Them's My Sentiments

Oleo

2012-01-09T17:43:00.001-05:00

My dashboard is back. I have no idea why this is so, but I am hoping the reason is that Blogger has fixed its glitch. I got here through Google Reader - I was looking through all the posts I missed over the Christmas rush and suddenly saw the Dashboard prompt where it should be. And voici. Or do I mean voila?

JG's 'Trail Cam' is still producing some amazing results, of which this one of the best. The garbage pail contains deer ration.

I could crop the photo to remove the pail, if I could find my editing program. My computer seems to have eaten it and I haven't had the time or the patience to reload the whole suite.

I have, however, thrown away close to 2000 photographs to date. A good many of these were either doubles (triples, quadruples) or losing shots that should have been dumped immediately. I am feeling Noble. I am also feeling like an idiot - I had seventeen shots of a pileated woodpecker that landed across from the kitchen door. Fifteen were total losers, hints of bird seen through off focus leaves.

Second Resolution for 2012 - dump losing photos at once!

I am off to play with my new coffee making machine - it is almost a barista all on its own.

Downsizing - The Downside of Digital

2012-01-04T12:22:00.002-05:00

Last evening and for all of this morning so far, I have been moving digital photos into the trash. The score for this morning is almost 400 photos gone forever. ( I am emptying the trash bin regularly, lest I regret and retrieve.) This is my New Year's Resolution for 2012: I resolve to stop keeping every last raw image that I have. It may take me all year to implement this seemingly simple decision.

Unless you are far more organized than I, you probably take a batch of photos, look through them, pick a few to use right away and leave the rest to be disposed of later. Alas that, for me, 'later' seldom if ever arrives. Even worse, I frequently sort through a 'raw' batch of photos, pick some out to edit, copy them and put them in another folder. Now I have two raw images and the edits (often several) of the same thing. Since I save all my photos in large format, I will shrink them to email them or post them and then I have raw images, edits and small versions, all of the same thing. I didn't realize just how messy this was until I started to use Picassa 3 and it sorted faces. Some shots of my daughters and granddaughter appear up to six times in the People Gallery. Oy.

This is not a new messy habit. I have boxes and albums of film and slides from the Time Before Digital and even more boxes of prints, mine, my mother's and my grandmother's. All stored away for a rainy day. In duplicate and triplicate and worse. From the time I started to use digital cameras, I stored all the images on disks and have a very large album of these with cryptic comments on them. Dating them would have been just too easy.

I am going to sort all of this out this year.

With tears and sobs she sorted out those of the largest size,

Holding her pocket handkerchief before her streaming eyes.

And gaining a great deal of space on her hard drive in the process. Not to mention a glow of virtue and the ability to find a photo that she wants inside three hours.

Wish me luck.

It's That Time of Year

2011-12-27T11:02:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas Season, and best wishes for a happy New Year.

Blogger Help is No Help

2011-11-23T22:59:00.001-05:00

I cannot access my dashboard except by a roundabout route. I get error bX-96hcvc when I try. This morning I deleted a blog. On Blogger Help several people report this error but get no answers. When I try to post a question on blogger Help myself, it will not let me post the question as it tells me I have too many characters in the box. Believe me, I have cut the report to the bare minimum and I count about a quarter of the characters they say I have. I do not understand what is going on, but, for me, Blogger Help is a complete loss.
Anyone else get this frustrated and switched to a different platform? AC, I know you did, but you are better at the tech stuff than I am. I am just about ready to try anyway.
Snarl.

As of December 4th, no help from Blogger. I am getting mighty annoyed about this.

Of Toes and Turkey Poop

2011-11-22T12:20:00.001-05:00

Photo credit: Patricio Lorente

I just read a wonderful rant from a blogger I love, who complained that her house has it in for her. I advised her to make offerings to the household gods to set things right. In my younger days I spent a lot of time that probably could have been better used studying Latin as well as Roman literature and history. The Romans had a pantheon of gods, but the ones I loved were called Lares and Penates, the local and household gods, for which a shrine would be set up in the atrium or dining room and libations poured before dinners and during household festivals. After being properly propitiated, these household gods would make everything go well.

I need to burn a little incense to my own, as well as to the spirits that affect dogs and toes.

We have been dog sitting the YD's doodle. Mostly she is a very easy dog to look after, but she does have some strange attributes. The weirdest is that she is not much interested in food - often at her mealtime she will stroll slowly over to her dish after I set it down, sniff once and wander away back to her bed where she settles herself with a sigh that seems to indicate that the cuisine is lacking tonight. Again. All the dogs JG and I have ever had rushed their dish almost before it hit the floor, curled around my feed during any meal preparation and generally did a poor starving dog act at every opportunity. Not this dog. The YD buys her the most expensive and nutritious dog food available, her doggy treats are delicious liver slivers, and she, mostly, scorns it all.

She has been eating better during this visit and she does adore Milkbones. She also adores turkey poop and sniffs out every morsel she can find, either to eat or to roll in. Early this morning we had a big flock wander through he yard, twenty-five birds or thereabout, and I most unwarily let the [censored] dog out for a quick run just before JG was due to load her in the car to take her back to her mistress in the city. And, of course, she rolled in the nice, warm, smelly poop that the birds had left behind. I grabbed a brush and lots of wet wipes and tried to clean her up, there being no time left to wash her before JG had to depart, but I suspect that the truck window will have to be open as he drives the hour into the city. So, why is turkey poop better than premium dog food? Who knows.

What kind of incense should I be burning? Other than lots.

I hope the Penates do feet. I had to have an ingrown toenail removed on Tuesday last. This has happened before and always I have healed up very quickly and been able to resume full activity almost immediately. After one instance, I was out taking down tubing in the maple bush after two days, with no problems. This toe, however, is not behaving. It has swelled a bit and I am slushing around the house in a pair of overstretched and ancient sheepskin slippers. The only shoes I should be wearing are a pair of runners with a very high toe cap. But I have had to go out to appointments and meetings and I am too vain to go in pale blue slippers that scuff or runners that are usually used for hiking and look like it. So, the toe - middle one - rubs on my dress shoe and stays swollen.

I have a meeting this afternoon. Vanity and common sense are at war. Would the fact that the runners probably have turkey poop on the soles be a good enough reason not to wear them?

Thirty Second's Worth of Distance Run

2011-11-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

I was never cut out to be the secretary of anything. Last night I wrote out a set of minutes (ten days after the meeting) for an organization where I am temporary secretary. I had them all done and was spell checking when the word processing program just, click, shut down. The document recovery feature gave me the first five lines when I used it. I went to bed both grumpy and puzzled. This morning I managed to recover a temp file with most of the material in it, re-saved in several formats and watched one format go pop again. Copied to a new document and that seemed to work. I proofed and sent it off in an email to the group. Without attaching the document. Luckily the organization is getting a new, better qualified, secretary next month. So all I have to do is tidy up the files I am using and pass them on. Whimper.

Almost seventy years of working at this sort of stuff has not made me good at it. I am not the right personality type at all. Give me an emergency deadline, hand me a bunch of posters or whatever to design, need something done in a hurry and I will come through. But the neat and tidy, precision stuff (unless it has to do with ems and hairline rule) is not my thing. I think you are born one way or the other. I have two daughters: one of whom is Ms Organized Precision; the other is your perfect example of adrenaline-charged Last Minute Mabel. They have been like this, both of them, from the moment they left the womb. If you kept the infant Ms Organized on a schedule, she was a happy, thriving child. Upset the schedule and she turned into Miss Hyde. The other daughter, hauled around a wet, windy Expo site at three months old, fed at weird intervals, forced to sleep in a bouncing backpack, was her cheerful self all through. Genes rule, I strongly believe. Nurture can only modify what Nature has created.

Not that my Very Organized mother did not try.

I get angry at myself from time to time, especially when I blow something. Especially when I have volunteered to do something that is not in my skill set and end up doing it badly. Sadly, experience does not teach me; I continue to take on stuff, to say yes to things that I really don't want to do, usually just to get them done when no one else is volunteering for the task. I have a fundraising event to run in the spring. If the event were to take place next week, I could just turn in and whack it together. But with several months' leeway on some of the tasks, what do you bet that I let them slide and end up running in circles in the last few days. Also, I don't delegate well. It almost always seems easier to do what needs to be done myself, rather than find someone, explain the task and monitor the results. Oh, well. At least I get to do all the posters and art work.

In the main, though, I manage to tolerate myself. There are things I am good at, that I do well. I hope there are enough of them to balance off the messes I occasionally make. To have patience with myself. Even to laugh at myself. Last night I was stamping around stewing at the computer and my own sloth. This morning I can be amused at the whole sorry mess. Especially since I did manage to recover enough of the job that I did not have to do it twice. Otherwise, I might still be sulking.

I Am Fed Up with Bell Canada

2011-11-03T22:37:00.002-04:00

At the end of April last spring, our area was hit with a major windstorm. The weather had been consistently rainy for some days before the storm, and the ground was saturated with water. During the storm two big pine trees on our road allowance were pulled up by the roots and deposited across the phone and hydro lines, breaking the lines and leaving us phoneless and in the dark.

Phoneless, because we live in a very rural area where there is no cell phone coverage. We have cell phones but we can't use them here. Well, if I stand on a kitchen chair by the back door and hold the phone over my head, I get a weak signal. Sometimes. We are the last house on both these lines and so the crews usually reach us quite late.

A neighbour phoned the outage in to Hydro and next day I drove the fifteen minutes to our local village where, if I park at the Town Hall, I get a signal. I tried to phone in our telephone outage, but because I was using my cell phone to make the call, I got the cell phone repair. God knows where the woman was who finally understood that I wanted to talk about my land line, but after a long wait while my cell phone battery got lower and lower, I finally reached a person who said that it would be repaired. Ah.

Meanwhile JG got out the tractor and the chainsaws and we cleared the trees off the road and the downed lines. The next day the huge hydro crane trucks appeared and put our power line back on the poles. Great service because the road dips just this side of the pole and the ground was pretty spongy. This is a photo of the road that, although it does not show the dip well, does show the location of the pole. The next pole is 90º left and on our land. Where I am standing is in the turning circle at the end of the township maintained piece and the trail you see is a gravelled strip put in by neighbours.

Here is the next to last pole. See the hydro line way up top? The saggy thicker line below it is the telephone line. The Bell repair crews showed up just after the Hydro trucks but they decided not to take the heavy trucks up to the last pole because the road was too spongy and, in fairness, the Hydro crew had chewed it up quite a bit. What they did do was reconnect the switch box and lay the lines out along the ground. So, we had telephone service. We figured they would be back when the ground dried up but time passed and the crew never came back.

In spite of my repeated calls to Bell service, as of this writing, on November 2nd, the lines remain looped along the ground. Bell has sent someone out three times now, at my repeated and ever more urgent requests. Each time the someone has been a single technician in a van. Each time the technician promises to report it and send out the big trucks. This has never happened.

Here is what our telephone line looks like.

Lovely. The weight of the lines has now pulled our neighbour's civic address pole back far enough that it cannot be read. The line from it has been buried by the township road maintenance crew. And I figure that the first snowfall will bring the township plough to, at best, bury the lines for the winter and, at worst, tear the jury rig apart.

Leaving me standing on a kitchen chair, shouting, if I want to access the outside world. Or, I can drive into the village. Curses.

I am not happy with Bell.

Geisha

2011-11-01T18:41:00.000-04:00

She was very well received - the loot bag bulged. I have no idea how long it took for her poor mother to get the makeup on - and then get it off again.
And she says the wig was HOT! The photo shows a solemn face because she says geishas have to look serene.

But isn't she beautiful.

Jack

2011-10-30T11:48:00.000-04:00

By popular demand - 2011's Jack o' Lantern. Design by the GrandDaughter. Execution by Grama. Casualties - one paring knife, unfortunately Grandpa's favourite.
Boo!

Of Friends and Luck

2011-10-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

I'm a lucky person. Really, really lucky. Good health, healthy children with good jobs, enough money. But one of the things I appreciate the most among all these blessings is good friends. The mark of a wonderful friend, for me, is that you can be apart for long periods and when you get back together you just mesh. I have a group of women with whom I go all the way back to public school. I have (and my husband and I have) couples we have known since we were undergraduates. We go on occasional jaunts as a group and have a wonderful time. Long distance friends, but you know they are there.

Today I had lunch with such a friend. When I try and figure it out, I think it has been at least four years since I've seen her - she and her husband have been working abroad. We met in the parking lot of the lunch place, started talking as we walked in, and kept right at it for two hours, first the catching up and then just a splendid conversation. The kids, the grand kids (we both forgot to bring a picture), trashing our husbands, clothes, jobs ....... and what I enjoy so much about this friend, the philosophy of living well and happily. On a dull, end of October day, it is sunshine to be with her.

Next week I am planning to go to the city to see another long distance friend who will be there for a few days' holiday, a former house mate from university. It will be a meeting with the same kind of joy. We have a horrible joke left over from being undergraduates that still makes us laugh. We have grandchildren growing up fast. We have white hair and wrinkles and squeaky knees and it all matters not one bit. As soon as we get together, years and wrinkles vanish.

One of the most miserable times in my life was watching my aunt, my father's older sister, descend into a dementia where she lost track of time. When she was in her eighties and still active and agile of mind and body, she moved from my childhood home town of Windsor up here to eastern Ontario to be with my father. She said, sadly, that her friends were mostly all sick or dead. She needed company and support and she made new friends here and loved her new life. But ten years later when the dementia hit, all she wanted was to go back home and see her friends, 'the girls' as she called them. When I would go to the nursing home we had had to put her in, I would find her packing, sometimes with her hat and coat on, ready for me to take her home. It was sad.

When you are growing up and as a young adult, friends are probably the most important element of your life. If you get married, you have to integrate your and your spouse's social circles. Then you have kids yourself and a demanding job and get involved with sports or a hobby and your socializing tends to be inside that range. If you don't marry, a network of friends remains very important and grows. In my experience, it becomes harder to make new friends the farther along in life you are. Or it used to be. One of the things I value most about the blogging world is the virtual friends I have made here. Although I have grandpa bloggers and grandma bloggers that I visit regularly, most of the online world where I hang out is peopled with women the age of my daughters, women raising kids and working and going to school and sometimes all three at once. Even though we might never meet over lunch and giggle, this world has become very important for me.

