If February were a blog post...

Almost half-way through February.  It's starting to sag though, the positive attitude.

Frozen branch near Terminal Beach, 2011

February is very difficult in Canada.  January, you have had Christmas vacation and a bit of a rest and you are just getting started with the real snow and the cold.  There's a sense of settling in for a spell of it, the winter projects kick in, the NHL gets interesting, and when it's fit to go out, there's sledding, and skating, and ski-joring or ski-ing or whatever it is you do to stay one step away from catatonic.

Also, there's still February - April to get through, so you don't want to over-think anything.

The end of January is a bit of a milestone though!  Cheers you right up for a minute.

And February is a short month.  The positive attitude gets a surge.  In the second week of February, the days stretch perceptibly at each end, so I am now driving to and from work in the dawn/ dusk, as opposed to the pitch black of January.  I can see the ice and snow on the road.  I feel less scared.  The cold makes for some pretty spectacular dawns.

Easy, peasy...

So here's the thing.

Round about the tenth of the month, you remember that February is not a short month.

In fact it is not a month at all.

February is in fact the moment in time when the long-suffering son-in-law of the meanest, coldest-assed, tightest-fisted, mascara-dripping bitch who ever produced a spoilt blonde turns away from the nagging to stoke the fire, but instead picks up the poker and hefts it.

If February was a scene in a movie it would be the Tommy Lee Jones soliliquy at the end of no Country for Lost Men.

If February was a book, it would be written by Franz Kafka.

If February was a song, Joy Division would have recorded it.

February is when the light is so harsh that every line on your face, every grey hair on your head is screaming 'LOOK AT ME EVRYONE, LOOKAT MEEEE'.

February is when the Caribbean music on your iTunes makes you cry instead of dance.

February is when your body has had enough of minus 28 and just wants to sleep all day and eat all night.  But you have to haul it to and from an office with forced air heating that makes your skin crawl.

I was on the phone with a federal colleague the other day, and I couldn't find my words in a week of not being able to find my words (not good in a week with an interview) and I said 'I'm sorry, i can't find my words, I have February Brain' and she said "THAT'S EXACTLY WhAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!!! I haVe it Too"

And that's the real problem.  We all have it at the same time, so life is a little grumpy right now.

Thankfully the Canada Games are on now, so the kids are off school for two weeks.  The disgustingly positive people have all gotten extra days off to volunteer.  The disgustingly selfish people are taking advantage of cheap trips to the Caribbean.

And the rest of us....

Hopefully there will be enough people gone out of the office that we can all hide in our offices, watch people having revolutions in countries where you can actually stand on the street for more than five minutes at a time.... and ignore each other in peace for the rest of the month.

Nearly only five weeks to the Equinox.
Eight weeks to the fishing season!!

Stay warm everyone.

The Lawrencetown worm massacre

It rained all day today which was good because the garden needed it, but bad because I didn't have my brain in gear and so left my umbrella in the car.  So did everyone else on the bus apparently, because when the rain burst onto the bus windows as we trundled over the bridge, everyone looked up from their book or paper and mouthed 'shit' simultaneously.

Then ran for cover when we had to get off a minute later.

But it's stopped now and my flip flops are drying out and so is the lawn.

Turdus Migratorius (American Robin)

From the window right now I can see eleven American Robins on the lawn.  I think that's a record for our house.  The poor worms that live beneath the grass are being massacred as I watch. 

Hoppity hop hop hop - stop.
Head cocked. 
Listen. 
Pounce. 

Another poor little worm gets hauled out of the clay by its neck, then pecked to death before the robin flies off to a tree to eat it.

I am waiting for one of the robins to encounter the two snakes that live on the front lawn.  I wonder who would win that contest.

The weekend before Christmas is really the Christmas

Big snowfall tonight.

Maybe two thirds the way up the ruler.

Standard ruler... 30 cm jobbie. Like in school.

OK. Mathematics starting.

Mathematics in the sense of one of Mr. Hensey's classes (fifth year honours) ... I am hanging out with my friends talking about the weekend, but I am also supposed to be doing maths.

The driveway is 100 metres long and four metres wide.

A little wider at either end.

The snow shovel is 45 cm wide.

I think.

Why am I writing a math post? This is not good.

Side to side. From lawn to woodland.

Over and back.

Over and back.

Pick up the spill.

Then over and back.

By my calculations (which are usually wrong and need John Brown to fix), that's 222 shovel swipes across the driveway.

Over and back.

And then scooping up spill.

Say, another 150.

That's 372 shovel swipes.

I'm pretty sure it was more than that.

Put the shovel into the snow with the blade aligned to the edge of what's left, and push along the line to the far side. Turn on your heel, and clean up the spill on the way back.

Then put the shovel back down against the clean line of the snow.

Scraaaape.

In early November snows it's mostly rain with some ice in it, so when you shovel it's like pushing water up a hill.

Heavy and wet and no fun at all.

After January, it's all ice pellets and misery. The shovel stops up on the ice and pushes into your sternum and it's hard and miserable to move it.

After I finished doing it seven times last year I found out all the men on my road used to watch me shovel ice off the driveway, and wonder at how Himself got himself such a hardcore woman...

But there's a couple of weeks in December when it's light and fluffy and perfect if it snows.

And shovelling is a meditation.

That was tonight.

I think about a lot of stuff when I shovel the driveway in December.

I feel so lucky that I get to do it. I need to think about a lot of stuff.

Today I was thinking about Ireland, because I was very lucky this Sunday; people from Ireland were all home suffering from pre-Christmas hangovers, so they were vulnerable and I got to talk to a few of them for quite the chat.

Well, I have to admit that during the section of the driveway from the road to the garbage box (about 20 side to sides), I thought about how difficult it is to build and maintain a mature and loving relationship with stepchildren who are the powerless pawns in a ridiculous battle of control freakery being waged by their mother against their father and me.

But I think about that a lot and if I write about it she uses it in court proceedings, so we'll just move on, shall we.

From the garbage box to the rhododendron bush, which is not very far, the rhododendron bush being near the garbage box for a reason, I thought about Ireland.

The lights on Grafton St.

Winking against the wet paving.

The weekend that was.

What a weekend that must have been. Everyone finally had time to go out and chew down on a few things.

I'm sorry I missed that weekend.

I would like to fly home for that weekend and then leave before Christmas. Would that be so awful?

How well everyone is doing!

Everyone I love has survived.

The recession. The revelations. The floods. The everything.

For my New Year's wish, I would like everyone I know in Ireland to be in charge of Ireland now.

It's the fact that you're not that's making your teeth ache boys and girls.

The demography is on your side, guys...

I was halfway up the section from the rhodo bush to the back of the car (the long, difficult, middle section), when I had to put the shovel down and go get the dog.

Neighbours again, not approving of the dog being allowed to wander about in what is ostensibly a wilderness backyard area...

She's half wolf for fuck's sake... what do you think she's going to do in the snow.

I got feedback on the blog tonight and was told the dog bits were boring, which I knew, but dog bits = life right now, so maybe up the ante in the life is a priority for soon.

After Christmas, as Himself would say.

Anyways, got the dog, got back in the rhythm, over and back, over and back, pick up the spills, over and back, when I noticed it was blowing snow, like it said in the warning.

Your late thirties and early forties are all about 'blowing snow' aren't they.

You shovel and shovel and shovel.

And then you get up the next morning and all the snow is drifted up against the car again.

There you go, metaphor for next year.

I'm going to post this without a resolution because I am drunk and blind (dog ate my glasses)..

I will amend if something comes to me.

Oh yeah.... make Christmas about the kids for once eh?!

The eye of the storm is quiet... maybe too quiet.

Sunday evening. Six thirty. Fed. Tidy kitchen. Very tidy house for reasons that are not good.

If this was the spring or summer I would be outside pottering around, but it's the winter so it's dark and cold and I am stuck inside with four hours to kill before I can go to bed with the only book in the house I haven't read which is a Patrick White, which is of course depressing the hell out of me. Which only a Patrick White novel can do.

Did he have a terrible mother?

All his novels (well not so much The Tree of Man, which is great) are about beastly women who struggle against the boredom of 1950s Sydney/ some beautiful-sounding outback station. Their children hate them. Their husbands are gauche hillbillies who get most of the sympathy.

And they take forever to die.

The current one is The Eye of the Storm. I'm not complaining about the writing, mind. it's beautiful...

... I just don't understand his obsession with the subject matter.

