Red Cedar

This is the smallest-town road trip ever. Eagle Bay and Bankier aren’t even towns, they are just settlements: the first being the homestead where my German family set down over a hundred years ago, the latter being the settlement closest to the land we just bought. It’s not wilderness travel, but we won’t have cel or Internet access either.

Eagle Bay is where I spent all my summers until I was about seventeen. My grandfather gifted each of his children with a 1/2 acre on Shuswap Lake, and all my mother’s siblings (save one) had cabins just down the road from one another. When I was six, my father and uncle spent a summer building our cabin which we spent our whole summers at every year after until my parents sold it because the taxes got too high  (fourteen years ago now). The last time I was up there was in the early summer of 1999, to commemorate the death of my grandfather — and I’ve meant to go back every year since.

But the closer we get to leaving, the more I wonder how much I want to see it again anyway. It’s the whole “you can never go home again” feeling, where the memories of being there don’t square up with the reality of the changes, and you’ve moved on anyway, so there’s a dissonance between what was and what is. Or who was, and who is. What made the place special to us — the people, the bustle of our family in the summer, the childhood freedom of going shoeless all summer and swimming whenever we wanted — all that is gone and we haven’t created new memories of the place in the intervening years to carry  forward into our present.

We’re only there for two days — camping down the road at a a private site in Sorrento — with one day of family activities and hopefully some time to drive around the take a look at things. I think it might be my last time going there, because there isn’t much left to go and visit. I don’t know most of my family there very well, there are only two cabins left in family hands (and my uncle’s place, where he lived full time until he moved into Salmon Arm. burned down a few years ago which makes me so sad – I remember it being built), and the rest of the community has turned into a hyper-developed Calagary oil money retreat – summer houses tucked into every other corner. Even if we did still own the cabin,  it’s not an area I would want to spend a lot of time — it’s no longer the quiet dirt road community of my childhood.

After Eagle Bay, we drive to Bankier on the holiday Monday where we will commence work on the new cabin property in my life. A nice counter-balance to leaving the past behind. We’re meeting with a backhoe operator first thing, getting culverts and a driveway put in, and starting to clear the land with chainsaws and machetes and axes! A couple friends will be coming along for extra hands and I plan to swim in Link Lake every day since the weather should get sunny again around Monday.

I hope to find some Internet access either at the place we are staying or in the town of Princeton so I can post photos  as we start to do land-clearing. But if that doesn’t happen? I will return on the 11th with many stories to share. I’m nervous, really — the cabin project is so beyond the scope of anything I’ve ever done — getting into the beginnings of it makes me a little twitchy. By the end of next week though I should be getting the hang of the land clearing part at least – and by the fall? I’ll be swinging that machete like a pro!

Have a great long weekend people!

I am starting a course called “Everyday Enlightenment” in the fall – a combination academic and personal exploration as I understand the course syllabus. Admittedly I’ve always been pretty biased against the notion of enlightenment being a desirable goal…. and this morning a quote came across my screen that pretty much summed some of my aversion:

I am not interested in enlightenment if it means detachment from the emotional body, the earth plane, the challenges of being human. I’m interested in enrealment, because it means that my most spiritual moments are inclusive, arising right in the heart of an immersion in all that is human: agony & ecstasy, laundry list & unity consciousness, earth & sky, joy & sorrow, fresh mangoes & stale bread. It’s all God, even the dust that falls off my awakening heart. ~ Jeff Brown

Emotional detachment – even if it was possible to live severed from our evolved emotional selves, do we want to?

• Talk to the cabin company
• Work on web contract
• Pick up supplies for community banner-making project
• Book family air tickets for travel to parental anniversary next year
• Pick up work gloves, safety glasses and other odds and ends at Rona
• Pin lace scarf for blocking
• Laundry

Check, check, check. That’s what my Mondays “off” work look like! No doubt there is even more to do now that we’ve got this land and have to start working on getting it cleared off for building next spring.

But I’m not complaining because that is all stuff that I’ve chosen to take on and it’s all a part of fowarding the things I want in my life – family, a little extra work, a rec property and community building.

I’ve been making a lot of lists lately, and am finding it’s helping to keep me on track, or at least reminding me of what needs to be done.

The one thing I forgot to put on the list and therefore didn’t get to? Making a base for cherry ice cream for dinner tonight.  Not exactly an emergency but fortunately I remembered this morning and got it done before running out the door to work.

