Spring is slow to get going this year and I LOVE it. It’s been grey and cool and wet and gloomy and we even had snow not one morning, but two.
A few brave bulbs are starting to bloom:
These are possibly ‘Tête-à-tête’ daffodils (which my gardening journal says I planted under the horse chestnut last November 4), but I could be wrong.
I had a really busy week trying to get my office/studio/personal disaster zone prepared for Cam to use as a workspace when he and Anna move back on Easter weekend. I moved all the gift wrapping supplies (paper and fabric bags, ribbon, tags, cards) into the laundry room cupboards, inventoried my ridiculously extensive yarn stash (which is in one of the room’s closets), pulled apart and completely reorganised the bedlinens and blankets (which is in the second of the room’s closets), gathered together a huge pile of loose papers and magazines to sort through, and discovered a box of receipts from 2014 to toss out. What a mess. The years 2010 – 2016 were an extremely hectic time for me for a variety of reasons and this, I have accepted, is my time to do all the things I couldn’t get around to doing then.
Grateful to sit down every evening, I worked on the blue alpaca seed stitch cowl and started and mostly finished another toque for the stash while watching baseball. Before bed, I’ve been reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams and Flying Too High by Kerry Greenwood.
For many years now, it’s been hard to see the point in blogging. No one visits, or, if they do, they don’t comment. I have persisted, half-heartedly, because I like the idea of recording things – books I’ve read, places I’ve gone, birds I’ve admired. I need to write things down or I forget.
To minimise what has long felt like wasted effort, I had taken to writing only two monthly summaries: one of what I’d read and the other of photos of anything that had captured my interest. Eventually, I dropped the ‘month in photos’ post, even though I enjoyed the opportunity to review the past month and pick favourites. Despite keeping a paper journal of everything I read, I could never quite give up on the book review posts, though, because the blog’s search function does come in handy sometimes.
Thanks to Feedly, I still keep up with about a hundred blogs, although the number dwindles every year. People get discouraged and give up, or switch to Patreon or Instagram or Substack (which pays actual Nazis to create newsletters, btw), or drop the personal (and, to me, more interesting) posts to focus on whatever bland content SEO demands.
I do enjoy the hardy bloggers who stick it out – like Lucy at Attic24, Julie at Little Cotton Rabbits, Barbara at Coastal Ripples and Pip at Meet Me at Mike’s – even though I am also guilty of not leaving comments. I guess it’s nosiness, but I love the glimpses into their daily lives. I like seeing what they’re interested in and what’s particularly trying to them at the moment and what they’re doing with their time. And every time I see them add another post I think again about how nice it would be to have years and years of detailed records of a life. How gratifying it would be to look back on.
Anyway, all this blah blah blah is me trying to remind myself that even if no one ever sees a thing I post, future-me would be grateful to current-me for taking the time to jot things down.
So, to keep it brief, this past week, I:
-celebrated Anna landing a permanent, full-time OT position only 20 minutes away (instead of the current six-hour drive to visit)
-started putting Merlin in the window again to listen to the birdies (no spring migrants yet)
-have been reading A Pelican at Blandings by Wodehouse, Undoctored by Adam Kay, Marple by Mark Aldridge, and listened to The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
-sowed Brandywine, Sweet 100, SunGold and Roma tomatoes, as well as Bright Lights chard, Sugar Ann bush pea, Grand Rapids lettuce and basil
-tidied all the seeds and potting stuff
-cleaned out and reorganised all the pantry shelves
-opened all the windows because it’s been unseasonably warm for mid-March
-watched Blue Jays spring training baseball
-went to the farm market for fruit and veg
-scored a couple old music books at the local Little Free Libraries
-cooked a gigantic pot of chickpeas to freeze (but have since used four jars so so much for a huge freezer stash)
-worked on the never-ending blue alpaca lace wrap and a very chunky baby blanket (nothing exciting – just using up stash)
I was sick at the end of March and not up to posting anything, so today’s recap will be two months for the price of one.
This was Simon in March, taking a short breather from destroying houseplants and pots.
March 7 was an incredibly grey day, making this flock of cedar waxwings in our beech tree hard to make out. Boy, were they noisy.
