My Fingers Are Crossed

Heathrow airport has re-opened. Therefore...

My bags are packed. My fingers are crossed.

We leave around noon today to travel to Vancouver, and tomorrow evening we fly to London and then on to Cairo, Egypt.

Anybody reading this who decides to also cross their fingers, send good vibes, pray/sacrifice to deity of choice on our travelling plans behalf would be a good friend. :)

A Volcano: So Magnificent, So Making Me Cranky

It's beautiful, an awesome and fiery geologic force. It's an erupting volcano with a massive ash cloud swaddling the upper skies of northern Europe. It's an unstoppable force of Nature. And so...

I'm trying to see that my travel plans are something very insignificant in the grand scheme of natural world events. (Deep breaths, be zen...) But Heathrow is closed and my connecting flight to Cairo goes through London. Whenever I've gone over my mental list of possible trip glitches (though I try not to wallow in these sorts of thoughts...bad ) I never once paused and considered whether an Icelandic volcano might throw a wrench in the works.

Well, I'm trying not to be a little despondent/cranky/irritable/anxious that only time and Nature and the good scientists/people of air traffic control can tell me if I'm actually going to be able to go on my trip next Friday.

A lot can happen in a week so I'm crossing my fingers. This is the first time I've ever wished that a trip was not until...later.

The Flaming Gerbils of Armageddon

Last Friday night the forces of the Flaming Gerbils of Armageddon were ready for Trivia Night out in Cumberland.

Oh, it's not that the Flaming Gerbils were the winning team or even MY team, but I thought they deserved a mention (or maybe even an extra point) for having the most awesome name.

MY team (cough, choke) was called The Little Wonders, but in my defense, I didn't have ANYTHING to do with that.

Anyway, the Trivia contest was part of a fund-raiser for the Cumberland Community Forest Society, and my friends Louise and Sherry invited me and Jeff along to join the team and duke it out (nerd-style) with DENSA, We're Right, Nerdgasms, THe Sunshine Girls and the rest.

Last week I mentioned to someone that I was going to go to the Trivia Night thing, and they were curious as to how one got ready for something like that. "What are you going to study up on?" they asked.

The answer, for me at least, is that I DON'T study up at all.

I know the trivia I know. I just have to dredge it all up from the primordial mud layers of my brain at the right time.

I know there are nine circles in Dante's Hell. I know that Hecate is the name of the witch goddess in Shakespeare's MacBeth. I know how to spell "sarsaparilla".

Somethings you just DON'T know. Like, who won the Stanley Cup last year? Sometimes I'm just not paying attention. (And apparently nobody else at our table was paying attention to the Pittsburgh Penguins either.)

Sometimes you have to GUESS that the only domestic animal not mentioned in the bible is the cat. Actually, I DID guess that. But my vote was over-ruled in favor of the llama, which was the wrong answer according to the people running the event, but is also technically correct I think, seeing as how the llama is a New World animal. Oh well. It's trivia.

What is the digit 1 called when it is followed by one hundred zeros? Answer: A googol. (We got this one.)

What is a pulicologist? Answer: Someone who studies fleas. (We didn't get this one.)

Anyway, it was a fun evening. There were bowls of free pretzels, the cheap wine flowed, and there was much healthy (loud) competition.

Or team tied for fourth/fifth place out of fifteen teams so all our total lack of studying paid off. :)

Tax Time and Greek Islands

Every year around this time it seems there is a fairly steady stream of relatives dropping by for tea...and to get their taxes done.

I visit and drink tea, Jeff gets to do the taxes. :)

Last night, as Jeff worked away on his lap-top with my friend Claudia's paperwork, Claudia and I had a nice long talk, something we haven't done in a long while.

One of the things we talked about is Greece as Jeff and I are travelling there soon and Claudia has lots of fond memories of that part of the world. Being from Germany, flying to Greece for a week or a weekend was as simple as Canadians jetting off to Mexico.

