Bread and fences

Didn't sleep too well last night, no doubt the change in the weather. Drop in barometric pressure, low pressure passing through don't you know. I think the other term for it is depression. Anyway, not a lot of sleep.

Lying there awake and wishing I wasn't, thinking the kind of thoughts you end up thinking at times like that. What passed through my mind was an incident that happened a very long time ago, and some of the stuff that happened as a result of that incident. It occurred to me that my whole life was about that one incident. Not a pleasant thought.

I thought about how it affected other people, and how that affected me, the ripples kept moving out and out and it was getting very unpleasant. I think though that the thing that got to me the most was that it was a damn stupid thing to have your whole life be about. I hate when that happens. Can I have a do-over?


It started raining this morning. We had a week of hot humid weather and the rain seemed like a relief. The garden sure needed it. And the greyness of it all suited my mood. Last night the hardware store called to tell me my order was in so I was going to go pick it up, but I didn't want to do it in the rain. Checked the radar on the internet and it looked like the rain was going to end in the afternoon, I hoped it would end before the hardware store closed.

I made bread in the meantime. I waited all week for today to make bread, I sure didn't want to be running the oven in the heat.

Bread has become an obsession lately. I read My Bread by Jim Lahey and that got me started. Not that I haven't made bread before, I have. In fact I really started when I was pregnant with my first kid, so that would be over 40 years ago. [you know you're old when you're kid celebrates his fortieth!] But Jim Lahey's book turned me on to 'artisanal' bread.

Lahey's breadmaking method is virtually foolproof. I've made more mistakes with it and still ended up with great bread. From there I read a couple more books on breadmaking, including Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. As the result of a comment I made on her blog, A little red hen directed me to a TED talk that Reinhart did on breadmaking, in which he talked about a technique he uses to bring out the flavour of whole grain flours in bread and today I thought I'd try it. I already have a sourdough starter I made a couple of months ago based on his recipe, and his technique is essentially to start two doughs, one with the starter and one without. After letting them set for however long you mix them together, form a loaf and let it rise. Then I follow Jim Lahey's method for baking the loaf in a Dutch oven. I've been meaning to try Reinhart's baking method, but I like the Lahey method so much that so far I haven't tried any other.


Anyway, the bread turned out great, I had some for supper. Split pea soup (with free-range locally cured ham), homebaked bread and a salad of fresh local greens and locally made feta. Oh yes and the rain stopped before the hardware store closed so I whipped down to pick up my order.

In preparation for the impending arrival of up to three giant dogs I am building a fence. Most of it is wooden but part of it is going to be metal fence (at the hardware store they call it corn crib fence) because the area it has to go through is just too difficult to install the wooden fence in. The hardware order was the corn crib fence, a hundred feet of it. If all goes well, we will install it on Monday.



The twenty-something son of a friend is helping me with the work that requires big young muscles (pounding spikes and T-rail posts into the ground). He's also painting his mother's house, so he likes to spend the best part of the day doing that, which is fine by me because I am happy to spend only a few hours a day on this project. It is going much faster than I expected though, I thought all this spike and post pounding was going to take much longer than it has.



This fence will have one major drawback, not being able to walk off the property anywhere I want. I am putting three gates in it but that still doesn't seem like enough. The dogs better appreciate what I do for them.



The photo at the top of this post is of the flowering dogwood in front of my house.

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.

Two books I've read

I found this draft posting from a couple of months ago and thought it was still kind of interesting so I upgraded it from Draft to Published. These are books I read in February that I really enjoyed.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (2010).

This is the story of Louie Zamperini, who lived quite the amazing life as he moved from being a juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner to warplane crash survivor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to Japanese POW. The story is absolutely rivetting, I lost a night's sleep because I couldn't put it down at bedtime.

This guy, born in 1917 and still alive, lived through the most harrowing life-threatening experiences, first floating over 2,000 miles in a life raft during wartime and then surviving a Japanese prisoner of war camp where they thought the Geneva Convention was for sissies. He returned home to the United States at the end of the war, an emotionally scarred man who scared the heck out of his beautiful new wife with his terrible nightmares and heavy drinking. Fortuitously he went to a Billy Graham revival and turned his life over to God, which apparently saved him, allowing him to forgive his worst POW camp tormenter and move on in life without terrorizing the people who loved him.

As an enthralling true-life adventure story, this book takes the cake. The author, Laura Hillenbrand, previously wrote Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), so she is no stranger to best seller lists. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down until I finished it, losing a night's sleep in the process. The librarian also couldn't resist it either when it arrived at the library as the result of my interlibrary loan request. She borrowed it after I returned it.

Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected Past, by Robert Hunter and Robert Calihoo (1991)

This is the amazing story of Robert Calihoo, as told to Robert Hunter. Hunter was (he died in 2005) a journalist and one of the founders and the first president of Greenpeace; Calihoo is a First Nations man who for the first ten years of his life was raised by his white grandmother and did not know of his Indian heritage. On the death of his grandmother he was quickly returned to his birth mother, a woman he never knew until then. She also was white but had had three children by an Indian man on the Calihoo Reserve.

Life with his birth mother and her current partner (a white man) was a rough shock for the young boy and things quickly deteriorated for him. Eventually, as a teenager he sought out his birth father. He called 411 from a public phone booth and asked for him by name, but he didn't know his location so the directory assistance woman spent a good long time searching for the name in the listings for the entire province. Several hours later his father drove up to the public phone booth where Robert made that fateful call. For the first time in his life Robert realized his father was an Indian.

For a brief period Robert lived on the reserve with his new found father. It was an extremely rough life in the dire poverty typical of such reserves, but the highlight for Robert was going hunting and fishing in the bush with his Dad. Hunting and fishing in the bush was a wonderful life, and doing it with his father was icing on the cake. A far cry from his middle class upbringing in his grandmother's suburban house.

Through a bizarre turn of events Robert and all of the other Calihoos lost the reserve and ended up on the streets of Edmonton. Robert soon found that the only way to survive was through a life of crime, and the next dozen years or so were spent in and out of prison. However, during that time Robert pursued an education, eventually graduating with a university degree.

One life project Robert took on was to regain the old Calihoo Reserve that had been lost. By the end of the book we still don't know if he was successful in that project, but in the process he found out a lot about his ancestry and how exactly the reserve was lost. In essence it was stolen from them illegally.

The history of the Calihoos was fascinating, they were actually descended from Iroquois who migrated to Alberta in search of land. Two brothers, Louis and Bernard Karhiio, travelled all the way from what is now Quebec to the Rockies in search of unclaimed land, that is, land that no one, not even the native First Nations, had ever laid claim to. They actually managed to find a large parcel of land that fit the bill, in the Rocky Mountain foothills of modern day Alberta. So far as anyone knows this is the only piece of land on the entire continent that had never been claimed by any nation or tribe as part of their territory up until that time (the 1790s). The brothers returned to their village of Kahnawake just outside of present-day Montreal and convinced some family members to return with them to settle that piece of land.

The Karhiios (their name eventually changed to Calihoo) settled there, built log homes and proceeded to hunt, trap and raise crops and livestock. Unlike the Plains Indians, the Iroquois were ancient farmers. They were very successful in their new setting. Unfortunately they got caught up in the troubles that Plains Indians and Metis faced at the hands of the Canadians seeking to expand westward to the Pacific. When the Canadians made treaties with the Indians, it was assumed that the Calihoos were local Crees. To the Calihoos there was no advantage at the time to setting the Canadians straight on their identity. They took their treaty settlement and returned to farming.

But then the bison were hunted out and plague came to the Prairies. The Iroquois Calihoos were not dependent on the bison and had acquired some immunity to European diseases, but not enough. In the end they were just as ravaged and destitute as the rest of the Plains tribes, vastly reduced in population and ability to support themselves.

The duplicity of the Canadians who negotiated and enforced the treaties, who changed the terms of the treaties without notice and who created the Indian Act to further oppress native First Nations is described and documented in this book, as well as the racial discrimination and abuse heaped on the lazy drunken Indian. It is not an easy book to read, but Robert Calihoo's struggle to rise above all that is inspiring.

With a little research on the web, I found the website for the Calihoo Band, now called the Michel Band (after their first chief Michel, son of Louie Karhiio). Reading on this website, it would appear that the fight to regain government recognition as a bona fide Indian band is still in litigation.

What struck me about this book was both the personal struggle of the author and the peek into an aspect of history I would never have been aware of otherwise. When we think about the history of exploration of North America, we automatically assume the explorers were white Europeans, it never occurs to us that there might have been aboriginal explorers and settlers too. The Karhiio brothers knew a lot more about the lay of the land than the white explorers they guided, but they had the same curiosity and sense of adventure in exploring new territory. Their superior knowledge of the aboriginal peoples already occupying the land they explored helped them find what they were looking for, a bit of land to claim for their own.