The older you get, in my experience, the faster things change. The 'mommyblogger' network I was enmeshed in in 2007 has mutated, the way people blog has changed a lot as new apps and software allow more photos, instaposts and other embellishments. There are a lot more formal networks, commercial loaded blogs and some quite pernicious rating sites to pull writers attention in specific ways. A lot of the bloggers whom I first connected with have left, or changed their focus. It's my great and good luck that the people I feel the most connected with are still around in some form or another.

And in this world, it's easy to make new friends.

The Mouse will Play

2011-10-21T09:39:00.002-04:00

When my husband is around I eat three meals a day at regular times, on a schedule he likes to follow, get up and go to bed ditto, and plan my week around his plans and my meeting list. When he is away, as he has been this week, it is quite an indulgence not to work or eat to a plan. I have been working away at losing some weight, and tried out the 'only eat when you are hungry' method this week. I dropped about a pound and a half - hope it stays off - and passed a benchmark.

On Thursdays I go to a line dancing class. This Thursday I was running late so I grabbed out a pair of cords that just came out of summer storage, threw them on (well, with other clothes, yes) and hurried to my class. About half way through, I tripped on the hem of the pants and realized that they are loose enough around the waist that they had slipped down and the hems were trailing on the floor. I guess I am going to have to wear a belt - and that my belts might even go around me again. Benchmark. Ta da!

The line dancing class is a lot of fun. Our instructor is a Francophone woman with a great sense of humour and an equally great love of country music and Anne Murray. Yesterday we learned a longish series of steps (she paces out the pattern, we practice it and then she puts fairly slow music on and we do the steps. If we have the pattern down, we get faster music and do it again. Yesterday, with a big grin, she told us that the music was really fast. And it was. Luckily, this was not the place where my pants slipped down or they would still be scraping me off the church hall floor. We were all groaning at the end of the class, but they were good groans.

My feet are going to cost me a lot of money. I spent my childhood and youth in swimming pools, ending up as a swimming instructor, and along the way I acquired toenail fungus, big time. My doctor and chiropodist have both worked on the fungus, but the best they could do has not eradicated it. That and the fashion for pointy toed shoes (and my vanity) as a young woman have made a real mess of my toenails. And it is no longer possible to cut them properly on my own. So I booked an appointment with a podiatrist. I am going to have four nails surgically removed at a fairly steep price, but this guy also xrayed my feet, was most dismayed at the results and is urging me to get orthotic insoles. Also expensive. JG says I should have expected this as they sell the orthotics, but I will try almost anything that will improve my ability to walk distances. My credit card was steaming when I walked out of there. And I will have to wear lace-up sports shoes. Snarl. I guess vanity is not yet dead in me.

Why is it that my toenails and the floor are a lot farther away than they used to be. And gravity is heavier. I'm in another photo group and the prompt for this last week has been 'up from below'. I thought of one very interesting thing to do, but it requires me to lie on my back on the living room floor and getting up from there is not simple. Nothing to hang on to. I watch Herself effortlessly swing her feet up over her head and pull herself up into a tree, and remember when I used to be able to do that. Herself was amused to tell me that she and her daddy went to the park and he tried to pull himself up into a tree the same way and, she giggled, got stuck. Kids can be really hard-hearted sometimes.

My week of no schedule is over and I must now make the house look as if it has been lived in. I did remove almost eight pounds of surplus paper from my office. Having a baby of the same weight did not take as long.

Throwing Out Stuff

2011-10-17T21:34:00.001-04:00

I put up a Facebook update earlier today that I was tackling a 7" (12 cm, I think, maybe) stack of paper to be filed. I now have it down 5" more or less. From time to time I have posted Good Resolutions about cleaning my office; I have even sort of done it from time to time. But I have a horrible time throwing out documents and good articles and booklets about subjects that interest me, not to mention any scrap of material from a trip we have taken and the third to twenty third photographs of some gorgeous piece of scenery. Well, there only used to be four or five when I used film.

I swear this time it will be different! I am winding up fourteen years of involvement with a community board that has taken a lot of my time and generated a lot (a dead woodlot) of paper. I am tossing the contents of binders, eliminating file folders and generally keeping only the few things where I still have a specific task to do. One big carrier bag of paper has already gone to the paper recycle at the dump, and there may be two more by tomorrow's open dump time.

A lot of people, I think, are pack rats au fond. Most little kids are, for starters. Herself, my age eight grand kid, keeps all sorts of bits and pieces. A couple of weeks ago she went home with a snakeskin, some lovely pieces of bark and a bunch of coloured leaves too bright to resist. Her bedroom is stuffed with stuff, a lot of it stuffed toys but also ornaments, hair clips, scarves, boxes and books. She has her birch bark stock stored in our screen porch and two boxes of varied art supplies in my office. My husband is a life long, charter, pack rat. When he runs out of room to keep his stuff, he builds another building in which to store it. A lot of his stuff is big, motorized and noisy but he also keeps piles of hardwood and softwood, various lengths of pipe and iron and steel, and cupboards and shelves both in the house and in the barn full of nails and screws and all sorts of strange objects that might even come in useful some day, including a big pile of empty coffee cans to put the bits into.

Both of my daughters keep lots and lots of stuff. I was hanging my clothes in the spare room closet last Thursday, settling in at the ED's place for a few days of child minding, when I looked up at the closet shelf and saw a big Tupperware container labelled "Letters from Mom". Since it said 'from Mom' and that is me, I looked in and this 2' x 3' container was full almost to the top with letters, cards and postcards covered in my writing. (Confession time - I have a file drawer that is about half filled with letters from MY mother and from our daughters.) The YD keeps books. Shelves and shelves and shelves full. I helped her move them once when she was a penniless undergraduate, but there are a lot more these days. She would need two strong men and a van with very good springs. (Confession - I have just about as many, some still in boxes from when we moved fifteen years ago.)

So many of us keep stuff. There is so much that seems precious, that evokes memory, that might someday be the very thing you need. In fact my husband swears that whenever (unlikely as this is) he gets rid of something, that something turns out to be exactly what he needs a short time later. Maybe. But I find the things that I don't 'need' and will never need are the ones that are hardest to toss.

When I finally managed to get my hair cut short as a girl, my mother kept a braid. When I decided that my little daughters' hair had to be cut short before I went crazy, my mother asked for the braids and kept them, too. I thought she was nuts, at the time, but she got a frame and put all three braids into it. Since her death, the frame sits on the top of the cupboard here in the office. I dust it and think about her. The grand daughter assured me this weekend that when she decides to cut her hair again, she will give me a braid to put in with the others. Sometimes I worry that the next step will be a brooch made out of the dear departed's hair and I will turn into Queen Victoria.The braid in the middle is mine, the ED's is on the right, the YD's on the left.

The latest - I cleaned out my closet and discarded a whole bunch of stuff. In the process I found a handkerchief that my grandmother had made, a white on white appliqué of her name on fine linen. I kept it. Of course. I am sure Herself, in the process of time, will treasure it because the big sorting out will be done by my long suffering daughters after I am gone.

Sorry girls.

I've babbled about this before. See: http://themsmysentiments.blogspot.com/2011/01/reports-from-pack-rat.html

A Day in the City

2011-10-15T22:50:00.000-04:00

I have just renamed Little Stuff. Any kid who can climb twenty feet into a tree is not Little any more. I am presently referring to her as Herself, and hoping to come up with something better.

I am looking after the grandkid this weekend, her parents having to go to an event in Toronto. I have been at it for two days now, in fact, mostly getting Herself from place to place -- to school, to gym class, to shop for a Hallowe'en costume -- and allowing her to do all sorts of stuff that her very organized and structured mother would probably not allow.

This afternoon we went to the park to feed the birds and get some fresh air. Boy, was the air ever fresh. There is half a gale blowing and the temperature is dropping and the wind keeps blowing in rain clouds. Anyway, the rain and the wind had a lot of birds on the ground and the feeding opportunities were good. Herself had brought along a loaf of French bread that had got a bit mouldy and it proved very popular. In fact, outside this circle of feeding geese was another of squawking, begging gulls. Herself refused to feed the gulls, saying that they were all spoiled. An occasional squirrel crept through the mass of honkers -- they did get fed and most of them will take a peanut from Herself's hand.

After she disposed of most of the edibles, Herself set out on a project that involved climbing all the scalable trees in one corner of the park. Her strength level is very high, and she can shimmy up a tree trunk of the appropriate size in no time at all. Then she swings up through the branches until she gets to the top of what will bear her weight, sits and admires the view for a bit and swings down again. On to the next tree and up she goes. She did this for the best part of an hour without showing any sign of tiring. (I took a lot of photos and may add more later but I am on the household Mac and the only way I can figure out how to shrink the photos is by emailing them to myself. So, later.)

I can't resist adding one more shot, however. As well as minding the kid, the babysitter has to deal with a household full of animals. There is the tortoise who woke me up last night banging around in his habitat at midnight, there is Leo the lung fish, Charlotte Anne the guinea pig, Charmy the leopard gecko (belongs to Herself's brother, in truth, but when brother left for university, somehow Charmy stayed home.) and last, but by no means least, Miso. Who is a cat. Miso loves bags, of any sort. He loves my suitcase a lot, but I have learned to leave my door shut. This afternoon as we left for the park, this is where Miso was spending the afternoon.

He was still there when we got back, but sometime in the interim he had got out of the grocery bag pile long enough to throw up on the hall floor. Charlotte Anne's cage needs cleaning in the worst way. Luckily Leo and Charmy are self sustaining over one weekend. Charmy, when he has to be fed, requires live crickets dusted with vitamin powder. I am not sure what Leo requires, just that he does not need it very often.

Herself, on the other hand, requires a lot of stoking. She won a horrible sugary ring as a prize at her gym class and turned her mouth, teeth and tongue bright blue while consuming it. And the shop where we bought the bits and pieces for her costume gave her a loot bag as a bonus, a loot bag that contained a Hallowe'en themed noisemaker, the kind that unrolls and makes an unlovely blat. Herself has been blowing it. A lot.

Grama is still smiling, but ............... In truth, I love looking after Herself. She described the geese this afternoon as 'aggressive'. And her laugh would melt a heart of stone, let alone mine.

Tasty Thoughts

2011-10-12T15:39:00.000-04:00

I got an Ethan Allen catalogue in the mail yesterday. (Once, feeling momentarily affluent, we bought a dresser there. When a handle broke, EA replaced it and started to send us all these glossy catalogues.) The shiny and expensively printed booklet was full of ornate furniture and home decorations, displayed with handsome people in evening dress draped over some of them. Mirrored chests, curlicues, turned legs, brocade bed covers, huge abstract art and artefacts. Not. My. Taste. No, not at all. I tend more to plain wood, cherry for choice, with maybe a tiny ornamentation and overstuffed comfy leather wing chairs. Lots of lamps, placed so that reading is easy. Very few display objects, most of them gifts, such as a digital picture frame. Overly ornate and decorated makes me slightly crazy, not to mention the extra care and cleaning.

My take on clothes is similar. When I open the paper and see the latest in spring fashions displayed on models who make toothpicks look plump, my reaction is disbelief. Crotch level skirt, all ruffles. Droopy sweater with arms that hang below the fingers and some kind of hanging front. Not. Wearable. No, not by any ordinary human being who has to do things like write, cook or drive. Or even sit in comfort.

I am also repelled by hairstyles that, in my opinion, are not styled. Long hair, almost exclusively, either streeling over the shoulders or tied back inadequately so that hair has to be pushed out of the face, just puzzles me. You manage this hair with a baby? Out in the wind? You keep it out of the stock pot? Not. Likely. No, not practical and also, not pretty. It makes women with long faces look like horses and women with round faces look even worse than that.

I believe taste is formed both by the family and by the generation in which a person is born. I am a 'war baby', born in 1942 and my taste is probably partly attributable to my mother*, who liked clean lines and classic clothing, and to the style of the late forties and fifties, when I was an impressionable kid. I was brought up to dress 'like a lady' and regard an easily cleaned house as a blessing. While I have extensively revised what my mother thought these standards meant (I wear trousers and jeans almost exclusively, even though the standards of the fifties relegated the latter to gardening only and my mother insisted on skirts in public, even for twelve-year-olds), I still judge by similar values. Revealing a lot of cleavage in a business setting or looking like you and your hair just got out of bed together seem to me bad taste. Making dust-catching vignettes all over the house is a waste of time and effort. I may be a stuffed dinosaur, at that, or stuffy, anyway.

What's your idea of good taste and tasteful dressing?

* My mother in full 'lawyer's wife' costume. At my wedding reception, in fact.

Days of Gold

2011-10-09T23:26:00.000-04:00

Er, Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, that is. We had the big turkey dinner yesterday, in weather so warm that I had all the windows open. This is unusual for this part of eastern Ontario: there have been years when we had snow. But yesterday was glorious and so was today and so tomorrow is forecast to be. Even though the colour is not marvellous this year - too dry in August and September.

The red maples in front of our house are just about as bright as we have anywhere in our bush. Having rushed madly about doing turkey and fixings yesterday, today I put everything away and then turned the oven on to self-clean and escaped outside. JG and I went roaming around the place, he introducing me to various bits of trail that he has cleared out this summer, mostly very bumpy bits going up or down or sideways. But in spite of the lack of red, all of the bush is very beautiful. A lot of the leaves are already down and that wonderful scent of dry leaves rose everywhere we went.

This shot is typical of what the woods looked like today. If you look carefully you can see two tire tracks through the leaves. That's the trail, in fact that is one of the better parts of the off road network we have maintained over the years. You can see a lot of smaller diameter trunks. Some of them are saplings and a few are older, ironwood and such, that will live under the canopy but do not thrive and therefore grow very slowly. JG and a couple of his friends are doing an improvement cut in this part - turning damaged trees into firewood.

As you can see, this was what my family calls a 'blue' day - sky so glaringly cerulean that you seem to be suspended in light and space. This kind of weather is rare in October, when you are more likely to get the 'smokey hills' of the infamous poem we all had to learn in grade school.

Along the line of smokey hills the crimson forest stands,
And all the day the blue jay calls throughout the autumn lands.

There is more, but I will spare you. I did link it to the poem, just in case you want the rest of it.

In fact, the jays are not calling at present, because their beaks are stuffed full with either corn or sunflower seeds that they are abstracting in quantity from the bird feeder and the deer feeding station and stuffing into other locations to eat this winter.

When we got back to the house, most of the odour of burnt turkey fat had dissipated and we ordered in pizza for supper. Tomorrow we have another Thanksgiving feast to attend.