Claudia's ex owned property on a tiny little island near Naxos in the Cyclades and they returned again and again to the same village and beaches. They had a little house with no electricity or running water and enjoyed roughing it.

A local shepherd would sometimes bring them fresh goat cheese. So fresh it sometimes still had goat hair in it.

Tales of Greek ferries in rough sea, gypsies, hiking and beautiful beaches...

Geocaching and Woodpecker Love

Jeff and I spent Sunday afternoon doing some combined hiking/geocaching Cumberland. The trail head is really close to our friend Kim's house and she has hidden five caches in the woods there, most of them along the mossy path that is sign-posted Mama Bear's Trail of Tears.

Somewhere between A Cache for Miss Dickinson and Mama Bear's Second Cache we came across two pileated woodpeckers courting---circling round and round a tree, peeking around the trunk at each other and bobbing their red-crested heads. There was no pecking of wood involved.

(Finally remembered my new camera can take video and took the below clip of them.)

Forty-five minutes later, as we retraced our steps along the trail, we came across the same two birds--they were still at it. Round and round. Ah, wood-pecker love in the Spring-time!

Number 28

Thirty minute coffee break--what should I do with it? Hot beverage? Or geocache with Kim?
Well, obviously I just don't need caffeine that bad! :)

Hearth

The weather is wild and stormy tonight.

But in my house it's cozy by the hearth.

We've been in this house seven years this past Halloween and it was only as this winter started approaching that we thought about getting a chimney sweep in to have a look. The chimney was clean and bare.

And so now let the coziness begin!

I spent this evening in front of the fireplace with a Terry Pratchett book and visions of a winter talking with friends in front of a lit fireplace.

Egypt?

We've been planning on going to Greece this Spring, you see, and looking at all sorts of brochures and possibilities.

Well, we're STILL going to Greece, but in our research we couldn't help but notice how tantalizingly close Egypt is.

Hey, in the world of ancient civilizations, they're practically just down the block from one another.

So here is a trip to Egypt that we're seriously considering. It's the same company we went to Africa and India with and therefore we'd get a discount. So, so tempting!

Zombies

So, it's almost a week after Halloween, but zombies are on my mind. Maybe it's all the zombie-like motions I've been going through this past week as I dealt with my "flu-like symptoms" (that's the correct media term lately I believe).

Yes, I got quite good at shambling around the house and moaning. No matter.

Last Saturday was Courtenay's first ever official Zombie Walk and I'm rather sorry that I was merely a spectator as this sort of thing obviously has great potential merit to be an Awesome Annual Cultural Event in this girl's book.

In no particular order, Things I Learned at the Zombie Walk:

* Canadian zombies may lurch menacingly down the sidewalk, but when they need to get across the street, they use the cross walk. Yay, zombies!

*For the vegetarian-inclined zombies out there, a cauliflower covered in fake blood makes a rather convincing brain. so no need to feel left out when your fellow zombies are slathering apart something more squishy.

* If you're a zombie dog-owner and you can train your doggie to play fetch with your own severed arm, that's extra points or something.

* Finally! a use for all that stuffy formal wear at the back of your closet! Zombies like to dress up when they eat out. Yeah, it may have a few stains...

* Zombies appreciate a good cheer-leader. "Give me a B! Give me an R! Give me an A! Give me an I!.." Well, you probably can figure out the rest. Zombies are a little bit single-minded.

* The sight of hordes of zombies apparently don't traumatize local children at all. One baby's mom had turned into a nasty pus-filled zombie and there he was all gurgling and happy in his carriage draped with black tulle.

* Zombies sometimes talk on cell-phones.

*Zombies seem like a fun crowd.

Shoreline Cleanup...What Went Right...and What Didn't

So Saturday afternoon was the day slated for our part in the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-up. It was a pretty nice day despite a few clouds. We had our gloves, our garbage bags. We had our team of cleaner-uppers.