Kathleen, the dancing crossing guard

Kathleen lives in my old Toronto neighbourhood. She's the crossing guard for my grandson Tristan's school. She's also his little brother Phelan's favourite babysitter. Can't imagine why.

Oh what fun...

Graduating

Just read an excellent Op-Ed by David Brooks in the New York Times (It's Not About You). Brooks is writing about college commencement addresses. Graduating classes in colleges across North America are listening at this time of year to speeches delivered mostly by successful Baby Boomers, telling them how to succeed in life, and as Brooks says, these speeches pretty much sum up the whole baby boomer theology:

"Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture."

What Brooks says about that message just rings so true to me. He points out that for a 20/22-year-old the sequence is wrong, one doesn't form a sense of one's self and then go out and create a life around that self-image. For most people one's sense of oneself grows out of life experience not the other way around. There are a few folks who emerge from their education with a fully formed idea of what they want to do in life, but for most they emerge like prisoners from jail: just happy to be out and wondering what to do next.

There are all sorts of messages out there on how to be happy by living in the moment, meditating to find a peaceful centre to alleviate stress and find a solid happy core from which to operate in life. One is exhorted to stop worrying and planning and doing and just Be Here Now. Laudable, but I think misguided.

I think that Being Here Now is something that happens naturally as one ages, one gets to that point through life experience and aging anyway. I don't think it is something that one ought to pursue deliberately right from the get-go. Perhaps the business of young life is to be out there doing stuff and experiencing life, not blissing out. One lesson one learns from experience is that finding inner peace is not really something that can be taught, you have to get there from inner turmoil. Inner turmoil comes pretty naturally, usually from outer turmoil.

David Brooks appears to be saying something similar. You get to wisdom through experience, and experience is usually hard-won dealing with life's tasks and problems as they come up. How one copes with a crappy dead-end job and a mean stupid boss might just be a source of great wisdom later in life; the perfect job in the chosen field of one's dreams isn't necessarily the best outcome in life, nor the one where one makes the greatest contribution to one's community, family or society.

In addition he suggests that what our culture needs most now is not a whole lot of young people out there finding themselves, but losing themselves. That self-centredness is pretty much a core value that has run its course, maybe we need a little less of it. How to suppress one's self might be a greater life skill than how to express one's self.

Of course, most college grads are going to learn that anyway, life has a tendency to do that to a person. I think that self-fulfillment often comes up from behind, you don't get there by pursuing it directly.

The down side of to-do lists

As noted in my previous post, I started another to-do list last week. It is getting out of hand.

I have only managed to cross off a couple of items on the list, but have added close to a dozen more items to the list. The list is way longer than it was originally, and it is starting to resemble that amorphous black cloud I was talking about. And now I remember this about to-do lists, they get longer not shorter.

Every item I cross off invariably adds a couple more items to the list stemming from that one accomplished task, either that or it triggers a memory of some other item I previously forgot to put on the list. And eventually the list gets so long I have to abandon it.

Yesterday I got a call from a lady who is going to give me a tutorial in setting up my loom for weaving tea towels, we settled on dates and things I needed to do in preparation.

After I got off the phone I thought, This is one more thing for the to-do list.

And then I thought, Oh no! It's too long already!

I did not add it to the list. The beginning of the end.

Three things and a beer

Yesterday I got two things accomplished, well three actually.

1. Went to the new Market.

Our local farmer's market has its own building now, yesterday was the official opening. Up until yesterday the Market was held in a parking lot in the summer and at the university student union building (the old Sub) in the winter. On the one hand it is great they have their own digs now, and appropriately in an old apple storage warehouse. On the other hand it is dark and echo-ey. It was packed and the crowds and noise were quite overwhelming. Several regular vendors were notably not present, for a variety of reasons.

2. Assembled my new lawnmower.

Jeesh!! Took almost the whole afternoon! These days, everything comes in a box, unassembled. And to read the instructions you'd think every purchaser has a fully-equiped workshop to hand.

It was cold and rainy and I was trying to assemble the darn thing in an unlit shed with a collection of scrounged tools. Five different sizes of wrenches required!! I have the most mismatched collection of wrenches imaginable, it was painful just putting the required tool list together, never mind actually assembling the darn thing. Instructions called for securely blocking the chassis while working, I balanced it precariously on an assortment of firewood logs.

There were two sets of instructions, one for putting together all the bits and pieces and one for preparing the gas engine for use, each published independently of the other. Having once made a living writing instructions for a variety of machines, processes and procedures, I will restrain myself from huffing and puffing over the inadequacies of these two sets of instructions, but I am offended that after centuries of work on improving such things, abominable instructions are still the norm.