I'm reading an online essay about him now... apparently I am looking at the book through the wrong end of the analytical telescope... it's about Elizabeth Hunter reconciling living and dying and trying to find that 'eye of the storm', inner peace and a touch of the divine.

I had decided that the eye of the storm was the peace her family had at the beginning of the end... as in when you get to the eye of the storm, even though there is the rest of the storm to get through, it's usually not as bad as the first bit...

No wonder I didn't get a first in college!

As well as not being able to 'see', I cannot see right now, because Shannon ate my glasses the other morning.

Despite having searched the house (and tidied it on the way and having found lots of things I thought I had lost forever, including a 'congratulations on your engagement' card I should have mailed in September) I cannot find my old glasses so I am blind for the foreseeable.

I have to wait till January to get a new pair on the health insurance... major pain in the ass.

Why on earth would a dog eat a pair of glasses?

We have managed to spend another weekend without setting foot in a mall, which is one of the things I try to do coming up to Christmas, and we got our new water system installed, the dog spayed, and quite a few odds and ends done, so we are feeling pretty good about things.

And my online campaign against the crapness of the company that we bought Little 'Un's present from seems to have worked because they emailed us today and said they were express shipping it to us in time for Christmas.

So thanks to them for that.

While I was outside trying to find chores to do to get some of the sunshine into me, Himself spent some of the afternoon looking at land online.

The reason he did this (I think) is because when we checked MLS the other day to see the sale price of the house next door (which is for sale again), we noticed that an acre of swampy land down the road by the lake was for sale (for $180,000, FFS!). Then we noticed that a beautiful swathe of land by the seashore, that we walk on regularly is for sale (for $600,000 FFS!!) and that got us thinking and talking about how ludicrous the price of land is around here.

So today, Himself started looking at land in other parts of the province, and found 100 acres in Victoria County, Cape Breton, for $29,000.

Remote woodland now, not Cabot Trail picturesque.

But still.

Good price.

I hope he doesn't want it for Christmas!

I'm kinda broke right now.

But he reckons this will be the land for the compound.

Those of you who know us know about the compound.

The compound started out as a game, round about the time I read Cormac MacCarthy's The Road, which scared the bejaysus out of me.

The compound was an ongoing project we discussed while having a beer in the yard in the summer. The compound is where we'll go when the world starts to go pear-shaped.

We'd need some land. Build an off-grid housing complex. Invite some friends to come along if things ever got tough for them/ they could get there.

Some of our Irish friends got to thinking about solar-powered sailing ships... to get to the compound (although they'd probably end up sailing around a lot).

It got popular, so we decided that everyone had to have a skill.

People got really into this... we had beekeepers, librarians, flax-spinners, (hunters, gatherers, gardeners, cooks, etc).

What would we put there?

Fuel, food, weapons (yes dear).

You can while away a number of hours quite pleasantly talking about the compound.

In the summer.

When everything's good in the world.

When the winter comes, Himself gets bored and starts scouting for land.

At least this year, it's Cape Breton.

Last year, it was Northern New Brunswick.

Anyways, applications for residency at the compound if the times get too bad can be submitted to us on the back of a renewable energy source diagrammatic.

Just mail it to Eagle.

We're looking for engineers.

Specifically electrical engineers.

And, yes, I'm still in charge.

Somebody has to be and it was my idea.

That's why.

Apart from issues regarding perimeter security, of course.

And so the winter begins... a long, long drawn-out effort to not get too bored in the evening and end up gnawing my own arm off for something to do.

I need a hobby.

Any suggestions?

Nothing too expensive, I'm really broke right now.

And knitting I think is beyond me.

And nothing chewable of course.

For obvious reasons.

All Soul's Day - getting set to live in the dark

Today was such a beautiful day it was difficult to believe it was 1st November.

Positively balmy here on the Eastern Shore.

I got bitten by a mosquito.

The last time I got bitten by a mosquito in November, I was in Venezuela.

But of course the year has turned slightly and it got dark at 5.25pm so it is November.

Shannon and I went down to Lawrencetown beach to watch the sunset. Our sunset walks will be curtailed for a few months now, as I won't be home in time to walk her in the daylight, so I was happy our last one for a while was a beauty.

The surf was pounding the shore and about a dozen surfers were out bobbing on their boards like seals on driftwood.

Although there are generally at least two people out in the water when I am on the beach, I rarely see anyone actually stand up and surf in. They just bob around on their boards. Nova Scotian surfing I suppose! Not too much effort, just hanging out in the cold water for kicks.

The sun went down over Halifax Harbour and the nearly full moon rose simultaneously so we had half a sky of rose pink and slate blue clouds, and half a sky of luminous light filtered through the gauzy cloud the moon was veiled in.

Shannon picked around and sniffed stones (in the absence of trees) and I walked the shore and thought about my grandmothers and Jim and Eileen and Paddy Egan and Geraldine and Himself's Uncle Glen and all the other wonderful people I know who have passed over to the other side of the hallowed gate and wished them peace wherever they are.

Then we came home and I went downstairs to find something for supper and when I came back Shannon had an enormous block of Gouda (left on the worktop) in her mouth and a guilty look on her face.

Pulling expensive food off the worktop is the new chewing.

Anyways, we had a little row and she got put out on her line and sulked for a bit and so did I but we eventually made up and went for a moonlight gander around the neighbourhood.

It's too bright to let her out by herself when the moon is full. One of my well-meaning neighbours always spots her and brings her home.

Now it's about nine and cloudless: so bright out you can pick out individual trees in our wood.

The temperature has dropped substantially. I harvested the last of the garden today, probably in good time. I got a fair-sized bucket of onions - Spanish, red and 'normal' - and the last of the tomatoes and cabbage.

We had a middling garden this year, mostly because it was our first year and so the earth was not well composted or fertilized. I bagged four big sacks of leaves today for spring compost, and as soon as it gets cold enough I will start a proper compost bin.

We had plenty of radishes (of course), tomatoes and zucchini, and our corn was pretty good and our squash. Everything else was a little late, so our leeks and beets were small and our cucumbers never even tried.

Himself being an Aquarian loves beginnings. He loves getting the earth ready and planting. Tomatoes mostly, but he'll plant anything if you get him interested in the idea.

Then apart from watering, which is a manly chore that gets him out of cooking supper, that's it for him.

Unfortunately, that's not it. But fortunately, I don't mind weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, harvesting and finally pulling and cleaning up. Usually it's up to me to remember to do it, and he is pretty good at helping.

If he can't think of anything to begin instead.

I got him and Littl'Un to help me clean up the main garden a couple of weeks ago, but I have been on the road a lot recently due to work commitments so when I went in the greenhouse today it was the first time in over a month.

It was a tomato plant mausoleum. Tall, rotting tomatoes groaned under the weight of their fruit and leaned against each other in an orgy of decay.

It took over an hour to clean out.

GRRRR.

I think I need to hire a garden help who's a Capricorn. They're good at detail. Or another Cancerian... even better... the plants are their children.

Anyway, we have successfully completed one cycle. Hopefully it will be the first (and worst) of many. I am kind of annoyed (in a bizarre gardner way) that I am going away because the next three weeks present the cleaning up and readying for winter tasks that I like the best in the garden (it's cool, there aren't many bugs, you can't really mess it up). Hopefully we'll have a really mild November and I can get some work done when I get back.

When to do it though...

... why do they put the clocks back anyway? I hate gardening in the dark. I hate walking the dog in the dark. I hate cooking supper and not being able to watch the sun set. I hate wanting to go to bed at 8.30pm because it's been dark for so long.

GRRR.

Lucky I have a fortnight to prepare myself for what's coming.

Last Days of Summer on the Eastern Shore

Tonight is the last night of summer here in Nova Scotia. It has been a beautiful seven weeks or so (July was a wet, foggy write-off) and today was no exception, 22 degrees in the afternoon and yet another beautiful starry, windless, still night tonight.

There are only two downsides to a windless night here on the Eastern Shore. You can't hear the surf roaring against the beach. Which is why we live out here.

And the mosquitoes have free rein.

Yes we still have mossies. On 21st September. I think I will enter ours in the mossie equivalent of the round the world race, they are that hardcore. They have to leave soon, btw, I hope they realise this.

Last weekend was the Eastern Shore yard sale extravanganza. It didn't stretch up the shore as far as I thought it would; when we hit Musquodoboit Harbour there were no sales, but the road from Gaetz Brook to Lawrencetown was pretty good.

