Red Cedar

I took this photo over the Christmas holiday while on a walk with Brian and our friends Kyla & Will at Swan Lake in Victoria. Of course I only downloaded it from my camera last week, along with all the photos of our new year’s food and Christmas cookies – so you may be seeing some belated holiday shots and recipes here in the next little while since that was the whole purpose of the photo-taking: blogging.

January was supposed to be the month that I started my photo-a-day project which would have happened except that I realized at this time of year I’m only outside when it’s dark…. I go to work before the sun comes up and return after it’s gone down which doesn’t make the best conditions for photography – so I think I’m going to wait until March or April before before I do my month of photo-blogging.

Having said that, I suspect I will be posting frequent photos of our backyard over the next few weeks as we are starting the garage reno shortly. We have folks lined up to work, and Brian has been hard at work clearing all our stored stuff out of it. If everything goes according to plan we should be finished the substantive work by the end of February…. it’s not a whole month of work by a long shot (more like 10-14 working days) but it’s all about the scheduling of people and when we can organize the second phase to get done after the first. I suspect we won’t be painting until sometime much later in the spring when things dry out again… but everything else should be done by then…… and surely we can count on some friends for a painting party? It really is just a small project after all. And so exciting to get going on the centerpiece of our little east van “spa”!

Of course none of this gets paid for until we close out on the Gibsons house which is still six weeks away. Unfortunately that happens during the Olympics which makes for a potential travel headache since I plan to spend a weekend up there at the end of the month getting the property ready to transfer. A busy few weeks ahead and work’s been crazy lately too so I’m not getting much respite in the cube these days either!

I’ve tried to save posts twice now only to have them crash. So I’m going with the short story version of my post: It’s been a really busy week hence no writing here or anywhere. Hopefully my work life settles down next week and there’s time for some ranting and noveling again. In the meantime, here’s two photograph I took in the neighbourhood that indicate what I’ve been thinking about these days.

It has just occurred to me that while I frequently ask myself “what’s the point” with keeping on writing, I never – ever – once asked myself that question as a performing musician. I mean, there were times when I found it a bit of a drag… tiring, too much in addition to my regular job, creatively taxing or stressful…. but the audience always made it clear to me that they were the point, and you could always tell whether you were hitting the mark or not. Writing isn’t like that. It’s solitary and goes on without a lot of feedback a great deal of the time which makes it a much harder internal slog. It’s not like I get to sit down and jam on a poem or a particularly nifty piece of prose with other writers, or cause an audience frenzy with a poignant memoir reading… And while the slam movement serves as somewhat of a bridge between performance and writing (strong on the performance often weak on the writing), it’s really not my style. I’m just not bombastic enough, or something.

But perhaps I need to be. Because I do note a certain lack of performance options in my life and I *miss* it these days. It’s either music or readings or some combination of both….. but I’m not sure what that means creatively or where I’m going to find the time for one more thing.