Gone Fishin'

There are 12.5 hours of work between me and vacation.

Normally this would be a really good time, and I would be cheerily counting down yadda yadda, but this time my vacation is long overdue and I have no cheer left. My brain shut off a month ago. I am killing those hours between me and my vacation dead.

I will be away two weeks. Part of me feels that it's too early in the summer to take my vacation, that I shouldn't be blowing my proverbial wad when July and August still stretch before me, but the secret is this: I have more time to take, and I'm gonna take it. I'm going to take a week in July. Maybe a week in August. I'm going to distrubute it so that it counts. I'm going to take lots of long weekends.

And of course, because I am who I am and who I am is a serious list-maker, I have drawn up a list of things to do during my vacation:

1. Remove the siding from 2 sides of my house, and start putting up styrofoam.
2. Go to the spa with my sister-in-sort-of-law for a massage and pedicure.
3. Plant more perennials in my two-year-old terraced beds, which are not looking so hot.
4. Clean up the pile of dirt and tarps in the laneway.
5. Sell the old chimney behind the house.
6. Get pregnant.
7. Go camping for Canada Day weekend.
8. Visit a friend who has a new baby.
9. Take lots of photos of bugs doing it. Have them printed and blown up because I'm a pervert.
10. Finish up pottery class - make something for the potluck dinner, and bring home my stuff.
11. Go shopping with my mom, get her to buy herself a new dress (I am her own personal Stacey London).
12. Learn to make vietnamese salad rolls properly.
13. Finish the sweater I am knitting. Think seriously about the next one.
14. Read a book. Perhaps A Confederacy of Dunces ?
15. Hope my friend gets her driver's license so she can come to my house and shoot my bb gun.
16. Finish weeding and rehabilitating my 'boomerang' garden. Add dirt and plants.
17. Get a tan.
18. Download and make a CD of all the old-school rap music I loved in high school.
19. Install the new light fixture in the basement.
20. Go fishing.
21. Think about mulch for the terraced garden.
22. Possibly scam some free flagstone with my truck, so I can build that patio that I want around my firepit. Then I want those side-by-side muskoka chairs from Costco with the little drink table in the middle. I am woman of simple needs.
23. Move the furniture in the bedroom around.
24. Catch up on laundry and ironing.
25. Stain my staircase.

So not too lofty, right? I think that's a reasonable list. If I break it into time fragments, some of those are pretty tiny fragments. Some are evening activities, some are not. The trick will be to wake up at the same time as hubby and stay up, and not let myself get droopy during the day. I will of course keep you apprised of my progress when I return.

If I keep writing I will kill more of that pesky time. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Tonight I'm going to the Reno Depot to look at two things: Styrofoam and plants. I realize that I have one big galvanized tub on my deck that I filled with soil and then forgot about, so it needs something. Also I need to get some sunflower seeds because mine didn't come up, and if they still have some scraggly cucumber seedlings I may as well pick those up too because mine haven't shown their faces yet. I also want to look at shorty perennials for the terraced bed.

And here is a pic of my veggie garden taken this very morning. My garden is 30% weeds, 30% stuff I planted on purpose, and 30% cilantro, which re-seeds itself each year.

So it's very green, mostly because the entry is infested with a mix of clover (not the nice stuff, the tall gangly stuff), quack grass, and cilantro. Literally there is cilantro everywhere. I need to control that a bit better this year, nip those seeds and scatter them myself. Flagstones would look super nice there.

This is my favourite time of the year in the garden. Well, I guess this and early September, when everything's being harvested. But check out the colours going on right now: the bright fuschia of the spiderwort, the gray-green of the iris leaves, the dark blue-purple of the irises, I have the emerging electric-red of a poppy coming up, the bright orange nasturtiums and marigolds, and soon some yellow lilies, pink anemones, hot pink geraniums, red bergamot, purple bergamot, and yellow something-or-other-that-I-don't know. I am trying to work on leaf texture too - I am going to plant some colocasia that I grew in a pot into the ground, which makes huge leaves. I think I'll put them in that gap in front of the veggie garden on the right, between the marigolds and the irises. There were strawberries there, but they preferred the veggie garden so they migrated to the far right, about 10 feet away, and now stay there full-time. I let them choose - I am very relaxed about such things (see: cilantro).

Ack! There's a man in my garden! In this photo, L to R: rhubarb, pumpkins, catnip, turnips that need to be thinned, emerging basil, marigolds, beans, and a whole lotta quackgrass.