We spent sixty dollars. We got:

- a pair of barely used Rossignol cross country skis and poles for me
- a brown leather handbag for me
- a hand-tooled leather tool belt for Himself
- Bill Clinton's My Life
- Dog training for Dummies (which include sad people who own huskies that are totally spoilt and think they are the alpha of the pack)
- an enormous box of camping equipment including a stylish kettle, numerous plates, cups, bowls, one of those plastic egg holding devices, an egg poacher, two saucepans, etc etc
- and a framing nailer (which is well hardcore I am told)

Not a bad little haul.

Last yard sale of the year...

Then we went home and painted the deck and the steps to the deck, and the other steps, and the steps up to the front door, and I hid the disaster of a side garden that I started deconstructing and got bored with, and cut down rag weed and trimmed bushes and we ignored the flower garden which needs to be sorted out (the Queen Mother has tonight stepped up to the plate on this one)

And hung the new curtains and the framed pictures we had sitting in the spare room for seven months.

And started cleaning the house.

So busy, you say....

We are getting married in the house soon.

Thanksgiving weekend to be exact.

So it has to be clean.

The house, I mean.

Normally it is tidy. Tidy is not clean, but it is enough for me as I am immune to my germs, Himself's germs and now Shannon's germs. But there will be foreigners and children and older people at this event, so clean is necessary.

That's a lot of cleaning, though.... And as I talked with the Queen Mother on the phone this evening, while watching the beautiful glow of the sunset light on the 'beginning to turn' trees and while realising I live in a wonderful house and how lucky I am (yet again), I also noticed that the dog has licked all the windows in a not even pattern, up to a height of about two feet so they will have to be cleaned too.

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No I am not stressed. I did the stress and told everyone but nobody felt it was special, so I gave it up because it was giving me indigestion with no positive outcomes! Also I decided against a hen party, which relieved me of all my stress immediately.

Really, I am not stressed. I am very happy and excited and looking forward to our beautiful day and if we have invited too many people and they all turn up and it rains and there is no room in the house, well then we will all just have to pile into the basement to party, and hey, it won't matter if anyone drops their plate of roasted pork down there.

We are having a pig roast.

Our friend Dukie is organizing it.

And Elizabeth is marrying us. And there will be music on the iPod. And maybe a few carved pumpkins.

And then we will be married.

How about that!!

And then it will be back to routine, which now includes puppy school.

I already hate puppy school.

I have been to one class.

But that's a whole other post.

Which may come tomorrow, as I had quite the chunk of the top of my big toe (left) cut off today as I cut it in a bizarre argument with a door frame, then didn't look after it, then went camping in the woods with it, then yadda yadda, so it was 'gone septic' and needed to be removed. So what with the antibiotics and the anaesthetic and the glass of wine to give them a little edge, and the pain and the blood that won't stop and the need for copious amounts of epsom salts and polysporin and clean gauze, I may have to keep my toe home tomorrow for a little rest.

I would prefer not to have to wear flip flops to my autumn country wedding. It would remind me too much of the fact that I was supposed to wear flip flops to my Carribbean beach wedding.

Maybe I'll just wear my comfy slippers.

Much love to all the sick puppies/ kittens/ cats in Laytown and other places!!

Critter attack at 1am

In true Canadian fashion, at 1am this morning I was standing in my peejays throwing garden furniture at a raccoon on my deck that wanted to get in the crate to eat my puppy, or at least give her rabies.

The raccoon ignored the garden furniture so eventually I had to sidle up to it and beat it off the deck with a broom. Which took a while. Then I took a completely frazzled dog out of the crate and had to let her pee all over the deck to reassert her dominance. Which also took a while.

And then I had to clean all the critter waste off the deck.

Did I mention that it was 1am while I was doing this?

Goddamn critters.

The summer is not living up to my expectations

I am getting the teensiest bit annoyed with my summer so far. We've had the occasional spell of good weather, but mostly it's been rain on the weekend, followed by cloud, then glorious sun just at the point of the week where I am stuck into a piece of work and can't take a lunch break, followed by a glorious Friday evening drive home to the barbeque, whereupon the clouds descend for another two days of rain.

Which is making our mosquitoes legion. And legendary in size.

And of course no camping. Because if I wanted to go camping in the rain, I would have stayed in Ireland and bought a tent there.

Although all our vegetables are growing away like there's no problem with the clouds, my carefully planted humming-bird attracting flowers are mouldering away in pots on the deck.

No humming birds this year I guess.

My photography sessions have been non-existent this year so far, as I cannot be assed taking more pictures of the fog around the lake.

And now my laptop is starting to die.

My laptop is well over five years old of course, and in computer years that's about 120, so it is entitled to be a little cranky and slow.

But I don't want to spend money on a new laptop right now.

Because I am Fear of deh Credit Card Bill Girl.

Dear weather gods, make something nice and bright and extended happen soon, please.

JD the squirrel finds a new world order

The feud between Himself and the squirrel living in his building ramped up a notch last weekend.

For those of you not in the know, the nature of the feud is based in the concept of 'his'.

Which one of them is the 'his' that the building belongs to.

The squirrel, having spent the previous Fall and winter living rent-free in the building, thinks it's his building.

Himself, having paid for the building, is pretty sure that it is in fact his building.

The noisy chatter that he gets from the squirrel every time he walks into the building to pick up a tool (in order to do some work) PISSES HIM OFF.

What does that goddamn squirrel do but eat corn all day?

But my man is nothing if not slow to anger.

A veritable leviathan progressing through the Bay of Fundy when it comes to rage.

But even the calmest leviathan will swallow a Jonah, if he won't shut the hell up!!

That is why last weekend, despite my best efforts at averting revolution by cleaning up evidence of grand theft corn, Himself went into the shed to do something and realised that the squirrel had gotten back into the carefully wrapped-up sack of cracked corn (which I had carefully placed in the thick plastic bin) and there was cracked corn all over the building.

ALL OVER THE GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MY GODDAMN BUILDIN'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The squirrel had managed to eat through the plastic this time. As well as the sack.

GODDAMN SQUIRREL, BATHIN' IN CRACKED CORN HE IS!!!!!!!! LYIN' BACK JUSTA SWIMMIN' AROUND IN IT!!! THINKS IT'S HIS EFFIN' CORN!!!!!!!!!!

I could hear the roaring from the house.

I'LL SHOW HIM!!!

Retribution was swift and brutal.

Every kernel of cracked corn (and when it was all found, it was a substantial amount of corn) got swept out of every crevice in the building, and the whole lot was put out in the yard in a big pile.

NOW!!

HE'LL HAVE TO SHARE!!

SERVE HIM RIGHT FOR BEING GREEDY.

Suddenly the rabbits, crows, wood pigeon, robins, jays, chickadees and other critters who had spent months getting by on just a tincture of cracked corn, provided to help them stay above the critter poverty line (with not even an increase to help with recent rampant corn inflation) .... they are all in carbohydrate heaven right now.

PARTYTIME!!!!

All the daily foraging routines have been disrupted in order to partake of the sudden corn largesse.

I have no doubt that this summer will see abnormally big baby critters emerging from dens all over the yard.

The babies will no doubt turn into a me-me-me Critter Generation Y and will break our door down in January demanding carb-rich three course meals, $120,000 jobs, and/or better EI (I mean corn) payments if this largesse doesn't continue.

Last night according to Himself, we even had Bob Rae the big old silver raccoon who pretends he's not living in our yard, come along last night for a bit of chow.

Seeing as it was goin' a beggin'.

If I was the squirrel, I would take my beating and my sudden eviction from the squirrel Versailles that is our buildin' like a man squirrel, and go find a new place to live.

Because the squeaking of tumbrils is quietly, but definitely discernible above the rhythm of the waves that is the soundtrack to our yard.

If I were JD the Little Red Squirrel, I would seclude myself, reflect on my loss and return in a few years... when the corn is gone... refreshed, with a new, superficially sustainable way of keeping everyone fed.

But no. He hasn't the wit to do it.

He is camped out on the pile of cracked corn, fighting everyone off.

As if he can.

He has been there all day according to Himself, who is home with a chest infection.

Instinct has kicked in and he's an aggressive little bastard.

JD the Little Red Squirrel ... not Himself.

Why wouldn't he be?

He's used to having most of the corn to himself.

He's used to being the only critter who knew where the corn was kept.

He's used to having unlimited access to the corn, to people turning a blind eye to grand theft cracked corn, to squirreling away some extra corn for the winter.

He's fighting for his political life as they say.

All the fat he's put on over the last couple of weeks is worn off him.

