Knitting

Thanks to the inspiration of Ann at Shim Farm, who reminded me of the pleasures of Lopi, and my friend Elisabeth, who knits socks that are works of art, I recently rooted through my long-forgotten box of knitting supplies, dug out my needles and knit this shawl.

It seems the familiar Leave Things 90% Unfinished Syndrome that governs our home renovations applies to knitting projects, too. The shawl got almost finished quite quickly, but then it stalled, with strand ends waiting to be woven in and the fringe undone. Finally I got my act together and finished it off one day (and took the photo you see), only to come home from tutoring the next day to the news that Frankie had decided it looked awfully soft and cozy and had dragged it off the back of a chair with his paws and snuggled with it on the floor, in the process creating a number of pulls and bobbles. Oh well. Nothing that can't be fixed. After all, people (and that includes dogs) are more important than things.

I mostly knit the shawl in front of the TV, which made the process of watching the latest episode of Boardwalk Empire less of a frivolous use of my time. Does anyone just sit and knit, without something else going on? That's a bit too stultifying for me, and there's only so much TV I am willing to watch. So my new favourite thing to do while knitting is to listen to an audiobook on my ipod. Which I did on my recent trip to Calgary, which involved about 50 hours on a train. What a perfect combination: the rock of the train, spectacular scenery passing by the windows, being read a good book with a pair of needles in my hands, learning to cable knit.

And speaking of needles, I have learned of the pleasures of wooden needles, which somehow feel more fitting in my fingers than metal or (gasp!) plastic ones. They make it easier to channel the spirit of Laura, which is part of the fun.

The next project? Another scarf, with wool made of merino and silk, in a shade of green to bring out the sparkle in my honey's eyes.

Gossamer

If you're not tired of fall colours and the beauty of decay, here are two more photos for you, of a nameless scrubby shrub growing in the wilds at the front of our property. Judging by their ethereal state, especially compared to the foliage around them, I think these leaves might actually be from last year, somehow surviving through the winter thanks to the protection of the large trees overhanging them.

Click on the photos to see larger versions, so you can really appreciate the lacy beauty of these ghost leaves.



I'll be away for the next little while - I'm off the Calgary to visit family and attend parts of this. Until I see you again, stay warm and dry!

The colours of fall

For a recovering perfectionist, I think it's sort of remarkable that I love a garden in the fall as much as I do. After all, autumn gardens are full of falling over, turning brown, self-denuding plants.

There are still splashes of colour, like the rudbeckia and the asters, which bloomed just in time for the Big Party. (How did they know?)

The hydrangea are still going strong...



...as are the gallardia that I grew from seed this year.



But even the plants that have officially called it quits and are dancing slowly into wilt and decay have their own beauty, like the dogwood.

And the peonies! Compared to how this plant looked in June this may seem like nothing much, but as much as peonies are my favourite flower in the garden, I find I am pausing much longer to admire the beauty of the foliage in its last weeks of life.

It's awfully tempting to draw a parallel between my feelings about the fall garden and about turning fifty. But cliche or not, there's something to it. From this perspective, the June garden, as fresh and glorious as it may be, seems to shout "Look at me! Look at me!", which seems a little tedious from here. On the other hand, the autumn garden is full of plants that have a different kind of splendour - less show, more dignity. A kind of beauty that factors in the places the bugs have nibbled, the edges that have become crispy, the spots that are bare, and through the calculation that is life, comes to an answer even more precious than short-lived June blossoms.

My garden continues to teach me, and I am listening hard.

Dry

We haven't had any significant rain for months. People think of southern Vancouver Island as being wet, wet, wet, and it is (usually) through the winter. But our summers are traditionally hot and dry, and this particular summer doesn't seem to be ending when it comes to the "dry" part.

It has been so dry people are worrying about the state of their wells and aquifers, and some communities that haven't ever been to Stage 3 water restrictions are now on Stage 4, which means no outdoor watering of any kind for any reason. It has been so dry there are concerns that our local river, the Cowichan River, doesn't have enough water for the returning salmon to make it upstream for spawning, so volunteers are hand-carrying salmon in crates up the river.

