Red Cedar

I’m using my creative writing time this morning to blog, having been errant here for some time and with another busy weekend ahead of me. October and April are my busiest months generally and while I haven’t been nearly so taxed this year as last, I have still lacked time for proper updating here.

Last week was pretty much a write off after the big Thanksgiving party. Monday and Friday I was on the Sunshine Coast dealing with issues relating to selling my place up there – first up to meet the realtor and take a look over the place, then returning to steam-clean carpets and tidy the dead plants off the deck. It’s listed now with some very unflattering photos (realtors can’t take pictures, besides which the place isn’t particularly tidy at the best of times) but I’m hoping to get some action anyways because it’s listed at a good price. At least that’s what everyone tells me.

Even though I’m not urgent to sell, I’m in a few knots over the whole thing. Knowing the ups and downs of selling and buying recently I worry that I’ve picked the wrong time, that I will be saddled with that house forever always paying more than I have to keep it up and for what? More stress than I need on a month-to-month basis. I’m hoping to have this all wrapped up by Christmas, but there’s no predicting now that the rains have come. Will anything move? As annoying as realtors are I am glad to have someone else out there handling it for me.

Last weekend both sets of our parents visited overnight (my parents on Saturday, Brian’s on Sunday) which gave us a chance to tell everyone in person that Brian and I are getting married next fall. Yes. Married. In two separate ceremonies – one legal (just for the parents, tiny affair) and one social (at our house, think everyone invited and potluck and handfasting type vows). Neither of us are interested in a large or expensive wedding, nor anything formal beyond the exchange of vows, so we figured this was the best way to separate out the various interests and keep things close to home for our friends. There’s still a lot of details to sort out, but this is generally what we are thinking and more will be posted here as we get closer (it’s a year away, lots of time to figure it out).

But it has definitely given both Brian and I pause to cringe from and reflect on our first weddings and marriages – not to mention the question of why get formally/legally married at all? Which doesn’t have a simple answer to it, but goes something along the lines of family acceptability and making it real on a different level for me (Brian doesn’t give a toss either way, I’m hung up about it I think precisely because we were both married before and I want to undo that legally beyond divorces).

Before we get married, however, we have decided to put our relationship to the ultimate test by participating in Nanowrimo together this year. This is on my impulse because my writing has faltered so badly in the last month and I want to kickstart it through a ridiculously steep word-curve (1500-2000 words per day for a total of 50,000) in a dedicated month of effort. In order that Brian not resent my time at the computer, I encouraged him to come along for the ride to see if he, too, could craft his very own hastily-written novel alongside me and he guarantees we’ll get through it, even though the last time I tried this I dropped out 10,000 words in.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m hoping at the very least to get an initial start at the novel I was working on scenes for all summer. Of course I can’t use those scenes in my Nanowrimo novel because pre-writing is cheating, but mostly I just want to start fresh from the beginning and write it end to end to get the basic story down without caring too much about the work that’s come before. Hopefully then I would have something to go back and actually work with bit by bit rather than being daunted by the fact I’ve really still got a whole novel to write from the beginning. Two hours per day I figure, since I can do 1000 words in an hour if I don’t fuss over what those words are too much. An hour in the morning, half an hour stolen mid-day, half an hour in the evening? It’s a challenge to be sure, let’s see how it goes.

Otherwise, I’m just heading into a weekend-long union meeting, which I’m resenting more by the minute (the whole weekend really?) and on Sunday afternoon (at the close of said meeting) I have my writing circle to attend. Fortunately Halloween weekend is wide open and I’m planning two days of sleeping in and hopefully a couple kickstart days on Nanowrimo given that it begins on a Sunday and I am off work on the Monday as well.

Generally though? I’m happy, productive, trying to keep my routine of writing and going to the gym in order (not so successfully, but not failing entirely either), and totally in love – a good fall heading into winter as I plot my spring garden and the work on our backyard studio for next year.

For a bigger copy, click on the above document.

I’m home sick with a cold today, which gave me an opportunity to actually set down on paper all the plans that have been going on in my head these past months. As evidenced in the last post, half the plan is already in action. The west side of my garden has been laid out with raised beds, a sitting area and yards of mulch. The east side of the garden is in the planning stages for next spring.

