Red Cedar

I thought I had a post from earlier this week all loaded up and ready to go, but it turns out that I only crafted that post in my head and it didn’t actually make it into the draft folder yet. This is happening a lot these days. I spend an hour every day walking to work and in that time I think lots of thinks and compose many opening sentences – but when I walk through the office door I’ve got to get right to work and my time outside of the office is mostly spent doing work with my hands (a conscious effort to get away from the screen) – so a lot of these thoughts simply fly away.

But I’m not upset about that because the thinks themselves are helpful, as is walking like a maniac every morning, and I know at some point this will all come together in some amazing blog post of self-discovery.

For the moment, however, this is where things are at:

1. That whole feeling bad about myself thing? Yeah. So as a first step I told my partner about how I was feeling, and then I wrote about it here, and I also have mentioned it to a few women friends. That talking about it (as opposed to keeping it secret and shameful) has really helped. A lot! That was my stage one plan for tackling my bad feelings – share my story – and so far that’s working.

2. Stage Two of Project Self-Awareness has been taking place this week and involves making more eye contact and more small talk rather than assuming that no one wants to look at/talk to/know me.  That’s also lead to some great interactions, the kind I have shut myself down to for the last few months….. and I feel like I’m getting back to who I *can* be when I am feeling good about things.
3. Last weekend I played a show at the Princeton Pub and for the first time in twelve years I shut a room full of drunk men up by singing Diamonds and Gold on my own. If I can still do that at forty, I can’t be doing that bad.
4. There’s a piece of land that we can afford for sale and on Monday we are driving 8 hours round-trip to view it. It’s all I can think about this week because I have a feeling this might be the one! It’s only a third of an acre, but in a fabulous spot across the road from a little lake and within walking distance of four other lakes – and it’s a scant four hours from Vancouver. The cheap price means we can pay it off in a short period of time (we’ve got two other interested land-partners – but even without them we could afford it on our own and have it paid off in under five years). The lot is being sold at less than half its assessed value which is why we’re a bit frantic to get up there – it’s a very good price for the area we are looking in.
5. I finished a pair of capri pants last night and am one-sleeve-left on a pullover sweater (crochet). I am hoping that next week I will have photos of both to share here. The pants are a bit baggy in the crotch, but they do fit – pants being a pain because there are so many fitting points. I am thinking of drafting a pair to my own measurements to see if that helps since commercial patterns are always a bit of a challenge to fit. I *really* want to make my own trousers.
6. After nearly four months of walking 25 km per week I am feeling quite ready for our hiking trip to Berg Lake eight days from now. Not only am I feeling pretty fit – we’ve invested in some camping gear additions/upgrades this year and I’ve also got all of our dinners prepped and dehydrated. Totally feeling the trip coming on.
7. I’ve got a weekend of friends and family on the Island and am looking forward to getting out of the office this afternoon!

And that is pretty much what’s going on. Have a great weekend people!

I made a bit of a Craiglist score last night and have finally satisfied my desire for a Kitchen Aid stand mixer (at less than half the price of new). This came with all the original attachments, plus the slicer/shredder set and the ice cream maker. Of course I immediately put it to work on some egg whites left over from making ice cream last week (hence the blur in the bowl).

Our before-KA-stand-mixer belonged to Brian’s grandmother and has ceased standing (literally, it falls off the stand whenever the motor is running), my food processor is almost dead after 22 loyal years – and I like the idea of having one workhorse appliance instead of several cluttering up the cupboard. So this makes sense.

Below you can see my effortless egg whites which became meringues. I’ve never bothered with such things before because I hate beating egg whites to stiff peaks, but with the new  mixer I just dumped in the eggs and let the beater do the job. Incroyable!

(PS – if you don’t have Cream of Tartar you can use lemon juice instead. I learned that last night on the Internet.)

A brief post to track the first of the season’s canning. I’m hoping to keep a running tally so I can capture the total poundage of fruits and vegetables that make it onto the shelves in my bi-annual canning madness. So far this year I have put up:

• Rhubarb: Six lb. (Ketchup and stewed with raspberry jam from last year)
• Asparagus: Eight lb (Pickled)
• Apples: Forty lb. (Sauce)

One thing I’m feeling very smart about is the fact that I did my apples early using the end of last season’s storage apples. Every year we do a huge can in August and so I often miss out on doing apples because I am all canned out. Since we’re just getting started, and last year’s apples are very very cheap, thirty jars of sauce (flavoured with honey, vanilla and cinnamon – it’s my best batch ever) seemed about right.