I seem to myself to be writing very dull and somewhat didactic posts. Apologies to all of you who have found me better fun in the past. I am hoping to get back into the groove again soon.

Grumping my way through my day

2011-10-03T22:27:00.000-04:00

It has been one of those days. Rain, fog and dull light for one thing, not a propitious start. A meeting that went on too long and where nothing solid seemed to get accomplished. Lunch at our post meeting restaurant where we ordered soup that sounded wonderful and wasn't. More rain.

Then I went into my shopping town to get groceries and run errands. There are repairs being carried out on the highway that borders the town. Grooved pavement, ledges and bumps, verges masses of mud and pylons everywhere. I got through that and navigated off into the heart of down town where my bank crouches amid inadequate parking and too much traffic. Lo and behold, the bank parking lot is under construction and so is the street beside it. I had to park several blocks away and trek back through the mud and machinery. And the rain.

So befuddled was I by all this that I drove almost back to the highway before I remembered that I had to return my library books -- the library also being right down town. Reverse. Back into the scrum.

Having finally torn myself away from the library, the next job was the groceries. My grocery store parking lot was ALSO all torn up and under construction. I had to park on the far side and plod back through the muck and machinery again.

The grocery store is also undergoing a massive renovation. No one can find anything, making for lots of grumpy customers moving slowly along looking for stuff or standing in the middle of the aisle looking for stuff. The new layout has separated the lactose free milk from the rest of the milk by the length of the aisle and rejigged all the staples. The spice I wanted wasn't there. The soup I wanted wasn't there. And after struggling through all of this I had to hump the groceries back across the whole rain-swept parking lot. And go back to get wine - in Ontario you have to buy wine at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario store.

Then to the pharmacy for some stuff for JG that they didn't have. Then to pick up some esoteric part for a chain saw that had, by some miracle, just come in by the courier truck. Then I got to go home through ever thickening mist.

Oh, yeah, one of my credit cards got rejected. I do not know why and I have not had the strength to phone yet. That I have on the list for tomorrow.

What do you do after a day like that? I curled up in my reclining chair with a blankie and dozed. The stalwart man I married started supper and made the salads, or I would still be there.

It is supposed to rain again tomorrow.

Oh, yeah ......... the stockmarket had a bad day too.

The Jury Is Still Out

2011-10-02T22:03:00.004-04:00

I'm playing with the new blogger layouts - am still not sure whether I like it. And placing photos is still confusing me. What do you think?

Added Monday - I have reverted. I think the new style still has too many bugs in it. Thanks, commenters!

The Apples of my Eye

2011-09-29T22:34:00.002-04:00

I've been obsessed with apples lately. Not only has JG been buying them by the bag, but I see them everywhere, not just in a big bowl in the house.

We have had an excessively dry August, for eastern Ontario - less than an inch of rain in August and not much more in September. The leaves have been drying on the trees and are falling early, some turning red and gold but more fading to a depressed brown and raining off the branches. The apple tree under the kitchen window, however, seems to have got enough moisture and since the spring rains encouraged it to blossom lavishly, it now has a fine crop of apples. They are not worth picking, being both wormy and riddled with various moulds and scabs, but the deer and the turkeys love them. We've had lots of wild life under the tree as the fruit ripens and falls.

I think the best laugh to date has been the confrontation between the YG's beautiful but dim dog and a deer - the dog was lying on the grass under the kitchen window and when the deer drifted in to eat fallen apples, Shammy just lay there and blinked at it. The deer munched for a bit, saw the dog, did a double-take and thumped off into the bush. Shammy yawned and went back to her contemplations.

The apples are beautiful. As the light changes through the day, various parts of the trees are spotlit by the sun and the apples glow, both the green ones and the red ones. The sugar maple beside the apple went gold with bits of red very early in September, and provided a lovely backdrop of gold for one green apple hanging on on an isolated branch. Yesterday most of the maple leaves fell softly down to form a gold carpet below the still green apple tree. And, as a series of thunder heads came through, with the sun breaking through occasionally, the light varied from dim to glowing, and the colours muted and strengthened and changed. A screaming, and screaming-blue, jay added contrast. I did bits of jobs that allowed me to trek past the window a lot and just enjoyed it.

There's another photo group going, one with a weekly prompt. So far I have taken a lot of photos of that apple tree and my favourite green apple for various types of focus. Now that apple is blushing a bit pink and will likely hit the ground in only a few days. I hope for good light for one more photo before the turkeys get it.

Monarchs

2011-09-21T22:25:00.000-04:00

You probably know the monarch butterfly and its migration patterns - if not, here's the link.

When I was a girl my family had a cottage just east of Point Pelee on Lake Erie. In the late summer and fall monarchs were as common as falling leaves because Point Pelee is one of their launching spots to cross the Great Lakes on their way, in the case of this population, to Mexico. We did not know that, then, but we knew they migrated. Once my mother woke to see a tree covered with many hundreds of them, fanning their wings to dry them of dew, waiting for a favourable wind to take them south across the water.

When my daughters were girls, monarchs made a yearly appearance at our eastern Ontario weekend cabin's fields. The girls collected the caterpillars and incarcerated them in a glass fish tank, fed them on milkweed leaves and released them into the garden when the adult butterfly hatched. Some years we might have more or fewer, but always in August they would be around, close to the edge of their northern limit, happy with the goldenrod and other wildflowers, plentifully supplied with their feeding plant. Here is the Elder Daughter, age ten or eleven, releasing one. Once one of the caterpillars escaped the aquarium and we could not figure out what had happened to it until the butterfly wobbled out from under the dishwasher, not too much the worse for wear. Gave me the grues, let me tell you, imagining what stepping on the caterpillar in the dark would have felt like.

This daughter is now the mother of Little Stuff, whose nickname I will have to change, shortly, as she is growing like a weed. For the last several years they have hunted monarch caterpillars with good success. This year they collected twelve, in all, and ten hatched. As each one hatched, it was given a name and admired before it was released. Here is Little Stuff with, I think, Miriam. Two of the newly hatched were hauled off to school, where they were also much admired. The two that did not make it were very small caterpillars when captured and pupated too soon. I am told that they do better if they are cold at night, so that they will eat for more days. Next year!

Sadly, some years we don't have many monarchs at all. Although we have lots of milkweed, further south there is less and less as big fields take over and the hedgerows and pasture where the plants grow undisturbed are being lost. If you are in monarch territory, you might consider trying to persuade your local government not to spray the plants, or even plant some yourself. These are precious, beautiful and fragile creatures and their life is a wonder.

Inertia

2011-09-20T10:43:00.002-04:00

I get ideas and the urge to write a post while I am driving somewhere, when I am trying to reduce the pile of laundry waiting to be ironed, as I read the paper or a book. But when I open the computer, lately, I find myself checking Facebook, playing Scrabble, doodling mindlessly with Spider Solitaire, fiddling with my photos - anything but write. I suppose this is writer's block in a specially insidious form. And I am behind in reading a lot of your very good stuff, and very bad at commenting, lately. Inertia (my mother would have said 'Lazy!) is not a good thing.

Part of it is, I think, that I am not sleeping well. What with the man in my life ripping the duvet off me in the pre-dawn, an inability to go to sleep in any timely way or sleep in and what seems to be a chronic state of fatigue, my brain is not functioning well. When I was a sleep-deprived young mother, I used to listen to my elderly relatives complain about inability to sleep and mutter to myself that if I just had some time and a flattish surface, this would never happen to me. I thought their complaints about sore knees and itchy skin were sad but would not ever be relevant to my life. Well, guess what. I've got all of that as well as a few that they never mentioned, probably because the symptoms were too gross to be public.

Anyway, enough of all that. I am going to write again, and it is not going to be a catalogue of the joys of being almost seventy. (Picture my jaw clenched with determination, head thrown back, eyes staring sternly ahead - disregard the bags underneath these glowing eyes.)

I have a friend who has just taken up blogging and is having a fine time journalling her life. The other day she put up (at some unseasonably early hour) a list of what she planned to accomplish that day. Knowing the Bee, I suspect she got it all done, too. And when she finds her voice, she will shine as she is one of the most up-beat, mindful and generous people I know. I have to check with her to see if she wants me to put her site up. One more to add to the list of people who inspire me (you know who you are!).

My preoccupations at present - one is the weather. We got a few minutes of rain last night, enough to bring the rain gauge up to 3/4 of an inch. That depth is the total sum of the rain we have had since September 2nd. And we had 1/2 inch between August 2nd and September 2nd. There are a lot of stressed and grumpy trees that have just gone dormant and are shedding dry brown leaves. A few of the more deeply rooted are showing some colour now after three nights of frost, but it is not going to be a colourful fall. Time to put the flower borders to bed and almost time to start raking. These next few weeks are one of the highpoints of my year. The bugs are gone, the sky is often a remarkable blue (to-day with the last of the rain clouds sailing away), the colour, good or bad, something to make me rejoice.

I also rejoice at the wildlife we see. Lately we have had a bear, various numbers of wild turkeys, and this morning six deer trooped out onto the back field in the early morning light. One was a very young buck with single spike horns, and there were two fawns, dancing and chasing one another. I posted this sighting to Facebook, calling it a 'good haul' and got called on the expression. In fact, I was asked (tongue in cheek) if this meant that they were being loaded into my truck. You don't question the expressions you use until someone does question them, in my experience. My mother's family used 'a good haul' to mean a satisfactory collection of something, whether it be strawberries or shopping. My guess is that this set of ancestors must have fished - they came from Ireland during the famine there in the nineteenth century. And they used some lovely phrases. My grandmother called the guy who delivered the baking 'gossamer wings' for his inability to remember much of anything, leaving your work undone to go somewhere was 'roading' and a child who misbehaved got 'a good hiding'. In fact, what I meant was that this sighting had a good number of deer - we usually see only one or two at a time.

I love language. Well-turned expressions, succinct and punchy sentences, a lyrical stream-of-thought poem, all delight me. Someone who can tell a story well, design an understated amusing comment or convey an atmosphere in a few words is an inspiration. I read well-crafted novels again and again, for the turn of phrase, the skilful characterization and the sheer joy of an exciting plot, one that keeps your interest even when you know the ending. Reading the local papers is an exercise in keeping my temper, sometimes, when the writer of an article makes basic mistakes. Sometimes they get an email from me, more in sorrow than in anger, about the repeated ones. If we're reviewing a set of minutes or a policy statement at the board where I volunteer, the meeting members will sigh and resign themselves when my hand goes up and I start correcting lame sentences and awkward grammar. I got myself onto a committee to redesign our Vision, Mission and Values statements because of this nasty little vice. The whole thing is now boiled down to fit on one page but we are still tinkering. As with family expressions, something you don't question takes on a whole new aspect when someone else tags it. The latest is a question about 'just'. If we talk about a 'just' society, just what do we mean.

Stay tuned. I may figure that one out one day. And in the meantime, I have to go and stock up the deer feeding station.

The Cottage Week

2011-07-23T18:54:00.000-04:00

Yet another submission of cottage sunset photos from Mrs Repeats Herself. But who could resist. If we ever rent a cottage on the western shore of a lake, I don't promise to do sunrise snaps, however. Sorry!

We had a hugely hot week. Perfect cottage weather, except for sleeping. The water was 82ºF. Got to love that.

What most of my family like to do is fish. More fish shots. Later.

Does anyone see any improvement over last year?

In time for the 12th of July

2011-07-05T10:20:00.000-04:00

The sunset was rose last night, a soft warm wash of colour that turned the grass and leaves green/gold. One day lily had opened in the bed in front of the house, harbinger of things to come. More have opened today.

This lily bed grew from three roots that JG planted for me along the orchard fence line, roots that I dug from around the old house site. While there still was an orchard, before time and the black bears and the porcupines destroyed it. When we decided to build the house where the orchard had been, to take advantage of the slope in the ground for a walk out basement, the lilies had advanced to two patches, on two sections of fence. I dug out one patch and combined it with the other, making an oval bed about six feet long and four across. Every year the lilies push out another round and the bed gets bigger.

Unfortunately, so have the trees, even with JG having cut every second one out to allow the canopy to be more open. The lily bed is being drowned in shade and while the leaves come up as strongly as ever, there are fewer blossoms each year. I will have to move it again, I think, before long. There are fewer and fewer places with both good soil and sun as the trees around the house and yard recover from the big ice storm. One sugar maple that was reduced to a stalk with one branch by the ice and wind has recovered alarmingly and is now shading the whole front of the yard.

This is one tough plant, this orange day lily. It is quite similar to the tiger lily of my southern Ontario childhood, but without the black stripe. I think the plants that I have are descended from lilies brought here with the first settler as we found them around the site of the original house. And they still grow at that site in profusion. When the ice storm broke the trees around the old foundation, the lilies there bloomed marvellously and shoots crept out into the grass, enlarging the bed each year. Now the shade is growing back, but there is still a huge patch getting enough sunlight to allow me to cut swathes for the house.

I think of our house as new, even though we have been living here for almost fifteen years. Although I notice that all the rooms need repainting, know that we have replaced the roof shingles once, am convinced that I need a new bathroom floor and cabinet, still, the house is the 'new' house. I, as well as the lilies, have deep roots here now, though. I have watched my friends' grandchildren grow up, seen other of my friends grow older, lose a husband or cope with his illness. When I shop, I regularly end up having conversations in the soup aisle or in front of the eggs. Even so, it doesn't seem very long ago that we bought the land here. That was 1974.

This old dog is doggedly learning new tricks, though. I am struggling to replace my old typewriting double space after a period with a single space, much more modern and stylish. I can do it maybe half the time, even when I am thinking hard about the change. I have a new sewing machine with a different threading pattern - I have to refer to the book every time I thread it. And what is worse, the pressure foot lever is in a different spot. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to retrain sixty years of reaching with my left hand into a right hand reach. I am loving my Pffaf, even so.

This afternoon we replaced my clothes line pole. We needed to replace the line and pulley, both worn out, and JG was afraid that the cedar pole we put in in '96 would be too decayed to hold the weight of the ladder needed to reach the pulley. When we dug out the old one (actually, JG lifted it out with the front end loader of the tractor) it was pretty eaten away at the soil line. The new one is now in place and I will soon have the new line up.

And maybe I shall go and look at paint colours.

And the Small Rain Down Doth Rain

2011-06-24T11:34:00.001-04:00

We are on our second of three forecast rainy days, although there is a bit of blue sky showing to the west just now, and this means that I can catch up on my inside work. Later. Just now I have a quiet house and lots of bits bottled up in my, alas, untidy brain.