But now - now there is this.

(Thanks, www.weathernetwork.com.)

If you can't quite read it, don't worry, The important part is the row of weather symbols along the top. Can you see it? Rain! Three days of rain, beginning on Friday.

Of course forecasts and reality are sometimes different things, but the regular appearance of the rain icon over the next fourteen days is giving me hope. I'll let you know what happens.

Now I just have to find my umbrella.

Jam, jam, jam

The windows are a bit steamy these days thanks to all the canning that has been going on, starting with a wheelbarrow full of Cox Orange Pippin apples and 20 pounds of crab apples from the trees here at Mucky Boots.

And then there were those 45 pounds of Italian plums courtesy of my dad's plum tree.



Yes, you read that right: 45 pounds. Last week we spent an afternoon picking them and then two days making plum butter and a couple of kinds of plum jam. Kim, bless her heart, split and pitted somewhere between 850 and 900 plums, and together we cooked and mashed and stirred and processed, and now we have 50 half-pints of plummy sweetness filling the shelves in our cold storage room.



The crab apples have been made into juice, which has been canned until either I have time to make it into jelly or we drink it (which, since it is unsweetened, should send the Tart Meter into the red zone).

We have only just begun on the apples: one big bucket-full has given us almost two-dozen jars of dark, spicy apple butter, and there is an awful lot left to process. The rest will go to apple sauce or will be dried. And even though we'll have plenty for ourselves and to give away, we're feeling a little sad that this year's harvest is less than half that of previous years, because our beloved grand dame Pink Lady tree has succumbed to the massive damage done when a bear climbed it last fall to get the two apples we hadn't been able to reach at the top. As Harry, our master-pruner friend said the other week when he had a look, the tree had been living with a minor case of blight which speedily took over the tree once it was damaged, and now even the few limbs that survived the bear are dead or dying. The tree needs to come down, and that will be a sad, sad day at Mucky Boots.

As if to compensate, our other distinguished old tree, the Cox Orange Pippin, presented us with a bountiful barrow-full of big, fat apples. They are a more utilitarian apple than the Pink Ladies: they are naturally much drier, and consequently good for dehydrating and storing. They don't have the sweet, juicy flesh and amazing flavour of the Pink Ladies, but we're grateful for them nonetheless.



And so the pantry is filling up again with jars and jars of jam, jam, jam - far more than we could ever eat. But half the fun is giving them away.

Can you say "Christmas presents?"

Melon

I grew melons this year.

I still can't believe it. I can't believe it's possible to live in Canada and grow melons. I grew four of them, only the size of a softball but full of melon-y fragrance and taste. The essence of melon-ness.

Next year I'm trying pineapple.

Finished

Please understand that "finished" is a flexible term here at Mucky Boots. By "finished" we generally mean something that is functional and largely complete except for a few details we'll eventually get around to. We hope.

Our goal was to get the Last Big Project completed before the big birthday party, and even though it was a lot of work, and an ambitious deadline, and we both got really tired and grumpy, we got it finished. Er, sort of. We still need to sort out how to change the fluorescent light fixtures in the mud room and the laundry room to something more charming, and then do a more straightforward light fixture change in the powder room.

Speaking of the powder room, here's what it used to look like. If you're not a really long time reader of the blog, you might want to check out the story about the day we removed the old sink, only to discover that not only had it been tiled in, it had been drywalled in. And, even worse, the studs had been notched out to accommodate it. My oh my.

Finally, two-and-a-half years after demolition, here's the after. If this photo looks strange, it's because it is strange: the room is so tight I had to stand on the verandah and take the photo through the window screen.

By the time we were ready to install the new vanity we thought we were coasting downhill. I should know by now that's a dangerous thought. Because the drain pipe coming from the wall was low enough we would have had to drill a really big hole in the shelf of the vanity to allow enough room for the p-trap. Naturally, we didn't want to do that, so we got clever and sawed an inch off the legs instead, and opted for a p-trap without a clean-out which saved us another inch. Problem solved! Of course the whole thing necessitated five trips to the hardware store, but that's just par for the course...