3. Made a to-do list.

I make these things when I am overwhelmed by how much there is to do, somehow putting it in writing makes it feel like I have some control over it. Unwritten if feels like an amorphous weighty black cloud hovering somewhere above and behind me; I know it's there but I can't really see the extent or urgency of it. Once written it looks sort of manageable. I blithely attach "By When" dates (knowing full well it will never happen, but hey, we can dream) and feel like I have A Plan.

The list goes in my List Book, a notebook dedicated to this activity alone. It contains to-do lists dating back several years and over several home locations. Kind of funny reading all the things I thought I would do, but a lot of it actually got done. The big things anyway.

Sell condo.
Move.
Build kayak.
Buy house.
Pack my stuff, over and over and over.
Fix the truck, again and again and again.

On my current list I thought that after I got the lawnmower assembled I would then bake some cookies. However, it turned out I didn't have one key ingredient for the chosen recipe and had no desire to pick another recipe, so I have left that to-do undone and added "Go Shopping" to the list. Maybe tomorrow.

As my reward for accomplishing two---maybe three---things, I went to a play in the evening, a local production of Oliver!

In spite of some of the characters in that story being familiar to me, I did not know the story itself. I have avoided all things Dickensian (with the possible exception of the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol) since my first encounter with David Copperfield in high school. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the production even though it was incredibly schmaltzy. It did nothing to convince me to rethink my attitude toward Dickens, but the players were good and community theatre is A Good Thing. They even managed to recruit some three-year-olds to participate in the production and they were quite hilarious.

After the show the entire cast quickly moves from the stage to the theatre lobby so they are there to greet the audience as we emerge from the theatre. It's quite nice to be able to see and talk to all the players, congratulate them while they wave at and greet the audience they could not see while performing.

My friend and I checked the time when we were outside in the parking lot, the night was still young, so we went to the pub for some music and beer. Thugs@Bay were playing, we got seats at the bar in view of the band and spent the remains of the evening listening, drinking and chatting with friends. There is no dance floor in this pub but some young folks were dancing in the narrow floor space between tables and booths, even one waitress danced around with beers and bills. We were so close to the band that between sets we chatted with them as well. They commented on the music scene in this town, how it was such a great place for a young band to get started, and how much musical talent there was in the area.

Next on the list is "Mow the lawn". If it warms up, maybe later today...