Although June raced by in a blur of meetings, paperwork, gardening, trips to the city for JG's cataract surgery and similar delights, I can't exist without reading. I got a big box of new books from Amazon two weeks ago and have been reading them in every stolen moment since. The YD wanted to borrow one, but I hadn't finished it and she is waiting (patiently) for me to pass it on. Jaqueline Carey's third volume in the Naamah series, in fact. Fantasy, fairly well written but badly edited, and fun.

I got distracted by 'The Wild Girls', a new Ursula Le Guin, however. (Sorry, YD!). Just published by PM Press, it contains a short story - not one of her best - two essays and an interview. The first essay is a reprint from Harper's Magazine and it is a must-read, for anyone who loves books. Its title is 'Staying Awake While We Read' and it is at once a polemic against today's publishing industry and a paean to the joys of books. She makes what is to me a most enlightening argument for reading as a social art. 'The shared experience of books was a genuine bond,' she says, discussing the history of reading for pleasure. Yes! Look at the number of us who blog about what we read, post reviews for our blogging buddies, stick book lists in our margins, fill in endless memes about what we have and have not read. Le Guin says 'was', but where I hang around on-line, the bond is very immediate.

I also ordered two new books in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series that I haven't read. The second one came, but I am resisting reading it until the one before it in the series arrives. This is serious restraint, guys.  Hambly is an amazing writer.

Mostly I grab up a new book,collapse into a chair and am gone until I read through it. Meals? Clean clothes?   You'll have to wait - I have ninety more pages to read. This was an annoyance to my family, especially to the daughters as small children. In those days we went to the library in a group, all chose books and lugged the piles home. I have a clear recollection of one trip when, newly arrived home with her books, the YD asked 'Daddy, will you read to me?' and got the answer 'Not now, Daddy is reading his book'. Same question to mommy, same answer. Same question to big sister, wistfully. Same answer. Big sigh. ' I will have to read it minefelf,' she said, missing front tooth much in evidence. And she flopped down on the floor and did that.

These days JG and I get two papers in the mailbox each morning and one of us trots down the lane to retrieve them before breakfast so that we can read while consuming our toast and cereal. 'What a talkative pair we are,' said JG a few mornings ago when the only sounds in the kitchen for quite a while had been chewing noises and the rustle of turned pages.

The rain is now pelting down and the bit of blue has disappeared. No thunderstorm activity, though. Yet. It's forecast, though.   I think I had better shut down here, just in case, and unplug the computer and internet box.

And finish the Carey book before the YD loses patience.

Oh Bear of Little Brain

2011-06-02T12:15:00.000-04:00

Today is Oh Mary G of little brain day. I am working on my daughter’s Mac since I am in the city looking after my granddaughter while her parents are at a conference. I decided today that I wanted to download the photos from my camera so that I could use some of them in a post. It took me far, far to long to figure out where the memory card slot is, what program I should be using, etc. When I finally did get the thing set up, I could not find the photos in the folder where they should be. After redoing the whole operation a lot of times, it finally occurred to me to look at the card in the camera and, surprise, I had cleaned it and there are no photos on it. If that is not grade A stupidity, I do not know what else to call it.

I guess I have a much slower brain that I used to have. At almost 70 years old, this should not surprise me or anyone else, but it is an extremely frustrating thing to live with. Some aspects of it are neither new or surprising; the appearance of streets and parking garages and store fronts change and if you don’t see them often, the changes are confusing. I remember trying to drive around Windsor, where I was born and raised, after living elsewhere for some years, and discovering that all my landmarks were gone or changed. It meant treating my old home town like a place I had never been and using a map. Pity there isn't a similar set of ‘maps’ for skills and devices that I don’t use too often.

Living with this aging brain is fascinating, in a weird sort of way. Facts and skills that I need do not appear when I need them, but crop up later at the end of a range of associations that should not have produced them. That’s not a good description, but it’s a hard thing to explain clearly. Example. Every time I change the blade in my razor, I get a Paul Anka tune for an earworm for some hours. I have a Venus razor, the container for the new blade says ‘VENUS’ in big blue letters, and Anka wrote a song called ‘Venus’ back in the fifties (?) when my adolescent memory retained song lyrics after one or two hearings. Song lyrics that I do want to remember are in the gray cells somewhere, but as much as I fish for them, there are no bites. (bytes?)

Pity one can’t reload the wetware from disk when it corrupts.

The compensation is that in old age there is more leisure time, a lifetime’s worth of patience and tolerance learned and many rich memories that crop up in unexpected ways. Although there are times I mourn my young, agile mind (and my young, agile knees for that matter), I would not trade what I have now for the uncertainties and frustrations of my teenaged self.

Last evening I watched as Little Stuff learned to do a tuck at her gymnastics class. She was so happy, and having so much fun. I wish I could gift her with a magic carpet to get her through the teen years with that joy intact.

Au Secours!

2011-05-31T10:59:00.000-04:00

I’m just finishing my second day of minding Little Stuff while her parents attend a conference. She is being her cheerful and delightful self, but I have one problem. The temperature is forecast to reach 32°C tomorrow and I can’t remember how to work the climate controls to get air conditioning. If I were at home, I could move one simple switch but this house has a state-of-the-art multi-program climate control box and I can’t recall what to do to get it to cool. If I were at home, I probably could cope by opening all of our multitude of windows but this house is an inner city infill and, to have the number of rooms they wanted, daughter and partner had built what is essentially a staircase with rooms off it. It does not ventilate all that well because there are no good openings on the ground floor. I can see a melt-down coming. Mine.

In truth, I have a second problem. My darling Little Stuff is a rule abiding, earnest little soul. She attends a French Language school and the rule is that once on the school grounds, only French can be used. She has to be delivered to her day care and signed in. And she tells me all sorts of neat stuff, in French, while we go there. Even worse. Tomorrow she misses day care for gymnastics and I want to spring her at the end of the scholastic day and skip day care. I will have to tell her carer, she says, or write a note. Hélas, j’ai oublié toute ma Français. Starting with where to find the accents on this keyboard which is English querty. There is a way, using the control key, if I could remember what to hit afterwards. My own computer has a keypad and I keep the list of accent alternates on my bulletin board.

Tuesday Morning.

Problem #1 I think I have set the air conditioner. We will see later when the temperature rises.

Problem # 2 Little Stuff dictated the message I had to send. Several times. I hand wrote it, disguising (I hope) shaky accents.

Today I have to clean the tortoise's enclosure and the guinea pig's cage. Tomorrow I have to feed some crickets to the lizard. Luckily the lung fish can look after itself. And the cleaning company is due this afternoon to remove the cat hair and other debris. And put out all of the various refuse containers. Thunderstorms are forecast. Ah, the joys of city living. In the evening, however, I can sit out on the balcony and nothing bites me. A joy indeed.

Talk about Organized

2011-05-19T11:38:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm not. And lately, even less organized about reading good posts and passing them on.

Not even lately, though. To my great shame, I missed this blog post when it went up. It's more than worth a look. It's a list of Canadian MommyBloggers, and there are some wonderful blogs on there.

Don't be left at the post. Go browse this.

Of Time and Tides of New Baby Leaves

2011-05-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

A little while ago I saw a blue jay perched on a branch of a birch tree. There was soft sunlight turning the new leaves to shining green but the jay was, in the shadow of the trunk, soft blue gray. It was a painting in the making. In fact, all around me the last few days have brought incipient paintings, the green gold of the flowers on the sugar maples, small keys forming a halo around each branch, the muted red madder of the red maple flowers, soft cream and pink of the hawthorn bushes, silver gleam of the tiny oak leaves, just barely visible. There is green of every describable colour and some shades so pale, so transient, that they are barely there. A camera would not capture them, but paint might.

Down in my basement drawers is a box of oil paints, an easel, stretched canvas. I haven't touched them for a long time, occupied and preoccupied as I am with my volunteer work, my computer (haven't been posting lately, but I am inspired to do better), my bulbs, the yard and garden, changing the winter clothing for summer weight, spring cleaning urges. ( JG had a spring cleaning urge yesterday and sorted all his clothes, getting rid of a huge number of garments he had not worn for years. A shirt and trousers boasted Eaton’s labels; Canadian readers will know this store has been closed for well over a decade.) But I could paint today. If the tubes of colour were still good. If I weren't writing about it instead of doing it. If the windows were all clean. If there were not raspberry canes laughing at me in the iris bed. No, not today. But sometime soon.

I think, from time to time, how the immediate tasks and preoccupations seem to take over from the long held, the dearly held, things we want to do. The immediate necessity pushes in, shoving other things further back. At one time I thought that when my children were grown, when I stopped working for a salary, I would have so, so much time. Free, unencumbered hours to spend as I wish. And I do have time. I don't manage it well. I do not fill the unrelenting hour with even thirty minutes' worth of distance walked. I read, I watch the birds, I putter at household tasks that could be accomplished in half the time it takes me, stopping to check out a newly arrived grosbeak at the feeder or what Time has to say about the Wedding. It feels luxurious to do things this way. But it's sure not efficient.

Those of us who have raised children and managed a household and worked outside the home at the same time did not have the luxury, while doing so, of being 'in the minute', of pausing to admire a blue jay on a branch, of reading the magazine as soon as it arrived in the mail. Children need, as a matter of immediate necessity, the meal should be somewhere close to being on time, the man is out of clean socks (as are the children, for that matter), there are so many urgent tasks, deadlines, voices calling. Now that there is no stress in my life that I do not create for myself, I treasure the luxury of putting off, I give myself permission to loiter and look and dream.

I might enjoy the birds more, though, if I could see clearly through the kitchen window.

One of a host of golden daffodils.

There is a carpet of dutchman's breeches in the woods

JG and Shammy investigate windstorm damage

Shammy investigates the dutchman's breeches

Crunch. One of the mature maples the wind pushed over.

Last three photographs courtesy of the YD.

My Mother in Miniature

2011-05-08T15:59:00.001-04:00

The top photo is one of the few I have of my mother as a small girl: the second is of my granddaughter, taken about a year ago. If you darken Little Stuff's eyebrows and hair in your imagination you should see a resemblance.

It is more than just the facial structure and mouth. I watched Little Stuff at her gym meet this morning, sober, focused, determined. And I saw my mother, in miniature, in so many ways.

And Little Stuff did her stuff, too. She stuck every apparatus, did every move as perfectly as she could, ignoring the crowd and the cameras and the action all over the gym. She got great scores and was very pleased with herself. As were we. I only wish my mother could have seen her.

Annual Spring Grouch

2011-04-18T11:16:00.000-04:00

It is hard to imagine that you could design a more miserable day if you planned it. It is two degrees below the freezing mark and a mixture of cold rain and sleet pellets has been falling since mid-morning. It is gray, windy and dismal. The only thing missing is fog and I assume we will get that later. The YG's brainless but beautiful dog (we're dog-sitting again) abandoned her joyful outdoor existence and stomped into the house, dripping, was wiped down and is now sleeping in a heap on the floor in front of the wood stove.

It's a good thing it's Saturday, as we get two weekend papers today, enough to keep us occupied all morning with a couple of naps thrown in.

It is now Monday, and the wet snow is still with us. More fell last night and is presently melting off the lawn, the temperature now having inched its way to just above freezing. I am not hanging the laundry outside - it would just sit there and collect more moisture. Instead I am working on meeting minutes and other delights and not checking the forecast. If there is more of this coming, I really do not want to know.

Great excitement in the bird world. What we think is a Sharp Shinned Hawk just landed on the bird feeder. Needless to say, there are no small feathered or furred creatures to be seen, not even a red squirrel. A few weeks ago we had a Barred Owl hang around the feeder for most of the day. Again, not a creature was to be seen, although we think the owl did catch a squirrel or chipmunk the day before and was back for a second try. I do have a photo of the owl - it didn't care a bit that I was out on the kitchen deck with my camera.

Other than the owl and some shots of my birthday flowers to send to the givers, I have not been photographing. It is soggy, monochromatic and uninspiring out there and dim, dusty and uninspiring in here. I am longing for the day I can open the windows, let in the sweet spring air and start cleaning windows and do other spring things. I want to get out my spring and summer clothes; I'm sick of brown corduroy and heavy sweaters. I want to be able to walk without gumboots thumping my shins. I want Spring. Now.

There are two disgruntled and very damp and unkempt robins out on the lawn. They started to sing last week, but have been quiet since Friday. I don't blame them one bit. If they did say anything, it would probably sound a lot like the whinging I have just done.

(Even the worms won't come up in this weather. I can't make the mud stay put at the nest site. My claws are cold. Cheep.)

Oh, well. This mucky weather won't last forever. My next rant will probably concern biting insects. Or I can just repost the one from last year.

Sorry.

Spring is Whooshing In

2011-04-11T15:01:00.001-04:00

There is a mad April wind whirling around the yard, melting the snowbanks as I watch (and revealing lots of stuff I will have to police off the grass), whipping the trees to frenzy, drying the mud and the YD's dog's bed. As the clouds race by the sun flickers, strengthens, pales to shadow and returns. And here I am at the computer. Still. Again.

About the dog bed? We are dog sitting again. The YD's dog is a sweet but contrary 'Doodle' mix, with a long, wavy white coat and a puzzled expression. She moves from the inner city where there is no yard for her and all her expeditions are supervised walks to our acreage where she can go and do what she pleases. What she pleases seems to encompass, mostly, staying outside.

She refused to come in last night and so we put her bed and water out on the front porch for her. The edge of the porch is mostly shielded by a big roof overhang, but last night the rain blew in and when I looked out this morning there was a wet dog, a wet bed and, to make everything perfect, evidence on her no-longer white sopping wet fur that she had stuck her head into the bottom of the incinerator. She had the grace to look sheepish - wet sheepish at that.
Her majesty finally deigned to come back inside about noon and I am now letting her dry off before tackling her with a brush and carding comb to see how much mud I can remove.
Meanwhile, I have stuff done for my Thursday meeting, but not for two of the three I have scheduled for tomorrow.

Pause there while some dog brushing took place. I got some of the muck off - I now think she may have rolled in something lovely and muddy, but there is definitely soot in there too. Luckily she likes being brushed. The dog hair blows downwind as fast as I brush, and I envision some deliriously happy bird or small animal lining a nest with it in due course.

The lids all just blew off the trash containers downstairs. This is a strong wind. And, yes, it is a west wind. The birds are not crying, however. I suspect they are hanging on to branches with beak and claw, muttering to themselves.

