Red Cedar

a hearth for my fire container – 9 very heavy paving stones

i’m lounging about tonight – too tired to do much but read a little and update my blog as i anticipate my early-morning wake-up call for the start of the work week tomorrow. my very productive weekend has involved:

preparing the front garden bed for spring planting – this meant weeding it right down to some of the sorriest soil i have ever seen, purchasing a yard of compost for it, which i then had to spread and turn into the bed, covering it in a layer of newspapers (to keep down the weeds), and finishing it off with landscape cloth. yup – that was some sweaty work – but the goal is to have a plantable bed come march so i can put some perennial-type plants in there for easy maintenance. my next gardening task in a few months time will be working out the edible garden i plan to put in the side plot.

purchasing, loading, and then unloading and carying upstairs nine very heavy paving stones to use as a hearth on my deck for the fire container i acquired earlier this summer. you can see it pictured above – simple, but it will do the trick of protecting the deck from sparks.

installing a digital thermostat in my living room – again, an earlier purchase that has been waiting for me to action it. despite a little confusion in the wiring, it worked as promised on the box – and now i can program the heat in my home to be ready when i get in from work during the dark winter months.

reading two books from my reading challenge list.

playing music with some friends from gibsons and roberts creek on saturday night. funny enough, i thought i would only know one person there (richard, who invited me) but it turned out that i knew two of the other musicians from completely different places – proving once again that i do know people on the coast.

talking on the phone – catching up with my mother, and also with aaron.

doing the regular weekend chores – laundry, groceries, other odds and ends (but unfortunately no cleaning, i was just too wiped out from everything else!)

phew! all this really because i feel that the few weekends i am around the house, i have to make the best use of – next weekend i am off to vancouver island to visit family for the first time in months.

early spring sky at dusk in roberts creek

lately i have been having a series of “what the hell was i thinking when i made that major (or minor) life decision?” moments – i’m not exactly sure what has triggered all this questioning – but it is nice to note (reading blogs belonging to friends of mine) that i’m not alone in this petulant self-crit session. i suspect some of it might be the fall-out from the empowered-high after my canoe trip, and partly also because fall has more of a “new year” feel to it than january, which reflexively causes one to go into self-review mode.

in any case, it’s been wearing me down a little which is part of the reason my writing here has been sparse this week. the other reason for the sparsity (if that’s a word) is the fact i have been mired in work and union matters that are a little overwhelming and at times, a little bleak. yesterday (as i was working out a case strategy for one of the people i am representing), i drew out a flow chart of her downward spiral of illness and depression, starting with a decision made by management back in 2003 – which made for an excellent, if not totally disheartening, visual of how someone’s life can come so completely unhinged because of one or two simple events. it’s true of all of us, is the thing, which is where we get down to – those in glass houses should not… you know… throw stones, since we’re all living in a pretty fragile equilibrium whether we realize it or not.

as a mild elixir to my state, i decided last night to visit a friend in the fraser valley, who built me a fire, made me dinner, and sent me back into the city today with a cooler-full of fish (including one of the much sought-after fraser river sockeye) – all of which made me feel a little more cherished than i have been lately, and so this morning i am tireder for the highway trip, but happier too. i’ve been feeling a lot lately there must be something really wrong with me that no one seems at all interested at the moment (or at least, the interest out there is vague and intermittent enough to be annoying rather than ego-soothing). what’s really more frustrating about it is how much i am allowing my personal self-worth to be wrapped up in the absence of men attached to me, even though i have a whole life on the go which is fulfilling and meaningful in its own right. maybe this is an age thing? i hope it’s just a phase.