that porcupine when it was right about her nose-height up that tree. We avoided disaster.

Last year when the time changed it felt way too early, still winter. But the clocks change this weekend and I don't think it will be too early.

Rainy and windy today but tomorrow will be sunny again and wHapi and I are going back to the Harbour for a walk on the beach with beachcomber. Also, the Women's Day Cafe is tonight, local musical women performing, a bunch of us are going to that.

Family visit: Days Three and Four

On Day Three we went to Baxter's Harbour for the fundraising Coffeehouse and Concert.




You can see more photos of the concert here.

The following day we returned to Baxter's Harbour to look around in the daylight.

We went down to the harbour itself to look around. I love the fish houses hanging off the edge here, I guess it's just a matter of time before they fall off altogether:


Josh on the rocks:



We drove into the woods to see the Garden House, the first building we put up on the land in 1975:


Josh liked the creative wiring inside:


This is Josh and me standing on the spot where my house used to stand. I built it in 1975 and it burned down in 1993:


Then we went in further into the woods to visit Mike and Ruth's place:



And of course we went to see my outhouse, built in 2009:

Hooking for dollars

My blogbuddy beachcomber had this brilliant idea that four of us from the Harbour would go to a local hooker and get her to teach us to hook, and then we four would hook a rug of our own design and raffle it off to help pay for the community hall in the Harbour. The hall has racked up some debts that people in the Harbour are always trying to think of ways to pay off.

The hall was gifted to the community by the church, along with the church itself and a small fund to help pay for its upkeep. Emphasis on small. After the wiring and the insulation and the paint and the roof and... well, it was very small.

I think hooking for money is a fabulous idea.

It is pretty though

Sunny day

It's a lovely warm sunny day, after a somewhat muggy and rainy day yesterday. I am hearing about heatwaves in the eastern USA and heavy rain and flooding in the west, but here in Nova Scotia we are having the perfect summer. June had enough rain to satisfy the farmers and gardeners, and enough sun to satisfy the rest of us. And probably the farmers and gardeners too. Last year was terribly buggy here, this year they are making themselves scarce, the bugs that is. The North Mountain is living up to its long time reputation of being almost completely free of them. I saw maybe a couple of black fly last month, and this month a couple of sluggish mosquitoes. Today it is 30C in the Valley and about 25C here on the Mountain, a perfect warm sunny day in the woods.

I hear several different kinds of birdsong and the occasional scolding squirrel, and the chuggling of the brook in the vault below. The stillness broken by occasional bird and squirrel sounds feels as if time has stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing happening, not a damn thing.

A baby chickadee showed up at my birdfeeder yesterday. I had bought some birdseed for the nesting junco, but after she abandoned the nest I put it all in the feeder and strung it up in a tree. The baby chickadee was clearly a novice at this birdfeeder thing, he kept pecking at the seeds he could see through the clear plastic seed bin of the feeder. Could not figure out how to get at those seeds. And he was sufficiently naive that he didn't startle when I came out to get a better look at him. He was obviously a baby, you could still see the down sticking out between the adult feathers. Today he came back, but he seems to be a little more educated now, he flew away when I came too close. And he didn't peck at the clear plastic but rather picked up a seed from the tray and chewed on that.

I will soon be leaving here, won't be staying the whole summer this time. The house hunting is getting down to the wire, I am still looking and there are a couple of options but nothing firm. In a few more days I am going to have to give it up as a lost cause. It is quite discouraging and frustrating. It keeps me too busy to stop and enjoy being in the woods, and not having a phone or internet access is a real impediment. I knew I wouldn't be here long enough to justify having it put in and so far it has only made things more difficult.

Seeing as how this is shaping up to be a perfect summer weather-wise, it really seems a shame to have to cut things short and fill up that short time with real estate business. That's the frustrating part, it seems right now that it is all for nothing. I guess I'd be OK with giving up a summer if I knew it was for a good cause, but at the moment that is not how things are working out.

I was kvetching about it all on the morning dogwalk, Valerie was trying to make helpful suggestions and I really didn't want to hear it. At one point I think she was trying to tell me that I shouldn't be so focussed on future finances, I should just let the future take care of itself and buy something I like regardless of the cost. Which really makes no sense to me. I admit to being fairly cautious about how I spend my money, but I think that has stood me in good stead over the years, I am not inclined to throw caution to the wind now. She thinks I am being extreme about it. I don't think she realizes that I am operating on a much slimmer budget than she is, and there really is no fat to trim.

Another day another meal

Last night the junco babies were in their nest, this morning they were gone and the nest pulled out of its hidey hole and dumped on the ground below.

Mike says he has been watching that nest too, taking photos of it. I have a photo of the eggs, he has photos of the babies. He says the nest was lined with a very fine grey down, and the down also covered the babies so that when he examined the photos he took it appeared as if the babies were in a grey fog. He counted four babies in his photos.