Officially Out of Reading Matter

2011-04-08T21:33:00.001-04:00

Last week I received Jean Auel's latest book, a new book and new compendium of two older books by Elizabeth Moon, revised, and the latest in Cherryh's Foreigner series, all in one box.

Auel's stuff is repetitious, tediously didactic (but, sure, we all want to know Jondelar's techniques) and stiff. It is now at the top of the best seller list: and my cleaner has borrowed it, saying she is a huge fan.
Elizabeth Moon can write! I have read Surrender None and Liar's Oath before, but she has now tied the latter to the Paksennarion saga directly. I also burned through the latest in that saga, The Kings of the North and then read it a second time, just for the language.
Cherryh can write, too. The Foreigner series is all to a formula, but she manages to keep your attention, even when you know the fire fight is due up next.
I also got Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons for Little Stuff. Haven't reread that one, yet. Eyes are a bit blurry, somehow.
I did manage to change the sheets and do a bit of yard work, but the rest of the work all has taken second place. The downer is that now I have to wait at least another year for the conclusion of Moon's trilogy.
Best news of all - at least six yellow croci in the raised bed, three in bloom, three in bud. And the snow is off the lily bed. Over the next three days I think the last of the snow will melt.

Priorities

2011-03-31T16:38:00.000-04:00

I was going to post today, but UPS just arrived with a box of new books, one that I have been waiting for for a long time. Catch you later.

Saguaro

2011-03-23T00:40:00.001-04:00

219/365 This is a view of the sidewall of Sabino Canyon in Tucson. The tall spindly cacti are saguaro and when you are close to them they are very tall and not spindly at all. I find it most improbable that these giants of the desert choose to grow on tiny rock ledges way, way up a canyon wall. You pronounce the name sah wher o. Sort of.

220/3675 Here is a closer look.

221/365 You have to see this to really believe it

222/365 This is a barrel cactus - that has just finished blooming. This one is about three feet tall.

223/365 Woodpeckers make holes in the saguaro and they and other birds nest in the holes. I think there is a bird in the right hand hole - I took a series because the wretch kept popping in and out. Thw hole was about twenty feet in the air. Thank goodness for aperture priority.

224/365 A close up of the blossom bud on a cholla (choy ya).

Okay. Fixed that, dearest of my critics.

Arizona

2011-03-22T00:09:00.000-04:00

On a day in mid-March, when a mixture of soggy snow, thick mud and rain (again) was making me grumpy, the YD phoned and said " I need sun!" It was quickly agreed that we both needed a break and after a short negotiation we decided on Arizona as the best bet for warmth and dry. The fact that a drain is pouring water into the cactus bed outside my window, here in Tucson, does not make our destination a mistake. We arrived Wednesday night last week and have had glorious sun and warm dry weather right up till this afternoon. If it doesn't clear tomorrow, we have all of indoor Tucson to play in.

We opted for sunny and scenic and have spent the last five days on a small ranch a bit west and south of Chiricachua National Monument, of which more below. What we got as a bonus was the biggest full moon to appear in some years, and perfect dry air through which to admire it. This shot is one night before full.

209/365

210/365 Also one night before full. I have lots of tries for fully full night, but it was full dark and I only had a monopod with me, so none of what I took is much good. There is one funny one where the moon is falling out of the sky because I shifted the camera too soon. I may put it up later in a post entitled 'oops'.

211/365. The ranch is also a bird oasis. There is a small pond and enough water from the Turkey Creek to run fountains and bird baths. There is also enough water for a few full sized trees, and the small birds congregate in large numbers, sparrows, finches, doves, red-wing blackbirds and this guy, that I think is a waxwing.

212/365 This shot is one of the fountains, taken at close range and cropped.

213/365 The edge of the pond where Turkey Creek is dammed. The water is very low because the region has not had any winter rains this year. There is a flock of cranky tame geese stamping around in the dusty verges, grumbling.

214/365 The YD said she was not sure what this was supposed to be, but I figured it was an easy call. Bird on crossed wires. No? You had better appreciate this, because I had to stomp through a lot of dry and possibly rattlesnake concealing grass to get the angle right.

215/365 This is the YD surveying the rock formations inside Chiricachua National Monument. We took a lot of pictures up here - the YD on a long solo hike one day and, after she complained that she was not getting the colour correctly, both of us with my trusty D90 and a lot of different settings. The path she made me walk to get to this viewpoint filled me with terror. And frustration when YD and other tourists just strolled along on the parts where my acrophbia was worst.

216/365 The rock formations have eroded from the rock formed by an ancient vocano's eruption and you can see all sorts of forms and faces in them.

This is me clutching two hiking poles and enjoying a short patch of wide trail, in between places where the poor YD had to haul me up and down and carry the camera.

217/365 Sunset across the plain between the Dragoon and Chiracahua Mountain ranges. A nice border patrol guy stopped to see if we were okay as we took these.

218/365 The view out of our casa window at the ranch. This place is a birders' and hikers' paradise - they also have trail bikes, mountain bikes and horses. And friendly chickens. Highly recommended.

This is the YD's photo. Sun and sky and most improbably mustard-coloured grass. Or maybe lemon-coloured. I am not sure we did it justice although we tried.

I have more tries at the grass, and a whole day's worth of photos yet to download, but that is going to have to be a new post, because I am getting po-ed with the laptop.

2011-03-06T22:23:00.000-05:00

A teasel (teazel, teazle) is a plant that flowers in egg-shaped, dense, spiny heads with long, slender, stiff, prickly bracts below the head and numerous, short, stiff bristles within the head, the flower heads maturing into hard, brown, stiff-spined structures that were used for teasing and carding wool (hence the common name). Flowers from July to September. Teasel occurs throughout southern Ontario in waste areas, meadows, roadsides, and sometimes in cultivated land, usually in moist areas and on coarse soils. (Source, Govt. of Ontario Ministry of Agriculture.)

I don't know whether our plant is an immigrant or native, but similar plants occur in Great Britain and Europe and have been used for carding, time out of mind. Thus the Miriam Webster definition - teased TEASE/ transitive verb:

to disentangle and lay parallel by combing or carding, to tear in pieces; especially to shred (a tissue or specimen) for microscopic examination;
to disturb or annoy by persistent irritating or provoking especially in a petty or mischievous way, to annoy with petty persistent requests, pester or coax;
to comb (hair) by taking hold of a strand and pushing the short hairs toward the scalp with the comb;
to tantalize especially by arousing desire or curiosity often without intending to satisfy it.

It's the second definition that is occupying my mind this evening. I am good and tired of being poked with spiny comments.

My mother sometimes said, sadly, that she hated her grandfather when she was a small girl. He was a great man for teasing children, sometimes to the point of tears, and then by the gift of a candy or coin buying, he thought, complete forgiveness. She loathed the teasing, steered clear of the man when she could, and never forgot or forgave him. In consequence, she never teased, not even her hair. And aside from the Christmas game of guess-the-gift, I don't do it either.

Women and men tease differently, I think. Little girls tantalize one another with secrets, gangs and whispers. Little boys tend to pull hair, shriek insults and, in my long ago and antique childhood, dip pigtails in inkwells. (Yes, I am that old.) And although this type of action becomes more sophisticated in an adult, the impulse persists in many people, long after they are old enough to know better. I wonder, sometimes, if adult male teasing is a way of expressing affection without becoming vulnerable by showing the underlying emotion. I wonder that about my great grandfather who, I assume, was brought up in the nineteenth century to be 'manly' and strong. I wonder if his actions, so wounding to his granddaughter, were the only way he could show he noticed her.

My maternal grandfather made me plasticine rabbits and rescued me from my grandmother's hens. My paternal grandfather taught me to play euchre, cribbage and poker and slipped me quarters (big money in 1949) when my mother spanked me. I was a precocious only child, bewildered by playground teasing and far too prone to hide in a book. A lot of the vicious girl gang warfare of late childhood simply went over my head. I remember some insults from high school, but I have never been able to figure out what the people who gave them out thought they would gain.

And then I went and married a man who likes, from time to time, to tease. His teasing is quite gentle and isn't petty or overly aggressive. But it does disturb and annoy me, so I guess it fits the definition. And I can't seem to be able to explain why I am disturbed or annoyed in a way that he can understand. The comments he means, I am sure, to be amusing always seem to come from around a corner and catch me unaware. I feel insecure and inadequate. Then I realize I am being teased and he doesn't mean it. Maybe I don't have any sense of humour. Maybe I wasn't properly seasoned as a child and teen. Maybe he is trying to tell me something indirectly. Maybe some day he won't do it any more.

Maybe I should just pick out the sharp little spines and get on with things.

How do you feel about teasing and being teased? And what do you tell your children?

Making Tracks

2011-03-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

208/365 The joys of late winter. Warm sun. Big tractor.

Wearing several hats at once.

2011-02-23T15:11:00.000-05:00

One of my favourite amazing bloggers is bon over at Crib Chronicles. She has lately written a post about buying recreational land and the impulse to live a life of self-sufficiency. I started to write a comment about this post but, when I had reached about the one hundredth word mark, realized that what I should be writing was a post of my own. So, please go and read her post about almost buying a cottage. You'll love the writing and be fascinated by her topic. And I will add my bit to the discussion.

When you buy a hundred acre piece of vacant land, it can take over your life. It took over ours.

Our early years as a married couple were a mad scramble as we variously coped with doctoral dissertation, two babies in fifteen months, frequent moves and not enough money. Once JG finished his post doc, however, and settled into a permanent job, once the kids both started school, things, especially our finances, became smoother. And we decided that while a suburb was a fine place to raise and school young children, it was also noisy, crowded and nerve racking. We decided to buy recreational land.

Our first few investigations told us that a cottage on water in our price range came with even more noise, crowding and nervous tension. We started to look for a peaceful place, hopefully with access to water, where we could spend weekends. What we found was a hundred acre plot that had been settled and farmed in the nineteenth century but that latterly had returned to scrub bush. At the end of a rutted track on a dead end road, it was a perfect hideout.

My father, an avid consumer of survival fiction, worried from time to time about how his precious grandchildren would survive come Armageddon. He helped us buy this piece of land, and encouraged me to teach the girls subsistence farming, archery, self defence, all the skills he thought necessary for living through cataclysmic times. My husband was far more concerned with building an insulated cabin for all year weekending, taming the overgrown field and bush, killing marauding porcupines and exploring every nook and cranny of our new-found possession.

We did get books about surviving in the bush, we made (awful) soap and tried boiling down maple sap à la our pioneer ancestors. I tried gardening, but the competition with deer, coons, rodents and birds, on a two-day-a-week basis, was just too aggravating and I continued to keep my kitchen garden in the back yard of our city house. An electric fence, large dogs and a good aim with a twenty-two are the kind of help back woods gardeners need. Living off the land? While cat tail roots may be nourishing, they taste terrible. I was never inspired to see if porcupines were any tastier.

What did happen is that our daughters became very proficient at finding their way through the rocks, hills and swamps, learned to snowshoe and cross-country ski, charmed chickadees to their hands with sunflower seeds and, by helping with JG's various building projects, became competent carpenters. This was some comfort to my father. Later, my land happy husband acquired two hundred more acres of scrub bush, we became maple syrup makers and when he, a research scientist, got an early buyout from his federal government employer, we moved to this land permanently and built a home here. My grown daughters love it here for recreation and peace. I feed the deer and do not compete with them and live in gardenless tranquillity.

It was sometimes difficult, living five days in the city with part time job, two kids, dog and husband (um, not in that order), two days on the land, fitting all the city work into the four evenings, keeping two kitchens stocked, two houses clean and repaired, working with the woodsman husband long hours in the bush, cutting and stacking cabin stove and sugar camp evaporator wood, getting ready for the sugaring season, enduring the long hours of boiling, bottling, checking the lines in the bush for leaks plodding along through deep, soggy snow on snowshoes, lugging the equipment. Twice a week packing, travel out and back, arrange the children/teenagers' lessons and social life around two day absence from their milieux, keeping track of it all, could be frustrating, onerous.

We have friends who made the break complete, moved entirely into rural mode, grew food, raised their children there. Gradually they have adopted some amenities, buy more of what they need, made things easier. We have friends who have always lived here who seize on any and every labour saving device to make farm living smoother (theirs is the garden with the electric fence and all that, a garden where I weed in exchange for produce.) We have retired to 'the bush', and that is somewhat different. I shop in the nearest town for most of our food needs, and while JG happily lives a forest manager's life, I spend my time doing what my interests and age suggest to me, volunteering, reading and writing and photography, the minimum of housework. I no longer help in the bush - my joints and back are too vulnerable and, in truth, I'm not that fond of hoiking pieces of tree around.

As a young wife and mother I did what I had to do. I put myself at the end of every list for twenty years of child raising and for several more of housebuilding so that we could live comfortably here. I am now nurturing, slowly and carefully, my sense of self and my autonomy.

In the end, you see, the land and the dream have taken over only as much of our lives as we allow.

Obsessed with Tulips

2011-02-22T16:05:00.002-05:00

the 365 prompt this week was 'texture'. I became obsessed with photographing a pot of tulips (see prior post) but I did play around with other textures as well.

201/365 Back lighting. That should have been plenty of light for the plantcam, you would think.

202/365 Our chimney wall in late afternoon sun.

203/365 Birch bark

204/365 Everything was covered with a sprinkling of dry snow.

205/365 Hoar frost plus snow.

206/365 Satin smooth tulip petal

207/365 More backlighting, just at dusk. The composition sucks, but I like the colour values.

Recording Things

2011-02-22T15:57:00.001-05:00

Dead white pine.

The branches left after the trunk was tractored away.

199/365 Fire bug. Note tractor and JG to the right, scavenging more branches to put on the pyre.

A few days ago JG cut out a very tall and bushy (open grown) dead white pine. He tractored away the main part of the trunk but left a huge pile of dead pine branches across the back of the field behind the house . I suggested that we build a pile off the maintained grass and set fire to it before the end of the free fire period.This worked so well (photo #3) that he has since cut down two more moribund trees and made lovely bonfires of the lot.

The house has a lot of flowers in it today. A Christmas gift to me was a thing called a 'plantcam'. I was also given an amaryllis, and tried out my new toy with it, only to find that the wretched thing moved about so much on its stalk through the day, seeking light, that it bobbed in and out of camera range. What I needed, I thought, was a pot of tulip bulbs. Unfortunately, at this point the temperature dropped into the -20º C range and stayed there. I was afraid to try to get a flower from the store to the car to the house. Last week the temperature moderated, I got a pot of fine, deep pink budded tulips, and set up shop.

