think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's

And that was 2011.

A big year. But then they are all big  -  365 days of jam-packed action adventure.  2012 will be no exception… on the horizon is an astounding year of watching my Chicken Little grow from his four month old babbling self into a fully mobile and communicative toddler.. and  the failure of all my best laid New Year’s Resolutions (you know the ones we make every year… and never keep – I am going to lose ten pounds, I’m going to exercise more, I am going to eat healthier,  I am going to spend less, save more and pay off my debt, I’m going to learn to knit/speak Spanish/surf/play the guitar/master the art of Thai cooking….you name it.  By February I’ll have decided that Spanish is too hard to pronounce.  Guitar takes too much practice. Ordering out is just so much easier than cooking. I'll do it ... when I have more time…ya right!!)

To give myself credit I’m not sitting around doing nothing but navel gazing.  Although I do have times where my whole day revolves around nothing more pressing than a tot swim lesson… and that folks is a pretty good life!   Eating up my time (in addition to Chicken Little) is a host of volunteer work, including sitting as a director on the local Arts Council.  As far as volunteer work goes.. I like this gig.  People appreciate any ideas or work that I can contribute and I feel like I can make a difference in the community.  The latest project… the Creative Jam. From the realms of Photography, Music, Visual Art and Creative Writing, four facilitators will guide individuals and groups through a process of learning through active creativity in that most dark and dreary of months… February!   We’ve managed to keep the registration fee to a token amount  $40 adult / $30 student & seniors  (plus $5 supply fee if registering for visual arts). For a full weekend workshop that is truly a steal.

I thought I would share… hot off the presses… the poster for the 2^nd annual Creative Jam 

so this is Christmas...

I always get inspired during the darkest month of the year to feats of light and colour.  It might be the darkness and the romance of tiny twinkling lights that set rooms aglow.  Candles burning with their warm flicking radiance, and the dancing of cast shadows that entices the imagination.  But it might also just be the pleasant warmth of the mid-winter holidays.  The smells of mulled wine simmering somewhere below a boil on the stovetop,  the scent of the needle shedding tannenbaum, spending its last days bedecked in lights with a shimmering plastic angel jammed rather scandalously on its peak, the taste of butter, sugar, vanilla and flour moulded into a paste and fresh from the oven (a.k.a. shortbread).  The spirit of giving and the simple pleasure of bringing a smile to another’s face. 

This past week, found me visiting my folks, and taking Chicken Little on a number of first time adventures -  Such as marathon a Christmas Shopping trip (from a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it), a visit with Santa (the legendary jolly fat man made famous by a Coca-Cola advertising campaign in the 1920’s and capable of riding around in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer when not otherwise stuck moonlighting in shopping malls) decorating a batch of gingerbread men so enormous the recipe calls for nine cups of flour, painting winter scenes on the windows, and my personal favourite, the annual Christmas tree hunt and subsequent adventure of dragging it in the house and decorating it!  (this year’s tree topped 12 feet with a stump a good six inches in diameter – yes we had to open both front doors wide to get it in the house!)  But somehow amid the craziness that I love so much I managed to pull the following off the easel.  Behold: “Poinsettias”.

“Pointsettia”

Watercolour

© RiverWalker Arts

Also known as the Christmas Star and Christmas Flower. While considered by the ancient Aztecs to be symbols of purity, in today's language of flowers, red, white or pink poinsettias, symbolize good cheer and success and are said to bring wishes of mirth and celebration

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;
It makes no noise at all,
But softly gives itself away.
~Eva Logue

diapering disasters....and the common cold.

It all started with a snuffling snort from Chicken Little.  This woke me from my blissful sleep.  My poor child has a plugged nose and subsequent difficulty feeding - pulling and grunting and snorting trying to get both food and oxygen. I’m in no fit condition to be looking after this child.  I have a sprained thumb which makes it hazardous to pick him up, I have a bad cold, sore throat, blocked ears, hacking cough...  you get the picture.. and the absolute last thing I felt like doing at 2:30am was rousing to change a diaper.  But I’m also not going to let my little one suffer in a wet and stinking mess.  So up in search of a clean bum.  I wiped and cleaned up the mess, stuffed the next diaper under the bottom only to have him soil not only the diaper, but the counter, the cupboards, the wall and myself before I managed to get the thing done up.  So off to get another diaper... leaving baby on floor as he has proved himself capable of rolling over.

 With new clean diaper on, and the nastiest parts of the mess wiped up I carried the stinker back to bed, and was laying him down when I heard another wet blast from the poor blighter’s behind.