My baby boy. Man do I ever need kids. Oops I mean - more kids! Sorry Loki! This cat is the best cat ever. He's smarter than any animal I've known, and he's enormous - he weighs about 18 lbs, but I believe he's slimming down during summer - so he's substantial to cuddle when he lets me. He's just dense - he has big bones. When he smacks you, you feel it. But he also has a good sense of humour and a pretty face. And he's got great manners and knows the rules and comes when he's called, right at dinner time. Our other cat, Sasha, is adorable and cute and everything Loki isn't. They fill in each others' gaps. Sasha is affectionate and cuddly and a little bit dumb but sweet as heck. Loki is a party cat, he loves strangers and especially those wearing men's cologne, but Sasha hides under the bed. Loki doesn't fear from water - Sasha fears from lots of stuff. But Sasha's a lap cat, and chatty, and pure sweet sugar.

Phew! Sorry, got off track there. Hooray I'm at 12 hours now! See? Hang in there people! Nobody can ramble like I can!

Nice weather, if you're a duck

Today is a sad day.

The weather's been uncooperative the past few days, as the other night we actually had a risk of frost. It was 3.5 degrees C when we woke up. That's not enough degrees. I had to cover selected plants with sheets, mostly those on the deck, and just hope for the best, because I have planted so many frost-sensitive things that I'd need a one-acre sheet to cover it all. And it's been raining raining raining for the past week or so. Sunday was a nice day, but I managed to get a nasty sunburn, and then it rained again in the evening.

Thanks to a really dumb financial screw-up, we've been a bit broke for the past few days. It's been kind of interesting to watch our pennies in this way, but luckily hubby's paid tomorrow so we can start living the high life again. I'm kidding, of course; we never stopped living the high life.

And to top it all off, my team lost the Stanley Cup last night. Booo Hisss. I'm not even a hockey fan. I take bandwagon-jumping to new lengths, and during Stanley Cup playoffs (somewhere around the first series), I become a hockey fan. We watched all of the games, picked some favourite players (I unimaginatively chose Alfredsson and Fisher), and were seriously rooting for the Senators, but alas, it was not meant to be. Instead, Disneylan-er-I mean Anaheim, won Canada's biggest prize. Now I like Teemu Selanne as much as the next woman, but it would have been nice had my underdogs been the ones to raise the cup. Ah well. I look forward to next year, when perhaps I'll start watching in the regular season.

This morning we drove by a dead mallard duck on the highway. How sadly un-ironic. What a missed opportunity.

We now interrupt our regular subject matter...

I am not a big fan of the Police, and so I think that guy in the middle has to calm that shit down. He's dressed like Lance Armstrong from the waist up, and a 15 year old girl from the waist down, with the face of a middle-aged physics teacher. Even Sting disapproves, and he's worn some questionable things in the past. He's all like "does this drummer make me look gay?" The accountant on the right can barely contain his laughter.

Only a very select few can pull off white pants.

I am awesome.

This is the post in which I toot my own horn.

I was thinking this morning, as I lay on the bed waiting for the self-tanner to dry on my legs (seriously, I have zombie legs. Thanks Dad.), that I've done a number of things in the past year about which I am really proud. And at the risk of sounding like a braggert, because nobody likes a braggert, I thought I'd put them down for posterity since this blog is more like a journal that I use to amuse myself.

I drove in Paris
I was scared shitless, and some jerk backed into my car within 5 minutes of being out on the streets, but I did it, and found my way around, and figured out the whole people-coming-from-the-right-have-priority thing well enough. And on our way back into Paris, I, along with my trusty co-pilot-slash-husband, managed to not only navigate a rather expensive car through the most incredible gridlock patch of traffic I've ever seen in my life (it must have looked like a tight patchwork quilt from above. Cobblestones, no lanes, 8 directions merging into one - imagine it), but I found the rental car station no problem and managed to do it all in good time.

Then I drove the Autobahn
I know for millions of Europeans and other inhabitants of the world, that's no big thing and they use it as a morning commute. But for me, getting the car to 180 kmh in the slow lane and not pooping myself was a terrific accomplishment. I came back with a particularly leaden foot.

I organized a concert
... in cooperation with colleagues of course, but I played a major role in organizing a 50th anniversary classical music concert at the NAC a month ago, and it went off very smoothly. Afterwards, my brain officially hung up the "Gone Fishin'" sign and shut down for the summer.

I renovated a room, and built shelves
I've documented that process in these pages before, but every time I walk into that back room I love it, and it's been just over a year. Everything worked, miraculously. The shelves are still holding up (though a few have sagged ever so slightly - the combination of heavy books and MDF isn't necessarily a good one), the orange wall is still awesome, and now that we have new windows in there, the entire thing looks like a brand new house.

I built a garden
I terraced the front garden in no time flat this year. It went creepily smoothly.