Only to set the camera wrong somehow. Instead of a 15 minute time lapse video, I got a series of 15 second videos. If I can figure out how to combine them, the result might be interesting. In the meantime, I am enjoying the stills. Somewhat grainy, though, and I am not sure why as I had the plant in front of the big front window facing south west. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

200/365 The Plantcam set-up

First shot in the series

Second shot, end of first day. Note that sneaky bloom on the left is creeping out of camera range.

Last shot. Left bulb still reaching for the sky. In fact, it looks as if I moved the camera closer, but I don't have any memory of doing so.

Snarl.

Sigh

2011-02-10T22:38:00.001-05:00

Okay, I got the whole boiling of those jobs done and emailed them off, the second one without its attachments, about 11:00 pm. Crawled out of bed this morning and when I got around to checking the email, this lack was pointed out to me. Re sent. With the wrong attachment as I found out after I got home from not one but two sessions in the dentist's chair and feebly punched up the email. I have now resent with the right attachment (checked it this time) but have not had the energy to tackle the next set of jobs. One has to be done by noon tomorrow. Oh, dear.

I do, however, have photos. One thing about driving an hour in to the city to the dentist and sitting in the chair for two hours is that you have lots of time to brood about what you are going to do with a prompt like 'black and white and red all over'. Hilarious and inane variations present themselves, distracting you from the fact that the hygienist has just stuck a sharp probe into your tongue.

So,

197/365 Green and white and reeds all over.

198/365 Black and white and tromped all over.

You should ignore me when I whine. It was a fantastically beautiful day today and when I left this morning, every twig and branch and needle was covered with a lovely layer of hoar frost and a sprinkle of snow diamonds. Photos coming later. Must get Letter to the Editor emailed. Now! Just recalled I have a 9:00 am appt tomorrow.

I'm getting too old for this.

Quickly

2011-02-09T17:22:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting here in a massive mess of paper and jobs and ... why can't I learn to say no?

But being disinclined to attack the job of editing a ByLaw or reaming out my freezer, I'm sneaking a few minutes to post a few well edited shots of the highlands in February. Edited a lot. In fact, pretty close to black and white and blue all over.

093/365 Paul's barn from the road.

094/365 Paul's gate

095/365 The hay bales.

096/365 Footsteps in the snow.

Manual Dexterity

2011-02-06T16:17:00.000-05:00

190/365 Starting off

191/365 This one should be called 'brute strength'

192/365 The bear snowman gets his nose patted into shape.

I have a Little Shadow

2011-02-04T21:53:00.001-05:00

189/365 the granddaughter's first formal gym meet, floor routine.

Ezekiel saw a wheel a'rollin'

2011-02-01T10:35:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I drove into the village for a meeting, running just slightly late as is my (blush) frequent habit. The sun was blazing away on the clean, white snow, necessitating both dark glasses and a lowered visor. But through all this dazzle I could see a big sweep of sky to the north east. There was a bit of wispy cloud and contrail after contrail, some older and spreading, some knife blade new. There must have been close to a dozen in total and one tiny wink of a jet drawing yet another on its route west. I had my camera in my purse. And the title popped into my mind - 'way in the middle of the air'. But I was already so late that I had no time to stop and try to capture what I could see. And, of course, by the time I got out of my meeting it was past noon and whatever atmospheric conditions had preserved so many contrails had changed.

My mother used to fix me with a cold gray eye and quote 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions.' This, usually, when she caught me with my homework undone, the yard not raked or some other task waiting and found me with my nose in a book instead. Although far more diligent than I, she could frequently be caught nose in book herself and so she never really did train me into methodical behaviour. And living for coming on fifty years with a chronic procrastinator has not helped. So it is that nine months after we got home, I am finally getting around to editing and ordering the photographs from our west coast US trip last May.

188/365 Oregon coast at Astoria

Thinking about clouds and horizons, I started in to edit the Oregon coast photos and picked this one for the 365 project's post today. I had no idea that there was so much sand beach in Oregon - I somehow had the idea that the coast there was rocky. But that's California, or at least the part of it that we drove. This photo was taken at Astoria on one of the sand bars that frame the mouth of the Columbia river. And it makes a nice contrast to the thought of the 15 cm of snow forecast for tomorrow.

I love the ocean. Stuck as I am in the middle of the continent, I don't get to the ocean all that often, but when I do I am enchanted. The beat of the breaking sea on rocks, the long hiss of an incoming roller on sand, the indescribable scent of salt water, the wind off the waves streaming over my face, the light on the waves and the sand, all of these are a glory and a wonder to me. Swimming in salt water is dreamlike - the denser salt water is a support and a caress. I learned to scuba dive off the Florida keys and will sometimes dream that I am flying through the water there, dancing with silvery swirls of fish, watching the corals and sea plants sway. I would love to dive in the west coast kelp forests someday.

And here I sit, nose in the computer, with the morning cleanup undone, an agenda to set and various other tasks waiting. Almost I can sense a cold gray eye behind me.

Here's a nice redition of the song.

Stuck in the Middle of Winter

2011-01-30T23:07:00.001-05:00

186/365 This is what JG has been busy doing for the last week or so. We don't have deep snow yet and this has given him the opportunity to start on the stove wood for 2012 ... or, maybe, 2013.

We went to Wheelers' Pancake House and Sugar Camp for lunch today. There was a soft snow fall but the cloud was breaking up and giving some definition to the snow. This is the old sugar camp that they keep as decoration.

187/365. I was trying to catch the differences in light as the sun tried to break through. Not too successfully, but this is the best of a bad lot.

And the second best. These two photos show the multitude of main lines used to pump the sap from the trees to the big gathering tanks at the main camp. Wheelers' is a big, big operation.

Playing In the Middle

2011-01-28T21:32:00.001-05:00

184/365.
This is one of the shots I took for the 365 project a while back. it was bland and uninteresting but has become a lot more fun with the contrast enhanced and the gamma twiddled. (How professional I do sound, I don't think.) It was, though, supposed to be shot right down the gap between the red wine glasses and I blew that. So, 'not in the middle' might be the better title.

I use Corel's PhotoPaint to edit photographs. It is an immensely complicated program and I have never mastered all of its features, but it is a lot of fun. The rose I have just put in as the blog title photo has been altered with one of the 'Effect' choices in PP.... it's called 'ZigZag', for obvious reasons. You can also choose to apply the effect of a conté crayon or watercolour or many other artistic choices, or make the surface look like bubbles or stained glass, and on and on. I can play for hours, alas.

A while back I was whinging about organizing my photos. I picked up a copy of Corel PaintShop Photo 2010, but I'm not impressed with it. Too complicated and some of the features are not obvious (like applying tags. Ggggrrrrr). A couple of days later I was poking around in Blogger where I was offered a free download of Version 3.8.0 of Picassa 3. The download only took a few minutes and when I activated it I found the best picture sorter I have ever seen - at least, for my purposes. Unlike PaintShop Photo, you are not stuck with using trays (although you can), the red eye fixer is stellar and, best of all, the program organizes photo folders by date taken but also retaining the label I gave to the folder when I created it. This mirrors the way I think, unlike the Adobe organization tree that doesn't, and I find it fantastically easy to use.

It also cranked up all on its own (a bit disconcerting) and did face recognition on all my photos, with an easy to use labelling system for the faces. Excellent quality recognition, best I have ever seen. Once this was finished, the result gave me a good indication of how many doubles (and triples and quadruples) I have among my picture folders. And what a lot of photos of my grand daughter's smiling face I do have. Best of all, if you double click on any thumbnail, an option comes up that allows you to identify the exact folder where the thumbnail originated.

This software is so easy to use that I am now gearing up and sorting and cleaning up all (almost 1000) photos I took on our trip out west last spring. I am doing the flowers first, and am going to use some of the edited shots as 365 material, since editing and labelling can be a big part of photography.

185/365 This is a shot of a bunch of California poppies taken last May not in California (although we were there) but in a park along the Columbia River in Oregon. The flowers were ubiquious throughout our drive along the coast and they are spectacular. This one was in the middle of an island in the road into the park. The rest of the grass had not greened up around them but there they were and aren't they glorious. Contrast enhanced and cropped.

Oleo

2011-01-27T20:44:00.001-05:00

140/365 This is a cropped longshot of my family putting out deer feed. And of the dog, being sternly reprimanded for eating same.

141/365 This is a shot of the feeding station and the house the way the deer see it. In the right foreground is an apple tree that is pruned absolutely clean as far up as a deer can reach standing on its hind legs. Deer love apple leaves.

142/365 This is the deer feed. The Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario, has developed a recipe for winter feeding. There are oats, bran and other grains, as well as pellets of something or other, and the whole mess is mixed with a bit of molasses.

I took my new camera out around 4:00 pm today to play with aperture and shutter priority and with white balance in the long afternoon light. The sun was shining as I got dressed and ready to go out but just a few minutes after I stepped out the door, a nasty black band of cloud came up and obscured the sun. A lot of my shots have turned out blue, therefore, and I will have to play again later. Here are some of the gleanings from today and a few other similar tries.

143/365 Squirrel at the base of the bird feeder, with handy escape hole. There are all sorts of tunnels and holes around the feeders and will be more as the snow gets deeper.

144/365. Just after the sun ran off and left me.

145/365 Depth shot all to hell. If you squint you can see the deer trails.

146/365. Upped the aperture to F8. Still not good depth, but better.

147/365 Milkweed pods. Luckily close up not so much affected by the lighting.

148/365. My beloved wood stove. Late afternoon light is reflecting on the chimney wall. Needs more contrast.

______________________________________________________________________

I am skipping a few more than 30 days here and putting myself back on the correct day. Some frantic fill in will happen. Sometime.

183/365. Half Way Open.

Himself brought me rosebuds a week ago today. This is as far as they have opened.

Making tracks - a somewhat confusing description of where I live.

2011-01-19T23:05:00.002-05:00

There was a youngish buck at the feeding station this morning before we had put any feed out - a four or six pointer at most. This afternoon it has all been does and I think they've pretty well finished the batch of feed that JG put out after lunch. We don't have a lot of snow yet - the skiers are complaining - and it is easy for the deer to get around. There are deer tracks everwhere around the field. The low snow load also means that they're out and about on the roads and I am driving very, very carefully these days. A cautious speed won't help with the crazies that leap out of nowhere directly in front of you, but it does mean that you can miss the youngsters who wander onto the road and stand, knock-kneed in that peculiar puzzled deer stance, to stare at your oncoming headlights.

I drive a lot. The price of gasoline is giving me acute snarling spells every time I have to fill up, and I have a vehicle that gives pretty good mileage (kilometerage?) for a utility vehicle. But we live far from anything else at all and if I need groceries, or have to go to a meeting or even want to visit with friends, I drive, at the least, eight kilometres to my nearest Scrabble partner and fifty-four to the nearest comprehensive grocery store. Over 100 km to the city. I have walked to my friend's place in spring or fall but between the snow and the industrial strength local biting bugs, I don't do it very often.

I do love it here, though. I love the deer and the cheerful chickadees on the suet ball in the kitchen window, and tracing the tracks of coyotes and other small animals through our back trails. And the wolves. Big pawprints. The wolf tracks usually go pretty straight, but the coyotes wander from side to side, probably trail marking and sniffing at other coyotes' liquid responses. I love the silence and equally love it when the stillness is broken by the chuckly of an owl or the yelping of the coyotes on a hunting trail. I love the sound of the wind in barren tree branches, the tick of ice pellets on the skylight, the scrunch of cold, cold snow as I treck down the laneway to get the papers in the morning.

133/365. An arial view of our land taken a couple of years ago. The green patch in the centre of the photo is our field. The house is at the lower, left side almost hidden by trees and you can see the roof of the garage to the right and of the barn and drive shed in the trees to the right. Our nearest house is a hunt camp that is only occupied a few weeks a year. You can see it as a whitish blob at the very bottom of this photo, left hand side.

We live on what was, a century ago, a subsistance farm, complete with orchard, barns and a stone fence along the roadway. This land is at the end of three kilometres of dirt road that twists and turns around the rock outcroppings and precariously crosses a big marsh on a causeway. Our house is set where the homestead orchard once stood, at the edge of the only field still open when we bought the land in the mid seventies. We have labouriously cleaned and opened out this field and the deer are fed on a rock by a gap in what was once a fencerow. There is a big outcropping of bedrock in the middle of the field, and huge rockpiles all around the edges and off along our trails through the scrub bush that has grown up where one the farm fields lay.

134/365 This is a composite photo of the whole field area in the spring. The rock pile shows just to the right of the satellite dish. The big dish provides television: the small dish is a satellite receiver for the internet.

A few years after we bought the first one hundred acre piece we were fortunate to be able to acquire two more lots of the same size, one to the west of the original and one to the south. The western one has the maple trees we tapped for many years and the southern one has two huge beaver ponds at the back and on the west opens out onto a big marsh with a small river running through it. (see top of aerial photo.)

135/365 This is a view facing north west across the large back beaver pond, looking southwest.

136/365 Standing at the deer feeding station rocks looking toward the back of the house. My screen porch haven is at the far right hand end of the house and the start of the bed rock outcroping at the far left where the ground rises.

137/365 A summer close up of the rocks where the feed goes. It took us days of labour to haul rocks out of this back piece of land and get grass to grow on it. The feed goes on the bed rock so that if turkeys find it they will not rip up the grass scratching for the seeds.

138/365 This is the one apple tree left in what was the orchard. It is over 100 years old and the trunk is quite hollow but it still bears. And attracts bears.

139/365 Another view of the big back beaver pond looking due south. This is where Grandpa rows Little Stuff around in the punt. The blob on the tree just right of centre is a heron's nest.

It's a long way from anywhere else but our neighbours although not close are wonderful and the community is one I love. A grand place to retire. JG does his woodlot things and I do ... what I do.

It's peaceful here, howling canids and all. It's home.

Feeding the Deer

2011-01-18T16:30:00.000-05:00

We put out MNR deer ration and corn on some rocks near the back of our field behind the house, hoping to see deer and turkeys. We've had no turkeys lately, but we have a lot of deer. These photos are all taken from one angle because the deer can't see me there. Sometimes they won't spook if I go out on the deck, but mostly they run. This is at the outer limit of my telephoto and ability to hand-hold. Lots of fun!