I don't think the snake would have pulled the whole nest out, it might have been a raccoon. But I don't know snakes very well, so perhaps it did. Anyway, the nest failed. There was no down left in the remains of the nest, something gobbled up the entire contents of the nest.

I only ever saw one adult junco at a time, I wonder if it is common for juncos to raise families alone, or if the mate was gone, or if only one of the pair ever showed up at a time. But if there were two parents, it seems odd that they would leave the nest unattended at any time, which indeed was what was happening.

I think actually the babies were dead or dying before the raccoon got to the nest. Last night around dusk the junco was not sitting on the nest, that seemed odd to me that she would leave the nest unattended at night. Certainly she'd been there in the evening every other time I looked. The babies were not moving or making any sound. I think she abandoned the project as a lost cause.

It is still early in the summer, if the junco can find another mate it could start another family.

Junco babies

I was away for a few days, when I came back yesterday I saw the junco still sitting on the nest. A couple of hours later I noticed she was gone and took a peek at the nest from a distance. The eggs are gone and there are a few tiny junco babies in the nest. I couldn't count, I think at least three, and they weren't moving so I think they must just have hatched.

Ghosts

Last night I went for a walk in the woods. It was quite wet out so I wore my gumboots. Nevertheless my pant legs got quite wet from wading through dripping ferns.

After walking around in the woods along the vault for awhile, I came back out onto the road and walked down to the clearing where the house I built used to be. It burned down seventeen years ago. The clearing has been maintained by its current owner as a grassy meadow with flowers: lilies, foxglove, mallows, forget-me-nots and lupins.

I went into the clearing and walked around, finally coming to the place where my house used to stand. I built it in a spot surrounded by beautiful white birches, but those birches were badly scorched in the fire, and now they are all dead. I feel bad about that.

As I was standing there, I thought I could make out the outline of the walls of my house. It was a hexagon, six-sided, and I could make out the six walls as faint lines in the grass. I stood at the spot that would have been the front door. When I built it I put the door in the wall facing the road, but a later owner moved the door around to the opposite wall. I stood where I put the door. I turned around to look at the view, where the path was to the road, where my outhouse was, where the slashpile was beside the house.

And then my father walked by me, from the right to the left, and disappeared. I don't believe in ghosts, but I could see him there, walking by my front door. He died three years after the fire.

It gave me a bit of a chill, a cold sadness for things lost. I could never live there again. Don't think I haven't thought about it, but not now.

The hummingbird

For various reasons I have not put up any birdfeeders this summer. So the blue jays don't come and I hear other birds but rarely see them. The occasional warbler and of course the junco. And the hummingbirds.

Lots of people around here have hummingbird feeders so I am not too worried about them, but I guess they remember my feeder from last year because they still come around, presumably looking for it. I don't see them but I do hear the distinctive hum of their wings.

This morning I was standing under a tall spruce beside my house and I heard a hummingbird. I looked up to see if I could see it. And I did! It was of course looking for the feeder in the general vicinity of where it used to hang, but not finding it I think it saw me and was trying to check me out without me seeing it. So it was flitting around just beyond the spruce branches, kind of peeking at me between the branches. It did this for several seconds, finally coming within five feet of my face, hovering in the air looking directly at me.

Later in the day I was in the back door shed and I heard it again. This time it hovered just outside the doorway and looked in at me. For a moment it looked like it was considering flying right in, but it flew away instead.

I think it was trying to tell me to put up my feeder again.

The junco

There's been a little junco hanging around my front door. Juncoes (juncos?) eat stuff off the ground, you won't see them too often at a birdfeeder, they pick seeds up off the ground. This little junco was hanging around the front door, sometimes actually under the house. I'd see it flying away when I came up to or out of the front door.

Then I noticed that it seemed to have a resting spot under a rock in a little embankment about ten feet from the doorway. A couple of times I saw it fly out of there, as if it were erupting from the ground. I looked but couldn't figure out which little indentation it was coming out of, there were several rocks sticking out and just enough space under them for a little bird to get itself out of the rain.

So I kept watching. I was curious which rock it was hiding under, and what it was doing there.

This morning I found out. I walked over there and the little bird flew out and I saw which rock it flew out from. I looked under that rock and there was a tiny nest with five tiny eggs in it.

I went back into my house and looked out the kitchen window, I could just make out the five little eggs, now that I knew what to look for, and where. The little junco was sitting on a low branch of a nearby baby spruce tree, her back to me, seemingly ignoring me.

I finished my chores and got my bike out to go meet the dogwalking ladies of the Harbour. I met them on the road heading into the woods and I told them the story of the little junco. Valerie likes to come in to my place to use my "throne"---she loves the little throne house I built last year. But I said that as long as the junco is nesting there, I can't have the dogs come in, so I was very sorry but she wouldn't be able to use the throne for awhile. She said that was OK.

When I got back from the dogwalk, I put my bike away and went indoors, not looking at the embankment where the nest is. But I went to the kitchen window and could not see the eggs. The junco was sitting on top of them, but she is so grey that I can't see her at all. Except when she turns her head, and I see the movement of her tiny yellow beak.