Cloth Diapers on the line? rain forecast...

By the time we were on the fourth clean diaper and all trace of the nasty diaper filling substances had been safely removed from all surfaces and placed in appropriate disposal and laundry systems Chicken Little was not only fully awake but highly talkative, leaving me to lay in bed listening to the squealing chatter of an infant finding his voice, while I desperately sought oblivion from the wood file sawing away at the dusty remains of my ashen throat, as I attempted valiantly  not to cough.

It was a great night. 

Ugh! 

Laundry is getting done, but please don't feed the dust bunnies.

With a growing baby in the house I’ve become especially sensitive to the smell of soured milk and so the number of loads of laundry has significantly increased.  Between the clothes changes because of slimy sour smelling baby barf (both mine and Chicken Little’s)  and cloth diapers (which I LOVE and could quite easily expound on my love affair with cloth and share in the process an unsolicited advertisement for the Fuzzi Bunz brand– but I that is not the point of this blog entry... )

It is about Laundry... and the Mystery of the Disappearance of Socks! Especially small infant sized ones – but applies to all socks.   In the early days, the disappearance of articles of clothing could simply be accounted for by saying that the sock was lost in the river.  Unfortunately, such excuses can no longer be used today. 

It's a well known fact that socks disappear in dryers.  Until now there has been no suitable theory to explain the mechanism by which they disappear. Since the mass of the stuff left on the lint screen is not enough to account for the missing sock, one can only conclude that this disappearance is not a simple physical phenomenon.  It was once  proposed that a sock would be completely annihilated on collision with an antisock, i.e. a corresponding sock composed of antimatter. However, how the antisock actually got there could not be explained, and furthermore the energy released, according to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence relation, would destroy not only the dryer, but also everything else within a 10 Km radius.

So I have now concluded that  it has something to do with the speed at which the socks move and centripetal motion created within the washing process wherein the socks are directed orthogonal to the velocity of the spin cycle, toward the instantaneous center of curvature of the dryer drum... resulting in the abrupt disappearance of socks into another dimension.

There remains one last question of why other things such as pants and shirts don't also disappear. In fact, they do, but less often because their greater size and mass make them less likely to do so.  Also, it is much easier to notice that a sock has disappeared, since socks come in pairs.

And that my friends is my latest theorem on the disappearance of socks.  As well as representing the types of things I think about at four in the morning while changing diapers. 

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.  ~Rudyard Kipling

Yes, in fact there is such thing as bad weather... no matter how well you dress

There is a quote that states something along the lines of  “ There is no such thing as Bad weather, only poorly attired people”.  Whoever said/wrote/thought/believed that clearly never lived here.  For days now the winds have howled, the trees have swayed and the clouds have vomited a white slushy substance the whole combination much like a giant upturned margarita caught in a tornado.  

This is not weather in which to walk a dog, no matter how young and exuberant.  Particularly when walking said canine involves having to bundle up a young two and a half month old human in some sort of gear that will somehow miraculously allow him to stay both dry, and warm, and still be capable of breathing.   And so... I’ve holed up in my home on the hill (knoll?) and have marvelled in the growth of my Chicken Little, and focused what free time I’ve had on artistic endeavours... (that is when I’m not up to my eyeballs washing Mount Laundry and it’s cousin Diaper  Mound.) Meanwhile the dog, increasingly bored, gallops up and down the stairs, chases her tail and deposits a small arsenal of toys at my side in an effort to expend surplus energy.

Here are a couple miniature paintings I’ve worked up while Chicken Little slept soundly in the snugli.

“Twin Jellies”

Watercolour

Twining together in a bubbling sea two deadly bubbles of venom play.

© RiverWalker Arts

“Deep Midwinter”

Watercolour

The lake is frozen over and the ground is deep with snow.

We are children once again.

Brew me a cup on this winter’s eve and hold me near
For the frosty winds do howl and the glittering snow does fly.

© RiverWalker Arts

dreaming of a house on another hill.... gumboots not included.

I never was the one who dreamt of the house on the hill.  But I can imagine that dream.  A beautiful home with a wide covered veranda and a porch swing with Victorian detailing and Queen Ann Spindles, casement windows and elegant gables.   The house sits  perched on a hill that drops away on all sides providing sweeping views of rolling hills, forested groves and gurgling streams.  Sunsets are glorious and in the fall the days are crisp the air is golden, it smells like apples, and cinnamon,  and dry leaves underfoot, the land is alive like a dancing flame in oranges, reds and gold.   It is a lovely dream,  sometimes a lone and ancient tree sits near the house, a perfect place to lounge in low branches and read, write or draw.  