Our crows - we have three of them who are inseparable and who have that brilliant dark sense of humour that crows sometimes have - our crows have him driven demented.

It's so simple it's beautiful.

Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre take turns to run at him, wings spread, until he panics and runs away under the building.

While he's cowering under the building, they pick slowly and desultorily at the corn, with their backs to him of course.

After a while he can't help himself and he chatters at them like an Albanian matriarch with four fields to plough and every son in a tower.

That's when they leave the pile to have a big lawerly convocation on top of the old pine tree, or to stare intently at something moving over by the lake. (Probably the mo-fo eagle nesting on the island).

Ahaa.... JD thinks!! The Fools!!!

Back he goes for a moment, and every time a swarm of starlings swoop down from absolutely nowhere, kick his skinny red ass again and grab their piece of the action while the crows stare into the middle distance and nod knowingly at each other.

JD has to retire defeated from the bombardment that is those locusts of the birdworld.

JD the Little Red Squirrel has learned two simple, irrefutable facts.

The buildin' does in fact belong to whomever pays for it.

And Himself, who paid for it, is a force to be reckoned with when his ire is raised ....

....

... We had an election in Nova Scotia this week.

It was quite the game-changer.

The forthcoming redistribution of the provincial corn will no doubt be just as entertaining to watch as the antics on Eagle.

Me... I'm rooting for the crows.

And scanning the horizon for starlings.

Bunny's back

Queenie and Himself don't have any pets. Mostly out of pure laziness, dressed up as concern about their care. We don't have a dog because we're gone for almost ten hours every day... too long for a dog to be left alone. No point in thinking through a solution to the issue.

We don't have a cat because... well because that would involve finding a cat and getting all the cat accoutrements and looking after the cat.

Etc.

Pure laziness.

Happily, here in chez Eagle, we have lots of critters, who are now our pets. Who are great pets because they feed, house, exercise and clean themselves and all we have to do is admire their cute antics.

Himself has a special pet.. a rabbit that appears a few times a day to eat our lawn. Himself loves bunny because he's very tame (he obviously hasn't heard of Himself's previous life as a bunny shooter and boiler). In fact, he's so tame, he pops out of the undergrowth every evening to say hi when Himself pulls up in Albert the Station Wagon.

Not me. He never pops out to see me.

Just Himself.

Except that for the last few days he has been missing.

Coyotes gottim, Himself decided.

I was thinking maybe she's a lady bunny and she's been off having babies.

We were a little sad.

Then this morning I opened the back door to check the rain and there Bunny was. Chomping away like there's no tomorrow.

Bunny's back.

Thank goodness for that.

Taking the yard back in piles

Those of you who know me know that Queenie likes nothing better than to potter about in a garden/ yard/ farm/ pumpkin field/balcony pots/ terrace/ whatever.

So long as she has to scrub her fingernails afterwards, despite wearing a pair of gloves, she's happy.

As you can imagine, with a whole acre to play with, I am now in Queenie Heaven.

Every evening, I get home from work, I change into my yard clothes, I water my seedlings (my watermelon seeds started to sprout today) and I tackle something.

Someone in work asked me about my yard today (note - a yard in Canada is a garden, not a yard).

I said it was an okay yard, but it wasn't my yard, so it would probably take me about three years to get it right.

Probably 4 - 5 then, he said. Totally serious.

Probably he's right, he seems like a guy who knows what he's talking about.

So, five years....

I knew this year would be the back-breaking, re-organizing year, but all we seem to be doing is creating piles.

Piles and piles of stuff the previous people left behind.

There's the pile of paving stones.

They're everywhere.

Not just the piles.... the stones.

Coming from the Paddy Egan 'put the tools away' School of Gardening, I'm pretty anal about a place for everything and everything in its place, so when I find a paving brick, I have to put it on the pile.

Pretty soon, we had gotten down past the grass and they were everywhere, and that involved so much walking I was getting nothing done so I have created several piles.

I don't even like them.

The bricks.

Not that I like the piles either.

They're the red brick pavers... you know the ones.

There are three types: the octogon on top of a rectangle one that looks like a grandfather clock, the one that looks like a grandfather clock cut in half, and the rectangular one.

I have found over two hundred already... lying just about everywhere in our yard.

And I am such a weakling I can only put twelve in a wheelbarrow and carry them to the main pile, so it's taking a while.

There's something a little depressing about spending a whole day hauling someone else's boring red brick paving stones around the yard.

But HEY!!! When I get bored, there's the pile of building supplies.

It's bi-located - one pile under the blue tarp to be taken away, the other in the building for re-use.

There is building deitrus everywhere.

Wooden steps. Balustrade spindles. Large round balls for the tops of the spindles. Roofing felt. Wood. More wood. Gyprock. Rotting gyprock (the worst task so far). Different kind of more wood. Aluminium piping. Bathroom tiles. Copper piping. Lead piping. Paint cans. Tools.

Parts of cars.

ugggggghhhh.....

Then, you lift something up and you find a little pile of fiddlerheads.

Or tulips.

It's kinda fun in a back-breaking way.

We are trying to reuse as much as we can, but while we think what to do with the stuff, it's in a pile.

We found three huge tarpaulins.

I'm talking really expensive well-made stuff here.

Someone obviously had a boat at some point.

Then, I started to get mad...

One day, after about an hour, I finally dug up a really nice canvas tarp for a speed boat. Left out in the yard until it sank under the grass and rotted.

GODDAMN. IF YOU'RE GONNA LEAVE IT FOR ME PUT IT IN THE GODDAMN BUILDING SO I CAN USE IT.

Our building (which in Canada is the shed, not the main building) is a sturdy old New England type three room affair with a woodcote on top. I love it. We are going to put a wood stove in it so we can be outside in the winter. Sort of.

On Sunday, I realised it has a beautiful attic. With throw open windows at both ends and a warm, sweet-smelling spruce floor. it's going to make the most wonderful summer sleeping room for kids who are staying, or adventurous adults. All we have to do is build a sleeping platform and redo the mosquito nets... simple.

It took me a while to realise the potential. We're all a little more fire alert now, seeing as we're only two weeks into fire season and we've already had one major conflagration.

Sunday, I remembered seeing a lot of paper rubbish in the attic. I hauled myself up the ladder.

Five enormous garbage bags full of squirrel-chewed styrofoam later, I found the floor.

Forty five moving boxes (to add to our collection) later, I realised there was a second window. Four chest-height boxes full of random pieces of paper later, I just started throwing stuff out the windows.

Himself got a barrel and started burning the crap because we have enough piles.

But now, see photo above...I have a whole new pile.

Six in fact.

(I would just like to point out that I hauled all that shit out of the ground BY MYSELF).

There's one pathway into our little wood and with a little work it can be brought back to its original bucolic bliss - someone who used to live here worked really hard on it and planted all kinds of forest floor stuff, including fiddler heads and primroses and lupins and other flowers. But I haven't been able to find the end of the path - where it leads to.

I figure it must be near the building, but there's an enormous pile of brush left over from a tree fall lying there.

At least that's what I thought it was.

This evening, I waded into it and started lifting some of the brush.

And I found a cord of wood underneath.

A friggin' cord of wood.

Note: In Canada you buy wood in cords. A cord of wood is worth about $150 - $200 depending on the wood.

About four cords will get you through a winter.

So, wood is useful. It is currency. People need to buy it.

This wood was rotting.

The top layer was fine.
The second layer was softish, but it'll dry out.
The third layer was an interesting example of how wood fibre breaks down.
The fourth layer is what we call mulch nowadays.
The fifth layer was peat.

So now I have six more fucking piles.

In my driveway.

Brush.
Good wood.
Wet wood.
Useless wood
Mulch.
Peat.

Soon, I will be able to get a grant to open a garden centre.

I should be happy I suppose, I could spend years trying to get this level of decomposition going.

But the thing is, I live on the Eastern Shore, where there's lots of wood, and lots of wood stoves and lots of houses that would embarrass you with the beauty of their enormous wood pile. But I drive past houses every day that have a wood stove chimney and no wood outside and I always wonder.. is it some old couple that can't get any wood, or can't afford to buy wood or just need wood for some reason or another.

But there's always a truck in the yard, so the people in the house could come get some free wood if it were available. And they knew about it.

Himself drove in as I was working myself up into a tantrum about the needless death of the trees, and the waste of biofuel, and the lack of community spirit, yadda yadda... plus I was after pulling the leg attached to my recently Yoga/Pilates obsession with The Plank-destroyed right knee out of a particularly deep and dangerous mulch hole.