The sun appears, full-on summer has arrived

This post would enormously benefit from photos, alas, I have not taken any. It's been a bittersweet few days, on the one hand recovering emotionally from Sam's departure and on the other hand wallowing in the pleasure of sunshine after a month of rain. Please excuse the rambling nature of this post.

~~~~~~~~

Within minutes of Sam's flight taking off to return him to the west coast, the sun broke through. The rest of the day and all of the next was sunny and blue-skied. Just about every lawn in the entire province got mowed in those two days. It was the background hum everywhere you went. Fields of yellow dandelions, orchards full of dandelions, all were mowed from brilliant yellow back to vibrant green. Actually I kind of miss the dandelions.

Well no I don't. I didn't mow my lawn and it is full of dandelions so I still have lots of yellow. I spent the last three days weeding, pruning and seeding but not mowing as my lawn is still soaking wet. Today was supposed to be rainy---stormy even---but I think someone must have slapped the Weatherman around a bit because all we got was one very light shower.

Two of my four garden frames are now planted. The other two have no soil in them yet so instead I have piled them high with all the weeds I pulled; I am hoping to kill them and use them in my compost. Or maybe as mulch. Anyway, a couple more sunny days should do them in and dry them out nicely.

I pruned several bushes and the lowest branches on a blue spruce so the lawn mower can get around them easier. Two shrubs are in flower right now, a forsythia and something I don't know the name of, I will wait until they have finished flowering before I prune them. Three lilacs got pruned and a bush that has no leaves yet so I have no idea what it is. I pulled up a tonne of very tall grass that has invaded the large garden area on the north side of the back yard, and deadheaded all the tulips that are finished blooming.

I wanted to prune the grape vine, but I am unsure what I can do with it. I look at the vineyards around here (this is great wine country) and it looks like they prune the vines back to almost nothing, but I just can't tell what is dead and what is alive on mine. So I will wait and see, maybe next year I'll get it right.

My neighbour has chives and lily-of-the-valley to give away, I'd like to ask her for a cutting or two of her periwinkle too. I've got some lawn patches I'd like to convert to periwinkle so I don't have to mow it (slopes, and the area under the pines). She told me that the previous owner of my place went a little nuts buying plants and sticking them in the ground.

He'd plant them and forget about them. So the place is full of stuff that has never really been taken care of, and some stuff is planted in odd places. Like the line of tulips in the grassy strip between our two driveways. It makes mowing difficult. And the plum tree on the north side of the house between two big pines, it gets hardly any sun.

There are hosta, solomon's seal, forget-me-nots, lilies and irises coming up. There's one, possibly two, peonies. Some strange flowers by the deck that I have never seen before. When they first came up I thought they were grasses, I almost pulled them out but there was something just a little odd about them.

I am watching the cedar out front closely, it does not look healthy. It was just a little bush when I lived here before, now it is tree-sized but not particularly healthy. Maybe it needs fertilizer? I don't know what its problem is. It'd be a shame to lose it, the birds like it. On stormy winter days it gives them shelter from the wind.

The horse chestnut in the back is about to flower and I believe there's a dogwood in the front. In the field beyond my yard are two trees that might be maples, but they have not leafed out yet. Which is good, I still have a view of the Minas Basin and Cape Blomidon which will disappear when the two trees are fully greened up.

While I was away kayaking last week a friend picked up a lawn mower for me that was on sale. It is still in the box so I have to assemble it before I can mow. I am planning to do that Sunday or Monday. Also get more horse manure for the two empty garden frames. And supposedly I can take possession of my own plot on the Acadia Community Farm this Sunday, although I am not holding my breath on that. Everything has been delayed by all the rain.

I haven't decided yet what I will plant at the Farm plot, but I have a lot of seed packets to try. Squash for sure, probably beans, maybe brussels sprouts. Potatoes? I want to start a herb garden but not sure yet where. I also have some asparagus and strawberries to plant, I think they will go into the big garden on the north side but first I have to take out all the grass and weeds there. I am about one-third done with that.

Thursday was such a gorgeous day! Everybody around here was in such a good mood, the first full day without any rain. It was even hot! I think we all could hardly believe our good luck, it was starting to look like the rain had moved in for good. In between weeding and seeding and pruning I also got two loads of laundry out on the line, I believe this is the first time in a month I've been able to get even one load out there.

Today I put up screens on the windows to keep the black fly out, and I am grateful that the maple in front of my west window has leafed out because it blocks the sun there. It is now hot enough to actually prefer not to get sun coming in the windows. I don't remember there being black fly in town when I lived here before, but they are certainly here now.

Can't work in the garden without a bugshirt and bugpants, but I have to take frequent breaks because it is so hot. I also have to wear rain boots because the lawn is so wet. When I was planting one of my garden frames I could hear the water running under the grass!

There is so much birdsong now too. I never used to like starlings but they are quite musical here. And of course the robins. Yesterday I heard a red winged blackbird in the field behind my back yard, that was great to hear. I love them. I don't see much of the cardinals these days but I do hear them a lot.