129/365 Taken on January 9th. I increased the contrast a bit because it was a misty afternoon. Taken about 3:30 pm. They will turn their rumps to the camera, drat them.

130/365 Taken Monday morning, January 17th. The doe on the left does not belong to this group and is being driven back if she approaches any closer. There's also one big doe (doing the chasing) a mid sized doe and two fawns, tails to camera.

131/365. This is Mr One Horn. He dropped the other antler right beside the feeding rocks and we have it stored in the barn. I have seen what I think is this deer, hornless, but we had a snowfall. I will do an antler search in the spring. Taken very late afternoon, cloudy day.

132/365 This is the biggest group we have had. I took this one on Sunday. There

were actually nine deer but only eight show in this shot - they were two different groups that did not co-exist well. Number one is tail to the camera left of the cedar, two is looking over three's back, four and five are trying to sneak up on the corn, six and seven are guzzling and eight is the fawn at far right. Often the fawns get chased off, but this one belongs, I think, to the biggest doe.

Old Movies

2011-01-16T14:10:00.001-05:00

JG got a set of old war movies as a Christmas gift and last night we watched one of them - Twelve O’Clock High. To refresh your memory - this is a story about the first group of American daylight bombers (1942) to attack Europe. Starring Gregory Peck, it tells of his efforts to turn around a squadron of these bombers plagued by 'bad luck' and shows how they became an effective unit. Peck's character challenges the air crews to 'do their duty' to 'become adult and take responsibility', and in so doing he leads them until he is overcome by the weight of his responsibility and cannot function. He becomes catatonic but when the squadron comes back successfully from the mission he could not lead, conducted instead by the worst of the 'slackers', he recovers.

It got me thinking, this portrayal of dedication and duty. For one thing, we don't see a lot of this type of film any more. The Vietnam war produced a genre about how the men in uniform were broken (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter) and how they healed (I've forgotten the title of the film I want to cite here - it had Jane Fonda as a soldier's wife who encounters a maimed vet in an army hospital). Later we had 'operations' films from places like Afghanistan that are mainly concerned with the futility of heroic belief and action. The closest modern film to this 'dedicated hero' type that I can remember is not a war film but rather The Lord of the Rings trilogy that was, in the main, written during WWII.

This line of thought intersected another one, the product of several articles this weekend about a Yale professor's take on mothering - she describes her attempts to make her daughters excel in all they undertake. One response to her book has been a heartfelt howl from the proponents of nurturing (Western style?) parenting. The 'Dragon mother' has been accused of child abuse by several voices.

At close to seventy I obviously belong to the 'duty and rigour' side of the argument. I am not even a baby boomer, born as I was in 1942 while my father bobbed around in the North Atlantic in a corvette fighting submarines. I was brought up to believe that you keep your promises regardless of the cost to yourself, you do your duty no matter how unpalatable, you put the welfare of your community ahead of your own. I do not see much evidence that public figures follow these values much of the time these days. Sarah Palin, for example, lost all credibility for me when she quit as Governor of Alaska part way through her term. The parenting style of the aptly christened 'helicopter parents' is practically incomprehensible from my cobweb draped seat in the bleachers.

Some remnants of the 'duty' morality, mind you, also strike me as weird. A politician in the USA can be and is pounded into jelly for personal infidelity but can get away with huge amounts of patronage. Serial monogamy is not even questioned - Liz Taylor's seven (I think) marriages are regarded with indulgence. A person whose first question is 'what's in it for me?' is given a straight-forward answer. I have no patience, either, for people who squawk about having to pay taxes to provide community services and aids for disadvantaged kids.

I should be stuffed and placed with the other dinosaurs, perhaps.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that in the world I see now the hand has moved from the rigid morals of Twelve O’Clock High to the deep-sixing, by the 'Me' generation and those following, of many values and customs that make our society liveable. Courtesy. Courage. Responsibility for our own actions. Principles. And a little bit of putting the other guy first.

Playing

2011-01-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

When I need to learn or refresh my mind on how a program works, I play. Here I am playing in Corel Photopaint.

126/365 This is a preset effect called 'zigzag', set at normal.

127/365 I made this into a duotone, returned the colour to it (RGB) , on one colour plane and then turned it back into a .jpg. Not sure I could get the same effects again. She is a flaming red-head, though.

128/365 Playing with the light values in gray scale and then scrubbing the background.

Okay, playtime is over. Must read minutes and meeting notes now. Snivel!

Reports from a Pack Rat

2011-01-13T16:03:00.000-05:00

When we were down south visiting my in-laws over the holiday, I found my brother-in-law in custody of a tin box full of old and battered photographs, a range that had belonged to my sister-in-law and one or more of her aunts. I sorted some of these out, that portrayed family that I recognized, and am now in the process of trying to do some restoration on them. Some are of my SIL, some of my MIL's family, taken during WWII and shortly thereafter, some of my husband as a boy. Nice memories, since I find myself as a preserver of family history for Little Stuff, someday.

125/365

Above is a photo of JG's father taken in 1933: he would have been in his late teens or very early twenties. (Must find out for sure - can't remember his birth year off the top of my head.) The second 'cleaned' version has had the tonal balance changed and some of the creases and blots removed from the face and figure. I still have a lot to do on this one. Unfortunately the tonal values in the face and in the stains on the background are so close that playing with the colour of the stains makes the face lose definition. There are other avenues left to explore, though.

I have a lot of family data. My father's cousin is and has been an indefatigable delver into their family history. My family name is Holden, and Bob has traced the Windsor scions of that name right back to Elizabethan England, found a coat of arms, and put together a fat loose-leaf book of information. He and some of the other cousins of that generation also found the money and will to have the original Holden log house restored and moved to an historical park in Essex County.

My mother' family is one I have done a lot of work on: I did a seminar course in social anthropology a long time ago and was given the assignment of studying my family. I ended up with a huge genological table, a short write up on most of my immediate ancestors, and a lot of other neat stuff, most of it winkled out of my grandmother by my mother. I have a tape of my grandmother talking about raising her babies with sound effects from my baby interspersed. Lovely.

And, for the last seven years, I have been building this blog as a record of her grandparents for Little Stuff. As well, on the computer and now backed up to separate storage are large files of family photos, and other records. I recently read a post in which the writer described how she is archiving her child's art work on line and so I am doing some of that as well. (Because I can't store it all!) I have my two girls' work plus Little Stuffs. I have Commencement programs and University graduation programs and newspaper clippings. And once they are scanned and safely stored, I can Throw. It. Out.! Or, at least, some of it.

My grandfather Holden was a keeper, of clippings and pages from newspapers among other things. The YD has two posters made from the front page of the newspaper on the day Edward VIII abdicated and the day WWII ended. She also has my father's service medals and a fine photograph of him in uniform, all of which we intend to mount into a shadow frame.

I have a braid of my own and one from each of my daughters, mounted in a frame by my mother. I have at least one bronzed baby shoe and there used to be more. I found a nasty little envelope among my mother's things with all of my baby teeth in it. Pack rat and collecter of Stuff that I am, I hope someone knocks me on the head before I get that bad.

Must get back to playing with the old photos. More later. I love this stuff. And I am counting it for 365, okay?

Running as Fast as I Can

2011-01-12T10:47:00.000-05:00

What to do about the catch-up on the 365 project! I am about 50 shots behind and every day that I dither about the numbering puts me farther down. For now, I am hurling up bits of stuff that I did not have time to get to before Christmas. I also have a project going to clean old family photos that I picked up when we went to visit JG's mother over the holiday. Rejigging battered prints is a long, slow job, however and I know I will be slow posting those. So, for now, the pickup bits and, if my damn internet connection will just pick up some speed, throwing a whole pile onto Picassa. Then, when I see where I'm at, maybe ask for permission to jump.

118/365 Copper windchimes. Again, trying to capture the light and mood.

119/365 An icy twig where I played with the colour values. A lot!

120/365 Dainty pawprints on the marsh.

121/365 The Christmas Pointsettia. Not enough depth of field.

122/365 Our land is pure Canadian shield, with lots of outcroppings. I particularly like this one that gets afternoon light.

123/365. Christmas Tree bird with the new camera. My living room is painted a sort of 'cloud' gray. Very useful for this kind of shot.

And, last but not least,

124/365, So nice to come back inside and warm the fingers and toes. I do not have a clue why Blogger stretched this shot vertically. Rats!

Onward! (Trumpets in background, drums beating a tattoo).

A Little Order, Please

2011-01-09T22:16:00.000-05:00

My photo storage is A Mess. At one time I had a fairly reasonable filing system. Then I got a new Nikon that came with all sorts of software and I started downloading using Nikon Transfer. Then I decided to learn to use Photoshop. All of these programs store the photos differently and when I start to look for something, reverting to my own filing system, I find things all mixed up. Photos have been added to folders that they don't belong in, huge folders have been created by date, sitting next to folders with one or two photos in them, and I can't find anything.

I got a lovely back-up drive for Christmas and have copied my whole 'Pictures' file onto it, in its confused and unwieldy whole. Next, I am going to take the first file apart, throw out (shudder, sob) a lot of losers, and rationalize the wretched thing. If I don't get this done, may the next bird I photograph shit in my eye!

While plotting out what I am going to do, I actually found three photos that I wanted to use for the 365 project some time ago -- before I lost them.

115/365 Walking the YD's dog in a November sunset.

116/365 Bark. Not the dog, though. From the same afternoon.

117/365. Snow. I have played with this one a lot, and it is quite pixilated, if you enlarge it any more than this. But I like the colour contrast.

The Annual Office Cleanse

2011-01-08T16:43:00.000-05:00

If you page back a bit in this blog you will find several sets of before-and-after office cleaning posts, with photos. I will not inflict the photos on you again; indeed, if you have seen one 'after' shot, you have seen them all. And the 'before's are always embarrassing. As in, 'how could you let it get to this state!?' Let me just mention that there is some desktop showing and the 'To Be Filed' folder is bursting. And by Monday morning I have to have the minute book for one of my organizations complete. This means that the desktop will immediately vanish again and my floor will be covered with little white paper circles leaking from the three hole punch.

Maybe I need coffee before I tackle that.

112/365 Amaryllis

I did take a break from the frenzied hurling of paper into recycle bags to take a few photos. I used the D90, mainly because I know it better and I wanted to try to capture the quality of the light today. We've had snow on and off and the sky is sort of a bruised blue/gray and all the whites are flat. I was playing around with the amaryllis when I looked out and saw our frequent visitor - a six point buck - at the feeding station.

113/365 One horned deer

With one horn. We found the other one yesterday in the snow beside the pails of feed. But the deer seemed in no way concerned.

114/365 The third shot is my witch ball. Untouched by any editing. Probably the best shot to display the light.

Blue Winter World

2011-01-06T23:00:00.003-05:00

I spent the day in the city, spending my Christmas money in our outsized bookstore and also buying myself a new iron. I have had a cordless iron for some years but it died, choked by water deposits, just before Christmas. I had a lot of tablecloths to prepare for festive meals and so I hastened into Canadian Tire (ah, American friends, what you are missing) and bought a cheapie, with cord. And hated every tangled and frustrating moment of ironing 104" tablecloths with it. Unfortunately, Santa did not notice this debacle and so I treated myself to a replacement for my cordless one today. I shall give the offending corded one to the Reuse Centre at our local dump.

The YD and I went to a theatre after this retail therapy and saw The King's Speech. Highly recommend this film. Excellent acting, although I think the Queen Consort is somewhat miscast. It's probably specially affecting and interesting if you know your 20th century British history, but I think it would be a good movie even if you did not have the background.

I am also posting two more pictures - taken on our beaver ponds yesterday afternoon with my nice new little camera. Good thing I did not take the biggie as I got a lot of snow dumped on me getting to the ponds, but little guy was safe in my pocket, wrapped in a spare mitten. I thought the sunset shots would be the best, but in truth I like the dark aftermath of sunset the best.

110/365 Sunset on the upper beaver pond.

111/365 Blue Winter World

The tiny black blob in the centre of this shot is JG out on the ice chopping holes with an axe to test the ice thickness. It's skatable! Whee.

2011-01-05T15:13:00.000-05:00

01/01/11 was a few days ago, and we are rapidly approaching 11/01/11 (or we are if we are Canadian; I think Americans are heading for 01/11/11.) Before I know it, it will be 11/11/11 in all of North America and I will be even farther behind than I am now. Why is it that I struggle with date order, Roman numerals and the Greek alphabet. It seems as if, mostly, my mind echoes with ear worms, snatches of poetry, bits of whatever I am reading and the grocery list, and no thinking is getting done at all. this is not good, and it is making my list of posts look pretty anaemic. I will try to do better in 2011. Now, is that 'twenty-eleven'? Do we all agree? And is there a name for this decade?

I just finished mopping down the hardwood floors after the Festive Season incursions had covered them with shrimp juice, bits of icing and drippings from the YD's dog's chin. There were a few miniature foot prints as well. It would not have surprised me to find reindeer tracks. I have the downstairs room where I do laundry and crafts restored to an unusual cleansiness since it was the Christmas present wrapping station for two weeks and the floor there was a morass of bits of tape, ribbon and plastic. I have all the Christmas gift bags sorted by size and stored (yeah, I'm a bit strange.) JG's Christmas gifts are all still stacked on the bedroom bureau top, but I have a plan for that, too.

You would think that a glow of virtue would be illuminating my leisurely post-cleaning rest. Ha. I still have to tackle the office (where the boxes from some of my gifts are still stacked, blush). And all of the secretary and board stuff that I have been either bookmarking or printing and stacking since mid December. There is one review due tomorrow. There is a big pile of loose minutes, some of which are signed final copies, to get into the minute book. Meanwhile I am losing at Scrabble, as is my usual fate. Does anyone know a word that has 'toy' in the middle and with either two more letters following or three preceding? I need that triple very badly. And Spell-Checker does not like 'cleansiness'. Too bad, you boring, anal retentive program, it's staying.

Oh, yea, the procrastination queen is at her best this afternoon. It's been a nice day for a change with the sun popping out of the clouds and the wind whooshing the loose snow off all the tree branches and making our wind chime sing. (The sun does show up the mess on the floors!) I may get around to making the odd New Year's resolution in February. (Hmm, not to let the minutes pile up again? Wash the damn windows before the winter sun shows every bug spot and smear? Do things on time? I've broken that one lots of times.) How about - stop using so many parentheses. Can I actually keep that one?