But sometimes things don't work out exactly as planned.

Our team was scattered to the winds: one friend on the team had emergency gall bladder surgery, others in the emergency room with him, another friend was hours away with a car that wouldn't start....it was one of those days where cleaning the beach falls way down the priority list!

But Jeff and I decided that we had already planned to do this thing---and the beach wouldn't clean itself after all..

Among the eighty pieces of garbage we removed from Gartley Beach:

* a shotgun shell casing
* a moldering piece of carpet
* umpteen beer cans
* miscellaneous pieces of metal and plastic
*tangles of twine and disintegrating rope
* a smashed pair of eyeglasses
* a piece of green house plastic
"You're taking a picture of me picking up garbage?" Jeff asked quizzically. Well, yes, I am.

Halfway down the beach we saw a lone figure pulling litter from among the rocks. It was Mike, Kim's brother! Hurray, somebody else had come for the clean-up! He couldn't believe all the garbage we'd found! He had himself acquired quite a large shopping bag's worth of styrofoam and disposable coffee cups.

It's funny--when we arrived we really wondered if the beach had any garbage on it at all. To the casual eye, the beach stretched pebbly and clean and was littered with nothing more than oyster shells.

I am remembering all the pristine-looking shorelines we boated by on our whale-watching trip last weekend, hoping that they were as clean and untouched as they looked, and knowing that probably just wasn't so.

So anyway, we were halfway through the part of the beach that Kim had signed us up for, when the heavens opened up and our warm and pleasant afternoon turned into a pounding downpour. We got wet so fast we might as well have rolled a little in the tide-pools. Water dripping down our collars, we decided that finishing the other half (from the access road down to the Trent river) was a job for another day.

There's probably (sadly) lots of garbage waiting for us still. So if anyone wants to join me on a sunnier afternoon....? I'd like to finish the job. Oh yes, and then go have dessert at the Kingfisher like we'd planned!

Whale Watching Anniversary

Seventeen years married was celebrated this past Saturday by taking a whale-watching tour out of Campbell River. What a beautiful day out on the water!



This was a little video I took near the end of the afternoon as we encountered a playful group of Pacific white-sided dolphins for the third time that day. There must have been at least forty of them, puffing and whistling and playing all around us, jumping and feeding and sliding under our boat to look up at us through the water with bright eyes that looked both intelligent and mischievous.


Seven years ago, for our tenth anniversary, Jeff and I rented a kayak near April Point Lodge on Quadra Island,and had the thrilling experience of an orca whale rocketing through the water past our little boat, its giant fin and broad shiny back glistening in the sun. I have no pictures of that, but that moment in time has been replayed over and over in my head.

Whales are just magical. When I see them in nature, I feel some tug on my heart that is hard to explain.

On Saturday, when the tail of a humpback whale broke the surface of the water before its deep dive, that moment will also be part of me forever. Nobody snapped a picture because sometimes all you can do is stare in wonder, caught in a moment, and then it is gone.I think a memory like this is one of the best anniversary presents ever.

My Birthday Present Bathroom Renovation

A short while ago, I dug my fingernails under a tiny corner of some extraordinarily ugly rose-covered wall-paper and pulled a long ragged shred of it from the wall.

There. I'd done it. I'd officially committed to renovating the Very Ugly Hidden Room that was our downstairs bathroom.

These are the after pictures. These are not fancy renovations--just some nice updates so I don't have to scream and lunge in front of house guests when they go to open the door. Fresh paint, new mirror and vanity, new light, new baseboard heater, new towel bar, new tiles.
It was a birthday present (from Jeff, because he did a lot of the work) but also to myself. It was one of those things pushed very far down the List of Things to Do that in an Ideal World Would Have Been done Long Ago.

Below is what it looked like before---pink plastic towel bar, afore-mentioned wallpaper, fake-wood vanity, bad lino, rusted radiator, unframed mirror, wicker kleenex box painted pink and covering hole in the wall. It was bad.
It's been like that for the six years we've lived here though, hidden away off the rec room, unused and unloved.