Now that The Last Big Project is done - sort of - what's left are a myriad of odds and ends. A bit of trim left to paint. A transition strip to install. Some baseboard that needs nail holes filled and painted. One interior door that somehow got missed when all its neighbours were painted. But all that feels really, really minor. 

I didn't know how good it would feel to get the house finished. I look around and instead of seeing projects left to do, I see home. 

That feels pretty darn good.

Fifty

I turned fifty about forty-five minutes ago. Today may be the official day, but yesterday was the party. Yesterday was the second-most perfect day ever, and now today is the rest, re-read cards and eat leftover cake day.

Everything about yesterday was wonderful: the garden...



and the table.



The food - oh, the food!

And the cake.

The flowers from Margaret and Madeleine's gardens...

...and most of all the company.

Happy Birthday to me!

The last wall

Big announcement: we have painted The Last Wall.

We have been renovating this three-story house from top to bottom, which has meant, in part, painting every single wall. Make that scrubbing, patching and painting.  And on Friday, more than three-and-a-half years since we began, we finished the last one.

There's still some trim to paint in various locations around the house, but we're done with the walls. We're so close to being finished the Longest Home Renovations on Record we can taste it.

The best part? We finished with just a bit of paint left in the can. And then we went out for lunch.

Infusions

I've been infusing up a storm all summer long. Oils, that is. Rose petals, mint, comfrey, lavender, chamomile and lots and lots of calendula. In olive oil, rice bran oil and grapeseed oil. 

[The former Math teacher in me feels compelled to note that with six different herbs/flowers and three different oils, there are eighteen different combinations - just in case you were interested.]

Why, you might ask? Soap! Salve! Luscious, skin-friendly cream! Plus two delightful afternoons with the three completely charming girls (ages 8, 10 and 12) who live next door: one spent picking leaves and petals and cramming them into a jar to infuse with oil, and a second spent turning the oil into this salve.

The jars have looked so beautiful on the verandah in the sunlight it's almost a shame to use them.

Laundry

I've been thinking a lot about laundry these days, mostly because the laundry room is one of the rooms we're currently redoing. Which means our washing machine and dryer are living a life of leisure on the front verandah, having a little holiday while we make their special room a bit more special.

I'm aware of this every time I take off my clothes, because the knowledge that we're going to have to go to the laundromat if we want clean clothes is making me give a lot more thought to whether any particular item can be worn just one more time. This is a good thing, because we've been pretty cavalier about the amount of laundry we do. We can certainly afford to be more frugal in our clothes-wearing and clothes-cleaning habits, for a whole variety of reasons: energy use, hydro bills, time and effort, and wear-and-tear on our clothes. So even once these last renovations are done and our washing machine and dryer return to their rightful place, I hope the habits we're forming now stick.

We made our first trip to the laundromat yesterday, partly because the dirty clothes pile was reaching toppling height, and partly because Kim's current dental adventures (dentist visit for tooth pain followed by crown followed by more pain followed by emergency root canal followed by infection followed by antibiotics  followed by very uncomfortable side effects from the antibiotics - all of which is probably going to be followed by a search for a new dentist) meant she wasn't up to installing baseboard, but she was game for sitting in a chair at the laundromat while I fed coins into machines. 

In case you lost your way somewhere in the middle of that ridiculously long sentence, we went to the laundromat yesterday. And it was a very good reminder of how sometimes being poor can make you poorer. Because it cost $2.75 to run a medium sized load through a washing machine, and about the same to get it dry. Five bucks a load? Plus soap? Plus whatever it costs on public transit to get there? Wow. This is where I start thinking about community cooperatives, where people could share washing facilities without being gouged by laundromat owners. My mom always wonders why every family has to own their own set of luggage - couldn't we all share? I wonder the same thing about washing machines.

