April Showers Bring…
Another week gone. These things just fly by of late. I think we’re at about ten months in our “new” home now. Nearly a year, and I still feel like we only just returned the U-Haul.
In the grand scheme of things, though, there continues to be slow and steady progress (or perhaps just change) on various fronts.
Most obviously, though, spring continues around us, and brings colour and interest in all kinds of ways:
That first photo shows part of what what Anne has been calling the “octopus garden.” Not “the octopus’s garden,” mind you, but a garden of octopuses, unfurling their sucker covered arms. She’s trimmed back many of the ferns to make room for their new growth, and this is the result.
The others show various flowers planted here by the previous owners of the place. Except for the last one, which is something Anne recently planted and which seems to be taking off. It’s quite striking, but the fern in front of it (not pictured) is much taller and is taking over. I’m not sure how that will play out in the fullness of time, but the plant is lovely.
On the art front, there isn’t much progress to report. I did try some slightly larger sheets of glue & acrylic medium, and the attempt exposed a new problem with medium. Turns out if the sheet is too large it is not strong enough to let me pull it off the silicone in one piece. It breaks up into chunks, which is not what I want. Sadly I think it is out of the running. Elmer's continues to work just fine, though, and I will continue the experiments there.
There is also this:
That’s part of an old skylight waiting to be gotten rid of, but only now do I realize I might be able to use it in the roof of a shed… hmmm. In any case, it is keeping the rain off several chunks of cherry and maple (recently added) for eventual wood carving projects. They all need to dry out before I work with them, and I lack good storage out of the weather, so for now the skylight is helpful in this regard.
In other news this week, Anne and I are both over our vaccine reactions and seem to be just fine. It took over a week to get my full energy back. Ideally that means my immune system is primed and ready to dispose of any nasty virus particles that wander my way, but who knows.
My work on the local community association website continues. The planning is finished and I am now creating a few demo pages to show them what the site might look like — in part — when it is done. I promise to share a link to it here someday, but only once I have got it beaten into shape. It’s just not there yet, and I am carefully seeking approval for every significant change before I make it.
I have also been slowly researching replacement dishwashers, since the one we have sounds like a wheezing, asthmatic ferret while it runs. No decisions yet, but I am working on it. Some models from Bosch seem to be hard to get ahold of at the moment — pandemic induced production or delivery issues, no doubt — but I’ll work it out. Sadly, however, I think I will have to pull the existing unit out to see how it is connected electrically. I cannot tell if it is plugged into an outlet or hard wired into a junction box without doing so, and that could change what I need to purchase. As I say, I will get there eventually.
Finally, I’ve been reading several novels by John Green. He writes coming of age novels (at least in my experience so far, though his upcoming book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, is non-fiction) and they are wonderful. Quite the change from the The Three Body Problem — a Chinese science fiction series — I finished up a couple weeks ago. Green’s works are all about characters, which is rather the opposite of hard science fiction. I bought most of his collected works — five novels all together — because it was about time I did so. I’ve finished three — Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns — and am now reading The Fault in Our Stars. All are very good, but AAOK is my favourite of the first three, and TFIOS is clearly amazing so far.
A while ago one of my readers (hi Patty!) asked what I was reading. Now she knows, and you do too.
And yes, I am overdue on dog pictures, so I will remedy that. It’s an overcast morning here in Vancouver, and there may even be some drizzle, so everyone is a bit sleepy:
But Tinkerbelle still raises her head every so often to be sure we’re safe from intruders of all kinds:
I have to make a quick trip to the grocery store, so I will end now and do that before I reread this post and attempt (but fail) to find all my typos.
In closing, I had a laugh the other evening when I looked up at Anne from the book I was reading and asked her what she was doing. It turns out she was watching a YouTube video about commercial eel raising in Maine.
The world is a weird place.
Anne too. Clearly her interests run broad and deep (pun intended) and I should probably be careful to avoid becoming eel food.
Cheers!