Today’s list looks like:

• Write email about cabin info to land-partners
• Convert 50 web pages to new template
• Union follow-up on pending investigation
• Thank-you cards for work team
• Update completion numbers on Excel spreadsheet
• Blog
• Unpin lace scarf from blocking
• Work on crochet swatch
• Respond to BBQ invitation
• Follow up with friend re: drinks on Thursday
• Make ice cream
• Water back garden
• Put away finished laundry

……. and I’m definitely getting through it!

You might think that this is an awful lot of photos for a single dinner party – and you might be right – but honestly, I think I have hit on the single most perfect dinner party menu for summer-time and it required some serious documentation.

Basically I was looking to host a small backyard dinner party that wasn’t a barbeque and could take a couple of food intolerance issues into account (I don’t eat wheat, and two of my guests can’t have dairy). Also I don’t like having to spend a lot of time in the kitchen once guests arrive – and I wanted to use at least some of the fresh produce from the garden even though I don’t have a ton of any one thing. So – given all these factors – tapas became the obvious choice.

With an emphasis on dips and dishes that could be prepped in advance – this is what I came up with:

Opening Cocktail: Bing Cherry Mojitos
Appetizer Tapas: Pita breads with Baba Ganoush, Marinated Feta & 2 kinds of olives.
Cold Tapas: Salad skewers, pickled asparagus, green bean salad with hazelnuts
Warm Tapas: Tortilla Espanola, Meatballs with Ouzo & Mint (served with a yogurt/dill dip), Crab Cakes with fresh guacamole
Dessert: Chocolate Gelato (non-dairy) with raspberry coulis

Not only was the meal a fabulous array of small bits and flavours – it had all the visual appeal that a summer meal in the garden should:

This was a somewhat elaborate affair – and yet still, prep time was only 3 hours, and cooking time right before serving was about 15 minutes. Total cost for the dinner: Seventy-five dollars which works out to $12.50 a person – not bad for what turned out to be a truly special meal. Because the tasks were small and varied in the preparation, this was a joy to put together. Lots of kitchen puttering without any single large task. I got all the prep done in the morning which meant a whole afternoon of lounging around in the backyard. Not bad!

It’s been about six months since my boss went off sick with a mysterious ailment that caused all sorts of internal bleeding to a point very close to death. Even now that he’s on the road to recovery and the medical system can do a lot more exploration, they have no idea what caused it, nor if it will reoccur.

In the beginning this was very upsetting to our work team, and we sent gifts and made hospital visits in the weeks until he went home – where he is now recuperating, his return date uncertain. He popped into the office last week and is looking healthy, but he made no commitments to coming back to work, and I suspect he’s still in a pretty serious period of recovery.

For the first four months one of our co-workers stepped into the role on a temporary basis – which worked out in a pinch, but he’s a bit too young (and lacks the gravitas) to be taken seriously as senior management so he wasn’t able to advocate for us unit much. It was during this time my work team got loaded with a huge website conversion project, and quite seriously I was feeling under-supported as a supervisor and project manager of the work. My manager-coworker didn’t seem to take the added workload and stress very seriously, and I experienced some skepticism from my team as to our ability to complete the project in the time frame I had committed to. I actually cried at work on more than one occasion – unusual for me – and entertained active fantasies about quitting without notice.

Two months ago we got a new acting Director – a woman who has been around our organization and in senior management for a significant period of time. As a union rep I have encountered her a fair bit, and was somewhat ambivalent – seemed nice enough, didn’t really know what she was about, didn’t have an active dislike – which is how I feel about most people I deal with and don’t know well. Now that I’ve gotten to know her better? I have to acknowledge that she’s actually pretty excellent (so far) which I think has a lot to do with the fact that she actively enjoys managing people. Like it’s what she’s all about even though she comes from a policy background and has definitely paid her bureaucrat dues – she seems energized by having a team of people, and she actively works to draw the best out of those people.

My project deadline is next Wednesday and we’ve advanced nearly to the end of the work – for real, we’re going to be 95% by deadline which is an incredible rate of success for a web redevelopment project. We’ve all worked pretty hard to get here, and I’m feeling a million times better than I was six months ago when my boss got ill, or four months ago when the hammer came down in terms of workload. This is not the first time I’ve managed a large transition such as this, but I have to say it’s probably the most intensive and the most successful time around – which I will chalk up to:

1. I am a better project manager than I used to be
2. the ability to add an extra person for a 3-person team working on it
3. solid support from above rather than ambivalence
4. accountability tracking that were part of an ongoing conversation rather than ignored – not only did I visually track the team progress which they all agree (now) was motivating, but I also reported to my manager each week with a full account of where things were at.

The last six months has been a bit of a rough ride workwise but I feel like I’m coming out of it with a better grasp on my own role as well as a good relationship with my new Director which means more better projects soon!