While it was never my childhood dream to live in the house on the hill, there are benefits to living on a hill, and this is especially true when you are surrounded in muskeg that acts like a soggy blanket draped over the landscape  and allows water to stagnate on steep hillsides in addition to the low lying areas

I did, in the end, buy a house on a hill.  Actually my home is  more of a house propped up on a hunk of bedrock that just happens to rise out of the muskeg swamp. There is no veranda, no detailing, or elegant gables,  but it is home. And sitting atop my little hunk of rock, I console myself that water runs downhill (for the most part)  and therefore my yard is drier than most (theoretically).   Especially given that the majority of this island (apart from the stray outcroppings of bedrock) is Muskeg Swamp...  Muskeg itself consists of dead plants in various stages of decomposition, ranging from fairly intact sphagnum peat moss or sedge peat to highly decomposed muck.  (side note: sphagnum moss can hold 15 to 30 times its own weight in water, allowing the spongy wet nastiness to invade even the steepest of slopes. All in all a recipe for very wet feet. Gumboots anyone? )

© Spider Bug

 After 10 or so feet of rain in 2011, and more than 10 inches of that in the last ten days.  I’m feeling a bit waterlogged.  A trip out into my yard to chase my dog back in the house after she decided that digging herself her very own swimming pool in all this wet muck was fun has led me to the conclusion that the water table is variable.  It is not – as is commonly believed -  an inch under the surface... but it is a highly variable height and even on my little knoll raised above the rest of the neighbourhood the water table is exactly one inch ABOVE the surface.  Which may help explain why I have a unique lawn consisting of a form of semi- aquatic vegetation known as a liverwort that grows only in the deepest shade. 

*sigh* 

a boring, self obsessed narcissists blogging mainly as a means to discuss the inconsequential minutiae of my day to day life

I wonder about blogging.  I mean who really wants to read about the life and times of the average middle aged mom?  I live my life and really from personal experience I KNOW it’s not that interesting.. however here i am, a boring, self obsessed narcissists blogging mainly as a means to discuss the inconsequential minutiae of my day to day life .....  

What is a blog really?   An on line forum where I can post which ever strange bits of information I choose to share.  For which friends and family with any interest can visit and read or not as they choose. The odd photo and the latest art work can hang up alongside my text, and the odd inappropriate quote.  

The upside to this hair brained blog is that those who wish to read about the ongoing saga of what was once a very adventurous life turned into domesticated suburbanite yuppie-dom can do so without my clogging your inboxes at random intervals, and those who really don’t care can quit being bothered by the same. .. 

You have to believe most bloggers have few if any actual readers. The writers are in it for other reasons. …after all it is well know that many blogs are loaded with vanity posts, half-truths, rumours, and even intentional distortions… I’m not sure where mine fits in… no doubt smack in the middle of the classic middle class, yuppie bloggers with distorted views of how dull their lives really are….

Don’t get me wrong… I LOVE my life.  Love it.  I’m happy.  My job might not be my dream job, but it keeps me in the manner that I am rapidly becoming accustomed too,  and since yuppies are after all defined by superficial and selfish materialism… I should also state that … I love my house.  I love that it takes me 5 minutes to drive to work… 25 to walk, I love that there are trails near my house and clean air, and deer that sleep in the middle of the cul-de-sac.  I love my husband, and his willingness to indulge my artistic exploits… like painting the bedroom nuclear reactor green… with a hint of lime…

And speaking of green paint...... I’ve finished another piece.  I took that green smear... the I mentioned in an earlier blog (abandoned since before baby)  and with Chicken Little sleeping with his head cocked at an awkward angle jammed in the Snugli I managed to coax an image out of all that smear on paper.

Behold!  The Mossy Grotto!!  A distant relative of Fern Gully  (ok... so you might have had to have been an avid follower of cartoons, or have had small children in 1992 to get the reference... bad joke. sorry. )

Mossy Grotto

Watercolour

© RiverWalker Arts

" Here in cool grot and mossy cell
We rural fays and fairies dwell;
Though rarely seen by mortal eye,
When the pale moon, ascending high,
Darts through yon lines her quiv'ring beams;
We frisk it near these crystal streams."

— William Shenstone (1714-63)

Lines inscribed on a tablet in the grounds at the poet’s residence