Maybe they were trying to fill in this space so it wouldn't get washed out....

WITH A CORD OF FRIGGIN' WOOD?

Maybe not...

Or maybe they just didn't like dirty fingernails too much.

They liked ball games. I have found - two soccer balls, a rugby ball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a space hopper, and a basketball so far....

I've been trying to think what kind of little community festival I could have here now that I have more space than I can possibly think to do with.

Maybe we're heading inexorably towards the little festival of piles....

In the spirit of Paddy Kavanagh, we could stand on the steaming dungheaps of my piles and recite potery...

Like Paddy.. I'll have to find ways to avoid the haulin' and draggin' that goes on in the stony grey soil of the Eastern Shore so I can write potery.

Or maybe my piles are a little Song of Myself for the New World...

Addendum:

I just mentioned my piles post to Himself and he was horrified that I had forgotten our gravel pile. A previous owner had a child who had cancer, who had a playground built for them by the Make a Wish foundation. The toys are all gone, but there's sixty cubic feet of gravel left. Right where the vegetable garden will go.

You don't know despair until you have tried to shovel sixty cubic feet of gravel into a pile.

I hate to work on it, because every time I do I wonder what happened to that child...

We are leaving one corner... for our fire pit.

Also, Himself wants to make it clear that we did not burn the styrofoam, we left it out for the recycling truck.

I had to rescue the neighbour's cat from one of the bags this morning, such was the excruciating smell of squirrel emanating from the bag...

Oh stoney grey gravel of Lawrencetown

The laugh from my love you took

etc etc

The positive Greenhouse Effect

I was texting my sister Gypsy the other day and mentioned that we were building a greenhouse.

For Himself's cherry tomatoes no doubt!! ;-) she texted back.

Laugh!!!!

I nearly fell off the bus seat.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that last year, Queenie figured out the Canadian growing season after a couple of half-assed attempts. And managed to get a full crop of vegetables to harvest.

Of which achievement she was mightily proud.

But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in that harvest (not even the potatoes) came close to achieving the greatness of Himself's cherry tomatoes.

After I annoyed him by insisting on growing boring old heirlooms, one afternoon he took a hammer out and gunthered a lopsided, triangular 'greenhouse' out of some plastic sheeting he'd appropriated somewhere, and a few 2 x 4s he'd appropriated from somewhere else.

And nailed it to the neighbour's fence.

Hot, sleepy afternoons in our shared back yard were spent admiring the cherry tomatoes growing like crazy behind the plastic.

As well as having to do most of the admiring, Queenie had to do all the harvesting of course.

Anyways, this year we have our own garden and lots of space so as a reward for being the Cherry Tomato Cheerleader-in-Chief last summer, Himself promised me that my heart's desire - my very own proper greenhouse - would be the very first project this year.

We spent the last two weekends working on it, with the help of Little 'Un last week (who insisted on digging for treasure while not hammering, and found a fresh spring right beside said greenhouse which will help with our irrigation system. Go the boy.).

This year, we're using greenhouse plastic, as opposed to glass. To make sure it all works well. If it does, hopefully we'll replace the plastic next spring.

I love my new greenhouse.

For a start, it has the same dimensions as the living room in my Dublin apartment.

Yes, you read that right.

Build 'em on the fly 'n' stack 'em high, as they used to say in Irish property developer circles.... ah well, at least now they're saying ... get me that list of hot countries with democratic governments and no extradition, we're headin' out boys!!

17' x 9', if you're that interested.

The apartment was 436 square feet in total.

And people wonder why I put up with Canadian winters!!

Anyways... back to the tomatoes.

I have a four foot bed running the length of the greenhouse, and a big worktable for seeding and potting.

I even have a rack for my tools.

We are hooking up water barrels with a pump so we have running water, and Himself spent a couple of hours last night installing a drainage pipe around the base of the greenhouse to draw excess water away from the soil. Which will also make it more difficult for our yard rabbit to dig into the building.

All in all, it's very professional looking. And as it's round the back of our garage/ shed well hidden from public view, I have no doubt the Mounties will be round to search it come the first fly-over of the summer.

Well they won't find any of that muck!!!

Just peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, chives, herbs, sweet corn, peas, beets, and hopefully, water melons!

I popped into the greenhouse this morning to see how things were doing on the seedling front and the warm, cloying smell of compost and condensation hit me and reminded me, as all my gardening efforts do, of an afternoon spent at home with Paddy in the greenhouse (which was also the boiler house) thirty five years ago.

I think maybe I shall get an old wood stump or two from our little copse, and place them in my own greenhouse, so I can sit there during a rain storm and listen to the shore and the birds...

Peep peep

The peeper frogs are here.

Which means Spring has officially Sprung.

Hooray!!

Here's the gen. on the little bundles of joy, from the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History website.


Who can ignore a deafening chorus of Spring Peepers on a warm spring night? These thumbnail-sized tree frogs leave their woodland hibernation sites as early as March in southwestern Nova Scotia. Perched on grasses and sedges at the edge of ponds or roadside ditches, the males call mates with a shrill "peep peep peep". Their brown or gray colour, always with a dark stripe on the sides of the head and dark markings on the back provide excellent camouflage against the dead spring grasses. If the night is cold, Peepers retreat under leaves and stems. You'll likely hear hundreds before you ever see one.

About 1,000 eggs are laid singly on twigs and leaf litter at the pond bottom. Then adults head back to the woods for the summer, fall and winter. The males may continue to call from trees, clinging a metre or more off the ground with adhesive toe pads. Some call occasionally during the day throughout the summer and fall. The tadpoles develop rapidly and transform from July through September.

This treefrog eats mostly soft-bodied invertebrates. Small spiders, moth larvae and water midges are a common food items.

Makes me sick ... see how far we done fell

This blog is about seeing the beauty in small things.

Like this afternoon.

I was home sick. It was snowing. I was trying to read an article on rural broadband and figure out what to do next. I had the tv on in the background. People were banging on about trillions of dollars and toxic debts and the death of Jade Goody. Then the door opened and it was Himself home for a nap until he had to go out and plough snow all night.

We sat on the couch for a while. Then I looked up and out the window and saw a deer's ass in the corner of the yard. We got up to investigate.

A young doe had her head all screwed up and her tongue in the slit at the bottom of the bird feeder and she was just a hoovering out the seed. I tapped on the window. She looked at me and tensed just a little.

Then I swear she gave a little shrug before she recommenced her hoovering.

Sometimes it's difficult to see the beauty in small things when the world is shouting at you about the big things.

And you can't see the point in fucking people, as Mrs. Monkey would say.

And it won't stop snowing.

There's nothing like an animal to make you see the pointlessness of the human race.

I should get a dog.

To remind me of my place in the world.

I'm going to call him Bunk when I get him.

This is for Mrs. Monkey....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA

Chow time on Eagle

When we moved to this house, we were very excited at the thought of lots of new critters to bond with and observe and work around, so much so that Himself went out straight away and got a big bag of cracked corn and another big bag of mixed bird seed.

So, the bird seed goes in the bird feeder at the back of the house, and the cracked corn gets spread out on the ground near the garage (or as we call it here, the building), so that it is far enough away from the house (which is also a building of course but not called a building). This allows the shyer critters to eat without disturbance.

The spare seed and corn are stored in the building.

Me, with all this largesse being spread around the property, I'm already worrying about my vegetable gardening prospects in a yard where the critters are used to being fed.

Apparently that's not going to be a problem.

Hmmmm.

It's my humble experience that if there's food, and there's critters, and there's humans, then critters beat humans to the food supply every time.

And so it goes on Eagle.

The bird feeder is not too bad. We have a large and varied clientele who seem to have organized themselves into an all day rota that involves tits and chickadees first, then jays, then other birds.

Repeat cycle.

The birds spill seed onto the frozen ground while getting it out of the feeder of course, and lately we've been seeing a northern short-tailed shrew (as in the picture) burrowing around under the snow to get at the seeds.

I'm so tempted to trap him just to pet him: his coat is the shiniest, furriest, most beautiful I've seen on a critter yet.

What a sable must look like against the snow???

I am very excited that he is living in our yard because Northern short-tailed shrews neuro-toxinate and kill snakes, which is a good thing as snakes are to Himself as bears are to Queenie.

And as we have a pond, that means we have frogs, which means we probably have some snakes around somewhere.

Further over near the building, we were absolutely thrilled to coast down the driveway one evening and catch a very big deer having himself a snack of cracked corn.