I watched a pair of blue jays getting it on in my maple a few days ago. They are cute together. One of them goes into the birdfeeder and gets seeds which he (she?) puts in the other one's beak. Ah, spring.

The Weatherman is still forecasting rain for the next week or so, this may only be a brief respite, we shall see. It sure has been nice though.

Sam brings on the rain

It is Noah's ark time just about across the country now. Flooding in Manitoba and Quebec, rain everywhere. Here folks complain they will go crazy if it rains again tomorrow, which of course it does. Shades of the west coast!!! Thanks to major flooding along the Mississippi, Red and Assiniboine rivers a friend of mine says we can look forward to skyrocketing food, building material and insurance costs this summer.

I finally mowed my lawn on Saturday, I kept waiting for a dry day to do it and consulting the weather forecast for the best dry day available. But the weatherman kept moving the dry day out: first it was Thursday, then Saturday, then the following Wednesday, then the next Saturday. So I gave up and mowed in the wet. Got most of the lawn done except for one corner where I would have lost the borrowed mower in the deep water. The rest of the lawn looks quite ugly now, with deep muddy furrows where the mower wheels sank in. But it was either that or wait till the grass was well beyond knee high.


The plum tree outside my bedroom window is in blossom.


Sam is here till Wednesday. He sleeps till noon and presumably is up well past midnight; I wouldn't know, I collapse well before that. This visit is slower-paced than with Josh and Kim since Sam has less interest in sightseeing. We did go to the Harbour and to the town reservoir, but beyond that, not a lot of driving around.

Sam reconnected with an old elementary school friend (we moved away when he was in grade 3) who gave him a midnight walking tour of the town. The last time those boys saw each other was 18 years ago when they were both teenagers, it was kind of cute seeing them reconnect, they were both a little shy and wondering if they still had anything in common. But of course they did.


I will miss him when he leaves.

12 hours to stop Uganda’s anti-gay bill!

May 13 - From Avaaz.org:

Great news -- the bill has has been shelved! Together, we've won a major fight for equality and justice. Over 1.6 million of us signed the petition opposing the anti-gay bill, tens of thousands of us called our heads of state, and we helped make the attack on gay rights in Uganda a major international news story -- and it worked.

Today, under intense global pressure, the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament blocked the anti-gay bill from coming to a vote in the emergency session. Now Parliament has closed and the bill has been wiped from the books. It's not necessarily gone for good, but to be considered again, it would have to be reintroduced as a new bill and go through the whole Parliamentary process -- which took 18 months last time.

May 11 - From Avaaz.org:

We have 12 hours to save thousands of gay Ugandans from possible execution. On Wednesday, Parliament could pass a law that imposes the death penalty for homosexuality. An international outcry shelved this bill last year — if we can ramp up the pressure again and keep the gay death penalty law from reaching a vote this week, it will die when Parliament closes in 12 hours.

Click below to sign the petition:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_stop_homophobia_petition

Don't complain, camp in the rain

I've been away on a great kayak camping trip in the rain the past 5 days, with 3 women friends in a wilderness area of this small province. We camped at water-access-only word-of-mouth-locations in the Milford Lakes area and had a great, if rather soggy, time. We each were responsible for 3 meals and the food was great. We brought along books for whiling away the time when it was too wet and windy to do anything else, and shared a crossword puzzle book for entertainment.

On Mother's Day my iPhone rang a couple of times with calls from farflung offspring, it was so bizarre to hear a phone ring in the wilderness!!

The black fly were out in hordes, but this is the very beginning of their season and they're young, they don't quite know the ropes yet. So they hang around your face and hands in buzzing clouds, but they seemed to bite almost by accident. We of course had bug shirts and bug dope for protection nevertheless. At night our tents were filled with the little buggers, but they seemed not to be aware of us, more concerned with finding a way out than finding a free meal.

But the paddling was sublime...


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Another hiatus

Tonight I go to the airport to pick up my youngest son who is visiting for a week, so I may or may not find time to post more about the kayak trip.

Slutwalk

I heard about this on CBC Radio yesterday, Jian Ghomeshi hosted a pretty heated debate between two feminists about the value of the Slutwalk phenomenon.

The first Slutwalk was held in Toronto on Sunday, April 3, as a response to a cop advising some women that to avoid sexual assault they should not dress like sluts. So a group of friends decided they had had it up to here with that kind of talk and ended up organizing a 3,000-strong protest march (more info here). Wow.

The debate is, some feminists feel that it can't be done, you can't rehabilitate the word "slut". It demeans and shames women, particularly young women. But some others feel, yes you can. It's been done for "queer", why not for "slut"? A young woman should not be shamed for wanting strut her stuff, what is so awful about that?

You know, I agree. They're right.

Sometimes, as a woman of a certain age, I am rather shocked by how some young women and girls dress. I could never do that. And sometimes I have that cop's thought, they are asking for trouble dressing like that.

But on the other hand I am fed up to here with a world and a society that thinks how you dress is a reflection of your character, and if your character doesn't measure up then you deserve whatever ill treatment someone else chooses to dish out. It's OK to assault a woman because she looks like a whore.