Here's the thing though. At the beginning of July, three things happened to make a change.
One A vow. I opened the door one day to take something out of the shower stall (used as storage space) and thought: "I am DOING something about this room. Soon!"

Two A phone call. A friend called me to tell me about free interior design advice being offered on a new local website. They were looking for "Ugly Rooms". My friend said she thought of my downstairs rec room and, you know, that awful bathroom I had. My friends..always thinkin' of me. :)

Three A Visitor. A friend who hadn't visited in a long while opened the door, and made a face, "Hey, I didn't know you had another bathroom...GAWD, it's UGLY!"

Three times is the charm! Fine, fine, it's ugly! Let the renos begin!

Below are pictures of the floor, before and after...

Anyway, it's not like an ugly basement bathroom defined my house. But it sure feels nice now that I can leave the door open.

All the clutter stored there has been disposed of too.

Shoes

This blog post inspired by the shoe decluttering blog post of my friend Pol...

As I embark on my quest towards an emptier basement--- flying in the face of my SIMULTANEOUS quest to collect junk to sell for fund-raising-- I find myself with NINE bags of stuff to leave the house sitting in the basement. Stuff I can't flea-market or Craigslist. Stuff I can't possibly justify keeping. That's a lot of bags lined up in the basement waiting for the next CDA neighbourhood pickup--probably not until September. And I'll probably be filling more...

This afternoon I'm down to eight bags, having dropped a large load of shoes off at the thrift store. Out it's going, bag by bag, this holiday week *she vows to herself*

Sometimes I'm tempted to put aside shoes for a clothes trade, but this particular Pile O' Shoes only merited one pair for possible Future-Use-By-Friends.

Like I said, this post was inspired by my friend who likewise posted pictures of her shoe collection online. "Wow", I thought to myself, "My friend sure does like shoes!" But apparently, um, I have a similar problem. Nothing like a picture or two to illustrate.

The Before picture shows all twenty-eight pairs of shoes I found in various places around the house. (Not even counting my snow boots.)

How is it possible that I have collected so many? Friends will attest I don't enjoy shopping for shoes, can't wear heels without hobbling myself, and will wear a pair of favourites until the sole is separating from the uppers--HAD to leave my old hiking shoes in Kathmandu for just that reason. It's a bit of a shocker for me that I am nevertheless, after reviewing all evidence, a horrible hoarder of shoes. Sigh.

But...after this month's shoe purge I am relieved to say I am now ELEVEN pairs lighter than before! Although I am for some reason STILL holding onto the pink Italian strappy shoes I wore painfully to the Crazy Ladies Tea Party--oh, the memories!

Jeff pulled all his shoes out too and similarly junked out. Total number of pairs: eleven (two not pictured as they were later discovered hiding in trepidation).

Blackberries

I have ten days of holiday stretching ahead of me...my treat to myself is my birthday week off work.

Well, one treat anyway. I'm planning on having a good week.

To start with, I got off work early and wandered down the lane to the blackberry patch and picked a little pail of sun-ripened yumminess.

The bushes are laden with green and red berries--the potential for a blackberry-filled freezer bounty is enormous this year. All the recent hot weather has made the bushes amazingly productive.

Wild strawberries are good, fresh raspberries are a favourite, but nothing is more tasty to me than a perfect blackberry.

Alaska Photos

A month ago we were riding on a train from Seward to Anchorage! I can't believe this summer is going by so fast. And this hot weather is making me wish I was back in Alaska. Well, not in Anchorage. Maybe Skagway or Ketchikan though.

Anyway, below is the address to our Alaska trip photos on Photobucket. They are totally un-annotated, but I'll be posting notes on them later and stories here too. As soon as the temperature drops.

Heat. Making. Me. Unmotivated.
See the ice in the photo? Mmmmm...so, so chilly. :)


Alaska Photos June 2009

Makin' Baby Icebergs

Back from Alaska!