Himself in particular was beside himself with pleasure... none of this short-tailed shrew bullshit.... a critter isn't a REAL critter unless you can track it, shoot it, skin it, stick its head on your living room wall and eat what's left of it.

That evening, the deer watched us for a while, then ambled into the woods behind the house. Then, after a while, he ambled back into the yard and walked around. Chowed down a bit more, and then left.

Since then, he and his friends have been by quite a few times for an amble and a snack, but we've not had the pleasure of being here to watch them. We just find deer tracks all over the yard when we get home.

In addition, Himself has been finding pheasant tracks leading to and from the chow.

Yum yum, I keep thinking to myself.... corn-fed pheasant....

We rarely see the pheasants either though.

Himself is getting annoyed - he has a vague, irritating feeling that there's a whole pile of critters laughing at him behind his back.

He's probably right. Just after he leaves every morning, the pheasants start calling to each other. Ten minutes after I leave, I imagine they're knee deep in breakfast goodness.

This morning, I'm home waiting on the cable guy and sure enough, twenty minutes after Himself drove off, there were two pheasant, a partridge and a mess of crows standing around the cracked corn pile eating like there's no tomorrow!!

No doubt Mr. Bambi will be along later.

And the squirrel of course.

Our squirrel is one cheeky little bastard, as only a squirrel can be.

He infuriates Himself, who didn't spend a pile of money on nice cracked corn just so some rat with a furry tail could eat it all!

He's out there right now, engaging in a kind of hoover-sweeper movement across the cracked corn...

He spends a good part of every day scurrying around just to annoy Himself, with his cheeks full of corn and he has the temerity to sit on his favourite tree stump basking in the winter sunshine while chewing, right in front of Himself.

Then he got into the building, well, I think he lives there.... anyways, he managed to open the bag of bird seed, separate out every sunflower seed and eat them all.

Himself nearly had a fit when that happened, as Mr Squirrel dropped all the other seeds on the floor while sorting through them.

I sense many spats between those two occuring over the next few months. Himself might think it's his building.... but we all know who can more easily climb up on the rafters to shit on whose head.

Right now, the cable guy is here reorganizing our tv package - we're going digital in a last ditch attempt to find something to watch - and he nearly fell off the pole in excitement as a beautiful cock pheasant strolled across the lawn in front of him.

Yeah.. he's coming over for his breakfast I expect, I said.

Time for me to go to work... let the chow times begin in earnest.

New France is for sale!!

JD Irving, the clear-cutting lumber giant of the Maritimes, or the 'tree-growing people' as they like to call themselves, has arranged for an American real estate broker, LandVest of Portland, Maine, http://www.landvest.com/, to sell approximately 170,000 acres (70,000 hectares) of South West Nova Scotia to the highest bidder.

The acreage is listed in three blocks, and you can see some photos of these beautiful lands on Landvest's website here

http://www.landvest.com/property/NS0101/1/ .



The sale is a sealed bid auction due to close on April 9th.

The first block is Weymouth Timberlands in Digby Co. (128,000 acres) including most of the Sissiboo River drainage area, Long Tusket Lake, Silver River, and historic New France.

Anyone who knows me knows this is a very special place for me and Himself, and for all our friends in Digby County.

This historic area was settled by a French family who built a village in the woods - the first electrified town in Nova Scotia, with a railway to Weymouth, and a hydro-power plant, a pub, and every amenity you can imagine.

The village is in ruins now, but you can still walk around New France, camp nearby near one of the lakes, canoe down the old Mi'k Maq paddling routes, used for thousands of years to enable the original settlers of this place to travel easily through the region.

This river and lake system, and the forests that surround them is one of the few places left in South Western Nova Scotia where you can completely get away from it all. Acid rain has already wreaked havoc on it, but it is slowly starting to recover from that.

Let's not lose it to someone who doesn't care about it like we do.

I don't know the other two blocks as well, but I can imagine they are beautiful too, judging from the photos. They include:

Tusket River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (28,000 acres) including Barrio Lake, Barrio Falls and the east bank of the Tusket to North Kempt; and Carleton River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (17,000 acres) including the east and south sides of Ogden Lake and the east bank of the Carleton River to Lake Fanning.

A group called Buy Back Nova Scotia has started a coalition of diverse individuals and groups to urge the government of Nova Scotia to purchase these Irving lands and thereby halt the further sale of provincial beauty spots to those who might restrict access to the lands, rivers and streams, lakes and wetlands. Maintaining public access to lands and waters for recreation is critical and will become more so in the future.

The people involved are conservationists and ATVers, foresters, fishermen, hunters and hikers, bicyclists and birders, canoeists, campers and cross country skiers, photographers and writers.

Despite their differences about how to spend time in the wilderness, they are working together on this issue, to urge municipal and provincial politicians to purchase the JD Irving lands before more of the province disappears behind “No Trespassing’ signs and locked gates.

A public meeting to rally tri-county support for BUY BACK NOVA SCOTIA has been organized for Sunday, March 8, at 2 p.m., in the gym at the Yarmouth campus, NSCC.

A letter-writing campaign has begun too.

Please help with this. Details of who to write to on http://www.buybacknovascotia.com/

Book Reviews 2008, part 2: Non-fiction titles

The second round of book reviews is another short category – non-fiction. However, compared to previous years, this category is storming ahead in the lifetime stakes with a total of six entries.

It’s not often that Queenie reads six books that aren’t story books.

These were all second hand items I picked up in desperation, when I didn’t have the price of a novel, or even a CanLit novel (they being cheaper than non CanLit here in Canada) on me, but still needed something to read.

They were all pretty good despite their bought for the sake of buying a book rather than for the sake of owning them status. And there are one or two gems in here.

The Little Immigrants, the Orphans who came to Canada by Kenneth Bagnell, published in 1980, was a book I picked up in a store called ‘So many books, So little time, which we happened upon during our road trip to Algonquin last October. It’s a little shack down a side street in Huntsville, but when you enter the shack, it turns out to be quite the store. Second hand books line shelves that surround the real purpose of the store – tchotchkas and dried flowers. Plus the owner had two of the nicest dogs I have ever seen lounging around a second hand bookstore.

The book is described on the cover as ‘one of the finest pieces of Canadian social history to be written’ and the author was a respected Globe and Mail and Star newspapers, which of course are THE newspapers in Canada. It apparently spent one year on the bestsellers list when it came out.

As befits a book about the littlest immigrants, it is a little book. It really should have been called ‘the littlest hobos’ but I guess that title was taken.

The book traces the fate of over 80,000 orphans or indigent children who were shipped from England (primarily from East End London) to Canada between the 1860s and the 1930s. When they got to Canada, they were dispersed across this vast country to work as farm labourers. A number of organizations were involved in ‘saving’ the street arabs, as they were then known.

The collection, transportation and dispersal of these children was organized mostly by evangelical Christian organizations at first. A number of redoubtable Christian women were involved; women who steam-rolled over the concerns of the Canadian and English authorities.

Despite a serious enquiry that uncovered wholesale abuse and defrauding of these children (they were supposed to be fed, clothed, educated and paid, and a lot of the time, not much of any of these things happened), Canada’s need for cheap agricultural labour and England’s need to rid itself of street children overcame the Dickensian concerns of the media and the child advocates.

The collection and transportation was a bit hit and miss for a number of years. Then a young man named Dr. Barnado got involved and the process hit its stride. Thomas Barnado, born and educated in Dublin of course, sent 30,000 children to Canada. The book spends quite a bit of time on Barnado, his life and works, and the obstacles he overcame with his unwavering zeal that his choice for these children was the right one.

He sounds like a terrible person… one of those individuals so consumed with his calling his actions towards friends and family are monstrous. This monstrosity almost becomes his downfall, as a falling out with a friend results in a plot against him by a number of other evangelists.

It seems Barnado is yet another mixed blessing imposed by the Irish on the British. Having said that, his legacy organization is still fairly highly regarded in some places. But the book cleared up the rationale for a lot of moral standpoints I found strange about the old Barnardos.

The book is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, it documents the terrible treatment that a lot of these children received on isolated and primitive farms located deep in provincial Canada (all in the name of Jesus of course), and reiterates the fact that in Victorian England and Canada, children were not children as we now know them to be.

Secondly, the book describes very well the result of concerns finally getting a media airing when various well got individuals questioned the value (to the children) of ‘the importation of waifs’. The immediate reaction by God-fearing Canadians was to condemn the practice outright, because Canada should not have to house the scum and wastrels of England.