Speaking of putting it off, I'm about two months behind on the 365 project. I have a ream of stuff to put up on Flicker, but there it sits in a nasty, sneering folder on my desktop. What I have to post here are two from 'memory' - if I recall the prompt correctly - and one from the new camera. Extreme telephoto on this one and I overcompensated on the white dial, a bit. But I love it, and what is more, so does the YD. That's her new coat, chosen to make her visible when she walks the dog. I think that last week's prompt was 'resolution', and that is what the new camera and I are discussing at the moment.

107/365 - someone's baby shoe, bronzed. Might be mine, might be one of my girls'.

108/365 - the YD with the colour balance uncorrected.

109/365. My mother's cherished pickle dish.

I hate manuals. Maybe I will book myself into a digital camera course. It can't be worse.

Festival of Light.

2010-12-30T22:50:00.000-05:00

Since Boxing Day is long over, why is it that my house is filled with boxes? Boxes containing manuals, candy and unsorted credit card slips. Boxes containing an ever shrinking selection of Christmas cookies. Empty boxes, also, waiting to make sure the electronic device formerly contained therein actually works as advertised. Bags, also, litter the house, bags with Santas whose beards shed glitter everywhere, bags with food and lottery tickets and other small goodies from stockings, stashed there during the unwrapping frenzy and not yet put away. The stockings themselves are draped limply along the staircase railing. The tree is shedding and so is the poinsettia. Enough turkey remains for one more (sob) lunch, even after I sent the carcass into the city with the ED, whose stepson is home from his freshman year at University and eating everything that he can find. The Ghost of Christmas Past is hanging out at our place.

It was a good Christmas, however. The thermometer declared the turkey to be edible at almost the exact moment everything else was ready. The seven year old was prevented from melt-down by the provision of a special Christmas cake at exactly the right moment (lip quivering, she had just announced that she didn't LIKE anything being served for dessert.) Her father put on his Christmas sweater immediately and announced that he was never taking it off again. I managed to surprise JG twice with gifts he couldn't guess (as well as the obligatory gloves and shirt.) The daughters managed to surprise me - I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Plantcam. (That's one of the empty boxes, as the camera is now getting a trial run monitoring the amaryllis bud on the plant Little Stuff gave me.

The big news is that I am now the ecstatic possessor of a Nikon Coolpix P7000. It is small enough to fit into a purse (well, a good-sized purse, which is what I carry) or jacket pocket but big enough to possess a good lens, a viewfinder (!) and seven or eight shooting modes. I think. The manual for this virtuoso is sitting beside my easy chair and I had better dern well read it soon. I am hoping that the 365 Project participants will let me back in now that I have a camera that I can take with me and not worry about the case, camera, lenses and all being lifted through a smashed window of my car. My first attempts at using it well have not been spectacular, but I. Will. Learn. Aperture priority mode is at the top of the list.

For the first time in many years, no one gave me a book. Two photography magazines, but no novel. Perhaps they are tired of me buying a title myself before Christmas rolls around. When we were young and newly married, with money being scarce, I longed for books but only got them after putting my name on the wait list at the library. When we got a little more solvent, I bought the books I wanted after they came out in paperback, whining a little if I were too far down the library list for the hardcover. Whenever I got money for a gift, I raced to the book store. Now we are well and truly pensioned and financially secure, I buy the books I want when they come out -- or, at least, as soon as they are available through Amazon. Sometimes I forget I have ordered something from Amazon and buy it in the book store, leaving me with a new copy to give away. Now that, that is luxury. Or even excess.

With all this talk of boxes and pricey presents, you would think our Christmas was about excess. But it wasn't, really. It was about shared laughter ( the YD's dog got a chew toy that sounded just like a fart when chomped on) and good food and good music. It was about, mostly, small thoughtful gifts carefully chosen to the recipients' tastes. It was about watching the seven year old open her gifts. It was also, alas, about forgetting to take the aspic out of the barbeque where it was cooling down and finding the bowls frozen to the grill on Christmas morning. One more legend to add to the store of Mom's Christmas Disaster stories.

And I did get money from my mother-in-law, a generous amount that will accompany me to the book store quite soon.... while the sale is still on.

I hope your Christmas and/or holiday celebration was equally wonderful and wish you all the best for the New Year.

2010-12-24T15:17:00.000-05:00

and warmest wishes for a wonderful holiday, whatever you celebrate.

Mary

Memory

2010-11-10T22:27:00.001-05:00

This week's prompt is 'memory'. With Remembrance Day tomorrow, what else could I post.

This is my father in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve. He joined in January, 1940 and was discharged in 1946, in pretty rough shape. After a stint doing convoy duty across the North Atlantic in a corvette and a brief reprieve as an ASDIC instructor, he joined a destroyer as Executive Officer and ended up in the Mediterranean. He never talked about his war to me or, I think, to my mother, but by the time my daughters were adults he could bear to tell them things. This was a great joy to him as was his love for and pride in his grandchildren.

This is my father-in-law who joined the army in, I think, 1941 and fought his way through Italy. After that he was in the Netherlands at the end of the war and the first weeks afterward. He had some very amusing stories about the Netherlands, but not about Italy. He was an artillery spotter in the Italian campaign.

Two wonderful men, gentle, thoughtful, intelligent. Both scarred by their years of fighting. Both able to carry on, look after their families, find happiness in the small pleasures of life.

Courage, and love of country, look like this.

Shades of Grey #2

2010-11-10T22:10:00.000-05:00

I love to play with photos almost as much as I love taking them. The 'grey' prompt is, for me, an invitation to get out the photo editor and have fun.

I do have another grey squirrel shot, though. I was really torn between the two of them (see post below this one) but went with the other one as the model was in coffee pot mode. This shot is at extreme telephoto, hand held. I love my camera.

I hauled out several shots from earlier exercises and played with them. Moved them to grey scale, inverted, played with the intensity and generally had fun.

102/365 inversion. Should have cleaned the background here.

103/365 geranium.

104/365 pond scene

I also wanted to show you where the squirrel shots were taken. Little Stuff and her dad have turned their back yard into a bird restaurant. The squirrels, while not invited, are also ubiquious.

Shades of Grey #1

2010-11-10T10:50:00.000-05:00

 101/365 Coffee Pot

Like a small grey
 coffee-pot,
 sits the squirrel.
 He is not

 all he should be,
 kills by dozens
 trees, and eats
 his red-brown cousins.

 The keeper on the
 other hand,
 who shot him, is
 a Christian, and

 loves his enemies,
 which shows
 the squirrel was not
 one of those.

Humbert Wolfe

Running Hard

2010-11-04T22:10:00.000-04:00

I have just deleted a whole paragraph of whines about old age and too much to do. I got tired of listening to myself complain to myself, if that makes any kind of sense. Tomorrow I head off to the city to grandkid sit for part of the weekend, although not much sitting will be involved, I am pretty sure. Little Stuff and I are going to be making pies because the big fund-raising event at the local Community Hall takes place on Sunday. It's called the 'Hunters' Dinner' because we hold it during deer hunting season - there are a lot of hunters and hunt camps around the area. We feed over 300 people usually in a couple of hours, and we have a reputation for good quality pies and lots of them.

There are lots of orange figures staked out through the bush this week and the four-wheelers are humming in and out of the hunt camp on the next lot over from ours. I don't think they have any deer yet because no one has arrived on our doorstep with a dripping bag of liver - JG told them we like liver and we have had a gift of one every November ever since those unwise words. And I am having the annual attack of driving nerves I have every hunt season since I hit a spooked deer and crunched up the front of my poor Jeep. (Okay, poor deer also.)

There are fewer deer visible this fall than during the last several years, but we still see them most days because we put feed and corn out on a rock at the bottom of our back field. Here are three of them, looking hopeful.

096/365 I think this is a mom and two almost grown children. We haven't seen a single buck this year.

Alas, it is November. Frost and wet rain and wet snow and falling temperatures and dark, short days. I find it hard to keep my spirits up until the Christmas rush overwhelms me and there is no time at all to brood. I've been admiring other people's frost and first snow photos; here are my attempts. Please don't notice that the planters are still on the porch and not cleared away until next year.

097/365 Please note the stylish snow tam Mr Pumpkin is wearing.

098/365 Flash frozen geranium close-up.

099/365 Hoar frost.

I'm still also playing around with self-photos in my trifold mirror. This one is a little better than the last try.

100/365 Looking over my own shoulder.

Yahoo. 100. I am now going to find out what the prompt is for the coming week. And admire some of the other 365ers' work. There's a link to the list in the upper right corner of the right column -- go and take a look. Some of the work is truly excellent and all of it is fun.

Spooky

2010-11-01T11:32:00.001-04:00

We went to Montreal over the weekend and I hopefully lugged my camera along, wanting a fine vista from Mont Royale and some last-of-the-autumn shots. Rained out. Sigh.

However, we dropped in on Little Stuff and her parents to help her prepare for her Halloween outing and eat pizza and I now, finally, have some photos of the jellyfish costume and her mother's classy spooky decorations for the great night.

As of this morning, I am told that the costume was a great success - she got a lot of compliments and interest - and candy, of course. Which were deserved; she worked very hard to make it.

091/365 - the Jellyfish girl is admired by all.

092/365 A tour de force jack-o-lantern face.

093/365 Decorated for Hallowe'en

094/365 The full jellyfish rig.

095/365 bat light

She also had glow-in-the-dark face paint. I have no idea how her mother got her cleaned up.

On Where I Live

2010-10-27T23:01:00.001-04:00

087/365 This one is titled, 'Where IS everybody".

Have you ever noticed how the very tipmost leaves hang on when all of the others are long vanished? I explect that there is some scientific reason that my brainy ED could explain to me, but I prefer to think of this one as the baby of the bunch who does not want to leave home.

088/365.

Every year I take photos of glowing trees and forests pulsating with colour. But these last few burnished leaves, accented by the absence of light and their fellows, are so beautiful.

089/365.

090/365

This is the cemetary of the hamlet near where I live. The old part of this graveyard is grey and sere on a misty day, the legends slowly eroding from the stones, but in the new part, the families have decorated and elaborated and the monuments are new and shiny. If you magnify this last shot a bit, you will see that the centre gravestone, the one with the tub of gold chrysanthemums in frontof it, also has a hummingbird feeder on a hook at the left hand side. I am not sure whose grave this is, but whoever it is, I would wager, loved hummingbirds.

Can I have the last two count for both idiomatic and spooky? No? Oh, well. I agree that these graves, in their festive decorations, are not the least spooky.

Tangles

2010-10-24T15:55:00.002-04:00

A while back my daughter and granddaughter presented me with a Martha Stewart magazine of Halloween projects. Along with the maximum labour pumpkin faces and other décor ideas, there were some pages of costumes for the big day. Adult costumes, and very elaborate. And on one page was a photograph of a woman about my age, dressed in white perfection, holding above her head an umbrella that had been crafted to resemble a jelly-fish. Seven year old Little Stuff was fascinated by this and asked if, maybe, I could make her one like that, big brown eyes staring imploringly into mine.

'I have a cloche umbrella just like that one,' said my daughter, cheerfully.

I know when I'm outnumbered. I promised LS I would make her a jellyfish umbrella.

Yesterday she and her mother came out to our place from the city, lugging big bags of bubble wrap, rolls of cellophane and tape, the umbrella and the illustration. I read the directions beside the photo. I read them again. Not a lot of help there. And so ......... we propped the photo up on my desk, plugged in the glue gun (but forgot to turn it on) and started cutting strips of bubbles, diagonally across the large size bubble wrap. Not a fun job, that. If you are not very, very meticulous in your cut, you can nick the side of the bubble and it goes foof. LS was getting frustrated and grama was starting to perspire, gently. We developed a technique where we cut only every second line of bubbles, in strips. Not perfect like the ones in the photo, but possible.

Then we had to make the handle and edge of the umbrella white, while taping the strings of bubbles to the edge. White book tape - miserable to stretch out and impossible if it touches itself - was laboriously applied and the bubble strings untangled. And untangled again. Next we had to make the umbrella sections look like turquoise jelly.

The instructions said "Cut 8 same-size strips of lightweight iridescent cellophane; sandwich each between 2 bubble strips; hot-glue smooth edges of tentacles to umbrella spokes. (Plastic will melt.)" We made a pattern. We cut, fringed, pasted, untangled the strings of bubbles, untangled the fringe and repeated. Two hours passed while we did this, again and again. Little Stuff was indomitable and hung on for the whole time, with one digression out to the swings while I put the roast into the oven and one small pause for a snack (and coffee for grama) when we discovered the glue gun was still cold.

The pattern cut from the newspaper had most of a photo of Muslims at prayer on it - down on their knees with foreheads on the floor. "What are all those people doing, grama," said LS. "Praying," says I. "They look silly," said little Miss. Oh, dear. While I tried to get bubble wrap to stay square, not drip the glue all over and untangle the strings of bubbles, I also had to carefully pick my way through the minefield of discussing tolerance of one another's differences with a judgemental child.

I asked her what she would do if a friend wearing a dress she loved but that looked ugly to Little Stuff asked LS what she thought of it. LS allowed that she would not make her friend unhappy by saying it was ugly. Same with what people do that looks strange, I tried to explain, especially their religions, because that is something that a lot of people feel strongly about and it is both wrong and easy to hurt someone's feelings. After some discussion of this, LS read the caption under the photo, which accompanied a story on the firing of Juan Williams, "Remarks over Muslims cost top US radio host his job."

To the tangles of bubble wrap and strings of glue, we now added the tangles of political correctness. We got into 'jihad' from Williams' statement that Muslims on a plane madehim nervous. I finally wiggled loose after explaining that some people misinterpreted their religion and were very wrong. I clearly recall, in another post, saying that I was thankful that theology and all its ramifications were the province of parents, not grandparents. And after this I shall make sure that we make newspaper patterns with the comics section of the paper.

The umbrella looked quite handsome when it was finished.

Idiomatic

2010-10-21T15:32:00.000-04:00

After some brooding about the latest 365 prompt, I realized that I have at least one photo in the ready pile that answers it.

We have a lot of buildings around here with the characteristic 'doghouse' on the top - old and decrepit ones, new and spiffy ones, big ones, tiny ones. In Eastern Ontario a building with a doghouse on the roof is a sugar shack or sugar camp, a building used to boil down maple sap until it becomes syrup. The 'doghouse' has removable sides and when the sap is boiling, the excess steam escapes through it, making the main part of the building less steamy and improving visibility.

087/365 - idiomatic - an old sugar camp on Concession 2.