My god! It is not even OK if she is a whore! And just because she dresses in a way that makes some guy think of whores, is no excuse for anything. First of all, it is that guy who makes himself think that way, not the woman or her clothes. Second of all, even if he makes himself think that way still does not give him any excuse to think he can jump her without her consent. Even a whore. She does it for money, a guy has to pay for that, he can't just take it.

A woman has the right to dress however nicely or badly as she wants. You can disapprove, you can criticize, you can be shocked and appalled, you can even bar her entrance into your home or dress-code space. But you can't assault her. And as long as there are people who think that you can connect the dots between lust or disgust and assault then we have a big problem.

The language we use shapes our thinking. When we use words like "slut" or "whore" we conjure up certain images and we respond viscerally. Our visceral responses are our own responsibility, no one else's. We can change the meaning of words, we can change how we respond to those words. Language is alive, we can change it, we do not have to be prisoners to words.

So when they say they want to take back the word "slut", I agree with them. It's time.

Lumber? Check.

Yesterday I attempted to get a bunch of things on my to-do list off. Filed my income tax, paid some bills, made some phone calls seeking information. Like, where can I get a kitchen compost bin for free/cheap? Where can I get topsoil cheap? When is the local sawmill open and what do they charge for the lumber I want? Can I borrow a gardening book from a neighbour today? Unlike many, I want to get on the flyer list, not off, and for the second time I phoned in a request to get on. I guess that is so unusual that they didn't believe me the first time.

Largely the info calls were unsuccessful, although after a fourth try I did get someone at the sawmill who told me to just drop by and pick up the lumber I wanted. I forgot to ask if they took credit cards (most likely they do but I just wanted to make sure) so I thought I'd drop by the bank for some cash in case they didn't. And since the post office was next door to the bank, I'd check my mail while I was at it. Here, we don't get door-to-door delivery, but have mailboxes at the post office.

Anyway, I was successful getting cash at the bank, but there was no mail for me. And when I got to the sawmill, the owner's wife told me "the boys" were in the woods and due back any time so I could wait if I wanted. After a few minutes of chatting and looking at various dusty knick-knacks around the office (handmade by customers) I said I was going down the road for tea at a friend's and could she call me when the boys showed up.

When I arrived at my friend's place she called a neighbour who whisked over and we all sat down to tea and biscuits with my friend's fine china given to her by her husband's grandmother. After a half hour or so of chatter about this that and t'other thing, I got the call from the sawmill lady, the boys were back and whenever I was finished at tea I could come on by.

Another half hour of chat and tea and I drove back to the sawmill. The owner met me on the driveway in and directed me to follow him and his giant black dog down a very muddy road behind the mill, across a creek and up the hill into a field. He pointed to a muddy wet pile of 2'x8's under a blackberry bush and told me I could take whatever I needed from that. The planks were all about 7' long, perfect for my needs, except I wanted some of them cut in half. He told me to pick out what I wanted and take the planks needing cutting to "the young feller" at the mill and he'd cut them up for me.

I wasn't sure but I gathered that he was giving me the planks, they were scrap to him, but I thought asking his young feller to cut them up was probably pushing the limits of free. Anyway, I picked out twelve planks and drove back to the mill and asked the not-so-young feller to cut four of them in half for me, which he did.

I then drove back to the sawmill office to offer payment for the job. The giant black dog bounded out from the sawmill and stood in the road in front of me, I couldn't pass him and he showed no inclination to move. Finally he spotted his master walking toward the office and slowly turned to follow him, allowing me to do the same.

When I went into the office the sawmill owner charged me $2.00 "nuisance fee". I only had $1.75 so he took that. I want to build four garden bed frames and these planks are enough to do that, $1.75 plus gas is a not-bad price.

I have an abundant source of free horse manure, some of which I have already shovelled into garbage bins awaiting the frames. I will lay down some of the cardboard from my moving boxes, put the frames on top and the manure inside. I will also need straw and topsoil, I don't expect to get a deal on the topsoil so that will be the expensive item. But I am hoping that I will only need to get topsoil once, the manure should be rotted enough by next year to not need any more store-bought topsoil. I will not use all of the garden frames this year, some of them I am starting for use next year.

On our trip down The Valley when Josh and Kim and Eva were here I noticed a small shop that sold old wooden windows; I was thinking I'd go back and pick up a few for use as cold frames, maybe my garden frames could do double duty.

I have also joined the Acadia Community Farm to get a small allotment out on the dykes and hopefully some experience and advice from fellow gardeners. The Farm has a small field divided in half, one half for personal allotments and one half for a community garden producing food for the local food bank and the university dining hall (the field is on university land). Every member is required to put in time in the community garden in addition to work on their own allotment garden. I look forward to the allotment as a great learning experience and a decent-sized garden space ready-made. In the meantime I can start a few things at home in one of the garden frames and have the rest of the frames developing for next year.