Nice kick to moral touch there, Upper Canada.

Finally, the book has some local flavour as one of the homes where the children were housed before they were sent to their new masters was in Bedford, near Halifax.

I meant to go find the home last summer and forgot. I must do it this spring.

Many of the stories outlined in the book were from Nova Scotia too, and they don’t come out well from it.

Worth a read if you ever find it.

The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson, is quite simply the best biological book I have ever read. I followed it with The Lobster Chronicles, by Linda Greenlaw (who is the actual woman who is represented by an actress trying to talk the skipper played by George Clooney out of his fool’s errand in A Perfect Storm).

After she lost her friend in that storm, she gave up her career as a swordfish boat captain, and went home to a small island off Maine to fish for lobster. The book describes a season and its not very good. Although I get the sense she was very contrained by the fact that all her neighbours were a little tense about the writing of it.

She does get the whole ‘living on a small island, knowing everyone, knowing their faults and failings and adjusting to them so nobody will kill each other’ thing very well. I’m just not sure it’s as riveting a read as she thought it would be.

Salutary…

As for the fact that I spent quite a lot of my reading time last year reading up on lobsters… it’s all about the fishery, doncha know… you gotta get with the game when you’re in Nova Scotia.

It was funny… when I finished reading The Secret Life of Lobsters, Himself and I were down visiting his folks on Long Island for the weekend. I was so impressed by the book I couldn’t stop talking about it or lobsters, much to everyone’s amusement because usually I pay no heed to the talk of fish. Eventually I had to haul it out of my bag to show them what was pushing my buttons.

Turned out every guy in the room had read the book when it came out first.

It is a great book. Even if you have no interest in lobsters, fishermen, the sea, crustaceans, ocean currents, the Atlantic, North Eastern USA/ Canada, or whatever, you will still love this book.

It is such a labour of love. It is beautifully written. It is painstakingly researched. It understands that a lobster is just one example of the beauty, uniqueness, humour and genius of evolution. In fact, in the dying days of the Empire of Creationism (which is when I read it), it really was a refreshing reminder that the USA can do so much better than Bush and his cronies.

Did you know that lobsters urinate on each others heads when they’re horny? Lobster sex is the most interesting animal sex I have ever read about.

But even more interesting than the description of lobster sex is the description of how US scientists figured out every aspect of lobster sex.

And that’s what I love about this book; it’s celebration of enquiry.

I found Alexander the Great, Journey to the end of the Earth, by Norman F Cantor in the bargain bin at Chapters for $2. As Kitty was doing Classical History I bought it for her, but it ended up being read by me as I had suspected.

It was okay… the maps weren’t great and I would have preferred more what and less why, as we don’t know why.

Late in the year, I found a new second hand bookstore, DustJackets, in the bowels of the Aliant building on Barrington St. and celebrated by buying a copy of A Brief History of The Celts, Peter Bereford Ellis’ recommended tome for beginners in the subject.

It’s a very good, concise overview of every aspect of Celtic society. He breaks it down into aspects of Celtic life – laws, women, religion, politics, architecture, art, money, trade, etc. He does a good job with shitty sources. That’s the problem with the Celts – it’s either some Roman making up stuff about how they’re all mental and they eat brains, or it’s some monk in a monastery in Ireland banging on about Lugh of the Long Hand and giants and such like.

Ellis’ book is famous for being a serious attempt to make sense of it all and I must say I got a lot out of it.

Plus, I found out that my maternal surname is over 3,000 years old and is one of the oldest surviving surnames in Europe.

So there.

Finally, I bought a copy of Getting Past No this year, because it was time I did. This is the sequel to Getting to Yes, the bestselling book on negotiation written by the guys who invented interest-based bargaining.

If you haven’t read GTY yet, then what are you doing reading this article. Go out and buy it. When you get it, I mean get it as in get it…. practice that for a while and then buy Getting Past No.

If you haven’t done any of that stuff yet, and you have children who are going to be older than five soon, then just go straight past GTY and buy Getting Past No.

It’s good for puppies too.

That’s it for the non-fiction.

Onto CanLit...

Mid-February mid-Atlantic weather advisory

Sometimes I love to post blog entries with titles that will mess up or just get in the way of serious Google searches undertaken by serious people looking for serious information.

And so with this one.

Please be advised this posting will mostly be about vitamins. Not maritime conditions.

So eventually the weather systems aligned. What I mean is, the weather systems that are pounding Atlantic Canada eased off slightly and the weather systems pounding Ireland and the UK ramped up slightly and so there was almost a condition alignment. It brought about some interesting consequences.

The Queen Parents started to get quite panicky about the idea of me driving to Cape Breton by myself, until I pointed out that the snow is scraped/ pushed/ ploughed off the roads here, so it is safer than at home.

Certain random people sent me emails that said 'yeah, okay I understand now'.

I got to see photos of people I know to be grown ups making snowmen when they should have been at work.

I would just like to point out that people don't make snowmen in Canada as a rule. They're too busy getting on with the day. Tobogganing now or skiing is considered acceptable snow fun.

In fact, there's such an absence of snowmen in politically correct Canada, I am beginning to think snowmen is one of those Enid Blyton things along with all those bad, unmentionable things she seems to have encouraged many generations, including mine, to do in her seemingly innocent children's writing.

Maybe we'll all wake up one morning sometime soon and realise that to build a snowman is a really bad thing.

Anyways, back to the weather.

Now that you have the same weather as us, here's some advice.

Take plenty of Vitamin D. At least 1,000mgs a day. This week in Canada, it was announced that they're pretty sure that there's a positive link between Vitamin D deficiency and multiple sclerosis. So take it for that reason too.

Go on. Vitamin D is really cheap. It's sunshine in a bottle.

If the wind is cutting your face, and you live near the sea where there's lots of salt, or near the airport, where there's lots of salt right now, you're going to have dry skin by the end of March. Then one day in April the sun will shine very brightly and you will look in a mirror and go 'ohmygod deh wrinkels!!'

Don't panic!!! Go get some Vitamin E capsules, and take them if you feel like it. But about once a week, cut a capsule open and gently pat the goo onto the skin around your eyes. Let it dry in. Don't do this unless you have an hour to spare to just sit around and do this, as the goo is very very sticky. Do not under any circumstances go for a walk on the beach.

INSTANT WRINKLE REMOVER, EH! EH! EH! FOR LIKE NO MONEY AT ALL!!

See, the Queenie knows how to look after you all.

Those tissues with the goo in them to make your nose feel nice when you have a cold are really great for getting snow/ salt/ sand/ all the winter crap off your shoes/ boots.

WEAR A HAT!!!!

Look after your hair.

It is very important to use the right shampoo and conditioner in the winter because the snow/ ice ruins your hair and the continuous hat wearing gives you a bad case of hat head.

I have tried them all. Organic, non-organic, every supermarket brand, every stylist brand, Aveda, all of them.

The absolute best shampoo - conditioner combo for the winter hair that comes with wind, rain and snow is Head and Shoulders shampoo followed by Pantene conditioner for coloured hair.

So there you go.

Just think... for you guys, this is an exciting period that will end soon with snowdrops and tulips and daffodils. For us, this is what it's going to be like until April.

April is when the snow melts into the rivers, the birds come back, the fishing season begins, the hardy among us get out the camping gear.

And the black fly wake up.

The Great Ontario Moosehunt

So Himself and I have traversed Atlantic Canada and Quebec and are now in Ontario.

We're only in the south-eastern part of Ontario, but I still feel like I'm a long way away from home.

#1. Canada is very big. Very very very big. Particularly if you come from a little island on the west coast of Europe.

#2. There are a lot of trees in Canada. And most of them are varying shades of gold, red and orange right now, which makes for a very pretty drive. New Brunswick is just a big Irving tree farm, with the occasional strip of farmland along the St. John river. Himself's ancestor, Daniel, was one of the Loyalist soldiers that helped settle Loyalist refugees along that river in the mid-seventeen hundreds, so we spent most of the hours driving through New Brunswick imagining what it must have been like to fetch up there with a few hand tools and some supplies for the winter.

Not good.

Personally, if I had to live in interior New Brunswick, I would not be a happy camper. The coastal areas are much more interesting.

Having said that, we are on our Great Ontario Moosehunt (I have never seen a moose) and we saw one in New Brunswick.

A lady moose.

But not up close.