One morning we got up early, braved the chill, and watched from the ship's deck as enormous chunks of ice calved from the Hubbard Glacier.....

The blue wall of ice stretched and towered, squeaking and creaking and rumbling constantly, sending little mini avalanches trickling into a sea already bobbing with ice. It sounds like a rifle shot mixed with thunder when something the size of a house breaks off and crashes into the ocean.

This is also my first YouTube video. :)

First Geocaches for "Spideyjen"

Ah, the great outdoors....

Nothing like getting outside on a beautiful day, venturing through forest and meadow and creekside, discovering hidden trails...and, er, turning in circles while muttering darkly until your GPS unit decides to start picking up the signal correctly.

Yes, we are venturing into the hidden world of geo-caching.


There is probably more than fifty hidden caches within a few miles of our house, so today we set out for the nearby ones.

The first cache we found while ostensibly wandering (quite incorrectly) toward another cache. Once we realized we were in spitting distance (well, 500 feet or so) of it, we changed our target and soon had discovered a hidden trove of fishing lures (it's the hunt, not the prize, right?) tucked away in a little tupperware container in the hollow of some tree roots.

We went back to our first target, got on track, and found ourselves in a little park. The GPS swore up and down we were practically standing on top of a cache, but there were people about and we didn't feel like crawling through the leaves while other folks hovered. Also, it was too darn hot out to concentrate. Later this evening, we returned and found the little log book and pencil after some pondering on the subject of where, oh where could it be.

Third hunt took us through deer trails and serious brambles . Serious bush-whacking. This was the geocache that my dedicated geocacher friend, Kim, suffered many long scratches on her legs to find. Well, we didn't find it, although we stared at and prodded a long series of fallen tree trunks in the hope that something man-made might appear. Alas, not.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Birdsong and Massage

I'm feeling blissed out and serene right now, freshly back from a massage at my friend/co-worker's little studio.

The little cottage backs onto the forest, and as I lay there, so relaxed I was practically in liquid form, two deer walked right by the open window. Birdsong poured in, a duet with the soft Asian music playing.

I've been meaning to treat myself to this for a while now. It's funny how you can vow to make time for yourself, just yourself, and then somehow the months go by and making time to luxuriate is forgetfully pushed to the bottom of the list.

Mmmmm. Do not forget again.

Magee and Colby

The kitties are settling in...

Magee is the one on the right. They're a little hard to tell apart in this photo. :)

Magee is very, very affectionate and while she's not a replacement for Lestat, she is already making herself a very loved part of the household. She will sit on your lap for hours and rumble away in a very quiet purr.

Magee

Is Magee the cat for us, a companion for Colby and a new little creature to take into our hearts?

We don't know yet, but we've made an appointment to go see her tomorrow at the house she's being fostered at.

She's just over a year old and was a stray picked up as a dirty thin kitten from Hornby Island. She'd been living rough for a while the shelter people think. Her torn little ear speaks to that. Lestat had an ear like that-- he wasn't living rough but he was a bit of a scrapper in his youth.

She's apparently a bit handshy at first, but with a sweet personality. I hope there's a bond.

This is how we picked Colby---looking at pictures of local adoptable animals and making a list of possibles. When we met Colby there was an instant bond and we barely glanced at the other cats I'd selected on paper. She sort of threw herself at us, and from Magee's description it's doubtful we'll be greeted in the same way at first.

It's a big decision and I thought I'd wait much longer after Lestat was gone to go searching, but I am missing having a second cat in our household more than I thought. Not missing Lestat more than I thought (I miss him sure enough), but missing two cats in general as well. Two hopeful faces at breakfast time, two furry bodies warming the end of the bed, twice the trouble, twice the purring.

If Magee is not a match, as may happen, there will be others I know, but we both think she has an appealing little face and I'm a sucker for a hard luck story.