Josh and I were looking at the playset in the back yard while he was here and he suggested turning it into a greenhouse. It faces the wrong way for a greenhouse, but it could work. I am debating whether I really need a playset for grandchildren who live thousands of kilometres away, or would I be better served with a greenhouse. I'm leaning toward greenhouse.

It's A-frame shaped, so a few planks and some heavy-duty plastic thrown over the whole thing will turn it into a decent greenhouse I think. Maybe some strawbales around the base. The straw will help insulate and will generate heat as it rots, or so the theory goes.

And that will be one less plot of back yard that doesn't need mowing. My real goal in all this is to greatly reduce the amount of lawn mowing I need to do.

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!!!).

Family visit: Days One and Two

The next few posts are photos from my family's visit in Nova Scotia last week. We did a bit of sightseeing, well actually, quite a lot of sightseeing. For one short week I think Josh, Kim and Eva saw a heck of a lot of this little province. But not nearly enough of course. We didn't even get into The City! [Nova Scotia has a couple of cities, but "The City" refers to Halifax.] Or Cape Breton!

We took a lot of photos but somehow missed photographing The Valley (Annapolis, that is). We managed to drive down a good part of it, all the way from Wolfville to Middleton. Stopped at a wonderful antique store where Kim picked up a couple of lovely large old kids' story books.

We visited Halls Harbour and took some photos there, but I am not including them here. I am sure if you google Halls Harbour you will see some good pics. Also, google the Halls Harbour webcam for really great views of the giant Fundy tides (up to 30 ft here I think).

OK, here we go with the first day.

Hanging out at home:



We walked down the hill to see the town on a cold but sunny day:


We stopped at a local farm for eggs, and the farmer gave us a tour of the barnyard and showed off his biggest lamb:



Unfortunately, Kim was ill on the second day here so we let her sleep and took a short walk to the town reservoir for the view:


This is Eva doing her incognito film star act:

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:

Family visit: Day Five, part one

On the fifth day we did a marathon trip from Wolfville down The Valley to Middleton, then across the province to Bridgewater and Lunenburg on the South Shore, along the South Shore to Peggy's Cove just outside of Halifax, and then back across the province to Wolfville. It was a very long day in lousy weather.

We walked the streets of Lunenburg in the wind and rain:



This is an old and famous church in Lunenburg, it had a fire a few years ago but has been largely restored to its former glory:


The green house on the left in this photo is the oldest house in Lunenburg, built in 1760. It is a good example of an architectural feature known as the "Lunenburg Bump". That's the gable-like feature sticking out over the front door:


Here's another example of a Lunenburg Bump:


Kim spotted this store front:


I think the reflection in the window is yet another Lunenburg Bump.

Well, by this time we were all tired and grumpy. The initial plan called for a leisurely drive along the South Shore soaking up the sights of quaint old fishing villages and white sand beaches, but at this point we were faced with the choice of returning home, or a fast highway drive to Peggy's Cove and then home.

We decided to chance the Peggy's Cove trip, hoping that our tempers and patience, not to mention Eva's temper and patience, would hold out. We got lucky.

Family visit: Day Five, part two

Peggy's Cove is a major tourist attraction in Nova Scotia. Hard to visit the province and not visit Peggy's Cove. In a way, visiting it during stormy weather is kind of neat, you get to see the big waves on the rocks, even if the wind is too strong to really spend much time outside of the car looking around.



Very fortunately for us there's a lovely restaurant and gift shop, the Sou'wester, right by the Peggy's Cove lighthouse. I'm sure that in the high season it would have been very crowded and busy, but on a stormy April Monday, the only other customers were a couple of brave bikers. There were more staff than customers!

So we got a great table and could spread out and let Eva explore:


She got to see the aquarium and the tank of live lobster. We each picked out a lobster and our waitress took our choices to the kitchen for the inevitable fate of all lobsters unlucky enough to end up in a restaurant tank:


Do I look a little skeptical? It did taste good though:


The view and the tubs of cracked lobster shell:


We left there a bit lighter in the wallet, satisfied and tired. The staff were wonderful and we very much enjoyed the experience.

Family visit: Sixth and last day

The weather was much better on my family's last day in town, I suppose it would have been nicer to do our South Shore tour in the good weather, but we were all glad to have a relaxing day at home.

We did a nice stroll around town, had dessert at the Front Street Cafe. We had been told that the Bread Pudding there was a treat and we were not disappointed.

For supper we went to Rosie's and had seafood and of course their own micro-brewed beer (I think we had the Annapolis Cream Ale, I don't remember for sure). Josh had lobster mac 'n' cheese, I had codfish cakes, and Kim had haddock fish and sweet potato chips. All good!

We also stopped at the Old Burying Grounds.


Many of the gravestones are so old and eroded you can't read the inscriptions, but some are clear.


In the old days gravestones were often marble, and unfortunately marble is very susceptible to damage from acid rain. Thankfully the acid rain is somewhat reduced now, but it has done a heck of a lot of damage.

Sadly, Josh, Kim and Eva headed home early on their seventh day here. I had a wonderful time with them and loved the time I got to spend with baby Eva. She's such a mellow and beautiful little girl!