I learned some German

I ate stuff for the first time
In the last three years, I ate the following foods for the very first time:
- lobster (hard to believe, but I am landlocked and hated seafood for years)
- foie gras (I can translate, and it doesn't appeal. I didn't love it)
- beef tartare (I loved it too much. Perhaps I'm a vampire?)
- truffles. (the fungus kind) Mmmm truffles.
- King crab legs (thanks Rob - my friend in Kelowna hates seafood, or 'fish product' as she calls it, but her hubby loves it, so he's happy to cook for the two of us when I visit and Nat has to do her own thing. tee hee.)

I grouted.
'Nuff said.

I knit an awesome sweater
I knit this sweater ...













...for myself last fall, and it was so incredibly enjoyable that I almost went right back to the beginning and knit it again in another colour. Mine is a dark mossy green tweed. Kate Gilbert is an amazing knitting designer, and I love everything she does. She hails from Montreal, I believe, and is now living in Paris, so obviously she's a woman of impeccable taste. I have ordered 2 more back-issues of Interweave Knits so that I can make a couple more of her designs.

I put down my cat
This took a lot of nerve, and was among the hardest things I've ever had to do. I love my cats like they're my children, and watching Peter decline was truly horrible. I made the decision to put her down after watching her fail for four days. She tried desperately to get outside, go down the front stairs, and get under the deck, even though she couldn't walk and ended up flopping down in the dirt, eyes all big and scared. That was my sign that she was ready to go, because Peter never ever hung out under the deck. I took her to the vet, and they gave her a needle to calm her before giving her the final injection, but that first needle was all she needed - she died really peacefully while I held her, with her chin resting on my arm as I stroked her boney back. When the vet came in to ask if she'd relaxed, I told her I didn't think she was with me anymore, and she wasn't. It was so difficult that I have a big lump in my throat right now just writing about it so I'm going to stop. R.I.P. Peter. I was going to post a picture in her honour but it's just too sad.

I subjected myself to crazy medical tests
We are currently in treatment at a Fertility Clinic (mostly because I'm impatient; there's nothing super wrong with us except I may have PCOS so I'm a bad ovulater), and I have had more blood tests this year than in my entire life added up. Then I had a sugar test, where I had to chugalug this weird Orange Crush x 1,000 that nearly killed me, and two crazy weird ultrasounds, one of which enabled me to see my eggs and fallopian tubes. That may be TMI, but I don't care - I am a science nerd and there were 3 complete strangers in the room and so you may as well know too. For all of you out there who are interested, I am in possession of a rather beautiful uterus, and my plumbing is fine.

I smuggled wisteria seeds back from Austria, which grew
Don't tell the cops. Thank god this blog is anonymous ha ha ha. My brother-in-law has a beautiful and huge wisteria vine growing up his super-cool house in Graz, and I couldn't resist picking off one of the 3-inch-long moss-green velvety pods. They're so beautiful and fuzzy. He told me "that will never work" but stillI brought it home in my suitcase, stuck it in the freezer for the rest of the winter, then planted the seeds in my greenhouse this spring. I am now the proud mama of a 7-inch-tall wisteria vine, and I couldn't be more smug.

I made this thing in pottery class















It's kind of a birdbath-slash-garden ornament. It's about a foot in diametre, and it stands on a copper pipe pole. I seem to have a wee knack for pottery, though my teacher might disagree (I am a bit impulsive on the wheel) and one of my classmates has borrowed my design to make a platter for cheese and crackers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I love pottery class so much and fantasize about it all day long, and am really really sad that it ends in three weeks. My instructor has been added to my (quite short) list of really-remarkably-fabulous-people-I-have-known.

I lost 15 lbs.

After the doctors told me I might have PCOS and recommended that I lose a bit of weight, I embarked on a serious but healthy diet of my own construction just after the dawn of the new year. I'm not obese and I'm tallish, but I was a bit overweight, so I cut out the junk, the processed stuff, upped the vegetable content, lowered the carbs and red meat, ate smaller portions, recorded everything I ate, watched the calories and fat content of everything, skied every week, did yoga for an hour and a half on about 5 saturday mornings (I'm not as dedicated an exerciser), drank gallons of water, ate fruit as snacks, and lost 15 lbs in about 2.5 months. So far I've kept it off, even though I have started eating junk again (reluctantly - I'm going to be more disciplined soon - it's easy to slide), and I always lose in the summer anyway, from all of the manual labour and the swimming. I had to have all my pants taken in, and that felt great. I want to go another 10 0r 15 lbs, and then try to maintain that. It may sound like I'm weight-obsessed, but I see it more as a medical experiment than anything.

That's all I can think of right now. It's been a busy year. Time passes quickly with age, so it feels like it's been no time since I renovated the bathroom a year ago, but in other ways the cycle keeps rolling and everything is just right. If I didn't mention something here, it's because it was good as usual or because it wasn't so great. And I guess I am a braggert, but I always say: if you don't toot your own horn, who will?