Red Cedar

…. and it went a little like this.

We originally had a difficult time finding the lot because the “driveway” was apparently severed from the road by a drainage ditch some years ago:

The “small cabin on the back of the lot which has probably fallen down” is actually a giant debris pile in the best building site at the front of the lot:

In addition to the debris pile we found a tipped over outhouse and an unusable  shed:

Oh – and the gentle slope on the rest of the property turned out to be a little more like:

HOWEVER

• This is a 15,000 square foot lot
• It is at the end of the residential area of the lake – neighbours on one side only.
• Great hunting and trout fishing access within steps from the property (this is a literal measure – you can walk four steps off the back of the property into hunting territory).
• It is the cheapest thing for sale in Southern BC at less than $40,000 and only four hours from Vancouver
• Once the debris is cleared there is one very solid building site – while smaller sleeping cabins could easily be build on leveled platforms.
• There are peekaboo lake views which will be enhanced once the pine-beetley trees are cleared out of the way.
• The slope allows for a gravity-fed rainwater collection to the main cabin we would build.
• And best of all, it is a 5 minute walk down the road from the property to this:

Which has a sweet little place to leave your rowboat even:

And so WE’RE PUTTING IN AN OFFER with the hopes we can get some of the cost of cleaning the debris up knocked off the asking price – because its obvious that the realtor and the seller have no idea of the state of things up there (seller hasn’t been in more than ten years and the realtor has never been).

Yes, it’s a funny little lot with some issues. But it’s a workable lot, in a fabulous location, for an asking price of affordable — and so it seems that new project time will be upon us soon.

(All lot photos in a Flickr set here.)

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!