Saturday 6 June 2015

A Big Piece of Peace

Garden of Earthly Delights

The extended silence here on the blog has encompassed the handover of moving out from my extended winter house-sit -- this was year four -- which is a mixed blessing.

It's always hard to leave the big house, as I call it, especially this time, as I had the opportunity to cook a proper Christmas dinner and have friends over for open house on Boxing Day, but then to return to where I was last summer, sleeping in my own bed, having a proper studio space (albeit small, but…), handy to shopping and transportation, and perhaps most importantly, with space to have a small garden (above), is something I've grown to appreciate.

Sleepy Wascal

As usual, the reason for blog silence has been because real life has been too busy (and lately, complex) to carve out time for words and to take pictures to illustrate what's been happening.

Home!

Now that I've become reasonably ensconced (i.e., I'm cooking and freezing more homemade nuke-a-meals), I've had the chance to get my wee green children going, and, to my extreme gratitude, retrieve my small propane BBQ.

I had a long run of firing up the wee 'que -- at least twice a month since I had moved back to Calgary -- until it got packed away with everything else from the house in December 2011. Since then, I've taken any opportunity I've been able to squeeze out, but between the weather and where I've been crashing, they have been few and far between.

But now I've got mine back: so liberating! I've already fired it up twice in the last week. So long as the weather holds, I suspect I'll be grilling a lot for the next while.

Slowing down

Spent last Saturday afternoon floating, not paddling (too much strain on my injured shoulder), down the Bow River last Saturday. When we beached, I opted to depart the group and instead of taking the chartered bus back to the Esker Foundation, I walked over to the monster power mall centre, had dinner (ironically, it was fish, having been on the river), and did a lot of thinking about some of the other things that have been going on in the last while.

Well, no

I found a used book online a few weeks ago that I had been on the hunt for nearly four years: a copy showed up at a bookstore in Omaha, Nebraska for $30 U.S., and I immediately snapped it up. It was obviously loved and used by its previous owner, but given that copies in the past have shown up in the $500 to $1000 range, I can only suspect that neither the bookstore nor the consigner had any clue of its rarity. Their loss, my gain: the next project on my bookbinding bench will be to construct a box for it, to keep safe.

There's a few other things I've been thinking about, and writing extensively in my journal to sort them as well, but that's not a discussion for the blog.

Not yet, anyway….

Reporting for bug duty

Books for Sale

The shop is currently empty.