Red Cedar

After an exhausted day yesterday, I am feeling renewed today for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on. But here I am again, immersed in self-improvement plans, excited by the prospect of summer holidays, relatively pleased with the short story I am writing. Not to mention the fact I’ve got my camera out again, new classes at the gym have me piqued, and I feel like our home is really coming together with the basement finishing and all. (Now, if I could just ignore this sense of impending doom at work, what with unmet deadlines at all, my life would seem just perfect at the moment….)

I’m pretty sure that less travel to Ottawa is a major contributor to this new period of peace, stability, restedness – and for the first time in a long time I’ve felt able to get on with the things I really want to do besides work. Not that it means I will eschew future opportunities in my union, but during this quieter period I am intent on maximizing the positives of being around home more.

For those of you interested in summer plans, joining up with us at this point – so far we’re doing the following:

June 18-21: Hornby Island with some of the raddest folks I know. Car-camping at Little Tribune Bay.
July 19-24 (somewhere in that week): 4-day hiking trip on Flores Island.
August long weekend: Salmon Arm and area, family visit in Eagle Bay. Mostly a research trip for me, I love interior road trips in the summer fruit season!
And we’re still hoping for a mid-August kayak trip with some friends from Vancouver Island – though nothing has firmed up yet. Also thinking about an early July Flying Folk Army/music party at our house…..

That’s all pretty exciting. Let me know if there’s something missing off the calendar that we must do, we’ve both got lots of vacation time banked.

I’m having a hard time getting down to work this morning – fuzzy-headed from staying out too late last night, clicking through Internet pages rapidly looking for inspiration of some sort. Goddamn if things didn’t end up exactly the same as they started. Not that I’m convinced it’s a bad thing for the NDP to have failed, for a victory last night would have meant four crappy years of floundering around for a policy platform followed by a real trouncing by the right in the next election. Four years of not being able to fight back against “our party” is four years too many of complacent plodding. Really, the voter turn-out says it all, when there is no difference between the two parties why bother?

So it was an excuse for drinks at the WISE which isn’t a bad outcome either way – B. and I haven’t been there once since moving a month ago. So much going on these days between family dramas and getting ourselves set up in the new house. Tomorrow is Brian’s birthday, Saturday our housewarming and his party, I’m trying to finish a story I’m writing, I’ve got plants to go in the garden… Etcetera etcetera. But I’m not complaining because this life is way more interesting than the thin politics offered by the electoral system – friends, family, creative life, digging in the dirt. Did I mention before that we are planning a small pond in our front yard? I think that’s way more intriguing than whether Carole James steps down as leader now.

My library experiment, incidentally, has been working wonders on my financial health – noted here because yesterday I took five landscaping books out – my impulse to purchase new books on a whim has pretty much ended with a constant stream of new books in the house to keep my interest. Still have a small budget for special things (local authors, small presses, poetry) and secondhand – but in the last month have purchased only one book for myself (Elizabeth Bachinsky’s new poetry collection God of Missed Connections). Brian has bought me a few small additions for the collection as well, so I’m feeling satiated on every literary level without spending my average $200-300 I would have spent this past month otherwise.

Besides that, I’m feeling a tad perplexed about my brother these days, stumbling ahead to getting married despite what seems to be a pretty miserable relationship. The wedding is in July and beyond showing up for the actual event I’m declining to participate in a situation that depresses me this much. It seems my brother and I had opposite reactions to our somewhat dysfunctional upbringing. I have tended to leave any relationship that shows signs of verbal/emotional abuse – where on the other hand my brother seems to believe there isn’t anything better out there because it’s all that we knew growing up. I’m hoping that I’ve read the relationship situation here incorrectly, but I doubt it. I have no idea what to do except hold my tongue and try to stay out of the choices of others.

Looking forward to warmer weather, camping trips and lots of down time this summer. That’s about the long and short of it. I don’t feel like working very much at the moment.

I just hate coming back to work after a week out of the office. Hundreds of emails, the to-do list I didn’t finish before taking off, a nagging sense something will get forgotten in the week ahead of catching up. All that, and it wasn’t even a holiday! Damned union convention.

But I survived it – this, the national triennial convention of my union is a big deal – a thousand people attending, hosted at the new convention center in Vancouver (first triennial hosted in BC since 1986 no less), late nights and early mornings with lots of talking in between. By the end of it all I was pretty much done, but managed to drag myself through an obligatory May Day demo on Friday evening anyway. Which left me feeling annoyed rather than militated or even committed to the cause. I spent the whole demo just wanting to get on a bus and go to dinner. Sometimes I just hit my limit.

I spent the rest of the weekend at home, cleaning up after the concrete-grinding dust that got all over my house from the downstairs renos, grocery shopping, meal-planning, and gardening my backyard. I’m getting pretty excited about that last part now Brian has dug out the dog area and built the dogshit composter, and I’ve worked all the other beds to get a lot of plants, bulbs and seeds into the ground. We’re not developing any new beds this year but rather working with what we’ve got in order to keep expenses and work low while the basement is being finished. But even with limited planting space dug out I’ve managed to put in kale, cabbage, lettuce, peas, basil, parsley, dill, radishes zuchinni, and cucumbers not to mention hostas, gladiolas, poppies, yarrow, lilies, anenomes, bleeding heart, columbine, sweet peas and a few other assorted flowers as well. I’m working on a mixed planting scheme for the first time which means not having a stand alone vegetable garden but interspersing vegetables, flowers and shrubs where things fit and look attractive together. We’ll see how that works, I am slightly afraid of forgetting where and what I’ve planted – particularly the stuff coming up from seed.

Last night I saw an owl in front of my house which is the first time I have ever seen an owl in urban Vancouver. It was hopping around on the ground and at first I thought it was a big cat, but it flew up into a tree when I opened the door to look at it better. It made another appearance on the ground in time for Brian to see it also, so we both got silly-excited about it and we hope it lives on our street among the big trees at night all the time. I’m going to look up how to attract birds to the yard in general, and I’m hoping we can get hummingbirds even – though I have never seen a hummingbird in the city, Brian has heard that if you put out a feeder you do get them. I suppose it’s worth a shot, after all, it’s not like the sugar water costs much to put out there.

I have about eight million ideas for both yards, and it’s hard not to get out the shovel and just start digging all over the place. But plants either have to be cultivated/divided/dug up at the right time or they cost money – and either way you can’t just rush around with no planning. Still, I am thinking woodland garden with a small pond for the front yard, maybe in a couple of years when we’ve finished the shed and patio in the back. The good thing about woodland garden is the availability of native plants, particularly in areas being turned into horrible developments – no one complains there when you dig up a fern or a salal bush – so I can dig them up as I find them, and plunk them in one small plot at a time. I suppose that makes for screwy planning. but since when have woodlands ever been organized?

I will post pictures of the backyard shortly in any case, and the inside of the house. I have been waiting until the lumber is out of the yard first, and I haven’t had a chance to take pictures inside since we got all set up….. Though soon.