Speaking of my mom, being at the laundromat made me think of one of the happy memories from my teenage years. Our washing machine broke down one summer and it took a few weeks to get repaired. So my mom and dad would take the laundry to the laundromat - just the two of them - and spend the evening having a laundry date, sitting on the hood of the station wagon and eating bean salad from the local KFC. Even as a fourteen-year-old I thought that was pretty cool - that my parents liked each other's company enough that doing laundry together could make a date.

Since I'm writing about all things laundry, you might be wondering how things are progressing on the last phase of The Slowest Renovations of All Time. Here's the Before picture of the laundry room, which you've already seen. (Do I need to tell you that wallpaper was not one of the selling features of the house?)

Then it looked like this...

...and now it looks like this.

I know our choice of flooring might not be to everyone's taste, but I laugh every time I see it. In a good way. I love that floor. In fact, because I love it so much, here's a longer view of the mudroom and laundry room.

Burger and milkshake, anyone?

Peach

I want to say we grew these, but the reality is the tree grew these. We really had little to do with it. The tree just did its thing, minding its own business, hanging out in the vegetable garden with the cabbages: it blossomed beautifully in the spring, grew fruit bountifully though the summer, and now, in early fall,  has presented us with fifteen gorgeous, juicy pounds.

We've already eaten a pound or two, more have gone into a crumble for dessert after tonight's supper, and some will be made into jam. A handful were earwiggy and were given to the chickens, but that doesn't feel like a loss. After all, the peach tree shades the entrance to the coop, so the chickens have been eyeing the ripening fruit hanging above their heads all summer, waiting for some to fall. It seems mean to whisk it all away without giving them a taste. And for them, the odd earwig is a bonus. 

(Want to know how fast can six chickens devour a peach? Fast.) 

The last push

When we moved to Mucky Boots we knew the house needed a lot of work. The kitchen. All 2.5 bathrooms. 90% of the flooring. Most of the light fixtures. Every wall needed painting. I thought it would take a year once we left our jobs, although in retrospect I have no idea what I based that on. It's not like I actually knew anything about home renovations...

Fast forward three years and we're finally embarking on the last big project: the mudroom, laundry room and powder room on the main floor. After that there will be lots of loose ends to finish up, but once this last job is finished it will be downhill all the way.

We actually started this project a couple of years ago, when we demolished the powder room. But then we discovered that the empty room made a great space for brooding baby chicks, and other projects claimed our attention, and somehow more than two years have passed without any progress. Two years of stained vinyl flooring, damaged baseboard, dog-scratched doors, institutional fluorescent lights and unbelievably ugly wallpaper as the main entrance to our home. It will be so nice to get this project done.

But in the meantime there's some mess and disruption to get through. Kim and I emptied every room, moved the washer and dryer, took shelves off the walls, repaired every hole, stripped the wallpaper and removed the baseboards. So now our dining room is holding the relocated contents of the laundry room and mudroom, and looks like this...

...and our front hallway looks like this.

But the experts have arrived to install the new floor, and so our porch looks like this...

and the laundry room looks like this.

Already a big improvement. 

Johnny D

Every August since we've been here (and this makes #4) this is the conversation that crops up.

Kim: "Lawn tractors are going on sale."

Miriam: "Maybe we should get one."

Kim: "It's a lot of money."

Miriam: "We have a lot of lawn to mow."

Kim: "It would be nice."

Miriam: "It would also be one more thing to take care of."

Kim: "Do you think they come with cruise control?"

But somehow, by the time we talk ourselves into taking the plunge, the inventory has sold out and the sales have ended and we wind up exactly where we started: tractor-less.

Not this year. This year the stars aligned themselves perfectly in the universe. The threads of (1) being tired of mowing and mowing and mowing with our gutless mower, (2) tractors going on sale, (3) our research into the best model for us being up-to-date, and (4) having money in the bank account, all came together, and we brought home Johnny D, the newest member of the Mucky Boots Family of Tools That Make Our Lives Easier (which also includes our Miele vacuum, our Mikita cordless drill and Ruby the Truck).

We (by which I mean Kim) have (has) now mowed everything in sight, easy as pie. 

Yes, it has cruise control. And no, I'm not kidding.