If you read this blog regularly you will note that my posting has dropped way off in the last few months. There are a lot of little reasons this has happened, but in the main it boils down to two things:

1. Work is kicking my ass these days, and
2. I have been so self-hating recently that my self-confidence has been kicked into total submission.

It’s reason number two I need to talk about here.

In the couple of years approaching forty I told myself that I wasn’t going to be one of those women who became distressed by my age/appearance/self just because of a date on the calendar. Somehow (I thought) despite the fact I live in a society which has pretty much only taught me self-loathing, I am going to transcend that by the time I hit my official “middle age” and just enjoy myself the way I am. As evidence of this, at 37 I allowed my hair to go undyed and now sport a head of “prematurely” silver-grey hair which was intended to signal that “hey, I’m okay with getting older.” Except it turns out that I’m not. I am not okay with getting older.

But let’s backtrack here and be terrifically honest — I’ve never been okay with my age/body/self-expression in a total sense, and the turning forty thing has just added another dimension to run that set of bad feelings through.

And strangely, it started with getting back into shape.

I started walking to work every day in March, which is also when I cut wheat out of my diet in an effort to control a sinus problem. In the beginning I was doing the walking and Pilates in an effort to get myself in good hiking shape for a trip I’m doing in a couple of weeks. (Walking 6-10 km a day has definitely done that by the way.) But after about a month I started weighing myself, hoping that one of the side benefits of the walking/no-wheat would mean that (as in the past) I would lose weight pretty effortlessly. I put new batteries in my digital scale and then the daily weighing began. Despite losing a few pounds in the beginning, the losses stalled out pretty quickly and brought me to the realization that my body-metabolism truly has changed with age.

I am now “that age when your metabolism changes and you can no longer lose weight” that my mother always warned me about — and if I wasn’t already feeling forty, this has sunk into a whole new level.

I should have known I was going down a bad road when I stopped looking at myself in the mirror – something that periodically happens in the cycle of “I’m not good enough”.  On a good day I don’t love what I see in the mirror, on a bad day I can’t look at myself at all.

And yes, I know that I can’t actually tell what I look like (and have never been able to) because my inner-view is so distorted. Occasionally I run across a picture of myself from high school and realize all over that I wasn’t actually fat in high school despite being encouraged to diet non-stop by my mother and feeling like I was, in fact, a whale. This is a very depressing thing to realize because it means that I have truly not enjoyed huge parts of my life because I believed that I was fat and therefore unlovable/unworthy.  It also means that even after all these years I make fat=awful as opposed to just one of many possible physical states of being.

The worst part though? I know I am not alone. I know that a great number of women, if not the majority of women in our culture experience these thoughts and feelings. And how could it be otherwise? Women in this society are devalued for all but their looks, raised to a narrowly defined set of roles, and are bombarded daily  by a media which prizes only certain ages and only certain expressions of womanhood. And we’re the supposedly “liberated” women of the world!

What really worries me is that if I don’t get these feelings under control now, at forty (fast becoming one more invisible woman) , then I could easily spend the next forty years of my life mired in these feelings. I’m not getting any younger after all, and I’m probably not getting any thinner/prettier either. What I don’t like now will only become magnified (as I have seen happen in other older women I know) unless I put an end to the negative self-talk, the comparing myself to other women, the constant apologizing, the refusal to enjoy my body and my life because I feel I don’t deserve what I have.

So – being the project person that I am –  I’ve decided this summer is going to be my “summer of self-awareness” – a concentrated ten-week period where I find ways of “seeing” myself more accurately and becoming aware of my own truth by filtering out the negative voices.

Each week I will assign myself an exercise that involves doing something for myself or for other women  (a full list of which will be posted by the end of this week) and I am going to write about it here. I would love it if there were other folks who wanted to engage in this work, or even just contribute here in the form of positive comments!

(Already I’m balking at hitting send. Do I really want to announce to the world that I have poor self-esteem related to my gender, body image and age?)

Oh well. Here we go!