#3. For a country with as many trees and swamps and Danger, Moose Ahead signs as I've seen in the last few months, there aren't the dozens of moose lining the roads to ram the Beast as I expected.

The Danger, Moose Ahead signs are particularly funny.

In New Brunswick, the moose on the signs are just standing there, looking at the oncoming cars (note these are yellow road signs with black outlines of moose).

In Quebec, the moose has charged a car side on and squashed the car. Which is unusual because moose generally just loom out of the darkness and stand there while you hit them with your car. (they then fall off their spindly legs and fall through your window). This is a very aggressive and angry moose - perhaps he has lost his cultural funding and is looking for the Tory tour bus to ram?

Speaking of elections, the Liberals have just accused Stephen Harper of copying his homework from John Howard. Highly amusing pre-election mud-slinging stuff. I pity both the poor Liberal staffer who obviously has no life, other than searching the Net for right wing idealogue fuckups, and who stumbled onto the 2003 plagiarism, and the poor Tory staffer who obviously has no job now, who actually lifted the speech and put it into Harper's set-piece on Iraq.

The Great Game continues in the hearts and minds of the Canadian people.

The Great Ontario Moosehunt continues, unabated, in Ontario.

We made it through Montreal and drove to Ottawa in about two hours through flat farmland. Not so many trees. Many many cows and lots of slurry spreaders. As we headed west on the 60, the land became a little more rocky and the trees reappeared.

# 4. The 60 is a very nice highway. I recommend it as a way through Ontario, if you have time to meander along it.

We fetched up in Arnprior, near Ottawa on Sunday night, as our former neighbours seem to have disappeared.

Generally, there's a lot of Jesus worshipping going on in this part of Ontario. I'm not sure if this is the part of Ontario that Alice Munro wrote about, I have a feeling I'm pretty close to it.

Arnprior boasted thirteen churches, one of which has a big lit up-at-night cross on a hill.

We stayed in the Comfort Inn, which was the only hotel, and ate in the Elgin Restaurant, which handily enough was in the hotel.

The special was ribs.

They were so big that we didn't speak for twenty minutes while we ate them.

(I swear I am getting more like a Canadian/ like my paternal relations in my growing inability to eat and talk at the same time. Talking only slows down the eating, doesn't it, and the enjoyment of the food).

Then we staggered back upstairs and lay on the bed which was really not big enough for two people who are used to a king-sized and not used to eating that many ribs in one go.

Then it was 7am and time to get on the road again.

Thankfully, Monday was only a four hour hop through the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Park to Huntsville where our hotel, sorry resort, is.

Algonquin Park is Canada's oldest provincial park and has been around for about 110 years. It was originally set aside so that logging barons such as JR Booth could log in peace without worrying about prospectors, settlers and the like either moving in, or just plain old setting fire to the trees they had bought at auction.

JR Booth, who was one of the richest men in North America at the time, owned the rights to most of the park. He built a railway through it which is totally overgrown now. In fact, we walked on a trail along the old railway and it was incomprehensible to us that it used to be a railway line.

Then we found an old sleeper under the moss.

Algonquin was lovely and the weather was great, so the railway track trail was a wonderful trek through maple stands and around lakes and more importantly hills (so the seniors couldn't get around it).

No, I'm not being ageist, it's just that having had to walk at funeral pace on a previous trek that promised black spruce bog and moose and gave us bog and moose tracks only, due to the plethora of seniors trundling along the track, we really needed to just stretch out leg muscles that had been in a car for four days.

However, in the Canadian version of the game Himself and I play when driving around Nova Scotia: Spot the Young Person, it would appear that NB, QUE and Ontario are as chock-a-block with seniors and as devoid of young people - apart from in crappy service jobs - as Nova Scotia seems to be.

Maybe rural depopulation is not a NS thing, maybe it's a Canada thing.

There are some lovely little towns in this part of Ontario though; it would be a real shame if they were to die off and people kept drifting towards the GTA.

Anyways, after about 10kms of walking, we still hadn't seen any moose or bear, so we headed back to the car and drove the rest of the way to Deerhurst Resort, near Huntsville.

Typical resort hotel. Overpriced, lots of airs and graces, vast quantities of add-on costs, and when you really get down to it, cheap towels.

I hate cheap towels.

Having said that, we have a lovely room overlooking the lake and the autumn colours are as vivid and bright as you can get here.

Today it has been raining, so we went into Huntsville for food and found the liquor store, which was much better than any Nova Scotia liquor store I have seen yet. It had a massive wine section, with rows of tetra pack wine (for camping) and a great South American section.

It also has a great International Bottled Beer selection - with beer from England, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Jamaica, US and many many other countries, some of which I've never seen before.

So we added to Himself's beer bottle collection.

I think it's stopped raining, so maybe we should drag ourselves back out to the car and head off on our moose hunt again this afternoon.

Of bread, beets, potatoes and other organic delights

We've hit a new plateau in the attempt to grow/ make/ control what we eat, so Himself and I are feeling a little smug right now.

Firstly, though, we had to get our basic tools organized. After weeks and months of searching, we managed to get a nearly new breadmaker and a nearly new fridge in the same week.

It never rains but it pours nearly new appliances.

The nearly new breadmaker came from Himself's boss, who had bought it for his wife for Christmas. So it was never used. Which is almost new. I arrived home from work one day and there it was on the dining room table, complete with recipe book.

The fridge came from a neighbour up the road and was a little trickier. We had to find a dolly, wheel it up the road, strap the enormous fridge to it, wheel it back down the road (which is being dug up by Dexter Construction right now) and then haul it up two flights of stairs to our apartment.

Gnugh....!

Suffice it to say Himself was on the heavy end and I was on the balance it so it won't fall on my head end.

Himself's arms are still sore from hauling a fridge up the stairs (almost) by himself.

But ah, bliss, lovely newish clean fridge.

Secondly, we started harvesting the garden.

This year is UN Year of the Potato. As an Irishwoman, potatoes are incredibly important to me. Potatoes are what you eat with your dinner. Some days I do rice, but really, if there's no potatoes in my dinner, then I haven't really eaten.

But the potatoes you get in the supermarket are crap. Soapy, soggy, too small, wrong species. It offends me to have to buy them, like a heroin junkie forced to rob for crappy junk (well maybe not that life-destroying, but you get my drift).

So I planted my own this year.

They grew. The stalks died. I waited. Himself adopted his doom and gloom tone and said they'd never work. It rained. It was hot. Flashbacks of my famine folk memories started to assert themselves, but I forced myself. I waited some more.

Monday I dug them up.

Lovely, purple, large piles of potatoes.

WHAT I GREW BY MYSELF.

Words cannot express how smug I felt on Monday evening, arriving back from my tiny urban garden patch with a bucket of potatoes.

And that was just three plants.

Also, the beets are getting big and are really good.
The beans are being harvested (but I have to figure out what to do with them as I don't do beans normally).
The carrots are still growing, but they're looking good.
The garlic has started to grow, finally, so that will be ready for next year.
And our tomatos are finally putting out like healthy well-fed tomato plants should.

The other night, we had a tomato and mozzarella salad, with our own basil in the vinaigrette, stir-fried beef with vegetables from our garden, Lyse' garden and Ms. Maggie Beach's garden, and a rhubarb crumble made with rhubarb from a friend in Cape Breton.

And potatoes of course.

A big shout out to all the potato people in the world in this, their SPECIAL year.

May you finally figure out how to end the blight in your lives!!

Last night, I remembered to buy yeast and made my own bread for the first time in my life.

The Queen Mum used to make bread.

(She used to grow vegetables as well, and recycle everything. In the seventies and eighties, when you did that kind of stuff because there was a RECESSION. Not because it is a lifestyle branding choice.)

Anyhow, I started with the basic white loaf, and put the breadmaker on 'nice smell wafting into the bedroom at six am this morning).

At six am this morning I woke up and sniffed.

OHMYGOD!!

Nice smell wafting into the bedroom.

After Himself got up and put on the organic (caressed gently by a yak somewhere in the mountains before being lovingly cradled into a bag by an upwardly mobile coffee farmer co-operative member with happy, educated, clothed kids who don't know what it was like when mama and pappa were young) coffee beans, the smell coming from the kitchen was better than the best French boulangerie.

It made me remember my first ever (not for Queen Dad) job, back in 1984, when I managed the till in Griffin's Bakery, Main St, Birr.

There's nothing like sitting in bed feeling smug about your ability to produce your own food while drinking coffee and eating warm bread and jam.

Nothing.

Now, how do I go about opening my own coffee plantation??