At present we have a broken down single-car garage – vintage 1945 and never updated. The roof is sagging badly, some of the boards are rotten – but the foundation is solid and a lot of the material can be shored up and used even so. Tearing it down is not an option (getting a permit to build a new structure could take as long as a year), but building onto the original walls and repairing the roof can go ahead without city inspectors. At present, the garage is really rather low to the ground and we’ve discovered that you can build these backyard structures as high as 14 feet (18 feet if it’s going to be laneway housing, which it’s not in our case).

So the plan is to put an extra several feet on the walls to peak the roof at 14 feet with a very lightly sloped roof grade in order to take advantage of all the height we can in order to build a combination backyard studio/loft and garden shed. I’m having a hard time describing it in words here, but essentially our 10*20 foot garage will be divided into two rooms – a studio of 10 * 13 and a shed of 10 * 7. The inner wall of the shed portion (represented by the dotted line above) will come up to only 7.5 feet and atop of that will be a loft that looks down onto the studio. The studio itself will look out onto the patio through french doors and will be used as a combination guest cottage, outdoor swing space, sauna and library. At least half the studio roof will be a green roof with shallow rooting plants and strawberries growing over the edges.

We’re also thinking that eventually the rounded bed by the side of the studio might be turned into a small greenhouse which would feed heat into the structure via the window and also provide for a beautiful view. All very exciting! I wish I could computer-generate a picture of my mind’s eye rather than just the skimpy drawing above, but alas! I am no artist and don’t know how to use those cad programs to do such things.

It’s no small project to develop this yard to its fullest – but I’m hoping the money will materialize through the sale of my half-duplex on the Sunshine Coast – a financial burden that I’m hoping to turn around this fall for a small profit. If that happens then we will be in good shape by the spring to start work on this *very* exciting project: East Vancouver’s very own private spa for all the activists and artists I know 🙂

I’m a little under the weather these days – mild cold, bladder infection leading to nauseating antibiotics, having some trouble sleeping. Crotchety is probably the best way to describe how I’m feeling right now, like the days are too long and I’m fed up with everyone I encounter. I am hopeful the weekend will be better as I look forward to Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday night.

Like I wrote earlier this week, things are a bit heavy in my world at the moment. Not only have I decided to sell my place on the coast, but my family (parents, brother & sister-in-law) are having some trouble these days that have left me not knowing how to respond. It all feels off at the moment, I don’t trust my own responses and so in the midst of what should be a time of joy (my brother about to be a father) I find myself wondering about how we continue these relationships at all? How do we forgive without capitulating to repetitive bad behaviour?

I’m a bit stuck in a negative loop as a result, wishing mostly that it would all pass without too much emotional effort on my part. If I delve too much into what is really bothering me about the family situation, I find a well of old hurts and snubs that take me further away rather than bringing me closer to a resolution. And so I’d rather just read books and pretend the real world doesn’t exist right now. I’d mostly just like to be left alone for a little while.

A trip to McLeod’s on my way home from work is in order, I think, for some second-hand books to add to the already-large reading pile. Always a reading pile (two at the moment, in fact), but always something more to add to it. Right now looking for the next book Brian and I will read outloud – some sort of classic I think. Some totally other world.

For everything in between, see the flickr photo set on this project at http://www.flickr.com/photos/redcedar/sets/72157622296535899/.

Now isn’t that exciting? In just a few short days B. and I managed to landscape half our backyard and create a collection of richly-fed vegetable growing beds for next spring. Total project cost came to under $1050 including the garden bench and the perennial vines & plants – but not including the arbor which came from my mother-in-law’s previous garden. Best part of all is that this is probably the first time ever a project has turned out to look as good in real life as it did in my imagination.

So what did we do here?