The robins are nesting under the deck again this year, meaning lots of photo opportunities when they come out to find food.
The old man sunbathing. Still a heartthrob.
A young goldfinch, I think, keeping an eye on things from the deck.
The goldfinches love love LOVE picking at the seeds in whatever this tree is beside the deck. They descend upon it en masse and will easily spend an hour hopping from branch to branch looking for goodies.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
I’ve been re-photographing all my completed mittens and hats for sale and it is…not my favourite thing. Who knew that accurately photographing the finished product would be the hardest part of the whole process?
I love January. It’s cold and cloudy most of the time (the best weather) and quiet and peaceful because everyone else is too depressed to make many demands. I love wearing layers and cuddling under a blanket to read or knit and spending hours at my desk reflecting on the previous year (and all the targets I missed) and planning the year ahead (and all the goals I’m sure to fail to reach). Happy times.
A pair of eagles against a rare blue sky.
A mid-afternoon look across Wellington Dyke.
My snow-shovelling partner.
Trees in the backyard at the tail end of a snowstorm on January 29.
One of my mourning dove friends.
Eagles eagles everywhere.
Looking across the fields toward Blomidon.
Always a sucker for hay bales.
A slushy Minas Basin.
If you put a brightly coloured tractor in your field, I will take a picture of it.
Yet more eagles. Seriously, they are everywhere this year.
December is a lot. The cooking, the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, the cleaning, the cards, the finishing of handmade projects, the four million little things to prepare and remember. I get a little more organised with every passing year, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be organised enough to not feel overwhelmed for a couple weeks in the middle there. We had a lovely week with everyone home, though, and all the work was worth it, of course.
*My favourite people
*My favourite granddog
At her great-grandparents’, tuckered out by late Christmas afternoon and using Santa as a pillow. He’s been around so long there are probably pictures of little me doing the same thing.
*One of my favourite grandcats
This is Nadja, waiting impatiently for me to make a fresh cup of green tea she can share. Her brother, Simon, never stops moving and is harder to get a picture of.
*My favourite birthday present: Shaun the Sheep
Charlotte, genius crochet toymaker, designed him herself, which is no mean feat. Makers understand just how much skill goes into crafting something like this.
*Gecko!
Charlotte looked in on a friend’s geckos while she was away for the holiday and you better believe I was getting in on that. There were three geckos, but this one was the most outgoing. I could have watched him (?) eat mealworms all day.
*This week, I was lucky enough to do my absolutely favourite thing: spend time by the shore
*When I could tear myself away from the beach, I was admiring the hardy plant life
*Back at home, the mums are blooming like crazy, the only sunflower to get knocked down by Hurricane Lee won’t give up, and I continue to thrum and admire the clouds
*Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
This was perfect vacation reading. One of the many passages that made me LOL:
“It’s the men who make the mistake. They see she’s got the looks and think she can’t have the grey matter as well, and they try to take her for a ride. Their mistake, of course.”
“They deserve all they get,” said Miss Pettigrew belligerently, but without the faintest idea of what they were talking about.
The March midday sun is a bit harsh here; it’s prettier in person.
This was another partially finished project that had been sitting around for years, making me feel guilty about my lack of perseverance. In this case, finishing it meant ripping out everything I’d done and starting over, so it was in fact more ‘beginning a new project’ than ‘completing an old one’, but whatever. At least I didn’t shove the whole thing back into the closet.
I’ve always had this weird hang-up that others are allowed to make purely decorative pieces, but my crafting has to be practical, and it’s a waste of time and materials if the finished object isn’t wearable or functional. But working on this unabashedly useless object helped me get over that. It’s nice to look at and that’s enough. I think I’ll soon start another.
Recently, I came across a bag stuffed full of half-finished projects I’d abandoned for one reason or another and instead of shoving it back where I’d found it and forgetting about it for another five years, I resolved to either rip out or finish each and every single item. This is progress.
First out of the bag was this ripple scarf, which needed another, oh, six feet or so. The labels were long gone, but I’m pretty sure it’s a Fleece Artist hand-painted wool, mellowed out with alternating stripes of some anonymous black wool.