This map comprises 1250 kilometres of road trip that Brian and I took over three and a half days. We started with Kamloops only because I had a meeting there Thursday night, and after that we visited or drove through (in order):

• Princeton
• Coalmont
• Tulameen
• Bankier/Osprey Lake (camped overnight)
• Hedley via the Old Hedley Road
• Keremeos (breakfast & bought asparagus and apples for canning)
• Penticton
• Summerland
• Bankier again, this time via the other half of the Princeton-Summerland Road
• Princeton (again – we ate at the most unfriendly restaurant ever)
• Manning Park/Lightning Lake (camped overnight)
• Hope (breakfast)
• and then back home to East Vancouver

Despite the fact that the driving was rough in some places (we explored a bunch of logging roads) I have to say that this was one of the most fun and relaxing trips we’ve taken in ages. We’ve discovered that the back of my car is long enough to sleep in with the seats folded down so no tent/worry about rain – and we headed out with little in the way of a set agenda after Kamloops which allowed us to decide what we were doing as we went.

This trip started out as a way to check out some potential placer mining claims that we thought might also be good hunting grounds, but as we discovered those claims were way too far out in the bush to consider, we found ourselves circling back around Princeton-Summerland Road to check out some real estate we’ve been vaguely interested in for awhile. The large piece composed of mostly wetland – which we really have wanted for months – is still up for sale and still too expensive. That didn’t stop us from checking it out again and walking the length of it. However, there are a couple other potentials up there at the moment – one which is a cheap lake-lot at Link Lake (not right on the lake, across the road from it), and one involving a share in a land co-op. As always when returning from these land-jaunts, B and I are now busy researching these possibilities with an eye to heading back up that way as time permits to give it a further look over.

We have been sometimes-looking for recreational property for the last couple of years. This has involved scoping realtor websites, driving to the occasional property, and checking out areas of the province we think might make good get-away zones for our activities. So far our list of wants includes a property that is roughly 4 hours from the city (not more than 5), close to or backing onto crown land, private (no subdivisions in the wilderness), and with good access to water for swimming in (creek/river or lake nearby). In short, we’re not particularly picky, but we have some parameters because we know how we would use such a place. Our biggest problem/parameter however, the one which is keeping us from owning anything at the moment, is cost. That is, BC real estate seems ridiculously valued, particularly land in the south-west quadrant of the province.

In the area we are currently looking, there are probably 100 properties for sale, plus a new development of 5-acre lots going in – and very few of them are on the market for less than $300,000. A lot that is priced lower usually has some major flaw (like the one we wanted to purchase – which is 34 acres, 90% of which is wetland or steep/unusable slope – selling for $170,000) or nothing more than bare, unserviced land exposed to the road. Even then, it isn’t possible to find anything for less than $150,000.

Which to a city-dweller in the most expensive real estate city doesn’t sound like much, except we are talking about areas where there are few to no jobs, no municipal services, and where the properties being sold are clearly for secondary use, not primary residences. Having looked now for a couple of years, I am pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling this way as many of the properties seem to sit year-after-year with nary a change in price (though real estate agents seem get get thrown over with fair frequency).

Now, I recognize that a recreational property is simply a nice thing to have and not a necessity – and I am not complaining about not being able to afford a luxury item. But the whole situation has gotten me curious – who is the market for the $350,00 recreational property? These aren’t exactly properties for the uber-rich after all, but at the same time very few Vancouverites can come up with that kind of money particularly given the very high cost of the city these days (not to mention the pricey nature of all the interior cities where actual work and decent wages exist). I know Bob Rennie and other urban developers have been peddling the myth that a whole new crop of retirees are just aching to downsize their homes, buy their kids condos and perhaps get themselves a vacation property – but the fact that many people are working longer than ever leads me to question whether or not the older retiree really is hankering to settle down in communities with limited medical services and long driving distances.

In any case, recreational real estate in BC seems to be in the same state as residential real estate in Vancouver – the prices are too high for what’s being offered, no one is particularly keen to pay those prices (or simply can’t pay them) but the sellers seem to think if they just hold on a bit longer they will get the price they want, and so – stalemate. I expect the whole thing isn’t going to hold for much longer in the city or the hinterlands because at some point people *need* to unload their real estate and start moving down the price ladder in an effort to do so.

All I know is that we have an amount we are willing to borrow for this endeavor and once a property drops into that range – we are interested. As I mentioned above there are two places which are possibilities at the moment and I am hopeful that by the end of the summer there will be a few more. Or that one of these ones (like the co-op) works out to be the right thing.

In the meantime, the road trips are fun and always interesting – more of those in the near future most definitely!