1. To start off, I made the garden boxes. Probably didn’t need to start there, but they were easy to build over a couple evenings after work. These were constructed using 1×6 untreated cedar fencing planks that I bought off Craigslist for cheap, and Lee Valley hinges to hold them together which were not cheap. I probably should have used 2X6s but it’s easier to find untreated 1×6’s anyway when I need to replace them.
2. We were feeling a bit lazy about digging up the sod in our yard, so once we finished the boxes we spent a few hours covering the backyard with layers of newspaper, cardboard and weed fabric. Unfortunately the day I did this was a bit windy so I had to keep spraying the layers of paper with water to keep it from blowing away, and then had to hold the fabric down with scraps of wood so it wouldn’t blow up overnight.
3. The next day we got into the mulch – which I got a really good deal on from a co-worker whose brother has a mulch company. B. did most of this while I made breakfast and organized other things.
4. By the afternoon of this day, we had the boxes in place (and leveled with scraps of 2×4), and the arbor up and managed to make two runs out for additional supplies – the edging wood, the bench on the vines for the arbor – all of which we got on sale because we were purchasing at the end of the season.
5. On Friday, this guy brought me five yards of vegetable-gardening mix. He was super nice and the mix is gorgeous – compost, peat, sand and well-rotted mushroom manure. That afternoon, B. and I filled four of the boxes. Unfortunately I miscalculated the amount needed and we are about three yards short (we’ll wait until spring to fill the other boxes).
6. Yesterday, I nailed together pieces of lath to make my square-foot-gardening grids and stuck them in the boxes. Not only that, but I planted some garlic! (still awaiting an order or seed garlic from west coast seeds to finish my garlic planting).

That’s pretty much it until February when I start putting more stuff in the ground as per the growing charts – and we are *so* happy to have got this far in creating both a really productive vegetable growing space as well as a nice little “hangout corner” in our yard. I will be putting trellising up in the two boxes closest to the fence so I can vertically grown squashes and peas, and am further planning planting potato plants in burlap sacks which (I hope) will add to the growing/space-maximizing aesthetic.

After all this was done, I sat down with six sheets representing each 4×4 box and mapped out what all is going to go in there come spring. Which may sound ridiculously hyper-organized, but one of the problems I always have (and the reason I buy so many starts and don’t go from seed on up) is because I continually miss planting windows – so after choosing each of my varities, I am going to make an actual planting calendar with an attempt to stagger sowings so as to get continual crops of some things throughout the summer (like bush beans). Basically designing my own garden master-plan in an attempt to see what works and what doesn’t with this whole square-foot method. Only time will tell whether I’m satisfied gardening this way, but already I can say that breaking the garden out into squares and planning that way is a whole lot easier to conceptualize than rows.

I’ll be recording some of my choices here in the next little while as I sift through my broad categories and get down into varieties. Perhaps I’ll even try to post my grids here as examples of my neurotic organizing streak. In the meantime, I’m just glad the bones of the garden are in place to flesh out come late winter and spring.

Really, I think I just need to go to the damned gym. Achy all over, exhausted from insomnia – a result of not getting enough real exercise I’m sure. Of course the kicker is, that when I feel like this all I want to do is feign illness and crawl back home to bed. But instead, I will pry myself from the cube shortly and go jump up and down like a mad person – all in the quest of feeling just a little bit better than I do now.

Last week was one of those running-around weeks – I barely wrote, didn’t work out once, and somehow spent the whole weekend trying to catch up but failing miserably. At least I got more work in the garden done (garlic planted), groceries bought, and roots retouched. The essentials right? At least I got to the essentials.

Oh, and made an appointment with a Sunshine Coast realtor. That too. I’ve decided to sell the Gibsons house two and a half years after moving back to Vancouver because I just can’t afford to keep it any longer. Not only does the house cost several hundred more dollars per month to keep than I get in rent, but there are some large repairs looming (roof etc.) which I can’t afford without costly loans – and then how would I ever pay them back if I’m already operating at a monthly deficit? Oh yes, some day in the future the house will be worth so much more and then I can cash in….. but right now I can barely afford to pay the mortgage in the house I live in. So I’ve had to make up my mind about it and I’m going ahead.

Financial issues aside, I have a lot of stress about owning that house and I’m looking forward to shedding that aspect of my life as well. Increasingly I’m thinking about simplifying my existence – whittling things down to my East Vancouver existence for awhile….. but that’s for another post since right now I need to get off to the gym, and burn a few of these worries off so I can sleep better tonight.