I have another close neighbour. Well, there are the squirrels of course, but this year they are not staying in the kitchen door shed where the antlers are. They obviously spent the winter there, but they are gone now. No, my neighbour is a little snake. He is brown, just over a foot long, and he lives under the house. On sunny days he comes out to sleep in the sun on the bedrock at my front door. Other times I see him slithering around the woodpile, or in the grass behind the house. But I am pretty sure he lives under the house. Not ten feet from the junco's nest.

I don't think this will end well.

Barred owls

This is a Barred Owl I saw in the ravine behind Carolyn's house. Its distinguishing feature is the alien-like large black eyes.

When I was walking in the ravine, I passed this owl in a tree and it flew out and down the path in front of me. It landed in this tree and I took a photo of it. But I was uncertain whether it was facing me when I took the photo, so I tried to get a little closer to take another photo. He didn't like that, he sidled further out the branch and reached up with his beak to grab the end of the branch and pull himself up, then tipped forward and silently glided away down the trail.

I guess I was lucky to get this photo, it was the only one he allowed.

We have Barred Owls in the woods here in the Harbour. Some years ago the boy scouts put up some nesting boxes and the owls use them. One nesting pair has produced a baby this year, Ruth and Mike saw it on an evening ramble in the woods recently.

I hear them sometimes in the evening. The parents hoot and the baby mewls, a bit like a lost cat. It's nice to know there's a baby owl out there.

Three pools

I'll be off for awhile. Last trips to Mahone Bay and Cape Breton before heading back to Toronto, don't expect to have time to post here until I get to Toronto. I've spent the last couple of days packing the truck and there's still more to do, but I am leaving tomorrow morning.

It hailed and sleeted this morning and now it's howling out, and I am listening to Matt Anderson on Holger Petersen's Saturday Night Blues. My favourite blues man.


This is a favourite spot of mine on the Fraser Brook. We used to call it the Three Pools, but it isn't really three pools. Its main feature is a water slide into the pool at the bottom. When my kids were little we used to come down here in the summer and the kids would slide into the pool while the adults sunned themselves on the rock beside the pool.



Sheila had never been here before, so I took her and her daughter Jana down here the other day. We had to cross someone else's property to get here, but he didn't mind. Sheila has lived in the Harbour for many years and never knew about this spot.

We had a potluck lunch at Valerie's on Friday, it was very fine. Curried squash soup, hummus and pita bread, chicken stirfry, marinated tomato slices on white rolls, and cake and tea. The dog walk ladies gave me a going away card, but Nancy said it wasn't really a going away card, it was a come back again card. Sherry told a horrific story about having hornets in her house walls, she figured she had already killed hundreds and they were still going strong. While she was having lunch with us, the exterminator was trying to find the hornet's nest. She said if any kids showed up at her door on Hallowe'en as hornets, she'd squash 'em.

Fader house

From a distance, this little house looks OK, cute even.


It was built in the '70s by a young family, a series of different people lived here over the years. I don't know when the last person moved out, but it then began it's slow decline into what it is today.


I took these photos last year, this year it is in even worse shape.



The location is lovely, perched on the edge of the vault with a view down onto the Fraser Brook. At one point we thought that it might actually have been built on someone else's land, it was so close to the boundary of the hundred acre woods. But an aerial view proved it to be placed on the right side of that boundary.

Socks and tiers

I brought some knitting along with me from Toronto, but I have done very little work on it, too much else to do I guess. However I thought I'd show what I have done so far anyway.


This is a pair of socks in Fleece Artist sock yarn, Fleece Artist is Nova Scotian. I had quite a bit of the sock on the left done when I arrived and started the second sock here. The reason the two socks are still on needles is because I want to make both of them the same length (duh...) and don't know how far this ball of yarn will go.

It's hard to see the pattern, but basically it's kind of a leaf motif. You can make it out on the right side of the sock in the middle, the left side has the same motif in mirror-image. I found it in a book of knitting stitches and decided to try it out on a pair of socks. I love the colours!

These are toe-up socks, you start at the toe and work up. There is a technique for doing both socks at once, but I would have had to divide my yarn into two balls right at the beginning and use a very long (or maybe two very long) circular needle(s), but I didn't do that.

While in showing off mode, here is my neighbour's handiwork tiering wood. I've never heard that term before, I always say 'stacking' wood, but 'tiering' is the correct term around here.


Another neighbour thought this photo was a classic Nova Scotian fall dooryard scene: the squash (on the purple picnic table), the firewood, and the apple trees.


My neighbour is finished tiering, the last of the pile on the left is being burned now so no point moving it around. Great job, eh?

The Dog House

The Dog House was built some time after the Kat Kabin, it never aspired to be a work of art. The owner-builder had a beagle named Annie; it's kind of weird to hear a dog being called by your name.